A Fresh Start

by rlfj

Book One: Junior High

Chapter 1: The Worst Day in my Life

Tuesday, November 5, 1968

"Carl, it's time to wake up!"

I was having the damnedest dream. I could hear my mother calling for me to wake up, but she had been dead for six years. I dozed on and a few minutes later she called for me again. I rolled over and tried to burrow back into the covers, but the bed was oddly sized and didn't seem right.

"CARLING PARKER BUCKMAN, IT'S TIME TO GET OUT OF BED!"

I groaned and sat up, my eyes still shut, and ran my hands over my face. That didn't feel right, either.

"Man, she used all three names. You're in trouble now!" said my brother.

But that wasn't right. I hadn't seen my brother since we had buried our mother six years ago. He hadn't even come to Marilyn's or Alison's funerals. And as I ran my hands over my face, I realized I was clean shaven, no morning stubble. I continued moving my hands around my head and discovered hair up on top. I lost my hair a long, long time ago.

I opened my eyes and looked around. My kid brother, Hamilton, was sitting on the end of his bed smirking at me. "You better get up or Mom's going to be angry!" But he wasn't my brother. My brother is two years younger than me, so he is 65. This Hamilton was younger, a lot younger, pre-teen younger, a little kid. And what were we doing in our old bedroom, in our house in Lutherville? I haven't lived there in fifty years. I moved out when I was seventeen. I looked around in confusion. It was our old bedroom, our first bedroom, upstairs across the hall from our parents, before we moved to the garage when it was remodeled.

"Carl, are you up yet!" sounded from down the hall.

"I'm up, I'm up!"I replied.

Hamilton kept smirking as he started getting dressed. He normally was the slow one. I got out of bed and opened my side of the closet - yeah, there was my robe hanging on the hook on the left side. I put my robe on and stumbled down the hallway to the bathroom. Suzie's bedroom door was closed but I could hear her getting up. I slipped into the hall bathroom before anybody saw me.

Hamilton and I didn't have any mirrors in our room. The bathroom mirror showed the face of me in my early teens, and I had a strange haunted look to my eyes. What was going on? The last thing I remembered was being in a Middle Eastern antique shop at the mall and thinking I was having a heart attack. Had I died? Was this heaven or hell? I remembered the store owner's name was Selim al A-Din al-Kassim, and I was holding a lamp. Al A-Din's lamp? Aladdin's Lamp? I had wished to be a teen again. Was that possible?

"Mom, Carl's hogging the bathroom!" yelled Suzie from the other side of the door.

I muttered under my breath. "Give me a minute!" I replied.

"Mom!" I ignored her and pissed and brushed my teeth. When I was growing up you took a shower before going to bed, not in the morning. I opened the door and she brushed past me, pushing at me from behind to move me along. I ignored this, too. When I was growing up, I thought Suzie was a major league pain in the ass, but it wasn't until I had daughters of my own that I realized that all female offspring fall into that category. Male offspring, too, for that matter.

Shaking the cobwebs from my head, I went back to the bedroom I shared with my brother and dressed. Briefs and undershirt, jeans, flannel shirt, socks, and sneakers. I went down the stairs and found everyone already in the dining room. Well, my father had already left for work, so it was just Mom, Hamilton, and Suzie.

Hamilton and Suzie had already dug into their cereal. Mom looked over at me and smiled. "Morning, sleepyhead. How's it feel to be a teenager?"

"Huh?"

"Happy birthday! You're a teenager today, remember?"

"Uh, yeah, thirteen.", I said stupidly. Suzie ignored me and Hamilton just rolled his eyes. He was still ten and wouldn't become eleven for another couple of months. So I was thirteen. That made today the fifth of November, 1968. Jesus H. Christ, it was the Sixties? What was going on?

My thoughts were interrupted by a nudge at my knees. I looked down and saw Daisy pushing against me. I didn't think twice, but reached down and scratched her head. She gave a happy bark and lay down under the table at my feet. Maybe the Sixties wouldn't be so bad. My favorite dog was alive and well!

Mom had to remind me to eat. I used my toes to rub Daisy's stomach, which she enjoyed. Daisy was about two at the time, a curious result of an afternoon's dalliance between a golden retriever and a beagle, the end result of which was the size and shape of a beagle, but with the coloring and beautiful coat of a golden retriever. She was one of the best dogs I've ever owned, with a happy disposition, little barking, and never biting. She didn't need a leash when we went outside and never left the property without one of us with her. The only flaw anybody could figure out with her was that she wouldn't chase the rabbits away from Mom's garden. Daisy could care less. Dad used to say they could come up and play pinochle on her snout and she wouldn't do anything. This bothered my mother, since the rabbits loved to eat her petunias. The rest of us thought this was hilarious.

It's funny, though, how a dog picks its master. Daisy was the family pet, but she had immediately picked me as the master. After I went to college, her new boss became Suzie, completely skipping past Hamilton. She would live another 12 or 13 years, dying of natural causes after Suzie went off to college. She was a good dog and lived a good long life.

I had finished my cereal and Mom had to remind me to get up. "Carl, what is with you this morning? You're going to be late for school!"

Oh, shit! School! At thirteen I would have been attending Towsontown Junior High, off York Road. I was in the eighth grade and took the school bus. Hamilton and Suzie walked up the hill about a third of a mile to Hampton Elementary. He was in the sixth grade and she was in second grade. Supposedly he watched out for her, but the reality was that he could care less and she simply followed him there and back. I always suspected that if a van pulled up alongside them and masked men jumped out and abducted Suzie, Hamilton not only wouldn't do anything, he wouldn't tell anybody until somebody asked him what happened to her.

I took my dishes to the kitchen and went to the living room closet and pulled out my pea jacket. I was headed out the door when Mom stopped me. "Your books?" She was pointing at my knapsack of books and I grabbed it. Daisy was waiting at the door and followed me out. Mom was muttering in the background, "If his head wasn't screwed on, he'd leave that behind, too."

The bus stop was just on the other side of the road. We lived on the corner of Ridgefield Road and Felton Circle. I had plenty of time to get to the bus stop. Daisy and I crossed the road and Daisy sat down at my feet. Katie Lowenthal came up to us and bent down, holding her hand out to Daisy. "Hello, Daisy!" Daisy woofed and raised her paw, shaking hands, which caused Katie to giggle. Most of the other kids greeted Daisy this way, too. Daisy didn't know many tricks, but she liked this one and she was a good spirited dog. Everybody knew and liked Daisy.

I glanced up the street to see a big yellow school bus heading our way slowly. "Okay, Daisy, time to go home." I pointed at our house and she took off, to bark at the front door. Mom let her back in with a wave to me. A few minutes later the bus lumbered up and I climbed on board.

There was a seriously restricted seating arrangement on the school bus. Seventh graders sat near the front, where they were near the driver and the big kids couldn't pick on them. The big kids, mainly the ninth graders, with a smattering of large and 'cool' eighth graders sat in the rear, where they lorded over the lesser beings in front of them. The eight graders were stuck in the middle to fend for themselves. I usually sat inboard next to Katie Lowenthal and across from Ray Shorn and Betty Lewis. I looked around, remembering classmates from days long gone and trying to figure out where my classes were. Or had been. This was too fucking weird.

I was so wrapped up in trying to figure out my past that I failed to notice when the bus stopped at the next stop. There was the usual fussing as the alpha males got on first. At this stop, simply by happenstance, it was mostly ninth graders and jocks. It was a mouthy crew that got on board.

The first three down the aisle were Jerry Strutter and his twin brother Tim, and their buddy Bob Tewkes, a trio of bullies who liked to boss around the younger kids. I remember how all three got the shit kicked out of them when they graduated to Towson High and got to meet some older kids who were nowhere near as impressed as any of us. Jerry smiled as he saw me and said, "Where's our money?"

What the hell was he talking about? I glanced over at Ray and Betty in confusion, but they just had scared looks on their faces. I turned back in time to hear Jerry laugh. "No money?" The next thing I knew his right fist was rushing at my face.

I jerked my head back, but not in time to completely avoid getting smacked in the face. By the time I shook it off, Jerry had stepped past me, and his brother was moving forward, laughing, and saying, "My turn!"

What the fuck? The hell with this shit! I jumped up from my seat and pushed Tim hard, in the chest, knocking him into Bob, and the pair of them fell backwards, setting off a chain reaction of dominoes. I then turned around, and before Jerry could react, I tackled him from behind. No way was I putting up with this crap again. With him yelling, I rode him down to the floor of the bus.

"GET THE FUCK OFF ME, YOU LITTLE FAGGOT!" Jerry was roaring and cussing up a storm, but he couldn't do much else. He had already started to peel off his jacket and it was now tying him up like a straight jacket. I tried a rabbit punch in the kidneys but he was too padded there and all I got was some more yelling and struggling. I decided I would have better luck smacking his head. I reached up and tried to shove his head at the floor, but the angle was all wrong, and he was struggling to get loose.

Down at my feet, towards the front of the bus, Tim and Bob were getting untangled. Tim started towards me with murder in his eyes, but as soon as he got closer, I lashed out and kicked him in the chest as hard as I could. He and Bob collapsed backwards again, and it was like dominoes all over again. By now the screaming of the little kids and the calls of "Fight! Fight!" were deafening.

Jerry and I had shifted slightly on the grimy floor of the school bus. Now I tried slamming his face forward, and connected with one of the supports for a bus seat. There was a satisfying crunch and Jerry let out a scream of pain, followed by more demands to let him up. "I'LL KILL YOU! I'LL KILL YOU!"

Fuck that shit! I started slamming his face into the support again, and the results were most gratifying. Jerry began screaming more and threatening less, and after three or four more slams, was just crying and bleeding. Suddenly I was grabbed from behind and pulled up and away. The bus driver had finally managed to work his way through the scrum of bodies and grabbed me from behind. My final look at Jerry showed blood and teeth on the floor of the bus, and he was crying.

"Out! Get out!" ordered the driver. Half the bus had already gotten off and were milling around outside the bus, on somebody's lawn, and everybody was staring at me with sick faces. Very few of them had ever seen much violence before. At 67, I had seen my share already, even if I was only 13 now.

It wasn't over yet. Waiting outside were Tim and Bob, working themselves up to avenge Jerry. They waited a minute until I was off, screwing up their courage, I suppose, and then came for me. It was Tim who came in first. "You faggot, I'm going to kill you!" Unfortunately for Tim, he had never learned how to fight, and being big isn't enough. He simply rushed at me and tried to grab me, a loser's game for me if I let him. At the last moment, I sidestepped his rush and then pushed him from behind into the bus. He slammed into the bus and sagged against it.

I had a brief moment, while he was shook up and Bob was startled, to even the odds. Bob had been running up behind Tim, so I stepped closer and slightly sideways. I kicked out as hard as I could at the side of his knees. My timing was off slightly, and I missed the outside of his left knee but kicked him hard on the inside of his right knee. You could hear the cartilage tearing and bone snapping. Three hundred pound professional football players end up retiring from injuries like that, so it was no surprise when Bob collapsed screaming to the ground.

Tim decided on a final try for me, but he was still slow and stupid. After another mad rush towards me, I slammed him into the bus, and then pulled him back and slammed his head into the bus another couple of times. When I pulled him back the last time, his eyes were fluttering and I threw him backwards to fall to the ground.

I was suddenly exhausted, as the adrenaline began flushing out of my system. I sagged back against the bus, breathing heavily. I remembered this day from my first go around. My thirteenth birthday had been the worst day of my life.

You see, the thing to know about me was that I was a little guy, very little, one of the smallest in the school. I was certainly the smallest guy in the eighth grade, and last year, in the seventh grade, was the smallest kid in the entire school, even smaller than all the seventh grade girls. Being small in junior high school simply made you a target. Even after I hit my growth spurt in the ninth grade, I was still beanpole skinny and a target. It wasn't until I got out of high school that I was mentally mature enough that I was no longer a target. So for the rest of my junior and senior high school time, I was a victim, a target, and school was a prison more than anything else for me. I've heard it said that you don't graduate high school, you survive it. Certainly it was that way for me.

The first time around, all three boys had punched my face as they passed me in the bus. I just sat there and took it, and cried. Later, after I got to school, some of the girls on the bus complained to the vice-principal, so I got called down to the office for that. The bus driver reported that he hadn't seen anything happen, so that was the end of that. My parents were notified, and they just gave me a ration of shit about 'standing up for myself' and 'being a man' but of course fighting was not allowed.

I just leaned against the side of the bus, my mind going a million miles an hour in every direction. Tim was sleeping on the ground, Bob was still screaming and clasping his ruined knee, and Jerry was still bleeding on the bus. Then it got even more interesting. A police car showed up followed closely by an ambulance. I remembered that school buses at the time carried some kind of CB radio. The driver must have called it in. Now he came off the bus and pointed the cops to me. I guess he never saw the fight outside the bus, although how he missed hearing me slam Tim's head into the bus was beyond me.

The police came up to me and one of them was already reaching for his handcuffs. I stepped away from the side of the bus and held my hands out to them. I was cuffed in front of my body and loaded into the back of the patrol car. A few minutes later, after calling in another unit and another couple of ambulances, we pulled out. I leaned back against the side of the car to get some rest. This was going to be a very long day.

Chapter 2: Hard Time in the House of Many Doors

It was only about a ten minute ride to the police station. Lutherville is on York Road north of the Beltway, Towson is on York Road south of the Beltway, and Towson is the county seat and headquarters of the Baltimore County Police. I was quickly brought inside to a fairly clean central area with a big counter and pushed onto a bench against the wall. I was sitting next to another guy, early twenties, kind of scruffy looking, but hey, we were in a jail, also sitting there with his hands cuffed. I nodded at him but otherwise kept my mouth shut.

He nodded back. "They run out of the FBI Top 10 and had to bring you in?"

I laughed at this. I looked like exactly what I was, a slightly rumpled school kid from a rich, white neighborhood. "Yeah, they found out I'm the one who actually shot JFK. What's your story?"

"I got picked up for boosting a liquor store, but I didn't do it. They got the wrong guy.", he asserted. I just nodded in understanding. "You?"

"Some kids on the school bus decided they wanted my lunch money."

He stared at me for a moment. "You're shitting me. So why are you here and not them?"

"They're in the hospital."

He gave me a look of respect, which made me wonder about my standards in my new life. I was getting approval from criminals. I just gave an embarrassed shrug. Any further discussion was ended when a uniformed cop came up and took my new friend by the arm and took him away. After another couple of minutes a different cop came for me. I was led down a series of hallways towards what looked like an interrogation room of some sorts. I glanced in and then asked if I could use the bathroom first. The police officer led me to a bathroom and followed me in. Thank God the cuffs were in the front. I was able to fumble my zipper down and use the urinal. I don't pee easily when being watched, but I ran the Fibonacci Series in my head until I relaxed and did my business. I zipped up and was led out. I glanced at my reflection in the mirror. I had a nice shiner starting. A minute later I was in the interrogation room.

"Who do you want me to call?", he asked, pulling out a small notebook and a pen.

"What, you mean my parents?", I asked.

He nodded. "Yeah."

I gave a wry shrug at this. "Well, they're both at work right now." I gave it a thought. "Listen, I don't know the number, but my father works here in town at Harry T. Campbell's. He's an engineer. His name is Charles Buckman. I don't know the number but they must be in the phone book. When you get him, you'd better tell him to bring a lawyer. I have a funny feeling this is going to be a hairball."

The police officer gave me a funny look at this. "And your mom?"

"Why don't you ask me that if you can't reach my father. I think you'll find him more ... rational, let's say."

He just grunted at that and left the room. I had a chance to look around the room. Very stark and utilitarian, lowest bidder government work. A metal table, bolted to the floor. Four metal chairs, bolted to the floor. A mirror along the side, probably one way glass. No carpet. Plain sheetrock walls, painted institutional gray. Single door, steel, small window with the heavy glass and metal mesh, locked.

I sat down on one of the chairs and considered my predicament. In a lot of ways, despite my surroundings, I wasn't doing badly. Yes, I was cuffed in a jail, but I hadn't been booked, fingerprinted, photographed, or otherwise processed through the system, and the reality of it was that I probably wouldn't be. Unlike my new friend out in the lobby, I had been involved in a schoolboy fight on a school bus. Okay, yes, I had put all three of them into the hospital, but the bottom line was that this was a fight on a school bus.

I reflected a moment on the fight itself. How had I beaten up three older bullies so badly, when at the time, the original time around, I would have been so much dead meat? It was purely a matter of surprise and circumstance. They had figured that the three of them could cower a little kid, but I wasn't thinking like a little kid, but like a fully grown man who wasn't going to put up with their shit. When I fought back it was like the mouse spitting back at the cat. They were stunned. The last time I was actually in a fight had been when I was 17 and working at Pot Springs Pizza, and a punk kid wanted to prove he was a tough guy. He shoved me from behind and I swung around and backhanded him across the face. He was so stunned that somebody fought back it was easy for me to hustle him out of the shop.

Mind you, it usually still works out badly for the mouse. The only reason I managed to win was that I managed to fight in a restricted space, where I could handle them one at a time. The bus aisle was the first place, with two boys tied up and falling all over everybody while I concentrated on Jerry. Later, outside, I had my back to the bus, eliminating 180 degrees of vulnerability, and still managed to get the two boys to attack me individually. If we had all been outside, on a field, with no place to hide, and all three had attacked me at the same time, I would have been the one in the hospital.

So what was going to happen now? They hadn't started processing me through the system, so it was much more likely they were going to send me home with my parents. The cops and the courts are not how you want to handle schoolboy fights. But was that actually what I wanted? It is certainly what I would have wanted back the first time around. I would have been terrified; hell, I would have shit my pants being on a bench next to an armed robber! Now, at 67, I was nowhere near as impressed as they wanted me to be, even if I was 13 on the outside.

There were several tactics the police could use to get me out of their hair. They could threaten me and/or my parents. They could knock me around and show me how tough they were. Never mind the nonsense about how that was illegal. It was 1968. The Escobedo decision was only four years old and the Miranda ruling was only two years old and I was underage in any case. The cops could do any damn thing they wanted to a criminal and realistically get away with it.

Still, that wasn't going to happen. After the war, when the highway system was being developed and it became possible to move out of the cities, Baltimore developed a large network of suburbs just like every other city in America. This was where the rich white people moved to get away from the niggers. Don't blame me if you don't like the language. This was 1968, not 2022, and this was south of the Mason-Dixon line and that was how people talked. So my parents moved to the new suburbs, and the richest and whitest suburb in the state was Towson. There was no way I was going to end up in the basement getting the rubber hose treatment.

I was in the interrogation room for over an hour and a half when the door was opened and two large men stepped in. The first man in was a big man, tall and stocky, dressed in a suit, and his hair was gray and his face was red. The second man was similar, only a bit shorter, and his face was a normal color.

I stood up and turned towards the red faced man. "Hi, Dad."

"WHAT THE HELL HAVE YOU DONE NOW?!", he roared.

"Well, so much for 'innocent until proven guilty'.", I commented. I turned towards the other man as my father fumed and seemed to get redder. "Hi, I'm Carl Buckman. Who are you?" I held out my right hand to shake his, but of course the left came with it since they were cuffed together.

The other man quickly came around to stand between me and my father. He stared at the cuffs for a moment before shaking my hand awkwardly. "I'm John Steiner. I'm a lawyer."

"I asked what the hell you have done!", yelled my father again.

"Why don't we sit down so I can tell you?" I answered calmly.

The lawyer pushed my father towards a chair opposite mine. "Charlie, sit down so we can figure this out."

"I want to know..."

"Charlie, sit down and shut up.", replied Steiner.

My father sat down with no small amount if ill grace and stared at me. In a low and dangerous voice, he said, "This had better be good."

"I will tell you everything in just a moment, Dad. Just believe me when I tell you that I am not the bad guy here. Please, just believe me. First I need to ask Mister Steiner a question."

Dad looked like he was about to explode, but the lawyer grabbed his arm and kept him under control. He sat down next to my father and looked at me. "Yes?"

"Mister Steiner, I presume you are my father's attorney."

"Yes, I have been for several years. Why?"

"The question is, are you now my attorney or are you his?"

Steiner sat back in his chair and eyed me curiously. Dad just looked confused and was on the verge of some more yelling when Steiner leaned forward and held his hand up. "Hold it, Charlie, this is good." He turned back to me. "I will be your attorney."

"Even though he is paying you?", I pressed.

He glanced at my father and then turned back to me. "Even though."

"And if his wishes were different than mine?"

My father was staring at the pair of us like we were speaking in Martian. "What in the world are you two..."

Steiner simply held his hand up to silence my father. "I know where this is going." He turned back to me. "If there was that much of a difference of opinion I would arrange for a new lawyer for you. Is that satisfactory?"

"Yes, sir, thank you very much." I stood and reached across the table and offered my hand again. "Like I said earlier, my name is Carl Buckman."

He shook my hand much more firmly. "I'm John Steiner and I'm your lawyer. You want to tell us what you're doing here?"

"Yes, sir, I would very much like to do that."

The sense of rationality in the room had grown by several orders of magnitude. Even my father seemed calmer now. In a much more reasonable tone, he repeated himself. "This still had better be good."

"That all depends on your definition of good." I told them everything, about how the three boys had decided to begin ganging up on the kids on the bus, taking lunch money, and how they had told me they were going to charge me five bucks a week. This had been announced on the bus yesterday afternoon on the ride back from school. Then I described the fight. Dad's a pretty tough guy himself, but it's mostly his size and looks. He might look like a stevedore, but he's actually a design engineer. Dad actually blanched when I described what I thought were the final results. "Jerry has got to have a busted nose, some busted teeth, and probably a broken jaw. Tim was just knocked out, a concussion, I guess, and Bob's knee is totally shattered. I would bet all three are staying in the hospital for a few days."

"Jesus Christ!", Dad said. He was finally looking at me with a mixture of horror and respect, the lawyer, too.

Steiner asked, "Have you told this to the police?"

"They never asked. I've been sitting here for the last couple of hours waiting for you. Besides, I'm not talking to them without a lawyer. Miranda v. Arizona comes to mind."

Both men stared at me for a second, and then Steiner stood up and pounded on the locked door. It opened a few seconds later and he spoke quietly to whoever was on the other side. He then came back and sat down at the table. "Okay, a detective will be in shortly. I want you to tell him everything you just told us. We'll get out of here afterwards. I can't imagine they'll charge you with much more than a misdemeanor. Fighting on a bus or something."

"Mister Steiner, I have no intention of agreeing to anything of the sort. I'm the victim here, not them. They attacked me, not the other way around.", I replied.

This sort of disagreement was what my father used to call 'back talk', 'lip', or 'sass', and you could see his face clouding up again. At home he'd start swinging at me by now. Mr. Steiner just nodded in understanding and motioned for Dad to keep calm. "Let's talk to the detective first. I won't agree to anything without discussing it with you first."

After another minute the door opened up and another man in a suit, smaller and thinner, with a noticeable bald spot even though he was still in his thirties, came in. He was carrying a legal pad and a pen and a manila folder. He looked at us and tossed his things to the table. "Hello. My name's Robert Ritchie and I'm a detective." He waggled a finger at the two men, pointing in turn at them. "Mister Buckman?"

"This is Charles Buckman, and I'm John Steiner, Mister Buckman's attorney.", answered Mr. Steiner.

Detective Ritchie shook their hands before turning to face me. "And you must be Carl. Can I call you Carl?", he asked, a big friendly smile on his face. Yeah, we were all buddies. He was my friend. He would remove my cuffs and send me home to my loving parents. I would leave the horrible police station. And to do this, I only needed to make a little confession. Kidnapping the Lindbergh baby came to mind as the little confession.

"Sure thing, Bob, you bet.", I answered happily.

Ritchie started at this and stared at me. Smiling to himself, he shook his head. "Okay, I deserved that, I suppose. Let's sit down and get this over with."

"Yes, sir.", I replied, much more politely.

"Can we do something about the handcuffs?", asked Steiner.

"I suppose, but these are some pretty serious charges.", replied Ritchie. It was like watching poker players raise and fold on their hands.

"There's three of us. I think we can take him if we need to." was the dry response.

Ritchie shrugged and removed my cuffs. I guess this gave him some form of card for later in the game. He put the cuffs and keys in his pocket and picked up his pad and pen. He turned to me and said, "So, tell me your side of it."

I glanced over at Steiner, who nodded silently, and told my story again, just like I had before. He made several notes, most specifically when I mentioned names. At the end he commented, "That's not precisely the story I got."

It was important that I stay in control as much as possible. Before my lawyer could respond, I said, "I imagine not, but who would you have heard differently from? The other three are all in the emergency room. No way have you talked to them yet. Who's left? The bus driver?"

Ritchie gave me a very sharp look at this. "According to the driver, you attacked all three boys on the bus, and then attacked the two he rescued when you got outside."

I snorted in derision. "He rescued them? That's rich. Let me guess, he stated he saw the whole thing, right?"

"Yes, he did."

My father was keeping quiet, which was good. He simply couldn't understand what had happened to his nerdy little asshole son. More importantly, the lawyer was keeping silent. He could always step in and claim I was being coerced or stupid if something came up that was bad, but in the meantime, if I was asking questions, the detective might just screw up himself. I was taking control of the interview session.

"You may consider that report as fine a work of fiction as anything Hemingway or Faulkner ever wrote. It has just about as much relation to the truth. The driver was sitting in his seat, facing out the windshield when this all started. The only place he could have seen anything from was standing in the aisle, but that is where all the kids getting on the bus were, so he wasn't there. He was sitting, face forward. When he heard the fight start, he would have turned around, but there were at least a dozen kids between us and him. He never saw anything."

"Uh, huh." Ritchie wasn't letting me know what he was thinking. He would have been a good poker player.

"Then later, after he threw my last two attackers off the bus - the phrase he used was 'get the fuck out of here' - he was kneeling on the floor trying to see to Jerry. He was three feet below any windows on the bus, which are six feet off the ground in any case, so how did he see me attack the other two? He didn't know anything about what happened until after the police and ambulance arrived and he came down off the bus." I continued.

"So why did he say different?", he asked.

"Well, what was he going to say? That he had no idea what was happening and couldn't keep control of the kids on his bus? How long would he stay employed after that? I would bet that he's not actually a school employee and protected by a union, but a part time employee of the contracting company that operates the busses." On the first go around, the same driver had reported that nothing at all had occurred, despite what some of the passengers had said.

"Interesting thought." He was very noncommittal to my statement.

"Have you interviewed any of the other witnesses? Any of the other students on the bus?"

"Who should I interview?"

"I saw you writing their names down." I read off the list that he had written. "They would have been right beside me on the bus. They saw the attack this morning and they heard the threats and extortion yesterday afternoon."

"That's an awful lot of time to take these statements. Why should I do anything with this other than let you go on a misdemeanor disturbing-the-peace complaint?" I looked at him curiously and he continued. "Let's be realistic here. This is never going to trial. You four boys got into a beef and the bus driver decided to cover his butt. You are going to take the misdemeanor and go home."

"Because I want those three arrested on at least four felony counts." I answered calmly.

The room exploded, with all three men exclaiming the ridiculousness of this. I just sat there with a calm look until they quieted down, and then held my hand up for silence. The detective simply shook his head at me. "Felonies? Never going to happen. This is never going anywhere near a court."

"You're right, this is never going to go to court, but I have a problem now because of this, and the only way my problem gets solved is with your help."

"You have a problem?"

I nodded. "A big one. As it stands, I have been arrested and hauled away in handcuffs, and the bus driver has formally accused me of attacking three kids on the school bus. At the bare minimum, I'm barred from riding the bus, and much more likely, I'm expelled from school. Right now, as we speak, Towsontown Junior High is getting ready to burn me at the stake."

It was obvious that the adults in the room had never thought of this. My father, in particular had a worried look on his face. "I know this isn't going to court. However, if the three boys are formally arrested and charged with felonies, the school will have to allow me to stay in school, especially since no charges have been formally filed against me yet. A detective trumps a bus driver any day of the week." Maybe I could play to his vanity a touch. "I don't care if they plead it down to attempted jaywalking. It will keep me on the bus and going to school, with no record."

"Interesting. You've given this some thought." Unspoken was 'A lot more thought than a 13 year old kid should be having!' "What felonies did you have in mind?"

He wouldn't have asked me this if he wasn't thinking of going along. "Just the obvious ones. Assault. Conspiracy to commit assault. Attempted extortion. Conspiracy to commit extortion. I bet there're a few others you can think up. Maybe something gang related." We didn't have any criminal gangs in Towson that I had ever heard of, but I was being ambitious.

He shook his head with a certain degree of incredulity. "I've got to tell you, this is the craziest stuff I have run across in a long time."

"But certainly it is the right thing to do.", interjected Steiner. He had been following along closely and was nodding and making other motions to push the detective along.

"And I do this how?"

"Everybody is at school now, probably at lunch. You go over there, right now, and get those three kids to come to the office. Ask them what happened. Ask them if they heard the threats yesterday. They have no reason to lie to you. If they back me up, you tell the principal. If they don't back me up, you throw my sorry butt in jail. I'll be safer there than at home with him." I pointed at my father as I said this.

"Like you would not believe.", Dad said dryly.

"Just do it right now. It will be the most fun those guys have had this year! I'll hang around here until you get back. You can do it in an hour.", I pushed.

He gave an exasperated look at me, but then he stood up. "My captain will never believe me when I tell him about this. I'll be back." He left the room.

Once he had left, Dad looked at me. "Where do you get off talking to the police like that?"

"Charlie, it's okay, he did okay.", said Steiner.

"Dad, I was neither rude nor loud nor coarse. If anything, I was the voice of reason."

"Carl, I don't know what you plan on doing someday, but if you ever get a law degree, look me up." Steiner gave me a very approving look.

I smiled at him and nodded my thanks. "Thank you. Now we come to part two. I couldn't say this in front of the detective, so we have to plan this out."

"Plan what out? What's part two?"

"That would be the lawsuit we bring against the three of them and their parents."

"What?!" My father had jumped out of his chair and was staring at me.

Steiner was calmer. "A lawsuit? On what basis?"

"A civil suit based on the assault and extortion, my severe emotional disability, the slanders they have been speaking - I don't know and I don't care. You're the lawyer. You can figure it out."

Steiner just shook his head. "This will never go to trial. It's ridiculous. You destroyed those boys."

"Yes, I did. They are all going to be hospitalized, and the bills are going to be horrendous. If we don't sue them, they will sue us." My father got very worried looking at this. He really hadn't thought this through.

"They can sue us regardless."

"I know, but it won't matter. They get charged with felonies, they plead them down to something minor and do no time in jail, but the plea is prima facie evidence of wrongdoing. The standard of proof in civil court is lower than in criminal court. I don't need anything more. Meanwhile, I will have no criminal arrest record and they will have been expelled from school. We win so fast your head will spin."

"We win in ten years. They will drag this out forever."

I smiled. "Stop thinking like a lawyer for a second and think like a parent. They don't want to drag this out. They want it to go away! Sue them for a quarter million apiece."

"A quarter of a million dollars? Are you crazy?"

"Too low? Half a million?" Steiner sputtered and I just grinned. "I don't care if you ask for their first born male children. You offer to settle for ten grand each. They'll cave in a heartbeat. You take a third. It will be the easiest and quickest ten grand you will ever earn."

Dad was beside himself, sputtering indignantly. "This is the craziest thing I have ever heard of. Nobody is suing anybody!"

Steiner, on the other hand, slowly smiled and nodded. He grinned at my father and said, "No, this makes perfect sense. It's brilliant."

"This is crazy."

"Crazy like a fox, maybe. Look at it. It keeps him in school, it keeps them from suing you for damages, and it maybe nets us all some cash. What kind of a cut do you want?", he asked.

"Jack, I'll punch you instead of him."

Steiner laughed. "You do that. I'm hiring him as my attorney." He pointed at me. "We won't be able to sue until after they have been arrested and charged and agree to the plea. They might have an attorney who can figure this out as well."

"Fine by me. We'll know in a week's time or so. Even if they do figure it out and try to fight it in criminal court, their lawyer will bankrupt them trying to fight something the district attorney will be begging with them to plead out on. They will have to settle. My immediate worry is getting back to school. Dollars to doughnuts, by the time we get home, they will have called Mom and told her."

"Jesus H. Christ!", commented Dad.

"Sorry about that, Dad." I just gave him a sympathetic look. There was a reason I had told the cops to call him rather than Mom. She could be a bit extreme at times. His look back at me was not a happy one.

It was closer to an hour and a half before Detective Ritchie returned, time in which Steiner and I spent plotting strategy. Ritchie's return was almost anticlimactic. "You are free to go.", he announced, coming in the door.

"The charges?", asked Steiner.

"No charges."

"And the school? What did the witnesses say?", I asked.

"The witnesses back you up a hundred percent. The school is your problem. I told the principal but I don't think he cares. You've been expelled."

I looked over at Steiner. "Let me handle this. You'll be back before the end of the week. Let's go.", he said confidently.

We all trooped out, though I made sure I shook the detective's hand. "Thank you very much, Mister Ritchie. I know you went out of your way and I appreciate it quite a lot. You didn't have to help me, and it means a lot to me. Thank you."

Most cops don't get thanked by the guys they interrogated. He gave me a shocked look and mumbled out a 'thank you' before sending us away.

I followed my father out of the station to his car and climbed into the passenger seat after he unlocked the door. He was quiet the entire walk, and stayed quiet as he started the car, but then he turned the key off again and twisted to look at me. "What is with you? You backtalk to a police officer? You make deals with a lawyer? You fight on the bus? It's like I don't know you anymore."

I just looked out the windshield. "I'm the same guy, Dad. Maybe this is what happens when you treat me like a grownup and not like a kid."

"What, you're thirteen now and don't think you need to do what you're told anymore?"

I turned to face him and took a deep breath. "No, Dad, I'm thirteen now and decided I wasn't going to be pushed around by bullies anymore. If people want to deal with me, they can deal with me like an adult. Life is too short otherwise."

"An adult? This is how you act like an adult?"

"Yes, father, it is. Tell me, how have I not been acting like an adult? If a gang of three men decided to punch you in the face, would you have just sat there and let them? Or would you have fought back? Come on, Dad, you were in the Navy during the war, what would you have done?" Before he could make a response, I pressed on. "Go ask Mr. Steiner if I was acting like a kid or an adult today? I was respectful and asked intelligent questions and we worked together to make an effective plan to keep me in school and protect you and Mom from lawsuits. Are those the actions of a child or an adult?"

Dad continued to stare at me. "The only time I was anything less than courteous with the detective was when he condescendingly treated me like a child at the start. Once I called him on that, we got along fine. Even better, he came into the room planning on offering me an out as long as I pled guilty to something minor. I managed to get out of there with no charges and no guilty plea. Is that childlike? Or did you really want me to break down and cry and piss my pants? Hell, Dad, the only one in that room who was treating me like a kid was you!" I was immediately sorry I said this since up until now I hadn't cursed once.

My father just stared at me for a moment and then shook his head in disbelief. My use of the word 'hell' was ignored. "Huh. Now what?"

I grinned. "Now we go home. I missed lunch today. Maybe I can grab a cookie or two."

He glanced at his watch. "Your mother is probably home by now. This is not going to be fun."

"She's probably already heard from the school.", I agreed.

We were both right. Mom's car was in the driveway when we got home. Ham and Suzie weren't home yet, but I saw my knapsack with my books on the couch. Somebody on the bus must have brought it home, so now Mom knew everything. "Carl? Is that you? I want you up here now!" She was calling me from their bedroom, across the hall from my bedroom. There was no way to avoid her. I followed Dad up the stairs to the bedroom.

Mom looked furious. Normally she's a very attractive woman - Dad snagged a real looker - but not this afternoon. She started right in on me. "What did you do!? Katie Lowenthal brought your bookbag home and told me you had beat up three boys on the bus and the police had arrested you, and then the school called. You've been expelled! What have you done now!?" She was at full volume during all of this, and her face looked pinched and ugly.

I turned my head to my father. "You know, you guys really have to work on this 'presumption of innocence' thing."

I turned my head back towards Mom just in time to see her hand come swinging at my face. She clocked me a good one, staggering me back a step. "Don't you dare give me any lip!"

I stepped back forward to my original place and rubbed my jaw. "Good one, Mom. We'll get to that in a bit. Why don't we all sit down?"

Mom moved to slap me again, but Dad simply said, "Shirley, no." and she stopped.

My parents have managed to cram in a regular size bed, a desk and office chair, and a recliner into their bedroom. I plopped down into the recliner and Dad sat at his desk. Mom had no choice but to sit on the bed. "Okay, here goes.", I said.

I gave her the full story, including what happened at the jail. I did leave out my meeting the armed robber. That would have been just one story too much for her. By the end of the tale she was somewhat mollified, but still angry with me. "You shouldn't have fought those boys. You know better than to fight."

She was starting to piss me off, but I tried to keep it out of my voice. "What, Mom? What should I have done? Tell someone? Who? The bus driver? The bus driver lied to the cops just to keep his job. You think he was going to do anything? Who am I going to tell at the school? The principal? You think he's going to assign somebody to walk me to class every day and protect me?"

From the look on her face, this is precisely what I should have done. Still I pushed her. "Maybe I should have told you and Dad? Oh, that's right, I did that already, last year. You told me to be a man and stand up for myself. Guess what, I did just that and now you're unhappy with me. Make up your mind, Mom."

"How dare you speak to me like that!?" She looked over at my father, expecting him to start beating the crap out of me, which is what he would have done any day prior to this. Instead he just sat there and looked at her. "Are you going to let your son backtalk to me like that?"

"Shirley, stop it."

"Mom, define backtalk. Is it saying anything under the sun that you and Dad don't agree with? You might as well just shoot me now, because there are lots of things in the world we don't agree on.", I replied, which was probably not a good thing to do.

Dad turned his head to me. "Don't push your luck."

"Yeah." I rubbed my face wearily. It had been a long day, and the time with my parents was the worst of it. "Is there anything else?"

Mom stared at the both of us. She had no idea what was happening, but it was definitely not going according to her righteously indignant plan. "That's it? You're not punishing him for this?"

"Punishing him for what? For defending himself? For getting out of jail? For protecting us from a lawsuit? What's he done?", Dad asked. Score one for Dad. If they began arguing between themselves, I could escape.

I stood up and moved over to the door. "Two last things I have to say." They stopped their bickering and looked over at me. "First, don't ever hit me again." They stared at me like I was speaking in tongues. "I just got in a fight and went to jail because three kids decided to hit me. I won't stand for that ever again. If you want to punish me for something, fine. Ground me, take away the car keys, take away my possessions, throw me out of the house - I don't care, I just don't care, but never hit me again."

They didn't say anything to this. I guess they were too stunned. "Second, I just want you to think about something. If I ever have children, and I ever find out they've been arrested, I pray to God that the first thing I would say to them is 'Are you all right?' and not 'What have you done now?' I just want you to think about that." I left the room and went across the hall to my room.

Chapter 3: Making Plans

I went over to my room and crawled onto my bed, rearranging the pillow to sit upright against the wall. I was no longer hungry, just tired. It had been a long day, and dealing with my parents simply made it more tiring. Ham and Suzie came home a few minutes later. Ham came upstairs and dropped his shit off and then left without paying any attention to me. I mean every word of it when I say that he is self-centered to the point of near psychopathic proportions.

I was forced to give my parents a lot of thought, and reflect on what they had been before and what they were now. It was a very complicated subject. Charles and Shirley Buckman are good people. They are the rock solid upper middle class foundation of this country. They work hard, go to church, pay their taxes, vote, and give to charities. By any stretch of the imagination, they are people you would want living next door.

However - they are lousy parents. Don't get me wrong on this. It's not like we were chained in the basement, eating gruel and being whipped. We weren't. By most standards we were raised well. By any objective standard we all turned out okay, with three white collar jobs, college educations (mostly), grandchildren, and nobody ever getting into trouble (until this morning.) Further, kids don't come with an instruction book, and they never really got lessons.

But it was not enjoyable growing up in that house the first time and I was seriously wondering if I could do it again. My father could be very abusive. His view of child rearing involved using a carrot and stick approach, but the carrot was a few tiny slivers of orange shaving and the stick was a half inch thick oak pledge paddle from his college days. If anything, and I do mean anything, was not perfect, Ham and I would get hit with it. Further, since we were supposed to always exhibit proper behavior, whatever that was, and since you do not reward correct actions, only above average actions, if we behaved properly, there was no notice taken. If we behaved, nobody would ever say how good we were, but if we were bad, we would get beaten with a stick.

In some ways, my mother was worse. She didn't hit as much, preferring to wait until Dad got home, but she could be very cold. She fully bought into the idea that good behavior was expected, and therefore not to be rewarded, and that bad behavior should be punished severely. Further, her job was to mold us, especially me, as the oldest, into a proper adult. Being loving did not enter the equation, but teaching and training us did.

Once, when I was five or so, I made a birthday card for her birthday. On the front side it said "I love you!". Then, when you opened it, it said, "I love you too!", "I love you two!", and "I love you to!" I thought I was being clever, and proudly gave this to her. The average mother would probably hug and kiss her child for this. My mother used this as a chance to correct my spelling and teach me proper word usage. I never made a mistake in using those words again, but I never made her another card, either.

As the oldest child, I got the brunt of this. Hamilton, two years younger, got some, but he wasn't the first born male child and wasn't as important and they didn't hide this fact, which must have done wonders for his self esteem. Suzie, on the other hand, was a girl and the youngest child, and they made no bones about the fact that she was the favorite. You would think that I would have been jealous about that, but actually not. Suzie was a good kid, and even though she knew she had her father wrapped around her little finger, she didn't rub it in our faces. She was also six years younger than me, so we didn't have all that much in common. We never went to school together, for instance. Later on, whenever she managed to get something really outrageous (an all expenses paid trip to New Orleans, for example) I simply smiled and considered her a really sharp operator.

By the time I was a teenager, it was very obvious that my future position in life was to be Charlie Buckman's clone, only better. Like my father I would go to a good school and become a scientist or engineer. This is about the only part of the plan that actually happened. The rest was a disaster. I was to go to an Ivy League school like Dad, but four years and not the two that he did. I would get a graduate degree, which he never did, and be a professional (letters after the name), which he never did. I would marry properly, another WASP, also a college trained professional, and we would have 2.3 children. We would live in the suburbs, only a nicer and more expensive one, have a bigger house than theirs, and I would work for a large conglomerate. We would be good Republicans and pass on these values to future generations of Republican Ivy League WASPs.

Inasmuch as almost none of this was to occur, my parents made no attempt to hide their disappointment in me. Even though by almost any rational standard I led a good and happy and well-off life, until the day they died they made no bones about the fact that I had let them down. There was a very good reason that I went to school three hundred miles away and never moved back and rarely visited.

Part of today's discussion with them was an effort to put them on notice that my life was to be lived on my terms, not theirs. I was not naïve enough to think that today would make that much of an impression. I knew that before too long Dad, and especially Mom, would begin molding me back to the path of righteousness. The first time around I had usually acquiesced unhappily for a time until something would go wrong and cause me to explode in juvenile anger. This time I would have to be different, and they would have to be taught that if I was to be a part of their lives after I was seventeen, it would be their expectations which would change, not mine.

One of the curious events that had transpired today was when I told them never to hit me again. You might not believe that would happen, but on the first go-around, it actually happened when I was only a year older. My mother had decided I needed to be slapped, probably for backtalk or some damn thing, and I had instinctively brought my arm up to block her. She was so startled she had stared at me for a second, and then swung at me again. By then I was already in too deep, so I blocked her again. She put her arm down and promised to tell my father, at which point I had told her to do what she thought best, but they couldn't hit me anymore. They didn't hit me anymore, either.

I don't mean to say that when my parents were home we were cowering in the basement hiding from them. It really wasn't like that. The best comparison I can make is with other families. I've seen normal families. Mom or Dad get home from work or the store or wherever, and the kids show up to say hello and see what they brought back or whatever. We didn't. We avoided them lest they figure out what we'd done wrong that day and hit us. It was over quickly, but it was never a good thing to be called up to see them. There was never any praise, only punishment. No carrot, only stick.

I skipped dinner that night, which was very unusual. Generally speaking, you ate what Mom put on the table, when she put it on the table. There were no substitutions and no delays. If you didn't like it, which could happen, you ate it anyway, since the other choice was a beating with the oak paddle. If the meal was toxic radioactive sludge, you ate it. If you didn't eat it and survived the beating and still wouldn't eat it, you didn't get fed until the next day. Surprisingly, my parents let me skip out, even after I told them I would eat something later.

I stayed in my room, thinking about what I was doing and how I would survive the next few years, until Hamilton came upstairs to bed. We had a small room but had managed to cram in two twin size beds and a dresser. By then my stomach was growling and I went downstairs to the kitchen. Everyone else had gone to bed, so I scrounged up a can of soup and opened it and poured it into a pan and set it on the stove.

Mom must have heard me stirring about, because she came downstairs. She found me stirring the soup over the flame and surprised me further by taking a bowl out of the overhead cabinet. "Thank you.", I said.

She looked at me without speaking as I finished stirring my soup. I poured it into the bowl and sat down at the kitchen table to eat. Finally, as she realized I wasn't going to be the one to speak, she said, "I'm sorry I yelled at you this afternoon about the fighting. I know it wasn't your fault."

"Thank you." Better to keep my words brief and to the point. Obviously she was the one who wanted to speak.

She gave me a strange look. "You're different somehow. You're acting ... different."

I set my spoon down and looked at her. "You always tell me to grow up and act my age, but now that I do, you don't like it. You need to make up your mind, mother."

Her face clouded up at this. Before this afternoon, I am sure I would have been smacked. Now she controlled herself. "You can't speak that way to your mother."

"Mom, I am speaking to you like an adult. You want me to act like an adult. You have said this more than once. If you want me to act like a little kid, just let me know. I have to tell you, it's awfully confusing." She just sat there, flummoxed, not knowing what to say to me. My words were making perfect sense, but just weren't registering. I pushed a little harder. "Mom, I'll make you a deal. You want me to act like an adult? Fine, I'll do just that. You just have to treat me like an adult."

"But you're not an adult, you're only a child!", she protested, probably louder than she wanted.

I simply shrugged. "Okay, it's up to you. I am the one acting like an adult at the moment. I'll keep acting like a grown up, but don't be surprised when I let you know I think you're letting me down."

She just stared at me and then stood up and went back upstairs. I might as well have been speaking in Chinese for her understanding. I cleaned up and put the dishes in the dishwasher, and then headed upstairs and went to bed.

The next morning I woke up at my normal time, even though I wasn't going to school. I went down to breakfast, which is basically cereal and juice, and got some Frosted Flakes and OJ. Hamilton ignored me as always, but Suzie noticed my eye. "What happened to you?"

"I got a black eye?"

"How?"

"I got punched in the eye." I grinned at her and jumped up from the kitchen table. I balled my hands up into fists and waved them around wildly. "How would you like to be a Black Eyed Suzie!?"

In case you don't know, the Maryland state flower is the Black Eyed Susan, which sounds a lot more exotic than it really is. It's actually just a daisy with a brown center instead of the normal yellow. It's a common wildflower all over Maryland. Ever since she's been old enough to understand, the entire family has been teasing Suzie about giving her black eyes and making her the state flower.

Suzie giggled and squealed and ran back up the stairs. "Mom! Carl's going to make me a black eyed Suzie!"

I laughed and sat back down to finish my breakfast. A minute later Suzie reappeared and stuck her tongue out at me. I stuck mine out at her, and this was how Mom found us when she came in, sticking our tongues out and making funny faces at each other.

"This is acting like an adult?", she asked me.

I smirked and then made a pointing gesture at Mom to Suzie. She giggled and nodded, and we both turned our faces to Mom and stuck out our tongues. It was too ridiculous. Mom just laughed and then stuck her tongue out back at us, before telling us to finish breakfast. Suzie and Hamilton got bundled out the door to school. Mom went back upstairs to get dressed for work. She worked part time in ladies lingerie at Hutzlers, a Baltimore department store. She had started part time once Suzie started school, and as we got older, she began working more hours, and eventually becoming full time and moving into management. By the time I got out of college, she had become the head of telecommunications for the company, which was an amazing thing, considering she only had a high school diploma. She stayed with them until retiring, just before the company folded and was sold.

I stayed downstairs and found my bookbag in the living room. Mom went off to work and I pulled everything out of the knapsack and spread it around. Wow! I didn't remember being this sloppy!

El Camino Real, the Spanish book. Five years of Spanish and all I ever learned was 'Mas cervezas, por favor!' An algebra book. General science. Nothing on English or Social Studies, so I must have left that in my locker. A three ring binder with all sorts of handouts and crap falling out of it. Thank God I found a copy of my schedule, because after fifty years, I didn't have a clue where I was supposed to be or who the teachers were.

I lived in a rich suburb in a rich county, and the public school system reflected this. It was your typical big suburban school system. When I got to Towson High it was about 2,200 kids in the top three grades. My graduating class was about 650. You could study almost anything. It was really first rate. It was a massive change when Marilyn and I lived north of the Catskills and raised children. When Alison and Parker graduated together, their class was 29 kids.

Because the school was so big, every seventh grader at Towsontown took a standardized test, a sort of junior SAT test. On the basis of this single test, the remainder of your academic life was laid out in precision detail. The next five years were organized, and attempting to vary your destiny was considered both futile and somewhat subversive.

The top ten percent of all students were the elite, the college prep group. These would become the future masters of the universe. They were destined to go to four year colleges, private colleges, becoming doctors and lawyers and scientists and engineers. They would become the future leaders of America. They were in accelerated classes. While others were taking 8th grade math, they were taking algebra. They were at least one year ahead of the others in taking biology, chemistry, and physics. They took AP advanced classes for college credit. Ten percent of 650 students worked out to roughly two classes of about 30+ students each, and for five years we moved in lockstep together, marching towards the future. I, of course, was a member of this exalted group, on the basis of my phenomenal ability at taking standardized tests, and in no way on the basis of my horrendously average grades.

Along the way, we were encouraged to mate and breed with other members of the top ten percent, to produce the next generation of elites. If necessary, because of the excess of teenage hormones, it was deemed acceptable to mate with members of a lower class, but breeding was certainly to be avoided, lest we waste our precious seed and eggs with subhumans. The overall theory was to allow the elites to sow their wild seeds with the lesser breeds, but to make sure they married within their class.

The next lower class was the normal kids, who made up about eighty percent of the school. These children had been tested and found wanting in the lottery of life. They would generally go to college, but it would be a public school, or even a community college. These unfortunates were often graced by the elites with being allowed to date and mate, but it was well known that these could only be temporary and physical affairs. After all, we, the elites, were all going to very expensive colleges on scholarships, and the lesser types would not be able to follow.

At the lowest level was the bottom ten percent, those assigned to Vo-Tech, or vocational technical training. They were considered almost a different species, and only spent a few hours every day at school before being shipped off campus to some form of job training. Such shipments were rumored to be made in off duty County Police transport buses, which was considered a good idea, since it would acclimate these knuckle-draggers to a frequent mode of future transportation after graduation. If they didn't end up going to jail and not passing Go, most would end up in the Army. This group invariably smoked, sported tattoos, grew mustaches (women, too!), and rode motorcycles. They would have frightened Marlon Brando in The Wild One. Nobody had anything to do with these examples of pond scum unless they needed drugs. Since there was a lot of drug activity in the Sixties and Seventies, a lot of people actually knew these guys.

On the basis of my amazing standardized test scores, I was assigned to the college prep crew, and my mother never let me forget it. As I mentioned, her duty was to make sure I fulfilled my academic destiny and my grades were never good enough. She was the sort who could complain 'Carling, you only got straight A's. You have the potential for so much more!' and mean every word. If I had graduated as valedictorian, it would probably not have been sufficient. My rebellion was to not give two shits, and I was a B- student at best. B- among the college prep kids, at least. This would have still been considered an A student among the normal kids. Worse, I often dated the normal kids, and even had friends among the dregs of humanity, the Vo-Tech crowd. I was smart enough, at least, to hide the last fact from my parents.

I picked up my algebra book and glanced at my homework sheet to see where in the book we were. I found my place easily enough and reviewed the chapter, but decided I needed to catch up, so I started at the beginning of the book. After a couple of hours, I had finished the book. This brought up a new dilemma. I had already gone through this shit the first time around - would I be able to survive doing it a second time without going batty? I glanced through the rest of my books and confirmed my fears.

I stood up and stretched and went to the kitchen and made myself a ham and cheese sandwich. I was hemmed in by the fact that in the here and now, I needed to graduate high school, graduate college, and get at least one graduate degree to make something of myself. It didn't matter that I had already gotten an associates, two bachelors, and a masters degree the first time around. That didn't count.

When I got out of high school in '73 I had gone to Rensselaer, RPI, for a bachelors in chemistry. Immediately after graduating in '77, I had gone to night school and gotten an MBA. Then, ten years later, in a new job, I had gone back to school for an associates and then a bachelors in computer science. If I was to repeat the sequence, I would go nuts.

But I could make some changes. As I thought about it, I started to get a wacky kind of idea. Way back when, in '78 the first time around, I had toyed with the idea of switching majors to become a chemical engineer. I have always been comfortable in an industrial setting and working in engineering related fields, probably thanks to my dad being an engineer. When I mentioned this to him, he just nodded and had a chemical engineer he knew talk to me. We all had a very pleasant dinner and discussion, and at the end I realized that I was actually a much better chemist than I was an engineer. I stayed a chemist and compensated by specializing in industrial chemistry. Any chemist can make drugs in the lab - I could make them by the ton in a factory! I spent the better part of ten years doing this.

But it was only after several years that I realized that I was actually a much better mathematician than I was a chemist! By the time I got through with my degrees I had certainly had enough math classes. Quantum mechanics is nothing but another semester of calculus. I picked up operations research and linear algebra getting the MBA, and so forth. By the time I got the degrees in computer science, I had the equivalent of at least a bachelors or a masters.

There used to be a television show called Numbers, about a math professor who had a brother who was an FBI agent. Every week he would come up with some strange aspect of set theory or number theory or information science to figure out who the killers were. In a hundred people, I would have been the only one who could not only understand what he was talking about, but could also figure out the shortcuts and discrepancies the show had to take.

My first foray into this had been at RPI. Everybody in the school had to take three semesters of calculus (the place is nerd heaven) plus either a semester of differential equations or a semester of computer programming. I had suffered enough with calculus so I took computer programming. Even though I was stoned and drunk about ninety percent of the semester, I still managed a solid B in the class. I even considered getting into programming, but no, I was a chemist; I put that silly thought out of my mind. The funniest part was that when I was a senior and needed an elective, I actually took differential equations on a lark and got another solid B, again half-baked the entire semester. A math degree, especially considering that I remembered most of my math, would be a breeze. I was going to have to give this some serious thought.

I reviewed the rest of my books. English 8 was simplistic bullshit. It didn't get interesting until senior high. The same was true of Social Studies, which didn't break down into history until then. You would get a year of American History and then a year of World History, and then a year of whatever subjects were trendy. In the eighth grade we took General Science, not taking anything specialized until Biology in the ninth grade, a year before the rest of the kids in the school. This wasn't all that bad, however. Our Science teacher was Mr. Rodriguez. A generation later he would be considered Hispanic or Latino; in 1968 he was known as the 'little spic.' I didn't much care. That 'little spic' was the reason I became a chemist. He was a damn good teacher!

I was still reviewing things when Mom got home from Hutzlers. She gave me a curious look when she saw me studying, but her only comment was that I damn well better be right about getting back into school. I just smiled and nodded. When Suzie and Ham got home, he just ignored me. Suzie teased me about my black eye and I offered to give her one. She just giggled and ran off to Mom. Ten seconds later I heard a loud "Carling! Will you knock it off!?"

I just yelled back, "Yes, Mom." I didn't mean it. There had to be some way to have some more fun with this.

Dad got home about half past five. He just told me that he had a phone call from Steiner. We had an appointment at school at nine the next morning, and supposedly everything was worked out. Dad was doubtful; he had a hearty mistrust of all lawyers. I remember dating a girl in high school who had gone on to become a lawyer. Years later Mom asked if I remembered her. When I said I did, she mentioned that she had become a lawyer, and had married another lawyer, and that they now had two kids. Dad promptly quipped, "Oh my God, now they're breeding!"

Dinner would be in half an hour. I found Suzie watching TV in the family room. I sat down on the ratty old couch we had down there. "Want to play a joke on Mom?", I asked.

Suzie giggled and nodded. In many ways she was the most normal of us. She grew up to become a nurse, married a divorced cop with two boys, and had another two boys with him. They did very well together. Her biggest problem when she was growing up was her teenage years. She was a real pain in the tail, to the point I nicknamed her the Ice Queen Bitch From Hell. My parents used to say that she had 'growing pains.' I took this to mean the normal adolescent issues, which seemed to me to be wholly inadequate to describe her, but this actually was their clever little euphemism for actual pains. She had terrible PMS and menstrual cramping, which made her miserable for almost two weeks of every month. It was so bad that her gynecologist put her on the Pill to control her cycle, which worked wonders for her, though it totally freaked out our father.

"Do you have a water color paint set?" I thought I had seen her painting with it the other day. She nodded and I told her to go bring it down to the laundry room. She scampered off.

She was back a couple of minutes later, acting all sneaky and surreptitious. "Okay, what are we going to do?"

I opened up the kit and grinned. "We're going to give you a black eye!"

"Cool!"

I took a brush and wet it at the laundry room sink, and then used it to wet the black water color pigment. I then had her stand still and close her eyes. I only did her right eye, to match mine, even though she wanted both done. We got finished just as Mom called us to supper.

"Okay. You need to wait here. Wait until I get upstairs to the table, and then you come in last. And don't touch it. Don't scratch your eye or get your eye wet or the paint will run."

"Maybe I can go to school like this tomorrow!", she said excitedly.

I had to smile at that. "Yeah, I bet Mom would love that idea. You should make sure to ask her. Now wait until Mom calls you."

I headed upstairs to find the other three already seated. I immediately sat down in my normal seat to the right of Dad and next to Hamilton. Dad sat at the head of the table and Mom at the other end. Suzie's normal place was opposite Ham and me.

"Suzie! We're waiting for you!", called out Mom.

I endeavored mightily to keep a straight face. Suzie bounded up the stairs and into the dining room. "Sorry I'm late." She had an enormous grin on her face as she sat down at the table.

Mom stared at her with a mixture of awe and horror. "Oh my God!" Dad took the opposite tack, simply breaking down into raucous laughter. I had to hide my face behind my hands and bite my napkin to keep from joining him.

"Carling made me a Black Eyed Suzie after all!", she announced, which totally set my father off. He was laughing so hard he was crying, and even Mom was smiling through her disapproving looks.

"Hey, you should have taken me seriously this morning.", I said, breaking down and laughing. Even Hamilton had started to laugh by now, not so much at Suzie as at my parents' reactions.

"I wanted him to do both eyes.", said Suzie.

"You'd look like a raccoon then.", I replied.

"Cool! Mom, can I go to school tomorrow like this?"

Dad laughed some more, and Mom simply repeated, "Oh my God!" She began wagging a finger at me and smiling. "I'll get you back for this one! I assume it comes off, or I really will get you back."

"It was water color. It will come off in the bathtub tonight." I grinned. "I debated making camouflage paint like they use in the army, but I figured I didn't have the time."

"You can't do that.", said Ham scornfully.

"Of course I can. Do you have any idea what that stuff even is? It's nothing but lipstick with brown and green instead of the red. Stick it in a green plastic container and it's no longer Sunset Kiss but Macho Manly. I figured I could grind up a charcoal briquette and mix it with a little Vaseline and do it. Kind of greasy, though, and I didn't have time to experiment." He looked disdainful but I ignored him.

Dad settled down enough to start serving dinner, although every time he looked at my sister he would chuckle. I was sentenced to cleaning up after dinner, while Mom took Suzie to the bathroom to wash up. There were to be no black eyes at school the next day, or at least none that didn't belong to me.

Chapter 4: Back To School

I set the alarm clock for an hour early the next morning, which made it my normal time to get up as an adult. Back when I was a kid the first time, I was a very late riser, but after forty years working I tended to get up by seven or earlier, even on my days off.

When the alarm went off the next morning, Hamilton grumbled and bitched he was going to tell Mom. I ignored him and pulled on some gym shorts and a tee shirt and sneakers. I also grabbed a sweatshirt. It was November after all. I quietly went down the stairs and out the back door.

This was going to be a major change in my overall life plan. It was one thing to accelerate my schooling. I was a nerd before and would be a nerd again. Previously, however, I was a couch potato, and it showed. I was skinny and weak for many years, but as I grew older, I started putting on a couple of pounds a year like clockwork. For many years I was simply filling out to a normal size. Then I started getting fuller, becoming plump, chubby, a few pounds overweight, fluffy - fat. By the time I was in my late fifties I was a good fifty pounds too heavy. Clothing wouldn't fit, my health went downhill, and it exacerbated the normal problems you get with aging.

I didn't plan on being a jock, but I did plan to get in better shape and stay there. I also planned to learn some self defense techniques. Nobody knew better than me that the fight on the school bus was a real anomaly. I won by surprise and aggression, not by skill. One thing I damn sure wouldn't do again was smoke. I had spent half my life smoking cigars and cigarettes, and it's just not good for you. As much as I liked it, and don't ever think smokers don't enjoy it, it's terrible for your health. After I quit I put on 30 pounds immediately, and was still healthier being fat than I was when I smoked.

I had no hopes of becoming a jock. I was always going to be too slim and wiry for that. I could, however, build up my stamina and some muscle. It was going to have to be a long term commitment. I knew enough about human nature to know that if I got in the habit now, it would be a lot easier to continue into the future. It's incredibly easier to keep the weight off in the beginning than to try to lose it later on.

Life was simple. I decided to run around the block. I alternated jogging and walking for a half hour. I didn't do much, maybe a mile and a half or two miles total, which isn't much more than an average walking speed. I made a couple of laps around the block, which was big, and on the second I added another block in as well. I was sweating by the time I got back to the house and let myself in.

"What in the world are you doing?", asked my father. Normally he would have been off to work, but today he was reading the paper and drinking coffee.

"Getting in shape."

"What, so you can get in fights again?"

I grinned. "No, so I can run away!" He just snorted at that and I went upstairs and took a shower. I made it quick, since it's the only bathroom the three of us kids can use. Hamilton was waiting outside the door when I got out, a towel wrapped around my waist.

Hamilton brushed past me into the bathroom. Suzie opened the door to her bedroom and looked out into the hall, to see me standing there with a towel around my waist. "Gross!", she shrieked and slammed the door shut. I laughed and went to my bedroom to dress. I had grossed out my baby sister and it wasn't even breakfast time. My day was complete! Everything else was going to be like ice cream on top of the pie!

At 8:30 Dad and I drove over to the school. Steiner wanted us to meet him in the parking lot. We found a space in the visitor's lot. Since none of the kids had cars, none of the spaces were filled by student cars. We got out and waited for the lawyer to show up, which he did about five minutes later. He got out carrying a brief case. His only instructions were for me to keep my mouth shut at all times, and for Dad not to lose his temper. I smiled at this, but Dad glared at me and I promptly found it a good time to look at something else - anything else!

We went inside and I led them down the hallway to the offices. In the future schools would be locked fortresses, with guards and check in procedures, but not back in the Sixties. You just walked in. In the office, we announced ourselves and were sat on the cheesy modernistic couch they had picked up somewhere. A couple of minutes later we were summoned into the Holy of Holies, Mr. Butterfield's office. He was the Principal, and he and Mr. Warner, the Vice-Principal were waiting for us. Neither was smiling. They really weren't smiling when my father introduced Steiner as our lawyer.

They got right to the point. I was expelled for attacking children on the school bus. They weren't at all sure why I wasn't serving time in the Maryland State Penitentiary already, but they didn't care. No matter what that cop said the other day, I was history.

Dad's face got red, but he kept his mouth shut. I just sat there like a bump on a log. When Mr. Butterfield and Mr. Warner ran out of steam, Mr. Steiner spoke up. "Okay, gentlemen, it's my turn now. Let me make a few things clear." He opened up his brief case and pulled out several thick documents wrapped in heavy blue paper. Everyone's eyes went to them immediately. "First, my client is not under arrest and has never been under arrest. He was taken to the police station for questioning and sent home the same day. If you were to say or do anything which implies otherwise, I formally warn you that we will be suing for slander and/or libel."

They looked at him, stunned. How dare anybody come into the Inner Sanctum to tell them what to do? He ignored their sensibilities. "Next, the three students which my client allegedly attacked have all been arrested. They have been formally charged and arraigned on multiple counts of extortion, conspiracy, assault, and battery. More may be coming. Don't just take my word for it, either. Maybe you missed it, but it made this morning's edition of the Baltimore Sun." He slapped down a copy of the newspaper, with a circle drawn around a small article. No names were mentioned, since everybody was a minor, but the fact that three boys had attacked another on a Towsontown Junior High school bus and had been arrested was noted. "All three boys are currently handcuffed to their beds at GBMC, in the prison ward. A judge actually went out there and arraigned them in the hospital."

GBMC, the Greater Baltimore Medical Center, was a big hospital in Baltimore County. It was the local trauma center, a good place to go when you got the shit kicked out of you. On a side note, it was also a place you could generally find a cop to make an arrest. Steiner made it sound a lot more dramatic than it really was. At the arraignment, to which the judge brought a public defender, he immediately turned the kids over to their parents and the public defender washed his hands of the whole thing and told the parents they should get their own lawyers.

"So, gentlemen, your premise is incorrect. It is not my client who did the attacking, but your three innocent children. So, here's how we are going to handle that." He slapped down one of the blue documents. "That is a court order, a judicial restraining order, prohibiting you from punishing my client without first taking it up with the judge in Family Court. If you do so and lose, which you will, the school district will be responsible for court costs. Additionally, you will open yourselves up, both through the district and in your own persons, to a countersuit. Gentlemen, I will take you to the cleaners."

He then slapped down a second blue sheaf. "That is another restraining order, ordering you to keep those three boys out of this school and no closer than 500 feet while my client is in school. Copies have also been served this morning on each of those boys and their parents. Gentlemen, you expelled the wrong students. We have corrected your error. Again, failure to obey these restraining orders without judicial approval will result in civil penalties against both the school district and you personally. Is that understood?"

Neither man could do more than stare at the blue documents and sputter incoherently. Steiner continued on. "I think I am going to require something more concrete, gentlemen. I have officially served you with legal orders. Now, I assume you will have counsel for the school district review these, but I assure you, they are quite legal. Now, I expect my client to be able to return to class, today, and ride the school bus home. Is that clearly understood? Please answer."

Warner was stupefied. Butterfield simply looked at us and said, "Yes."

Steiner stood up. "Then we are done here. My card, gentlemen, in case you or your attorneys, both the district's and your own, wish to contact me." He dropped a few business cards on the desk, and then we all stood up and went out of the office. He led us back to the front door. He stopped there.

"Carl, you stay here. Go to your regular class. If there is any trouble from the teachers or the administration, let your Dad know and he will call me. Don't do one damn thing that will get you in trouble, okay?"

"Uh, yeah, sure.", I agreed.

"Is this for real?", asked my Dad.

"What the orders? Sure. I play golf with the judge. He'd have to recuse himself, but it will never get that far. Those two are so buffaloed it's not funny. It's like Carl said yesterday, a detective beats a bus driver any day of the week. The arrest just nailed them to the cross." He smiled at me. "Are you in the Boy Scouts, by any chance?"

Where the fuck did that come from? "Uh, yes sir, Troop 896."

"St. Paul's? Good for you? First Class yet?"

"Second, but almost to First. Why?"

"I'm the Adviser to an Explorer Post in Timonium. You can transfer when you turn fourteen. I want you to think about it."

Holy shit! Now I knew where I remembered him from! I had joined that Explorer Post anyway. All I remembered of the leadership was that the Adviser was a rich lawyer and his son was the Post President. Nobody cared, though, since he had a monstrously large SUV that could haul the trailer with all our gear. They specialized in white water rafting, which I thought was infinitely cool!

"What's the specialty?"

"White water canoeing and rafting. We even have our own canoes and rafts.", he replied.

"Cool! I promise, I'll give it some thought!"

"Good. We can use a guy like you." He shook our hands and headed out, followed closely by my father. His words were somewhat more succinct, telling me to stay out of trouble, 'or else!'

It was about half past when I finished with Dad and Mr. Steiner, already fifteen minutes into the second period. According to the schedule in my binder, I was supposed to be in English class in Room 214 with Mrs. Turnbull. I couldn't remember where 214 was and barely remembered her. First I had to find my locker and dump my crap off. I rooted out my binder and found my locker and combination taped to the front inside cover. High security, you bet!

I wandered around the halls getting familiarized to an extent and found my locker. Boy, that was like looking into a time capsule! I would need to sort through that at some point. I tossed my bag and jacket in there and went off in search of 214. Finding it, I looked through the window in the door and saw Mrs. Turnbull standing near a blackboard at one end of the room. I moved on to the other door and slid in through the back.

There was no hope of doing this secretively. Mrs. Turnbull stopped and stared at me as everyone in the room turned in their chairs and looked at me, goggle eyed and slack jawed. A memory came back and I realized that the empty chair in the fourth row on the right was mine. I made my way over and slid into it.

"Welcome back, Mr. Buckman. I had heard you were no longer with us.", said Mrs. Turnbull. She was a nondescript but witty and sharp woman in her forties.

"The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.", I replied.

She smiled. "So I gather, Mr. Twain, so I gather. Might I assume you will continue to grace us with your presence in the foreseeable future?"

"And a most gracious presence it will be!" Mrs. Turnbull had enjoyed witty repartee back in the day. She didn't mind a student arguing or disagreeing with her, just so long as they used good English, proper phrasing, and refused to swear or insult.

She nodded at me. "We'll see about that." She went back towards the board and resumed her lecture.

As soon as Turnbull's back was turned, when she began to write something on the blackboard, Katie Lowenthal, who sat next to me turned and whispered, "What happened! I saw you go to jail!"

Without turning, Mrs. Turnbull loudly said, "Miss Lowenthal, questions such as that are best answered after school. Would you like a detention later on to allow you time to make a list?"

"No, ma'am."

"Then spare the discussion until after class."

Katie gave me a dirty look, but I just shrugged my shoulders. Katie was one of my best friends in school, and she was a girl, but she was never a girlfriend. We had known each other since our days at Hampton Elementary. She was another college prep kid, scary smart, and we could talk about anything. She was rather roly-poly throughout our time in school. We totally lost track of each other after graduation, when I moved hundreds of miles away and stayed away, but ran across each other at our twenty year reunion. She had become a doctor, was doing research in oncology, and was living in Southern California. She had slimmed down, gotten an amazing tan, and looked very foxy. I got the impression she might have been interested in a little reunion get-together on our own later, but I was with Marilyn and just smiled away the tentative approach.

Anyway, that was all years in the future, or the past, or something. We muddled through the remainder of the class, and I could feel the occasional stares as people wondered what I was doing here. The fight on the bus, the expulsion, and the three boys in the hospital would have been amazing in themselves, but add that I was arrested and hauled off in handcuffs and you just knew that I was the talk of the last couple of days. Now I show back up like nothing has happened.

As soon as I got out of the class to the hallway Katie was in my face, with some other friends around us. "What are you doing here!? You're supposed to be in jail!"

"Yeah, you escape or something?", asked somebody behind her.

I just gave a laugh. "It's nothing like that. I was never arrested. It was all a misunderstanding."

"No it wasn't! I saw the police put the cuffs on you!", she protested.

I just leaned against a wall of lockers. "Yeah, but that was because the bus driver screwed up. That's why the police were here later that morning. Did they talk to you then?", I asked.

She nodded. "Yeah, me and Betty and Ray. They wanted to know what happened. It was kind of cool. Ray said he asked if you were going to jail but the police officer wouldn't say. Mr. Warner stayed with us the entire time and the police officer kept telling him to let us talk. He kept trying to tell what happened, like he was there or something."

"Figures. Anyway, as soon as they knew what really happened I went home. It's no big deal."

"It is too a big deal! They had you in handcuffs like on TV. Did they fingerprint you? Take your picture?" Ray Shorn had come up next to Katie and was hitting me with all sorts of questions. He was one of the normal kids, but was a good guy anyway. He lived three houses up and across the street, and when we were little we had made a tree fort in the woods behind his house.

"Nope. None of that. They just asked me some questions and sent me home."

"What about the Strutters and Tewkesie? What happened to them?", asked Katie.

"Don't know. Haven't seen them? They haven't been to school?", I asked innocently.

She stared at me. "They all went off in a couple of ambulances. There was so much blood that Marcie fainted and little Billy Smith puked up breakfast all over his brother."

Ray laughed. "Yeah, it was so cool!"

So much for being innocent. That was pretty funny, in a black comedy sort of way. I had to smile at that and shrug. "Hey, they started it, not me."

"Where did you learn to fight like that?", asked Tommy Toner, another guy from the college prep crew. "What, you some kind of karate guy or something?" It was years before Kung Fu ever made it to television, so at least I didn't have to put up with that.

"I just got lucky, I guess."

The bell rang and we had to split up and move along. Next class was Algebra 1. I wondered just how bad it was going to be. It turned out to be just about as bad as I thought it would. It had been pretty easy and straightforward the first time around, and it sure hadn't gotten any harder since then. I was going to have to do something about this. I decided to think some more about it and speak to the teacher tomorrow.

The rest of the day was pretty much the same. I was a celebrity, in a dark and creepy sort of way, and I spent the day rehashing the entire event between classes, and the time in class rehashing ancient lessons. It got funny, though, when it was time to go home. I followed Katie out to the buses, not trusting my memory as to where in the lineup it would be. The driver refused to let me on. That led to an argument between him and Mr. Warner, who oversaw us getting on the buses, which got very interesting. It ended when Warner threatened to have the driver yanked off the bus and have Joe Jenkins, the head maintenance guy, drive us home. I was allowed on the bus, but ordered to sit in the first row with the little kids, so he could keep an eye on me. I just smiled and sat where he pointed. When one of the little kids asked why I was being punished, I just answered, "I guess he likes me!", which got me an order to shut up or he was throwing me off.

The ride home was quiet, since none of the seventh graders I was riding with knew who I was, other than 'the guy in the back who got in the fight and went to jail.' My buddies, who would all have been bugging me, and any friends of the three ex-students were all behind us. The bus driver told me he was going to see about having me removed, no matter what Warner said, but I just shrugged and ignored him.

The next morning I went running again, same route as before, same crick in my side as before. It would have to get better sooner or later. Daisy ran with me the first lap, but then I let her into the house and continued on. I suspected she was smarter than I was. The bus driver was different however, a woman this time. Katie asked her what happened to our old driver and she said that he was on a different route. She didn't say anything about any assigned seating to me, so I just moved on down to my normal seat. One of the ninth graders, a buddy of Tewkesie, gave me a dirty look, but I just looked him straight in the eye and he continued on down the aisle. After he passed, I slowly turned and saw him sitting down. He looked at me again, silently daring me to do something, but I just stared him down and after about ten seconds he looked away.

Ray reached across the aisle and punched my arm. I lowered my head to his. "Are you trying to start trouble?", he whispered.

"Trying to stop trouble. I'm a peaceful kind of guy. Trust me."

"Yeah? Well remind me before you get all peaceful on my ass. I don't need too much of that kind of peaceful!"

"I'm a lover, not a fighter!", I protested.

"You're full of shit, is what you are."

Classes were back to normal for me. Algebra was a total waste. I went up to Mrs. Bakkley after class and asked, "Mrs. Bakkley, when would I be able to speak to you about the class?"

"What's on your mind, Carl?"

"I want to know how I go about testing out of the class."

She looked at me curiously. "I'm not sure I understand."

"Is there some kind of test you can give me that I can take, that if I pass it, I get credit for Algebra 1?"

Her eyes popped wide at that. "You want to drop Algebra?"

"No, I want to do both years now, this year. Can I do it?"

She stared at me. Some of the kids from the next class were drifting in, but we ignored them. "What did you have in mind?"

I shrugged. "I'm not sure, but I was wondering, I finish this class by Christmas, and then catch up and finish Algebra 2 by next summer. Do they use a different book? Could I do it?"

"No, it's the same book. We only do about half this year, and finish it off next year. Why do you want to do this? What do you plan on doing next year?"

"Geometry."

"We don't even teach that here!"

"No, but I bet I can take it over at Towson High somehow."

She shook her head in disbelief. "You need to get to class. Let me ask around about this. I don't even know if you would be allowed to do this."

I grinned. "Do us both a favor. Don't mention my name. I don't think Mr. Butterfield is in the mood to be generous when my name comes up."

She laughed at this. "I think you're right. Now get out of here and let me talk to some people."

I didn't say anything to my folks that night. My parents would be upset because it messed up their intricately crafted plans for my future, even though it was advancing them. Mom, especially, liked being in control. Dad was somewhat easier going, but not by much. I had always avoided them in any serious discussion of classes and grades, because it was always a painful subject, painful in the sense that the oak pledge paddle invariably would be involved. I dreaded nights when the PTA had their meetings and my parents went to school to see the teachers. Since I was never 'living up to my potential', a beating was held as soon as they got home. It would be better to ask forgiveness than permission. If the school allowed me to do it, I would bring them into it then. If the school balked, I would have to get my parents to somehow force them, and this had a possibility to backfire on me. No, it was better to wait for Mrs. Bakkley to talk to me next week.

As for my siblings, Suzie was in the second grade and could care less. Hamilton would care because he was a snoopy asshole and couldn't mind his own business. He would spend the weekend telling me why I couldn't be allowed to do it, and then telling the entire neighborhood what I was trying to do. It would be infinitely better if my plans were presented as a done deal.

I continued my running over the weekend. Saturday was pretty straightforward, getting up with the alarm clock, running a lap with Daisy, and then running a bigger lap without her. I still had the crick in my side, but it seemed to come later in the run, and didn't seem as bad. I also shaved a minute off the run. Mom gave me a funny look when I came in, but I just repeated the old line about 'he who fights and runs away, lives to fight another day.' Later that afternoon I rooted around in the garage looking for something I could use as weights. The only things I could find were a couple of bricks I could do some arm curls with. I also tried doing pushups, but the calisthenics seemed to be too much. I was going to have to work up to that.

Sunday morning sucked. We were Lutheran, on both sides of the family, and while we didn't have to go to church every week like the Catholics did, I did have to go to Sunday School. Worst of all was the fact that by the time I got to college I had lost my faith. I had already seen and learned too much about the wickedness of man to believe what a church, any church, had to say about anything. My folks, however, were members in good standing of St. Paul's Evangelical Lutheran, and I was going to Sunday School and then confirmation class and communion or else Dad was going to tie me to a stake and Mom was going to light a match.

To be fair about it, St. Paul's was a pretty nice place. We had a fairly new pastor, Pastor Joe Needham, who had an excellent way with young people. He was married and had adopted a couple of nice little ones and lived in Timonium. There was an active teen program and Pastor Joe was an avid camper and canoer, often leading church group camping and canoeing trips. He and I got along just fine. I often would stop by his house to gab even after moving away, for many years, just to see an old friend and shoot the shit. We often talked about my problems with my family, but we always showed each other pictures of our kids.

Now, however, going to Sunday School was like an hour in a communist reeducation camp. Years later I would joke to Marilyn that I used to be a real Bible thumper when I was a kid, but then I figured out the Devil made chocolate chip cookies, and I was a lost cause. She was a hard core Catholic, and this irked her to all get out. It was a Communion Sunday as well. Unlike the Catholics, we only did Communion once a month. On those days it was like a double dose - Sunday School followed by an hour plus of church. As we left, Pastor Joe asked if I wanted to become an altar boy, but I replied, "Only if I get put in charge of the wine." Pastor Joe and my father both laughed at this, but Mom gave me a huffy complaint and smacked the back of my head. I guess the agreement not to hit me anymore was null and void while standing in the House of God.

Monday at school, Mrs. Bakkley asked me to stay after class. She briefly said that we needed to talk, and asked if I could meet her in the classroom at lunchtime. She even gave me a hall pass. It sounded positive to me. If the answer was no, she would have just said that.

I swung by the cafeteria at lunchtime, but simply bought a couple of apples and stuck one in my pocket. I ate the other on the way back to Mrs. Bakkley's class. She was sitting at her desk grading some tests when I knocked on the open door and came in. She put down the test she was working on and looked up at me. "Grab a seat and bring it over here." She pointed at the side of the desk.

"Yes, ma'am." I pulled one out of the front row and sat down facing her.

She eyed me curiously for a second. "Let me make sure I understand you correctly. You want to go through both Algebra 1 and Algebra 2 this year, and then somehow take a high school level course next year. Is that correct?" I just nodded, and she continued, "Why? What brought this on? I have to tell you, your grades so far are average at best. What makes you think you can even do this?"

"I just decided to quit fooling around and do something with my life. I decided to stop goofing off so much."

"This isn't just stopping the goofing off. Taking two math classes in a single year is a lot more than that. And next year? Are you planning on actually attending class at Towson High? Are you planning on skipping a grade?"

"Not really. I figure that if I go over there and say that I managed to pull this off, they would have no reason not to let me do some kind of independent study. My understanding is that they have students already moving ahead in some cases, even taking some classes over at Towson State for dual credit. I want to do that.", I announced.

"Well!" She sat back and eyed me for a moment. "What brought this on?! Did your parents tell you to ask about this?"

I stared at her. That seemed totally out of left field. "My parents? They don't even know about this!"

"You haven't talked to them about doubling up in math?"

"God no! It will make life a lot simpler if I simply present this as a done deal, a fait accompli if you will. I will admit, though, my mom will be all in favor of it. I'll finally be living up to my potential. Why?"

She rolled her eyes. "You wouldn't believe how many times I've seen Little Johnny get an A on a test and the next day his parents come in thinking he's Sir Isaac Newton brought back to life." She waved it aside. "So, seriously, what brought this on? Does this have something to do with the fight on the bus the other day?" My eyes opened wide at that. "Yeah, I heard all about it. Do you think you can get out of here a year early and escape the bullies? Towson High will be even worse!"

I just shrugged. "It's a yes and no answer. It's more like I just turned thirteen and decided to do something, make something of myself. I want to take control of my life. Up until now everybody and their brother has been telling me what to do and when to do it and how to do it. No more! I want to be in control. Nobody's going to bully me anymore and I want to have some say in what classes I take. I think I can do this. Will you help me? Or not?"

"Hunh." She sat there stumped for a moment. "Well, I might, although if you think you can take control of your life, you are sorely mistaken. I don't think any of us are really in control of anything. Here's the deal. If we were to compress all of this year into half the year, this would be about the midpoint of the semester. Tomorrow, after school, I will give you a midterm test. It will cover not only what we have studied so far, but the topics I will be teaching up through Christmas. You take the test and I grade it. You do well and I will figure out how to do this. You fail, and you stay like now. This is it. One test, make or break. That's the deal. Understand?"

"Yes, ma'am!", I said eagerly. "What chapters will the test cover?"

An eye raised at this, as if I was calling her bluff. She gave me the chapters to be covered. Then she said, "This is a one time shot. You will get one hour, no curve on the grade. I don't care how you finagle staying after class or how you plan to get home. This is your shot at glory. If you don't show up for any reason, it's all over. Are we in agreement?"

I stuck out my hand. "Yes, ma'am! Do we need to spit on our palms to make it official?"

She snorted in laughter at this. She simply took my hand and shook it. "I think we can avoid that."

I got up and left, pulling out my second apple and eating it on the way to my next class. I said nothing to any of my classmates, or to my parents that evening. It would be a lot simpler to keep them out of it until I had it locked up. I will admit that I studied those chapters awfully hard that night, reading the first half of the book twice and doing a bunch of problems at the end of each chapter, but it was still a snap. I spent more time writing the answers down than in figuring them out. The next day, I lingered after class and confirmed the time I was to show up in the classroom. I told my parents I was staying late to study in the library, and that I would walk home. It was only about a mile and a half from the school to home, so it wasn't a big deal.

The test was fifty problems, seemingly split evenly among each chapter of the book. I was done in about forty-five minutes, even though I had to ask for help twice, simply to make sure I understood what the problem was asking for. I handed Mrs. Bakkley my test and sat back down in my seat.

"Okay, you want the good news or the bad news now, huh?", she asked. I nodded. Suddenly my mouth was as dry as dust. "Alright, let's see." She pulled her answer key out of her briefcase and graded my test as I waited. She was using a red pen, and I felt an annoying sense of dread as she would make cryptic marks on the paper. It sure seemed like she was making a lot more marks on the test paper than could possibly be warranted. Finally she put down her pen and sat back, to look at me curiously. "Huh!" She wordlessly handed me the page.

My nerves were shot as I turned it to face me. 97! I stared at it, and then glanced up at her. It wasn't perfect. Was it good enough?

"I wrote that test harder than I would have for a normal class, and you just aced it!", she exclaimed.

"Is it good enough?", I asked, barely able to speak.

"Good enough and beyond. If you want to do this, I'll help."

I felt like buckets of sweat washed through me. I suddenly felt lightheaded and ran out of the room to the bathroom across the hall. I just made it to a toilet stall in time to lose my lunch. My guts heaved and I puked up about three years of meals. After a minute or so, I got to my feet weakly and saw Mrs. Bakkley staring at me from the doorway, horrified. "Carl! Are you alright?"

I moved to a sink and ran cold water over my face and through my hair. I spit out the aftertaste of my vomit and breathed deeply, then looked at myself in the mirror. I was grinning. I washed up again and grabbed a few paper towels. I turned to face my math teacher. "I am now!"

Chapter 5: Planning For The Future

Taking control of my life meant that I was going to be in charge of the timetable, and this was a major step along the way. Mrs. Bakkley told me to go home and she would make some arrangements. I would need to discuss this with my parents and meet with her and the administration for permission. She was also going to speak to one of the math teachers over at Towson High. She would tell me when the meeting was.

On Thursday she told me everything was all set, and that she had made an appointment with Mr. Butterfield for after school on Monday. I would need to get at least one of my parents there at four.

At dinner that night I asked them if either of them could come. The results were predictable. Dad wanted to know what I had done now, and Mom wanted to know if I was being punished or given detention. "Your faith in me is overwhelming!", I responded, which brought outraged cries about 'lip' and 'backtalk' but no hitting. Suzie just stared, not understanding. She liked school and didn't understand why staying after was bad. Hamilton was much more along the line that I was being punished for something, a feeling for which he had an inordinate amount of glee. It was bad enough that I had to mention to Dad that Ham was really starting to get on my nerves and I was starting to work up the energy to give him a good thumping. This got Dad to give me a stern warning to leave my little brother alone, but it also got him to chew Ham's ass ragged. He left me alone after that.

Mom pushed for an explanation of the meeting, and I simply told her, truthfully, that it involved getting permission to take an advanced class. I left it at that, and when they pushed, I simply stated that it would make more sense on Monday. Mom would ask Mrs. Bonner across the street to keep an eye on Suzie and Hamilton after school.

Larry and Lenore Bonner were our parents' best friends. He was an executive at Black & Decker and she worked part-time at the County offices in Towson. They were a few years older than my folks, and their children were several years older than us. Their youngest daughter Shelley, a senior over at Towson High, was a frequent babysitter, but Mrs. Bonner often sat for us.

I continued running every morning, always taking Daisy for a quick run first, and was now doing three laps around the neighborhood. One day I had Dad drive the route with me and we used his odometer to check the distance. Our best guess was that two laps, one small with Daisy, and then one large by myself, worked out to about a mile and a half. By now the cramp in my side was history, and I was able to speed up enough to add in another small lap. Dad noticed this, and he also noticed me lifting the bricks down in the garage, and asked if I wanted a set of real weights for Christmas. I decided some barbells would be a better choice and told him so. He just nodded and said he would think about it.

Hamilton was getting to be quite annoying. He was bitching constantly about everything I did. When I got up early to run, he would complain I was waking him up. I started taking my clothes to the bathroom to dress and he complained about my opening the drawers. I started laying out my clothes at night before I went to bed and he complained about where I left them. He started turning off my alarm clock, so I had to double check it each night, and placed it on the far side of the bed where he couldn't get at it without going over me. He had a major case of schadenfreude going on; it wasn't enough to feel good, others had to feel bad.

It really came to a head at dinner on the Saturday night before our meeting with Mrs. Bakkley. Right there at the dinner table, he decided to tattle on me, that I wasn't sleeping in my pajamas, but in my underwear.

In my humble opinion, pajamas are one of the stupidest inventions ever invented. Really, clothing to sleep in? Mind you, I certainly don't mind the look when a woman is wearing a pajama top and nothing else, but on guys it just looks dumb. My mother, however, insisted on them. The day I went off to college I started sleeping in my briefs and an undershirt, like normal men do. I've never worn pajamas since then, and had no intention of restarting now.

He sat there looking smugly at me as Mom stared at me, horrified. I just looked at him and disgustedly asked, "Why in the world could you possibly care for what I sleep in?"

He smugly replied, "It's the rules! I bet you get punished now!"

"Christ on a crutch!", I muttered under my breath.

"Carling!", protested Mom. "I heard that."

"Sorry."

Hamilton started to laugh, saying I had been cussing but I think Dad had enough out of him. He was told to shut up, or else. Ham looked daggers at me, which I just ignored.

Mom, however, was all worked up about my improper sleeping attire. "Carling, why aren't you wearing your pajamas to bed at nights?!", she demanded.

"Because I don't want to wear them." Simple answer.

"But you are supposed to sleep in pajamas."

I smiled at that, blandly. "Oh? Do you wear pajamas?", I asked. I already knew the answer to that was a resounding NO! Mom preferred to wear very small and skimpy sleepshirts, although I also suspected Dad preferred her to wear them as well. At 5'10" tall, Mom was slim and very leggy, and a real looker. She was fairly slender, an A cup, but was within five pounds of the day she had married, and that after three children. She was an elegant and good looking woman, and she was very fortunate that my father was 6'1" tall, so she could wear high heels and not be taller than him. In the future she would be considered a MILF or a cougar, but back then she was just a hot mom.

Mom had the decency to blush as she stumbled out, "Uhhhh..."

"Really? I think I know what that means." I hooked my thumb over at Dad, who was now grinning. "How about Dad? Does he wear pajamas?" I knew the answer to that as well. He wore briefs and an undershirt, too, or at least until Mom got into bed with him. For all of her coldness with Hamilton and me, Mom was decidedly not cold with Dad. The romance was alive and well across the hall.

Mom blushed again.

I looked over at Suzie and grinned. "I hope the pajama police don't find me! You want some extra pajamas?" They'd look like they were made by Omar the Tentmaker on her.

"Yuck! You've worn them!"

"Yeah, they probably have my cooties.", I said, which got a laugh from Dad.

She stuck her tongue out at me, which I returned, and Mom began protesting that as well. It was a lost cause for her. Hamilton tried to protest but Dad shut him down again. I really began to wonder about him. He had some mental health issues on our first go-around; this time looked to be the same, and I wasn't sure how much I was going to tolerate this time.

That Monday I hung around the library after school until my parents were scheduled to show up. It was always open late for students who needed to do homework. At four I met them in the lobby and we went into the office. Mrs. Bakkley was waiting there with Mr. Butterfield, and another woman I wasn't sure I knew.

Butterfield pointed at me and asked Mrs. Bakkley, "This is the student you are talking about? Him?" I definitely got a warm and fuzzy feeling.

"Why don't we all sit down.", she replied. She led the way into a teacher's conference room. We all took seats around the table.

"This is your meeting.", he replied. "I think it's a mistake, myself.", he added nastily.

My parents were thoroughly confused now, but getting angry. Mrs. Bakkley took on the lead role. Turning to me, she asked, "Did you explain your plan to your parents?"

"No, I just said the meeting was about taking some advanced classes. Nothing else."

She nodded and turned to my folks. "Let me start off with an explanation. Last week Carl came to me with the suggestion that he take both Algebra 1 and 2 this year, to, in effect, squeeze two years of math in. When I asked why, his response was that it would allow him to take Geometry next year, which is normally a high school course. That's why I brought Mrs. Rogers over from Towson High. She is a math teacher there." Mrs. Rogers said hello.

This was all very confusing to my parents. They tried to ask me what was going on and what I was up to, but they were interrupting each other. Finally Mrs. Bakkley stopped them. "Let me finish. My first reaction was like yours, that this was a crazy idea, but I talked to Carl about it and he seemed sincere. So I made him a bet. I would give him a midterm test for Algebra 1, a test I wouldn't normally give for another two months. It was a one time deal, take it or leave it. He passes the test and I see what I can do for him. He flunks and he forgets the whole thing."

She took a deep breath as my parents stared at us. "He got a 97. Half the material on the test I haven't even covered in class. I think I could have given him the final from the end of the year and he would have passed that as well. I suspect he is a mathematical prodigy of some sort."

Finally my mother looked at me with something akin to pride. It made me a little disgusted, to be fair about it, that she would only be satisfied if I was some sort of genius. Like I said, great person, crappy parent.

My father eyed me curiously. "So what is your idea here? You want to skip a grade or something? Start high school next year?"

I had anticipated this. I shook my head. "No, not really. If you think I've had problems with bullies this year, wait until I'm still thirteen and the smallest kid in the entire high school. No, my thought is to skip some time on the math classes. If I can do geometry next year, I can take some of the other classes early when I get to Towson High." I named a few of the advanced classes available.

"So what happens when you finish those? Do you plan to graduate early?"

I just shrugged my shoulders. "I don't know yet. That's a possibility."

The others all looked at me. My parents stared at me like I had grown a second head, Mrs. Bakkley like I was a new toy to play with, and Mrs. Rogers like a potential science experiment. Mr. Butterfield was the worst. He looked at me in contemptuous disdain. "What could possibly make you think you can do any of that?", he asked.

I returned his haughty look. "Because unlike you, I understand the meaning of the phrase '99.9th percentile'. I know what my IQ is, and I suspect it is considerably higher than yours." As soon as I said it, I knew I had overstepped the bounds. "I apologize, that was rude of me."

"How dare you! I absolutely forbid this! This meeting is over!", he yelled. "Get out!"

I stayed seated. "On what grounds? An inability to perform the course work? That is something which can be tested for, and failure to allow me to do this will only result in a legal challenge to the school board which you will most certainly lose. I have my lawyer's card in my wallet. Should I call him?"

The reminder of my lawyer caused him to sputter incoherently. He turned to Mrs. Rogers and said, "This boy is nothing but a troublemaker! You should have nothing to do with him!"

She eyed me closely. She asked me, "In his day, the physics establishment considered Einstein a troublemaker, also. Are you a good troublemaker or a bad one?"

"Probably both, but I don't presume to think of myself as an Einstein. That would be presumptuous even for me.", I said with a smile.

"Your teacher told me about your difficulties last week. I would be willing to work with you despite that."

"Towson High will go along?"

She nodded. "It wouldn't be the first time. We usually have a few students who have moved forward, and a few who end up taking classes their senior year over at Towson State. You have to mean it, though. The school will want you to do your best, but more importantly, so will I. I need a personal commitment from you, not your parents."

"Done!" I held out my hand to her.

"Agreed, then." She shook my hand. "I will be talking to you near the end of the year, to figure out our arrangements. Until then, Mrs. Bakkley will give you both years of Algebra, and monitor you in Geometry next year."

She stood up. "My part in this is over. Carl, if you don't give us one hundred percent, we'll know it and the cooperation will end. If you do give us that one hundred percent, I promise we will, too." She shook hands with my stunned parents and left.

Mr. Butterfield sputtered some more, but in the end agreed. Mentioning the lawyer had broken his spirit. Mrs. Bakkley told us she would develop a lesson plan to speed me along, and we left. Just like that I was on the road to a doctorate in mathematics.

It was a quiet ride home, but I could almost hear the wheels grinding in my parent's heads. Once inside, they dragged me into their bedroom. "So, is that what you want to do? Become a mathematician?", asked my father.

"I think so.", I agreed. "I've been thinking about it since the beginning of the school year, actually. I guess I just got bored."

"Well, what would you do? What do math people do? Do you want to become a school teacher?", asked Mom.

Dad and I just stared at her for a moment. Mom's actually fairly bright, but she's never been to college and she met Dad a couple of years after he got out. She simply doesn't know what college is like. "Well, Mom, I might be able to get a job at the University of Pennsylvania teaching mechanical engineers how to do calculus.", I said blandly. That got a laughing snort out of my father, since that was his degree and college.

"Very funny, smarty-pants. I'm serious!"

I shrugged. "Lots of things, Mom. Even leaving aside teaching at the college level, maybe computers. That's all math."

"Isn't that electrical engineering?", asked Dad.

"Well, maybe back in the dawn of time, you know, the Forties. It was run by dinosaurs, I heard." The first electronic computer, ENIAC, had been built at the University of Pennsylvania back when Dad had been going there.

He made a rude gesture to me, eliciting a sharp rebuke of "Charlie!" from Mom. To me she said, "Don't encourage him. What about what they asked? Do you want to graduate early?"

"Mom, I just don't know yet. Maybe, but maybe not. If I go to school my senior year over at Towson State, who picks up the bill? I bet Towson High pays! I bet I can get a free year or more of college out of them."

That got them both thinking. College wasn't cheap, and at their income level, was going to result in a hefty chunk of change, even figuring in scholarships or loans. Dad asked the next question. "What did you mean by you knew what the 99.9th percentile was. What do you think it means?"

I looked him straight in the eye. "Low genius."

"How do you know that?", he asked quietly. This was all supposed to be hush-hush, top secret. Children weren't supposed to know the results of IQ tests; it would warp them or something.

"Dad, you'd be amazed what you can find out in the library.", was my only answer. Yes, the library and the Internet (when that was invented) and a couple of later standardized tests. Most tests pegged me at about 140, just at the bottom end of the genius rating. It didn't warp me all that much knowing about it. Hamilton tested out even higher - I mean, have you ever actually met somebody who scored a perfect 1600 on their SAT? I lived with the little bastard! - but he was living proof that IQ doesn't make you smart.

The final discussion was my insulting Mr. Butterfield. Despite the fact I had apologized, I was chewed out for pushing his buttons, and television was denied for the rest of the week. Well, it beat a beating, and I deserved it. Oh well.

Chapter 6: Financial Planning

Thursday, December 19, 1968

Surprisingly, not much was said about my testing out of Algebra 1. Those who noticed me skipping out on the classes basically assumed I was dropping out of the class, not burning ahead. It would probably be more noticeable in January, when I began sitting in on some of the Algebra 2 classes. Mrs. Bakkley's plan was for me to skip out for about a month, studying on my own to catch up, and then to audit the class towards the end of the spring semester.

Otherwise things went along quietly. Eighth grade English and Social Studies were abysmally boring, as always. They had been before. We didn't move ahead of the norms until we got to high school in those subjects. General Science was much like before, and Mr. Rodriguez was just as interesting. I still found chemistry to be interesting - after all, I had made it a career once before - but now had no burning desire to do so again.

Gym proved curious. Before, I had suffered from the same body anxiety and nervousness as any other little boy. I often tried to skip out on showers after gym, and my locker smelled unbearably atrocious. Now, I just didn't care if anybody saw my scrawny little ass, and if anybody commented on the size of my pecker, I'd just ask them why they were looking. I also cleaned my shit out of the locker and took it home to be washed. The EPA would have approved, if there was an EPA at the time; it wouldn't be invented until after Nixon took office.

My physical training program had begun paying some marginal dividends. I could run almost three miles now, and if I wasn't the world's fastest runner, I could do so without embarrassing myself or tossing my cookies all over the place. I decided it was time to learn self-defense.

Monday, at dinner, after dessert, I brought it up. Suzie had already been excused along with Hamilton, but I stayed at the table. "I want to learn self-defense." I announced.

Mom looked startled at that, and Dad said, "I thought your new plan was to run away?"

"Well, what if they catch me?", I replied, earning a snort from him and a frown from my mother.

"Did you have something specific in mind?", he asked.

I nodded. "I don't know if you remember him or not, but Lance Miyagi was at Hampton with me, and his father teaches karate or something up on York Road in Timonium. I figured I could see about that."

Hamilton had been spying on us from the kitchen. Laughing, he came through the doorway. "You're going to learn karate?" He kept laughing and started waving his arms around in giant fake karate chops.

"I may use it on him.", I muttered.

"Hey Suzie, Carl wants to learn karate!" Suzie came running up the stairs and the pair of them jumped ludicrously around the living room chopping and kicking at each other. Mom and Dad yelled at them to knock it off, which only ended when my idiot brother actually connected and hit her arm. Suzie started crying and Hamilton got smacked by my father and both got sent to their rooms.

"Well, that doesn't seem like a very good idea, now, does it?", asked my mother in her most disapproving voice.

"Mom, it's not my fault he's a jerk. Why did you even have him? I mean, you got it right the first time!"

Dad laughed at this and Mom pursed her lips. This was a recurrent joke around the house. I would say that they got it right the first time and how can you improve on perfection. Suzie would say it took them three tries to get it right, and they were able to stop after she came along. Only Hamilton couldn't say anything, stuck in the middle like he was.

"I don't like the idea of you fighting. It's not right."

"Mom, it's not fighting, it's learning how not to fight." that made no sense, but Mom wasn't big on logic to begin with. Reasonably smart lady, but couldn't pass a logic course if her life depended on it.

Dad agreed to take me up to the Miyagi school after the holidays, at least to look around. Unsaid but implied was that I was going to have to figure out how to pay for any lessons. He certainly wasn't going to cough up any cash. This evening, however, the answer to that problem had come through. Dad came home early, and Mr. Steiner followed him. Ham and Suzie were sent to their rooms, and my parents and I sat down in the living room with him. It was a very brief meeting.

The lawsuits we had brought against the other students on the bus had been settled, much like I had predicted, but even faster than I thought. He had been barraging them and their lawyer with letters, but that was about it. His only real time and trouble was the day he filed the lawsuit and had them all served with papers. He opened his briefcase and brought out a pile of papers that he had my parents and me sign, and then handed me a check for $20,000.

This was some serious coin for the day. Dad never said anything to me, but it could well have been more than his annual paycheck, and he was a fairly senior engineer at the company. It could certainly have paid for four years at most colleges for me, and that was the plan immediately announced. Mom decided to put it in their savings account.

"I think I'd rather put it in my savings account.", I announced.

"Don't be silly. We certainly aren't going to let you have it. It's for the future.", she replied.

Steiner raised an eyebrow at that, but I just calmly answered, "According to the check, it's my name on there and not yours. I have no problem with putting it in a savings account to start with, but it will be in my name."

"Well, I never!" She looked at my father irately. "Are you going to just sit there? He can't keep this money, he'll just spend it!"

Dad didn't agree with her automatically. Instead he looked at me and asked, "What did you have in mind?" This caused my mother to issue an outraged cry.

I ignored her and answered, "Well, a savings account would be adequate to start with, but I know I can get a much better rate of return at a brokerage. The equity markets in general have been averaging somewhere around nine to ten percent for most of the last decade, which is quite a bit higher than a savings account. If I am saving this money for the future, I should make it work for me."

Mom continued to fulminate as Dad and Mr. Steiner sat back and appraised me. Finally Dad said, "Shirley, settle down. He's making sense."

Mom quieted down, not too graciously, and Dad then asked, "Anything particular in mind?"

I did have some thoughts, but simply said, "Not initially. Probably a general stock fund, perhaps something that mimics the Dow, or a money market account. Eventually, though, I see considerable opportunity in commodities."

That stumped him. Steiner broke in and asked, "Commodities? Like wheat or orange juice?"

"I was thinking more like oil."

"Oil!"

"You're crazy!", remarked Dad.

I grinned. "Crazy like a fox. You wanted to know what a mathematician can do? Here's an example of probability theory as applied to financial analysis."

"What in the world are you talking about?", asked my perplexed father.

The lawyer, however, said, "This I want to hear. He was right about the law suits, after all. Go on, Carl."

I smiled. "Okay, consider the following - the Arabs hate the Jews, right?"

"The Arabs and the Jews? What in God's name are you talking about?", thundered Dad.

I just held up my hand. "Bear with me. The Arabs hate the Israelis. That's a given. In the last twenty years they have fought three separate wars. The first was in 1948, the second was in 1956, the last one was last year."

"During which, the Israelis handed the Arabs their heads on a platter.", remarked Steiner.

"Indeed they did, but does anybody here think they have made up and are friends? Or do you agree that everybody hates each other's guts?"

"Agreed."

I continued. "Okay, so let's apply probability theory. From 1948 to 1956 is 8 years. From 1956 to 1967 is 11 years. The average separation between wars is 9.5 years. With me so far?" My father and Mr. Steiner nodded their heads. Mom was totally lost and stared at me in disbelief. "So, for simplicity sake, let's say they average 10 years apart. That would mean the odds of having a war in any given year are 10 percent. Once you have the likelihood of the war determined, it is possible to apply probability theory to subsequent actions."

"Keep going.", said the lawyer.

"If we assume a 10% chance of a war in any given year, then you have a 90% chance of avoiding a war in any given year. So, now, one year later, there was a 90% chance of not having a war in the Middle East."

"Which we didn't have.", said Dad.

"Right. So what are the odds of not having a war next year?"

"Like you said, 90%."

"And the year after that?", I pressed.

"90%, like you said. Why? You disagree?"

"Quite. The odds of avoiding war for two years in a row are 90% time 90%, or only 81%. The odds of avoiding war for three years in a row are .9 times .9 times .9, or roughly 73%. Four years works out to 64%, five years is under 60%, and at six years we are barely at a fifty-fifty chance of not having another war between Israel and its neighbors."

"So you're saying that by 1973 there is a fifty-fifty chance of a war starting between now and then.", asked Dad.

"Precisely."

"Okay, but so what? They hate each other. We already knew that!"

"Leaving aside other considerations, the Arabs are probably going to lose again, just like in every war they've had before. And, like in every other war, they will blame everybody but themselves - specifically the United States and Western Europe. The last time they had a war, they seized the Suez Canal, but now what can they do? What is the one thing that the Arabs have that everybody else wants and that they can take away from us?"

Suddenly a light went off in both Dad's and Mr. Steiner's heads! Almost as one, they both whispered, "Oil!"

"Precisely. What is going to happen the next time the Arabs get frisky and decide to take on Israel? We already know it is going to be sometime in the next five to ten years, and we already know the Israelis will clean their clocks. The one single thing the Arabs can do is shut the spigots off. The price of oil will go through the roof."

"So, we'll just pump more from here. There's still plenty of oil in Texas and Oklahoma.", countered Steiner.

"It doesn't work like that. Oil wells aren't like faucets you can turn on and off. Dad, you're an engineer, you know it's not that simple."

Dad looked at us thoughtfully and answered slowly. "Uh, this really isn't my specialty, but he's right. Besides, the reason we went to Arabia is because it's cheaper than drilling here. If we start drilling here again, the price is going to rise anyway."

"So, we stop burning oil in power plants and burn coal or something.", countered Steiner.

"You can't burn coal in an oil fired power plant. You'd have to spend a fortune and six months just refitting them. That much I do know.", replied Dad.

"And you can't burn coal in your car engine. What happens when gasoline that now costs 28¢ a gallon costs a buck or more?", I added.

"The government would never let that happen!"

"I don't know.", commented Dad. "This actually makes a lot of sense, in a crazy sort of way."

"All I'm saying is that if I put the money in the stock market rather than just a bank, I'll have a way to do better than whatever they pay on a passbook account. There are any number of events that can happen, any one of which can affect prices on stocks or bonds or commodities, but you can't do anything unless you are willing to play the game."

Dad eyed me. "Is that what you want to do? Become a stockbroker?"

I just laughed at that. What an impossibly boring job!

Mom decided to put her foot down. "You aren't actually going to allow this insane plan, are you? You want to gamble on wars and killing? Charlie, I absolutely forbid this!"

"Shirley, settle down." Dad faced me. "All right, I can see the idea of investing in the market, but you're only thirteen. You're too young to do that."

"So we put your name on the account. Not Mom's, she's obviously against the entire idea." Mom started squawking again when I said that, causing the three of us to wince. "I'll make the decisions. Is it my money or not?" Mom's squawking got even louder.

"Shirley, for the love of God, shut up!" Dad rarely, if ever, yelled at Mom, and the sheer shock of it made her speechless. "He's right. It's his money. I'll keep an eye on it."

I stuck my hand out. "Deal."

"Deal. But you better be right, or I'm going to have to bunk with you down at the poorhouse."

Mr. Steiner laughed at that and took his leave. "You really are amazing, Carl. Don't forget I want you in our Explorer Post next year."

"Yes, sir, I remember.", I replied, grinning.

Christmas was on a Wednesday this year, as was New Year's Day. School was shut down for a full two weeks, and I wondered about seeing a stockbroker during the off time, but Dad said no. It was the holiday season and a lot of people would be using up vacation days. Instead, the Monday I started back to school, he took off work early and picked me up after school. We drove directly over to his broker's office in Towson.

"What's your broker's name?", I asked.

"Bill Hardesty, but you call him Mr. Hardesty.", he answered.

"I'm about to hand him a check for $15,000. Maybe he'll let me call him Bill."

Dad snorted and said, "Don't push your luck."

I had taken the check to the bank the day after I received it. I had had a passbook account since I was about eleven or so at Clifton Trust, a small community bank with a few branches. The closest was less than a mile away, and easy to get to on my bike. I had only a couple of hundred dollars squeezed out of allowances and money from mowing lawns. The deal I made with Dad was that I would keep five grand in the savings account, and the other fifteen would go to the brokerage. A few simple interest rate calculations showed him that by the time I got to college, I could make up that five grand easily.

In the lobby of the brokerage were pictures of all the brokers - white, middle-aged, graying temples, perfect smiles and perfect hair, looking like they all had just stepped out of a thirty-year-old-Scotch ad. All except one, a young girl, who looked barely in her twenties. It was the late Sixties, so I assumed she was the token woman, hired as much for her looks as any brains, and probably having to fight off a bunch of overaged Lotharios who should know better. Curious, I noted her name, and then glanced over at a Broker Of The Month plaque on the wall. Hardesty's name seemed the most prominent, but Melissa Talmadge was listed more than her share of the time. Interesting.

The receptionist answered her phone and then set it down, Standing, she asked us to follow her and she led us down a hallway lined with offices. As we went down, I noticed Melissa Talmadge's office a few feet beyond Hardesty's.

I enjoyed following that receptionist. She was a good looking lady, and wore a short skirt and high heels. This was one of the finest aspects to reliving the Sixties. This was the period of time when they invented the miniskirt! Even further, in many situations, women were prohibited from wearing pants, as a violation of the dress code. Back on my first go-around, I remember when two ninth grade girls dared to come to school in blue jeans; they were stopped at the front door, marched to the principal's office, and their parents were called to take them home. Meanwhile, skirts so short that a generation later would be considered suitable club attire were perfectly acceptable. It was a hell of a time to be young and male!

Hardesty rose when we got to his door. "Thanks, honey, I appreciate it.", he told the receptionist. Forty years later he'd have been slapped, but not then. He ushered us in, looking curiously at me. Dad was placed in an armchair next to his desk. I was put in a smaller chair at the back of the room. "It's good to see you, Charlie. I got the message you were coming over, but not what it was about. How can I help you?"

"It's about my son, actually. This is my oldest boy, Carling. He'd like to open an account."

For the first time, Hardesty looked me over, deciding to stop ignoring me. He put a big smile on his face and reached over the desk, thrusting out his hand. "Well I think that's tremendous, Carling! Give you a chance to see how business is done, hey?" He immediately turned back to my father and began talking to him again. "Are we figuring a weekly deposit, ten or twenty dollars? Or a small lump sum? We've got some great funds we can place you in?"

I cleared my throat, and Dad smiled and said, "Ask him. It's his money."

Hardesty looked over at me curiously. "Really? What did you have in mind, son?"

"How many shares of ITT common will $15,000 buy? I'm not looking for any odd block purchase fees, so some will end up in a money market account, preferably an equity growth account.", I replied.

Hardesty looked at me and blinked, and then turned right back to Dad. "I'll have to look that up, Charlie. I really don't think that's the way you want to go, though. I think you'll do much better with one of the mixed equity funds we've had you with for the last several years."

"It's not my money, it's his." Dad just pointed a finger over at me.

Hardesty looked back at me like I was growing a second head. "You want ITT common? You shouldn't be doing that son; you should be buying some money market mutual funds. Here, let me show you this brochure and tell you how they work." He couldn't have been more condescending and patronizing if he had tried.

"I'll be looking to actively trade equities, at least as a start, but I would expect that as opportunities arise, to also move into commodities. Additionally, I'll probably be doing some trades in options, both calls and puts, maybe some short sales.", I replied. "Is that going to be an issue?"

Hardesty looked back at my father. "Charlie, what is going on? Is this some kind of joke?"

Even Dad was getting a little pissed. "Bill, I already told you, it's his money. He has a check in his pocket, already made out in the name of the brokerage, for $15,000."

"Mr. Hardesty?" He looked over at me and I pulled a folded up check out of my pocket and unfolded it, although I kept it out of his reach. "I plan on being an active trader. Will you execute the trades I call in, or not?"

"Well, I suppose so, although I'll need to confirm them with your father..."

I stood up. "Come on, Dad. This isn't going to work." I tucked the check back in my pocket and walked back out into the hallway. Behind me I could hear Hardesty spluttering and asking my father what he thought he was doing.

I wandered down the hallway to see the cute young Miss Talmadge working at her desk. It was a much smaller office than Hardesty's. She was hanging up her phone when she saw me standing in her doorway. "Got a moment?", I asked.

She looked at me curiously, and motioned me forward. "How can I help you?"

I sat down at the armchair next to her desk. "I saw on the Broker of the Month plaque that you're number two around here. Is that true?"

She smiled at me. "Yes it is. Why?"

I placed the check down on her desk. "Is it true that number two tries harder?" This was the slogan of Avis Rent-A-Car at the time.

She eyed the check and then me again. "Yes, that is exactly what it means. Who are you and what are you up to?"

"I apologize for not introducing myself. My name is Carl Buckman and I'm looking to start an account."

"Really? You? You're a little young for that, don't you think?"

I gave her a soft smile. "I'll bet you've heard that said too."

She gave a quick barking laugh. "Okay, I earned that. You're serious?"

"Absolutely. Are you?"

"Yes and no.", she replied. "You're too young to open an account by yourself. Until you're eighteen, an adult has to be on the account as well."

"I have that already covered." Out in the hallway we could hear Hardesty and my father arguing, and looking for me as well. I raised my voice slightly, and said, "In here, Dad."

My father stuck his head around the corner. "Here you are. I thought we were leaving."

I pointed at Miss Talmadge. "She's number two, she'll try harder. Dad, this is Miss Talmadge. Miss Talmadge, my father, Charles Buckman."

"Pleased to meet you.", she said.

Hardesty stormed in. "What the hell do you think you're doing, Missy. You can't just steal my clients out from underneath me!"

I stood up and got between them. "Mr. Hardesty, I have never been your client, so she hasn't stolen me from you. I have no intention of being your client. And furthermore, this is not the behavior of a gentleman."

"How dare you speak to me like that, you little..." At that moment he noticed my father standing in the corner, and he stopped. He looked at Miss Talmadge, and yelled, "We'll see about this!", and then stormed out.

Missy Talmadge blinked and said, "Well, that was fun. Are you two serious about this?" I sat back down and outlined my investment plans. She just nodded and agreed with them. At one point she looked over at my father and asked if he was in agreement. He said he was, so she just shrugged and pulled some paperwork out of her desk. Fifteen minutes later she had the check and I had a brokerage account.

She led us out, but on the way, we were waylaid by an older gentleman, who called the three of us into a very large and rich corner office. He introduced himself as the branch manager and asked, politely, what had happened. I took the lead in explaining the situation. I finished by stating, "Here's the bottom line. I'm not doing business with Mr. Hardesty. If I do business with your firm at all, it will be with Miss Talmadge. If that breaks some sort of rule, then give me my check back and you can just shred these papers. I am sure that Merrill Lynch would be more than happy to talk to me. I think they're a couple of floors up, aren't they?"

"That won't be necessary, Mr. Buckman.", he replied, and for the first time, a man at this outfit was using that title with me, and not my father. It was a curious feeling.

On the drive home, Dad smiled and asked, "Think you were a little rough on Bill Hardesty back there?"

I smiled back. "What I think is that you can do better. He has you into mutual funds his company runs, right?"

"Yes."

"And occasionally you find him trading in something you hadn't authorized, but afterwards he tells you it was a great deal, right?"

"Yes. So?"

"Dad, he's churning your account and putting you into high cost proprietary funds. I can guarantee he makes more from your account than you ever will."

Dad stared at me for a second, but didn't reply.

The money I got from the lawsuits was going to be seed money. How many times have you ever thought, boy, if I'd only known about this company or that company, way back when, I'd have bought it and be rich? Wouldn't you have liked to have bought Microsoft or Xerox or Apple or Wal-Mart back when they were tiny and nobody had ever heard of them? Well, obviously I had heard of them.

There was more, however. As part of my MBA classes I had to take a finance class, and the professor had discussed the accounting practices and stock market analysis of the conglomerate craze of the Sixties, and how it had risen and fallen in the Seventies. I had even worked for several years at an ITT subsidiary, so I knew what most of the conglomerates would do in the next few years. This was the last gasp of the conglomerates. Within three years, their stocks would tank. You can make just as much money betting a stock will drop as you do that it will rise.

That was why I discussed options. This can give you incredible leverage betting on the rise or fall of a company, although you have the possibility of losing everything if you bet the wrong way. There were other ways to make money, too. The scenario I outlined of the rise of oil prices following another Arab-Israeli war would be duplicated in 1973, during the Yom Kippur War. The Israelis won the war, but the price of oil quadrupled. This happened again in 1979. For real money, the Hunt brothers tried to corner the silver market in '79 and silver prices quintupled in a matter of months, and then collapsed in 1980. Ride the wave up, and then ride it back down. By the time I got to college, I could have a million dollars. By the time I graduated, many times that.

This wasn't what I wanted in life. I have never really understood the burning desire some people have for inordinate wealth. A nice house, fine. Maybe a vacation place. But three, or four, or five places? Some people buy homes that they never actually even visit or live in! Want a boat? Okay, not my cup of tea (a boat is a hole in the water you try and fill with money) but I've had a lot of friends who liked them. How many do you need, though, and what's the fun of having a boat that you can't even steer, but have to hire a crew and captain to run? How many planes can I fly at once? How much is too much?

I wanted enough to have a nice home, maybe a vacation place. Hell, just be able to take a vacation when I wanted to! Fly first class, or even better, be able to charter a plane! Put my kids through college and pay for my daughters' weddings. And no debt, no credit cards! The worst arguments Marilyn and I ever had were not about the kids, but about money! Or about our lack of money! Everything else was a piece of cake.

I've been rich and I've been poor. Rich is better.

Chapter 7: Growing Up

A few days after starting my brokerage account, Dad drove me up to the Miyagi Dojo up on York Road. Mom still wasn't all that happy with either one of us for not giving her the money to put in the bank. It's not that she was going to steal it, but if I gave her twenty grand to invest, all I would ever see was the twenty grand, spent on college. If college were to cost less, she would hold onto the money until I needed it later. It would be used to pay their portion of any wedding expenses. Forget about earning interest on the money!

She was just starting to get over her mad when Dad took me to Miyagi's. That just got her started on why I needed to learn to fight. I would just get in trouble and go to jail again, and this time she wouldn't let me come home. Or Dad either. Later I told him that jail might be quieter. He just grinned and swatted the back of my head.

Lance had been in my grade going through Hampton Elementary. Almost all, about 95%, of the students there ended up going to Towsontown Junior High. Not all, however; the school boundaries between elementary schools and between junior high schools were not exactly identical. There were always a few kids each year who got caught in the overlap. Lance had ended up at Ridgely, which was to the north of us.

I hadn't seen Lance in a couple of years. He was the only kid in the entire school who hadn't been Caucasian. He was Japanese-American, though none of us knew how many generations ago they had come here. Mind you, this was during the Sixties, when the northern Baltimore County suburbs were about as white as chalk. If you went there now, they'd be just as rich, but as integrated as any other suburb. Nowadays right next door to St. Paul's is a Korean Catholic church, and they are at least as large. In 1969, being a Jap in Timonium was pretty damn unusual.

I didn't care. He was a nice guy. I always figured he would have more problems being gay than being Asian. This was a major no-no back then, and could actually get you arrested and jailed. He kept it quiet, but when I was around him, my 'gay-dar' would start pinging like crazy. I know that most women don't believe in gay-dar, but most guys do. We can tell. It's not 100% certain, maybe more like 90%, but we can tell. I have known only a few guys in my life who I have known were gay who I couldn't tell, a fellow teacher at MVCC for one, and one of my cousins, who I was never completely sure about anyway, for another.

It's not like I care. I am totally able to distinguish between the act and the person. I don't care if you fuck donkeys, as long as they're consenting adult donkeys. I have never understood the bit about how the gays are going to lead the youth of the world astray. Sure, sounds like fun - be ridiculed and beaten up by yokels, have family members shun you, be jailed and lose jobs! I bet you can get lots of people to sign up with a membership package like that! And I have also never understood how this might be tempting to a young person who is still 'learning about his sexuality.' If you have to learn, you're already gay. Ever since I was old enough to figure out that I could use my gizmo for more than just writing my name in the snow, I've known I was totally straight.

So, although Lance wasn't a flamer, it was obvious that he was 'as queer as a three dollar bill', that being one of the catchier descriptions of the day. He was also already a black belt, so it wouldn't do to make a smart comment about it.

The Miyagi Dojo didn't teach karate, but taught aikido. When I heard that I thought it was pretty cool. Dad had never heard of it but at the time nobody had ever heard of Steven Seagal. He became a movie star much later. I remember seeing him in a bunch of movies, and he was a for real 7th degree black belt in aikido. He didn't chop you or kick you, but he could toss you all over the place. That looked infinitely cooler, so I signed up. It wasn't terribly expensive, but it would all come out of my pocket, and I would need to ride my bike there after school. The only way I would get my parents to take me was if it was raining or snowing.

Aikido is not one of the more glamorous martial arts, in that nobody is breaking any boards or concrete blocks. Those are all 'hitting' arts, like karate or kick boxing. Aikido is a 'grappling' art, like judo. In a perfect match, your opponent tries to attack you, and then you avoid the attack, and use his momentum to make him do something he doesn't want to do. So, for instance, if he punches you, you can duck inside and then throw him over your shoulder, or maybe duck him from the outside and grab his arm, to twist it and flip him on his ass.

You also need to learn how to avoid this sort of thing happening to you. Bouts can be quite physical and quick. A premium is placed on speed and agility, not so much on strength and power. You have to be in good shape, and have some stamina as well. If I hadn't been running and working out with bricks and (after Christmas) barbells, it would have been very painful. As it was, although Mr. Miyagi considered me hopelessly slow, I learned and advanced.

School in the spring semester went about as I figured. I had finished the semester at Christmas with straight As, which mollified my mother somewhat. Mind you, I still wasn't living up to my potential, whatever the fuck she thought that was, but it was a lot better that the B-/C+ which had been my previous grades. In addition to Algebra 2, I signed up for typing class, which got me a serious ration of shit from just about everyone on the planet.

If you ever saw the television show Mad Men, then you know that in that day and age, secretaries were women and only women. Only secretaries used typewriters. If a boss needed to write a letter, either he hand wrote it and handed it to a secretary to type, or he gave it to her by dictation, personally or by tape recorder. Guys didn't type - end of story! This was one of the reasons Missy Talmadge was such a standout at the brokerage. She wasn't a secretary, but a broker, which was for men only.

Curiously, my father had actually sent me to summer school on my original run, between my eighth and ninth grade years, to learn typing. I was the only guy in the class. I have no idea why he wanted me to learn, and it may well have been as a punishment for some now long forgotten misdeed, but it was one damn useful skill. From then on I typed all my reports; considering my handwriting, this was a vast improvement.

Maybe Dad liked secretaries. When he met Mom, she was his boss' secretary. He went fishing in the secretarial pool!

Anyway, I signed up for typing class, and was rejected immediately by the teacher. I wasn't a girl. I was supposed to take shop class, which was for boys. Shop class was actually three classes in one. You started out in the fall with drafting, moved into wood shop over the winter, and finished with metal shop in the spring. We did this for two years, and then when we got to high school were required to specialize, so some guys took all drafting and some took all wood shop. Girls took secretarial classes and home economics. There was to be no mixing of the species, since no good would ever come of such a thing. It was sort of like miscegenation, which was also considered unnatural.

By the time I got to high school, the rules began to break down. My junior year, the last I had to take shop, I took a second full year of drafting, and we actually had two girls in the class. The teacher, an old style geezer, simply couldn't deal with them. He was simply stunned when they showed up. He compensated by ignoring them the entire year. He graded their projects and tests, but nothing else. He wouldn't even talk to them.

Drafting had always proved useful to me. I had worked in several jobs where the ability to read blueprints and do design work proved quite helpful. I learned enough in wood shop to make a crappy wooden stool and know which end of the hammer was which. Metal shop was a disaster, since everything we used was either blistering hot or razor sharp, or both, and the only projects we made were totally useless. Of course, a lot of the guys ended up making high school versions of prison shivs, which for some of them would prove good training for the future.

When the typing teacher refused to let me in, I simply went down to the office and saw Mr. Butterfield. He also refused to let me in, with the same argument. I very calmly asked what the legal reason was. As soon as he heard the word 'legal' his ears pricked up and he stared at me.

"It's the rules!", he sputtered.

I set the paper back down on his desk and marked a big X where he was supposed to sign. "Mr. Butterfield, please, just sign here."

He turned bright red and spluttered some more, than grabbed a pen and scrawled his name angrily. I left quickly, not wanting to push my luck. I marched right back to the typing class and handed Mrs. Wakerman the paper. She stared at it and wordlessly pointed me towards an empty desk to the side. The typewriter was a decrepit and ancient manual Royal model, but it worked, mostly. I managed to get some time on some of the IBM electrics as well during the course.

This class was a little tougher. Typing on a keyboard is a snap compared to using a typewriter. Make a mistake and you have to go over it with a correcting ribbon. There's only one font. No spell checker or grammar checker. No automatic centering. No automatic line return. And you have to do it all blind, because your eyes aren't on the screen, but to the side, reading what you are trying to type. They call this touch typing, probably because afterwards you're touched in the head.

Still, I got a decent enough grade the first time, and while Mrs. Wakerman wasn't happy, she was fair. I got a decent grade this time, too. Even better, I got to hang out with a bunch of pretty girls, and didn't have to make prison shivs with a bunch of ugly guys. I promised Mrs. Wakerman I would sign up for Home Economics next year, which made her apoplectic and the girls giggly.

I didn't have much grief from my male classmates, though. For one thing, after the fight on the bus, I got a wide berth from anybody interested in bullying me. For another thing, well, like I said, I got to hang out with some awfully pretty girls in class, which was a pretty big deal at 13 or 14. I wasn't anywhere near as nervous about girls this time around. If the girls weren't interested in me, and let's face it, they weren't, they often told me which guy they were interested in, and I could drop subtle hints ( 'Asshole, I am telling you, she'd like to go to the dance with you! Get with the program!') in the proper direction. I had a rather subtle power over my compatriots.

Okay, I had my fair share of hormones rampaging as well, but as a midget 13 year old, I couldn't buy a handjob from a hooker, let alone a dance invitation with a girl. The first time, I didn't get anywhere until I was 14, next year. This time looked to be the same. I jerked off in the bathroom at home occasionally. Oh well.

I managed to make it to First Class in Boy Scouts as well. I liked Scouting, and was involved from Cub Scouts, up through Boy Scouts, and then transferred over to the Explorers. Later, when Parker was old enough, I registered him as a Cub Scout and I became a Scout Leader. He actually made Eagle, and I had just about every rank in the book, ending as an Assistant Scoutmaster.

At the time, however, I only cared about the camping. I cared nothing about ranks or merit badges, even though I learned enough to qualify for a shitload of them. I never made it above First Class, and the Explorers simply don't have ranks. They have job titles, and they consider themselves elite anyway.

Hamilton couldn't hack it and dropped out after a year. He hated the hazing all first year scouts get. The final straw for Ham had been when he was diagnosed with the dread disease 'ear lobes', which required the bottom half of his ears to be painted with mercurochrome. I actually enjoyed it, and then dished it out when I was older. In later years Scouting became all politically correct, and hazing wasn't considered nurturing and progressive. I remember one camporee where a buddy of mine and I spent two hours being sent from one campsite to another in search of a left-handed monkey wrench. I don't recall it leaving me feeling un-nurtured. Nobody ever died from searching for smoke shifters (keeps the smoke out of your eyes at campfires), skyhooks (to hold your tent up if the pole breaks), tent-stretchers (obviously to stretch your tent), or a hundred feet of shoreline. Likewise, sending a bunch of 10 and 11 year old boys into the woods with a stick and a bag to catch snipes (they actually exist, but not in the woods) is an excellent means to burn off their energy. Snipe-hunting was a time honored tradition in the Boy Scouts of the Sixties and Seventies.

I loved it. Between Boy Scouts and the church youth group Pastor Joe took camping, I could count on a camping trip every month, rain or shine, no matter what the season. I liked it and I was good at it. I had all the gear, and when I moved to the Explorers it just got better. Explorer posts specialize in something. Many specialize as police or EMT or firefighter auxiliaries, but the one I joined specialized in canoeing and camping. By the time I went to college, I was an expert, and could confidently tackle Class V whitewater rivers. I even had a waterproof World War II surplus UDT diver's backpack for keeping my stuff dry in rough water. It was a seriously cool Post.

The major change that happened in the summer of 1969 involved a major remodeling of the house. Nana, my mother's mother, was moving in. This was somewhat of a mixed blessing the first time around, and I suspected it would be this time also.

Pop-pop, Mom's father, had died when I was twelve, almost two years ago. He and Nana lived in Baltimore, in the Highlandtown area, which is where Mom grew up. They were a real pair of characters. He was at least ten years older than Nana, was from London, and around the turn of the century had run away from home and gone to sea on a whaling ship. For the rest of his life he earned a living from the sea. One winter he got snowed in at Tierra del Fuego at the southern tip of South America. During World War II he had been a civilian deep sea diver for the Navy, moving mines around ports. After the war he had his own deep sea salvage yard. I remember his deep sea diving suit and helmet down in the basement of the house. He kept a double-decker pigeon coop in the backyard for racing pigeons.

Nana was a crusty old battleaxe, born around the turn of the century. Her parents were German, and came here during the massive immigration of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Her parents must have found a way to get busy on the boat, because she was born about 8½ months after they arrived. She used to make beer in the bathtub during Prohibition.

Anyway, Pop-pop was sailing a different sea these days, and Nana still had the place in Highlandtown. Last year, during the riots in Baltimore after Martin Luther King was killed, Dad had me get dressed in case he and I had to go into the city to rescue her. It didn't have to be done, but it got my mother very nervous. She was going to come out to live with us. If ever I wondered whether my father loved my mother, this was the ultimate proof he did; the old bat could be cantankerous as hell! Every week she would buy the National Enquirer, the worst of the tabloids, and she believed every word, because 'it's a newspaper!' Because of that, we didn't need to spend all that money sending men to the moon, because the aliens were actually landing somewhere in New Mexico. Besides which, all those rocket launches interrupted the soap operas she set her life by.

She really hated the moon launches. Not only did we not need to spend the money on space, we should keep the money here, where it could help all the poor people. It could be used to increase Social Security! Dad went nuts when she got on that kick. She was living under his roof and eating his food and not paying one red cent, and he would be damned if his taxes went to raise her Social Security payments when she didn't spend penny one!

On the other hand, she was an easy touch for us kids, and was always slipping the three of us a buck or two. What really cost her money was that twice a week, Tuesdays and Thursdays, she played Bingo over at the VFW in Perry Hall. On Tuesdays Mom would go with her and sit with her, but Thursdays I got the task. For at least a couple of years, no matter what the season, even during school sessions, I ended up playing Bingo on Thursday night. She must have been the unluckiest Bingo player on the planet, because I don't recall her ever winning, not even once.

The house we lived in was like every other house in the development, a split-level. They were like an upscale Levittown, built in the mid-Fifties. You could get the house right-handed or left-handed, in-line or tee-shaped, and in brick or clapboard. A total of 8 styles, and they must have built about five thousand of them! Miles and miles of these things! I could go into any friend's house in a five mile radius and know where everything was.

No way could we fit Nana into the house. First, a contracting crew built a big utility shed on the end of the house. Then, after it was finished, Dad and Hamilton and I moved everything out of the garage and moved it into the shed. Once the garage was empty, the contractor ripped out the garage door and converted the garage into a giant bedroom for Ham and me. This was the blessing end of the deal. Our bedroom actually became the largest room in the house. Our old bedroom would become Nana's.

My first thought was that Suzie was getting the short end of the stick, but she didn't mind. Her bedroom was the smallest in the house, sort of an upholstered closet. Still, she got along great with her grandmother, and Nana bought a beautiful cherry bedroom set for her new bedroom, with the understanding that when she passed away, Suzie was to get it. Suzie cared for Nana from the day she moved in, which was a hell of a job to ask of an eight year old. Suzie never complained once, and when Suzie became a nurse everybody, including Suzie herself, acknowledged that she became a nurse because of taking care of Nana.

I got my first lessons in both practical and theoretical construction that summer. If anybody was ever to tell me I would eventually spend over thirty years at a construction company, I'd have said they were nuts. I was going to be a scientist! It's funny where life takes you.

Chapter 8: Ninth Grade

Fall 1969

By the time school started, I had grown one more inch, so now I was 5'1" tall. The ninth grade had seen a huge growth spurt for me, and I was really looking forward to it. From the time school started until the time school ended, I grew nine inches in nine months. I shot up like a beanpole. I was 5'10" tall at junior high graduation. Mom was beside herself the entire year, trying to keep me in clothing; I would outgrow everything I owned every month or two! It was ridiculous! After school ended I would only grow another inch and end up being my final 5'11" height.

One major difference now was that I was exercising and had already put on about five pounds of muscle. Before, I had looked anorexic, now I just looked slender. Even after I stopped growing, I was so skinny I had needed all my suits tailored for me. Maybe this time I could buy off-the-rack and have them fit.

It started within a few weeks of school starting. Two weeks into the fall semester I was walking through the kitchen when Mom stopped me. We had a measuring spot on the door frame between the kitchen and dining room, with lines drawn in different colors for each of us kids. "Come here, get against the door frame.", she said. I grinned and got into position. We normally did this on our birthdays, so this was a couple of months early for me. She put the ruler on top of my head and I scooted out from underneath it. "Well, I know what you're getting for your birthday - new clothes!" Mom, if you only knew! As it was, she had to buy me a couple of pairs of blue jeans anyway, because they were too short.

Ninth grade was similar to eighth grade, but was more focused for the college prep kids. We no longer took general science, but now took Biology. Everyone else would get that in high school. Likewise, the college prep kids took a second year of algebra and a foreign language. My deal with Mrs. Bakkley had her tutoring me in Plane Geometry, and required me to make a weekly visit to Towson High to see Mrs. Rogers and turn in assignments and receive new ones. Mom or Dad would usually take me over after school.

Spanish II was livened up this year. We had a new girl in school, a transfer, Rebecca Rinaldi. Becky was a State Department brat, and had lived in a bunch of different Latin American countries, moving every few years when her father was transferred to a different embassy. She was perfectly fluent in Spanish, and delighted in teaching the class all the words you didn't find in El Camino Real. Cussing in Spanish became the new sport! We also knew enough Spanish now to get into trouble. If you didn't know what the word was, you could always fake it by adding an 'o' to the end of the English word. You'd usually get a laugh and be told what the word was. This time it backfired on Tammy Roberts, who had to say she was embarrassed, so she said 'Yo soy embarrassado.' The teacher broke down in laughter before explaining it to us. 'Embarrassado' means pregnant! Tammy was the butt of jokes for a month after that.

I was now in the 9th grade chorus. Back on my first go-around, I had played trumpet all through elementary and junior high schools. I have no known musical talent. When I got recycled (for want of a better word) I hadn't held a trumpet in my hands for over fifty years! I didn't even know how to blow into it anymore, let alone how to key the notes. One of the biggest blowups we had last year was when I announced I wanted to stop playing the trumpet and sing in the chorus. Chorus was for those kids who couldn't afford an instrument or were too stupid to play one. My utter lack of ability was not considered grounds for change. Thank God my voice had changed by then, because I finally settled the argument by breaking into 'The Impossible Dream' from Man of La Mancha. While the movie wouldn't come out for several years, my parents had a copy of the sound track from the Broadway play. It is a tremendous song for a baritone, and they were simply stunned. To look at me you wouldn't think I could pull it off, but I had once sung baritone in the church choir.

By the time my birthday rolled around, I was already well on the way to my final height. I had grown another couple of inches since Mom had measured me, and I was on the way to outgrowing the clothes she had bought me at the start of the year. She fretted over this, and I just laughed and told her I was going to be taller than her by my next birthday. She just rolled her eyes and muttered a lot. I told her to save everything that I grew out of, since Hamilton was probably going to do the same thing in another two or three years. He ended up three inches taller than me!

School became vastly more interesting in mid-November. The Science Fair was announced. Students could enter a project in the annual Science Fair, to be judged in the spring; it was expected of all the college prep crew to participate (read required) and optional for other students. It was open for individual students, or as teams of two.

Back when I did this the first time, I did it by myself, and took second place, with a project showing the effects of different radiation levels on the growth of barley plants from irradiated seeds. The first place winner was Mike Misner, who was a buddy in the college prep group. His project involved growing a bunch of fertilized chicken eggs in an incubator. Every day he would harvest an egg and place it in a jar in formaldehyde, showing fetal growth. The leftover eggs at the end of the project he hatched, so we had peeping chickens at the fair. Timing was everything. I had the better science, but let's face it, peeping chickens make for great theater. Mike continued this field of endeavor, ending up as a pediatrician down in Annapolis.

I decided on better theater myself, but growing chickens in the house was out of the question. I had already decided to do a project on the tar in cigarettes. Randy Bronson did this the last time, using a vacuum pump to 'smoke' cigarettes and collecting the tar they generated. That was all he did, though, collect the tar. Adequate theater but lousy science. I figured I could dress it up and do better science and I might beat the chickens. I put in a proposal the first day of the announcement, before Randy had a chance.

The interesting part was when Shelley Talbot came up to me that week in the hallway. I was very curious about this, because up until now, Shelley had looked at me like something to be scraped off the bottom of her shoe. She was one of the popular girls, very pretty, and the rumor mill had it down as gospel that chastity was not one of her cardinal virtues. Supposedly she put out, but I had serious doubts about a fourteen or fifteen year old girl doing that back in the Sixties. Then again, I did have a feeling she was more advanced than her classmates. She was the only girl in the school who I knew for a fact dyed her hair. In the eighth grade she had been a blonde. This year she was a brunette.

She came up to me between classes at my locker. "Carl, can I talk to you for a bit?"

I smiled and said, "What's up?" For the first time in my life I was actually tall enough to look a girl in the eye!

"Well, you know, we have to do a project for the science fair. What are you doing?"

I gave a brief explanation of my plan. "What were you doing?", I asked. I was curious. Technically the Science Fair was optional, but participation would be good for your grade. In practical terms, it was required for college prep, and Shelley was not college prep.

She groaned, "I can't think of anything!"

"You need some ideas? I suppose I can help with that."

"Uh..." She gave me a slightly coquettish look. "Well, I was wondering. You know, we can do this in teams of two, and I was wondering, uh, maybe..."

I stared at her. This was totally out of the blue! This was a girl who wouldn't give me the time of day before. What was going on?! "You want to team with me? Why?"

"Oh, God, Carl! Like, you're so smart! Everybody knows you take classes over at Towson and all. You're straight A, for Christ's sake! You're going to blow this away!"

I gave her a thoughtful look. "Yeah? So, what's in it for me?"

"What do you mean?" The idea that somebody wouldn't be dying to have her in their team was an alien concept.

"I mean, if this is a team effort, what do you bring to the team?", I replied.

Her face kind of scrunched up at this. An original thought would kill this girl, and right now she was experiencing death-like symptoms. "Uhhhh..."

I let her off the hook. "Listen, let me give it some thought. I'll talk to you tomorrow. Alright?"

"Thanks, Carl, you're tremendous!", she said, and then she leaned forward and kissed me on the cheek! She was off and down the hallway after that, while I stood there in shock, rubbing my cheek until the class bell rang. I was late to English 9.

I was lost in thought the rest of the day. Developing a project outline for a scientific experiment was a piece of cake. I had spent fifty years working with math and the hard sciences before, even at the construction company. I jotted down notes quickly. No, what had me wondering was Shelley. The way she had looked at me, and that kiss ... well, that kiss really made me wonder! It had been a long time since that had happened to me, and I liked it. Was she trying to buy my support via some form of sexual gratification. A Buckman can't be bought - but we can be rented! I looked forward to negotiations.

By the next morning I had developed two plans of attack, one for me doing the project alone and the other for working as a team. We had a week to develop our planned projects, for review by the science teachers, but I wanted to get my project approved before Randy submitted his plan. I saw Shelley in the hallway before class and asked her to meet with me at lunch. Normally she would never have been seen with a geek like me, but she readily agreed. She must be desperate, I thought.

She was. She admitted she needed a good grade on this project in order to pass Science, and everyone knew I was going to win. She was also a lousy negotiator, revealing the weakness of her position like this. I brought out the two person plan and explained it. "Okay, here's the plan. We're going to smoke a whole lot of cigarettes and collect all the tar, and then measure it."

"We're going to what?! I don't smoke and I don't plan to start!", she protested.

I grinned at her. "Good for you. Neither do I. No, we're going to build a machine and let it do the smoking for us." I pulled a sketch I had worked on out of my binder and laid it down. "See, here's how it works. First we get a vacuum pump, and then we simply make a few filters and attach them to the pump. Finally, at the other end, we make a mouthpiece and stick in a cigarette. We turn on the pump and light the cigarette. The pump draws the air in and the smoke goes into the filter. Afterwards we measure what was in the filter." I traced the parts of the system with my finger, and Shelley followed along.

She slowly nodded, but looked up at me. "We do all that for only one cigarette?"

I shook my head. "No, never work that way. There's not that much tar in a cigarette. We'll have to smoke a lot of cigarettes, a whole lot."

"Like how many? Besides, where do we get the cigarettes? We can't buy them. We're not old enough to buy them."

That was questionable, since I knew several guys who already smoked, however no way was I going to buy them from a vending machine. I had given it some thought though. "I'm not completely sure, but probably several cartons." She looked at me confused. "Do either of your parents smoke?", I asked.

She nodded. "Both of them do."

"Okay. There's twenty cigarettes in a pack, and ten packs in a carton. That makes two hundred cigarettes per carton. Five cartons is a thousand cigarettes."

"That's a lot of cigarettes."

"Yeah, but we need that many. I don't know how much tar is in a cigarette, but it's on the order of milligrams. A milligram is a thousandth of a gram.", I explained.

"So a thousand cigarettes is..." She looked stumped.

"A thousand milligrams is one gram. Now we'll never be able to detect a milligram, but a gram we can measure. If it's more than a milligram per cigarette, it becomes easier." I showed her how the filters would work. "We can take the filters apart after we weigh them and then collect the tar chemically."

"You can do that?", she asked.

"WE can do that.", I replied. Her eyes opened at this. "If we are doing this as a team, it won't just be me. You'll have to help out, too. Otherwise I can do it on my own."

She nodded slowly. "Uh, okay, but what can I do? I'm not all smart like you. I don't even know what grams and stuff are. How am I going to help?" I figured Shelley was planning on smiling and flirting and getting that silly nerd, Carling Parker Buckman, to go along with her, for the sheer enjoyment of her company. Five minutes after the A was handed out, Shelley would be history.

I reached across the table and laid a hand on top of hers. "Don't worry. I've thought of that as well. You're going to be a lot of help." I squeezed her hand and then pulled my arm back. No use frightening the prey away. The hunter had to leave a little more bait out first.

"Oh? How so?", she asked suspiciously.

Time to calm the prey down, show her that the trap wasn't really there, but just part of the landscape. "Well, we need a place to set this up. We're going to need someplace which can be secured, without a lot of people wandering through and messing it up."

"Here, after school?"

"Take too long to smoke all those cigarettes.", I answered.

She shrugged. "Home?"

"There's five other people at home, several of whom would take the thing apart or turn it off or something, and I don't have a basement to lock it in."

"Well, I do. I mean, we have a basement. We could set it up there.", she said.

I nodded. "Any kid brothers who'd wreck it?"

"I'm the baby of the family. The only person other than my parents is the cat, and we can keep her out of trouble."

"See, you're already helping. We set the lab up in your basement. We can smoke cigarettes down there after school. You help with that, and get your parents to buy the cigarettes. I'll do the science. Do you know how to type?"

"Better than you, Carl. I've seen your typing!" She smiled at this. We shared the same typing and home economics classes.

"Then you can type up our final report. It's a natural partnership. Even at the actual fair itself. I'll stand there and look like a nerd, and you can dress up and look pretty. We can't lose!"

"I can do more than just look pretty!"

I laid my hand on hers again, just for a moment, and squeezed it again. "I know that, and this will be your chance to prove it. Besides, you end up better off than I do."

"How so?" She never removed my hand.

I pulled back and smiled. "Because you'll always be pretty, and now you'll show how smart you are. As for me, I'll still be smart, but I'll never be pretty!"

She giggled loudly at this and agreed to my terms. I turned in our project outline that afternoon, beating Randy by three days. The first few weeks would all be research anyway, and I would have to do that on my own. My compliments to Shelley notwithstanding, the brain portion of the project was all mine. She was a gorgeous airhead.

I got home late from school that night, missing the school bus, and had to walk. It was only about a mile and a half or so, and my new and improved shape wasn't even a light workout. I came in the door to find Mom standing there. "Detention? Wait until your father hears about this!" The school must have called her.

I gave her a sheepish shrug and went downstairs, dumping my stuff off in the bedroom. I avoided Mom and any questions until later. Mom must have told Dad when he got home, but I stayed in my room studying Geometry until we all went up to dinner.

Now that we had six people in the house, Suzie had to share her side of the dining room table with Nana. She was in charge of making sure Nana didn't put salt on her plate before we sat down. She was on a low sodium high blood pressure diet, and she salted everything, driving my mother nuts. I never narced on her, figuring the old bat would just make a ruckus if we caught her. Usually Suzie caught her about once a week and ratted her out, causing Nana to start crying. Tonight I noticed Nana got away with it. I debated winking at her, but Mom would probably catch me and figure it out.

Dad was the one who started in on me. After we said grace, he picked up the serving plate of the pot roast and speared a piece. "So, you want to explain how you got a detention in Home Economics?"

Hamilton started laughing. He began singing, "Carl got detention, Carl got detention!"

"Hey, Dad, really?" I hooked my thumb at my brother, and Dad ordered him to shut up, or else. Hamilton had never given them the no-hitting ultimatum like I had, and could still get walloped.

"So?", he pressed.

I thought about it, and I must have looked very sheepish doing so. "I couldn't help it. I swear, I just couldn't help it. It just sort of burst out.", I admitted.

"What just burst out?", asked Mom coldly.

"Well, Mrs. Wakerman was talking about tropical foods and fruits and nuts and stuff, and she started talking about coconut milk, and she asked if anybody knew what you could use coconut milk for. So I just said that mommy coconuts fed it to the baby coconuts, so they could grow up to be big and strong, and that's when she gave me detention."

Mom stared at me for a second, and then just buried her face in her hands and started laughing. Dad leaned so far back while he laughed that his chair fell backwards and dumped him on the floor. Even Nana started laughing. Only Suzie and Hamilton didn't laugh; Suzie because she didn't understand, and Hamilton because he could see I wasn't getting in trouble.

He still tried to push it, though. After our parents calmed down, he started smirking and snarkily said, "You still got detention. You're still going to get punished."

I just shook my head at him. "Hamilton, you want to know why people like me more than you? I was named after a delicious and refreshing adult beverage, and you were named after a watch." That set my parents to laughing all over again.

The next day at school I got the approval for the project from our Biology teacher, Mr. Hailey. I told Shelley and she squealed with delight, and kissed my cheek again. This time I gave her a hug, which surprised her, but she didn't protest. My seduction strategy was a slow one, but would probably prove successful. A few discreet inquiries gave indications that Shelley had a much better understanding of the birds and the bees than would be expected in a ninth grader. How much was completely true, I couldn't say - yet - but I considered this as worthy of scientific investigation as cigarette tar.

"Now, for the next week we need to do preparation. I need to get over to Towson State and use the library there and you..."

"You're going over to Towson State College?", she asked, her eyes widening.

"Uh, sure. I need to do the preliminary research."

"Wow!"

I don't know why this surprised her, but I chalked it up to the fact that she figured only college students could go over there. The truth was that Towson State was only about a half mile from Towson High, and the college prep kids there routinely went over to the library for research. All you needed was your student ID card and they'd let you in. I didn't see why there would be an issue.

Getting over there would be simple, too. It was basically just a couple of miles further south on York Road, almost in the center of Towson. I could ride my bike there easily. Further, what with my wacky schedule and a lot of independent study time, I pretty much had an unlimited hall pass. As long as I let my teachers know what I was up to, I could take a day and go over there without worrying about skipping class.

I shrugged. "It's no big deal. Like I said, I'll go over there either tomorrow or the next day and figure a few things out. You need to sweet talk Mr. Hailey into letting us use a vacuum pump. I know they have one here, but we'll need to take it home."

She nodded in understanding. "I'll ask him at lunch. If he says yes, I can call Daddy and he can drive over and we can carry it out to the car. We can carry it down to the basement. How big a space do we need?"

Again, I shrugged. "I don't know. It's not like we're building anything all that big." I used my hands to measure out an area of about three feet by three feet. "I bet we could put it all together in a space like that. I mean, if you have an old table or something like that, I'm sure it can fit on that."

"We have an old dining room table in the corner."

"Sounds perfect. We can pull it away from the wall so we can move around it. We'll build our own lab in the basement, just like Doctor Frankenstein did!"

She laughed at that. I put an arm around her shoulder and gave her a quick hug, and she giggled at that. Then she put an arm around my waist and hugged me back, and then pulled away. She smiled shyly and we split up, and she gave me a hip bump as she moved away. This project looked to be very educational, indeed!

The next morning I rode my bike to school. After lunch, I checked out and rode down to Towson State. At the time it was known as Towson State College. It had originally been a small teacher's college, but over the years the size of the school and the quality of education there had grown substantially. By the time I graduated from college, it had transformed into Towson State University, and a few years later became simply Towson University, the second largest university in the state. The odds that I would be able to find relevant information were quite high.

They were even better than I thought. I quickly found an article on cigarette tar that had been co-authored by a professor there at Towson State. Figuring nothing ventured, nothing gained, I rode over to the chemistry building and locked my bike into the rack there. Once inside I found the professor was at class, but would be back in another half hour. Despite a number of curious stares from much older students, I sat down on the floor in the hallway to wait for him.

About half an hour later a middle-aged man came walking down the hallway towards me. He glanced at me curiously, and then opened the door to his office. He stopped and looked down at me as I climbed to my feet. "Can I help you?"

"Are you Professor Milhaus?", I asked.

"Yes. Are you waiting for me, Mister... ?"

"Buckman, sir. Carl Buckman. Can I talk to you for a few minutes?"

"Sure." He opened his office door and stepped inside, holding it open for me as well. "How can I help you, Mr. Booker?"

"That's Buckman, sir." I pulled out my wallet and handed him a business card. He stared at it in surprise, not expecting a teenager to have a card.

It had been as much a joke as anything else. Some of the guys at school had been talking about their fathers having business cards, and they seemed to think it was cool. I had commented that it was no big deal; they should get some of their own if they wanted them. That immediately started an argument about whether kids could do it, about how to get them, and about what they would say. I just said to give me a couple of weeks and I bet I could get some made for me. One loud mouth even bet me five bucks I was full of shit.

That afternoon, after school, I found a printer in Towson in the Yellow Pages. I called and asked if they did business cards and how much they were, and got the directions. The next day I rode my bike to school, and after school rode into Towson. The guy at the front desk thought I was full of shit until I laid a twenty down on the counter, at which point he blinked hard and began to help. It was a simple card really, no artwork or logos, just printed on a pebble finish heavy white stock, with

Carling Parker Buckman, II

(I'm named after my grandfather) across the center in a heavy font, and under that

Scholar Adventurer Soldier of Fortune

in a smaller serif font, and then down in the lower right hand corner, my home phone number, discreetly done in a sans serif font, all done in a glossy black. It actually looked rather classy.

I won the fiver from my friend along with some brownie points at school, but it all proved to be a bit of a mixed bag, at least at home. Hamilton got seriously bent out of shape about my business cards. First he decided to complain about them at the dinner table, and about how I was breaking the law doing this. My parents were kind of curious about why I would bother, and when they refused to have me destroy the cards and otherwise punish me, he ran down to our room and started scribbling on them with a Magic Marker. I caught him at this and called mom down to our bedroom to show her. He stood there with ink on his fingers and denied everything. That got him walloped by Dad with the oak pledge paddle. When I asked about getting paid for the cards he had ruined, Dad tossed me my brother's wallet, and I lifted out a five. This caused Ham to start fighting and screaming, and got him spanked a second time. I took the remaining cards and locked them in a foot locker I had.

Professor Milhaus looked at my card. "Mister Buckman. Sorry about that. How can I help you?"

"Professor, I'm a student over at Towsontown Junior High and my partner and I are working on a science fair project related to tar in cigarettes. I know you've done at least one paper on that and I was hoping for at least a little education."

His eyes lit up at that. "Yes, I can certainly help you. What did you have in mind?"

I quickly outlined my plans and asked for any advice he had to offer. Considering he understood what I planned, it went a lot faster than with Shelley. He followed along easily.

"Well, it's an ambitious plan, but nothing too unusual. Ambitious at least for high school. You go to Towson High?", he asked.

"Uh, no sir, Towsontown Junior High. We're in the ninth grade."

"Good lord! How old are you?"

"I just turned 14 a few weeks ago."

He stared at me for a second. "You're only 14? I've had worse explanations and plans from grad students! What do you plan to study after you graduate?"

"I want to get a degree in math or computers."

"Can I interest you in chemistry?", he asked with a smile.

Oh, Professor Milhaus, if you only knew. "Sorry, I think it'll be math.", I said, smiling back.

"What about your partner? What are they doing?"

I must have given a wry smile at that, because he raised an eyebrow at me. "Shelley is more the facilities and logistics end of the partnership, while I handle the science portion."

"Facilities and logistics?"

"It's in her basement.", I said with a shrug.

He looked askance at me. "Her basement, huh. Just for the sake of idle curiosity, is Shelley pretty?"

"Scientists are human, too, Professor." That got a good laugh from him.

We then got down to brass tacks. He made several suggestions for improving the project. He also gave me a small stack of scientific papers on cigarette tar. I asked about bringing a sample of the tar over and having it analyzed. They had a new gas chromatograph which would be useful on this, but it would end up using most of the first sample we created. Shelley and I would also list his name as an academic adviser. It was a fair request - he would get some credit for a community service type project for the college, and we could get some time from him.

I bundled up my paperwork and went back outside. I rode home through a cold wind and decided that the next time I needed to go over to the college, I would call and make an appointment and get somebody to drive me.

The next day at lunch I told Shelley about meeting Professor Milhaus over at Towson State, and how he had offered to give us some help. She was amazed at what I had achieved. So far she had simply managed to get her father to come and take the vacuum pump home. It was now sitting on the old table in her basement. We decided I would ride the bus home with her and I could see what the lab looked like. As soon as lunch broke, I found the pay phone at the school and called Dad to let him know I was changing my schedule, and that I would call when I needed a lift from Shelley's; he would let Mom know in turn.

The ride to Shelley's was interesting. She lived in our development, but on the other side of Charmuth Road, so she was on a different bus. We got a lot of questions when I got on with her, and then sat next to her, and she proudly proclaimed she was my partner in the Science Fair. For some reason this seemed to give her an improvement in status, which I couldn't fathom. She was already in the 'popular' clique; why worry about being smart? I don't claim to understand women.

I was already the King of the Nerds, and fully graced with all the rights and privileges of said kingdom. It was a rather dubious honor. The rights and privileges seemed few and far between.

Shelley lived about a half block from where we got off the bus, and as we walked to her house she tucked an arm in mine. This was the first physical touch that she had initiated, and I liked it. Maybe the King of the Nerds had some hidden rights. Droit du seigneur seemed a bit of a stretch, but I'd be willing to go along. We walked to her house, bumping hips and laughing. She let us in, telling me that her parents were both at work for another couple of hours. Interesting!

Before anything else could happen, I needed to see the lab area. The basement was well enough lit, if a bit dusty. The table was in the corner, with an old vacuum pump sitting on it. I looked around but couldn't find an electric outlet, so Shelley looked and found one on the other side of the room. I picked up the pump and moved it off the table, and then we both picked up the table and carried it across the room. Then I grabbed the pump and set it up again. "You got any rags and Windex or something?", I asked. Everything was fairly dusty.

"Upstairs."

"Can you go up and grab a bunch, please? We need to do some cleaning first."

She scampered up the stairs and came back down a few minutes later with an armload of old rags and a bottle of Windex. I grinned when I saw her. "Professor Milhaus asked what you were doing, and I said you were Facilities and Logistics. I was right!" This didn't get the response I expected, since Shelley didn't know what either facilities or logistics meant. Oh, dear. Well, she was very ornamental.

We cleaned up the table and the vacuum pump, which was old and a little dirty and greasy. We still needed a power cord to connect up the pump, which made an ungodly racket when running, but it looked like it would work. I found a wrench and took off the suction end of the pump and stuck it in my backpack. I would need to go by the hardware store and come up with a filtration cavity. I told Shelley I would get my father to take me to the hardware store on Saturday and try and figure out something we could use, probably from plumbing supplies. With any luck we could have a working model next week.

"Wow! That seems awfully fast! I thought we didn't have to do this until the spring?", she commented.

I looked around the room. At the other end of the basement was some old furniture. I led her over there and sat down on a ratty old couch. She sat down next to me. I leaned back into the corner and said, "You'd be surprised how quickly the time will go. Listen, you want an A on this, right?"

"I need an A on this.", she replied ruefully.

I didn't react to that, but I admitted, "And I want to win this, not just get an A, so we have to do more than you'd think. First, we're probably going to have to suck down about a thousand cigarettes to get a batch of tar to take over to Towson State. I don't know how long it will take to smoke a cigarette, but even if we do one a minute, that's three packs an hour. It might take us a couple of weeks to smoke fifty packs."

Shelley blinked at that. "Wow!"

"It gets worse. That first batch of tar will go to Towson State, but they'll be using it all. We won't get anything back, which means we'll need to make another batch for the demonstration of the project. Maybe even two batches." Even so, I was privately worried we still wouldn't win. We could win the Nobel Prize with the science, but Mike Misner could still beat us with even a half-assed project. You just can't beat an incubator full of baby chicks for cuteness.

Shelley saw my worried look and smiled at me. "Hey, we're going to win, I just know it! You're too smart to do anything else!" Then she leaned over and kissed me again, only this time not on my cheek but on my lips. "I'm telling you, we're going to win!"

I smiled and licked my lips. I hadn't been kissed by a girl since Marilyn died on my first trip through eternity. I liked it, and the hormones going through me were not all that much under control. "Wow, is that how you plan to keep my morale high?"

She waved her arm at the room. "I'm not just good for facilities and logics, but I can also handle morale."

I grinned. I could have explained the difference between logics and logistics, but I didn't think that would be all that productive. On the other hand... "You know, I still think there's an awful lot of work to do. I'm just feeling really depressed about it." I moaned theatrically.

Shelley waggled her eyebrows at me. She shifted on the couch and crawled over me, and this time the kiss lasted a good deal longer. Then she sat back down on her heels. "Feeling better?"

"Some, but you know, it kind of comes and goes. I think I need another treatment." I reached out and tugged her towards me. She crawled back on top of me and I stretched out. We began kissing again, and this time I slipped her a little tongue. Shelley instantly responded, and our tongues began dueling. We necked for another hour or so, until we heard a door open upstairs and the floor creaking. We separated, grinning, and got ourselves back in order.

I stood up and tucked my shirttails back in. "I hate to say it, but I think we're going to have to work on my mental depression some more."

Shelley licked her lips lewdly. "I know cures you wouldn't believe!" She checked her own shirttails, and then grabbed my hand. "Come on, we need to go upstairs. I think my mom is home." I allowed myself to be dragged upstairs to meet first her mother, and then her father when he came home.

Shelley's parents were both heavy smokers. Nobody had ever heard of second hand smoke in those days, but you could probably get lung cancer just by walking through the house. Both her parents smoked two packs of Marlboros a day, and the house reeked of tobacco. Shelley didn't smoke, and when I got done with this project, she'd never want to. Mr. Talbot drove me home, since he hadn't even taken off his coat. The way he and Mrs. Talbot coughed, I hoped Shelley wouldn't be an orphan before she graduated.

I suspected my father would end up quitting by the time I got through with this project, also. He smoked two packs a day of L&Ms, and had done so since he was in the Navy. He ended up quitting when I was in high school, and then took up cigars for another ten years, before quitting that, too. The curious thing was that for all that the anti-smoking zealots complain about the dangers, and God knows, it's a deadly habit, not everybody who smokes gets cancer. Dad lived until he was 75 and never had a problem with his lungs. I smoked 26 years and when I had to quit I had a lung test and found I had the lungs of a teenager. Marilyn was seriously peeved with me about that. She wanted me to have something dreadful, but curable, so she could sit there and tell me, 'I told you so!' It might eventually kill 95% of the people who smoked, but Dad and I were in that other 5%. Then again, I seemed to have been recycled due to a heart attack, but was that because of smoking or the lamp?

That Saturday Dad and I drove up to a local hardware store and went through the plumbing section. This was all long before the days of Home Depot or Lowes. Hardware stores were much smaller. There was an ample supply of pipes and fittings, and while I would have preferred stainless steel, it just wasn't available. I settled on galvanized. I bought enough parts for three different filters.

Monday afternoon I rode the bus home with Shelley again, and we headed down to the basement. I had the bag of pipe fittings in my backpack, along with a big package of surgical cotton balls. I laid everything out on the table. "I tried this all at home over the weekend, but we need to try it here and see if it actually will work. We need to hook it up to the pump and see if it can work."

"Okay, but what exactly do we have?"

"This is the body of the filter.", I said, holding up a piece of 1" galvanized steel pipe, six inches long and threaded at both ends. I then grabbed an adapter, which converted the 1" pipe to ¼" pipe, and threaded that onto one end. "So that end goes onto the pump. Now, we drop in this piece of wire mesh." I held up a small round piece of wire mesh.

"Where did you get that?"

I shrugged. "I think it's supposed to be a sort of garden fence wire. It's bigger than screen for windows but smaller than chicken coop screen." I dropped it down the pipe and jiggled it, then glanced inside to see if it lay flat. "All it does is hold the actual filter in place."

"The cotton balls, right?", she said pointing at the bag.

"Exactly." I reached over and grabbed the bag, and then ripped one end open.

"If we just drop the balls in there, won't the smoke go around them?"

I eyed her curiously. Actually, that was a very good question. Shelley might not be as dumb as she let out. "That's actually something we should think about. Maybe we should pull some of the balls apart before stuffing them into the tube." Shelley nodded and we each took a handful and pulled the balls apart into a mass of cotton. I held the tube upright while she pushed it down inside.

I really wasn't sure how much we wanted to fill it. Too much would make the draw too hard for the vacuum pump. Too little meant we wouldn't capture enough tar. We would also have to keep an eye out on how the pump functioned after tar started accumulating and clogging the filter. I was just guessing when I stopped Shelley and put the other end cap on.

"Now we attach the filter to the pump." I twisted the adapter onto the business end of the vacuum pump.

"And the cigarette goes on the other end. How does that work?"

I just looked at her. "That part I haven't figured out yet. Maybe when your parents get home we can ask them."

"It's funny. For once there's something you don't know!"

"Oh, Shelley, if you only knew! There's lots of things I don't know!", I said with a laugh.

She grinned. "Maybe I can teach you some."

"I'd like that."

"Anyway, let's figure that you figure out how to put a cigarette on that end and we smoke a bunch of cigarettes. How do we get the tar out of the cotton?"

"The way I see it, we open it up, take out the cotton balls, and mix the cotton balls in a solvent. The tar goes out of the cotton into the solvent, and then we boil off the solvent.", I replied.

"We do that down here?", she asked, looked very warily at the idea.

"God no, not unless we want the house to blow up! I think we had better do that over at school in the chem lab." She looked rather relieved at that.

We took a break at that point, and settled back onto the couch, where Shelley tried to teach me a few things. She was an excellent teacher. I got a bit bolder and began moving my hands around her back (she had on a small bra under her very thin sweater) and then around to the sides and her front. She had medium sized breasts. She didn't complain, but simply moaned louder when I began touching her through her sweater. Her face was very flushed when we had to stop because her parents started coming in.

Okay, it wasn't just her. I was breathing pretty hard as well. It had been a long time since I had made out with a teenage girl like that, and Shelley seemed very responsive. We both got off the couch and turned our backs on each other, and tucked in our shirttails and tried to clean up and look innocent. Almost as one we turned around to face each other and gave sheepish grins.

I smiled and said, "You know, I plan to become a mathematician, but chemistry seems pretty enjoyable, too."

Shelley laughed at that. "I'm starting to like it, too." Then she smiled and got a little more serious. She sat down on the arm of the couch and said, "You're not at all what I expected."

"Oh?"

"I figured you to be a super serious nerd and a total loser, and you're not." I raised an eyebrow at this. "Oh, I mean, you're just a genius and all, but you're, like, normal, too." She licked her lips and smiled. "You sure don't kiss like a genius."

I had to laugh at that. "And just how do geniuses kiss?", I asked.

She laughed with me. "I don't know, but not like that!"

"I'll have to give you a list of geniuses and how many kids they've had. They aren't a bunch of monks." I got a little more serious, as well. "Does this mean you won't be embarrassed to be around me in school? I won't be a secret?"

"That's not fair Carl, I haven't been treating you like that.", she answered me.

I rubbed my face. "No, no you haven't. I apologize for that. I get treated so differently at times, it's hard to remember not to be sensitive about things. I'm sorry."

She nodded. "We'll talk about that sometime." She looked at the project. "Let's get some help on this." She walked over to the basement stairs and yelled up the stairwell, "Daddy, can you come down and give us a hand?"

Chapter 9: The Science Fair

Shelley showed her father what we had concocted and asked about something to hold a cigarette in. He scratched his head for a moment, and then pulled a pack of cigarettes, Marlboros, out of his pocket. He lit it up and took a drag on it, and then put the filter end into the end of our filter. "Turn it on.", he ordered.

I reached across the table and flipped the switch on the pump. It started chugging away, and the cigarette was pulled firmly into the small pipe on the end of the adapter we were using as a filter cap. The coal glowed brightly and began to quickly march down the length of the cigarette, to ultimately go out when it hit the filter. I turned off the pump. We all looked at each other, and Mr. Talbot said, "That cockamamie gizmo actually works. Nice going, kids."

I stared at it again. "Yeah, I guess it does." Holy shit, this thing actually worked!

Mr. Talbot lit up another Marlboro and put it in place and I flipped the switch again, and we watched it smoke another cigarette. "Well, now what? What exactly are you planning on doing?" He asked it of his daughter, and lit up another cigarette. This one he started smoking himself.

Shelley stumbled a little explaining it, but I refrained from taking over. This was her moment and I didn't want to ruin it. At the end she turned to me and asked, "Did I say that right?"

I smiled. "Pretty much. By the end of this, we're going to have to pretty it all up, but you got it right. We're going to smoke a bunch of cigarettes through it, collect the tar, and measure it all."

"Going to prove I shouldn't be smoking these things, huh?", he said with a grunt.

"Daddy, it's not like that!"

"Yeah, it is, honey. That's exactly what it is. Don't worry about it. If somebody had done this forty years ago, maybe they wouldn't be killing me now.", he replied.

"Daddy?", she asked, suddenly fearful.

He coughed and smiled. "Not just yet, baby, but one of these days. I've still got a few years left. Just don't you grow up as stupid as your mother and me. You, neither, young man.", he said to me.

"No thanks, sir. My father smokes L&Ms and I have no interest in it either.", I responded.

He just nodded at that. "Just how many cigarettes are we talking about, anyway?"

I looked a little sheepish at that. It was a big number. "Uh, I figure we're going to need about five cartons per batch, and probably two or three batches."

He stared at me and gave a quiet 'oof' sound. "That's a lot of cigarettes. You got any preferences on brands?"

I shrugged. "More a matter of what they aren't. We don't want menthols, because they add a chemical to the tobacco which will just complicate things. And they shouldn't be filter tips, just tobacco."

"Why not?", he asked curiously.

"Well, we just built a filter. We don't want any of the tar stopping at the cigarette, but only in the big filter."

"Makes sense. Camel has a non-filter brand. You could try that, I suppose."

"Uh, would you be able to buy some for us? I mean, we'll pay, but no way is anybody going to sell us five cartons of cigarettes. We're only fourteen!", I said.

He looked at me for a minute, and then lit up another Marlboro. "You already bought all these parts yourself, didn't you?" He waved a finger towards the various filter parts.

I nodded. "Yes, sir."

He nodded in understanding. "Tell you what, I'll take care of the smokes. You and your parents can take care of the rest of the expenses. Agreed?"

"Yes, sir, that would be fine." I stuck out my hand. What that meant was that I would pay my half of the bills. My folks would happily donate their time, but wouldn't cough up one red cent.

We shook hands and went upstairs. He offered to drive me over to my house, and today Shelley decided to come with us. She got into the back seat, so I did too, and she sat close to me. It was a move that caught her father's eye, and while he didn't say anything, he looked at us curiously when I got out. I refrained from kissing her good-bye, the better part of valor being discretion, and all that sort of thing.

I couldn't get back over to Shelley's to work on the project until the following Tuesday. She had to go out of town for the weekend and I had plenty to do to keep busy. Over the summer I had increased my training sessions at the dojo to three a week, but once school started, I was back down to two. I still needed to work out and run in the morning. Unfortunately, now that I was growing, my reactions and timing were totally screwed up. Exercises and katas and workout routines that should have been quick and easy were now the work of a drunken spastic. Mr. Miyagi said that this was normal in students of my age, and as I stabilized at a new height and weight, I would quickly get back to normal. I had already moved up one belt color, or kyu, to yellow, and was now working towards orange. Curiously, in official Japanese based aikido, everyone is white, until the graduate from kyu status to dan status, where everyone is black belt. The multicolored belt system is an American innovation.

I also got Dad to trade in our family's Royal manual for a used IBM Selectric, and amazingly got him to cough up half the difference in price. Typing homework became much faster. Hamilton didn't like that I could use a typewriter, but he had pushed his luck too far lately and he was afraid of fucking with it, on fear of Dad's anger.

Tuesday afternoon I rode on the bus over to Shelley's house, and she held my hand on the bus, which generated more than a few stares from some of the other kids. We walked hand in hand up to her house. Once inside, I held up our hands and said, "Thanks, I think."

She gave me an exasperated look and took back her hand. "Carl, I don't know what it is you think of me, but I'm not as shallow or as stupid as you seem to think I am."

I gave her a bleak look. "Yeah, I mean, no, you're not." I shook my head at the import of what I was saying as she gave me a disgusted look. "That didn't come out right."

"Carl, what is your problem with me?"

I sat down on the living room couch and rubbed my face. "I don't know, Shelley. Maybe the problem is with me, not you."

She sat down next to me. "Huh?"

"I don't know Shelley, maybe I'm just being a jerk. I mean, a year ago, or even just last spring, you wouldn't have given me the time of day. Then this year, out of the blue, you ask to partner with me and we're suddenly boyfriend-girlfriend. What happens the day after the Science Fair is over? I get kicked to the curb again?"

"That's a pretty ugly picture of me, Carl, you know?" She did not look happy.

"I know." I looked at her and shrugged. "Or am I just the most cynical and pessimistic bastard you've ever met?"

She smiled at that. "Maybe it's a little of both.", she replied. I eyed her curiously. "Listen, before this year, you weren't anything to write home about. Don't get me wrong, Carl, but I at least would like a guy to be as big as I am!"

I laughed at that. "God knows that's the truth."

"And this year,", she continued, "Well, maybe I did start out just looking for your help on the project, but I also got to know you. You're nowhere near as scary as I thought you would be."

I had to stare at her. "Scary?! What in the world are you talking about?" The very concept that anybody could be impressed by me was ludicrous on its face. Scary?

"Well, Jeez, Carl, everybody knows you. Come on, you're only the smartest guy in the entire school. You kicked the shit out of three guys twice your size last year. You got arrested and then sweet talked your way out of it, and then you got the three guys arrested and thrown out of school! Everybody sees you out running and working out every morning, and everyone knows you're, like, a black belt in karate or something. You take classes at Towson High and know professors at Towson State - I mean, half the school wants to know why you aren't going to college!"

I stared at her in disbelief. "Are you shitting me?" I just shook my head.

"No, I'm not!"

"Jesus!" I looked over at her and smiled. "Listen, I ain't nobody special. I'm just trying to get by, like everyone else. I'm the same asshole I've always been. All that stuff is just stuff. I don't go looking for trouble."

"Oh, yeah? So, let me ask you, seriously, how come you're still at Towsontown then, and not in high school or college? You're the smartest guy I've ever heard of, like our very own Einstein or something."

I had a good laugh at that. I may well have been the smartest guy in the school, but I know the difference between that and Einstein. "Here's the question for you. Maybe I could get into college. Maybe I am that smart. Why would I want to?"

"Huh? Why wouldn't you?", she asked, her forehead wrinkling. "So you can get out of school, silly." For the average student, graduation meant escape.

I just shook my head. "Think about that for a second. I'm 14 years old. All the kids over at Towson State are 18 or 19 or whatever. If you think I stand out now, how about then? How many college girls are going to be interested in me? Think any of them are going to hold my hand like you did? How do I get to school? I can't drive. I can't wait to see Mommy and Daddy taking me to school over there."

Her eyes opened at that. "I never thought about that."

"I just want what everybody else wants. I'm so normal I'm boring, even to myself."

Shelley rolled her eyes at that. "You aren't boring! I mean, what about all the karate and working out and all?"

"Lots of guys work out. What's the difference between me and the guys who stay after school for sports?"

"But that's just it; you're not going out for sports! You do it on your own."

"Who'd pick me for sports? I'd still be the smallest guy on the team, and besides, I'm not a black belt in karate. That's just silly."

She pointed a finger at me. "I know you go up to the Miyagi place. I saw Lance two weeks ago and we were talking."

"That's aikido, which is different, and I'm not a black belt."

"Listen, say what you want, but you're different, special-like. I'm just glad you let me be your partner and not one of the other girls."

My eyes widened at that. "What other girls?"

She rolled her eyes again. "Oh my God! Give me a break! There were a bunch of them - and no, I'm not giving you their names! - and I just asked you first. Besides, now that you've outgrown the midget stage, you're kind of cute."

I just stared for another minute or so. "I think each and every one of you have lost your fucking minds!"

Shelley laughed loudly at that and stood up. She grabbed my hand and pulled me to my feet. "Come on, we need to work on this project!"

She dragged me down to the basement and it was obvious that somebody had been working. I won't say it was spotless, but it was a whole lot cleaner. The room had been swept and dusted, and while the couch was still dilapidated, it was clean, and an old Afghan had been draped over it. "Wow, somebody has been working."

Shelley laughed. "Daddy made me do it. He said it was pretty disgusting when he saw what we had been working in. I got Mom to help." On the table along with the pump was a shopping bag with a half dozen cartons of Camel nonfilters.

I pulled a carton out of the bag and opened it up, and then pulled out a pack. "Let's give it a shot. Got any matches?"

She looked startled. "This is it? We're starting?"

"Sort of. We need to test the machine and see how it works first. I figure we should smoke a couple of packs and time it and see how it goes."

She nodded and ran upstairs, coming down with a small box of kitchen matches. I turned on the pump and stuck a Camel in the end, and then struck a match. In just a bit over half a minute the Camel was sucked down in its entirety, not even leaving a butt. Shelley stuck in another cigarette and I lit another match. Over the next fifteen minutes we smoked an entire pack of Camels.

I turned off the pump and laid my hand on the filter. It was uncomfortably warm. Well, we were sucking burning material through it. We smoked another pack of cigarettes and the filter was becoming too hot. I shut off the pump. "We need to figure a way to cool this thing down.", I said.

"What's the problem?"

"The problem is that if we keep sucking hot smoke through the filter, it's going to get too hot and start baking the tar it's already trapped. We need to cool it down somehow." This was a problem. I was trying to envision wrapping some sort of hose around the filter and running cooling water through it, or building a double layered filter. That could get very complicated, very fast!

"You just need the filter cooled? Can we use ice?"

I looked at her curiously. "I don't know. Maybe."

Shelley scampered back upstairs. I turned on the pump and drew some air through it, hoping to use air cooling to bring the temperature down. That worked, but it would slow things down immensely if we had to spend half our time just sucking in cooling air.

Shelley returned with a tray of ice and a couple of different size Baggies. She also had an old candle. She broke up the ice and put some in a Baggie and sealed it, and then draped it over the filter. She didn't like how it looked, so she repeated it with the next larger size and added another couple of ice cubes. "Try it now." I shrugged and opened another pack of cigarettes and then picked up the box of matches. "Here, wait." She set the candle between us and lit it with a match. "Use that and save on the matches."

"That's a good idea.", I commented. I smoked another pack of Camels. Inside the Baggie the ice began melting and the temperature of the steel filter stayed at a decent level.

I shut off the pump. "You know, that actually works."

"Really?"

"It's ugly, but it works. Next time, we mix a little water in with the ice, and crush some of the ice cubes first. We start off cool and stay that way."

"Why?"

I explained heat transfer and surface area and heat capacity, but after a few minutes her eyes were glazing over. "Hey, it doesn't matter why. This will work. You saved us a lot of grief."

"Wow! I did?"

"Yep!" I grabbed the filter and twisted it off the pump. "Let's see what it's like."

"I thought we had to smoke all these first.", she said, pointing at the rest of the Camels.

"No, this week we are in test and preparation mode. We need to make sure it all works first." I twisted the filter apart. The suction end was noticeably brownish-yellow, showing tar accumulating, but there were also a number of bits of unburned paper and tobacco. Over five cartons of cigarettes, that would be a problem. I pointed it to her. "We need something to keep out this junk."

Shelley picked up some spare screen. "Can we use this?"

I shook my head. "Too coarse. We need something finer."

She went over to a workbench and pulled out a piece of metal window screening. "How about this?"

"We'll try it tomorrow."

"Tomorrow? Why not now?"

"Because we don't need to. We'll have to suck down another pack or two of Camels and we don't have the time. The schedule allows us plenty of time to get this right."

"What schedule? You haven't said anything about a schedule.", she said accusingly.

I thought about it for a moment. "You know, you're right, I haven't. Sorry about that. Listen, I will type up a schedule at home tonight and bring it over tomorrow. Anyway, on the schedule, this week I have us doing initial design and testing. Next week we can start for real."

Shelley nodded with that. Her eyes perked up when I asked what she was doing after school on Thursday. "Why?"

"We need to take the filter over to Towson State to be weighed. My mother will pick me up after class and take me over. Want to go with me?"

"Sure! That would be pretty cool. Why are we weighing the filter, and why over there?"

I explained that we needed to accurately weigh the filter assembly before and then after the experiment, to try and measure how much tar we had collected. The only balances the school had was a bunch of old triple beam balances. We needed something much more accurate. I don't think it really sank in, but Shelley went along. I figured to weigh the filter now, weigh it again after loading it with the tar, then remove the cotton and collect the tar, and weigh that as well. The science would be impressive. Whether it would beat baby chicks was questionable.

Lab work for the day was ended, and the sounds of the front door opening and a parent arriving indicated there wouldn't be much in the way of non-lab experimentation going on. Shelley glanced at the stairs with an unhappy look. "I wanted to spend the time down here differently.", she said.

I smiled. "Me too. Well, tomorrow, if your design changes work out, maybe there'll be time for testing our personal chemistry."

"I'd like that!" She tossed her arms around my neck and pulled me closer, and we kissed for several minutes, with an awful lot of tongue swapping, before we broke free and went upstairs. I ended up walking home tonight, but it wasn't that big a deal.

Chapter 10: Chemistry, the Experimental Science

The next afternoon, Wednesday, I went over to Shelley's and we quickly smoked a pack of Camels. This time our Baggie held crushed ice and a little water and kept the filter temperature nicely under control. The screen caught any paper and tobacco, and the filter cotton was becoming decidedly browner. We pronounced the design a success. Shelley then grinned and blew out the candle.

I sat down on the couch and stretched out, making myself comfortable. Earlier, Shelley had changed out of her skirt into a pair of tight jeans, which looked really good on her. As soon as I was stretched out, she sat down on the couch and crawled over me. She kissed me and said, "Mmmm, I think we have at least an hour before anybody comes home. Whatever will we do until then?"

I smiled and ran my hands up her back. Shelley was wearing a green print cotton blouse, with a bra underneath it. I could feel the catch behind her. "Well, we could always talk, or watch TV, or read books. Did you have something else in mind?", I asked innocently.

"I was thinking about a different experiment." She leaned in and kissed me much more deliberately.

After a minute, I pulled back and smiled. "I love science. I think I'll let you be the project leader." I put a hand behind her head and pulled her closer.

We French kissed for several minutes, and I could tell Shelley was becoming very aroused. She was a vocal lover, and reminded me of an ancient joke: Two guys were talking and the first said that it was his birthday, and his friends had gotten him a sweater. The second guy said that was very nice of them, at which point the first guy replied, 'Yeah, but last year they got me a moaner!' Shelley was a moaner!

Shelley lay on top of me, moaning as we kissed. Her eyes were closed and she squirmed around, rubbing herself across me. Well, I might not understand women (God knows I didn't on the first time around, and so far the second trip wasn't looking all that favorable) but even I knew enough to move forward. I began rubbing her back, slowly running my hands down her back to her jeans and then back upwards. I could feel the muscles in her back moving in response. I lingered briefly at her bra, letting her know that I knew it was there, but otherwise handled it slowly. Shelley moaned even louder, and she began squirming around feverishly, even beginning to hump my leg.

After another minute or two of frantic kissing, I brought my hands up and along her sides, and then brought my right hand around to her front. I simply held it against her left breast. Shelley shivered and kissed me harder, and then pulled away slightly. "Oh, God, oh God..." She opened her eyes and looked at me. I just smiled and shifted on the couch, so that now we were lying more or less on our sides.

I moved my lips away from hers, and began licking and nibbling first her lips, and then her cheeks, and then began moving down her neck, all of which elicited tiny little shrieks of pleasure from her. She was furiously humping her pelvis at me. When I got down to her neckline I spent a fair bit of time working at the side of her neck before moving my lips around to her throat. As I did, I reached between us and popped the top button on her blouse. Shelley didn't complain, so I kissed lower, and undid another button.

Inside of five minutes I had Shelley's blouse unbuttoned, and I was kissing and licking the tops of her breasts above the cups of her small bra. Shelley wasn't the bustiest girl in the school, but what she had was nice and soft and warm, and looked very perky. I pulled away and reached around her, inside her blouse, and smiled at her as I undid the catch on her bra. She sighed and said, "We can't go any further today."

I pulled my hand back. "Do I need to stop and leave?"

She smiled and took my hand and held it to her breast. "I didn't say that, just that we can't go any further. It's not a good time."

The confusion must have been evident on my face, and then I simply said, "Ohhhh." It had been a long time since Marilyn and I had been held up by menstruation.

"Yeah. In the meantime, don't stop, no matter what!" She tugged my head back down to her chest. I maneuvered her bra out of the way. She had large and puffy nipples on those two perfect little cones, and I split my time on them, licking and sucking them, first one and then the other. After several minutes, Shelley's moans became even louder and she began to shiver and shake. Then, she stiffened in my arms with a tiny little shriek, and gasped out, "Yes! Yes! Yes!" She was coming, and I led her through it and then let her down. She collapsed in my arms, breathing heavily.

Well, hell, so was I, and it didn't look like I was going to get any relief until later that night in the bathroom. Meanwhile, my cock was stuck halfway down one of my pant legs and I was starting to suffer the mother of all blue balls. I moved away slightly and tried to adjust my position. Shelley noticed and grinned. "Things a little hard for you?", she teased.

"Uh, yeah!"

"Maybe you'd like a little help with that?"

"Well, now that you mention it..."

Shelley smiled a very adult smile at me. She sat up, not bothering to cover up or adjust her blouse and bra, and very expertly undid my belt and the zipper on my blue jeans. "Lift up.", she ordered. I obeyed and she tugged my jeans and my tighty-whiteys down. Little Carl popped into view, hard and red and proudly waving in the wind. "Oh, Carl, that's very nice!", she said, a coo in her voice.

Well, I wasn't the biggest guy in the gym on my first trip through, but I wasn't the smallest either. If the average was between 5½" and 6½" long, I was between 6½" and 7", depending on how you did the measuring. It was pretty obvious to me that this wasn't the first cock Shelley had seen, although exactly how many I wasn't sure I wanted to know.

Shelley climbed off the couch and knelt on the carpet at my waist. She reached out and delicately began to stroke and pump me, smiling at me and looking into my eyes seductively. "Does that feel good?", she asked in a whisper.

"Oh, God!", I moaned. She gave me a slightly more vigorous stroke, with a bit of a twist involved, and I lost control. Jism spurted up and into the air, and then came down and landed all over my crotch and her hand. She gave me several more pumps until I drained out.

"I think it felt good.", she commented, laughing. Then she completely surprised me. She peeled off her blouse and bra, leaving her kneeling next to me topless. Then she used her bra cups to wipe the come off my cock and balls and her hand. Just the sight of her doing this, and the feel of the silky bra running over my groin, drove me nuts, and my cock immediately stiffened again.

I had forgotten one of the great things about my teenage years, the ability to rejuvenate practically at will! I was a pretty normal guy. In my teen years I could go again after about ten minutes or less, and screw three or four times in a row, no problem. In my twenties, it was two or three times a night; my thirties and forties, once a night. By the time I was mid-fifties, Viagra became a useful helper, and by my sixties, a requirement.

Now - now I could go again as quickly as I needed to, and right now, it looked like I needed to! Shelley pumped my dick until it was sufficiently hard, and then leaned in, opening her mouth. She only sucked on my cockhead, all the while pumping and twisting my shaft. It was my turn to moan happily. I laid a hand on her back and another on her head, not pushing her lower but simply running my fingers through her hair and keeping her in place. "Oh, that's it, don't stop ... don't stop ... just like that ... don't stop ... yes, yes..." As she took me closer to the edge, biology took over, and I began pumping my midsection upwards, trying to fuck my cock into her mouth. Shelley stayed firmly in control.

Just before I cut lose, I had enough semblance of thought to weakly cry out, "I'm going to come, I'm going to come, keep going, keep going." If she didn't want it in her mouth, and some girls don't, at least I gave her warning. She could probably tell anyway by the taste of my pre-come. Shelley didn't care. She kept sucking and pumping until I exploded again, and she swallowed every drop.

I collapsed into the couch and gazed at her. She sat back on her heels and grinned, using a finger to wipe the corners of her mouth. "Wow!", I said.

"That was fun. We're going to have to do that again."

"Any time you want." I theatrically looked at my watch. "Give me a few minutes..."

Shelley laughed and stood up, grabbing her top and bra. "Not now. My folks will be home in ten minutes. I need to get dressed!" She scampered up the stairs.

I waited another minute to catch my breath, and then stood up and pulled my briefs and pants back up. By the time Shelley returned, I had the basement in a semblance of dignity. We packaged up the parts of the filter we were taking to the college and tossed them in my backpack and headed upstairs.

"Not to be too personal, but any idea when, you know, we'll be able to, you know?", I stammered out. I figured this was better than asking the real question - when can we fuck like minks in heat?!

She grinned. "Sometime next week."

"Should I be getting some protection?", I asked.

She gave me a surprised look. "Thank you for asking, but no, I'm on the Pill." She then said, "Most guys don't ask."

"You should know by now, I'm not most guys."

She ran her hands across her breasts, shivering, and said breathily, "I figured that out already. I thought I was going to be teaching you, but boy did I have that wrong! Who taught you?"

"A friend."

"Who was she? I didn't know you had been dating anyone."

I just shook my head. "I don't kiss and tell, or do anything and tell. I have had friends."

"Friends? Multiple friends?"

"I'm a friendly guy."

She looked at me and then reached out to try and tickle me. "I bet I can force you to tell me."

I didn't tell her, but the only places on my entire body that are ticklish are the soles of my feet. I let her try to tickle me, but just held out, stalwart to the end. "Us tough guys can't be broken!"

"Then I'm going to start asking around school!"

I shrugged. "Ask away, but you'll never hear it from me."

"And if one of your friends asks about us?"

"We're just friends. Good friends. Unquote. Like I said, I don't tell." Then I grinned. "But don't let me stop you. You ask your friends in school, and the next time we're together, you can try tickling me again, too, but don't be surprised if I tickle back." I goosed her side and she squealed and jumped away. "Payback's a bitch, baby!"

Her mother walked in just then, to find her daughter trying to tickle me, and me valiantly resisting. I was polite enough to look embarrassed, and then I grabbed my coat and took off. As I left the house, I could hear Shelley saying, "Mom! Nothing happened!" I grinned like a fool the entire walk home.

That evening, after demolishing what little homework I was behind in, I gave a lot of thought to my newfound sexual liberation. In many ways, the Sixties and Seventies were the golden age of the sexual revolution. With the introduction of the Pill in the late Fifties/early Sixties pregnancy was effectively eliminated as a reason for abstinence. Even if a girl got pregnant, it was no longer the end of the world. By 1973 Roe v. Wade legalized abortion throughout the country. By the Seventies the social stigma of abortion was at the lowest it would be for a generation or two.

The other major problem with promiscuous sexual freedom was disease, but AIDS didn't exist until the early Eighties. In the Sixties and Seventies the worst you could get was gonorrhea or syphilis, both of which were susceptible to standard antibiotics. (Okay, herpes was around too, but that was never that big a deal.) Once, in the mid Seventies when I was in college, I got an abscessed tooth, and needed to be treated with penicillin. My frat brothers immediately suspected I had the clap and my reputation soared!

So I was in the midst of a sexual smorgasbord that on the first go-around I had been both oblivious to (at first) and then unable to do much with. Sexual liberation was something that really wasn't seen until college. While statistics on the subject have always been notoriously unreliable, the average age when virginity was lost was 18 or 19. It would continue to drop as time went on, but when I graduated high school in 1973, well over half my class, despite the bragging and brave talk, were virgins, myself included. I also have to be fair about it, when I say that in 1969, it was very unusual for a junior high student to be sexually active. There were always rumors and stories, but were generally just rank bullshit.

I saw no need to repeat that history! If two-thirds of my graduating class were virgins, then one-third wasn't, and it was my duty to find the females in this group. It looked to me like I already had found my first serious girlfriend, and I intended for us to become very serious.

Certainly nothing was going to happen on Thursday. Mom picked me and Shelley up after school and drove us the five minutes into Towson to the college. It took us longer to park the car and walk across campus than it did to drive there. Once inside the chemistry building, I led the way to Professor Mihaus' office. He was waiting there for us and I introduced everyone. Before we went into the lab, however, I asked, "Professor, do you have a blank lab notebook? I completely forgot to pick one up."

He shook his head and wagged a finger at me. "You need to remember the importance of proper observations." He opened a desk drawer and pulled out two notebooks. "Now, record today's work in one of them. How many days have you been working on this?"

"About a week or so."

"Why, Professor?", asked Shelley. She had gotten over her initial awe and was curious.

"I messed up.", I replied. "I forgot to record our daily work and progress each day. You need accurate observations and recordings to document your lab work.

Professor Milhaus nodded in agreement. "Quite correct. Still, it's early on and no harm, no foul. I want you to take the second notebook and start on page one and record the work you've done to this point. When you get to today's work, copy from the one notebook into the other, and then only use the second from that point."

I nodded my understanding. My mother, on the other hand, didn't. While proud of me (and barely acknowledging Shelley) she felt this was an awful lot of work for a little junior high project, and she told him so. "Is all that really needed, Doctor?"

"Oh, very much so. I would never accept less from one of my students.", he replied. She looked quite skeptical, and he noticed. "Mrs. Buckman, I think you are working under a misapprehension about this project. You are thinking this is just a school project. This is a most ambitious undertaking. I would normally accept this caliber of work at the undergraduate level. I plan on using the sample that these two provide me as a basis of lab work for a senior and graduate organic chemistry course. Proper documentation is essential!"

"I apologize, Professor, it won't happen again.", I assured him.

"I know it won't.", he said with a smile. To my mother, he said, "Talk to your son. He would have a future in chemistry."

From there we went into the lab. Today's work was simple. We weighed the filter without the cotton, then Shelley and I fluffed up some cotton and put that in place, and then reweighed the loaded filter. After we had smoked a bunch of cigarettes through it, in a couple of week's time we would reweigh things. The filter system should be demonstrably heavier. Afterwards we would isolate the tar and measure that. Throughout the experiment, we could calculate the amounts of tar we could obtain and the overall efficiency of our system.

Shelley followed along well enough, once it was explained. Mom was totally lost, but ridiculously proud. Mom drove us back over to Shelley's house, and Shelley took the filter inside. Mom also noticed that on the ride over to Towson State, and the ride back, I rode in the back with Shelley, and that when I walked Shelley to her door, Shelley gave me a very enjoyable kiss before going inside.

I got back into the car, although in the front seat this time. Mom immediately asked, "So is Shelley your girlfriend, too?"

"Yes, I think we could say that.", I admitted.

"Why haven't you told us anything about her?"

I just stared at her briefly and started laughing. Mom wasn't amused but she bit her tongue. "Carl, I'm serious."

"Okay, Mom, I'll tell you about all my current girlfriends the same day you tell me about all your current boyfriends." I started laughing some more.

"Carl! How dare you?! I don't have any boyfriends!"

"Well, I'm sure Dad will be relieved!" I continued laughing until we got home and managed to avoid answering any questions.

To be fair about it, once I started dating, my mother never gave me any real grief, back in the first time around. I was a fairly good kid and not one that fathers would start chasing around with a shotgun. The only time she ever stuck her nose in was a brief period between girls when she suggested I ask Denise Maitland out. 'She's such a nice girl.' I almost rolled on the floor laughing, telling her that Denise Maitland was the Queen Bitch of the entire high school, and if she ever held my hand, I'd cut it off at the wrist. She never bothered with me again on the subject of girls.

Mom got very upset with me that night. First she told everyone at the table that I had a girlfriend, which was amusing, not upsetting. That came later. As soon as the words were out of her mouth, Ham started in on me. "Carling's got a girlfriend! Carling's got a girlfriend!", started spewing out in an annoying sing-song rendition.

I looked over at my father, rolling my eyes and pointing with my head at my brother. "Dad? Really?"

He gave my brother a disgusted look and yelled, "Hamilton, knock it off!"

Hamilton started sulking. "What did I do?"

"Just shut up and eat your dinner."

Mom then said, "But Carling won't tell me anything about her."

"Mom, it's like I told you. I'll tell you all about my girlfriends as soon as you tell me about all your boyfriends."

Suzie and Hamilton giggled at that, Nana snorted, and my father just eyed Mom curiously. Mom protested, "Carling!", and then looked over at Dad. "Don't you start, mister."

"I don't know, Shirley. Sounds reasonable to me."

"Yeah, Dad, you can tell us about your girlfriends, too.", I remarked.

"Old girlfriends or new girlfriends?", he asked, causing even more giggling.

"You two think you're just so smart!"

I looked over at my father and we shrugged our shoulders. I turned back to Mom and said, "Well, we are smart. You want us to be dumb?"

Mom started wagging a finger at both of us, which only got her other children and her mother laughing, before she stopped and primly announced she wasn't going to go any further. Then she caused real problems, when she announced at the dinner table how she had taken Shelley and me over to Towson State and how I was going to become a chemist.

Dad looked at me curiously, since he knew I was interested in math. I just stared at Mom in disbelief. "No, Mom, I never said any such thing. I have no interest in becoming a chemist." Again.

"Well, that's just silly. That professor said you would be a brilliant chemist. You like chemistry. He said that this Science Fair project was good enough for college." Mom heard what she wanted to hear. She had selective hearing disorder as bad as any four-year-old.

"Uh, huh. You told me I did a nice job scrubbing the floor last Saturday, but that doesn't mean I want to become a janitor.", I answered.

"Don't give me any lip. You do very well at this sort of thing. You'll be an excellent engineer some day, maybe a chemical engineer."

I just stared in disbelief. There it was, her master plan for my life. I was to be Mini-Me for Dad. "No, Mom, I will not."

"Carling, stop it. I have to say, your behavior now is very disappointing!"

I glanced over at Dad, who was silently watching us. I suspected she had been planning this since I was born, and had suitably informed him at many steps along the way. I could also tell by the look on his face he was not at all convinced this was such a good idea. Despite the ease with which he punished my brother and me for the most trivial of offenses, he actually had a pretty tight grip on reality.

I took a deep breath and looked back at Mom. "You should get used to that feeling, Mom. It's going to be a lot more frequent than you can imagine."

"Watch your mouth, Carl.", my father told me.

"Sorry, Dad."

"How dare you! Charles, are you going to allow this insubordination?"

"Let him talk, Shirley."

She looked over at me as if about to launch into a tirade and I just held up a hand to stop her. "Mother, I love you, but you seem to have my life planned out in advance. Well, it's my life, not yours. Let's be very clear on this. I would happily die for you, but I will never live for you. I will go to the colleges I want to go to, choose the professions I want to choose, and take the jobs I want to take. Along the way, I will date the girls I want to date and marry whoever I want to marry. We will live where we want to live, in the house we want to live in. I have a terrible feeling that very little of what I do will match up with your plans for me."

She stared at me. "Charlie, are you going to sit there and allow your son to talk to me that way?!"

"Shirley, let him be. If he doesn't want to be a chemist or an engineer, fine. That's his business, not ours." Mom started crying, and then got up and ran from the room. I looked over at Dad, who simply heaved a great sigh and said, "Just shut up, Carling. You've had your say, but don't push it." I just nodded.

Later, Hamilton started in on me about making Mom cry and how I was in big trouble. I throttled my desire to beat him to a bloody but silent pulp, and took the book I was reading up to the living room. He didn't dare follow me somewhere our parents might hear him.

Friday I gave Shelley a typed schedule for the experimentation. I had budgeted two weeks to smoke the first five cartons of smokes for Professor Milhaus, and then a third week to isolate the tar for him. We would then repeat this three week exercise to generate a sample to be shown during the Science Fair. Finally, we would use another couple of weeks to generate a filter sample without the chemical isolation, also for the Science Fair. At that point we would have a couple of weeks left to prepare our exhibit and type up a report.

Shelley looked it over. "You know, it doesn't seem so bad when you put it down like this."

I nodded. "No, it's not. It's just a huge pile of piddling little things that will drive us nuts, but it's really straightforward. We follow the plan and we get it done in plenty of time."

"You figured this all out by yourself?"

I shrugged. "It's not all that much to figure out. You were there when we smoked the Camels the other day. You know how much time that took. Multiply it out to smoke 50 packs and we'll be within this time frame. Some time will be spent going over to the college, but we can cover that in the time we have. You just have to work backwards in an organized fashion."

"I don't know..."

I placed a hand on hers and smiled. "You're overthinking things. You think I'm so smart. Okay, honestly, I am smart, but even more importantly, I'm organized. I manage my time. I get my shit done on time. That's my secret!"

This was also the God's honest truth. God knows I screwed off on my first time through, just like every other kid on the planet. I spent my entire time in high school farting around, and wasn't much better in college. I did, however, manage to get through college finally knowing how to learn and how to study and with the desire to actually do so. I went from a 2.61 in college to a 3.61 on my next degree, and then 3.98 on my next two degrees, and by then I was already married with children. I just had to stop screwing around.

Shelley didn't look convinced, but I just laughed and told her that if we followed the plan, not only would we get the project finished, we'd win it and ace our science classes. She calmed down and gave me a very hot kiss before bouncing off to class. Several people noticed and looked at me curiously, but I just smiled. When pressed by the guys, I just did what I told her I was going to do, and said we were just friends.

One of the mouthier assholes in the class, Jerry Bruce, then started asking all sorts of personal questions about what Shelley had done with me, and what her tits and pussy were like. He was pretty graphic and disgusting, which made a few of the guys nervous, as if he was daring me to fight. I just looked at him and asked if he talked about Amanda Burns, his supposed girlfriend, that way. "Oh, yeah, she's got great tits, and really sucks my cock so good!"

"Really? Congratulations! You won't mind then if I ask Shelley to talk to her about that, and ask Amanda for tips. Do you think Amanda will be able to tell her, especially when Shelley lets everybody else in class know how good Amanda is?", I asked.

Jerry's eyes bulged out and he started sputtering, "No, you can't do that!"

"Jerry, maybe you ought to watch what you say about other guys' girlfriends, hmmm?"

"Fuck you, Buckman!" He stomped off.

His romance with Amanda didn't last much more than another 24 hours. She heard all about this from somebody else (not me!) and slugged him in the cafeteria the next day. So much for true love.

Chapter 11: Working at Shelley's

I went over to Shelley's on Saturday and we started smoking cigarettes, sucking down almost an entire carton. Her parents were home all day long, and had the disconcerting habit of wandering down to the basement at odd moments to 'look for something', in other words, to check on what we were up to. This kind of kept any of our own romance limited, although we did get in some pleasant French kissing. Likewise, we smoked another couple of cartons on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday (total, not each day), and since Shelley was on a self-imposed lockdown, we didn't get much else done, although she gave me a sizzling blowjob each day.

Thursday was completely out. It was Thanksgiving, and both her family was coming to her house, and the entire Buckman clan was coming to ours. This was a major deal, and nobody was smoking cigarettes that day. I don't know how crazy it got at Shelley's, but the Thanksgiving feast was a major production at our house, the biggest of the year. Of the three Buckman offspring, Dad was the only male, the most centrally located, the only college educated, and the richest with the largest house. It was his duty to host the affair, and do it in grand style, an idea which suited my hilariously snobbish mother to a tee. (Where she got her snobbishness was a totally different question, one which us kids often debated, since Mom was just a middle class girl from Highlandtown, not Nob Hill.)

Mom had a 12 place setting (six pieces each) formal china service from Pfaltzgraff which was kept in the hutch in specially padded containers. We would drink from matching Steuben crystal stemware (three pieces each) and eat with Oneida flatware (nine pieces per setting). Needless to say, all the serving bowls and utensils matched. We would wipe our fingers on Irish linen napkins, initially held together by silk ribbons, and the table cloth would be matching Irish linen. Thanksgiving dinner was held by candlelight from a silver candelabra.

That was the grown up table. The kids' tables were a whole lot less formal, mostly whatever Corelleware was available. One of the great delights of growing up was being the oldest and occasionally getting to dine at the grownup table. By the time I was actually old enough and married and could expect this treatment, Mom went to a buffet format. There is simply no justice in the world.

This year we were expecting our family (six including Nana), Aunt Nan's family (five), and Aunt Peg's family (four including Grandpa - Dad's father). That made it 15. By the early Nineties, Nana and Grandpa would be gone, but both my sister and I would have families, as would a couple of my cousins. The number peaked in the low to mid-20s at that point and the formal meal became a true zoo!

Hamilton and I were used as slave labor during the preparations for the feast, which consisted of turkey, both regular stuffing and oyster stuffing, gravy, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, two types of cranberry sauce, Brussels sprouts, sauerkraut, green beans, and rolls. After dinner we had at least three types of pies, as well as sundry other things both before and after. You could feed third world nations with what we had at that table. It was the most marvelously gluttonous affair imaginable, and my mother hosted it every year from the time she got married until the time my father's Alzheimer's became unmanageable, almost fifty years.

Friday, however, was an entirely free day. The women of the family, my mother and my two aunts, would go on an all day shopping frenzy on Black Friday. Suzie, at only eight years old, was still in the amateur ranks; she wouldn't be able to go with the pros until she was a teenager. My father took the day off and could watch the kids, but Shelley's parents both had to work! We would have her entire house to ourselves, and Shelley had told me in no uncertain terms to get there early.

I left the house at nine, just after Mom and the ladies left wearing their finest holiday hobnailed boots and brass knuckles, the better to fight off the maddening hordes. I rode my bike up to Shelley's and parked it around back, and then knocked on her back door.

I wasn't quite sure what Shelley had in mind. I didn't really expect her to open the door wearing a lace teddy and high heels, and she didn't. She did, however, have on a blouse and a short denim skirt, and was barefoot. She opened the door and I slipped inside. "Brrrr, it's freezing out there!", she commented.

I thought it was just a normal November day, but I had spent damn near fifty years in upstate New York, where it snowed six months of the year. Maryland is a tropical paradise compared to that! As soon as I got inside, Shelley unzipped my coat and slipped her arms inside and around me. I quickly noticed she was missing a bra. "Maybe I can warm you up.", I replied.

"I sure hope so!" She tilted her head up so I could kiss it. Just in the time we had been working on the project I had grown another inch, and I was now taller than her.

I kissed her back, taking my time about it and being thorough. After a few minutes she pulled away and took my hand, and led me into the living room. She had already laid out a comforter on the floor in front of the fireplace, although no fire was laid. I took off my coat and kicked off my shoes, and followed her to the comforter.

She was already seated on one side of the comforter, her legs drawn up beneath her, and was grinning. I sank down next to her and lay back, tucking a couple of throw pillows under my head. "I have to admit, this is a lot nicer than the couch downstairs.", I said.

Shelley giggled. "No kidding. That thing is awful!"

"And your parents won't be back until... ?"

She grinned. "Not until after five. They both work in Baltimore and never come home for lunch or anything. They're gone all day. Why? Did you want to go downstairs and smoke some more cigarettes?" She stretched out next to me and threw a leg over mine.

"Uh, not right away." I wrapped my arms around her and pulled her on top of me. "Maybe later."

"Maybe a lot later!" She lowered her lips to mine and gave me a scorching hot kiss with her tongue thrusting halfway down my throat. I began to run my hands up and down her back, and she began moaning loudly. We had played this game before, but this time, when I slipped my hands down to cup her butt through her skirt, she didn't warn me off with a statement that she couldn't. No, instead she began moaning, "Uh huh, uh huh...", and humping herself at me.

I was in no hurry, and wanted to treat her like I was sure no other guy had ever done before. I very slowly reached down to the hem of her skirt and began tugging it northward. Shelley went into overdrive, rubbing herself on me and trying to pull it higher. Meanwhile she had reached between us to start undoing the buttons on my shirt. Eventually I had her skirt around her waist. She had worn bikini panties, and I slipped one hand down from the top and the other up through a leg opening, and cupped her bottom.

Suddenly she stopped and sat upright. I was worried I had done something wrong, but she just began to feverishly work at the buttons on her blouse. "Oh, God, hurry up!", she demanded, quickly peeling off her blouse and pushing her skirt and panties down off her legs so that she was naked on the comforter. She was a natural brunette, which I had suspected when she changed from being a blonde at the start of the year.

I smiled. "There's no hurry.", I said.

"You are driving me crazy!"

I just grinned. "Now, lay back. By the time I get done with you, you will be ruined for any other man. No matter who he is, you'll always be able to tell him, 'You're no Carl Buckman!'"

"Oh, just hurry!"

I didn't hurry. I rolled over so that I was laying at her side, facing her, and began kissing and licking my way from her lips down her throat and on to her perky little tits. Shelley lay there and sighed happily, but she wasn't expecting what was next. Moving lower, I licked and nibbled my way down to her belly button, lingered there a few minutes, and then shifted down even further. "What ... what are you ... oh God! Oh GOD! ... Oh Jesus..." Shelley wailed loudly as I began to lick her pussy. To be fair, I didn't use any great technique, but simply used my fingers to spread apart her pussy lips and concentrated on her clit. Shelley was orgasming nonstop from this, bouncing her cute little ass up off the floor, and her hands were in my hair trying to pull me even further in.

I licked her through three very quick comes, and then reversed course, licking my way back to her navel and then her tits, as I crawled over her. It was my turn. During my dining, I had managed to slip a hand free and had undone my belt and zipper, and had worked my jeans and briefs low enough that Little Carl was available. As soon as Shelley realized what was about to happen, she spread her legs wide and reached between us to guide me in.

Shelley wasn't a virgin, but she was awfully tight. Thank God I had licked her ahead of time, so that she was well lubed. I slipped inside slowly, and she gasped and moaned as I sank down and bottomed out. "Oh, Carl, that was ... that was..."

"I told you we shouldn't hurry." I began to slowly thrust in and out, and Shelley's butt was bouncing off the comforter beneath us. "We have all day."

"I don't know where you learned to do that, but you should give lessons." Shelley wrapped her arms around my neck and her legs around my waist and I began to pick up speed. The sensations of her hot little pussy around my cock were amazing. She was so wet you could hear it slurping. It was only another five or ten minutes before I lost any semblance of control. Pounding her down into the comforter, I collapsed on top, my hips churning as my cock spasmed out a heavy load. I could feel her pussy twitching around me as it accepted my jism.

It took her a couple of minutes to respond. I tried to lift up and relieve my weight, but she held me tightly. "Oh, my God, that was amazing! I never knew it could be like that."

"Was that the first time you ever had your pussy licked?", I asked.

She blushed and nodded. "I asked once, but he refused."

"That's not very gentlemanly." I rolled over and off of her, and she curled up next to me, a leg thrown over me and her wet pussy pressed against me. "Well, that was only the first lesson. I think I can do better the next time."

Shelley sighed happily and hugged herself against me. "I don't think you can do better than that."

"Ummm, a challenge. I like that." I rolled over on the comforter to face her, and put my lips against hers. I assume she could taste her dried pussy juice on my lips, because her eyes widened at the touch, but then they closed again as she moaned happily. This time I concentrated my lips on her neck and tits and nipples, and one hand on her clit. As soon as she began crying out for me to fuck her, I moved a leg over hers and held her down and in place, while my free hand gently held her on her back. I continued this torment through another pair of quick orgasms before getting back into position on top and screwing her until we both came again. Much as before, she had her arms and legs wrapped tightly around me.

I was breathing pretty hard after this, and I figured I needed a bit of a rest, so I rolled over on my back, with Shelley rolling along with me, so that she was half draped over me still. If either parent came home early, we would both die before we could even sit up, but I really didn't care at the moment. Shelley was murmuring incoherently in my ear. She was really turned on, and slipped a hand down to my groin, where my soft and sticky cock lay, slumped to the side. Well, I was young, so I hoped I would rise to the challenge quickly. It was only mid-morning, so I should be able to tear off another piece at some point.

Miracle of miracles, Shelley's warm hand began coaxing my cock back to life. "I need you so bad!", she whispered in my ear. That's always nice to hear. "I want you. I want you to fuck me." I just smiled as she manipulated me, although I did lift my hand up to tease her nipples. She had maybe a B cup, but her nipples were much darker, and stuck out like tiny pencil erasers. I flicked them with my finger tips, and she rolled onto her back and tugged me to follow.

I had a slightly different idea, though. I snuggled up next to her and pushed her over onto her side, facing away from me. She quickly turned her head to look at me. "Carl, what are you doing?"

"Trust me, you'll like it." I slipped a leg between hers and lifted her leg up slightly, then squirmed around until my cock was between her legs.

"Carl?", she asked nervously.

I suddenly realized she thought that I was going to try anal. It occurred to me that although Shelley wasn't a virgin, she was still very inexperienced. Her previous lovers didn't have very much experience, and her bag of tricks was rather limited. She gave a great blowjob, and knew about the missionary position, but that was pretty much it. It was time for a few more lessons.

'Trust me, it's not what you think." I squirmed around slightly more, and she could feel my cock head butting up against her pussy lips from behind. "Now, reach down and help me inside." She gave me a nervous look, but slipped a hand between her legs and spread open her pussy, and I slipped inside. I kept pushing until I was fully seated.

"Oh, my God! I've never done it like this before!", she admitted. "You feel even bigger!"

I began pumping in and out, her perfectly round little butt cheeks jiggling to the motion. "It gets better. Reach down and touch yourself."

"What?"

"You know what I mean." I reached around and touched her arm, and gently slid my had down to hers. I maneuvered it back down between her legs. "Now, touch yourself."

"Carl!?"

"Just like at night, when you go to bed, and you think about me, and what we're going to do together. You touch yourself then, don't you?" I picked my pace up while holding her hand in place.

Her fingers began probing her pussy slit, touching her clit along with the underside of my cock as it slowly sawed back and forth. "Yes...", she admitted.

I let go of her wrist and she kept her hand in place, so I ran my hand up her body to tease her nipples. Shelley shuddered and came. I pumped some more, and then pushed in deeply, and rolled her further, so that she was face down on the comforter while I was laying on top of her from behind. I lifted up slightly and straddled her legs, and began pumping into her from behind more forcefully. God she felt so tight and wet and hot!

Shelley was definitely enjoying the ride. Both hands were buried beneath her, rubbing her clit and pussy, and she was almost babbling, 'Fuck me! Fuck me!"

"Oh God!", I exclaimed, and one of her pussy spasms sent me over the edge. Another load shot out of me into her overheated snatch, and I collapsed down on top of her back, as my hips weakly churned and finished pumping. I just lay there on top of her, sweaty and disgusting.

After I rolled off her, Shelley just lay there face down on the comforter. "That was ... amazing! Where did you learn... ?"

I smiled. "Like I told you before, I never kiss and tell. I take it you liked that little trick?"

"When can we do it again?"

"Maybe later. Suddenly, I'm very hungry." Just as suddenly, Shelley's stomach growled, and she blushed fiercely. I just laughed, and sat up. "Any chance we can make lunch?", I asked.

She groaned and rolled over, looking for her clothing and blushing. "I need to clean up first. I'm starting to feel kind of yucky." She turned her face away from me.

"That just means we're doing it right!", I laughed. I reached out with my fingertips and tilted her face back to mine, and then kissed her lips gently. "You are an amazing and beautiful lady."

She kissed me fiercely and might have wanted more, but her stomach growled again, and she pulled away, turning bright red. "I need to clean up. I'll be back down in a minute or two."

I lightly held her wrist. "Soup and sandwiches?" She nodded agreement. "Okay, don't hurry back. Why don't you take a quick shower and get dressed again. By the time you come back down, I'll have some things ready. Okay?"

"Okay." We stood up, grabbing our clothing.

I had another thought as I saw her pick up her blouse and skirt. I wrapped my arms around her from behind and whispered in her ear, "Do you have a pair of high heels?"

She turned and looked at me curiously. "I have a pair of high heeled sandals. Why?"

"I want you to put on your shortest skirt, and your tiniest top, and your high heels, and come back down. Will you do that for me?"

Shelley giggled. "Give me a few minutes."

"Take your time. I'll be in the kitchen."

Shelley scampered up the stairs and I walked into the kitchen, still naked. I dropped my clothing on the table and went over to the kitchen sink, where I used a clean dishcloth to wash up. I scrubbed off all over. Back in the day, this was known as a whore's bath, but I didn't think I wanted to tell that one to Shelley. Hell, it would probably just gross her out if she knew her mom was going to wash the dishes that night with a dishcloth I had wiped my cock clean with. It would gross me out, too!

I pulled my jeans on commando fashion, along with my shirt, which I left unbuttoned. Her house wasn't much different than mine, although ours didn't have a basement. I found the pantry and pulled out a can of chicken noodle soup and found a clean pot and made soup. I put that on the burner, on low, and dug bread and cold cuts out of the fridge, along with mayo and mustard. I set it out, along with a couple of plates, and waited for Shelley's return.

It was worth the wait. I turned when I heard the sound of high heels coming down the stairs. She was a little clumsy on them, but I couldn't care less. "Is this all right?", she asked nervously.

"Oh, yeah!", I replied, nodding. The heels were a classy set with at least a two inch height. I suspected the skirt and top were from last year, and she had outgrown them. The skirt was extremely short, white cotton, and very light and flirty. The top was a tank top that looked sprayed on, and short enough that a band of skin showed at the waist. "You look great! You should wear that to school someday."

She laughed at that. "In your dreams!"

"You look good enough to eat! In fact, that gives me an idea!"

Just then her stomach growled. "Good idea, bad timing. Let's have lunch first." She came into the kitchen.

"Well, at least I know what I'm having for dessert.", I replied. She grinned at this.

I poured the soup into bowls while she made us both a ham and cheese sandwich, on white, with mustard. I set Shelley's bowl on the side of the table, instead of across from me, so that I could watch her better. "You look tremendous!" I told her. A quick glance at her lap showed the skirt had ridden up enough so that I knew she had skipped on the panties.

"Thank you!", she said with a blush. "You don't think I look cheap, do you?"

"No, I think you look smoking hot!" She grinned at that. "Besides, it's just you and me. It's not like I'm going to say anything to anybody! It doesn't matter if you look cheap, as long as it turns me on, right?"

She smiled coyly. "And does it?"

"I'll let you know after dessert." That earned another blush and a grin.

Lunch was a hurried affair; dessert was of greater interest to both of us. When we were finished with lunch, Shelley took our plates over to the kitchen sink, and then came back to take my hand and go back to the comforter. I had a slightly different idea. I held onto her hand and pulled her back to the table. "I like to eat my dessert at the table.", I announced.

"Carl?"

I leaned down and quickly kissed her on the lips and then stepped back. Placing my hands on her waist, I lifted her up and sat her on the dining room table. Finally, a use for my new muscles other than just defending myself!

Shelley looked shocked, as she sat there at the end of the table. "Carl!?"

I pulled out the chair and sat down directly in front of her, spreading her legs apart and sliding forward. This chair, like the one at the other end, had armrests built in, while the ones on the side of the table didn't, so I suspected this was either her mother's or father's chair. I grinned up at her. I tugged her forward so that her pretty little pussy was at the edge of the table, and said, "Now this is what I call dessert!"

Shelley shrieked happily as I ate my dessert. After her first orgasm, I pulled back and looked up at her. "I bet you'll be thinking about this at dinner tonight!" I then ate her out some more. Afterwards, I stood up, dropped my trousers, and fucked her right there on the table. Thank God it was sturdy!

By mid-afternoon, we were both running out of steam. I taught Shelley about the cowgirl position (save a horse, ride a cowboy!) and then we decided we needed to clean things up. She let me shower first, so I didn't smell like a whorehouse on Sunday morning, and then she took another shower. The comforter went into the washing machine, and the windows were opened to air out the house. We even went down to the basement and smoked about half a carton through the filter before one of her parents came home. It had been a productive day, in more ways than one.

That night and Saturday we had turkey and leftovers at the Buckman house. This wasn't a bad deal, since I can eat turkey, oyster dressing, and gravy until it runs out. If you're not from Maryland, you won't know what oyster dressing is, but it's great! Sunday I was dining over at Shelley's. I don't know whether they were suspicious of me, or of her, but I got the third degree that night. Politely, of course, and I just smiled and answered their questions. I will say that at one point during dinner I complimented them on their lovely dining room set, and Shelley almost died of a coughing spell. We also smoked another half carton of Camels. I figured we could smoke the last of the cartons this week, and either do the tar extraction late in the week or early next week.

The tar extraction was fairly simple. First we would weigh the filter assembly accurately over at Towson State. Then, back at Towsontown Junior High, we would open the filter, extract the cotton, and dunk it in a flask of acetone. Acetone has a very low boiling point. We would let the cotton soak overnight, and then filter off the acetone the next day. Washing the filter material with some more acetone would clean it up, and then we would carefully heat the mix in a fume hood, allowing the acetone to vaporize, leaving behind the tar. This would be collected in a pre-weighed test tube, and then be given to Professor Milhaus. Then it was back to work for us, collecting another sample for show-and-tell during the Science Fair.

In all honesty, it was very difficult to stay on track with the schedule from this point on. While we didn't have any more all day sex marathons like Black Friday, Shelley was very agreeable to screwing down in the basement. We could usually manage to sneak in one or two very enjoyable sessions after smoking some Camels, and the cigarette smell covered up any sex smell.

I definitely learned that Shelley's previous lovers hadn't taught her anything other than blowjobs and plain missionary position. Now, there's nothing wrong with that, and thankfully, for her sake, Shelley was easily aroused and highly orgasmic, so she certainly enjoyed herself. However, that was so limiting, and once Shelley learned there were more possibilities, she was extremely enthusiastic about learning them all. Now, I won't claim that I taught her the entire Kama Sutra, but we sure got well through the Beginner and Intermediate sections! It turned out that she really liked the control she had when she was on top, so we often did some sixty-nine, or she would climb on my lap and bounce on my cock. I really couldn't complain.

In December I took Shelley as my date to the Christmas dance at school. Yes, it was my first formal date since I got recycled, but no, it's not much of a date when your parents drive you. We couldn't get all that hot and bothered, but Shelley definitely liked being taken to the dance, and not meeting me there. I was still growing, so I was now a couple of inches taller than her, and she could wear a pair of heels and not be taller than me. She was very hot!

For Christmas, I bought Shelley a charm bracelet with a couple of charms, one with a heart, and the other with a cigarette. The first got me a very passionate kiss, the second a very long laugh. A charm bracelet seemed a nice compromise present - not too expensive, not too personal, and something she could wear after we broke up.

By February I was beginning to suspect this would happen in the near future. Aside from the Science Fair and our mutual love of screwing our brains out, we had about zilch in common. I mean, for Christmas I got a copy of Gibbons' The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (both the first time around and now) and she got a subscription to Teen magazine. Forget about intellectual discussions. Shelley was not precisely sure of the name of the President; she did, however, know volumes about the breakup of The Monkees and the effect this would have on western civilization. We did manage to stage several all day sex-athons over the Christmas holidays that left me gasping for relief. Every time I started thinking we weren't all that great together, and that maybe I should start breaking up with her, she would use her body to convince me otherwise. What can I say? I am a guy. I am not a hero. I have no known moral fiber.

The breakup pretty much occurred the night of the Science Fair itself. That was a pretty fair success. It went about as I had expected it to, and I mentioned it to Shelley. Mike Misner had done the fertilized chick project, with a few dozen fertilized eggs, and cracking one open every day for three weeks and dropping the contents into a formaldehyde filled jar. He had the sealed jars on display, along with a box full of baby chicks. Since chicken eggs hatch in 21 days, he had started 22 days ago and so he had 1 day old chicks. He had about zero science involved, but you could hear the heart strings being tugged all the way across the gym everything was set up in. People love baby chicks.

Our project was science, pure and simple, but we did have just enough sizzle to sell the steak. Dad had gotten a 2' by 4' Formica countertop for me, and I had gone over to Mr. Bonner's across the street. Working for Black & Decker, he could buy any of their tools at wholesale price. Dad always got mowers and power tools from him, and Mr. Bonner actually had a garage full of drill presses and saw tables. I used the drill press to put holes in the countertop and mounted everything on it, including our freshly cleaned and painted pump, filter assemblies in use and disassembled, and even one I had managed to cut in half. The print shop that I got my business cards through had a nice deal on some professional looking displays for behind us, and we borrowed a tiny booth from them.

The science part was impeccable. We had a sign showing that our adviser was a chemistry professor over at Towson State, top-notch lab workbooks showing our work, and an analysis of the tar we collected, along with estimates showing the efficiency of our collection method.

What really impressed the judges was when Professor Milhaus showed up with a couple of college students, just as the judges came through. I introduced the professor to the judges, and then the professor introduced his students. One was a college student and the other a grad student, and they had used the sample I had provided for their own work. The grad student analyzed the sample as part of his thesis, while the undergrad used his work to design an upper-class experiment for the organic chemistry classes. Then the professor blew us all away. He asked if I would contribute my work to the project and be part of a paper to be written for the Journal of Chemical Education. Holy shit! Of course I would!

One of the important parts of being a college professor is publishing scholarly works. As the saying goes, 'publish or perish.' Most of the work done at a research college is actually done by various students, but for every one of their publications, more than one person can be listed as an author. In almost all cases, the head of the lab will get his name on the paper, whether he had anything to do with it or not. It's sort of a game, and everybody knows the rules. The undergrad student would write his paper, and the grad student and the professor would get their names on it. The grad student would write a paper, and the professor's name would show up as well. And then the professor would write his own paper. Three publications for the work of one.

Now, I would have my first publication, at the age of fourteen, and while still in junior high. This was practically unheard of, and my parents were suitably impressed. I had been published before, and in the same journal, but not until I was in college. This was quite a jump start. (Eventually I would be listed on the grad student's paper as well. Two publications!)

"Does this mean my name goes on this paper thingie, too?", asked Shelley. She didn't really understand how publishing worked, but she did understand being snubbed, and she could sense being snubbed big time.

The undergrad who had come with Professor Milhaus just gave us a blank look, but the grad student gave the Professor a look that equated Shelley with something to be scrubbed off and washed down a drain. One school kid was bad enough, but two was unthinkable. I also noticed that Professor Milhaus saw this all. He would pay attention to the grad student more than he would heed the undergrad, and way more than he would listen to Shelley or me.

Well, as hopeless as I knew it to be, I had to ask, for Shelley's sake. I was pretty sure what the answer would be. "Professor, can both of us be listed?"

He eyed me, and then Shelley before answering. "I don't wish to be rude, but we can really only put one name on the paper, and my feeling is that you, Carl, did more of the work that could be published, as opposed to other work on the project." He didn't elaborate on what that other work might be.

I turned towards Shelley. At least I had tried. Shelley didn't seem to care, and she became noticeably cooler. Later that evening, when we packed up and took the project home, she turned her face away when I tried to kiss her good-night. The first great romance of my revival was going down in flames!

The winners weren't announced until the next day at school, when it was announced in the morning over the intercom. Third place was some kid in the eighth grade with some idiot description of the Solar System. Second place was Mike Misner and his chickens (What did he do with them, anyway? Raise them and then eat them? I never did find out.) The winners were me and Shelley. The announcement came during Spanish class, and the room erupted in cheers when my name was spoken. The last time this happened, I took second place, and it felt pretty good; this felt much better.

Shelley was happy, at least with the project, if not with me. She had an A on the project, which brought her Science grade up to a B. She had gotten what she was looking for. To be fair, so did I, in every conceivable meaning. She dumped me that day at lunch, when I saw her holding hands with a member of the basketball team. He looked at me nervously, and she simply gave me a haughty look and turned away. This was noticed by others as well, and earned me a mixed bag of comments. A few of my friends commiserated with me, and a few others made jokes about it. It certainly wasn't worth breaking a sweat over, to my way of thinking at least.

It wasn't the end of the world. The following Monday, Tammy Braxton came up to me in the hallway at my locker as I took my coat off in the morning. Tammy was a short and very curvy little brunette, and very cute, a ninth grader like myself. She leaned back against the locker next to me, her arms across her chest pushing her cleavage up on display in her vee neck sweater. "Carl, I hear you and Shelley aren't seeing each other anymore.", she stated.

I stopped at this and looked over at her in surprise. "Uh, I guess not."

"What happened?"

I shrugged. "I don't know. I guess we just sort of drifted apart, I suppose." 'She's a fucking moron and used sex to earn a B in Science.' No, I didn't say that! Where was this going?

She smiled coquettishly at me, and sifted slightly so that I could see more of her cleavage. Very nice, too, probably twice what Shelley had. "That's too bad. I heard that you and she studied together after school a lot."

I raised an eyebrow at that. "Well, we did work on the Science Fair together."

"I heard you worked on other things, too.", she said teasingly.

I just shrugged. "Hey, we're just friends."

"That's not what she said."

I smiled. "Well, I would never talk about a friend, no matter what or when. She was a friend and we were friendly." I glanced at that very inviting cleavage, and then looked her in the eye. "I'm a very friendly guy."

Tammy smiled back, and looked down at my pants, and then back at my face. She licked her lips, and asked, "Interested in making another friend?"

I simply smiled. I closed my locker and put my arm around her shoulder, and began walking her to class. "I don't think anybody can ever have enough friends!"

Book Two: High School

Chapter 12: High School

September 1970

Tammy and I were friends for the rest of the school year, although we broke up when summer hit. With Tammy I had to start buying condoms, since she wasn't on the Pill. It was worth it. She had a seriously nice set of tits and an ass to die for. Still, while we were 'friends', it never seemed to me to be a permanent thing. I always had the feeling that she was interested in someone else, but I couldn't figure out who.

It turned out to be my buddy Randy Bronson, who had been messing around with somebody else at Towsontown and needed some maturing. By the start of tenth grade Tammy deemed him ready, and I was dropped like a hot potato. I wasn't one to complain. Tammy and I were more like friends with benefits, and I have to admit, her benefits were bountiful! If she ever decided to breast feed her children, they would be very well fed!

Summer had some changes this year. Nana dragooned me into escorting her to Bingo at the VFW over in Perry Hall every Tuesday night (Mom was drafted on Thursdays) and that made me reschedule some of my aikido lessons into the afternoons. I was now orange belt and moving up towards green. When I ran in the morning, I would now carry my barbells with me, and I was running four miles. I was much stronger than I used to be. I also stopped growing taller. I hit 5'10", and only grew another inch taller in the remainder of my time in high school. I had started Towsontown Junior as the smallest kid in the school, and was finishing as one of the tallest.

A few other changes occurred at home. Hamilton was becoming seriously annoying. He had a major problem with the concept of privacy as it applied to anybody other than himself. Basically, if it was mine, it was his. I had gotten a very strong foot locker and a lock supposedly guaranteed to be pick-proof, and kept a lot of things in there. The rubbers were just one item I needed to lock away. My spare cash was stored there as well, along with brokerage and bank statements.

I even had to get a post office box and have my mail sent there. I caught him going through my mail one time and showed it to my parents. He did the lie and deny trick, but it was pretty obvious, especially when he complained about how much money I had. Mom refused to listen to any blame of him, but Dad drove me up to Timonium and helped me get a PO Box. We didn't tell the others. I would ride my bike up there once a week to collect my stuff.

I really wondered about my brother's stability. I can remember telling my father once that he should have his head examined. Dad just glanced over at where my mother was, and then he looked back and told me to watch my mouth and take care of my own problems. I just shrugged and kept my padlock key on a chain around my neck.

When the school year started, Towson High was nowhere near as impressive to me as it was to the other graduates of Towsontown Junior. For the last year I had been taking the bus over after school on Mondays, to meet with Mrs. Rogers. She would give me assignments and monitor tests in Plane Geometry. Then I would walk into Towson and go to my father's office and hang out there until he took me home.

The administration at Towson High either didn't know or didn't care about my reputation as a troublemaker at Towsontown. I endeavored to keep my nose clean. Still, there were a couple of things that caused trouble, but fairly minor.

The biggest thing was dropping Spanish. The rule was that students could take a foreign language, or a foreign language and an advanced math, however you couldn't take an advanced math without taking a foreign language. That was just so much bureaucratic nonsense.

I had zero interest in taking any more Spanish. It had been a waste the entire first time around. The high school teacher, Miss Fontaine, was a very pleasant person, a spinster who was totally burned out from teaching us little assholes. Her one true passion in life was raising Blue Merle Collies as show dogs (imagine Lassie in a silver gray color) and it was ludicrously easy to get her off of Spanish and talking about dogs. At least twice a year she would do a show-and-tell and bring in her dogs. Nobody learned anything from her.

The administration refused to allow me to take math without taking another year of language. I responded by pulling out a copy of the graduation requirements and guidelines from the Baltimore County Board of Education, and showed where they didn't have a leg to stand on. They grumbled, but signed off on it. I had my minimum two years of a foreign language and was out of Spanish.

I decided to push hard on math. Towson High offered a half year of Trigonometry, a half year of Analytic Geometry, a half year of College Algebra, a half year of Probability and Statistics, and a year of Calculus. I was going to skip the calculus, and cram all the rest into the next year and a half. I intended to get out of there with at least one year of college under my belt. I would get the calculus over at Towson State. Mrs. Rogers thought me ambitious, but not crazy, so we worked out the schedule.

What I knew, and what Mrs. Rogers knew, but didn't know that I knew, was how tied together math really is. For instance, a big part of Plane Geometry is devoted to logic and proofs, which feeds directly into Boolean Algebra for computer studies. Likewise, Discrete Math and Finite Math are really nothing more than very rigorous studies of set theory, which feeds back into Probability and Statistics. Likewise, Calculus provides the language for everything, but you won't really understand parts of Trigonometry or College Algebra without learning Calculus. You'll never figure out Cryptography without a background in Information Theory, and ... you get the idea.

I didn't actually get into any trouble with the school over the second item. I never even got detention from it, and I still ended up getting grief about it from my parents, even though they didn't learn about it from the school. They learned about it from Tessa's parents.

We had already been back to school for a week. It was a Thursday night, about seven or so, and dinner was over. I was sitting in the living room going over some homework in Trigonometry. I was already at least a week ahead of things. Mom was in the kitchen with Hamilton, and Dad was upstairs. Nana and Suzie were downstairs watching television. At that point the doorbell rang. Mom told Hamilton, "Go see who's there."

I didn't pay any attention, because I figured it was probably a salesman of some sort. Hamilton opened the door, and I could hear the voices. "Good evening, Hamilton. Are your parents home?"

I swear to Christ, he actually said, "I'll let them know you're here.", and closed the door on whoever was there. I swiveled in my chair and looked out the picture window to see Tessa Harper and her parents standing there on the stoop. I muttered under my breath at his behavior. It was typical Ham; it wasn't for him, so common courtesy to people he knew were neighbors didn't apply.

It pissed off Mom, too, because the next thing she said was, "Well, for the love of God, don't just close the door in their face! Let them in!" I was already starting to stand up, but Mom beat me to the door. She opened it and said, "Come in, come in! I don't know what that boy has on his mind!"

Dad came down the stairs asking, "Who is it?" He eyed the Harpers curiously as they came in the door. "What's up?"

I looked over at Tessa as she stood there. "This really wasn't necessary." She just shrugged her shoulders and gave me an it's-out-of-my-hands look.

Before the Harpers could say anything, my mother immediately asked, "Carling, what have you done now?" Dad just stared at me.

I just shook my head. "Rousing vote of confidence, guys."

Tessa's father looked at us. "I don't understand."

Before my folks could say anything, I looked at the Harpers and explained. "Well, two parents have shown up with their teenage daughter in tow." I pointed at Mom first, and then Dad. "My mother thinks I've done something to get myself in trouble. My father thinks I've gotten Tessa in trouble. Like I said, a rousing vote of confidence."

The Harpers stared at my parents, and my mother protested their innocence. I also noticed my father not arguing. Tessa simply smiled and shook her head in a silent laugh.

It was her father that said, "Good heavens! It's nothing like that! My God, they're only children! We came by to thank your son for saving Tessa."

"Saving Tessa!?" Both my parents started squawking at that. It got equally loud with the Harpers.

I just rolled my eyes and grimaced over at Tessa. I mouthed a silent, 'Thanks!' to her, and she silently laughed back at me.

"I think you'd better start explaining, Carl.", said my father.

"It really wasn't anything. Why don't we all just sit down..."

It had been a totally normal day so far. Trouble didn't start until after lunch. I headed back to my locker and was getting my English textbook, when Tessa Harper showed up. Her locker is two down from mine. I nodded at her and she smiled back, and she worked the combination on her locker.

I've known Tessa for years. She lives about a block from us, rides the bus with me, and her family is in St. Paul's with us. All that being said, I can't honestly state that we were friends, but were more like acquaintances. We didn't have the same set of friends, and despite both of us being in the college prep group, didn't actually have too many classes together. She was a quiet girl, very shy, and her family raised her fairly strictly. Her skirts were always knee length, her white blouses were always buttoned to the collar, she always wore flats - that sort of thing. She never wore makeup and her strawberry blonde hair was always kept back with a headband or barrette. Despite that, she still managed to get a fair bit of attention from the guys. She was very pretty, in a peaches-and-cream, wholesome, girl-next-door sort of way.

It worked against her that day. Three of the upperclassmen came up to her in the hallway, and one of them leaned up against the row of lockers and started talking to her. I could tell by their letter jackets that all three of the guys were on the varsity lacrosse team.

You have to understand, at Towson High, lacrosse is the big sport. Screw football or basketball, lacrosse is the big deal. We had been top ranked in the state for years, and lacrosse players routinely got scholarships to NCAA Division 1 schools.

Lacrosse is a crazy sport the white man inherited from the Indians, and is probably the means the Indians were planning to use to kill off all the white men. It's sort of like soccer, but everybody gets to run around with big wooden sticks with nets on the ends. The ball is small and round and as hard as a rock, and you throw it with the stick, catch it with the stick, and run it around with the stick. For real fun, you get to hit the other team with your stick and run them over, just like in hockey, but without all the ice. It is incredibly brutal, and there are always one or two guys in casts and stitches.

Lacrosse players thought they were the gods of the school, and usually had no problem finding girls who thought so too. They were generally big and strong and in shape, and pretty much had their pick of the female half of the school. Why Jerry Jones wanted Tessa Harper when he could have had any number of volunteers was beyond me.

But he did. He leaned up against the lockers and tried to engage her in small talk. This consisted of the statement, "Hi there, I'm Jerry Jones. When do you want me to pick you up Friday night?" Very suave and sophisticated. I had seen him around school already, and read his stats in the school paper as well as the sports section of the Baltimore Sun. He was a shoo-in for a scholarship when he graduated this year.

Tessa was a nice girl, and very shy. I knew her parents wouldn't allow her to date, probably not until after the Second Coming of Christ. Unless that happened Friday afternoon, Jerry was shit out of luck. Tessa simply smiled and said, "I don't think so.", and put her books in her locker.

Jerry was not to be dissuaded. "What's your name?"

"Tessa.", she said quietly. She tried to push her locker door shut, but Jerry had a hand on the door, holding it open. "Excuse me, but I need to close my locker."

"There's no hurry, Tessa. We're just starting to get to know each other. Besides, you'll get to class in time. Tessa, how old are you?"

Tessa had definitely figured out Jerry's plan, and pushed hard against the locker door. It almost caught his fingers, but he just smiled and kept her door open. "Let me close my locker.", she asked.

"As soon as you tell me when we're going out, baby. You're awfully pretty. Too bad you don't have anything nicer to wear. Maybe you can wear something nicer on Friday." At that point Jerry moved so that he was trapping her against the lockers, and he traced a finger along her arm, and across her blouse. He actually had the gall to slip a finger into the breast pocket of her blouse, though he didn't go so far as to grope her.

Tessa was starting to panic. She's not a very big girl, and Jerry was probably twice her size. Just as bad, she could see his two friends behind him, and they were as big as he was. "Please, let me go."

"But Tessa you haven't told me what you're going to wear on Friday." He was leering at her like a shark eyeing fresh chum. Nobody turned down Jerry Jones!

I had pretty much had my fill of Jerry. Somebody needed to get Tessa out of there, and it looked like it was going to have to be me. I pushed my book back into my locker and stepped closer. I pushed in between them with a smile. "Sorry about that. Tessa, you should be getting to class."

She gave me a terrified look and tried to sidle away behind me. Jerry slammed an arm forward, blocking the path, while saying, "Who the fuck do you think you are?" I wasn't sure which one of us he was talking to.

I leaned forward, and Jerry leaned backwards slightly. "Jerry, Tessa needs to get to class." I looked him straight in the eyes (well, upwards anyway, he was at least three inches taller than me) and kept my gaze there. "Tessa, you should go to class now."

"Tessa is staying here talking to me, asshole." At that point he reached out to grab her. Tessa moved back against the wall, but Jerry's fingers grabbed the pocket of her blouse and tore it. Tessa shrieked and tried to back away.

I grabbed Jerry's arm and twisted it up and away from her, and used his momentum to push him backwards, where he fell on his ass. "Tessa, get out of here!", I said.

Tessa scampered out of the way and ran down the hall, while Jerry's two teammates helped him to his feet. "You're dead, asshole!" He ran at me and swung wildly. I received the attack using the technique of munetsuki koshinage, whereby I grabbed his wrist and swung him around from outside of the body, and ultimately used his momentum to flip him up and over, dropping him on his side and shoulder. Jerry was out for the moment, but one of his stooges decided to help out. He tried grabbing me, so I used katatetori kokyunage, another gripping move, to twist him up and over and slammed him into one of the lockers. He slid to the ground.

The second stooge had now gotten Jerry up and both decided to attack. I'd never really done any two-on-one training at the dojo, but while these guys were big, they were untrained and there was enough time differential that I could still defend myself. Jerry punched at me again, so I used munetsuki kotegaishi to put him down a second time. This did open my rear to an attack by his friend, so I had to break this with an ushirotori kokyunage defense, which put him into the lockers upside down as well.

That was the end of it in more than one way. Jerry had really screwed up by trying this little stunt in the middle of a crowded hallway with a teacher at one end of the hall. While she couldn't hear what had started it, she could certainly see Tessa running away with a torn blouse, and three much bigger guys attacking me. She came running up yelling at us to stop, which I did by backing up against my locker. Jerry and his two friends were shaking their heads wondering 'What the fuck?!' as they got to their feet. Tessa also returned with a couple of large male teachers.

A few minutes later all of us were down in the principal's office, along with the school nurse. All three of the lacrosse players started in on how I had attacked them, but nobody was buying it. There were two school teachers as witnesses along with Tessa. Tessa had already slipped into her jacket and was holding her torn blouse, which was more than evidence enough. I didn't have to say hardly anything, and they didn't even call my parents. Tessa's folks were called to take her home, and the lacrosse team's parents were called to take their kids home. They all had three day suspensions, which they protested loudly, earning them five day suspensions.

The funniest part was when their coach, who happened to be one of the teachers Tessa had snagged, asked if I wanted to try out for any sports. I stared at him in disbelief and said, "I'm not real big on team sports. Do we have an unarmed combat team?" He just laughed at that, and asked me when the wrestling coach should expect me. I just smiled in response.

"Really, it's like I said, nothing happened. It's all just been blown up.", I said, after Tessa described what occurred.

"It wasn't nothing, Carl. I had to come here and tell you thank you for saving my daughter. We owe you for this.", replied her father.

"Thank you.", added her mother, who then leaned over to kiss my cheek. I glanced over at Tessa, who laughed silently and rolled her eyes. Her parents were a lot more fundamental in their beliefs than she was, although she was fairly conservative herself, and she had a good, if quiet, sense of humor. "You should come over and visit sometime. You and Tessa would make a nice couple."

"Mother!", shrieked Tessa in embarrassment.

"Well, you would."

My parents were simply staring at me and the others, my father in wonder, and my mother absolutely appalled. I just smiled and shook my head. "That's very nice Mrs. Harper, but Tessa and I are just friends. I don't think Tessa is my type of girl. Thank you anyway."

Tessa laughed at this, and even more so when her mother pressed the issue. "What type would that be?"

I had to laugh. "Tessa's a very nice girl, and the type I'm looking for, well, they aren't as nice as Tessa." I gave Tessa a wink, which she laughed at. Tessa's mother gasped softly and my mother protested loudly. I could see a twinkle in both fathers' eyes, though.

Tessa laughed loudly at this. "I'll let some of the girls at school know that."

I grinned back at her. "You do that!"

The Harpers took that as their cue to leave. I saw them to the door, and Tessa was the last to go out. "I'm going to tell some of my friends just what kind of girl you're looking for.", she teased.

"You just do that. Tammy and I broke up, so I am definitely available."

"I'm also going to tell them you're a hero.", she said softly.

I grinned at her. "Don't do that, you'll ruin my reputation!" She took off after her folks and I waved goodbye.

Once inside, my mother immediately protested about me learning aikido. "You're always getting into fights at school! You are going to quit this immediately!"

"Mom, this is the only fight I've been in since I started learning aikido. Did you want me to let them hurt Tessa?", I asked. I glanced over at Dad for some support. "What if it had been Suzie?"

"I don't care. You are always getting into trouble, and this is just more of the same. You are stopping it, you hear!"

I looked at my father, and for once he stood up to her. "Shirley, shut up!"

"What?"

Dad ignored her for a moment. Turning to me, he said, "Anything ever happens with your mother or your sister, you take care of them, you understand?" I nodded silently. "Shirley, he stays in those classes. He didn't start it. He's doing fine. Leave him alone." Back to me he said, "You take care of them, no matter what." I nodded again.

"How dare you...", started Mom.

"Shirley, just shut up." Dad went back up the stairs, with Mom following behind him, arguing. I never saw my father ever hit my mother, but I know he must have wanted to at times. This was one of those times. She was losing the argument, and she didn't take losing well. I knew I wasn't hearing the end of it. My mother is not one to bury a grudge. No, she's the type who stuffs it and mounts it on the mantel.

Chapter 13: Moving Along

Fall 1970 to Summer 1971

Tenth grade moved along quickly on schedule, my advanced schedule. I managed to squeeze Trigonometry and Analytic Geometry into the fall semester, and nailed Probability and Statistics in the spring, when it was normally held. The unusual part was that I took the class with seniors two years older than myself. They treated me okay, but differently, like an alien had landed among them.

I was active in both the Explorer post and the church's teen youth group, led by Pastor Joe. I figured I went camping or canoeing at least once a month through the entire year. I had enjoyed this immensely on my first trip through, and now was no different, except that I was a lot more knowledgeable. I was a whole lot better campfire cook this time around, which is a skill you only learn through experience. At least this time I didn't dump my canoe and partner upside down in the middle of the North Branch of the Shenandoah River, like I did the first time.

I didn't warn Mr. Becker about what was waiting for him on that trip, though. He had a brand new plastic canoe, which cost him a fortune and of which he was inordinately proud. It was about a third of the weight of the Grumman aluminum canoes the rest of us were using. It was one of the very first non-metal canoes ever built, plastic, not fiberglass, and was made of two halves welded down the keel. He was one of the church deacons, and was with us for the trip, and his partner was a young girl, Jenny Smith. After about an hour on the river, he signaled for a stop and we all beached our canoes. His canoe had sprung a leak along the seam at the keel, splitting for a couple of inches.

Not to worry! He had a patch kit, just in case! Still, it would require him to beach the canoe, flip it upside down, and let it dry, then apply the patch and wait another hour or two. He and Jenny would be along in a few hours, so make sure dinner was ready. I smiled to myself and we all went on our merry way.

We didn't see either Mr. Becker or Jenny until Sunday afternoon. Five minutes after they were back in the water, the entire keel split down the middle and dropped the pair of them into the Shenandoah. They swam to shore and spent a wet night under the stars. The next day, Saturday, they hiked out along a railroad track, and found a phone. Jenny's parents were called, and they drove four hours into the West Virginia countryside to rescue them. Jenny went home, and Mr. Becker was taken to his car. He slept in the car overnight, and then drove to a lookout the next morning, where we found him waving to us. He told us the incredible story amid much laughter about his "new and improved" canoe.

I continued working out and running, and gained some muscle mass. By the end of the tenth grade, I was 5'10" and weighed 155 pounds, almost thirty pounds heavier than I was way back when. I was big enough that nobody thought about pushing me around, especially after word about the fight with the lacrosse players got out. That almost ended right there, but Jerry Jones decided to keep pushing it. The day after he was back in school after the suspension, he came calling and demanded I meet him after school behind the gym. I said I would be there.

Instead, I rode the bus home. Jerry was a certified moron. Ray Shorn, a buddy from Hampton Elementary days, looked shocked. "You're supposed to be fighting Jerry Jones behind the school!"

"Jerry Jones is an idiot.", I replied.

"He's going to say you're chicken."

"Jerry is going to say whatever he wants to say, regardless of what happens. What Jerry says about me isn't worth the breath it takes to say. Why don't you go back and ask Tessa if I'm a chicken?"

Ray glanced over his shoulder at where Tessa sat with some friends, and then looked back at me. "I don't know, man. I think he's going to be all over you tomorrow."

I blew this off. Ray was right, however, in that Jerry found me at the lockers the next morning and tried to brace me right there in the hallway. He was yelling loud enough to cause a commotion, and was grabbed by a teacher, and got a week's detention. That night I got my father alone and told him what was happening. Mom would have freaked out, but Dad was more or less human, now that he was no longer hitting me with the oak paddle.

I ended by saying, "I don't want to start anything, but I don't see Jerry letting this drop. For one thing, he ain't smart enough to let it drop!" Jerry was a big guy, with at least three inches and forty pounds on me, and it was all muscle, especially between the ears.

Dad gave an exasperated shrug. "Well, the good Lord says to turn the other cheek, but I don't recall him mentioning doing it more than once. I will tell you something I learned long ago, when I was your age, and later again in the Navy, and that's if you have to put somebody down, put him down hard and fast and permanent. Let me know what happens." I nodded and we broke apart.

A week later, after his detention was up, Jerry was back in my face, and actually tried to grab me and push me into the lockers. Like I said, Jerry was a moron anywhere other than the lacrosse field. I noticed a teacher standing behind him, and as soon as Jerry grabbed me, the teacher yanked him away. He got marched down to the office and got another five day suspension.

The day after his suspension was up, Jerry started mouthing off that he was going to beat the shit out of me right there in the school, and no pussy teachers were going to stop him. Everybody heard about it, of course, and several people mentioned it to me. I just nodded and thanked them, and kept my eyes open. It happened in the lunchroom. I was already seated at one of the benches, when Ray elbowed me and pointed towards the door. Jerry was striding purposefully towards me. "Shit, I need this like I need a hole in my head!", I muttered, and stood up to face him.

It was over quickly. Like Dad told me to do, I put him down hard and fast and very, very painfully. He grabbed for me, so I took his wrist and twisted it up and around, breaking it in several places, and then as he screamed in pain, flipped him up and over, and dropped him on his shoulder, wrenching his arm up and backwards and dislocating it brutally, shredding the joint. Jerry was going to the hospital, and he was not going to the NCAA. He lay there screaming and crying, and I stepped away. I wasn't all that hungry anymore, although I did pocket an apple for later. Jerry ended up in the hospital, and I ended up in the Principal's office, waiting for Dad to come over. By now, there was more than enough evidence, with two suspensions, a string of detentions, and countless witnesses to the attack, that got me out of any punishment. Jerry was expelled.

Mom was less than amused. I heard her and Dad arguing about it that night, and hid out in my room.

Tessa made good on her promise to pass the word about me to some of the girls, and the results were interesting, if a little schizophrenic. A number of girls looked towards me as somebody who would protect them, so I was a 'safe' boyfriend. Other girls heard that I wasn't interested in 'nice' girls, but 'not nice' girls, which was a wholly different demographic. I made it a point to thank Tessa, which she laughingly accepted. A couple of girls even tried to use me in the protective role, to make their boyfriends jealous, but it wasn't like I was some dumb teenager; I saw through those tricks immediately and told the boyfriends they were welcome to the trouble.

The net effect was that I had several different girlfriends that year, although opportunities to be alone with them were extremely limited. I didn't have a car or a license (I was only 15) and you really can't get too frisky in the back seat when Mom or Dad is driving you anywhere. Whatever mischief we could get into occurred at parties where we could sneak away, or bike rides around Loch Raven Reservoir, or maybe after school at her house, if she didn't have family around.

The first was Jenny Smith, she of the St. Paul's Canoeing Hall of Fame, who proved that canoes weren't the only thing she went down on. She wouldn't go all the way, and was very nervous when I pulled her pants off and returned the favor, but once she understood I would play by her rules, was very enthusiastic when I ate her out. I think I was the first guy to ever do this to her. I would have to admit that while it's not my favorite activity in the bedroom I had certainly done it before, back on my first time around, and it's definitely a favorite of the ladies. If my counterparts weren't going to take advantage of the opportunity, I was more than happy to make up for them.

Jenny and I didn't become an item, but were more like occasional friends with benefits. On the other hand, girls talk, even more than guys do, and probably more honestly. When Shelley, Tammy, and Jenny began telling the girls about my oral expertise, I became even more popular than when Tessa told them I was a hero. Heroes are good; heroes who eat pussy are even better! I am not going to say the phones were ringing off the hook and girls were battering down my door, but if I didn't want to be lonely, I didn't have to be.

Once the weather got warmer, and especially in the summer, when school was out, there was nothing quite like taking a bike ride with a girl up to Loch Raven. A picnic lunch, a ground cloth, and a blanket ... keep it simple. You couldn't go swimming or boating in the reservoir, but there were any number of places to take your bikes up into the trees and out of sight, and then settle in for some al fresco and au naturel dining. For the girls it was an exciting and liberating experience. Ride our bikes up to the reservoir, slip into the trees, spread out the ground cloth and cover it with a blanket, and then have lunch. After lunch, time for a little nap and seduction. The breeze on their naked skin was at once both nerve-wracking and exciting, and almost always very stimulating.

I got my working papers and got a job as a stockboy at Hutzlers during the Christmas rush. My first job - and my first layoff! I was let go after the first of the year. Oh, well. Later that year, when summer rolled around, I got a job up at Pot Springs Pizza. It was minimum wage, but all the pizza you could eat! I had worked there before, the first time, and it was a pretty good job. I worked my way up to a night manager, and learned how to make pizza, a very useful skill. I made sure that this time around I memorized the recipes.

I also started memorizing Mom's recipes, and writing them down. Both my folks were very good cooks, and over the years, I became one as well. This became immensely handy when I got married, because Marilyn was one of the worst cooks on the planet. If you visited our house on a night we were both home, I was the one cooking. She could burn water.

Hamilton became increasingly hostile to me through the tenth grade and the summer after. I was really at a loss for what to do about him. Mom wouldn't hear that there was any problem whatsoever, and Dad wasn't about to get into it with her, but it was really wearing on me. This was a lot worse than the first time through.

I have heard many sermons and paeans to brotherly love. Supposedly we would always be able to make up our differences and eventually come together, but it was never that way with us. He was always too self-centered and too stubborn to ever compromise on anything. On my first time through he would get so annoying that I would end up hitting him, but this never solved anything. Now I would just walk away from him. No matter what I did to him or what threat was made or what my parents ordered him to do, if he didn't want to do it, he wouldn't. Most people learn through pain - the stove burns, so don't touch it. He refused to learn. Was he a psychopath? A sociopath? Psychotic? Whatever was going on, I couldn't fix it, and Mom wouldn't consider that the 'good' son might have problems.

I was the 'bad' son, since I wouldn't live my life the way she wanted it. Even when Dad got sick with the Alzheimer's' and some other problems, she would call me up from 300 miles away and make me come home, just so I could see him and she could complain about how far away I was and how I didn't care enough. Christ, Mom, why the hell do you think I moved 300 miles away!? Marilyn and I used to joke that whenever we had a problem raising the kids, we would always imagine what my parents would do - and then do the exact opposite! (Of course, Parker told us that he and Janine did the same thing, and he had such a poker face we couldn't tell if he was kidding us or not.)

He always thought he was smarter (okay, he was) and that made him immune to normal people and civilized behavior. I can remember one Thanksgiving, in the 2010s, when we were driving home from Suzie's house. I hadn't lived in Maryland in forty years, and needed directions. He and Mom were driving with us, and he refused to give me directions, instead trying to tease and make fun. For the love of God, we were in our mid-fifties and he was acting like a four year old. I finally ended up yelling at him, in front of our mother, to "Knock your shit off and give me the fucking directions!" Even then he refused until Mom, now in her eighties had to order him to behave.

Now, he was even worse. It seemed that the more successful I became, and the faster I went through school, the more he hated me. He had always tried to pry before, but now I could see that he was actively trying to break into my locked foot locker, and was vandalizing my possessions. Needless to say, when confronted, he would lie and deny. Sometime this worked, and sometime it didn't. When he squirted ink on my ties, he managed to get some on his hands, and that was pretty irrefutable. I measured my closet and mail ordered a metal cabinet and put that inside my closet. Hamilton was furious, as was my mother, but Dad let me. I got another padlock and wore that key around my neck as well.

Even Suzie figured out that there was something wrong with Ham. When Marilyn died, and then Alison, Suzie and her family came to the funerals, over three hundred miles away, but Hamilton didn't even send flowers. Now, this time around, his disdain and dislike had changed to hatred.

The first time, Marilyn and the kids didn't even want to be around him. Maggie wouldn't even visit without Jackson being with her, and Mom wouldn't allow that until they got married. Most of the family thought he was kind of creepy, sort of like Norman Bates in Psycho, but without all the nasty killing business. Now I wasn't so sure about avoiding the killing, especially my desire to kill him!

On the other hand, I had learned a lot on my first trip through. Specifically, Alison having Williams' Syndrome was a learning breakthrough. The most important thing to remember when you have a child with learning disabilities (or, as we called it in the far less politically correct Sixties and Seventies, mental retardation) is to have patience. There are many things the child will never learn, no matter what you do or how loud you yell or how hard you hit. Not that I did, I was never a monster, but you really learn patience. Hamilton taxed my every limit.

I had learned. Back then we had often gotten into fights, when his behavior and mulish stubbornness had pushed me too far. Now, I would just simply get up and leave the room. I generally only slept in my bedroom now, and any of my belongings were under lock and key.

Mind you, this was all very depressing. I had spent the first 21 years of my life in this environment, being told repeatedly that I was a failure and a disappointment. Now I was going through it all over again, and vastly exceeding what I had done before, and being told I was even more of a failure and more of a disappointment. I understood what was happening, but it made for some very black days at times. This recycling bit was not all that great at times.

I also changed my overall appearance. Prior to this, I had always tried to dress like a hippie, just like every other kid in school. All of us non-conformists simply had to conform to each other. The uniform was blue jeans, a tee shirt, and sneakers. An exciting change, for some of the tougher kids, was boots, like biker boots. Hair was worn long, as long by the guys as it was by the girls. At the time, I grew my own hair so long that it went below my shoulders and I had to wear a headband, suitably painted with a Peace sign, to keep it under control.

Oh, if I had only been able to save that hair! Even then I knew that male pattern baldness was genetically transmitted, and that it ran in the family. It runs down the women's side, skipping generations, and Mom's father had been a cue ball. I was going bald by my mid-thirties.

So I changed my wardrobe. By the time I was out of school, I had realized that the back seam on Levi's really rubbed my rear end wrong, and had shifted over to khakis and chinos. I also switched over to sports shirts, with collars, which actually looked pretty good on my muscular upper body. Wear them a little tight and the girls really noticed. I got a haircut, not ridiculously short, but like something a fashionable twenty-something would wear. That actually took some doing, because back then you had to search to find a stylist for a man. Men went to barbers, and the choices were limited to crew cuts or a 'regular', which was just long enough to part on one side. When I grew out of my denim jacket, I bought a leather jacket, bomber style.

And I bought a hat. Way back when, on my first go-around, I had started wearing fedoras almost from day one in college. This was years before the Indiana Jones movies made hats popular again, but I didn't care. It made me a bit different, and the ladies didn't mind. I looked good in a hat. I just started a few years earlier this time.

Ten years before, every man in America owned a hat. Then JFK wandered down Pennsylvania Avenue bareheaded and overnight the hat industry in America entered bankruptcy! In the future, everyone idolized him, Camelot cut short, all that sort of nonsense. In reality he was a fairly decent domestic President and an abysmally bad foreign relations President (okay, he did all right with the Cuban Missile Crisis, but he's the one who put us into Viet Nam, and the Bay of Pigs was his baby), but he sure wasn't Washington and Lincoln reincarnated. The one thing you can't argue about is that he was young, vigorous, virile, photogenic - and didn't wear hats! You couldn't pay men to wear a hat by the end of the decade.

Mind you, I got razzed about it the first couple of times, but the first time I wore it, it just happened to be raining. I simply said, "Go ahead, laugh, see if I care. My head's dry. Hmmm?" I said this to Ray Shorn, who looked like a drowned rat at the time. He flipped me the bird and I laughed right back at him.

By the time I got through tenth grade, my khakis and sport shirt and deck shoes (very comfortable!) set me apart like a great white shark swimming through a sea of blue denim. I am telling you, it didn't hurt with the girls, either.

Chapter 14: Junior Year

September 1971

In the Seventies, it was a lot simpler getting a driver's license as a teen than it is nowadays. You could get your learner's permit when you were still fifteen, and then get your license when you were sixteen, as long as you had taken Driver's Ed classes and passed the tests at DMV. Now you get different grades of license, all depending on how old you are, but back then, if you had a license, you could drive. I was going to be sixteen in another couple of months, and I wanted my license.

On the first trip through, Hamilton and I weren't even allowed to get our learner's permits until we were seventeen. By the time we went through driver's ed and took the tests, it was the spring of our senior years before we got our licenses, and we weren't allowed our own cars. Well, fair is fair, neither of us had any money to buy a car. We could only drive Mom's old 67 Dodge Dart, and we ran that sucker into the ground!

I raised the subject at dinner after school started in September. "Dad, what does your company do with the company cars when you turn them in?" Dad had driven a company car for years, mostly station wagons, but had now started to drive sedans. He always had some work gloves and steel toe boots and a hard hat in the back, for going to quarries and job sites.

He shrugged. "They sell them. Harry T. Campbell's doesn't actually own the cars. They're owned by a leasing company. Why?"

"What's a leasing company?", asked Hamilton.

I didn't look at him and we all just ignored him. "How's that work? After so many years you give it to them and they give you a new one?"

"What's a leasing company?", pressed my brother. He hated being left out of a conversation. If it wasn't about him, nobody else should talk.

I looked over at him. "I'm talking to Dad, not you." and then turned back to Dad.

Dad was on the verge of answering when Ham started complaining. Mom cuffed him on the back of the head and told him to be quiet, which he did grudgingly. Dad waited for this little Hamilton drama to finish before answering. "Pretty much. They're typically three year leases, so every three years I give them back my car and they give me a list of three or four new cars I can get, and I pick one. Why?"

I didn't answer directly. "What do they do with the old cars?"

"Sell them. Why?", he continued.

"Give me a moment. Can anyone buy one?"

He looked at me very curiously. "I suppose. I know they offer them to the employees first, but then I suppose they auction them off. Where are you going with this?"

"Is it only when you turn them in, or can you buy one at other times?"

He crossed his arms and stared at me. It was obvious he had figured out what I was up to. "It's a big leasing company. Every month they send out a list of cars and prices. Tell me why you're asking."

"I'm going to need to buy a car, and I figured a corporate model might be better than going to Honest Abe's Used Car Emporium out in Timonium."

As expected, the room erupted in nonsense. Mom said I wasn't old enough to drive, and besides, I didn't have a license or money. Hamilton protested I wasn't allowed to - I guess it was in the rules somewhere. Suzie thought it was a great idea. Nana didn't understand. Dad just sat there staring at me.

This was not at all a crazy idea. Way back when, Hamilton and I had driven that poor Dodge Dart to death, and it finally gave up the ghost in 1976. When that happened and Mom needed another car, Dad bought one from the leasing company. It was located in Youngstown, Ohio, so he loaded me on a shuttle to Pittsburgh and then on to Youngstown, and had me drive it home. Why couldn't we do the same thing now?

Dad silenced the room and then said, "Everybody be quiet and give him a chance to talk."

"I will not! This is ridiculous and I won't stand for it!", replied Mom.

Dad gave her an aggrieved look and said, "Shirley, let the boy talk. You'll get a chance later." Mom huffed but crossed her own arms and waited in a bad mood. Dad looked back at me and motioned for me to continue.

I took a deep breath. "Okay. First, I am going to need a car by January. I will be starting to take college courses over at Towson State then. I will need to get back and forth between Towson High and Towson State. There is no bus service. I could take a bus from Towson State to here, but it would take at least one transfer and then it dumps me up on York Road. Unless of course one of you wants to leave work and drive me back and forth."

Dad lifted an eyebrow at that but didn't stop me. "There's no reason I can't buy a car. I will pay for the car, gas, and insurance. It won't cost you anything." I glanced over at Mom and her face was getting red. "Finally, as long as you sign off on it, I can take driver's ed now, before I turn 16, and then can take the tests in November. If we time it right, I can get it all done that first week in November."

"Shirley?", Dad said, inviting her response.

"No. We're not buying you a car. That's the end of it."

"Mother, you wouldn't be buying me anything. I already have the money to pay for a car. It's like I said, I'll buy the car and pay for gas and insurance."

"Where did you get money to buy a car? Answer me that!", she demanded.

"From the lawsuit three years ago, remember?"

"That's for college. You can't have that."

Mom was really pissing me off, because even after three years, she still thought of that money as her own. It was a damn good thing I had Dad's name on the account with me instead of hers. "Mom, I have already tripled the money I kept in the brokerage account. I can afford just about anything this side of Harvard already. In two years I'll be able to afford that." Even including room and board, you could go to Harvard for about ten grand a year in the early Seventies. This was before tuition increases began to rival the increases in health care costs. "Would you like me to write a check, or do you prefer cash?"

"You tripled it?", interjected Dad incredulously.

I turned to face him. "Large cap stocks such as ITT and LTV are changing growth modes from stock acquisitions to cash, increasing market volatility. Volatility is opportunity." My Advanced Finance Professor at Fairleigh Dickinson had taken us through the conglomerate formations and breakups in the Sixties and Seventies, and as I worked at ITT at the time I had followed it keenly.

Dad shook his head in amazement. "What about driver's ed?"

"I can go to a night school in Towson. They advertise in the Yellow Pages. I need 10 hours instruction and another 10 hours of practice, and then I take the written test at DMV and the driving test. We do that the week I turn 16. I'll pay for the classes and the cost at the DMV."

"Darn right you will.", he replied.

"Charlie! This is ridiculous! We're not letting him have a car! The next thing you know, Hamilton will be demanding a car, too!", Mom said. Hamilton perked up at this, an eager look to his face.

"Yeah, well when Hamilton can pay for his own car, we'll talk about that. Besides, he's only 13." Hamilton's shoulders slumped at this, and he looked daggers at me. Like I cared. "Besides, you know he'll need a car at Towson State. I can't drive him back and forth and neither can you. Be realistic!"

"No!"

Dad rubbed his face and excused all of the rest of us. Suzie helped Nana up to her room. Nana was in the early stages of senility and needed a fair bit of help. Nobody had invented Alzheimer's yet, so we were all ignorant and called it dementia or senility or natural causes or old age. Within a year, Nana would be in an old folk's home. Hamilton and I went downstairs, although I stayed in the family room, so I didn't have to put up with his horseshit. He was already fuming about how I was getting a car and he wasn't. Jesus Christ, he couldn't even see over the steering wheel yet!

Mom and Dad argued over this for the rest of the night. Mom's biggest problem was that this didn't fit her neat and tidy plans for the lives of her children. She was very proud that I was going to college, but otherwise I was still a little boy. She couldn't have it both ways, but wouldn't accept that. This was just like my quitting band, taking aikido, or taking home economics. You did what the school and society told you to do and nothing more and nothing less.

On the other hand, the logic was relentless. I needed to be able to drive if I was going to go to Towson State, and I needed my own car. I wouldn't be able to get away with driving her to work and using her car, when I might have morning classes that would mess this up. By the end of the week, Dad brought home a list of cars available from the leasing company. "This is this month's list. It changes every month, so we'll have a new list in October. Sometimes the list is good and sometimes it isn't."

"What do I do if I see one I want?"

"You make a bid. It has to be at least as much as the figure on the list. If somebody else beats you, you can try for a different car. This just gives you a figure on how much they will run."

"Do I do this now, or do I wait until I get my license?", I asked.

"Probably be easier to wait. You won't have to horse around getting it in my name first and then yours. That would be the November list."

I nodded. "Then that's what we'll do. I'll do the driver's ed and tests with Mom's car, and then buy this as soon as I pass."

He smiled. "You sound awfully sure of yourself."

I grinned. "If Pop-pop could get a license, so can I." Mom's father had been a notoriously poor driver.

He rolled his eyes. "I think he started driving before they even had licenses. You'd better just hope you drive better than he did."

"Maybe he learned driving a horse."

Dad laughed. "That was my side of the family, not his!"

Maryland had DMV offices that were open on Saturday mornings, so we went over that weekend and picked up the paperwork and applied for my permit. I also went into town and registered with a driver's ed school. Classes would be twice a week, an hour a night, for five weeks. I also signed up for the live training, where a driving instructor would come out to the house after school and I would get behind the wheel of his car.

This part actually wasn't a requirement; you simply had to state you had ten hours behind the wheel. Dad washed his hands of it though. I couldn't blame him. When Parker went for his permit, I did the first tour of duty in the car and was scared half to death, even though we were barely breaking 20 on deserted country roads. I crawled out of the car white faced and white knuckled, and Marilyn took over all further driving lessons. It got worse - Parker was the serious child, Maggie was the wild and crazy one! I never even attempted teaching her to drive!

Classes started next week. The curriculum was broken into ten one hour chunks, each on something different, so as long as you hit each of the lessons once, you got your certificate.

The driving itself was amusing. It had been, effectively, about five years since I had driven myself, but it's just like riding a bike or sex, once you learn, you never forget how. The biggest problem I had was remembering that in 1971 'right on red', the ability to turn right at a red light if the traffic was clear, wasn't legal yet. It would come about later in the decade, although they were already starting to debate it in the state assembly. Ultimately it would be passed, and then delayed six months while they implemented it. The joke at the time was that the delay was so they could paint enough 'No Right On Red' signs.

After the first fifteen minutes of driving, the instructor looked over at me and asked, "Just how much bootleg time do you already have?"

I tried to look innocent and said, "Sir?"

He snorted, and pointed me out of the suburbs and onto Dulaney Valley Road. We spent the rest of the hour driving up and around Loch Raven and around some of the busier streets. It felt very good to be back behind the wheel.

The next two months moved along much too slow for my taste. I wanted to get the car under my belt before tackling my next big project, college. This semester I was taking high school physics at an accelerated pace, so I could finish it by the end of the semester. My plan was to take a semester of calculus and a semester of physics in the spring over at Towson State. Then, next year, I would somehow cram in freshman chemistry, another semester or two of physics, and at least another couple of semesters of calculus over at Towson State, and maybe an English or humanities elective as well.

Most colleges require about 120 credits to graduate with a Bachelor's degree. This splits up to about 30 credits a year, or 15 credits a semester. That works out to 4-5 classes each semester, depending on whether they are 3 or 4 credit classes. If I loaded up now, I could conceivably earn 35-40 credits from college and graduate from high school with Towson High footing the college bill. If I was able to overload in college, I could graduate in two years or less.

Or, and this was my plan, stick it out for four full years, overloading all the way, and graduate in four years with a doctorate. This was one of my biggest mistakes back in the day. I had been a chemist and at the end of the four years I knew I wasn't going to go to grad school for chemistry. I went and got an MBA instead. Great for business, but only a Master's degree. If I ever wanted to teach at the university level, I would need a PhD; the Master's only allowed me to teach at a community college level (which I had done.) I wanted to get my doctorate in either math or computers, and I figured I should be able to do it easily, if not in another four years at my final destination, then in five.

Both Mom and Hamilton were still sulking about my driving. Mom wasn't happy that I was upsetting her carefully made plans for me to be Dad Junior, but Dad just shook his head and rolled his eyes and kept her under control. Hamilton was simply pissed that I was doing something he wasn't allowed to do, like drive a car at thirteen. He decided to retaliate by putting epoxy on the locks on my foot locker and my steel cabinet. I showed them to Dad. Ham denied everything, but never bothered to dump his garbage can with the epoxy kit in it. He really got his ass whipped that night! I went out and bought another couple of locks and used a bolt cutter to take off the old locks. As a master criminal he left much to be desired. What an asshole!

It was all rather anticlimactic when my birthday rolled around. November 5 was a Friday, so I cut class and Dad skipped work and we went out to the DMV office in Westminster. This was a much smaller and quieter office than the main branch down in Glen Burnie. I aced the written test and then drove around the block and aced the driving test. I mean I drove around the block - that was the driving test!

This was pretty much the way it went previously. The funny part was when Hamilton did this two years later, he flunked the driving test and had to repeat it a month later. When he passed it, he thought his shit didn't stink and basically told everyone at dinner that night. I almost died laughing when Dad told him, 'Of course you passed! The examiner was your second cousin!"

By then, the November list of cars came out, and I got lucky. That month a lot of 1968 Ford Galaxie 500s came off lease and were available. If I didn't get the first one I picked, there were a whole slew of them available. The Galaxie was Ford's full size sedan, designed to compete with the Chevy Impala. These were all business class models, four door sedans with a decent size V8 and a back seat big enough to put a bed inside. This was the type of car we bought when the Dodge Dart died. It drove like a tank, guzzled gas like you owned an oil well, and had a soft and comfy ride. You've got to love that big Detroit iron! They just don't make them like that anymore! I put in a bid of $2,250 and within a week had one reserved in my name. I wrote Dad a series of checks to cover the car, the insurance, and the title fees.

Towson High took a very interesting turn that first week in November, as well. I was standing at my locker that Monday morning, chatting with Ray Shorn and Randy Bronson, when a group of pretty young girls went past us in the hall. They were mostly juniors like us guys, but not all of them. I doffed my hat as they passed by, and said, 'Morning, ladies!", with a big smile.

Jenny Smith was in the group and she smiled back. "Morning, Carl." Several of the other girls giggled with her, generally the ones I had gotten very friendly with. Jenny and her group slowed as they passed, and I got a good look at the new girl who was with them. For some reason, she looked awfully familiar.

"Who's your friend, Jenny?", asked Ray.

Tammy Braxton said, "This is Jeana Colosimo. She just transferred in from New York, and Mrs. Vickery..." (the new vice-principal) " ... asked us to take her to class."

Holy shit! That's why I remembered her! Jeana Colosimo had been my first real love, way back when. We had dated my entire junior year. I remembered that she was actually only a sophomore, a tenth grader a year younger than me, but we didn't care. We broke up at the end of the year when they started up a new school over off Cromwell Valley and transferred all the tenth graders in the area to it. I didn't have a car then and couldn't see her anymore.

No reason not to see if I couldn't date her again. She was a gorgeous little package, and back then I had really outdone myself getting her to date me. It was like a 4 nabbing a 10. She wasn't very tall, maybe 5'3" if she was thinking tall thoughts, but she had great legs, a tight and perky rear, a slender waist, and a set of really nice knockers! They had to be at least C cups, and might be more. She had a beautiful oval face, dark Mediterranean skin, and long and straight dark, dark brown hair.

"Well, I have to thank you ladies. You've brought her to me, so I'll walk her to class from here.", I replied.

Jeana blushed and the other girls laughed at my cheek. "Not so fast.", said Mary Brewhauser. "We haven't had a chance to warn her about the perils of being seen with some of the older guys yet." Mary was another of the girls to be considered friends with benefits.

"Like you!", added Tammy.

"Tammy, that's so hurtful!", I replied, waggling my eyebrows at her.

She giggled and Randy, who was now her steady boyfriend, put his arm around her shoulders. "Do I have to thump you, Buckman?"

"Hey, I'm a lover, not a fighter!" That got quite a few laughs, though not from Jeana, who wasn't in on the joke. "So, Jeana, what would you like to do on Friday night? Being new in town, you should have somebody older and wiser take you a few places, and help you familiarize yourself with Towson."

"Yeah, somebody like me!", commented Ray. "Jeana, I'm Ray, and I think you are beautiful! You should be going out with me on Friday! Carl just got out of prison and is now under house arrest."

"Amateur hour, Ray.", I commented. "Some girls, not Jeana here, but certainly the type you hang out with, would find that even more interesting."

That got everybody laughing. Jeana was on the verge of speaking, but Jenny put her hand up. "Hold on, you two. Jeana's new here, and we didn't bring her by just so we could throw fresh meat to the resident wolves. Let's hear what you two have in mind, so that we can give her some advice."

This proved very popular, so I made a motion and signaled Ray to speak up. His eyes bugged a bit, but he said, "Uh, nothing like the classics - a movie and something to eat later." The ladies seemed to mull this over for a moment, and then Tammy said, "Your turn, Carl."

Ah, the benefits of experience. Let the rookie go first. I just shook my head. "Not very impressive. A 1.4 on the difficulty scale. 3.7, 3.6, 2.4 from the East German judge. No, definitely not a movie." I tapped my cheek dramatically, and just as dramatically, walked around Jeana. "No, for the first date we want something active, not passive. Where we can talk, and Jeana can learn just what a great guy I am, and how fortunate she was to pick me, and not Ray. Hmmm..." Most of the girls were giggling by now, and Ray had punched me in the shoulder. "No, I think we should go up to Timonium Lanes and go bowling."

Jeana's face lit up at this. "I love bowling! How did you know?"

I gave a big smirk to Ray, and then held my fingers up to my forehead. Twirling them dramatically, I answered, "Is it my incredible knowledge of women? My Houdini-like powers of mind reading? Or..." I paused dramatically. "Could it be that you just moved here from New York and are wearing an Oyster Bay Rollers jacket?" Jeana was wearing a pink jacket with a silhouette of somebody bowling on the back. I crossed my arms and looked proudly at the others.

The rest of the group seemed to consider this either cheating or brilliant, but Jeana's eyes were shining and she was smiling at me. Ray had been blown out of the water. I pulled out a piece of paper and grabbed a pen out of Randy's pocket and used it to write down her phone number. The girls left, dragging Jeana off to her homeroom, with a warning that they were going to tell her all about me.

As they disappeared, Ray looked over and Randy. "Can I join you in thumping him?" I gave the pair of them a raspberry and we headed off to our classes.

The rest of that week I made sure that I talked to Jeana whenever I could. I told her on Wednesday not to believe all the awful things that she had heard about me. At that point she blushed furiously, leading me to suspect that the girls had told her quite a bit about me. I teased her and asked what they had told her, but she refused to tell me. Smiling, I leaned closer, putting my lips to her ear, and whispered, "Are you scared because you're afraid it might be true? Or because you're afraid it might not be?" She blushed some more, and swatted my arm with her books, so I kissed her on the cheek and stepped back. She looked a little confused, but then leaned forward and moved up on her toes and kissed me on the lips, lightly. She giggled and ran off, and I was left in happy contemplation.

At six that Friday night, armed with my brand new temporary license and the keys to the Dodge Dart, I left the house and drove over to Jeana's. She and her parents lived in a development off of Joppa Road that backed onto Goucher College. Before I was to be allowed to take their daughter out, I was to meet the parents.

Goucher was one of the two colleges in Towson, but was very different from the other, Towson State. Whereas Towson State was a public college, a teaching college, and was in the center of town, with a wide open campus, Goucher was a very expensive, girls only, private liberal arts college. Imagine Radcliffe, but south of the Mason-Dixon Line. As such it had a mystical quality to it. Unlike Towson State, the campus was very private, screened by manicured hillocks and impenetrable forests and fences, behind which goddesses the likes of which had never before been seen by mortal man studied in luxury. Nobody ever actually saw these creatures, but everybody knew somebody who had a friend whose brother had a cousin who had snuck over there one day, and had seen them all sunbathing out on those manicured lawns in the nude! Or at least that was the story. I had been there once myself, at a 4th of July concert given by the Marine Corps band (you really have to hear The 1812 Overture done with a real cannon and fireworks!), and didn't see any sign of naked women.

It didn't take me long to figure out which house was Jeana's, since I had been there before, so to speak. I parked and got out and walked up the drive. The door opened before I even got to the steps. Jeana must have been waiting for me to show up, and she looked a little nervous. I decided to play it safe and not kiss her. I did, however, hand her a small bouquet of flowers. "They aren't as pretty as you, but I thought it would be a nice welcome present for your family."

I got a nice hug out of that, and she took me by the hand and led me into the living room. A man my father's age was sitting there, eyeing us curiously, if not happily, and Jeana took a big breath. "Daddy, I'd like you to meet Carl Buckman, from school."

Mr. Colosimo got up out of his armchair and I walked over to him. He was an inch or two shorter than me, and a fair bit rounder, though it seemed like there was a bit of muscle underneath it all. He was almost totally bald, and had very beefy arms and hands. I stuck my hand out and looked him in the eye. "It's nice to meet you, Mr. Colosimo. Thank you for inviting me into your home."

"Yeah, you're welcome, but I think it's more a matter of Jeana inviting you into our home than me.", he replied wryly. He didn't try the squeeze-him-to-death trick, but I could sense some power there.

"Daddy!", she protested.

I gave him a wry smile back. "I think you're right. I have a baby sister who's only ten. I doubt my father will handle it all that well in a few years either." There was the sound of some clattering pans, and then a woman came into the room. I turned and held my hand out. "Mrs. Colosimo, thank you for having me over. I'm Carl Buckman."

Jeana's mom looked like an older version of Jeana, short, Italian, busty as hell, with wide hips and a slim frame. She shook my hand. "You're very welcome." She glanced over at her daughter, who was standing there holding some flowers nervously. "Jeana?"

Spooked, Jeana hurriedly thrust out the bouquet. "Carl brought these over. Do we have a vase or something?"

"They're very lovely. Well, come along, we can look for something in the kitchen." Jeana and I followed along, trailed by her father.

"Something smells awfully good.", I commented as we entered the kitchen.

"It's Friday and I didn't want to do fish, so I made some manicotti.", said Mrs. Colosimo. "Do you like manicotti?"

"Love it!", I replied. "Can I help?"

This was received with laughter, since the kitchen was totally off limits to possessors of the Y chromosome. I was ushered back out to the living room with Jeana's father, while Mrs. Colosimo prepped dinner in the kitchen and Jeana moved nervously back and forth between the kitchen and the living room.

Mr. Colosimo was okay. He just wanted to get a feel for the guy taking his daughter out. Although he looked like a plumbing contractor out of a bad sitcom, he was actually an executive with an insurance company that had just transferred him to their Baltimore office. Mrs. Colosimo was his secretary. Over dinner, he gently quizzed me about my plans for the future. At one point, exasperated with his daughter's nervousness, he told her to stop having kittens. She grumbled back at him, and Jeana's mom and I laughed at them both.

After dinner, Jeana excused herself to get ready to go out, and her mother asked me, "So, has Jeana shown you her trophies yet?"

"Trophies?"

"She's a very good bowler." Mrs. Colosimo led me into the den, where there was a small glass fronted display rack filled with a number of bowling trophies. That was where Jeana found us.

I smiled at her. "I think I've been hustled. Trophies?"

She gave me the biggest shit eating grin. "Oh? Didn't I tell you? It must have slipped my mind. Come on, let's go!"

"I want you home by ten.", said her father.

"Daddy! No!"

"Daddy yes! Ten!"

"I think we can let her stay out until ten-thirty.", said her mother. Dad snorted and waved us off after I promised I'd have her back by ten-thirty.

"They treat me like a little kid!", complained Jeana as we got into my car.

"They treat you like their only daughter, who is precious to them. Give them a chance. After I get you home by ten-thirty tonight, next week it will be eleven, and the week after that, we'll be able to stay out until the crack of dawn."

She smiled at that. "The crack of dawn! You sure about that?"

"Well, maybe not quite that late, but you get the idea." I smiled over at her as we headed up York Road. "Trophies? Really?"

As I knew she would, Jeana cleaned my clock but good. Why not, she had the first time around, too. This time I had been expecting the trophy case, so I just smiled when I was shown it, and complained about being hustled. We bowled three games and then goofed off around the snack bar. I made sure she was home at least ten minutes early, and then hung around the living room with her until eleven. I got a very nice kiss, no tongue, but very nice, when I said good-bye.

I made sure I called her the next day, just before lunch, to tell her how much I enjoyed our date, and we ended up talking for almost an hour. Needless to say, Hamilton complained to our parents how I was using the phone. I have no idea why he was bothering, since both of them had been through the kitchen more than once and knew I was on the phone. After I hung up, I made some lunch and told my father, "You know, we ought to put a phone down in the family room."

"You know how?", he asked.

"Absolutely." - because I spent thirty years running telecomm networks. No I didn't say that, but I thought it.

Hamilton immediately protested we weren't allowed to do that, and I thought to myself, for once, he's actually right. In those days, practically the entire country's phone system was a licensed monopoly of the Bell Telephone System. You didn't actually own the phones in your house, you rented them from Ma Bell. Until the Eighties, when it was broken up, Bell Telephone ran the entire thing. If you wanted a new phone in a bedroom, you were supposed to call them and they would send out a technician to run the cable and install a phone, for a small fortune.

At the same time, however, it was entirely legal to go out to the store and buy telephone wire and jacks, and even telephones. You just weren't allowed to install them in conjunction with Bell equipment. It was a rule observed more in the breach.

I told Dad what we would need and we went out after lunch and went to the hardware store and picked up the supplies. It was ridiculously easy, run a fifty foot spool of two-pair twisted-pair phone wire to the junction block in the utility room, and then install a junction block in the family room. We spent far more time running the wire than anything else, sneaking it around corners and through the wall, and then up and over a door frame, tacking it down with wire staples as we went. At the end of it, Hamilton once more complained, "You're going to get caught!"

Dad ignored him. I just said, "Well, if we do, we'll know who squealed, won't we?" He skedaddled off to his room in a hurry at that. I looked at my father. "His continued existence strains my belief in both a benevolent God and Charles Darwin."

"Settle down!"

Mom came in just as we finished up, and I lifted the handset and we could hear the dial tone of a clear connection. "Does it work?", she asked.

I couldn't have asked for better timing. As soon as the words were out of her mouth, the phone rang. "Don't know! Let's find out!" I picked up the handset and said, "Maryland Home for Dissolute Women! Dropping off or picking up?"

Dad started laughing, and Mom gave out a shocked, "Carling!"

There was a loud laugh at the other end of the line. Aunt Peg then said, "Carling, you rascal, is your mother available?" Aunt Peg was my godmother and one of Dad's sisters. I loved her dearly.

"She's one of the more dissolute women available. Hold on." I handed the phone to Mom and Dad laughed some more. Mom swung at the back of my head, but I ducked out of the way. Back before I got restarted, in college, it was considered a sign of a real wiseass to be able to come up with smartass answers when the phone rang. 'County Morgue. You stab 'em, we slab 'em!' and 'Murphy's Bar and Cat House. Liquor in the front, poker in the rear!' were always favorites.

Hamilton expressed his disapproval with the phone in a different way. If he answered the call, and it was for me, he simply hung it up and then left it off the hook until somebody figured it out. He was becoming a real pain in the ass!

Chapter 15: The Carl Buckman Experience

Proof that Jeana had enjoyed our date surfaced on Monday morning. Ray and I and a few of our friends were hanging out in the hallway before homeroom, when Jeana came up. God, but she looked good! How she snuck out past her mother was questionable at best. She had on jeans that looked like they had been painted on, black pumps with at least a two inch heel, and a bright red long sleeved knit top that zipped up the front and had a tiny built in hood down the back, and that top was so tight and thin you could count her freckles, if she had any. Conversation simply stopped as she sauntered down the hall. She came up to me and wrapped her arms around me, and kissed me hard on the lips.

I have to admit I was smiling a cat-with-a-canary-dinner smile after I came up for air. Ray looked disgusted. "So, the date went well?", he asked.

"Well, I certainly thought so, but you might want to ask Jeana?", I replied. Jeana blushed and gave me a hug. I looked down at her and asked, "This weekend, maybe a movie and something to eat afterwards?"

Ray groaned as I drove in the knife. "Buckman, there's a petition going around asking for volunteers for your asskicking, and I am putting my name down on the list!" Everyone laughed at that, including Jeana, who promised to chase down Ray if he hurt me. "I'll die a happy man!", he answered, causing Jeana to blush again.

We all chatted until the warning bell rang and Jeana had to move off to her homeroom. We all stared as she sashayed away, those killer heels causing her rear to move in a hypnotic figure 8. "Oh, man, I hate to see her go, but I love to watch her leave!", I commented.

"Would you explain how it is you got her and not me? And don't give me your shit about bowling, either!", protested my friend.

I turned to face Ray and smiled. "Well, it might be that I'm smarter and better looking that you, and later today, in the showers after gym, I'll tell you about your other shortcomings."

"Fuck you, Buckman! You are way at the top of the asskicking list now!", replied Ray as the others laughed. "I am going to be able to subcontract out the asskicking and charge for the privilege!"

We avoided any asskicking that week. I asked Jeana out again this weekend, but it would have to be Saturday, since I was working Friday night. She offered to come over to the pizza shop, but I told her no, that it was work and I couldn't have friends hanging around like that. None of us guys did. We were all high school kids but we had to take it seriously. That was alright, though. The job was enjoyable, although it didn't pay much. I didn't need much, either. I remember the first time around, it basically kept gas in my Mom's car and enough dough to take a girl out for a date. I was a man of simple tastes. It was such a small operation that the owner paid us in cash and coin, in an envelope, with the payroll deductions handwritten on the back of an order slip. I usually worked three to four nights a week, which was an issue with scheduling aikido practice, but I almost always had either Friday or Saturday free.

By that Saturday, I had my new used car in hand, and that is what we went to the movies in. Jeana was very impressed. I have no idea what we saw, but I knew I had seen it before, probably a million times over. After all, it could have been a premiere and I still would have seen it before. Jeana didn't care, and I made sure I spent time paying attention to her.

I had to get her back home by eleven, but this time her parents weren't waiting for us in the living room. We spent several minutes kissing before I had to run along, and I promised to call the next day.

Monday proved very interesting. Jeana was a wonderful girl, not just beautiful, but smart and interesting as well. I drove to school for the first time, and when school let out, I asked if she would like me to drive her home. Her eyes lit up at this. I carried her crap out to my car and we rode around a bit first, and then we got to her house. "Want to come in?", she asked.

Said the spider to the fly, but who was the spider, and who was the fly? Of course I wanted to come inside. She unlocked the door and I followed inside, carrying her books. She tossed that onto the coffee table. "Want a Coke?", she asked.

"Sure." I followed her out to the kitchen. "Where's the rest of the family?", I asked.

She leaned back against the kitchen counter and said, "There's not much family to keep track of. Both Mom and Dad work, and my older brother died in Viet Nam a few years ago."

"I'm very sorry to hear that. I'm sorry for your loss." That stupid fucking war was the disaster of our generation, and was the dumbest fucking foreign policy move we made until the invasion of Iraq.

She shrugged. "Thank you. It was about five years ago, but thank you anyway."

I walked back out to the living room with my drink. "When do your parents get home?"

Jeana gave me a big smile. "Not for another couple of hours! Would you like to see downstairs?" She grabbed my hand before I even had a chance to answer and pulled me to my feet. "Come on!"

The Colosimo house was unusual for our neighborhood in that it actually had a basement. My parents' house, for example, which was an expensive unit on a corner property, was half crawlspace and half slab-on-grade. Jeana's house not only had a basement, it was actually finished off as a family room and wet bar. It was carpeted, had a drop ceiling, and the walls were sheetrock and oak paneling. There was a large television at one end, facing a sectional couch and chairs, and the other end had oak stairs to the main floor and a fancy wet bar, even including a beer tap.

"Whoa! Very nice!", I said as I looked around. Jeana had gone over to the couches and sat down, so I followed behind. "I wasn't sure if you were planning on making drinks down here.", I said, pointing my thumb over my shoulder at the bar.

She gave a pleasant shrug. "It's all locked up anyways. Sorry."

"Not a problem."

I sat down in a very comfortable armchair and set my Coke on an end table. "Do you have any coasters?"

Jeana hopped up and found one and brought it back to me. I set my drink on the coaster and then tugged her down onto my lap, sideways, and wrapped my arms around her waist. "This is very comfortable, indeed. When did you say your parents were getting home?" I leaned in and whispered this into her ear, and then licked her ear lobe.

Jeana shivered in my arms, and I thought I heard a faint whimper. "Not until six." She turned her face to mine and kissed me.

That first kiss was just on the lips, but then I twisted my face slightly and opened my mouth, and she responded eagerly. Within ten minutes we were swapping tongues. Jeana wasn't very experienced, but she was very enthusiastic and learned quickly. After about fifteen minutes I came up for air and took a deep breath. I was shaking as I reached out and grabbed my drink. Jeana was breathing hard, too, and laid her head on my shoulder.

Things were moving along a lot faster this time around than before. Of course the last time around, I had been lacking in both self-confidence and experience, and a car, both of which can be critical. The self-confidence and experience let you know what you can get away with, the car gives you opportunity to do it.

My mind was whirling as I set my glass back down. I gave her a smile. "It would be awfully easy for a guy to fall for you big time.", I said.

She sat up and smiled back. "That's what the girls at school said about you."

I snorted and rolled my eyes at that. "I have no idea what they are talking about. We are just good friends."

"They said you would say that, too!", she said, giggling.

"Yeah? So what is all the gossip about me? What do all the girls say about me?", I teased back. "This ought to be good!"

Jeana sat upright on my lap, which put some pressure on my erect cock trapped down my pant leg. It was a pleasant sort of pressure, but I silently prayed things would subside. "Well, you get very high marks for technique, although nobody really went into any detail on that. In fact, I was told that I would have to wait until I had the entire Carl Buckman Experience before they would discuss anything else on technique."

"The Carl Buckman Experience? Are you shitting me?" Good God, I was an amusement ride!

She giggled some more and squirmed a bit, making me think about the experience a little too graphically. "Just how many girls at school have experienced the Carl Buckman Experience?", she asked.

"There is no such thing as the Carl Buckman Experience!", I replied. Good Lord!

Jeana shrugged. "Well, if I ever experience it, I'll know who to talk to about it."

"I repeat, there is no Carl Buckman Experience. I'm just being friendly.", I repeated.

"It certainly sounded friendly.", she agreed.

I groaned. "Is that all they had to say about me?"

"No. They also said you were wicked smart and the toughest guy in school and that you've even killed people, but I thought that was kind of crazy." Suddenly she seemed rather nervous; I could feel her tense up and pull away.

I looked at her curiously. "Jeana, what is going on? I know we've only been dating a couple of weeks, but you must know by now I'm not some crazed killer. What's the matter?" She had a confused look on her face, and I could see tears forming in the corners of her eyes. I lifted her off my lap and stood up. I went to the bar and fished out some more ice and coke, surreptitiously adjusting myself in my pants in the process before coming back. "Jeana, just talk to me."

"Well..."

I freshened her glass as well as mine and then sat down again, this time making sure that Little Carl wouldn't be uncomfortably down a pant leg.

I wasn't sneaky enough. Jeana noticed me adjusting myself and said, "That!"

"What?"

She gave me a very embarrassed look and nodded her head in the direction of my lap. "That!"

I figured out what she was talking about, but still wasn't connecting any dots. "Huh? Jeana, I'm not following you."

Her face turned beet red and she stammered out, "I have to know about the Carl Buckman Experience!"

I spewed some Coke out, missing Jeana but spotting the armchair, and she ran off to get some paper towels as I coughed. If she was looking to break the tension, there had to be a healthier and safer method. "Sweet Jesus, Jeana, are you still worried about that nonsense?! Good God!"

"It's not nonsense!", she protested. "All those girls at school, telling me about what you're like, and how I'll know all about it, too, and everything ... Carl, I'm not like ... I mean, I'm..." Tears were starting to leak down her cheeks.

I took the cleaning supplies and set them to the side, and then pulled her gently back onto my lap, being a lot more careful as I did so. I just wrapped her in my arms for a bit, and just rocked her, whispering, "It's all right, it's all right." She settled down after another few minutes.

Once she had stopped crying, I helped her sit upright and turned her face to mine. "Okay, you want to know about the Carl Buckman Experience?" She nodded and I smiled. "Well, this is it. It's just me being me."

"I don't understand."

"You think I plan to make you another conquest. I'm going to seduce you and make love to you and then leave you for another girl, don't you? Right? Hmmm?", I asked.

She nodded shyly, not looking at me.

"Jeana, did all those girls tell you I've had sex with them? All of them? Because I haven't."

Jeana's eyes widened at this. "You haven't?"

"Nope. I will admit I have been with some of them, maybe even most of them, but not all of them. I never go beyond what a girl feels comfortable with, and never take a relationship beyond what they want."

"I don't understand that.", she admitted.

I smiled. "Not every girl wants a steady till-death-do-us-part boyfriend. Some of the girls in school might, in fact, just want a friend to go to a dance with or somebody to see every once in a while. Friends, but maybe a little bit more, but nothing serious. Can you follow that?"

"I guess so."

I could tell she really wasn't following me. "Here's an example. You met Tammy Braxton the other day, right? Now Tammy and I were friendly on occasion, even very friendly, but we were never more romantically involved that that. Now she is dating Randy Bronson and they are a whole lot more serious than we ever were. I mean, like deeply in love serious."

"So you aren't looking to get serious with me either then."

"No, that's not what I'm saying at all. I'm saying that it's up to you, not me. If you just want to be buddies, I will understand. I'll be disappointed, but I'll understand. If you are starting to feel more like how I'm starting to feel for you, I will be very happy with that idea, too."

"You mean... ?"

I grinned and wrapped my arms around her again. "I mean, just like I said before, it would be very easy for me to fall in love with you. I'm already at least half way there, so try not to break my heart if you are just looking for a friend."

Jeana wrapped her arms around my neck and hugged me tightly, and I could feel the wetness on her cheeks as she started crying again. I let her go for another few minutes, and then pulled her away. "What's the matter? Are you all right?"

"Oh, God, I think I love you, too."

"Well, that certainly makes it more convenient. So stop crying. Girls in love are supposed to be happy, not sad.", I answered.

"I am happy, you jerk!"

I shrugged. "Okay, I'm a jerk. We can add that to the Carl Buckman Experience, too."

Suddenly she got nervous again. "Carl, uh, I'm not actually all that ready for the Carl Buckman Experience. I mean, I'm not ... I mean, I haven't..."

I rolled my eyes. "Here's a part of the Carl Buckman Experience you are ready for. Tomorrow I plan on killing any girl who ever calls it that! I am not a ride at Disneyland!" Jeana giggled at that. "Seriously, nothing happens unless you are happy with it. It's not like I was planning on ravishing you as soon as we got down here this afternoon."

She blushed at that. Jeana was innocent, but not all that innocent. Somebody, at least, had taught her how to kiss.

I wrapped my arms around her again. "Here's the real Carl Buckman Experience. It's about caring and sharing and listening and talking and protecting and being a friend. Anything else is just a wonderful extra. Can we start out with all of those things, and then worry about the extras later?"

She eagerly nodded. "Yes!"

"Now, would you like me to tell you about how the Carl Buckman Experience starts out? The first part?" Those big brown eyes looked at me eagerly. I stood up and held her in my arms, then lowered my hands down to her very warm and soft rear. Jeana squealed when I did so. I leaned down and whispered in her ear. "The first thing I do is pull your jeans down..." I rubbed her butt and she whimpered. " ... and then I give you a good hard spanking!" I brought both hands down hard, and Jeana squawked in outrage. I kept my arms around her, keeping her from hitting me. "And that's what you get the next time you talk to me about it!"

"You bastard!", she complained, rubbing her butt.

"Now, go upstairs and wash the tears off your face, so your father doesn't shoot me as soon as he sees you!" I sent her scampering up the stairs and I cleaned up the basement. I ended up in the kitchen carrying our glasses, just as she came back down the stairs. Her parents came in a few moments later to see us chatting in the kitchen.

I declined an invitation to dinner and took off. I was late for my family's dinner and was punished by being denied dessert. When Mom asked me where I was, I just smiled and said I was at Jeana's, and that it was worth being punished. Both she and Dad snorted at that. Hamilton complained when I wasn't drawn and quartered.

Chapter 16: Be Careful What You Wish For

The next step in my estrangement from my brother occurred in another couple of weeks. Monday, the 22nd, during Thanksgiving week, I asked my parents if I could bring Jeana to Thanksgiving dinner. This was pretty much a first for me. Shelley Talbot had come over several times back when we were seeing each other, but we had also been working on the Science Fair together, and besides, since neither of us could drive, a parent always was around. Jeana was the only girl I had ever asked to bring over.

Hamilton immediately said no, since it was against the rules. Everybody ignored him, and my parents said it would be all right. Mom asked if I had already asked Jeana. I answered, "No, I wanted to clear it with you, first, before asking." That certainly satisfied my mother, and we all continued to ignore Hamilton.

In retrospect, that was a mistake. The next night at dinner, Mom asked if Jeana was coming to Thanksgiving dinner. I just shook my head. "No, Jeana and her parents are driving up to Long Island to spend the weekend with family. They leave Wednesday after school."

"That's too bad. Maybe you can invite her over for Sunday supper afterwards."

"Yeah, it's too bad.", parroted a smirking Hamilton. "You won't be able to use these, will you?!" Everybody at the table turned to look at him, and we stared as he reached into a pocket and pulled out a wad of foil wrapped condoms and dumped them on the dining room table. "I found these downstairs."

My mother gasped, but that was the only sound in the room. I actually saw red for a moment, but managed to grab the table with both hands, and held on until my fingers turned white. By the time my vision cleared, I could see that my father was actually watching me, to see if I would kill my brother. I certainly wanted to.

I don't know how he did it. Did I leave the padlock loose on the foot locker? Or had he finally figured out how to pick the lock? I never found out. I calmed my breathing and turned to him. The room was still staring at us, and the rubbers on the table. Even Ham was starting to look like maybe he had overplayed his hand. "Have you absolutely lost your mind? Dumping a box of condoms on the table in front of your mother, your grandmother, and your little sister? What in God's name are you thinking?", I asked quietly.

The mention of my sister and grandmother roused Mom from her shocked silence. "Suzie, help your grandmother upstairs to her room, and stay with her." Nana really was out of it these days, and I'm not sure she really understood what was happening.

"But Mom... !"

"Suzie, go now, and take your grandmother. Don't make me tell you again." Then she turned to Ham. "Go to your room now, mister."

Before he could get up, I said, "No, Hamilton, go into the living room and stay there. Do not go downstairs."

This was very confusing to the others, so Mom simply said, "Go to your room."

Again, I interjected, "Go to the living room and sit down and stay there." I looked at my mother. "It's obvious he has gotten into my stuff. If he goes down there now, we won't know what else he'll destroy or steal before I can check."

Hamilton immediately protested his innocence, stating I had just left the box of rubbers out in the open. Mom looked at my father, who said, "Hamilton, go up to your mother's and my bedroom, and sit down, and if you even think about touching anything, you won't sit for a week. Now, go."

Again he tried to protest, but my father was furious. If he could have reached him through me, Dad would have smacked him right then and there. Hamilton went upstairs.

Once he was gone, Mom looked at me coldly, and said, "How dare you do this!?"

I stared at her in amazement. "Excuse me?"

"How dare you bring those ... things ... into my house!"

I simply couldn't believe it! Hamilton breaks into my locked possessions, ransacks through them, and then has the gall to dump rubbers on the dining room table - and it's my fault! "You are kidding me, right?", I asked.

Mom swung at me, but since my seat was actually closer to the other end of the table, I just moved my head back and she missed completely. She tried a second time, half rising out of her chair, and I caught her wrist. "Mother, we've been over this before. You are not going to ever hit me again." I glanced over at my father, who was easily in reach to deck me.

"Shirley, settle down." He looked at me coldly. "Don't ever touch your mother again, or it will be me you'll be dealing with."

"It will be the last day I live in this house if I do." I replied.

I let Mom's arm go, and she moved to hit me again, but Dad barked out, "I said to knock it off, both of you."

I sat back in my chair and looked at him. "I just want to know how it is that he busts into my foot locker, steals my possessions, dumps them on the table, and it is my fault. Just explain it to me, please!"

"Don't push it, mister. That's the only thing you have going for you in this mess as it is.", he answered.

"Again, excuse me?", I asked incredulously. "Explain to me what I have done wrong!"

"Those!", cried Mom, pointing at the rubbers still on the table. "Get them off my dining room table! How dare you have them out!"

I reached out and grabbed the little envelopes and stuffed them in my pants pocket, holding one back. "These, Mom? These. You know perfectly well what they are. They are prophylactic condoms for the purpose of birth control, and you and Dad have been using them for years. It's not like it's a secret."

Mom gasped, but Dad just rolled his eyes. "What!?", she demanded, sputtering.

"Mother, stop it. I have emptied the garbage cans around here for a while now, and I have seen the torn foil wrappers. Please, for the love of God, stop treating me like a child. I knew perfectly well what they were for then, and I know perfectly well what they are for now."

"It's that Jeana girl, isn't it. She's the one you're having sex with. And you wanted to bring her here to my house! How dare you!"

This was going nowhere. "Mother, I have never even been to bed with Jeana. To the best of my knowledge, she's a virgin. I have been using these, as needed, for quite a while, and no, I will not tell you with who."

This totally stumped her, and she turned her face to Dad. "Are you just going to sit there?"

"Or do what? What do you want me to do, Shirley?", he asked.

"Well, do something! He's your son! Make him behave!"

I buried my head in my hands as I listened to them argue. Mom wanted me to go back to being four years old, Dad wanted this to all go away, and it was all my fault, regardless. I finally was just so sick and tired of it, I stood up. They both stopped and stared at me. "Where do you think you're going?", asked my father.

"I am going downstairs. I have had enough of this."

"The hell you are!"

"Yes, the hell I am!", I replied. "This just totally blows my mind. Hamilton is free to break into my possessions and do any damn thing he wants, and I'm the one getting yelled at for acting responsibly when I am with a girl. I'm glad he hasn't shot me; I'd hate to get in trouble for getting blood on his bullets! If you have anything else to yell at me about, I'll be down in my room checking my belongings."

I left them yelling at each other in the dining room. Eventually I heard them yelling at Hamilton upstairs. By then I had determined that he had only gotten into the one foot locker. It seemed like as soon as he saw the rubbers, he figured he had hit the mother lode, and took them and left everything else.

Eventually, Hamilton was returned, crying and holding his bottom. Dad pointed at me and I followed him out to the family room. "Keep that stuff locked up in the future.", he said.

"Hey, I thought I had."

"Well, double check in the future. And forget about bringing Jeana over until your mother has had a chance to calm down."

He waited for me to say something. I just nodded. "Okay, but he is getting totally out of control. He needs help, professional help, and you know exactly what I mean."

"Not going to happen.", Dad responded.

I just nodded again. "Then be warned. This is the end of it. He does anything else, anything at all, and I am history. I will pack my shit up and leave. How much longer do I have to live like this before I wake up some night with him coming after me with a knife or baseball bat."

"I don't want to hear it."

"Last time, Dad, last time!"

I slept out in the family room that night. Our bedroom, which had been the garage previously, still had the original doorknob on it. This meant it was actually an exterior lock, with the latch on the inside, so that you could lock the door and prevent people coming in through the garage. I flipped the latch when I went to bed, locking him in the room. I just didn't trust him.

I couldn't understand how much worse Hamilton was this time versus the last time. He had always been a problem, and had hated me back then, too, but now it was far worse. I remember thinking that it was because he was two years younger than me, and had to follow in my tracks, with the same teachers, on the same school bus, and everybody expected him to be just like me. I had thought that must have been infuriating to him, but after a while, I figured that was the most narcissistic thing I had ever come up with. Now, I wasn't so sure. It seemed that the more successful I became, in school or otherwise, the more antagonistic he became.

Now, the more I thought of it, the more I thought I was right all those years. The only thing different was me. Mom and Dad and Suzie were still the same, but my behavior was different. On my first incarnation I had fought constantly with Ham, but wasn't otherwise a threat to his self image. Now, I didn't fight, no matter what he did to provoke me. Worse was that by any measure, I was far more successful than he was at school. In that first life he could argue to be smarter, even if I was more socially successful. Now he was under a stricter discipline (I didn't get hit anymore) and I was getting privileges (cars) long before he would.

It was becoming noticeable to others as well. On my first trip through, Hamilton had been in the Towsontown Junior Science Fair when I was a junior at Towson High. He hadn't won, but neither had I, and he had entered. This year he had loudly refused to even enter. He had also been mouthing off to any teacher at Towsontown who compared the two of us, earning him detentions, which he had never gotten before.

I slept in the family room another couple of nights, through Thanksgiving, safely. There were too many eyes on him over the next couple of days for him to get into any more trouble. He did make an ass of himself at Thanksgiving, though. Nana wasn't doing well, and she stayed in her room. That left my parents, Aunt Peg and Uncle Jack, Aunt Nan and Uncle Fred, and Grandpa at the main table. As the oldest of the grandkids, I got promoted to the big table. Hamilton had a full blown temper tantrum, demanding that he sit there as well. He was finally sent to his room without dinner.

It was on Friday that the lid blew off. Everybody had the day off. Mom and Dad took a day off, and school was out. Mom and my aunts went shopping, and then came home. Everything was very quiet, up until dinner. Friday was leftovers, of course, but the feast was always big enough to serve a second meal, allowing me to have some more oyster stuffing. I didn't complain. It was a few minutes before six when the doorbell rang. I was in the living room, along with Mom, and she opened the door to find a Maryland State Trooper standing there.

"Hello.", she said, curious as to why the State Police were at the front door.

"Is this the residence of Carling Buckman?", he asked.

Mom gave me a look of 'Now what?' but kept her mouth shut. After all, I had been home the entire day with Dad. I stepped forward. "I'm Carl Buckman. Come on in."

The trooper stepped inside. "Mister Buckman, are you the owner of the yellow Ford Galaxie parked over there?" He pointed at my car, and I followed his gaze.

It was my car, parked behind Mom's. Dad's car was on the other side of the corner. "Uh, yeah, that's my car. What's wrong, officer?" Always be polite to large men with guns, that's my motto!

"Mister Buckman, a few minutes ago, as I was making a patrol through the neighborhood, I noticed someone trying to do something with your car. I put my spotlight on them and they ran off, but they dropped these items. I think somebody was trying to vandalize your car." He held up a funnel and a plastic measuring cup. The cup was mostly empty, but I wet my finger and reached in, to find some crystals on the bottom. I touched my finger to my tongue. Sugar!

"Somebody was trying to put sugar in my gas tank!", I exclaimed.

"Do you know who might want to do this, sir?"

My mind was blank. By now, my father had come in, and Mom sketched out the problem. Then I took another look at the funnel and measuring cup. I whirled around. "Where's Hamilton?"

"What?", asked Dad. Mom simply looked shocked.

"Who is Hamilton?", asked the trooper.

I ignored him for a moment. I pointed at the measuring cup and the funnel. "That's one of our measuring cups, and one of our kitchen funnels. Now, where is Hamilton?" I went to the top of the stairs to the family room and yelled down, "Hamilton? You there, Hamilton?" The silence was deafening.

Mom was frantically trying to protest this couldn't be possible, and Dad was staring at the funnel and measuring cup. Again, the trooper asked who Hamilton was, only this time in a tone demanding an answer.

"Hamilton is my younger brother." I picked up a family picture off an end table. "Was this the person you saw?", I said, pointing at my brother.

Mom tried to snatch the picture away, but Dad was in the way. The trooper, whose nametag said 'Johnson', admitted he couldn't tell for sure, since whoever it was had been wearing a winter coat. "Green and yellow?", I asked.

"It might have been."

"This is crazy! Officer, you must be mistaken. I'm going to have to ask you to leave!", interrupted my mother.

Dad kept between my mother and the rest of us. She was squawking incoherently, and I was telling Trooper Johnson I wanted the criminal found and sent to jail. Just then, we all heard the back door open. The master criminal had returned without ever checking to see if the cops were still around.

Mom whirled out of Dad's arms and ran to the stairs. "Hamilton, go to your room, right now!"

"Like hell!" Dad stormed down the stairs and dragged my brother up, still wearing his green and yellow winter coat.

Mom was screeching for the cop to leave, but he stood there for a moment and said, "That's who I saw." Mom started crying at this, and my brother actually peed his pants; you could see the stain form and run down his legs. My father was disgusted with them both, and sent them both to their rooms. He came back to the living room and crossed his arms, waiting for somebody to say something.

The trooper looked at me. "Officer, let me ask you a couple of questions. Will you be writing a report of this up tonight?"

"Wait a minute...", interjected Dad.

I held my hand up to stop him, and looked the trooper in the eye. He glanced at Dad, but said, "Yes, I will."

"Does what you have seen tonight constitute enough evidence to have my brother arrested?"

He shrugged at that. "Arrested, yes. Convicted, who knows? He's underage, anyway."

"Can I pick up a copy of that report tomorrow?"

I got a sharp look at that. "Yes, I can make one available. Why?"

"And if I decide to press charges, how long will I have to do that in?"

Dad started squawking loud enough now that I really missed the answer, but I just didn't care. If I couldn't manage my plan now, it wouldn't matter. I thanked the trooper and sent him on his way.

Once the trooper left, Mom tried to come back downstairs, but Dad angrily ordered her back to her room. We settled into the armchairs. "Well?", he asked me tiredly.

"I can't live like this. Do you have any idea how much a new engine would have cost? Were you going to pay for it? He certainly doesn't have any money. What's next, slashing my tires? Bricks through my windshield? I'm already living with my stuff under lock and key, and sleeping on the couch. What's next?", I asked.

Dad rubbed his face. "I don't know, Carling. I just don't know."

"I'm moving out, Dad. As soon as I can find a place, I'm moving out."

"You can't do that. You're only sixteen."

"So what? If I stay here, I won't live long enough to grow old enough to move. Do you honestly think he's going to stop? Honestly?"

Dad looked like he was going to cry. I couldn't blame him. I felt the same way when Alison was diagnosed as learning disabled.

I had to keep pushing. "Dad, either I do this with your help, or I do it on my own. If I have to, I will load everything into the car and just leave, and you will never see me again in your life. Do you really want that? Do you only want one child you can call a son?"

"No. We'll do this tomorrow." He looked defeated by it all. All my life my father had been bigger than life, but not tonight. I made myself dinner and ate it in the family room, by myself.

It might seem very unusual that the State Police would be making patrols through our residential neighborhood, but actually it was fairly common. Ridgefield Road was the main thoroughfare between York Road and Dulaney Valley Road without getting on the Baltimore Beltway. People used to whip through the neighborhood at sixty plus miles an hour! At least once a month somebody would have a fender bender somewhere on the road, and at least three times I knew of accidents with people slamming into school buses. It got so bad that by the Eighties, the County actually blocked off the entrance to York Road, eliminating the craziness. You had to go up to the end of the road and then go another block out of the way up to Greenridge to get into the development.

I remember one time when we were kids, Ray and Joey Bravo and I were throwing snowballs at cars from the hillside across from our house. I nailed this one car a good one, right on the windshield. Then I noticed the bright red star on the license plate - I had just hammered an unmarked trooper! I don't think the three of us stopped running until we hit the Pennsylvania line!

I slept in the family room again that night, after locking Hamilton in his room. The next day I unlocked his door when I went out running. Mom ignored the entire situation, as if it was all just a bad dream, so I ignored Mom. It was a real shit sandwich as far as my parents were concerned. Back on my first run through, even then I knew my brother was fucked up, but who listens to a kid. I got out before he lost it. Now, he was losing control early. The more successful I became, the loonier he became. Worse, the social stigma to having a crazy kid was immense. You didn't send somebody to a shrink unless they were foaming at the mouth, and maybe not even then.

Dad came down to breakfast to find me going through the classified ads. He looked over my shoulder and saw me going through the section for apartments. He sat down next to me. "You're serious about this?"

I looked up at him. "I have to. It's the best way, Dad."

"Your mother will never allow it."

"She will if you tell her she will." This was true. The one person in the world Mom would always listen to, no matter what, was my father. Their love was straight out of the books. No matter what, they would be there for the other. Dad still didn't look convinced. "Dad, there are very few good ways for this to end. Choice One - I stay here and Hamilton keeps on being crazy. Sooner or later one of us is going to kill the other one, and I am not being humorous. Either he will kill me, or I will kill him while defending myself." Dad grimaced at the thought, but didn't argue.

"Choice Two - you and Mom do nothing and I decide not to put up with it. I leave. I don't care what you think you can do to me, but short of chaining me in the crawlspace, I will leave. You can take my car, my possessions, my money, whatever. I will still leave and you will never see me again in this lifetime."

"Or Choice Three - I move out. I'll pay for the apartment. You keep me on your medical insurance. You sign away all rights to my brokerage accounts. I don't sue for emancipation. And we stay some semblance of a family. It's your choice." I leaned back in my chair and looked at him. The emancipation was a long shot at best. Short of physical or sexual abuse, it is practically impossible to pull it off in Maryland without a parent's consent.

He didn't say anything for a minute, but then picked up the newspaper. "Just what did you have in mind for a budget?"

I shrugged. "Maybe a couple of hundred a month. I don't need much. I just need a one bedroom place for the next couple of years. Not even that, actually. I would appreciate your help."

"Spend a bit more and get a furnished apartment."

I nodded in agreement. We looked through the listings for furnished apartments in Towson and Lutherville. Some he knew about and warned me away from, either from the neighborhood or the landlord. A few others he circled on the page, for a call later. After lunch we made some telephone calls. He took point, since it makes a world of difference when a father is looking for an apartment versus a teenager is looking for an apartment. He simply would tell people that I was looking to start at Towson State in the spring, and would leave out my age, or the fact that I was also still in high school.

We drove around to a few places that afternoon. The first was a real dive, but the second was quite nice. It was a walkup over a garage, in a residential neighborhood about a half mile from Towson High. It was an older neighborhood, with a detached garage, and the owners of the property had made an apartment for an uncle over the garage. He had moved into a nursing home, and the apartment was available. It was about a thousand square feet footprint, but taking into account the kneewalls for the 12/12 roof, actually was about only 800 square feet. It had a small kitchenette and dining area, a small living room, and a small bedroom with a three-quarters bath. It even had a stackable laundry. I didn't think twice about it. I wrote a check for the first and last month's rent, along with a security deposit.

I was responsible for electric, but they handled water, sewer and taxes. They would call Ma Bell and have phone service restored. I would move in on Monday afternoon.

As I expected, none of this sat all that well back at the Buckman residence that night. Mom refused to allow it, but I would let Dad handle that. Hamilton was torn between his delight that I was leaving and his demand to be allowed to do this also. I ignored it all, and scrounged up some boxes to move stuff in. Dad would take off work Monday afternoon early, and help me pack and move. What I didn't tell anybody, even Dad, was that I would come back at lunch on Tuesday, while everybody else was gone, and pack up the stuff in our room that was actually mine but that Hamilton had claimed was his. In particular, I wanted my collection of Analog: Science Fiction and Science Fact magazines, which would become quite valuable in future years. He couldn't begin to claim them, since my name was on the subscription. I knew he would scream, but I really didn't care. The little asshole shitcanned it all when I went off to college, along with anything else I left behind.

I moved in Monday afternoon, and promptly made a list of crap to buy at Woolworth's. That was the original 'five and dime' store, and back in '71 nobody east of the Mississippi had ever heard of Wal-Mart. I bought cleaning supplies and a set of sheets for the regular size bed. It was a bit lumpy, but it was better than a couch, while having to lock away my brother at nights. I cleaned that little apartment until I was exhausted, and then went to bed without even bothering to make it.

Ever since I came back I had wondered if I was going to have to relive my life in every excruciating detail, as well as put up with parents who treated somebody old enough to be their parent as a child. Turns out I didn't have to. I don't know who won. The battle sucked.

Chapter 17: Independence

Well, it sounded like a good idea at the time...

After all, isn't a swinging bachelor pad the dream of every high school kid in America? Wild parties every night! Nobody to tell you NO! You can drink and do drugs and get laid whenever you want! Right?

Well, maybe yes and maybe no. The getting is one thing, the keeping is another. For one thing, somebody has to pay for this. I was figuring that I could live in the apartment and be independent for about $6k a year. Figure another grand or two for additional living expenses - wine, women, and song. I had roughly $50k in the brokerage account. At 10% appreciation a year, which was the average market growth during the period, that didn't cover the $6k. I was doing much better than that, of course, but I still needed to conserve my funds. Fortunately, I knew what was going to happen to Ling-Temco-Vought and Gulf+Western, and Intel had their IPO earlier this year. Still, I needed to watch my pennies. It wasn't going to be parties every night.

My big dilemma with my funds was that I needed to conserve and build my cash for the two upcoming events which would make me a multi-millionaire. In 1973 oil was going to skyrocket, and in 1979 silver was going to go even higher (relatively speaking) before collapsing back. The more money I managed to make and save now, the more I would be able to leverage then. I figured I could conservatively manage ten-fold returns on every dollar in 1973, and more than that in 1979. I was reading the Wall Street Journal and Fortune religiously.

Another reason was that all of this took time. Time to cook, time to do wash, time to clean house. This was all on top of time to do homework, time to run and exercise, and time to go to aikido class. I even contemplated quitting the pizzeria, to free up some time, but at least that provided some income. The only way to handle it was through rock solid discipline and time management. The average sixteen year old would never be able to handle it. By now I must be at least seventy, depending on how you count it. I had discipline to spare.

The one thing I knew I didn't want to do was let everybody know I had moved out of my house. If the rest of the school thought I had my own place, I would be under never ending pressure to be the party spot every weekend and most weeknights. Leaving aside that this didn't actually appeal all that much to me, telling people no would piss them off. Far simpler to not let them know. It would come out eventually, but better later than sooner.

Not that I was going to live as a monk. Tuesday, after school, I met up with one of the guys I knew, one of the Vo-Tech crew who looked like he was better at robbing liquor stores than buying from them. Really, he was a very nice guy who just liked to ride and repair motorcycles. He ended up owning a Harley-Davidson franchise and did very well for himself. James 'Tusker' Tusk was in the tenth grade like me, but had been held back a year, and looked older anyway. I had him drive his car over to Towson Liquors with a list and a fifty. He drove back to school and we transferred it to my trunk. I let him keep the change and a couple of sixes of beer. I let him think I was stocking up for a party.

I carried it up to the apartment covered with an old blanket, and then poured myself a shot of Black Velvet. It had been a long time since I had a drink! Felt good. After that I made myself a Seven & Seven, and did my chores around the place. The biggest problem with living as a bachelor, which I remembered from my first go-around, was that if I made a nice meal, I always ended up with leftovers. All my recipes were family sized.

The one person I knew I was going to have to tell was the one I was most nervous about - Jeana. I wasn't worried about her telling anybody, but she might not be all that thrilled about a boyfriend that independent. Certainly her parents wouldn't be! Dating is one thing, when the only place you can be alone with a girl is the back seat of the car in winter. A boyfriend with his own apartment is quite a different matter!

It had to be faced, however. The Monday after Thanksgiving, the same day I was moving into the apartment, Jeana told me that she would be able to come over to the house for dinner the following weekend. This was after my offer to her to bring her over at Thanksgiving, which she couldn't attend. I ducked it by saying I would have to check with my mother, and then ducked it again later in the week, by saying we had guests coming in from out of town and we would have to wait. She just nodded in understanding. The following Monday, she asked again.

I was going to have to face this at some point. We had been dating three or four weeks already, and Jeana had already accepted when I asked her to the Christmas Dance at the school. I asked if she wanted to see my house that afternoon. Her eyes lit up, and after school I helped carry her books to the Galaxie and we took off. I drove over to the house, but parked across the street, and didn't move to get out.

Jeana didn't recognize where we were or understand why we had parked here but were sitting in the car. I turned to her and said, "Jeana, this is actually very painful and very personal. I have to ask you, please, not to tell anybody what I am about to tell you. Nobody, not your friends, and certainly not your parents, and I can't tell you why until you agree."

"I don't understand.", she said, confusion tinting her voice.

"I know, but I am asking you to trust me. Can you trust me?"

She nodded slightly. "Yes."

I nodded in return. I pointed out the windshield at the house. "That is my parent's house. I grew up in that house, but I moved out a week ago. I have my own apartment now. I live on my own."

"I don't understand! What do you mean you moved out? You don't live at home? You're only sixteen."

I took a deep breath. "I'm only sixteen. My brother - I think I've mentioned he's a real pain?" She nodded agreement. "My brother, he's more than a pain. He's actually somewhat unstable. He's dangerous, or at least with me he is. I had to move out, for my own safety. I made an agreement with my folks to move to an apartment in town. I moved out a week ago."

Jeana looked shocked. "Can't you go to the cops? About your brother, I mean."

I shrugged and gave her a wry grin. "If only it was that simple." I put the car in Drive. "Come on, let me show you where I live now." We drove back over towards school, and I parked in my slot at the side of the garage. "I live upstairs."

"Can I see it?"

"Sure. Just don't tell your parents. They won't be happy about any of this."

I don't think she actually believed me until I unlocked the door to the apartment and let her in. I played the gracious host, taking her coat and ushering her to an armchair in my living room area. "Can I get you something to drink?"

Jeana smiled. "What do you have?"

"That's actually a very good question." I opened up the refrigerator and peered in. "There's some Coke ... some OJ ... a couple of beers..." I glanced over at her. "I don't think your parents want me taking you home smelling like either a brewery or a distillery."

"You've got beer!?", she asked, shocked.

"Liquor, too, if you're interested. I suspect your parents will send us both to jail if they found out, so please don't tell them.", I replied. I pulled out some Cokes. "How about a Coke? Then you can tell me what you like and the next time you visit I'll have something for you."

She nodded and I poured some Coca Cola over ice for us. I brought it over and sat down on the couch facing her. "Not exactly what you expected, is it?"

Jeana drank some of her Coke and then came over and sat next to me on the couch. "Talk to me. Tell me what happened."

"Oh, Christ, what happened? Okay, you asked. Don't say I never warned you." I lay back against the arm of the couch and Jeana cuddled up against me, and looked up at me with those brown eyes. I told her most of it, though I left out the part about Hamilton dumping the rubbers at the table. I really didn't think that was a good topic to bring up with a young virgin I was planning on seducing.

She was silent at the end, and I wondered if I had put her to sleep, but then she stirred and crawled up my body and kissed me. "I am so sorry. What can I do to help?"

Oh, Jeana, if you only knew. "You help just be being here. That's all I need."

"So why all the secrecy?", she asked.

"What do you think is going to happen when everyone in the world knows I am living on my own? Do you think your parents are going to let you come over here to visit? Do you think half the school is going to think they can come over here to party all the time? Can you think of anything positive that will result?"

"Do you really think that will happen?"

"Oh, baby, you have no idea! I'd never get anything done! And do you really think your parents are going to approve of this?"

She smiled ruefully at that. "Well, probably not."

"Probably? Do you think there is any possibility whatsoever that your father would want you to be alone in my apartment on my couch while I was doing wicked things with you?" I leaned my face down to kiss her on the lips.

Jeana moaned slightly and crawled higher up, and in doing so my cock stiffened. It was my turn to start groaning. "How wicked?"

"Wicked, wicked, wicked..." I held her tightly and we began making out on the couch. If I have to spend my life alone, I definitely prefer it to be with a cuddly and beautiful young woman. I didn't get too 'fresh' with her, limiting my hands to roaming all over her back and rear. I did determine she was wearing a rather substantial bra with a rear buckle, but hey, Jeana was packing some serious hooters; she needed a serious bra. We kissed with a lot of tongue action and some mutual groans and moans for about an hour, and then I rolled off her and took several deep breaths while sitting on the floor.

"Honey, we keep going like that, I'm not going to get you home until it is way too late!"

Jeana was breathing just as hard, and looked at least as flustered as I did. "I think we should go."

I just nodded and pointed her towards the bathroom. I splashed some water on my face at the kitchen sink, and then used the bathroom after she got out. When I exited the bathroom, I found her standing in the doorway to my bedroom. "Is that where I get to find out about the Carl Buckman Experience?, she asked.

I just groaned and rolled my eyes. "You keep kissing me like earlier, and you'll get that experience sooner than you think."

"I just think the bed might be more comfortable."

"Is that an invitation?", I asked.

Jeana blushed. "Not just yet!"

I grabbed her coat. "Then don't tease! Let's get you home before I regret letting you go."

I got her home in time for dinner, explaining that I had taken Jeana over to the house, which was technically true. I didn't stick around, but went home and made myself some canned beef stew. Then I did a shitload of homework and went to bed.

I called home the next afternoon. It took me two tries, since the first time Hamilton picked up, hung up, and took the phone off the hook. Fifteen minutes later I called back, and Suzie answered. She bellowed for Mom, and a moment later I heard the click as Mom picked up the phone, and then a second click as Suzie hung up. "Hello?"

"Hi, Mom."

"Carling! It's so good to hear from you. How are you? Are you ready to end this foolishness and move back home yet?"

Trust my mother to blow off my moving out as foolishness. Just then, to act as a counterpoint to her argument, I heard another click on the line. "No, Mom, I'm not moving home." I raised my voice. "Hamilton, hang up the phone. It's very rude."

I could suddenly hear the telephone being muffled, and a faint "Hamilton, are you on the phone?!", being called out. There was another click on the line, and Mom called out a second time, and then she said, "Carl, nobody was on the line. Stop picking on your brother like that!"

"Right, Mom. Here's another good story - the check is in the mail."

"Carling, stop it!"

I shrugged to myself. "Okay, Mom, the reason I called was to see if you and Dad were going to be home on Sunday."

"Where else would we be? Why?"

"I'd like to bring Jeana over for a few minutes after church. Would that be all right?", I answered.

"Oh, that would be lovely. What do you think she would like for dinner? Maybe I can see if your aunts and uncles can come over, too..." Mom started rattling on, planning our engagement party.

"No, Mom, nothing like that. We won't be coming for dinner. She just asked and I offered to bring her over. We'll be there maybe an hour, tops. No family, Mom."

"But Carl...", she protested.

"No, Mom. And one other thing. If Ham isn't on his best behavior, and I mean good enough for the White House, we'll never be back."

"Don't you dare threaten me!"

"Best behavior, Mom!"

We said good-bye after that. All in all it was a strange and strained conversation. I decided to call Dad at his office tomorrow. At least he wasn't going to try and tell me how I misunderstood my brother.

I asked Jeana the next morning if she wanted to come over to my place on Sunday for dinner. She gave me a funny look and said, "I thought you didn't live at home anymore."

I returned her funny look. "I don't. Why?"

"Then who's making dinner?"

"Well, I am, of course. Anything in particular you'd like?"

"You cook!?", she asked, astonished.

I gave her a peeved look. "Yes, I cook! I'll have you know I took two years of home ec at Towsontown Junior High! I was an honors graduate of their fine dining tradition!"

She started laughing at me. "I don't know what's funnier, that you can cook or that you took home ec. You really took home economics?"

I held my hand up and made the Scout Sign. "Would I lie? What do you want me to make?"

"Me?"

"Tell me what you want and I'll make it."

"You're serious?", she asked. I nodded. "Pheasant under glass!"

I smiled. "Too many leftovers. And no glass. But I could do a chicken or small turkey."

"God, no! We just had a turkey! You're actually serious about cooking, aren't you?", she said.

"I am. I am quite competent in the kitchen. I gather your father doesn't do much in the kitchen?"

"Daddy can't get his own ice cubes!"

I laughed at that. God knows I've seen many men like that. Some women, too. I married one. "Do you like seafood?"

Her eyes lit up. "I love seafood!"

"How about shrimp scampi over noodles, with garlic bread on the side, and perhaps some white wine, a nice Pinot Grigio for example."

"For real?"

"Trust me on this. It will be delicious.", I assured her.

"Okay, you're on, but I'll believe it when I see it."

"Trust me!"

"Make sure you have some hamburger thawed out, just in case!" She kissed me and went off to class.

This was really a no-brainer for a guy, any guy. If you pull it off, you look like a suave and sophisticated man of the world. If you fumble it, you look like you tried and she gets to rescue you. There is no downside. I wasn't going to fumble it, either. This was a family favorite that I learned from my mother. Aside from the shrimp, it is fairly inexpensive. I had already copied the recipe before I moved out. I had everything, including the wine, by Friday afternoon.

I traded off Sunday hours for a Saturday afternoon shift at the pizzeria. That evening I told her I was making the weekend all about her. Jeana's eyes lit up. "What do you mean?"

"Just what I said. This is your weekend. Tonight, pick out whatever movie you want, no matter how much of a girlie movie it is, and tomorrow I cook for you."

"I still can't believe you're cooking for me. My friends will never believe it!"

I smiled. "Just don't tell them I'm cooking for you at my apartment. Tell them I'm doing the cooking over at 'his house' and imply my parents were there."

"So nobody knows you have an apartment."

"And so none of your girlfriends decide to check out what is obviously a good thing by coming over for their own cooking lessons!" I laughed at her and leaned down to kiss her, squelching her return remarks.

Jeana stuck her tongue out at me. "Just for that, I'm picking out a movie you are going to hate!" I did, too. It was the last weekend The Last Picture Show was playing. We were still a week or two away from the releases of Dirty Harry and Diamonds Are Forever. I promised retribution.

Jeana had asked what to wear to my parents' to meet them. I had suggested something simple yet sophisticated looking, like a fancy blouse and black slacks. She told me she had both, and I figured that with her trademark high heels she would look elegant and older that she was.

I was right, too. Jeana wore a long sleeved cream colored fitted silk blouse with a high collar, high waisted tight black slacks, and black pumps. She wore just a trace of makeup, and kept her hair tied back with a simple black ribbon. I picked her up shortly after noon, and told her, "You look gorgeous."

"Is this all right?", she asked nervously.

"Perfect. My mother will love you!"

We made our escape, after promising I would bring her home that evening after supper, although I did say that wouldn't be until eight or maybe nine. Her parents didn't care; why should they, I was taking their daughter to meet my parents, not off to my bachelor love shack!

It was somewhat weird sitting in the living room with my parents like guests. They spent several minutes talking to Jeana and asking her the standard questions, like where did she live and what did her parents do. Nana was introduced, but promptly went to her room to lie down. Daisy came bounding up, so I got down on the floor to play with her, and then Suzie bounced through and was very amusing, even asking the question no one dared to ask, which was whether we were going over to my apartment later. I finessed that and said we weren't really sure, we were going out to dinner. (Yes - out to dinner at the apartment. Not exactly a lie.) Then Suzie was off, followed by Daisy, who had quickly found a new master. Hamilton even made an entrance, although both he and I noticed that our father was watching him like a hawk. He was sent off as quickly as possible. Everybody glossed over the fact that I didn't want to live there anymore.

All in all, a decidedly awkward afternoon, for all involved.

After about an hour, I figured we had done our duty, and Jeana had met the family. I nudged her tastefully and silently tapped my watch. She nodded and I mentioned that we had to be going, and stood up. Jeana popped up like a little marionette, and despite some pro forma complaints from my mother, we made our escape.

Jeana spoke up first. "You have a very nice family."

"Thank you. Would you like them? Think of it as the Christmas present that keeps on giving."

She snorted and laughed. "That's all right. I already have one of my own."

"Maybe we can swap. That way you can end up as crazy as I am."

"They're not that bad! I think you're being kind of hard on them."

I sighed at that. "Yes - and no. You're right, they're not that bad. Dad's okay. Suzie's a little doll. Nana's okay but more than a bit flaky these days. I think they're trying to put her in a home. Even Mom isn't bad, in a snooty, fancy sort of way. The problem is my brother, who is just totally off the fucking wall batshit crazy and out of control. He drives people away and makes them just as crazy as he is. I just hope Suzie can escape before he drives her around the bend as well." Before, she had escaped, but he hadn't been as bad then. Now I wondered.

We got to the apartment and I let Jeana in. Her first comment was, "You've done something with the place! It looks different!"

I smiled. "Yes and no. Mostly I've been cleaning and getting my stuff put away. I did pick up a few things. Does it look better?"

"You bet!", she gushed. "Can you come over and work on my room?"

"Absolutely! Right after I get written permission from your father to spend the afternoon in your bedroom with you!"

Jeana blushed. "Let me think about that."

I took our coats and hung them in the closet. "While you're thinking about it, I need to start dinner."

"You were serious about cooking!?"

"Very."

"What can I do to help?", she asked.

I grabbed one of the bar stools I had bought and brought it into the kitchen. "You can sit up here and inspire me to greatness."

Jeana giggled and climbed onto the stool and crossed her legs. "Inspire you?"

"You have no idea!" I opened the refrigerator and pulled out a bottle of white wine. I know it's supposed to be cooled, not cold, but I figured Jeana wouldn't know and I didn't have a wine cooler available. "Wine?", I asked.

"You were serious about that, too?"

"Absolutely." I pulled out a couple of small glasses from a cupboard, and fished a corkscrew out of a drawer. I didn't have any stemware, but I was able to pick up a decent set of glassware and Corelleware dishes at Hutzlers using Mom's 20% employee discount. "I think you'll like this. At least I hope you'll like it. It's a Pinot Grigio, sort of an Italian Chardonnay, not too dry." I pulled the cork and poured her a small bit in her glass. "Try it."

She looked a little dubious, but I don't think Jeana had much experience with wine. She sipped it and looked at me in confusion. "What do you mean by dry?"

"Dry wines don't have as much sugar in them as a sweet wine. That's one of the big differences, dry versus sweet. Some wines are so sweet they only get served with dessert. Others can be so dry and tannic as to be tart. I would think with the last name Colosimo you've had wine before." I opened the refrigerator and took out a one pound bag of shrimp.

"Some, but mostly red. Daddy likes Chianti."

I dumped the shrimp into the sink and filled it with warm water, and then grabbed a plate and covered it with a paper towel. "Chianti is a dry red wine. It comes in several varieties, from plain Chianti, which is good and inexpensive, but can be a little rough, up through Chianti Classico and Chianti Riserva, which cost a bit more, but can be very smooth." I started cleaning the shrimp of their shells and tails, and setting them on the paper towel.

Jeana watched me and sipped her wine. "How do you know so much about wine?"

I just smiled. Back in the day, Marilyn and I drank quite a bit of wine. Neither of us was a major beer drinker, but a glass or two of wine a night was very pleasant. She preferred sweeter wines than I, so it was always a trick to find something we both liked. "Every Tuesday night is spaghetti night, and Dad keeps a bottle of cheap Chianti in the basement refrigerator. You know, the type with the twine all wrapped around it that you find with a candle in the top at cheap Italian restaurants?" By Jeana's smile I could tell she understood exactly what I meant. "Dad calls it Dago Red, and we have it every spaghetti night."

"Don't tell Daddy that, but it sounds awfully familiar.", she said with a grin.

We continued talking about wine, and also about family heritage, while I finished cleaning the shrimp. Jeana's father was from a Sicilian family, while her mother was from a Milanese background, so they had quite a selection of Italian foods and wines to choose from. Once I was finished with the shrimp, I set that to the side, and drained the sink and dried my hands. I pulled out the pots and pans I would need, along with the spices, noodles, and minced clams. I set my recipe on the counter, where Jeana grabbed it and started reading.

"Are you sure I can't help?", she asked.

"It looks more complicated than it actually is. I need to get everything going at once, because of the timing, but once I start cooking, we'll probably be eating twenty minutes later. If you want to help, you can set the table.", I replied. I filled a large pot with water, to cook the noodles in, and pointed out where the dishes and silverware were.

Jeana quickly set the table and then came back over. "What next?"

I kissed her quickly. "Thank you. Okay, if you want to help, take the garlic bread out of the freezer and put it on this baking sheet." Jeana popped over to the fridge and pulled out the foil wrapped garlic bread. It was a store prepared loaf, heat up and serve. She read the instructions on the wrapper carefully and opened the package up and spread the two halves of the loaf out on the baking sheet. I also had her preheat the oven.

Meanwhile, I prepared all the ingredients so that I just had to mix and cook them, measuring out my spices into a small cup, and opening up the can of minced clams. I did this all while the water for the noodles was heating. Meanwhile, we continued talking about cooking while we sipped our wine. Finally, as the water began to boil, I said, "Show time!"

Jeana hopped back up onto her bar stool and I went into action. I used to make this in an electric skillet, but it was just as easy on the gas range. First I started with some olive oil in a skillet which I heated up, which I used to cook up some garlic. Once that was ready, I tossed in the shrimp, and cooked them, not completely, but making sure they didn't stick to the pan. Once they were cooked, I poured in some of Ernest and Julio's white wine from the jug, which deglazed the pan. I know that they say they make no wine before its time (or was that some other winery?) but I generally only use it for cooking.

At this point I took a break and put the garlic bread in the oven to warm up, and threw the noodles into the boiling water. After a few minutes in the wine, I added the clam juice from the minced clams and some marinara sauce, and started making the broth, letting the shrimp absorb the flavors. Next, I added the clams themselves, and finished with butter and oregano. By the time I was done, the bread was ready to come out of the oven, and the noodles were ready to drain.

Jeana offered to help, so I let her take care of the bread, while I drained the noodles through a colander. The shrimp went into a big serving bowl, the noodles into another bowl, and the bread into a basket. Off we went to the table. Elapsed time, 23 minutes. Jeana swooned as soon as she took a bite of the scampi. "Oh my God, that's amazing!"

I grinned. "You like it?" It really is a great recipe, and my wife and kids liked it as much as my family did.

"It's too bad I can't tell my parents. This is just delicious!" She stuffed another forkful in and blushed. "I feel like a piggy!"

I laughed. "Go ahead, tell them. Just tell them I cooked it, not that it was at my apartment." I used some of the garlic bread to sop up the gravy.

"They'll never believe me. My father can't imagine a guy cooking. He'd have a heart attack if I told him you took home economics!"

We both laughed at that. In the future it would become common for boys to take home ec, but not in the Sixties and Seventies. In fact, it created a minor stir once. My son Parker was a notoriously quiet and even fellow. It was almost impossible to rile him up, to the point where occasionally a bully mistook him for being weak. Once, in the eleventh grade, at a band concert in the late spring, some loudmouth decided to push him around, and knock him into a wall. Parker was surprisingly agile and strong, and whipped around and punched the much larger kid in the nose, breaking it and spraying blood all over. There were plenty of witnesses, and even the principal told me later the kid had it coming, so Parker wasn't in any trouble.

The funny part was that Parker's quiet reputation was over, and he became known as 'One Punch Buckman' around town. The next weekend, at the school's honor banquet, 'One Punch' took the top prize in Home Economics. All around the banquet room, fathers and friends were turning towards me and I could see their mouths moving, as if to say, 'One Punch? Home Economics!?', in disbelief.

"So, I'll come over some night and cook for your family. They'll believe then."

"You will?" Jeana stared at me and shook her head.

"Sure, why not.", I said with a smile and a shrug of the shoulders. "Let me think. Next weekend is the Christmas Dance, and we're going to be busy. The weekend after that is Christmas. The weekend after that is New Year's. Why don't you tell your mother I'll cook for her the weekend after that."

"They will never believe me!"

"I'll give you a list before then, nothing special, just some chicken and ham and spices." I had in mind coq au vin, a French chicken and wine recipe that could be scaled up or down to any size dinner party.

"That would just blow their minds! You have to promise me you'll do that!", she said, laughing.

"I know a way to cook chicken so that it will melt in your mouth and make you want to change your heritage from Italian to French.", I replied, laughing just as hard.

We finished our meal, after having generous seconds. There was just enough left over for me to make a one person meal during the week. We also finished our wine, and while I was tempted to pour some from the jug, I declined. While I have certainly served alcohol to willing women over the years, taking a drunken daughter home would not get me in the good graces of the Colosimo family! After putting away the leftovers, I left the dirty dishes for later, and Jeana and I settled onto my couch.

I sat on the couch, and Jeana sat down next to me, but before I could even think about it, Jeana had twisted around ninety degrees and was laying down, her head in my lap and her body along the length of the couch, and was looking up at me with those big brown eyes. "No more cooking.", she said quietly.

"No more cooking." I leaned down and kissed her on the lips. "What's a nice girl like you doing with a guy like me?"

I must have given her a sad smile. Jeana wrapped her arms around my neck and pulled me down for another, more thorough kiss. "I think it's the other way around. How did I ever get such a great guy like you to be interested in me?"

"It's the curse of beauty. The more beautiful the girl, the more the guys are like riff-raff. You're so beautiful, you end up with a bunch of bums chasing you, and I'm just one of them."

"Oh, so by picking you, I've saved myself from Ray Shorn?", she teased.

"Oh, God, now there's a fate worse than death!" I laughed at that. "I'll have to tell Ray you said that!"

Jeana tried to punch me, but couldn't in her present position. Instead she pulled me back down to her. "I think I love you, even if you don't love yourself." Then she kissed me with a lot of wet and sloppy tongue action, and I stopped thinking about what she was saying.

Fifteen minutes later, Jeana gave me the biggest surprise of my life, either version. Letting her arms go from around my neck, she stretched out languidly on my lap. "I know a place we'll be a lot more comfortable doing this." Her eyes darted over towards the archway to the bedroom.

I gave her a rather surprised look, I'm sure, and glanced in the direction she was indicating. "I'm sure we'll be a lot more comfortable there, but that might be more comfortable than you can imagine. If we go in there, we might end up doing more than kissing."

Jeana didn't even blush. "I know that. It's just, well, I think I'm ready for another piece of the Carl Buckman Experience."

I just groaned and rolled my eyes. One of these days I was going to have to thank all my previous lovers. Arsenic seemed appropriate. "Honey, I can think of almost nothing I would like more, but you need to think about that. Once we go in there, there's no going back. I mean, well..."

Jeana put a finger to my lips. "Let's go in and get more comfortable and talk about that." She sat upright, and then twisted and got to her feet. I stayed on the couch, watching and not quite believing it, but she held out her hand and I stood and followed her. It's important to realize that up until now, I had only been with girls who had already been with guys, and whether they initiated things or I started them, we both knew what was happening and were equally eager for it to happen. Jeana was a virgin, and younger than me. She was only fifteen for God's sake, and while I had already been with girls even younger than that, I hadn't been the one to pop their cherries. Jeana was the one instigating this, too. Very unusual, in my experience.

I followed Jeana into my bedroom. She quickly kicked off her pumps and sprawled out on the bed. I sat down next to her and wordlessly kicked off my own shoes, and then lay back next to her. I spread my arms and Jeana curled up next to me. She looked up at me, and said, "We can't, I mean, I can't..." She blushed, and then stammered out, "It's not a good time for the full Carl Buckman Experience! Do you know what I mean?"

Holy Christ! It was that time of the month. I blushed, too, and then cleared my throat. "I understand."

Jeana looked very relieved. I resigned myself to a massive case of blue balls by the end of the day. "God, I love you!", she said, and then half crawled onto me and began kissing me again.

Jeana was extremely turned on. She was squirming around in my arms, and trying to tongue my tonsils, and I returned the favor. Likewise, while I was usually a gentleman with her, this afternoon, while running my hands over her back, I did a little more, tracing my fingertips along her bra and down her back, and running my hands all over her saucy little rear end. Each of these moves caused some moans from Jeana, and she squirmed fitfully with me.

While she wasn't too heavy laying on top of me, the position actually limited my actions, so I held her and rolled over to a point she was lying on the bed with me at her side. I continued kissing her lips, but now began to slowly move them, so I was licking her cheeks, nibbling her ears, and moving down her throat. I brought a hand around to begin unbuttoning her silk blouse. This elicited a gasp from her, but she also arched her back, thrusting her breast into my hand. I kneaded it briefly, and then undid her buttons.

I had my eyes open, and I glanced around as best I could, without taking my mouth from her body. Jeana's eyes were closed, and she had an almost orgasmic expression on her face. Looking down her body, I could see her breasts, heaving as she panted, barely encased by a lacy bra so small I was amazed she owned it. I continued unbuttoning her blouse, and then reached inside and around, and flicked open her bra. It popped off and she sighed happily. Her tits were rather substantial for a fifteen (well, almost sixteen) year old girl, with small nipples and dark areolas. I moved my mouth south and she squealed as I began tonguing and nibbling her tits.

"Oh Carl ... oh my God ... Carl ... oh, oh ... don't stop ... oh God!..." Jeana was babbling as I worked her tits over. She was laying there, with one of my legs thrown over hers, and my thigh pressing against her crotch. I wanted to move her a notch higher, so I brought a hand down and pressed it against the front of her slacks, and she went into orbit. Squealing loudly, she began to shake and shiver as she came, and I continued to play with her through her pants for several minutes until she collapsed in exhausted bliss.

Happy with our progress so far, I pulled my hand away and held her in my arms. Jeana shivered for another moment, and then sagged against me. "Oh, Carl!" She was silent for a moment so I backed up and pulled my face up to hers. She had a faint sheen of perspiration to her that I found quite alluring. "So that's the Carl Buckman Experience?", she asked weakly.

I had to laugh. "No, that's only the first stage. After this, it gets better."

"Oh my God! That's impossible! That's even better than..." Suddenly her mouth snapped shut and she blushed a deep red.

I had to laugh a second time. "Better than when you do it?" She continued blushing and refused to answer, but she turned her eyes away and then nodded shyly. I just roared in laughter. "Well, next time you're talking with your friends, ask them if that was part of the Experience. God, I can't believe you girls actually give it a name, like I'm a ride at an amusement park."

"That was better than any amusement park!"

"And it only gets better!" I put my hand down on the front of her slacks again, and Jeana got a very nervous look.

"Remember, we can't ... I mean..."

"I remember. Take off your blouse and bra. God, you are so beautiful!"

Jeana sat up and peeled off her blouse and bra, so she was sitting there topless. She really had a nice set of tits. I ended up peeking at her bra later, and it was 34D. I wondered if she had stopped growing, or whether she was going to be larger still. They were very impressive!

I had a raging hard on at this point, so I adjusted myself as best I could. Jeana noticed, and though she blushed slightly, never took her eyes from what I was doing. "Are you... ?"

"What? Hard as a rock? You bet! Want to find out?"

Jeana's eyes opened wide at that. I took her hand and held it to the front of my khakis, and she gasped as she felt my stiffness. As soon as I released her hand, she pulled it away, but I took it again and held it against me. She got the idea and began rubbing me through my pants. I couldn't help it, and groaned. "Are you alright?", she asked.

"Oh, yeah."

She giggled a little as she began tracing her hand up and down the front of my pants. "I think you like that."

"Honey, you'd better stop, or I'm going to have a bit of a mess to deal with." My crotch was throbbing with every stroke of her fingers.

Thankfully, Jeana stopped. "Really? Can I see?"

That opened my eyes up. For a virgin, Jeana Colosimo was very adventurous. "Whatever you want, baby!"

A little unsure, but determined, Jeana reached out and hesitantly began working on my belt. I let her work on her own, though I smiled up at her. She fumbled my belt open and then undid the catch and pulled down my zipper, but didn't really know what to do next. I lifted my hips up, and she finally got the idea, and pulled my pants down a bit.

"You can pull them down a lot further, Jeana."

She giggled nervously and pulled them down to my knees. I still had on my briefs, and my cock was just about pulsing inside them, and there was a wet spot near the top. She took a deep breath and yanked my tighty-whiteys down as well, so that I was standing to attention in full view. Jeana gasped as she saw me. "Oh! Wow! I mean, I've never ... I saw a picture in a magazine once, but ... Wow!"

"You surprise me every day! What magazine, and where did you see it?", I asked.

Jeana turned beet red and shook her head violently. "No way!" I just laughed at that. She moved a hand to touch me, but then pulled back. "Can I, you know, touch you?"

"I hope to God you do, because I'm going to explode if you don't!"

Jean very gingerly touched my cockhead with a fingertip, so lightly I almost didn't feel it, and then yanked her hand back. She looked at me very nervously, afraid she had done it wrong. I reached out and took her hand and drew it back. I wrapped it around my shaft and used her hand to slide up and down my shaft, jerking me off. "Oh, God!", I moaned. I took my hand away and Jeana continued to jerk me for a moment, and I popped my cork. My jism started spewing in pulses out the tip. Surprised, Jeana yanked her hand away and stared as I just pumped for a moment. Come had sprayed out onto my shirt and her hand. She looked at me nervously.

It took me a moment for my breathing to get back to normal. "I told you I was close.", I said. I quickly unbuttoned my shirt and peeled it off, tossing it in the corner, and then peeled off my undershirt, which I used to wipe her hand clean. Then I leaned over and kissed her softly on the lips. "Thank you."

"That was supposed to happen?", she asked meekly.

"Only if you do it right.", I answered wryly. "Remember a few minutes ago, when I was sucking your nipples and rubbing against you, and you went nuts?" Jeana nodded, and I continued, "That was an orgasm. You came, right?" She blushed but nodded again. "Well, this is what guys do when we come."

Jeana asked me a few more questions, and I found myself giving her an impromptu biology and anatomy lesson. Since she was topless and I had even less on, biology and anatomy really came into play, because I quickly hardened up into a second erection. This time I had her reach out and take matters more firmly into her hands. With my instruction, she gave me a very nice handjob, and this time continued pumping me until I was dry. I groaned at the end, and looked down to see my lower chest and crotch coated with my come. She had a wicked grin on her face. "It's like I have you in my power!", she said laughingly.

"Like you wouldn't believe!" I sat up and grabbed a box of tissues off the nightstand and used it to clean up. Satisfied, I next opened my nightstand and pulled out a box of rubbers. "Listen, I know you said we can't do anything more today, but when we do, I have things covered. Or won't I need them?"

Jeana knew what I was holding, from girl's health class, I suspect. "No, I'm on the Pill."

"Really?" The little Catholic school girl was very surprising.

"I need them to even out my periods."

I just nodded. "I've heard of that. So, uh, how soon do you think we'll be able to give you the full Carl Buckman Experience?"

Jeana sighed. "I want to do it today! But that's not going to happen. I don't think before next weekend. I'm really sorry!"

"It's not your fault. How about this - after the Christmas Dance, we come back here for a few hours."

"Could we?", she asked excitedly. "Won't that take too long?"

"Just tell your folks that we're going to a party with some friends after the dance, and that we won't be home until late. They'll fuss and fume, but all you'll need to do is promise there won't be any drinking. They won't worry after that."

"And we'll have the party here!"

"Something of the sort.", I agreed.

She hugged me, which led to another round of kissing, which led to us laying back on the bed for another round of heavy petting. We both came again. Afterwards, I let Jeana use my shower to clean up, and then I took a shower and dressed in clean clothes, and I took her home. Her parents even thanked me for taking Jeana to meet my family. I assured them, it had been my pleasure!

Chapter 18: Opening A Present

Saturday, December 18, 1971

I went over to Jeana's about 5:30 on Saturday to pick her up. I had made reservations at a steak house in Timonium for 6:30. The dance was at the school, from 8:00 until 11:00, and then the party was at Ray's afterwards. His parents were away for the weekend, which was like leaving the hen house unlocked and inviting the foxes over for a free chicken dinner. He would definitely cover for us.

"Well, don't you look dashing!", commented Mrs. Colosimo as she ushered me inside. "Louis, doesn't Carl look handsome!", she called to her husband in the living room.

He looked at me, with the confused look most men do when responding to their wife's questions which don't require a response. "Yes, very nice. Welcome. Come on in, Carl."

"Thank you. Here, Mrs. Colosimo. I wasn't sure if I would get a chance to bring this over before Christmas, so why don't I give it to you now." I was holding a large foil wrapped package, and she took it with considerable curiosity.

"Thank you. What is it? Jeana will be down in a moment, I'm sure. Take your coat off."

"Thank you." It was a chilly evening, like most December evenings in Maryland, cold but no snow. A white Christmas was a rarity here. Snow normally didn't start until early January. I had worn a trench coat and dark leather gloves along with my trademark fedora. I peeled them all off, leaving me in my suit.

"Oooh, you really do look cute! Too bad there's only one of you. Do you have a brother?", she teased. Mr. Colosimo gave a laughing snort.

"Yes, but he's quite a bit younger than me, and I don't think he'd be able to handle a sophisticated lady like yourself." That got hearty laughs out of both of them.

Mister Colosimo went to the stairwell and yelled up the stairs. "You'd better get a move on, Jeana. Carl is putting the moves on your mother!"

"Hold on! Give me a break!", came bellowing back down the stairs.

I grinned at her parents. "You might as well open that up now, and figure out what you're going to do with it."

They gave me a curious look, and Mrs. Colosimo tore open the foil wrapping. Inside was a large poinsettia plant in full blossom. "Oh, it's beautiful!", she exclaimed.

"My mom is always getting poinsettias for Christmas. If you take care of them, they will keep blossoming for weeks and weeks.", I commented.

"I know. My sister grows them. This is very nice. Thank you.", she replied.

"Then ask her what to do with it, because that is the sum total of what I know about flowers."

Just then the click of high heels announced that Jeana had joined us. I turned to face her and whistled. "Wow! Don't you look good!"

"Thank you!", she said, blushing.

"Turn around."

Jeana pirouetted and I whistled again. "I repeat, wow!" Jeana had gone with a bright red cocktail dress, nicely tight on her buxom frame, with a U shaped neckline front and rear, and short enough that it came several inches above her knees. She was wearing sheer hose and matching red pumps. "We won't be able to dance, since I'll be too busy fighting the other guys off!"

"You look pretty nice, too.", Jeana replied.

Her mother agreed. "He's pretty cute."

I glanced over at Jeana's father, who had an amused expression on his face and was rolling his eyes. I just gave him a good-natured shrug. I was dressed nicely tonight. The only school dances you needed to be formal for are the proms, otherwise, a suit was sufficient. In those days you wore a suit and a tie to a school dance, and the girl wore a dress. By the time my own children were going to school dances, the dress code seemed to peak out at 'clean.' They looked the same as when they went to school.

Tonight I had on a dark charcoal gray suit with an understated plaid, and a hint of a red thread in the plaid. Dark charcoal suits are good for any formal occasion. I had a brand new black dress shirt, which for the time was rather daring, and a bright red tie to go with the plaid. Black dress socks and black wingtips finished it off. I thought I looked good, but when I was with a girl as gorgeous as Jeana, it wouldn't matter in the slightest. Nobody would be looking at me, except her, and she was who I wanted to look good for.

Jeana looked exceptional, with just enough makeup to offset her dark complexion and add a splash of color to her lips. I reached into my pocket and pulled out a small Christmas paper wrapped jewelry box. "I thought about waiting until Christmas to give this to you, but I decided tonight might be better."

"What is it!?", she asked excitedly.

"You'll never know unless you open it." I handed it to her and she quickly tore the Christmas wrapping off. Inside was the jewelry box, which stopped her in her tracks. She opened this much more slowly, and stared inside.

"Ohhhh..." I had bought Jeana a gold necklace, with the centerpiece being a pair of gold hearts that were linked. "It's beautiful!", she whispered, as much to herself as to any of the rest of us.

I took it from her hands. "Here, let's see how it looks." I touched Jeana on her shoulder and had her turn away, and then reached around and did up the clasp from behind. She could see what I was doing in the reflection in the mirror in the foyer. Her breathing stopped as I draped the necklace across her throat.

"It's gorgeous!", she exclaimed. The next thing I knew she had whirled around and thrown her arms around my neck and was planting a major league kiss on me, right there in the foyer with her parents watching. I glanced over at them; her mother was amused, her father not so much. I held my hands up in a pleading fashion, to say, 'Hey, don't blame me!' After a moment, Jeana's father cleared his throat loudly and tapped his daughter on the shoulder, and she released me. The look in her eyes didn't go away, though, which I thought boded well for later.

Jeana's mother loaned her a good coat and a scarf, and I put my trench coat back on, and I escorted Jeana to my car. Once inside, she turned to me and said, "Do you really want to go to the dance?"

I had to laugh. "Yes, I do, if simply to show off my beautiful date!" I laughed again and put the car in gear. "And I'm hungry, too! I have this funny feeling that being with you tonight is going to take a lot out of me!"

Jeana giggled at that, and we went to dinner. We both ordered steaks and baked potatoes, and ice teas. Maybe I could have brazened out ordering a drink, but no way Jeana looked 18. I didn't even try to fake it. After dinner we got on York Road and drove down into Towson. We got there just a few minutes after 8:00.

All the school dances, except for the Senior Prom, were held in the gym, even the Junior-Senior Prom. Only the Senior Prom was held off site, at a night club rented for the evening. As a result, we parked in the regular school parking lot and made our way to the gym. Outside the gym, in the hallway, several folding tables had been set up to block our way, and form a coat room of sorts, with several large coat racks behind it. The dance committee was running the coat room.

Like every other high school dance committee across the nation, Towson High's consisted of six people - four good looking girls who liked to help, one gay guy trying not to be obvious, and one horrendously ugly guy hoping to use whatever infinitesimal influence he might gain to be able to score a dance with a girl. At the moment, the coat room was being run by two of the girls, Becky Stafford, who I knew (but not in that sense!), and Shelley Talbot, she of Science Fair fame. "Good evening, ladies! You two are looking mighty festive tonight!", I said as I got to the table.

Both girls had on Christmas themed outfits. Shelley wore a green skirt and red blouse, and Becky had a red dress and green pantyhose. I assume they were pantyhose. Stockings didn't come back into fashion until the Eighties. They posed for us a second, smiling, and Becky said, "It seemed appropriate."

Shelley grinned when she saw me with Jeana. "Who's this Carl? The newest member of your harem?"

Jeana looked shocked at this, but I just smiled and wagged my finger at Shelley. "Be nice!" I turned to Jeana. "Jeana, this is Shelley Talbot. Shelley, Jeana Colosimo. Shelley and I won the Science Fair together at Towsontown Junior a couple of years ago."

"More like Carl won it and Shelley tagged along.", commented Becky, cattily. Shelley stuck her tongue out at Becky, who promptly returned the favor.

I wagged my finger at Becky, too. "Shelley helped quite a bit.", I responded. I handed over our coats and my hat, and pocketed the ticket. "Anyway, the decorations look very nice, almost as nice as you two look, so we'll be going inside." Jeana and I thanked the girls and I pulled her away, before Shelley and Becky managed to get a three-way catfight going.

"What was all that about?", asked Jeana after we got inside the door to the gym. She almost had to yell in my ear, since the music was so loud. No way could the doorkeepers hear us.

"Shelley has some mixed feelings about the Science Fair. We won, but she wasn't invited to participate in some research papers over at Towson State, and I was. She gets a little catty about it."

Jeana stared at me for a moment. "Towson State? Like, Towson State College? You did a research paper for a college?"

I tried to shrug it off. "I was just one in the group. It was no big deal."

"How old were you? This was two years ago? You were fourteen?! How many papers?", she pestered me.

I took a couple of minutes to explain things to Jeana, but if I was trying to minimize my involvement, it failed. She was stunned that I was doing things like that. Wait until she realized I would be starting classes over there in another few weeks.

We walked around the dance floor, where the standard mix of students was milling about. This early in the dance, not very many people were dancing yet. A punch bowl was set up in the corner, with the watchful eye of the Vice-Principal making sure nobody tried to spike the punch.

Suddenly Jeana looked at me with a grin. "Was Shelley part of your harem?"

I groaned at that. I had been hoping that Jeana would have forgotten the comment. "I don't have a harem!"

"That's not what Shelley says. Maybe the Carl Buckman Experience isn't all it's cracked up to be."

"Maybe you need a good spanking!"

She pulled my head down to where she could speak directly into my ear. "Would that be on my bare bottom?" I jerked away from her in serious surprise, as she laughed. "I've never been part of a harem before. Maybe I should get one of those harem outfits like in I Dream of Jeanie." She gave an impromptu belly dance for me, which made me laugh.

It was her turn to get the finger wag. "Just you behave, or you might get both!"

I decided to end this line of discussion. Fortunately, the band picked that moment to start a slow set. Yes, we had a band. In those days, DJ equipment was very expensive. It was actually a lot cheaper to hire a live band to play, and there were always high school and college age bands that would do covers of popular songs while they worked their way to stardom. That was the theory, anyway. Some were good and some were awful, but loud. This was about average. I pulled Jeana onto the dance floor and took her in my arms.

Back in the day, I actually had learned some ballroom dancing. Marilyn enjoyed dancing, and while I look like a spastic moron dancing to anything fast, the slower romantic stuff was easy. I also had a bad right knee, from time beyond memory, and I could always use that as an excuse. Nowadays my knees were still good, but I wondered if that was going to last.

The standard slow dance among teenagers is to simply hold each other and rock sideways and twist around. No style, but you get to make out with your girl legally. That was what Jeana and I did through the first song, but during the second, You've Got A Friend by James Taylor, I taught her the box step, a simple four beat dance step that made you look like you could actually dance. Jeana was a very quick learner. At the end of the song, a number of people were watching us, and a few clapped. "I didn't know you knew how to dance!", exclaimed Jeana.

I shrugged. "I'm good at all sorts of things involving moving with a beautiful girl."

"I'm serious!"

"So am I!" Jeana blushed at that. "You dance very nicely, too. Have you had any lessons?"

"I took some ballet when I was little, but nothing in years."

"You moved nicely." We were over to the edge of the dance area. The band had switched back to something faster, Three Dog Night's Momma Told Me Not To Come, and I said, "Follow me on this." We stayed on the sidelines, but I taught her a few more basics, including spinning her around a bit and finishing with a dip at the end.

Jeana was very flustered and excited when we finished. Several of our friends were watching us, and Jeana looked both embarrassed and proud to have been seen by them. "You're a natural!", I told her.

"I can't believe we did that!" She jumped up into my arms and wrapped her arms around my neck, and kissed me. After I set her back down, she said, "I love you!"

"I love you, too.", I replied.

"Let's go, now, back to your place."

I smiled at that. We hadn't been at the dance an hour yet. "I'll make you a deal. We'll leave at ten, and we'll skip the party completely."

"We were going to skip the party anyway!" She saw through that ploy.

"I'm just going to kill you with the suspense!", I replied. I led her over to the punch bowl, to cool her ardor slightly.

Jeana did not handle anticipation well. She tried to wheedle me into leaving at the nine o'clock set break, but I held firm. Afterwards I taught her how the waltz went, and we danced a few more slow songs. By nine-thirty she was on pins and needles, which is about where I wanted her. I agreed to go early, and by quarter of we had our coats on and were heading to the parking lot. I only lived about a half mile away, and we could have walked, but it was too damn chilly for that. We were in the apartment about five minutes later.

Jeana was excited, but nervous. I wasn't sure if she had told any of her friends what was happening that night, but I wouldn't have been surprised. I got several not so innocent remarks from some previous recipients of the Carl Buckman Experience, and at least one of them commented to me that Jeana was expecting fireworks. Nothing like a little pressure! Now that we were alone, however, she looked nervous.

I tossed my hat and coat on the armchair, and went behind her, and peeled her coat away from her, and tossed it atop mine. Then I turned her to face me. "If you're scared, we can stop right now."

She gave me a look of relief, but then smiled. "I know that. I'm not really scared, it's just, well, what if I don't do it right?" I must have stared dumbly at that, because she kept on, in a hurried tone, "I mean, you've had all those girls at school and I know what they've said and what if..."

I stopped her with a finger to her lips, and reared my head back and laughed. "Oh, good Lord! Will you stop worrying about what the girls at school will say! It isn't all that difficult!"

She looked up at me. "Huh?"

"Listen, Jeana, billions and billions of people have been doing this since the dawn of time, so it can't be all that difficult. Hell, I should be the one worrying, not you!"

"What do you mean?", she asked.

"Well, while I admit to nothing more than being friends with anyone, it sure seems to me like a lot of your friends have been building me up as some sort of real life Romeo. What if I can't meet your expectations, hmmm?" I smiled as I said this.

Jeana blushed. "I never thought of that." I took her hand and led her into my bedroom, leaving the light on. Jeana asked, "Shouldn't we turn off the lights?"

"You're so beautiful, I want to see you." I could tell she was nervous about that, so I went back to the living room and brought in a couple of candles, and lit them, and then turned off the bedroom light. She seemed much more relaxed, and I guess the mood was more romantic. "You are still beautiful, much too beautiful for me.", I said as I kissed her.

Jeana melted in my arms, and tried to devour me. As soon as I came up for air, she immediately tried to reach behind her and unzip her dress. I stopped her, taking her hands in mine and whispering, "No, let me." She simply nodded agreement.

I decided to heighten her anticipation by moving slowly. First I removed my suit coat and tossed that aside, and then I undid my tie and the top button to my dress shirt. The tie joined the jacket. I kicked off my shoes. Next I moved back to her, but kept her facing forward as I sidled around to her back. My lips began nibbling on her neck, as my fingers undid the zipper to her dress. I could hear her gasp as I slowly unzipped the dress, and then pushed it down her body. She was now standing before me in a lacy strapless bra, matching panties, and sheer pantyhose, along with her high heels.

"You are so beautiful!", I whispered. I continued nibbling her neck as I undid the clasp on her bra, which dropped to the floor. I then kept kissing and licking as I moved back around to her front. Jeana's chest was heaving, which did some amazing things to her tits, so I spent a little time on them, leaning down to suck her nipples. Then I knelt at her feet. I could smell her desire through the hose and panties. Still, first steps, first. She had been wearing ankle strapped stilettos. If she had been wearing stockings, and not hose, I would have left them on, but I was going for full nudity this evening. Jeana had to balance on one foot and her hands on my shoulders as I lifted her feet and undid her shoes. Then I slowly peeled her pantyhose off, and finally pulled her lace panties down.

Jeana had a trim dark bush, cut closely in a small triangle pattern. Shaving didn't start becoming popular until the Eighties, when bikinis took a wonderful turn for the smaller. I didn't mind. Rather than stand, I simply moved closer and kissed her, right on her mons. Jeana almost jumped. I held her hips with my hands and decided to let my tongue burrow in for the winter.

Jeana shrieked happily. "Oh my God! Oh my God!" It was involuntary - her hands went to the back of my head and pulled me closer just as her hips pushed forward. She tried to smother me with her pussy, which would make for a fascinating autopsy report. I kept her under control, and after she had squealed her way to an orgasm, I stopped and pulled away. She looked down at me with a dazed look. "Oh, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!"

I stood up. God I loved being sixteen again! I didn't need to grab something to help me climb to my feet! I maneuvered her over to the bed and she lay down on it and moved to the center. I lay down next to her and whispered, "Your turn. I think I'm overdressed."

Jeana nodded mutely and unbuttoned my shirt. She didn't rush through it, but didn't take her time about it either. That was fine by me, since I didn't want to wait any longer than I had to. This time, when she got to my pants, she had no hesitation about pulling them and my briefs and even my socks off. I stretched out naked beside her. She needed just a little more priming, so I put my lips to her tits and a hand to her pussy. She was drenched. After a minute of finger fucking, I said, "Last chance to say no.", and gave her nipple another lick.

"Yes, yes, yes!"

I grinned at her and rose up. Jeana spread her legs apart and I knelt between them. I didn't know if this would hurt her or not, but I knew it would be tight. Some girls bust their hymens through routine activities growing up, and some don't. Marilyn still had her cherry when we first made love, and I know I should have been gentler. I hoped I had succeeded with Jeana. I let myself down slowly, holding my upper body on my left arm, while I used my right hand to position my cock head in her slit. The head slipped in easily enough. Oh well, no guts, no glory. I pushed in slowly and smoothly, and didn't stop until I had bottomed out.

I slipped in without any difficulties or obstructions. Jeana didn't start crying or beg me to stop. It felt wonderfully tight and hot and juicy. Jeana may have been a maiden, but she certainly was lacking a maidenhead. She simply gasped happily and threw her arms around my neck. All she had to say was, "Don't stop!"

Okay, that sounded like a really good idea. A really, really good idea! I don't think I could have stopped even if her parents and the Pope had walked in the door! I had to move slowly, not so much for Jeana's sake as for mine. I was just a few pumps away from exploding. I slowly pulled out, eliciting another cry of "Don't stop!" from Jeana, and then I slowly pushed back in, earning me another squeal of delight. Jeana very quickly understood the rhythm and began pushing her hips up as I was pushing down, trying to suck me inside, ever deeper. She began shaking as I pumped into her, and squealing, and I lost it. One final thrust forward and my balls erupted. I lay on her, my breath panting, as my hips churned forward and my cock pumped a heavy load into her. Jeana kept pumping her hips the entire time.

After a couple of minutes, Jeana's arms went limp around my neck and I roused myself enough to lift up and look down at her. I'm not sure whether to expect happiness or dismay ("Is that all there is?") She looked angelic there, her dark hair spread out in a halo, a sheen of sweat to her entire body, a happy look on her face. "Oh, Carl, I love you!", she whispered.

"I love you, too." I rolled off her and Jeana rolled with me, to lie on my side. She put her head on my chest. "Are you, I mean, are you okay?"

She looked up at me. "Huh?"

I cleared my throat. "Are you alright? Do you hurt?"

She gave me a very curious look. "No, I feel great. Am I supposed to hurt? I don't understand."

I probably rolled my eyes, but I simply smiled. "No, it's just that the first time with girls can sometimes hurt. I would never want to hurt you, but it can happen."

"Still not following you.", she said with a smile.

I groaned and sat upright. "It's just, well ... Quick biology lesson. Girls have a small piece of tissue, sort of like a flap of skin, in their vagina. It gets in the way of, well, you can guess what it gets in the way of. Anyways, the first time they make love, it will end up being torn, and can be a little painful."

She smiled. "Nope, no pain."

"With some girls, especially athletic girls or if they've had an accident, it can break all on its own."

"I fell on my bicycle a few years ago. That hurt a lot, and I had some bleeding, but I thought it was because I fell.", she admitted.

"That was probably it."

"So, no problems then. When can we make love again?" She looked directly at my slimy cock, and I started to stiffen.

"Give me a few minutes. This time I want to make it better for you."

Jeana gasped. "It gets better."

God, I loved being sixteen again! "Oh, baby, it gets so much better!"

We made love twice more that night, and each time I took my time, touching her all over and slowly pumping her. Jeana discovered the wonders of the multiple orgasm, and I learned just how much of a screamer she really was. I just hoped the neighbors didn't come to check us out! We ended at half past midnight, although neither of us wanted to stop. However, we needed to clean up and get her home. We both took quick showers, and Jeana redressed. I put my suit back on, though I left off my tie (just in case her parents were still awake, they wouldn't be clued in by my coming back in different clothing.) I put my trench coat back on. I drove her home and walked her to the door. It was just after one o'clock, which her parents had agreed to as an extended curfew.

I kissed her thoroughly. "When can I see you again?"

"Monday in school."

"Let me be more specific. When can we do this again? I think they might have a problem with that at school.", I replied.

Jeana giggled. "I think we are stuck for a few days. I can't go out on school nights, and the weekend will be all Christmas."

"Do your parents work the week after Christmas?"

"Yep! I'll be home all alone. I wonder what I'll be able to do?"

I licked her ear and got a happy shudder in return. "If I come over in the morning, maybe we can think of something." That got me another kiss, and I left her and went home.

Chapter 19: A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year

Saturday, December 25, 1971

I drove over to the house at eight on Christmas morning. Once again I was thankful I lived south of the Mason-Dixon Line. A white Christmas sounds awfully nice, but believe me, it's not. Snow causes accidents and people die because they can't handle it. I spent fifty years in upstate New York, where it snows six months of the year, and is chilly another four months. The last remaining months are July and August, which is when the mosquitoes breed and grow to a size able to carry off small children and pets. We routinely got 8-plus feet of snow a year, and some parts of the state got much, much more!

I let myself in through the front door, to find most of the family already waiting. Of course, Suzie was only ten, so she had made sure everybody got up. My mother, Nana, and Suzie were sitting in the living room, Dad was preparing to cook breakfast, and Hamilton was downstairs in his room. I had several bags filled with wrapped gifts, which Suzie grabbed out of my hands and spread around the tree. Mom called Hamilton up and Dad came in and greeted me.

We had a few traditions around the Buckman household, and the Christmas tree was one of them. It went up the first weekend of December and would stay up until the first weekend after New Year's. Once you had bought somebody a gift, you could wrap it and place it under the tree, a sacrosanct region. Nobody was allowed to cheat and peek, on pain of a loud and horrendous thumping, and the loss of the present. You were, however, allowed to pick up the present and shake it and make guesses.

When I was twelve, a large box appeared under the tree on the first day after we set the tree up, addressed to me, from Ham and Suzie. It was large and heavy, and something was rattling around inside it, thumping against the sides of the box. It was right there in the middle of the living room, so no way could I cheat and not get caught. For almost a month this thing intrigued me, and it was the first thing I grabbed and ripped open that Christmas morning. I have no idea where they got it, but my siblings had managed to scrape up a ten pound lump of coal! My parents almost died of laughter, and my brother and sister were inordinately proud of themselves. Well, okay, they earned it. I was the butt of jokes every Christmas after that for the rest of my life.

The other major Christmas tradition, at least regarding presents, was that you had to get Hamilton two. Believe it or not, the little asshole's birthday was December 25. Today was his 14th birthday. The rule was that we would have Christmas presents in the morning, around the tree, and birthday presents in the evening, after dinner, at the table. Also, you had to buy him two presents. There was no cheating allowed; you couldn't say that one present cost extra, so it should count for two. Nope, one in the morning and one in the evening. He didn't get squat the rest of the year.

Almost the whole family was like that. My birthday was in November, and both my parents were in January. Only Suzie was smart enough to be born in June, and get stuff every six months.

As soon as we were all in the living room, Suzie went to work, grabbing presents and handing them out. I just sat there on the couch, waiting for a few, but nothing came by. Well, I knew enough probability and set theory to not worry about it. I'd end up with a giant pile at the end of things. After a few minutes, however, even my parents were starting to wonder where my presents were. They even told Suzie to find mine, so I didn't just sit there. It never occurred to any of us that they wouldn't be there.

But they weren't. There was absolutely nothing under the tree for me. I looked over at Mom and Dad with a raised eyebrow, and they just stared back at me in horror. "Where's Carl's presents?", she asked.

For once, at least, nobody could blame me. Dad and Mom and Suzie just started squawking, and I sat there wondering what was happening. That was when we all realized that the only person not speaking was my brother, Hamilton. I looked over at him to see a ghost of a smile on his face, an expression which completely disappeared when my parents started asking if he knew where my presents were. He just had a look of superiority on his face. "I don't know where his presents are!", was all he said.

My parents continued quizzing everybody else, including Hamilton, and the din became quite loud. It took me about thirty seconds to figure it out. Dad was looking at me, when I told Hamilton, "You little shitweasel. You really did it this time, didn't you?"

"What was that?", demanded my father, waving everybody else into silence. His head was swiveling between me and Hamilton.

Hamilton simply gave us an innocent look, and repeated, "I don't know where his presents are."

"No, you don't...", I agreed, " ... because you don't know where the dump is. For once in your life, you're actually telling the truth. I am almost impressed."

My father was stunned, and my mother simply gasped in disbelief. "Carling, take that back! Hamilton wouldn't have done that! He couldn't have done that!"

I just smiled at her. "It would have been simple. All he would have to do is sneak up here at night, the night you put out the garbage. All he has to do is take any presents for me and take them downstairs, and rearrange everything so that it looks normal."

Even my father couldn't believe Hamilton could do that. "Impossible! We'd catch him!"

"Really? Who takes the garbage out now that I don't live here anymore?" I leaned back on the couch and crossed my arms. It was actually sort of clever. As I've said before, Hamilton is not exactly the criminal mastermind, but for once he actually managed to pull one off. He could grab anything for me, stuff it into the garbage cans, and then deliver it to the curb himself. I wondered what I had gotten that I wasn't going to get now.

My father simply stared at me in horror, and then slowly turned on my brother. I wondered if Hamilton had finally burned his last bridge with my Dad. Nana was sitting there very confused. Suzie was crying, because she had actually knitted me a small scarf; Nana and Mom had taught her how to knit. My mother continued to protest Ham's innocence.

Ham might have gotten away with it, but he decided to push his luck. Most criminals talk their way straight into jail, and he was no different. "People who don't live here don't get presents.", he announced.

"Yeah, you're right, I guess they don't." I stood up and went to the closet. I grabbed my coat and pulled it on. "I'll see you guys around." I was out the door before they could protest. Mom actually ran out of the house after me, in her robe and slippers, but I just waved good-bye and took off. I found a Denny's that was open up on York Road in Timonium, and had breakfast there. When I got home, I found the message light on the answering machine lit, but didn't bother. Another call came through, and it was my mother pleading for me to call, but I ignored it and unplugged the phone.

In 1971 answering machines were rather unusual. In the future, in the digital computer age, voice mail and answering machines would become commonplace, but that was twenty or more years from now. In those days, an answering machine was actually a small tape recorder, and you had to wind through your messages. I had a very bland greeting on mine, simply stating we weren't home, so leave us a message. In case Jeana's parents ever called, they would think it was my parent's number.

It might have been the loneliest I have ever been. I won't lie about it. I cried. In some ways it was even worse than when Marilyn or Alison died, because then I had family around me. Now it was my family which had abandoned me. I just sat there in the apartment until early afternoon, wallowing in my sorrow, and then decided the hell with it. Being miserable is only good in small doses. I opened a bottle of Chardonnay and went on with my life.

The first thing I did was plug in the telephone and listen to my messages. With the exception of one of them, they were all from my mother. The only one which wasn't was from Jeana. I called her back. I didn't tell her what Hamilton had done. We talked briefly and I told her I would come to dinner on Sunday. If I had told her about today, she would invite me for Christmas dinner at her house, which would raise far too many questions from her folks.

I didn't call my mother back, and I continued to use the answering machine to screen my calls. Later, that evening, after dinner, my father called. I answered him. "I'm here, Dad."

"Where have you been all day? Your mother's been calling all day long. She's very upset."

"Well, gee, Dad. I'm really sorry to hear that. I'd hate to think that my actions have been the cause of all the family's problems today."

He didn't respond to my sarcasm. "So, where have you been?"

"Right here. It's Christmas. Where else would I be? Nothing's open, remember, because it's Christmas."

"Carling, please, I'm sorry. Don't be like this." Dad doesn't do contrite very well. The fact that he was trying said a lot.

"Why did you call, Dad?" I wasn't in a forgiving mood. I had finished off the Chardonnay and was now at work on the jug.

"I just wanted to let you know that Hamilton confessed. It was just like you said. We'll get you replacements for what he destroyed."

I sighed. "Yeah? How are you going to replace Suzie's scarf?" He didn't answer that. "Listen, Dad, do what you want, but I just don't care anymore. Save your money. I won't keep it."

"Carling, don't be like that."

"Like what, Dad? Like my brother? I'll make you a deal. Get me whatever you want. I won't throw it in the garbage. I'll give it to the Salvation Army. How about that? Is that a good deal? We'll both get to feel good then. Anything else, Dad? Or can I hang up now?", I asked.

"We'll talk later in the week. I'm sorry, Carl."

"You and me both." I hung up the phone and disconnected it again. I poured some more wine from the jug. I was going to have a headache in the morning, but right now I just didn't care.

I woke up the next morning with a fuzzy head and a fuzzy tongue, a useful reminder of why you shouldn't drink to excess. It wasn't the worst hangover I had ever had, not by a long shot, but is there such a thing as a good hangover? I swallowed a glass of water and a handful of Tylenol and took a shower. Advil would have been better, but it was 1971, and it was still prescription only. After the shower I took another load of Tylenol with some OJ, and sat down at my typewriter. I put some paper in it and sat there for a moment.

I had spent much of yesterday afternoon and evening thinking about this letter. It needed to be written, and if I didn't, and something happened, I would never forgive myself. The cover letter came easily.

Dad,

I want you to give the envelope inside to Suzie. I can't simply mail this, since he is reading all the mail in the house. You might not want to agree with me, but you know it's true. I don't know if he's reading through your mail or Mom's, but I know he was reading mine.

There is nothing secret about this letter, but it is Suzie's not yours. If she wants you to see it, it's her business. I'll be talking to her and I'll ask her to make sure she got the letter. Don't tell Mom about this, it will just cause problems. Thank you.

Love,

Carling

That was the easy part. The tough letter was next.

Dear Suzie,

I am very sorry about what happened to the scarf you made me. I am sure it was very nice, and I know you put a lot of time into it. I would have been happy to wear it if I had gotten it, and if you ever have a chance, I would love another one. I'm sure it would have been very warm and comfortable.

I wanted to write about why I moved out a few weeks ago. I know it is very confusing, but it is something I needed to do. I know you don't understand what is happening, so I am going to try and explain what I can.

Our brother, Hamilton, has a sickness, a disease, but not of the body. He has a sickness of the mind. I don't know all that much about this sort of thing, but I do know that it's real. Mom and Dad will say it's not real, but even they must know something is wrong. I don't know why he is like the way he is.

What I know about psychiatry can be written in a matchbook, but I knew something was wrong with my brother. I thought he had some form of schizophrenia, which is just a five dollar word for believing things that aren't really true. What the sufferer thinks and what really is don't line up. Since he was so much against me, I wondered if it was paranoid schizophrenia, but I just didn't know. I do know that in future years, after I went off to college, his behavior got even stranger. What would happen now, I just couldn't guess.

For years now he has been becoming very aggressive and dangerous towards me. This is only the latest thing he has done. Someday, when you are older, we can talk about this and I can explain it better. Believe me when I say that the only reason I left was because I didn't feel safe around him anymore. If I was to keep living at home, sooner or later one of us was going to end up hurting the other. It was safer if I left.

I don't know what is going to happen in the house now. With me gone, Hamilton might settle down. However, I have to warn you, be careful around him. I know this is awfully hard on a young lady like yourself, but watch him. If you ever think you are in any kind of danger, let Dad know. If you can't find Dad, call me and I will come and help you. Trust Dad or me; don't trust Mom, at least not about Hamilton.

Hamilton snoops around the house. If you have a diary, he has probably already read it. If you get mail, he will read it. He has gone through your dresser and closet. You should get a box like I did and a lock, and keep anything private in it and locked away. Ask Dad to help you buy a foot locker. If he says no, call me and I will buy you one.

Ask Dad to install a latch on the inside of your bedroom door, and a door knob that locks. Again, if he says no, call me and I will help you. I want you to be safe.

I won't be coming around the house much in the future, but I am still in town. You can call me whenever you want to. I have included several of my business cards. Keep one in your wallet or purse. Give one to both Aunt Peg and Aunt Nan, and tell them I have moved out. Mom and Dad won't like that, but tell them anyway, and give them a card. You won't get in trouble.

After I had moved out, I had gone back to the printing company and had new business cards printed up, with my new phone number and my post office box address included. I also knew my parents would be loathe to admit I had moved out. This would be considered airing our dirty linen in public, and Buckmans just didn't do that!

Remember, I'll always be your big brother. If you ever get scared, or need help, or just want to talk to me, call me. We can talk on the phone, or I can come and meet you. I know this is confusing, but as you get older, I think you'll understand a little better.

Love,

Carl

PS: Take care of Daisy. I miss her, but I know you love her and will take good care of her. Thanks.

I pulled my letter out of the typewriter, read it several times, and edited a line or two, and then retyped it. I enclosed some of my cards and sealed it in an envelope, which then went inside a larger envelope with the cover letter. This I mailed to Dad at his office, marked 'Personal.' I would give Suzie about a week before I called her and made sure she got it.

By that time my headache was mostly gone, although I had a very sad feeling in the pit of my stomach. I felt like I was abandoning Suzie to her fate. Hamilton had never before shown any hostility towards our sister, but with me out of the way, would he settle down, or turn his anger towards her? I just didn't know. Back on my first trip through, he had always been good towards her and her boys, and was the favorite uncle, which my mother proudly proclaimed. He was always taking the boys to the movies or down to see the Orioles play. One time she even told Marilyn that he would have made a great father. Marilyn had stared at her in disbelief, and then said no, he would have been a lousy father. A good father is somebody who is there at the bad times, not just the good times. Mom didn't have much to say in response to that.

I had a late breakfast of some more juice and a big piece of fruit cake. Yes, I know all the jokes, but we actually like fruit cake at the Buckman house. I had even picked up one at the store for myself. I am sure that my mother had gotten me one for Christmas, and it was now at the dump. Afterwards, I got dressed and drove over to Jeana's for Sunday dinner.

Jeana's parents welcomed me warmly. I dodged the inevitable questions about what I had gotten for Christmas, by simply going with an innocuous 'clothes and stuff for school'. Jeana was wearing the necklace I had given her. I don't think I had seen her since the night of the dance without it! We had talked in school since the dance, but her parents wouldn't allow us to go out on school nights. I know I was feeling rather horny, and she had whispered to me several times in school that she wanted to be alone with me again.

Mind you, I simply smiled at that. Whispering back, I said, "Tonight, when you're in bed, take off all your clothes and touch yourself."

Jeana had given me a very shocked look. "I can't do that!"

I just grinned at her. "What? Take off your clothes? Why, do you wear pajamas?" She had blushed and simply nodded. "So, take them off. Who's going to see?"

"Oh my God!"

"And then touch yourself in all the places you want me to touch you.", I told her.

"Oh my God, you're so bad!" Jeana had scurried off at that, and refused to tell me later if she had done what I told her to do. I just laughed at this. I knew she would, but I also knew she would never tell me, not unless I got her alone, and started doing those things to her again.

Today was no different. There were a few minutes when her father was out of the room and her mother was in the kitchen, and I whispered in her ear, "So, still wearing your pajamas to bed?" Jeana had turned beet red and jumped up, to go help her mother. I laughed and trailed along.

Unlike the Buckman house, where WASP tradition ruled, there was no turkey for Christmas dinner. Christmas was an all Italian feast, and we had lasagna leftovers. We also had an antipasto with meats and anchovies, fresh garlic bread, hot peppers and greens, and some Chianti. Mr. Colosimo gave me the eye before pouring me a glass, and I promised to behave. It was a very nice meal.

Afterwards, as stuffed as if we had been eating turkey leftovers, we all lazed around the family room in the basement, until the early evening, at which point I took my leave. Jeana walked me to the door, while her parents stayed downstairs. It gave us a little privacy.

She looked at me hopefully as I bundled up. "You'll be coming over tomorrow, right?"

Oh, yes, I was coming over! The cats were going to be away, and the mice wanted to play! "Absolutely! When should I come over?"

"They'll be gone by eight."

"I'll be here by nine, just in case they get delayed.", I said.

She nodded. "If you see the car in the driveway, don't even stop. Just keep going and call me."

I kissed her quick and opened the door. Turning back, I grinned. "Do me a favor."

"What?"

"Wear those pajamas I keep hearing about."

That earned me a squeal of outrage, and a swat on the arm, and I went out into the cold. I laughed all the way down the driveway to my car.

I was outside of Jeana's house promptly at nine the next morning, and there was no car in sight. I parked and walked up the driveway, and then up to the front door. I knocked and the door opened immediately. Jeana must have been waiting for me, but I didn't see her as the door opened. "Jeana?"

"Hurry up! Come in!", came a muffled voice from behind the door.

Curious, I stepped inside. Jeana was hiding behind the door, She was barefoot and wearing a bathrobe. "What are you up to?"

"I can't just open the door up in my bathrobe! Definitely not if somebody sees you coming in! Now hurry up and get inside!"

I laughed. As soon as I was inside, Jeana slammed the door shut. She nervously looked at the picture window facing the front yard, and then skedaddled off into the kitchen on the backside of the house. The window in the kitchen was much smaller and you couldn't see anything out there expect the back yard. Once there she relaxed some. I could see an empty cereal bowl and a juice glass in the sink. She saw me looking at her and quickly turned away and rinsed the dishes off and put them in the dishwasher.

"What has got you so jumpy?", I asked. I turned her back to me and gave her a hug.

"You. I mean, you being here. My parents would kill me if they knew you were here.", she answered.

I had to chuckle at that. "I don't think they'd kill you. Now me, me they'd kill, but not you."

"You're not being very reassuring."

"So, are you wearing your pajamas?", I quizzed.

Jeana's face went beet red. "Yes."

"Show me."

"I can't show you my pajamas!"

I laughed louder at this. "Baby, I've already seen you out of your pajamas."

She stuck her tongue out at me, and then backed away. She fumbled the sash holding her robe closed and then pulled it open. Underneath she had a simple cotton baby doll top and matching calf length bottoms. "Satisfied?", she asked.

I smiled and looked at her. "Do you always wear a bra and panties to bed under your pajamas?", I asked.

Shocked, Jeana whirled away and tied her robe shut, and then turned back to face me. "How did ... you can't see ... how did you know I had on a bra and panties?", she demanded.

I shrugged. "I didn't. You just told me."

The look on her face was priceless. "That's cheating!"

"If you're not cheating, you're not trying."

"Ooooh, I hate you!" Jeana came closer and balled up her hands and tried beating my chest.

I laughed and wrapped her in my arms, and then lowered my face to hers. For somebody who hated me, she sure kissed me back like she loved me. After a few minutes of heavy breathing and tongue swapping, we came up for air, and she said, "It's still cheating."

"So, sue me. All's fair in love and war." She hit me again, and I said, "Maybe I should tell your parents about how you keep trying to hit me. I wonder what I should tell them when they ask me what happened."

"That's not funny." She took my hand and led me to the basement door. "Let's talk downstairs."

I followed Jeana down the stairs to the finished basement. At the bottom of the stairs she looked at me a little hesitantly, so I took the lead and led her over to a large armchair. I sat down in it and then pulled her sideways onto my lap. I wrapped my arms around her waist and she settled onto me. It was time for a little more kissing.

Now that we were out of the living room and someplace a whole lot more private, Jeana calmed down and relaxed. Relatively speaking that is - she got very excited kissing me, especially after I tugged the sash loose on her bathrobe. I pulled away from her lips and kicked an earlobe. "I was wondering which pajamas you would be wearing."

She pulled back so that she could look me in the eyes. "What do you mean? Which pajamas?"

"Don't you remember? I told you to change out of your regular pajamas into something else." I tugged her robe open.

"No, you told me to take my pajamas off completely."

"That's what I meant, your invisible pajamas."

Jeana giggled at that. "And come into the living room dressed in my invisible pajamas!? No way!"

"So, does that mean you changed into your invisible pajamas after you went to bed?" I slipped a hand under her baby doll top and caressed the smooth warm skin of her belly.

Jeana whimpered at my touch. "I can't tell you that.", she said, her breath becoming a bit ragged.

"I think you can. Did you do the other things I told you to do, too?"

Jeana was squirming in my lap as my hand moved up and traced a line along her bra. "I can't ... no ... I mean..."

"I am going to find out, no matter what it takes."

"Noooo..."

I lifted her in my arms (thank God I worked out this time around) and carried her over to the couch. I set her down on the couch, and Jeana lay back on it, but I didn't join her. Instead I grabbed all the blankets and comforters I could find, and dropped them on the carpet. Kneeling down, I spread them out, forming several layers as an impromptu mattress. I tossed a couple of throw pillows at one end, and then Jeana joined me on the floor. "This might be a little more comfortable.", I commented.

"You still won't get me to talk.", she replied.

I waggled my eyebrows and replied in a corny German accent, "Vee haff our vays, vee can make anybody talk!"

"Never! You'll never break me!"

I kicked off my shoes and lay down on the blanket next to Jeana and we rolled into each other's arms. Once again I let my fingers do the walking, but after a moment teasing her, I pulled her top up and off, so that she was only in her bra. I quickly undid the catch and pulled that off as well. Now I began kissing lower, working first on her neck and throat, and then down her shoulders, and then finally rolling Jeana onto her back so I could alternate on those two magnificent breasts. While I was doing this, I slipped a hand inside her pajama bottoms. Jeana immediately spread her legs apart. First I moved all my fingers across her panties, feeling the moist warmth inside, and pressing them into her slit gently. Then, I moved my hand down into her panties, and began to slowly finger her slit and clit. Jeana responded like a bottle rocket that had just had the fuse lit; she cried out and tried to hump her little bottom up off the floor and even tighter against my fingers.

I rubbed Jeana's clit until she had an orgasm, relented slightly so she was coming down from it, and then started up again. I was even more vigorous this time, using my thumb on her clit as my fingers moved back and forth in her pussy. Jeana came even harder this time. Once she peaked I slowly let her down, to finally just cuddle in my arms. I kissed her cheek. "Oh my God! That was ... amazing!", she told me.

"Amazing is my specialty.", I quipped.

Jeana laughed at this, and propped herself up on an elbow. With her free hand she began undoing the buttons on my shirt. Knowing of our plans for the day, I hadn't bothered with an undershirt. "Weren't you chilly?", she asked.

"I figured you might be able to warm me up."

Jeana continued on, and unbuttoned my pants. When she pulled down my zipper, she got another big surprise. "You're not wearing any underpants!"

I had decided to go commando today, just as a shock for her. "I was hoping to wear the same underwear you were wearing."

Jeana smiled at that. "I guess I fooled you."

"I guess you did." I raised up and pushed my pants down off my legs, and then pulled off my socks. I now had less clothing on than she did. Jeana noticed this and peeled off her own pajama bottoms and her panties, so that we were both naked. "Do you really wear underwear under your pajamas?", I asked.

"What! No, of course not!", she protested. Then she looked at me and grinned. "I felt kind of funny when I put my robe on after I got up, seeing you without any on, so I got undressed and put them on first. It's kind of silly, I guess." She giggled as she looked at my erection. "Isn't that a problem without underpants on?"

"No more than it would be for you without underpants on." Jeana looked shocked at the very thought. Smiling, I lay back. "Get on top.", I told her.

"I thought we were going to make love."

"We are, just a different way." I stretched out on my back. "Now, climb onto me just like you're going to ride a horse."

"Or a cowboy?", she asked, giggling. Jeana straddled my legs and then wiggled and crawled towards my waist.

I used my hands on her hips and lifted her up enough that my cockhead was brushing her pussy lips. "Go on, use your hands and put me inside." Jeana didn't need to be told a second time. With one hand holding my cock vertically, the other spread her pussy open enough for the head to slip inside. As soon as it was in, I slowly pulled her hips down, burying myself inside her.

Jeana sighed as she became used to this new position. "This is very nice." She experimented by moving around a bit, and raising and lowering her hips. My cock slowly pumped up into her as she moved. "It's like I'm in control."

I groaned. I hadn't come yet, and I wasn't sure I was going to last very long. "You can be in control whenever you like.", I replied. Jeana giggled and she began bouncing slowly on me. Her tits jiggled hypnotically as she moved. I reached up and cupped them, and flicked my thumbs across her nipples. Jeana gasped and began moving faster. I pinched them and she cried out as she came, and I spurted upwards into her a moment later. I thought I was going to blast her off of me, but she never budged.

As soon as I had finished pulsing upwards, I sagged backwards into the blankets. Jeana fell forward onto my chest, still kneeling astride me, my cock still in her pussy. I wasn't sure if I was going to go limp and slip out, but I stayed just firm enough that my cockhead stayed in her now very gooey cunt. I wrapped my arms around her back and held her tight. "I love you.", I told her.

"I love you, too."

I continued to caress her back until I felt myself starting to stiffen again. At that point, I brought a hand around and began running a finger along Jeana's breasts. She shifted slightly, sighing happily, and I was able to reach between us to touch both of them. Jeana began moving as well, so I used my other hand to push her back upright.

I took her hands and pushed them between her thighs. "Go on, touch yourself." Jeana was silent, with a guilty look on her face, but then I felt her fingers gently stirring at our groins, and I knew she was rubbing her clit. I used both hands on her breasts, and became a little harsher, pinching and tugging her nipples. She gasped and her fingers began moving faster, and her ass began bouncing up and down again.

The combination of pussy juice and my come was pistoning out of her, and my crotch felt drenched. More amusing, the fluids ran down my balls, and I felt oddly cooled. This time I was definitely able to control myself, and I lasted through Jeana's orgasm to a second one for her. This time when she fell on top of me, we shifted and she stretched out. Another flood of our mixed come washed out of her onto my midsection. "I can't believe that. It seemed like it would never end."

"I know.", I whispered in her ear.

I think Jeana fell asleep on me for a few minutes. Her breathing became very slow and regular, and she simply wasn't moving, at least until I stopped rubbing her back. That change seemed to rouse her, and she rolled off of me and sat up. "Oh my God, we're a mess!", she exclaimed as she saw how we were both covered in sweat and come.

"That simply means we were doing it right.", I commented.

"You're awful!" She looked around wildly until she found where I had tossed her clothing. "Do you think my parents will find out?"

"Well I certainly don't plan to tell them.", I replied, which got me a dirty look. "Seriously, how will they learn?" I sat up as well. They'll be home by six, I'll be gone before five. You'll have gone upstairs by then and taken a shower. Air out the basement and spray some Lysol or something, and toss this old blanket in the wash."

"You make it sound so easy."

"That's because it is. Listen, tomorrow, you come over to my place. I don't have to worry about anybody coming in early."

Jeana rolled her eyes at that. "Yeah, like they're going to drive me over to your apartment."

"Again, you worry too much. Tell them I coming over in the morning and we're going to go bowling, and you won't be back until after dinner. Do you think they would have a problem with that?", I asked.

"Not when you say it like that."

"Okay, then. In fact, why don't you have the same sort of underwear on to visit me that I had on to visit you?"

Jeana roared in laughter. "Oh, like they wouldn't notice that when I came home. And besides, could you imagine me trying to bowl with these things bouncing all over the place?" She cupped her boobs and jiggled them.

"Well, it would certainly make bowling a far more interesting sport.", I replied.

"You're hopeless! You're still mad at me for beating you the last time."

"Yeah? You've heard of strip poker? How about strip bowling! That'd be one hell of a spectator sport!"

Jeana snorted and laughed, and just shook her head. She stood up and grabbed her robe, and pulled that on, and then picked up her pajamas and undies. "I'm thirsty and hungry. Let's get lunch." I just nodded and pulled on my pants and shirt. I followed her up the stairs.

Jeana pulled a can of soup out of the pantry. "Here, make yourself useful. I need to go up and clean up. Give me about fifteen minutes."

I snapped her a silly salute. "Yes, ma'am! What did you want to drink?"

"Coke is fine." She left the room and I puttered about the kitchen for a bit, finding where the pots and pans were, and pulling out a pan to make soup in. After that, I kept looking until I found some bowls and glasses.

It was closer to twenty minutes before Jeana returned, and I had the soup on a slow simmer at that point. I also had cut a couple of slices of Italian bread and buttered them. Jeana came in wearing a different bathrobe than the terry cloth one from this morning. This was much prettier, a knee length green satin robe. It was also quite obvious from the way she moved around that it was all she had on. Her hair was damp, so I knew she had taken a fast shower.

"Have I told yet today just how beautiful you are?", I asked.

"This morning, but thank you.", she said, smiling.

"I like the robe."

"It's actually one of my mom's. She gave it to me last year. She said it really didn't fit her anymore." She giggled and pulled at the lapels, pulling it out from her chest. "She said she outgrew it!"

I laughed at that. "Well, it sure looks good on you. You should be glad."

"Why?"

"There's an old saying - if you want to know what a girl is going to look like in twenty years, take a look at her mother. Your mother is very nice, so you're going to be very nice in twenty years."

"You were looking at my mother!?"

"Hey, I'm a guy. We look at all women. It's the way we're made."

"You're a pig!", she replied.

I made several oinking noises and then poured about half the soup in her bowl. The rest went into mine, and I poured some Coke and put the bread on a plate next to her soup. "Thank you. You're still a pig, though.", she said.

"Oink, oink, oink! Want to go play with me in the mudpit after lunch. It's what us pigs love to do!"

"Not dressed in this, I don't!"

"That's okay. I bet it comes off." She colored at this, but smiled. We sat at the table eating and talking, just enjoying being together. I was seeing aspects of Jeana I had never seen back before, probably because we were simply more intimate with each other now. She was simply a lot of fun to be with, and very easy to talk to. And, while I hadn't understood it at the time, she simply smoldered with sexuality. Just walking around a room, fully clothed, she radiated that she was all woman, and happy to prove it! I wondered about her parents. Maybe it was an Italian thing, because her mother had it too, although she covered it up well with the whole housewife and working mom routine. I suspected Jeana's father was a happy husband.

After lunch I cleaned up the kitchen, and loaded the dishwasher. Then it was time for the afternoon matinee. I led Jeana back to the basement. The room still had a smell of sex and sweat, and I reminded myself to make sure Jeana hit it with a deodorizer after I left. I sat down in the armchair again, and Jeana crawled into my lap. "Now, where were we again? I think I lost my place."

"We were just about to get undressed and make love some more.", she replied.

"Hmmm, I don't know. Don't we have to wait until two hours after eating?"

"That's swimming, you doofus!"

"Oh, right. Okay, so we can't have sex while swimming until two hours after lunch."

That earned me another giggle, and Jeana took matters into her own hands, in a matter of speaking. She wrapped her arms around my neck and started kissing me. It seemed like a good idea, so I kissed her back. I let my fingers do the walking again and untied the sash holding her satin robe together. Much as I expected, she was wearing invisible pajamas. "I think I like these pajamas even better.", I commented.

"I thought you might."

I began softly caressing her stomach, and idly tracing a fingertip around her belly button. "You know, sooner or later, you're going to have to tell me."

"Tell you what?"

I slipped a finger lower down her body, to tease her through her trim little bush. "Tell me if you touched yourself at night." I slipped a finger inside her and diddled her clit, earning a sharp gasp and a flood of warm pussy juice on my finger. "I'm going to make you tell me."

She laughed a little, but was content to relax in my arms as I played with her body. "Nope, nope, nope. Never going to tell."

"I know how to make you."

"How?"

I pulled my hand away. "By stopping."

Jeana's eyes widened at that. She had been building up to an orgasm, and now I had suddenly stopped. "Ooh, that's mean!"

"I'm a mean kind of guy."

"See if I'm nice to you!", she pouted.

I leaned down and licked her ear. "I want you to show me what you did to yourself. You did, didn't you? Don't lie. I know you did. Do it now, show me what you did.", I whispered lowly. I began caressing her stomach again, but kept my hands from her tits and pussy.

Jeana gave me a whimper. "Oh, don't be mean!" She put her hands on my wrist and tried to push them back to her pussy.

I resisted. "I want to see what you did. I want you to tell me what you like to do. Show me. Teach me how to make it even better for you."

"No...", she answered weakly, still trying to make me touch her.

"You want me to. You need me to touch you. You know it will feel even better than when you do it. Show me what you want me to do to you." I was breathing heavily into her ear, licking her earlobe and neck as I did so, and Jeana was squirming on my lap.

I continued to torment her for just another minute or so, and then she quietly whispered, "Yes."

I immediately stop resisting her hands. "Where do you want me to touch you?", I asked. Jeana pushed my hand back down between her legs. "Show me. Use my fingers like yours." After a few seconds, Jeana's fingers took my index finger and put it directly on her clit, and began moving it. "Do you like that?", I asked.

"Yes." Jeana was almost whimpering with relief as she used my finger to masturbate.

"What else did you do? What about your other hand? Where was it?"

Jeana surprised me. I had expected that her other hand would be rubbing her tits, which is the way Marilyn used to masturbate. Jeana instead pulled my other hand from behind her and pushed it between her legs as well. This was very awkward, sitting on my lap like this. I stopped and we moved back down to the blankets on the floor. Jeana promptly lay back and spread her legs wide apart, and then took both my hands and pushed them back to her crotch. Her legs were splayed open, and she was using her fingers to both spread her pussy wide and move inside and to frantically rub her clit. I took over, using both hands on her as well, but I also leaned down and began sucking on her nipples. That sent her off like a rocket, and she screamed as the orgasm rushed through her. It must have been a good one, because she was shaking all over, and her ass was humping up off the floor as I did it.

I kept up until she begged me to stop. She looked happy, but exhausted. "Were you as loud as that?", I teased her.

"It's better with you here.", she replied.

"I told you I could make you talk."

"You can torture me that way any time you want." She glanced down at my pants, where she could see my erection straining to break free. "What about you?"

"I don't know. I think I'm a tough guy. Maybe you should try torturing me for a while."

In short order, I found myself naked again, and Jeana was working me over. I decided it was time for another lesson, so I had Jeana kneel, and I introduced her to the doggy style. This proved extremely popular, and I fucked her this way until I came inside her.

By four-thirty, we had both managed to make love one more time, this time with me on top, and we were simply beat. I dressed and kissed my love good-bye after we cleaned up the evidence in the basement. Jeana was planning on another shower, and I headed home for a shower and nap. I might fuck myself to death with her, but I'd sure go out with a smile on my face!

Chapter 20: Academic Plans

And that's how we spent the entire Christmas break. Some days I would go over to Jeana's and we would screw our brains out, other days I would pick her up, we'd goof off, and then go back to my apartment and screw our brains out. Isn't it just awful when you get in a rut like that? That first day at my apartment I told her what had happened to me at Christmas. Jeana was horrified, but for the first time really understood why I had to leave.

School started up again, though, and we had to cool it. It was back to no dates on weeknights, and only getting laid on weekends. Jeana's birthday was in mid-January, so I made reservations for dinner and bought her a tennis bracelet to go with her necklace. That weekend her monthly visitor showed up again, so nothing much happened, but I managed to get her off anyway, and I got another couple of handjobs out of it.

Aunt Peg called me a few days after New Years. Suzie must have gotten her address, along with Aunt Nan's. It was a bit curious, though. I think the two of them must have talked and decided that Aunt Peg, my godmother, would call me. First she called Mom, which went over about as well as I expected. Then she called me. I didn't go into too many details with her, but both she and Aunt Nan had witnessed Hamilton's tantrum meltdown at Thanksgiving dinner.

She offered to let me move in with her, but I declined politely. They had a small three bedroom bungalow, with all three bedrooms occupied. I would end up living in the basement of a house with a sump pump that ran 24/7, and when the power stopped, that basement got very damp. Once, during a hurricane, when the power was out for two days, they ended up with three feet of water down there! Besides, no way in the world did I want to move to Pikesville!

As promised, I went over to the Colosimo home the weekend after New Years and made Sunday dinner. I had given Jeana the ingredients list and her mother had picked up what I needed. The fun was that I actually used Jeana as my galley slave and had her cook the meal, while I supervised. Jeana's parents, especially her mother, found this hilarious. Coq au vin is fairly simple to make. I cut the boneless chicken breasts in half, sliced up the ham and mushrooms, and measured out the spices and wine first, while I had Jeana get out all the skillets and pots and pans. Then I put Jeana to work. I had her dredge the chicken pieces in flour and sauté them, and then she added the ham, mushrooms, spices, and wine. We simmered that for about forty-five minutes, adding some water as needed to keep it from drying out and to make a nice gravy.

I also showed her how to make a Dijon sauce, and we had that over some steamed cauliflower. Add in some rolls and some rice to serve with the chicken. It's all simple enough, but requires the timing you only get through experience. Jeana was very proud to have made it, and her mother approved heartily, commenting that she couldn't get her daughter to do anything in the kitchen! Jeana's father was somewhat more suspicious of it all, or he was until I told him that the recipe was actually very similar to chicken saltimbocca, except the ham wasn't prosciutto, and we left out the cheese. Once I told him there was an Italian version he quickly came around, which got smiles from both of the ladies. This must have been a recurring event.

The big doings in January occurred in school. I was college bound. As long as I was enrolled at Towson High and taking classes there, they would pay for me to go take classes over at Towson State. I was signed up for a semester of calculus and a semester of physics. This actually proved tricky. I had my schedule from Towson High, and I would need to find classes which would fit into this schedule. Otherwise I would need to rearrange my high school schedule.

This was trickier than you might imagine. In the future, you would be able to schedule everything over the Internet. You could register, pick out classes, determine schedules, and so forth all by computer. Not in those days. You basically had to stand in long lines and do everything in person. I had already enrolled and pre-registered, and received a packet of information, but so had everybody else. I went over there early in the morning the day of registration, parked, and took my packet and found the line for A-B, and went to the end. By mid-morning I was at the head of the line. A registration person read over my paperwork and walked away to a massive table filled with boxes of computer punch cards. She fished out two punch cards, one for the physics section I wanted and another for the calculus section I wanted, and handed them back to me. I was directed to another table and another line. In this line I was to find that the physics section was already overbooked, and asked to go back for another try. Supposedly they only issued enough punch cards for each class, but it always seemed that something went wrong.

This pretty much sucked, since I wanted to get both sections in the morning, along with the lectures, so I could do my other classes at Towson High in the afternoon. I argued a bit and was directed to a third table and yet another line. Here was a higher ranking professor type, who heard my story and nodded in understanding. He signed a slip giving me permission to take the class and sent me back to the second table and line again. It was after noon before I was out of there, and I considered myself lucky.

I also registered for the SAT test. I would take it in March. I had done well the last time around, and I expected to do even better this time.

What with college starting, high school continuing, and Jeana occupying all my free time, I decided to quit at Pot Springs Pizza. Yes, I was losing maybe $40 a week (don't forget, the minimum wage at the time was only $1.60 an hour) but I surprised myself in the stock market. 1972 was going to be the end of a great bull market. I was going to need to hire a tax accountant this year, for sure, and at the end of the year, sell almost everything and hunker down for a bit. My next major gambit was going to be when oil prices spiked next year, when the Arabs and Israelis went at it again, just like I told Dad once. As it was, if I didn't get stupid, I would make enough in the market to pay for my independent lifestyle, make up what I had forked out, and still turn a tidy profit for the year.

I stayed away from the house. I simply had no interest in dealing with all the drama. Suzie called me about once a week. She told me that Dad had read the letter I gave her, but only after she had given it to him. He hadn't wanted to, but he went out and bought her a foot locker and replaced the door knob on her bedroom door. It didn't seem, however, that Hamilton was focusing any attention on her whatsoever. His hatred was aimed only at me.

Nana was moved into a nursing home on Charles Street. I visited her once, but she didn't really know who I was, so I didn't go back. Suzie moved into her room, as planned all along, and Dad moved her new door knob.

When it was Mom's birthday, I got her a present and wrapped it, and then drove around the Hutzlers parking lot until I spotted her car. I still had my keys to the old Dodge Dart, so I unlocked it and placed it and a card on the passenger seat. She called me later, and while I was still screening all my calls, left me a thank you message. A few weeks later, for Dad's birthday, I had Tusker pick me up a gift bottle of a very expensive bourbon, and I repeated the same procedure, leaving a note to Mom to give it to Dad. If I had taken either gift home, Ham would have chucked it.

Again, I found myself settling into an interesting rut through the spring. Monday through Friday I went to school, both schools, studied, did homework, and otherwise did the scholarship routine. Friday night through Sunday afternoon was Jeana's time. We would always go out, bowling or a movie or a party or something else she would pick out, and then spend time back at the apartment.

She already knew she was leaving the school at the end of the year. Towson High was severely overcrowded, so they had built a new school to the east and were moving about half of the tenth graders over there. Only the juniors and seniors were staying in Towson. Jeana was scheduled to move to Loch Raven, and was very worried we would be apart. I promised her that I would still be around, would still have a car, and would still be in love with her. While I couldn't be with her in school, this semester we weren't together all that much anyway, and we seemed to be doing all right. She was still worried, but I assured her we would make it work.

Jeana was constantly full of surprises for me, pleasant surprises. In early February, when we were in my apartment one afternoon, I had just gotten her naked on the couch, and had fingered her and eaten her to a mindblowing orgasm. I was still dressed, and I began to pull my own clothing off, so that I could have some fun, too. Jeana stopped me, however, and said, "The girls all said you were incredible at eating pussy, and boy were they right!"

"Well, if I die tonight, you and your friends can all chip in and have that chiseled on my tombstone. Good Lord! What else do you girls talk about?" Jesus Christ! Those girls chattered like magpies about shit that if they caught a bunch of guys talking about would get the guys killed!

Jeana laughed nervously. "Well, they wanted to know how I liked sucking your cock."

"Oh, really?" That was something we hadn't done yet. "And you said?"

"I told them I liked it, and most of them said it was a lot of fun with you.", she blurted out in a rush.

I know I had a wicked grin on my face as she told me this and she couldn't have looked more guilty than if she had been caught red-handed with the Hope diamond. "Well, I'm certainly glad you're such a truthful young lady.", I commented.

"Carl!", she protested. "You're not being very helpful."

I laughed loudly at that. "And just how should I be more helpful? Hmmm? I'm not the one telling falsehoods and untruths, am I?"

"Carl!"

I finished undressing and sat next to her on the couch. Little Carl hadn't diminished any, and was standing at attention. "Well, why did you tell them that?"

She looked very sheepish. "I didn't want anyone to think I was a little girl."

I just rolled my eyes. "Trust me, you're not a little girl."

"Do you like, uh, blowjobs?", she asked.

I had to grin at that. "Jeana, every man ever born likes blowjobs."

"So how come you never asked me for one?", she asked.

That was actually a good question. "Well, for one thing, all the other girls I have ever been with, and I will neither confirm nor deny any names, were all much more experienced than you. Like, they weren't virgins, and they all had sucked a cock or two before me. And besides, it's considered a little rude - 'hey, baby, how about sucking down a heavy load' isn't the politest thing a guy can ask a girl."

"Ooooh, yuck!"

"See?" I had to smile at her reaction.

"Well, that's pretty crude, but I bet you could have asked me nicer.", she replied.

I shrugged. "Would you like to find out?" I glanced meaningfully at my erection.

Jeana's eyes followed mine, and she blushed, but she also nodded. "What do I do?"

I have to admit, I had never been asked for lessons on this subject before, but I thought I just might enjoy the idea. I tossed a couple of throw pillows on the floor at my feet. "Well, I would suggest that you get on your knees between my legs for starters."

Jeana grinned, and scooted her pretty little ass off the couch on knelt on the pillows. I spread my legs, and she was up close and personal with Little Carl. She looked up at me expectantly.

"I guess a little anatomy lesson is in order." I pointed out most of the major features using the most common names. I never learned the medical terms. "Now, very important. Down below everything are my nuts, or balls." Jeana nodded and reached out and touched them, a little more forcefully than I like. I practically jumped off the couch. "Jesus! Be careful!"

She looked stricken. "Sorry."

I calmed down and sat back in front of her. "What I was going to say is that they are very, very sensitive! Some guys like a girl to play with them, but some don't, and I am definitely in that group. Before you ever touch them, ask permission."

"What!?"

"Ask!" I mimicked a low and sultry voice. "Oh, baby, I want to kiss and lick your balls! Do you want me to play with your balls while I suck your cock?" She looked shocked at me. "Get the idea?"

"Carling! I'll never do that! I'm with you!"

I smiled. She was only sixteen and this was the one great love of her life. I knew better. "You're right, and I apologize. Just do me a favor and leave the little guys alone, okay?"

She smiled at that. "Okay. So, what should I do first?"

"Well, think of me as a lollipop, and see what happens."

Jeana nodded and extended her tongue, and began to softly lick the shaft from bottom to top. However, I must have scared her off of using her hands, so I tended to move away from her. I told her that the no hands rule was only for my nuts, and that I really liked it when she played with my cock otherwise. That got me a very large grin, and she reached out and took control of the situation. She continued to lick my shaft and cockhead for several minutes, and started jacking me off at the same time.

That was going to get her a surprise soon, so I said, "Go a little slower, unless you're trying for a speed record. Now, the next step is open your mouth, and put me inside." Jeana's mouth came open and my cockhead slipped in. I groaned at the wet warmth, but then I felt her teeth, and that wasn't as nice. "Careful there, remember, no matter what you do, no teeth. Open wide and stay that way!" Jeana opened her mouth more and began bobbing her head up and down.

"Oh, that's so good! Just keep doing that! Don't stop, don't stop!" My mind totally lost track of the lesson plan. Jeana was doing just fine on her own. She even put a little suction on the end, and was jacking me so nicely. "Don't stop, just like that, don't stop..." My hips began moving up and down, involuntarily trying to push in deeper. "That's it, that's it, oh, oh..." Come started pumping up my shaft. Jeana gagged and coughed, but soldiered on gamely. My jism spurted into her mouth, and some dribbled back out of her lips, but she managed to swallow some of it, and a little more got on her face.

When I was pumped dry, I looked down at her jism smeared face. "That was amazing!", I said weakly.

Jeana looked up at me happily. "I did it right?"

"You did it more than right, honey."

"I wasn't sure."

I smiled. "This is a test that is very easy to grade. If the guy comes, you passed."

Jeana giggled. "Has that ever happened? You know, somebody fails the test."

I shrugged. Marilyn had given terrible blowjobs. They were okay for making me stiff before we screwed, but she never got the hang of just doing it for full release. She would always try to give me deep throat, which she really couldn't do, she never totally got her teeth out of the picture, and she tended to stop just before I came, to try a new trick. "It can happen."

Jeana noticed her face was covered with jism, so she stood and ran off to the kitchen sink and washed her face. I stood up and followed her. "So, we know I liked it, but what about you? I don't want to do anything you don't like to do."

Jeana dried her face and I decided to run that dishtowel through the laundry before using it again. "It was okay. I mean, it's not chocolate ice cream, but it was okay."

"I meant, did you enjoy doing that, or did it feel wrong to you or something?"

"Huh?"

I had to be careful here. In the future, a certain strain of super-feminists would proclaim that all sex, but especially fellatio, was demeaning and cruel to women. "Well, I've heard some women think it's demeaning to them."

She gave me a look like I was a little crazy. "I bet they wouldn't say that if you were the one doing the eating, and not them!"

"You're probably right."

She grinned at me. "You think I should practice some more?"

I grinned right back. "You can never practice too much! Why don't we go get on the bed first? Have you ever heard of sixty-nine?"

Jeana smiled. "I've heard of it, but maybe you should teach me."

"Maybe I should."

From there on in, oral sex on both our parts became an integral part of our lovemaking, and we both practiced as often as possible.

The rest of the semester went forward in a bit of a blur. There were times I felt definitely overstretched, but Jeana was always there to settle me down and take care of me, and I tried to do the best I could by her. I always knew in the back of my head that ultimately we would end up separating, but if I could delay that, it was a good idea. I kept my weekends open for anything she wanted to do. Usually once a month I would cook a Sunday supper over at her house and teach her a new recipe.

The biggest issue I had was balancing attendance at two different schools. I pretty much had an open hall pass over at Towson High, since my schedule depended on my class schedule over at Towson State. A fair bit of my high school classes I ended up doing self study in the library. I still tried to spend time there every day, to see my friends at home room or lunch, and go to lacrosse games or school plays and such.

I also applied to college, but just one college, RPI - Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. I wanted to go back. Before, it had been just one of three schools I applied to and was accepted at. Now I only applied to the one. Why there, when I could have gotten into almost any school now? Because I liked it! The city itself, Troy, is a dump, but the school was small and intimate, and had a frighteningly high IQ. You've heard the expression about learning something from the guy 'who wrote the book' on the subject? At RPI, the professors quite literally wrote textbooks on the subjects they taught. Some of these guys were simply world class. I took at least half a dozen courses where the books we used were written by the professors, and they were used around the country. In 1973, the year I would start there, the Nobel Prize in Physics was won by a fellow at GE who had gotten his doctorate at RPI and his thesis was the basis for the Nobel Prize.

Besides, I learned much more from RPI than simply what was in the classes. The school itself is in the top 25 engineering schools in the nation, at least according to the various polls and rankings on the subject. They had an attrition rate of about 50%; in other words, half of all students flunked out. It was incredibly tough.

At every other college, every semester you would have that one class that everybody dreaded, that one teacher who piled on homework, gave ruthless tests, and graded like Attila the Hun. However, you could always tell yourself that this was the only class that semester that would be like that, and then sleep through everything else.

At Rensselaer, all of your classes were like that. I graduated down in the bottom third of my class, but I did graduate, and I have never in my lifetime faced a tougher intellectual standard. I've heard Marines say the same thing about boot camp; that if they could survive that, they could survive anything. It was the same for me at RPI. No matter what happened to me and no matter how tough life was, I survived RPI, I could survive anything. Maybe this time I wouldn't be in the bottom of the class.

Let me put it another way. Even when drunk and stoned out of your mind with a bunch of equally drunk and stoned college assholes, you could end up in a scientific discussion. I remember once being stoned and drunk with another couple of guys, and we actually designed a microwave system using negative feedback control systems to stop cars from tailgating. Thirty years later a similar system would become a common option among high end cars.

The application process was fairly simple, but it took time. There was no Internet then, so you couldn't just apply online. I had to call long distance and have a packet mailed to me. At the end of the semester my grades would be mailed from Towson High and Towson State. When the SAT scores came back, they would be mailed directly to RPI. I put in for early acceptance. The last time around I had scored 1340 on my SATs, which definitely beat my B-/C+ school grades. This time around I should have straight As and a higher SAT score. I expected to get in on early acceptance.

By the end of the semester, I learned I had beaten my previous SAT scores by a fair bit. My old 660 in reading/writing was now a 720. My old 680 in math was all the way up to 780. I still took this with a grain of salt. Hamilton was going to end up with a perfect 800 in both. Still, 1500 was a more than respectable number. When I mailed my packet back to RPI at the end of the semester, I was fairly sure I would be accepted early on.

At the end of the semester, just before the end of school, I took Jeana to the Junior/Senior Prom. This prom was held in the school gym, and was the only really formal dance held there. Mind you, things were much more formal at that time than they would be in the future, but it was still even more formal than usual. The Senior Prom required that you be a senior, although your guest could be younger than that. Generally a lot of senior guys had girlfriends who were juniors or even sophomores. (It was almost unheard of for a senior girl to be dating a junior or sophomore.) The Junior/Senior Prom was the same rules, but now included juniors, so I could attend and take Jeana as my date. The other rule was that juniors had to wear a tuxedo, but seniors didn't. I think this was because they had to rent a tux for the Senior Prom already, and renting one twice would be too expensive.

Thankfully I looked actually fairly good in my tux, which spoke volumes about how my workouts and early morning runs had me in shape. Back when I did this previously, in high school and at my wedding, it was almost impossible to find a tuxedo that didn't make me look like what I really was, impossibly skinny and wearing a too large rented suit. I skipped on the wacky colors some guys were getting, and simply went with basic black, although I did manage to find one with a vest and not a cummerbund. What a useless piece of clothing!

It didn't matter in the long run, though, since nobody would be looking at me, and everyone would be looking at Jeana. She had piled that long brown hair up on top of her head, leaving her neck and shoulders bare, and looked like a goddess. She had on a long green gown, tight through the bodice and hips, but flowing around her legs, with a halter top. She looked amazing! What in the world this girl was doing hanging around with me was something I continued to ask myself, and I never came up with a decent answer. I just thanked God she saw something in me that I didn't see.

When we left her house that night, Jeana informed me that her mother had lifted her curfew. As long as she got home before dawn, nobody was going to say a word. She had told her parents that there was going to be a major party after the dance, which didn't get out until midnight in any case, and they relented.

"So does that mean you are planning on leaving the prom early, and skipping the party?", I asked teasingly.

"No on One, yes on Two.", she replied. I eyed her and she smiled. "If you knew the trouble it took to get my hair up like this, you wouldn't ask."

"You look so beautiful, I don't know if I'll be able to wait until then. What if we're dancing and I get a sudden urge right out there on the dance floor?"

She laughed. "Remember that thing I do for you sometimes?" She held a hand up and curled her fingers, then moved it in a pumping fashion. "You'll just have to head off to the bathroom and take care of that urge yourself."

"That's cold, lady, cold!", I protested.

"On the other hand, if you behave yourself, you're going to get a very nice surprise later on."

"What?"

She shook her head. "It's a surprise, remember?"

Jeana looked spectacular that night. Oh, sure, there were more than a few girls there who looked spectacular. It was, after all, a prom, and they really tend to go all out for that sort of event. Still, I thought she was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen. A lot of guys thought so as well, and Jeana basked in the attention she got. It took all my willpower not to hustle her out of there until the end of the dance, although I made sure I informed her how strong the urge was. She took pity on me about halfway through the last set, and we left early. Fortunately, it being June, it was warm and neither of us needed coats. We headed back to my apartment, getting there a few minutes before midnight.

"When do I get my surprise?", I asked.

Jeana wagged a finger at me. "Don't be so hasty. Maybe if we had a glass of wine first?"

I think I broke a new land speed record opening up a bottle of Pouilly Fuisse. I poured a pair of glasses and toasted her. "To the most beautiful woman I have ever seen."

"And to the equally handsome man who took me dancing.", she replied. We sipped our wine, and I eyed her expectantly. "What's on television?", she asked coyly.

It was my turn to wag a finger at her. "If we have to watch TV, I'm taking your Pouilly Fuisse and giving you Ripple!"

She smiled at me over her glass. "Well, this is too nice for that. Would you hold my glass for a moment? Thank you." I took her glass, and she reached behind her back, and I heard the zipper on the dress come down. Then, as she stood there and smiled at me silently, she undid the clasp on the halter top. Her gown slipped to the floor pooling around her feet. My heart almost stopped, seeing her standing there. I knew she had to have been without a bra, since the halter top pretty much precluded that. What I hadn't expected was that Jeana was wearing sheer stockings, and not pantyhose, and that she had skipped on the panties. Now she simply stood there in her stockings and three inch heels, and calmly sipped wine with me.

"Oh my God!", I exclaimed. Suddenly my mouth was dry and I felt a flush hit my face.

"I'm not overdressed am I?", she asked with a smirk.

"No, the look is perfect for you." I cleared my throat. "Uh, would you mind if I took off my jacket?" And everything else?!

Jeana sat down and settled back against one arm of the couch. I didn't strip down completely, but I did kick off my shoes and took off the jacket and vest and bow tie. "I have to tell you, honey, the gown was gorgeous, but this definitely is better."

She laughed. "I thought you might like it!"

"Oh?"

"I've seen your Playboy magazines. I know what guys like."

I blushed at that. Now that I was living on my own, with a PO Box as an address, I could get Playboy delivered to me. I was too young to be able to buy it in a store. High heels, stockings, and a smile were perennial favorites. Jeana had seen it every once in a while on an end table, but I never knew she had actually looked through it. "Hey, I read it for the articles."

"So I should get dressed again?"

"I don't only read it for the articles." I finished my glass of wine and set it down and moved closer to Jeana. She simply smiled, finished her glass, and set it aside herself. She made short order of my remaining clothing, and then we made love right there on the couch, with her arms wrapped around my neck, and those unbelievable stocking clad legs wrapped around my waist, and her heels urging me on from time to time.

Afterwards, we went into the bedroom. I pulled her hair loose, but kept her stockings and heels on, and she got on top for the next go, and then we did our final set missionary position again. It was the most incredible way to finish the school year.

Chapter 21: Senior Year

Tuesday, November 7, 1972

It was about halfway through the fall semester of my senior year. All sorts of things were going on. Today was the day Tricky Dick was reelected President of these United States. The man was a seriously flawed but seriously underestimated man. Nixon probably had the finest mind for foreign policy of any President since the end of the Second World War. He also, very surprisingly considering he was a hard core Republican, signed into law a plethora of domestic regulation legislation, including the Clean Air Act, the EPA, the war on cancer, and the Title IX reforms that increased women's presence in sports, all of which his future Republican successors would blame on the Democrats as socialism. He was also incredibly paranoid and committed any number of crimes as the President. Angel or demon? I've been following politics since his time and I still don't have the answer. He was certainly no worse than some of the buffoons who followed him.

Today was also the day I received my early admission notice to Rensselaer, along with a big packet related to financial aid. I shitcanned that. I wasn't going to get anything in financial aid through the college. For one thing, looking through the FAFSA financial aid forms I noticed that it required a list of my assets. The average student at the time might have been able to save up anywhere from a few hundred bucks up to a grand; I had over seventy grand in the brokerage. No need based scholarships for this student.

There were a couple of different alternatives. One was that I was way, way up in the class standings. Apparently A grades at a college counted extra in the class rankings calculations. The odds were good that I would get some scholarships given simply to the top student in a field, probably math. However the scholarship I was really banking on was different. I was applying for a ROTC scholarship.

I had given this a fair bit of thought, both this time and the first time around. I skipped it then. Back when I was choosing colleges and trying to figure things out, we were still involved in Viet Nam, and despite the glowing reviews of the beauty of Southeast Asia given by the recruiters, that was an insane and stupid war. My parents wouldn't have stopped me from joining, but they wouldn't have helped me along either. While I could join the army at seventeen, I would need their signatures to do it, and there was no way in the world they would sign off on me quitting high school to do that. I could get a military scholarship or drop out of college and join.

That brought me to a second reason I didn't do it way back when. I went to school as a chemistry major, and the BIG topic in military science in the Seventies was something called binary nerve agents - nerve gas. Now, mind you, I was always a good lab chemist. I had excellent technique and routinely handled toxic and carcinogenic materials with ease. Nerve gas scared the bejeezus out of me! Forget about getting it on you in any way - just looking at it funny is enough to make you twitchy the rest of your life! I knew that if I got out of a high end technical college like RPI with a chemistry degree, my duty station was going to be Dugway Proving Ground, hoping like hell the wind didn't shift and spread gaseous hell all over me. No thanks!

Now, with the benefit of hindsight, I knew the Army could actually be done safely. After we got out of Viet Nam, the Army saw relatively little action for about another decade. Grenada was in '83 and fairly small, and Panama was in '89 and not much bigger. Things didn't start getting dicey again until the '90s. If I got out of RPI with a math degree or two, I would almost certainly be assigned to a nice warm non-chemical lab somewhere.

Furthermore, the military is actually something of a family business for the Buckmans. We've been here since the 1750s, and while we managed to avoid the Revolution, every generation of Buckmans since has served in some form of the military, right from the second generation, which served in the Maryland Militia during the War of 1812. (That might not be the best of examples, considering the Maryland Militia led the retreat at the Battle of Bladensburg. A Buckman probably led the way. We gloss over those details.) Mind you, we've never been movers and shakers, and I don't think anybody got much higher than a sergeant or lieutenant, but we always served.

We actually had a wall in the family room with photos of family members in uniform that I can remember from when I was little; my mother laughingly called it the 'Wall of Heroes.' There's a photo of my grandfather (Dad's dad, who I'm named after) in his army uniform from World War I, complete to campaign hat and puttees. There were several photos of Dad in his naval uniform during World War II. Over the years it would include Hamilton in his army uniform when he joined the Maryland National Guard, and Suzie's husband and two of her sons, who were in the Marines, and Parker, who went Navy. I was actually just about the only family member who never served. There was never any pressure on us, but we always knew it was an honorable choice to make, and one which would be approved of. After Mom passed away, Suzie took over the wall and mounted it in her house; it will probably pass down to one of her boys.

Probably the biggest reason that I was going the military route was that I just wanted to do something I had never done before. Was I supposed to go through this life just repeating what I had done before? Or could I do better? It wasn't about the money, either. I had already proved to myself that my knowledge of future events could pay off for me. I wouldn't be poor, and would probably be much richer. Still the idea of just watching the money roll in was too sterile. Yes, I could do it, but couldn't I do more?

So I pushed myself to do things that I had never done before, things that I could say I had earned on my own, and not because I knew about the future. I did aikido and worked out. I was going to get a doctorate. Now I was going to try the Army. I wanted to be challenged. Before, in my first life, I had always wanted jobs where there was a challenge and a payoff, sales for instance, or something that would let me stand out.

I had solidified my acceptance with a school visit to RPI over the summer. One of the things I remembered dramatically from the summer of '72 were the school visits I made that summer. The first visit I was to make was to the University of Rochester (accepted) and then Syracuse University (not impressed.) Both were to be done the weekend of June 23-25, which just happened to be the same days that Hurricane Agnes came ashore and ran straight up the Chesapeake Bay, ripped north up the Susquehanna River valley, and died in western New York. Dad insisted we all drive up, and it took us eight hours to go north about 60 miles, give up, and turn around.

Now, to a Marylander, hurricanes are more of a nuisance than anything else. We don't get all that many, being north of the expected tracks for the average hurricane. Further, the real damage from a hurricane will come from two sources. The high winds can throw a lot of debris around, and the storm surge can flood things. Still, unless you live near the water's edge or in low lying areas, the water won't get you, and as for debris, a sturdy house protects you and you stay away from the windows. Generally, unless it's a Category 4 or 5, you just wait it out. I remember when my parents retired, they took a trip out to Arizona, just in time for a very freaky Pacific hurricane that ran up the Gulf of California. The locals were going crazy, but my folks were just going, "So what?"

I didn't remember the specific dates of Hurricane Agnes, but I did know the normal hurricane season runs from June through November, and the hurricanes are named alphabetically, so Agnes would have been in the beginning of the season. I made my visit at the end of July, about a month after Agnes blew through.

The visit was interesting. Troy is about 350 miles north of Baltimore, so I was going to drive up on Friday, do my interview Saturday morning, and then drive back in the late afternoon. Normally there are two routes, a coastal route and an inland route. The coastal route takes I-95 up to New York, and then the New York Thruway up to Albany. The inland route takes you up the Harrisburg Expressway, I-83, to Harrisburg, and then I-81 up to Binghamton. From there you take I-88 up to Albany. From Albany you take I-787 to Troy. The only problem was that in the early Seventies, most of I-88 was still under construction, leaving partial rides on Route 7. I took the coastal route.

I stayed in a noname motel in Watervliet Friday night. In the future, especially after 9/11, you couldn't do that without credit cards, but I simply paid cash and nobody cared. The next morning, dressed in a blue blazer and pressed khakis, I showed up at RPI and parked near the Student Union. Inside the Admissions office I was first met by a student who gave me a fascinating tour, although it was fascinating as much for what the young man got wrong as what he got right. He was a sophomore and probably had learned where the bathrooms were just the previous week. I had forgotten more about the school than this kid had learned.

After a delicious lunch in the freshman dining hall, with food of a quality only seen during parent visits, I met with an assistant to an assistant for the interview. The biggest issue the interviewer had was where my parents were. My response, that 'I was pretty independent.', didn't quite penetrate. He kept asking about how they were going to find out about financial aid, and what if they had questions about the school. He finally passed me along to another person higher up the food chain who was much more at ease with me and actually took the time to review my transcripts and SAT scores. He was most impressed with the two papers I had my name on, and quizzed me closely about them.

A lot of colleges proclaim they want a varied and well balanced student body. They really stress they want students who have diverse interests. Rensselaer had a slightly different perspective. They wanted really smart nerds. Diverse interests were limited to making sure they met the various minimum quotas of minorities the federal government was looking for. When my second interviewer asked about my hobbies, I pulled out my wallet and showed him a picture of Jeana in a short sundress and high heeled sandals. He just grinned and said he had had similar hobbies when he was in high school.

Now, with my acceptance to RPI in the bag, I just needed to apply to the Army by the end of the year. My grades would be more than sufficient, and I was sure I could pass any background check. I just needed four letters of reference. I asked Pastor Joe (himself an Air Force vet), Mr. Steiner (a Marine on Guadalcanal), Mrs. Rogers, my math tutor, and Professor Milhaus, the chemistry professor who had helped during the Science Fair. All agreed to write me letters of recommendation, although Mrs. Rogers and Professor Milhaus thought I was throwing away my talents. It was easy enough to ask, since these were the same people I got to write my letters of reference for admission to RPI. I would need to have an interview with an officer after they got my formal application and letters, and enough of a background check to make it worth their while to take me.

Summer break had been enjoyable. I took three classes at Towson State, all in the social sciences field. RPI had an unusual requirement, in that while you had to take eight humanities or social sciences, one a semester, they didn't care what they were. There weren't even requirements to take any English courses. This didn't become an issue until I went back to school in the '90s and was required to take two semesters of English Composition and Literature. The teacher was an adjunct who taught eighth grade English at a local school and I had been published back when she still playing with her Barbie dolls. I already had a master's degree by that time, but they wanted me to take English (gym, too, but I got out of that.) It was ridiculous.

Since school was out, I had to pay for the summer classes out of my pocket, but that was it. This was in the time before college costs began rising faster than medical costs. It was just a few hundred dollars for the three courses, Intro to Psychology, Intro to Sociology, and Western Civilization I (intro to history.) RPI had a dismal humanities and social sciences curriculum, as could be expected from a college of nerds. Towson State was much better in the liberal arts.

That, however, was the tough part of summer, and it wasn't all that tough. The easy part was spending a lot of time with Jeana. Sometimes we were in her basement, sometimes I would pick her up and bring her back to the apartment, and sometimes we would ride our bikes up around Loch Raven to see the submarine races. We never saw too many submarines, but Jeana sure saw an awful lot of my periscope that summer. We worked on our all over tans too, which was a lot of fun, especially when it came time to rub on the sunscreen. Even if we weren't working on the all over tan, Jeana in a bikini was an awe inspiring sight, even a religious experience. At least the phrases that came to mind were certainly religious - "Oh my God!" and "Sweet Jesus!" were just two of many.

Some of the more memorable dates involved going to the movies - the drive-in movies! Timonium still had the Timonium Drive-In in those days, up off Timonium Road, and while they generally played family friendly fare, by the second showing, the kids were asleep and people were getting frisky in the back seats. A couple of times I saw a few babies snoozing while their youngish parents got it on in the front seat. It all reminded me of the time I took Marilyn to the Malta Drive-In in upstate New York, a venue which actually showed X rated movies. She was wearing a sundress, fishnets, and high heels, and not much else! I forget what the movie was, but it didn't have a candle to what we were up to or what was going on around us!

My senior year I took a second semester of calculus, a second semester of physics, and a first semester of chemistry. I figured that by the end of my senior year I should be able to finish off RPI's science and big chunk of the liberal arts requirements, along with most of the calculus I would need through sophomore year. I was toying with the idea of very aggressively burning through some credits, more than I had considered before. Originally I had been thinking about 35-40 credits, but with the addition of the liberal arts during summer school, there was no reason I couldn't bring that total up to 50-60, the equivalent of two years of college. RPI's policy was to accept grades that were B or better, and so far I was working at an A level.

That would leave all the advanced math and computer courses to be done at RPI. That was a lot more important in those days than in the future. At the time, computer programming courses had to be very cognizant of the computer they would be run on. In the future, personal computers would run C++ or Java or other more advanced programming with no differences based on the computer. Not so in the early days. My first programming course at RPI was Fortran 4, with a Watfor compiler specifically for an IBM 360 mainframe running batch processing using punch cards. Just a few years later I was programming in Basic for a terminal version of an IBM 370 at Fairleigh Dickinson, using a teletype machine while working on my MBA. Meanwhile, at work I was programming with a different flavor of Basic on a PDP-11 minicomputer with a keyboard and monitor. Better to learn the language while using the computer I would be working with.

My time back at the Buckman house was very limited. I was invited on the family vacation to Rehoboth Beach, but since they would be staying at a Bed and Breakfast and I would have to share a room with Hamilton, I turned it down. For once my parents didn't push it. I did visit for Suzie's birthday party, although I watched Hamilton like a hawk to make sure he didn't destroy my present to her. Otherwise I stayed away. Sunday had been my 17th birthday, so I went over for dinner and presents, which was quite strained. There was even a present from Ham, but it was obvious Mom had bought it, and she damn near had a leash on him all through dinner and the party afterwards. I thanked him and it was all he could do to keep from spitting at me.

I spent as much time as possible with Jeana. There was a part of me that got very depressed when I looked at Jeana and thought of the future. In a year's time we would be splitting apart. I was going to college 350 miles away, and she would be staying back home, a heartbreakingly beautiful girl in her senior year. No way was she going to wait for me, and it wouldn't be fair to ask her to. I had no idea how that was going to go. Would she break up with me? Would I have to break it off with her? Our feelings for each other now were far deeper than they had been before.

Many years before, on my first shot, we had broken up at the end of that first year. Later, in college, I had called her out of the blue, and we had gone out to dinner, to see if there was anything still there. There wasn't. We had changed, me as much as her. She was far more worldly and sophisticated, no longer a little high school kid, and to be fair, my life had moved on as well. Thomas Wolfe was right, you can't go home again.

Right now, however, I was still dating the prettiest girl in town. I still couldn't figure out what she saw in me, but I wasn't going to look a gift horse in the mouth. (Hell of an analogy, Jeana didn't look at all like a horse!)

As I told Jeana, we wouldn't have to break up when she went to Loch Raven High. What with my schedule for classes over at Towson State, it was actually fairly easy for me, at least half the time, to drive over and pick her up. She rode home with me instead of on the school bus, and if we just managed to make a stop along the way at my apartment, nobody seemed to notice. I actually felt relatively comfortable hanging around with her and her friends over there, since it was a new school primarily made up of transfers from Towson High. On my first go-around, I dated a girl my senior year who attended Dulaney Valley, our archrival to the north, and I always felt very uncomfortable there.

Now, not only could I take Jeana to school dances or plays at Towson, she could invite me over to Loch Raven for their events. Every girl likes to be taken to events, and Jeana was no different. The interesting thing to me was school plays and band concerts. After Marilyn and I started working for her father in the mid-Eighties, we built a house in a small town outside of Cooperstown, with a central school K-12 of barely 800 kids. School plays and concerts were awful, because the tryouts consisted of making sure everybody had a pulse. At Towson High, with three grades consisting of almost 2,000 students, we had enough people that they actually had tryouts and the kids had to learn their lines and compete for parts. Our senior year musical was The Music Man, and the male lead ended up going to Hollywood and becoming a real actor, though in character roles and bit parts. Still, there was an obvious depth of talent available.

The last few weeks of April through the last few weeks of May are prom season. This year I could take Jeana to three formal dances, and she went nuts figuring out dresses and outfits. We had the Senior Prom at Towson, and Junior-Senior Proms at both Towson and Loch Raven. I would only need to rent a tux for my senior prom; for the other two, a dark suit and new shirt would be sufficient. This was all in the day before people started getting crazy, with renting limos and party rooms at hotels and such. The most elaborate thing any of us did was when Tusker, one of the more flamboyant bikers and Vo-Tech students, and possessed of shoulder length red hair and a magnificent mustache, went all out on an all white tuxedo, top hat, and walking stick. He looked spectacular!

Tusker was a good friend of mine, and he was a real character. He had flunked his sophomore year and been held back. He had actually run for class president in our senior year, on the platform that he had an extra year of experience! Made sense to me! He lost, but still managed to beat out some of the other senior suckups.

Jeana wore a couple of cocktail dresses to the junior-senior proms, but did the evening gown routine again for our senior prom. Mrs. Colosimo insisted I come early each night, so she could get pictures of us, and my mother made me bring Jeana over the night of our senior prom, so she could get pictures. Jeana hinted to me that she was wearing something similar to last year for each prom, which I took to mean stockings and not pantyhose. This made me really look forward to finding out, and more than a little surprised that she would consider this while wearing above-the-knee cocktail dresses. She did, however, so I decided to surprise her as well.

At the end of the last break during the Towson High junior-senior dance, the first of the two junior-senior dances, I pulled her around the corner in the gym, into a very dark spot, and before she could stop me, I reached under her dress and pulled her lace panties off. I tucked those in my pocket and led her back out to the dance floor. Jeana was very nervous about this, as stockings themselves were extremely daring for the time, and she stayed on my arm the rest of the evening like glue. She did whisper in my ear, however, that she was incredibly turned on, and wanted to leave almost as soon as I did this, and not out of embarrassment. We never even made it back to my apartment before she was crawling across the bench seat of the Galaxie and pleading for me to stop and screw her right there in the car. I just smiled and drove to the apartment, where I took care of her in a more comfortable setting.

Chapter 22: End Of The Year

Saturday, June 9, 1973

School was over. Finals had been this week, and now they were done. Towson State had finished a couple of weeks earlier. I was basically all set. I had the credits I needed to graduate, early acceptance at RPI, and even my formal letter of acceptance into ROTC. I was signed up for a few more humanities and social sciences classes at Towson State this summer, to kill some time and pick up some more easy credits.

The most amazing thing to me was that I was the class valedictorian. This was the student with the highest grades in the class, and it seemed as if the college credits I had aced weighed more than high school credits. The really crazy part was that neither time I went through this I had been asked to join the National Honor Society. This just proved to me that it was totally about favoritism and school politics and nothing about grades. When Parker went through high school, he ended up as salutatorian (number 2 in grades) and was asked to join. When Maggie followed him a few years later, with even better grades, but a don't fuck with me attitude, she wasn't asked to join. How I became valedictorian without being asked amazed me.

But valedictorian I was, and now, instead of sitting with my classmates, I would sit up on the stage and have to make a speech. Graduation itself was being held off campus, since we simply didn't have the facilities to handle it. I had a graduating class of about 660, and if you figured each of those 660 had 4-5 family members coming, you needed seats for almost 4,000. We actually were having graduation over at Essex Community College, over on the far side of the county.

I wasn't sure I was inviting anybody, except maybe Jeana. Once I moved out of the house, I changed my address with the school to my new PO Box. However, this was in the days before massive databases, and school records were a hodgepodge of written records, some kept in the school office, some at the county Board of Education, and still others spread around to places like the counseling office. Before I even had a chance to decide if I wanted guests, my mother called to say she had received the tickets already. I just shrugged silently and got a spare ticket for Jeana. If Hamilton showed up and fucked with me, I'd just kill him on the spot and let Dad handle it.

I really thought hard about my speech. When I was 17 the first time, I was terribly afraid of public speaking. I didn't become comfortable with speaking in front of groups until I was older and going to grad school. Once you are in an MBA program, you end up speaking to lots of classes about business plans and presentations, and I got over my nerves. I wasn't worried at all now about speaking. I just wondered what the acoustics would be like. The school gives you a bunch of suggested topics a few weeks ahead of time, with lots of crap like how we are marching into the future, and bullshit like that.

I didn't like those topics, and when it finally came to me, I wasn't sure the school would allow me to make the speech. I went ahead and wrote it anyway, and submitted it to the Principal. He read it, and then reread it. "You really want to get up on stage and say this?", he asked.

"I do."

He replied, "You aren't going to make any friends with this."

"Maybe that's why I need to say it."

He gave me a hard look and then shrugged. He signed off on it with the words, "It's your funeral." He handed it back to me.

Now it was time to speak. We had all marched in together, in alphabetical order, but I was at the front of the line, and I had marched up to the stage. Several other faculty members were up there in gowns and mortarboards, along with the guest speaker, a local county representative or something of the sort, a politician. We marched in, girls on the left and guys on the right, and sat in the lower seats facing the stage. Parents and guests sat on the sides, up in the bleachers (but a lot more comfortable chairs than regular bleachers) watching. After everybody and their brother got through talking, but right before we got our diplomas, it was my turn. I stood and went to the podium. I was more worried about tripping in the damn robes than in anything else. Mine were too long and dragged on the floor. I reached inside and pulled out my speech and set it on the podium and looked out. I took a deep breath. Showtime! I was about to lose every friend I had gained in the last four-plus years.

When I was asked to speak today, I wondered what I should speak about. I wondered what legacy our class would leave behind, and even more importantly, what legacy our generation would leave behind. As a nation we are rapidly approaching our third century of existence. Are we as a generation prepared to handle it?

Two hundred years ago, a generation of Americans with names such as Washington, Jefferson, and Adams were already talking about their legacy. They would go on to declare independence, fight a war, and write a constitution, and then build an entire new country. Theirs was a legacy of service and sacrifice.

Four score and seven years later, another generation of Americans had a disagreement about the future of that new country. They had another war, but they ended slavery and conquered a continent. Theirs was a legacy of service and sacrifice.

I had to be careful here. Maryland was still south of the Mason-Dixon Line and even though the Civil War ended over a century ago, there were still some people in the neighborhood who called it The War of Northern Aggression. Once a new preacher came to town and put The Battle Hymn of the Republic on the hymn list for Sunday service, and half a dozen people got up and marched out of the church!

Our parent's generation climbed out of the Great Depression, defeated Tojo, Mussolini, and Hitler, and then went on to put a man on the Moon. Theirs was a legacy of service and sacrifice.

Now it is our generation's turn. We even have a name, the Baby Boomers. We were born between 1946 and 1964, and we here are right in the middle of that generation. Our parents survived the Depression, and after fighting in World War II and Korea, decided to come home and relax. Well, we're the result of that relaxation. As a group, we are the largest, the richest, the most privileged, and the most pampered generation of Americans yet born. I look at the legacy we are building, and so far it isn't very impressive.

If the power goes out we complain because we can't watch our favorite TV show, yet my father was born in a farmhouse without electricity or running water. We complain about war and burn our draft cards, but my mother would go on vacation to the beach and see ships burning where German submarines sank them. One day our parents will be known as the greatest generation of Americans, and we will be known as a bunch of whiny bastards! If previous generations left us legacies of service and sacrifice, ours seems to be a legacy of entitlement!

Okay, I stole the 'greatest generation' line from Tom Brokaw, but by the time he writes it in the new future, nobody here will remember. Also, the Principal had wanted me to lose the word bastards, and I told him I would change it. Somehow it got left in.

This not a legacy I wish to leave behind. A member of our parents' generation once said it best. He fought against tyranny and oppression, was wounded in that fight, and then survived to become a great American leader, only to end up paying the ultimate price for his service. John F. Kennedy told us to not ask what our country can do for us, but to ask what we can do for our country. I cannot change the behavior of a generation. I can only change my own behavior, and tell others what they can do to change their behavior. I cannot make commitments about how others will behave, but I can make commitments as to how I will behave. Therefore, I plan to make the following commitments.

First, I am going to college. There is no surprise in that. I dare say that every valedictorian in America will go on to college. No, my commitment is to go to a school that teaches science and engineering. Scientists and engineers invent and build things, and inventing and building things seems a whole lot more productive than buying and selling and squabbling about things.

I hoped that wouldn't insult the salespeople and lawyers in the crowd. I wondered if they would even be aware I was talking about them.

Second, I commit myself to serving our country. Again, it is not too surprising that a valedictorian has some scholarships lined up. Mine is through the Army. I will be a soldier. We live in a great nation, and one that has enemies. I doubt I will make it a career, but I intend to help protect this nation, so that future generations will have the chance to make their own legacies.

And finally, I plan to make some money, maybe quite a bit of money. No, that is not the commitment; that is just the American dream. No, my final commitment is that when the time comes, every April 15th, to pay my taxes, I will do so with a smile. Taxes are what we pay for civilization, said a member of the generation that ended slavery, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. They pay for roads and bridges and sewers and water and police and firemen and garbage collectors and everything else we need to function. So I will pay those taxes and not complain, because I much prefer living in a civilized world than in an uncivilized world.

Those are the prices I will pay, to leave our nation a better place. What price will you pay, or will you decide not to pay anything? My challenge to you is to commit to improving this nation and to leave behind a legacy of service and sacrifice like those who gave us this chance. Thank you.

I stepped back from the podium. I had been so nervous about what I was saying, I hadn't really noticed the reaction I had gotten. Was anybody even listening, or were they all just sitting there waiting for this interminable day to end? I looked out at the audience, and they were just sitting there staring at me in silence. Okay, this had been a notable bust. I moved back to my chair, hoping to not make any more of an ass of myself than I could.

Then the applause started. I looked up and saw my classmates applauding and climbing to their feet. Stunned, I looked out and found the audience doing the same. I didn't understand! I had just insulted every member of my class and called them whiny bastards, and now I was getting a standing ovation. This was simply incomprehensible. I just stood there as the building erupted in cheers and applause, and the Principal shook my hand. I didn't know what to do. After a minute or so, I sat down and we finished the ceremony. I collected my diploma, my classmates trooped across the stage and got theirs, and we marched the hell back down the aisle as our parents applauded. I felt totally drained, and my shirt was drenched with flop sweat.

I was mobbed by my classmates out in the parking lot. I peeled off my robe and just leaned against the side of the building near the doorway. Ray found me and handed me a flask, and I think I chugged a couple ounces of something potent before I handed it back, coughing. He just grinned at me. "That was amazing!", he said with a big grin.

I didn't understand. "I don't get it." I had just dumped a Cleveland Steamer on my fellow Baby Boomers, and everybody was cheering for me? This made no sense whatsoever.

It got crazier. All my friends, and even some kids I barely knew, came up to me and shook my hand. Finally I grabbed Ricky Santorin, one of the guys in the college prep group like me, and asked him. "Ricky, what's going on? Everybody says they loved my speech, but I don't understand why! I just dumped on everyone!"

"No, you didn't.", said Mrs. Rogers, coming towards me. "You challenged them. You challenged them to be better than they were, and they responded. Right now every parent in that room is wondering if any of you will live up to that challenge."

Ricky laughed. "My parents are wondering about paying to send me away for four years. Their challenge will be getting me to graduate!" I had to join in the laughter at that.

Mrs. Rogers smiled. "Then here's a fourth challenge, Mr. Buckman. You come back to your high school reunion in five years and show us what you've done to meet your challenge. Your classmates will be waiting on you!"

Ricky laughed at that and pushed me back against the wall. We fumble-farted around for a bit, and then Jeana came bounding up, followed by my family. My parents had brought Suzie with them; Hamilton had declared a sudden stomach ache and nobody wanted him there anyway. Ricky took off and I hugged Jeana and then Mom. Dad I simply shook hands with. Mrs. Rogers said, "I was just commenting to your son how impressed I was with his speech. I can't recall every hearing one quite like that."

For once even my mother looked at me proudly, although Dad looked at me with pride and a certain degree of skepticism. "Me either.", he replied. "Since when did you know I was born in a house without water or electricity?"

"Since every summer when we go to the family reunion and you tell us all about it!" I winked at Suzie and she joined me in reciting, "Walking barefoot to school, through the snow, thirteen miles, uphill, each way!" Every summer the story got longer and more dire, until all three of us kids began reciting it before Dad could get around to it. Dad had lived on a farm out in Arcadia until shortly before the war, at which time they moved into the working-class Pimlico section of Baltimore. "I told Aunt Peg about it one time and she told me the truth."

Mom laughed at him, and Dad just smiled and said, "Your Aunt Peg lies."

"I'll tell her you said that."

At that point it became surreal. The Principal came up to me, dragging the speaker, the county politician who had talked before me, and a third man, a young fellow who announced he was with the Baltimore Sun. Everyone congratulated me on my brilliant speech, and the county representative suggested I had a fine career ahead of me in politics.

It must have been a very slow news day for somebody to be reporting on a high school graduation. It was actually kind of strange. The reporter already had a copy of my speech that he had gotten from the Principal. I had no idea it was copied and available. "That was an amazing speech, Carl. Are you planning on going into politics?"

I stared at him for a second. "God, no! I would like to think I have more self respect than that!"

Several people laughed at that, although my parents and the politician were mortified. "You don't think much of politicians?", asked the reporter.

I thought about it for a second. "Politicians are a lot like puppies. They're cute and warm and loving and like to lick your face, but as soon as you put them down, they like to go to the corner of the room and pee on the carpet. The difference is that with a puppy, you can yell at them and rub their noses in it and hit them with a rolled up newspaper, and sooner or later they learn not to pee on the carpet. Politicians never learn. No matter how much you yell or how much you rub their noses in it or how hard you hit them, they always end up peeing on the carpet."

The reporter grinned at this, and the Principal and the politician ran away like I had just puked on their shoes. Dad just shook his head and rolled his eyes, and Mrs. Rogers smiled

"Are you visiting anytime soon?", asked Mom, which caused Mrs. Rogers to look at me funny. I had kept my apartment secret from everybody at school but Jeana.

"I wasn't planning on it. I was thinking I'd take Jeana out." I turned to her. She was in a very pretty little sundress, nice and light and airy, perfect for a June day. "Did you want to go out to lunch? How did you get over here?"

"Your parents picked me up. I'll go with you.", she answered.

"We can go out to eat, if you'd prefer.", Mom said.

I was tempted to say no, but decided to make nice. "I'll find you in the parking lot in a few minutes. I'll follow you."

My parents and Suzie left, and I found myself with Jeana and Mrs. Rogers. "Carl, I know this isn't my business, but you only visit your home?"

I shrugged, and then took a deep breath. Mrs. Rogers was a good person and a good teacher. She had taken a chance on me. "I moved out two years ago. I have an apartment in Towson."

Mrs. Rogers' eyes snapped wide open at that. "Two years!" She looked over at Jeana, who had an arm through mine. "Oh, my!"

"I'm pretty independent, Mrs. Rogers." I gave a quickie explanation of the problems with my brother, without getting too detailed. "It was just simpler for all of us."

"Well, I just don't know what to say. I'll be very interested in what you have to say for yourself at the reunion in five years."

I grinned at that. "With your shield or on it, Mrs. Rogers.", I replied, quoting the orders given to Spartan hoplites before going off to war. Either come home carrying your shield, victorious, or come home being carried on your shield as a makeshift stretcher. No other choices were allowed. Conquer or die.

"Precisely."

Jeana and I moved off to the parking lot and I followed them to a restaurant in Cockeysville. After that, I drove Jeana back to my apartment, for a little personal time. It was still only mid-afternoon, so I went over to my liquor cabinet and pulled out a pair of wine bottles. "White or red?", I asked her.

She smiled. "Let's go for the red today."

I nodded and put back a bottle of chardonnay. I glanced at the bottle of red. "How about a nice little cabernet?" I grabbed a couple of wine glasses and the corkscrew, and peeled the foil off the wine bottle. I pulled the cork and poured some in our glasses and handed hers to Jeana. "Here's to graduation. Thank God that's over!"

Jeana laughed. I took the bottle and my glass and led the way back into the living room area, and set them down on an end table. I sat in the armchair and smiled at her, and she sat down sideways on my lap, being careful not to spill her wine. I picked up my wine and sipped it. "Have I told you today just how beautiful you are?"

"I'm not sure. I'm trying to remember, but I just can't be sure.", she responded teasingly.

"Well, it's true. You are very, very beautiful." I sipped some more wine and gave her a leering look up and down her body. "And that's a lovely little dress you have on, too." She was wearing a white linen sundress that left her shoulders bare except for a couple of very thin straps. "Is it new?"

"You noticed!", she said with surprise.

"Of course!" I eyed her lewdly. With the hand behind her back, I found the hook-and-eye catch and flicked it open and the grasped the zipper and tugged it down.

"I think you have ulterior motives, Mister Valedictorian!"

I gave her my most innocent look and set my glass back on the end table. "Oh, how can you say such a thing? I'm just trying to be helpful! Could you imagine what your parents would say if you came home with a spilled wine stain on this nice white dress? They'd be furious!" I pulled the straps down off her shoulders. Underneath the dress Jeana had been wearing an almost transparent strapless bra, and I doubt it came from K-Mart.

"You're so thoughtful."

"I am, I am!" I set her glass to the side and, as she lifted up off my lap, I tugged her dress completely down and off. Jeana was left sitting on my lap in her bra and matching transparent white panties and her ankle-strapped high heeled sandals. Suddenly I felt quite warm, and not because the air conditioning was set too low. "You look spectacular!" I handed Jeana back her wine and she sipped at it silently, while starting to fiddle with my tie.

I popped the clasp behind her back and her bra slipped off as well. "Worried about wine stains there, too?", she asked.

"I really think that would set your Mom off."

"What would set my Mom off would be simply knowing that I had a bra like this!", she replied.

"Would they kill you first, or me first?"

"I think it'd be a tag team event. Dad would work on you while Mom would kill me, and then they'd swap off." Jeana handed me her glass, and then lifted her delicious little rump and slipped off her panties. "Forget about them and drink your wine! Don't you remember? I'm going away tomorrow for ten days. This is our last chance to be together. Hurry up! I need something a lot more stimulating than wine!"

I laughed at her and kissed her, and then helped her strip my tie and shirt off. She was right. Tomorrow morning the Colosimos were heading back to New York for vacation with their family. We needed to screw our brains out this afternoon, since after I took her home today, it was Celibacy City for the next week and a half. We finished off our wine while we made out in the armchair, and then ran into the bedroom to get more comfortable. I was exhausted and sated by the time I drove her back to her parents after we made dinner. We made love four times that day - missionary, cowgirl, doggy, and then missionary again. Jeana had an appetite and ability for carnal dissipation that was world class!

Summer was beginning, and we were planning to spend massive amounts of time together before I went off to college. I was still taking a few more humanities courses this summer, but I would still be able to spend time with her getting hot and sweaty. During the coming week, however, I was able to spend time getting into the swing of summer school over at Towson State.

It was almost two weeks, actually, before I was able to see Jeana again, and our actions were a little limited, since her monthly friend was making an appearance. Furthermore, her parents were acting very suspiciously around us, as if they didn't want to leave us alone. At one point I asked Jeana what was going on.

"I don't know, but I think it's something my Aunt Theresa said to her. My cousin, Mary Jane, who's a year younger than me, got herself knocked up. The entire vacation that's all we talked about.", she replied.

"So, do they know what we've been up to?", I asked.

"No. You're still alive!"

I semi-laughed at that, but only semi, since Mr. Colosimo gave me a number of hard looks. I wondered if her mother had found Jeana's stash of lingerie. Well, a man has to die of something, I suppose. I always used to joke with Marilyn that I wanted to die when I was 80 while diving out a window, being shot by a jealous husband. Her typical reply was that with what I had to offer, I'd die alone in my bed.

The following week Jeana was back in shape for fun, and we were both in the mood for some serious action. Now, however, there was an air of necessity about it all. The 800 pound gorilla in the room was that I was leaving in a few months. It was one thing to date somebody at a school five miles away, but Troy was at least 350 miles away. What would happen when we split apart like that? Would we break up? Try to keep it together? Meet new people?

This was on both our minds, and weighed heavily on us. On my first trip, I didn't have a girlfriend when I went to college, having broken up with my girlfriend mid-summer. What would we do when I left at the end of August? I didn't know, and while I wanted desperately to spend as much time with Jeana as I could, I was feeling bittersweet and depressed about it. Jeana's parents were also being more obstructive. Now that her cousin, her younger cousin, was pregnant, it was like they finally realized that their gorgeous little girl was dating a guy with a car.

That first week we were back together went much like previous ones. Some days I would go over to Jeana's house after her folks went to work, some days I would pick her up and we would go out, and then back to my apartment. Friday nights and Saturday nights we would go on official dates. Things cooled down some with them, but you could still tell they were watching us a lot more closely than before.

It was the following Friday night that the schedule changed, somewhat. Jeana's parents had to go to a dinner downtown, so they were going to be out for many hours. We went out to dinner, but then Jeana suggested we go back to her place and screw around. I shrugged and agreed, and we drove back to her house. Jeana was very turned on, and flashed her panties at me on the drive home. Once inside her house I expected that we would run to the basement, but she couldn't even wait that long! "No, I can't wait! I want to do it right here!", she said, dragging me into the living room.

"Here? In the living room?", I asked in disbelief. This was the one place we never fooled around.

"I was talking to Mary Jane, and she told me that was where she and her boyfriend used to do it. It made me so hot!" Jeana pulled off her tank top and her bra, and then pushed down her shorts and bikini panties. "Hurry up!"

"You're kidding me, right?" I suddenly had a bad feeling about this.

"No! Come on, get undressed!" She grabbed my arm and pulled me towards her, and started working on my jeans.

"Jeana, did you tell your cousin that we were screwing, too?"

"Oh, yeah, we talk about everything. Come on, get undressed."

Oh shit! Now I knew what was going on with Jeana's parents. Jeana told Mary Jane, Mary Jane told her mother, Mary Jane's mother told Jeana's mother ... hell, by now half the Colosimo family knew about us! I could feel my life ending. Still, I was being sexually assaulted by a naked centerfold quality girl. The blood had flowed to my small head, and I went along with Jeana's insane plan. I sat down on the couch and stripped down as well. After all, Jeana's parents wouldn't be home for at least another three hours, and I figured I could drag us down to the basement after this first round.

As soon as we were naked, Jeana was in my arms, with one hand stroking my rock hard cock, while she moaned as I roughly fondled her big tits. She was feeling very aggressive that night, and she pushed me flat on my back on the couch. The next thing I knew, Jeana had reversed her own position and had crawled onto the couch on top of me. I found myself staring up at her very wet and very inviting pussy, and I totally lost any capacity for thought when her lips started sucking on my cockhead. Groaning, I gave in. I wrapped my hands around that plump ass and pulled her down, and began slurping away on her pussy lips and clit.

Jeana liked that, as she gave a happy shriek, and ground herself down on my face. She continued sucking and jacking on my cock. I knew we were going to finish in this position by the moans she was making. Sometimes it's just foreplay, but other times it's a main event. I just concentrated on Jeana's clit. We wouldn't be long before I popped and we could scamper downstairs.

Jeana was bouncing on my face, pussy juice streaming out of her as she orgasmed. After another three or four minutes, I could feel my balls tightening up and my hips were humping up, driving my cock into her mouth. I mumbled something to indicate I was going to come, but I don't know if she heard me. It didn't matter, since it was pretty obvious what was about to happen. I held back as long as I could before giving in. Just as I cut loose, Jeana pulled her mouth off my dick, like she wanted me to give her a facial. I just pulled her ass down as my cock started spurting.

"OH MY GOD!" That wasn't Jeana's voice! It was the voice of her mother.

"WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON!?" That wasn't Jeana either, but her father.

So much for romance! Jeana's parents came in the door just as I started coming. Jeana must have heard something because she pulled away from me, just in time to get a full facial, with them staring at her in amazement. This change in position, however, sat her ass down even more fully on my face, and cut off my breathing. While my cock finished pumping (totally out of my control, an anatomical reflex once it gets started) I began struggling to get out from under Jeana before they killed me or she smothered me. As her parents screamed, I flailed away and simply succeeded in rolling us both off the couch and onto the floor.

I landed on top of Jeana, and the next thing I knew I felt a sharp pain in my side as something hit me from behind. I tried scrambling off my girlfriend, only to find myself face to face with a murderous Mr. Colosimo. He took a swing at me, and for once, my aikido skills vanished. I took a roundhouse punch to the face and felt my nose give way. I could even hear the bones breaking! Blood spraying, I flew backwards and landed on the coffee table, which collapsed under me. There was all sorts of fresh pain from my backside now, but I suppose the collapse saved me from even more. Just then I noticed a tea cup flying across the room at me, but since I was now on the floor in the wreckage of the table, it flew through the air above me.

Mrs. Colosimo was shrieking incoherently as she threw her tea service at me. Jeana was screaming and crying as she tried to use her body to shield me from her enraged father. Suddenly the old joke of dying by being shot by a jealous husband seemed all too realistic! I scrambled to my feet, taking two more shots from tea cups, grabbed my pants off the floor, and raced out the still open front door. I didn't stop until I got to my car.

Then, as the neighbors came out of their houses and stared at the commotion, and listened to the uproar inside the Colosimo house, I yanked my pants on and climbed into my car. I just had my keys out of my pocket when Mr. Colosimo came roaring out of his front door running down the driveway towards me. I locked the doors, started the car, and tore out of the neighborhood as fast as I could!

I stopped at the corner of Joppa Road. I looked in the mirror and found my face was covered in blood, and I hurt all over. I needed to get to a doctor. It probably would have been smarter to stop and call for an ambulance, but I could make it to a hospital faster if I just kept driving. As blood dripped down my face and onto my bare torso, I drove over to GBMC and parked near the Emergency Room. Barefoot, I picked my way through the parking lot, limping as I did. I must have managed to cut my left foot open, either in the house or running down to my car. I limped into the emergency room, where I was spotted by a nurse.

"Holy shit!", she exclaimed. "What happened to you?"

I limped closer. "Long and painful story."

She grabbed my arm. "How did you get here?" She pulled me through some automatic doors and pushed me into a cubicle.

I climbed onto an exam table. My ribs hurt and my ass was killing me, and my broken nose was throbbing. "I think I need a doctor." I lay back, but ended up sitting back up when my ass started bugging me even worse.

The nurse had decided I wasn't dying in the next few seconds, so she grabbed a clipboard and started the hospital routine of asking my name, rank, and serial number - the standard hospital crap. All I could grab when I ran out was my pants, but fortunately I had my wallet in my back pocket and my keys in a front pocket. I pulled out my wallet and gave the nurse my health insurance card, and then lay back down in the most pain free position I could manage. She left me and stepped out of the cubicle.

About five minutes later, two more people came in. One was a young fellow in surgical scrubs with a stethoscope around his neck who was obviously the doctor. The other fellow was a few years older, and was wearing the uniform of the Maryland State Police. I guess I shouldn't have been surprised. GBMC is the major trauma center for the northern portion of Baltimore County, and they are always getting accident or fight victims into the Emergency Room. It's not as bad as Johns Hopkins down in the city, known to one and all as the 'Baltimore Knife and Gun Club', but it was bad enough that you could usually find a cop nearby.

The cop stayed with me as the doctor started examining me. I tried to get him to drop his little investigation, but he wanted to know what was happening. Meanwhile the doctor and the nurse, a different one than before, started cleaning the blood off me and stripped my jeans off, leaving me in a hospital gown. They had the worst of the blood off my face, and the doctor was getting ready to bandage up my nose when my parents came barging in. Things were just going from bad to worse!

"What are you guys doing here?", I asked.

"You're still our son and still a minor. The hospital called us.", explained Dad. "What happened?"

"Carling, what happened to you!?", cried Mom when she saw me. Okay, the maternal instincts could kick in when needed, but I knew I'd never hear the end of this.

"I keep asking that myself.", commented the trooper.

"Were you in an accident?", asked Dad, eyeing both me and the policeman.

"No."

"Well?", asked both Dad and the trooper. Even the doctor and nurse stopped what they were doing to listen in.

I just groaned. "Okay, I'm just going to say that this is nothing that the police can do anything about, and I won't be pressing charges, no matter what. My girlfriend's parents came home a lot earlier than we expected. Okay?"

It took everybody a few seconds to visualize what had happened, and then the babble started up again. Mom was 'extremely disappointed' in me. The nurse and doctor just rolled their eyes. Dad tried to stifle a grin and a laugh.

The trooper didn't even try to not laugh. He folded up his notebook and stuffed it back in his pocket. "And you don't want to press charges?"

"No way, no how!", I answered.

He shrugged. "It could have been worse, you know."

"How?"

"It could have been your girlfriend's husband." That got him a number of groans, and he laughed and left the room. I've known a lot of cops over the years and I knew I was going to be the topic of conversation back at the barracks that night.

Mom continued to lecture me while I was worked on, and Dad didn't try to stop her. After my nose was taped up, I was laid face down on the table while the injuries to my backside were examined. The large bruise above my left ribs was poked and prodded and I was told X-rays would be taken. "What caused that?", asked Dad.

"Mrs. Colosimo hit me with her sterling silver tea pot, I think."

Dad grunted at that. Then they started poking and prodding my butt, and Mom kept scolding me. Forceps were used to draw several wooden slivers from my ass, and then I was bandaged up. I explained these were from a coffee table, and I got a tetanus shot along with some penicillin. The cut on the bottom of my left foot was worse. They dug a shard of what appeared to be a tea cup out of that, and I needed four stitches to close it up. I was in almost as much pain when I left as when I got there! I was given a prescription for pain killers, sent off for X-rays, and finally escaped somewhere around midnight.

It was actually a good thing that my parents were there. I was in no shape to drive. Mom drove my car (Dad threw a blanket over the blood stains on the seat) and Dad drove me in his car. I had thrown away the bloody torn jeans and was dressed in hospital scrubs and slippers. We stopped at an all night pharmacy and got some pills, and then I went home. My parents followed me inside.

They watched as I went into the kitchen. I popped open the pain killers and read the directions. One every four hours. Screw that. I took two. Next I opened up my liquor cabinet and pulled out a bottle of Canadian Mist. I grabbed a few glasses. "Anybody want a snort before I go to bed?", I asked.

Mom was dumbfounded by my possession of liquor, my father, not so much. "You shouldn't be doing that with those pills.", he told me.

"Carling! What are you doing?"

I was pushing my luck, but I just didn't care anymore. I poured about a shot's worth into one of the glasses and pushed it across the counter to my father, and then poured a second for myself. I raised an eyebrow to Mom, but she was in a state of high dudgeon and didn't answer. I shrugged. I turned back to Dad. "Mud in your eye!"

"Same to you." We both lifted our glasses and downed the whiskey in a single swallow.

"You two are both disgusting!", said Mom.

"Shirley, let it alone.", Dad said in a tired voice.

"Carl, I hope you've learned your lesson!"

What lesson would that be, Mom? Not to have a girlfriend who blabs about getting laid to her family? Or not to let her screw you in the living room? Or to run faster when being pursued by a homicidal father? I was too tired to argue. "Good night, Mom. Thanks for bringing me home. I really do appreciate it. Good night, Dad."

"Well, I never...", she continued, but Dad took her by the elbow and led her out.

I had another shot and went to bed.

I woke up the next afternoon, after sleeping around 14 hours straight. My telephone was ringing, and I grabbed it rather than wait for it to go to record. Unfortunately it was my mother, and not Jeana. Mom wanted to know why I hadn't answered her earlier calls ("Because I was asleep, Mom.") and whether I should move home until I was feeling better ("No thank you.") I'd rather move in with Mr. and Mrs. Colosimo than that!

I rolled out of bed and put my feet to the floor, only to be really woken up by a stabbing sensation in my left foot. I had forgotten my stitches. I gingerly hobbled into the bathroom. I looked about as good as I felt - like a week old sack of shit. Mr. Colosimo must have really tagged me with that roundhouse right, because in addition to my busted nose, I had a pair of black eyes, a contusion on my cheek, and a split lower lip. My ribs hurt like hell, and I was going to be limping for a couple of days. Being a black belt in aikido didn't seem to count for much against a really pissed off father.

I brushed my teeth carefully, which still managed to cause my split lip to open up a bit, so I swallowed another pain pill. I had been warned against showering for a few days, and simply grabbed my robe and wandered out into the front half of the apartment. The answering machine was lit up, but the only thing on it were five calls from my mother. Nothing from Jeana.

I moped around the apartment for the rest of the weekend, on a subsistence diet of pain killers, beer, and chicken noodle soup. Were you aware that every single civilization in the world has some form of chicken noodle soup, and that every one of them is guaranteed by mothers to cure every disease known to man, up to and including cancer? It's true. It wasn't working on bruising, so I wasn't moving around much.

I did hear from my father Sunday night. Mr. Colosimo called him at the house and demanded to speak to me, and when I wasn't made available, threatened me, Dad, Mom, our family, our relatives, and Daisy the Dog with every manner of threat possible. Dad responded in kind, which Mom was happy to tell me had been very childish. I didn't think a Sunday afternoon drive to see Jeana would be very helpful. Jeana didn't call.

Monday morning I woke up early. I had classes and needed some time to prepare myself for school. I wrapped some Saran Wrap around my foot and managed a quick shower. I was able to replace the bandage on my face with a much smaller one, changed the Band-Aids on my ass, and somehow changed the bandage on my foot with a smaller one I could put a shoe over. I was still limping badly, but I could get around. My face still looked hideous, with the bruising now beginning to enter the really ugly green and yellow stage. Luckily, the split lip was mostly healed up. I got quite a few stares from my classmates.

By mid-week I still hadn't heard from Jeana. I had tried driving by the house a couple of times, but they must have had her under lock and key. Her mother's car was there, and the one time I parked and walked towards the house, I heard them arguing inside. I skipped out. Dad called me Wednesday afternoon to tell me a large box had arrived for me at the house. I went over and found it contained the clothing and shoes I had left behind at Jeana's during my hasty departure. Also in the box was a forceful note in her father's handwriting telling me to never show my face again around their house. A small envelope was the saddest item, since it contained the locket, tennis bracelet, and an ankle bracelet I had given Jeana, along with my class ring. There was no note from her. I declined the offer of dinner and took the box home with me.

I waited a day, just staring at the box, and at the envelope, and then called Ray. He had been dating Marianne Monroe for a few months, and Marianne was a friend of Jeana's. Ray and Marianne had broken up, but he still had her number. I called her and invited her out to lunch on Friday. We met at a place over in Towsontown Mall.

"Wow! Jeana's old man really worked you over, didn't he?", was the first thing she said to me.

"You heard about that, huh?"

She nodded and grinned. "Jeana called me the next day and told me what happened. You look pretty gross."

"Thanks. I actually look better now. Last weekend I looked grotesque."

We talked about my injuries for a moment, and then I asked, "How's Jeana doing? I've tried calling, but they're screening their phone calls, and whenever I've tried driving by, one of her parents is around. What's she said to you?"

Marianne rolled her eyes. "It's not good, Carl. I think she's been grounded for the rest of her natural life. They took away her car keys and one of her parents is staying at home with her until school starts. They've even been talking about sending her to a girl's only Catholic boarding school."

"Holy shit!"

"Yeah! You've got about as much chance of seeing her as you do of getting into a convent.", she said.

I shook my head. "Do you think you could get in to see her?", I asked.

Marianne's eyes popped open at that. "Hey, Carl, don't get me into this!"

"Marianne, you're not going to get into it. You're just going to see her. That's all."

"No way am I going over there while it's like this!"

"So, how did you hear about all this?", I asked.

"Jeana called me on Sunday."

"I thought you said she was in solitary?"

"Close. I guess the warden must have relented. I know her Mom was nearby, because she was whispering part of the time.", she admitted.

"Great! You can go over to her house and carry a letter for me."

Marianne started waving her hands at me. "No way! No way!"

"Marianne, get real. They're not going to strip search you. You just get her alone and slip her the letter. It'll be easy!" It took me several minutes to convince her to go along with me. I handed her the envelope and she put it in her purse. Business done, we spent the rest of the afternoon chatting about her upcoming senior year over at Loch Raven and my college plans.

It was a short letter, simple and to the point. Packed in with the letter was the jewelry she had returned to me. I kept my class ring.

Dear Jeana,

I am very sorry about what happened the other night. I hope you didn't get in a lot of trouble, but I know that's just wishful thinking. If you can get a chance to call me or write, I'd like to hear from you, but I know that's probably going to be very difficult.

I'm sending back the jewelry to you. That was a gift from me to you, and showed the love I have for you. I'll never love another girl like I love you, and I'll never be able to look at it without feeling that loss. If you don't want to wear it, I'll understand. Maybe you can put it in the back of your jewelry box, so that someday you'll look at it and smile and remember what we once had. It was special.

You are special, too. I'll be going away in a few weeks, and we'll both be moving on with our lives, but I'll always treasure the time we had. If you can get a chance to call me or write, I'd appreciate it. Until that time, though, always know how much I love you.

Love,

Carling

She never called or wrote. I checked with Marianne, and she reported she had given Jeana the note, and Jeana had read it, but she never called or wrote.

Book Three: Rensselaer

Chapter 23: Freshman Year

I tried reaching Jeana for the rest of the summer. I did a few drive-bys, and called every girl I knew who knew Jeana. The response was the same. They could get in to see her, but Jeana was on lockdown, and probably going to parochial school, a private girl's parochial school, in the fall. She was depressed, but otherwise okay. Whenever one of the girls brought my name up, Jeana would sigh and or cry, but she didn't ask to see me or send me a message. It was over in more ways than one, I guessed, but it was very depressing.

Tusker came over one afternoon. For the last year he had known about my apartment, but he kept it quiet. "I heard you and Jeana are broken up. Her old man do that to your face?"

"Mom joined in, too, but yeah, her dad tagged me pretty good." I gave him a condensed version of what had happened, though I left out some of the graphic details. "I'm worried about her. I can't see her or talk to her, and nobody knows anything.", I finished.

He nodded silently, and then went to my refrigerator and grabbed a couple of beers. "You ever think that maybe this wasn't an accident? That maybe Jeana had this planned out?"

"Huh!? What?!" I just stared at him, my bottle frozen halfway to my mouth.

He shrugged. "Hey, you're about to go away and she isn't going to want to wait for you, is she? So maybe she managed to get caught by her parents, and that breaks you two up nice and neat?"

I rolled my eyes at this. "You're shitting me, right?"

"I'm just saying, are you sure?"

"You think Jeana managed to time this so that she was buck ass naked and sitting on my face getting hosed with a facial just in time for her parents to walk in!?", I exclaimed.

Tusker's face lit up. "You're kidding me, right!? You gave her a facial while her parents were coming in the door? No wonder they went nuts! You're lucky to be alive! Oh, that's tremendous!"

I was less than thrilled by being able to liven up my friend's afternoon. Still, I wondered, could Jeana have been cold-blooded enough and ruthless enough to manage our breakup in such a way? I couldn't imagine she would have ever wanted to be caught the way we were, but what if she had been planning on me getting caught just 'fooling around' with her, my hands down her pants or her top up around her neck? What if our timing was off or she got hornier than planned? I just didn't know what to think.

I stopped bothering her or her friends.

I spent the balance of my last free summer finishing my classes at Towson State and getting ready to move to Troy. I hate moving. I did before and discovered I still did now. I split things into two separate categories, stuff I would take with me and stuff I would put into storage. I rented a small storage locker/building out in Timonium, and went out and bought a bunch of storage boxes. Even though I had been renting a furnished apartment, I still had spent the last couple of years accumulating a huge pile of shit. I rented the storage unit for a year, and paid in advance.

Moving into the freshman dorms was going to be a wrenching change. I could have afforded an apartment, but RPI required all freshmen to live on campus. The only exceptions were students whose parents lived nearby, and I only ever met one guy who qualified. Everybody else lived in the freshman dorms, which a national college guide had described as being constructed in 'the neo-penitentiary style.' I could attest to that. Short of bars on the windows, the freshmen dorms had all the coziness of Alcatraz. The rooms were small, able to fit in two small desks, two single beds, and not much else. They had two built-in closet/dresser assemblies, one on each side of the doors as the inmates would enter their cells. Linoleum flooring, and cinder block walls completed the charming atmosphere.

I began packing up what I was going to store. I also brought out one of my trusty foot lockers, for the trip to Troy. I would fill a foot locker and bring it, my IBM Selectric, and a small half-size refrigerator which I picked up at a local appliance store. Those were allowed, although hot plates or toaster ovens were not. I would also bring several cardboard boxes holding my clothes, which I would chuck once I was unpacked. Lastly would be my stereo, a small but very nice Bose system.

Everything else went to the storage locker in Timonium. I called Tusker and he came over with his dad's pickup truck, and we loaded it all up and drove over. This was just returning the favor I had done him. After graduation he had gotten a job tending bar at a place in Towson, and was also working at a repair shop. He had moved into a small apartment in town. A bunch of us helped him move, four fellow bikers, and me, the preppy college kid. Fuck it, we moved him, finished off a couple cases of beer, and fucked around and arm wrestled. I won a few and lost a few.

After we moved my stuff, we went back to the apartment and drank all my beer, finished off my open jugs of cooking wine, and ate or threw out the last food in the fridge and pantry. I was ready to travel by August 23, a Thursday. Freshmen could start showing up on Friday August 24, but most wouldn't show until Saturday August 25, which was when the Freshman Dining Hall opened. The following Monday, the 27th, class registration would happen, and classes would start the next day, Tuesday August 28. My plan was to drive up on the 23rd, spend the night in a motel, and be first in line Friday morning. I wanted to be in the dorm room and unpacked by Friday afternoon. Saturday was going to be a fucking zoo! Worst of all, RPI has very few parking spaces. I needed to have the car parked Saturday before a zillion parents and kids showed up to drop Little Johnny off at school.

Mom, Dad, and Suzie came over Wednesday night to say good-bye. Dad and I hauled the stuff I was taking out to the Galaxie. The only heavy stuff was the foot locker, the Selectric, and the mini-fridge. They took me out to dinner and then we got the hugs and handshakes out of the way. I promised to write. I ducked any questions on when they would see me back home. That night I slept in my clothes on the bare mattress. Early the next morning I showered, dressed in my clean travel clothes, and stuffed everything into a duffel bag. I handed my keys to my landlords and was off.

I stayed the night at the same dump motel I stayed at in Watervliet when I came up for my school visit. I was up bright and early Friday morning and had breakfast at a diner in Green Island. I was parked in the parking lot between the Student Union and the Armory by 8:00. I looked around with quite the sense of déjà vu all over again. I actually wandered around the campus for a bit before heading into the Student Union for check-in.

Physically, Rensselaer is split into several different sections. You have the old school area, which borders on Sage Avenue and 15th Street, with a residential quadrangle for upper classmen and a number of stately brick and ivy covered buildings dating back to the 19th century. You can see these buildings for miles around because they are on the side of a big hill and have green copper roofs. South of this section is a newer academic area, where the new chemistry, physics, materials science, and library buildings are. The old school was engineering and architecture only.

East of 15th Street was a vast area that had been developed by the college during and after World War II. The Student Union was here, a three story modern building, the Armory (which actually had a fully functioning tank lift in the basement, in case your M-4 Sherman needed a tune-up!), and all of the newer student housing. The freshman dorms were over there, along with the dining hall, as well as some newer grad student housing.

I grabbed my paperwork and went into the Student Union about 9:00 or so, and the line for check-in was mercifully short. Tomorrow it would be much, much longer! This was still in the pre-Internet, pre-computer days, so it was a matter of standing in line until you got to the table, where somebody would pull out paper files on you and check you in. Still, I was an early bird and the people at the desk weren't going crazy yet. By mid-morning I was marked as present and accounted for, had my room key for Hall Hall (The residence hall was named after a guy named Hall. Go figure.), and I had registered the Galaxie and gotten a parking sticker for the student lot (And the student lot only! The campus police were vigorous in their detection and prosecution of cars where they weren't allowed.)

The Student Union was a fair sized building. Check-in was held on the second floor, which was the main level, and normally had some meeting rooms and a large dining area for formal college uses or small concerts. Upstairs was where the student government lived, along with rooms for clubs and the school newspaper. The basement held the bookstore, a branch of Key Bank, a small bowling alley and billiards room, and the Rathskellar, or Rat, which was a sandwich and pizza shop you could get a beer at. Before I left the building, I went downstairs and opened an account with Key Bank, funding it with a certified check I got when I cleaned out my accounts at Clifton Trust.

Next I was off to Hall Hall. By getting there a day early, I was able to snag a good parking spot near the main entrance. In those days, the key was an actual physical key, not a card. The main door was unlocked, and I grabbed some stuff and wandered up to the second floor. I was going to be in Room 206. My roommate wasn't there yet, so I grabbed the left side of the room and tossed my duffel on the bed.

I wasn't the only one checking in early, so I made nice with my new neighbors and offered to help them move in if they returned the favor. This was readily accepted, especially after they noticed I had a small fridge and an unopened case of Budweiser in my car. I promised we would work on that later, so that got carried in first and set up, and then loaded with beer to cool down, while we went back out and finished bringing our shit in. After that the guys gathered in my room and we cracked open a few cool beers, cool but not cold, since that little fridge was a bit anemic. Nobody cared.

It was all guys in the room. It was all guys in the dorm. It was all guys in all four freshman dorms! This place had the highest testosterone factor I had ever been around, at least until I went through basic training in the Army. Up until about five years ago, RPI had been men only, sort of like The He-Man Woman Hater's Club for nerds. Historically, the only time women had ever attended the school had been for things like World War II, when no men were around and they needed women engineers. As soon as the war was over, the women were sent packing. As it was, in 1973, after five years of co-ed education, it was still 14 to 1 guys to girls. You didn't go to this place to get laid! There were so few women in the freshman class (40-50? Less?) they were all put into the graduate apartments, where they had private bathrooms!

The dining hall wasn't open until the next morning, so after we got hungry we all got into the Galaxie and headed down to Hoosick Street. There was a strip mall there I remembered with a Price Chopper and a few other stores, but also a small Italian place we could order a couple of pizzas. When somebody asked how I knew about the place, I just replied that I had spotted it coming in from 787 off the Hoosick Street Bridge. In a different life I had taken girls down there to wine and dine them.

Saturday dawned sunny and bright. The dining hall was open, which was fortunate in that I didn't want to have to drive into town. It was unfortunate in that, well, the dining hall was open! Imagine the worst meals you ever had in your high school cafeteria. Now, imagine them as an adult, seven days a week. Exactly what was being served at any given time was decidedly questionable. Nobody was ever able to prove anything, but most people noticed a suspicious lack of stray dogs and cats in the local area. That's probably not what really happened, since I'm positive they would have tasted better. There were reasons I moved out of the dorms sophomore year, and the dining hall featured prominently in those reasons.

I woke up early and pulled on some gym shorts and jogged around the campus for a bit before heading back to the dorm and showering and changing. Then I wandered over to the dining hall, where I grabbed some OJ and an apple. Part of my strength and weight control conditioning was that I usually skipped breakfast. I don't know who came up with the crap about breakfast being the most important meal of the day. Whenever Marilyn gave me that shit, I would always ask if she worked for the American Breakfast Board. By the time I got back to the dorm the day's rush was started, and a huge number of cars were trying to cram themselves into the parking lots, as parents tried to get rid of their offspring. Nobody showed up in the morning, and by noon I was hungry enough to actually go over to the dining hall and eat a real lunch.

I got back to my dorm room to find the door open, and somebody's crap on my bed. Whoever that somebody was I had no idea, and he was nowhere to be found. I threw his stuff on the other bed, the one conspicuously empty, and closed the door. It seemed as if I wasn't going to be running a singleton, but as I remembered back, that was never going to be the case anyway. Back when I did this the first time, I hadn't been early acceptance, and for the first few months, until Thanksgiving, I was in a temporary dorm carved out of a corner of the lounge on the first floor, sleeping on a bunk bed and living like I was in boot camp. By Thanksgiving enough students had flunked out to let us move into real dorm rooms.

Ten minutes later there was a loud thumping on the door. I roused myself off my bed to greet my new roommate. I opened the door to look out and found a fellow about my height, maybe a touch less, and about ten pounds smaller. He had a soft look to him, though he wasn't quite pudgy. His hair was long, down to his shoulders, and very curly, and he had a wide, round face. He looked at me and asked, "How come the door was shut?"

What a fucking moron! "So that nobody would come in and take anything.", I replied.

He laughed and pushed his way inside. "Nobody would do that!" Then he noticed his stuff was on the right side of the room. "Hey, how come you moved my stuff over here?"

"Because I already set my stuff up on this side yesterday. Didn't you notice it when you came in?", I asked.

"Oh. Yeah, I guess so. Who are you?"

"I suspect I'm your roommate. Carl Buckman. You're assigned to 206, also?"

He gave me a funny look. "Yeah, why else would I be here?"

"Okay then, pleased to meet you." I stuck my hand out and he absent-mindedly shook it, even as he was looking around the room.

"Yeah, great." His eyes found my mini-fridge and lit up. "Hey, we've got a fridge! Wow! That's great!" He immediately went over to my refrigerator and yanked the door open. "Wow! Beer, too!" He reached in a grabbed a can of Bud, before I could say anything, and popped open the top. Next, as I stood there in disbelief, he threw the door to our room open and yelled down the hallway, "We've got some beer in 206!"

Enough of that shit! I moved past him and slammed the door shut before I was mobbed. Even then it shut in the face of a pimply kid from across the hall. My roommate stared at me. "What's the problem? Let's have a party!" He drained the can of beer in a single long swallow, and moved back towards my fridge.

"Hold your horses. Let's get a few things straight.", I said.

"Like what?"

"Like who the hell are you?"

"I'm your roommate.", he said.

"Yeah, we've been over that part. What's your name?"

He relaxed at that. "Oh, yeah, my name's Jim Connolly, but everybody calls me Buddy. What's your name?"

"Carl Buckman."Like I told you the first time.

"Great, Carl, let's get the party started!" He made another move towards the fridge.

I stepped in front of him again. "Hold it. That fridge doesn't belong to the college. It didn't come with the room."

He looked at me curiously. "It didn't? We don't get fridges in the dorm rooms?"

"Not unless you buy your own.", I answered.

It took a few seconds for that to sink in. "You mean you bought that fridge?"

"Precisely."

His face lit up. "Well that's really great! We can keep our beer cold!" He moved to open it again.

"Wait!" He stopped to stare at me. "That was my beer. That wasn't our beer. My beer involves my money. Our beer involves our money. Follow me?" He had a puzzled look on his face. "If you want some of my beer, you can ask me first. Okay?"

He shrugged. "Jeesh, it's only beer. Whatever. Can I have another beer?"

"Of course." I opened the fridge and took out two beers, popped them both open, and handed him one. "Cheers. Welcome."

Once again he downed his beer is a single prodigious swallow, which was then followed by an equally prodigious belch. Buddy began to start putting his stuff away, but after a few dispirited minutes, he opened the door and marched off down the hallway, greeting new people, leaving our door open. After five minutes I went to the door and looked around. There were masses of milling freshmen, but no Buddy. I shook my head and closed the door.

Five minutes later, Buddy was back and pounding on the door. "How come you closed the door?"

"Buddy, you've been gone fifteen minutes. Close the door when you leave the room."

"Why?" Buddy put away some more of his stuff and then headed out the door again. This time I was able to call out to him to take his key with him and to close the door after him. I got him to take his key, but he was gone before he closed the door. I didn't bother closing it.

Ten minutes later, Buddy came back. "See, I didn't need to close the door! Hey, want another beer?"

"Uh, sure."

"Great!" Buddy opened my mini-fridge and pulled out another couple of beers, handing one to me and popping the other. I should have expected that. He puttered around some more, putting away more stuff, and then wandered down the hallway again. Fifteen minutes later he was back, and this time he closed the door behind him. I put down the book I was reading and watched curiously as he rooted around in one of his drawers before pulling out some rolling papers. Then he pulled a baggie of pot out of his pocket and started rolling a joint. "I found a guy with a stash." He lit the joint and took a deep draw on it, sucking down almost a third of the joint, and held it in longer than I thought humanly possible. "Want a hit?", he asked.

Oh Lord, give me strength. I didn't have anything against smoking pot, and God knows I smoked enough of it when I went here the first time, but there was no way I was smoking dope in the middle of the afternoon with Buddy Connolly. "Thanks, but no thanks." I got up and cranked open the windows.

"You don't smoke pot?", he asked.

"Not in the middle of the afternoon, and not when parents are wandering around the hallways. You don't think anybody can smell that shit?"

"Hey, it's no big deal!" Buddy finished the joint and rolled a second. "You sure you don't want a hit? Payment for the beer?"

"Thanks, Buddy, but no."

He shrugged and said, "Okay, maybe later." Then he set up his own stereo, a cheap piece of shit with one of the speakers missing the foam cover, and started blasting Aerosmith through it.

He must have had that thing set to 11, and the fillings in my head started coming loose. I yelled for him to turn it down a couple of times, but his eyes were closed and he was totally zoned out. I got up and turned the volume down to about halfway on the scale. "Hey, what's wrong?", he asked.

"Too loud."

Buddy shrugged and wandered down the hallway, leaving the door open again, the reek of the pot followed him like a cloud. He came back after a few minutes. "Where's the phones?"

"There's a pay phone down in the lounge.", I told him.

"Oh." He wandered out. The album was ended, so I turned off his stereo. Five minutes later he was back. "Hey, there's a phone down the hallway, but it doesn't work. You can't call out."

I remembered that. It was a Centrex system designed to only allow people to call around the campus. That was the theory, anyway. Putting a system like that in a college full of nerds and geeks was like waving bloody meat in front of a wolf. By the Christmas break somebody had managed to figure out how to call anywhere in the world for free, and the school yanked all the phones out of the dorms when they saw the bills.

"I know. It's a Centrex system. It only calls around the campus."

He looked at me funny. "How come you know so much about phones?"

Because I spent thirty years running telecomm networks. "Because it says Centrex Telephone on the label on the phone."

"Oh." He wandered away again.

I shook my head in disbelief. A few minutes later I decided to get out and wander around myself. I ended up down two doors and across the hall, drinking beers with the residents. They were in the process of emptying some beer cans through their kidneys, so they could fashion a cannon out of the empty cans. Sounded like a fine idea. We cut the ends of the cans off and managed to stuff the ends one into another so that they were stacked together as a long tube. Then one of the guys poked a small hole in the closed end. We balled up some newspaper and dropped it down the barrel, and then squirted some lighter fluid in through the hole. We aimed the gizmo out the open window, yelled 'Fire in the hole!', and held a lighter up to the hole. There was a satisfying 'WHOOMP!' and a flaming ball flew out of the cannon into the center of the freshman quad. Everyone gave a loud cheer, and more people crowded into the room for a second shot. Eventually we ended up with a bunch more cannons and a duel with Cary Hall, before being shut down by the Resident Advisers.

I headed back to my room just in time to meet Buddy coming back. "Hey, did you know there were flaming cannons around here?" He smoked some more dope and drank my last beer, and then fell asleep on top of his still unmade bed.

Okay, so the guy was an idiot, but he was an amiable idiot. The thing was, for the life of me, I couldn't remember him from before. RPI isn't that big a school, and by the time you graduate the odds are you have at least seen everybody, even if you don't know their names. I was already able to look at the guys in the dorm and at least remember seeing their faces around campus. I couldn't remember Buddy Connolly for shit. That left me with two options: either we had managed to get through four years of a small school without running across each other or, more likely, Buddy didn't last. I was definitely going with Option Two. No way was I going to last with a drunken stoner roommate.

Don't get me wrong, it wasn't all that terrible. Buddy could be annoying, but he didn't have a mean bone in his body, or a smart one. He was constantly drinking up all my beer or scarfing down any snacks I had around, but it wasn't like when Hamilton took my stuff to destroy it. Buddy was just a party animal and couldn't understand why I wasn't. I stopped buying beer, and kept my liquor and some small bottles of mixers in my foot locker, which I kept locked, along with anything else I didn't want him to eat or drink. He didn't seem to mind when I came in and turned down the stereo he had blasting heavy metal.

Buddy really cemented his reputation as a doper supreme the following weekend. It was the long Labor Day weekend, and I don't think he was straight a single minute. He wasn't very straight the rest of the time, for that matter. On the plus side, we had absolutely no classes together.

That was very, very unusual at RPI. As a general rule, every freshman in the school had an identical schedule. Every engineer and every scientist took the same classes, certainly through the first semester, and almost certainly through the second semester. They didn't really separate until sophomore year. Every single freshman would take Calculus I, Chemistry I, Physics I, and for the engineers - about 60% of the school - Engineering I. Second semester was more of the same.

These classes were done in two parts. First you had massive lecture halls that held hundreds of students at once, where professors delivered canned lectures covering the week's topic. Then, groups of up to 20 students would assemble at different times with grad students or more junior professors to review the topics and go over homework. This was where you would go for help if you didn't understand the lectures or books.

The real fun came every Friday morning. Starting about three weeks after classes began, at 8:00 AM on Friday was the dreaded F-Test. F for Friday? F for Freshman? F for Failure? Nobody knew. It started with Calculus, the next week was Chemistry, the following week was Physics, and it finished with Engineering. The 40% of us who weren't engineers got a break that week. After the four week cycle ran its course, you immediately started a new cycle. It continued this way right up until the end of the semester, ensuring that every class had at least two or three major tests before the final. Since almost everybody in the school was required to take at least two semesters of these courses, the procedure continued in the spring.

It was actually funny, in a macabre sort of way. The freshmen dorms and dining hall would empty out at about 7:45, and the entire freshman class would begin a Bataan Death March style hike across the campus, generally using the Ho Chi Minh Trail, an asphalt pathway that connected the freshman quad with the main campus, so named because it was so cracked and potholed it resembled the heavily bombed supply line in Viet Nam. It was like a mass migration, lemmings' marching to the sea, with the always remembered proviso that the lemmings ended up drowning at the end of it.

The only ones who got out of this were the ones who managed to test out in high school on AP classes. I was very, very different, in that even though I was technically a freshman and living in the freshman dorms, I was actually already taking sophomore and junior level math and computer courses. Nobody else in the freshman class was doing that!

Buddy went to his first round of classes, but then forgot to go to the bookstore and buy his textbooks. Of course, as his roommate, I could be expected to loan him mine. I mean, what are roommates for, right? By Wednesday, he was asking, "Hey, can I borrow your Resnick?" A Resnick was our physics book, named after Professor Resnick, who wrote it.

I looked over at him from my desk where I was studying Finite Math. "Sorry. I don't have one."

He looked very confused at that. "You don't have a Resnick?" He glanced over at the pile of textbooks on my bookshelf. "How come?"

"Because I already took Physics last year."

"Yeah? Like AP in high school?", he asked.

I turned to face him. "No, like I've already taken about two years of college while I was still in high school."

Buddy was quite perplexed at that. "So, if you're, like, a sophomore or something, what are you doing here?" He waved his arms around, indicating Hall Hall and the freshman dorms.

I shrugged and smiled. "Buddy, I'm only 17. Where the hell else are they going to put me?"

It was like I was explaining quantum mechanics (which I had actually studied once) to an aborigine. We didn't even have the same language. "You've been in college since you were 15?"

"Not quite. Just the last half of my junior year and my senior year, a little after I turned 16." I told him how many credits I already had, and which courses I already had finished. He was still confused.

"So, you don't take Calculus or Chemistry either?"

"Nope."

"You mean, I can't borrow those books either? I haven't had a chance to get them yet."

"Sorry."

"You can't give me your notes from the other day?"

"Ask down the hall. I wasn't there.", I replied.

Buddy was starting to look like I'd hit him in the face with a two by four. "So, where were you?"

"Buddy, get real! I was taking different classes."

"Like what?" He came over and grabbed up my Finite Math book and flipped it open. A string of calculus equations stared back at him. "What is this shit?"

I grabbed my book back and looked at the page. "That's an explanation of Bayes' Theorem."

"Huh?"

I tried explaining the use of finite and discrete math as advanced set theory in applications of probability, but his eyes were starting to glaze over. "What, are you some sort of genius or something?", he asked.

I just laughed. "Go down the hallway, Buddy. Somebody down there must be able to loan you their notes and book." I waved him away and went back to studying.

Eventually some of the other guys on the floor figured out what was going on with me and the advanced classes, but mostly they didn't care. I did get asked for some tutoring help, which I was generally able to provide. Otherwise I just tried to be as normal as possible. Looking at people, with decades of experience, I was able to start making my own internal predictions on who was going to last and who wasn't.

I had seen the same dynamic back when I taught at Mohawk Valley Community College in the late 1990s and early 2000s. I discovered early on that I was very comfortable in an academic environment, to the point that my mother used to joke I was a professional student. After I got my Associates in Computer Science from MVCC and my Bachelors from SUNY-IT in Rome, I taught for several years at night at MV as an adjunct. We had the same issue then, and among the teachers we called it Grade 13. We would see kids start college and thinking it was still high school and they could get away with the same nonsense they did the year before.

College is not high school! Most of the students are already 18, or will be in a matter of months, and the system treats them as adults. Nobody is going to call home and tell Mommy and Daddy that Little Johnny is skipping class or not doing his homework. Nobody cares! In fact, if Mommy or Daddy calls to ask why we flunked Little Johnny, we weren't legally allowed to even tell them. Most freshmen courses have two intended effects, to teach the basics for future courses, but also to winnow out the wheat from the chaff. If a student complained that a teacher was tough, among the teachers it was considered a sign of prowess! I remember when students told some of the other professors that Mr. Buckman was really tough and strict, the other teachers all would smile and give me a thumbs up.

I could look around the dorm and tell who was going to survive and who wasn't. I was not going to bet on Buddy making it. In fact, I wasn't even willing to bet he would last until the end of the semester, or even the month!

I knew there was one set of classes I would be attending that Buddy wouldn't be at. Monday morning I had my first muster with the ROTC class. It was time to learn to be a soldier. To be fair, it wasn't that big an imposition. Being in ROTC meant you got to skip out on gym class. I guess the theory was that we would be drilling and doing our own calisthenics and running and didn't need to do those things as students in gym class would. Academically, we had one class a semester in Military Science. Mostly this was military history and all sorts of stuff on leadership and management.

This was all at a time when military service and ROTC were in a decline across the country. Some colleges kicked ROTC off campus as a way of protesting the Vietnam War, and there were riots and protests across the country, often centering on college campuses. RPI was different. While there was one protest where the main administration building, the Pittsburgh Building, was taken over by students during the war, it was very brief and peaceful and was over almost before it started. In reality, engineering students are generally fairly conservative thinkers. Most of them were hoping to land a good paying job at an aerospace company or defense contractor when they got out! We were a pretty mercenary bunch. Certainly I never saw any issues with ROTC being unpopular when I was there.

From what I remembered the first time, ROTC had a fair number of students in it, but it was very low key. You almost never saw anybody in uniform. ROTC operated out of the Armory, which was also one of the gyms, and everybody stored their uniforms there. You would show up, dress, take your class, change, and leave. I was there on a four year scholarship, which meant I had to serve for four years active duty. The minimum was two years, but they only paid for junior and senior years then.

At the time, most of us were four years. We were just starting to come off of the Viet Nam War, and ROTC was filled with the biggest collection of draft dodgers you would ever want to meet! These guys all signed up in 1969 and 1970, when the war was at its ugliest. As long as they were in ROTC, they couldn't be drafted and sent to Viet Nam! Furthermore, there were a couple of separate deals available. ROTC would only pay for one degree, but since Rensselaer had a program for a five year combined Bachelors/Masters in Engineering degree, a lot of the ROTC engineers got the Army to pay for that fifth year, so they could get the masters. Likewise, you could defer your service if you paid for grad school on your own. The ranks were full of grad students doing anything they could to avoid the military while there was a war on.

However, the theory went, sooner or later they would have to serve. But, luckily, the war was winding down by the time they became juniors and seniors. Further, they would graduate and be commissioned with multiple degrees. The thinking was that nobody was going to send these RPI geniuses to war; no, they would do desk duty in the States where nobody would shoot at them. It was incredibly cynical and mercenary, but it worked. By the time they graduated Viet Nam was over, and these guys had just gotten free high end college educations.

There were also some of us who knew we were going into the Army and didn't plan to delay it. I wasn't the only guy there with military tradition in the family. It's like anything else. You get out of something what you put into it. You put the effort in; sooner or later you'll be rewarded. I decided to make my time in uniform worthwhile. I knew the Army would respond. For one thing, you could get more training during the summer. At the time you took boot camp (I know, it was called something else, officially, but that's what we called it) during your last two summers. However, if you wanted to, and your grades were good enough, and you were in for a four year scholarship, you could add to it by taking airborne school after your second summer. I knew a couple of guys who did that. Wally Miskowitz was really hard core, and ended up going Special Forces. One winter, during the January break, he even went on an Arctic survival course!

I wasn't quite that crazy. I had spent fifty years in upstate New York. I was already an Arctic survivor. Still, what else was I going to do? Go back to the old homestead and move in with my brother again? Boot camp and jump school sounded a whole lot easier and a whole lot safer.

Chapter 24: Kappa Gamma Sigma

Despite my above average success with the ladies in junior high and high school, I saw very little action that first semester. Okay, to be honest - almost no action. It's not that I wasn't interested, because I certainly was. This was the longest dry spell in my life since I had lost my cherry for the second time with Shelley. However, I had several very large issues to deal with. The first was that as a freshman, my ranking on the social scale for the average girl ranked somewhere lower than whale shit. Even if I managed to hit up a girl at a Friday night dance at the Rat, when they learned I lived in the freshman dorms it was 'see you later.' Secondly, there were no girls to hit up. Like I said before, with a 14:1 ratio, the place was a total sausagefest.

Finally, there was my course load, which was heavy. After a few weeks of classes I knew two things. One, I was probably going to be able to accomplish my goal of a doctorate (or at least a masters) in four years, and Two, I was not going to be valedictorian again, although I should be able to at least be in the top half of my class this time. That first semester I was taking around 22 credits - Differential Equations, Finite Math, Linear Algebra, Basic Algorithms, and Computer Science I (each 4 credits) and Military Science I (2 credits). This was complicated by the fact that I'm a really good programmer, so I was already blowing through the programming course and my professor came to me to ask if I wanted to get both it and Computer Science II done in one semester. That would give me 26 credits, which some students only get in a year. At that rate, by the end of my freshman year, I was going to be a senior.

The only way I was going to have time for a girl was if one of them crawled under my desk and offered to give me a blowjob, and even then I'd still end up multitasking!

Still, I didn't spend the entire time buried in books or the library. I actually enjoyed my time at Rensselaer the first go-around, and I saw no reason not to now. I was just going to be a hell of a lot smarter about it, starting with partying. It was one thing to party on weekends, but there was no excuse for me to get stupid drunk and stoned in the middle of the week. I think I really blew Buddy's mind in that regard. I never said anything to him about his smoking dope, but I didn't join in. Then, the Friday night of Labor Day weekend, he gave me his perfunctory "Want a toke?" question and I said yes. He watched in utter amazement as I expertly rolled a fat joint, lit it, and smoked a fair bit before handing it to him.

"I thought you didn't smoke pot?", he asked.

"Not on school nights.", I replied.

"What's the difference?"

I just laughed. If Buddy didn't know, I wasn't going to be able to teach him in the time remaining until he flunked out. After that first week I had him totally pegged. Buddy was from a small town in Vermont, with just enough brains so that he was able to glide through high school without needing to crack a book, which got him mostly As and Bs, and a decent enough SAT score. What he totally failed to understand was that now he was playing in the big leagues, where everyone and their brother had managed to do that. He was now competing against guys like me, people who actually studied and went to class, and we were going to bury him.

By the end of the second week I had a nice little rhythm going of studying like a madman until the end of classes Friday, and then getting a little bent on Friday night and Saturday. I scored a lid through Buddy and his connections, although I had to keep it under lock and key so that Buddy wouldn't smoke it all up himself. I also kept the boozing under control, not out of some moralistic sense, but because I didn't enjoy the hangovers. Most Friday or Saturday nights there would be a band playing down in the Rat. I would sometimes hit the Rat weeknights, too. It stayed open most nights until 11:00 or 12:00, for people looking for a place to study and grab a late meal. I started going down every few nights late to play pool. I had enjoyed it before, but gave it up when I moved off campus.

So it went for another week. That Friday Buddy managed to sleep through the first F-Test. Well, it wasn't a shock; he had managed to sleep through every other 8:00 AM class he had signed up for. He even had the gall to complain that I didn't wake him up, but I told him I wasn't there, since I had my own classes to go to. Regardless, the sheer shock of the F-Test was finally sinking into my classmates, and a major party was planned down at the Rat that night. Lots of people were going to get stupid.

I had a beer in my room after class and then headed down to the Student Union, skipping out on whatever fresh hell the Dining Hall was preparing to serve up. I wasn't quite hungry yet, so I wandered into the billiards room. All the tables were taken, so I found the one with what seemed to be the shortest line and plunked a quarter down on the table. The pool tables were coin operated. Once the balls went into the pockets, they fell into a track mechanism and would only be released by a quarter in the slot. Only the cue ball managed to escape this indignity, and I never figured out what magical method the table used to determine which ball was the cue ball. You placed a quarter on the edge of the table. When it was your turn, you put your quarter in and played for rights to the table with the previous owner. If you lost, the reigning owner of the table took on the next challenger. If you won, you were the new owner of the table.

The present king of the table was a loud mouthed sophomore, supported by his equally loud mouthed friend. They were playing as a team, alternating turns with the cue ball. There was some degree of skill present, but only enough to whip on somebody who had never played pool before. They beat, barely, two freshmen in a row, and then it was my turn.

"Lookie, lookie, fresh meat!", crowed the first guy, a tall and skinny guy in an RPI t-shirt and faded jeans.

"Just leave the quarter with us, little boy.", added his partner, slightly shorter and heavier, who was wearing a Led Zeppelin sweatshirt and jeans.

I smiled. These assholes weren't just marginal pool players, they were also half drunk. Another freshman had queued up behind me and laid down his quarter. I turned to him and said, "Give me ten minutes, and I'll take care of you, too." The freshman grinned as the two sophomores started loudly mouthing off.

"Hey, knock it off and keep it down!" The manager of the billiards room/bowling alley yelled at them. They looked at him and shrugged but still were ragging on me in a lower tone. I ignored them.

We were playing 8 Ball. Normally we would have seen how close to a full rebound we could get with just a cue ball to determine who got to break, but these two clowns said the rule was that the owner of the table got to break. I didn't care to push it, and despite a truly vicious break shot, the tall and skinny guy couldn't sink a ball. I took my cue and promptly sank the 2 ball. "I have solids.", I commented, and promptly ran the 1, 3, and 7 balls before scratching on the 6. The other guy managed to get both the 9 and 10 balls before scratching. I then ran the 6, 4, and 5 balls before calling, "8 ball, corner pocket." I nailed it with a flourish.

"Thank you very much.", I said with a smile. I nodded to the other freshman to come up and take his place.

"Fuck you!", said the first sophomore. "What are you, a hustler?"

"Nobody hustles us!", said his friend.

They both puffed up their chests and tried to crowd me off the table, but I just stood there and kept my mouth shut. They got loud enough that the manager came over and threatened to throw them out.

"He's cheating! He's hustling us!", said the first guy.

"Yeah!", agreed his partner.

Not the sharpest tools in the shed. I was trying to figure out how a four ball run was a hustle. I settled it by asking the freshman if he minded waiting another five minutes. He gave me a curious look and said it was okay by him.

I turned back to the manager. "I'll make you a deal. I'll take these two on again. I lose, it's their table; I win, they get lost."

He chewed their asses another minute and then washed his hands of them. I broke this time, ended up with stripes, and cleaned them out in another couple of runs. They started bitching and moaning again, but this time the manager just yelled at them and pointed them towards the door. They wandered out with no good grace.

I joked about it with the other freshman, who perked up when the two sophomores left but still couldn't break me. I will admit, he had more talent that they did. Next in line were a pair of upper classmen. They were dressed in matching red and gold fraternity shirts, with the Greek letters Kappa Gamma Sigma on the front. "I bet you're feeling all sorts of brave now, aren't you!", said the first one, a guy roughly my height and weight.

"Yeah, he's feeling like it's his table now.", agreed the second guy, a little shorter than the first.

"It costs a quarter to find out.", I replied, with a smile.

"Oh my, somebody needs an asskicking.", commented the first fellow. He pulled out a quarter and flipped it through the air to me. "You're on." He fished a cue out of the rack, rolled it on the table to see if it was warped, and put it back. It took him another two tries to find one he liked.

He must have really liked it a lot. I got nothing on the break, and he ran the table. I glanced over at the manager, who was grinning at me. "Sonny, you've just been hustled."

"I guess so." I turned back to the frat boys. "I guess you've played before."

That set them both to laughing. "They're the frat champions." The manager pointed at a plaque on the wall. There were a number of small brass plates, one for each year, and the current winners were James Easton and Rubin Goldstein, Kappa Gamma Sigma.

I shook my head. "You two are these guys?", I asked, tapping on the plaque. They howled in laughter again. "Okay, so who's who?"

The guy who played me grinned and stuck out his hand. "I'm Jim Easton. This is Boris." The other student put out his hand.

I gave him an odd look. "Boris? The sign says Rubin Goldstein."

"That's my nickname. Come on, let's get a beer. I'm buying.", said the second guy.

"You're on." I hung up my cue and surrendered the table to the next pair of students. We left the billiards room and settled into a booth. Jim and I sat down, while Boris wandered off towards the counter. "You stood up to those clowns pretty well.", commented Jim.

"Nothing to it. They were too drunk to play anyway.", I answered.

"Drunks like to fight."

I shrugged. "Well, I wasn't born with this nose." I gave a lousy impersonation of John Wayne: "A man's got to do what a man's go to do!"

Boris came back with a pitcher of beer and three plastic cups. "What's a man go to do?"

Jim said, "He was about to tell us how he busted his nose."

I grinned. "My girlfriend's parents came home early."

Both Jim and Boris grinned wildly at that. "And were you being naughty?", asked Boris.

"Extremely. They kicked the shit out of me."

"They?", asked Jim.

I gave them the condensed version of what happened, which led to howls of laughter and a lot of beer drinking. They asked for my name and what classes I was in, and were very surprised when I told them I wasn't in any of the freshman classes. That discussion took us through the first pitcher of beer. Jim paid for the second, and we continued to talk for another half hour.

I was definitely feeling the beer, and I wasn't surprised when Jim said, "It's time for dinner. You want to come back to the house with us for dinner."

"It's got to be better than whatever the mystery meal is at the dining hall.", added Boris. He got his nickname from playing chess like Boris Spassky last year. He also looked like a Russian, with a round face and slightly Tatar eyes.

"That's got to be the truth!", I agreed. I grabbed my jacket and followed them outside.

Boris had the world's ugliest and most decrepit Chevy Impala, which looked like it was held together by twine and bubblegum. "Behold, the Galactic Derelict!", commented Jim. We climbed inside, and I tried not to think about what I might actually be sitting on. At least it didn't squish. The engine started with some difficulty, and it knocked and rattled the entire trip to the frat house. Worse was the fact that not one of us was really in shape to drive, but we made it the mile to Kegs.

"Welcome to Kappa Gamma Sigma!", said Boris as we climbed out of his junker.

"Home sweet home!", added Easton.

We were parked behind a couple of houses on Burdette, surrounded by a chain link fence, and with a swimming pool in the back yard behind one of them. The house and grounds were both large and lived in, with a comfortable feel to it and both nice and dump-like aspects. "Which home is it?", I asked.

"It's both buildings.", answered Boris.

Jim said, "The frat house is actually two houses."He pointed to the larger of the two houses, a rambling three story Federalist monstrosity. "That's the main house. The other one is Grogan's, which only has bedrooms. The main house is where we have the kitchen and dining room and living room and shit."

"It has the bar, too. Come on, let's get a beer.", finished Boris.

I followed them inside to find a beer keg tapped and set on a folding table in the front room of the main house, in what was known as the living room. I was handed a beer and told to make myself comfortable. I saw a surprising number of people I knew. First, I ran into Stew Sokoloff. He was a junior in my Finite Math class, and looked shocked to discover he was taking classes with a freshman. Stew was a math major and wanted to become an actuary with an insurance company. We talked about the upcoming test for a few minutes, and then I noticed several guys from ROTC. I started talking to several of the guys and figured out what was happening.

I had been invited over for an informal rush party kegger. A fraternity is a living organism, and every year the seniors would graduate and move away. The brothers needed to recruit, or 'rush', enough freshmen to make up for this loss. Since you couldn't just run an ad in the newspaper ("Wanted: RPI freshman to join deviate social fraternity and live in filth and squalor. Must be heterosexual alcoholic drug fiend. Be prepared to show proof of being able to pay a hefty bar tab. Call now! Operators are standing by!") it was necessary to hold various parties and keggers to introduce freshmen to the fraternity lifestyle. Further, sophomores and juniors would be told to meet freshmen and invite them back to the frat to attend these parties. It's sort of like luring a four year old into a darkened van with candy and toys, only with beer and without the grisly ending.

For the freshmen, it's a chance to load up on free beer and, in effect, audition for the brothers. The brothers use this time to see if any of these little assholes have what it takes to become Keggers and if they could stand living with them for a year or two. All this occurs during the first semester. At the end of the semester, the freshmen selected would be formally invited to 'pledge' the fraternity, and announce their intention of joining the frat. Pledges gained several privileges, including the right to hang around, automatic invites to all parties and functions, free meals on weekends, and getting to run up a bar tab. On the other hand, they get used for scut labor by the brothers. Towards the end of the spring semester they would go through 'Hell Week', a week long ordeal of abuse and hazing. At the end of the week they would be initiated into the fraternity and become full members, entitled to live in the house the following year. It is a ritual that goes back to the 19th century with fraternities, and probably thousands of years with equivalent organizations around the world. Hammurabi and the Babylonian Army probably had a similar system of recruitment.

I quickly ran across Bruno Cowling and Joe Bradley, another couple of freshmen in ROTC, and chatted with them about what brought them here. It turned out they had been invited by a couple of the older brothers in ROTC. I nodded in understanding. I had been chatted up by a guy in Crows (Alpha Chi Rho) about coming out to their house. Since Kegs and Crows were the two ROTC houses, I suspected every freshman cadet who wasn't a total hose job was going to be invited to one or both houses for a visit. That was when I looked around and started counting noses. About two-thirds of the brothers were in Army, Navy, or Air Force ROTC. To be fair, they looked about as degenerate as the non-military brothers.

I had another couple of beers before the Friday night meal of burgers and fries. I looked in the kitchen and saw it was only one step away from a Health Department shutdown, but the food still tasted better than the dining hall. I kept wandering, and at one point walked over to Grogans' with Boris and looked around. The main house consisted of a living room, a formal room (same as the living room but cleaner), and the kitchen/pantry/dining areas. Upstairs were two more floors of residential rooms and a big communal bathroom. Grogans', the house next door, had been bought in the late Fifties from a family named the Grogans when the frat outgrew the main house. There was nothing in there but two floors of residential rooms and a couple of bathrooms.

Kappa Gamma Sigma was one of 24 fraternities on campus. There were no sororities yet, since there were no girls. Greek life, as it was called, was a major element at Rensselaer. No matter what the antics of the frats were, RPI didn't have enough dorm space to hold the 750 to 800 students in the frats, and Troy didn't have enough apartments to hold them either. They added up to almost a quarter or more of the undergraduate student body.

There were all sorts of different frats. Tau Kappa Epsilon, 'Teke', was the frat for the football team. Lambda Pi was a nerd frat, and with a nickname like 'Lambie Pies', heavily ridiculed. 'Castle', Pi Kappa Phi, actually owned a Victorian era frat house down in the middle of Troy that was so authentic that every year or two a movie company would come in from Hollywood and shoot a movie there (hence the nickname Castle.) Kegs and Crows were the two military frats, though non-ROTC guys were allowed in as well.

Dad hadn't wanted me to join a fraternity before, not that he ever got a vote. He did tell me that if I moved off campus, he wouldn't pay my room or board anywhere else. My father's animus towards fraternities always confused me; he had been in Delta Upsilon at the University of Pennsylvania. Then again, he told me once that they didn't have a frat house. They met once a month in a rented room at a hotel. My bet was they would have their meeting and then use the room to get liquored up and bring in a few hookers. Hey, it was the 1940s and times were different. Now he didn't want anything to do with fraternities.

Most of the freshmen wandered back down Burdette to the dorms somewhere after 11. I got there just in time to find Buddy floating in on a cloud of pot smoke, followed by a small group of guys from down the hall. I crashed on top of my bed and slept through whatever they were planning to do.

I woke late the next morning, to find Buddy staring at me from where he was sitting on his bed, lighting up a bong. "So you do know how to party!", he crowed.

Oh, I knew how to party. I felt it throughout every bone of my body. Maybe this frat business wasn't all it was cracked up to be. My tongue felt like somebody had been hiking on it. I rolled out of bed and flipped Buddy the bird, which set him to laughing, and grabbed my toilet kit and a towel. I stumbled off to the bathrooms at the end of the hall and took a long hot shower and then shaved. I simply wrapped the towel around my waist and stumbled back down the hallway to our room, carrying my used clothes in my hand.

A good looking middle-aged woman was coming the other way, leading the rest of her family, which seemed to consist of a number of very nice looking high school age girls. "Awfully informal, aren't we?", she asked with a smile.

"No ma'am. This is just basic informal. Awfully informal wouldn't require the towel. Care to see the difference?"

The girls started giggling, as Momma laughed loudly. "As tempting as you make that sound, young man, I think I'll have to take a rain check."

"Too bad. You ever get informal yourself?", I asked.

The girls giggled even more, as their mother blushed. "How do you think I ended up with a son and four daughters? Speaking of which..."

I eyed her figure, which was quite satisfactory. "Five kids? No way! Stop by 206 on the way out!" I slipped past the ladies as she laughed and her daughters giggled, and headed back to my room.

Five minutes later, I was dressed and working on a gin and tonic as a hair of the dog, when the door started pounding. I opened it to find a very, very large fellow named Bo Berzinski from down the hall and around the corner. "What's up, Bo?"

"Were you hitting on my mother?", he asked.

Buddy was staring at us, his mind reeling with questions. I sipped my drink, and wondered if my repartee was going to get my ass kicked again. Bo just might be able to pull it off!

"Damn straight! Your sisters, too. They're all a lot cuter than you are, Bo." I opened the door wide. "Come on in. Drink? It must be after five somewhere."

Bo laughed and came in. "Yeah, they are. I'm the sane one, I think." I mixed him a drink and handed it to him. "They wanted to know if you wanted to go to lunch with us. You must have really impressed them."

I raised an eyebrow at this. Was Bo pimping me to his Mom and younger sisters? "And what did your Dad say to that?"

"Wouldn't know. Haven't seen the bastard in years! Interested?"

I shrugged. "Why not." I changed into some decent clothes and followed Bo back to his room.

Bo's room was the same size as mine, and it was packed to the rafters. Between his mother, his four sisters, a roommate, and a couple of guys trying to hit on the oldest sister, it was loud and cramped. Bo and I weren't helping. Bo solved the problem by picking up one of the interlopers by the waist from behind and turning around, to face the door. Jerry Kozak, the victim, squawked loudly, but was quickly shoved out the door. His roommate got the idea and vamoosed on his own. Bo kicked the door shut. "There, that's better."

"You do have a way about you, Bo.", I commented. "Hey, Frank."

Frank Dittmers, Bo's roommate, nodded. "Hey, Carl."

Bo's mom smiled at me. "Is that your name? Carl?"

I looked her over and got a better view than when I was passing in the hall. She was a very attractive lady, probably about my mother's age, or maybe a few years younger, with wide hips and an impressive bust, but a surprisingly narrow waist. She was tall, almost as tall as I was, in her heels. Her hair was a deep auburn, and her eyes were blue.

"Yes, ma'am, I'm Carl Buckman."

She held out her hand. "Well, it's very nice to meet you, Carl. I'm Sophia Berzinski. I have to apologize for teasing you in the hallway. I had forgotten what it's like to have a young man around the house, now that Bo has moved out."

"Please, Mrs. Berzinski, it was my fault for speaking out of turn. I apologize for that. My mouth tends to get me in trouble at times."

She grinned. "I just bet it does! Would you care to join us for lunch? Bo says the food is better off campus." She looked at Frank. "Frank, you're invited too, of course."

Frank smiled. "Thanks, but no thanks. I'm going out in ten minutes to see my girlfriend."

Both Bo and I stared at him. "You met a girl? Here? On campus?", asked Bo. I nodded in agreement with the question.

Frank grinned. "It's true! They actually do exist! She's in my Chem 1 section."

I smiled. "Will wonders never cease!" I turned back to Sophia and her daughters. "Well ladies, that leaves me free to escort all of you."

"Forget it, Buckman. They're all too young for you!", commented Bo, which got him a loud collection of raspberries from his sisters.

I looked at the oldest girl. "I bet he was a real problem with boyfriends back home."

She stuck her tongue out at her brother. "Yeah, but not anymore!"

Bo's eyes opened wide at that, and he started quizzing the girls on boyfriends, which they ignored. Sophia laughed and motioned us towards the door. "Enough! I'm hungry. Where are we going?"

Bo's sisters all started arguing about that, with each one wanting a different restaurant or style of food. It was decided in the end to go out for pizza, since this was the one thing that everybody liked. I told them about the place down at the Price Chopper mall and they agreed to that. "How do we get there?", I asked. "Unless you're driving a bus, we're going to need two cars."

"Bo and you can go in his car, and I'll take the girls. You can show Bo where this place is, and we'll follow.", said Sophia.

We headed down the hallway and I found my room door closed, with music blaring from the inside. I pounded on the door, and Buddy opened it, letting out a pungent cloud of smoke. I ran in and grabbed my jacket, and then went out again. Sophia was smiling and inhaled theatrically, which her daughters missed, but both Bo and I caught. I blushed and muttered, "Buddy!" Bo snorted and nodded. By now, Buddy's antics were legendary.

No, Sophia wasn't driving a bus. She had a late model Cadillac De Ville in pristine condition. "Very nice!"

"Thank you. I would have thought you'd prefer a little sports car like Bo drives." Bo had a late model Mustang. It appeared that the Berzinskis were loaded.

"Sporty is nice, but not all it's cracked up to be. I prefer the quality of the ride, myself, something smooth and comfortable.", I replied, winking at her.

She smiled. "I see."

I wasn't introduced to the daughters until we got to the restaurant. There was Maria, the oldest girl, who was a senior in high school and the reason they were visiting; she was thinking about going to Rensselaer next year. The next two girls were Julietta and Margreta, a pair of fifteen year old identical twins, and bringing up the rear was Antonia, a twelve year old just starting junior high. The entire family was visiting from the Boston area.

Sophia asked, "So, Carl, are you in Bo's classes?"

Bo laughed at that. "Carl's the dorm genius. He's not in any of our classes."

I tried to play it down. "It's not like that. I'm a math major and Bo's in engineering." I looked at Bo for help.

He nodded. "Chemical engineering. Still, you aren't in classes with any of us. You're what, a sophomore or junior?"

Sophia eyed me curiously. "Really?"

I just waved it off. "I simply had some advanced classes in high school. It's no big deal." Time to defuse this. I looked over at Maria. "So, if you're looking to go to school here, what's your major going to be?"

Maria and her sisters were all duplicates of their mother, real knockout redheads, in other words, even the baby of the family, Antonia. Maria answered, "Mechanical engineering."

"What are your grades like?" I quizzed her about her grades and SAT scores. They were perfectly adequate to get into RPI. Add in that she was a girl, and the school was actively recruiting women and other minorities to fill Federal quotas, and she was a shoo-in.

While we were talking, a pair of large pepperoni pizzas were ordered, along with breadsticks and drinks. The girls all ordered sodas, but Bo ordered a beer, and I ordered a bottle of wine with Sophia.

"Wine, Carl?", she commented.

"Something Italian, I think, since we're having pizza. Not too full bodied, no Barolos or Tuscans, so maybe a Chianti, but it's pizza, so nothing as fancy as a Classico or Riserva." I glanced at the wine list for a moment and then ordered a bottle of Gabbiano. She nodded approvingly.

I looked over at the twins, who were teasing their brother. "So where do you two want to go to school?", I asked. "And do you always dress alike?" They were wearing identical jeans and t-shirts, and even sneakers. Antonia was dressed informally, too. Only Sophia and Maria had dressed to impress, for Maria's college tour.

The twins giggled at that. Antonia piped up and said, "That way nobody can tell them apart."

"Not true. I can tell.", I answered.

Sophia and the girls all laughed at that. "Even I can't tell, and I'm their mother.", she said.

"No way, man. These two have been playing this game since they learned how to walk!", agreed Bo.

I shrugged. "Well, Julietta's the one with the piece of bread stuck in her braces."

Instantly, the twin on the left slammed her mouth shut, as all eyes turned to the twins. You could see the twin on the left moving her tongue around in her mouth, and then she looked at me and said, "No I don't!"

I smiled. "Yeah, but now I know you're Julietta."

The twins immediately started complaining, "That's cheating!", as the rest of us laughed at them. We refused to hear their complaints, so the two of them went off to the bathroom together.

"They're going to switch places.", said Maria after they left.

"Or maybe just say that they've switched places.", rebutted Antonia. She looked at me and said, "They do this all the time."

"Doesn't matter. Unless they swap clothes, Margreta has a tiny string hanging off the sleeve of her t-shirt." I had been eyeing the two girls trying to find something to tell them apart. They really were identical. "I just bet they're going to be a handful when they start dating. The guys won't know what's hit them. Or who!"

Both Bo and Sophia started at that thought. A few minutes later, the twins returned. "Now you don't know who we are.", said the twin on the right, and they both stuck their tongues out at us.

I looked at their mother and siblings. There was a definite thread loose on the left sleeve of one of the Aerosmith t-shirts. I pointed at her, "Margreta", moved my finger to the other, and said, "and Juliettta."

Both girls gave shrieks of disbelief and pouted when their mother laughed at them.

"You're a very observant young man.", she commented, especially after she caught me looking at her ring finger. She was missing either an engagement ring or a wedding band.

"I'm an observant kind of guy.", I returned with an easy smile. Shortly after that, I felt a stocking clad foot running up the outside of my left leg. Since I was sitting to the immediate right of Sophia, and Maria was on the far side of Bo from me, I was left with an interesting observation of my own. My cock also stiffened inside my pants. I didn't know what happened to Mr. Berzinski, but he didn't seem to be a factor anymore.

After a very pleasant lunch, we all headed back out to the parking lot. Bo's Mustang was parked next to his mother's Caddy, and I smiled again when I saw it. "You got to love that big Detroit iron.", I commented.

"You like a car like that?", asked Sophia.

"Nothing like it for a soft and comfortable ride."

She smiled at that.

It was time to go. I waved to the twins and Antonia, and shook Maria's and then Sophia's hands. As I touched Sophia's, I felt something in the palm of my hand. "Thank you for the lunch, Mrs. Berzinski."

"It was my pleasure. Let's hope we run into you again." She smiled and got into her car.

Bo went around the side to the driver's side, and I took the moment to glance at the note in my palm. Holiday Inn, Room 312, 10:30. Well, maybe I just might run into Sophia again. I bet I wouldn't be calling her Mrs. Berzinski the next time. I climbed in Bo's car and we rode back to the dorms.

Chapter 25: Midnight Rendezvous

I goofed off that afternoon in the dorm, and had dinner in the dining hall. After dinner, Buddy pushed me to go to a frat party with him and get totally drunk and wasted. I declined. "Buddy, I'm going out tonight. Sorry."

"Hey, it's free beer and dope!"

"Buddy, with you it's always free beer and dope." I had never seen him actually buy beer or pot, although he certainly seemed to mooch it pretty quickly.

"So, where are you going?"

"That's secret, Buddy. If I told you, I'd have to kill you."

"But..."

"Trust me, Buddy. I'm going to have even more fun than you will, and I won't get a hangover from it.", I said, laughing.

By nine, Buddy was history, off to wherever he was getting drunk and stoned at. I grabbed my toilet kit and a towel and headed down the hall. I took another shower, and shaved again, because you never want to be the one to cause rug burns. (Actually, that was sort of overkill. My beard really didn't get heavy until I was almost 20. A second shave in one day was more along the lines of wishful thinking.) Afterwards, I went back to my room and changed into fresh khakis, a clean white dress shirt, and my deck shoes. I skipped the socks; I definitely skipped the briefs and undershirt. My dress shirt I wore casually, with the sleeves rolled up to mid forearm and a couple of buttons at the collar undone. I left the room a few minutes past ten.

I parked in the Holiday Inn parking lot away from the building, in a spot not well lit, and waited in the car until it was closer to the appointed time. No way did I want to be in the hall when one of the girls came wandering through. I figured that the girls were sharing a room or two, and that Sophia was in her own separate room. By 10:30, the girls would have settled down, but I didn't want to chance running into them. At 10:27 I got out of the Galaxie, locked it, and went in through the lobby. The clerk glanced at me, but I went through to the elevators and went up to the third floor. Room 312 was to the right side. I walked down the hallway as quietly as I could, and tapped lightly on the door.

After a moment, the door opened wide, and Sophia Berzinski smiled when she saw me leaning against the door frame. She didn't say anything, but stepped aside and invited me in. I followed her inside, and she closed the door behind me, and set the latch. "I was hoping you might stop by.", she said.

"I was hoping you would invite me.", I replied.

Sophia was looking extremely seductive. She had on a long black silk robe, and the way she moved underneath it led me to believe it was almost all she was wearing. She was also wearing black stockings and black stiletto heels. I eyed her frankly and approvingly. She was carrying a champagne flute half filled with sparkling wine. She wiggled it in my direction. "Would you care to join me?"

"I'd like that." I followed her over to the table in the room where she had a bottle of champagne sitting in an ice bucket, along with a second glass. I took off my jacket and hung it over the back of a chair. I looked around the room. It was your basic Holiday Inn style room, with a single king size bed, a dresser with a television bolted to it, and a small table with a couple of chairs. A pair of small armchairs was in one corner facing the television.

Sophia handed me the glass of champagne. "I'm not so sure of the vintage.", she commented.

I had to smile at that. "I think I'm more astonished that you got champagne through room service at a Holiday Inn."

We sipped our champagne and looked into each other's eyes. She gave me a smile and I sat down in one of the armchairs and held my hand out to her. She settled sideways on my lap, with one arm around my neck and the other holding her flute of champagne. I kept an arm around her waist and the other on my own glass. "I debated picking anything up before coming over.", I said.

"Oh?"

I gave a small shrug. "I figured that the girls might notice flowers tomorrow morning, and I'm still not old enough to buy booze."

"How old are you?", she asked, surprised.

"Does it matter?"

It was her turn to shrug. "No, I don't suppose it does."

I finished my glass of champagne and set the empty glass on the table to the side, and then put both hands around her waist. The silk felt very thin, and her body felt very warm and supple beneath it. "I didn't think so, either."

She smiled at me, and continued to sip her champagne. "You are very sure of yourself."

I tried to sound innocent. "Am I? I just try to be myself." I tightened my hold on Sophia's waist slightly and began running my hands slowly over her. She shifted slightly, and her robe came apart slightly on her legs. First I saw the elastic band at the top of her stockings, and then she shifted a touch more, and I saw some pale white thigh above the stockings.

Sophia closed her eyes and gave a slight shudder as my hands moved over her back and side, and her eyes closed as she slumped against me. This brought her head close to mine, and I turned my head slightly, to where I could whisper into her ear, "You should be yourself, and relax. Let me help you relax. You're an amazing woman. Let me make you amazing tonight." I nuzzled her neck and extended my tongue, and traced a thin line along her neck up to a spot just behind her ear. I flicked my tongue across her ear lobe, and as I did, I brought the hand wrapped around her from the front, back and up. I lightly traced a line using just the tips of my fingers across her side and up along her breast. Sophia gave another small shudder, and this time she let out a soft sigh.

I continued to lightly tease and taste her, slowly letting my fingers wander across the front of her robe. Sophia's breathing became a little raspy, and I glanced down at the front of her robe. Her nipples were clearly aroused and tenting out the front of it. She was showing a lot of cleavage by now, as her squirming in my arms was opening her robe up, and her chest was becoming flushed. It was time. I slipped my hand inside her robe and cupped a large and warm breast, lifting it and running my thumb across the distended nipple.

Sophia moaned, and her eyes snapped open. She pulled her head away from mine and looked me in the eye, and then her hands came up to cup my face on both sides. She lowered her lips to mine and kissed me, her tongue dueling with mine, as I peeled her robe open enough that I could use both hands on those beautiful full breasts. We continued like this, and I undid the tie holding her robe together. I slid one hand between her legs, and she quickly spread them as much as possible while staying on my lap. She had a small patch of coarse and curly hair, which seemed drenched, and her clit was throbbing as I ran a fingertip up through her slit. Sophia's musk filled the room.

Sophia moaned loudly as I touched her clit, and to keep her quiet, I held her face to mine with the hand to the back of her head as I began to finger her pussy. She was shaking as she moaned into my lips, and I refused to let her go until a quiet shriek and a flood of warm juice to my fingers indicated a crushing orgasm. At that point I let up on her, and let off of her clit and simply used my fingers to rub her wet pussy from the outside. Sophia pulled her head back and looked at me with glazed eyes, and with a weak voice, said, "Oh, God, fuck me!"

I shook my head and smiled. "No."

"No?", she asked weakly.

"Not yet. We have lots of time. I plan to use you all night long. You want that don't you? You want one orgasm after another, don't you? You want me to make you do things, don't you?" As I whispered these things into her ear, I began touching her pussy again, and pinching her nipples again.

Sophia responded with a gasp. "Please, just fuck me!", she pleaded.

I licked her ear and backed off on her pussy a touch. "No, not until you tell me what you want me to do to you." She whimpered and tried to twist out of my grasp, to get in bed, but I held her tight. "Do you want me to lick your pussy? Do you like that?" I gave her clit a vigorous rub for a second.

She barely stifled a scream and then nodded. "Yes!"

"Do you swallow?"

It took her a second to understand me, and her eyes opened wide, but she nodded, and whispered, "Yes, sometimes."

"I'm going to want you to swallow. I'm going to make you swallow." If anything, the idea of force seemed to excite her. She nodded and flushed at the thought. "Then I'm going to use you. I will make you do things, nasty things. I'm going to touch you and kiss you and make you do things. You want to be nasty for me, don't you, Sophia?"

Again she blushed, but she nodded and whispered haltingly, "Yes."

"You're so much of a lady, Sophia, but you're also a whore." I fingerfucked her hard as I said this. "The only difference is what room you're in at the time. Now you're in the bedroom, so you're going to be my whore for the night, aren't you?"

Another flood of pussy juice greeted my fingers and her back arched as she came. It was almost a silent cry of orgasm, and I kept up my torture until I didn't think she could handle it any more.

It was time for the bed. I put my hands on her waist and lifted Sophia up, and she got the idea and climbed to her feet. I stood up myself and faced her. Her robe was already hanging around her waist, loose off her shoulders, so I pushed it down and let it slip to the floor.

Sophia was looking nervous as she stood there in her thigh top stockings and black stilettos, but I simply smiled and licked my lips in anticipation. Despite having five children, including a pair of twins, she was in excellent shape, with large and proud breasts, wide set hips and a soft but not saggy rear, and the slightest hint of a womanly belly, which I found quite intriguing. She had a few stretch marks, but nothing I hadn't seen on Marilyn, and Sophia was very enticing.

I stood facing her and slowly unbuttoned my shirt. I was in good shape. I had managed to keep up with my running and some weight training since I got to college, although my aikido training had suffered. While there was a karate club at the school, that was it for martial arts, and I had been too busy to find a new dojo. I had managed to earn my black belt right before high school graduation, but I knew I was sliding backwards there. Anyway, Sophia seemed to like what she saw as I opened my shirt and took it off. I tossed it aside and moved closer.

"Sit on the bed.", I ordered. She looked confused, but I put my hands on her waist and pushed her back against the bed, and her legs automatically buckled and she sank down onto the bed. Now, with her face at my waist level, Sophia began to undo my pants, but I surprised her when I took her hands in mine and stopped her. "Not yet." I knelt down at her feet and put my hands on her knees, to spread her legs apart. I smiled as I stared at her pussy, neatly framed by trim auburn coils.

"Oh.", she commented, as she understood what I had in mind. I pushed her back down on the bed and put my face to her pussy. She was very wet and very warm, and her juice was almost pungently fragrant. I teased her by licking the edges of her pussy lips, which elicited a tiny squeal from her, but then I started licking her clitoris. Sophia's back arched as she gasped with pleasure. Her entire body seemed to go rigid, but then as I continued licking her pussy, she tried to hump her cunt up into my face, and her hands were grabbing the back of my head and trying to force me deeper. Soft animal mewing was coming out of her, and it was all I could do to keep her from suffocating me. Wouldn't that be a hell of an autopsy!

After another few minutes, Sophia suddenly gasped and whined, her entire body went rigid, and a flood of warm wetness surged onto my face. I had often heard of women like this, but I had always considered them a myth - the squirter! Apparently it was true that some women could ejaculate. Sophia made the concept of the 'wet spot' more of a 'drenched spot.' At that point I backed off slightly and allowed her to relax some.

While she was still a touch dazed, I managed to undo my pants and pushed them down on my legs until they hit the floor where I was kneeling. As soon as she looked down the length of her body at me, I stood up. It was my turn to have some fun. I could hear her breath catch when she saw me between her legs, my cock stiffly erect, but I wasn't going to give her any time to catch her breath. I lifted her legs up and held them behind the knees, spread wide, and leaned forward to rub the bottom of my erection through her slit. Sophia gasped again, and as soon as I could, I slid my cockhead inside her gaping hole and pushed inward. A single thrust had me buried balls deep.

"Oh God! Fuck me, fuck me..." Sophia lifted her ass up off the bed to meet my thrusts. I levered my body forward, keeping her legs upright and tucked into my arms, my elbows behind her knees. She was bent almost double, a position which made me thrust incredibly deep into her. Pussy juice was flowing freely from her, and my cock pistoning in and out made a loud squelching sound. With each thrust I pushed her further up the bed, so we were no longer hanging off the end. Sophia continued to babble as I rammed down into her. Otherwise she was twisting and squirming underneath me, and her arms were almost flapping as she orgasmed. It wasn't long before I grunted and slammed down one last time, as my cock pumped a load into her. At that point she wrapped her arms around me and hugged me to her.

We slowly disentangled ourselves, first by my letting go of her legs, and then by Sophia stretching out underneath me. "Oh my God, I've never been fucked so good!", she said. "I could feel every little squirt of come. Oh God!"

I caught my breath and rolled off to the side. "Yeah!", I agreed.

Sophia tried to roll onto me, but I felt soaked at the crotch. I looked her in the eyes and said, "Clean up time."

Her eyes widened, and she glanced down at my wet dick. When she looked back up at me, she asked, "You mean..."

I nodded and smiled. "Yes." I squirmed a bit on the bed, moving up the sheets, and this brought my midsection closer to her face.

She smiled and nodded, and then moved her face down to my cock. It was wet and shriveled when it went into her mouth, and wet and shriveled when it came out ten minutes later. During that ten minutes it got quite a bit larger. Sophia was an excellent cocksucker. I think her natural instincts were to spit, but I told her several times I was going to come in her mouth, and that she was going to swallow. I used my hands on the back of her head to keep her in place, and she sucked and jacked me to completion.

Afterwards I lazed on the bed happily, and Sophia crawled up next to me and snuggled against my side. "Are you sure you're only seventeen?", she asked, giggling.

"I don't turn eighteen until November.", I answered. "Trust me. I don't plan on calling the cops on you."

She laughed. "I didn't think you would."

"If nothing else, I don't need Bo to kick my ass!"

Sophia laughed again. "I think you're right about that."

"So where's Mr. Berzinski?", I asked. Sophia wasn't wearing either a wedding band or an engagement ring, but the conversation earlier indicated she was, or had been, married. "Divorced?"

She grimaced, but nodded. "Divorced. The bastard decided he preferred his secretary to me about ten years ago. Bo actually walked in on them once."

"Yuck!"

She continued. "The really awful part is that his secretary has a mustache."

It took me a second to understand her, but then I blurted out, "Double yuck!" I had to think about it for a bit, because several of Marilyn's female relatives had mustaches, too.

"I hired a lawyer and a private investigator, and my lawyer took him to the cleaners.", she concluded. Well, that explained a lot. Mrs. Berzinski and family were very well off, and money did not seem to be an issue.

"Well, I don't know what to say about that. I know about such things, but I'm damned if I understand it. You're a hell of a woman, Sophia. Do you have anybody back home who ... uh ... helps you handle the occasional itch?"

"That's one way to put it, I suppose.", she giggled. "I see a few gentlemen. Nothing serious, and nobody as young as you."

I laughed. "Maybe you need to tutor some deserving young high school students."

"Oh, God, that would be all I need!", she laughed. "I think I'll stick to Mister Happy before I try that."

"Mister Happy?" Sophia actually blushed deeply at that. I pressed her. "So, who's Mister Happy? Or is it a what"

She blushed again. "It's a what." I motioned for her to explain, and she continued, "I have this toy. Some friends of mine got it for me after the divorce went through."

"A dildo?" She blushed again and turned her head away, obviously embarrassed, and nodded mutely. "Did you bring it with you?"

Her head whipped around in astonishment, and her jaw dropped. "What?!"

"Did you bring it with you? I've never seen one." Not in this lifetime, anyway. Marilyn and I had several. "Show me." She hesitated, so I asked, "Please?"

Blushing and rolling her eyes, Sophia sat up and climbed off the bed. She rooted around in her suitcase and brought out a small plastic bag. Inside it was a non-vibrating plastic dildo and what looked to be a small bottle of baby oil. She brought it over and sat down on the bed and handed me the bag.

I opened the bag and pulled out the plastic dildo. It was a fairly standard model, a little over an inch wide and six or seven inches long, ridged and with a slight curve to it. I smiled and looked over at her. "Have you ever used this with somebody else?"

I think I shocked her at that. "No, of course not! That's only when I'm alone!"

"Would you like me to use it on you?" Sophia's mouth opened, but she was speechless. "I bet you'd like it.", I said slyly.

It took a moment, but she nodded, and quietly said, "Yes, would you?" My cock took this moment to begin lengthening again, which Sophia noticed, and she smiled at me. "You actually like that idea."

"Have you ever tried the electric versions? You know, the vibrating types.", I asked.

"I have one at home, but I don't travel with it."

I just nodded and handed her the dildo and the oil. "Show me what you like, and then I'll take over."

Sophia stretched out on her back in the middle of the bed. She said, "Normally I start by squeezing some of the baby oil out, you know, down there, but tonight I don't think I need any." She spread her legs and laid the dildo along her slit, and began to slowly rub it back and forth, letting the ridges work on her aroused clit. "Just like that."

I reached out and took her right hand, leaving her left to manipulate the dildo. I squirted some of the oil on her hand and then placed her hand on my cock. She promptly began fisting me, and it was my turn to say, "Just like that." I reached out and placed my hand over hers on the dildo.

I suppose we could have continued like that, masturbating each other until we both came, but I was looking for a little more active fun. Before I got to the point of no return, I pulled away and lay flat on my back. "Get on top."

Sophia put the dildo aside and scooted around into a position where she could swing a leg over my midsection. With one hand she lifted my cock upright, and with the other she spread her pussylips apart and dropped down onto my greasy cock. I slid in easily.

Sophia began a very natural rocking motion, lifting up and down and twisting from side to side every once in awhile. She smiled when I handed her the dildo. "Use this too."

"Then you can do something, too." Sophia leaned forward and lowered her tits to my lips. Her fingers and the dildo went to work between us, rubbing her clit as she rode me, and I began to suck on her nipples. I also reached around, to cup her ass cheeks and guide the ride. I decided to take it one step further; I reached between her cheeks, to slide an oily finger into her asshole. One of two things was going to happen, she would either stop me abruptly, or enjoy it. Sophia was a real wild woman in bed, and she shuddered and orgasmed. I continued to rub her asshole and finger her butt as a flood of pussy juice came down onto my crotch. I kept it up until I came again.

Sophia climbed off me and rolled onto her back. "Oh my God, I've never done that before.", she exclaimed. "Where did you ever learn that?!"

"I never kiss and tell. Or do anything and tell.", I answered.

She looked over at me. "Earlier I wondered if I was going to be your first. It actually kind of excited me. I would guess that isn't the case."

I laughed. "Hardly."

"May I ask that sort of thing?"

It was my turn to shrug. "I started learning back when I was fourteen, if that was the question."

"And how many girls have you slept with?"

"We almost never sleep." That got me a little jab in the ribs, so I laughed and said, "About a dozen, dozen-and-a-half, somewhere in there."

"Oh my God!"

I smiled. "I learned a lot more in high school than you might imagine."

"I guess so! I wonder about Bo and the girls."

"You're going to have to ask them about that. Do you really want to know?"

We continued to chat for a bit longer. By now it was well after midnight, but neither of us was all that sleepy. When Little Carl decided it was time for one last playtime, Sophia noticed, and we both smiled. She got me stiff, and then I decided to try something new for her.

"Get on your hands and knees.", I told her. She had already stripped off her stockings and heels, so she was completely naked as she knelt on the now soaked bedding. I slid up behind her and used my hands to hold her position as I guided my cock into her cunt. She was so wet and slippery that I wasn't getting much friction, but I knew a cure for that.

I grabbed the bottle of baby oil and squirted some on her asshole, and then slid a finger in. Sophia bucked slightly, more in surprise than anything else, and then she moaned and thrust back at me. A second finger followed, again to moaning approval. At that point I slid the ribbed and ridged dildo in and began double fucking her, with my cock in her pussy and the dildo in her ass.

Sophia was really into this. She was shaking and fucking back at me, hard, and her pussy was tightened up like a twelve year old virgin. She was babbling, "Fuck me! Fuck me!", over and over.

It was about to get better. I squirted some more oil on her asshole, allowed the dildo to work it in, and then yanked it out and tossed it aside. I pulled my cock from her pussy and slipped my cockhead into her ass before it could close up. I was able to push in easily.

Sophia's eyes snapped open, and she moved away, but I rode her down to the bed and lay atop her with my cock buried in her ass. She turned her head to look at me, and nodded. "Fuck my asshole!", she demanded.

I smiled. As she lay on the bed, I brought my legs up so that I was straddling her thighs and buns, and kept my cock buried in her rear. Then I started hammering her. She was very nice and tight at the back door, and I was well sated from our earlier fucks. I fucked her ass almost fifteen minutes before I came inside her, and Sophia lost track of her orgasms.

Sophia was almost comatose by the time I finished and pulled out and rolled onto the bed. It wasn't the first time I had assfucked, but it was the first time on this trip on the roller coaster. I went to the bathroom and showered quickly. I wasn't sure about Sophia, but I didn't think Little Carl was going to be able to come out and play anymore. When I came out, she was asleep. I dressed and pulled on my shoes and jacket. I finished off the champagne, and then took the bottle, the glasses, and the wine cooler out the door. I figured the girls didn't need to know Mommy had been entertaining a guest. I set them down by a door halfway down the hall and left. It was almost half past four by the time I crawled into bed.

Chapter 26: Thanksgiving Dinner

I slept late Sunday morning, not even waking when Buddy started drinking and smoking pot. After the mandatory shit, shave, and shower, I grabbed my books and headed out. I needed something for lunch, and then I had to study on campus. I ran across Bo almost immediately, when I was leaving the dorm and he was just coming in. "Good morning.", I said, eyeing him to see if he had any suspicions about me and his mother.

He must not have, because he simply greeted me in return.

"Next time you talk to your mom, tell her thank you for lunch yesterday."

"No problem.", he replied.

"So, is your sister planning on applying to this place?", I asked.

He gave me a shrug. "I think so, but I'm not completely sure."

I grinned at him. "You know, she's awfully pretty. If she does come here, she's going to need a friend, an older friend, maybe a sophomore that she already has met, to help ease her into things and be a mentor. I mean, she really is pretty."

Bo's eyes opened wide at this. "Oh, shit! No way, no way! I'm going to be responsible for her!"

I just laughed. "I'll be happy to help share that burden."

"No way! She's going to be the only girl on campus who doesn't have a boyfriend."

I just laughed at Bo and continued on my way, leaving him to wonder how he was going to keep his sister from meeting 4,000 new men, all of whom would be happy to show her around.

I grabbed some fruit and juice at the dining hall, and kept on going. Five minutes later I was walking into the basement of Amos Eaton Hall, also known as 'Amos Eat-Me', which was where the math department made its home. The basement was where their pride and joy lived, an IBM 360 mainframe, a state of the (then) art computer. This behemoth was generally treated better than the students who used it. It, for instance, lived in air conditioned luxury, surrounded by technicians wearing white coats. You could see it at work behind a massive glass wall. No students could even get close to it.

Just that year it had been massively upgraded. It now had an entire megabyte of memory! That 1 MB cost roughly $1.5 million. That megabyte was what they called core memory, but not because it was at the core of the machine. No, core memory was memory that stored the ones and zeroes on what looked like steel washers, or cores. 1 megabyte equaled 8 megabits, which meant that they had bought gigantic boxes holding 8 million washers tied together in racks by wiring. If you wanted one of the bits to be a 0 or 1, you energized the wires and flipped the magnetic direction of a washer. This was some serious high technology!

(Remember, in 1973 even hand held calculators were ridiculously expensive. While they had come out just a few years before, a decent scientific calculator might run $300-$400. That was over 10% of tuition, so you had to be rich to be able to buy one. Most professors wouldn't even allow you to use one during your tests because that would favor the rich students, at least until the price dropped a few years later.)

Most undergraduate computer programming was done on this beast. The language was a flavor of Fortran, and the programs were run batch style. You actually typed your program on a card punch machine, one line of code per card, and then fed the cards through a card reader which stored the program in memory until it was your turn in the batch. If you had a thousand lines of code, you would have a thousand punch cards. One of the standard jokes was that you could tell a computer science major because they walked like a gorilla; the boxes of punch cards were so massive they dragged your arms to the ground.

After feeding your punch cards to the machine, you went away. Later in the day, or maybe even the next morning, you could pick up your printouts. Hopefully it worked. The odds were it wouldn't. You would have a typo on one of the cards and the whole thing would be rejected. You would fix the problem and submit the cards again, which simply meant another card would have a typo. Screaming students bitching about typing were commonplace.

There were rumors that in the subbasement were computers which actually had keyboards and monitors, but these were just rumors. Nobody had ever seen them but some grad students.

The computer center was one of the few buildings that were open all night. Batch processing of programs went on 24/7. Also open until the wee hours was the library, which was actually in a converted Gothic cathedral on campus. A new modern library was under construction but wasn't anywhere near ready yet. As I recall, it wouldn't be in use until senior year. During finals week it and the Student Union would be open 24/7. I found myself an empty punch card machine and started typing in code that I had already written out long hand on paper. The program was one that was normally only taught towards the end of the semester, so it was fairly long. I was burning through the programming course, and Professor Nichols had agreed to let me take the follow on course independently when I finished this class' assignments.

I spent the rest of the afternoon typing code and then going over to the library. I alternated between Amos Eat-Me and the library until the early evening, skipping the deliciousness of the dining hall. Later I grabbed something in the Rat. Back in my dorm room I found Buddy missing, but what the heck, it was a weekend and he was off somewhere goofing off. Mind you, it didn't matter that he also did this the other six days of the week as well. The man was a serious student of moral dissipation. If they offered classes in that, he'd be magna cum laude!

I must have passed my first audition at Kegs, since the next morning at ROTC muster, Ricky Holloway, a junior in the ROTC program and one of the Keggers, invited me back for dinner. I thanked him and agreed, although I did mention I wouldn't be able to drink and get too stupid on a school night. He laughed at that. Ricky was one of the supreme partiers of the frat, and his room was almost a shrine to marijuana. About ten years ago a couple of upper classmen had spent almost two years painting the entire room flat black and then covered it with intricately linked paisley artwork in neon green, red, yellow, and orange patterns. The room had been wired for sound and UV lighting. Ever since then the 'Black Light Room' had been passed down from generation to generation, with the residents morally obligated to keep up the tradition and care for the room. Whenever parents were around, the room was kept closed off, lest they get the wrong idea (well, actually the right idea) about what went on in there.

And so things went for the next few weeks. I made it a habit to visit Kegs on Friday and Saturday, and maybe a short evening during the week, and I noticed several other freshmen doing the same thing. Fall Rush was doing its job, and a new slate of freshmen were being groomed for an invitation to pledge.

The one really, really serious task I was overseeing had nothing to do with school. I was about to become a millionaire. I had managed to finish high school with my brokerage account right about $125,000. On October 6, the Yom Kippur War would kick off, and within weeks, OPEC would raise prices and cut production. Currently the price of oil was about $3 a barrel. By early 1974 the price would be up to $12 a barrel.

And I knew it. Shortly before I had left Towson and driven here, I had sat down with Missy Talmadge and outlined my future plans. She had been highly skeptical of my move into oil, which she thought was just one more commodity. I knew better; it was also the one single element which the economy of the world moved on. The only more important resource is water, without which we die. I knew the price of oil would quadruple, which would get me from $125,000 to $500,000. That wasn't good enough. Missy and I worked out a series of derivatives and futures which was predicated on the rise in pricing. If the Arabs started shooting at the Israelis again, I was going to be a millionaire. If peace broke out, I would be bankrupt.

Peace didn't break out. Yom Kippur was not a holiday the school closed for, and by Monday morning's ROTC muster every military tongue was wagging over what was going on halfway around the world. We followed it closely in the Military Science classes. Ten days later OPEC starting playing games, almost doubling the price of oil overnight. That was only the start. I had left instructions for Missy to keep her nerve until the price hit $12 a barrel, at which point I wanted to dump everything and diversify. 1974 was going to be a disastrous year for the stock market. We were going to invest in Toyota and Nissan, sell short the American car companies, and buy stocks in Exxon and a few other oil companies.

Missy also suggested buying stocks in building supplies, like companies that made insulation, since people would want to insulate their houses more, but I declined. What I knew but she didn't was that most of those same companies were about to face massive tort exposure related to asbestos. Many would go out of business entirely. Unfortunately I wasn't sure when this would happen, but I didn't want to go anywhere near asbestos, not even as an investor.

November 5 came and went quietly. I was now officially and legally an adult. It was a Monday, and after dinner I called home and said hello to my parents and Suzie. They had mailed some presents to my new PO Box address. There was even one from Hamilton, but when I told Mom to thank him for me, she gave me a very hesitant response. It was obvious he hadn't actually gotten me a birthday present. They asked if I was coming home for Thanksgiving and I told them no; it was an eight hour trip or more by train or bus, and would leave me just a few days at home.

The only thing I did different that day was apply for an American Express card. Times were different then. The idea of unemployed college kids having credit cards was not even considered, but I had sufficient assets that I was sure I would get the card. Besides, American Express was not (at that time) strictly speaking a credit card. You paid off your balance every month - or else! - and couldn't roll the balance over. Additionally, there were very few places that accepted American Express back in the early Seventies. It was almost entirely restricted to hotels and restaurants. On the plus side, no matter where I was in the world, I would always be able to get a meal and a bed, and that was sufficient for me.

By early November I was already well on my way to being a millionaire thanks to the oil crisis. Buddy was well on his way to a totally different type of crisis, this one involving his grades. Even though he started attending a few classes and no longer slept through the F-Tests, Buddy had uniformly flunked every single midterm. You could see a haunted look start coming to his eyes when he tried to get me to help him. I did try, but the boy was hopeless. He would buckle down for a day, but then go right back to drinking and doping. By the beginning of November his parents must have found out about his grades, because he was suddenly getting long phone calls on the pay phone in the lounge. Buddy was frightened, but didn't have the discipline to do what was needed to catch up. He didn't do much better on the next round of F-Tests, and I knew time was getting short for my roommate.

The hammer fell Thanksgiving. I wasn't going back to Baltimore, and Buddy's parents showed up at our door bright and early Wednesday morning. They were not amused by their son's antics. His father peremptorily ordered Buddy to pack up; his mother looked me over disdainfully and demanded to know why I hadn't helped her son get the A's he deserved. Buddy must have been throwing me under the bus all semester. There was nothing to say, so I kept my mouth shut and watched. It got really amusing when his father opened his closet to help pack and found Buddy's bong. Buddy immediately claimed it was mine, at which point I just laughed. Buddy was gone fifteen minutes later. He left 'my' bong for me, but I noticed he managed to hide his stash and take that with him.

It was a perfectly serviceable bong. I cleaned it up and put it in my closet.

The school closed after all classes on Tuesday of Thanksgiving week, and wouldn't reopen until Monday morning afterwards. That left me with a major dilemma. The dining hall would be closed from Tuesday after dinner until Sunday after lunch. If I was already a Kegger, I could eat there, but we hadn't been officially rushed yet. I was going to be eating out for several days. I had already mentioned the problem to Jim Easton and Mark Malloy. I couldn't move in, of course, but I was invited to eat there for a few days. Two or three of the brothers lived far from home, and wouldn't travel until the Christmas break. The same sort of thing occurred even during the summer. There were always two or three guys living there and not moving back home. I would have to talk to them about that.

As it was, three guys were staying over, Jack Jones and Bill Swayzack, a pair of sophomores, and Marty Adrianopolis, a junior. I asked if I could come over for the day. They agreed, and I sweetened the deal. If they coughed up a few bucks, I would stuff and cook a turkey dinner. That got an enthusiastic agreement, although they were all very curious about whether I could cook or not. It was one more way to cement myself as a guy worthy of being a Kegger. I collected a fiver from each of the other three and went on my way.

Wednesday I woke up and went jogging around the eerily deserted campus. It was kind of chilly to start; the snow season in upstate New York is considered to start by Thanksgiving, or sometimes even sooner. In later years Marilyn and I had occasionally taken the kids trick-or-treating in the snow! We had already had several inches of snow, but it wasn't snowing just then. I was almost warm by the time I got back to the dorm. By lunchtime I was showered and shaved. I drove the Galaxie down to the Price Chopper mall on Hoosick and went into the Italian place for a couple of slices of pizza and a (now legal) beer. Then I went shopping. The fifteen I had collected from the three brothers, plus another five from me didn't really cover the dinner, but I had sufficient funds to cover the difference. The house was very quiet when I rolled into the parking lot. Marty heard me coming in through the back door by the kitchen and helped me carry the load in and put it in the fridge. Afterwards he invited me into the living room and we had a couple of beers while watching television.

Afterwards, Marty and Jack Jones and I drove to a diner in Albany for dinner. I remembered it from way back, Jack's Diner, an Albany landmark since the dawn of time. Many a night we'd get stoned and get the munchies and drive over there at two in the morning and demolish an entire cheesecake. We ate and then I drove the guys back to the house and I went back to the dorm.

Thanksgiving morning I skipped the run and drove around until I found a Denny's that was open for breakfast. I loaded up on bacon, eggs, and toast, and then drove out to the frat. It was time to start prepping for dinner. Even though it was the smallest turkey I could find, I figured I would need to cook it about four hours and would need a good hour of prep time before that. I let myself into the kitchen.

I had left the turkey in the refrigerator overnight, but it had been frozen and hadn't totally thawed out yet. I filled up one of the sinks with scalding hot water and dropped the unwrapped bird in. It wasn't pretty, but it was effective. I also got out my stuffing mix and started making that. Dinner was going to be a fairly traditional Thanksgiving feast, just cut down in size a bit - turkey, stuffing, gravy, fresh green beans, rolls, sweet potatoes, and pumpkin pie. No, I wasn't going to make a pumpkin pie, but I had bought one at the Chopper. The rest I could do. It felt good to be working in a kitchen again. I hadn't really done any fancy cooking since breaking up with Jeana.

Bill Swayzack came in and found me with my hands inside a turkey's guts, pulling out the bag of gizzards. I set that on the counter and dropped the bird back into the water to finish thawing. "Wow, you really are going to town on this, aren't you?", he exclaimed.

"You bet."

"What do you need me to do?", he asked.

I thought for a second. "Got a corkscrew?"

Bill stared at me for a moment. "A corkscrew? What for?"

"For removing corks from wine bottles. Just see if you can find one."

He shrugged and departed. He must have looked all over, because he didn't come back for another ten minutes. By that time I had the turkey out of the water and draining onto some paper towels. I had a stick of butter melting in a pan on the stove, and I had opened a can of chicken broth (I don't think they make turkey broth, or at least I've never run across any), all to be added to the stuffing mix.

Bill returned with a battered looking corkscrew. "I found it down behind the bar."

"Hopefully it's sanitary.", I commented. "The alcohol should kill any germs anyway." I pointed at a gaudy case over on the far counter. "If you want to help, open the case, and open a bottle of wine."

"Now?"

"Why not!? You're the boozemaster for today."

Bill laughed at that, and opened the case on the side. He gasped slightly when he saw what was inside. He pulled out a bottle and set it on the counter. Marty came in just then to see what was up. "Go get some glasses.", said Bill.

Marty shrugged and wandered off, returning with three matching water glasses. Okay, so we were being a bit more informal than normal for a wine tasting. "What's going on?", he asked.

"Well, I know you're supposed to normally have a white wine with poultry, but this is the first week of the Beaujolais Nouveau, and I thought that would be a nice change. It's also pretty cheap.", I explained.

"Beaujolais new ... what?", he asked.

"Give the glasses to the boozemaster.", I answered. Bill laughed at that and went to work on opening the wine up. Meanwhile I started mixing the melted butter and some broth into the stuffing. "Every year on the third Thursday of November, that year's Beaujolais Nouveau is released. It's a fairly inexpensive red wine from France."

"And you bought an entire case of it?", asked Marty incredulously.

"Well, it isn't that expensive, and you'd be surprised how fast it will go. Besides, there are four of us, and the normal ratio for a party is one bottle of wine per guest."

"Yeah, but there's twelve bottles here." Bill had finished opening the wine and had poured some in each glass.

I sampled the wine. It was about average for a Beaujolais Nouveau. Marilyn and I had gotten into the habit of buying a case every year. If it was a good year, we would buy a second. This year's was a touch tannic, but otherwise quite agreeable. "A good year. Not a great year, but a good year.", I pronounced.

Marty and Bill sipped their wine. Neither had much experience with wine, but they didn't just swill it down, either. "So we end up drinking three bottles apiece?"

I laughed at that and sipped some more wine. "Not necessary. Listen, if you guys cough up another five apiece, I'll split up whatever's left with you. Otherwise, I'll just take it back to the dorm with me. It's no big deal. I like wine and I'll just drink it myself." I stirred the stuffing in the bowl and mixed in the butter and broth.

I got Marty to help by holding the turkey upright while I loaded the stuffing inside. Bill seemed to like the wine, and started asking, "So how do you know so much about wine?"

"I've been drinking wine for years. I prefer it over booze and beer, actually. Plus, it's an excellent way to get your girlfriend in the mood while still acting sophisticated and cool."

Bill wasn't buying it. "You've been drinking wine for years? You want to explain that?"

I looked at the two of them and shrugged. "Okay, but I'm just asking you, don't go blasting this all over the house, okay?" They both nodded, and I finished stuffing the ass of the bird and carefully lowered him to the counter. I quickly grabbed a few skewers and closed him up. "Where's your home?", I asked.

"Huh? West Babylon.", said Marty.

I turned my head to Bill. He shrugged and said, "Sacramento. Why?"

"My home is wherever I'm standing. These days it's Troy. The last couple of years it was Towson, Maryland. Before that it was Lutherville, Maryland. Two years ago I moved out of my family's home and started living on my own."

"I'm not following you. Your parents threw you out?", asked Marty.

"More like the other way around. Things were really bad at home, like really bad, and I told them I was either moving out and getting an apartment or I was going to leave and never come back. We struck a deal, and I moved out just after I turned sixteen. I had my own place through most of high school."

"That is so cool!", gushed Bill.

"Whatever it was, it wasn't cool.", I replied. "But it was necessary."

"Why was it necessary?", asked Marty.

"I'll get to that, but let me finish this." I stuffed the neck of the bird without any help and found myself with just a little left of the stuffing. I tossed that out and turned the oven on. "Where's a roaster?" We found one on a shelf, and I rinsed it quickly. Finally I set the bird in the roaster, basted it with cooking oil, covered it with tin foil, and stuck in a meat thermometer. Then, after I put the bird in the oven, I had time to answer their questions. I washed my hands and sipped some wine, and then refreshed our glasses.

"Okay, back to me moving out. The problem is my little brother, who's kind of nuts. I couldn't live there anymore."

"So what? My little brother is nuts too.", commented Marty.

"No, you don't get it. I mean my brother is nuts!" I waved a finger in a circular pattern around my ear. "As in, my brother is a raving psychotic. He's dangerous for me to be around. I think he's a paranoid schizophrenic, and his delusions are aimed at me. Towards the end, I was sleeping in a different room behind a locked door, and I still wasn't safe."

"You're shitting me!", said Bill.

"I wish."

"You mean he's actually crazy? What about your parents? Couldn't they do something about him?"

It was my turn to shrug. "That's a big part of the problem. I think my Dad knows something's wrong with him, but he won't go up against my mother, and she thinks the sun rises and sets because my brother tells it to. She doesn't see any problem at all. I finally had enough and got out of there."

Marty eyed me curiously. "We'll get back to that in a moment, but what does that have to do with wine?"

I grinned at him. "Hey, I was sixteen and had a bachelor apartment by myself. I got an older buddy to keep me stocked on booze. It was great for wining and dining pretty young ladies."

It took a second for it to sink in, but you could see the comprehension in their eyes. This time the 'Are you shitting me?' comments were much more appreciative! Jack Jones picked that time to wander in and after hearing how I had been living for the last two years of high school, simply said, "You dog!"

While this was going on, we finished the first bottle and the boozemaster opened a second. I started getting all the sides ready. The canned yams were opened and put into one sauce pan, the bottled gravy was opened and put into another, a baking pan was pulled out for the rolls, and I grabbed the bag of green beans and a cutting board, and started cutting the ends off the beans. Meanwhile, the guys peppered me with questions about the crazy shit my brother used to do, and I went over a lot of it, all the time explaining that I had to move out.

Eventually we exhausted that topic, and Jack said, "So that's why you know how to cook. You've been on your own for two years."

"Bingo!", I agreed. "I do like to cook, though. I used to go over to my girlfriend's house and cook a big meal about once a month for her and her family. Still, we broke up over the summer, and this is the first chance I've had to cook in months! I really appreciate it!"

"What'd she think of you having your own apartment?", asked Marty.

"She really liked it. I mean, really, really liked it."

"And her parents?", quizzed Jack.

"Somehow we never got around to telling them the story. Jeana would come over to 'my place'. We just weren't too specific about where that was.", I commented.

"So you lied to them."

I gave a thoughtful look. "I think of it more as a sin of omission, rather than one of commission."

That got a snorting laugh out of the others, and we ended up talking quite awhile about high school girlfriends and who had done what to whom. Once the preparations for all the side dishes were out of the way, we grabbed another couple bottles of wine and headed to the living room, and continued the discussion. Jack said, "We need to give Carl the Purity Test!"

"What's the Purity Test?", I asked.

"It rates how pure you are!", replied Marty with an evil laugh.

"Oh, it's a requirement!", agreed Bill. Jack was sent upstairs to find a copy, and a Bible.

The Purity Test consisted of 100 questions, all related to some form of sexual activity, from the mild ('Have you ever seen a girl?') to the deviant ('Have you ever fucked a barnyard animal?'). Your score was the number of NOs you gave. A score of 100 meant you were probably an alien from Mars and had just landed. A score of 0 meant you generally spent your nights gangbanging sheep. Male sheep!

Jack came back down with a stack of tests and handed them around, and placed the Bible in front of me. I was ordered to place the Bible in my hands and swear on pain of eternal damnation and torture to tell the truth. I then took the test. It only took about five minutes or so, maybe less. I scored a 29, which seemed very impressive to the others. Jack wasn't sure he believed me, since my score was actually a good 15 points lower than his, but the truth came out that his girlfriend had just popped his cherry that September, which got him razzed by the other two.

The scores actually broke down into several categories. The first cutoff point was about 80; above that number was a virgin who had never even dated. The next major range was in the 60s, and meant you were a virgin who had dated, maybe had a handjob or a blowjob, but never actually gotten laid. There were enough points involved in actually getting laid that the moment you became a non-virgin, your score dropped into the 40s. After that, as your sexual proficiency and the number of partners increased, your score would continue to drop. For fairly conventional heterosexual college seniors with a degree of sexual proficiency, they usually stabilized their score in the mid 20s. The lowest on record in the frat was Ricky Holloway's, somewhere around 19. Much lower than that and neither pets nor your fellow brothers were safe.

We sat around and drank wine and swapped lies for another hour or so, and then I had to return to the kitchen to check on things. Marty had fallen asleep on the couch and Jack went upstairs to his room. Bill wandered out to the kitchen with me and watched me working. "You could be the Kitchen Steward.", he said.

"What's a Kitchen Steward?", I asked.

"Well, I'm actually jumping the gun, but just suppose you were to be invited to join Kegs and you did so, then you can run for a frat office.", he told me.

"Like what? Chancellor?", I asked.

A hundred years ago, when Kegs had been invented by a bunch of drunken assholes at Amherst, they had created a bunch of positions and titles to run the place. What most frats called the President was named the Chancellor. The Vice-President was the Minister, the Treasurer was the Exchequer, the Secretary was the Scrivener, and the fifth guy, the tie breaker, was named the Provost. These five brothers were voted in every year by the brotherhood and was the Ruling Council, and their names and titles were on the pictures of the brothers in the Formal Room.

"No, the Steward runs the kitchen. There's all sorts of jobs around here."

"Like what?"

Bill shrugged. "You name it. The Chairman of the Social Committee runs the parties. Rush Chairman is in charge of recruiting you new guys. The Steward runs the kitchen. The House Manager keeps the heating system and stuff working. There's all sorts of shit that needs to be run."

"Freshmen can do this?"

He shook his head. "No, you have to live in, but we have elections for the following year in the late spring."

"I still have to get in first, don't I?", I said with a smile.

"There is that."

Dinner was a rousing success. I used the pan drippings from the bird and separated off the fat, to pour the remainder into the gravy base. I also whipped up a very quick white sauce for the green beans. I cooked the bird until it was quite thoroughly dead, but still juicy, and for the last half hour I had the tin foil tent removed so it would brown. Then, while the other guys set the table, I destuffed the bird and carved him up. By the time we were done, I was fairly certain I had cemented myself into the frat. It was late when we split up. We had gone through two-thirds of the wine, and I left three bottles behind me and drove back to the dorm with my last bottle.

Chapter 27: A Very Important Date

Two Mondays after Thanksgiving, Marty Adrianopolis showed up knocking on my door in Hall Hall. He had in his hand a large envelope in a creamy parchment sort of paper, and he told me to open it while he stood there. Inside it was a formal request to pledge Kegs, also done on the fancy paper. I read it over and asked, "What do I do now?"

"Are you accepting?"

I nodded. "Yeah, sure."

"That's good enough for me. Friday we'll have the induction, so make sure you're around for that.", he replied. We shook hands and he headed out.

That Friday night the incoming pledges were assembled in the basement, dressed in suits, while the brethren, dressed in black robes, swore us in as pledges. Then we were given our Pledge Books and we went upstairs, where we took off our coats and ties and got drunk.

Pledges had to learn all sorts of strange shit, like the frat's colors (magenta and gold), history (founded at Amherst College, otherwise known as the Oracle), and even the secret alphabet, a collection of stick figures. A century ago, those clowns at Amherst - excuse me, the Oracle - had way too much time on their hands! We were also taught proper attitudes for proper pledges, namely utter subservience to higher forms of life, like bacteria and viruses. For instance, when the pay phone in the lobby rang, it was a pledge who had to answer, even if he was upstairs in the bathroom, and even if a brother was sitting in a chair underneath the phone. Likewise, pledges were assigned duties helping in the kitchen and around the house.

Now, looking back, I can explain some of what was happening at the time. The Sunday after Thanksgiving, a week after the vacation, Kegs had a house meeting. These were usually held once a month and were supersecret burn-before-reading sorts of affairs. All non-brethren were thrown out onto the street. It was time to select pledges.

House meetings were brothers only. They were held either in the basement (dark, foreboding, formal) or in the formal room, which was a lot more comfortable. You only did basement meetings during the secret ceremonies. Upstairs in the formal room there were couches along all the walls and carpet to sprawl out on.

Selecting pledges was similar to the scene in Animal House, only with a few twists thrown in. They didn't have a projector with slides, but they did have Polaroids taken at parties that could be passed around. Generally the procedure was that the Rush Chairman would have a list of prospects, and one by one, would propose a name. Often there would be a discussion on the guy, but not always. Occasionally comments such as "We need the dues!" would be heard. Then they would pass the box around. The box was a clunky gizmo with a tray of white and black balls in it. You would reach in and grab a ball, and then drop the ball through a hole into the box. The whole thing was constructed so that nobody else could see what color ball you were grabbing. The box was then passed to the next brother. Generally only sophomores and juniors would vote, since they were the guys who would have to live with their choices. Traditionally seniors would allow the box to pass by, although technically they had the right to vote. A white ball signified acceptance, a black ball signified decline. It had to be unanimous. A single black ball killed the prospect.

You could almost always figure out who was going to vote yea or nay, but not always. Sometimes the most promising candidates would get a single mysterious black ball and be out. Sometimes the biggest assholes would get in. If you went back in history, for many years the national Kappa Gamma Sigma organization had a rigid and written 'no blacks or Jews' policy, which wasn't formally revised until a lawsuit in the Sixties changed it. This was especially bizarre since during the Forties and Fifties the RPI chapter was the Cuban house, where all the rich expatriate Cuban students lived. Even so, I knew of at least one current resident who explicitly stated he'd never vote to allow a nigger to move in - and he was a Jew! Go figure.

After the selection of candidates, the Rush Chairman is out of a job, and a Pledgemaster is selected. His job is to nurture and train the incoming pledges so that they can assume their rightful position as future masters of the universe, or something like that. Generally this was a simple job. He made sure they showed up on time, knew the rules, and didn't fuck up too egregiously.

A second vote was held before the formal induction ceremony in the spring as a full brother. Theoretically, you weren't a brother yet, but you really had to fuck up to get thrown out at this point. In four years there, I only saw one case where a pledge was deemed so screwed up that his invitation was rescinded after he pledged. Likewise, once you were a full brother, it was next to impossible to vote you out, requiring a unanimous vote to do so. Again, I only saw this once in four years, and even then the hose job wasn't formally voted out; a group of brothers met with the asshole and told him he was not being invited back to live in the house the next year, and that if he pushed it, a vote would be forthcoming. He chose to move out.

We ended up with a fairly large class of pledges, fifteen in all:

Bruno Cowling - a civil engineer in ROTC. He was from Maine and talked funny, like everybody else from Maine. Ay-yuh!

Joe Bradley - a math major like myself, in ROTC. More about him later.

Leo Coglan - an aeronautic engineer in Navy ROTC. Leo had several misfortunes. For one thing he actually took a black girl out on a date (quite unusual in 1974, when it happened) and got all sorts of shit over that ("Once you go black, you never go back!" and "You're not a man until you've split a black oak!") Also, during the final stage of pledgehood, during Hell Week, we were renamed Neos, for Neophytes, and Leo became known forever afterwards as Leo the Neo.

Tony Defrancisco - an electrical engineer. Tony was 6'3" tall, 325 pounds, shaped like a pear, and had a pockmarked face. He was probably the ugliest human being on the planet. Dumbest, too. It took him six years to graduate. Nicknamed 'The Cisco Kid.'

Joe Brown - a cocky and arrogant pre-med biology major. Got caught cheating in organic chem lab when synthesizing caffeine, after he ground up some No-Doz and submitted it. Still graduated and actually went to medical school - in Guadalajara!

Bill Pabst - electrical engineer, nicknamed 'Pigpen' after his room condition.

Bill Schlitz - electrical engineer. Pabst and Schlitz became best friends and roomed together. Every Christmas during gag gift giving, Schlitz would get a bottle of Pabst beer and Pabst would get a bottle of Schlitz beer.

Jack Dawson - mechanical engineer. Had an expensive stereo system and held himself out to be an expert on all things audio, even though he was deaf in his left ear.

Barry Lewis - chemistry major. Turned out to be a major league asshole, but he was quiet and we all just ignored him when he was being a dork.

Homer Simpson - yes, that was his name, but this was long before the show ever got on TV. Homer was a computer science major. He was also a concert pianist. He had turned down a full scholarship to Juilliard to accept a full scholarship to RPI. As soon as he joined the frat, the brothers went out and bought an upright piano for the house, and he played all sorts of stuff for us. He had a photographic memory for music.

Andy Kowalchuk - civil engineer and doper supreme. Flunked out at the end of sophomore year because he was always stoned and never went to class.

Bill Keswick - chemistry major. Definite doper, he actually ran a hash oil still sophomore and junior years. Made some really amazing stuff! You would see colors unknown after smoking pot laced with his hash oil.

Jerry Modanowicz - electrical engineer and the only guy ever kicked out of the frat that I ever heard of. Pretty much a hose job.

Harry Haroldson - civil engineer, Air Force ROTC. Eminently forgettable. Total zero.

Yours truly!

All in all it was an eclectic group. One major change was in the ROTC makeup. For a number of years, Kegs had been a ROTC house, and roughly two-thirds of the brothers were in ROTC. By 1973 it was obvious the Viet Nam War was over and nobody needed to hide at college from their draft boards. My pledge class was only one-third ROTC, and we were the last to join for a long time. It was very disconcerting to some of the upperclassmen.

We were also assigned our Big Brothers, a mentor among the upper classmen who was assigned to ease us into the frat. Mine was Marty Adrianopolis. I think he volunteered to be my big brother, since he had effectively left home like I had. His parents were divorced, his father was long out of the picture, and his mother had remarried a few years ago to an asshole Marty couldn't stand. He knew some of what I was going through. He never went home either.

The semester ended with a final round of F-Tests for my fellow pledges, and finals for everyone, and then most people went home for a few weeks. I ended up sleeping at Kegs in my sleeping bag on a couch, since the dorms and dining hall were completely shut down. I didn't bother driving back home. They mailed me presents and I returned the favor. Four guys stayed there with me, and I acted as cook. For Christmas I did a ham with horseradish and mustard glaze, mashed potatoes, asparagus with Hollandaise sauce, rolls, and brownies for dessert. It was suggested that next year I try to get in the Sunday rotation for cooking. We had a house mother cook for us Monday through Saturday, at least for lunch and dinner, but Sundays we had to fend for ourselves. Cooks got paid ten bucks, and rotated among three or four guys who knew what they were doing in the kitchen. One of them was Ricky Holloway, he of the dope smoking hall of fame.

I also went over to the school infirmary and got the name of an optometrist. I knew this was going to happen. I started needing glasses by the end of fall semester, both this time and the last time. Before, I had mentioned it to my mother, and I had gotten the glasses back home. Now that wasn't an option. Further, once I started at RPI, my dad had cut me out of his medical insurance and told me to get the student policy through the college. I was going to have to pay for my glasses out of pocket. I bought three pair, wire rimmed clear, aviators' frame sunglasses very dark, and a pair of birth control glasses for the Army. These are hideously ugly black plastic framed glasses that are totally indestructible, but so catastrophically ugly that no soldier who wears them will ever have a chance of actually meeting with and talking to a girl.

School restarted in January, sort of. They had a four week mini-semester called January Term, or simply J-Term. You could take a single course for credit, if offered, at a high intensity. A lot of freshman had to take calculus or physics or chemistry if they had flunked it first semester. Otherwise there were some interesting one-off courses you could take, without credit. I once took a class on urban planning, where we actually worked with real politicians and urban planners from Albany. It was actually pretty interesting, and gave me an early appreciation of politics.

This time was different. The military science department (ROTC) was offering a J-Term class on Tactics. They were playing a board game called Panzer Leader, which simulated armor tactics on the western front in WW2. I actually had once owned this game and it was very good. Yeah, I know, board games, the ultimate nerd diversion. Hey, I was a nerd, sue me!

(By the way, the official spelling of nerd at RPI is 'knurd', which is 'drunk' spelled backwards. Only at a nerd school do you have an official spelling of nerd.)

This was all done before computer games became possible. Boards, physical maps, were carved up into square, hexagonal, or octagonal spaces, and small cardboard counters representing units would be moved around on them. Panzer Leader used a hexagonal grid, and the counters represented various tank, infantry, and artillery units found in the war. A given tank counter might represent a company of American Shermans or German Panthers, and so on. There were elaborate rules about what each unit could do, how fast they could move around the board, and what they could shoot at.

What they did differently was that they had bought a shitload of the games, nine of them. There were three boards to a game and they could be linked in any number of ways. They combined all the parts and boards of three games and set them up in three separate rooms in an identical fashion, one for the Allies, one for the Germans, and one for the umpires, who would be the teachers. Half the students would play the Allies and half would play the Germans, and each team would only see their board, plus what the umpires would show them of the other side's moves. The umpire's room would have everything. Each team would move in succession and their move would be duplicated in the umpire's room. The umpires would then modify the appropriate boards, if necessary in the adversary.

For example, on the American board, a tank unit might be moved from one spot to another, and they would move the counter. The umpires moved the counter on their board, and since they had both sides showing, would be able to tell if the Germans saw them. If they did, the German side was told and shown the move, and they could then respond. It was cumbersome, but realistic. On each side, the teams were split along functional and unit lines. There was an overall commander, several subunit commanders (brigades and battalions), and other separations as well, so the students would only be responsible for what they 'owned.'

I had played this game before, quite a bit, in fact, and knew a lot of tricks. I volunteered to be artillery commander, and made some of my own rules for my subordinates, speeding up the process and making sure we were always shooting somewhere at someone. This paid off repeatedly when my surprise fires would catch enemy units on the move or trying to deploy. The Air Force and Navy have a saying - 'Fighter pilots win the glory, bomber pilots win the war.' I told the others that 'Tankers win the glory, gunners win the war.' The teachers all agreed with me.

I knew I was going to be in the Army, but I think that's when I decided to go for artillery. No matter what I did, I was going for combat arms. I should explain that. There are two types of Army officer, combat arms and everything else. Combat arms includes the infantry, armored, airborne, artillery, and engineers; other stuff would include communications, MPs, transportation, medical, supply, chaplains, and so forth. This stuff is pretty important when the shit hits the fan, senior officers are killed, and bullets are flying. It is not unheard of that a lieutenant in the engineers or infantry finds himself commanding units with much more senior (majors, colonels, etc.) non-combat officers, for instance if a headquarters position gets hit hard by artillery or gets cut off behind enemy lines.

This was actually one of the major differences between me and my father. He was a staff officer, and hated being a line officer. The same applied in civilian life. He loved being in a staff engineering position and hated being a line manager with final profit-and-loss responsibility. I've had both types of jobs. Staff managers are important; line managers get promoted and paid more. They also get fired more, but that's the breaks. No guts, no glory.

That took us through most of January. The second semester was starting the last week of January, and we all needed a blowout party. Kegs had one scheduled for Friday night, February 8. Everybody was back from winter break and had a week of class under their belts. Now I got to see the mechanism for organizing a party and the most important thing of all - getting girls to come!

The Albany-Troy-Schenectady area has a lot of colleges. Aside from RPI, you had Russell Sage, Samaritan Hospital Nursing School, Albany State, Union, Siena, St. Rose, and probably a few I've forgotten, all within fifteen to twenty minutes. Every frat had a few selected colleges they found women at. Teke always hit on Russell Sage, for instance. Kegs liked Samaritan, St. Rose, and Albany State. It was a self reinforcing system. You were dating a girl at a college, she posted a notice a party was happening, girls would come to the party, some brother would start dating a girl there, and the cycle was repeated.

All the pledges were expected to show up after classes Friday and work on the house. Mostly it was a matter of cleaning the place up and putting shit away. The formal room, for instance, was gutted. The furniture was taken out and put on the porch under a gigantic tarp, and the carpet was rolled up and carried out as well. In the living room the foosball table was hidden and the furniture rearranged. The basement was shoveled out and a stereo system was set up. Most of the brute work was done by pledges under the tutelage of a brother. A fair bit of beer was consumed during this period.

My part was actually different. Marty was actually the Social Chairman, the guy who ran the parties, and he acted as a bartender. He grabbed me, since I knew a lot about drinks and booze, and assigned me to help setting up the bars. One was down in the basement in a cubbyhole off the side, where we actually had a real bar set up, and only served mixed drinks and draft beer. Upstairs, we set up a folding table. We had some mixed drinks, but mostly served punch. The punch was free; beer and mixed drinks went on your bar tab, which had to be paid monthly.

Every frat had a different signature punch. Kegs' was mai tais, a rum based fruit punch. Crows served up the Purple Jesus, Welch's grape juice plus vodka. Others I had seen around campus included screwdrivers, Bloody Marys, and a sangria sort of drink involving cheap red wine, sliced fruit, and vodka. No matter what the punch was, it was invariably sweet and heavily laced with alcohol, so that our female guests would enjoy it, get stupid, and take off their panties. Subtle flavors weren't all that critical.

For whatever reason, I was kept working on the bars and booze when brothers were sent out to find hot and willing women. To be fair about it, willing was more important than hot. Tonight was a big party, the first of the semester, so we had put up notices at St. Rose, Samaritan, and Albany State. While the girls at Samaritan could just walk down the street to us, we had to send cars over to Albany State and St. Rose. These cars were known as 'meat wagons.' We weren't very politically correct in 1974, and I suspect if you went back there today, they still wouldn't be. Even though I had a car, I wasn't sent out, probably because they figured a freshman would fuck up, and I never even knew they had left until long after they were gone.

I had just finished making a batch of mai tais and poured them from the kitchen kettle into a glass punch bowl, and was sampling one when people started coming in. The freshmen were fairly predictable. They concentrated on mai tais, since that was free, and they all drank too much too soon. That shit had a kick to it, and if you weren't careful, you could get real stupid real fast. Some of these guys would have three or four within the first hour and end up passed out somewhere. I had one, but I was nursing it along.

The party was supposed to start around eight or so, and the first ones there were all the freshmen, the single brothers, and any brothers who had girls staying for the weekend. The meat wagons didn't start coming back until around half past. Sometimes, if we were lucky, some of the girls would come over in their own cars and bring friends. This was one of the first parties of the semester at any of the houses, since most of the rest were having parties the next week, and attendance was high. I quickly found myself filling and setting out plastic cups of punch from behind the bar, with Marty supervising and taking the occasional mixed drink order. Somebody else was handling the basement, and the floor was already rumbling from the sound of the stereo down there. Led Zeppelin and the Stones seemed to be the order of the day, with a heavy dosing of Aerosmith.

Things were moving along quite nicely. I remember filling some cups, going off to the kitchen to make another batch of mai tais, coming back and pouring it into the punch bowl. Then I turned around, set the kettle on the floor behind us. I stood upright and faced the front of the bar. There she was, the most beautiful girl I had ever seen.

It was Marilyn Lefleur.

Chapter 28: Dueling

Friday, February 8, 1974

It had taken me five years, three months, and three days to get to this point. Everything I had done since I had recycled was aimed at being here, at this point in my life. Nothing else was important. Nothing else mattered. No matter what had changed in my life, I knew one thing. I had met Marilyn Lefleur at the first party spring semester our freshmen year at a Kegs party at RPI. That was a constant. Up until that point, we had never had any contact, not even in the slightest. She came to the party, we met, we fell in love, end of story.

Everything I had done in the last five years was done with the sole purpose of maximizing my chances of being at this party and meeting her again. I had come back to RPI to be here. I had joined ROTC, and had hung around the pool hall, all so that the Kegs brothers would notice me and invite me over (I had originally been found playing pool.) I had kissed every ass possible so that they would invite me to join, just so I could be here, tonight, at this party. No matter what the price would be, I had decided to pay it. If that meant leaving my family or joining the Army, so be it. I had to be here, tonight, in the formal room, to meet Marilyn. Nothing else mattered.

I just stared at her. She was so beautiful to me as to take my breath away. Okay, to be absolutely fair about it, Marilyn wasn't, and had never been the most beautiful girl on the planet, not in any objective sense. Jeana, for instance, was probably the most beautiful girl I had ever seen, and if she had been half a foot taller would have been a shoo-in for any number of fashion or men's magazines. Marilyn was never quite in that league.

That's not to say she wasn't good looking. She was. I remember clearly once when Maggie was looking through some old pictures of us and she said, in the most delightfully tactless way, "Wow, Mom, you used to be hot!" While I tried to keep from laughing, Marilyn looked daggers at Maggie and asked me if she was allowed to kill her. Of course, the best response was when I told Marilyn she was still hot, but now it came in flashes. That got her laughing so hard she snorted milk out her nose!

At 18, Marilyn was definitely hot! She wasn't all that tall, maybe 5'4", with a nicely curvy build, large B or small C cup, and a wickedly round and interesting rear. She had a round face, with a perky upturned ski lift sort of nose, big brown eyes, and masses of curly chocolate brown hair that fell in ringlets past her shoulders. She was dressed in jeans so tight it made you want to watch her ass and cry, a tight red and white gingham shirt, and really ugly flat shoes.

She was standing there, looking at me, with a shy smile on her face, watching me as I stood there stupidly, my jaw dropping, with a plastic cup of punch in one hand and a ladle in the other. I just stood there and stared at her. I had just spent over five years devoting myself to this moment, and I couldn't even speak. She was actually here!

She looked at me, and then looked at the cup of punch in my hand, and then glanced over at Marty, before looking back at me. The next thing I knew, Marty slapped me from behind my head. "Wake up, dopey!"

That woke me up. I snapped out of it, and looked at him and then turned back to Marilyn, still standing there. It was time to speak. "Huh?"

Marty muttered under his breath. Marilyn said, "Can I have some of that punch?"

"It's a mai tai.", I replied.

"Okay, can I have some mai tai?"

Marty smacked me again. "Carl, you are beyond hopeless. Give the lady a drink, and then go around the table and talk to her. You're acting like you've never seen a girl before! Jeesh!"

I must have turned about three shades of purple as I blushed, and Marilyn laughed loudly. I grinned and shook my head. I handed her the cup of mai tai, and said, "You are absolutely right!" I poured myself a drink, and before Marilyn could escape, I was around the table at her side. "I really want to apologize. I'm normally not like that, but you are just so pretty, you took my breath away!" It was Marilyn's turn to blush. She wasn't wearing any makeup other than some light lip gloss, but that was always her style. "I have to ask. Who are you?"

She blushed again, and smiled. "I'm Marilyn. Marilyn Lefleur. Who are you?"

I just couldn't help myself. I gave her a big shit-eating grin and said, "Oh, darling, I am your Daddy's worst nightmare!"

She started at that, and then burst out laughing. "Oh really!? That's pretty big talk from a guy who couldn't even say hello a minute ago!"

I gave her a sheepish smile and shrugged. "It's like I said, you took my breath away."

"So who are you really, and what makes you my father's worst nightmare?", she asked, smiling.

"Well, I'm Carl, Carl Buckman, and as for your father, well, I can guarantee that no father alive wants a boy, any boy, looking at his little girl like I'm looking at you!"

"And just how are you looking at me?", she asked teasingly.

"Not like a little girl!"

"That's still awfully big talk for a guy who was about to drool into the punch bowl!"

"Speaking of which..." I set my cup down and took hers from her hand, and then refilled it from the punch bowl. Then I grabbed my cup and took her free hand in mine. "Let's go downstairs. Do you dance?" I didn't give her a chance to answer, but simply tugged lightly and she followed me, laughing at me the entire way.

Once down in the basement, we drained our mai tais and started dancing together. It was mostly classic Seventies rock and roll, the good stuff, with some Southern rock thrown in, which I always enjoyed. When Jerry Masters, a senior and our DJ, switched to Stairway To Heaven, Marilyn didn't even hesitate when I took her in my arms and held her against me. She simply sighed and laid her head against my chest as we swayed in time to the music. At the end of the song I held onto her and lowered my face to hers. It was a first kiss, all over again, and went just fine!

.38 Special came on next, and we started dancing faster, and then Mike Ghormley, a sophomore, came up and tried to cut in. He was a little guy, maybe a couple inches shorter than me and twenty pounds lighter, and he was already drunk off his ass. "I'm cutting in!", he announced.

I stared at him in amusement, although Marilyn looked nervous. "Ghormley, you're drunk!"

"But I want to dance!"

It was all I could do not to laugh in his face. I just smiled at Marilyn. "Do you want to dance with him?"

"I want to dance with you!", she laughed back.

"Sorry, Ghormley." We pulled away from him and finished the dance. By the time the song ended I was sweating and not just because the basement was like a furnace. "I think I need some air."

"Good idea!", she said with a nod. She led the way, holding my hand, and dragged me up the stairs. By now the front doors to the porch were wide open, letting the cold February air into the house and cooling things off. We went back into the formal room, and I moved to get Marilyn another mai tai.

Who would already be standing at the table but Mike Ghormley? As soon as he saw us, his face lit up. "Now we can dance!", he announced.

I looked over at Marty Adrianopolis, still on duty behind the bar. "How many of these has he had?"

He grinned back. "More than enough."

"Mike, the lady doesn't want to dance with you.", I said.

He gave me the drunk-and-puzzled look. Mike was a nice enough guy when he was sober, but he had a major superiority problem. As a sophomore, he was automatically superior to all freshmen, and therefore could order them around. I remembered that this went right on through college; as a junior he would boss around the sophomores and freshmen, as a senior, juniors would be added to the list. We generally ignored him when he was drinking. "But I want to dance with her!"

Marty was starting to look concerned. "Ghormley, you're drunk!", I said.

That got him angry! "Take that back!" I just rolled my eyes. "Take it back, I said!"

"Or what? Are you planning on fighting me?" I looked over at Marilyn, who was starting to get nervous. "Don't worry, we're not going to fight.", I whispered.

"YES! I'm challenging you!" By now half the room was staring and pretty much openly laughing at him, and Marty was inching around the table preparatory to grabbing him.

Suddenly I had an idea. I motioned for Marty to cool it, and said, "What? Like a duel?"

"Yes! I am challenging you to a duel!"

Marty slapped his head in disbelief. I smiled at Marilyn. "Ever had two men fight a duel over you before?"

"God, no!"

"Someday you'll be able to tell your grandchildren about this."

"Spare me!" Still, she smiled at me.

I turned back to Ghormley. "Okay, I accept the challenge. I get to choose weapons." Ghormley was looking very superior now. I glanced behind the bar and found everything I needed. I reached out and grabbed Joe Bradley, my fellow pledge, who was watching this all with considerable interest. Pulling him closer, I said, "Joe will be my second." I leaned over and whispered in his ear, "Run off to the kitchen and bring back the matches." He looked at me curiously, but I repeated my instructions and he ran off.

"Shots at two paces!", I announced. Ghormley looked confused at that. I smiled at Marty. "Hand me two identical shot glasses and that bottle of Southern Comfort."

He shrugged. "It's going on your bar bill."

I set the two glasses up one at each end of the table we were using as a bar, and then filled each one to the very brink with the liquor. Ghormley moved to grab his, but I waved him off. "Wait! Wait! We're not ready yet!" Bradley handed me a box of wooden kitchen matches, and everybody stared. I lit a match, and before anybody knew what I was doing, I held it to the lip of Ghormley's shot glass. The Southern Comfort began burning with a faint blue flame. I quickly lit my glass. I stepped up to the bar. "On the count of three!" Both Marty and Ghormley stared at me in disbelief, although Marty had a big smile on his face. "One! Two!..."

By now everybody watching was chanting along. "THREE!"

I grabbed my shot glass and lifted it up to my lips and swallowed it down, not even pausing to think or look at it. Ghormley was slower, and nervous. He hesitated as he brought it up to his face, and then he started worrying about his mustache, which was big and blonde and of which he was quite proud. He waited just long enough for the shot glass to get too hot to hold. He quickly set it down and started flapping his hand around. "Jesus Christ!"

I grabbed his still burning shot glass, brought it to my lips and poured it straight down, and then slammed the shot glass victoriously down to the table. Joe Bradley grabbed my hand and lifted it up. "The winner!"

I preened for a moment, and then grabbed Marilyn. I lifted her up and gave her a good hard kiss. She laughed and kissed me back.

Ghormley stared at us in disbelief. Around us people were laughing and lining up to do their own flaming shots. Marty was simply lining them up while Joe Bradley lit matches. Marty laughed at me. "You're fucking crazy!"

"Crazy about her!", I said, pointing at Marilyn. She laughed and I spun her around. "I'm crazy about you!"

Okay, by now, with two shots of Southern Comfort on top of the mai tais, I was officially lit up myself. Marilyn refused to have one herself, so she took her punch and we wandered out of the room and went out on the porch to cool off. The brisk air felt good. Several brothers and pledges came out and congratulated me on my victory. Ghormley even came out and stared at us in total disbelief. How dare a mere pledge show him up like that!

When we started to get chilly, we went back inside. That set up a round robin sort of motion - drink, dance, cool off. Around midnight or so, we wandered into the living room and sank down onto the only couch not in use. I leaned against the arm of the couch and Marilyn lay half on top of me and we began kissing.

Light was just starting to peep into the windows when I woke up. I had a warm and familiar weight on my chest, and when I cracked open an eyelid, I noticed the top of a head with curly chocolate brown hair resting on my chest. Oh, shit! We had fallen asleep on the couch, and Marilyn's buddies had left her here. I was going to have to get her home.

I was also going to have to pee. My bladder felt like it was going to burst. I tried to slide out from under Marilyn without waking her, and mostly succeeded. She murmured sleepily and went back to sleep on the couch. I wandered down the hall and used the bathroom off the kitchen. Christ, but I must have pissed for half an hour in there, and it sounded like Niagara Falls! Afterwards I looked in the mirror and was sorry I did so. I looked like a poor grade of refuse. I went into the dining room where we had set up the coat racks and found Marilyn's and my coat still hanging, although my hat was on the floor in the corner. I retrieved my car keys and headed outside.

I popped the trunk and pulled out a large duffel bag I kept in the back. This was one of my two emergency kits. Us Boy Scouts have a saying about being prepared. I kept two kits in the trunk of every car I've ever owned. The first is a tool box and it's filled with flares, jumper cables, a first aid kit, and the like. The second is a duffel bag with a complete second set of clothing, an old snowmobile suit, and an old toilet kit. If I got stranded somewhere, I was going to survive, and over the years, I've needed most of the stuff, even if only once.

The duffel bag went with me back to the living room, where I found Marilyn stirring to life and looking horrified. Marilyn was very much a small town girl, a 'good girl', who didn't do these sorts of things. "I'm back.", I said as I came back in. "I didn't leave you!"

"Oh my God! I can't believe this!", she stammered.

I smiled at her. "Let's get you cleaned up and get you home." I sorted through my duffel bag and pulled out my toilet kit. Inside I found two toothbrushes, one still in its original packaging, and an old tube of toothpaste. I grabbed them and walked over to her and held my hand out to her. She nervously took my hand and climbed to her feet.

"I can't believe I did this!", she repeated.

"Did what? Fall asleep on a couch? That's no crime." I looked her over and noticed a big stain on her shirt. I vaguely remembered her spilling her mai tai late in the evening. "I think you need a new shirt." I dug down through the duffel bag and pulled out a shirt.

That didn't help. Marilyn looked at me in terror. "I can't believe this."

I set everything down and cupped her face in my hands gently. "Marilyn, nothing happened last night. You're fine. Nothing happened. You fell asleep on the couch with me. That's all. Now, can you calm down?"

She searched my face. "Nothing happened?"

"Nothing! I promise!" I let go and grabbed the shirt and toiletries, and then led her back towards the bathroom. "Now, go in there and get cleaned up." Before she could close the door, I squeezed out some toothpaste on the old toothbrush, and wandered off to the kitchen. I cleaned myself up as best I could without a mirror. I even dropped my trousers and tucked my shirttails back in. I found a mirror in the living room and combed my hair.

Marilyn took longer, but when she came out of the bathroom she was wearing my old shirt, which was rather long on her (although she filled out the front nicely) and she seemed a lot calmer. I suspect that she used the toilet and figured out her virtue was still intact. Yes, I knew from way back when, my once (and future, please, dear God, my future!) wife was still a virgin when we met. She smiled sheepishly and then looked away. "This is so embarrassing."

I laughed. "Why? You didn't do anything wrong. Think positively! Think of the story you'll be able to tell your roommate when you get back." I took my toilet kit and tossed it back into the duffel bag, and zipped it back up.

"Oh God! What will they think!?"

"Are you kidding? They're all going to be jealous!" I helped her into her coat, and then pulled mine on. Marilyn eyed me curiously when I picked my hat up off the floor and dusted it off. I set it at an appropriately jaunty angle and grinned. "Come on. Let's get you some breakfast and back home." I grabbed the duffel bag and my car keys and headed out through the kitchen, with Marilyn in tow.

She was very quiet on the ride, and by the time we crossed the Hoosick Street Bridge, I glanced over at her and laughed. Marilyn always had the most amazing ability to fall asleep anywhere, anytime, within seconds of closing her eyes. Now she was sitting there, upright, with her head tilted back, her eyes closed, and softly snoring. I had seen her do this countless times before. I just chuckled to myself and shook my head. I drove down I-787 to Albany, switched to I-90 for a mile, and got off on Route 9. From there I went down to Central Avenue and drove west to Jack's Diner.

Marilyn woke up as I pulled into the parking lot. "Where are we? This isn't Saint Rose."

"Even better. This is Jack's Diner. We need to get some food in you.", I answered.

"I don't know. I should be getting back..."

I simply parked and turned off the ignition, pocketing the key. "Marilyn, my dear, you worry way too much! Life will seem much better once we get a nice hot breakfast inside you." I opened the door and climbed out. Marilyn slowly climbed out and followed me inside cautiously. Once inside the door, she discovered we were at a diner, and not at a roadhouse where she was about to be abducted by white slavers.

A hostess promptly settled us at a booth. "Can I get you kids some coffee?", she asked.

Marilyn shyly nodded to me. I just rolled my eyes in amusement. "The lady will have some coffee, and I'll have some tea."

"Hot tea?"

"Please."

"Coming right up." She gave us a couple of menus and wandered off towards the kitchen.

I gave Marilyn my best smile. "You need to stop worrying. Nothing happened last night and nobody will care about where you were. Hell, tell them the truth. They'll all be jealous!"

Her eyes widened at that. "No way!"

"Oh yeah! Tell them the truth. You went to a party, where two men fell for you and fought a duel over you. The tall, dark, and handsome one was the winner, and you ended up sleeping with him, and then this morning you wore his clothes home. They will be stark raving mad with jealousy!"

"That's not what happened!"

"Really? Tell me one thing I said that wasn't true."

It was amusing to watch Marilyn squawking without making a sound. She finally settled on, "But that was different!"

"Tell it my way. They'll be so jealous of you."

She smiled at that, and then slowly started to giggle. "You're not tall, dark, and handsome."

"Well, I'm tall-er. That should count for something."

"Is that the story you're going to tell?"

I gave her a big grin at that. "Oh, absolutely! This gets me in the He-Man Hall of Fame for sure!"

The waitress brought our coffee and tea, and took our orders, even though we really hadn't even glanced at the menus. Still, every diner in America has some form of special covering two eggs any style, bacon or sausage, toast, juice, and potatoes. Marilyn ordered up hers sunny side up, wheat toast, bacon, skipped the hash browns, and had orange juice. She always did. I did what I always did, and ordered over easy, bacon, white toast, hash browns, and tomato juice. What really surprised Marilyn was when I ordered Tabasco sauce. She stared at me when I made a Virgin Mary with Tabasco, salt, and pepper.

"That looks awful!"

"Here, try it." I slid the glass across the table to her.

She looked at it dubiously, but sampled it. Her face wrinkled up and she pushed it away. "That just ruins perfectly good tomato juice."

I tossed in a few more drops of Tabasco and stirred that in. It was definitely spicy. "Gets your heart started in the morning!"

She looked around the diner. "Exactly where are we?"

"I told you, Jack's Diner. It's pretty much a landmark in Albany. We're on Central Avenue. We're only a mile, if that, from Saint Rose. You could walk home if you wanted, but don't, I'll drive you."

"I never even noticed. You have your own car?"

I pointed at the Galaxie out the window. "The Galaxie out there. You?"

She shook her head. "I have one at home, but my folks wouldn't let me bring it."

I got her to open up and start talking, first about her car, and then about her family. She calmed down when she talked about them, although I teased her by saying that she probably shouldn't tell the story about the duel and sleeping with me to them. That got her laughing so hard she almost snorted her juice out her nose. Once our breakfasts were brought out, she realized just how hungry she actually was, and polished it off totally, and then started nibbling on my hash browns. I smiled and asked if she wanted seconds, and she blushed at that.

Afterwards, as we sat there sipping a second round of coffee and tea, she said, "Thank you for breakfast."

"Oh, you're welcome. I always buy breakfast for the women I sleep with. It's the least I can do." Marilyn turned bright red, but stopped smiling. I reached out and touched her hand. "That was a joke, honey."

She nodded without looking at me. Finally she said, "And does that happen often?"

It was my turn to look startled. "What the sleeping part or the breakfast part?" Marilyn didn't answer that, but just looked out the window. I took my time before answering, but I reached over and took her hand. She looked at me nervously. "I think I know what you're asking. It's okay to ask me."

"Well..."

I gave her a soft smile. "First off, I have never had a girl fall asleep in my arms and wake up that way in the morning. That's a first for me, too. I kind of liked it, though. I think we need to try that again." Her eyes widened at that. I just patted her hand. "Marilyn, you are safe with me. I would never hurt you. No matter what happens, I will never hurt you. If the question is whether I still have my innocence left, well, the answer is not for a long, long time. If the question is if yours is safe with me, the answer is yes. You can trust me. I will never hurt you."

She seemed to relax at that. "I'm not that kind of girl."

"Never thought you were."

"But you're that kind of guy!", she said with a certain degree of amusement.

"Never said I wasn't."

"I'm not sure if I trust you."

"Well, the only way to find out is to go out with me.", I replied. "What time should I pick you up?"

That shocked her. "What? Tonight!?"

"Why not?"

"I can't go back there after sleeping there last night!"

I laughed at that. "You'd be surprised what goes on there, but who says we'd be going to Kegs. I want to take you out. How about going to dinner tonight?"

"Where?"

I shrugged. "Who knows? There must be a couple of dozen places over on Wolf Road alone. You want to go anyplace special?", I asked.

"No."

"So, I'll pick you up tonight at seven. How dressy do you want to be?"

"You're crazy! I never said I was going to dinner with you.", she protested.

"You never said you weren't. I'll tell you what. I'll dress casual, maybe a sports coat but no tie. You dress to match, and we'll see what there is to see. I'll pick you up at seven."

Marilyn made a few more pro forma protests, but she was smiling as she did so. I think she liked the idea of talking to me someplace where we didn't have brothers drinking and dueling over her. I had no idea where we would eat, but Wolf Road was a major thoroughfare. It paralleled I-87, the Adirondack Northway, from Exit 2 to Exit 4. At the southern end, Exit 2, was the Colonie Center mall. The northern end, Exit 4, was the turnoff to the Albany airport. In between was about a four mile stretch of strip malls, hotels, and every kind of restaurant you could ask for. A steak house was probably about right, and I knew I could find one there, even if I didn't have a name.

I paid the bill and had Marilyn back at the dorm within minutes. I was getting ready to walk her to her door, but she just leaned over and gave me a quick kiss, and then hopped out and ran up to the door to the dorm. I smiled and drove back to RPI.

I unlocked the door to 206 and was greeted by my new roommate, Frank Michaels. "Where have you been all night? Have you been naughty?"

Frank had shown up on my doorstep the Monday after Thanksgiving. I knew my good luck wouldn't last. RPI intentionally overbooked students, knowing that some wouldn't last more than a few weeks or months, and the excess they put up in temporary dorms. In this case they walled off portions of the freshmen lounges in the four freshman dorms and installed bunk beds and student desks. It was like being at summer camp. On my first go around, I had been in the temporary rooms and Frank had been in the dorm room, and his roommate had left.

Now, it was the reverse. They must have assigned rooms according to when people were accepted, and this time I was early acceptance. That first Monday morning I got back from my run to find Frank and the Resident Adviser, a totally forgettable sophomore who got free room and board for living in the freshman dorms and putting up with us, carrying Frank's crap in. I had already met Frank downstairs before this, so I helped them in and then went down the stairs with Mike to help him finish.

Frank was a short and beefy guy from Ohio who had played football in high school. Now he was on the RPI team and was being rushed by Teke. He was quite disconcerted with going from a team that was 10-0 in high school to one that was 0-10. At RPI, most athletes actually had to go to class and take their tests, with very little sympathy from the teachers. Of course, rules don't apply to everybody; the only sport Rensselaer gave scholarships for was ice hockey, where we were NCAA Division I finalists most years. On a side note, way back when, Frank, who wore contacts, taught me how to take care of my glasses when I started wearing them.

Now I just looked at him through bloodshot eyes and said, "It's a long, long story." He laughed and left. I collapsed on the bed and fell asleep still dressed.

I woke up mid-afternoon, considerably refreshed, even if I still looked like shit. Well, that was easy enough to handle. I stripped down and grabbed my robe and took a long hot shower, and then went back to the room and put some clothes on. Then I sorted my laundry and grabbed it and my Advanced Algorithms textbook and went down to the basement. I wasn't the only one doing laundry and studying. I always smiled when I saw the laundry machines. We had already lost the Centrex phones when students learned how to hack the system. Now they had turned their inventive energies to the coin operated laundries.

Last year the washers and dryers had taken quarters, but somebody had managed to make slugs in one of the machine shops in the engineering labs, and gotten around that. Not to worry - the ever clever minds at Whirlpool had devised a new system. You would buy coupons down at the Student Union. The machines were altered so that only coupons could be used. These were very special coupons, too. They were actually rigid plastic, with a printed circuit inside them. Once they went in the washer or dryer, the machine would run a current through them, both activating the machine and simultaneously burning out the printed circuit.

Inventive RPI engineering students cloned the chips inside of four months. Next year the college surrendered and made the machines free, but raised the room rates enough to cover. Everybody seemed to think this was quite reasonable, and we turned our evil genius loose on other topics.

I read several chapters more in my book, effectively finishing it, while my laundry ran. I would reread it later this week while working the various assignments, but I wasn't too worried about it. Once my laundry was washed and dried, I took it back to the room and sorted it out. The guys across the hall had an iron and ironing board, so I bribed them with beer and did my shirts and slacks. Then I shoveled the garbage from my room so that it looked almost livable. Frank was a superior roommate to Buddy in innumerable ways, but was still a slob.

Frank came back from a pickup basketball game just as I was starting to get ready to go out. "So, where were you last night?", he asked.

"You wouldn't believe me if I told you." No, he really wouldn't!

"Come on, give! You looked like you'd been sleeping in the gutter."

"Not quite."

"Give!"

I smiled at him. "Okay, you want to know? Here's the God's honest truth." He looked at me all ears. "Last night I was over at the Kegs party and met this girl. Absolutely gorgeous. She hung on me all night long. I fought a duel over her, to protect her from a drunk. Afterwards, she spent the night with me, and this morning I took her out to breakfast and now I'm going to take her to dinner."

"Bullshit! What'd you really do?", he said with a laugh.

"Frank, I told you that you wouldn't believe me. Every single word I just said is the God's honest truth."

"Bullshit!"

"Fine, go find me a Bible. I'll swear on it.", I said, grinning.

"You fought a duel?" I just nodded. "How?"

"Frank, Frank, details aren't important. Suffice it to say I survived and won, and was declared the winner by the witnesses."

"Bullshit!"

"You know Joe Bradley?" Joe lived downstairs at the other end of the building. "Ask him, he was my second."

"You're fucking nuts. And she slept with you afterwards?"

"All night long, in my ever loving arms. Then this morning we went out to breakfast."

"Yeah, right."

"Frank, are you telling me you don't take the women you sleep with to breakfast the next morning? Or are you telling me you don't sleep with women yet?"

"Fuck you, Buckman!", he said with a laugh.

"I was awfully hungry. That duel, and afterwards, really took it out of me!", I told him. He flipped me the bird.

I went and took another shower, and this time shaved, and then went back to the room to dress for dinner. Frank was still there and tried to wheedle some more information from me, all of which I ducked, citing discretion as the reason. By this time, he had told a couple of guys from next door the story, and they demanded information. I simply recited my story, and reiterated they needed to talk to my second for confirmation. They actually went off to find Joe Bradley, but he wasn't around. I laughed at them and went off on my date. Tonight I was wearing fresh khakis, a dark blue dress shirt open at the collar, a navy blue blazer, dark blue socks, and black dress loafers. Over that I had on my trench coat, and my fedora, which I had cleaned up from where it had been laying on the floor.

After leaving, I drove first to Price Chopper and picked Marilyn up a nice bouquet of flowers, and set them carefully on the floor of the Galaxie as I drove over. The weather had turned, and snow was staring to fall, which sucked. The Galaxie, like all cars from the late Sixties, was rear wheel drive, which simply didn't handle as well in the snow as I would have liked. Still, if you're careful, you'll do fine. I kept my speed down.

I parked near the entrance I had dropped Marilyn off at this morning, and grabbed the flowers and headed inside. There was actually a small booth near the door where you had to stop and ask for your party. While Saint Rose was coed, it was mostly girls, and the dorms were not coed. They didn't allow Y chromosomes inside. I asked for Marilyn and a call was made. They actually had room phones.

Marilyn came down a couple of minutes later, followed closely by a pair of giggling girls who must have been roommates or friends. Marilyn was wearing a pair of dressy slacks which looked like they had been painted on, and a crisp white blouse, with two inch heels and her hair tied back with a ribbon. She was carrying the same coat she had worn last night, a truly hideous down filled parka. She smiled when she saw me, and then her breath caught as she saw the flowers.

"They're not as pretty as you.", I said, handing them to her.

She blushed at that, and sniffed them. "Thank you. You shouldn't have." Marilyn's friends stayed a few feet back and giggled at this.

I leaned in and whispered, "It was the least I could do, considering you slept with me last night." Marilyn turned beet red and swatted at me with her free hand, and I just laughed. "Maybe you should get one of your friends to take these upstairs?"

The two girls giggled some more, but came up. One took the flowers, and the other said, "You're cute. Any more like you where you come from?"

"Sorry, darling, but after I was born, the nurses took one look at me and decided to break the mold!" That got some more giggles, especially after Marilyn swatted me again. I held her coat and helped her into it, and then escorted her to the car. As I expected, she simply marched up to the passenger side door and went to open it. I had to unlock it for her, and then let her in. "Allow me.", I told her, before going around and climbing into the driver's side. I remembered that Marilyn didn't have much experience with dating or guys, and didn't know we were supposed to open doors for girls. The only guys she really had experience with at this point were her brothers back home.

It brought back to me that it was simply an amazing fluke we had ever met to begin with. I never quite figured out why Marilyn ever came to that party in the first place. She was never a big party-goer, and didn't have much experience with boys in general or frats. I don't know whatever possessed her to come to Kegs in the first place, but it must have been with some girls from Saint Rose. That they left her there at the end of the night always indicated to me that they weren't close friends. Maybe she simply got swept up when we were loading the meat wagon. Anyway, that's how we met, and if it was pure luck, it was the luckiest thing that ever happened to me.

I looked at her sitting across from me in the car. "I didn't say it inside, but you look really nice tonight."

"Thank you. I wasn't expecting my roommates to come downstairs with me."

"Well, don't complain, they got to take your flowers back to the room."

She chuckled at that, and we got moving. It was easier to head back out to 787 and take 90 over to the Northway, then head out Central Avenue. That would take us forever with the lights. Once we got on the highway, I asked, "Did you have anything particular in mind tonight?"

"No, not really. The only times I've been out to dinner here have been when my parents have been picking me up or dropping me off.", she answered.

"They're not much for anything fancy?"

Marilyn shook her head. "Howard Johnson's is fancy for them."

"I was thinking a step or two above that, if that's all right with you." I smiled as I said this. I already knew far more about her folks then I ever wanted to know.

"That's all right. They're just not real fancy people. Did you have a place you wanted to go?"

I shrugged. "Not really. I would bet my bottom dollar, though, we can find a steak place over on Wolf Road. Care for some surf and turf?"

Marilyn's eyes lit up at that, as I knew they would. "That sounds nice."

"I bet we can even find a place where they have silly little drinks with umbrellas for you.", I replied teasingly.

We talked about what we told our roommates as we drove west. Marilyn admitted she was too embarrassed to tell them what I told her, but just said she fell asleep on the couch and got a lift back this morning. When she asked what I had said, I laughed and told her the story I had told Frank. She was both horrified and laughing as I described it.

"I can't believe you told him that! It's not true!", she protested.

"Tell me one thing I lied about."

"Well, we didn't sleep together!", she said.

I wagged my finger at her. "Excuse me? You want to try that again?"

"Well, not like that!"

"I never said we did anything more than sleep. I never said anything of the sort. If he wishes to think more than that, it's his morality which is compromised, not mine, and certainly not yours.", I said.

"But he thinks I'm, well, I'm not going to say.", she said primly.

I had to laugh at that. "It gets better. I told him about the duel and that Bradley was my second. Wait until he hears from him!"

We both started laughing at that. As I expected, I found a decent steak house towards the northern end of Wolf Road, near the hotels and the road to the airport. The snow was keeping some people home, so we only had to wait about five minutes for a booth. Once seated, the hostess asked us if we wanted drinks to start off with. I glanced over at Marilyn and smiled. "Definitely."

Marilyn looked at me. "Like what?"

I chuckled and looked at the hostess. "Do you have anything sort of frozen and funny colored with an umbrella?"

She laughed loudly at that, even as Marilyn protested, and then pulled a couple of menus with drinks listed off the wall of the booth. "Here, look these over. I'll be back in a couple of minutes."

Marilyn looked the little book over in fascination; each page had a different concoction, often with a tropical theme. "What should I get?"

"Whatever you want.", I replied. "You'd probably like one of the rum drinks, though. That might be sweeter."

"And you? Are you getting one of these?", she asked.

"Gin and tonic." I reflected on my changing tastes in booze. When I had been young, back then, I had figured that being a Southerner meant I had to like bourbon, like my father did. The truth was that I don't like bourbon; it's too sour and tart for me. I can't stand Scotch either, which tastes like bad medicine. On the other hand, I do like Canadian whiskey, which is predominately rye, or Irish whiskey. Also, I discovered that more than a few bartenders can't make a sour to save their lives, but it's almost impossible to screw up a gin and tonic.

Our waitress came along and introduced herself, and asked if we were ready to order our drinks. Marilyn gave an embarrassed look, but then ordered a Bahama Mama, which looked like a blue daiquiri. The waitress looked at me. "Should I make that two?"

"God forbid! I'll have a gin and tonic. Tanqueray is fine."

She nodded and went on her way. Marilyn looked at me. "What's that? Tangerine?"

"Tanqueray. It's a brand of gin."

"You know a lot about drinking.", she said, somewhat accusatorily.

"I'm an RPI student. It's on the application. They ask how much you drink, and if the figure isn't high enough, you can't get in."

"I almost believe you! I still can't believe you drank flame last night!"

I had to grin at that. "That? That was nothing, just an old parlor trick." Marilyn has a disbelieving look in her eyes. "Okay, here's how it works. Alcohol has a very low temperature when it's burning..."

"Yes, but it was burning.", she said, interrupting me.

"Right, but it's a much lower temperature than oil or gas or other things. Anyway, there's more to it than that. Booze won't burn unless it's at least fifty percent alcohol, or 100 proof. Southern Comfort is just 100 proof, so it will burn, but just barely. As soon as I got it past my lips, it ran out of oxygen and went out. It didn't burn me at all."

"What's his name, the other guy, he was saying how hot it was."

I grinned at that. "That's because I set him up to lose. He was so drunk ... Anyway, if you remember, I lit his glass first, and then waited a few seconds before lighting mine. Then I slammed mine back so fast the shot glass didn't have a chance to warm up. Ghormley stared at his for a while, and was scared. He didn't want to burn that mustache of his. By the time he tried, he had burned his fingers."

"So why didn't your fingers burn when you picked up his glass?"

I mimed grabbing the shot glass and slamming it. "I don't think I had it in my fingers for five seconds."

"You've got an answer for everything! What if you had a mustache, too, or he didn't?"

I laughed at that. "Then I'd have had to come up with something else, wouldn't I! Maybe I should have just let you dance with him!"

Marilyn rolled her eyes at that. She asked me where I had learned about the trick, and I spun a yarn about doing it with friends in high school. In reality I learned about it at Kegs. I also knew how stupid it could be, seeing one guy burn his mustache, and another guy so drunk that when he slammed it back, he missed his mouth and spilled it down the side of his neck, which promptly caught on fire. That was a nice burn. I didn't think I would ever do it again.

Once we were served our drinks, we ordered matching surf and turfs, sirloins and lobster tails, medium rare. Marilyn offered to let me taste her drink, which I did (very sweet and cold, the better to hide the booze) and I gave her a taste of my gin and tonic, which she didn't like as much. We talked some more about booze, when she asked where the blue in her drink came from. I remembered seeing this on a TV show once, and described the process of making liqueurs. When she asked how I knew about it, I gave her the story about the RPI application again.

"Enough about me and my dissolute habits. Tell me about Marilyn Lefleur and her dissolute habits.", I said.

"I don't have any dissolute habits!", she protested.

"Really? Those are the best kind of habits. Besides, I already know you have a bunch of them."

"Like what?"

"Well, you hang around frat houses, luring young boys into duels, and then sleep with them. Sounds pretty dissolute to me."

She grinned at that. "You are never going to let me hear the end of that, are you?"

"And I told you, it will be a great story to tell your grandchildren someday. Especially if you tell it while your children are around to be properly scandalized."

"So what did your grandparents ever tell you?", she countered.

"My mom's parents made booze in the bathtub during Prohibition. Does that count?"

"I'm seeing a real trend here."

I had to laugh at that, and then nodded and agreed. I got her to start telling me about her family. I already knew it, of course but it was good to hear it from her again, fresh.

Marilyn was the oldest of nine children, and her mother was currently pregnant with number ten. Needless to say, they were Roman Catholic. She had gone to parochial schools, in her case UCA, Utica Catholic Academy, which was the girl's school in Utica. Boys went to Notre Dame, which hadn't turned coed until after she left. The next seven kids in the family were all boys, which made growing up difficult in some ways, but better in others. She never had a roommate, for one thing.

"I gather your mother didn't use the Pill."

"That's against the rules.", she replied.

"Not that pill. I mean an aspirin. That prevents pregnancy, too."

"How?", she asked, curiously.

I leaned forward and whispered, "You hold it firmly between the knees."

Marilyn's face lit up in a huge grin. "She obviously never got that lesson!"

I kept her talking about growing up in such a big family, and it was easy, since she was very much a family girl. In many ways, except for meeting me, Saint Rose was very much a mistake for Marilyn. Family was critical, and this was the first time in her life she was away from them. Without the structure of family life she was adrift in a sea of endless changes. While she never admitted it to me, I already knew from experience that she was already on academic probation after her first semester. She lacked the focus and discipline necessary to keep at her studies. I also got her talking about teaching and children. She was majoring in elementary education, and wanted to teach at the grade school level. Again, her lack of focus and drive would be a problem in the future. She never went back to school to get her masters, which is pretty much a requirement, even though most school districts give you five years and will pay for it.

Still, I just loved hearing her talk like this, so young and innocent and full of plans for the future. I let her chatter away, which was astonishingly easy. Certainly all of our children wondered if she ever stopped talking. I would tell them she even talked in her sleep. Finally, after dinner, drinks, and dessert, it was time to leave. The snow was still coming down slowly, but it wasn't sticking much yet. I bundled her into the car and drove back to Saint Rose.

I held onto her in the lee of the doorway and kissed her. "I want to see you again."

"Me too. When?"

"Tomorrow. Monday. Tuesday. You tell me when."

"Next Friday.", she replied. "You know, you still haven't told me anything about your family yet."

"I haven't drunk anywhere near enough to talk about them." She opened the door into the closed foyer of her building. "Give me your phone number."

She jotted down a number on a slip and I tucked it into my pocket. We had one last, long kiss and then I drove back to the dorm.

Chapter 29: Polar Bears and Baby Seals

I talked to Marilyn on the phone Sunday afternoon, and a couple of times more during the week. She was an excellent way to take my mind off classes. I was beginning to doubt the wisdom of what I was attempting to do. Being a genius is all well and good, but 24 credits is still a shitload of credits and hours! This semester I was taking mostly junior level courses with a few senior classes tossed in. By the end of the semester, assuming I didn't crack up and start drooling, I would have about 100 credits or more. This semester I was taking Assembler Language and Compiler Design, among the computer courses, and Information Theory and Topology, among the math courses. I was also starting to spend time with Professor Rhineburg, who taught both the Information Theory and Topology courses. Both subjects were completely fascinating, and had been of interest to me way back when. That was where I wanted to get my doctorate, and I was trying to stay in his good graces. What I was trying to do was unusual but not unheard of; he could either be a big help or put the kibosh on the whole thing!

The plan was that I was going to pick her up on Friday and we would go out for dinner and a movie, but plans change. Around lunchtime, word came down that all pledges needed to be at the house after dinner, but that it wasn't anything secret. You could bring a girl and head out afterwards. When I picked up Marilyn, I told her I didn't know what was happening, but that we could eat over at Kegs and then go out afterwards. She simply shrugged and agreed.

Dinner was always served on the dot at six, so I picked her up and we drove over about half past five or so. I parked in the back, and as we walked into the main house, we saw several guys standing on the frozen surface of the swimming pool. We didn't drain the pool, so the ice in mid-February was several inches thick. Curious, we wandered over to the edge, and were quite mystified. "What's going on?", I asked.

Jack Jones and Bill Swayzack were in the process of cutting a hole in the ice with a chain saw, while Ted Mackinaw, a senior was supervising. Ted was the House Manager this year, and controlled all the power tools and the pool. Jack looked over and said, "What's it look like we're doing?! We're cutting a hole in the ice."

I turned towards Marilyn. "I know I'm going to regret this." Turning back to the trio on the ice, I asked, "Why?"

"Tonight's the polar bear swim.", answered Bill.

My eyes suddenly widened. Oh, Holy Christ! The polar bear swim! I had always managed to avoid this the last time through, but every winter you see these idiots on TV, cutting holes in the ice and going swimming. Kegs had a pool, so Kegs had to have a swim! "This is voluntary, right!?" I had no desire to jump in freezing water to prove my manliness.

"Absolutely!" Satisfied with their first hole, the three of them moved about six feet away and started carving a second hole in the ice.

Marilyn looked at me and was as stumped as I was. "What's the second hole for?", she asked.

Ted gave an evil grin. "Well, the polar bears go down one hole, but they have to come up the other hole.", he said, pointing his finger. "Only baby seals jump in and climb back out, and you know what happens to baby seals, don't you?"

This didn't sound promising. "What?" I just had to ask.

It was Swayzack who answered. "Baby seals get clubbed to death, and then get skinned for their coats!"

Marilyn squawked at that. "That's gross!"

"Come on, let's go in and get out of the cold. It's freezing out here! These idiots are going to catch pneumonia.", I told her.

"You aren't going to..."

"NO WAY!"

The dining room was packed tonight, with most of the brothers, all of the pledges, and about half a dozen girlfriends. It was simple enough fare, being beef stew and bread, and the main topic was who were polar bears and who was going to become a polar bear. Several of my fellow pledges had decided to try it, along with a couple of sophomores who had skipped last year. As always, there were some real nuts who did it every year. No thank you! The only insanity in my family was Hamilton!

After dinner, Thad Johnson, the Chancellor, yelled for everyone to head to the formal room for a quick meeting. This was a bit curious, but I thought he just wanted to get a list of names of the next of kin for anybody dumb enough to jump in the pool. Suddenly there was a mad scramble as all of the brothers ran into the formal room. There was a definite pecking order in the seating arrangements. Seniors and quick juniors got the couches and armchairs, and sophomores and slow juniors lounged on the carpeted floor. Most girlfriends sat on laps, but Marilyn was offered a corner of a couch, and she crammed in. Joe Bradley moved to sit on the floor, but was stopped and ordered to stay upright. It was finally just us pledges standing in the formal room, surrounded by everybody else. Curiously, Thad was seated at a folding table and holding his gavel of office, like he did during house meetings, which I hadn't started attending yet.

Thad motioned everyone into silence and then looked at the 15 pledges standing before him. "Pledges, you have been called here this evening for a most important reason. Tonight we will be having a trial. One of you has been charged with a crime for which there can be no excuse, and no leniency. One of you has profaned the oath you took as a pledge. One of you stands at the very edge of the abyss!", he thunderously intoned.

We were all standing in a line, and every one of us was staring up and down the line! Who did what, and to whom? Even I was getting worried, since this never happened the first time. What was going on?!

"The charge is behavior unbecoming of a Kegger! Grab him!"

Suddenly a bunch of guys behind me grabbed me, and I found myself wrapped up in a pile of bodies before I could even move, let alone fight them off. "What!?", I yelled. "Me???"

Most of the brothers were laughing now, although the other pledges were totally mystified, as was I. Un-Kegger-like behavior was charged about once a year, usually in the late spring or early fall, after an especially rowdy party, and almost always involved women and booze. The miscreant would be found guilty in a kangaroo court and chucked in the pool. I had seen that before - but what had I done?

Thad motioned for quiet again, and continued on. "The charge, Mister Buckman - because as of this instant I no longer dare call you Pledge Buckman - is behavior unbecoming of a Kegger. It has been levied by Brother Ghormley after much consultation. How do you plead?"

"What are you talking about!?" I tried to squirm free, but I had hands on both arms. "When did I do anything to Mike?"

"You have failed to show the respect, the deference, and yes, even the brotherly love due to a fellow member of Kappa Gamma Sigma. You placed yourself, a mere pledge, above a brother. You even got into a drunken fight with somebody so superior to you as to be beyond belief! How do you plead?"

"This is crazy!"

"Your honor, my client pleads not guilty!", said Marty Adrianopolis, standing up and coming over to me. The other pledges were motioned to sit on the floor as witnesses.

"Your client?", I asked.

"Brother Adrianopolis has consented to be your defense attorney, worthless worm that you are.", explained Thad. He waved a hand grandly to the side and said, "And Brother Holloway will be the prosecutor. Brother Holloway, you may begin."

"This is crazy!", I repeated. Everybody laughed, and I could see Marilyn loosening up as well.

Ricky stood up and came up to me, shaking his head in disgust, before turning to face Ghormley, who was sitting in an armchair with a look of happy superiority. If he couldn't win at the duel, he had another way to beat me! "Brother Ghormley, is it true that this scum challenged you to a duel at the party last week?"

"It is!"

"Wait a minute, he challenged me!", I protested.

"Silence your client!", said Thad.

"I apologize, your honor. He's only a pledge and doesn't know better.", answered Marty. I rolled my eyes at that.

Ricky asked the next question. "And did he win the duel?"

Ghormley smiled and said, "Yes, and he cheated, too!"

Cries of, "Shame! Shame!" filled the room.

"Your honor, I rest my case!" Ricky sat down with a flourish.

"Brother Adrianopolis, your response?"

Marty looked at me and shook his head. "Well, your honor, my client is an asshole!"The room erupted into laughter.

"Jesus Christ! That's your defense? I'm an asshole?", I blurted out.

"Your honor, he convicts himself with his own words!", cried out Ricky. "He has admitted to being an asshole!" The place really went nuts at that. Even Marilyn was laughing.

Marty just shrugged and grinned. "I'm an officer of the court. I can't lie!"

"Time for the verdict...", said Thad as he raised his gavel.

I squirmed some more. "Wait! Don't I get to say something?"

Thad put down his gavel. "What could you possibly say about this crime?" He motioned and the hands holding me loosened slightly.

"Your honor, look at her!", I replied, nodding my head towards Marilyn. "Isn't that a woman worth fighting for?"

Marilyn blushed deeply, and the other girls in the room roared and clapped their approval of my defense. Even Marty smiled and said, "Good move, Buckman." There was much consternation in the room at this, and everybody was talking. I might actually beat this!

Thad pounded the gavel and silenced us. "You provide a powerful argument, Mister Buckman. The charges of un-Kegger-like behavior are dismissed." The room erupted in a tumult, but was gaveled quiet again. I noticed that I was still being held prisoner. "However, I now charge you with making the rest of us look bad in front of the girls! How says the jury?"

Oh shit! The room exploded into catcalls and cries of "Guilty! Guilty!", and Thad and the others were laughing at me.

"Wait! Wait! What about him?", I yelled out. "If I was dueling, so was he!"

Mike looked surprised at that, even more so when Ricky commented, "He's got a point there, your honor."

Thad nodded. "He does. Grab him!"

Mike moved surprisingly fast, but ran into a wall of three guys at the doorway to the formal room. He was wrapped up and held squirming alongside me. There wasn't even a pretense of a trial in his case. He was charged with dueling and immediately found guilty. We were immediately sentenced to become polar bears, at which point we both tried to squirm loose and run for it, but we had four or five guys holding us each and we were lifted off our feet and slowly carried towards the back door.

"Hold it, hold it, let me take off my shoes first!", I yelled. My captors stopped and I got Marilyn to come over. She grabbed my shoes and wallet and my glasses (I had totally forgotten them) and then one of the guys told her to grab my belt, too. She blushed when another one said she needed to know how to do that. Thus, properly prepared, I was carried outside to the pool.

Jesus, but it was cold out there! I noticed they had managed to fish a rope between the two holes. Marty told me as I was carried to the first hole, "Grab the rope and we'll pull you out the other end."

"What if he lets go the rope?", asked Marilyn.

"Then we'll pull him out in the spring!", he replied. Oh shit! I grabbed the rope and wrapped it around my wrist as best I could, and then found myself unceremoniously turned upside down and dropped through the hole head first.

Oh my God, but that water was so cold it was painful! I couldn't even think straight, but it felt like every hair on my head was on fire, and I was totally lost. I couldn't even tell up from down. I barely felt the tug on my arm, and the next thing I knew I heard a bunch of guys yelling "Heave!" as I popped out the second hole. Hands grabbed me and yanked me up and out, amidst much congratulating. The rope was unwrapped from my wrist, and I turned my head around just in time to see Mike dumped into the pool with a giant splash. The rope was tugged and a few seconds later he was pulled out as well.

"I swear I'm going to kill you for this!", Mike promised me through chattering teeth.

"Right now that would feel good!", I replied. Mike ran into Grogans', where his room was, and I was bundled inside the main house and up the back stairs to the second floor main bath. A couple of brothers already had a hot shower running, and I jumped underneath.

"You can join him.", somebody said, and I looked out of the shower to see Marilyn staring at me in amusement from the doorway. She was holding my shoes and stuff.

"No thanks. This is close enough.", she answered with a laugh.

My teeth were still chattering, but I was able to get her to run out to my car and bring in my duffel bag. By the time she got back, I had been joined under the hot water by a couple of sophomores who had become polar bears. When Mack Senack started undressing under the water (he lived upstairs on the third floor) Marilyn squealed and scampered away. I laughed and got out of the shower and stripped down. Somebody brought in a few towels and I dried off, and then changed into the spare clothing in my emergency bag. I left it and my wet clothes in the bathroom afterwards and went downstairs.

I found Marilyn chatting with a couple of the brothers and their girlfriends in the kitchen as I entered. Everybody clapped as I entered. I just grimaced and shook my head. "I can't believe I did that!", I said.

"I think our movie night is out.", commented Marilyn.

I leaned down and gave her a quick kiss. "Sorry about that. I had no idea this was going to happen!" I looked around. "Do we have any big plastic bags? I need something to hold my wet clothes." A garbage bag was scrounged up and I went back upstairs, to bundle up my wet clothing and stuff it into the duffel. I finished dressing and slipped my shoes on, and then carried my duffel downstairs again. The two sophomores who had become polar bears had already departed for their rooms to change. I dropped the bag in the coat room, and went in search of Marilyn. I found her on a couch in the living room. Surrounding her on the other couches were the rest of the polar bears, passing around a bottle of Jack Daniels and drinking straight from the bottle.

I'm not a big fan of bourbon, but I needed a drink. I flopped down next to her and tossed an arm around her shoulders. When the bottle got to me, I put it to my lips and took a healthy swig and passed it to her. She looked at it curiously, and put it to her lips, but barely had a sip in when she passed it along and said, "Yuck!" That got her a lot of laughs.

When the bottle came back around, I took another dose of medicine. "I'm certainly feeling warmer now than when I started." I passed the bottle to Marilyn, but she simply handed it to the guy next to her, who I just now noticed was Mike Ghormley. He took a heavy swig and looked me in the eye and nodded.

"Cheers." He took a second swallow. "You deserved it.", he told me.

"So did you.", I replied.

He just shrugged and gave me a wry smile. "Yeah, so what. Fuck it."

I got a third swallow out of the bottle and was starting to feel mellow when Marilyn nudged me with her elbow. "I am not sleeping here on the couch again!"

I nodded in understanding. "Well, you can always drive us back to my dorm room and you can sleep there. We can kick out my roommate."

"Forget it."

"You can drive us back to your dorm room and we can kick out your roommates."

"Not going to happen.", she replied.

"Maybe I need to do something other than drink more whiskey."

She nodded. "I think that's the right answer."

I shrugged. An armchair opened up across from us, and we moved over there, with her sitting on my lap. Another bottle was produced for the polar bears, but this time I let it pass by. It was unfortunate, since this was a bottle of Canadian, but I just whined and whimpered as it went by. Marilyn just wagged her finger at me and I behaved.

It worked out however; by the time the second bottle was gone, everybody in the living room was drunk off their asses and passed out. We snuck into the formal room and made out for quite a while without anybody bothering us. Then I drove her back to Saint Rose, and we decided to go to the movies the next night.

Chapter 30: Second Semester

The next two months went by in a pleasant routine. I would call Marilyn from the pay phone down in the lounge every couple of days, since she couldn't call me. Most weekends we would see each other, but a few times she had to beg off and go back home. I did notice that she usually came back to Saint Rose from these trips rather depressed. I had noticed this way back when, also, but hadn't been smart enough to pay attention. I also knew that things were not improving on the academic front.

The usual complaint was that her family just didn't understand her. I had always chalked it up to standard issue complaining. Nobody's family ever understands them! (Jesus Christ! I should know, right?) In Marilyn's case, however, I knew this to be true. Marilyn was actually a lonely girl, and visits home didn't help a whole lot. Her father was a workaholic obsessed with his business, her mother was buried by trying to raise ten-plus kids, and the next seven kids were all boys and useless to boot. Depending on who she was dealing with at home, she was either the unwanted older sister or free labor. The only other woman in the family she could talk to was her four year old sister. Even if she could sit down with her mother or an aunt to try and have a discussion about something adult, it still wouldn't work. Her family was hard core Catholic and in no possible way could she talk to them about boys or sex. Likewise, she was the only person in the family to ever go to college, so that wasn't a topic either.

Mind you, Marilyn's family was far more supportive and loving than mine, even on its worst day. Still, on more than one occasion, she'd visit me at Kegs and cry on my shoulder after a bad time at home. I now realized that I was one of the first people to ever talk to her like an adult and treat her like one. Even her roommates at college weren't much help; one was a snob who looked down on Marilyn's white trash upbringing and the other was a doper. I was the only one who really understood her, and even more now than before.

One thing that I got back in the habit of doing was giving blood. Every couple of months the Red Cross would have a blood drive on campus. They would set up tables in the gym or the Armory and the vampires would come in and drain a pint off anybody who got close enough to wrestle onto a table. You couldn't donate unless you were over 18, so I missed the first few chances, but by February I got back in the habit.

For me it was very easy. I don't have any problems with seeing blood, although I would always look away when they stuck me, so that I wouldn't flinch. (I did have a friend or two over the years who would pass out at the sight of anything medical, even a hypodermic needle!) After that, I would just lay back and rest. I remember one time I actually fell asleep on the table, and only woke up when I heard someone next to me yell out, "We've got a deader here!" I woke up and looked around, much to the consternation of the vampire who thought I had passed out.

I mentioned this to Marilyn once. She couldn't donate blood, since she had had some sort of jaundice or liver disease as a child that prevented it. It wasn't anything fatal or dangerous, but it was something that kept her from donating. On the other hand, I gave a couple of gallons while I was in college.

Professor Rhineburg was actually quite interested in helping me navigate through the hurdles of staying at Rensselaer as a grad student. At the time, most colleges wanted you to go to grad school elsewhere, to broaden your outlook. The standard practice was to get a bachelors at one school, a masters at another, and your doctorate at yet a third. RPI was different in that they offered a large number of five and six year masters programs in engineering and architecture, and I knew a chemistry major who stayed there for eight years and got his doctorate. When I discussed working on something involving both information science and topology, he smiled and nodded and invited me to see him after class at least once a week to discuss possible research.

Eventually it stopped snowing and winter was declared over. Mid-April saw the end of pledgehood. We all knew it was going to happen, and eventually Hell Week was upon us. We were summoned to the house a week before and handed a list of instructions and banished from the environs for a week, and told to report back to Kegs the following Sunday at 2:00 in the afternoon. We all ended up walking back to campus reading over our lists and trying to figure things out.

We had to show back up at the frat in a week wearing a suit, but also carrying a suitcase filled with work clothes and a pair of sneakers. We were also to each have a pledge box (matching cigar boxes) painted in the fraternity colors (magenta and gold) packed with a variety of very strange items:

A travel size packet of Ex-Lax

A road map of Danbury, Connecticut

Two packs of matches

Three pencils

Two pens, purple ink

A small notebook

An emery board

Three marbles

Two quarters, a dime, and four pennies, all minted within the last five years

A green lollipop

Four large paperclips

None of us knew what was going on. The first major crisis was finding fifteen matching cigar boxes! None of us smoked cigars, or even knew anybody who did. I had smoked cigars on my first trip around, but not now. Eventually Bill Pabst called his father, who did smoke cigars, and conned him into sending us enough empty boxes to take care of things. He apparently saved them for knick-knacks. Leo Coglan volunteered to go out and buy the paint, and we split up the remaining purchases among ourselves. We almost didn't get it all done. The cigar boxes came in on Friday and we weren't sure they would dry in time. We painted the sides of the boxes magenta and the folding lids gold.

Sunday afternoon we all trooped back up to Kegs, making sure we got there early. We were kept waiting on the street until 2:00, at which point the door was opened and we were marched into the formal room. It was there that we learned trouble was brewing! The entire brotherhood was sitting there, watching us solemnly, with Hank Barlow, a senior, facing us with a gavel. Once we were lined up, he said, quite mildly, "You were told to be here at 2:00. It is now 2:05."

Joe Bradley took the bait. "We were kept outside until 2:00."

Hank jumped up and leaned over the table and started screaming! "DID I ASK YOU FOR YOUR OPINION? YOU ARE LATE! YOU FAILED THE VERY FIRST TEST! YOU DO NOT SPEAK! YOU DO NOT THINK! YOU ARE NOTHING!" He went on in this vein for another five minutes before settling down and sitting back in his chair.

He pointed over at our Pledgemaster. "This is your fault. You failed to train them properly. Now I have to do your job for you." Bill Gasic simply stared at the floor and looked miserable.

Hank turned back to us and ordered us to place our pledge boxes on the table in front of him. That started another tirade. "YOU CALL THIS MAGENTA AND GOLD? THIS IS FUCKING PINK AND FUCKING YELLOW!" He actually picked up one of the boxes and flung it at a wall, where it popped open and spread everything around that side of the room. Much cursing by the brotherhood was done at this moment, but all directed at us, since if we had done it properly, this wouldn't have occurred. It was Leo's turn in the box, explaining that the labels on the paints said magenta and gold. It made no difference, they were fucking pink and fucking yellow!

After about an hour of abuse, we were all sent up to the attic and told to change out of our suits and into work clothes and sneakers. We would expiate our sins with hard work. The attic was a place on the third floor stuffed with ancient and diseased mattresses. Our suitcases were already upstairs, and had been opened and ransacked, and our clothing had been dumped into a single pile. We spent valuable time sorting it out and changing, so we were late for our return to the formal room. Time for some more screaming.

Fifteen of the brothers were sucking on green lollipops. We hadn't brought enough. We had the wrong maps of Danbury, so they were being taken away; we would not be able to use them later in the week. Some of the brothers were sitting there flipping quarters, obviously from our pledge boxes. We were then divvied up into work parties and sent off to various sections of the house with a senior brother to supervise us, all under the instruction of the House Manager. I ended up in the kitchen, where we completely dismantled everything and removed it and cleaned a year's dirt and grease out. We didn't get done until almost 7:30, at which point we were sent to the pantry and told to repeat the process there. We were dirty and exhausted at 9:30 when we all reassembled in the formal room.

Our efforts were considered marginal at best, but would be accepted for the time being. We were fed a delicious dessert of chocolate pudding. At the bottom of the pudding bowls were small chunks of something that looked suspiciously like Ex-Lax. (It wasn't; we found out later it was Hershey's chocolate!) We were sent off for another round of house cleaning. This round lasted until after midnight, at which point we reassembled, got yelled at some more, did some pushups, and received our assignments for the week. First, though, we were handed back our toothbrushes, which had all been used either in the cleaning of the bathrooms or the cleaning of the kitchen. Most of us looked at them with horror.

Each pledge, now known as a neo, or neophyte, was assigned a task. Leo, the shortest of us, was assigned to measure the Hoosick Street Bridge in body lengths. By this they meant his body lengths; he would be laid down and the road would be marked, then he would be lifted and carried head to toe and another mark would be made. This would be done sufficient times to generate a statistically useful sample. Joe Bradley, a very straight laced fellow, was assigned the task of Condom Control Officer, and would have to quiz each brother and neo about their preferences and again come up with statistical modeling. I was handed a gigantic 44G bra. My assignment was to measure the quad down at Russell Sage College, a girl's school, and get the bra signed by as many girls as possible. Two brothers would be assigned to supervise.

There would be a treasure hunt, and we were given lists of the treasures to be found. Most of us stared at the list and simply groaned. Nobody knew where we would find anything! Some of the items included a stripper, a cop, mustache hairs from a Dean, a signature from the owners of the Canty-Hammett Hot Spot (a black bar on Hoosick Street), and so forth. Point values were assigned to the items, and demerits for bad behavior during the week counted against the points.

We were given another bowl of chocolate pudding and sent back to work. At eight the next morning, sleepless, we were fed and sent to our classes. To ensure that nobody skipped out and went to the dorms and slept in, we had to get signatures in our notebooks every hour between classes from a brother somewhere on campus. After classes were over we had to head back to Kegs for more work.

And so it went for the rest of the week. Our second night we got about two hours of sleep. Our third and fourth nights we got about three. Our pledge boxes were repeatedly ransacked, and strange items were added and subtracted. The brothers made sure we had time to do our assigned tasks. I got dragged down to Russell Sage Tuesday afternoon and handed the bra and a black magic marker. I had made one full pass across the quad, stopping every time a girl came up and asking her to sign the bra. About half signed and half were disgusted. I got a crick in my back from all the up and down movements.

One of the girls must have complained. As we started our second pass, a security guard came up and hustled us off to the Dean of Students, and told her about our offense against human decency. He must have been new, since she just smiled and sent us on our way. I did, however, ask if she would sign the bra. She snorted and said I was pushing my luck, but she signed it nevertheless and we went back out to the quad.

On the way back, I asked the guys to drive us over to Hoosick Street. I had them drop me off out front of the Canty-Hammett Hot Spot. They were nervous about leaving me, but I wasn't. I was the only white face in the place, but I just walked up to the bar and sat down on a stool. "Can I get a beer?", I asked.

The black bartender looked me over curiously. "What do you want?"

"What's on tap? You got a Budweiser?", I asked.

He shrugged and silently poured me a glass. I pulled out my wallet and laid a five on the bar. He left it there and just watched me. I drank some beer as the room watched me. "Is Mister Canty or Mister Hammett in?"

The bartender nodded. "I'm Ron Canty. What do you want?"

"Nice to meet you, sir. If you could just sign one of these bar napkins for me, I'll finish my beer and get out of your way." I slid a napkin towards him from a pile at the end of the bar.

He rolled his eyes and snorted with laughter. "What is this, another frat stunt?"

"Yes, sir, that is exactly what it is!" I finished my beer and pushed it forward for a refill.

He refilled my glass and slid it back. "This is one of them silly ass white boy things, ain't it?"

I stuck my hand out. "Carl Buckman, silly ass white boy. How you doing, sir?"

He laughed at that and signed a bar napkin. I stuck it in my pocket and finished my beer, thanked him again, and left. Outside, I found my keepers nervously standing around the car, worried I was being mugged in the all black bar. I handed them the napkin and climbed into the car. I was also given five demerits for drinking.

I wasn't the only one to catch demerits, of course, and Tuesday night we discovered egregiously bad behavior amongst the neos. Jerry Modanowicz had flipped the bird to a brother on campus. As punishment, he was to paint the offending digit Wednesday morning, in shades of magenta and gold. In response, we all painted our middle fingers magenta with gold fingernails, although we almost had to tie Barry Lewis down to get him to agree. This was considered a sign of superior moral character by the brothers, by the way!Meanwhile, a different form of punishment was being meted out to us. During our hours of sleep, hidden loudspeakers were blasting "The Morning After", the sickeningly sweet theme song from last year's The Poseidon Adventure over and over at us. We started singing it back until they realized we couldn't be broken, and they stopped.

Thank God the professors knew what was happening. No tests or assignments were given to anyone that week, since this was happening to hundreds of us all over campus. Every frat did Hell Week the same week. The only time we had to sleep was in class, and the only time the teachers complained was when we started snoring.

It got seriously weird Wednesday night. We were asked if we had our new maps of Danbury, and then we were blindfolded and handcuffed, and then loaded into the back of a panel truck. We drove for what seemed like hours, but it was actually only about fifteen minutes before the truck stopped. We were let out and lined up, our handcuffs removed, and finally we were left standing in a row. After about five minutes, a voice behind us cried out, "What the fuck are you assholes waiting for?" We slowly took our blindfolds off and found we were at the edge of a parking lot facing the Hudson River. We all looked around and saw that behind us, across the street, one of the brothers was waving to us from the door of a bar. Nobody knew what was going on, but we ran across the street. The brothers were all buying us beer, as much as we wanted, and we all got wasted.

Thursday night we had to give our reports on the tasks assigned to us. Leo reported how many Coglans the Hoosick Bridge was long, including sub-Coglan units, like Coglanarms and Coglandhands. I presented the 44G bra and gave the measurements and counts of girls. The supervising brothers gave out with various humorous anecdotes about our performances.

Thursday night we also presented the results of our scavenger hunt. Not everything was found, but a surprising amount was. One of the deans was a brother from the chapter at Union College and donated a few mustache hairs. A cop in Green Island was a brother and was married to a stripper. It seemed that for the last few days brothers had been dropping hints on where to find things, if we were just smart enough to listen.

We were then given a few more hours of sleep and sent off to campus in the morning, with instructions to return that night, Friday night, at 7:00 PM, wearing our suits. By now totally confused and mystified, and totally exhausted, we went off to classes.

We were back at Kegs that night, and from the outside, the house looked dark and sinister. No lights could be seen through the windows. The Hell Master, Hank Barlow, greeted us at the back door. "From now until you leave, there is to be utter silence. Nothing can be said, and utter obedience is expected. As I call out your names, you will enter and stand in line. Obey and be silent."

Everybody looked at each other, with the one single thought - 'What the fuck is going on?!'

"Bruno Cowling!", intoned Bill. Bruno looked at the rest of us, shrugged in confusion, and went inside. Bill looked down at a slip of paper, and said, "Barry Lewis!" Barry followed Bruno inside. All of us were announced, in no order we could figure out. I was two from the last, and only followed by Tony Defrancisco and Andy Kowalchuk. I found the others all standing silently in the back hallway.

It was obvious why the place looked sinister. Black curtains had been hung over every first floor window, and over every archway between rooms on the first floor. It was actually kind of creepy. I could smell something cooking in the kitchen, but that was curtained off also. Hank followed Andy inside and went to the front of the line. "Follow and obey in silence." He moved slowly down the hallway, and after a second of confusion, Bruno moved along after him. Our little line moved through the dining room, down the front hall, and into the formal room.

It got stranger. Inside the formal room, the folding dining room tables had been set up end to end and covered with black tablecloths. The only light in the room was from the candles burning on every table. On one side of the string of tables were our big brothers, and I noticed how, as we streamed in and down the length of the tables, each pledge's big brother was already in position opposite him. The upper classmen were all dressed in suits themselves, and were standing in place, with chairs behind them. We had chairs behind us. Hank sat at the end of the table, and I saw Thad, the Chancellor, following behind, and he took a seat at the other end of the table.

Defrancisco, the big lummox, promptly moved to sit down, but I noticed nobody else was moving, and Tony's big brother was giving him a dirty look. I nudged him with my elbow and he stopped, looking at me in confusion. On the tables before us were silverware place settings and an empty wine glass. Thad picked up his knife and tapped his wine glass, causing it to ring, and suddenly all the big brothers moved to sit down, and indicated we should also. We were still silent as we sat in our assigned seating.

Everybody was looking curiously at the place settings. The fork was in its normal position on the left, but there was a steak knife on the right, and it was upside down, facing outwards and pointed at you. Everybody put their hands in their laps except Defrancisco, who picked up his knife. Marty looked at me and rolled his eyes, and I had to nudge Tony again. It looked like I was the idiot's keeper.

Next, Hank rapped his wine glass, and fifteen other brothers marched out from the hallway, all wearing dark pants and white shirts and looking like extras in a Mafia movie. Each of them had a bottle of champagne, and after lining up behind us, all bent forward at once and filled our glasses. Defrancisco moved to grab his but I nudged him and he backed away. Glasses were then filled across the table. We continued to sit there, and the waiters retreated, but then returned with a spoon in each hand. One spoon held a strawberry, and this was ceremoniously dropped in the big brother's glasses. The second spoon held a frozen pea, which was dropped in our glasses. The waiters retired, and after Thad tapped his glass, the big brothers picked up their glasses and motioned for us to do the same. Tony drank his right down, even though everyone else waited for Thad and Hank to drink. I looked at Marty and Jack Jones, Tony's big brother and shrugged. The moron just couldn't take a hint.

Hank rapped his glass, and the waiters returned carrying our plates, each of which had a steak, mashed potatoes, and peas. Then Thad rapped his glass and the waiters were back with another pea on a spoon, which was dropped in the pledges' wine glasses. After they retired we were allowed to start eating. This time I was able to catch Tony before he started eating, and got him to wait. The steak wasn't the greatest, but I've had worse, and we were all hungry. Likewise, the champagne was Andre's, about the cheapest carbonated swill available, but after you get enough in you, it started to taste pretty good. Every few minutes either Thad or Hank would tap his glass and we would sit upright and put our utensils down, and more champagne would be poured and another pea would be dropped in our glasses.

Dinner ended with another rap of the glass, and this time all the big brothers stood up, and then they motioned for us to stand. Hank walked out of the formal room and motioned for us to follow, so Bruno tagged behind him and the rest of us got in line, with Andy bringing up the rear. Behind us our big brothers also marched along. We went down the stairs to the basement. The basement was dark except for candles lighting a black draped table along one side of the room, with five seats behind it. We pledges were lined up along the left side, and our big brothers faced us from the right side. Around us in a circle stood all the other brothers. Thad moved to the center of the table.

"Pledges, I call on you now to swear allegiance to Kappa Gamma Sigma, and to the ideals we hold dear..." He was reading a small book by holding it to the side and trying to get the candlelight to shine on it. We were being inducted! Nobody had ever given us any warning. At this point it started getting even weirder. A low murmuring chant began from the brothers, and Thad began enumerating a list of oaths we were to take. Suffice it to say that the Mafia's code of omerta had nothing on us! I have to tell you, those clowns a hundred years ago at Amherst really had a lot of free time on their hands! According to what I ended up swearing, even thinking about revealing our dread secrets was enough to call down lightning! Then, in the same order we had marched in, we were called forward and had to sign our names into a ledger book with a quill pen. Tony spilled the ink on the table.

It was almost 11:00 when Thad finished, "The ordeal is finished. The induction is made. The vigil begins. I call on all new brethren to retire for the evening, to contemplate in silence that which they have sworn, and to thereby signify their allegiance and obedience." There were a few more flowery sentences, but the gist was that we were to remain silent until dawn, and then to return at the same time the next night, at 7:00. We were then marched to the back door and sent off into the night.

Before we had even made it to the sidewalk Defrancisco opened his fat mouth and asked, "So what do we do now?" There were a number of muttered curses in response, and everybody made 'zip it' motions across their lips to shut the idiot up. We marched back to the dorms. Back in 206 I found Frank also wearing a suit and looking serious, and he was silent, too. All of the frats must have this sort of ceremony tonight. We both went to bed and slept very late.

When I woke up Frank was already sitting up in bed. He looked over at me and asked, "Initiation?"

"Uh huh. You too?"

He nodded. "Can you talk now?"

I looked out the window at the sunlit parking lot. "It's after dawn. I can talk."

"What was it like?"

"If I tell you I have to kill you."

Frank grinned at that. "Same here! Back to Kegs tonight?"

"Yeah. Back to Teke?" He nodded. "I think it's party time.", I told him.

Frank grinned some more. "I think you're right!"

Actually I knew that was the plan; I had been through it all before. What the freshmen didn't know, however, was just how much Hell Week took out of the brotherhood. They only saw the endless abuse and chores, but they failed to understand that it took a lot out of the brothers to make it work out right. The Hell Master spent as much time awake as the pledges. There always had to be brothers around to supervise the work details and drive the pledges to their tasks and scavenger hunt. Considerable care was taken in choosing the Hell Master and his minions, and several other juniors and seniors were assigned the task of protecting the pledges in case somebody hazed them too much.

That's not to say the brothers didn't enjoy it immensely. They delighted in coming up with weird shit to spook us. On the walk back to Kegs that evening, the only topic of conversation was the ceremony. What was with the peas? Why was the knife upside down? What was with the chanting? Was there some deep and mystical meaning to it all? Or were the brothers just fucking with our heads? We would be kept in the dark until next year, at which point we would discover we were being fucked with, and now got to give it to the next bunch of dummies.

When we got to Kegs, the place was totally lit up, and a keg was sitting in the formal room and was already tapped. We were promptly stripped of our good clothes and handed red and yellow ('magenta and gold') tee shirts with some sort of individualized words on them. Mine read 'I'm an asshole!' because of my statement at the trial. Leo's read 'Leo the Neo'. Tony's was the best. It read 'Huh?' He really was a moron.

A few minutes later the girls started coming in. Even Marilyn showed up, having been given a ride by a few other girls. We all got really lit with a beer bash that night. I can't even remember how I got back to the dorm, since I wasn't even in shape to walk, and somebody must have given Marilyn a lift home, too. My head was pounding the next morning.

One aspect of the ceremonial nonsense was explained right away, and was the only part that was important at all. This was the order in which we were called forth and lined up and signed onto the rolls, and that was our ritual order. That was determined during the final house meeting before the induction, and was accomplished by pulling names out of a hat. This was the order in which brothers were inducted, and a lower number was better. We were about to join into the merriment known as Room Roulette.

Nobody had ever really asked how rooms were assigned at the frat house, but with the seniors graduating in a few weeks and fifteen new brothers moving in next year, the subject had to be brought up. A couple of weeks after joining, room roulette started, and would run for the next two weeks. It would end at midnight on the Saturday two weeks before graduation. This year it would be very, very important. The house was going to be crammed full next year.

Grogans' was a residential only house. It had 4 rooms on the first floor and 3 on the second, each of which could hold 2 brothers, so it could hold 14 brothers. Grogans' was relatively quiet, in that all the parties were held in the main house, along with all meetings and meals. The main house was where all the action was, and was quite a bit larger. The most prestigious location was on the second floor above the formal and living rooms, known as the Landing. There were 4 large rooms there which held 2 brothers each. The next best spot was the Third Floor location, above the Landing, with another 4 rooms for 2 brothers apiece. Finally, on the second floor, in the section over the kitchen, pantry, and dining room was the Mezzanine, with 4 smaller and odd shaped rooms, all designated as doubles. That gave us 19 rooms total designated as doubles, capable of holding 38 brothers.

Then there were two rooms designated as singles, because they weren't much more than upholstered closets, and if the health department ever found out we used them, we'd be shut down. One was a third floor Garret over the kitchen with a ceiling too low to be legal. Also, there was the Underground Railroad room on the landing. The main house went back to the 1850s (the courthouse burned down about that time, so we don't really know how old it was) and at one point had been a stop on the Underground Railroad that hustled escaped slaves from the South up to Canada. There was a trap door in the floor and a false floor to hide people, and a ladder and tunnel down to below the basement. It was closed up long ago, but it originally connected with Troy's sewers and went down to the river.

Finally, one of the rooms on the first floor of Grogans' had originally been the living room when it was a private house, and was absolutely monstrous. This room was known as the Triple, because you could room three guys in there easily. Final maximum count - 41 brothers.

That was the supply side of the equation. On the demand side, we had 15 incoming sophomores, 8 sophomores staying on as juniors, and 12 juniors becoming seniors, plus 2 seniors staying on as grad students. Total - 37 residents. We were going to be crammed in!

For room roulette, the House Manager put up two large maps on the bulletin board, showing each floor of both the main house and Grogans', with rooms laid out, and covered by Plexiglas, with a grease pencil tied to a string. You would write your name on a room, but it all depended on following the Byzantine rules:

Squatter's Rights - If you were already living in a room, you could stay there the following year without being kicked out. Doubles Beat Singles - Two guys ranked higher than one guy. Lower Ritual Number - When deciding which two brothers to pick, the lowest ritual number won. Crones Should Die! - Graduating seniors who stick around become known as crones, and lost all ritual number rights. You ended up with some real gamesmanship and political shit going on! Squatter's rights were very important, but if one of the two residents of a room graduated, the remaining resident would lose precedence to an incoming double unless he picked a new roommate. This resulted in the most desirable rooms, such as the triple or the black light room, invariably being passed down generation to generation, with upper classmen leaving and younger members moving in. If two sophomores decided to bunk together, it was very important that one of them have a low ritual number, since the lowest number counted. In our class, I was number 13, about as bad as it could get. I wasn't even sure I would rank high enough to get a closet!

Over the years you had all sorts of fun and games. Often, two upper class guys would put their names on a room just to fuck with everybody else's heads, and then switch around later. During room roulette it wasn't uncommon to have potential residents knock on a door and come in, to start looking over whether they wanted to move in, just like people walking through homes with a real estate agent! Further, there were always cascading effects. If a couple of people selected a room with a name already on it, that they had a better number for, those people would now find a different room and kick them out, and so on and so forth. It was major food for gossip for two weeks, and usually went right down to the wire!

My ritual number was so lousy I was probably going to end up living on the porch. I needed to hook up with a guy who was higher up the food chain. I was friends with several upper classmen, but the best candidate, Marty Adrianopolis, was staying with his current roommate in their double in Grogans'. Likewise, while Ricky Holloway was a good friend, as the doper supreme, with squatters' rights over the black light room, he selected Jack Dawson, another major league pothead, as the inheritor of the tradition. Like I had done before, I hit up Joe Bradley, who was number 3 in our class. Linking up, we could call the shots over most of the other sophomores.

I buttonholed Joe after ROTC that first morning after room roulette was announced. "Joe, given any thought to what you're doing in room roulette?"

He eyed me curiously. We got along well enough, but if I was asking, it was obvious what my reason was. "Why? Interested in rooming together next year?"

I nodded. "I hadn't heard that you had hooked up with anybody yet, and my ritual number has me living in the pantry."

Joe nodded in agreement. "Yeah, you're shit out of luck. I heard Bruno's moving in with Lynchburg into the triple."

"Yeah. Ever been over there? They've got a fireplace for God's sake!" I thought for a second. "Barry's rooming with Terry up on the third floor."

"Barry's going to have a single half the year. Terry's going to be out on an internship the entire first semester.", commented Joe.

"Then that makes you the man! You're top dog of the freshmen after those two. Interested in teaming up?"

"The Cisco Kid is still looking for a roommate.", he answered with a smile.

"I'll get an apartment before I do that. If you haven't noticed, personal hygiene isn't high on Tony's agenda." He stunk! Cisco had a heart of gold, a head of cheese, and armpits from hell. "Anyway, you interested?"

He shrugged. "Maybe."

"I have a mini-fridge and a stereo.", I said, sweetening the deal.

"That's nice.", he said with a smile.

I thought for a second. I had roomed with Joe our sophomore year, but it broke down at the end of the year. Junior year I had the single on the third floor, and senior year I shared a room on the mezzanine with a sophomore. I suspected I had been the one who screwed up with Joe, and didn't want to repeat the mistakes. "Joe, you got any rules I need to be aware of?"

"Like what?"

"Well, I don't know about you, but I like girls. What happens if Marilyn wants to come for the weekend? Is that going to be a problem?"

"It is if it's every weekend. Are you tapping that yet?"

I ignored the question. "How about once a month, and only if I clear it with you ahead of time?" Marilyn didn't end up coming over more than that anyhow, but we needed to give him more warning.

"That I can handle. You never answered my question.", he commented.

"No, I didn't, did I. Anything else? You do know that I've been known to smoke the occasional joint now and then, right?"

His face hardened at that. "I don't want any of that shit anywhere in the room. No way, no how!"

It was as I suspected. Previously I had been a serious doper. He hadn't said anything, but I had known he didn't like it. I nodded in understanding. "Okay. If I keep it out of the room, is it a problem if I still smoke on occasion?" I figured I could store my head kit in somebody else's room.

He shrugged. "I just don't want that stuff around."

"How about liquor or wine? You have a problem with that?" Joe was a pretty straight-laced guy, but I didn't recall him as a teetotaler.

He shrugged again. "I don't care about that. Just no drugs."

"Deal!" I stuck my hand out.

He thought for a second and then shook my hand. "Deal."

"Next time we're at the house let's shop for real estate.", I replied. He smiled and agreed.

As expected, the idiocy ran for the full two weeks, and went right on up to midnight on Saturday. It really only affected about half the house, since the other half had some sort of squatter's rights going on. When it finally became clear what was happening, Joe and I found ourselves claiming a room on the third floor facing Burdette. It was a decent size, square, with a couple of built-in bunk beds in an L shape in one corner, and a pair of long built-in desks on the other two walls. The only drawback was that it was at the top of the house, and we would have to carry my mini-fridge up about a million stairs.

Chapter 31: Road Trip

It was our last date of the semester. Finals were just ended and most of us had already taken off. I was sticking around for another week before heading out. I definitely wasn't heading back to the old homestead! Before he went home, Joe Bradley and I had boxed up all our shit and driven it over to Kegs. It had taken us several trips, but our boxes were now all moved in. I would be in the room before he was, so I told him I would sort it out at some point.

It was a last date in several ways. Marilyn was heading home tomorrow also, but she wasn't coming back to Saint Rose in the fall. Much like before, she had flunked out. It wasn't that Marilyn was dumb. She wasn't. Maybe she wasn't a genius, but she wasn't stupid. However, Saint Rose was a bad mix for her. She needed the structure and discipline of family to keep her focused, and she certainly wasn't getting that in Albany.

Tomorrow her parents were coming to pick her up and take her and her possessions home. She would start over again in the fall at Mohawk Valley Community College. She could apply her credits from Saint Rose, but since I don't think she passed a single course all year long, nothing would apply. I didn't tell her I knew that, but I let her put as good a face on it as she could. Regardless, Marilyn was quite depressed about it, and the fact that she felt we were breaking up and would never see each other again had her on the verge of tears.

I had felt that the first time around as well. I had taken her out to dinner and afterwards had cried myself to sleep. Then, we started writing each other over the summer, and I took the train from Albany to Utica in the fall and we figured out how to see each other. The rest was history, or would be history.

I picked her up outside her dorm about seven or so. I had stressed that I wanted to take her to a nice restaurant, and I was going to wear a suit, so she needed to dress nicely as well. A dress and heels would look good on her. It was a beautiful spring day, dry and warm, and I was all smiles when I saw her. She had on a red and black knee length dress with a U-shaped neckline that showed just the tops of her breasts and was tight enough through the waist with a slight flair at the thighs, along with hose and medium high heels. She looked like she was on the edge of crying, but trying to make a brave go of it.

"My God! You look fantastic!", I told her. "I won't be able to eat, I'll be too busy fighting off the other men in the restaurant!"

She smiled at that. "This is all right?", she asked. Marilyn really wasn't a very fancy girl, and her mother wouldn't have been helpful at all, even if she had asked her for help.

"Turn around.", I said, twiddling my fingers in a circular motion. Marilyn slowly pirouetted and I whistled appreciatively. Our daughter Maggie really had been correct, in her utterly tactless way; Marilyn was hot! "You are gorgeous!" If we had gotten that far already, I would have taken her inside and ravished her a time or two before we went to dinner.

But we hadn't gotten that far yet. This was, without a doubt, the longest period I had gone celibate since I lost my cherry to Shelley Talbot. Marilyn, however, was very Catholic, and she had told me once the difference between a good girl and a nice girl. 'A good girl goes home and goes to bed, and a nice girl goes to bed and goes home!' Marilyn was going to be a good girl, right up to her wedding day, and told me so in no uncertain terms. Marilyn also got extremely turned on when we were making out, as much now as before, and even if Marilyn's mouth was saying 'No, no, no!', her body was screaming 'Yes, yes, yes!' Early in the fall I finally popped her cherry, and I was hard at work on moving the timetable forward.

"Are you sure I can't convince you that maybe we should head back to my dorm, so that tomorrow I can serve you breakfast in bed? Wouldn't that count as taking you out for a meal?", I teased.

Marilyn blushed but smiled. Wagging her finger at me, she said, "Forget it!"

"Well, it seems like a good idea to me, but okay, if you'd rather have dinner..." I gave her a quick kiss and then opened the door and led her outside. We held hands on the way to the Galaxie, and I opened the door for her. I went around and climbed behind the wheel, and then whistled at her again. Her dress had ridden up slightly and her legs looked spectacular! Marilyn simply giggled and tugged her dress down a touch, and had me start the car.

I was taking her to L'Auberge that night, a very fancy French restaurant in Albany. It was also very expensive. On the first trip through, my mother had been visiting us once when we were living in Clifton Park, and she took us to dinner there. Afterwards, when she saw the bill, she turned green and said she was going to have to tell Dad when he was in a good mood. I suspected something sexually exotic would be involved. As it was, I fully expected the bill to be at least $100. Considering that this was 1974, and that was a month's room and board at Kegs, L'Auberge was not where I routinely dined.

It wasn't more than a few minutes away in downtown Albany, a stately old home turned restaurant. It was a place frequently used by businessmen and lobbyists to wine and dine politicians, and we were younger than the usual crowd. Still, I had made reservations, and we were dressed appropriately, and I knew how to handle myself, even if Marilyn felt a little self-conscious. Before I locked my car, I reached into the back seat and pulled out a gift wrapped box.

"What is that?", asked Marilyn once she saw me carrying something.

"That is for you, but not until we get inside.", I said, smiling.

"Tell me!"

It was my turn to waggle a finger. "Inside!" She stuck her tongue out at me, but then scampered towards the door when I moved to swat her rear with the box.

Once we were seated I set the box on the side of the table. "We'll get to that in a moment." Just then, our waiter came up and we ordered drinks, with me ordering a gin and tonic and Marilyn getting something sweet and silly. Then I picked up the box.

"I can read minds.", I said, "and right now I can read yours perfectly."

"Oh? So what am I thinking?", she asked.

I held a hand up to my temple and closed my eyes. "Well, actually, there's two things." I paused dramatically and closed my eyes again. "The first thing, well, Marilyn, that's illegal in this state, and certainly won't get you into heaven!"

"CARLING!", she shrieked quietly.

"And the second is that you're worried you'll never see me again, and you've fallen hopelessly in love with me." I smiled at that. Marilyn's face screwed up and her eyes started to water. I had said the wrong thing. I reached out and patted her hand. "Marilyn, it's all right. I love you, too, and we'll certainly see each other in the future."

She stared at me. "What did you say?"

"I said I love you. I didn't think you'd be so unhappy as to cry about that." I smiled and continued holding her hand.

"Oh, God!" She started to blubber, and I just lifted her hand and kissed her palm.

I also reached into my pocket and handed her my handkerchief. "I love you.", I repeated quietly.

Marilyn had happy tears in her eyes, and she grabbed my hankie and started wiping her eyes. Of course then she had to honk her nose into it, so I decided to let her keep it as a souvenir.

"Now, stop worrying so much. This is not the end and we are going to keep seeing each other and we're going to talk about that tonight. What? Were you worried I was going to break up with you tonight?", I asked, smiling.

"Well..."

"Honey, if I was going to break up with you I wouldn't do it at these prices. I'd take you to a HoJo's and go Dutch!"

Marilyn blushed. "So what's that?", she asked, pointing at the box.

"Here, it's for you." I handed her the gift.

She tore the wrapping paper off the box. Inside was a Polaroid SX-70 instant camera, a state-of-the-art (at the time) instant camera with a single lens reflex action. You took a picture and within seconds the film pack spit out a picture that would develop in your hands inside of five minutes. "What ... why...", she asked curiously.

I handed her another couple of film packs from a pocket. "I am going to take pictures of you tonight before we split up, and keep them with me over the summer. That way I won't forget you."

She smiled at me. "You want take pictures of me? Like what?"

"Well, high heels at one end, and a smile at the other. The middle is kind of optional."

"Carling!", she said with a blushing smile.

"Oh, all right. A fellow can dream, can't he?"

I simply waggled my eyebrows at her, and she blushed some more. I opened the box up and showed her how to load a film pack, and then I took a quick picture of her, and showed her how it developed. The flash attracted some attention, which embarrassed her a touch, but nobody seemed to mind a boyfriend taking pictures of a pretty girl. I folded it back up and put it back in the box to the side. "I'll take a few more after dinner. Then later, when you get back to the dorm, you go upstairs and put on a bikini and come down..."

"CARL!"

"It was worth a try!"

The waiter brought our drinks, and we looked over the menu and I reviewed the wine list. I decided to splurge on a nice bottle of Pouilly Fuisse. In just a few days I was going to be dining with some people a whole lot less decorative than Marilyn.

"I still can't believe you're going across the country next week.", she told me.

"It'll be fun. You should come along!"

"No way! I think you're just going to chase girls and drink and smoke pot.", she said, smiling.

"No on one, yes on two and three.", I said with a shrug.

"I'm not sure I believe you."

"This is my only chance to do this. My next two summers I'll be camping with the Army." I told her.

"I still can't believe you're going into the Army."

I shrugged. "It's not like I have a choice. Uncle Sam is paying for college for me, and he's looking for some payback. If my father could do it during World War II and my grandfather could do it during World War I, I guess I can survive it now. At least nobody's shooting at us at the moment."

We talked some more about my joining the army, and how ROTC worked, and also about my family's military tradition. This took us through a fair bit of dinner, and I took this as an opportunity to toss a new idea into the mix. "After I get back, let's go to Maryland. I can take you to see my folks for a few days, and then we can go to the beach."

"The beach? You live near the beach?"

I shook my head. "No. Several hours away, in fact. Here's my suggestion. I'll get two rooms at a place in Ocean City. You'll have your own room. I know you well enough for that." Marilyn looked relieved at that. "We'll start at my folks for a few days and then drive to the beach. Take a week or two at the beach and then come back up to New York for the fall."

Marilyn was looking intrigued, so I told her all the positive ideas about meeting my parents and family, which are always important to a woman. I also stressed the idea of sun and sand and warm, warm water. You just don't get that in Utica. By the time dessert arrived she had agreed.

I'd warn her about Hamilton some other time, like after she got to Lutherville. I would put up with him for a few days for Marilyn's sake, so my family could meet her. Besides, she'd never believe my stories about my family without meeting them first.

After dinner I had her pose a bit in the lobby and I took a few more pictures. When we got back to the dorm, I asked her again to change into a bikini, but she declined again. I grabbed my shots of her and tucked them in a pocket, and gave her the camera, and then I gave her a big kiss and left.

The next day I spent the morning on the phone long distance to the Hilton Hotel in Ocean City, Maryland. My parents preferred to visit Rehoboth Beach, which is in southern Delaware, about half an hour north of Ocean City. Rehoboth is a smaller and quieter town than Ocean City. Me, I preferred a little glitz and glamour on my vacations. The Hilton is near the Boardwalk, and I could afford it. Although the economy wasn't too happy about it, I had ridden the oil shock up and down, and was now invested in some stocks that did well under these conditions. I was worth about a million and a half now, plus the $2.47 my atoms were supposed to be worth. I was able to reserve a large suite with two bedrooms (I did tell her she would have her own room, just not what type of room) for two weeks starting a week after I got back. I also specified that I would probably show up late in the first week, but I wasn't sure when, and let them bill it to my American Express card, which they were quite happy to do.

After that, it was just necessary to wait a couple of days for Ricky and Marty to finish with the semester. Both guys were juniors and had to finish finals, but after that, they were free for the summer. Marty never went home anyway, but stayed at school and lived in the house. Ricky, on the other hand, was in ROTC, and would normally have gone to do his second summer at training, but he had deferred it until after graduation. He had the summer free, too. They were planning a road trip across the country. When I asked them what they were up to, they invited me along. I was planning on living at the house and goofing off. I jumped at the chance to join them!

The general plan was that we would travel across the country, spending the nights at various Kegs chapter houses around the country. Kappa Gamma Sigma was a national fraternity, with dozens of chapters all across the US. It was not at all unheard of for brothers to show up at another house, out of the blue. Every year we would get a few people passing through from other colleges, who would be invited in for anywhere from a night to a few days. We'd let them sleep in their sleeping bags in the formal room, mooch some meals with us, share some beer and weed, and otherwise goof off. Why anybody in their right mind would visit Troy was an entirely different question. The usual answer was they were on their way through to somewhere a whole lot more interesting.

Marty, Ricky, and I were going to return the favor. We all tossed sleeping bags and duffel bags into the trunk of Marty's 1970 Buick LeSabre. That thing was just a beast of a car! I think it was bigger than my Galaxie, with a bigger engine, and generally roomier. Of course, while the Galaxie needed an oil well in the back yard to feed it, this thing needed two!

We never even considered Ricky's car, an ancient VW Beetle. None of us was sure it would make it to the state line, let alone across the country.

Ricky had a map of the United States with chapter houses marked with red dots, and Marty had gotten from the national headquarters a list of addresses for the chapter houses. Our tentative route had us going through Cleveland and then on to Chicago. From Chicago we wanted to go to St. Louis, but after that we weren't sure. The idea was to go on a northerly route on the way west, and then come back on a southerly swing. Most of the chapter houses were either on the east coast, California, or the south. North and west of St. Louis was a bit limited.

I had a Kodak Instamatic camera with a few spare rolls of film, and before we set out, I got Jack Jones to take a few shots of us in front of the Buick. I got razzed by the other guys, but screw it. They'd thank me someday.

The first stop was Cleveland, and the initial theory had been that we would drive on the US and state roads, not on the highways. We'd get a chance to see the real America, not just concrete. After about five hours on Route 5 going west through every Podunk little town in central New York, we said "Fuck this shit!" There's a reason they built the Interstate system! At the pace we were going, we'd have hit the Pacific just in time to return to school - next year! We got onto the Thruway around Rochester and moved it up to the speed limit. We got to the chapter house at Case Western Reserve about eight in the evening.

I suppose Cleveland is a nice place. Certainly people live there. Still, you really have to wonder about a city where the river has a tendency to catch fire. I mean really, you use water to put out the fire, not to start one! The chapter house was not an auspicious start to the trip. There were two guys living there, and we met one as we pulled in the parking lot and he was leaving. "Hi, can I help you?"

Ricky flashed a smile at the guy. "Hey, how you doing? We're from RPI in Troy, New York. Any chance we can spend the night?" He had on a Kegs shirt so the guy knew we were brothers.

"Yeah, sure. Welcome. Go on in. Wozinski's in there. Let him know. I'm out of here for a few days. Nice to meet you." Then he was in his car and leaving.

We glanced at each other and shrugged our shoulders, and then went inside. There was a single brother holding down the fort, Wozinski, and he was watching television and drinking a beer. That was it. He greeted us and grabbed a few beers and showed us where we could sleep, but that was it. He was the only guy around and not much of a talker. After a bit he left us to our own devices and went to bed. The three of us raided the fridge and had another beer, and decided to keep going the next day.

Northwestern, in Chicago, was a whole different story. If the trip had consisted of houses like the one in Cleveland, we could have turned around and had more fun in Troy. There were almost a dozen guys staying over the summer at the house at Northwestern, and they greeted us warmly! We spent the first night drinking and smoking, and then stayed on for another three days. We ended up swimming in Lake Michigan, which was a bit warmer than the polar bear club routine, but not by much, and hitting some bars and clubs downtown.

I remember comedian Bill Maher commenting when Barack Obama became President, that for the first time in ages we had a President from a place you would actually want to go to. Chicago was pretty cool. I had a headache and Ricky was totally hungover by the time a groaning Marty pulled onto the road towards St. Louis.

We stayed in St. Louis (Washington University) for a couple for nights, and then drove up to Des Moines (Drake University) for another couple of days. Lots of good barbecue and beer, dull as dishwater in some other ways. I mean, I know that's where all our food comes from and that's pretty important, but who the hell wants to live there? There's just miles and miles of miles and miles! We consulted our map and list of colleges and decided to keep going west. It was about 700 miles to Denver. At normal highway speeds we could be there in nine or ten hours, easy. However, earlier that year the national speed limit was dropped to 55, because of the gas crisis. Trust the government to do something dramatic - and wrong! Now it was going to take us at least 13 or 14 hours. This was a massive waste of time and money, and dangerous to boot (you spent longer driving, so you had more chance of getting into an accident.) We left mid-afternoon and arrived in the early morning, after bypassing God only knows how many cow towns and hitting too many truck stops to pee and eat and gas up.

The brothers at the Colorado School of Mines took pity on the weary travelers and put us up. That was pretty good, we had some fun there. It's a small school, about the size of RPI actually, and specializes in engineering. A bunch of Rocky Mountain nerds, in other words! We got along well with them. Lots of Coors beer, which at the time you couldn't get east of the Mississippi. Some guys swear by it, but I'm not that big a beer fan. A couple of the brothers took us up to Pike's Peak with Marty's Buick, and then helped us change the tire when he blew one coming down. We also went into Denver to drink and chase girls at a few of the bars. We stayed there three nights, and weren't all that sober at any given time.

We spent a couple of nights in Boise, completely bypassing Utah, which would have been the halfway point. There were no chapter houses there, and it didn't seem like much of anything else. Big damn place, but hopelessly earnest. No drinking, drugs, fornication, or much of anything else that might be enjoyable. We bypassed it before we could be contaminated by the Mormons. It took us almost an entire day, what with the travel time, stopping for meals and gas, and so on. On the other hand, the brothers at Boise State were a bunch of real yahoos and cowboys. We were bedded down for the night, and the next day we were taken along to a bar with a mechanical bull. More Coors beer, more stupid shit going on. I'm glad we had the Instamatic along, because we ended up with pictures of all of us getting thrown by the mechanical bull. My picture damn near has me upside down, but my face was recognizable.

"Someday I will show these to my kids, just to prove to them their old man was crazy.", I told Ricky.

Marty came limping up, bowlegged. "Yeah? I don't think I'm going to have kids now!"

"If the choice is putting an ice pack on your balls for you, or letting you die, you're going to die, Marty!", I told him.

"This from an asshole mooning over a girl who hasn't even given it up yet! If I want horseshit, I can come here and find a horse!", he retorted.

"I agree! You need to either start drilling that well, or give up the lease!", said Ricky, a geological engineer by major.

"He's just going to ignore us and mail her another post card!", said Marty.

"Fuck you two, and the bull you rode in on!", I replied, without any heat. "I've seen the women you two have been sleeping with. At least I'm working on the proper species." I pointed at Marty's crotch. "You'd have better luck screwing the mechanical bull rather than riding it."

Ricky laughed. "You know how rodeo riders have sex?"

I rolled my eyes, since I knew the answer, but Marty bit on it. "How?"

"After they get on top of their girl, they whisper in her ear that she's just as good as her sister, and then they try to stay on for eight seconds!"

"Shit!"

Marty and Ricky were right about one thing, though. Every time we stopped, I'd buy a postcard and mail it to Marilyn. I'd always be looking for something a little offbeat. In Golden I had sent her one of a fellow falling off Pike's Peak. Boise just had postcards with either stunning vistas or cowboys. I found one with a girl on a mechanical bull, and wrote that I was behaving myself, despite the temptations. It was too bad we were going to miss Donner Pass, since there just had to be some good ones for that!

From Boise it was off to Portland (Portland State) where we spent a couple of nights. The chapter house was a gigantic Victorian three story house, and something about it just didn't seem right. In fact, it was sort of creepy. We went inside, following a brother named Biff and wandered around the first floor. It had about ten small rooms, all open to each other. "Man, what's with this architecture?", wondered Marty.

I nodded in agreement. It was kind of strange. Ricky simply said, "I don't know, but for some reason it's kind of familiar."

Biff had a big smile on his face. "It used to be a funeral home."

Ricky's eyes lit up. "That's it! My grandmother died last winter and the funeral home looked exactly like this! Lots of little rooms all connected one to the other!"

"Yeah, that way they can run partitions between the rooms and have more than one body in residence."

Ricky nodded vigorously. "And a lot of these old funeral homes were family owned and run, and the family would live upstairs!"

"Exactly. Come on, let me show you around.", said Biff. We got the real nickel tour, too. Out back was a four car garage, now devoted to junk and lawn care gear, that originally could hold four hearses and limos. Then he took us down into the basement, which had a number of curious features. For one thing, there was a driveway that went from the back to the front, down through the basement and back out to the front driveway. Midway through the basement was a room with a big stone table and drains and the most ghastly colored stone flooring. This was where the hearses would roll through and drop off the customers, who would get drained and prepped in the basement before being sent upstairs for viewing.

"Holy shit!", I said. "This is just, like, ghoulish! How can you sleep here?!"

Biff just laughed. "Piece of cake! Man, it's too bad you're not coming through this fall ... All month long we run a haunted house for the neighborhood kids, and we have one hell of a Halloween Party."

"BYOB - Bring Your Own Body!" I shivered. I'm not all that religious or superstitious, but it was more than a bit creepy.

A couple of days later, we headed out, and I think we all felt better leaving the place. Don't get me wrong, they were great guys, but really, a funeral home? There are some jobs I just don't want to have!

"I'm finally feeling safe again.", announced Ricky as we drove south. "I had to sleep with one eye open, just in case Buckman woke up at midnight and felt the need to gnaw my flesh like a zombie!"

I smiled at that. Ricky was actually kind of scrawny and tough, small, and wiry. Marty, on the other hand, was taller and a bit stocky. "Not to worry, Ricky. You're kind of tough and stringy. Marty's probably tastier. He's well marbled."

"Fuck you, Buckman. You feel like walking home?", asked Marty.

"Actually, Ricky, you're suddenly looking tastier.", I answered.

We drove down to California on I-5. You don't hit anything interesting until you get as far south as Sacramento and San Francisco. Mark Twain once said, 'The coldest winter I ever saw was the summer I spent in San Francisco.' No shit! It was the end of June and fog was present as we drove in!

It was in San Francisco that we finally got to see the Pacific, even if icebergs were off shore. Very scenic city, very pretty. I kept waiting for Steve McQueen to come roaring over a hill, all four tires in the air, in his Mustang. We spent two days at San Francisco State before driving further south, in search of warmth. Cal State Long Beach is only three miles from the beach! The three of us even debated over staying there and not going home, and only Ricky's insistence that the Army would chase him and me down made us leave. The only argument otherwise was which was more important, a better body or a smaller bikini.

From Los Angeles it's not quite a day's drive to Las Vegas. It can be maybe four hours if the roads are clear and you're leaving from the eastern side of the city, or five hours from the beach. It's a lot longer if the California Highway Patrol is running convoys at 55 out to the Nevada line. It was late in the day when we pulled up in front of the chapter house at UNLV. As soon as we got out of the car a gorgeous blonde coed came down the front steps, greeted us, and led us inside. We barely had time to say who we were before somebody handed us a beer. Now that's what I call hospitality!

If Vegas didn't exist, somebody would have to invent it! The entire city is dedicated to the moral dissipation of anybody silly enough to step inside the city limits. That parents would send their children here to college is beyond astonishing. While Ricky and Marty knew all this intellectually, I was the only one who had ever actually been there before, and that was in my previous life. We went down to the bar with a couple of the brothers, and there was a slot machine next to the bar. Ricky and Marty just stared, and then Marty asked, "Is that legal?"

"Yeah, pretty much.", was the answer, which made me wonder just precisely how legal it was, but nobody seemed to care.

"We need one of these back home!", Marty exclaimed. A minute later he had fished some change out of his pocket. It was a quarter slot, and he dropped all his quarters that he could find in, earning back nothing. "Shit!"

"It helps pay the dues!", commented one of the guys. He looked at Ricky and me invitingly. Ricky laughed and tried some change of his own, as did I. Everybody seemed happy that we had contributed to the fiscal operation of the frat.

We stayed several days at UNLV, and had a very nice time. One day we went over to Lake Mead and toured Hoover Dam, which is pretty cool for nerds. Still, I wanted to try something, so one day we drove into the city and looked around. Thank you, sweet Jesus, that the air conditioning on the Buick was working! It must get to be about a million degrees there in the summer! We parked at the Golden Nugget and went inside. This was in the days before the big expansion on the west side of the Strip had really taken off, and the Golden Nugget was one of the old casinos downtown. We looked around for a bit, but then I told the guys, "Listen, I can't explain this, but I'm breaking away for a bit. Don't leave without me, but I can't have you with me for a while."

"What are you up to, Buckman?", asked Ricky.

"Just trust me. I want to try something." I walked away and headed over towards the table game section, and found where the blackjack tables were.

It was time to try something silly. I watched the action at several different tables, and then went into a higher stakes area and watched some more, and then I sat down at a table where the bets started at $50. I handed an even $1,000 to the dealer, who simply announced, probably to a microphone and the pit boss, "Changing $1,000 for chips!", stuck the cash into a slot in the table, and pushed a small stack of $50 chips across to me.

That was what the stake I had decided to risk gambling. No way was I signing any markers. If I lost it, it was gone. Blackjack is one of the few games at a casino which isn't pure random chance. There is actual skill involved, and you can beat the house. The casinos know this, and they don't actually like it, but blackjack is a popular game and they can't afford to stop it. The skills needed to beat the game involve discipline and card counting.

Card counting involves knowing what cards have already been played and what is still in the deck. It does not involve memorizing the cards, which is what is shown in the movie Rain Man with Dustin Hoffman and Tom Cruise. In its simplest form you simply assign a value to each card as it is dealt. Cards 2-6 are worth +1 each, 10s and all face cards are worth -1 each, and 7-9 are worth 0. As each card is dealt, you keep a running tally, and the count will rise and fall. When the count is negative the deck is in the dealer's favor, and you should bet low. When the count is positive the deck is in your favor and you should bet high. There are more advanced systems which value the cards at multiple levels, but the basic Hi-Lo strategy works.

On the downside, it is not a guarantee, simply a method to move the odds to your favor. You have to pay attention, really pay attention to pull it off. The casinos know this and have a number of countermeasures, from simply trying to distract you and make you lose count, to more frequent shuffling, which erases the count but slows the game considerably. Another tried and true method, not used so much in the U.S. but very popular in third world shitholes, is to take you out and bury you, often with a single hand showing above ground, holding a card. Card counting is not illegal. Using a mechanical or electronic counter is extremely illegal. Worst of all, the advantage is small enough that you need to be playing for large sums to make it worthwhile, hence why I was playing at the $50 and up table.

By the time it became common knowledge how to do this, most casinos started tracking known counters and using computer software to analyze betting habits and facial recognition to discover disguised counters, and then ban the counters from returning. Nobody knew me yet.

The system works. It isn't easy, and you really need to pay attention, and that was why I couldn't have my buddies hovering over me yakking it up and kibbitzing. I sat there and gambled for a couple of hours before Ricky and Marty came searching for me. Thankfully I was in a definite hot streak where the count was very positive and I was able to make some large bets and pocket some serious coin. They came up behind me and saw the amount of chips on the table and gasped. "Buckman! Where have you been? We've been all over the place looking for you. Holy shit! What are you doing?!"

I still had a nice positive count going, so I played one more bet for $300, hit a blackjack, and collected at 3:2. At that point I stood up and slid a chip across the table to the dealer. "That's for you. I think I'm going to cash out." The guys had totally blown my concentration, but it was time to quit anyway. The count was turning.

"Thank you, sir. Cashing out!" My chips were placed in a small rack and handed to me, and Ricky and Marty followed me in astonishment over to a cashier's window. I had about four grand in cash, including my original one grand stake, so I was up about three. Not bad for an afternoon. Still, I wasn't sorry they had stopped me. I just don't have the fire in the belly that a lot of gamblers have. For me it was just a job, and one where having people at my side was a distraction I couldn't afford. It was lonely and sterile. I had never done it before because I had never really had the money to be able to sit at a table for the hours it took, and at the stakes necessary, to make it worthwhile. Now I had the cash, but it was still something that left me cold.

Real gamblers, the guys who get in trouble, are different. They get a thrill that is almost sexual in nature when they are making bets, no matter what on. They've run MRIs and scans and stuff on these guys, and the same parts of the brain light up like when you're on drugs or getting laid or whatever. It's part of why they have to gamble even when they are losing. Me, I just don't get that same sort of thrill. I smiled at the cashier and sorted through my money. I counted out five hundred dollar bills and handed them to Ricky, and then another five hundreds to Marty. "Here, take these."

Marty stared at the money. Ricky asked, "What the fuck is this?"

"This, my friends, pays for our vacation! Say thank you!"

Marty looked at me. "Are you shitting me?"

"I am dead serious. I'm still ahead. Come on, let's get a drink! I'll tell you there." We found a bar and grabbed a seat at a table against one of the walls.

"Okay, what's going on? What's with the money? When did you become a big time gambler?", asked Ricky.

I motioned him to be quiet when a pretty waitress came up and took drink orders. We all ordered beers. Once she went away, I considered what to say. This was in the days before microscopic cameras and microphones could allow each table to be monitored in a casino. I just nodded and said, "Okay, but this is just between the three of us. If anybody ever asks, just tell them I got lucky, real lucky at the casino, and leave it at that. Nobody'll believe you anyway."

"Believe what?"

I leaned forward and said quietly, "I can count cards."

I was surprised in that neither of the guys knew what I was talking about. "What's that?", asked Marty.

"Yeah, not following you either.", agreed Ricky.

"I'm surprised. I'd have figured that at a science and engineering school like the 'Tute everybody would've known about it." I shrugged my shoulders. "Okay, lesson time in applied probability and statistics. Most of what goes on in a casino has fixed probabilities of outcomes. For instance, at the roulette table, you have a wheel with 38 slots, numbers 1 thru 36, alternating in red and black, and the numbers 0 and 00 in green. Following me so far?"

"Sure.", said Marty. Ricky nodded.

"So, pure probability theory states that the odds of hitting any given value is 1 in 38. In a perfectly even payout, if you hit that number, they should pay you 38 to 1." Again, more nods. "But they don't, they only pay at 36 to 1. They keep the percentage from hitting the 0 and 00. The only way to play those two numbers is to bet directly on them, and they still only pay 36 to 1. The house keeps that fraction, roughly 2 in 38, as the house cut. That's their profit."

"What's that got to do with blackjack?', asked Ricky.

"I'm getting there. The thing to remember is that most of the games, the slots and wheels and dice and everything, they are based on totally random events. You can't control what number shows up on the roulette wheel or how the dice turn up. The casinos know that and have it manipulated so that they always get a piece of the action. There's only two games where you can beat the house, poker and blackjack."

"What?"

I nodded some more. "Poker is actually skillful, reading the other players and not the cards. A lot of casinos simply allow games to be held, and take a cut out of each pot. It's not even their money. Blackjack is more complicated. Over the course of a game, going through the cards, the house has the edge, but during the game, there will be moments when the house has the advantage and moments when the player has the advantage. When you have the advantage, you bet big, and when you don't, you bet small. That shifts the game's odds from the house to the player. That's what I was doing in there."

"And you can do this? You've done this before? How hard is it?", asked Ricky excitedly.

"Whoa, hold on! Don't get too excited. This is the first time I've ever tried it, more to see if I could do it than anything else. I can, but it is not easy. It requires a lot of concentration. That's why I had to be by myself. I have to watch every card as it's dealt and keep a running total in my head. Somebody talking to me, drinking, smoking, girls, anything and my concentration is shot and I start losing money."

"And it's legal?", asked Marty.

I waggled my hand in an iffy fashion. "Eh, yes and no. I'm not doing anything illegal. However, it shifts the odds away from the house, and the house doesn't like it. If they catch on, they can throw me out and ban me for life."

"What's with the money? Are you giving that to us?", asked Ricky.

"Sure, why not. Like I said, it pays for the trip. Fuck it."

We kept talking through another round of beer, and later that evening, in the basement at Kegs, I borrowed a pack of cards and showed them how it worked. The local brothers had all heard about it before. They knew what was involved, and every year somebody would try and find it was harder than they expected, and lose their shirt. They were amazed I had actually pulled it off, and wanted me to teach them. I demurred. No way did I want to become a professional gambler.

I went over to Circus Circus the next day and repeated my winnings, picking up another four grand. That ended my lust for gambling. I knew I could do it, but I just don't have the drive.

We drove from Vegas over to the Grand Canyon (that's one motherfucking hole in the ground!) and then drove down to Phoenix (Arizona State.) We spent a couple of days there and then moved on to El Paso (UTEP) and then on to Austin (University of Texas.) Big damn state, hotter than blazes, dry as dust. Nice people, though, and they sure know their barbecue.

The place we all really wanted to visit we got to in July, and that was the Big Easy, New Orleans. We would stay at the chapter house at Tulane for a few days before heading on east to Florida. Those guys were simply insane! There were only three guys staying there, but they took it upon themselves to introduce us to the depths of moral turpitude and degradation. We spent a very long night on Bourbon Street with them, eating and drinking, and then they took us out into a swamp the next night chasing down snakes! Poisonous snakes! I was so scared I damn near crapped my pants! Even garter snakes give me the willies, and these jokers caught some rattlers (only rattlers, they threw the other poisonous snakes back! I kept waiting for one of the little bastards to get pissed at us and come back for us!) I think I turned green when it was held up for my inspection and the sucker hissed at me. Bubba Ray just laughed and cut off the head with a machete. The next day we had rattlesnake steaks. Tastes just like chicken, only chickens don't bite you with venomous fangs. Remind me not to do that again!

From New Orleans we drove east. The road trip was starting to get old, and I told the guys we needed to get back by the first week of August. My reservations at the Hilton in Ocean City were for the second and third weeks of August. They agreed with me. We would hit Jacksonville for a few days, see what there was to see, and head home up I-95.

Well, that was the plan. It didn't quite work out that way, though. We found the college easily enough, along with the chapter house. The problem was that nobody was home! The place was locked up tighter than Marilyn's you-know-what!

"Nobody's home?", I asked.

Ricky kept knocking on the door. "I can't believe it. I've never heard of a house where everybody leaves."

Marty commented, "I'm not even sure the locks on our house even work! There's always somebody around."

"Ricky, I don't think anybody's here.", I told him.

"Shit! Now what?"

I shrugged and looked at Marty. "I have no idea. I am too beat to do anything. Let's find something to eat and head east. I hear there's an ocean somewhere in that direction."

We got back in the Buick and headed east towards the supposed Atlantic Ocean. We eventually found it in a place called Jacksonville Beach, so named because it was next to Jacksonville and had a beach. Go figure! We parked down at the beach and found a pizza place that was open. We ordered a large pepperoni pizza and a pitcher of beer. Then, when we had finished the pizza, we had another pitcher of beer. At that point we ordered a third pitcher, worked our way through it, and then decided to walk around on the beach. It was starting to get dark by then, but we didn't care. I had the Kodak and we took a few pictures of each other, and then I took off my shoes and waded knee deep into the surf.

Eventually we got tired of fucking around and started to wonder where we had parked the car. It was at that point we made a mistake, by sitting down to take a rest. Marty stretched out in the sand. It was a nice night, warm and breezy. I lay back, too, and so did Ricky. The car would wait for us.

I woke up around midnight, when I heard Ricky protesting a few feet away. Then a bright light hit my eyes and I reflexively brought my hands up to protect them. "Wha ... what's going on?", I muttered.

Just then I felt something hit my foot. "Come on boys, time to wake up.", said a voice I couldn't place. The light left my eyes and then I heard Marty grumbling and stirring. There was another nudge to my feet and I sat upright.

"What's going on?", I mumbled. I started to rub my eyes, and then looked around. There were two cops standing there on the sand at our feet. One of them had a Maglite on us and was nudging our feet, while the other was multitasking - chewing gum, shining his own Maglite at us, and flipping an old style billy club by the leather strap.

"Wakey, wakey, boys. No sleeping on the beach. It's time to go downtown.", said the cop nudging us awake.

"Downtown?", mumbled Ricky.

"It's off to see the wizard, boys. Come on, get up."

"Hey, we're awake. Just let us go to our car and we'll get out of here.", said Marty.

The second cop laughed at that. "No, no, no! We are going downtown. Do you want to do it the easy way or the hard way?"

"What's the difference?", asked Ricky, scratching his head and rubbing the sand out of his hair.

"Do it the easy way and you pay the fine in the morning and go home. Do it the hard way and we cuff you and book you and throw you in jail for a couple of days first.", was the reply.

I looked at my friends. "We're going to vote for the easy way.", I said for all of us.

"Most do. Come on, get your asses up and off the sand." I got my feet nudged again.

We grumbled some, but climbed to our feet. I put my shoes on, but then kicked them back off, since they were full of sand. I dumped them out and trudged barefoot across the beach to the roadside before slipping them back on. We were loaded into the back of a paddy wagon sort of truck, where a half dozen other criminal snoozers were already loaded, and headed on down the road. We made two more stops and picked up another three sleepers, and then we headed off to the Jacksonville Beach police station.

The easy way was definitely the smart move. A couple of the guys who were already on the truck had been cuffed, and were cussing up a storm. They got separated from the rest of us and taken away into the back of the station. The rest of us just got frisked for weapons (they took my Buck knife and camera) and tossed in a chicken wire cage off to the side of the main squad room. There were a few guys already sitting there.

To what extent Ricky and Marty had ever been in a police station was questionable. Certainly Marty was nervous. I think he expected that he was about to become the prison bitch for Jacksonville Beach. I pushed the pair of them over to a bench at the side of the cage, as much to get out of the doorway as any other reason. "Go sit down, guys. It's going to be a long night."

Ricky and Marty sat down on one end of a bench along the wall. There was an empty space between them and a thin and nervous guy at the other end, so I sat down between them, not saying anything, but nodding when he shifted over slightly. "What'd they grab you guys for?", he asked.

"Sleeping on the beach. You, too?", I replied.

He shook his head. "Nah. Somebody claimed I hit a liquor store."

I smiled at him. "No kidding!"

"Hey, I didn't do it!"

"No, that's cool. I was just thinking, the first time I went to jail I ended up next to a guy the cops said boosted a liquor store. Small world, huh?"

"What'd they get you for then?", he asked. He didn't seem at all surprised to find himself in jail with another ex-con. My buddies next to me were staring at me with slack jaws and open eyes.

"Three guys were trying to shake me down, so I put them in the hospital for a week. I got hauled off anyway.", I said, making myself sound tougher than I was.

"Fucking cops'll do it every time.", he agreed sourly.

Before anybody could say anything, a cop came to the cage and yelled, "COLEMAN! Get over here!"

My new friend stood up and said, "Good luck.", and then shuffled over to the door. He was taken out of the cage, handcuffed, and then pulled away. I wished him luck, too. It pays to be polite, even in jail.

After the cop and Coleman left, Ricky grabbed my shoulder. "Were you serious with him? You've been in jail before?"

"It was no big deal, guys. I was out the same day, no charges."

"How many times have you been in jail?", asked Marty.

"Including that time and today?" They nodded and I grinned back. "Twice! And both times I end up next to a guy who robbed a liquor store! What are the odds?"

They looked at me like I had just sprouted horns and a tail. "So what happened?"

"It's like I said to Coleman..."

"You knew his name?!", asked Ricky.

"The cop over there said his name. Anyway, like I told him, these three guys wanted me to pay them to leave me alone, you know, a protection racket, and I decided I didn't want to pay them."

"When was this?", pressed Ricky.

"My thirteenth birthday. They were, like, fourteen or fifteen."

"So what happened?", asked Marty.

"Well, I ended up with a black eye, but I gave one of them a concussion, broke another guy's nose and jaw, and tore the third kid's knee apart.", I answered.

"Holy shit!", muttered Marty.

I smiled at my friends. "Don't sweat it. When we get to the big house, I'll protect you. Just pay me a pack of cigarettes a day - each of you! - you'll be just fine." I laughed and put my head back, closing my eyes. I was still tired.

At nine the next morning we were all pulled out of the cage and paraded before a judge. It was pretty straightforward. Watch your mouth, plead guilty, pay $50 - 'NEXT!' I got my Buck knife back and had one of the cops take a picture of us through the walls of the cage. Then we got the hell out of Dodge! The last twenty-four hours were highly overrated!

We were all pretty beat at this point. We gassed up and turned the Buick north and just started driving. We drove straight through, only stopping for gas, food and pit stops, and made it to Troy the next day. The Great American Adventure was over!

Thank God!

Chapter 32: Meet The Parents, Part 1

We spent a week hanging around the house drinking and smoking dope and sleeping late and telling war stories to Jack and Swayzack. I had the film to the Instamatic developed and I got three sets of prints, one for each of us. Then it was Friday, and it was time to head south. I could have lived without this trip, but I was going to have to introduce Marilyn to my family at some point. Family was one of those critical things that she simply could not understand being apart from. Even before, when Hamilton hadn't been so crazy and I had actually spent time with my family, it was nothing for me to go weeks without talking to them. Now it was months. This would be my first visit since I had come to RPI in August of 1973, almost an entire year ago.

It took me a day to drive south, and I got to Lutherville around dinner time on Friday. My plan was to hang out for a day and maybe go see some of my old friends, and then be there when Marilyn drove down on Sunday. We would stay for a few days, or until I snapped, and then head off to the beach. At some point we would make a return trip, and then I would drive north with Marilyn following. I was still nervous about her driving from Utica to Lutherville. Before I had left for basic I had sent her detailed instructions and a marked map showing how to get to my folks, but Marilyn can't find her way out of a paper bag with a neon map and GPS. It's a genetic thing; Buckmans marry women who can't navigate. Mom can't navigate and Parker's wife Janine can't make it out of the driveway without GPS!

My homecoming to the tender embrace of my warm and loving family was strained, to say the least. Suzie was ecstatic, as was Daisy. Dad was quite happy, also, and he and I spent several hours swapping lies about my road trip, along with a trip or two he took at my age. I pulled out the photos from the trip and showed them to my family. Mom was a bit cold and distant, as if my estrangement was totally my fault, but she was also dutifully happy to see the prodigal son return. Hamilton was openly hostile.

Saturday I made a few phone calls and got together for the afternoon with Ray Shorn and Randy Bronson. We decided to get together later that evening after dinner.

I should have stayed away from dinner. The first thing that went wrong was that Mom made meatloaf, and I hate meatloaf. I ate some and just pushed some around on my plate. Mom noticed and said, "I thought you liked meatloaf."

"Sorry, Mom, not really." Maybe if it's made with brown gravy it's alright, but Mom's recipe called for it to be made with tomato sauce.

"But you loved meatloaf when your grandmother made it!", she wailed.

I buried my face in my hands and then gave her a sheepish look. "I hated her meatloaf, too. I was just being nice to your mother." Dad groaned at this and Suzie giggled. Mom simply gave an outraged, 'Hmmphh!'

The really bad part was when the others started asking about the girl who was coming to visit. Who was she? What was her name? Where was she from? Etc., etc., etc. Hamilton got really pissy at that point. I didn't live there anymore and I shouldn't be bringing anybody around. The others ignored him, but he said it once too often for my taste.

I set my fork down and pushed my chair back, and then took a deep breath. I was sitting next to Suzie, on the opposite side of the table, so I was able to look straight across the table at my brother. "Hamilton, I am going to say this only once, but I want you to listen very, very carefully. If you do or say anything to Marilyn, I will beat you to within an inch of your life. If you touch her, I will simply kill you. I have had it with your crap. Your life is hanging by a thread."

To say there was an uproar was an understatement. Hamilton loudly protested his innocence and Mom demanded I behave myself. Dad ended up yelling at everyone to shut up, and then he said to me, "Adult or not, I expect you to keep a civil tongue in your head."

"Dad, I love you and Mom and Suzie, but Hamilton needs things explained to him. I really want to be clear on this. This girl is more important to me than anything or anybody else. If you want to meet her, you need to keep him under control. This is not a threat, but a promise. If he gets out of line, I will never come back to this house while he's alive."

"Sounds good to me!", said Hamilton with a smirk.

Before I could even come across the table at him, Dad swung a vicious backhand at him and knocked him to the floor. Mom stared in disbelief as Hamilton, crying, climbed to his feet. "Hamilton, you stay away from her and leave her alone. Do you understand?"

Hamilton didn't reply, but he ran off to his room crying. I got up and left the table also, and went off to see my friends. I drank more than I should have that night, but I lucked out and the cops weren't around when I drove home. I was sleeping in Suzie's old room, now the spare bedroom, and I put my bag in front of the door in case Hamilton decided to attack me in the middle of the night.

Sunday actually turned out to be a pretty good day. Dad made his regular big breakfast on Sunday morning, a tradition I continued when I had my own household. We might have had cereal the other six days of the week, but Sundays were for bacon and eggs and sausage and pancakes and French toast and waffles and every other thing guaranteed to clog your arteries and raise your blood pressure. We had pancakes and bacon that morning, and everybody had two stacks. Even Hamilton seemed civil, or maybe he was quiet because he had a split lip from the other night.

After breakfast I was asked if I wanted to go to church. It was communion Sunday, which in the Lutheran church only comes around about once a month. I wasn't feeling all that religious, but I also knew it would settle my mother down, so I pulled a sports coat and some decent slacks out of my bag and went. It wasn't optional for my siblings.

In church we went to our regular pew, and sat in our regular formation. Like most parents, Mom and Dad learned very early on to separate their kids at important functions. We sat Ham, Mom, Suzie, Dad, and me, an arrangement that left us kids with easy reach of a parental smack. It also allowed us to return the favor. Dad had about a fifty-fifty chance at falling asleep and snoring during the sermon, and he did so today. When he started sawing lumber I glanced past him at Suzie, who was grinning, and held my hand up with three fingers extended. I gave her a three second countdown, pulling a finger in each second, and when I got to zero we both elbowed him from opposite sides. He woke up with a snort and a rumble and we just looked innocent while the people around us chuckled in their pews.

Marilyn called me around 3:30. I had given her my parents' number and told her to stop at the first Maryland exit on the Harrisburg Expressway and call. She would be at the house about half an hour later, so I went out on the front lawn and played fetch with Daisy. It was closer to forty minutes before a candy apple red '71 Dodge Challenger came slowly tooling down Ridgefield. Oh my God, but I had forgotten about that car! Marilyn never thought twice about her car, and her father never realized the folly of giving the thing to a teenager, but I always remembered it as an absolute wet dream of a vehicle! It was simply gorgeous, and people stared at it as it went past! I waved my arms and flagged her down, and she pulled up in front of the house.

I was all smiles when she got out of her car. "Oh, baby, is that your car?!", I asked.

"Uh, yeah. Why?" She gave me a confused look as she got closer.

"That's gorgeous! You are going to have to let me drive that around!" I held my arms open and she scampered up to me.

"I think you're only interested in me for my car!"

"Let me change your mind!" I bent my head down and kissed her, and put a lot of effort into it. I only stopped when the pawing at our legs got too bothersome.

Marilyn looked down and found Daisy standing on her hind legs and trying to climb up. "And who are you?", she asked, kneeling down. Daisy immediately tried to lick her to death.

I had to laugh when Daisy bowled Marilyn onto her ass. I grabbed her collar so that she could sit upright. "That's Daisy."

Marilyn let Daisy lick her a little more before she climbed to her feet. "I think Daisy likes me."

"Don't take this the wrong way, but Daisy likes everybody. If you were Godzilla, she'd lick your face."

"That's awful!", she said, laughing.

"I like you, too. Can I lick your face, too?" I stuck my tongue out and barked and gave her a goofy dog impression, which set Daisy going again. Eventually, I managed to lick Marilyn's cheek and she threatened to have me neutered, which did the trick in making me behave.

Marilyn glanced at the picture window on the house, and then turned bright red. "I think we're being watched!"

I looked over and saw Suzie grinning at us. "That's my kid sister, Suzie. Come on, let's get your bag and take you inside. I feel like I'm throwing meat to hungry lions." Marilyn popped her trunk and I stared at the profusion of suitcases and bags, all haphazardly arranged. I looked up at her. "You leave anything behind?"

She bristled. "I had to pack for two weeks!"

"They have these new businesses called Laundromats.", I replied.

"I'm not going to spend my vacation in a Laundromat!"

I shrugged. "I know one way you could have saved some space."

"Oh?"

"You could have left your underwear at home. I wouldn't have minded."

Marilyn blushed and blurted out a loud and protesting sound, and smacked me on the arm, and then said, "You wish!" She pointed out a suitcase for me to bring in, and I snagged it and closed the trunk. She followed me to the front door, with Daisy trailing behind. By the time we got there, the door was open and my mother was there to greet us.

"You must be Marilyn. It's so nice to meet you.", she said cheerfully. Or at least mostly cheerfully. Mom knew Marilyn was important to me, but she didn't know her yet. She had yet to realize how totally unsuitable Marilyn was for me. Things became frostier after that, at least on the first time through.

I waited until we came inside before doing the introductions. I set the bag down and said, "Marilyn, I'd like you to meet my mother. Mom, this is Marilyn Lefleur." They shook hands, and then I pointed past Mom to where my father stood in the kitchen doorway. "And that would be my father. Dad, Marilyn." Finally I nodded towards where Suzie was grinning over at the side. "And that would be my sister, Suzie!"

"Hi! Come on in! So you're Carling's girlfriend! We have got so much to talk about!", squealed Suzie excitedly. I just snorted at that, although my parents and Marilyn laughed.

"Carl's brother Hamilton must be downstairs." Mom went to the stairwell and yelled down, "Hamilton, our guest has arrived."

A moment later Ham climbed up the stairs, not looking all that welcoming, but he mumbled hello and went back down to his room. I noticed Dad was standing quite close to Ham when he came up the stairs, and I kept an eye on the little asshole, too. He wasn't so little anymore, either. He had hit his growth spurt in the year I was away, and was now as tall as Dad, if not taller. (At 5'11" I ended up the runt of the family. Hamilton was 6'2", Dad was 6'1", and both Mom and Suzie were 5'10", a well above average height at the time for a woman.)

Dad offered to make mixed drinks for everyone, which Mom, Marilyn, and I accepted. Suzie also accepted one, which both my parents found amusing, and Suzie was sent off for a Coke. Drinks were bourbon and bitter lemon, a sort of southern 7&7, which was okay with me, although it took Marilyn a few sips to get used to. It's much tarter than what she normally drank. Meanwhile Suzie was peppering Marilyn with questions about college and how we met.

"Well, we met at a party.", answered Marilyn, "and we just hit it off."

I laughed loudly at that, and all eyes turned to me. "Tell them the truth.", I said. Everybody started gabbling about what I meant, and I amplified my question. "Tell them the truth. We met when I fought a duel to defend your honor!"

My mother looked horrified, Suzie looked fascinated, and Dad looked curious. "WHAT?!" sputtered out of everyone's lips, all except Marilyn who blushed sheepishly.

"It wasn't like that!", she protested.

"Tell me what wasn't like that? I fought a duel, right?"

"It wasn't that kind of duel!"

"And I defended your honor!"

"You defended me from having to dance with your drunken frat brother!", she replied. "And it wasn't like you fought all that hard, anyway!"

"What was the duel?", asked Dad.

"You tell them. It's too silly for me to explain.", commented Marilyn.

I shrugged. "We did flaming shots at two paces." Mom just looked confused. "We poured booze into a couple of shot glasses and set it on fire before drinking it down. He burned his fingers and I drank both shots and won!" Mom gave me a very disapproving look, Dad just laughed and rolled his eyes, and Suzie wanted me to demonstrate it, which I refused.

"When I tell the story it sounds much more adventurous and romantic than when I tell it the other way.", I told Marilyn.

"What other way?", she asked.

"That this girl came to a drunken frat party in a car called the Meat Wagon, immediately headed to the bar, and picked up the bartender!" This time Marilyn joined in with the howls of protest, and punched me twice in the arm. Mom was very disapproving of this interpretation, and Dad simply groaned and headed to the kitchen to make another round of drinks. Suzie, on the other hand, wanted to know about me being a bartender. Teenagers! Suzie had just turned 13 and found this dating stuff fascinating.

Dinner that night was a baked ham with all the fixings. Suzie moved across the table to sit next to Hamilton, which he did not take gracefully, but it only took one word of warning from Dad to calm him down. Marilyn missed the byplay, and she and I sat opposite them. Most of the questions were about Marilyn and her family. Every once in a while one of the answers would have my parents glancing in my direction. Marilyn Lefleur was totally out of their comprehension. We had absolutely nothing in common.

"Well, we do have a few differences, I suppose. I mean, it's pretty obvious she's a Yankee, but if that was a problem we'd have to get rid of Suzie, too.", I said.

Suzie grinned. "Yeah, you're a Yankee, too! Where were you born?"

"Plattsburgh. Why?"

"Where's that?", my sister asked.

"It's way up by the Canadian border on Lake Champlain."

"Cool! I was born in Gettysburg, so I'm a Yankee, too!" That was true. Dad had briefly had a job in Gettysburg before he got on with Harry T. Campbell's. I had actually gone to first grade there.

"That's right, I almost forgot that.", I said. "And I don't think Marilyn told you she was Catholic, but I suppose the nine brothers and sisters gave you a hint."

Dad chuckled at that; religion never bothered him. It did bother my mother, who was quite a bigoted anti-Catholic. She was very pleased when I didn't have to convert, and once gave Marilyn a lovely Celtic cross (the type with two cross pieces) that she got as a gift, with the explanation that she couldn't wear it, since it was a Catholic cross. Suzie, however, thought this was all quite hilarious. Her best friend in life was Louise Sellisman, the next door neighbor, who was also Catholic. They were BFFs before the phrase was even invented. They were each others' maids of honor and a godmother to a kid. Mom's lips pursed when I said Marilyn was Catholic, but she didn't say anything.

"Still, it could have been worse. At least she's a Republican.", I finished.

"Carling! I am not! I'm a Democrat and you know it!", protested Marilyn.

At that comment Mom's eyes lit up with a look of laughter, and Suzie and even Hamilton broke into laughter. It was my father's turn to see red! More than a few times in life we heard him railing on about "Those people!" and what they were doing to the country. I even heard some of his coworkers kidding him about it once.

I just kept as straight a face as I could. Marilyn turned her head to face me. "I don't know what you're up to, but I will get you back for this!"

"I'm just welcoming you to the bosom of my family.", I answered, right before breaking down into helpless laughter. The rest of dinner was spent explaining how we were different.

At the end of dinner, Mom offered up some cherry pie for dessert. "How about giving Marilyn and me a chance to work off dinner first?", I said. "Care to take a walk?"

"Sure."

We put some shoes on, and I called for Daisy to join us. I figured a nice walk around the block would give us a chance to digest our meal, and I could show her the nice summer in Maryland.

We held hands as we walked. Marilyn said, "Your family is very nice."

"They're okay." I shrugged my shoulders good-naturedly. "It's not like you get to choose."

"Does your mother like me? I can't really tell."

That got a laugh out of me. "No, but don't worry about it. No girl alive would be satisfactory for my mother. She doesn't get a vote."

Marilyn gave me a worried look. "She doesn't like me?"

"Of course she likes you. You're a wonderful person. Don't worry about it. The Queen of Sheba wouldn't be good enough for me. Ignore her, like Suzie and I do. I can't wait until Suzie starts dating and my parents have to worry about that! They'll have some real fun there!", I responded.

Marilyn giggled. "I think you're right. She's so sweet. Pretty, too. I think your father is really going to have problems when she starts dating."

"Like you won't believe!" Thank God I was away from home by then, because Dad really didn't handle his baby dating all that well. "She'll be alright. She's the normal one of the family. She's got him wrapped around her little finger. When we were growing up, if Hamilton and I even looked funny at each other, Dad would start swinging. Suzie, on the other hand, could bring home a severed head in one hand and a bloody axe in the other, and he'd say 'Isn't that special! Let's put that up on the refrigerator!' It's disgusting how she can manipulate him!" I laughed as I said this, but God knows it was true.

Marilyn laughed, too. "What about Hamilton? He seems a little, I don't know, odd. He doesn't say anything to me, and seems sort of cold."

I sighed at that. We were about as far around the block as we could go before heading back, at a small bridge over a creek that eventually fed into Loch Raven. I stopped and leaned back against the railing on the bridge. "Hamilton has some problems, but they aren't about you, not really. They're about me."

"I don't understand."

"I don't know as I really do, either. I can't explain why, but Hamilton hates me with every fiber of his being. It's not that he doesn't like you; it's that you like me and therefore must be hated in return. I know this is going to sound strange, but don't take it personally. If you were Jesus Christ back from the dead and decided to be my friend, he'd still hate you."

Marilyn looked really shocked at that. "That's crazy!"

"And that's my point. I don't know all that much about this sort of thing, but he might actually be crazy. Just stay away from him. He's nuts, but he's also scared of me. You'll be fine." Somehow I didn't think my words of encouragement were all that encouraging.

"Can't your parents do something about him? I mean, can't they take him to a doctor or something?"

"The only time he becomes a problem is when I'm around. He's the reason I never go home. This is the first time I've been home since last August, right before I went to college. It might easily be another year or two before I make another visit." I stood upright from where I had leaned against the bridge. I whistled and Daisy came up from the creek where she had been romping. I wrapped my arms around Marilyn. "Forget about my brother. Let's go get some dessert!"

At the mention of dessert, Daisy barked happily and trotted on out. "Daisy likes that idea.", said Marilyn with a smile.

"She's sort of a canine garbage disposal. She also does the pre-clean on the dishes before they go in the dishwasher." Daisy scampered ahead about twenty feet and then circled back towards us before scampering off again, a routine she kept up as we moved along. "Yes, Daisy, we're coming.", I assured her. Marilyn giggled and slipped my hand. She ran forward with the dog and then circled back a few times. Eventually she got within arm's reach of me and I grabbed her. Despite her protests, I picked her up and threw her over my shoulder.

"Put me down!", she yelled, even as she laughed at me.

I carried her along until we got to a small bridge over the creek that was near the house. "You sure you want me to put you down here? That's a long drop!" I turned around so that she could see the water.

"You beast!"

"Yes, that's me!" Daisy found this all quite amusing and barked at both of us. I set Marilyn down and she tried to punch me in the arm, but I gave her a menacing look and she took off running. I chased her the rest of the way home, and cornered her in the back yard behind the shed. We made out for several minutes and came up for air breathing hard.

I looked around and found Suzie watching us intently. She had let Daisy inside and decided to spy on us. She blushed and took off inside. Marilyn and I just grinned at each other. "I think I'll let you talk to her about this.", I commented.

"Not in a million years!", she replied.

Marilyn slept in Suzie's old room that night and I bunked in the family room. I made sure that I locked Hamilton in his room. Monday we dressed casually and I drove Marilyn in the Galaxie down the Jones Falls into Baltimore, and we did some sightseeing. We spent part of the day wandering around the Inner Harbor. I showed her the Constellation and the Torsk, we had lunch over at Lexington Market, and I drove her up around Federal Hill, "Where you Yankees put your guns to keep the city from going over to the South during the War."

"The Civil War?", she asked.

"No, the War of Northern Aggression!", I replied.

"That was just to keep you rebels in your proper place!"

I laughed at that. "Yeah, why don't you try running that one past my father, see what he says about it."

"You southerners really are crazy!"

I just kept laughing. "I was fourteen before I learned that damn and Yankee were two separate words!"

Marilyn stuck her tongue out at me.

Dinner was fine, though not anything elaborate. Monday nights are usually leftovers night, so we cleaned out the fridge and warmed up a lot of stuff. Hamilton was starting to get over his fear induced quiet; as the swelling on his lip subsided, so did his fear. Dad had to tell him to behave twice, once when he cussed at me, and once when he was rude to Marilyn. The last remark almost got him a mouthful of loose teeth, but Marilyn was in the way and I just let it go. My parents apologized for him after they sent him to his room, but Mom made it come out as if it was really my fault anyway. Marilyn eyed me curiously. After dinner we left to go to the movies. I wasn't in a good mood. I wasn't sure if introducing Marilyn to my family was a good move. Maybe I should have lied all along and told her I was an orphan.

Tuesday started off better. Hamilton had a list of errands to run from Mom, so he got on his bike and went shopping. Both Mom and Dad went off to work like normal, but they announced they would be back by lunchtime. That gave Marilyn and I some quiet time, and we fooled around down in the family room. We still hadn't gone all the way, but Marilyn certainly seemed to enjoy the liberties I was taking with her. She no longer complained when my hands roamed around her body and she had a very pleasant moan when I felt up her breasts through her shirt. She hadn't kept her cherry until marriage the first time around, and I didn't think she would this time either!

We heard Hamilton coming through the back door and straightened up some, at least to the extent of stopping our makeout session. I was sitting in an armchair and Marilyn was sitting in my lap, with our arms around each other. Hamilton gave us a disgusted look but kept his mouth shut and put away the groceries.

Marilyn grabbed the remote and flicked the channels until the noon news came on WBAL. She stayed seated on my lap with my arms around her, and set the remote back down. As soon as Hamilton came in, he picked up the remote and began flipping channels. "Hamilton, we were watching that!", I protested.

He looked over at us and sneered. "If you don't like it, leave. You don't live here, so you don't get to watch TV."

Marilyn gasped, but I just shook my head. "This whole week was a mistake." I said quietly. To my brother, I said, "You're right. Let's go." I pushed Marilyn upright and stood up. "Go upstairs and pack your bag.", I said quietly.

"What? We're leaving?"

"It's either we leave or I break his neck. Please, just go and pack." Marilyn went upstairs and I grabbed some laundry I had washed and followed her. I had parked my B4 bag in the corner of Suzie's old room. We packed our bags silently. Finally I just sat down on the bed and said, "I'm really sorry about this, but I can't stay here any longer. If you want to go home now, I'll understand, but I'd much rather we went to the beach like we planned."

She sat down next to me and kissed me on the cheek. "It's not your fault your brother's a jerk. Let's go to the beach. All summer long you kept writing and telling me you wanted to see me in my swimsuit. Here's your chance!"

That set my heart to racing. "I think I like that idea. Of course, if you want to stay in the room without the swimsuit, that works, too."

"Two rooms, remember? You did get two rooms, right?"

I held my hand up in the Scout Sign. "Trust me, I'm a Boy Scout!"

"I find that impossibly hard to believe.", she answered with a smile.

"Trust me, if we ever get stuck in the woods overnight, you'll enjoy it!"

That got me some laughter. I grabbed our bags and headed down the stairs, just in time to see Mom and Dad come in for lunch. "Where are you two going?", asked Mom.

"I think we've worn out our welcome here. I've got a suite at the Hilton lined up and we are gone." I took the bags outside and tossed them in the back of my car. I just wanted to get out of there.

Unfortunately, Marilyn was stuck inside trying to explain things to my folks. I got back inside just in time to hear my father, red-faced, bellow out, "Hamilton! Get up here!"

"Oh, shit!", I muttered to myself. This just kept getting better and better. Dad must have heard me because he glanced at me with a hard expression but otherwise let it alone. Hamilton slunk up the stairs with a look that managed to convey both disdain and fear.

He was deathly calm when he asked Hamilton, "Did you really tell your brother and his guest they weren't allowed to watch television in this house?" Mom was standing off to the side next to Marilyn, and I could see she had a nervous look to her face. Hamilton had really stepped in it this time.

Trust my brother to do the exact worst thing humanly possible. Rather than either tell the truth or apologize, he fell back on his old standard of 'lie and deny.' "She's just another one of his lying sluts!"

I could feel the world changing as he said those words. In an instant life was different. Both Mom and Marilyn gasped in disbelief. Dad cursed under his breath. I took two quick steps forward and hit Hamilton in the face as hard as I could with a right overhand punch. Dad grabbed me before I could follow through, but the one punch was sufficient. Hamilton was lifted off his feet and crashed backwards through the louvered doors to the kitchen. As Mom screamed, Hamilton groaned and twitched on the floor. I could see him trying to sit upright but not being overly successful at it. I didn't care. The final ending was when the shattered door fell off its last hinge and crashed to the floor. The other was under my brother.

Dad kept his body between me and my brother, and pushed me towards the door. I looked him in the eye and nodded, and went outside. Marilyn was already there, looking at everything in sheer horror. "You should go now.", he said.

"I should have done that years ago.", I answered.

"Please, just go. I'll get this under control." He looked over at Marilyn. "Marilyn, I am so sorry you had to see this. Please, forgive my family."

Marilyn simply nodded. I took her hand and led her to our cars. I leaned against her car and looked at her sadly. "Welcome to the Buckman family."

"Holy shit!" For Marilyn, this was an amazing curse.

"Yeah. You have no idea how sorry I am about this. What now? Still want to hit the beach?" I gave her a weak smile at this. I really just wanted to crawl into a bottle, but I suppressed the urge.

She gave me an equally weak nod. I pulled my keys from my pocket. "Well, we can't leave either car here, but I know where we can leave one of them."

"We're leaving a car?"

"No reason for both of us to drive. Why don't we leave my car and we can tool around in yours?"

Marilyn finally grinned. "You just want to drive my car!"

"Hmmm, we can either drive around in my six year old rust bucket or your mint condition sports car. How do I ever solve that dilemma?" I stood upright and pushed her towards her driver's seat. "Listen, you follow me. I'll make sure you don't get lost, but we're going into Towson and you have no idea where I'm heading. Just stay on my ass the entire way."

I kissed her quick and we split apart. Most of the drive I was shaking my right hand. Now that the adrenaline was wearing off, I was feeling it where I had punched the bastard. Nothing was broken, but something was definitely strained or sprained. Oh well, no good deed goes unpunished.

I drove down Dulaney Valley Road into Towson, keeping Marilyn in sight in my rear view mirror. We kept going after it connected into York Road, and even further south, past Hutzlers and then turned left into a somewhat seedier section of town south of Joppa. I pulled up in front of what looked like a combination warehouse and opium den. There were half a dozen motorcycles parked in front, and a couple of bikers were standing around the front door eyeing Marilyn and me hard. I got out of my car and called out, "Tusker inside?"

"Who wants to know?", asked one of them nastily.

"Somebody that Tusker wants to know is here. Is he in or not?"

For an answer he just pointed his thumb over his shoulder at the door. I went over to Marilyn's car and opened the door. "Come on, honey, let's go in. I want you to meet an old friend of mine."

"Here?" She looked like she thought the bikers were about to carry her away to become a biker bitch.

I laughed at that. "Yeah, here. Come on, you'll like him."

I led Marilyn inside past the two bikers at the door, both of whom eyed us as fresh meat. Inside the place was a bar, and even in the middle of the day on a Tuesday had a fair number of people sitting at the bar or around tables. I walked up to the bar, with Marilyn hanging right on my tail. Tusker was down at the opposite end, talking to somebody so that his face was away from me. "HEY, I'VE HEARD THAT BIKER BARTENDERS ARE QUEER! IS THAT TRUE?", I yelled out, loudly.

Tusker's head whipped around, and his face was contorted with anger as he looked for the offending voice. Meanwhile the entire bar went very silent, and even the two guys from outside stepped inside. Marilyn was staring at me in horror. That all changed when Tusker saw me standing at the other end of the bar. His head went back and he roared in laughter. "You sonofabitch! I can't believe you said that!" He came down and leaned across the bar and we pounded each other on the back. "Damn it's good to see you, Buckman!"

"Same to you, Tusker, same to you!" I tugged Marilyn up to the bar. "Marilyn, I want you to meet one of my closest friends, Tusker. Tusker, this is Marilyn."

Tusker's a big guy and he thrust out a meaty paw to Marilyn, whose small hand was swallowed up by it. "Nice to meet you! You know this joker? One of these days he's going to get his ass busted good saying something like that." He looked at me. "Just be glad the other bartender wasn't around here."

"I saw you down there before I said it.", I replied, grinning. "You'd have thought this place was getting ready for the shootout at the OK Corral!"

"Damn straight! Can I get you guys a beer?"

"Absolutely!" I crawled onto a bar stool and Marilyn sat down next to me. "You're looking good.", I told him. Tusker had long red hair going several inches below his shoulders and a Fu Manchu mustache to match. He was also a big guy, at least my size, with much bigger arms from lifting weights. He was wearing jeans, and a black Harley t-shirt, and I knew he had on boots.

"So do you!" He poured a couple of drafts and set them down. "You been working out?"

"I'm keeping up. I'm taking tae kwan do now."

He turned to face Marilyn. "So how'd you meet this guy? You in college, too?"

Marilyn nodded. "We met at a party. How do you know Carl?"

"Why? Because I don't seem like his type?", he asked with a grin. I laughed at this, loudly. "You'll have to ask him, but I was his supplier all through high school."

Marilyn looked horrified. "His supplier?!"

I laughed some more. "Oh, now you've done it. She thinks you were selling me drugs."

"I was, sort of."

I snorted at that. "Yeah, alcohol!" To Marilyn I said, "It's not what you think. He bought all my booze back then."

"Your booze!?"

Tusker laughed. "Yeah, Carl had his own apartment here in town for a couple of years. I was a year older than him, and looked about ten years older, so he'd give me the cash and a shopping list, and I'd go buy his beer and liquor and wine and stuff."

"And I said, thank you very much, and made sure he got some beer and a few bucks for his trouble. We were also in English class together.", I added.

Just then I heard a girl's squeal and as I turned around to face it, a little whirlwind of a girl came running in. "Carl! I can't believe it!" She came running up and leaped into my arms and wrapped her arms around my neck. I ended up with a big kiss on my cheek, and I noticed Marilyn was watching this all quite curiously. "I can't believe you're here! Tusker never said you were coming by!"

I set the girl back down on the floor, totally mystified by this. She was very pretty, wearing skin tight jeans cut very low, high heeled slut pumps, and a fringed leather bra for a top. Her hair was long and straight and blond, and she had rose colored heart shaped glasses. I had to look closely at her, as she stood there smiling at me. "He doesn't know who I am." she announced with a laugh.

Slowly it came to me. My jaw dropped and I stared at her. "Tessa? Tessa Harper? Is that you?" I stared her up and down. No way was this hot biker chick the little Bible thumping girl I used to know. "No way! Tessa?"

Tessa giggled and twirled around, causing the fringe on her bra to fly up. "You got it!"

"No way!" I smiled at Marilyn. "Back in high school she was Little Miss Sunshine, with one hand holding a Bible and the other holding her textbooks." I grinned at Tessa. "What happened to you?"

She grinned back. "I met a guy." She glanced over at Tusker and gave him a shy smile.

I looked back and forth at the two of them. "Oh, no, I don't believe a word of it. No fucking way!"

"Believe it.", said Tusker. He leaned over the bar and Tessa stood on her toes to kiss him. It was like watching Beauty and the Beast!

"This is so bizarre! Do you remember when your mother wanted me to take you out, and I joked that I wasn't looking for a good girl. If I had only known!"

Even Marilyn laughed at that, and I introduced the two of them. When Tessa asked how we met, I laughed and said that I had fought a duel over her. Tessa just smiled. "You have a tendency to do that sort of thing."

"What do you mean?", asked Marilyn.

"I mean that your boyfriend once took out three lacrosse players who decided I was their next meal. He left them in pieces on the floor!"

Tusker nodded. "Yeah, you know, man, I really respected you when you took those guys out. They were just totally out of line. I mean, like, we weren't even seeing each other then, but we all knew Tessa was in trouble with them. She shouldn't have had to put up with them, not like that."

I just waved it off, but Tessa commented, "Carl, I love you dearly. You are the sweetest guy in the world, but you can be as mean as a snake. I mean that in a good way, of course."

That caused me to snort with laughter. Marilyn said, "I've actually seen that. Before we left his house, he knocked his brother out cold!"

It surprised me, but both Tusker and Tessa nodded. "You finally had enough of the little shit?", asked Tusker.

Tessa said, "He was awful, always running you down to whoever would talk to him."

"That was a long time ago, and I don't care anymore."

Tessa went into the back and made us some sandwiches, and Tusker poured us another couple of beers. We ate our lunches at the bar and talked about what we were up to. Tessa was going to UMBC and working at the bar nights, Tusker worked at the bar and fixed motorcycles on the side, and they were living together in an apartment in town. They had the idea of saving up enough money to get married and open a place of their own. I told them I thought that was a great idea, and that they should start working up a business plan. I also told Tusker he should take a few business courses of his own, maybe even get a two year degree in something. It would mean a lot to the bankers he would eventually need to talk to. He didn't say he would, but he didn't blow me off, either.

After lunch was done, Tusker offered us another round, but I declined. "Listen, what I really need is a place to leave the Galaxie for a week or two. We're going to Ocean City in her car, and I can't leave it at the old homestead. Hamilton will set it on fire or something."

"He's a little shit. Yeah, just pull it around back and leave the keys with me. There's a couple of spots in the back corner.", he replied.

Marilyn and I went outside and I tossed our luggage in the back of her car, and then I drove around the back and parked the Galaxie. I locked it up and went in through the kitchen entrance, and tossed the keys to Tusker. He hung them on a hook behind the bar. I hugged the pair of them, and then we were off.

Chapter 33: What I Did On My Summer Vacation

Marilyn handed me her keys, and I started her car up. There was a throaty rumble from under the hood. I looked at her and grinned. "Oh, shit! Your old man got this thing with the big V-8, didn't he?"

She shrugged. "I have no idea. I don't even know what you're talking about."

I laughed at that. The standard engine in this car was either the Chrysler 225 Slant-6 or a 318 V-8, but they also offered some larger V-8s. Her father must have gotten his daughter one of the big ones, which would have been just like him. Of course, Marilyn didn't grasp just how great this car was; she thought it was 'cute'.

"Don't sweat it."

On the way out of town, I diverted past Towson High and Towson State, to show her where I had gone to school. Then I drove past my old apartment, and pointed that out to her. That was a bit more sobering. "I find that so hard to believe. You're telling me that when you were still in high school you moved out of your house into an apartment, and your parents went along with it?"

I pulled onto the Beltway and headed west. "My father helped me pick it out and helped me move my stuff in. I had to pay for it, of course, but he let me go."

"You paid for it? How?"

Time to shade the truth a touch. "I had some money saved up, so I used that."

"You had enough money to live two years on your own? What about now?", she pressed.

"Why do you think I'm in ROTC?", I said with a laugh. Another shading, but harmless.

"And your parents went along with this? Why?"

I looked over at her, and then back out the windshield. I was silent for a second. "Because I told my father that if he didn't go along with it I would leave, and he'd never see me in this life again."

Marilyn was quiet for a moment. "It was because of your brother, wasn't it?"

I nodded. "It was one of his more monumental fuckups. The cops got involved in that one. I had enough, and told Dad I was getting out, either with his help or not. He decided not to call my bluff."

"So you were actually just bluffing, then?"

I looked at her again. "No, I wasn't." I waited a second and then looked over at her. "My old man knew it, too. I told him flat out that unless he threw me in jail I was history. I was gone the next week."

"Wow!" Marilyn thought about it for a minute, and asked, "So what did Hamilton do that got the cops involved?"

So I told her. Everything. Well, everything about my brother and my family. That was depressing enough.

It was a longer drive in those days. You took the Beltway around the city to Glen Burnie, and then drove down 301 to Annapolis, where you would cross the Bay Bridge and take 50 into Ocean City. It was a four hour drive. Eventually the ride to Annapolis would become an interstate, and Route 50 would be upgraded to an interstate in everything but name, and you could shave an hour off the trip. It wasn't as bad as it had been, though. The second Bay Bridge had just been finished last year, opening a major chokepoint up. I can remember times when you simply parked the car on the approaches and thousands of people would get out of their cars and play Frisbee in the median strip, while the entire single bridge was used one way. Then the traffic would be reversed and the people on the other side of the bridge would catch some sun.

It was a long and sobering conversation. No, I didn't tell her about any of the girls I had dated or Jeana, and I left out Hamilton's stunt with the rubbers. I did tell her how he used to break into my locker. She was astonished that I needed to keep my stuff locked away in my own home. The very concept was alien to her. She did ask me about the various fights I had been in, including the one where I got Tessa away from the lacrosse players.

"And now you know my entire sorry history.", I told her as we pulled into Ocean City. "Damn pathetic, isn't it?"

"I don't think so."

"You could do a lot better than my sorry ass." I looked over at her and shrugged. I never understood why Marilyn ever fell for me. God knows I wasn't much of a catch the first time around. She once said she fell in love with me at that first party at Kegs, but I never understood that. I always figured I was batting way above my average when I met her.

She began crying. "That's not true. You're good and kind and brave and wonderful. Don't ever say those sorts of things, not ever."

I took her hand and kissed it. I felt like crying myself, but then I wouldn't be able to drive.

I kept driving until I saw the sign for the Hilton. It was on North Baltimore Street, just north of the Boardwalk. I pulled in and parked under the overhang. We went inside to register. It was a Tuesday evening, so there wasn't a line (Friday afternoon would be a different matter!)

"Can we help you, sir?", asked a pretty young lady in a skirt and suit jacket.

"My name is Buckman. I have a large suite reserved.", I replied.

This was all in the days before you could just punch a few buttons and it would pop up on a computer screen. In those days the clerks would sort through paper records, and it took a bit longer. Eventually she found the paperwork and pulled it out. "Yes, sir, you have a two bedroom suite reserved until Saturday, August 24. Is that correct?"

"Quite." I handed over my American Express card. I still had about $4,000 in cash from the Vegas road trip, and I had pulled another grand from the bank. There was always the possibility that they might make a stink about an 18 year old with a credit card, so I made sure I could pay cash. Some places did, but I guess the Hilton was used to trust fund kids with daddy's credit card.

"Two bedrooms, right?", asked Marilyn.

I grinned at her. "I didn't forget."

She gave me a relieved expression and I rolled my eyes theatrically. Then it was simply a matter of signing some papers and getting the keys (actual keys, not electronic key cards). After that a bellhop was summoned and we went out to the car. I couldn't believe how much stuff Marilyn could bring! We loaded it on the bellhop's cart, and I handed the keys to the valet and slipped him a few bucks. We followed the bellhop to the elevators and rode with him up to somewhere near the top of the place. He let us in and after he took our bags off the cart, I slipped him a fiver.

"Carl! This is beautiful! How much does this cost?!", asked a wide-eyed Marilyn.

"For you, nothing!"

"Carl, I'm serious!"

"Well, I'll take it out in trade.", I replied, waggling my eyebrows lewdly.

"Carl!"

"Don't worry. It's already covered."

"How?"

"Okay, I'll tell you, but you can't tell your folks. Tell them I saved the money up, okay?"

Marilyn gave me a skeptical look. I knew she didn't tell her folks everything, but she didn't like it all that much either. "Don't tell them what?"

"Well, you know we went on that cross country road trip - I'll show you the photos later, by the way..."

"Keep going.", she prodded.

I nodded. "Okay, so on the way back we went through Vegas. I got lucky."

She gave me a shocked look and her jaw dropped. "You gambled!"

I just grinned. "I won! Someday I'll tell you all about it, but trust me, it was legal."

Marilyn simply rolled her eyes and shook her head in disbelief. "Unbelievable!"

I tossed my two bags in one of the bedrooms and lugged her twenty or thirty into her room. "Do yourself a favor. Unpack your bags and hang everything up in the closet or in the drawers. Don't try to live out of your suitcases. Everything gets messed up and rumpled." I gave her a quick kiss and applied my wisdom to myself in my own room. Five minutes later I stuck my head in her door. "I'm going to take a few minutes and grab a quick shower. You do the same, and dress pretty, and we'll go down to dinner. Okay?"

"Good. I'm getting hungry.", she replied with a smile.

Fifteen minutes later I felt fresh and clean, and was putting on some clean khakis and a dress shirt. I slipped barefoot into my deck shoes and went back out into the common room between the two bedrooms. I heard Marilyn puttering around in her room, but she didn't come out for another fifteen minutes. It was worth the wait. She had on a simple little pink and white sundress, with a tube top and tied spaghetti straps, and short enough that it was several inches above her knees, and a pair of medium heeled sandals. She didn't even have a strapless bra on underneath it, and she jiggled wonderfully. I groaned happily when I saw her, and cornered her against the wall. "I think I want to start taking that trade right now!"

"Forget about it!", she said with a giggle. She had on some lip gloss and a light flowery scent that went straight from my nose to my dick.

"Not when you look as good as you look!" I leaned forward and took her in my arms, and kissed her, with a lot of tongue and my hands roaming all over. It was a very thin dress, and she had on a pair of bikini panties and nothing else, and if she couldn't feel my erection poking against her she must have been dead! As it was, her nipples were pushing out against that tube top, so the feeling must have been mutual.

After a few minutes of this, she groaned and pushed me away. "Dinner!" She had a very wild-eyed and distracted look, and was breathing heavily, which did amazing things to that top, and she moved a little unsteadily.

I caught my own breath. I took her hand and grabbed the key. "Dinner."

We held hands on the walk down the hallway and in the elevator. I kept glancing at Marilyn, and she caught me at it. "What?"

"Nothing."

"What are you looking at?"

"You. You're beautiful."

She colored at that, and turned her head away, but I could see her reflection in the polished surface of the elevator door, and she was smiling.

As we were walking across the lobby towards one of the restaurants, I saw a man behind the registration counter start waving an arm and calling out, "Mister Buckman! Mister Buckman!"

I walked over to the counter. "Can I help you?"

"Mister Buckman, there have been a number of messages for you." I glanced at Marilyn curiously, and she gave me a mystified look back. The phone in our room hadn't rung. The clerk at the counter continued. "I think the problem was that these all came in before you registered. We took the messages down, but I stepped away from the desk when you came in, and, well, I do apologize." He handed me a small sheaf of pink notes. I glanced through them.

"It's all right. Nothing critical. Thank you."

"You're quite welcome, sir. Enjoy your evening."

I took Marilyn by the arm and led her towards the restaurant. We were seated quickly. Once we were seated, Marilyn asked, "So, what were the messages?"

I simply handed them to her. They were in time order. The first four were from my mother, starting at a time well before I could have ever possibly have arrived, all demanding insistently that I call her immediately. The fifth and final note was from my father, telling me to ignore my mother's notes, not to call the house, and call him at his office tomorrow, along with his direct line phone number. I stuffed them in my pocket when she handed them back.

"What does it mean?", she asked.

I sighed. "It means my mother has gone off the deep end, but my father has managed to calm her down. It means I'm never going home again." I shrugged with a fatalistic look. There are some things you can't fix. My brother was one, and my relationship with my mother was another.

"How bad is it?"

I gave her another shrug. "Well, I suspect that is what Dad will tell me tomorrow. I can make a guess or two. For one thing, Hamilton is still alive and kicking, although just how good that is is a debatable question." Marilyn gave me a dirty look at that. "When last he was seen on the floor of the kitchen, with the broken doors draped over him, my brother was moving and moaning, so he wasn't dead. Likewise, since the state troopers haven't broken down the door to our suite and hauled us in, nobody has called this in to the cops. They've had more than enough time to have gotten some troopers on my ass by now."

A waiter came by and took our drink orders. I went with a gin and tonic and Marilyn went with a whiskey sour. The main formal restaurant of the Hilton didn't have silly drinks with umbrellas; they were probably reserved for the other restaurants. I waited until he had left us with our menus before continuing. "Seriously, though, before you ever showed up, I had a talk with Dad and warned him that if Hamilton got out of line, I'd never be coming back. I've been independent of them for almost three years now, and I'm legally an adult. There is very little they can do to me to make me do things their way, and Dad at least knows it."

"I just don't understand them. Do they think it's your fault that your brother is a jerk?", she asked.

I had to think about that for a bit. "Actually, I think that is part of it, at least for my mother. We are not a Norman Rockwell type of family."

"Oh?"

"Well, my parents are really good people, but they are really lousy parents. They play favorites, for one thing. My Dad's favorite is Suzie. She's actually the normal one around our house."

"She's such a sweetheart!", said Marilyn, smiling.

I grinned at her. "Yes, she really is. She would love to get to know you better, too. She needs an older sister type to help her along. She is getting to that age where she is asking questions a brother shouldn't be answering." Marilyn giggled at that. "Hamilton is my mother's favorite, probably because he does what she tells him to do."

"You've lost me there."

I made a wry face as I tried to formulate an answer. "Think about your own family for a moment. Now, you've told me your oldest brother Matthew is just out of high school and he works for your father's company, right?"

"Yes, he's a truck driver."

"And that's the job your parents want him to do?"

It was Marilyn's turn to shrug. "I guess so. He likes it, I know that."

"What if he wanted to go to college or get a job somewhere else? Would they like that?", I asked.

"Uh, I guess so. I mean, they like that he works for them, like the other boys do, but if he wanted to go to college, they wouldn't stop him. Why?"

"From the time I was born, my parents have had my future mapped out in perfect detail. Where I would go to school. What I would study. Where I would go to college. The girls I would date. The jobs I would have. Where I would live. I figured this all out back when I was about twelve or so and told them I wasn't going to live their dream. Usually that resulted in a spanking, but by the time I hit thirteen I told them it had to stop. My father understood and agreed with me, but my mother fought it tooth and nail."

"How so?", Marilyn asked. She had a curious look on her face.

"Okay, let me give you an example. Back when I was fourteen it was already obvious that I was really good in math. I was still in junior high, but I was already taking math classes over at the high school, and talking about starting college early..."

"Hey, I have to ask, are you really a genius? I heard a couple of the guys at Kegs saying that."

I looked Marilyn in the eye. "Yes, I am, but don't be all that impressed. Hamilton is even smarter than me, and he's a total dork." Marilyn laughed at that, and I continued my story. "So, anyway, it's time for the school science fair, and I'm doing this project with a Towson State chemistry professor as my advisor..."

Marilyn interrupted again. "Wait a minute - you had a college professor as your adviser on a junior high project?"

"Yep. So one day my mother has to take me over there and she meets him, and he says I'd be a great chemist. Well, that night at dinner, Mom announces that I'm going to become a chemist, not a mathematician. I told her no, I wasn't, I was going to school for math. Well, you'd have thought I was denying the existence of Christ the way she carried on! You see, it wasn't in her plan for me to be a mathematician, but a scientist or engineer was quite acceptable. She demanded that Dad punish me for my behavior, and then went crying up to her room when he told her it was my life."

Marilyn shook her head in disbelief. After a bit she asked, "So how'd the science fair go?"

I just grinned. "How do you think it went?"

"You won."

"And I got two papers out of it!" That required another explanation, which took us through ordering our dinners and a second round of drinks. Marilyn is easy to talk to. No, she's not my intellectual equal, but we weren't discussing non-Euclidean geometry. That's not to say she's stupid, because she isn't; she has an above average intelligence. However she's more of an Everyman, with average interests and an average outlook on life and the world. She's generally a cheery person, certainly more so than my inherent nature. She's a glass-half-full person, and I'm a glass-half-empty type. If you want to know what the average American is thinking, for right or for wrong, go ask Marilyn.

We spent the rest of our dinner discussing my crazy family. By Marilyn's lights, my various accomplishments were something to be proud of in a child, but because they defied my mother's preconceived plans, they were meaningless. I explained how Hamilton went along with her plans, and therefore was a better child.

"The guy I'm really sorry for in all this is my father. He's got a real shit sandwich here. He's got one son who has been driven out of the family, a second son who is quite probably insane, and a wife who he dearly loves and who blames one son for the other one. The only normal one of them all is my sister. I just hope she gets out of there before Mom drives her bonkers, too!"

"I just don't know what to say.", she said.

"What can you say? I'll call Dad at the office tomorrow. Tonight I think I need a few more drinks." With that I raised my hand and flagged down the waiter, and ordered another round.

That made a third round for us, which is where I normally draw the line. Dawdle over the third drink, finish with some hot tea, and with my size and weight I won't be even close to the legal limit for driving. Talking about my fucked up family was depressing. After the third drink was finished, I ordered a fourth, although Marilyn skipped on it. After dinner we went back up to our suite.

"I'm going to get ready for bed.", said Marilyn.

I just nodded. "I think I'm going to sit up for a while."

Marilyn reached up and kissed me, and then went to her room. I went to mine and grabbed the bottle of Canadian Mist I had picked up earlier. I always pack a bottle of whiskey when I go on vacation. It's easy to make a quick mixed drink with some soft drinks from a vending machine, and it's much cheaper than whatever is in the mini-bar. Tonight I wasn't interested in anything mixed. I grabbed a glass off a buffet and cracked open the whiskey and poured myself a couple of fingers. It felt very smooth going down. I poured myself some more and sat down in an armchair in the darkened common room facing the patio door looking out over the ocean. It was very dark, much like my soul felt at that moment.

I went and opened the patio door, and found a couple of padded deck chairs out there, along with a small coffee table. Out there you could hear the crash of the surf and see a few ships' running lights out at sea, and not much else. It was warm and I unbuttoned my shirt. I sat there in the dark and sipped my whiskey. By one measure I was well on the way to achieving my dreams. By another, my life was in the shitter. What does a man live for? Is it himself only, and nothing else? If not for himself, then for whom? His family? And if he has no family, then for whom? His country? And when I was done with the army, or the army was done with me, what then? What if a man's family has left him, and not the other way around? I sat there and drank my whiskey.

It was bad enough on the first time through. Then I had simply been a lifelong disappointment, which was bad enough when your parents spend their lives rubbing it in. Now I had been thrown out of the house! What the fuck was wrong with me?

I felt more than heard Marilyn come out. I turned and found her standing there in the doorway. She was wearing a long silk robe, and was barefoot, and she looked impossibly young and innocent. I turned back to the sea and had another sip of Canadian Mist.

"Are you going to be all right?", she asked.

She must have thought me suicidal, sitting there and drinking in the dark. Hell, I felt it, somewhat. I set my glass down. "Sure, don't I look all right?"

She came closer, to stand next to me, and she put an arm around my shoulders. "It's going to be all right."

It was just too much for me. I couldn't help myself. I just started crying, silently. I could probably count the number of times when I've cried since I became a teenager sixty plus years ago on one. Twice, when my parents died. Once more when I understood that Alison was mentally retarded. A third time when Alison died. When Marilyn died, I cried for three days straight. There was the time this time around when Hamilton wrecked Christmas.

"I'm here, I'll stay with you.", whispered Marilyn.

I turned my head and buried my face in the soft warmth of her robe, and the tears just poured out of me. Marilyn pulled me closer and held me in her arms and continued to whisper to me.

Eventually I got tired of crying, and just turned my head slightly and looked back out at the ocean, as dark as my soul felt. I unwrapped myself from Marilyn and stood, leaning against the railing on the small patio and looking out at things. Marilyn came up behind me and wrapped her arms around me. There was nothing out there for me. I turned to face her and lowered my face to hers. It was so easy to kiss her, and to hold her in my arms. It was even easier to lift her up, and to carry her back inside. We continued kissing as I slowly carried her through the common room and on into my bedroom.

I laid Marilyn down on my bed and sat down next to her. I couldn't speak, and I couldn't give her a chance to speak. I lay down next to Marilyn and took her back in my arms. She smelled clean and fresh. It was obvious she had showered after we got to the room and I could feel the robe was all she had on. I ran my hands down her side and Marilyn moaned, and pulled me tighter into her arms. I was running on pure instinct. My kisses became more intense and I continued running my hands along her body, and she continued to respond. And then my right hand was inside her robe, and for the first time in seeming forever I was cupping her breast.

Oh, God, it felt so good there, so warm and full and firm. Marilyn has tiny nipples, so faintly pink as to be almost nonexistent, but they were poking at my fingers. I licked my way down her neck and across her chest until I was sucking her nipple, as my fingers played with the other. Marilyn was very sensitive to this, and she moaned and writhed on the bed. I took this opportunity to loosen her robe and slide a hand lower, down her body and along her hip, and then around to the front. She had a small triangle of fur between her legs, and it was wet with desire. I slipped my middle finger into the tangled mat and ran it along the greasy slit. As soon as it touched the little nubbin at the top, Marilyn arched her back and let out a silent cry as she orgasmed.

I began to slowly lick and nibble my way down her body, reacquainting myself with territory long since forgotten. Marilyn shuddered as she came over and over. When I got down to her pussy, I used the finger of one hand to hold her labia open while I licked feverishly at her clit. My other hand undid my pants and pushed them and my briefs down. As soon as I could get them out of the way, I began eating my way back north, with stops at her belly button, her breasts, her neck and then her lips.

And then I was over her, and between her legs, and inside her. Marilyn flinched as I tore through her maidenhead, but I stopped once I was fully inside and bottomed out. I continued kissing her and she relaxed, and that was when I began to slowly stroke in and out. Marilyn was moaning as the top of my cock rubbed against her clit, and her ass was humping up and down off the bed, thrusting up at me and driving me in deeper. It had been so long since I had done this, and it felt so good and I was getting closer and closer and it was so much better than when we did this the first time.

That thought was like a blast of cold water. Even as my cock began to spasm, I pulled out and began spurting on her belly. The first time we made love, I hadn't used a rubber and Marilyn hadn't been on the Pill, and here I was being so incredibly stupid again. Worse, I knew Marilyn had always felt wrong about sleeping with me that first time, and here I was raping her drunkenly. I rolled off to one side and just lay there staring at the ceiling. I couldn't even get this right!

Marilyn roused herself and rolled over to face me. "Oh my God!", she said. Then she looked at me, and asked, "What's wrong?"

"I never wanted it like this. This wasn't the way I wanted it to be." I felt ashamed of myself.

I wanted to turn away, but Marilyn put an arm on my chest, and asked, "What did I do wrong?"

I turned on my side to face her. "It's not you, it's me. I wanted this to be special, not this, me drunk and taking advantage of you."

Marilyn was silent for a moment. "Carl, I think I've known since we came here that we were going to end up like this. If I wasn't thinking about this, I would have never stayed in a suite with you, two bedrooms or not. How did you think this was going to happen?"

I had to smile at that. "I was planning on wining and dining you and seducing you to the point you would be begging me to, well ... this."

"So instead of that, tonight you wined and dined me and seduced me. I guess that was a seduction." I thought she was starting to laugh at me.

I looked at her and saw a smile starting to form. "Crying is a seduction technique?"

She grinned at me. "A lame one, anyway." She twisted around a bit more and winced as she moved.

"Are you all right? I mean, does it hurt?"

Marilyn sat upright and moved a bit slowly. "I'm fine. I'm just a bit sore." She wrapped the silk robe around herself again, but noticed the stickiness on her belly. "Why did you stop?"

"I realized we weren't using any protection. I didn't want to take the chance." I glanced at her and said, "I'll be back in a moment." I climbed to my feet and went into the bathroom, grabbing my pants as I went, and ran a washcloth under the hot water. I looked down at myself and saw some blood, and washed that off before pulling my pants back on. Then I rinsed out the washcloth, and brought it and a towel out to the bedroom. Marilyn watched as I sat down next to her and washed off her stomach and the bloody seepage between her legs.

"I never wanted to hurt you.", I told her.

"I'm fine, Carl. I love you. I think I've loved you since that first night I met you. I think I've known all summer long we would make love when we saw each other again."

"Well, I don't think anything else is going to happen again tonight."

Marilyn moved around gingerly on the bed. There was some blood on the bed cover, so I stood up and pulled that away and tossed it on the floor. I sat back down, with my back against a pile of pillows at the headboard and Marilyn snuggled up against me. "I want you to sleep tonight, and then tomorrow morning you should take a nice long hot bath. You'll feel better. Maybe tomorrow afternoon I'll kiss it and make it better." I was watching her as I said this and Marilyn turned about three shades of red! "I think you like that idea!"

She glanced up at me, saw me grinning, and quickly looked away. Then she looked up at me shyly and said, "I've never even heard of that before!"

"Marilyn, there are all sorts of things I can teach you." I gave her an evil laugh as I said that.

"I think I like that idea.", she shyly said.

"I love you."

"I know. You're safe with me Carling. I won't hurt you."

I looked out the window into the darkness, and then turned back to her. "You're my home now. When I came here today, I no longer had a home. Now I have a home again. It's wherever you are. If you're here, my home is here. If you're in Utica, my home is in Utica. You're my home now."

Marilyn moved up and kissed me. "I love you Carl." She snuggled back into my chest and a few minutes later fell asleep in my arms.

Chapter 34: Ocean City

I woke the next morning when the sun came in and hit me in the face, an early hour since the window was facing the beach to the east. I was in the same position as last night, leaning back against some pillows, with Marilyn curled up at my side. Surprisingly, despite a slight crick in my neck, I was feeling pretty good. By that I mean I wasn't hungover, although I did have to piss something wicked. I managed to extricate myself and went into the bathroom. After using the facilities, I stopped and looked at myself in the mirror. I looked a little worse for the wear, and my eyes were bloodshot, but I actually felt better than I looked.

I went back to bed and found Marilyn stirring awake. "Good morning, sleepyhead."

"What time is it?", she asked blearily.

"Sunrise! Can't you hear the birds chirping cheerfully?"

"That's too early. What are you doing up?", she asked.

"Nature called, and somebody had to answer. Ready to get up and face the world?"

She looked at me with sleepy eyes. "You are way too cheerful in the morning. If I had known you were this cheerful in the morning, I would have never have slept with you last night!"

I sat down next to her and leaned down and kissed her on the forehead. "Speaking of which, how are you feeling?"

"I'm good." Then she gave me a funny look and pointed at my chest. "Hey, what's with the necklace? It felt kind of scratchy!"

"Necklace?" It took me a second to realize what she was referring to. "Oh! Those are my dog tags! They're my military ID. I got them when I started ROTC. Sorry about that. I'm so used to wearing them I forget they're there."

"Oh."

"Is that a problem?", I asked.

She shook her head. "No, just curious."

I nodded. "Then I'm going out for a bit." I stood up and went back into the bathroom, where I brushed my teeth and washed my face. After that I slipped back into the bedroom as quietly as I could and changed into some gym shorts and a t-shirt, along with socks and sneakers. I grabbed my keys and clipped them to my dog tags.

"Where are you going?", asked Marilyn, finally sitting up and paying some attention to what was happening.

"I need to run."

"Why?"

"Because if I don't burn some calories, last night's dinner will stay with me for years to come!" I patted my midsection. Last night Marilyn had the surf and turf, while I had some seafood in white sauce on linguine. Maryland has the best seafood on the planet, and I was going to thoroughly enjoy my vacation in more ways than one!

"Ugghhh!"

I bent down and kissed her quickly. "I'll be back in an hour or so. You sleep some more, and then take that nice hot bath we talked about. Afterwards we'll get some breakfast, okay?"

"Mmmm..." Marilyn closed her eyes and sank back down into the covers. I grabbed my sunglasses and headed for the door to the suite.

I rode the elevator down to the lobby and headed out onto North Baltimore Street. According to the map, we were a few blocks north of the Boardwalk, which sounded like a good place to run. I stretched briefly, and then headed south, moving at an easy lope. I kept the pace down until I hit the Boardwalk, at which point I picked it up. I had read somewhere that it was about two and a half miles long, so a round trip would be five miles. I should be able to do that in an hour.

It was a nice run. The sky was grayer than I liked, and I could smell a storm brewing, but I had missed the forecast. At this hour it was empty except for a bunch of joggers and bicyclers like me out getting a quiet workout. I nodded to a few of them and simply enjoyed the run. The stores and tourist traps were still shuttered closed, although you could hear people working inside some of them. When I got to the end of the Boardwalk I reversed course and powered it up another notch. By the time I got back I was sweating and breathing hard. I walked from there back to the Hilton. I desperately needed to shower.

It was a good thing nobody was in the elevator as I rode back upstairs, because I think my smell would have had them getting off long before their floor had arrived. I let myself into the room and tossed the room key onto a buffet and walked into the bedroom we had used. The bed was rumpled but empty. A light was on in the bathroom, and I found Marilyn happily immersed in bath bubbles. I guess bubble bath must have been in the courtesy kit in the room, or Marilyn packed her own, which I wouldn't rule out; she liked bubble baths.

"Well, you look like you're having fun.", I commented from the open doorway.

Marilyn squealed and ducked even lower under the bubbles, although there were enough I hadn't seen anything anyway. "You're not supposed to be in here!", she protested.

"Considering that this is my bedroom and my bathroom, I could say the same to you." Marilyn stuck her tongue out at me. "You know, maybe I need a bath, too!"

"No, you can't!", she protested.

I peeled off my shirt and kicked off my shoes. "Why not?", I asked with a smile.

"Because!"

I peeled off my socks and dropped them in the corner with the sweaty shirt. "Because why?"

"Just because!"

"You sound like you're telling something to a four year old.", I laughed.

She smiled at that. I rescued her modesty by turning on the shower (deluxe suites had deluxe bathrooms, with both showers and tubs.) Then I stripped down and jumped in for a quick shower. She blushed when I stepped out and dried off. "You know, you saw everything last night.", I reminded her. I wrapped the towel around my waist and turned the water on in the sink.

"Not really.", she admitted. "I think my eyes were closed." She gave me a very sheepish look.

I grabbed my towel and moved so as to whisk it away. "We can fix that!"

"NO!" Marilyn yelled, and then actually ducked down under the water. When she couldn't hold her breath any longer, she surfaced and wiped the suds from her eyes, to find me standing there, my towel still around my waist, and laughing my ass off at her. "Now I have to dry my hair!", she complained.

"That's not my fault.", I said with a laugh. I turned away and went to the sink to begin shaving, and found a wet wash cloth flying through the air to hit me in the shoulder. I turned to face her and did a bump-and-grind, yanked off my towel and then showed her my butt as I shaved. Marilyn gave a little harrumph of displeasure.

When I was done, I left the bathroom and allowed her to finish up in privacy. I pulled on some clean briefs and a clean pair of chinos, along with a sports shirt. I also took a look at Marilyn's silk robe. It had a few blood spots and semen marks from last night. I took it into the common room and found a dry cleaning bag and stuffed it inside, and then I called down to room service and asked for a bellman for some dry cleaning. Maybe it could be cleaned. Those types of stains aren't the type you want to keep around and reminisce about; just ask Bill Clinton!

From behind me, in the direction of the bedroom, I heard Marilyn. "Carl? Have you seen my robe?"

Ooops. No good deed goes unpunished. I went to the bedroom door and said, "I sent it to the cleaners."

"Well, what am I supposed to wear now!?", she protested.

I laughed and pushed the door open. Marilyn squealed in outrage and tried to wrap her towel around herself. I simply strode up to her and wrapped her in my arms. "Will you stop worrying! You might not remember what I looked like from last night, but you can believe that I remember what you looked like, and I liked every single square inch!" I tugged away her towel and kept hold of her. "I like seeing you like this. I think I'm going to have to see you like this more often."

Marilyn blushed, and then she giggled. "I guess I am being silly.

"Yes, but I like that, too. Now, get dressed and we'll get breakfast." I tossed her the towel and she went off to her room carrying her towel. I followed, happy to see her from behind.

"I think I can do this myself.", she said with a smile.

"Well, I mean, it just seems logical, if I get to take your clothes off of you, I get some say in what goes on you.", I countered.

"You're too logical for your own good."

"Then let me make a suggestion, seriously. Put on a long skirt or sundress, and leave off the unmentionables. It will cut down on the irritation, hmmm?" I figured this was a long shot, but it sounded logical, and would definitely be more interesting.

"OUT!"

I skedaddled out of there. I figured I would be able to experiment later and see if she liked my idea.

Marilyn came out a few minutes later in some flat sandals and a long halter topped sundress. I smiled and looked at her hips to see if I could figure out if she was wearing anything under the dress. She noticed and laughed at me. "I'm not telling you, either."

I shrugged and smiled. "It's even more fun to wonder." I grabbed her hand and the room key and we headed out the door. In the elevator I took a chance and hugged her, and in the process ran my hands along her rear. At first she moaned slightly, but then she jumped back and swatted at me. "That's cheating!"

"I can't imagine why you would trust me not to cheat. I wouldn't trust me not to cheat!"

She glared at me for moment, but I just smiled innocently, and then buffed my fingertips against my shirt theatrically. Marilyn blushed again. Unless she was wearing a thong, and thongs weren't all that common back in '74, I was pretty sure of the answer.

Breakfast was a buffet, and Marilyn happily loaded up on some scrambled eggs, toast, and juice, while I limited myself to juice and some fruit salad. "You're not hungry?", she asked.

"Breakfast isn't my big meal for the day. I normally just have some fruit and juice, or something light. My big meals will be lunch and dinner. I need to watch my weight."

"You're kidding me, right? You're like pure muscle."

I laughed at that. "Not hardly. When I was a little kid I was nothing but skin and bones. I have to work at it. Besides, a soldier can't afford to be fat; I need the muscle."

"I find that hard to believe, too. I can't see you as a soldier."

"Hey, you saw the 'Wall of Heroes.' Even if I am drummed out of the family, my mother will put my boot camp photo up there next year.", I told her.

We talked some more about the road trip that summer, although I avoided discussion of my winning at the casino in Las Vegas. We also talked about our schedules for that fall, when school started.

After breakfast it was time to take a walk around town. It was continuing to stay gray outside, but it wasn't raining, so we walked down to the Boardwalk holding hands. By now businesses were open and people were coming out to the beach, although there weren't as many as if it had been bright and sunny. There are about a million tourist traps and stores along the Boardwalk, and we went into several. I bought a box of salt water taffy, which Marilyn had never had before. I said we'd have to buy a big box for Tusker and Tessa, and Marilyn asked me why it was called salt water taffy if there was no salt water in it, and I couldn't answer that one.

I bought a straw fedora for myself and a big floppy straw hat for Marilyn. I also pointed out several different miniscule bikinis and offered to buy them for Marilyn, which earned me a lot of blushes. I decided I would revisit the question later in the week.

We perambulated down the Boardwalk slowly, taking in the sights and letting the breeze blow around us. At one point it picked up enough that she had to grab her dress to keep it from flipping up and answering the question she refused to answer herself. I laughed and pointed to a little girl walking with her mother on the other side of the Boardwalk, towards us. She was giggling and pointing at us, among other things. I leaned over and whispered to Marilyn, "I know what she just told her mother."

"What?"

"She said that you weren't wearing any underpants and that her mother needed to call the Panty Police!" Marilyn squawked at that and smacked me in the arm, which got me to laughing so hard my hat blew off and I had to chase it down.

We had lunch a bit before noon at a pizza place. I was starting to get worried about the weather. It was getting darker and the wind was starting to blow stronger. We ate lunch and hurried back north. The rain held off until we were about a block away from the hotel, and then we ran back as fast as we could before we got drenched. I led the way to an ocean view bar and we sat and had a couple of rum punches. I admired the view of Marilyn more than the storm. Her dress got a bit clingy and sheer when wet.

After drinking the rum punches, Marilyn's dress dried enough that it wasn't so clingy and sheer, and I decided I rather preferred it the other way around. Or, in other words, I started thinking with my dick. I signed for the drinks and took Marilyn's hand. "Come on, I need to get something from the room." Marilyn nodded and stood up, slurping her rum punch down through the straw first.

We walked out to the lobby and got into the first available elevator. Thankfully it was empty. I slipped behind her and wrapped my arms around her, and then lowered my face to her shoulders. One of Marilyn's major erogenous zones was her shoulders; she just went nuts went I touched her or licked her there. She stiffened and arched her back, and whimpered slightly. "I think I know what you want in the room.", she said lowly.

"Is that a problem?", I asked, licking her neck as I whispered to her.

She whimpered some more, and haltingly answered, "No..."

I kept tormenting her for the rest of the ride to our floor, which was only a few seconds more. I gave her a knowing smile, to which she blushed, but she also smiled. I unlocked the door and led her inside. As I suspected, the room had been made up, and my bed had a new cover on it. I led her to the bed and gently pushed her backwards. "Sit down." She gave me a shy smile, but she sat promptly and looked at me expectantly.

I gave her a much more wolfish smile and knelt at her feet. "I seem to recall saying something about kissing something and making it feel better. Maybe I should check on that." I said this as I ran my fingertips lightly over her ankles. She was too excited to answer me, but she nodded vigorously. I tugged her sandals off and tossed them behind me, where they clattered against something, but I didn't bother looking. I slowly ran my fingers up her ankles to her calves, and under the hem of her long skirt. Then I lifted her left leg up and gently kissed her calf. "Was it here I was supposed to kiss?"

"No.", she answered weakly.

I gave her an innocent look and rested her calf on my right shoulder, and then lifted her right leg up and kissed my way from her right calf up to her right knee. I gave that a little more attention, and then looked up at her. "Here?"

"Unh unh." Marilyn's face was starting to get red and her eyes had a slightly glazed look to them.

I shrugged slightly, rested her right leg on my left shoulder, and turned my attention to her left leg again. Now I had to push her hem northwards, very slowly, and I kissed and licked my way about a third of the way up her left thigh. I could definitely smell her musk now, and I could feel the pulse of her racing blood under her supple flesh. "Now?"

She just shook her head.

I switched sides. Her dress was now almost up to her hips, although I still couldn't see the final objective. I kissed my way up to just a few inches south of the endpoint. "Now?"

"Oh, God, stop teasing me!", she pleaded.

I smiled to myself and kept licking. Another three inches and her dress was up to her hips, her legs were spread wide, and my lips were planted on her naked pussy. Marilyn gave a happy little shriek as I started lapping my tongue up and down her greasy slit, burrowing my way through the triangle of fur. "Oh my God! Oh my God!", she babbled. Juices were pouring from her, and when I started concentrating on her clit, her ass was humping off the bed and her hands were on the back of my head trying to pull me inside her.

I licked her through two very quick orgasms, and then as she came down from the second, I backed off slightly and slowed down to a stop. I could feel the wetness on my face and I looked up at her again. Marilyn had collapsed back onto the bed, and now she lifted up onto her elbows and looked down at me dazed. "Feel better now?"

"I think you know I do!" She smiled down at me and I crawled up onto the bed next to her. We were both still dressed, although Marilyn's dress was up around her waist. I reached behind her neck and undid the clasp holding the halter together, and it fell down, exposing those beautiful tits. Marilyn's skin is pale, and you don't get a whole lot of sun in upstate New York, so she wasn't tanned. I took a good look at her and then pulled her dress up and over her head, with Marilyn moving around and assisting me. Then she was laying on the bed next to me naked.

I sat up and peeled off my own shirt. I had already kicked off my shoes. "I think I'm overdressed. Care to do something about that?"

Marilyn blushed but said, "Okay." And then she stopped, unsure of what to do. I should have expected that; she was very naïve and innocent when we met. She may have known the theory, and what with nine brothers and sisters, she was quite well versed in the aftermath, but she was quite unsure of the practical aspects. To tell the truth, way back when we were first starting out, I was pretty much as fumbling as she was. That's probably why certain things never really improved. As I mentioned before, Marilyn gave a lousy hummer, but to be fair about it, I never taught her what I liked. I never knew how to teach her what I liked. Don't blame the student if the teacher is an asshole!

I lay back on the bed and pulled some pillows under my head. She looked nervously at me, so I took her hands and brought them to my waist. "The pants have to come off first. Why don't you start with the belt, and work your way from there?"

Well, that she could figure out. She undid my belt and then stopped to look at me nervously, but I just nodded encouragingly and she undid the snap and then pulled my zipper down. Just the pressure of her fingers through my pants on my painfully stiff cock had me twitching. She looked at me again, so I simply arched my back and lifted my ass up. "Now they need to come off."

Marilyn blushed fiercely, and she tugged my pants down to about my knees, and I told her to pull them completely off. That left me in my tighty-whiteys, so I arched my back and said, "Everything!"

Marilyn steeled herself and grabbed them and pulled them south, although she was quite surprised when the waistband caught on my stiff cock and I had to reach in and free myself. She looked down at me with both fascination and fear. This was quite a bit different than bathing one of her baby brothers. I even mentioned this to her. "There. I bet you had to do that when giving a bath to one of your baby brothers."

She smiled at that. "Yeah, well they sure didn't look like that!"

I reached out and took her right hand and laid it on my cock. It twitched happily at that, and she yanked her hand away by reflex. I just reached out and took her hand and brought it back, and wrapped her fingers around the shaft and began using her hand to jerk myself off slowly. I murmured happily as she got the idea, and decided to give some positive feedback. "Mmmm, yeah, just like that ... nice and slow, don't grab or yank, mmmmm, keep going ... that feels good, don't stop..." I was originally planning on just a little foreplay, but I was fairly worked up after eating her out, and seeing her there in her youthful beauty was doing a number on me. "Don't stop, that feels so good ... keep going, more, just like that, just like that." I knew that when I popped she would be so startled as to yank her hand away, so I put my right hand around hers to guide her, and stared at those beautiful tits. A couple of minutes later she got the surprise of her life, when I groaned and this white goop started shooting out of me. Much as I thought, she tried to move her hand, but I kept her in place and had her pump me dry.

Afterwards, I smiled at her. "Oh, baby, thank you. That was very nice."

"That was all right?", she asked tentatively. There was some of my come on her hand and she was eyeing it curiously.

I grinned at her. "Honey, guys are pretty easy to figure out. This...", I said, pointing to the jism sprayed on my torso " ... is sort of the desired outcome. We get this, we're happy. We're very simple creatures."

That got a nice giggle from her, and she calmed down quite a bit. I took the moment to teach her a little about Little Carl and the boys, and even about the end result. She offered to go get a washcloth, and I said that was probably a good idea. While she went to the bathroom, I rolled over and opened my night stand drawer, and pulled out a box of Trojans I had picked up. It was sitting there on the night stand when she came back in.

"What's that?", she asked.

"That's the next lesson." I had Marilyn wash me off, and then she looked around to place the wash cloth somewhere, so I just grabbed it and tossed it aside. "Everything washes out, but some things need dry cleaning.", I explained. "That's where your robe is. I sent it out for dry cleaning this morning."

"I was wondering about that. Wait a minute! That means they might know what happened?" Marilyn had an alarmed look to her face as she considered the implications.

I just had to laugh at that. "Trust me, Marilyn we aren't the first two people to have stayed in this hotel who've had sex. I don't think it will be a problem."

She gave me a shy look and smiled at that, and then glanced back at the box of rubbers. "So, what's that?"

"That, my dear, is a box of prophylactic condoms, otherwise known as rubbers. They are used during the act of sexual intercourse to prevent the transmission of disease and to prevent pregnancy. I assume the nuns over at UCA didn't get around to explaining how these work." I picked up the box and opened the top.

Marilyn colored and laughed. "It wasn't in the curriculum!"

"Well, these work a whole lot better than the Pope's approved version." She gave me a curious look. "The rhythm method. I would think with your family you'd know about that, but then again, with ten kids, I don't think your folks are being too rhythmic."

"I don't think so. This definitely isn't on the Pope's list of things to do.", she replied.

"Really? I wonder what method he uses?", I asked innocently. As anticipated, this earned me a squeal of outrage. "Don't be so hasty, babe. Read up on your history of the popes. The Borgia popes had both wives and mistresses, and they weren't the only ones. But I digress..." I pulled out a foil wrapped rubber from the box and held it up for her to see.

"Now, step one, Mister Happy needs to be very happy first." I took her hand and placed it back on my semi-limp cock. She had the program figured out now, and a minute or two later I was pleasantly stiff again. For step two I demonstrated opening up the foil wrapper and extracting the device, and then had her watch as I did the banana demonstration using my own personal banana. Then I grinned at her. I slipped a finger between her legs and ran it into her pussy. She was quite wet and ready to go. "Now, I think it's time for a test run."

Marilyn happily rolled onto her back and spread her legs. I climbed over her and inserted Little Carl, now wearing his protective raincoat, and sank in deeply. There was a whole lot less drama this time and a whole lot more pleasure. She was very tight, but not uncomfortably so, and she was very juicy. I had to concentrate not to blow my load too soon, and I was whispering to her the entire time about how good it was. I kept asking her to tell me what she wanted, but Marilyn has a very hard time concentrating on such things during sex. Her natural reaction is to simply lay there and enjoy it. Nor is she naturally vocal. I had to train her there before, and I knew I would have to do so again. It wasn't an unpleasant prospect.

Eventually Little Carl and I both had very satisfying conclusions, and from the sounds Marilyn was making, she was satisfied as well. I collapsed onto her, and then rolled over to my side, making sure to reach down and grab the used rubber so it wouldn't slip off. Marilyn noticed this and watched with considerable distaste as I peeled it off. "Ooohh, yuck! Gross!" She looked really horrified when I dropped it on the floor on top of the washcloth already there.

"It is what it is, babe.", I told her. "It's better than the alternative."

"Oh?"

"You bet, MOM."

She stuck her tongue out at me. "Not interested. I am not having a baby while my mother is still having babies!"

"There is an alternative. When you get back home, go to Planned Parenthood and get on the Pill. I'm not all that thrilled with these things either."

She just nodded in agreement and then looked back at the box and towards me. "You were planning this?"

"Let's just say I was certainly hoping, and the Scout Slogan is 'Be Prepared.'"

"I find it very difficult to believe you were ever a Boy Scout!"

I really had to laugh at that, so I sat upright, gave the Scout Sign, right hand up, middle three fingers upright and the thumb and pinky folded in, and said,

"On my honor, I will do my best

To do my duty to God and my country and to obey the Scout Law;

To help other people at all times; and

To keep myself physically strong, mentally awake and morally straight."

Then I lay back and smiled. "Would I lie?"

"Yes, you probably would!" I just tried to look innocent. At that point she looked back at the box of Trojans, and then down at Little Carl. "How long does he take to, well, you know..."

I grinned at her and tossed her another condom. "I love a good experiment! Why don't you find out?!"

There's a lot to be said about experimentation in the biological sciences! This time around I had Marilyn get on top, and taught her about saving a horse and riding a cowboy. The scenery, with her bouncing away on top of me, was much better than the rainstorm going on outside. Afterwards I had her remove the offensive trash, and we both lay down and napped the rest of the afternoon.

This actually reminded me somewhat of our first times together. Marilyn had been a rather scared and nervous virgin then, also, but once we had done it, and she was no longer a 'good girl', she had a healthy appetite for sex. She was just as horny as the next girl, and just as eager to fuck me as I was to fuck her. I was definitely going to need to get a refill on that box before the weekend! Probably two refills!

I was snapped out of my nap by the sound of a phone ringing. I looked around and tried to orient myself, and found it on a nightstand near my head. I shook the cobwebs loose and sat up and grabbed it. I grabbed my watch and it said it was just after 3:00. "Hello?" I wasn't sure, but I had a pretty good idea who would be calling.

"You were supposed to call me this morning." It was my father, as I expected, and he didn't sound overly happy. Well, fuck him! This whole mess was their fault anyway.

Marilyn rolled over and looked at me. I think she had figured out who was calling, too. "Well, Marilyn and I were out on the Boardwalk this morning."

"You should have returned my call!"

"Hey, Dad, it was either take my girlfriend out for a walk or talk to you about my asshole brother. I went with Option One. Still seems like a good choice." I was already getting tired of this conversation.

"Don't you dare speak to your father that way!"

I sighed. "Yeah, whatever. Dad, you called me. What's up?"

I could hear him try to calm himself down. "You haven't even asked about your brother."

"I wasn't planning to. The last I saw of him he was moving on the kitchen floor and starting to moan and cry, and the State Police haven't battered down the door here, so he must still be alive. Beyond that, I just don't care."

"You broke his jaw in two places."

No wonder my hand hurt! "Yeah? Well, tell him to consider himself lucky. The next time he mouths off like that to Marilyn I'll break his neck in two places. He's lucky I didn't kill him, and you know it."

"Your mother is furious about this!" He was trying the mother ploy, since the injured sibling trick wasn't working.

"She'll get over it. I've been getting over her being furious about me since I was a kid." I rubbed my face. This was getting me nowhere.

"DON'T YOU DARE SPEAK ABOUT YOUR MOTHER THAT WAY!"

"Okay, whatever. Here, let me make this real simple, Dad. I'll see you around some day. Feel free to take me out of the will and tell the family and neighbors I ran away and joined the circus. I just don't care anymore. Tell Suzie I'll write. She's the only one in the family worth a shit anyway, and that includes me. Goodbye." I hung up the phone.

I looked over at Marilyn and shrugged my shoulders and gave her a bleak smile. She just stared back in silence. We sat there like that for another minute or two, and the phone rang again. I picked it up.

"DON'T YOU DARE HANG UP..." I dared and hung it up again, and then I picked it up and dialed 0. When I got the switchboard operator, I told her I didn't want any more phone calls sent through, and that she should take a message and tell the caller she would pass it along. My parents weren't about to air 'dirty laundry' to a mere telephone operator.

I turned to face Marilyn and gave her a wry shrug. She looked at me very seriously and said, "I wish you hadn't done that. I don't like being the one who gets in between you and your family like this."

I traced a finger along her cheek and gave her a smile. "Whatever is going on here, it has nothing whatsoever to do with you. You just happened to be there at the time. Trust me, this is not about you. This has been building for years." I eyed her naked back as she lay there on the bed, facedown and looking at me. Grabbing the box of condoms, I rattled it and grinned. "Care to spend the rest of the afternoon doing something a little more interesting?"

Marilyn grinned at me. "You're hopeless! You're an incorrigible child!" I just rattled the box some more. "No way! I actually feel kind of grungy!"

"That just means we're doing it right!"

"No! I need a shower." Marilyn rolled off the bed and scampered off to her room, staying out of my reach. I had a good laugh at that, and then climbed to my feet. In my closet I found a Hilton bathrobe, and I carried it and the box of Trojans out of my room and over towards her room. I listened at her door, and waited a minute. Then I heard the shower go on in her bathroom, so I snuck inside. I tossed the robe on the bed and the rubbers on the nightstand, and went into her bathroom. Marilyn didn't even know I was in the room until I opened the shower door and slipped inside.

"What are you doing!?", she asked in a startled voice.

I grinned down at her. "I thought maybe you'd need help washing your back."

That got a smile. "Oh, really? You're just being helpful?"

I gave her the Scout Sign and recited the Scout Law. Helpful's in there somewhere, I knew that. "Remember that 'cheerful' line?" I glanced down between us where Little Carl was pointing towards her. She followed my glance and laughed. "I think that's cheerful."

She reached down and grabbed me. "I am sure that's not what they had in mind."

"Hey, some of us are more cheerful than others!" I took the soap from her hands and began rubbing it all over her body, concentrating on the front side.

Marilyn closed her eyes and moaned. "I thought you said you wanted to wash my back?", she asked raggedly. I simply pulled her tightly against me and ran the bar of soap up and down her back. That got me a few more moans. Marilyn turned out to be absolutely filthy, and needed an awful lot of scrubbing to get her clean. Eventually she begged me to stop washing her, and she concentrated on me. I only had one piece of equipment that needed special cleaning, and she washed that until I spurted onto her belly.

By that time we were starting to turn into prunes, so we turned off the water and wrapped each other in towels and made our way to Marilyn's bed. I lay down next to her and began to lick and suck on her nipples and began fingering her little clit again. Marilyn pushed me away long enough to grab a rubber and managed to tear the foil open and put it on me all by herself this time. Despite the number of times we had already screwed that afternoon, I found her incredibly stimulating and had no difficulty getting hard and fucking her hard.

After coming and filling the condom, I peeled it off and dropped it onto my towel. She looked at it and said, "It may be necessary, but it's still pretty gross."

"Promise me you'll go on the Pill, so we won't need these.", I replied.

"Oh, believe me, I'm convinced!"

"That way if we wanted to do it back there in the shower, we could have.", was my comment.

Marilyn's eyes opened wide at that. "What? There? In the shower?"

"I plan to teach you all sorts of things." I leaned over and nibbled her ear.

She smiled and pushed me away. "No more of that! We need to stop. I'm starting to feel sore again."

Well, considering what we had been up to all afternoon, I would have been surprised if she wasn't. Now that I thought about it, Little Carl was pretty tuckered out, too; he wasn't going cave diving again for a few more hours. I leaned down and kissed her on the cheek. "Then maybe later tonight, when we go to bed."

That got me another smile. "Yes, I think so. Don't worry about it. I like these lessons. Feel free to teach me anything you want to!"

I had to laugh at that. "Marilyn, I know things that would curl your toes!" I laughed some more and climbed to my feet. "Listen, take a nap. I'm going to clean up again and get dressed. Whenever you get up, we'll think about getting some dinner." Then I gave her a lewd look. "Unless you want to stay like this and get room service."

"Not just yet.", she replied, blushing. "Scoot!"

Teach her new things, indeed. That reminded me of the time I was teaching her how the Internet worked, back when it first started, and she asked what I meant when I said a search engine could find all sorts of stuff. She asked me what, so I typed in 'anal fisting' and watched her turn green while I rolled on the floor in laughter.

I scooted and took the box of Trojans back to my room, along with the robe. I took a very quick shower and then pulled on some clean clothes. There was a directory of local restaurants in a binder near the telephone in the common room, along with a listing of hotel services, and I started looking through the restaurants. I marked several down on a piece of Hilton stationery, to remember to ask Marilyn later. Then I sat down and turned on the television and flipped channels for a few minutes. I eventually turned it off and dozed in the armchair.

I woke up an hour or so later when Marilyn came out of the bedroom with her Hilton robe on. I rubbed my face and then smiled over at her. "Any ideas on dinner?"

She shrugged. "What's available?"

Marilyn sat down next to me on the couch and we went through the directory. I had never heard of any of these places, but I jotted down some names and addresses on a piece of stationery and figured I could always ask down at the desk. The leading candidate was what seemed to be a nice Italian place. I wanted to take Marilyn to a nice place, where she could dress nicely. We split apart to dress, since all of her stuff was in her room. I pulled on some clean slacks and a dress shirt, along with a sports coat I had packed. I was fairly sure Marilyn had something decent to wear since she had cleaned out her closet before coming down here!

Marilyn came out in a calf-length black and pink print dress with lace at the hem and short sleeves, along with a pair of medium high heels. "You look lovely.", I told her.

"Is this all right? I didn't pack anything all that fancy. I really don't have anything all that fancy?"

I smiled. She brought down enough bags to cause her car's front end to lift off the ground, and she didn't pack enough! I did, on the other hand, believe her about not having anything fancy. That really wasn't her style. "Well, if we go out later on to a fancy place, I'll just have to buy you a fancy dress."

"Carling, that isn't necessary!"

"Oh, it's not that bad an idea. The rule is, though, that if I buy you something to wear, I get to take it off of you later.", I replied.

She gave me a smirk. "That sounds more like you." I just tried to look innocent and we went down to the lobby. The girl at the front desk agreed the Italian restaurant was a good choice and gave us directions; the valet brought the car around.

Tonight, instead of drinks, I ordered a bottle of Chianti Classico from a cellar I was familiar with. Marilyn prefers sweeter wines than I do, but the Classico was a good compromise. Then we started reviewing the menus while waiting for the waiter to return. It was then that Marilyn asked, "I wanted to ask you about what Hamilton said the other day." I must have looked blankly at her, because she then lowered her voice and said, "You know, what he said right before you punched him."

"Marilyn, my brother is a horse's ass, and I'm probably insulting horses by comparing him to them. Forget about him. He deserved it."

"It's not that, it's what he said. I wanted to talk to you about it."

Okay, I was still confused. I lowered my voice so that it wouldn't carry, and responded, "Marilyn, I know you're not a lying slut."

"No, not that, before that. He said I was just another one. That."

My eyes opened wide. DANGER, WILL ROBINSON, DANGER! "Marilyn, I've never dated any girls like that. My brother is a very disturbed individual."

"I believe you. However, you have to admit, I am not the first girl to, you know..."

The danger signs were flashing in bright red for me now. If anybody here was a slut, it was probably ME! "Well, perhaps not. Is it important?"

"How many? I think I need to know."

Oh shit! Not only was I under fire, I was taking artillery fire! "No you don't. It's really not important. You're the only person I'm with anymore."

"That's not an answer, Carling."

"No it's not, but I don't want to get into numbers or details. That is the past. You should only need to know that I have no diseases and am responsible about that sort of thing. You already know I'm responsible about not having children just yet."

"Carling, I want to know if I'm number 2 or number 200."

I just rolled my eyes. "No. I'm not going there. You have no need to know. I won't hurt you or embarrass you. Nobody is ever going to come up to us in public and demand a paternity test. I was just a friendly kind of guy."

"Is that what you call it, being friendly?"

"Well I'd certainly hate to do it with somebody I wasn't friendly with! Remember, a Scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly ... That's number four on the list."

"And not what I'm looking for." She was looking a little peeved with me.

"Okay, I'm going to give you a brief history. I want you to keep a few things in mind." She nodded solemnly. "First off, very important, it doesn't matter how many girls I've known before I met you. Since the day I first met you, you have been the only girl I have been with. Period."

That sort of woke her up. "You mean, since February..."

"Longest six and a half months of my life, lady!", I answered with a smile. "But worth it!"

That got her to blush. "What else?"

"Another important thing is related to the first thing. I don't fool around. I won't cheat on you. I don't see two girls at the same time. I'm not going to have a Utica girlfriend and a Troy girlfriend." This was a major change since my first trip around the universe. Back then I had cheated on her right up until we got married. Never after, though, but I figured, I hadn't made a promise yet, so it didn't count. If Marilyn had ever caught me, though, she would have dumped me like a hot potato! "The third thing is that I don't force myself on women. My friends have all been willing volunteers, so to speak."

"Tacky!", she said. "So, how many?"

I just shook my head at her. "Not getting into that."

I continued. "Listen, you've heard the rest of my life story. Here's this portion. Ever since I figured out that I could use Mister Happy for more than just writing my name in the snow, I have been very happily doing so with young ladies of like mind. I have been very careful about that, but the fact is that girls enjoy it just as much as guys do. That ended my junior year in high school when I started going out with this one girl on a steady basis. We stayed together almost two years. I never messed around on her, not once. We broke up after graduation. Since then, I met one lady for one night in the fall semester, long before you and I met. And that, my dear, is my history."

I could see the wheels and gears turning in her brain. I knew what the next questions would be. "So, if there have been only three of us since junior year, you made all those friends before that?"

I couldn't help it. I gave her a big smile. "I really enjoyed junior high and high school."

"I can't believe it!"

"You're looking at it all the wrong way.", I said.

"Oh?"

I reached out and took her hand. "You aren't my first love, but you are my last. Those other girls simply trained me to be the best possible person for you. Forget them. I'm with you. You're all I ever wanted."

"They trained you?"

"I'm a very quick study." I rubbed her calf with a toe. "I'll give you another lesson tonight."

"I can't believe this." She said this with a smile, so I knew I was past the worst of it.

"Just remember, it doesn't matter how many were before you, only how many now, and the answer to that is one, you, and I don't want anybody else. Only you."

That must have satisfied her, since she leaned over and kissed me softly. She also had a wicked gleam in her eye afterwards. "Junior high, too?"

"Let's just say that my growth spurt in the ninth grade made everything bigger." Marilyn blushed fiercely at that. Thankfully she let the topic drop and we finished dinner without my feeling like I was wandering blindly through a minefield. Later that night I taught her a few new techniques. Education is a good thing.

By Thursday morning the storm was blown out to sea and the day was sunny and warm. We used another of the dwindling supply of rubbers and then cleaned up and dressed in our swimsuits and cover-ups. Marilyn was heading for the beach, and no matter how I tried to entice her back upstairs, she headed for the ocean as soon as breakfast was over. Even my entreaties that she needed to lie down for a few hours after every meal failed!

She searched around trying to find the perfect spot, with me trudging behind her like in a bad sitcom. I settled the matter by dropping our stuff in the middle of the beach and spreading a couple of jumbo towels out while she stood there and studied other locations. It wasn't until I pulled off my shirt that she decided this was adequate after all. Off came her shirt, and I smiled to see her in the bikini she had teased me about earlier. She posed and smiled at me. "Is this all right?"

By the standards prevalent when our kids would be going to the beach, it was definitely stodgy, but by 1974 standards it was very nice. It was a blue and white floral print, with a slightly underwired top that didn't cover too much, and a full coverage bottom, but still a fair bit skimpier than granny panties. I twirled my fingers around and she twisted around for me. "I really think you need to go upstairs and lie down for a bit. You shouldn't go swimming for at least two hours after eating. Maybe more!"

She wagged her finger at me. "Nice try, but I am not going to spend my entire vacation at the beach looking at it from inside a hotel room!"

"Well, if you get a cramp and drown horribly, don't blame me." I pulled a bottle of suntan lotion from the duffel bag we were using for a beach bag. "Why don't you let me help you?"

She deftly snatched it from me and plopped down on the blanket next to me. "Maybe my back." We oiled up, and then did each other's backs, and if I lingered longer than was necessary, it was simply to ensure proper coverage. Marilyn's quiet moan was simply from my massaging the muscles of her back.

"You sure about not lying down?", I whispered into her ear.

She laughed. "You are evil!" She jumped up and sprinted towards the gentle surf. I followed her into the water and we horsed around some, splashing and body surfing. If I managed to cop a few feels and otherwise torment her, it was purely accidental. Trust me!

Eventually we came into shore again, put on some more lotion, and sat there and watched the sights. We both had sunglasses on, so I felt safe with some girl watching. Not many girls were as pretty as Marilyn, but it was a worthy exercise anyway. For all I know, she was boy watching; I never asked, but fair is fair.

Lunch was beer and sandwiches at the Hilton's beachside café, followed by some more swimming and a nap on our towels. That part wasn't planned. I hoped I had on enough suntan lotion, but I have an unfortunate tendency to burn badly, and I suspected I would know it by tomorrow. By late afternoon I convinced Marilyn to go back upstairs for some afternoon delight.

She was giggling as we entered our suite. Like before, I followed her into her bedroom, and we kept on going right into her bathroom. "I need to wash my suit out.", she commented.

"Mine, too." I wrapped her in my arms and reached around to undo the clasp for her top. I pulled it off and then knelt down and pulled her bottoms off. I couldn't resist the temptation, so I leaned forward and gave her pussy a quick lick. She tasted salty, and a bit sandy. I stood up and shucked off my suit as well, and we got into the shower together.

"I don't think we're actually saving any water.", commented Marilyn while I rubbed the soap over her tits.

I pondered it briefly. "Would you prefer it if we stopped and separated?" I asked this as I began teasing her nipples.

She gave me a smile and grabbed my stiff cock. "Efficiency isn't all it's cracked up to be."

I washed her all over, but then I diddled her clit until she gasped and came, shivering in my arms. She ended up leaning against the wall of the shower while I quickly washed and rinsed, and then I turned off the water. We dried ourselves quickly. Marilyn scampered bare-ass into her bedroom and flopped backwards on it, spreading her legs lewdly. "Hurry up!", she ordered. I had created a monster!

I stood there at the foot of the bed and smiled as I took in the scene. "Bitch, bitch, bitch! Always with the orders!"

"Yes, yes, yes! Come on, get over here!"

"You don't love me! You're only using me for sex!", I cried out theatrically.

Marilyn laughed loudly at that. "I recall that it was you that wanted to stay up here instead of going to the beach."

I shrugged at that. I decided to torment her some first, so I knelt down on the floor and crawled onto the bed between her legs. I kissed and licked her pussy, but pointedly avoided touching or tasting her clit, so that she got to the point where she was squirming around on the bed and trying to push my head where she wanted it to go. Eventually I relented and ate her through two long and loud orgasms.

After the second orgasm, I crawled onto the bed next to her and tucked the pillows behind me, so that I was sitting semi-upright. Marilyn watched me with glazed eyes, and asked, "What about you?", looking down at my very hard cock.

I toyed with her some more. "I can't move. I'm suffering from whiplash!"

I was expecting at least a blush, but Marilyn said, "But what about those ... things?"

"You'll have to go and get them."

"Unh unh. You wore me out. You have to get them."

So I got to my feet and brought the box back in. I pulled one out and looked inside. We were going to have to go shopping. That had potential for major league humor. I let Marilyn open it and put it on me, and then I climbed on board for some good old fashioned missionary position. "You are so beautiful. I love you so much.", I whispered to her. Marilyn's pussy felt extra tight and hot this afternoon. I continued whispering to her, and spiced it up by adding some extra comments. "Ummm, your pussy feels so good ... you're so wet and juicy ... does it feel good?"

The dirty talk kicked it up a notch for Marilyn. Her arms were wrapped tightly around me, and I brought my hands down to that warm and full ass, to cup her buttcheeks and pull her against me even tighter. I had her wrap her legs around me and hold on while I pounded her into the mattress. My cock was slamming into her and rubbing her clit on each up and down stroke. After a few minutes of this, I collapsed onto her, and my cock pumped a load into the end of the rubber. It felt like it would never end, and I was wondering about the capacity of the things, but afterwards, when I rolled off of her and pulled it off, it was still in one piece.

Marilyn rolled over against me and tossed a leg over mine. "That was ... amazing.", she said, gasping slightly.

Yeah, it was! I told her, "Yeah!"

"Is it always this good?"

I smiled. "Well, we're still getting used to each other. I'm sure it will get better."

Marilyn gave a little shudder. "I think that would be impossible."

"I can guarantee it." She looked up at me, and I reached out and grabbed the box of Trojans. "For one thing, we won't always need these, will we?"

"God, no!" She took the box from me and poured the remaining rubbers out on my chest. "What happens when we run out?"

"Honey, it's not like these are the only ones left on the planet. We'll get a few more."

Marilyn smiled at that and reached down between my legs and started playing with my cock again. "Good!"

Afterwards, we took naps, and then showered again (separately) and got dressed. Tonight we went casual and I took Marilyn out to a Chinese place. Along the way, I stopped at a drug store. I got out and invited her inside.

"What for?"

"I need to pick something up. Come on."

I led her inside and wandered towards the pharmacy counter in the back. In those days, rubbers weren't something placed on the rack, right next to the KY and sex aids. Condoms were behind the counter and you needed to get them from a pharmacist, even though they weren't prescriptions. It was all very hush-hush and sinful, and when I was younger more than a few places wouldn't sell them to me since I was a minor. Some states, in fact, refused to allow them to be sold unless you were married, since having sex outside of marriage was illegal. That took a Supreme Court case to get thrown out. We walked towards the back, and once we got to the counter, I turned to Marilyn and asked, "What kind do you want?"

"What kind of what?"

I pointed at a rack behind the counter. "What kind of condoms would you prefer?"

Marilyn's eyes opened wide and she stared at the small display. "OH MY GOD!" She took off out of there like a scalded cat.

I laughed loud and long at that. The lady pharmacist who had witnessed this simply grinned at me. "You are so bad!"

I agreed with her and bought two boxes and paid for them. Outside the store I found Marilyn sitting in her car, beet red. I handed her the bag and she tossed it in the back like it carried the plague. I smiled at her. She was trying to look angry at me, but not really succeeding. "I can't believe you did that!"

"You want to go back with me and return them?"

"NO!" I smiled and shrugged, and then started the car and put it into gear. After a few seconds she asked, "How can there be so many different types? Aren't they all the same?" She glanced at my lap and then quickly looked out the windshield. "You know..."

"No, they aren't." I started laughing. Marilyn made such an amusing target on things like this. "For one thing, there are a number of different manufacturers. Some are thinner or more expensive and so forth. You can get them in colors..."

"COLORS!"

"Sure, red, blue, black ... that can be very popular among the brothers."

"The brothers? At Kegs?"

That made me smile. "No, baby, not those brothers. Assume that you and I were of the African persuasion. Would you want to be making it with a white cock or a black cock?"

"I can't believe you said that! You're such a racist!"

That was a subject that we would never agree on. Marilyn, who I don't think had ever even met a black person until she went to college, considered that because she was a Yankee, she was automatically non-prejudiced, and that because I was born somewhere south of the Mason-Dixon Line, was automatically a bigot. This never was resolved. I sighed, "No, I'm not, but these things are actually made for the purpose."

She simply sniffed at that. It was the only part of her being a Yankee I found an issue. I continued on. "There are even glow-in-the-dark rubbers."

She turned and stared at me. "You're kidding me, right!?"

I grinned back. "Think of it as your own little portable flashlight, for when the lights are out."

"Gross!"

I laughed long at that. We pulled into the parking lot for the Chinese place. As we went inside I said, "During the Vietnam War they were even used for psychological warfare." Marilyn gave me a confused look and I went on. "We had one of the manufacturers make these extra large models, but then had them label them as 'Small' and packaged in Army green, like they were government issue, and then they would accidentally allow a shipment to be captured every now and then. The idea was to make them feel small."

"Did it work?"

I shook my head ruefully. "No idea. We lost the damn war, so it couldn't have been that important."

"So they come in different sizes?", she asked after a second.

"Looking to trade me in already?"

Marilyn blushed, and then I laughed when I caught her looking at my lap, which only made her blush more and stare at the far wall. I never did answer her question, since I kept laughing about it.

After dinner we went back to the hotel, walked briefly on the beach, and then went up to our room and finished off the box of condoms. The next morning we would need to crack another box.

Actually, we didn't. I got up and ran a few miles and then used the Nautilus machines in the Hilton's workout room. By the time I got back to the suite, Marilyn was already up and bathed and dressed. I offered to let her scrub my back, but she just laughed and told me to hurry up and join her downstairs. Then she grabbed the key from the dresser and scampered out of my reach and out the door. I just shook my head and took a quick shave and shower, and then went down to the lobby. As I suspected, she was in the main restaurant working on her buffet breakfast. She smiled and waved at me, so I wandered in and sat down next to her. I got a big kiss from her, along with," I was hungry!"

"You burned up a lot of calories late last night.", I replied.

That got me a big grin. "That's some diet plan you came up with!"

"You have no idea!" I got up and grabbed some fruit salad and juice, and came back to the table. "So what's the plan for today? Back upstairs and work on your diet some more?"

"Stop it! No, we're going to take a walk down the boardwalk and window-shop, and then this afternoon we're going to go swimming again."

"You've got this all planned out, don't you."

"To the minute! Hurry up, we're running 30 seconds late."

I had to laugh at that. Marilyn couldn't tell time to save her life. Despite her protestations of being on time, she was chronically late for everything. The only clocks in the house that were ever correct were my wristwatch and the clock over the television, which I controlled. Everything else was set from five to fifteen minutes early, and she still managed to be late. The rule was that if Marilyn had to be somewhere at a specific time, you lied to her and told her half an hour early. Even the kids knew this, and knew I would protect them if they got caught lying to their mother about schedules. We even had a name for it - 'Mommy Time!'

"Right. I think I'll finish my breakfast first. Why don't you spend the time thinking about what parts of the diet plan you'd like me to emphasize with you. Be specific." That turned her face beet red, and I had to laugh some more.

She sputtered a moment, and said, "See if we work off any more calories!" I just kept laughing. Eventually I was banished back to the room to grab our straw hats, and Marilyn stayed down below so she wouldn't be tempted into losing any calories.

The weather was beautiful again, so we strolled leisurely down to the Boardwalk and started doing some window shopping. Again I pointed out several swimsuits and outfits I would be happy to purchase for her, all of which would assist us in the quest for fewer calories. Marilyn wasn't too terribly shocked by my suggestions and tended to giggle when I told her how it easy it would be to burn off calories while she wore them. She also told me she had several more sundresses in our room that she had bought and hadn't gotten around to showing me yet, so maybe I should wait until I saw them. That sounded very promising, so I simply tabled the notion.

After about a mile of walking, I spotted a place that I had missed while running. It was small and had a very psychedelic sort of front. I tugged Marilyn's hand and said, "Let's look in here."

"Okay."

Marilyn followed me inside. It was a small shop, narrow and deep, and had all sorts of odd stuff inside. I had immediately recognized it as a head shop, but Marilyn was very much a goody-two-shoes in that regard. As we slowly wandered through, I explained some of what was there - bongs, brass or blown glass pipes, rolling papers, a variety of drug and rock music related posters. This was all a new experience for her. Towards the back of the store I found a section that in future days would be known as 'adult oriented.' In 1974 you just didn't have stores like this; they were always in the back of head shops or Spencer's Gifts or other counterculture sorts of places.

I picked up a copy of an illustrated Kama Sutra. "Think of this as sort of an exercise guide."

Marilyn looked at me curiously and took the book from my hands. She flipped it open randomly, stared at the page, and slammed it shut. "Oh my God!" She thrust it back at me.

"Beats the hell out of Jack LaLanne, doesn't it?"

"That's ... that's a book on...", she lowered her voice to a whisper, "sex!"

I whispered to her, "Yes, I know. Why are we whispering?"

"Well, what if someone hears us?", she whispered back.

I looked around the store theatrically. "Well, nobody's here except us and the clerk, and I think he knows this stuff is here, since he sells it." I looked around some more, and found a small box and handed it to her. "Here, open this."

Marilyn opened it gingerly, not knowing what was about to happen, and she was so startled by the contents she managed to drop it on the floor. It was a dildo. We both had to scramble to pick it up and stuff it back in the box, and we were laughing quite guiltily as we did so. "You have to be kidding me!?", she said.

"For those times I'm not there to help you out with that diet.", I explained.

"Keep up with the diet cracks and I'll end the diet!" was the reply. That earned a few more laughs.

"So you don't want me buying you a belated birthday present?" Marilyn's birthday is in June, so she was actually five months older than I am. She was already 19.

"God, no!"

"Maybe I'll get that for you for Christmas. I can't wait to see you open that up under the Christmas tree."

"That's not even funny!" If it wasn't funny, why was she laughing? I just waggled my eyebrows lewdly and got her to laughing even more.

I put the dildo back on the shelf, and we headed back towards the door. I, however, had grabbed the Kama Sutra and I stopped at the cash register. Marilyn's face was beet red as I paid for it, and she quickly hurried out of there without ever looking the clerk in the eye. "I can't believe you bought that!"

"Hey, if there is a single guy on the planet who believes in education and books more than me, you find him."

She glanced back at the store. "You seem to know an awful lot about the other stuff in there."

I looked at her curiously. "What, you mean the bongs and pipes and stuff?" She nodded and I shrugged in response. "I never really thought about it. It's for drugs. I've seen pot on the school bus since I was in junior high. Nobody smoked it there, but it got bought and sold."

This really shocked her. I didn't want to push it and tell her that it was a guarantee that it went on at UCA, too. "Have you ever..."

"What? Done drugs?" I shrugged again. "Yeah, I have. I've smoked pot. I don't do it very often, but I have done it. Hash, too, but that's another cannabinoid anyway. Nothing else. Other stuff - heroin, coke, speed, acid - that shit scares the hell out of me. But yeah, I've smoked pot."

It took Marilyn a second to digest that. "I don't know what all that stuff you said is. Do you smoke pot much?"

"Not particularly. Maybe every other weekend back at the frat. To be fair, I drink a lot more than I smoke."

"Did you bring any here?"

"God no! I make no promises about what might happen when I get back to Kegs, though."

She thought about it, and then looked at me curiously. "What's it like?"

I laughed. "I'll let you try it someday. I can tell you one thing, though."

"What?"

I lowered my lips to her ear and whispered. "It really makes girls horny!"

Marilyn blushed at that and stared at me. I just gave her my innocent and truthful look and she quickly looked away. That set me to laughing.

Later that day, after lunch, we changed into our swimsuits and headed back down to the beach. I took the Kama Sutra and tucked it into the duffel bag. "Light reading, for the beach.", I told her. I put my book in there as well, a well worn copy of Alexander Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo. You just can't beat the classics.

I teased her into pulling it out of the bag later that afternoon, although she covered it with a towel. She glanced through it, and I explained its source as an Indian holy book. "It probably starts out as a beginner's section, then moves on into intermediate and advanced sections."

She gave me a prim look. "And just where are you in the book?"

"Are you kidding me? I teach the advanced classes. I'm listed in the section marked Professional Training Required, Do Not Attempt At Home!"

"You are so full of shit!"

"Tell you what. You start at the beginning, I'll start at the end, and we'll work our way to the middle." That got Marilyn to stick her tongue out at me. I simply said, "I think the tongue thing starts on page 47." She quickly sucked her tongue back in.

Marilyn kept looking through the book, and eventually started asking me if I had ever done this or that. I would glance over her shoulder and comment on them, and I promised to help her with some of them later on. After a bit she got sort of quiet and I looked over at her. She saw me and looked at me a bit sheepishly. "Is this something you like?", she asked.

Curious, I shuffled over a touch and looked at the book. She was on a section about oral sex, and the diagram showed a woman sucking the head of a man's cock. I decided to ask her a question. "Do you like it when I do that sort of thing to you?"

"Yes."

"Well, that sort of answers that question, doesn't it?"

She thumbed through that section, and I returned to the escape from the Chateau D'If. Suddenly I heard her breath shorten and she gasped, "Oh, no way in the world!"

I set my book down and looked at Marilyn again. She was staring at a section on anal sex. "Well, I had no idea the book was quite that thorough."

She looked at me with a shocked expression. "You know about this!?"

"Yes."

"You've done this?"

I glanced at the book again. "Giving - yes; receiving - no. I don't think I'd like prison very much."

"This is never going to happen!"

"Okay." I picked my book up again, smiling to myself about Marilyn's outrage.

"That's it? That's all you have to say?"

"Marilyn, you said no, I said okay. Nothing is ever going to happen that you say no to. I won't make you do anything. If you want to try something in there, we'll try it. I thought you understood that.", I remarked.

That mollified her somewhat. "Well, okay, just so long as we never even think about doing that." She gave me a small but victorious harrumph, and I laughed at her.

"Don't knock it until you've tried it." Marilyn wasn't a big fan of buttfucking, but if she got a few drinks in her and I got her turned on enough, she not only went along with it, she even occasionally asked for it, and she always came that way. Her little brown pucker was another major erogenous zone, just one I hadn't introduced her to yet.

"Gross!"

I pointed at the book again. "You just keep thinking about some of the things in there. Feel free to mark some pages for practice later on." She stuck her tongue out again at me, and I quipped, "That will be one of the things we practice." The tongue disappeared as quickly as it came out.

Eventually I decided I was probably about as sunburned as I wanted to be today, so I stowed my book and stood up. "Let's hit the water and then clean up." Marilyn slipped the book inside the bag and ran with me down to the water. We fucked around and splashed each other, and I copped quite a few feels once we got deep enough to hide my actions. I even slipped a hand down into her bikini bottom and fingerfucked her to orgasm as she clung to me.

"You are being very naughty.", she whispered afterwards.

"Advanced training, remember." I grabbed her hand and we walked out of the surf and back to our beach towels. We cleaned up all of our stuff and headed back inside.

Once in our rooms, I steered her towards her room. "Go clean up and come over in a few minutes." She was a little mystified as to why I wasn't showering with her, but Marilyn simply nodded and padded off to her room. I took the duffel bag into my room and opened it up. The towels went into a corner of the bathroom, along with my swimsuit and tee shirt. I put Dumas on the dresser, and the Kama Sutra on the nightstand, along with a few condom packets. Then I jumped into the shower and washed clean. I dried off quickly and pulled on my bathrobe. I came out of the bathroom just in time to greet Marilyn coming into my room, also wearing a Hilton bathrobe.

I sat down on my bed and stretched out, and Marilyn joined me, Lying down next to me and turning to face me. "Have I told you today just how beautiful you are?", I asked.

She blushed. "I don't know."

"Well, you are absolutely gorgeous."

"I think you just like seeing me in my bikini."

I tugged loose the belt holding her robe together, and found her naked underneath. "You're not wearing a bikini now." I slipped a hand inside her robe and caressed the smooth skin beneath it. She still felt warm and slightly damp from the shower. My hand went behind her back and pulled her closer. Marilyn moaned happily and I moved my lips to hers. She returned my kisses feverishly, and reached between us and inside of my robe, to grab onto my stiff cock and start stroking me.

I had something a little different in mind, though. I maneuvered her so that she was laying on her back, but then I threw a leg over hers and kept her trapped there, with her legs spread apart. Then I took one of her hands, the one on her far side, and gently tugged it down between her legs. Much like I had done the other day, using my hand to guide hers in jerking me off, now I guided her hand into caressing her most intimate region.

Marilyn was breathing hard and turned her face towards mine. I kept her one hand between her legs, while her other hand stroked me slowly. "You've done this before, haven't you?" Marilyn gave me a guilty look and didn't answer, so I kept pressing her, even as I forced her fingers into her slit. "Haven't you!?", I demanded.

"Yes.", she finally whispered.

"Before you met me, or after?" Again she resisted and I stepped up the pressure some, lowering my face to her chest and lightly flicking my tongue across her nipples. "Before or after?"

"Both.", she admitted. "Stop it. I need you." She tried tugging me onto her, but I resisted.

"Is this how you did it?" She nodded silently. "Did you come when you did it?"

"Not like when you do it. Oh, just fuck me! Don't be so mean! I need you!"

"I want you to keep playing with yourself. I want you to come when you think about me. I want you to fuck yourself." I kept whispering in her ear how I wanted her to pleasure herself over and over, and Marilyn began orgasming, humping her ass up off the bed and whining for me to fuck her.

Eventually I relented. Pulling away, I grabbed one of the foil wrappers and tore it open, even as Marilyn watched me through glazed eyes. Then I had it on and I crawled over her. She was practically lifeless as I sank into her, except for the gasping sighs as I started fucking her. "Is this what you wanted me to do?", I teased her in a whisper.

"Uh huh."

"Tell me. Tell me what you want.", I ordered her.

"Don't be so mean, You know what I want." By this point Marilyn had her arms and legs wrapped around me, and was fucking herself up at me as fiercely as I was fucking my cock down into her greasy pussy.

"Tell me!", I demanded. She continued resisting until I smiled and pulled out, leaving just the tip of my cock inside her. "Tell me!"

Marilyn cried and tried to force me back deeper but then she gave in. "Oh, God, fuck me! I need you to fuck my pussy! Fuck my pussy! Fuck my pussy!"

I slammed back in and Marilyn shot off in another wailing orgasm. I kept pounding into her and she kept coming, and then I filled the rubber with a nice large load. I collapsed on top of her, and we were both breathing raggedly for several minutes. After a few minutes like that, I reached between us and grabbed the end of the rubber and rolled off, to remove the condom and drop it onto the floor.

"That is still gross.", she complained.

"You know the answer.", I reminded her.

Marilyn shucked off her bathrobe and lay back down in my arms. After a few minutes more, she reached up and over my head (pushing her tits into my face, but I didn't complain) and then she grabbed the book on the nightstand.

I sat up and tossed aside my own bathrobe, and then arranged the pillows so we could lean against them in bed and read side by side. Marilyn flipped through some pages and I commented on several that we had already done, basically missionary and a couple of girl-on-top varieties. I pointed out several more, in the doggy style, that I knew she would enjoy. Then when we flipped to the oral stage, she looked at me shyly. "I don't know how to do that. What if I do it wrong?"

I had to smile at that. "Well, as long as you don't bite it off, I'm sure the scarring will heal."

"That's not being very helpful."

"Okay, so let's give you a lesson." All this talk and looking at the book had already gotten me stiff. I had Marilyn scoot her butt down and roll between my legs so she was face to face with me, so to speak. I gave her a quick lesson in the male anatomy, with some highlights and important thoughts thrown in. "Now, one very important lesson is 'No Teeth!' Nothing turns off a guy quicker than the prospect of being bitten. Very important. Also, be very careful with the little guys down below." I lifted my nut sack up and Marilyn moved a finger to touch them. I gently swatted her fingers away. "Be very careful. Some guys like it when you touch them there and play with them, but not me. Don't fiddle with them."

She looked at me with a wrinkled brow. "But how do I touch you without touching you? I don't get it."

"All I'm saying is just be careful. Speaking in an evolutionary sense, exterior testicles are a really poor design decision."

She gave me a wry look at that.

Holding my cockshaft, I bent it down and aimed my cockhead at her face. "Here's a useful tip for all you amateurs out there. Most of the nerve endings are here at the end." I used my index finger to describe an area around the glans. "There's not so many back along the shaft." I pointed there as well. "That means you can provide maximum pleasure by concentrating up here, and simply jacking the shaft down here. Deep throat is vastly overrated."

"What are you, some kind of tour guide?", she asked.

"I told you, I teach the advanced classes."

"Well, behave before I break one of those rules you told me about earlier." She stuck out an index finger and moved it close to my balls.

"Yes, ma'am!", I replied contritely. Some guys like that sort of thing, but even looking funny at my nuts will make me cringe. I hadn't enjoyed my vasectomy at all, and if we ended up with kids and Marilyn wanted me to do it, it would be a very unpleasant repeat for me.

"What's deep throat?"

"I'll rent the movie someday." She looked mystified at that. Porn was not something on the curriculum back at UCA.

"So what's next?", she asked.

"Now we get to the lab work." Marilyn's eyes opened wide at that. I moved my cock around so that the head was near her lips. "Open wide and say 'Ahhh!' This won't hurt you a bit!"

She smiled and said, "You are really pushing your luck, Mister Instructor." Still, she did what I asked, and opened her mouth. I pushed the end of my cock inside, only about an inch or so, and she reflexively closed her lips around me.

Ohh, that felt so good, so warm and wet. "Oh, yeah, just like that." She suckled on the tip for another minute and then looked up at my eyes. "Yeah, just suck that and don't stop. Now, jack me off at the same time." I took one of her hands and put it on my cock, and she instinctively began pumping me. Now it was really feeling good! "Oh, that's good, don't stop, don't stop."

Marilyn was starting to get into a rhythm and was beginning a very pleasant suction on my cock. "Baby, just keep doing that, just like that ... don't stop, keep going ... don't change what you're doing, it feels good ... keep going, don't stop..." Historically, Marilyn had a tendency to keep trying to shift around or change technique and it was very distracting. Now I wanted to teach her correctly right from the start. "Just like that, don't stop ... can you taste me? ... don't stop, don't stop ... that's my pre-come ... keep going, just like that ... that means I'm getting close, oh God, it's so good ... don't stop ... when I come, keep sucking and pumping me, don't be surprised ... oh, so good..." Marilyn was a very apt pupil. She stayed in position with about an inch or two of my cock in her mouth, suctioning away, as she pumped my shaft.

"That's it, don't stop, don't stop..." I felt it racing up my shaft and suddenly spurt into her mouth. She backed off, and the second spurt hit her on the chin, but then she moved back and sucked me some more while she finished milking me dry. I just gasped and sagged back against the pillows with a dopey grin on my face.

Marilyn looked up at me with some come on her lips and chin. "I guess I did okay?"

"Baby, that was great."

She swallowed and grimaced. "It's not exactly champagne." She wiped off her face with her hand, and then stared at what was now on her hand. "It's actually kind of yucky."

I had no reply other than a shrug of my shoulders. "It is what it is. I'm told it gets better with practice, so I promise to keep licking your pussy if you keep sucking my cock."

"I think I need to clean up."

I followed Marilyn to the bathroom, where she washed her face and drank some water. I leaned against the door frame. "On the plus side, nobody has ever gotten pregnant from a blowjob. I am guessing that your Mom is not sucking your Dad's cock, not if you've got nine brothers and sisters."

"Gross! I don't even want to think about that!"

I laughed and crept up behind her and rubbed a finger down between her buttcheeks. "Remember that section in the book about this? Can't get pregnant that way either!"

"Gross, gross, gross!"

I laughed some more and went back to bed. I lay down and fell asleep.

I woke up with Marilyn wrapped up in her robe and snuggled up against me, snoring. If there is one bad thing about her, it's that she snores. Loud! The kids used to joke about it even. I can remember one night when she went to bed early, and started snoring so bad my children asked, incredulously, "You sleep with that?!" It never really bothered me. If she snored too loud, I'd elbow her in the back and she'd roll over and I could fall asleep before she started snoring again.

I pinched her nostrils together gently and after a moment she roused herself and started swatting at me blindly. She looked at me angrily and I said, "You were snoring."

"I wasn't!"

I nodded. "Yes, you were."

"I don't snore!" I just laughed at that. "Well, you snore, too!"

"No, I don't. I stayed up one night and proved it."

"Ha, ha, ha, Mister Smarty Pants!"

"You'd prefer I was a Dummy Pants?" That got her to stick her tongue out at me, which just made me laugh even more. "Get up and get dressed. Let's get something to eat."

"How formal are we going to be?" Marilyn swung her feet to the floor and stood up. She looked so young and innocent standing there, barefoot in that oversized bathrobe.

"Let's just go down the Boardwalk and get some pizza and a beer. Maybe tonight we can go out."

Marilyn simply smiled and nodded, and ten minutes later we were heading back down the Boardwalk in short, tee shirts, and sneakers. Although it was about six and the crowds were all thinning out, there were still a number of places open, and we stopped at the first one where we could get a few slices and a beer. I loaded mine up with red pepper and we sat down to look out at the beach. "So, what did you have in mind for tonight?", asked Marilyn.

"You know, I have no idea. I mean, it's Friday night, there must be something to do around here. Right?"

"Don't ask me. You're the guy who's been here before."

I gave her a sheepish shrug to my shoulders. "Yeah, but not like this. I think the last time I came to the beach I was fifteen, and no way were my parents letting me out on my own." I looked around the pizza place and got an idea. "When venturing into a new and unknown territory, it is best to ask members of the indigenous population for assistance."

"What are you talking about?"

"Let's ask the natives!" I turned around and waved to a couple of waitresses hanging around the counter. They saw me and looked at me curiously, so I gestured for them to come over. They were a couple of pretty and well tanned sun bleached blondes about our age. Once they came over, I asked them, "So, is there any action in this town on a Friday night?"

"Sure. What did you have in mind?", asked our waitress, a girl slightly shorter and blonder than the other girl.

"Oh, almost anything, I suppose. Any good bars or dance clubs around?"

The two girls both started talking at once, and we got names and directions for several places back off the beach. We thanked them and talked it over. Afterwards, we walked for a while and then went back to the Hilton, and I cornered a couple of the desk clerks and asked them the same question. A couple of the names they gave coincided with the ones we got from before, so that was where we would head.

"What should we wear?", asked Marilyn. She was pretty much a small town girl and out of her element, and Utica is not what one would call a hub of excitement. I wasn't sure if she had ever actually been to a bar or night club.

"It's pretty casual around here.", commented one of the clerks.

"Yeah, it's not like Manhattan.", said the other, in a definite Brooklyn accent.

"I'm guessing clean khakis and a sport shirt for me?" The two girls nodded, and I continued, "And maybe a miniskirt and top and heels for her?"

Marilyn's eyes widened at the thought, but the two clerks just grinned. They leaned over the counter and looked at her, and one girl, a short brunette, said, "Oh, definitely!"

"Absolutely!", agreed the second, a tall and skinny redhead. "God, I wish I had your figure! If you've got it, flaunt it!"

I laughed and pulled a shell shocked Marilyn over to the elevators. "I keep telling you, you're gorgeous. Now you've had independent confirmation!"

Marilyn blushed. "So what do you want me to wear?", she asked when we got to the suite.

I wrapped my arms around her from behind. "I want you to wear your shortest little skirt, your tightest little top, and your highest heels. ", I whispered to her. "You are going to look so good, nobody will notice if I show up looking like a homeless derelict!"

"You're crazy!", she protested, but then she went off to her room, while I went off to change out of my beach clothes.

I knew Marilyn would take between half an hour and an hour to change, so I took a quick shower and a shave. My outfit was pretty simple - clean khakis, a brightly colored short sleeve Hawaiian shirt, and my deck shoes. It wasn't suitable for a Manhattan nightclub, but this wasn't Manhattan.

I was waiting in the common room, where I had made a couple of drinks for us. Marilyn's I had left in her room while she was in the bathroom. She came out looking a little nervous, and my heart just about stopped. "Is this all right?", she asked.

"Holy shit!", I exclaimed. There was no way her parents knew she owned clothes that looked that good, because they would have locked her away in a nunnery! She had on a dressy red halter top, sort of in a tie-dye pattern, a tight little denim skirt that stopped at least six inches above the knee, and these high heeled sandals that lifted her about three inches and did the most amazing things to her ass and legs. "Wow!" I set my drink down and came closer.

"Is that a good wow or a bad wow?"

As I got closer I picked up her scent, a light floral that just magnified everything. I couldn't take my eyes off her legs. Marilyn isn't all that tall, and she doesn't have long legs, but oh, that shape - you just wanted to start licking at the bottom and work your way up! They looked so very nice and toned, if still fairly white, and so smooth and lickable!

"Oh, God, you look so good!"

Marilyn looked relieved, and turned to look in the mirror over the buffet, exposing the back of her halter top. It only had a couple of small straps at the bottom and the tie around the neck, exposing almost all of her back and sides. I think I was whimpering when I got to her.

I wrapped my hands around her from behind and inhaled that scent. I think it was something called "Rape and Pillage", or at least it should have been called that! I buried my face in her neck. "You look amazing!" I nibbled her collar and Marilyn moaned at the touch. I brought my hands up and cupped her breasts, naked except for the halter, and felt her nipples responding to me.

"Oh, Carling!", she sighed.

It was too much for me. I had to have her, right then and there, and I told her so! "I need you! Right now!"

"Carling?"

I popped the tie holding her top up and watched in the mirror as it slipped down, exposing those perfect tits. Then I licked down her back and knelt behind her. I pushed that little denim skirt up around her waist, so that I could pull her little cotton panties down and off her legs. Then I stood up behind her and pressed myself against her from behind.

"I am going to take you! Now!"

"Carl?"

I reached into my pocket and pulled out a foil wrapped condom, and then undid my slacks and pushed them and my briefs down. I kept Marilyn facing the mirror as I put the rubber on, and then I nudged her legs apart. We hadn't done doggy style yet, but I couldn't wait. That perfect little bubble butt, and those gorgeous legs, now at the perfect height, thanks to her heels; those amazing tits staring back at me from the mirror; that intoxicating perfume - "I need you!" I put my hands to her hips and bent my knees enough so that my wrapped cock slipped between her thighs. I reached around and guided my cock into her and was happy to see that she was as excited as I was. Her pussy was drenched.

I pushed forward, hard and fast, and Marilyn gasped. "God, I need you! I need to have you! I need to fuck you!" I pounded my cock into her from behind.

"Fuck me, fuck me!", she begged, panting. "Fuck me!"

It didn't take either of us long to come. I was too far gone, too excited, to last beyond the orgasm she had, and I pumped my load into the tip of the condom while her pussy was spasming around me. We humped mindlessly for a few moments more, as we came down from the orgasmic high. Then I looked at her reflection in the mirror. "I love you so much!"

She smiled, and then started giggling. "I love you too, but what got into you!"

"You are so amazing! I don't know if it was your legs, your tits, or that incredible perfume that drove me crazy!" I pulled away and removed the rubber, leaving me with a wet dick. Now what? I glanced down and saw Marilyn's panties laying on the floor at our feet. I picked them up and used them to wipe up with.

Marilyn caught me doing this and gasped in indignation. "Carling, I was going to wear them!"

I just gave her a shit eating grin. "Not anymore!" I tugged her denim miniskirt back down.

"You're kidding me!"

"Not one little bit!" I wrapped her in my arms and kissed her thoroughly, enough to have her melt in my arms.

Marilyn capitulated, if not quite gracefully. She retied her halter and adjusted it and her skirt back into position. "Well, why not?"

I leered at her. "Because you look so good I'll probably need to do that at least two or three times more tonight."

She shook her head, but was smiling nevertheless. "You're nuts. Is that why you had a rubber in your pocket?"

"I'm a good Boy Scout. Be Prepared!"

"You and your Boy Scouts!", she said in an exasperated tone. She checked her hair in the mirror. "Let's go before you get any more bright ideas!"

"Babe, I am full of bright ideas." I had to tuck myself in and adjust everything, too, and then I grabbed her hand and pulled her out of the suite before she thought about it anymore.

Down in the lobby more than a few heads turned to watch us as we walked across the open expanse and out to the valet area. I should say that they were watching her, since she looked simply amazing. Marilyn was a bit more nervous. "I feel like everybody is staring at me.", she whispered.

"They are staring at us. They think you are beautiful and they think I'm the luckiest guy on the planet!" I was definitely a lot smoother on this go-around than when I was on the first time through. I got a big smile out of Marilyn for that. I grinned and leaned over to whisper in her ear while the valet went to get her car. "Actually they're all looking at you, and wondering if you're the kind of girl who lets her boyfriend use her for hot sex."

That got me an elbow to the ribs. "Maybe I'm the one using you for hot sex. Ever thought of that?"

"You just keep right on using me, honey. I promise not to complain." That earned me another elbow in the ribs, but she was smiling afterwards.

We went to a couple of places that night. Marilyn didn't really like the first place, so we had a drink and left. The second place we stayed at for several hours, dancing and having a few drinks. It was fairly crowded, but it was a Friday night and was a young crowd. If she was worried about anybody noticing her, she didn't have to worry. There were a lot of hot looking girls there, and some dressed in quite a bit less. I continued to tease her throughout the night, whispering that guys were trying to look up her skirt (impossible in the low light), her skirt was riding up while we were slow dancing (impossible since the skirt was pleasantly tight on her rump), and the like. It was crowded enough she spent a fair bit of time sitting on my lap, so I traced my fingers over her knees and thighs, causing her to shiver. I also whispered in her ear, asking if her pussy was wet and if she wanted me to screw her right there in the club.

Around midnight I took her back to the Hilton, by which time she was a bundle of jagged and oversexed nerves. We never even made it to a bedroom; I just pulled my pants down and sat on the couch, and pulled on a rubber, and Marilyn kneeled over me and fucked me on the couch, madly humping me. She was just wildly sexed up and drenching with desire - no, need! Afterwards we went to bed and used another couple of condoms before falling asleep.

Chapter 35: Meet the Parents, Part 2

And so our vacation went. We stayed until the following Friday. One day I drove us up to Rehoboth and showed her around that small town. Another day we drove down to Assateague and went to the National Park. One night we drove down there very late and parked in a deserted spot, went skinny-dipping, and made love in the dunes. Most days we worked on our tans and practiced various things in the Kama Sutra book. We used those two boxes of rubbers I had bought and ended up buying a third!

Friday we needed to leave. For one thing, Marilyn's period hit her and put an end to our Kama Sutra practice sessions. For another, we had to go back home. After checking out, we drove back to Towson and over to the bar where Tusker and Tessa worked. I picked up my car keys and gave them a big box of salt water taffy. We also talked about all of our plans for the future, and I really pushed Tusker on the idea of going back to school, at least part-time, and taking some business classes. I got their address and gave them one of my cards, with the frat phone number penciled in.

Tessa had giggled, "You and your business cards!" I had gotten some new cards printed up freshman year, with a Troy PO Box number, and no phone listing. Freshman year I didn't have a phone I could accept calls on, and in the frat we had several. We had a pay phone down in the foyer, and there were a number of private lines among the brothers. Usually one guy would front the account and handle billing, and we would run party lines to two or three nearby rooms. I handled this one year. In those days, phone calls were expensive, especially long distance, and you would have to go through the itemized phone bills and sort each long distance call to a user, and bill them. Major pain in the balls!

From there, Marilyn followed me to the storage unit I had been renting since I moved out of my apartment. We crammed everything but the furniture into our two cars, and I paid for another year's rent on the unit. I had already rented a storage unit in Troy. The plan was that I would move all of my stuff north in one or two trips, so that I was effectively living entirely in New York. For all intents and purposes I was no longer a Maryland resident. I had already registered as a voter in New York. I wondered if my father was still claiming me as a dependent. I hoped he didn't get in trouble if he was.

It had been a long day. We drove for a few hours more, until we got about half way through New Jersey, before pulling off the road and getting a room for the night. Marilyn was somewhat embarrassed by her monthly visitor and apologized to me that we couldn't make love. I just smiled and told her it wasn't important, and let her snuggle in my arms until she fell asleep. It was a very pleasant and comfortable feeling. I had always enjoyed sleeping with Marilyn, even if it was simply snuggling up against her spoon fashion. I wanted to keep doing it.

Saturday we drove the rest of the way to Troy, and then dumped my stuff at the storage unit. Suddenly both our cars rose up off the springs! Then we drove over to the frat and moved into Bradley's and my room on the third floor. He wasn't scheduled to arrive for another day or so, so we could spend the night together without worrying about him. It was a chaste night. Sunday, Marilyn gave me a good-bye kiss and headed home.

Sunday almost all of the other brothers showed up, including Joe. It was the start of Work Week, an annual bacchanalia dedicated to patching up the house. This was under the control of one of the two paid positions in the house, the House Manager. The other paid position was the Kitchen Steward. Pay was set as equal to room and board, so no cash actually exchanged hands. I already described the Kitchen Steward job, which I had previously had. House Manager was not my thing. It called for somebody with very practical hands-on skills in repairing an antebellum Federal style monstrosity. Something was always falling apart in the place, it was generally a death trap if a fire occurred, and the furnace and water heater were always in need of repair. It was a thankless position.

Work Week was the week before classes started, and attendance was mandatory. During the day, the House Manager broke us into teams to do various repairs and maintenance - lawn work, fixing the fence, painting all the trim, patching and painting drywall, and anything else he could dream of. At night, we applied these same techniques to our own rooms. Joe and I painted everything and stripped and varnished our desks and bunk beds. It isn't totally work, though. Every night was a drunken bash around the swimming pool. Marty, Ricky, and I told the others about our adventures on the road, and we all swapped lies about our girlfriends over the summer. Okay, they weren't lies in my case, but I really didn't go into too much detail; Marilyn would not be amused.

Barry was running the phone system on the third floor of the main house that year. I used my knowledge of running twisted pair phone cable and rearranged telephones for both Joe and myself. By mid-week I got my first letter from Marilyn, a syrupy love letter that made several references to the fun we had in Ocean City. She used strawberry scented stationery with little hearts all over it, the sort of thing a fourteen year old girl uses in junior high.

Back when I rubbed that lamp, I still had those letters from college from her, stuffed in the back of a file cabinet. Some things you don't throw out.

I called her at her home after I read her letter a few times. We talked for about half an hour, until Bradley came in and I hung up. No way did I need him hearing me talking to her. We discussed when we could see each other again. She couldn't say anything openly, since I think she was talking on the kitchen telephone, but when I asked her if she had gone to Planned Parenthood, she said, "First thing I did Monday morning." That made me smile. We decided to wait a few weeks until after school started before trying a visit. I was to travel to Utica to meet the Lefleur family. The plan was to do this in about three weeks.

That didn't work out. Three weeks out I caught the flu, along with about half the house and RPI. I could barely make my way down the stairs to the bathroom, let alone a hundred miles across the state. By the time I recovered enough the next weekend, Marilyn had a cold. We put things off another weekend.

Scholastically, I was taking all senior level math courses by now, with a grad level Information Theory course tossed in for good measure. The grad courses weren't going to be a problem. What I was worried about was my doctoral dissertation. It was already pretty definite that Professor Rhineburg was going to be my thesis adviser, and we made the relationship formal. He taught my class on Information Theory, and it looked like that was going to be my area of specialty.

The nice thing about RPI for grad studies is that they don't pin you into neat little boxes. They specialize in interdisciplinary studies. Many students do degrees mixing engineering and a science, or two different scientific disciplines. If somebody could think up a way to mix chemical engineering and French literature, and find a way to sell it to the academic committee, they'd be allowed to get a degree in it. I was thinking of mixing two different fields of Set Theory together, probably Information Theory and Topology, both of which I had always found fascinating.

This time around I kept my vices under much better control. Last time I had spent a lot of time smoking dope with Andy Kowalchuk, and not spending any time on school work. I cut that shit way back, not out of any moral difficulty with it, but simply because it was too distracting. I remembered back when I went to grad school the first time. Suddenly I was going to work days and school nights and I was commuting to grad school. Later, when I got married and had kids, it really hit me, just how much time I had wasted goofing off. By putting even a little effort into time management, and not being stoned 24/7, I actually was able to go to class and learn a thing or two. I went from a C average to straight As.

Eventually both Marilyn and I were healthy, and it was my turn to visit her. I let Marilyn give me directions to her house (which were wrong, in any case; like I said, she can't find her way out of a paper bag) but I already knew perfectly well how to get there. Friday afternoon I packed my trusty B4 and tossed it into the Galaxie, and headed out for a road trip.

It wasn't really all that ridiculously far. I ran down 787 to 90, and then over to the Thruway. From there you go straight west to Exit 31, which dumps you off in North Utica. Cross over the river into Utica and get on 5S going west, and stay on it after it turns into 69. The Lefleurs had a farm about halfway between Utica and the Oriskany battlefield, but they didn't run a farm. Instead they had about fifty acres that they used to run Lefleur Homes, a mobile home dealership.

It took me about two hours to get there, since the speed limit was now at 55. I pulled into the parking lot about four or so. I parked next to the Lefleur's farmhouse and out in front of the double-wide trailer they used for an office, and got out and stretched. It really felt like going back in time! I had spent gargantuan amounts of time here professionally before. I swore to myself that would not be repeated!

I was standing there a few feet from my car, just looking around and taking it all in, when suddenly I hear, "Carling! Carling!" I looked around and smiled to see a little brunette whirlwind come running across the parking lot. Marilyn was dressed in jeans and a tee shirt and sneakers and was calling my name as she ran towards me. I grinned and she didn't even slow down, she just jumped into my arms and wrapped herself around me. "I've missed you, I've missed you!", she said repeatedly, in between kissing me.

I just laughed. It was a good thing I was in shape and working out, because Marilyn was completely off the ground, her arms wrapped around my neck and her legs up around my waist. My hands were under her butt and holding her up as I kissed her back. "I guess you did miss me!", I told her.

"I did, I did, I did!", Marilyn replied, kissing me even more.

I started slowly walking towards the house, still carrying her. "You know, this isn't the easiest way to carry a person."

"If you loved me, you'd carry me!"

I snorted at that. "If that's the case, we're making a small adjustment!" I moved to drop her and Marilyn squealed and lowered her feet to the ground. I simply bent forward and grabbed her around the waist and hoisted her up and over my shoulder like a sack of cement.

Marilyn squawked! "Put me down!"

"Hey, I love you, so I have to carry you." I gave her a loud smack on the bottom and continued towards the house, with her squirming and fighting me all the way to the door. I looked the house over as I approached. Marilyn's mother was watching us through the kitchen window, and one of her brothers was looking at us through the glass in the door.

"Put me down!", she demanded. I simply shifted her around a touch, freed up a hand, and opened the door to the house. Her brother laughed and scampered away, and I carried Marilyn inside. I dumped her unceremoniously inside the door.

I leaned down and gave her a quick kiss. "That will teach you to challenge me on something."

"Very funny!"

Her little brother came romping up, and I recognized him as Michael, who must have been about five or six at the time. He held his hands up to me and said, "Pick me up." Marilyn looked quite amused at this, so I picked him up. I lifted him up to eye level, and then higher, over my head.

"Now what?", I asked.

"Put me down!" I put him down, and he repeated, "Pick me up!" I picked him back up.

"He's your problem now.", commented his sister. Marilyn left me in the living room with her brother and went off to the kitchen.

"Put me down!" "Pick me up!" "Put me down!" Michael was having a grand old time, with me using him as a set of free weights.

After a few more lifts, I flipped him upside down and carried him into the kitchen, holding him up by his feet. "Look what I caught! I think he's kind of small. Should I throw him back?" I held him out towards his mother.

"Put me down! Put me down!"

"I don't want him!", she said, snorting and smiling.

I turned towards Marilyn. "Here, you take one leg and let's make a wish!"

Marilyn laughed and grabbed one of Michael's legs, as he kept yelling for me to let him go. Eventually the noise level got too loud and Mrs. Lefleur told us to put him down. I slowly dropped him to the floor, and let him loose. Michael scampered away, but only after asking me to pick him up again. Mrs. Lefleur shooed him out of the kitchen, and then turned to face us.

"Mom, I'd like you to meet Carl Buckman."

"It's a pleasure to meet you, Mrs. Lefleur." I held my hand out and she gave it a solid shake.

Harriet Lefleur did everything solidly, because she was a very solid woman. A large woman. A hefty woman. She was also a short woman. Marilyn was only 5'4" tall, but she was at least an inch taller than her mother. Harriet wasn't quite as wide as she was tall, but seemed to be approaching that size. She was a good person, and a nice person, but a very unattractive person. When I first met her, I thought it was because the stress of having ten kids had taken a toll on her body, but then I saw the wedding pictures, back when she was nineteen. That was when I realized she hadn't just been hit by the ugly stick, somebody had smacked her with the entire damned tree! She was from some tiny village north of Plattsburgh up by the Canadian border, and all I could think of her husband, also from the same small village, was that there must have been some mighty slim pickings on the frontier!

It was then that Big Bob Lefleur came in, through a side door to the kitchen. Big Bob's nickname was tongue in cheek and given to him by his kids, like calling a bald guy 'Curley' or a tall guy 'Shorty'. Big Bob was anything but big. He was only about 5'9', maybe, and slim. He was one of the most incredibly depressing people ever put on the planet, with a perpetual hangdog look, permanently slumped shoulders, and an ever present sense of foreboding. We used to say that when things were bad, he would be worried they would stay bad, and when things were good, he would be worried they were about to go bad. He would ultimately be diagnosed both as depressed and bipolar, a hell of a combination.

On the other hand, Big Bob really got his nickname because he thought big thoughts! He was an absolute dynamo in his business. He came up with a dozen ideas a day; eleven would be totally off the wall and useless, but the twelfth? That twelfth idea might actually make you some money!

He was an incredibly complex guy. He had grown up much like my father, in a Depression era farmhouse without electricity or water, but unlike my Dad, had dropped out of school at 16 to get a job. He had never graduated high school, but still managed to build the largest trailer dealership in New York. Harriet wasn't much different, but she had at least gotten through high school. They married when they were 19, and started having kids at 20, and never stopped. They were also the purest form of white trash I had ever seen! Christmas lights were kept up all year long. Have you ever wondered who buys those singing fish on plaques you see on late night television commercials? They didn't buy just one! They bought them for family and friends! Forget about going to Vegas or Europe or Florida for a vacation - send them to Dollywood!

Lest anyone think I didn't like them, that really wasn't the case. We had absolutely nothing in common save their daughter. However, they had many fine qualities. They were absolutely scrupulously honest, and treated their customers far better than the industry average. While I had my differences in how they raised their kids, I had to admit they did a fantastic job - 13 children all married off and gainfully employed, with no drug or alcohol problems and nobody ever in jail. They were deeply involved in their church and donated heavily to it.

They could also be said to be mean spirited at times, treating family worse than the employees. They had absolutely zero interests outside of the Catholic Church and the family. They certainly considered me to be a burden inflicted on them by God, despite my ace record in sales and management for them, and somehow got the idea I was a drunk and couldn't hold a job. Again, very complex people, and I spent far more time with them than my own family. I worked for them 14 years before Marilyn and I bought a piece of the pie, along with some of her siblings.

I liked them, but I wasn't planning on a repeat of my previous history with them. Once was quite sufficient.

Big Bob came in and saw me, and Marilyn introduced me to her father. I shook his hand and he mumbled something to me, and then he kissed Harriet. Then he grabbed a beer from the refrigerator and headed out of the room, not saying anything to either Marilyn or me. I glanced at Marilyn curiously, but she just smiled. That was a good greeting, as I recalled.

Marilyn sat down on a bar stool at the kitchen island, so I sat down next to her. It was surprisingly quiet in the house, although I suppose that is a relative term when there are ten kids around. Michael kept running through, and Harriet kept shooing him out. A little girl, Ruth, about two or so, wandered through and Marilyn had to change her diaper, but as soon as that was done, she wandered away again. The newest addition, maybe a month or two old, was Peter, and he was sleeping and rocking in a little baby chair gizmo on the end of the counter. Otherwise, that was it. None of Marilyn's other brothers were around.

Harriet wasn't making dinner, since it was Friday. This was always pizza night, for decades! It was a good thing, too, since I was not looking forward to dining there otherwise. Marilyn was without question the worst cook in the world, but she came by it honestly. Her mother was the second worst cook in the world. I always found it significant that every single one of the kids found a spouse (even the girls) who was a massively better cook than what they grew up with. Partly this was because of Big Bob, whose taste buds must have been surgically removed as a child. Salt and pepper were exotic foreign spices. Worse, all meats had to be cooked thoroughly. Forget rare, even well done wasn't well done enough! If it was at all moist and flavorful, that simply meant it needed to be cooked some more, to make sure it was thoroughly cooked. I planned to take Marilyn to dinner on Saturday night, and make sure I departed on Sunday before supper.

The quiet was short lived. By about five-thirty teenage boys started filing into the kitchen, to be surprised by the new face sitting there. Part of Marilyn's problem was that after she came along, there were seven boys, all of whom she was expected to help take care of, since she was a girl. By now she was treated as the second mother, only without the respect that their real mother got. Most of the boys treated her like furniture. Then again, in a lot of ways, it was way better than my family, even on the last go-around. Like I said, I generally preferred her family's company to mine. Two boys were given some cash and sent out to pick up the pizzas. Here's the list of family members:

Marilyn, my beloved, just turned 19 over the summer. Yes, she was actually older than I was, by a few months. I never let her forget this, that she was an older woman. It made my birthdays so much easier.

Matthew - 18, just out of high school and driving a truck for Lefleur. He was a pretty good guy, cranky as hell at times, but a good friend. He and Marilyn basically bracketed me in age.

Mark - 17, senior at Notre Dame. Very smart, he ended up going into sales for Lefleur. He had arrogance by the bucket load! He made me look humble. He rose to be Number 2 in the firm, and when Big Bob didn't name him boss in the mid-90s, he took his marbles and went home. He quit and bought a dealership 60 miles away and went into business for himself. There was a huge amount of bad blood over that! Good businessman, and a good person, but not on Marilyn's or my list of good friends.

Luke - 15, sophomore at Notre Dame. Ended up running the contracting business at Lefleur. Not the most personable fellow. Actually, kind of a rude prick. Half the company wanted nothing to do with him, including me. He had on a cast on his left arm, from playing football. All of the boys were jocks, and over the years there were enough casts and bandages to pay for an orthopedic wing at the local hospital. That always made me think that while they were jocks, they weren't good jocks.

John - 13, freshman at Notre Dame. Very personable and very smart. John ended up actually running the show at Lefleur after we all bought it. He was a dream to work for. He handled setup and service. We became good friends.

Gabriel - 11, junior high at St. Peter's. Also very personable and smart. He ended up running sales at Lefleur. I spent half my time reporting to him and the other half reporting to John, but it really wasn't confusing. Also a good friend. He went to college at Siena for business.

Rafael - 10, elementary at St. Peter's. Extremely volatile. Worked in sales and accounting for the company, but I can't say he was any great shakes at either. Half the time I wondered how he managed to survive, but a rising tide raises all boats, so to speak. Most of his positions amounted to where he could do the least damage. Very prickly, and not a friend. He went to college at St. John Fisher for history.

Michael - 6, just started St. Peter's. Very friendly and a natural born salesman. By 16 he was working for Lefleur in sales, and rose to Number 2 in sales. He died in his mid-40s from cancer. A hell of a nice guy!

Ruth - 2. There was a four year span between the oldest eight and the youngest five, and Ruth was the first of the 'second family.' There was actually some resentment among these kids, and most of them wanted nothing to do with the company. Ruth was quite unfortunate, in that she looked a lot like her mother (ugly and morbidly obese) and had the IQ and personality of a rock. Literally! We employed her in positions where she could do the least damage, and then monitored her closely to fix what she still managed to fuck up. She was our flower girl.

Peter - newborn. Peter wanted nothing to do with the company and went to college to become a physical therapist. Nice guy, married a tiny little redhead who was smoking hot, and they had four kids. He was the ring bearer at our wedding.

Still to come, in future years:

Paul - Worked for many years as our dispatcher, but then transitioned to sales, where he proved to be an absolute genius! Nice guy, he married one of our salesladies.

Sarah - Grew up to become a school teacher. When Harriet and Big Bob passed away, she became one of the executors, and was an incredibly meddlesome troublemaker at it. She made very few friends in the 'first family.'

Miriam - Also became a physical therapist. She was also a meddlesome troublemaker when Harriet died. Harriet developed liver cancer, and Sarah, Miriam, and Ruth would argue over the treatment. Harriet ended up listening to the last one around, so she ended up changing her treatment and doctors several times, to the point where nothing could save her. Then the three of them repeated the process when Big Bob got melanoma two years later.

An incredibly diverse crew, to be sure. One thing to notice is that all the names came from the Bible. The boys started off with the four gospels, followed by the three named angels, and then they moved on to the saints. All the girls were named after saints or important Biblical figures. Even Marilyn! Within the house she was known as Mary, and when I asked her why, she explained that her father had named her Mary Lynette, after the Virgin Mary, and his baby sister Lynette. Unfortunately, the nurse was hard of hearing and changed it to Marilyn. Nobody noticed until she was enrolled at UCA, where the nuns demanded they use the names on their birth certificates.

Most of the older boys were quite mystified when I showed up. I don't think a single one of them thought of their older sister as a person in her own right, deserving of a life and love of her own. I was the first guy she had ever brought home. Most of the boys found me a curiosity but got over it quickly. Matthew saw me as a guy his age and we talked together fine. From Luke on down the boys were quite a bit younger, and they basically ignored me.

Little Michael didn't ignore me, however. I was the new friend who picked him up and played with him. After listening to me talk to his parents for a few minutes he popped up and asked, "How come you talk funny?"

Marilyn and his mother gasped and told him he was being rude, but I just laughed at him. "That's because I'm a southerner and y'all are just a bunch of Yankees.", I told him. I wasn't overly surprised by this. I had always had a strong southern accent, and simply hadn't realized it until I went north to school. On my first trip through I had lost it almost totally within my first year, but I would still pick it right back up whenever I traveled south. This time I hadn't lost it, and I didn't think I would. For one thing, every time I went to boot camp or other training, I would be in the heart of Dixie!

"What's a Yankee?", asked the little boy.

"A really lousy baseball player.", That earned me a lot of grief from Michael's older brothers, most of whom were Yankees fans. "Just remember, buster, that where I come from, y'all are the ones that talk funny!"

Marilyn gave me a raspberry for that.

Mark, on the other hand, thought of me as a challenge. He was very smart, and more than a little brazen and egotistical. He would always try to push his luck with Marilyn and me, knowing that Marilyn would never go up against him and that she would keep me in line. Tonight was no different. After he and Matthew brought back the pizza and wings, he decided he needed to sit at the bar, so he took Marilyn's barstool. No big deal, since she wasn't sitting on it at the time, and the rule is, 'you snooze, you lose.' However, he ended up yanking it out from underneath her as she started to sit on it, and she fell on the floor. Everybody stared at Marilyn, although nobody offered to help her up, and he looked at me with a smirk.

Bouncing him off the wall would not get me in anybody's good graces, especially Marilyn's, so I simply stood up and helped her to her feet. As I did, I heard him snicker behind me. I took a deep breath, and Marilyn grabbed my arm. "Don't!", she said lowly.

I took another deep breath and nodded to her. I turned to face Mark, and saw all of the family watching us. I slid my own barstool over to Marilyn and allowed her to use it, and then looked Mark in the face. "Mark, do you have a girlfriend?" I knew he did, since he married her a year after Marilyn and I got married.

"Yeah, why?", he said with a touch of bravado.

"Just curious. Suppose somebody you had never met came into her kitchen and knocked her to the floor in front of you. What would you do?" I reached into one of the pizza boxes and pulled out a slice of pepperoni pizza, but I never took my eyes off of him. Marilyn put her hand on my arm, but otherwise kept quiet.

Suddenly Mark's eyes widened. I think he decided that maybe the new guy wasn't somebody to test quite so boldly. He grabbed a slice of pizza and headed out to the living room. I took his abandoned bar stool and sat down next to Marilyn. I looked at her and gave her an innocent smile. "Can I get a beer?"

She smiled back and said, "You just behave yourself!" She got up and grabbed me a cold one from the fridge. I just smiled back, and nobody, including her parents, said anything about Mark and me.

Harriet instead asked, "What are you studying, Carl?"

"I'm going to school for mathematics, ma'am.", I answered.

"What do you do then?", asked Big Bob. "Become a math teacher?" He wasn't asking in a rude fashion, but simply because he had no idea what college graduates did when they left college. The only thing he could imagine a scientist doing was working in some kind of school teaching science.

It struck me as a touch odd, so I looked over at Marilyn. "You never told them?"

"It never came up.", she answered, with a shrug.

I looked back at her parents. "I'm sorry. I thought Marilyn had already told you. I'm going to be a soldier. I'm on a military scholarship."

"A soldier!?", squawked both her parents, loudly. I should have expected it. The Lefleur family was the biggest bunch of draft dodgers ever collected in a single place. There must be a gene for public service, and if so, the Lefleur family is completely lacking in this trait. The entire concept of joining the Army, and not just being drafted, but actually volunteering, was utterly alien to them. This actually led to a certain degree of friction between our two families, but it was just one of many reasons we were different.

The room fairly erupted with questions. The only soldiers these people ever had dealt with were the enlisted soldiers up at Fort Drum who would sometimes come down and buy a trailer. Marilyn's parents were rather distressed, in that their daughter was marrying somebody stupid enough to go into the Army, and couldn't come right out and say it to her face while he was sitting there. Likewise, her brothers all found this rather fascinating, if strange. The gene had skipped them as well, along with all their children. Of all of the grandchildren, only Parker ended up serving.

"You're going into the Army?", repeated Big Bob. Sort of like, 'You're becoming a child molester?'

"Yes, sir. It's an ROTC scholarship. They pay for four years of college and I need to serve four years as an officer."

He looked at Harriet with a degree of consternation, and then shrugged. "Does the Army need mathematicians?"

It was my turn to shrug. "I wouldn't know, sir. I intend to apply for combat arms. I'd like artillery, but I'd also go for either infantry or armor."

They stared at me in utter disbelief, completely ignoring the look on Marilyn's face. Her feelings were quite a bit more complicated. In many ways she hated the military, having a very idealistic view of the world. 'Fighting never solves anything' and so forth. On the other hand, she was also proud of our son and his decision to serve, and understood the hard work and sacrifice involved. On this trip through, she was equally proud of me. When I felt her take my hand, I looked over at her to see her smiling at me. That made it all worth it.

It was Harriet's turn to speak. "But that could be dangerous. You could be killed."

"Yes ma'am. I had a second cousin who died in Viet Nam. I never met him, but I heard he died in '68 or so. Another couple of my ancestors died in the Civil War."

Gabriel popped up and asked, "Which side?"

I smiled at that, and grabbed a second slice of pizza. "Both, actually. One died at Chancellorsville and the other died at Gettysburg, but I couldn't say which side they were fighting for. I only know we played both sides of the bet."

"Which one are you descended from?"

"Neither. They had a third brother who was too young to enlist, so he stayed home and worked the farm. Pretty much my whole family has served, or at least the men. Buckmans have been serving the country since the War of 1812.", I explained.

"You're kidding!", commented a horrified Big Bob.

"All of you?", asked an intrigued Luke. He was a young teenager and the idea was fascinating, at least in a sense.

I nodded and chewed my pizza. Once I swallowed I gave the family history. "Marilyn saw some of this when she visited the house. We actually have lists and photos of servicemen. My great-great-whatever came over from England in the 1750s and bought property and became a farmer in Maryland."

"The 1750s? What side was he on in the Revolutionary War?", interrupted Matthew.

"Neither. He was a farmer and wanted to stay out of it. Anyway, he had a bunch of kids and after the war they all thought of themselves as Americans. One of the younger ones joined the Maryland Militia, and was in the War of 1812, and ever since then somebody has been in the service."

"Such as?", he asked.

"Well, his youngest son was in the Mexican War. He got his foot shot off, and went home and back to the farm. He had three sons, two of whom died in the Civil War, and the third had some more sons. For the next couple of generations, the boys joined the Navy. My great-grandfather was at the Battle of Manila Bay. So, after him, my grandfather went into the Army and served in France in World War I. My father was in the Navy during the Second World War. Now it's my turn.", I finished.

Harriet and Big Bob just stared at each other. I was sure that Marilyn was going to get an earful after I left.

"We're in ROTC, too!", piped up Luke, pointing at himself and John.

I looked at the two boys. "Really? Aren't you a little young for that?"

"We're in Navy ROTC.", he said.

I gave him a curious look, and John added, "Junior ROTC. Navy Junior ROTC."

I remembered that Notre Dame actually had an NJ-ROTC program, although I never could figure out why. I think the kids enrolled to get out of gym. They also got to wear uniforms, and the ROTC Ball was the big prom type dance at the end of the year. "Junior ROTC? What's that like?"

I let them yammer away about it. Neither Matthew nor Mark had joined it, but Luke, John, and Gabriel all joined. This was the closest to any form of service anybody in the family ever attempted. Finally I asked, "What happens if you quit?"

"You have to take gym. Why?", asked Luke.

I grinned back at him. "If I quit, they hand me a rifle and ship me overseas as a private. It's a little different."

After dinner everybody sort of moved out to the living room, where the kids turned on the television. The older boys all left, and Marilyn's parents plopped themselves down in armchairs. I ended up on the sofa, with Marilyn curled up next to me. I whispered in her ear, "I don't think your folks think much of me becoming a soldier."

"It's pretty unusual in our family. Nobody's ever enlisted, at least as far as I've ever heard."

"Bunch of draft dodgers!", I whispered, at which she gave me an elbow in the side. I laughed and whispered, "Don't tell them I ran away from home when I was sixteen, or that I'm a pagan. That would drive them totally crazy."

She grinned up at me. "You're not a pagan. You're a heathen. There's a difference."

"Trust me. As soon as they learn, I'll be the main attraction at the next bonfire!" That got me some more giggles and we chatted quietly about the differences between our families. Despite the enormous differences, the Lefleurs were good people, and over the course of my lifetime, I ended up spending much more time with them than with my own family.

After a bit, I asked her, "What's on the schedule for tomorrow?"

"Well, we have church at four, but other than that, nothing. What did you have in mind?"

"How about I take you out to dinner and then we go out for a while? Know any decent bars or clubs?"

"Not really."

"Know any indecent bars or clubs?", I asked innocently.

"Only you would ask that!" She thought for a second, and said, "I'll call some of my girlfriends and see what they say."

"Okay. Tomorrow you can show me all the wonders of the greater Utica metropolitan area."

"That will be a very quick trip.", Marilyn replied.

"Where am I sleeping tonight?", I asked. "I assume it won't be up in your room."

Marilyn glanced nervously across the room at her parents. Her mother was sleeping upright in her armchair, and her father was totally oblivious to us. "Keep your voice down. That isn't even funny!"

"Sorry. Anyway, they can't hear us. Down here somewhere?"

She pointed towards an archway to the side. "Over there, in the library."

"And tonight? Any chance of us going out for a while?" I waggled my eyebrows lewdly.

Much to my surprise, Marilyn waggled hers right back at me. "Later, when the little ones go to bed, and my parents go upstairs, I'll tuck you in. Think that will do?"

Suddenly my mouth felt very dry and my pants felt very tight. I nodded and cleared my throat. "Uh, yeah, good idea.", I croaked out.

"I've missed you, too." she continued on with a grin.

I glanced over at her parents, still sleeping and watching television. Then I looked down at her. "Oh, yeah, I've missed you way too much!"

Marilyn giggled and gave me a quick kiss, and then snuggled back against me. In short order she was napping too.

About nine or so, Harriet woke with a snort, which wasn't much quieter than her snores. (Tonight had been relatively minor, but when she gets going, bears run away!) She glanced around and then stood up. She nudged Big Bob from where he was dozing and then bent down and picked up a sleeping Ruth. Big Bob stood up as well and ordered Rafe and Gabe upstairs. All this activity woke up Marilyn, so she stood up and picked up Peter in his bassinet and carried it and him up the stairs. Suddenly I was alone. It was time for me to get ready for bed. I went out to the Galaxie and pulled my bag from the backseat, and then popped the trunk and grabbed my sleeping bag. I couldn't remember the details of the library, but I wanted to be prepared.

Back inside, I turned off the television and moved through the arched doorway into the library. Much of it I remembered. There were the shelves of books, but all from the World's Greatest Literature series of books, in the fake leather covers and the fine, thin paper, all unread. Big Bob had bought his library by the yard, and never read any of it. There was a fish tank, empty and unused in the corner. It had a worn leather sofa and a matching armchair, neither of which was all that comfortable, as I recalled. Heavy shag carpet in a burnt orange color, very ugly, but clean and soft. The room had a few windows, but they were completely covered by heavy drapes, and even in the day the room was dark.

I had to smile when I saw the picture on the wall. It was the most perfect reminder of the tastes of Big Bob and Harriet. They had bought, on their last vacation trip to somewhere really tacky, matching leisure suits for Big Bob, all four of the gospels, and all three of the angels. The picture was of the eight of them, standing together side by side, from tallest to shortest, wearing these ungodly awful blue-green polyester double knit leisure suits that looked like rejects from a bad Saturday Night Live sketch about the Seventies. They were so horrendous as to be fascinating, at least in the same sense that everybody watches NASCAR for the crashes. In another thirty-some years there would actually be websites devoted to really hideous and embarrassing pictures, and this photo would deserve to be on the main page!

I stared at it for a minute, and then tossed my gear on the sofa. There were already a pile of blankets and comforters on one end of the sofa, and I decided to simply sleep on the floor, as opposed to using the couch, or trying to figure out how to open the sofa up. As I vaguely remembered, it was a sofa-bed. I laid out a couple of comforters, and then unrolled my sleeping bag and spread it out. I also unzipped it and laid it open. Inside it was an old sheet I used as a bag liner. I couldn't find any pillows, so I went out into the living room and grabbed a cushion from an armchair and brought it back in. Then I grabbed my B4 and dug out my toilet kit. There was a half bathroom off the foyer, and I used it to brush my teeth and otherwise prepare for bed.

Marilyn still hadn't come down, so I just kicked off my shoes and socks, and lay down on my bedroll, and pulled a copy of The Hobbit from my bag. I had first read Tolkien when I was a sophomore on the first go, and it was still good. Marilyn wasn't much of a reader, and I could never interest her in it, but she enjoyed watching the Peter Jackson movies. I got through another chapter before I heard movement in the other room, and set the book down, and looked up. Marilyn came into the library and smiled. "Hi."

"Hi." I patted the bedroll next to me.

Marilyn came closer and sank down to the floor next to me. She had kicked off her own sneakers earlier, but otherwise was still dressed in her regular clothes from before. "Sorry about the delay. I wanted to make sure my parents and the kids were all in their rooms and sleeping."

I smiled at her. "I wasn't sure if you were changing into a nightgown or something first."

Marilyn stretched out next to me. "That would be really pushing our luck!" I lifted my arm up and she snuggled up against me. "I have missed you so much!"

"I think you need to show me just how much you missed me.", I replied, and wrapped my arms around her and twisted around to face her.

It seemed that Marilyn missed me an awful lot! She brought her hands up to behind my head and pulled my face to hers. As soon as our lips touched, she tried to tongue wrestle me into submission. I moved my hands across her back, where I could feel her bra straps under the thin cotton of her tee shirt. That sort of put her into overdrive. Marilyn thrust herself against me, with her legs trying to wrap around mine, and started humping me as she moaned into my mouth as we kissed.

Well, I was feeling pretty horny and pent-up myself. Just because I had been recycled and had the thoughts of a 70+ year old man didn't mean I didn't have the hormones of an 18 year old boy running through me! As jaded as I was, and I most certainly was, Marilyn was turning me on something fierce! I tugged her shirt out of her waist and slid my hands underneath it, to thrill at the contact with that deliciously smooth skin, and then quickly moved north, to pop the buckle on her bra.

Marilyn's kisses became feverish, but she pulled away enough that she could reach between us and start undoing the buttons on my shirt. As long as she was doing that, I brought a hand around front and began playing with her tits. Marilyn kept working on me, and once my shirt was open, she moved lower, and quickly started undoing my pants. Turnabout was fair play, so hers went next. Her pussy was drenched and I didn't need to do much petting to know she was primed and ready. We pushed our pants and underwear down far enough to be out of the way, and then I rolled Marilyn onto her back and crawled on top of her.

She squealed as I entered her, but not because of any pain. I already knew she was safe, since her letters had told me she had been to Planned Parenthood and gotten a prescription for The Pill. Now she humped herself up at my naked cock, and our bodies slapped against each other happily. I had reached down under her and was cupping those perfect buns as I drove downwards, and Marilyn was doing the same, feverishly pulling me into her. Meanwhile her lips never left mine, and we French kissed as we fucked wildly. I couldn't tell whether she was on her second orgasm, or just one really big and long one when I stiffened and drove down into her, and pumped a month's worth into her greasy cunt.

I lay on top of her for another minute or so, as we caught our breaths, and then I rolled over onto my back. "That was ... amazing.", I told her.

"So, do you think I missed you?", she asked in a teasing fashion. Neither one of us moved to get dressed.

"I think you missed me. I missed you, too."

She glanced down at both our crotches, now wet and sticky. "Yeah, I think you did."

I watched what she was looking at. "Was it better without the rubbers?"

"Oh my God, those things are awful! I never want to use them again!"

"I agree. I'll do anything you want me to, but anything else, please." I could feel myself starting to get hard again.

"It does make things a bit messier this way.", Marilyn commented.

"Maybe, but there's no incriminating evidence to dispose of, either. Would you want to explain that to your parents?", I asked.

"That's not even funny!", she said, but she was smiling as she did so.

"Why don't you see about doing something to clean me up?", I suggested. I pulled my shirt off and then lay back down on the bedroll.

Marilyn stripped off her own clothing, and I was able to see her in her glorious nakedness again, getting me even harder. She kissed her way down my chest until she was face to face with Little Carl. "Is this what you had in mind?", she said with a giggle, and then licked my cock.

I gave a happy twitch and simply murmured happily, and put my hands in that long chocolate brown hair and kept her down there. I suppose my original thought had been to just get a little clean, but Marilyn did a very thorough job. She licked my cock clean, slowly, and was gently stroking it and sucking the cockhead, and generally driving me nuts. Then she started sucking harder, and jacking me harder, and I just said 'Fuck it!' "Don't stop ... keep going...", I whispered, as I started thrusting my hips upwards, to drive my cock up into her mouth. The various training sessions we had back in Ocean City paid off. Marilyn kept going, and I kept whispering to her, and then I gave in. "Yes, yes ... don't stop ... keep sucking ... just like that, don't stop ... yes ... that's it!" Marilyn kept sucking as I spurted in her mouth, and she swallowed it down.

Marilyn popped to her feet and went running out of the library. "Back in a bit!", she mumbled. I just lay there in a happy daze.

Marilyn came back a few minutes later, and sank down on the floor again. "Sorry about that, but I needed to pee and clean up, too."

"Not a problem." I studied her as she sat there next to me. "You are so beautiful." I looked between her legs, and it looked like she had really cleaned up well. "You know, I might be able to return the favor, but only if you promise to keep from screaming my name over and over and waking your parents up."

That got me a slug in the shoulder. "I'll try to keep the racket down. Why don't you try to make me noisy?" She lay back on the floor and spread her legs wide.

"I'm a man who likes a challenge. Just remember, we tried this a couple of times in Ocean City and I always won."

"I just let you think you won!"

"I think I can tell for sure." I lay down on the floor between her legs and started to slowly lick on the inside of her thighs. Marilyn gave an involuntary squeal and I smiled and raised my head. "See, I told you I can tell."

"You just startled me."

"Give me a minute and I'll really startle you." I flicked my tongue across her slit and got another little jump out of her.

"Just don't do anything to wake up my parents!", she warned me.

"Honey, if they catch us now, no matter what happens, we are both dead! If you're going to scream out my name, pull a pillow over your face!" With that, I went to work. Now, while eating pussy isn't always my favorite meal, it isn't a bad menu choice, either, and the ladies certainly think it's a good idea. Likewise, while creampies aren't my fetish of choice, Marilyn had cleaned up enough it wasn't a problem. I avoided trying to lick my way to China, and concentrated on that little red nub hidden away at the top. Within seconds Marilyn was thrashing underneath me, and whimpering loudly.

For the first few minutes, Marilyn had her hands in my hair, holding me head in place between her legs. That didn't last long, however; within ten minutes, Marilyn was demanding, in a hoarse whisper, that I get on top of her and fuck her. I gave a last lick to her clit and moved back into position. She wrapped her legs around my waist and her arms around my head. Her eyes were closed and her head was tucked into the corner of my neck and shoulder, and she was holding onto me for dear life. Marilyn moaned and whimpered beneath me, and I could feel her kissing and sucking on my neck.

I was going to have a hickey in the morning. I decided to let Marilyn explain that one!

Because I had already come twice that night, I was able to last longer, and I gave Marilyn a good ride. Still, she looked and felt so good, and she was being so enthusiastic, when I did come, it was another nice load, and I felt a pleasant ache in my nuts from being drained out. I was done for the night. We slowly untangled and I gently kissed my beloved. "I love you so much!", I whispered to her.

"Oh, I wish I didn't have to leave here.", she said.

"Well, if you don't somebody is going to be very surprised in the morning!"

"No shit!" She smiled at me. "I'd better get dressed again." She reached out and grabbed for her tee shirt and jeans.

I grabbed my own pants. "I told you I could win the bet."

"What? Oh! I think you cheated!"

"How?", I asked with a laugh.

"I don't know, but you must have cheated. I want a rematch!"

"Any time!"

By now Marilyn was dressed, though she had stuffed her bra and panties in her pants pockets. "What was the bet for, anyhow?"

I had to think about it for a second. "If I won, you'd go to bed with me, and if you won, I'd go to bed with you."

"Spoken like a true mathematician!" She leaned down and kissed me. "We'll have to see about that rematch."

Chapter 36: Lefleur Homes

Well, I slept happy that night, let me tell the world! It was the sleep of a well fucked man! All good things must end, however, so I woke at six the next morning when my alarm clock went off. I stumbled off to the bathroom, where I found that, yes, Marilyn had given me a hickey. It was low down, where it would be covered by a shirt, but only if it had a collar. No tee shirt today.

This reminded me of a time when my parents were staying with us. My Dad hadn't gotten sick yet, so we must have been in our mid-forties, and Marilyn got extra amorous one night. My mother made a number of amused comments about my 'bruise' the next morning, much to my embarrassment!

I relieved myself, and then went back to the library. I cleaned up my bedroll and made sure the evidence had been cleaned up or destroyed, and then I changed. I put on some running shorts and yesterday's tee shirt, and dug some socks and my running shoes out. It was time for my morning routine. I stretched the kinks out and then let myself out of the house.

It was cool in the morning, with dew on the grass, and I looked around at the neighborhood, such as it was. We were a couple of miles west of Commercial Drive, and the area was fairly rural. There were a number of dairy and vegetable farms in the immediate vicinity. While I wasn't sure, I figured I was about three or four miles from the Oriskany Battlefield, max. I took off at any easy lope down the side of the road. There wasn't much traffic at this hour.

I kept the pace down for the first mile or so, before picking it up a notch, and made it to the battlefield in about half an hour. It was definitely warm enough by then, or I was warm enough, that I took off my shirt and carried it. Once there, I wandered around in the parking lot, not that there was much to see. The Battle of Oriskany was one of the opening salvos in the Saratoga Campaign in the Revolution, but it was a small battle and not very well known. There isn't even a visitor's center, just a monument and some memorial plaques. After about ten minutes I ran back to the Lefleur house, and tried to up my pace, so that I had a good sweat going by the time I got there. I made it back about 7:15 or so, just in time to find some of the older Lefleur boys wandering around the parking lot.

I wiped my face with my shirt and walked up to them, blowing out and cooling down. It was Mark, Luke, and Gabriel, and they were looking at the old rust bucket Galaxie. "Hey guys, what's up?", I asked.

"Where've you been?", asked Gabriel.

"Out running. I try to run or work out every morning." I wiped my face off again.

"Where'd you run?", asked Luke, looking around the yard.

I pointed down the road. "I ran down to the battlefield and looked around, and then ran back."

Luke stared at me. "The battlefield? The Oriskany Battlefield? That's, like, miles away!"

I nodded. "Yeah, I guess so. It's three, three-and-a-half miles or so. I wasn't measuring it, but I left here at six, and I didn't push it. I guess that's right."

Luke kept staring at me, and Mark, true to form, said, "Bullshit!"

I just smiled at my once and (hopefully) future brother-in-law, and I shrugged. "No, no bullshit. Come down and join me tomorrow morning. It's a nice morning run. Or we can do calisthenics for an hour. You choose."

Mark didn't respond, but Gabriel asked, "Why?"

I leaned back against my car. "Oh, a bunch of reasons, but really, only two. First, I'm going to be a soldier. I need to be in shape. Second?" I hooked my thumb towards the house. "Girls like a guy who's in shape."

All three of them groaned and rolled their eyes at that, especially when the door opened up and Marilyn stuck her head out. "What are you doing out here? It's freezing!"

I waved at her and I smiled at her brothers. "Like I said, there's benefits to being in shape."

"What's that on your neck?", asked Gabriel, the youngest of them.

I grinned at that. I winked at the boys and answered, "Ask your sister." Luke and Mark just groaned in disgust, but Gabriel was mystified. He wasn't quite at the age where girls mattered.

I headed towards the door with the boys following.

Needless to say, the hall bathroom upstairs was occupied when I got there. I just sat down on the floor and waited. Eventually it was free and I got inside before anybody else got any smart ideas. I made it a quick shower and shave, and then changed into clean khakis and a sports shirt. I grabbed my stuff and went back downstairs; the bathroom was filled as soon as I left it!

I found Marilyn and the three boys in the kitchen with their mother, along with a couple of the smaller kids. Marilyn looked at me curiously, and said, "Gabe says there's something on your neck?" Behind her, Luke and Mark were damn near breaking up with laughter, and Harriet was eyeing us curiously as well.

I just gave her an innocent look and shrugged my shoulders. "No idea what he's talking about, hun." I leaned in and kissed her quickly. There was a basket of apples on the corner table, and I grabbed one. "Want one?"

"No thanks. So, you went running this morning? Down to the battlefield?"

I nodded as I chewed a bite of apple. "I wanted to make sure which side won. I'd hate to find out I was rooting for the wrong side all these years."

Rafe popped up. "General Herkimer stayed in the house!"

"Really? General Who?"

"General Herkimer! After the Battle of Oriskany!"

I nodded in understanding. The farmhouse was at least a couple hundred years old, and in dilapidated condition almost the entire time. I remembered vaguely that Herkimer died of wounds after the battle. "Did he die here, too?"

"That would be cool!", came from Rafe.

Marilyn said, "Yuck!"

I smiled at her and nodded towards her brother. "Boys!"

"Very funny."

"Come on, are you going to show me around? I want to know all about trailers."

"HOMES! They're homes, not trailers.", said Harriet.

Yeah, Harriet, I know. We used to call it the T-word, sort of like the F-word and the N-word. I spent enough time in the business to call them any damn thing I wanted to. "Yes, ma'am." I leaned over to whisper directly into Marilyn's ear. "Trailer, trailer, trailer."

She gave me an elbow to the ribs, and whispered back, "Behave!" I just grinned at her. When she was done with her cereal, she put her bowl in the sink, and grabbed my hand. "Come on, let's go."

I grabbed another couple of apples and stuck them in my pockets, and followed her out the side door. She was already describing anything and everything in sight. It was a pleasure to hear her talk. She loved her family, even though she wasn't totally in love with the trailer business. I was the one who ended up working there full time; she never became more than a gofer.

In most ways, this was because of Big Bob. Women were second class to men. He was a very traditional sort of father and businessman. It was very curious, in a way. He often hired women for sales positions, which were the highest paid positions in the company, but it was because women were better at the touchy-feely sorts of things in house hunting. He never once promoted a woman to a management position, and his own daughters never rose higher than part-time secretary. Marilyn's jobs were cleaning lady, trailer escort, secretary, and general gofer. Sarah and Miriam understood this immediately, and it was why they went to school and never got into the business. Ruth never had any choice; nobody else would ever employ her.

I will point out that his sons, the second generation to own the company, never had this problem. We frequently had women in various management positions. Big Bob didn't like that, but after he sold it to us, he didn't get a vote.

Marilyn led me on a tour of the facility. The office was a metal sided double-wide that had seen better days. There was a gigantic warehouse full of parts. There were about a dozen or so trailer homes of various sizes, and another couple of dozen used trailers further back, and to one side were three double-wide trailers. It took me back in time. These homes were state of the art in the trailer business at the time. Lefleur's had a reputation for only carrying high end trailers, and the brand names were like a time machine for me.

Most of the acreage was flat and empty. Eventually the operation would grow immensely. Two more warehouses would be built, along with a massive pole barn capable of storing homes inside it. The existing office building and farmhouse would be torn down and new office buildings would go up. It would continue growing until the Great Recession, at which point it would begin a long, slow, and painful decline. The company finally failed about a year after Marilyn died and I had gotten out of it completely, in 2021, when Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were finally shuttered and mortgage financing collapsed. I was lucky. Gabriel lost his house, and John committed suicide.

Maybe I could change that. I wasn't going to work for the company, but maybe I could change things. That would be a worthy goal for the future. I would have to give that some thought.

I pointed at a yellow metal double-wide out back, in a field. "What's that building for?"

Marilyn laughed. "That's where the boys live! Come on!"

Marilyn tugged my hand forward, but I stayed where I was and kept her from romping ahead. "Hold on, hun.", I said.

"What?"

"It's just ... listen, do me a favor and don't tell anybody about my family. Have you said anything to anybody about what happened when we were down there?"

"No! That was just too weird. Nobody would have understood."

How true, how true. "Okay, so don't let it out. I'm already enough of a shock to your parents. Let's not make it worse."

"I think you're being too critical of them.", she replied defensively.

I gave her a sad smile. "Your parents are good people, but I am not what they bargained for in a boyfriend for their daughter. They already don't like that I'm a soldier. Later today they're going to learn I'm not Catholic. Let them get used to me before we spring on them that I ran away from home as a teenager."

She looked up at me sadly and wrapped her arms around me. "I love you. It doesn't matter what anybody else thinks."

I hugged her fiercely. "If that was all I had left in the world, it would be enough. Just humor me on this. It will all come out eventually. Just let me tell about it first, please?"

She looked like she was going to cry on my behalf. I just grinned down at her. "If I ran away from home and joined the circus, that must be the ring with the elephants out there.", I said, pointing at her brother's double-wide. "Let's go feed them some peanuts!"

"You're awful!" She tugged my hand and pulled me along.

I remembered the building, but not very well at its original purpose. The Lefleurs had a brilliant solution to the problem of how to house their gigantic brood in a farmhouse not equipped to hold them all. They had lots of empty land and the ability to get a big trailer at cost, so they built a four bedroom double-wide trailer out back of the sales lot and put the four oldest boys out there. Then, as each boy graduated from school and went out on his own, the next oldest boy would get moved out to the second house. Since this occurred at the same rate as new kids came along, the house population remained high but stable. Ultimately it became the service building.

Marilyn walked up to the front door and barged right in. I hoped none of her brothers were in a state of undress, but we walked into a small living room. I had been in the building innumerous times, but only once when it was still a house. I had completely forgotten the layout of the place. Four bedrooms, two baths, small kitchen, central living and dining rooms, no foyer, small laundry off the kitchen. Only Matthew and Mark were out there, and neither was naked in the living room. The place reminded me of a residence inhabited by teenage boys - it was messy and smelled of gym socks.

"What's up?", asked Matthew as he came out of his room.

I was just standing there in the doorway looking around, and Marilyn answered, "I was telling Carl how Dad put a place for you guys up out here and decided to show him."

"Yeah, we were really getting packed in down there, and then you came back.", he said.

"So where do you keep the beer and women?", I asked.

Marilyn gasped and smacked me in the arm. "There's no beer or women here!"

Both Matthew and Mark, who had now come out of his room, were grinning as she said this. I just shrugged good-naturedly and said, "How do you know? You don't live out back here."

"Because they don't!" Strong on emotion, weak on logic, that was my Marilyn!

I just held my hands up in an undecided sort of gesture. "You never know, babe, you never know!" Actually I did know. Matthew, for instance was incredibly straight laced, and John was pretty serious, too. (Luke, on the other hand was a party hound, and would do it if he could!) If anything like that were to occur, the chances their parents wouldn't hear about it were infinitesimal!

Luke and John came in and I asked them where they kept the beer, which got a nice discussion going, and then Marilyn and I left. She shook her finger at me. "Don't go giving them any ideas about beer and women!"

"Honey, they're teenaged guys. All they think about is beer and women!"

"No they don't! They're good boys!"

"Then they must belong to a different species of humans than the one I know about!" I grabbed her from behind and wrapped my arms around her. "I think about beer and women, or at least just one woman!"

"They're better behaved than you are!"

"Most humans are!" I decided to punish her for arguing with me, so I started tickling her.

Marilyn is extremely ticklish, and within seconds she was shrieking and trying to escape. She managed to squirm out of my reach and ran off towards one of the warehouses. I ran after her, which made her bolt in a different direction. I caught up to her and tickled her some more, and she kept running away. Eventually I managed to trap her in one of the corners of the warehouse. "Stay away from me!", she said with a warning tone.

"Oh, I can't do that. All I can think about is beer and women, remember, and there's no beer out here." I moved closer, and she tried to squeeze to my left, but I blocked that and moved in.

She was smiling, and said, "I'm not that kind of girl!"

"But I'm that kind of boy!" She moved the opposite direction and I blocked that path as well. By now I had her completely in the corner, with my arms planted on the walls, trapping her.

"Your father would have never done this with your mother!", she argued.

I laughed loudly at that. "Where do you think us three kids came from? The stork!" I moved even closer, so that I was pushing up against her. "I think we should go find an empty trailer."

Suddenly she got a very scared look to her eye, and tried to push me back. "That would be crazy! We'll get caught for sure!"

Yeah, we probably would be. You'd think that my experience when Jeana's parents caught us would have taught me a thing or two, but hormones are powerful things! "We can be quick!"

"My parents will kill us!"

"What a way to go!" I started kissing her.

Marilyn eagerly responded, but then she pushed me back. "No way are we doing anything in the homes or out here in the warehouse. You are going to just have to wait until tonight!"

"Okay, but tonight you'd better have taken your vitamins! It's going to be a long night!"

"I hope so!" We settled back down to making out. "I missed you so much!"

"Me too, and not just because of that. I like being around you. I love you.", I told her. I never told Marilyn that enough the first time.

"I love you, too."

"It's just too bad we can't be back at the Hilton for a few hours."

She giggled at that. "I can't believe we did that."

"It'd be even better now, without the, well, you know."

She just rolled her eyes. "Those things are so gross!"

"But necessary."

She nodded, but said, "Yuck!"

"Come to Kegs in a week or two and spend the weekend with me. We'll kick Bradley out and get crazy." I pushed my body against hers. "I really liked sleeping with you, even when we were just sleeping."

"Okay. Maybe every other weekend we can see each other?"

It was my turn to nod in agreement. "You know how we spent our vacation? How would you like to do that over winter break?"

Marilyn eyed me curiously. There was some sound from the other end of the warehouse, so we pulled apart and slipped out a side door, and walked hand in hand slowly around the lot. "What did you have in mind?", she asked.

"Well, I was thinking, I have off most of January. I don't know what your schedule is going to be, but you'll probably have at least a few weeks off. You could come and visit me, and we could go away for a week."

She had an eager look to her face. "Where?"

I shrugged. "Who cares? Anyplace would have to be warmer and sunnier than New York in the winter!"

She gave me a disdainful look. "New York is a great place in the winter!"

"Not if you're wearing a bikini it isn't!" That got a giggle from her. "Do you know how to find a tanning booth or salon?", I asked.

She looked very confused at that. "A tanning salon? Why do I need a tanning salon?"

I wrapped her back in my arms and whispered in her ear, "Because I am going to find you the world's smallest bikini, and you're going to need an all over tan before you can ever wear it."

She blushed fiercely. "Oh my God!"

"It will be so small I will need to shave you, everywhere, before you can wear it!"

"You are evil!" She tugged my hand and we went back to the farmhouse. It was time for lunch.

We goofed off after lunch, and I took a quick nap around two. At three I woke up and Marilyn asked me if I was going to church with her. I shrugged. "Sure, but don't sit next to me. When the lightning comes down through the roof, you don't want to be caught by friendly fire."

"Very funny!"

At three-thirty the entire family showed up. I changed shirts and put on a dress shirt I had brought for the occasion, along with a tie I had tossed into my bag. Back home, when I was growing up, 'Sunday go to meeting clothes' consisted of suits and ties for the guys and dresses for the women. I was very surprised to find that to the average Catholic, simple clean clothes were considered sufficient. In the rural area we ended up living in, that could mean fresh overalls and clean barn boots. My mother would have been scandalized! As it was, simply wearing a tie meant I was fancier than any of the boys.

They went to St. Peter's in two cars, and Marilyn and I drove separately in my car. She simply had on clean jeans and a decent shirt. We sat together in two pews, with Harriet and Big Bob in the back pew, the better to swat unruly heads. I had been to countless masses before, and skipped countless more. It took all my willpower not to whisper to Marilyn my thoughts on the priest's sermon. Over the years it got to the point where Marilyn stopped asking me to attend, because I wouldn't behave. I think that was after one of the priests at her church compared the Holy Week to a baseball game. Of course it could have been after the sermon where an older priest repudiated the Second Vatican Council and called Jews the Christ killers. My mother was a quarter Jewish (maiden name Rosenkrantz - long story, but she was still hard core Lutheran), enough to have gotten her into trouble with the Nazis, and it was all I could do not to stand up in the middle of church and denounce the priest and leave. Marilyn was very worried about me that day.

And don't even get me started on the priestly sex scandals that ultimately broke the church. By the time I stopped going to church with her, I had taken to calling the collection plate the Altar Boy Defense Fund. Marilyn lived long enough to see how all that ended, and it just about killed her.

Marilyn had steadfastly refused to believe there was a problem in the Catholic church. Whenever there was a sex scandal in a Protestant church, maybe once a year at most, she would trot that out to 'prove' we had problems like they did. Never mind that for the better part of two decades the Catholic church had a problem every week! That was just anti-religious people like me publicizing things unfairly.

I had a different take on it. Historically, up until about the time of World War II, the priesthood was a good method for a young man from a lower class immigrant family, a fellow with just about zero chances of getting a decent education or any kind of non-blue collar job. As for the whole celibacy issue, well, the church had long experience with that sort of thing, and as long as everybody was discreet, nobody really cared. Following the war, there was a massive expansion of low cost and state funded higher education and the job market exploded. Suddenly, all those Italian and Irish and Polish kids could get college degrees and good jobs. Meanwhile, the church drifted to the right, and began really pushing the celibacy requirement.

The result was massively predictable! 'Normal', i.e. straight, men no longer had a need to go into the church to get ahead. That left the only candidates for the priesthood the 'non-normal', in other words the gays and pedophiles. Suddenly faced with a massive decline in recruitment, the church drastically lowered standards on who they would let into their ranks. By some accounts, by the Nineties, the majority of Catholic seminary students were non-heterosexual. It's a mathematical certainty, an element of Set Theory, my specialization - If you exclude all members of a subset from the superset, the remaining members of the superset will all be members of other subsets. In other words, if you actively exclude heterosexuals who like grown up women, you are left with homosexuals and heterosexuals who like kids.

There was probably a different explanation, but I was going with my version.

I hadn't thought much about John Paul II, who seemed like a nice enough guy, but was definitely old school, and he could never understand why those pesky Americans got so wrought up over priests diddling little boys. Benedict XVI didn't have much more luck. During his reign the European churches found out their priests were diddling their little boys as well. On the one hand he was much more open about the problem than his predecessor, but on the other hand he was also old school and got caught covering up problems in his own jurisdiction. At least he wasn't personally involved in anything.

Supposedly, his replacement, John Paul III, was going to be the key to fixing the problems. A dark horse candidate, he was a Swiss bishop (not even a cardinal), young and modern, and had an understanding to the problem. Scarcely had his papal coronation been completed, however, when the videotapes came out, videotapes that showed him when he was a monsignor, with another priest sodomizing a teenage boy who was crying and begging them to stop. The boy later committed suicide, and the tapes came out when the other priest was caught with a different boy.

The outrage was worldwide. There were immediate calls for his abdication and prosecution, but nobody could actually make him do anything. The Vatican is a separate country, and the Pope is the boss. He refused to resign, and then threw fuel on the fire. In a Papal Bull, he ruled that Papal Infallibility not only extended forward to the future actions of a Pope, but extended backwards, to actions in the past. In effect, he wrote himself a pardon.

Within weeks of this, the Catholic Church collapsed. Three-quarters of the world severed diplomatic relations with the Vatican. Even the Swiss Guards, his own security force, from his home country, resigned and went back to Switzerland. The Pope ended up hiring non-Christian Nepalese Gurkhas as his new security force. In the United States, several of the big city bishops and cardinals called an emergency meeting of the Conference of Bishops, and within weeks over ninety percent of American parishes created the Reformed Catholic Church, splitting the church in two. There were no differences in the liturgy, but there was no pope, priests could be married, women could be ordained, and birth control was allowed. By the time I left the scene, the church was actually undergoing a rebirth. Sarah's husband, the Catholic chaplain at Nazareth College, although not an ordained priest, immediately quit his job and went to divinity school to get the remaining courses necessary to be ordained.

But that was for far in the future, and even thinking about it now would make enemies, including Marilyn. I just sat there in the pew and listened and kept my mouth shut. Nobody said anything until the time for communion came, and I stayed in my seat. Everybody eyed me curiously, and only asked me when we left the church. I simply told them I was Lutheran, not Catholic, and they gave me a very curious look and didn't say anything more.

In the entire family, with all the spouses and relatives, I was the only non-Catholic. They didn't make you feel like a pedophile, not precisely, anyway.

Saturday night supper was going to be burgers, which I normally like, except when they are burned to charcoal, which is the way Big Bob liked them. Sunday dinner was scheduled to be roast beef, roasted to a finely dried leathery substance and then smothered in brown gooey gravy. I reminded Marilyn that we would go out, and she nodded and wandered upstairs to change again. I nibbled on some cheese for the cheeseburgers while I waited, and drank a beer with Big Bob. It was Kraft white American cheese, the sort that will survive through nuclear firestorm and the Apocalypse. The beer was Heineken, though; Big Bob had good taste in beer.

Marilyn came back down a few minutes before seven, and my mouth got suddenly dry. She was wearing that short denim skirt she had worn that one night in Ocean City, along with the high heeled sandals. She did have on a very tight red checkered short sleeve blouse and a bra, though. She looked beyond sexy, and her perfume was driving me crazy. I thought for sure her parents were going to say something to her, but they didn't.

Harriet and Big Bob had perfected the mechanism for not seeing what they didn't want to see. They didn't want to know that their eldest daughter was fucking a frat boy soldier, so they simply pulled their blinders on. My parents never learned this skill, and both this time and the last, had constantly quizzed me on whether girls were coming to the apartment or frat house. Neither Harriet nor Big Bob ever asked me once, even when their little girl was running around in a miniskirt and fuck me heels and visiting me for vacation weeks.

Her brothers all knew, just about from day one. They might have been young and virgins, but they weren't blind. Matthew used to crudely joke, after we got engaged, about the foolishness of buying a cow when you can get the milk for free. Luke and Gabe once walked in on us fooling around under a blanket in front of the fireplace one winter when the library was chilly. I actually stood up to defend myself from their righteous anger, but I forgot that my pants were still down around my knees. They just laughed at us.

I was smiling as we left the house, and I let her walk in front of me so I could watch her legs and ass. God, was she hot! Once in the car, I turned the key and then said, "I think I've changed my mind. I want to go over to the Marriott and order up some room service for dinner!"

Marilyn laughed at that. She waggled a finger at me and said, "I don't think so. Dinner and then we're going out, remember?"

I groaned at that. "Please, tell me, are you wearing anything under that skirt?" I reached across and laid a hand on her bare thigh.

Marilyn whimpered, but then crossed her legs, which really made the skirt ride high, and said, "You'll just have to find out later. Let's go."

I groaned as I put the Galaxie into gear. "You're killing me. You know that, right? You're killing me!" Marilyn simply grinned at that.

We drove into Utica and across the river into North Utica, where I remembered a restaurant on North Genesee that had a fairly young crowd. It was crowded enough we couldn't get a table right away, so we had a drink in the bar until something opened up. Utica is not one of the great dining cities of the world, but you can always get a steak somewhere. There is, however, a local dish seen only in the Mohawk Valley known as 'greens', which I love and Marilyn hated. It basically looks like grass clippings (which I think is actually escarole, kale, or spinach - something like that) mixed with hot peppers and bread crumbs and baked in olive oil, and it's delicious! Every restaurant has their own recipe, and everybody argues over whose is best. I made sure I had a large serving.

"So what's the plan for after dinner? Did I hear you say something about driving up into the hills and getting into the back seat of the Galaxie and steaming up the windows?", I asked her.

Marilyn laughed at that. "Is that all you can think of? No! We're meeting Tammy at a place she knows between Utica and Rome, over on 5."

"Who's Tammy?"

"I told you about her. She was my best friend all through UCA. I called her and asked where she liked to go. It's a country bar sort of place."

I vaguely remembered Tammy. She was a ditzy blonde, very cute and curvy, who was pals with Marilyn. She was Marilyn's maid of honor at our wedding, but after that we moved out of the area for a few years and they totally lost track of each other. If I recalled correctly, she was dating a greasy asshole that I nearly got into it with a couple of times. I think they got married and had a nice slew of white trash kids.

"Oh, I think I've heard of the place. They have a dress code, right? Women aren't allowed to wear bras and panties, something like that?"

"You're horrible!", she said, laughing.

"I'll have to check on that when we get there.", I insisted. Marilyn just laughed, a sound I really enjoyed listening to. I always loved it when she laughed. Whatever it took, I was going to have her laughing and snuggling with me the rest of our lives, all over again.

"Horrible!"

Marilyn gave me some half-assed directions to the place we were going, and thankfully I knew how to get to 5 and going west, because her directions would have sent us to Lower Slobbovia. It was about nine when we got to the place, which was not quite a night club, but more than a bar. It was a country place, with a live band and a dance floor, and both a bar and table service. This was in the days when you could still smoke in bars and restaurants, and it had a smoky tobacco scent that I loved and that would have my eyes red by closing time. Once we got inside and our eyes adjusted to the low lighting, I recognized Tammy at a table on the side, jumping up and down and waving to us.

I pointed out the girl to Marilyn. "Is that Tammy?"

"Yes!" She grabbed my hand and pulled me along behind her. Tammy was wearing skin tight jeans and a tank top with nothing underneath it. Her date was a greasy and thin scuzbucket that looked like he had graduated from the Oneida County Jail, where he had majored in auto theft. I shook his hand and then carefully counted my fingers. Thankfully we were seated boy-girl-boy-girl, so I didn't have to worry about getting my wallet lifted just by sitting next to him.

There was a band playing, loud and good, but not great. You want a great bar band, you go to LA or Chicago or New York or Miami, or for country, you go to Nashville or Austin or Branson. You can really tell the difference in those places. There's a crispness to the music, where every single note is hit with a precision that only comes from superior skill and relentless practice. This band was good, but not up to that standard. They would do the bar band circuit for a few years, before settling down in their day jobs at the Arms or Faxton or wherever they called home. They were okay to dance to, though, doing mostly covers of country and southern rock, lots of Eagles, Molly Hatcher, .38 Special, and some Johnny Cash and Bocephus thrown into the mix. When we walked in, the band was doing Merle Haggard's Okie From Muskogee.

It was loud enough I didn't have to converse with Tammy's date. I just eyed Marilyn and Tammy (surreptitiously, of course). Tammy was a cute and tight little blonde with some interesting knockers swinging freely under her tank top, a look always good on a girl. She had a slight gap in her top front teeth that actually looked very cute on her. I always thought she could have done better than the guys she hung out with.

We danced and drank some beer and danced some more. Tammy and her boyfriend ordered up pitchers of beer and mostly drank them themselves. Marilyn had a few glasses herself. I had a couple, but I'm not a heavy beer drinker and I stayed sober. Marilyn got a bit loose, and Tammy and her friend really got lit up. After an hour or so, Tammy announced she had to go to the bathroom, and Marilyn was drafted to accompany her. They must have union meetings in there, I swear!

When they returned, the two girls were giggling and laughing, and Marilyn asked me for the keys to the car. I asked why, and she said she wanted to put her purse back in the car. I just shrugged and handed her my keys. Tammy's boyfriend looked at me curiously, and I just shrugged and gave him a mystified look. The girls took off, still giggling.

Five minutes later they were back, still giggling, like little girls with a secret. The riddle was solved when Marilyn and I were dancing again, and the band started playing something slow by the Eagles. As I took Marilyn in my arms, I stroked her back idly, and found something missing. Marilyn's bra was gone! She and Tammy must have been talking about it, and either she took it off in the bathroom and needed to hide it in the car, or she and Tammy went to the car and Tammy covered for her while Marilyn stripped it off in the parking lot. Normally Marilyn wouldn't be that crazy, but she was drinking and Tammy was drunk, and they were thick as thieves anyway.

I rubbed Marilyn's back, and she giggled at me. "So did you do that in the bathroom or out at the car?" I asked her, speaking into her ear.

"Wouldn't you like to know?!"

"I would! It makes me really hot for you!" I surreptitiously brought a hand up and tweaked a nipple through her blouse.

Marilyn shuddered in my arms. "Behave yourself!"

"Do you want me to?", I asked. "Or do you want me to take you outside and ravish you in the back seat of the Galaxie right now?" I nibbled on an ear while I asked that.

Marilyn whimpered. "Behave!", she told me, weakly in my opinion.

I let it slide and gave her a smile. After our dance we sat back down at the table. Tammy was laughing at us knowingly. Her date was leering at Marilyn and looked like he was about to make a smartass remark. I just looked at him without smiling and he must have gotten the message. I hadn't been afraid of him way back when, and I certainly wasn't impressed now. Tammy missed everything, and she grabbed his hand and dragged him out onto the dance floor. The band was doing .38 Special now and she was shaking those tits inside the tank top in an amazing way.

"What's with you and Jim?", asked Marilyn.

That was his name, Jim. Eminently forgettable as a human. I just smiled. "Nothing, why?"

"You look like you want to fight him or something."

"Marilyn, I'm a peaceable kind of guy." I put my hand on her thigh under the table. "I'm a lover, not a fighter!"

Marilyn shuddered and flushed, and I just moved my hand northwards until my fingers were slipping under the very short hem of her denim skirt. "What are you doing?", she asked.

I pulled my hand away and then moved my chair around, so that we were facing each other. I moved my other hand down and placed it on her thigh and quickly moved it up her leg and under her skirt. "I was just wondering whether anything else got left in the car." I pushed my hand farther in, but the skirt was tight and without some explicit help from Marilyn, I wasn't going to find the answer.

She whimpered and panted, but begged me to stop. "You can't ... no, stop ... not here ... people will see ... please..." Then her eyes focused and she moved back violently, almost backing into a waitress and getting a shower of beer. "Tammy and Jim are coming back."

I just smiled. "How much longer do you want to stay?"

Marilyn was breathing hard. "Not much longer at all! Bastard!"

I just laughed loudly at her. I poured the last of the beer around, and finished my glass, and then took Marilyn back onto the dance floor, where I danced slowly with her and held her closely and whispered extremely detailed descriptions of what I wanted to do to her as we drove home and afterwards. After a few minutes of that, she took my hand and headed back to the table, where she finished her beer and waved good-bye to Tammy and Jim, and then dragged me out.

Marilyn led me back to my car, and was obviously in the mood to get home and get into action. I had a slightly different take on things. I looked around and found that the parking lot wasn't all that well lighted and that not a whole lot of people were outside. Rather than unlock her door, I pushed Marilyn up against that door, and began kissing her. "I know what you want!", I told her softly.

"Oh?", she said, trying to be coy.

"Uh, huh, you want this!" Then before she could stop me, I reached down and pulled her skirt up towards her waist, and I quickly slid my right hand between her legs; my left hand was holding her in place. As I suspected, her panties were missing along with her bra, and her curly little patch was wet and musky.

Marilyn gasped, and shook, but she also tried to pull back. "No ... we can't..."

I diddled her clit furiously, and Marilyn whimpered and sagged back against the car door. "We can, and we will!" I fingerfucked her, standing there in the parking lot until she came. "Tell me when you come!", I ordered her.

Marilyn was quietly whining by now. "Unh ... unh ... unh ... oh God ... I'm, I'm coming, I'm coming!", she gasped after another minute.

I kept up this torture. "Tell me."

"Oh, please ... I'm coming!"

I relented at that and stopped. I also pushed my face against hers, and she greedily took my kisses, as I smoothed her little skirt out. "I love you."

"I can't believe the things I do with you.", she replied, shaking her head in disbelief.

"But you like them.", I said, laughing. I unlocked my car and Marilyn climbed in. I went around to my side and let myself in. I had to unlock my door since Marilyn seemed a little dazed. I noticed her underwear in the back seat of my car. That gave me another thought. I started the car and put it in gear.

As I pulled back out onto the road, I patted the seat next to me a couple of times, and Marilyn got the message. She unbuckled her seat belt and slid over towards me. There was something to be said about that big old Detroit iron - bench seats and no idiot lights or warning beepers. "You better not hit anything!", she commented.

I draped my right arm around her shoulders and drove with my left hand. "I can handle it. I was the soberest one at that table, although that's not a glowing tribute." I draped my arm a touch farther, and lowered my hand down to the front of her blouse, and grazed my fingertips across her nipples.

Marilyn gasped and looked up at me. I felt her movement and turned my head to grin at her. "Watch the road!", she said.

I maneuvered my hand a touch lower and firmly cupped her breast and tweaked her nipple. "Well, aren't you the Little Miss Bossypants?"

"Behave."

"I didn't think I was misbehaving." I tried to slip a finger inside her blouse.

"What if we have an accident?"

"Then the coroner is going to have a whole lot of fun explaining this to both our parents.", I replied, laughing. Marilyn gave me a sheepish look at that. I pulled my arm from around her, but set my hand on her bare thigh. Now that we were alone, she spread her legs apart, and I slipped my fingers between her soft and warm thighs. I wormed my hand upwards and began running my fingertips across her greasy little slit.

"You are driving me crazy!", she panted out. By now she was laying back in the front seat, sprawled out with her legs spread wide and her skirt had worked its way up her thighs so that her pussy was in view.

"Unbutton your top.", I told her.

"Just watch the road.", she said, but she also undid the buttons on her blouse. This was also like our first trip through. Whenever Marilyn and I went out on date night, underwear was notably absent, and the drive home was always hot and steamy, even well into our sixties.

I drove a few more miles, until we were close to the Battlefield, at which point I turned off the road and went up into the hills south of Utica. I only drove until I found a side driveway that went into an abandoned farm. I pulled in far enough we couldn't be seen from the road, and put the car in Park. "And just what do you think we're going to do here?", teased Marilyn, sitting upright and sliding closer to me.

I undid my seat belt and took her right hand and placed it in my lap. "I think you know exactly what we're doing here!"

We didn't do a whole lot of talking after that. Marilyn definitely had an idea of my plans, since she was working on my belt and zipper within a few seconds. She got a surprise when she found me going commando under my pants. A light rain had started falling by then, cooling the car, and we really fogged up the windows! Marilyn got a mouthful of jism while blowing me while I finger fucked her, and then I got stiff again and crawled over to her side of the seat and we tore off a vigorous piece on that side of the car.

Afterwards, as we struggled back into our clothing, she said, "We could have done this in the library and been a whole lot more comfortable, you know."

"You have been driving me crazy in that skirt and those heels all night! I couldn't wait!"

"I ought to make you wear these heels.", she complained.

I'll make a deal with you. You only need to wear heels when you are wearing a skirt or dress.", I replied.

"Why do I think you're up to something?", she countered.

"I don't know. Maybe because I really want you to dress only in skirts and dresses?", I answered innocently.

"Uh huh. I thought so."

"I'll compromise. You just keep wearing this little skirt with nothing underneath and the highest heels, and you can wear hot pants and high heels the rest of the time."

"Dream on!"

I popped my door open and hopped out into the drizzle, and tucked my shirt in and straightened up, so I didn't look like I had just gotten dressed in a car after screwing my brains out in a car. Marilyn made sure her blouse was all set, and she tucked her panties and bra in her purse. I started the car up and we went back to her house. Back at the house, I insisted we find out if the library was more comfortable, and Marilyn went along with my experiment.

Experimental sciences are the best sciences!

Chapter 37: Sophomore Year

Sophomore year is an interesting year for most students, in that this is their first really independent year, at least academically speaking. Not in lifestyle, of course, since that occurs freshman year. Freshman year is a huge change for the average college student. For the vast majority that are now living away from home for the first time, this is a massive culture shock. They are now being treated as adults, and need to learn discipline quickly. Mommy and Daddy are no longer going to be there to hold their hands, and they will have to adjust to a totally foreign environment and meet new people and assume new responsibilities. More than a few students totally bomb out at this; Marilyn and Buddy were just two examples. Buddy was obviously more extreme, but Marilyn didn't have the discipline needed to study away from home. She needed a structured environment.

A lot of students don't survive freshman year. Those that do find that sophomore year is more interesting. For most college students, not just at RPI but at almost any college, freshmen are interchangeable parts. All engineers need to take a couple of semesters of basic engineering before they can specialize. All chemists need to take basic chemistry so they can have the proper language. All liberal arts majors need to take some basic English courses, so they can learn to write. RPI was more extreme than most, but not by much.

Almost all colleges understand this, and to some degree or other try to help their students cope and adapt. They have tutors and help offices and at RPI the structured nature of freshman courses (everybody does the same classes) helps. That doesn't affect the fact that more than a few students are simply too immature to be on their own, and will simply spend their time fucking off, like Buddy.

Sophomore year is when you start to specialize. At this point the classes become a lot smaller and more intimate. Gone are the days when 500 students crammed into Chemistry 1 classes. Now you get lectures for maybe 30 Organic Chemistry students. Different disciplines will have different requirements, so electrical engineers won't need to take hydraulic engineering courses, and so forth. Make friends with these guys, because they're going to be with you for the next three years!

The classes also become tougher, and it's very easy for the professors to spot the students sleeping through class, since it won't be in a giant lecture hall. There will be another cut on students who somehow managed to fake their way through freshman classes and now have to take it up a notch. Likewise, at this point a lot of students start moving off campus, and have to face those challenges as well. While some colleges insist that everybody live on campus, most colleges simply don't have the dorm space to do that. At RPI fully 1 in 4 students live in frats, and just about as many live in apartments in town. The school simply does not have enough rooms for all students.

As I settled back into full time life at Kegs, I could see some of these dynamics working already. Joe and I had meshed nicely. He was a relatively quiet guy, who didn't drink much and never even looked at drugs. He didn't chase women around very much, and in fact kept that part of his life rather quiet. That being said, I never once had a warning bell from my gay-dar, and I suspected he had some action going back home. Home was in suburban New Jersey, a place I had once lived in for a few years and never much cottoned to. Joe had a good sense of humor, in a quirky and understated sort of fashion, and was actually a decent magician. He did a lot of card tricks, with the most awful stage manner, but you could never see how he made those cards appear or disappear! He was a hard core Catholic.

We made it through September fine, and then I did that first weekend at Marilyn's the first weekend of October. She visited two weekends later, and as I promised Joe, he had plenty of advance warning. We were already working on a calendar - I would visit Marilyn the beginning of November, she would visit a week or two later, I would visit her for Thanksgiving, and that would be it. December we would go bonkers for finals, and then we would have the winter break. We'd worry about the 1975 schedule then. I wanted to keep things under control this time around, and be a better roommate. Joe was a decent guy, and I always felt guilty about being an asshole with him. I knew he didn't like my being a doper and one time Marilyn and I went to bed while he was still in the sack himself, and that really offended him.

I could already see what was happening with some of my incoming brothers. Andy Kowalchuk was a big time pot smoker, which I knew now but not on the first trip through. He got me into pot big time back then, but I kept it much more low key now. Still, he got Bill Keswick, a chemistry major, to design a hash oil still and steal some lab gear to run it. This turned out to be an amusing weekend project for the two of them. Jerry Modanowicz was proving to be an asshole, but since he had moved into the glorified closet that was one end of the Underground Railroad, he didn't have any roommates to worry about. The Cisco Kid was back, uglier and stupider than ever, having barely managed to keep his grades high enough to come back. Within two weeks he had already broken one chair when he sat in it, and I knew it was the first of many to come.

Joe was a math major, and was taking sophomore level math classes, but he didn't need all that much help from me, and rarely asked. He thought my working on a doctorate was a little strange, but it wasn't that odd. In fact, despite being a real animal house and a nest of dopers and drunks, Kegs had a surprising number of geniuses living there. A lot of the upperclassmen were in five year engineering masters programs. Both Pabst and Schlitz, the Beer Buddies, would graduate with electrical engineering degrees (pure math) in three years, and Homer Simpson would get out in four years with a masters in computer science. Joe would graduate in four years with two bachelors degrees, math and economics, and then defer his military duty while he went to Wharton on his own dime and get both an MBA and a masters in operations research (also pure math) in two years. My doing a doctorate in four years was not at all out of the question.

Marilyn showed up two weeks later in the middle of the afternoon on Friday, while Bradley was taking a rare late afternoon Friday class. We quickly tore upstairs and snuck in a quickie before he got back, although we giggled a lot when he came back from class and found us sitting there pretending to study. Marilyn had already met Joe before (he was my second in the duel with Ghormley) as well as the rest of the brothers, and settled right in. There were always a few girlfriends around the house, some serious and some not. We did not live a chaste lifestyle. It was rather more of a desperately horny lifestyle!

The best example of this was a fellow about five years ahead of us who made a name for himself and the fraternity at every college campus in the area. He combined the finest traits of nerdly math wizardry and terminal horniness. He figured that an average brother would meet, over the course of a semester, ten to twenty girls at various parties. They would end up getting one or two of them in the sack, a closing ratio of roughly 10%. So therefore, apply some good old fashioned Yankee ingenuity to the problem. He would hit on 100 to 200 girls a semester! If it had two X chromosomes, he would buy her a drink at a party, quite bluntly say that he was only interested in one thing, and ask if she was interested in it also. If so, they could leave together. On the down side, he got his face slapped a whole shitload of times, had drinks dumped on his head even more, and earned a major reputation as a first grade creep. On the plus side, he figured his ratio held true, and he got laid a lot! It took us years to live his reputation down!

By strange happenstance, we were having a party Saturday night, the first big one of the semester. It wasn't Halloween, which was the following week, but we were celebrating Oktoberfest, so we had a couple of kegs going. Next weekend we'd get even sillier. That afternoon, Marty and I and Marilyn set up the bars, much like I had done with Marty last year when I met Marilyn. It was looking like I was a junior member of the Social Committee, or maybe they had just figured out I was a lush. Joe was spending the night in the triple with Bruno and Lynchburg, and with any luck, Marilyn and I could spend some quality time alone before the party that afternoon.

We had finished setting up the bars and were relaxing in the living room when another couple of guys, juniors, came in and plopped down on the couch. They were starting to argue about learning and education, which Marilyn found amusing, since she was an education major. Meanwhile, they got totally off the first topic and started arguing about what the most important thing they learned in high school was. That was when I chimed in. "Hey, I learned everything I ever needed to know back when I was five years old. Everything else is just BS."

"Like what?", sneered Jim Easton.

"Well, I learned to play well with others and to share my toys when I was five. Didn't you learn that, too?"

That got a good laugh from everybody there, including Easton. "That's true. It didn't take, but I do remember learning that."

"Everything else important is from that time, too. Don't you remember being told to watch both ways before you cross the street? Five years old!"

Everybody nodded, and they started tossing around stuff like, 'Don't run with scissors.', 'Don't cheat.', 'Nobody likes a tattletale.', and so forth.

I nudged Marilyn in the side and said, "Here's a good one. Always take a nap every day." Marilyn turned bright red at that, especially when Marty asked if I needed a nap.

"Maybe.", I agreed. "Besides, I always remember what I learned on Romper Room."

That got a few people reminiscing about Romper Room. Marilyn got some attention when she announced, "I was on Romper Room!"

"Really? You and Miss Sally?"

"It was Miss Nancy in Utica."

I nodded. Romper Room was a sort of franchise operation, and every town and station in those days, back before you had nationwide broadcasting like that, had their own hostess. "Well, I learned a very important lesson from Miss Sally."

"What?", she asked, falling into my trap.

"Be a Do-Bee and eat your honey!"

Oh my God but the place roared at that, and Marilyn turned beet red and squealed as she ran out of the room. I raced after her and caught her and carried her up to my room. I was a Do-Bee!

Marilyn put up with quite a few jokes the rest of the weekend, but we left the party early and had our own party upstairs. Sunday morning, after a nice bout of early morning loving, we hit the bathroom early. The procedure was that you could lock the main bath on the second floor hall from the inside, and then clean up together. Sometimes, if the traffic was heavy, a girl would simply barge in and hop into the shower, and then peel off her robe and hang it up by sticking her arm out through the curtain. That I saw more than once in my time there.

Sunday morning I had to get up early anyway, since I was cooking. Not just cooking myself and Marilyn some Sunday breakfast. No, I was cooking Sunday Supper for the entire fraternity! I was confident of my abilities in preparing a nice intimate meal for two, or a delicious family sized meal, but this was the first time in either life that I would cook a professional meal for a large group of people on a budget. I was a little nervous.

Normally we had a cook who came in at about 11:00 and worked until 6:00, Monday through Friday. She made a simple lunch, sandwiches and soup, that sort of thing, and then made dinner. The Kitchen Steward was in charge of ordering everything needed, overseeing the budget, and running the assigned labor. All the brothers acted as waiters and dishwashers in rotation. Saturday we did the same, but Mrs. Clarity simply prepped the meal ahead of time. We simply warmed it up.

Breakfasts were usually cereal or toast or eggs, which were free, or you could do yogurt, which had a signing sheet on the fridge, where you marked down what you took and it was added to your bar bill at the end of the month. That's how I learned to do omelets, studying under Ricky in the middle of the night when we had the munchies.

Sunday was different. We only had one meal, a big deal meal, at 1:00. You scrounged for yourself Sunday night. This was usually a big roast of some sort, veggies, potatoes, dessert, etc. We had these things at other meals, but Sunday was definitely supposed to be bigger and better. We would also have more people in attendance. Girlfriends were usually around, and we often brought pledges and potential pledges in for meals. The cook was one of the brothers, from a list of three or four brothers who had demonstrated superior kitchen skills over the years. They got paid $10 for a Sunday meal. I had been a Steward once, but I had never been a cook.

I didn't have an unlimited budget, and I didn't have unlimited manpower. I had me and Marilyn, after I promised to split my fee with her. She was generally hopeless in a kitchen, but I would supervise her and use her for the scutwork. I just wouldn't tell her that. I had been assigned a beef roast, and Arnie, the current Steward, had gone over my menu. I promised him roast beef, canned green beans, potatoes, gravy, rolls, and my choice of either Jell-O and Foo (a non-dairy whipped topping that we made from a powder) or ton cake (it's bigger than a pound cake), which was nothing more than a sheet cake with some baker's sugar sprinkled on it.

So that was the menu, but it didn't mean I couldn't improvise. We started early, and I had Marilyn help with mixing the ingredients for the ton cake and pour it into a baking tray. Marilyn, for all her being a lousy cook, is a perfectly adequate baker. As soon as the cake was in one side of the double oven, I had her make some dough for biscuits. Again, this can be pretty simple, but we needed 50-60. Meanwhile, I quickly washed three dozen potatoes and set them on a tray, and put them into the other side of the oven.

Just because we were doing meat and potatoes, it didn't mean we were doing something boring. I remember reading Heinlein's Starship Troopers, and there is a passage about the fall of communism. It basically goes that not everybody has equal abilities. A good cook can turn apples, sugar, and flour into a tasty treat, a great chef can take the same ingredients and turn out a brilliant confection, and a lousy hack can turn them into an inedible mess. I was going for something special today. These weren't just going to be baked potatoes; I was going to make double baked potatoes! You bake the potatoes until done, remove them from the oven, and cut them in half lengthwise. Then you carefully scoop out the potato from the skins and save the empty skins. The potatoes get mixed up with some milk and butter and chives, into a creamy mashed potato filling, get spooned back into the potatoes, and then rebaked. It takes a little longer, but it's very nice.

While the potatoes were baking and Marilyn was working on the biscuits, I was preparing the roast beast. I was going for a horseradish crusting. You slit some pockets into the roast and then dredge the roast in flour and place it in the roasting pan. Next you prepare a paste of melted butter, horseradish, parsley, and lemon juice that you pour into the pockets and then cover the outside of the roast with. Then you roast as normal. Very tasty!

For gravy, I was taking some standard canned gravy, but modifying it by adding some beef bouillon, garlic, and horseradish. For my veggies, I was using canned green beans, which I had to use since I couldn't budget for fresh and didn't have the time to prepare them anyway. I was tempted to bake a green bean casserole, but instead settled for adding some chopped onions and cilantro to the pot while they were warming up.

By noon everything was cooking along nicely. The real trick to cooking is not the individual dishes, but the timing required to bring it all together at once. Some items, like the dessert, can be prepared ahead of time without worry. Others can be cooked and then kept warm for a bit longer, like the potatoes. The meat needed to be ready about fifteen minutes early, so I could carve it in time to be served on the dot at 1:00. The biscuits and the gravy needed to be ready without any delay. By half past twelve Arnie was marshalling the waiters and starting to prepare everything for serving. The kitchen smelled fabulous; Marilyn and I looked like we had been dragged through a knothole!

By 12:45 the tables were set and people were starting to congregate. I was slicing roast beast as fast as my little fingers could go. On my own I used an electric carving knife, but here I used a big chef's knife. Meanwhile Arnie had the main counter lined with serving plates and bowls, and he and Marilyn were slopping beans and biscuits and gravy out. At five minutes of, cries of "Food! Food!", were sounding in the dining room, and we could hear the thumping of fists on the tables. I just grinned at the others as we started portioning out the roast beef onto serving plates. We actually got done with about ninety seconds to spare, by which time the hue and cry was thunderous. I looked at my watch as the grinning waiters picked up their plates, and as the second hand hit the 12, I flashed my hand down and sent them on their way. I leaned back against the counter and grinned at Marilyn. "Some fun, huh?"

She gave me an exhausted look. "I think I need a raise!"

"I'd make a smartass comment about the type of raise you're going to get, but I'm too tired.", I admitted. I pushed her towards the dining room, where I had reserved her a seat near the kitchen, next to my roommate. "Sit. Eat. Rest!"

Bradley looked at me as I leaned in the kitchen door next to Marilyn. "What's in the gravy?", he asked.

"You like it?"

He nodded. "Yeah!"

"I added some beef broth, garlic, and horseradish. The horseradish is what gives it the extra kick. That's on the beef as well."

"It's good!"

"What'd you do to the green beans?", asked Boris.

"Added some onions and cilantro."

He made a funny face. "I hate green beans."

Then why ask? I just shrugged. Everybody else was stuffing it in as fast as they could, and waiters were starting to head for the kitchen for seconds. I followed them in and sent out some more food.

About ten minutes later, the calls for dessert started, and I had the waiters send out the trays of plates with cake on them. As I knew would happen, there were immediate cries for 'Foo! Foo'", done in a high falsetto voice. I also knew that Arnie would clamp down on it. He jumped up and yelled back, "No, you don't get Foo, not after last week! No more Foo until you learn to behave yourselves!" Last Sunday the dessert was Jell-O and Foo, and had resulted in a Foo Fight at the end. In fact, it was about even odds that when Foo was served, a Foo Fight would ensue.

I grabbed a clean plate from the pantry and loaded it up with some food and took Bradley's seat, and had some supper while Marilyn dawdled over her cake. Arnie came in with a slice of ton cake and sat down across from me. "So, you want in the rotation?", he asked.

I smiled. "So, I passed the audition?"

"You passed." I grinned over at Marilyn, who grinned back at me. "You want cash or do you want me to put it against your bar bill?"

"Put it against my bar bill."

"Where's my cut?!", asked Marilyn. She held her hand out, palm up, and twiddled her fingers.

"Considering what I should be charging you for lessons, I thought we'd call it even."

"Lessons? Think again!"

"True. A gentleman never charges a lady." Arnie snorted at that and stood up. I simply pulled out my wallet and handed Marilyn a ten. "Keep the change. I'll take it in trade later."

"Not if you have that attitude!" Still, she was smiling as she said it.

"Go clean up before you go home. I'd offer to wash your back for you, but I'd rather just take a nap." We headed upstairs while the dishwashing crew took over. Marilyn cleaned up, and I dozed in my armchair at my desk. When she came back from a second shower, I carried her bags out to her car and kissed her good-bye. I would see her in another couple of weeks.

And so it went for the rest of the semester. I went back to Utica in two weeks, and Marilyn visited the frat house two weeks after that. In Utica I was becoming a fixture. Mark kept trying to needle me, but Marilyn kept me calm, and then really ripped him a new asshole one night at the dinner table, during the early November visit. For Thanksgiving, I planned to spend the holiday weekend in Utica with the Lefleurs, much to the disappointment of any frat brothers staying over.

I was worried about what would occur when Harriet and Big Bob found out I was estranged from my family. I dodged that bullet when they asked about it that first weekend in November, simply stating it was too far to travel. They nodded in understanding at that, since it was at least 300 miles away. For Thanksgiving I would drive over to Utica Wednesday morning and stay until Sunday, my longest visit yet.

The house was extra cramped that weekend. I was in my usual spot in the library, but Marilyn had a roommate, too, her Aunt Lynette, who was visiting and sleeping in the same room as the only other adult female. She was Big Bob's baby sister, and only about ten years older than Marilyn and me. She worked in the admissions office at Plattsburgh State. She was the person who Marilyn was named after, sort of. She was a spinster, in that she never married, and as far as I ever knew, never had any romantic inclinations.

She was a little pistol, though, and I do mean little. Lynette was maybe 5'1" tall, if she was standing straight and thinking tall thoughts. One of the rules was that the little kids couldn't think of themselves as "big" until they were as tall as one of the grownups, so they all looked forward to getting as tall as Aunt Lynette and being "big". She got off the hook a generation later, when Peter married a blazingly hot redheaded Irish girl who was only 4'11" tall. Suddenly you had all these nine and ten year old nephews and nieces and grandkids who were "big". You simply had to laugh at it all.

One interesting thing was announced. Harriet was pregnant with number 11, who was expected in the late spring. I don't think a year would pass between Peter and Paul. If nothing else, Harriet and Big Bob had figured out the mathematics of being fruitful and multiplying!

Wednesday went okay, pretty much like my other two visits. Marilyn and I went out to dinner and then she tucked me into bed later, before sneaking up to her room a couple of hours later. Both of us were smiling when she left the library.

The plan for Thursday was to just hang out with the family, watch football in the afternoon, and then suffer through a Lefleur Thanksgiving dinner. Maybe Marilyn could pour a lot of booze into me before dinner. The morning started off fine, and football was okay. I'm not a big fan, but Marilyn's brothers certainly were. For me, while I was always a big fan of the Baltimore Colts, I already knew that they were going to move in a few years to Indianapolis and that just ruined football for me in the future, and for me, that meant now. Tenses get weird with this back to the future shit.

So while the day had started fine, things changed during dinner. Dinner did not go well, not well at all. In fact it was an absolute catastrophic disaster! We were all seated at the dining room table, all except the little kids who were either at the bar or in high chairs. Marilyn was across from me and Lynette was next to me, and since we were the oldest, we were down next to Big Bob and Harriet. "So, Carling, where do you go to school?", asked Lynette.

"RPI."

"Oh, that's a good school! What are you studying?"

"I'm taking mathematics.", I answered.

"Really! What kind of degree is that?", she continued.

Marilyn popped in at that. "Carl's working on his doctorate." She looked over at me. "Isn't that right? You're working on your PhD?"

Suddenly it felt like the whole room was staring at me. I nodded. "Technically I don't start until next semester, but I've already started working with Professor Rhineburg, and he's agreed to be my thesis adviser."

"Your PhD? Oh my! That's amazing!", said Lynette.

I tried to shrug it off, but it was out there now. Big Bob stared at me. "You're going to be a doctor?"

"Of mathematics, sir."

"Damn fool thing to be going into the army then.", he said huffily. "If you're so smart, why didn't you get a real scholarship?" I just rolled my eyes and bit my tongue.

"Just how old are you, Carl?", asked Harriet.

"I just turned 19, ma'am."

"What are you, some kind of genius?", asked Mark.

I put my utensils down and wiped my mouth with my napkin. Mark was trying to push my buttons again, and had been all day long. Worst of all was that his parents knew what he was doing and didn't call him on it. Marilyn had gotten into it with him a couple of times earlier in the day, but he hadn't stopped and his parents hadn't said anything to him. I wondered if they were trying to test me. Marilyn couldn't figure it out, either. For instance, earlier that day Mark had heard her laughing at me about being a Boy Scout, and he had started in on it. I simply recited the Scout Law while his parents listened in, and then asked if he thought his sister should be dating a guy who didn't believe those things. He had just sneered and then left the room.

Now, as he rode me about working on a doctorate, I looked over at him and said, "Yes, Mark, that's exactly what I am. Is there a problem with that?"

He blinked his eyes and tried for a comeback. "Yeah, I think you're full of crap! If you're so smart, what are you doing with Marilyn?" That got a number of laughs from his brothers. I noticed that Harriet and Big Bob weren't laughing, but they weren't telling their kids to shut up, either.

I felt very cold inside, and if it had just been me, I would have punched him out. I knew that was a really lousy idea, but I couldn't put up with it any more. I set my napkin down beside my plate. I felt a kick at my ankles and Marilyn was trying to keep me calm. I looked across at her and she was silently pleading with me to keep my cool. I took a deep breath and just nodded at her. Dinner had been bad but edible; the turkey was dry as a bone, but with enough gravy and salt, anything can be eaten. Now it felt like an icy ball in the pit of my stomach. I looked at Mark. "Your sister, Mark, is a bright light in the darkness of my soul. The real question is what is an amazing girl like Marilyn doing with me." I turned my head to Harriet. "If you don't mind, I think I'll excuse myself for now."

I pushed my chair back and stood up. I think everyone was in a certain state of shock at my leaving. I went out of the kitchen and through the living room, and found myself in the library. Behind me, Marilyn started yelling at her brother, and the volume level became intolerable. I looked around the room. While I normally unpack when I stay in a hotel, there was no place to put anything, so I was living out of my bag, and I rolled up my sleeping bag every morning. I put on my coat and hat, grabbed my shit, and headed out. The screaming in the kitchen was approaching jet engine levels. I went outside and tossed my stuff in the back seat of the Galaxie, and then went back inside.

Nobody had even noticed I had gone out or come in. I went back into the library and found a scratch pad and a pen, and wrote some stuff on the pad. Then I went back into the lions' den. Everybody stopped yelling and stared at me, now wearing my winter coat and my hat. I walked up to the table where Mark was sitting on the far side and dropped the note pad onto his dinner plate, right in the middle of his mashed potatoes. "Mark, you think I'm full of crap about college? That's the number for the RPI switchboard, and Doctor Rhineburg's office. Feel free to call him on Monday to confirm I'm going for my doctorate. If you ever call me a liar or insult your sister in front of me again, I'll feed you your teeth."

Mark just stared at me as I turned towards his parents. "Mr. Lefleur, feel free to think me a fool for defending this country. My family has been defending your family for generations. We don't ask for your thanks, but please do us the courtesy of not mocking us, either. Mrs. Lefleur, dinner was very nice, but I think I've worn out my welcome. I'll take my leave now before I say or do something we will all regret." I headed back out to the living room.

The room erupted, with Marilyn leading the howl. I was already out the door when she started crying out, "Stop! Stop! Wait!" Marilyn caught me as I was opening the door to my car. "Where are you going?! Come back!"

I turned to face her, and smiled down at her. I wrapped my arms around her. It was absolutely frigid and she was already starting to shiver. "If I don't get out of there, I am going to go bust, and punch out either your brother or your father or maybe just both of them. I'm heading back to Kegs."

"You're leaving?!"

I gave her a wry smile. "The guys staying there need me to cook for them. They're probably starving by now!" She started to protest, but I leaned down and kissed her, stopping her. "It's for the best. I can't stay here." I gently turned her towards the house. "Go inside before you freeze to death!" She stood there numbly, and I got into my car and pulled away.

I drove back to Troy on autopilot, not really noticing or seeing anything. I felt as numb as if I had walked back through the cold. I parked the Galaxie at Kegs and walked in through the kitchen. The light was on in the living room and I found Marty there watching television.

He looked up at me in surprise. "What are you doing here? I thought you were at Marilyn's?"

"It was a disaster!" I tossed my bag on the floor and sank down onto the opposite couch.

"How so?"

"Well, let's see." I held up my hand and started ticking things off on my fingers. "Marilyn's parents discovered I'm working on my doctorate. They think college is a waste of time and think I'm a fool for going to school."

"Yeah? They sent their daughter to college!", Marty interrupted.

I waved that off. "She's a girl. That's so she can meet a guy and get married. Anyway, that's one. Two, her brother called me a liar and said I wasn't going for a PhD and I threatened to feed him his teeth."

"Why didn't you?"

"Marilyn stopped me."

Marty nodded. "Should have anyway."

I shrugged. "Three, her old man thinks I'm an idiot for wasting my time in the army. Only idiots go in the army."

"He's right about that."

I just flipped my friend the bird. I started a fourth finger. "They treat Marilyn like shit, and I feel like smacking the bunch of them upside the head with a two-by-four half the time. Let's face it, Marty, they're white trash! Hell, they make white trash look good. Jesus Christ, her father's a trailer salesman for God's sake! Name one job more white trash than that!"

"Yeah, what's that make the guy mooning after his daughter?"

"An asshole. An asshole that needs a drink. You got the keys to the bar cabinet? I'm all out."

Marty rolled upright off the couch and shrugged. "What the hell, why not. Come on." He went off to his room and came back with a ring of keys. The bar cabinet was the most secure room in the frat house, considering that everybody who lived there was an alcoholic in training. He unlocked the bar room and then the bar cabinet, and I reached in and found a fifth of Black Velvet. "It's going on your bar tab, you know."

"Fuck it. You want a shot?" I grabbed a couple of shot glasses from behind the bar and filled them without waiting for a reply.

Marty grabbed his. "Mud in your eye!"

"Skoal!"

Marty locked up the bar and took a second shot for himself, and we headed back upstairs. "You going to be all right?"

"Peachy." I wandered off and went into the formal room. I sat down in an armchair in the corner, and left the lights off. It was dark and quiet, and seemed to fit my mood.

There are many different types of drinking. There's binge drinking, party drinking, social drinking, happy drinking, sad drinking, and all sorts of other types of drinking. The most dangerous type of drinking is thinking drinking. It's deliberate, slow, relentless, dark, and depressing. You think, and then you have a drink, and then you think some more, and then you drink some more. You keep this up until you either run out of thinks or run out of drinks. I was doing some serious thinking drinking.

I had really fucked up this time. You could always trust me to do and say the exact worst thing. It was bad enough that I got into it with Mark and Big Bob. No, I couldn't let the assholes slip by, I had to go after them. I had to react to them, let them call the tune. I couldn't act like a grownup. I had to act like a spoiled little boy. I had left Marilyn. She'd never want to see me again. Now what was I going to do? The only thing I cared about in the whole damned world was gone. I had already destroyed my own family, now I was working on Marilyn's. I sat there and slowly sipped shots of Black Velvet in the dark.

After a bit, I heard the back door open. Somebody else must have come in. There weren't any other guys staying in the main house, but there were about three over in Grogans', I thought. Whoever it was climbed the back steps and went upstairs, and I poured myself another shot. A minute later, as I stared at my shot glass, I heard somebody coming down the front stairs. For some reason I thought it sounded like a woman's walk.

"Is he here? I saw his car in the parking lot." It sounded almost like Marilyn. I swallowed the whisky and pondered that thought. Now I was hearing things.

Marty answered. "He's in the formal room. What happened? He said his visit didn't go well." I heard the creak of the old couch, like somebody was getting up. I eyed the bottle and contemplated pouring another shot.

"No, not very. My brother Mark thought he would be funny and see how far he could push Carl, and my father decided to let him. They pushed him awfully far. He just left and came back." The voices were sounding like they were getting closer. I thought about looking around for them, but decided not to. I looked at the bottle instead.

"He said something like that. I told him he should have decked your brother."

"I kept on him to behave. I should have let him deck him, too. The last time this sort of thing happened, he broke his own brother's jaw." The voices were getting closer. "Oh, shit. We need to get him to bed."

"Why do you think I was hanging out down here? I wanted to keep an eye on him until he passed out." Before I could make a response, somebody took the bottle away from me, and then hands grabbed my arms and pulled me upright. "Jesus Christ! Put this asshole on a diet, will you?", complained Marty.

The room started to swirl around me, and then things seemed to go very dark.

Chapter 38: Aftermath

I woke up on top of my bed the next morning, with the sunlight making achingly bright patterns on my eyeballs. My head was pounding and my stomach was churning and I felt like I was about to pee my pants. I was still dressed. I stumbled downstairs and made it to the bathroom, where I got my pants down in time to sit down and piss out a river. There are actually two toilets parked next to each other in the main bath, which was a good thing, since my stomach kept churning and I was able to simply bend over from where I was sitting and puke into the other toilet until I had nothing left but dry heaves.

I didn't think I had ever felt this crappy on my first go-around! This was even worse than the bout of dysentery I once had. To prove it, my guts cut loose and I had the runs. I sat there until that stopped and I prayed to die. God must have really had a wild sense of humor that day, since he let me live. I eventually was pissed, puked, and shit dry and empty. I got up slowly, my head throbbing, and looked in the mirror. I looked even worse than I felt. I stumbled over to the shower and turned the water on, and then stuck my head underneath it. I was still dressed, and my shirt ended up soaked, but I didn't care. Now, semi-clean, I wandered back to the third floor.

I wasn't sure how I had gotten there. I must have left the bottle downstairs last night. I felt too crappy to want another drink, so I dug out my bottle of Tylenol and dry gulped a handful. Oh, how I missed Advil! That wouldn't be legal for another ten years! I stripped off my wet shirt and thought about going back to bed, but I wasn't sleepy enough at the moment. Besides, my room and my bed stunk of stale sweat and booze. Despite the chill, I opened a window to air out the joint. At first it was bracing and refreshing, but then it just was cold. I grabbed some clean clothes and my toilet kit and headed down to the bathroom again.

It was about half an hour later, after a very long and hot shower, and another round of shitting, puking, and pissing, that I was alive and dressed and back upstairs. I did some more Tylenol; it might kill my liver, but after last night it was probably dying anyway. I closed the window to the room and grabbed my dirty laundry and headed downstairs. There, in the living room, as I turned the corner to head to the basement, I found Marilyn. I stopped dead in my tracks. "Hey, what are you doing here?"

She was sitting on the couch playing solitaire and watching Marty, Swayzack, and Ghormley play three handed poker. The three guys looked up and grumbled out various greetings, and Marilyn rolled her eyes. "I've been here since last night. How do you think you got up to your room?"

I gave her a very perplexed look at that. I looked towards the formal room, which was the last location I remembered clearly, and then back, to find Marty smirking at me. "You know, I have no idea. I was wondering about that. What happened?"

Marilyn flung the deck of cards at me, which didn't hit me since they fluttered all over the room. "You asshole!", she yelled, which earned her a lot of laughs from the others. She got to her feet and came over to me, and wrapped her arms around me. "Sometimes you make me so mad I want to scream!" She grabbed my laundry and said, "Come on, let's get the laundry going. Then we can clean up your pigsty."

I followed along mutely. I didn't know what to say, but I knew I wanted to say it alone with her. We went down to the basement and on towards the back where the washing machines were. Once we got there, I asked her, "So what happened after I left? I didn't expect you here."

"I left about an hour and a half after you did, maybe two hours. Just long enough for you to get drunk! You don't remember me and Marty carrying you upstairs last night?"

I gave her a wry look. "Not really. I thought I heard you two talking, but I thought I was just hearing things."

"The next time you get drunk like that, you'll hear me kicking you in the balls! Asshole!"

The washing machine was making an uncommonly loud sound as it started to cycle, so I took her hand and led her back towards the front of the basement. There we sat down on an old couch. "I'm sorry about that. I had no idea you would come here. I would never do that with you around."

That mollified her slightly, but only slightly, and I let her rag on me for a few minutes more. When I finally got a word in edgewise, I asked, "So why are you here? What happened after I left?"

She gave me one last "Asshole!" before settling down. She looked at me and shrugged. "It got crazy for a while. Most of the kids and Aunt Lynette took off, but Mom, Dad, Mark, and I went at it for over an hour. I don't think anybody has ever stood up to my father like that before, and he didn't know whether to respect you for it or banish you for life. He did try to ground me, and I told him I'd move out first. Mark did get grounded, and Dad even smacked him on the head, and I've never seen him do that before."

Oh, shit, I had never seen him get physically angry with any of the kids either. This was really serious. "Oh, crap!", I muttered.

"Really!"

I looked at her. "So, what happens now? Are we still together, or have you dumped me, or what?"

"I'm here, aren't I? Christ, you're an asshole!" She gave me a few more minutes of grief. I sat there and ate it. I guess I deserved it. Better to have her yelling at me then ignoring me. She finished by yelling, "If I was going to leave you, I wouldn't be here, would I!?"

I was saved by the bell, the washing machine bell, so I quickly went and threw my wet clothes in the dryer and started another load. When I came back she was pretty much over her stewing, so I sat back down next to her and tentatively lifted my arm up. She must have been over her mad, since she moved in next to me and snuggled against my side. "Just don't do that again."

"What? Get into it with Mark and your father, or leave?"

"Leave! If you had waited, I would have come back with you. You can kill Mark for all I care."

"That never even crossed my mind. Listen, Marilyn, I've already fucked up my relationship with my own family. I know your family means a lot more to you than mine ever did to me. I won't get mixed up with that. You should leave me if it's me or them. I'm not worth it."

"I hate it when you speak like that. You're worth it and more."

We snuggled together quietly until the bell rang again. We had to wait until the dryer was finished before putting the second load in the dryer. We took the first load back to my room, at which point Marilyn started ripping me again about the squalor that Joe and I were living in. "It smells in here! You need to change the bed immediately!" We had an old rickety ironing board behind the door, and that was set up and Marilyn started ironing the clean clothes. I was assigned to take a load of bedsheets down to the basement. I returned to receive orders to find some cleaning rags and a bucket of soapy water. I was about to wash the room down!

"You're really getting into this ordering me around shit, aren't you.", I commented.

Marilyn glared at me and waved the iron at me. "You earned it! Get to work!"

I snickered and turned away. "Yes, ma'am!" I looked back for a second. "I bet you like being on top, too!" That got me a screech of outrage and a face full of laundry.

I wasn't all that hungry, and I kept downing aspirin and Tylenol the rest of the afternoon, while I cleaned and Marilyn supervised. She had me dusting the whole room, washing down everything, even dusting our textbooks. Meanwhile it was up and down the stairs to do loads of laundry. At one point Swayzack was passing through and I warned him away - Hurricane Marilyn was coming through!

By late afternoon I forced her to stop, saying we had already cleaned the room twice, and put away everything and went downstairs. "You hungry? You didn't have any lunch.", I asked.

"Neither did you."

"I don't think that would have been very pretty. I think I could handle something now. Want an omelet?"

"What's that?", asked Marilyn.

I shouldn't have been surprised, since I don't think I ever saw the Lefleurs cook a breakfast. "Fancy scrambled eggs. Want some?"

"Okay." I led the way to the kitchen and pulled eggs, milk, and American cheese out of the giant wall fridge. I also spotted some leftover ham from the Sunday meal I had cooked a week ago. I yanked that out as well, along with the butter. These I placed on the counter, and then I started grabbing spices off the pantry shelf - red pepper, garlic powder, some dried onion, oregano and basil. Marilyn was watching curiously as I brought out a small frying pan and a mixing bowl. I put the frying pan on the stove with a low flame, and melted some butter in it, while in the mixing bowl I broke three eggs and added some milk. I also prepped a slice of cheese and cut up into small pieces some of the ham.

Marty wandered in as I was pouring the eggs into the frying pan. "What's for dinner?", he asked.

"I told you they'd starve without me.", I commented to Marilyn. To Marty I said, "Three egg omelets. Want one? Marilyn's first, but after that I'm taking orders."

"Yeah, sure!" I already had a reputation for making omelets almost as good as Ricky's, which was only appropriate, since I learned to make them from Ricky on the first trip through. "Can I let the others know?"

"Go take some orders." I looked over at Marilyn and said, "If you want some toast, you should probably put some bread in the toaster."

Marilyn looked around for the bread, and Marty pointed her towards it before heading over to Grogans'. A couple of minutes later he was back with Swayzack and Ghormley. I had already flipped Marilyn's over, encasing the melted cheese and ham, and was busy mixing some more egg. Marty and Bill wanted ham and cheese omelets, but Mike only wanted cheese, and no peppers. I ran an assembly line for about fifteen minutes before I was able to start on my own.

Marilyn stayed and watched while she ate. "How was it? Like it?", I asked.

"It's very good! I still can't believe you can cook."

"Want any more?"

"No."

I poured my own egg into the pan. "It's like I told you. I lived on my own for two years before I ever came here. I had to learn how to cook."

"Yeah, you told me. You also told me you used to cook dinner for your girlfriends in order to seduce them. Don't remind me."

"Jealous? I suppose I should be flattered. Besides, that was long before I met you, and it was only one girl anyway.", I said with a laugh.

"Hmmm ... Still sounds fishy to me."

I grinned. "How's that seduction thing working, anyway?"

Marilyn smiled back. "You're wining and dining me with scrambled eggs?"

"Dining you, at least. I think I'm leaving off the wining for a few days."

"We'll see."

With the five of us eating together, it was simpler to run the dishwasher for a few loads. The house had an industrial type dishwasher, and I showed Marilyn how it worked. By then I was actually starting to feel sort of human again, and after dinner we went upstairs. I put some Moody Blues on the stereo, Days of Future Passed, and lay down and stretched out on my bed. I turned towards her as she turned towards me, and we came together slowly and softly. We spent some time taking each other's clothes off, and then we made very gentle love. After all that had happened, it felt really good to be with her, alone in that big house, without any cares or worries.

Afterwards, we made love a second and then a third time, and it was still just the evening. Sated, at least for the moment, I pulled some pants on, and Marilyn pulled my shirt on. "That looks better on you then on me.", I commented.

"That's because it's so short.", she said with a giggle.

"If you don't like it, you can always take it off. I won't mind. Really, I won't!"

"You're such a jerk!", she said, smiling.

"I never noticed earlier. What did you bring with you? Where's your stuff?"

"I packed a quick bag and threw it in the back of my car. It's out back. Can you get it?"

I nodded and headed out and downstairs. I was barefoot and bare-chested, and damn near froze as I grabbed her bag and brought it back up to the room. Marilyn was still wearing just my sport shirt, and curled up on a beanbag chair in the corner. She's not tall, and not what you would call leggy, but they were all on view that night and looked very tempting. "Here you go! I hope you have something in there to keep us warm, because it's absolutely freezing out there."

"There's nothing in here that will keep you warm."

I laughed. "That's your job."

She took her bag and opened it, and then rooted around in it for her bathroom kit. "I need to borrow your robe."

"Why?"

"I can't go out like this!"

"Why not? There's nobody else in the entire house!"

"Carl!"

"Hell, wear a pair of high heels and go naked. I'll go along to protect you."

"CARL!"

I relented and took my robe from the closet, and she pulled it on like I was about to take it back. I just laughed at her. I grabbed my own stuff and followed her down to the bathroom, and then made a production out of locking and bolting the door. We were the only ones in the house. Marilyn stuck her tongue out at me. We showered together, which is always fun, but didn't get carried away otherwise, and then brushed our teeth and went about our other business. Then it was back upstairs.

Normally I sleep in my briefs and a tee shirt, although I usually skip the undershirt when I'm with Marilyn. Hell, with Marilyn I usually skip the briefs, too. I wouldn't want anything to get in the way in case she started feeling frisky in the middle of the night. Tonight, with the temperature where it was, I grabbed some underwear and set it down by the bed. I turned towards Marilyn, who was kneeling on the floor going through her bag, and spotted something blue and lacy. I bent over and pulled it out before she could stop me. Marilyn grabbed for it but missed. I held it up to the light and discovered it was a light blue and lacy chemise. "That looks interesting.", I commented.

Marilyn blushed and took it away from me. "Didn't your mother ever teach you to not go through other people's things?"

"Yeah, but she never taught me about that sort of thing. Did your mother take you shopping?"

"Oh my God! No!", laughed Marilyn. "Tammy and I went out shopping."

"In Utica? I figured that sort of thing was illegal in Utica."

"Don't be silly."

"Did you help her pick something out for her?", I quizzed.

"You are such a pig! I'm not telling you that!"

I had to laugh. "So is that for tonight?"

She tossed it back in the bag. "How about tomorrow night instead?"

I nodded and opened up my bed. I stripped off my pants and tossed them onto a chair and climbed inside the sheets, and then scooted over to the side. Marilyn stripped off my robe and climbed in with me. I snuggled up next to her and whispered, "Thank you for everything. I love you." Then we made love one more time before we fell asleep.

I woke up the next morning to find Marilyn stroking my cock. "What a wonderful way to wake up.", I told her.

"I thought you might like it."

I rolled onto my back and Marilyn climbed up on top of me. Save a horse, ride a cowboy! Considering I hadn't gone to the bathroom yet, and a piss hardon is notoriously difficult to come with, Marilyn had a nice long ride. "I like waking up this way, too." she sighed afterwards, stretched out and lazing on top of me.

"Babe, I need to get up!" I rolled her off me as gently as I could, and scrambled to my feet. I left her the robe and pulled my pants on quickly. I scampered off to the bathroom.

I was still sitting on the toilet when the door opened and Marilyn came in, her arms full. She was wearing my robe, and was carrying towels and our bath kits. She blushed when she saw me, and turned away, and said, "Ooops, sorry. I figured since you were already down here, we might as well get cleaned up."

"Thank you. That way we can get dirty together all over again!"

She looked over at me and grinned. "You're an awful person!"

"It's my most endearing quality." I wiped myself, and flushed and went to the shower, to turn on the water and get some hot water into the pipes.

"I wasn't sure you had any."

"Cold, lady, that's cold!" Marilyn hung my robe on a hook and we washed each other under the shower. It's a damn good thing nobody else was in the house, since Marilyn got kind of noisy, and we had a very good time using up all the hot water. Afterwards, as we were toweling dry, I said, "Well, that's two so far today. Interested in going for a record?"

"Think you're up for it?" Marilyn was staring at something in the mirror, though at what I had no idea. I think all women do that.

"Only one way to find out."

"Breakfast first, breaking records later!" We went back upstairs and dressed.

Downstairs, we had a fine dining experience based on bagels and cream cheese, with an OJ chaser. As we nibbled our bagels in the living room, I asked her, "So, have you been going to the tanning salon?" I had asked her this several times in our letters, but had never gotten an answer.

"You're serious about that? And about, you know, down there?" Marilyn turned red as she asked this. I had also told her, several times, that I was going to buy her a swimsuit when we got there that was so small she would need to shave everywhere.

"As serious as a heart attack, which is what you're going to give men when they see you. Absolutely!"

"Well, Tammy and I went to this place together a couple of times, but I felt really weird. I went topless, but not bottomless."

I slid over next to her and placed my hand on her leg. Marilyn was wearing jeans and a KGS shirt I had bought her last year, with nothing on underneath. I leaned over and whispered into her ear. "If you don't tan all over, your butt and your pussy will have white lines all over them. Do you want me to trim you up now?"

Marilyn gasped at that. "Oh my God! You wouldn't ... no ... really ... I couldn't..."

I laughed and stood up. I took her hand and pulled her to her feet. We stopped in the dishwashing room and dropped our plates off, and then I led her by the hand back up to my room. Once inside, I closed the door. "First things first. You need to get undressed completely."

Marilyn looked at me nervously. I opened my toilet kit and dug out a pair of small blunt nosed scissors I had in there (for nose hairs, but I didn't tell Marilyn that, way too gross!) Next I spread out a towel on my bed and had Marilyn sit on it and then lay back. She propped herself up on her elbows and looked down her body apprehensively. It wasn't the best position in the world, but I lay down between her legs and clipped and trimmed her pussy hair as best I could with my little scissors. A mustache trimmer works great, but I didn't have a mustache. Marilyn didn't have a real heavy bush, more like a small dense triangle, and the little curls fell to the towel.

"That's part one.", I said, and then climbed up off the bed.

"There's more?"

"We've just started. Don't move." I headed downstairs and found a couple of empty 2 liter Coke bottles. I rinsed them out several times with hot water, and then filled them with warm water, and carried them back upstairs. Once back in my room, I set them down and closed the door, and pulled out my razor and the shaving cream.

"What in the world are you doing?", asked Marilyn, looking at the bottles of Coke.

"It's just warm water. Don't worry." I scratched my head for a moment. "Get up. I can't do this with you laying down like that." My bed was actually a mattress on the floor, and I needed to be able to kneel down and work on her at eye level. I folded up a towel and placed it on my swivel chair. "Sit here."

Marilyn climbed to her feet and sat down on my swivel chair. I knelt down in front of her and maneuvered her so that her legs were spread wide and her pussy was all the way forward. She was half slumped back in the chair. I poured some of the warm water in a washcloth and rubbed her pussy a few times to get it wet, and heard her whimper softly. I grinned to myself, and then squirted a thin line of shaving cream on her, which elicited a little squeal of surprise. I rubbed it into her remaining stubble, and then said, "Now, whatever you do, don't move!"

I took a lot of care with that shave, since I really didn't want to nick her. I used my old razor blade first, and then put in a new blade and redid the entire area. When I was done, Marilyn was completely smooth and soft and shiny. What really surprised her was when I had her turn around and kneel on the chair, and then repeated the process from behind. I used some more water to wipe everything clean.

Finished, Marilyn stood there and marveled at her new haircut. "Oh, God, I can't believe it! How did you know how to do that?" She glanced at my grinning face and promptly said, "No! Don't tell me! I don't want to know!"

"That was just part two. We're not finished yet."

"There's more?"

"Final moisturization! Sit down again, just like before."

"Final moisturization?" Marilyn was very confused, but she sat down obediently and spread her legs wide.

What an amazing sight! She looked so smooth and sexy, her pussy gaped open slightly, and I could smell that she was terribly excited and turned on. "Final moisturization! Just let me know when you've moisturized enough.", I repeated, and then put my face between those soft thighs and started eating her out. Within seconds her hands were entwined in my hair, pulling my face deeper, as she slumped in the chair and keened a quiet tune of desperation. I slurped up the juices flowing freely from her pussy. I pulled her legs up so they were resting on my shoulders and concentrated on licking her slit and tonguing her clit.

Marilyn was definitely enjoying this third phase of the process, but what really drove her nuts was when I homed in on her clit. Marilyn has a small clit, very sensitive, that hides up underneath the hood. I used my fingertips to spread her pussy lips apart and then put my lips directly on it and began sucking it like a tiny prick. The effect was instantaneous. Marilyn let out with a shriek and then began urging me on with totally incoherent sounds. "Unh ... unggghhh ... unh unh unh...", or whatever that meant. What it really meant was don't stop! I kept sucking until she sagged back and collapsed in the chair.

I sat back on my heels. She might have come, but I still needed to. That pussy looked awfully moist and ready to me. I pulled her over to lie back down on my bed, and then I got on top. Last night we had made love. This was pure animal fucking, crazy, dirty, raw monkey sex. Marilyn had her arms and legs wrapped around me and was humping her pussy up at me as hard as I was pumping down into her. It only was a few minutes more before I groaned and complained that I couldn't stop. She was urging me to come with her, and her cunt was spasming around my twitching cock. I filled her as I pistoned madly into her.

Afterwards, we both lay there panting, with me on top of her, and then I rolled over onto the bed. Marilyn groaned slightly as she twisted around and threw a leg over me. "That was ... amazing!", she murmured.

I took a deep breath. "Yeah!" I smiled and turned my head to see her. "So, how do you like your new look?"

Marilyn rolled her eyes. "I can't believe we did that!"

"It feels okay?"

"It feels ... different."

"Well, you need to keep it shaved now, or else it might get stubbly and itchy. I'll be happy to help, but at home you'll have to take care of it yourself."

"Jesus!", she said, half to herself. "I hope this is worth it. Just where are we going, anyway? You haven't said anything. Back to Ocean City?"

I grinned at her. "Nope, and I'm not going to tell you. It's a secret."

"Well, that's no fair! How am I supposed to know what to pack?", she protested.

I sat upright and grinned down at her. "All's fair in love and war! It's not like you need to pack much. Feel free to leave your bras and panties at home; you won't be wearing them."

"What!?"

"Trust me, it will be a lot warmer and sunnier than here! Nice beach, nice restaurants, nice hotel room, big, big bed. What more do you need to know?"

"Carling!", she protested. She continued to push, but I resisted, and would only let on that it was somewhere in the United States. Finally, she looked at me and gave me a wicked smile. "I bet I know a way to make you talk.", she said, and licked her lips.

I had to laugh at that. "The only thing I would end up saying is, 'Don't stop! Don't stop!' Not exactly a method designed to break me."

"That's the point. I would stop, unless you told me!"

We both laughed at that. "We'll have to try that after lunch. Did you pack any skirts?"

"Just the one, that little denim one you like. Why?"

"Oh, it's very important not to irritate the skin now. You can't wear panties or pants. You'll need to put the skirt on. No bra, either. Sometimes that can cause an effect as well."

"You are so full of shit!", she replied, as she sat up on the bed as well. "I am not running around this place showing everything to everybody. Not going to happen!"

"Darling, I am distressed you feel this way. I only have your best interests at heart. Trust me, if you put on pants right now, by the time lunch is over, you'll have an uncontrollable urge to scratch an itch. I'll help you, though." I said this in my must unctuous and helpful tone.

"Right. I'll take my chances."

"Let's compromise. We'll go out for dinner tonight, and when we do, just wear a blouse and your skirt. That way it will be easier for me to help you later on."

Marilyn snorted and laughed. "You're a real helpful son of a bitch, aren't you?" I just put on an innocent look. Marilyn laughed and climbed to her feet. "Come on, I'm hungry." She grabbed her bag and started pulling out some clothes. She settled on some jeans and a MVCC sweatshirt, and pulled them on commando fashion. I did the same with some pants and a frat shirt.

We must have missed the lunch rush, since we were the only ones in the house. I fried up the last of the leftover ham in some butter in a skillet, and we had that and some leftover veggies I warmed up. "Were you serious about going out for dinner?", she asked.

I nodded. "Nothing fancy though. There's a decent Italian place down on Hoosick. Let's go down there for pizza."

Marilyn nodded, and we talked about her conversation with her parents before leaving and coming here. I still felt bad about what had happened. "I should never have lost it like that. I am really sorry."

"Are you coming for Christmas?"

"Not in a million years!"

"Carl!"

"Forget about it. I can't imagine it getting any better any time soon. Wait until your mother asks me when I'm going to see my family. What the hell do I tell them then? Huh?", I countered.

"You'll have to tell them sometime."

"I have to die sometime, too, and I'm still trying to figure out which would be better."

"They're going to find out someday."

"Yeah? Well, I don't want to be there when they do. Here's an idea. Why don't you tell them? Just do it after we get back from our little vacation. That way you can have some fun before they lock you up in the nunnery. Do they still have nunneries?"

That earned me another exasperated, "CARL!", and a tongue being stuck out at me.

After lunch, we went back upstairs. Marilyn sat at my desk and played solitaire while reading my Playboy magazine, and I lounged in the beanbag chair studying my Information Theory textbook. I was reviewing my notes and doing some calculations on the relationship between information density and the size of corresponding symbol sets. We had finals in just a few weeks. After a bit, I put down my book and notes, and grabbed for my book on basic topology. I was interrupted by Marilyn, who climbed down off her chair and came over and sat in my lap on the beanbag. "What's up?", I asked.

"I've got a problem, Carl?", she answered coquettishly.

I started to suspect what the problem was. "Well, I'd love to help you. What's the matter?"

"Well, remember when you told me I might get an itch?"

"It's a serious problem. Is that what's the matter?"

"Uh, huh. What should I do?", she asked innocently. Her face wasn't looking innocent at all. More like Cleopatra eyeing Julius Caesar for the first time, or Eve looking at Adam's apples!

"We'll need some hand lotion...", I started.

"I have a bottle of Jergen's!"

"Perfect." Marilyn popped up and pulled a large plastic tube of Jergen's out of her bag and handed it to me. Then I pulled my frat shirt off, and started undoing my pants. "Now, you need to get undressed, so I can work the areas of irritation properly."

Marilyn smiled and peeled off her sweatshirt. "So why are you getting undressed?"

"I don't want my clothing to irritate your skin." Marilyn snorted at that and stripped off her jeans. I sat back down on the beanbag chair. I wasn't completely erect, but I wasn't soft either. I had her sit down in front of me, and lean back against me. I picked up the tube of lotion and flicked open the top. I brought my hands around in front of her. "Now, make sure and tell me if what I'm doing is helping."

Marilyn's nipples were already stiff with anticipation, and I could detect a trace of musk as well. She gave me a weak, "Okay." and settled back.

I squirted some lotion on Marilyn's tits, and that earned me a giggle. "I think my itch is lower."

I simply set the tube down again and began working the lotion into her breasts. "It's necessary to start from the top down. Of course, this can cause that itch to actually increase, but it's very important to do it this way." Marilyn's nipples were like little erasers under my fingers, hard and rubbery, and every time I touched them she would squirm and murmur happily. "Trust me, I'm a scientist."

"Maybe a mad scientist!", she giggled.

I had to smile at that. I remembered when Maggie followed in my footsteps and became a chemist. She had sent me a tee shirt that said, 'We're not mad scientists! We're just enthusiastic!' "Merely an enthusiastic scientist." I caressed her breasts some more. "Is that itch getting worse?"

"Yes...", she answered softly.

I took her hands and brought them up to her breasts. "You keep working here. I'll go to the next phase."

"Hurry!"

I squirted some more lotion into my left hand, and then brought my fingers down to her pussy. Marilyn gasped as I began working the lotion all over her puffy little pussy. "Is that helping?", I asked.

"Uh huh...", she whimpered. Her back was arching and she was squirming around on the beanbag in front of me. By now my cock was as hard as steel.

I took her hands from her breasts and moved them between her legs. She immediately started rubbing her greasy slit and her clit. "You need to do this treatment every night. Do you ever do this at home?", I teased.

"It's better when you do it with me.", she gasped.

"You need to do it more than that." I was rubbing her greasy tits while she fingerfucked herself madly. "Every night!", I ordered.

I couldn't wait any longer. I grabbed her by the hips and lifted her rump up. Marilyn got the message and lifted up enough so that she could sit back down on me. She used her hands to guide my cock into her from behind and then slipped down on me reverse cowgirl fashion. It was like my dick had just been dumped into a hot and greasy soup. I moved her hands back between her legs and ordered her to get the both of us off. She was bouncing on my cock and keening out a lovely tune of orgasm.

"Oh, God!", I gasped, and then I pulled down on her hips, driving my cock into her as far as it could go. Her back arched as I spewed upwards into her, and I could feel her twitching and shuddering as she came also. I pumped a load into her, and kept pumping until I felt myself become too sensitive, and then I sagged back into the beanbag with my beloved laying on top of me.

"Oh, Carl!", she murmured dreamily.

That roused me enough to respond. "I told you I knew how to cure that itch."

"I'm going to need a few more treatments later on."

"Yeah!", I gasped. Like after my heart got restarted. The beanbag was going to need a good cleaning! We lounged there for a few minutes and then took a nap.

We slept for almost two hours, and when we woke I began to have serious doubts about my ability to set a new world's record for screwing with Marilyn. It seemed much more likely I was going to end up dying with a smile on my face.

Marilyn came to life as I roused myself. Her long brown curls were a mess around her head, and she looked at me with one eye open and the other eye covered, like a new Veronica Lake. "I really needed that nap."

"You're wearing me out.", I replied.

"I told you this was better that running laps and exercising."

I had to smile at that. I had skipped running the last few days and spent them with Marilyn. It didn't do much for my muscles, but it was very aerobic. "I'll recommend it to the army. You want to show them the proper technique?"

She screwed up that pretty nose and said, "Yuck!"

I stumbled upright and grabbed my pants. The smell of sex and sweat was prevalent in our small room. We were going to have to do another load of laundry before Joe ever came back from Jersey. "Do you want a shower before we go out?", I asked.

"Good idea." Marilyn climbed to her feet and grabbed my robe. I was going to have to buy her a robe for here, but maybe not like my terry cloth. Maybe something in a very sheer and slinky satin. That would be a nice little Christmas present.

We were dressed and down the stairs inside of an hour. Marilyn wore that little denim skirt I loved and her heels and a tank top, and I really considered taking her back upstairs and screwing ourselves into starvation. Swayzack was down in the living room, and I informed him that he and the guys were going to have to fend for themselves tonight. He cast an appreciative eye over Marilyn and then simply smiled and nodded. I took her hand and we walked out to her car. She tossed me the keys and five minutes later we were inside the Italian place in the Price Chopper plaza.

I helped Marilyn off with her parka and she stretched lazily, an act that did amazing things with her tank top, since she was braless beneath it. In many ways she had no idea just how good she looked. "I'm hungry!", she told me.

I dragged my eyes from her cleavage and nodded. "Pizza or something different?"

"Pizza's good." She sat down after I pulled out her chair, and then I sat down at the table opposite her. A waitress came out to ask for our orders, and I ordered a pepperoni pizza and a couple of mugs of beer.

"You need to come to the house for Christmas.", she started.

"There are many things I need to do, and that ain't on the list.", I replied.

"You can't run away from this."

"I can think of very few good things which will result from this, and many bad things. Let it alone."

"What bad things?", she pressed.

I looked at her for a second. "They could ban you from seeing me. That would be a very bad thing."

"Never going to happen."

"You are far too trusting." We were interrupted by the waitress returning with our beers, and it gave us a chance to think some more.

"Carling, you can't run from this. You can't go through the rest of your life hiding from my parents. You are the bravest person I know! How is it you are frightened by my parents?"

"Brave, there's a joke. That worst case scares the hell out of me."

"You have to do this, and you know it, and the sooner you do it the better. They won't ban me from seeing you, but they damn well might ban me from seeing you until after they see you again!", she replied.

I hadn't thought about that, and it was entirely possible. Hell, I would do it, why wouldn't they? I rubbed my face wearily, and drank some of my beer. "Shit!", I muttered.

"You know I'm right!" This was one of Marilyn's more annoying habits. No horse was so dead it couldn't be beaten some more. She kept harping on me another minute or two.

I finally shut her up by waving her to silence. I gave it a little more thought as the waitress came back with our pizza. I took some time to put slices on our plates. Finally, after a bite of pizza and some more beer, I told her, "Okay, but it sure better not be like last time."

She beamed at me and started promising me the sun and the moon. I waved her to silence again. "Listen, here's the ground rules. I'll talk to your parents. They can ask me any questions they want. Mark is not invited. If I ever hear another word out of your asshole brother again, I'll rip his head off and shit down his neck and you can feel free to tell him and your folks exactly that."

She had a worried look to her face at that comment. "Well, I can say..."

"As far as I'm concerned, you can use my exact wording. Your brother ever wants to start up with me again, I'll break him six ways to Sunday. It's bad enough I have to put up with shit from my own brother. I sure won't put up with shit from yours!" She had a wry mouth at that, like she was sucking on a lemon. I pushed on. "Tell your parents not to be so insulting, either. I don't call them red necked white trash; they don't have to call me stupid for serving my country."

"I'll talk to them. We're not white trash!" It was my turn to give her the wry look. I knew way more than I should about her family.

I agreed to visit Christmas Eve and stay one night, or two if it went well. Then I would come back to Kegs. Marilyn was coming to Kegs on Thursday, December 26 either way. We were flying out of Albany on Friday morning. I still hadn't told her our plans, just that we would be flying and she couldn't bring more than two suitcases. I steadfastly refused to tell her our destination, but just reiterated she wouldn't need a passport, or much in the way of undies or pants. I even teased her about the swimsuit I was going to buy her. "You know, I know some places where there are nude beaches. Maybe I'm taking you there?"

Marilyn's eyes bugged out and her lips flapped in panic. Finally she sputtered, "You wouldn't dare!" I just gave her a smug smile and shrugged my shoulders. That got her to stick her tongue out at me. "I know you aren't doing that, since then I wouldn't be wearing a swimsuit!"

"You ever hear the story about the emperor's new clothes?" She nodded in confusion. "I hired the tailor to do a swimsuit."

Suddenly Marilyn was nervous. Then her face brightened. "You'd never do that, since you'd have to wear a matching suit, and they'd never let you walk around with your thingy sticking out like that."

That was the God's honest truth, and the best reason I would never do this with her, but I had to brazen it out. "It depends."

"It depends on what?"

"It depends on how well you're taking care of business keeping Little Carl tired out!" We traded raspberries over that.

Chapter 39: Sin City

After dinner, we went back to the frat house and watched some TV in the living room, and then went upstairs, made love, and went to sleep. We got a little more action the next morning, and then our holiday weekend was over. We got up, cleaned up, dressed, and did another load of sheets and towels while eating breakfast. A little before noon a call came in on the house phone. It was Joe Bradley down at the Albany bus station looking for a lift back.

Marilyn agreed it was time for her to take off, also. We kissed good-bye, and then she climbed into her Challenger and I got in the Galaxie. By the time I got to the bus station, I found Arnie standing there with Joe, so I loaded them both into my car and brought them home. On the drive back, Joe asked, "So, how'd the visit at Marilyn's go?"

"Don't ask.", I replied.

"That good, huh?"

"That bad."

This was a subject Joe never really understood about me, my relationship with my own family. His family was fairly tight; even though he was living away from home, he often visited them, riding the bus down to the Port Authority and then taking a local bus off into the wilds of Bergen County. I met them once or twice when they would drive up at the beginning and end of the school year, but the only thing I remembered about them was that he had a sister still in high school so achingly gorgeous that most guys would drag their balls through broken glass just for the privilege of being spit on by her. "So what happened?"

I glanced in the rear view mirror but Arnie was already snoozing for the fifteen minute drive home. I shrugged my shoulders. "I got into it with her father and one of her brothers, and told them both where to head in. Then I left and came back here. Marilyn showed up an hour or two later and spent the rest of the week here. She left to go back right after you called."

"They must have loved that."

"I don't know and I don't ask. I just say thank you."

Back at the house I helped Joe move his shit back upstairs. He immediately noticed the improvement in our hygienic standards. "Hurricane Marilyn came for a visit.", I commented.

"Maybe I can send her down to my sister's room at our house.", he replied.

"Don't be surprised if she gives you some shit the next time we're all here. I had to put up with her on a rampage, and so should you!" He just laughed and waved aside the very notion.

The rest of the semester went quickly and quietly. In three weeks time we had finals, and as soon as they were finished, people started streaming out of the place. A few brothers would be coming back in a couple of weeks for another J-Term, but I was skipping J-Term to go on vacation with Marilyn. There was already a rumor going around that J-Term was being ended after this year, and that they would simply have the regular semester start a few weeks earlier in the future. I knew this to be true.

Christmas Eve was a Tuesday, so I drove out to Utica a little before lunch. I got there about two, and spent a quiet hour with Marilyn before we all bundled off to church. For the Lefleur family, everything was done Christmas Eve. After Mass, we would have a big dinner and then in the evening Santa would visit and they would do presents. Santa actually visited, too, since they had somebody come in every year. You were practically required to be there Christmas Eve, on pain of dismissal from the family, and the only year we got out of it involved an ice storm. Before long, the kids were getting married and bringing wives and fiancés and girlfriends, and eventually their own children. It was the loudest and most obnoxious gathering imaginable, with screaming kids everywhere. I often hid out in a side room and read a book, just to keep my sanity. No such luck now. I sat there on the couch next to Marilyn and just tried to let it all wash over me.

On the plus side, Mark must have had the riot act read to him. He never said a peep to me. There were several conversations with Big Bob and Harriet and Marilyn, although really they were between Big Bob and me. Marilyn and her mother just sat there on the sidelines and listened in. The first was on Christmas Eve, over dinner, when Big Bob semi-apologized for what he said about my going in the Army, to the extent that he said, "I just don't understand. If you're so bright, why are you going into the army?"

I rolled my eyes at that, and bit my tongue before replying, 'You want stupid people defending you?' No, I didn't say that. "Well, as I explained, the army is paying for me to go to school, so this is how I pay them back."

"You couldn't get any scholarships?"

"I did, Mister Lefleur. I got an army scholarship." He looked shocked at that. This was simply an argument we would never settle. The Lefleurs, none of them, not even Marilyn, simply didn't understand the concept of public service. "Sir, let me explain. In my family, we were brought up to be good citizens. We vote, we pay our taxes, we sit on juries, we obey the law, and we defend the country. I've known my family served since I was their age.", I said, pointing at Ruth and Peter. "Why shouldn't I let them pay for me to go to college? They paid for my father to go to an Ivy League college."

"But it's such a waste to go if you don't have to."

I glanced over at Marilyn. At heart she agreed with her father, but she loved me and wanted me to do well at what I was doing. I had to stop this. We would never agree on this, and I didn't want to tell him what I thought of his family before I was married to her. "It's a family tradition, Mister Lefleur. We serve our country. It's my turn now."

For Christmas I gave Marilyn an RPI sweatshirt, but inside it was a small box from a jewelry store, with a gold necklace in it. Marilyn oohed and aahhed while I put it around her neck, and then planted a big kiss on me in front of the parents. I happily settled for a very nice sweater, always useful in upstate New York. The summer, the only semi-warm weather in the entire state, was when I would be down south in training.

Christmas Day was a more difficult conversation. Marilyn had not discussed my home life with her parents, and quite innocently her mother raised the topic after breakfast. "Aren't you planning on calling your family, Carl? Feel free to use the telephone.", she offered.

I looked across the kitchen island at Marilyn, but she just shrugged in response. Her parents noticed this and then looked back at me for an answer. I gave a small sigh. "Thank you. I will try and call my sister before the day is out."

"What about your parents?"

"I don't really have much to do with my family any more. I'm basically independent of them."

"What does that mean?", demanded Big Bob.

I took a deep breath. "It means exactly that. I've been living on my own since I was sixteen. I have very little to do with my family."

"Sixteen! What do you mean you've been living on your own? What about this past summer? I thought Marilyn visited you at your parents?"

Marilyn reached across the table and placed her hand on mine reassuringly. It calmed me quite a bit. "She did, sir. We stayed at my family's house for a few days before going to the beach." I glanced at her again, and then turned back. "Let me explain. I have told Marilyn everything about my family. I haven't hidden anything from her. I wanted her to understand me."

"That's true!", she chimed in. "Carl and I have had long talks about his family."

To what extent that mollified them, I don't know. He came back with, "So, does that mean you ran away from home? Or did they throw you out?"

I shrugged and gave a half smile. "A little bit of both, I guess. By the time I was sixteen it was really obvious I couldn't stay, so I told my father I was leaving, and he could either go along with it or I would simply run away. He helped me find an apartment and helped me pack up and move out. I lived on my own for the last two years of high school. The last time I saw my folks was this past summer, and the last time before that was after I graduated high school. It's easier on all of us this way."

They were both totally flummoxed by this. Family was the most important thing to the Lefleur family. "Your father moved you into an apartment when you were sixteen and paid for you to live somewhere else?"

That sort of startled me. "Oh, no sir, I paid. I've never seen a penny from my family since I was a little kid. I'm totally independent. I pay my own way." That should at least make me look good in their eyes, I thought.

Or not. "You paid? Where did you get the money for that? What are you, rich?"

Oh, good Christ! This wasn't looking very positive. The day was really swirling around the bowl now. Marilyn just patted my hand. I sighed and nodded to her. "I had some money of my own, and a job."

"Money from what?"

I looked over at my girlfriend. "You know, I don't think I ever told you this story. Remember how Tessa told you how I protected her that time in high school? This is sort of similar." I turned back to Big Bob and Harriet. "Okay, here goes. Back when I was in junior high, when I was 13, I was attacked by three bullies. When it was all over with, they were arrested by the police, and I was able to sue them for assaulting me. I saved the money. Part of it bought my car, and part of it went to pay for my living expenses when I moved out."

Big Bob looked at me with disgust. "You got beat up in school and sued the bullies?"

"Uh, it wasn't like that, sir. I only got a black eye. They all ended up in the hospital. That's where they were when the police arrested them."

"You put three boys in the hospital?!", gasped Harriet.

"Ma'am, they attacked me, not the other way around, and besides, it wasn't like they were smaller than me. They were all a year or two older."

"Why did they attack you?", she asked.

"They wanted my lunch money." I looked over at Marilyn sheepishly. "Kind of lame, huh?" I turned back to Harriet. "Mrs. Lefleur, I know how to handle myself. Marilyn is very safe when she's around me. Nobody will ever hurt her when she's with me.", I promised.

"Well, I never!", she huffed out, looking at her husband.

"You never explained why you had to move out of your house.", said Big Bob.

I just rubbed my face with my hands. "Sir, that would take a long, long time to explain. There's a few basic reasons, though. For one thing, I have a brother who's, well, he's crazy. As in, he's nuts." I made a whirly sign around my head with an extended finger. "He's not safe to be around. One of us would have killed the other one by now, and I am not exaggerating. Either he would have killed me, or I would have killed him defending myself. Marilyn knows, she's met him. I never let him be alone with her and I made sure I locked him in his room at nights." Marilyn simply nodded in agreement. Her parents stared at me in disbelief. "Secondly, my family is not like Ozzie and Harriet or Leave it to Beaver. My folks are good people, but lousy parents. It's better not being there."

"What? Like they beat you?", asked Big Bob sarcastically.

I was a touch slow answering this and he noticed this. "I made them stop when I got older. I got my father to stop, anyway. I just stayed away from Mom."

Big Bob's mouth slammed shut when he heard my answer, and he stared at his wife. "I don't believe it. I don't know what to say."

Marilyn came over behind me and wrapped her arms around me. "It's true, all true. The nice one, though, is his sister Suzie. She's an absolute sweetheart."

I nodded and smiled. "She is. You should invite her up here this summer, while I'm in training. She'd love it."

"That's a great idea!", she replied, beaming. "I'll ask her the next time I write." Looking at her parents, she explained, "We write back and forth all the time."

"You know, we should give her a call now. You should call and ask for her. Hamilton doesn't know your voice, and he won't hang up on you or break the telephone."

"Okay, good idea."

We stood. As I passed her parents, I said, "Hamilton's my brother. He usually intercepts all calls and hangs up on me. One time he even broke the phone when I called my father." Big Bob and Harriet just stared at each other with open mouths. We went over to the kitchen phone and Marilyn called Suzie, and then handed me the phone. She confirmed my box with presents had arrived at Dad's office, and she asked if their box had arrived. I said it had. I put Marilyn on with Suzie, and then took it back. I talked to my Dad for a couple of minutes, and then to my mother even more briefly. I hung up with a sense of considerable relief.

"What was that bit about the horse?", asked Marilyn.

I laughed at that. "That's a long time family joke. Years ago, when she was little, Suzie decided she wanted a horse and asked for one for Christmas. Well, you've seen the house. No way could we have a horse! So my parents just mumbled that they would think about it and bought her a calendar for Christmas with horses on it. Well, she asked again for her birthday the next summer, and she got something else horse related. Cowgirl Barbie and a toy pony, I think. Anyway, ever since then, we've been getting her something horsey ever since. This year she got a key ring with a Mustang convertible on it, along with the words that it was the only kind of Mustang her parents would ever buy for her!"

We both laughed at that. "What about your parents?", she asked.

Marilyn's parents were both watching us. All I could do was shrug. "Dad said he was sorry we were apart like this. Dad always says he's sorry. Mom blamed me for destroying the family."

"You! They drove you out!", exclaimed Marilyn.

I just grinned back at her. "Don't sweat it. She also blames you for leading me astray."

"What!"

I just started laughing. "After all these years, she finally got it right!" Marilyn started punching me at that, so I just wrapped my arms around her in self defense and kept laughing. Her parents weren't as amused, but they didn't say much. After a few minutes I said, "Your birthday's in June, right?"

"The 11th."

"Suzie's is the 14th, Flag Day. Invite her up that week. Have a joint party or something. Dad can stick her on a plane and you can pick her up. Does Utica have an airport? Maybe fly her into Albany or Syracuse."

"That would be so much fun! I'll write her and ask."

I looked over at her parents. "Suzie's the normal one in the family. You'll love her. She wants to become a nurse. That's about as normal as you can get." I looked at Marilyn and smiled. "With my family, she should probably become a psychiatric nurse!"

"She'd never run out of patients, that's for sure."

I kissed Marilyn on the cheek, and hugged her to me. Afterwards I said, "I think I need to be getting back to Kegs." I turned to Big Bob and Harriet. "Probably the one thing I most envy about your daughter is her family. You have a really nice family, much nicer than mine. I envy her. I just wanted you to know that." I wandered off to the library and packed my bags and grabbed my coat and hat. Marilyn promised to meet me at the frat house the next day. I kissed her thoroughly and left.

I spent a quiet night at the house, and Marilyn showed up a little after lunch the next day. I have no idea what line of bullshit she handed her parents to get them to sign off on her going somewhere with me. I just don't think they wanted to know. Our flight out was at six in the morning from Albany, so we needed to get up by four or so. Marilyn had two gigantic suitcases, along with a carry-on bag. I had a hanging bag for some dress clothes and my B4. We moved a couple of nice dresses from her bags into my hanging bag, and then got out some clothes to travel in. I teased her that the travel time counted as vacation and she needed to wear a miniskirt and no panties, but Marilyn was having no part of that idea! She selected jeans, a cotton blouse, and sneakers.

The alarm clock was abysmally loud the next morning, and we would have probably destroyed it if it was within reach, but I had placed it on the desk across the room. We stumbled alive and cleaned up. I had her leave yesterday's clothes on my bed, as opposed to taking them with us. Finally dressed, we packed our toilet kits and grabbed our bags and made our way down to the Galaxie. The weather was a bit crappy, but not bad enough to ground the plane, and the Galaxie was heavier than her car, so it would handle better on the wet and slushy roads.

This was in the good old days, when airplane travel was still sort of enjoyable and exciting. If you showed up only an hour ahead of time, that was perfectly fine, and nobody got strip searched and run through body scanners. You didn't even need identification on domestic flights. They ran television ads about just grabbing your honey and taking her away for a quick flight to the Bahamas on a lark. Thirty years later you needed a passport and a public body cavity search to even get in the security checkpoint lineup. Nobody flew on a lark anymore.

The Albany airport is a real airport (as compared to some of the grass strips I've flown in and out of) but not a very big airport. Several of the majors flew in and out, but mostly feeding to hubs like New York or Chicago. At five in the morning there was a decent amount of room to park in the lot near the terminal. After getting out of the car, I peeled off my parka and pulled on a windbreaker. Marilyn stared, since it was freezing cold. "Where we're going, we won't need a parka.", I explained.

She nodded and peeled off her own winter coat and tossed it in the back with mine. "Where are we going, anyway?"

I still hadn't told her. I grinned and said, "Somewhere we won't need parkas!" She flipped me the bird at that and I laughed.

It was too damn chilly to stand there and chat. I grabbed my bags and both of hers, and then moving like a Sherpa, hustled through the parking lot and across the drive-through area and into the terminal. I looked around and found the Alleghany Airlines desk, and led the way. I wanted to keep Marilyn in suspense as long as possible, so I only handed over our tickets to New York. Marilyn missed the ID tags placed on our luggage. After getting our boarding passes I led her to the escalator up to the second floor, where we walked to our gate. Along the way we stopped at the only place in the airport open for food at that hour, a coffee and pastry stand, and got some Danishes.

"You have to tell me where we're going! I know we're not going to New York!"

"And how do you know that?", I asked.

"No beaches.", she said primly.

I just smiled. "And maybe I just lied to you. Maybe we're going to the City and spending the week living on room service and going to Broadway shows."

"I don't believe you." She looked daggers at me, but I just let it wash over me.

"You'll find out soon enough." After a bit, our plane, a 727, started boarding and first class passengers were called. "That's us.", I announced, and stood up.

"First class?", she asked gawking.

"Don't we deserve to be first class?"

"I mean the tickets, you jerk!"

"Check your boarding pass." I grabbed her hand and pulled her to her feet, and then grabbed her carryon bag. "Come on, get going."

She shuffled along with me, not quite believing we were going in first class, but finally accepting it when we were seated in the second row. First class wasn't all that spectacular on a 727, but I had the money.

Actually, I had a fair bit of money. My portfolio was now between a million-and-a-half and two million bucks. Just because the economy was sucky didn't mean you couldn't make some money. There is just as much money to be made on the down side as the up. By the winter of '74-'75, the American economy was in turmoil. Nixon had resigned in disgrace and Ford, his replacement, was under a major cloud because he pardoned Nixon. The oil shock from last year had eased, but people were still getting used to gas prices they couldn't afford, and unemployment and inflation were both rising. The rest of the decade, including Jimmy Carter's none too glorious term, were not easy on most people. I was invested in a variety of inflation indexed and recession resistant stocks. My next big play wouldn't be until after I graduated, but I was rich enough that I bought myself a Rolex Oyster Perpetual, in stainless steel, for my birthday. Fuck it, Happy Birthday to me! I was also thinking about replacing the rusty Galaxie.

First class sure beat the hell out of peasant class in the back. The seats were leather, extra wide and far enough apart you had legroom and the ability to recline, and they were only four across. Sardine class packed them in six across, and if you didn't sit bolt upright you couldn't move your legs.

First class is nice, and not just because you get to lord it over the lesser beings flying in the back. The seats alone are worth the extra expense, but in first class you got real food and real drinks - for free! By the time I recycled the flight attendants were issued cash registers and sold you everything from your food and drinks to pillows and blankets, and even the bathrooms were pay toilets. I swear that if the plane was falling out of the sky, they were instructed to make you pay to use the oxygen masks that fell from the overheads.

In 1974, first class passengers were promptly served a Danish and juice or coffee, and on a real plate and a real cup or glass. The flight was only an hour long, but as soon as we got up, a first class only flight attendant was serving us. Marilyn was impressed. "Ever flown before?", I asked her.

"Yes. A couple of years ago my class went to France on a school trip. We were gone for two weeks.", she answered.

"Really! We were lucky if they loaded us on a bus and took us to a museum. Did your brothers go when it was their turn?"

She shook her head. "They didn't do that at Notre Dame, only UCA."

I hadn't been entirely clear on that before anyway, so I asked her to clarify. In Utica, at the time, there were several parochial elementary and junior high schools, but really only two high schools. The younger grades were coed, but the high schools weren't. UCA was the girl's school and Notre Dame was the boy's school. Long before Ruth got to that age, UCA was shut down, and everything was combined at Notre Dame. All of Marilyn's brothers and sisters went to Notre Dame. Apparently only UCA did the trip to France.

"Learn anything?", I asked.

She grinned at me. "I learned I didn't want to go to any more museums or cathedrals in France!" Bless her sweet heart, but Marilyn is not the intellectual type. I'd have killed for the opportunity! "Have you ever flown?", she asked me.

I nodded "Back when I was ten, my father had to fly out to Pittsburgh, for his company, and they were taking this little propeller driven puddle jumper, and he asked if I wanted to fly with him. It was the summer, and I said, 'Sure!' Boy, did Hamilton throw a fit over that! Anyway, we never left sight of the ground, and that little sucker bounced all over the sky. On the trip back, there was some turbulence and the pilot announced we were going to fly a little lower, and I told him to land on the highway and taxi home!"

We both had a laugh over that, and by the time we were done talking about our flight experience, we were descending into JFK. We were right on time (another difference from the future) and I led the way through the airport to American Airlines. Back then you had to get your boarding pass at each airline; you couldn't get them all at the same time up front. The computer technology just didn't exist yet.

The cat was out of the bag as soon as I handed the ticket agent our tickets. I had done all this through a travel agent in Troy this fall, and had arranged the flights and the hotel room. The agent looked at my tickets and said, "That'll be two first class tickets to Las Vegas, correct?"

Marilyn gasped. "Las Vegas!"

I grinned at her. "You bet!"

"Literally.", agreed the ticket agent.

"You said we were going to the beach.", she said accusingly.

"I said we were going somewhere you'd be able to wear a really small bikini. It's not exactly the same thing."

"Like where!?"

I smiled. "Well, Ellie Mae, you and the rest of the Clampetts will just have to make do out at the cement pond!"

"You're not funny." She stuck her tongue out at me, so I laughed and hugged her to my side, and we took our boarding passes and continued on. We had about an hour between flights, and had to change concourses, so we didn't actually have a lot of time to waste. By the time we got to our gate, we only had fifteen minutes before they called for first class passengers to board.

"First class again?", she said as we went on board.

"Only the best for the woman I love!", I answered theatrically.

She eyed the large seats, and then looked back through the curtain to where the sardines were packed. "Well, maybe I'll forgive you for lying to me."

"Not lying, misdirecting.", I clarified.

"Hmmpphhh."

I just smiled at that. The flight was four hours long, and although I think flying generally sucks, it sucks a whole lot less when you're sitting up front. We had a real lunch served to us on plates when the people in the back got a sandwich, and while everyone could get a drink, ours were free. As soon as we were aloft and the stewardess started with beverage service, I asked her, "I know it's kind of early, but is there any chance we can get a couple of mimosas?"

The stewardess smiled when Marilyn asked what that was. "Champagne and orange juice." Marilyn's eyes popped out at that. "I think we can manage that." She pulled out a split of champagne and made the drinks right there in the cart for us. "Honeymoon?"

I replied, "Practice run." The flight attendant laughed and Marilyn squealed in outrage. I laughed and thanked the girl, and toasted Marilyn. "Here's to lots and lots of practice."

Marilyn laughed at that and we clinked glasses. "So, what are we going to Las Vegas for? I didn't know you gambled."

"I almost never gamble. Remember those classes on probability and statistics?" She nodded and I said, "I actually paid attention."

"Well, why then?"

"Marilyn, there is a lot more to do in Vegas than gamble. Hell, it's known as Sin City! If you can't do it in Vegas, you probably don't want to do it."

"Really?"

"Babe, when Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed, the survivors sold the franchise rights to Las Vegas."

"Well, what will we do if we're not gambling?"

"Oh, I don't know, maybe take in some shows, go swimming, see the sights, watch the suckers lose their shirts, and practice.", I answered.

Marilyn blushed at that. "Carling!"

I lowered my voice as I leaned in. "I intend to use you for my sexual gratification, all day and all night long, over and over and over again."

Marilyn reddened again, but it was more of a flush than a blush, and I could tell her breathing picked up. "I think you're full of talk.", she challenged me.

"And I think you aren't going to be able to walk by the time we get back on the plane."

"You'll have to explain that one to my parents.", she replied with a grin.

I just shrugged. "And you'll have to explain to my mother why I died with a silly grin on my face." It was still a few years before Nelson Rockefeller would actually die riding tall in the saddle, but that was a whole different story.

We were served lunch over Tennessee, and I ordered us another pair of mimosas. After lunch we napped until we were descending into McCarran. Marilyn slept through the movie, and I ignored it. I had seen it before and didn't like it then, either.

Marilyn was nothing but slack jawed and awed when we landed. The first thing she saw when we got off the plane and into the concourse was a fellow betting at a slot machine. "Look at that! There's slot machines in the airport!", she exclaimed.

Several of our fellow passengers laughed at her, and I just said, "Dorothy, you're not in Kansas anymore!"

"I guess not!" She stared at the various sights. Despite the travel time, we had also jumped back a few time zones, and it was still the late morning local time, bright and sunny and a beautiful day. At the baggage claim were a number of chauffeurs holding up signs, and Marilyn noticed that one of the signs said, 'Buckman.' "Hey, there's somebody looking for somebody with your name. Maybe you've got a relative visiting!"

I loved her, but she was very naïve at times. I led the way over. "I'm the Buckman, honey. He's waiting for us." I showed the driver some identification. He was only there to carry us over to the hotel. After that we were on our own. "It's actually not that much more than a cab, babe, and a hell of a lot easier with the luggage." We waited for the luggage to come off the carousel, happily discovered it was all there, and then the driver and I carried it out to his car. It was a limo, but nothing crazy, just a black Caddy with a big trunk.

Vegas is unique in that the airport is practically in the city. It's only four miles to Caesars Palace, and it can't be more than five or six miles to the downtown. You can walk it in well under two hours, but it was way too warm for that and we had all that luggage. Caesars was actually one of the first of the big casino resorts on the western end of The Strip, as Las Vegas Boulevard is known. All the old time casinos from the Fifties and Sixties were located downtown, and were now getting kind of seedy. That was where I had done my card counting that summer, on our cross country road trip. Caesars, on the other hand, was brand new, and glitzy.

It was worth it all just to watch Marilyn stare at everything as we drove in, her eyes wide and her mouth open. It was like taking a four year old on a trip to a candy store, or a Kegger on a trip to a brewery.

When the limo dropped us at Caesars, the driver handed our luggage to a bellman at the door. I tipped him and he gave me a card. "You want to go anywhere, just call our number. If I'm not available, somebody else will be. We can also do tours, you know, out to the desert or down to Hoover Dam, that sort of thing."

I stuffed the card in my pocket. "Thanks. I'll keep it in mind." I shook his hand and took Marilyn by the hand. We went inside, with the bellman following us with a cart of luggage. He followed us to the front desk, and then stood back while we checked in. I had to laugh when Marilyn noted that our path to the elevators went through the casino. "Everything they do here is designed to run you past a place to lose your dough.", I told her. "They'd put a slot machine next to your bed if they thought they could get away with it."

Soon enough we were in our room, a small suite consisting of a bedroom and a sitting room. After tipping the bellman, I grabbed our bags and took them into the bedroom, only to find myself alone. Marilyn was standing at the picture window in the sitting room, staring out at the sights below us. I walked up behind her.

"I can't believe we're in Las Vegas!", she repeated to me. She kept looking out at the city below.

"Like I said earlier, when Sodom and Gomorrah went under, the refugees landed here. Do you have any particular sins you'd like to commit this week, or do you just want to go for the beginner's introductory package?"

"I bet you'd like that!", she said with a giggle.

"Babe, I ran through the introductory kit when I was a baby! I've already graduated from the intermediate school, and am now taking advanced classes. Debauchery and Depravity 101."

Marilyn laughed at that. "You are so full of shit!"

I moved closer to her, trapping her face forward against the window. "I think you are out of uniform, soldier!" I brought my hands around her from behind and started working on the buttons on her shirt.

"Oh, really! Just what did you have in mind?" Marilyn was practically purring as I unbuttoned her shirt from behind, and as my fingers slipped underneath the cotton to caress her skin. I kept moving my hands down, and then began to work on her pants. She whimpered when I slid my fingers down into her panties from behind. At that point, she pushed me back and twisted around so that we were facing each other. "You're overdressed, too, mister."

Marilyn started unbuttoning my shirt, although she had to stop briefly when I pushed her shirt off and reached around to flick open the clasp on her bra. Her tits looked slightly flushed, her nipples already stiffly erect. I flicked my fingers across them and Marilyn giggled and started working on my pants. As soon as my zipper was down, she pushed my slacks down off my hips. "Hey, you're out of uniform, too!", she said when she saw my briefs.

"Oh my God! Where did they come from! Marilyn, you need to do something about this right away!", I cried out.

Marilyn laughed at that and pushed them down, too. Now we were both standing there, our pants down around our thighs, and it was just incredibly awkward. I grabbed her hand and together we shuffled over to the couch and sat down. As soon as we were seated, we stripped each other naked and lay down. I was on top of her a few seconds later and then she had her arms and legs wrapped around me as I power fucked her into the cushions.

"Fuck me ... fuck me ... fuck me...", she repeated as I slammed my cock in and out of her. The only other sounds were my hoarse breathing and the wet SLAP ... SLAP ... SLAP as our bellies smacked together. "I'm coming, I'm coming!", she cried out, and I could feel her body convulsing underneath me. That was my signal to groan loudly and unload into her pussy.

We lay there on the couch for a couple of minutes, catching our breath and slowly untangling our limbs. Marilyn spoke first. "Is that what you had in mind for your first lesson?"

I snorted in laughter. "That was more in the way of morning recess. Trust me, when I start teaching the lesson, you'll know it!" I sat up and looked down on her as she lazed there naked on the couch. While Marilyn would always be fair skinned, I could see she had been getting some color from a tanning booth. Certainly her bra strap marks were quite faint, although you could see tanlines around her hips. I suspected she had been tanning topless, but not naked. I could also see that she had kept up with the shaving.

I touched her mons with a finger, causing her to give a little squeal and a jump. "I see you've been keeping things nice and clean." I slid a finger inside her scummy little slit and flicked it across her clit. That got me another happy little squeal, and Marilyn squirmed on the couch. I could feel myself getting hard again. "Have you been moisturizing yourself at night, too?"

"It's not like when you do it.", she said in a low moan. "Mmmmm..."

"You need to do it every night!", I replied. I began to fingerfuck her come filled pussy, and as Marilyn moved around you could hear the squishiness. I continued to tease her until I figured I was stiff enough for an encore, and then crawled back into place. Our second screw wasn't quite as animated as our first, but it lasted longer, and Marilyn came at least twice before I did.

"Welcome to Las Vegas.", I said crawling off her a second time.

"I think I'm going to like it here." Marilyn smiled and sat upright.

"For some reason, I'm hungry."

"I can't imagine why!" Marilyn stood and picked up her clothing and went into the bedroom. I did the same.

I saw the bags still sitting on the bed where I had dropped them. I pulled my pants back on and then tossed my bags on the dresser. I unpacked and put everything in a dresser or the closet, then closed my empty bags and stuck them in the back of the closet. Meanwhile Marilyn went into the shower and cleaned up. I put her suitcases on the bed. She came out in a hotel bathrobe and I had her do the same while I cleaned up. When I returned, she had her bags unpacked, so I stuffed them into the closet also. Then I grabbed a clean pair of slacks and a sport shirt. She watched as I slid the pants on commando fashion. "Don't forget the uniform of the day."

That got me a laugh. "You and your uniforms! You just want to be able to get into my pants without my pants being in the way!"

"I think it's important that I be able to reinforce any lessons you learn. Not just teach the lesson, but to do the lab work necessary, as soon as possible."

Marilyn pulled a knee length white sundress from the closet and slipped it over her head, and then slipped into some dressy sandals. "Is this what you had in mind?"

I don't think she realized just how light the dress was on her, but boy did it look good! I swallowed and nodded. "Just fine!" Oh my God, but we weren't ever going to make it out of the room! We'd be spending a week on room service at this rate!

Marilyn was oblivious to me. She grabbed her makeup kit and headed back into the bathroom, coming out ten minutes later looking even more desirable. Now she had on some lipstick, a trace of perfume, and the necklace I had given her for Christmas. When she moved it was obvious she wasn't wearing a bra, and you couldn't see any panty lines either. "You look good enough to eat!", I said, and licked my lips lewdly.

"Hold that thought for later!"

"Okay!"

In another life, Marilyn and I had gotten to Vegas on a trip we earned when our office sold the most homes, back before the Great Recession. By then we were well into our forties, almost fifty, and we were both thoroughly jaded. We both enjoyed it, quite a bit, but we had already perfected our favorite sins by then, and there was little left that could shock or awe us. Now, doing it with a nineteen year old novice at my side, it was like taking a little kid to Disney World for the first time. An adult Disney World. I definitely would have some fun with Marilyn this week!

First stop was through the casino and into a large lunch shop where we had oversized sandwiches and some beers. Regardless of what you think about Vegas, you can't say they don't feed you! I figured while we were here, I'd make sure we sampled a few of the buffets, which are quite literally world renowned. One thing you have to be careful of is that these new casino resorts, like Caesars or the MGM Grand, or some of the others under construction, offer everything. You never have to even leave the property. I wanted to get out some.

After lunch we went all around, through the casino and outside to the swimming pool and over to the auditorium where the big name shows were held, and we stopped at a couple of the bars and clubs for drinks. There were also a number of little shops and boutiques, although they hadn't built the gigantic shopping center they called the Forum yet. That was probably (or would be - strange thing with these verb tenses) one of the most expensive shopping districts on the planet. I teased Marilyn that I would take her into some of the boutiques to pick out a swimsuit for her. Several of the suits they were showing were shockingly small, and I simply told her we wanted something smaller.

By late afternoon, we headed back up to our room. We both used the bathroom, and then I dragged her off to the bedroom. "Remember what I said about looking good enough to eat?" Marilyn laughed and I pulled her dress up and over her head, leaving her in her sandals and jewelry. We tumbled down onto the bed and I rolled onto my back while Marilyn undid my clothing. As soon as my pants were down far enough, I pulled her into a sitting position over my face, and we had a very enjoyable round of 69. It was so enjoyable, in fact, we celebrated it with a second round. Afterwards, we napped.

In some ways, our Vegas vacation was a lot like our Ocean City vacation, as in we goofed off and had a lot of sex. In between we worked on our tans, did some shopping, and did some nightlife. On the other hand, Las Vegas is one hell of a lot larger and more sophisticated city than Ocean City! There are some very nice restaurants, many nightclubs, some of which are rather risqué. Marilyn had never seen topless showgirls before! I took advantage of our being there to take her to see Wayne Newton one night and Frank Sinatra, back out of retirement, another night. I hadn't appreciated him on my first go; now I had the chance to rectify my ignorance.

That was one of the things I wanted to change this time around. I enjoyed music as much as the next guy. I wanted to see some concerts that I had never seen before. I had already taken Marilyn to see Seals and Croft at the RPI Field House freshman year, like we had before. Just like then, we made out under the mirror ball during the encore. Okay, it's corny, but so what!

Now I had a whole list of others I wanted to see - Pink Floyd doing The Wall live, The Grateful Dead before Jerry passed away, the Dixie Chicks before they self-destructed. Certainly Frank ranked in the lists of the greats!

I could also skip some really bad concerts! I remember paying good money to see America at the Field House. They came out an hour late, so stoned they could barely pick up their instruments, played a lame-ass 45 minute set, and then bugged out saying they had to go to the airport.

It was still too soon for the really decadent lifestyle to hit Vegas openly. The town was about to try rebranding itself as family friendly as it put up giant new resorts and closed down the older casinos. By the mid-90s it became apparent that this wasn't what people really wanted, so the city went back to its roots with the slogan, 'What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas!' By the 2000s, you started seeing resorts with secluded 'European style' pools, where you could be topless or nude, and Caesars had a nightclub with backlit translucent walls, where nude women would dance on the opposite side and all you could see was their nude shadows.

I spent a few dollars on Marilyn, buying her a couple of very nice dresses, and several pairs of thigh high stockings. She found them silly, but she sure liked what they got me in the mood for. I bought her this gorgeous calf length halter-topped wrap dress in a light blue silk, and some very sheer and long stockings for the night we went to see the Chairman of the Board, and I dressed in a nice charcoal suit. We looked like young jetsetters out for a night on the town. At the end of the night, I slipped the dress off of her and luxuriated in the feel of the nylons caressing my thighs and hips as she rode me back in our room.

Needless to say, I took her into the boutiques and bought her a couple of swimsuits, one a side tie string bikini, and the other a crocheted one piece suit that wasn't much larger. Marilyn was very nervous wearing them down to the pool, especially the bikini, but got a number of wolf whistles when she took off her cover-up. I whispered all sorts of naughty things to her when I put suntan lotion on her back.

One of the most amusing afternoons was when we took a cab to an address in the downtown area. I had found it in the handouts and flyers in our room. It was an adult store. Everywhere else in the country, these places are behind walls and in drab industrial areas. In Vegas they have plate glass windows with everything on display! If Marilyn thought the head shop in Ocean City was crazy, she could barely speak when I pulled her into this place! "Alice, this is the other side of the looking glass!", I told her as I led her inside. She just stared in disbelief at some of the stuff. I did notice, however, that her nipples crinkled slightly when she found the bondage items. She had a very dark and secret interest in being tied up, I would discover, but we rarely did that since it's just not one of my kinks.

I did buy her a vibrator, which caused her to turn beet red, along with a couple of very naughty nighties. Later that afternoon, back at Caesars, I loaded the batteries in the vibrator and showed her how it worked. Marilyn became a very eager convert! Vibrators became a part of our sex play in the future. After we got married, and we would leave the kids to go out on date night, one or two often went into her purse for the drive home in the dark.

We even did some gambling. One day we walked through the casino and I explained how some of the games worked. Roulette was pretty straightforward, but it took a while longer to explain craps. Then we wandered over to the blackjack tables. Marilyn turned her nose up at the table games, preferring slot machines. On the other hand, she's a very cheap gambler. In those days they still had a few penny slots, so I bought her a couple of rolls of pennies and turned her loose. I headed off to the blackjack tables. I explained that if I was going to lose my money, I at least wanted to do it with a pretty girl.

I sat there and gambled for a couple of hours before Marilyn ran out of pennies and came searching for me. I heard her gasp behind me, but I held up my hand to quiet her. It didn't work; she kept talking. "Oh my God! What are you doing?!" I waved her into silence and kept my eyes focused on the cards and the count.

I beat the dealer and he slid $300 in chips across to me. I slipped a $50 chip back to him. "For you. I'm cashing out."

"Cashing out!", he called, and then picked up my chips and slipped them into a holder. He handed that to me, and then motioned a security guard to follow me. I led a dumbfounded Marilyn over to the cashier. The total was about $5,000, which would cover quite a bit of our vacation.

She was silent, but once we got into a lounge and settled down in a corner booth, she asked, "Since when did you start gambling?"

"Hmm? That? That wasn't gambling, that was skill." Just at that moment a pretty waitress in a mini-toga came over and took our orders, a gin and tonic, and a daiquiri.

"Carling, I saw you making bets! Don't tell me it wasn't gambling!"

I smiled. "It bothers you that much?"

"Yes!", she replied, looking at me in a state of high dudgeon! (Is there a state of low dudgeon?)

I shrugged and said, "Okay, so I won't make any more bets. How'd you do at the slot machines?"

"That's not the point!"

I laughed loudly at her "That would mean you lost!".

"No!"

"So you won? How much?"

"That's not the point!"

I just started laughing at her. I was still laughing when our drinks arrived. Marilyn stuck her tongue out at me when I quizzed her on how much she had won playing penny slots, and where were her winnings. It turned out that she had indeed won a jackpot, but they had all gone back into the penny slots. I just laughed even more at that.

On the other hand, I promised her I would stay away from the tables for the rest of the trip, and I would spend my winnings on her. That confused her, until I mentioned buying her a dress and some lingerie, which made her blush, especially when I told her what I had in mind. We ended up having a second drink before heading up to our room to talk it over some more. Horizontally!

Eventually our week was over, and we got a limo back to the airport and flew home again. Marilyn insisted that I had to keep her vibrator at the frat house, so I tucked it in the back of one of my dresser drawers. She didn't seem as worried about her mother finding her new dresses or lingerie. I have no idea how she kept that sort of thing a secret!

I didn't even try. I had a number of Polaroids of her in the blue dress and her new swimsuits, which I tacked to my wall over my desk. I had asked her to bring her camera with her, and I made sure to get some shots of her. I also tried to get a few of her in her nighties and in the buff, but that got her very upset, so I tossed the idea aside and promised I wouldn't do that. She was even nervous about the swimsuit shots, but I got her to model them around the pool and she quickly warmed up when she realized I wasn't doing anything untoward. It wasn't like I was doing anything X rated, or even R. Nothing got beyond PG-13!

Hell of a vacation!

Chapter 40: Time Flies By

Back at RPI, things began to move in a blur. I spent huge amounts of time down at Amos Eat-Me studying and working with Professor Rhineburg. Since a lot of what I was doing involved the computer system, I spent more than a few nights down there as well, after hours, when the system was at the lowest utilitization levels.

I continued working about one Sunday in four as a cook at Kegs, trying to time them with the weekends when Marilyn visited. I kept trying out upsized favorite recipes of mine and trying them as new recipes for the guys. Mostly they went over well (beef tips with mushrooms proved popular) but not always (pork roast with a curry glaze was sent back - airborne!)

It was sad in some ways, watching friends and brothers who weren't going to make it academically, as their college life went swirling around the bowl. Andy Kowalchuk and the Cisco Kid were the worst, but forget about telling them shit, they knew better. I laid way off the dope this time around, not out of any great moral issue, but because I just didn't have the time or inclination.

I did introduce Marilyn to it one weekend. She was very nervous, but we were sitting around in Kowalchuk's and Gravy Train's room playing bridge and listening to the Monty Python and the Holy Grail soundtrack, and they started passing around a bong. I took a hit and then showed her how to do it. It was hilarious to watch her reactions. After a bit she lost her nervousness, her eyes got a little glazed, and then suddenly she got very ... amorous. I had once told her it tended to make people horny, but she had just laughed it off. She eventually dragged me upstairs and ripped my clothes off of me, and then rode me hard and put me away wet! An amazing night, and I teased her about it mercilessly the next day. "Someday you'll have children, and what will you tell them when they ask, 'Why can't I smoke pot? Did you ever smoke pot?'"

It happened, too. Alison was never a problem with drugs, since she was handicapped to begin with, and Parker never got into it, although he did like his beer. It was Maggie who was the wild one, and she bugged us about dating as soon as she hit puberty, and we know she smoked pot and drank. On the other hand, she didn't do anything stupid and never got into trouble. The most hilarious moment was when she and Jackson moved into a fixer-upper apartment and she showed us a dresser she had stripped and stained. I promptly opened the top drawer to look at the construction and she screamed since I had found her stash. I just buried my head in my hands to try and stop laughing, while Marilyn huffed and puffed.

Near the beginning of April, a new brother joined the fraternity. A small mutt wandered into the back yard and took up residence. At first he hid in the corner, but then, as the day wore on, he got a little more adventurous and came out of hiding. By late afternoon he had wandered up to the back door, where we still had the airlock set up, and when the door opened, he scurried in before anybody could stop him. He sniffed the cooking in the kitchen and trotted on back, and promptly sat down and whined piteously. Mrs. Clarity ordered him out, but he kept whining, and when a couple of the guys tracked him down, they took pity on him and fed him some of yesterday's leftovers.

That was how we adopted Jefferson, or how he adopted us. He was of an indeterminate breed, what my parents called a Heinz, as in Heinz 57 varieties. He was short haired, a brown and white mix that had elements of a small hound and something larger. He was young, and mostly housebroken. Our initial thought was that he was a runaway or lost, and that we would find some flyers up or hear something or see it in the paper. At least that was what we told ourselves, which became a big, big problem. 'We'll take care of him for a week and try to find his owners.' Nobody tried to find them. Jefferson, named that by Ricky Holloway (a Texan and the only other southerner in the house besides me) for both Jefferson Starship, the band, and Jefferson Davis, the President of the Confederacy, was a very nice little dog, and we quickly fell in love with the little mutt.

Unfortunately, he was not universally beloved. Jerry Modanowicz in particular took exception to dog crap in the back yard. By the end of the week, Jerry took Jefferson down to the pound, basing his decision to do this on the statement that we were only going to keep him for a week until we found his owners. No owners, the week was up, and so was Jefferson's time with us. Jerry never told anybody about this either. By the time we figured all this out, enough days had passed that the pup was put to sleep.

Maybe not everybody wanted a dog, but nobody wanted him killed, and Jerry was thrown out. It was not considered a grave loss. He had proved a real pain in the tail, lived in a single on the first floor of the main house (the Underground Railroad room), and thought his fecal matter was not possessed of an aroma.

That was all on the first time through. Now I could do something about it. That Friday afternoon, when I noticed Jefferson was missing, I looked around for him. Nobody had seen him all day, and Ricky got worried and stared asking around also. "Where in the world did he get to?", he asked.

"Where's Modanowicz?", I asked.

"Why?"

Marty had joined us by now, along with Leo, and listened in as I said, "Wasn't he complaining about Jefferson, and how we should get rid of him at the end of the week? Do you think he might have done something?"

"You're kidding me! No way!", said Leo.

Marty was silent, but Ricky asked, "Like what?"

I shrugged. "The pound?"

Ricky's eyes widened at the thought, and he went into the hallway to the house pay phone and leafed through it until he found the phone number for the dog pound. He fished out a quarter, and as we watched, he called and asked if a small brown and white male dog had been brought in. His eyes lit up when the answer was positive, and he asked them to hold onto him until we got there.

"I can't believe that son of a bitch did this!", he exclaimed. "I swear, I'm going to kill him!"

"Hold your horses.", cautioned Marty. "We don't know he did it, not for sure. What do you want to do?" Marty was a senior like Ricky, and highly respected among the brothers.

"I want to go rescue him, that's what!", said Ricky. I nodded in agreement.

"That means you are adopting him into the house? What if the house doesn't vote to let him in?"

I looked over at Leo, not figuring that answer. "I vote yes.", said Leo.

"Me, too.", I added.

"Listen, I'm a senior. We don't have time to take a formal vote. If the house has a problem, I'll take him when I leave.", answered Ricky.

Marty nodded. "Okay, listen, you two go grab Jefferson. I'm going to figure this out and talk to Bill and figure out what we're doing. Get going!" Marty grabbed Leo and told him to start asking around over in Grogans', while he did the same in the main house.

Ricky and I got into the Galaxie and headed into town. Curiously, Ricky had grabbed the fraternity portrait off the wall of the formal room. Once we got down to the pound, we went inside and told them we had called about the brown and white dog. We were taken back to a line of kennels, which was a truly piteous sight, and there we found Jefferson. He immediately went crazy when he saw us, jumping up and trying to lick us through the chain link kennel side. I went to open the kennel, but I was stopped. "Hold on there, we have to do some paperwork first!"

We told Jefferson we would be back for him, and went back out front. First we had to buy a dog license, and then we had to have him neutered. Bitches got spayed. He needed rabies shots and other vet stuff done. And we had to cough up some cash to pay for all of this. Fortunately, they had a vet on tap to handle all these things, so if we wanted, they would arrange everything, but we wouldn't be able to take Jefferson home for another couple of days. Ricky agreed and I grabbed my wallet.

Then Ricky went outside and came back in with the fraternity portrait, and asked if Jerry had been the one to bring in Jefferson. The fellow squinted, but said he thought so. Ricky and I looked at each other and rolled our eyes. Jerry had really fucked up this time. We went back and said goodbye to Jefferson, promising to come back at the beginning of the week.

We got back to the house just before dinner, and Marty latched onto us in the kitchen. "Was he there?"

"We got there in time. He was there."

"And was it Modanowicz?"

I looked at Ricky and then nodded, saying, "It wouldn't be good enough to take to court, but the guy was pretty sure it was Jerry. We showed him the pictures from the formal room, and the only one that seemed familiar was Modanowicz'."

"Shit!", swore Marty quietly.

"Is he here?", asked Ricky. "Let's ask him!"

Marty shook his head. "He's visiting some girl over at Union. Won't be back until Sunday."

I shrugged. "What was the consensus around the house?"

"I think they'd all rather have the dog than Jerry."

"We'll announce it at dinner.", agreed Ricky.

It was the main topic of dinner that night, with about half the guys talking about the dog and the other half in disbelief over what Modanowicz had done. Ricky and I shared a table with Marty and Leo, and a few other guys, and at the end, Ricky motioned for me to stand up with him, and called for attention.

"Okay, here's what we figured out. We found Jefferson down at the pound. Buckman and I went down there and laid claim to him, and registered him in the name of Kappa Gamma Sigma. We'll do a formal vote at the next meeting. If there's a problem, I'll take him when I leave."

"How'd he get down there?", asked Joe Bradley, from a table on the other side of the room.

I took this one. "He didn't run away, if that's the question. The dog warden didn't pick him up. He was brought in by somebody, a college kid, a guy, at least according to the guy at the desk down there."

"Was it Modanowicz?", asked somebody in the back.

I shrugged. "Absolutely positively? Can't say. I will say that the guy picked his face off the portraits in the formal room, and nobody else's face. We'll have to ask him when he gets back."

That caused quite an uproar. Ricky motioned for silence and then said, "In order to rescue Jefferson, we had to get him a dog license, and he has to get his shots and get neutered."

"Just like you, Leo!", I commented. Leo flipped me off as everybody else laughed.

Ricky continued, "Which means we can't pick him up until Monday afternoon at the earliest. I'll go out and pick up some dog chow and stuff tomorrow."

"Another thing.", I said, "First, Ricky and I are out a few bucks to do this." I grabbed a ball cap from the hat rack in the corner and passed it around. "We need a buck or two from everybody." There was some grousing about that, but most guys coughed up something, and the ones that didn't said they would bring it by after dinner. "Another thing. Jefferson is just a puppy. We can't have anybody giving him booze or dope. Is that clear? That stuff will just kill him. It'd be nicer just to let the pound keep him. So nobody gives him any beer or booze, and nobody feeds him any magic brownies or acid. Is that understood?" There was a huge uproar over this, with everybody claiming they would never do this, but I knew my brothers, and somebody was dumb enough to try. Boris and the Cisco Kid came to mind.

We had a routine house meeting on Sunday night, and a formal vote was taken. Notably absent was Jerry Modanowicz. He also had cleared out his room, and I never saw him again. I mean never - not even on campus! I think he dropped out or transferred. There was never a vote to kick him out, since it takes a unanimous blackball vote to kick somebody out, and that was impossible. I don't think Hitler could have gotten a 100% blackball.

There was one other piece of grim news. The pool was in dire need of repair. We were filling it constantly, and the Pool Manager, who reported to the House Manager, had gotten a couple of guys in from a local pool company to take a look at it. The news wasn't good.

Kegs was the only house on campus with a swimming pool, which was a major source of pride and pledges, and most importantly, chicks! It was an in-ground pool, but unbeknownst to almost any of us, the pool didn't have a real concrete casting. It actually was some sort of hole in stabilized dirt with a heavy plastic liner. We kept it filled year round. Now the liner was worn out and it was leaking badly. A new liner was going to cost $10,000! No way did we have that kind of cash! Spread out over roughly 40 guys, that was almost $250 a person that very, very few of us had. The only alternative was to drain the pool and fill in the hole, at a cost of about $1,000.

Previously, we had reluctantly voted to fill in the hole. As an economic matter, a new liner would last many years more, and you could argue it was amortized over the life of the investment, but nobody had ten grand to invest. Well, almost nobody. I liked the pool as much as the next guy, and as an official polar bear, I had a certain say in the matter. The vote went as before, to fill in the pool over the summer.

Monday morning I went down to the bank and arranged to withdraw $10,000 in cash. I wouldn't be able to pick it up for a couple of days. Wednesday afternoon I took the cash and went down to the post office in Albany. I had a box in the Troy office and I didn't want any chance that somebody might recognize me. In Albany I bought ten grand worth of mail order checks. I had already used a typewriter down in the math department to type a letter and an envelope, and I stuffed it all together and mailed it to the frat.

The letter came in the mail on Saturday, and the response was one of utter disbelief. First off, nobody had ever seen a postal money order before, and they had to wait until Monday to find out if it was real. Then, that night, around the dinner table a new vote was held and the previous vote was thrown out; the pool would be fixed. I should have known, however, that it wouldn't be unanimous. There was a small group that wanted to have a party and spend the money on other stuff. There was a lot of discussion over where the money came from. Nobody knew I had money, and since the Galaxie was starting to burn oil, nobody imagined I had any cash. I started looking through the want ads for a new car.

The work would be done over the summer, when school was out and I was mostly away. Right now the plan was that I would spend some time up in the Adirondacks with Marilyn to start. We picked the week of her birthday. Suzie wasn't able to come up until the end of the month, by which time I would be elsewhere. Marilyn's family had a camp up on Sacandaga Lake, a big double wide that was only used on weekends. We could go up there and have some fun during the week. We wouldn't do much swimming, though, since icebergs float across the lake well into August. Later in the summer we would head back down to Baltimore and meet up with Tusker and Tessa for a few days, and then go back to Ocean City.

But first I had to go camping.

Chapter 41: Summer Camp

This summer I was to spend some time at the Fayetteville School for Unwed Fathers, otherwise known as Fort Bragg. The standard ROTC plan was that you spent a portion of your last two summers in some sort of training. Then, after you graduated and were commissioned, they would send you to your advanced training. Infantry officers go to Benning, artillery officers go to Fort Sill in Oklahoma, armor officers go to Fort Knox, Kentucky, and so forth. By the end of June, I would be at Bragg for six weeks

The day I was to fly south I had Marty Adrianopolis drive us over to the Albany airport. I was packing light, with just a few changes of underwear and clothing and my toilet kit in an army surplus B4 bag. We had a checklist of things to carry and you took those things and those things only. We would get gear issued when we got there. 'There' was Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and it was Joe, Bruno, and me going. I think the Navy cadets went off to Newport and the Air Force went to some base down in Texas.

Nobody actually goes to Fayetteville, which is where Fort Bragg is, even though they have an airport. Instead they flew us to Raleigh and told us to report to a military liaison at the baggage claim. At that point we would belong to the Army, and they would do whatever they wanted to us for the next six weeks. As the saying goes, 'Give your soul to Jesus. Uncle Sam gets all the rest!' The flight was the cheapest and longest trip imaginable, with stops in Philly and Richmond along the way. Nothing too good for our troops!

The real fun started once we got to Raleigh. The military liaison turned out to be a collection of sergeants and corporals, the most junior of which was holding a sign up on a stick saying 'ROTC HERE'. We collected our bags and wandered over to the noncoms and got in line. Outside it was raining and I could see a line of school buses painted in green camouflage. (Really? Like we were sending school buses into combat? I've been around military people my entire life and I just don't understand it at times. Like the time when the Navy issued Parker blue camouflage uniforms - If you want a sailor to hide on a ship, give him a gray uniform and make him look like an electric cable!) When we got to the front of the line I showed the sergeant my orders and he sent me outside to a school bus. That was the last I saw of my frat brothers. They were directed to different buses.

That was where the fun started. The fellow in front of me, on showing his orders and being directed to climb on board the bus, said, 'Yes, sir.' The sergeant replied, as most sergeants are wont to do, 'Don't call me sir! I work for a living!' I'd heard this any number of times before, if not by sergeants, than by foremen and other workers.

And I smiled.

"WHAT ARE YOU SMILING AT, PISSANT!? DID I GIVE YOU PERMISSION TO SMILE? DO YOU FIND SOMETHING FUNNY IN WHAT I JUST SAID?" The sergeant had whipped around to face me and just about crawled up my body. He was screaming at me at the top of his lungs, his face so close to mine I was being sprayed by his spittle.

Oh, shit! The secret to surviving any kind of training is to become invisible. When hammering nails, the tallest nail gets hammered first. When you're in a foxhole (what we learned was actually an 'improvised field entrenchment'), the guy who sticks his head up is the one who gets blown away. I had just violated Rule 1 of surviving the summer.

I came to attention and barked, "NO, SERGEANT!" I locked it up and kept my eyes facing forward. The sergeant went on in this fashion for another couple of minutes, much to the astonished horror of my fellow boots, as the rain came down on us and we slowly got soaked.

Eventually, the tirade ended up pretty much like I expected it to. "DROP AND GIVE ME TWENTY!"

"YES, SERGEANT!" I immediately set my bag on the sidewalk and dropped to the ground. I assumed the position, with my face in a puddle, and dropped down and then pushed back up. "ONE!" I kept up the process as the sergeant processed the rest of my busload onto the bus, with them stepping around me, and in one case stepping on me. Once done, I pushed up and locked my elbows. "PERMISSION TO RECOVER?"

"DID I SAY YOU COULD SPEAK, PISSANT? PERMISSION DENIED! GIVE ME ANOTHER TWENTY!"

I guess we needed to load some more onto the bus. I gave the sergeant another twenty, and then locked my elbows and stayed in position. Eventually I was ordered to recover and stood up. My arms were killing me, but I kept my mouth shut and a blank expression on my face. Out of the corners of my eyes I could see one or two boots at each bus doing pushups, so I guess I was just the lucky guy on my bus. I retrieved my B4 and got on the bus when ordered to. I squished when I sat down. The fellow next to me was wet, too, but I was soaked to the skin. Thank God it was a warm day.

We were ordered to keep our mouths shut on the drive to Bragg. It was an hour and a half or more, and needless to say, some asshole hadn't learned from my example. He did pushups in the aisle for thirty miles. That was the procedure for the day. I went through the entire incoming process in soggy clothes. I didn't know whether it was funny or miserable.

I am not going to describe all the fun of boot camp. If you've ever seen a John Wayne war movie, you already know all about it, except ours was a lot louder, smellier, dirtier, and messier than what he did. Reveille was officially at 0600, but by then we were already wide awake. The weather was either blistering hot and sunny, or drenching downpours, with the occasional tornado scare thrown in for good measure. On the other hand, we were assured it didn't snow much in North Carolina. Every day we did PT - physical training - also known as calisthenics. We ran, for miles and miles. We ran through obstacle courses. And then we did it all over again, while carrying backpacks full of rocks. Meanwhile, we would suffer daily abuse from drill instructors who must have had lungs and throats made from leather, since every one of them had the dial set at 11.

I just kept telling myself it was only for six weeks, and then five weeks, and then four weeks, and so forth. Every few days we would have just enough time to scribble out a note to somebody and I would write Marilyn, telling her I loved her, and how the thought of seeing her in a bikini at the beach was the only thing keeping me from going crazy. Every few days she would write back, and I would find a Polaroid enclosed. Most of them were pretty tame, but several of them were in a swimsuit or a short skirt; she said she had been up at summer camp on her own and Tammy had taken the shots.

Thankfully, I was in pretty decent shape going into basic training, what with my running and workouts. Theoretically, taking ROTC gets you out of gym class, because you are spending an equivalent amount of time doing pushups with the army. However, college ROTC programs vary tremendously across the country. You are supposed to come out already in decent shape, knowing how to march and salute, and ready to chew nails and spit tacks. Some schools are so good you come out ready to go into battle. Some you come out not even knowing how to wear the uniform. Rensselaer's is somewhere in the middle, on the mediocre side. I can honestly say that if I hadn't been already in good shape, I would have been one hurting pup!

There were a few odd moments along the way. By the end of the second week we were introduced to unarmed combat. During the spring semester I had managed to find an aikido instructor and start up again. He was a lot tougher, at least personally, than Lance Miyagi's father, and ran me up one side and down the other about how my appallingly limited skills had been allowed to fade away. He even threatened to take away my black belt. Under his strict tutelage I was able to blow the rust off and get back into fighting shape by the end of the spring.

There were probably about a thousand ROTC students at Bragg that summer, in a gigantic oversized training battalion, and maybe a couple of hundred in any individual training company. My company was split up into smaller groups, each of which had a drill instructor of some sort to teach unarmed combat basics. That was when my 'low profile' plan failed. Our drill instructor, Corporal Jones decided to teach us hands on and he needed a volunteer. He got that volunteer the Army way - he selected one.

Me.

Everybody was looking at me, and I just blinked and asked, "Me?"

"You, pissant." He crooked a finger at me and summoned me forward. I walked out into the sand circle in front of our group. "Your next of kin registered?", he asked, a common enough question.

"YES, CORPORAL!", I barked out. You never talk; you say it loud and proud!

"Assume a defensive position, or what you think is a defensive position.", he said with a laugh. He then proceeded to tell us what was going to happen. The instructors worked on the 'tell them three times' principle, which is a common teaching method (remember, I had once taught college back in the day.) You tell them what you are about to tell them, you tell them for real, and then you tell them what you just told them. In this case he told them how he would kill me, then kill me, and then tell them how he killed me. This felt like it was going south quickly.

In for a penny, in for a pound. I stepped into the ring and took up a kamae defensive position, as bait. In aikido you always let the attacker come to you, even to the extent of feinting to draw an attack towards you. Then you react defensively to thwart the attack and position yourself for any further attacks.

The corporal stopped and eyed me curiously. He began to move cautiously, trying to circle me. I stayed facing him as he tried to circle me, and I kept watching him closely. I noticed he wasn't getting any closer. Suddenly he stepped back. Keeping an eye on me, he yelled back over his shoulder, "Sergeant Jenkins!"

Sergeant Jenkins was the senior drill instructor, a staff sergeant, and our company commander. He came over after a couple of minutes to find the corporal and me still standing facing each other in sand ring. "Corporal Jones?"

"I think we've got us a karateman here! I just thought you might want to watch.", said Corporal Jones.

"There's always one.", replied Jenkins with a light laugh. "He's all yours."

Oh shit! Jones laughed and came back towards me.

The move he had told us he was going to make was a grab and a throw, allowing me to land hard on the ground, stunning and immobilizing me, and allowing him to kill me at his leisure. That was the theory, anyway. I'm sorry, but it was just a force of habit. I had spent too many hours in the dojo and I just fell back on rote memory. He grabbed me and I countered, and twisted him up and over and dropped him on his ass. I quickly stepped back and assumed a defensive position.

There was dead silence. Jenkins entered the sand ring, and walked up to Jones, who was now sitting upright and brushing sand out of his hair with a rueful grin on his face. He looked up at Jenkins and said, "Yeah, there's always one. I'm going to remember you said that."

Jenkins helped Jones to his feet. "I never said he wouldn't kick your ass." Then the sergeant turned to face me. "Feeling lucky, are we?"

"I'm not all that sure, sergeant." Now it was really too late to back down!

Jenkins motioned Jones out of the ring, and this time he bowed to me, which really made me think I had fucked up. I had nothing else to do but return the bow. This time we circled each other warily, and he didn't charge in at me. I actually had to fake a backwards motion to get him to commit, and he struck at me with a fist punch, which didn't leave him off balance. I still managed to twist him around and toss him, but he had barely landed on the sand before he rolled to his feet and came back at me. This time I was off balance and I took two solid blows to my ribs as I fell on my ass. I was up quickly though, rolling out from under his kick, and managed to take a second kick in stride and drop him in the sand a second time. That just got me a smack to the head. I was moving back into position when he stopped the fight.

I was breathing hard, and rubbing my sore ribs, and I was pleased to note that the sergeant was rubbing a hand along his rear. "So, what degree are you, and in what?", he asked.

"First dan, aikido. Uh, that'd be a first degree black belt, sergeant.", I answered.

"I know what it means, soldier.", he answered me, but not angrily. "You're very good, but your timing is off."

I nodded. He was right, I wasn't moving properly. "I know, sergeant. I should have been more fluid, and quicker."

"It's the uniform, and the boots. I bet you've only practiced in a gi and barefoot, right?"

It was like a light went off in my head! No wonder I was moving like molasses! "That's it, I think! I've never worn boots during practice! Can we do another fall?"

He just snorted a small laugh. "Not now. Just get your ass back in ranks." Corporal Jones and Sergeant Jenkins supervised the day's unarmed combat training, and I made sure to do as I was told. At the end of the period, however, I was called over. Both Jones and Jenkins were standing there.

"You could have made him look like a real horse's ass. Why didn't you?", asked the sergeant.

"That would have been disrespectful, sergeant."

Jones spoke up. "You would give a break to an enemy?"

"Are you my enemy or my teacher, corporal?", I asked.

The two noncoms looked at me curiously. I was then sent on my way, although I was also given extra duty. Three nights a week I was to make my way to the training hall, and Sergeant Jenkins would give me an extra special workout along with Corporal Jones. The sergeant was a black belt in karate. When the corporal made a pro forma protest about this, the sergeant replied that he shouldn't have let me put his dick in the dirt. That got an easy laugh from the corporal. At least I wasn't in any trouble.

When we started weapons training with the M-16, Sergeant Jenkins asked me if I was as good with rifles as with aikido. "I don't know, sergeant. I've never even held a gun before.", I told him. That got him to laughing, but it earned me five minutes of running around holding my M-16 with one hand and grabbing my crotch with the other, singing, 'This is my rifle! This is my gun! This is for shooting! This is for fun!' That kind of sucked.

It turned out that I did well with weapons, probably because I didn't have any bad habits to unlearn, or at least that's what the instructors said. The guys who bragged that they were sent out in the morning with a rifle and a single bullet, and weren't allowed to eat if they didn't bring back dinner, weren't all that good with an M-16. I figured they were full of shit, anyhow. My father, growing up on a farm during the Depression, had told us that story too, but with him I believed it. I managed to qualify as Expert in both rifle and pistol. That was with the Colt .45, Model 1911A1. The army wouldn't change over to the Berretta 9 mm until the mid-Eighties, and I thought before, and think now, that was the stupidest thing they could have possibly done. God knows it's loud, and if you aren't prepared it kicks like a mule, but it wasn't that hard for a guy my size to hold and fire, and the target goes down permanently.

Some of what we did was what I told Marilyn we would do, which was to go hiking and camping in the woods. Well, that's not precisely what we did. We practiced patrolling and setting up defenses and ambushes and stuff like that. This was just an introduction. The guys who ended up in the infantry would take advanced classes in crawling through the woods. The end results tended to be comical.

At one point, towards the end of training, the battalion was split in two and we had to play a giant war game, with the equivalent of two big companies on each side. We had a headquarters and two opposing lines of defense, and we had to patrol 'No Man's Land' and bring back intelligence. It was sort of like playing Capture the Flag while taking steroids and LSD. That was when the fun started. I was assigned to the Blue Army, along with the guy in the bunk beneath me, Harlan J. Buckminster (this was all done alphabetically), and we were assigned to be part of the patrols probing the Orange Army's defenses.

So, off we went. We left our simulated headquarters, following behind our simulated sergeant, while our simulated lieutenant showed us our simulated front line. We were to sneak across a very large and very scrubby field and find out what the Orange Army was simulating, and then sneak back and let the simulated good guys know what the simulated bad guys were up to. This was a whole lot more fun when I was 10 and I could sneak home for some non-simulated milk and cookies.

Harlan and I slathered on the grease paint and grabbed our M-16s. We only had blanks, but you don't fuck around with guns. As our simulated leaders looked on, we slipped down to the edge of the field and dropped to our bellies. It was a nice and sunny day, and even the dirt was relatively dry. It took us over an hour of slow crawling to make our way across the field and around the scrubby brush. Then, maybe twenty meters (yards to normal people, but the Army had gone NATO and we all used metric) away from the edge of the forest somebody other than Harlan and me yelled out, "HALT! WHO GOES THERE?"

Harlan looked at me with wide eyes, which was the only thing you could see of his face, since he was as black as the ace of spades to begin with, and now he was covered with grease paint. I just looked back and shook my head. I didn't know what to do, either!

Just then the voice yelled out, "JULIUS!"

I looked over at Harlan and shrugged my shoulders. Julius must have been a password, but since we didn't know the countersign, we were fucked. He shrugged, too.

"JULIUS!" was repeated.

We were so fucked. No way would we get a third chance. We were already dead men. It was so stupid, I just had to take the chance. "CAESAR!" Harlan just looked at me and rolled on his back, and tried to keep from laughing.

Just as suddenly, a helmeted head prairie-dogged up from about fifty feet away. "Hi, guys! What's up?"

Harlan and I stared at each other. I couldn't believe that these guys had picked the stupidest set of passwords in the history of warfare. Harlan whispered, "I can't believe this shit!"

"It's better to be lucky than smart!", I returned. I rolled to my knees and stuck my head above the scrub and looked around. The Orange Army sentry was standing there, holding his rifle to the side.

"Well, don't just stand there! Come on in!", he said eagerly. His fellow sentry emerged from behind a stump a few meters away and stood up, too.

Well, we were well and truly fucked now! I could only see two ways out of this. Either we would be recognized as members of the hated Blue Army, and captured, tortured, and gruesomely killed, or we were going to have to return the favor to these guys. I looked over at Harlan and said, "Give me your rifle." I tore off the blue Velcro patch on my left arm that signified who I was. Harlan had a blue one of his own, and the two sentries wore orange Velcro.

"What?", asked Harlan.

"Come on. This is our only chance. Give me your rifle and hold your hands behind you. You're my prisoner!", I replied.

Harlan's eyes widened at this, but he just grinned and passed over his M-16. I stood up and manhandled him vertical, and he held his hands behind his back. We walked towards the enemy lines, and he started grumbling, so I gave him an easy shot to the kidneys and told him to shut up. He hammed it up and almost fell to his knees.

The two sentries bought it, though. They came towards us, and the first one said, "Wow! You got a prisoner!?"

Harlan protested and I punched him again. At this point the second sentry came up and asked, "Where's your armband?", referring to my Velcro.

I looked down at my arm in surprise. "I must have lost it when I captured him."

That seemed to satisfy both of these guys. No doubt about it, Harlan and I must have stumbled across the stupidest members of the entire Orange Army. Thank God! The second sentry promptly sat down on a log and propped his rifle up against a tree, and the first sentry turned his back on us to lead us in. As soon as this happened, I handed Harlan his rifle and grabbed the sentry from behind. By the time I had my guy on the ground, Harlan had wrapped his arms around his guy and pulled him to the ground ... My guy was struggling, so I gave him a stiff shot to the kidneys and growled at him to knock it off, and then I got Harlan to sit on the pair of them while I trussed them up.

We also stole their orange armbands, which prompted an outraged, "That's wearing an enemy uniform! You'll be hung as spies when you get caught!"

"Well, when they put the simulated rope around my simulated neck, I'll just say that I'm sorry I only had one simulated life to give to my simulated country!" I yanked their socks socks off and shoved them in their mouths. I then showed them my combat knife. "Now shut up and behave!"

We trussed those two up good, and tossed a shelter half over them. We searched and found a map with their position and the nearby sentry positions marked, and pocketed it. It was time to go home.

Just as we started to leave, a rustling in the brush behind us prompted us to turn and bring our weapons to bear. A grinning simulated Orange Army lieutenant stepped out. "How's it going, men!"

Harlan looked at me. "This just keeps getting better and better!" He turned his rifle aside and said, "We caught some prisoners, sir!"

The lieutenant came bounding up, only to find himself grabbed and trussed up with the others. He had a better map on him, which we also took possession of. I looked at Harlan. "Now can we go?"

Before he could answer, things went from bad to worse. The distinctive sound of a Jeep could be heard approaching us up a path from the woods. "You have got to be shitting me!", replied Harlan.

"What, did we stumble on the Grand Central Station of Fayetteville?", I responded. Our prisoners were struggling under the tarp, so we gave them a couple of kicks and told them to shut up.

Only real soldiers could drive a Jeep, and our newest visitor was a real lieutenant, not just a cadet wannabe lieutenant. Still, he was wearing an orange armband, so we captured him, too. He was nowhere near as happy about this as you would expect. At that point, we had four prisoners, loads of info, and no way to get home. If we tried to sneak back across the field, we would get caught for sure, probably by these very assholes. Somebody was bound to show up and let them loose.

Harlan solved the problem. "Can you drive a Jeep?", he asked me.

I looked at him blankly, and then looked at the Jeep, and then looked back at Harlan. "I don't know. Why?"

"Because we can drive back to HQ then."

The idea was so ludicrous that I wanted to laugh, but I didn't. I looked at the Jeep again, then back at Harlan, then back at the Jeep. "Can you drive a Jeep?", I asked him.

He shook his head. "I never learned how to drive a stick shift."

Well, it had been many, many years, but I knew how to drive a standard transmission. I looked in the Jeep, and it was rudimentary, but it had a stick. "You're kidding me, right?"

"No, I'm not. Look here." He grabbed the real lieutenant's map and laid it out on the hood of the Jeep. "We head back down the path 300 meters and then turn right. We hit this crossroad and head back this way." His finger traced a path and had us sneaking around the backside of everybody and back to our HQ.

"You know, if we get caught, we really will be shot, and probably by everybody, including our side."

He grinned. "Think of all the simulated medals we'll get."

"Simulated posthumous medals." I hooked a thumb over at our friends. "What about these assholes?"

He grinned even more. "Prisoners!"

"Oh, shit!" Well, it's better to be hung for a goat as a sheep, or something of the sort. We tossed our new friends in the back of the Jeep, on the floor, on top of each other, with the real lieutenant on the bottom, and then covered them up with the shelter halves. Then we climbed in and I started up the Jeep. I was very rusty, and ground the gears a couple of times, and stalled it out to boot before I got the hang of it. "Well, it was nice knowing you, Harlan.", I said.

"Drive!"

And we drove. Harlan's cockamamie scheme actually worked. Fifteen minutes later we pulled up to headquarters (we had already switched back to our blue armbands) and turned our intelligence, prisoners, and captured enemy equipment (the Jeep) over. The response was interesting, to say the least. The maps we grabbed were used to launch a simulated attack. The simulated Orange prisoners were carted off for a simulated debriefing. The real lieutenant was thoroughly outraged and demanded Harlan's and my immediate flogging, castration, and court martial, in no uncertain terms and in no particular order! I got the definite impression that he would have considered the final scene from Braveheart lenient! We were warned away from being around any of the Orange Army companies and from wherever the lieutenant was normally stationed. We were not awarded any simulated medals, but we weren't court martialed (either real or simulated) either.

The warrior elite had triumphed!

Chapter 42: Junior Year

And so ended my summer at the Fayetteville Camp For Incorrigible Boys. Most of us graduated, but not everybody did. You have to meet various minimum standards to be considered as graduated. For some of us it was physical fitness, being able to run a distance in a maximum time, or pushups or swimming or something like that. (I recall Joe Bradley saying he had problems with the swimming; he could swim fine, but almost flunked the floating test!) You also needed to meet minimum qualifications with the weapons. Marksman is the minimum allowed for the M-16., then you move up to Sharpshooter, and then Expert. I initially qualified as Expert with the Colt .45 but only Sharpshooter with the M-16. Later I was able to requalify as Expert with the M-16.

If you fail, you have to come back next year and do it all over again. Fail a second time and you are history. Theoretically you have to pay the Army back for the cost of the scholarship, but I know that can change. Harry Mikulski was two years ahead of me and morbidly obese. He couldn't even fit into a uniform. He got a waiver on both summers of boot camp, and just before graduation the Army tossed him out as unfit. He never had to pay back a cent, and never even got a bad type of discharge. He got a totally free RPI education. Of course, he probably had a heart attack by the time he was thirty, but think of all the money he saved!

During our last week at basic we were given lessons in how to behave as an officer and a gentleman. It was like the army, after spending thousands of dollars and five weeks turning us into bloodthirsty killers, had suddenly decided that maybe it wasn't such a good idea to turn us loose on the general public again. We were taken down to the officer's club and shown around (during off hours, of course!) and given other instruction as well. Much of this was done by the lieutenant Harlan and I had captured, so he and I slipped to the back for those lessons, and hunkered down out of sight. I don't know whether this stuff was the lieutenant's regular job, or penance for being caught.

When it was finally time to go, it was with both a profound sense of relief, and also the sense I was going to miss a new friend. Harlan was heading back to Memphis on a different flight. We said that we would keep an eye out for each other in the service, and you never knew but we would run across each other. It couldn't be any crazier than our fun in the bushes with the Orange Army!

Here's the scary part - these were the same kids that 16 years later, by now commanding battalions, went through the fourth largest army in the world like so much shit through a goose! I guess they learned a little more!

We had another long bus ride back to Raleigh, but this time nobody was doing pushups. At the airport I hooked up with Joe and Bruno again, the first chance I'd had to see them all summer. The flight back to Albany was just as long, but I slept through the entire thing, including the takeoffs, landings, and terminal waits. I was short on about four weeks worth of sleep. When we got into Albany we got a cab to take us over to Kegs. My car was parked in back, and looked to be in good shape. I didn't know if Marty had driven it anywhere, but I really didn't care, either. It just felt good to be back among civilians.

Once I was back, I called Marilyn and she drove over to see me. We spent a very enjoyable afternoon and evening at Kegs before she went home the next morning. The plan was that Friday she would come back, packed and ready to travel, and we would spend a couple of days staying with Tusker and Tessa before heading off to Ocean City again. I definitely wanted to see her in that bikini and crocheted one piece I had bought her before.

Marilyn was still a little nervous about hanging out at the biker bar Tusker and Tessa worked at, but since we had survived the first time, she wasn't as nervous as the last time. I was feeling young and dumb and full of come like a good soldier should be, so it didn't bother me at all. We got into town about eight in the evening, since we had started late and stopped for dinner before arriving. We parked out back and walked around, getting several hard stares, but nobody stopped us from going in. I didn't yell out any smart-ass remarks this time, and we just bellied up to the bar.

It was smoky, not well lit, a bit dirty, and Steppenwolf's Born To Be Wild was blaring from the speakers. If the brothers at Kegs wanted to scare the pants off the pledges, make them come in here for an autograph! This place was a hell of a lot scarier than the Hot Spot! What a great dive!

Tessa was working the beer tap, filling a pitcher, when she noticed us. She gave us a big smile and yelled, "Tusker, guess who finally showed!" Tusker came around the bar from the other end and grabbed me in a bear hug, which I returned.

"You made it!", he yelled over the racket.

"Wouldn't miss this place for the world! Say hello to Marilyn! You met her last year, remember?"

Tusker gave Marilyn a big hug as well, and then went around the bar and set us up with a couple of beers. Marilyn and I sat at the bar for a few hours gabbing with both Tusker and Tessa as they became free, drinking our beers and eating peanuts off the bowl on the bar. We were a bit young for the crowd, but not by much, and we got more notice from my short hair and khakis than anything else. I don't want to say we looked preppy, but we sure wouldn't pass for bikers. A couple of guys looked like they wanted to start something, but Tusker warned them off, saying that we were friends from school, and nobody wanted to mess with Tusker. I was never worried in any case.

The bar closed eventually, and we followed Tusker and Tessa home. They had a nice little one bedroom apartment in Towson off of Joppa Road, with a convertible couch in the living room. It was well after midnight, so we simply sacked out and slept until late morning.

The next day, Saturday, we all just hung out in the apartment and talked about what we had been doing in the last year. This was the first time that my friends had really had a chance to sit and talk with Marilyn. Needless to say they decided to embarrass me by pulling out our high school yearbook. I returned the favor and found the pictures of Tusker and Tessa, and managed to get a few laughs out of that. The nice thing about the yearbook is that it actually comes out a couple of weeks before graduation, so nothing was in there about me as valedictorian, other than a listing of proposed speakers somewhere in the back. No pictures, no copies of speeches, no reminders of the idiot speech I made way back when. What a presumptuous asshole I had been! In fact, there were very few pictures of me at all, since I spent so much time over at Towson State. There were a lot more pictures of Tusker, since he was far more flamboyant than either Tessa or me, especially considering his long red hair and large build.

I asked Tessa if she was figuring to graduate from college in two years, and she said yes. "Tusker's going to take a little longer, but he got started late, and only goes part time."

I looked over at my old friend in surprise. "You're going to college?!"

"Don't look so surprised! You're the one who said I should."

I nodded in agreement. That was true. A year ago we had been talking and I had urged him to at least go part time to community college. "And you listened to me? Nobody listens to me!"

"Yeah, yeah. I don't want to hear it. I'm taking a couple of classes every semester over at Essex, in business."

I blinked at that. "No shit!? Good for you! What's with business? What are you planning on doing?"

He glanced over at Tessa, and then turned back. "Remember how I told you about starting a business of our own. We still want to."

"I remember you saying that!", agreed Marilyn. "Did you want a bar of your own?"

Tusker sort of shrugged and Tessa gave a frown. "Actually, I would really love to have a Harley dealership, but that's just crazy. I'll never have the money to start something like that."

I leaned back and thought about that for a minute. "Why not?"

"I don't have that kind of cash! Do you have any idea how much money gets tied up in a place like that? Thousands - no, millions! Where would we ever find that kind of money?"

"Tusker, nobody has that kind of cash. You borrow it from a bank.", I told him.

"Who the hell is going to loan me that kind of money? Christ, I'm just a bartender at a biker bar!"

"And that's all you'll ever be with that kind of attitude!"

"Fuck you, Buckman!"

I laughed and leaned back on the couch. "Do you really want that dealership? I mean really, really, bust-your-ass-hard-work-want that dealership?"

He stared at me for a moment and then looked over at Tessa. "Are you serious?"

"No, are you serious?"

"Okay, yeah, I want it."

"Then I know how to help you.", I told him.

"How?"

"Go get a piece of paper and a marker.", I ordered him.

"What for?"

"Do you want it or not?"

"Shit!" Tusker shook his head and stood up. He rummaged around in the kitchen for a couple of minutes, while Tessa and Marilyn eyed me curiously and asked each other what I was up to. Eventually Tusker returned with some lined paper and a black Magic Marker. "Yeah?"

"Now write down on a piece of paper 'Harley Davidson dealership 1980'." Tusker wrote it out in his block lettering and then looked up at me. I took the page and tore it off the tablet. "Now, go get some tape and tape it to the mirror in your bathroom."

"What?! What for?"

"Tusker, if you want to do this, then do it, otherwise just get us some beers and forget about it, but I am dead serious. If you want that dealership, go put it on the bathroom mirror. Right the fuck now!"

He looked over at Tessa, but she just nodded. He got up and scrounged up some tape, and went into the bathroom, then returned a minute later. "Now what the fuck was that all about?"

"Now you have a goal. Before you just had a dream, but now you have a goal!"

"Huh?"

"Every day when you get up and shave and shower and brush your teeth, the first thing you're going to see is that goal. The last thing you are going to see before you go to bed is that goal. When the sign wears out, put up a new one. Stick one on your bedroom wall. Paste one behind the bar. Write it on your books over at Essex. Everything you do now is aimed at that goal. It means you're serious!", I told him.

"That's going to get me a Harley dealership?", he asked incredulously.

"No, that's going to keep you pushing yourself so that you're not fucking off! When you want that extra beer, you're going to see that sign and decide to finish your homework first. When you see that sign, you're going to decide to save an extra dollar or two so you can get the cash for that dealership. When you see that sign, you're going to remember to work for it and not fuck off that night or that weekend."

"Bullshit! That's crazy!"

I noticed Tessa was not arguing with me. I turned to Marilyn. "Do me a favor and run downstairs to your car and get me my briefcase. Please?"

Marilyn looked mystified, but she hopped up and got her keys, and then went down the stairs, with Tessa following. "What's he up to?", I heard Tessa ask. I never caught Marilyn's answer, but I'm sure it was, 'I have no idea!'

"Buckman, I have to say, you have a real line of shit going! What are you up to?", asked my friend.

"You'll see."

After another couple of minutes the two girls returned, with Marilyn lugging my battered leather briefcase. "Here you go!", she said.

"Hold onto it for a second. Open it up and pull out my note pad.", I asked. I kept my eyes on Tusker and smiled.

"This one?"

I glanced at her and nodded. "Now, read what it says in block lettering on the front."

Marilyn's eyes widened. "Doctor Buckman!"

I took the notebook and handed it to my friend, and he stared at the cover. When he opened it up, it was written on the inside cover as well. "I am already about three quarters of the way to my doctorate. I already have enough credits for my bachelors and my masters. In two years time I will finish my doctorate."

"All by writing it down in a book?"

"No, by doing the work. Writing it down simply means that I am always reminding myself to do the work. It's not just a dream. It's a goal."

He looked back at the bathroom and asked, "And the 1980?"

"That's when you're going to do it."

He stared at me slack jawed. "No way!"

"Henry Ford once said that if a man thinks he can do something or thinks he can't do something, he's probably right. I think I CAN get my PhD. You think you CAN'T get a dealership."

"You're serious about this, aren't you?"

"It is entirely in your hands. One of these days I am going to take my kids over to see Uncle Tusker and Aunt Tessa where they work. Am I taking them to a bar or to a Harley dealership?"

"Shit!" He looked at Tessa in disbelief and then back at me. "Shit!" He just sort of shook his head. "This is some heavy shit, man! I got to think about this." He stood up. "I'm going for a walk."

I suddenly felt very guilty for putting my friend on the spot about this, but Tessa didn't look all that concerned. As soon as he had left, she said, "Thank you! He needs a good kick in the pants every once in a while. I love him dearly, but he needs a little more ambition."

"You don't think I was too hard on him?"

"Hell no! I've told him the same thing. He listens to you! I'm just his girlfriend.", she laughed.

Twenty minutes later Tusker returned and the first thing he did was get us another round of beers from the fridge. "So how do I do this?", he asked.

I smiled. "I don't know shit about dealerships or motorcycles, but I know a shitload about planning. That I can help you with."

It was all standard management stuff I gave him, things he would run across in any number of standard sales books on goal setting and sales management. God knows I had seen enough of this crap the first time around. It works, but by the 50th time through, it gets real damn old. John and Gabriel believed in this crap big time and were constantly buying new books and tapes and CDs and DVDs on these kinds of programs. I made sure Tusker wrote his notes down himself, and by the time they had to go to the bar for the evening shift, he had a crude timetable for his plans. I also got him to promise to write me once a month and tell me about how he was progressing on his timetable and what his future plans were. Tessa promised to make him write, and I promised to hold his feet to the fire.

We'd just have to see how it worked out.

Saturday night Marilyn and I went out to dinner with my parents and Suzie, with Hamilton staying home. It was only somewhat awkward. Suzie peppered me with questions about the army, and I told her to join up and find out herself. That got a lot of laughs from her and Marilyn, not as many from Dad, and outrage from my mother. Mom did say she appreciated my pictures and had put them on the Wall of Heroes. Suzie commented that Hamilton hissed every time he went by them, which she and I found funny and our parents found distressing. I noticed that only Mom disputed this story, which meant that Dad had witnessed it as well. After dinner, we went to a movie, and then went over to the bar until closing.

Sunday we went to the beach. It was pretty much a repeat of last year, in that we spent the week goofing off, catching some rays, and screwing our brains out. I made sure I packed the Kama Sutra and the vibrator, and Marilyn packed her lingerie. We kept working our way through the book, and by now were well into the intermediate difficulty pages. I kept promising to teach her some of the advanced classes, but Marilyn would just laugh me off.

I bought her a little Pocket Rocket type of vibrator, and used that to introduce her to some back door pleasure. Just the concept of enjoying something back there was alien to her, but I knew from experience that while she wasn't wild about anal sex, she did like having her asshole rubbed and toyed with, especially during doggy style or reverse cowgirl. I started out just running it around the area, then moved up to deliberately stimulating her butt, and finished with lubing it up and inserting the tip while she rode me backwards. Marilyn damn near went into orbit when that happened!

After our vacation was up, we headed back up to Kegs. Work Week was starting in another couple of weeks, and Marilyn went back to Utica. It was the start of my junior and her sophomore year.

The Galaxie was burning oil like I owned a well, and making a racket as well. I hooked up with Joe Santos, a fellow student who hung out with a lot of the guys in Grogans. Joe bought and sold cars like I changed my socks. He knew everything about fixing them, and was always working on one, fixing it up, and peddling it off. It was how he paid for school. I told him my problem and he came back to me a week later with somebody who wanted to sell a car. It was a three year old Impala with almost no mileage and in mint condition, owned by the proverbial little old lady from Pasadena, who had moved into a heavenly parking garage, and now her son wanted to unload it for cash. In a three-way deal, I paid for the car and gave Joe my Galaxie as a finder's fee. I have no definite proof, but I figured Joe also made a deal with the guy who had the Impala; if so, it wasn't my business and I felt no animosity towards Joe. He was a fine guy, and a year later he was voted in as an honorary Kegger.

Junior year was a lot like sophomore year, in that I had an overload of classes and spent a lot of time with Professor Rhineburg down at Amos Eat-Me. I still cooked about once a month on Sundays, still splitting the duties with Marilyn when I could get away with it. We had some new guys moving in and some old guys who didn't come back. Jefferson was back too, along with Ricky, who was living in the house until Christmas. He didn't report to the Army until then, and it was pretty obvious that Jefferson was moving along with him.

I didn't run for any offices, but acted as chief bartender for the Social Committee. What I didn't know from before I learned from Marty Adrianopolis over the last couple of years. I did make a name for myself when I handled the advertising for our first fall party. I got the idea from the ad I had run last spring, for the spring picnic up at Saratoga Park, which was an ad we had run once before, on my first trip:

Wanted: Virgins for Sacred Sacrificial Rite

followed by our frat name and phone number. The idea was that we would be up around the hot springs and needed to sacrifice some virgins to the geyser gods. I have no idea if any virgins came, but the phone rang off the hook for a couple of days, and quite a few girls showed up. We ran the ad in the Polytechnic, the RPI newsletter, and had some girls post it on the bulletin boards over at Samaritan and Saint Rose.

My new ad was a little more ambitious, and we paid to put it in the papers at RPI, Saint Rose, and Samaritan:

Virginity Reduction Clinic

Bothered by the burden of excessive virginity?

Meet with our trained counselors for one-on-one help, or participate in a group session.

Anesthetics provided free of charge!

All you'll feel is a prick!

again followed by our name and number. The response was even better than with the sacrificial virgins ad. Marilyn was not amused, and neither were some of the other house girlfriends, but us Keggers toughed it out. We started planning future ads, which was a good thing, because those two had tapped my creative abilities to the max.

Over Christmas break, Marilyn and I flew to Miami, and I bought her another couple of swimsuits. She still refused to even think about topless or nude beaches, which got me laughing at her more than once. However, just because she wouldn't go for an all over suntan, it didn't mean she wouldn't go for an all over moontan. We managed to rent a car and made a few late night drives over to the Everglades. I made sure to treat her special, and she returned the favor!

Also during Christmas break, Harriet had child number 12! Sarah was born while we were away, so Marilyn didn't learn until she got home. It's a hell of a thing to come back from a weekend with my girl and let my frat brothers know that Mom was still in production! Very weird.

Towards the end of the year, I got additional orders for my training during the summer between junior and senior years. I already knew I had to go back to Fort Bragg for more training, but after that I was heading to Fort Benning in Georgia for paratrooper training.

I let Joe Bradley in on the news, which was a bit surprising to him. I would travel down with him and Bruno, but not back. We had agreed to room together for another year. We meshed together quite well, since I wasn't smoking pot anywhere near as much as I did before. I was an asshole then; I had learned. Room roulette was looking especially chaotic this year, however, as the saying goes, in chaos there is opportunity!

"You thought any about what room we're going to be in next year?", I asked Joe one day.

He gave me a funny look. "You mean other than here? You got something else in mind?"

"Let's get a room down on the landing."

"We'll never get a room down there. Why?"

"Well, for one thing the rooms are bigger, and they have windows and porches." Okay, not really, but they all had windows that opened out onto the roof of the wraparound porch. You could carry a chair out there and sit comfortably in the sunshine and breeze. "Besides, we are shoo-ins, or at least you're a shoo-in. Me, not so much."

"How do you figure that?"

"You're still Number Three in our class for ritual order, and crones don't count. That makes you number three in the entire house.", I replied.

It was like a light went off in his head. "I never thought of that."

"It's better than that. Bruno is number one, and he's staying put in the triple, which he inherits from Lynchburg. No way is he giving up the triple to bunk over here. Agreed?"

"I'll buy that. What about Barry?", he pointed towards the wall, on the other side of which Barry bunked.

"It doesn't matter. There are two rooms opening up downstairs. Pigpen and Schlitz are both graduating this year." Pigpen had inherited the room on the landing from his sophomore year roommate, and invited Schlitz in with him. "So are Harry and Ralph in the front room." Two seniors were going, too.

"So even if Barry wants to move, we're a lock either way.", finished Joe.

"That's the way it looks to me."

"What's it worth to you?", he asked wickedly.

"Well, I won't tell anybody about the stash of queer porn you've been hiding, and how you like to bugger sophomores in the middle of the night."

"Fuck you, Buckman!", he said with a laugh.

"Sounds like we're moving."

As expected, Barry put in for one of the rooms with one of the incoming sophomores, and took the front room overlooking Burdette. Joe and I got the second room, on the side of the house overlooking the pool and across from the Black Light Room.

Chapter 43: The Summer Of Our Discontent

Marilyn didn't like that I wasn't going to see her for over two months, but she understood. We spent a wild weekend together before I left, and I promised her an even crazier one once I was back.

Summer training was similar to the first time we went through it. Once again, I got separated from Bruno and Joe and never saw them again. I did see my friend from last year, Harlan, but he was assigned to a different training company. We only saw each other intermittently, but we had a pretty good friendship going.

A lot of what we did was similar, although compressed. We requalified with weapons, brushed up on our various skills and drills, and ran and marched some more. This time we didn't have to play war games in the dirt. We did, however, get introduced to the various branches of the army. Now we actually could see some artillery and tanks, paratroopers jumping from planes, and so forth. The idea was to give us enough info so that when we graduated we could make an intelligent choice about the branch of the service we ended up in.

Personally, I thought this was a stretch. From what I knew of my fellow cadets, 90% would have been happy getting a demonstration of a typewriter in a clean and dry office. The secretarial branch was their preferred branch of service!

I had been at Bragg for about a couple of weeks or so, when I was suddenly called out of class and summoned down to Lieutenant Colonel Brownell's office. The colonel was in charge of our class and that section of the school. For the life of me I couldn't figure out what was I had done wrong, but I went to his office and reported in. His orderly, a corporal, checked on the intercom and then ushered me inside. "SIR, OFFICER CANDIDATE BUCKMAN REPORTING AS ORDERED!"

"At ease, Buckman.", replied the colonel. There's at ease, and at ease. I wasn't an officer yet, so I snapped to parade rest instead. Colonel Brownell, surprised me by then ordering, "At ease, Cadet."

I lost my rigidity and looked at the colonel, and noticed that there was a telephone off the hook and laying on his desk. "Yes, sir?"

"There's been a phone call for you, Mr. Buckman.", he said, nodding towards the phone. "I'm going to step out of my office for a few minutes. Just open the door when you are done."

"Sir?" Who the hell would call me by tracking down my commanding officer!? Marilyn would write, and so would Suzie. Nobody else would call me.

The colonel stood up. "I'm stepping out. See me when you're done, Mister Buckman."

"Yes, sir."

The colonel moved around from his desk and went out the door, closing it behind him. I was tempted to sit down at his desk, but lightning bolts would probably descend and fry my ass out of sheer effrontery! I picked up the telephone and held it to my ear. "Officer Candidate Buckman."

"Carling, it's your father."

"Yes, sir. What's going on?"

"We need you to come home, Carl. It's your mother and your brother. There's been a problem.", he said.

"Sir?" What happened? I could care less about Hamilton, but if something had happened to Mom, I needed to know. Had they been in an accident?

Dad told me. It was a sordid tale indeed. Hamilton, in his desire to separate himself from me, had gone to college down south, at Georgia Tech in Atlanta. That hadn't worked out so well. Unlike most colleges, they worked on a trimester system. Way back when, on my first trip through, his first trimester his grades were as good as anything I had ever seen. His second trimester they dropped to my level. His third trimester they dropped through the floor and my father yanked him out of school. When that happened Dad tracked me down and told me to take a Friday off and we drove down for the weekend and packed him up and dragged him home.

Before, during that third trimester, he had disappeared for a week, completely dropping out of sight. Nobody could find him, not even the college or campus security, and then he surfaced and denied he had ever been missing. We never did find out where he was, if he was on a binge or if he was stoned somewhere or in the slammer or wherever, and he just denied being out of contact.

This time around it was far, far worse. He disappeared for almost two weeks, and when he resurfaced, was dragged down to the campus security office and questioned before they called Dad. Hamilton still wouldn't say where he had been, simply denying he had been missing, despite what the college was telling my father. Basic Hamilton behavior - lie and deny. Dad went down to drag him out. Much like before, Hamilton was sent to a shrink because of his bizarre behavior. Much like before, Mom was absolutely destroyed, crying her eyes out at the failure of her favorite son. Unlike before, Mom's depression was much more severe, probably because I wasn't around to take it out on, and she had a nervous breakdown.

This had been an ungodly disaster the first time around. Mom denied any hint of a problem, even denying he was seeing a psychiatrist, when we all knew he was visiting one. Dad and I had a long talk one day, when he asked me why I had gone to college. He had been heartbroken when I told him, quite bluntly, 'Because you told me I was going to college!" When he asked if that was the only reason, I turned it back on him and asked if I had had any kind of choice. For the first time I think he actually gave thought to his non-existent parenting skills.

It was worse now. Both Hamilton and Mom were spending time in the nut ward. I was tempted to ask Dad if they had adjoining rooms, but that would have been really pushing my luck. He wanted me to come home.

I just stared at the phone for a bit. "Dad, I'm in the Army. You know what that's like. I can't just drop everything and come home. I'm on duty!"

"It would be good for your mother and your brother. You should talk to their doctor.", he replied.

"Excuse me? They're in the nut house and you think I need to see the shrink? Whose idea is that? The doctor's or Mom's?" This was beyond ludicrous.

"Your mother seems to think it would help you understand your brother and better help him." I think even he thought this was a stretch, and it was all I could do not to laugh.

"No, Dad, that's not going to happen. I am not coming home so Mom can blame me some more because my brother is a raving lunatic. You know it and I know it. It's only Mom that refuses to admit it."

"Carling, it's really not like that..." he tried to say.

"Dad, it's exactly like that. Do you have a diagnosis yet? On Hamilton, not Mom, I mean.", I asked. Dad tried to hedge and I continued to push. "Dad, I've earned it. What's his problem!?"

He sighed. "It's schizophrenia or something." I could practically hear him crying on the phone. This was a truly horrible thing to him. Mental illness had a very severe societal penalty then; it was not something you would tell people. Mom wouldn't even admit it to herself, either then or later.

"Dad, I've earned this. He drove me from the family. I need to see a copy of the doctor's report, the full clinical results." You never know but how that might be useful someday to me, if simply to prove that when he finally drove me crazy, there was a reason for it!

Dad tried to back away hastily, but I kept pushing until he agreed to send something to me. I also repeated that I wouldn't be coming home, and that the next time I saw my brother would be much too soon. My parents had sowed the wind, and now they were reaping the whirlwind. I was sorry for Mom, but I had moved on.

I hung up on my father and sat there for a moment, until I realized just where I was. I jumped up and scooted over to the door. "Sir, I'm sorry. I should never have tied up your office like that!", I blurted out.

Lieutenant Colonel Brownell was about 45, in a semi-retirement posting after seeing action in Viet Nam and getting a little burned out. He just smiled and came back into his office, and closed the door behind him, with me still inside his office. "Mister Buckman, is everything all right?"

I hesitated before answering, and then deflected the question. "How did you end up getting called by my father, sir? If I may ask."

He nodded. "I spoke to him briefly. It seems that he wasn't even aware you were training here this summer." He looked at me curiously at that.

I just nodded. "My family and I parted ways many years ago, sir. I'm sorry you had to get involved. I apologize for that. It won't happen again." Dad probably called the house, and somebody must have given him Marilyn's number. She was the only one who had any kind of detailed itinerary for me, along with the address to send me letters.

He waved it off. "There are provisions for emergency family leave, at least for a few days. We can have you home in a couple of days, I'm sure."

"No, sir, that won't be necessary."

"Really, your class record is in fine shape. I would see no difficulty in giving you a three day emergency pass. I mean, I didn't really ask, but your father indicated that your mother and brother are in the hospital. You don't want to go home?" He seemed somewhat incredulous at that.

I had turned and was staring out his window towards one of the parade grounds. It was all such a waste. I turned back to face him. "That won't help, sir. It's not really my place to speak, but my going back won't help anybody. I'm sorry if I seem cold about it, but there's very little left for me back there."

He shrugged. "I can't say as I understand, but it's not my business. If you change your mind, my door is always open."

I snapped back to attention. It was obvious I was being released back to duty. "Thank you, Colonel. I apologize for intruding. It won't happen again." I saluted, received a return salute, and I turned smartly and headed out. I had been gone almost an hour, about fifty-nine minutes more than my brother deserved.

In my next letter from Marilyn, she did indeed confirm that my dad had called her and gotten my location. I wrote back and told her what was going on. I felt bad for my father, but he had really gotten himself into this mess, and I had no idea how he was going to dig himself out. He had been letting Mom go on for years about how poor Hamilton wasn't understood and how it was all my fault and the school's fault and everybody else's fault. Anybody but his fault. Okay, I'll grant that being a certified nut job like a schizophrenic is more than just a character flaw, but I had had enough. If it wasn't for Suzie I would have washed my hands of the entire bunch of them.

A week later I wanted that emergency leave, but not to go home. Marilyn dumped me. It was all my fault. I have a big mouth. When I was writing her, I let my mouth write my letters. She took exception to something I wrote and told me which way to head in and just how far. She also mailed me back the jewelry I had bought her.

It wasn't the first time this had happened, but it was the first time on this trip. She had dumped me between junior year and senior year before, just like now, and for a similar reason, my big fat fucking mouth. She had written me that one of her little brothers, Peter I think, had managed to fall in the fireplace. I wrote back that it wasn't a problem. She had so many brothers and sisters by that point that she had spares. Big mistake! I was promptly informed that family was much more important to her than I was, and she returned my fraternity pin.

Giving a girl your frat pin was sort of like a pre-engagement. Huge numbers of guys gave their girl their frat pin with the intention of getting in her pants. What the hell, it worked for me back then! We also had a tradition of the Sophomore Curse, which basically stated that any sophomore that gave a girl his pin would end up breaking up with her. Looked at logically, that was inevitable, since how many 19 year old kids know who they're getting married to. Okay, so I made up with Marilyn, but the curse had done its work by then. This time I didn't tempt the curse, and I didn't give her my pin.

Yes, I made up with her then, but it took me the better part of six months. No girl can dump Carl Buckman! I 'played the field', messing around with a few girls I had been dating at the same time as I was seeing Marilyn. I was a real pig. Eventually, in January, I get really loaded, lost my pride, broke my resolve, and wrote her a letter begging forgiveness. We met up and got back together again.

Okay, so I fucked up. No, I didn't say a damn thing about her family. I knew better than that. Now I knew how important family was to her. No, I really screwed the pooch this time. I called her stupid.

No, not really. It was more of an implication. She had finished with her two years at MVCC and had transferred to Plattsburgh State. She would be rooming with her Aunt Lynette, and for some reason had commented that her college degree was the equivalent of mine. Yes, I should have stopped and dropped it, Yes, I knew from living with her for almost fifty years that she was an egalitarian while I was an elitist. Yes, I should have known better because we had argued about this more than once over the years. No, I'm smarter than that.

I replied that, first, Plattsburgh State had just made Playboy's Top 20 Party Schools, so maybe she shouldn't brag about the quality education she was getting. Then I really buried myself when I commented that it was taking her five years to go through three colleges to get one degree, while I was taking four years to go through one college to get three degrees! Okay, so I conveniently forgot about Towson State, but I thought it had a certain poetic symmetry.

Strangely, Marilyn didn't agree with my style of prose. In fact, she actually took offense at my thoughts. Considerable offense. Enough offense to inform me that she didn't particularly want to hear from me again. Ever. In this lifetime or any other lifetime. Ever.

Ever, ever, ever!

Okay, so I knew how to handle this from the last time I fucked up. I would write her a letter and commit written hari kiri. I did this just about immediately, and enclosed all the jewelry, and promised to never misbehave again and stated my undying love repeatedly to her. It had worked before. I was smart enough to know how to fix this problem.

My letter came back from her house marked Return To Sender. That was somewhat disturbing, so I wrote a really heartfelt letter, not only disemboweling myself, but also jumping off a bridge and hanging myself, and this one I mailed Return Receipt Required.

She refused to sign for it.

I tried calling her house that weekend, after waiting in line at the payphone with a roll of quarters for half an hour. I ended up talking to Harriet, who sounded a touch sympathetic, but couldn't get Marilyn to the phone and told me to wait and try again later. In a month or two. Or maybe longer.

I was going to have to do this in person, but that wasn't possible, either. At the end of training, I wasn't going back to Troy, I was going to Columbus, Georgia, to become a paratrooper. That was three weeks long, and unless a pilot got lost and dumped me in Utica, I wasn't going to see her for the better part of a month!

After graduation, a few dozen of my fellow graduates and I were loaded on buses, along with our gear, and driven to Columbus. There is no slower form of transportation than an Army bus. I wasn't sure if we would arrive before the winter came through. After that, welcome to Fort Benning!

Wow, what an incredibly stupid idea!

Think about it - I was going to let the United States Army take me up in aeroplanes and throw my ass out the back end! Ever since then I have wondered at my own mental stability at this, but at the time it seemed like a marvelous idea. Since I had already done basic, jump school was available. A limited number of slots are held open during the summer for officer candidates, and I qualified and was selected for the end of July. A lot of officers end up taking jump training, maybe even most officers, even those who don't end up in the airborne. It's considered a useful box to check off on your things-to-do list.

It isn't all that difficult to learn how to jump out of an airplane. They tie a parachute on your ass and toss you out. Gravity takes care of the rest. As they say in the airborne, 'We've never left anybody up there yet!' They have lots of sayings like that in the airborne. Another is, 'If your chute fails, bring it back after you land and we'll give you a brand new one!' They're just chock full of uplifting tales and sayings in the airborne. They even have their own song, 'Blood Upon The Risers.', which starts out:

"He was just a rookie trooper and he surely shook with fright,

He checked off his equipment and made sure his pack was tight;

He had to sit and listen to those awful engines roar,

and he ain't gonna jump no more!

(CHORUS)

Gory, gory, what a hell of a way to die,

Gory, gory, what a hell of a way to die,

Gory, gory, what a hell of a way to die,

he ain't gonna jump no more!"

all sung to the tune of the Battle Hymn of the Republic.

The song continues through an endless series of verses with what happens to this hapless young trooper. It isn't pretty. His static line fails, his chute fails, his reserve chute fails, the risers (the ropes he's hanging from) strangle him, he breaks every bone in his body, blood gushes everywhere - "And he ain't gonna jump no more!" You learn this song very early in jump training. It is a harbinger of things to come.

Jump school is deceptively easy, but before you can earn the coveted jump wings and get to die for God and country, you have to make it through. It's only three weeks long, and for all the students who figure they just made it through eight weeks of basic and another eleven of advanced training, so what the hell is the problem with another three, they have another think coming. Jumping out of an airplane is a brutally Darwinian process. Jump school is very, very tough.

Your first week is all about physical fitness. You run and work out and do pushups and pull ups and take all sorts of physical tests. If you don't pass by the end of the week, you are history. They don't hold you back until you get it right. They send you home, and you have to apply a second time.

The second week they teach you how to actually jump out of an airplane and how to put on a parachute. It's Tower Week and there are all sorts of interesting ways to bust your ass while wearing a rig to simulate jumping. They actually have a bunch of jump towers they bought from the '39 World's Fair and transported to the ass end of Georgia to train guys before World War II.

The third week is when you actually jump out of airplanes. The requirement is to do four daylight jumps and one nighttime jump. The first two jumps are what they call 'Hollywood' jumps, where you jump with nothing but your two chutes. The next two jumps are combat jumps, loaded with everything the well armed killing machine needs to inflict mayhem and destruction on others. The final jump we do in the middle of the night, and it's a combat jump as well.

You flunk any single part of this and you are history. You break an ankle on the fourth jump, they send you home and you have to do it all over again someday, from the start. There are stories of guys who do their final jumps with sprained joints and broken bones, just to get through. I guess that's a good idea. If I had to do this for real, with real bad guys at the other end of the jump, maybe I'd want to be surrounded by guys that crazy!

This was why I had been working out so hard all year. I had to pass the various tests. It takes a phenomenal amount of strength, both upper body and leg, to do this. You're wearing a set of chutes that weighs maybe 50 pounds, and you've probably got a combat load of another 75 pounds, or more. It is not unheard of for troopers to jump carrying their own weight in gear. Doing this and not killing yourself in the process takes strength!

Going through as an officer candidate gets you no special treatment. Real officers have their own quarters; officer candidates bunk with the enlisted guys in the barracks. It was just like being back in basic, with drill instructors telling you to "DROP AND GIVE ME TWENTY!" at the drop of a hat. I understand that officers are 'counseled' ahead of time to keep their mouths shut when a sergeant starts giving them orders. The sergeants know who the officers are, of course, and they make their orders polite - "IS THE CAPTAIN AWARE THAT HE MOVES LIKE A RUPTURED DUCK? PERHAPS HE WOULD UNDERSTAND BETTER IF HE WOULD DROP AND GIVE ME TWENTY!"

Looking like a ruptured duck, whatever the fuck that is, is a cardinal sin, and damn near got my ass kicked out. It would seem that I am singularly graceless in my movements out of the airplane, floating to earth, and landing safely. I was allowed to pass because I didn't actually break anything or die. My night combat drop I sprained my right knee, but one of the guys in the barracks wrapped it tight and I just gritted my teeth and moved through it. There were a lot of us looking battered and bruised by the end of the class. We all smelled like we worked at a Bengay factory.

We had a final parade on the last day, and you could get pictures of yourself looking heroic with your new jump wings. You actually get your jump wings the night before, during the 'Punch' ceremony. The wings are held to your uniform by a pair of pins. During the punch ceremony, they take the caps off the pins and 'punch' them into your chest. Ouch! I ordered two sets of pictures, one for my mother and one for me. Now I simply had to go visit Marilyn and get my life back.

I called Harriet again and discovered Marilyn had already moved out. She had gone to Plattsburgh early, and moved into an apartment with her Aunt Lynette. I would have to track her down there. She gave me the address and wished me luck, telling me that Marilyn was miserable. I apologized and promised to make things right.

I flew back to Albany, by way of Chicago, and then picked up my car. I wasn't even in civvies, but had flown back wearing my dress uniform. I didn't bother heading over to Kegs to dump my crap off, but got on the Northway and headed north.

Lynette lived in a one bedroom apartment that was the second floor of a Cape Cod home. Marilyn used a hide-a-bed in the living room. Lynette was actually Big Bob's baby sister, and was only about ten years older than Marilyn. They were known to go out together on Saint Patrick's Day and close out the bars, just one of the reasons I had disputed her rating of Plattsburgh's academic standards. I climbed the stairs and knocked on the door.

The door opened and Lynette looked out at me. "Is she here?", I asked. I was prepared to go back downstairs and sleep in the car until she came home.

Lynette smiled at me. "Come on in." She stepped back and as I entered the apartment, she turned and called out, "Look, Marilyn, you have a guest."

Marilyn came out of the kitchen and turned white as a ghost. She looked like she had lost a few pounds. She came to a dead stop and stared at me.

I came closer. It was time for the big dramatic gesture. I was going to need one. She had been ducking me for over a month already. Previously I had to wait six whole fucking months for her to get over her mad at me. No way was I going to wait that long. What if she never got over her mad? I got the overall impression she was a lot more pissed at me now than before.

I dropped to my knees in front of her. "I'm sorry. God, I'm sorry. Please forgive me. I'm sorry."

Marilyn simply stared at me. My original plan had been that she would drop to her knees in front of me, instantly proclaim how sorry she was for overreacting, and we would embrace and kiss and hug and make wild monkey love on the floor of the apartment. Marilyn didn't drop to her knees however. She stared some more and then asked, "What are you doing?"

Wasn't it obvious? No, I didn't say that. I thought it, but I didn't say it. I was already in enough trouble. "I am begging forgiveness. Please, I'm sorry."

"Well, get up, for God's sake! You look ridiculous down there!"

Oh, shit, but this wasn't working out. If she had a secret plan to make me look like an idiot, it was working to perfection. At least she hadn't thrown me out. I got to my feet and glanced over at Lynette to see if she had any hints for me. She had a smile on her face, but was covering it with a hand. I looked back at Marilyn. "Uh, can we talk?"

"You're such an asshole!", she yelled at me.

I nodded. "Yeah, I know. That's why I'm here."

She just muttered, "You asshole!" She threw up her hands and tossed the dishtowel she was holding back in the kitchen. Then she went to the closet and reached in to grab her jacket. "Come on, asshole, let's take a walk." She stormed out of the apartment, and I quickly jumped after her.

I wasn't sure how this was working out, not at all. The last time we did this, she had already forgiven me in a letter before I came up. Lynette quickly took off to spend the weekend across the lake in Burlington, and Marilyn and I spent the weekend in bed together. Now she had gotten me out of the apartment, and I didn't see Lynette packing for an impromptu weekend away. I caught up to Marilyn and walked beside her down towards the nearest elementary school. She sat down on a bench, so I sat down next to her. "Can we talk?"

"You asshole!" Marilyn punched me in the arm. It didn't really hurt. She hit like a girl. Still time to keep my mouth shut.

"I'm sorry. I'm really sorry.", I told her.

"Asshole!" she hit me again. She repeated this a couple more times, and I just sat there until she seemed to run out of steam. I waited a minute more and then apologized again, and she hit me again. This was definitely not how I had envisioned our reunion.

Finally she stopped and we sat there besides each other. She leaned against me at that point and called me an asshole again, and I put my arm around her shoulders. I just whispered how sorry I was to her, and she cried against my shoulder, calling me an asshole every few minutes. Eventually she stopped crying and sat upright again, still close enough that I had an arm around her shoulders. "You never said if I was forgiven or not.", I said, which simply earned me another punch.

"Asshole!" Marilyn stood up and took my hand. She led the way back to the apartment, and left me standing at the bottom of the stairs. "Stay here. I'll be down if a couple of minutes." It was closer to fifteen minutes, but she couldn't tell time even if she was standing next to Big Ben. She was carrying a suitcase. She tossed that in the back seat of the rental car next to my bags. "Where are you staying?", she asked.

I shook my head. "Nowhere, yet. I came here directly from the airport."

"The Holiday Inn is on Route 3." She got into the car and I stood there in disbelief for a second before running around to the driver's side and jumped in. Marilyn needed to give me directions. Five minutes later I pulled up to the front of the Holiday Inn. Marilyn stayed in the car while I went in and registered, and then came out and drove around to the nearest door. We were in a room on the back side on the second floor. I grabbed my bags, and by the time I reached over to get Marilyn's, she already had hers in hand. Marilyn never carried her own bags!

I let us into the room and set my bags down. Marilyn set hers down as well, and then looked over at me and gave me a small smile. She took off her jacket, and didn't stop. She started undoing her blouse. I gave her a smile as well and tossed my hat on the table, and then unbuttoned my blouse, which is army talk for my jacket. We kept this up until we were both naked, and then climbed onto the bed.

"Uh, not to be rude, but are you still on the Pill?", I asked.

Marilyn punched me again, called me an asshole again, and then said, "Yes, damn it."

I breathed a sigh of relief and rolled towards her and took her in my arms. Marilyn moaned and reached between us and grabbed my cock. I returned the favor by lowering my face to her tits while I started fingering her clit. As soon as she was wet, I pushed her onto her back and climbed on top. Marilyn guided me inside and we made hurried love as she moaned and gasped and shuddered under me. I was moaning and gasping and shuddering as well, and it didn't seem like it took all that long before I was pumping a load into her.

I calmed down at that point, and as I lay on top of her, I asked, "Does this mean I'm forgiven?"

That got me another "Asshole!" and a punch in the side. Then she began kissing me, and we started another round. Maybe I was forgiven after all.

Chapter 44: Diagnoses, Fraternal and Personal

Marilyn and I spent Friday evening and Saturday morning living on room service and screwing our brains out, with me apologizing and her punching me in between. By lunchtime Saturday she had gotten the mad out, and we went from makeup sex to regular hot monkey love sex. There was a massive change in attitude, though. We were much more serious about each other, and it was something I had noticed the first time as well. It was like we were no longer kids and girlfriend/boyfriend. Now we were adults, and we were committed to each other, even if we were only 20 or 21 at the time. Saturday we got dressed and I took her down to the mall and we went into a jewelry store and looked at engagement rings. I hadn't even asked her formally, but she looked at several and got sized for the ring, and I made a 50% deposit. I would return in a month, finish payment, and she would be my fiancé. We would make the formal announcement at Christmas, when I would visit the family and ask her father's permission.

At that point I drove back to Troy. Once I got back in the house, I ran across Bruno.

"Sorry, Bruno, your reign is over." I told him.

"Well, hail to the chief and all that.", he replied.

I had done one radical thing that spring which I had never even contemplated before, certainly not on my first go-around. I ran for Chancellor. Chancellor, the equal to the President of a frat, is an odd position. You have to chair the various meetings and ride herd on a fractious bunch of college guys, and some guys simply aren't cut out for it. There are also some routine ornamental things, like reports to the national organization and to the college, and monthly meetings with the Inter-Fraternity Council. Some guys are good at it and some aren't. In order to win the job, it takes a certain degree of respect from the brothers. As a dope smoking asshole on the first ride through, it hadn't even been an option. Now I had a certain degree of respect, what with doing the doctorate and cooking and the military thing. We were no longer a military frat; since the Viet Nam War was over and the draft ended, ROTC was plummeting, and my class was the last in the frat to have anybody in ROTC. Still, I had a degree of respect because of it.

I wanted to run because of what I saw developing around the house. We needed leadership. The house was splitting into three separate groups, and had been for a year now. The first group was the Dregs, short for Dregs of Humanity. These guys were mostly older brothers, a year or two ahead of my class, with a heavy proportion of ROTC and a propensity for heavy drinking, and they lived in Grogans'. Their enemies were the Heads, short for Potheads, the pot-smoking bunch around the house, mostly in the Main House. The third group was everybody else, growing sick and tired of the nonsense.

Originally I had been one of the Heads. This was a large group, but by our senior year the numbers were down significantly. Ricky Holloway had graduated and moved out, and despite being a Head, had been enormously respected by everyone, even the Dregs. Both Pabst and Schlitz had graduated and left, and Homer Simpson was going to be gone by Christmas. I was not a Head this time, although it was known that I still smoked an occasional joint.

I had tried to defuse what I saw as a growing situation during my sophomore year by blackballing a guy named Kevin Farnsworth. He was a very nice and funny kid a year behind us, who had gotten into the frat on my first run. Once in he proved incredibly divisive. He was a major doper, and after the end of his sophomore year had flunked out. Unlike the average guy who flunked out and moved back to East Asshole, Tennessee, Kevin was a local boy, from Albany. He could come over whenever he wanted. He became a major drug dealer, and supplied most of the Heads, and had no compunctions about giving the Dregs a ration of shit whenever he saw them. This time I blackballed him and he stopped coming around. It defused things, but only somewhat.

Another time, last spring, a couple of the Dregs, Bill Swayzack and Hank "the Hammer" Hotaling, decided that one of the sophomores needed to 'ride the wild surf.' They were drunk, and this kid came through, Matt Lincoln, who was kind of small and quiet and had been known to have a toke or two with the Heads. The way the Main House bathroom was set up, it had two toilets sitting next to each other without any kind of a barrier between them. To ride the wild surf, two guys grabbed the victim and lifted him up off the floor, and then dangled his feet in the toilets. A third guy would stand next to the toilets, and on the signal, would flush them simultaneously. For extra insult, you made the victim give the signal - "Surf's up!"

When Bill and the Hammer saw Matt, they started yakking about riding the surf. Matt didn't know what they were up to, and he sat down in the living room to watch television. By the time he figured it out, they were already heading towards him. I moved in between them. "The surf is not up.", I told them.

"Fuck you, Buckman, the surf is up.", answered the Hammer.

"Nobody's riding the surf today."

"Maybe you'd like to ride the surf?", asked Bill.

I just smiled. "If you think you can make me, feel free to try." I could see Matt trying to slip out to the side, and I shifted a little more. "Get lost.", I told him. He scooted out through the arch and went upstairs. He roomed diagonally across from Joe and me. Bill tried to move and intercept him, but I just stayed between them.

"What the fuck is wrong with you?", he demanded.

"The surf is out.", I repeated. At that point a few other guys came in the room and told us to knock it off. I just gave a gracious smile and went into the kitchen, and Bill and the Hammer grumbled and went over to Grogans'.

The Dregs were as numerous as ever, and without me or Kevin in the Heads, they outnumbered the Heads almost 2:1. Most of the Dregs were actually crones, grad students hanging around a fifth year, and a couple were actually guys who flunked out and stuck around anyway, rooming with us while their buddies finished school. The only Dreg in our class was Bruno, and he was running for Chancellor, too. Previously he had won the election and become Chancellor, but had been a weak leader.

Bruno got a fair number of votes, but with me running as an Independent, he didn't get enough. My platform was simple. We had problems, the house needed a leader, and it needed a leader not in any particular group. That was me, not Bruno. Vote Buckman, for a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage! I won. I immediately threw my support behind Bruno for Minister, the Vice-Chancellor so to speak, and he was voted in unanimously.

His slogan as Minister was "Only a heartbeat away!"

In general, being Chancellor wasn't that big a deal. You ran the house meetings, mediated squabbles, and prayed that the important positions had brothers who knew what the fuck they were doing and had some people to back them up. Nobody cared a whole lot if the Social Committee Chairman got drunk and passed out. If the House Manager was away for the weekend in January and the furnace died, everybody cared!

So far, it hadn't been a problem. I just hoped we'd get through the year without the Heads and Dregs fucking things up. By next year they would all have graduated anyway.

Otherwise the year went along nicely. During Work Week we had the vote for Master Chef and I won. This was a purely honorary title, and was given to one of the designated Sunday cooks, usually a senior, but not always. Ricky Holloway had held it for the last two years. You got to kibbitz with the regular cook and the Steward, but otherwise it meant nothing. You were not allowed to nominate yourself, and weren't present for the voting. Still, it was nice to be noticed.

My doctoral studies had moved along nicely, and I had a framework for the calculations which had meshed together neatly. With any luck at all, I would be writing the dissertation by the Christmas break and be able to graduate with my PhD on schedule. Marilyn and I continued seeing each other every few weeks, although we started a new technique; she would drive south and I would drive north and we would meet up in Lake George and spend the weekend there.

I found myself a shrink in the fall. Dad mailed me the report from Hamilton's shrink. I got it when I made it back to Kegs. It was about a dozen pages long and made absolutely no sense to me. It only made sense to another shrink. I couldn't even look it up on the Internet, since nobody had gotten around to inventing it yet. Eventually I just tucked it in my drawer and went about my business.

Midway through the semester I got to thinking about it again. RPI didn't have any sort of medical or pre-medical program, so I couldn't find a friendly teacher to quiz. Maybe Professor Rhineburg knew somebody I could ask, or at least know where to start. I hit him up one day in his office when he was alone.

"Excuse me, Professor, got a moment?"

"Sure, Carl, what's up?"

I sat down across from him. "Do you know any psychiatrists?"

"Why? Finally starting to go crazy around here?", he joked.

"No, sir, it's not about me."

He sat upright at that and looked across his desk. "Wait, you're serious? What in the world do you need a psychiatrist for?"

I shrugged and gave him some background. "It's not me, sir, it's my brother. He's seeing a shrink, and my father sent me his preliminary report, and it might as well be written in Greek for all the good it's doing me." It was actually worse than that. Most mathematicians and physicists can actually read Greek, at least the alphabet, since we use it in math so much.

He nodded. "Yeah, that I know. Well, I don't know any psychiatrists, but Janet is a psychologist. She might be able to help you."

I looked surprised at that. "Your wife is a psychologist? I thought she taught over at Albany State?"

"She does. She teaches psychology."

"Oh." You learn something every day, I suppose. "Do you think she would see me?"

"Probably. I'll ask her tonight. At the minimum, I'll have her call you.", he offered.

"Thanks, thanks a lot!"

I talked to Janet Rhineburg that evening, and she agreed to meet me on Monday after her classes, in her office over at Albany State. I was to bring the psychiatrist's report with me. I made sure I was there early. She brought me into her office, we chatted briefly, and then I gave her the report. She read it twice, once just skimming through, and then a second time, much more thoroughly.

Then she set it down and sighed. "I'm very sorry to hear this, Carl. What would you like to know?"

I shrugged. "I don't know, not really. I don't even know exactly what it all means. There are words in there I swear aren't in the dictionary!"

Janet laughed at that. "We're doctors. We never use three syllables when four are available. Let's take it from the top. Your brother suffers from a form of mental illness called schizophrenia. I assume you've heard of it before."

"Sure. It's like he doesn't believe in reality or something, right."

"No, that's not really it. It's more that the sufferer is detached from reality, and in his own individual reality. His thought patterns are confused and disordered, he can be delusional and hallucinate, maybe see and hear things that aren't there, and exhibit signs of social dysfunction."

"Huh. Well, I've never heard of Hamilton hallucinating, but he has delusions, at least about me, and he isn't very social."

She nodded and continued, "Your brother has a type of schizophrenia known as paranoid schizophrenia. Now, forget about everything you have ever seen on television. They toss that diagnosis around like candy. Almost nothing that they show is true."

I gave her a wry smile at that. "I believe you!"

"In paranoid schizophrenia, many of the delusions and hallucinations are paranoid, or persecutory in nature. For instance, all of your brother's problems are because of you, in this case. If you weren't around, there wouldn't be any problems, that sort of thing.", she said.

"You keep mentioning hallucinations. As far as I know, he has never seen or heard things."

"That's all right. Not every case is identical. There are plenty of other indicators in the report. Certainly the delusions about you are what brings the diagnosis into the specifics of paranoia. He has had strong feelings about you from an early age."

I had to think about that. We had never been close, not even as little children, and it had gotten worse as we grew older. "Okay, I might buy that. We've never been close, and we used to fight all the time, at least until I got older."

"Oh?"

"Well, by the time I hit my teens, it just was obvious to me that we would never get along, and I just began to ignore him. I stayed out of our room unless I was sleeping, and would leave when he was around. It was easier than putting up with him."

"In a way, you were making it worse. By ignoring him, you were feeding his delusion that you hated him and were working against him. How much younger is he?"

"Two years.", I told her.

"So when you were in your early teens, he was 11 or 12. This is often when schizophrenic behavior becomes more marked.", Janet replied.

That made my eyes open. Hamilton's behavior became decidedly worse as I grew older. "One thing I noticed was that the more successful I became, the more he began losing it. As I began advancing through school faster, he became more aggressive towards me."

"You were feeding the delusion. By moving ahead of him, you must have been doing something to hold him back. I know, I know, you weren't, but that is part of the delusional and disorganized thinking pattern typical of paranoid schizophrenia."

"Huh." I thought about it some more. "What about the other stuff mentioned? Anhedonism? Avoluntary? Something like that."

Janet leafed through the report and found the proper page. "Anhedonia - that is a negative symptom." She saw me looking at her in total bafflement. "There are both positive and negative symptoms of schizophrenia. A positive symptom is something the patient has - delusions, hallucinations, bizarre thinking patterns, that sort of thing." I nodded slowly, and she went on. "A negative symptom is something the patient does not have, at least not compared to normal people. Anhedonia means the lack of pleasure - hedonia is the root of hedonism - and shows that the sufferer does not enjoy things that others enjoy. Asociality means your brother has an extremely limited number of friends or relationships, if any. Avolition means almost a total lack of drive and motivation. Your brother shows practically all the negative symptoms, even though he does not have the positive symptom of hallucinations."

I sat there stunned for a few minutes. Hearing it explained to me made it all so clear. Previously, on the first trip around, Marilyn and I had constantly commented to each other about Hamilton's behavior, and it was all the negative symptoms Janet Rhineburg was discussing. He had no friends that anybody knew of, never dated - ever!, never drank, smoked, or did drugs. He spent over 30 years working as a clerk in the billing department of the phone company, 20 of them on the graveyard shift, where nobody could bother him. In fact, he threw a royal bloody fit when he got bumped to the day shift because of seniority. Everybody else begs to go to days, he was begging to stay on nights! He could never finish anything important, and we often talked about the bizarre, to us, lack of interest in much of anything other than history books and war games. He lived in the house with my parents his entire life, until they died, in the same room that he and I shared when we were teens.

After a bit I just slumped back in my chair. "This all makes so much sense when you explain it this way! I could talk for hours about what I've seen, but it fits."

"Well, as I said, aside from the hallucinations, which aren't mentioned here at all, he has all the classic signs. For what it's worth, it's not a terribly serious case, at least as these things go. Your brother seems to be functional and stable, at least as long as you aren't in the picture."

"And if I was?"

Janet gave me a perplexed look and held her hands up in the air. "Then all bets are off. Your brother's delusions, in their totality, relate to you. If you are around, his hostility will increase and his disorganized thought processes will become more disorganized."

"I moved out when I was 16, and by then I was sleeping in the family room and locking him in his room at nights. He was starting to get violent, at least towards my possessions."

"If you had stayed, he might have gotten violent towards you."

I just shook my head. I knew the answer to the next question, but I had to ask it anyway. "Is there any kind of cure?"

"No, not really. Again, for what it's worth, your brother is relatively stable and functional. There are some antipsychotic drugs, but the effects are uneven. He may stabilize and improve as he gets older. The fact is we can diagnose it, but we don't know what causes it, and we don't have a cure. There's a lot of research being done, though. Maybe we'll know more in a few years."

Or maybe not. By the time I rerouted back, they had some new drugs, but still no cause or cure.

I stood up. "Well, that explains a lot. I guess I'm never going home again."

"John mentioned you had moved away from home years ago, and you said the same to me. I'm sorry to hear that, but is it that important anymore?", she asked.

"No. It just hurts, you know, knowing they prefer the crazy one instead of me. I guess that's just the way it worked out, Doctor." I shrugged. Nothing was going to get better about this, so I just needed to get on with my life.

"If you ever need to talk, not just about your brother, but about anything, you know how to reach me. I won't tell John."

"Thanks, Doc." I took the report back and shook her hand, and then went back to Kegs. I needed a drink, but not to get drunk. I didn't need that kind of problem. I'd end up as nutty as Hamilton!

Chapter 45: Hazing

Over Christmas I stayed with Marilyn in Utica. Christmas Day I got Big Bob alone in the kitchen and asked for Marilyn's hand in marriage. She knew what I was going to do, and wanted to be with me, but I said it was a guy thing and asked him alone. I was just about as nervous as when I did it that first time. Big Bob said yes, although I knew he wasn't thrilled with me. Marilyn squealed when I came back out and sent her upstairs to get the jewelry box with the ring in it. It was a one carat flawless and perfect cut solitaire on a simple white gold mounting. I made sure to have it insured, since she was bound to lose it sooner or later.

That winter we didn't travel anywhere. Marilyn needed to stay and study, and I needed to work on my dissertation. We kept up with the trips to Lake George, though, all through the winter.

I knew things were going too smoothly to last. A couple of months later, at the end of March, I drove back down from Lake George on Sunday, just after lunch. I knew I had missed Sunday supper, so I simply went up the back stairs and down the hallway to our room off the landing. Joe was surprisingly quiet when I came in, and then he left. He returned a couple of minutes later bringing Buddy Ebbits and George Dukoski with him.

I was still unpacking when Buddy announced, "We had a problem while you were away."

I looked over at them. "Oh?" Buddy was the Pledge Master, and George was scheduled to be the Hell Master. It had to be something with the Pledges.

Buddy and George looked at each other, as if to ask who was going to admit it. He just nodded. "I didn't find out about it until it was over."

George added, "I was over in Grogans', so I never knew about it." He looked very embarrassed at this.

"Knew about what?" I looked over at Joe, but he had spent the weekend away, too.

"The Dregs got loose. Friday night, while all the pledges were hanging out, the Dregs got drunk and made the pledges crawl around on the floor.", said Buddy.

"They did what?"

"I heard it was worse than that.", said my roommate. I looked at him for a second, and then turned back to Buddy and George.

Buddy dropped into the chair at my desk. "From what I've heard, Boris, the Hammer, and Ghormley got it into their peabrains that since pledges had never been laid, they needed to experience sex, so they made them get undressed, put their underwear on their heads, and crawl on their bellies up the stairs. Somehow this was to simulate working their way up through a cock. Don't ask me to explain it. I don't understand it."

"When did this happen?" I couldn't believe what I was hearing.

"Friday night."

"And you guys let these idiots do this? WHERE THE FUCK WERE YOU!?", I exploded.

"Hey, I didn't even know about it. I was over in Grogans'.", replied George.

"It was a quiet night. Most of us were down at Crows. They were having a party.", said Buddy lamely.

"Christ! How many of the pledges did they get to do this?"

"Uh, about eight or nine, I think."

"You think? You don't know? Jesus H. Fucking Christ! WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU KNOW!?"

Buddy cringed at this, so George answered. "It looks like there were nine pledges in the house. Afterwards they all took off and left to go back to the dorms. They've all heard about it by now."

"And?" I knew there had to be more to this.

"Six have dropped out of the pledge class." He gave me the names. "Three who were here and three who missed it."

I just stared for a second. Six out of an incoming class of fourteen. That was an almost 50% drop. This was not good. The last two classes had been relatively small. We needed a big class to keep the numbers up.

Everybody pays 'dues' to live in the house. This is about 90% room and board, with the balance for various social items and random requirements. It's like any business, where you meet your requirements with a certain level of occupancy. Anything above that gives you additional funds. It's also a battle between overcrowding and cash. Sophomore year we had 37 brothers living in and were crowded, but we had plenty of cash for parties and rush activities and decent meals. Since then the number of brothers had been dropping. Lots of guys had single rooms (excellent for getting laid) but cash was tight. We were down to about 30 brothers. If 6 guys dropped out, it would be down into the mid-20s, and that's a problem. All of your money is going to room and board, you still need to raise dues, and you don't have enough cash to recruit or rush. It becomes a vicious circle. Not enough brothers means not enough dues means there's no money to recruit new brothers and the number just starts dropping for another round.

"Six? You have got to be shitting me! This just keeps getting better and better!"

By now, a few of the other guys in the house had stuck their heads in the door and weighed in on the problem. It sounded just about as bad as it could get. After a bit more, with everyone explaining that they weren't around to do anything, I announced that there would be a formal house meeting that night, even though it wasn't scheduled, and threw them all out to pass the word.

Then I went down to the basement. I was going to set the room up for the meeting, but I was doing it the way I wanted to. I also reviewed my copy of the KGS handbook for any guidance I could find. I was chowing down on a big shit sandwich.

The meeting was called for eight that evening. By about five minutes of, guys started trickling in. Usually there's a lot of shit and trash talk going on, but tonight it was very subdued. Losing six pledges was a major damper on the night's festivities. Normally the guys have to grab their own chairs and set them up in a circle, but I had already taken that upon myself. Likewise, normally there is a folding table set in the middle of the room, with five chairs at it, with one at the head and two at each side. Tonight I had the table set up perpendicular, and only had one chair set up, and it was towards the back. Everybody else's chair was in a circle and set up facing towards the table, and I was already sitting at the table.

Bruno came down and looked at the table. Normally, as Minister, he would be seated at my right hand. He grabbed a chair from the circle and approached. I just pointed back at the circle. "No, I want everybody in the circle tonight." Confused and hurt, he went back to the circle. Fuck him! I wasn't worried about his feelings. The other members of the Council noted what was going on and just sat down in their chairs, although the Scrivener, a confused sophomore, wanted to know how he was going to take the minutes. I just looked at him and told him to figure it out.

Eventually the room filled up, with the Dregs coming in last. Since it had been a quiet weekend otherwise, attendance was damn near perfect. When I judged that everyone who was going to show was here, I rapped my gavel on the table. "I'm calling the meeting to order."

Billy Hoskins, the confused sophomore, immediately piped up and started calling the roll. Before he got too far along I said, "Billy, don't bother. We're here."

He looked confused. "But for the minutes..."

"Forget the minutes. We're not reading the minutes. We're not doing old business and new business. Take some notes and leave it at that."

Billy looked confused at this, and started fumbling through his paperwork. I ignored him. I just slowly looked around the room, from one side to the other and back again. "I'm going to make this very simple. We have one topic and one topic only tonight, and that is the event that happened Friday night. Here's how we're going to handle it. I'm going to talk and everybody else is going to be quiet. How's that for simplicity? Everybody got that?"

There was a loud murmur that went through the place, especially among the crones and the Dregs, mostly sitting over on my left. Swayzack spoke up and said, "You can't do that!"

"We'll get to that in a minute or two. In the meanwhile, give me a chance to talk. Alright?" I didn't give him a chance to agree or disagree, but pushed forward. "Okay, that's settled. I want to talk about Friday night. Let me see if I have this right."

"Friday night, Brothers Goldstein, Ghormley, and Hotaling decided that our pledge class needed to learn about sex. Specifically, the following pledges who were in the house at the time..." I picked up my notes and read off their names. After I had set up the basement, I had returned to my room and typed up some notes and letters. Joe had read my mood and left me alone. "They were then ordered to undress down to their skin, put their underpants on their head, and crawl up the stairs and down the hall like sperm. This was, I am told, to give them an idea of what sex was like. Do I have that correct?"

The room was fairly quiet, although there was a lot of whispering back and forth, and even a few chuckles out of the Dregs. Screw them! "DO I HAVE THAT CORRECT?!", I yelled.

The Hammer said, "Fuck you, Buckman. What is this bullshit?"

I turned to face him. "Is that an admission or a denial?"

"Fuck you! So what if we did it. The little punks deserved it.", he answered.

I just nodded. "Thank you." I turned back to the rest of the room. "Okay, since we have that out of the way, here's what has happened since then. Six of the pledges have dropped out." I rattled off their names. "I don't know who they've told. You guys really fucked up this time!", I commented.

It was Ghormley's turn to tell me, "Fuck you, Buckman! Who the fuck do you think you are, anyway?"

I smiled at him. "Ah, that would be the next point of the evening. I am the Chancellor. I was duly elected last spring. Does everybody remember that?"

"Fuck you."

"Are you denying I'm the Chancellor? Or that I wasn't elected? Do you want Billy to dig out his notes and read the attendance and the minutes of the meeting?" I looked around the room. "Anybody else doubt I'm the Chancellor?"

Bruno was on the side and sitting besides Joe Bradley. "Yeah, you're the Chancellor. Why?"

I just smiled and held up the Kappa Gamma Sigma handbook. "Just checking. Everybody recognize this? It's the Kegs handbook. I got mine back when I was a pledge. Remember that? We all had to memorize all sorts of stupid shit in here, and then we all forgot it the day after initiation. In the back of the handbook are our bylaws and governing rules. I bet nobody remembers them!" I even flipped the book open where I had already marked it and waved it around.

"Here we go, under Bylaw 20, Paragraph 6." I tapped the book and then read the passage. "In the event the Chancellor declares an emergency, the Chancellor's rulings shall apply, except when the Brotherhood votes a majority to declare the emergency over." I looked around the room. "Everybody follow that?"

There was a lot of confusion in the room. "Okay, a brief history lesson. Our founders loved the British parliamentary system of governing. It's where we get the silly names like Chancellor. In Parliament, the Prime Minister gets to run things. If the rest of Parliament disagrees, they get to vote him out in a vote of No Confidence, but if they don't get enough votes, what the Prime Minister wants, he gets. Everybody follow me so far?"

I didn't give anybody a chance to respond, but I looked around quickly and then said, "I hereby declare a state of emergency. That means I am going to tell you what we are going to do about this fine little mess we have, and then you are going to vote yes or no. If you vote yes, then you go along with what I say. If you vote no, you don't. There will be no discussion. There will be no changes to what I decide. It's yes or no. If enough of you vote no, then I will be out as Chancellor."

"Then it's NO, Buckman! Fuck you and the horse you rode in on!", yelled Boris. Several of the other Dregs grumbled an assent to this.

"Then let me explain what will happen if I am voted out as Chancellor. The first thing I will do is mail the following letter. Let me read it to you."

"Dear Grand Director;

I hereby tender my resignation as Chancellor of the Beta Phi Chapter of Kappa Gamma Sigma at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. On March 18, 1977 there was an incident involving hazing and sexual harassment at our Chapter House, involving several of the brothers and most of the current pledge class. Following the incident an attempt was made to rectify the problem utilizing the procedures set forth in Bylaw 20, Paragraph 6. The brotherhood did not vote to agree to a resolution of the problem.

As a result I am forced to resign my position as Chancellor. I also resign my membership in Kappa Gamma Sigma, and I intend to move out of the Chapter House. I will certainly be gone by the time this letter reaches you. A copy of this letter has also been sent to the President of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. I will cooperate fully with any fraternity or college investigations, as well as any civil or criminal investigations or court proceedings.

Thank you.

Carling Parker Buckman II"

I folded up my letter and stuffed it back into the envelope. There was a huge uproar around the circle at this. Most of the crones and Dregs were laughing, but everybody else was talking to each other, and the worry was palpable.

"This is fucking stupid.", said Ghormley. "There was no hazing and no sex involved. This is all bullshit!"

"You're kidding me, right? No sexual harassment? You made them get buck naked, put their underwear on their heads, and crawl around like sperm! If that isn't sexual harassment, I don't know what is!", I replied.

"Fuck you."

"What was that part about investigations?", asked Bradley.

"Well, what do you think is going to happen once National and RPI get their letters? The head of the frat was just thrown out on a hazing issue." I looked over at Bruno. "Hey, Bruno, guess what? Remember that bit about only being a heartbeat away? Guess what happens the day after you become Chancellor? National and the President of the college get to crawl up your rectum and take up residence! Have fun!" Bruno looked horror stricken at the very concept. I turned back to the other brothers. "That's going to be nothing! Wait until it comes out that you guys refused to address the issue. Wait until one of those kids tells Mommy and Daddy why they aren't joining Kegs after all! Wait until Mommy and Daddy call their congressman and the district attorney and the states attorney and their own attorney! Wait until the Evening News shows up with a camera crew and parks their ass on the front lawn! I hope all you guys have good lawyers. I plan to cooperate fully in return for immunity. Have fun."

Eyes were wide and jaws were slack by this point, and most everybody was silent, except for the three Dregs and even they were looking nervous.

"So what is the plan?", I heard from the center of the room, one of the juniors.

"Well, I'm glad you asked. Everybody understand what is going to happen if we don't do anything? Everybody?" I didn't wait for the answer. "Part One is simple. This ain't ever going to happen again."

I looked over at the three Dregs. "Brothers Goldstein and Hotaling. According to Bylaw 14, Paragraph 4," I held up the handbook again, tapping the relevant section. " ... Residence in the Chapter House is restricted to Brothers in good standing who are students at the Chapter's college. Neither of you is a student in any college in the area, let alone RPI. You both dropped out years ago. You two are history. Pack your bags. You have 48 hours to get out, or we start throwing your shit into the dumpster."

The Hammer had flunked out at the end of his sophomore year and had just been living in the house ever since, hanging out with his original pledge class. He worked at the UPS warehouse in Albany. Boris was even more pathetic. He had gotten into RPI on the basis of his junior year grades in high school, but in his senior year, he discovered drugs. He spent a year dropping acid every day, and nothing was left between his ears but cinders. He flunked Physics I seven different times at three different colleges in the area.

The room erupted into a clamor, with both the Hammer and Boris jumping in front of the table and yelling and pounding on the table. I just leaned back and let them yell. After about five minutes I started pounding my gavel, and most everybody quieted down, except for those two, and I motioned for a couple of the crones to grab these two and sit them back down.

"Listen, the first thing National is going to do when they show up - and they will show up, you know that - is to look at the residence records. If I don't get rid of you, they will. Get over it. You have two days to move out." Next I turned to Mike Ghormley. "Your turn. If it was up to me, I'd vote all three of you off the rolls and out of the brotherhood. I can't do that. However, there have been a number of brothers over the years who've moved out and remained brothers. You just became one of them. You have 48 hours to get out."

"Fuck you! Where the hell am I supposed to go?"

"Room with the other two assholes for all I care. You get two days, just like them. The clock is ticking. All three of you are excused. Get going."

There was another uproar, and this time calls for my impeachment. I actually let the Dregs call a vote, and the only hands raised were about eight on the left, some crones and Dregs. The rest of the room was silent, and generally looking at their shoes in embarrassment. Boris, the Hammer, and Ghormley all stomped out of the basement. We heard the door slamming even down there.

Once they were gone, I started in on the remaining brothers. "I have seen some stupid shit in my time, but this really takes the cake! I was tempted to simply resign and let you all hang, but you voted me in and somebody has to clean up this mess. You should be ashamed to call yourselves Keggers."

"Hey, nobody knew.", commented a sophomore who lived over in Grogans'.

"You want to tell me that three brothers could make nine pledges crawl naked on two floors of this house and nobody knew? The house was totally empty and nobody heard a single thing? That nobody looked at what was going on or stuck their head out the door? Try again."

"What were we supposed to do?", asked somebody else.

"I don't know ... maybe show a little backbone? Maybe get up on your hind legs and say 'STOP!' Maybe get between these idiots and the pledges. Jesus Christ! You went and asked these kids to join you, to become your brothers, to stand with you and become something special. Is it so much to ask that you protect them from a bunch of drunks? Christ, I'm amazed that any of them wanted to stay in!"

Everybody went back to staring at their shoes. I decided to finish the meeting. "Here's the last part. We need to fix this. Everybody is dismissed unless you are a big brother to one of these kids." Everybody got up except the fourteen big brothers. "I want to meet all of these guys tomorrow. Why don't we meet in the lounge of Crockett at eight? They should all be in their dorms by then. I want each of you to go down there, right now, find your pledge and tell him I will meet them in Crockett at eight tomorrow night."

"Now?", somebody muttered.

"Right the fuck now, goddammit!" Billy was actually a big brother and was still sitting there taking notes. I turned to him and said, 'That's it, Billy. Pack up your shit. The meeting and the emergency is over." I stood and went upstairs.

I kept my own counsel that night, and went to bed early, emotionally drained. The worst that had happened on the first go was that a couple of the Dregs got loaded one night and took a fire axe to the door of the Black Light Room before a couple of guys grabbed them. The next day, sober, they were made to go out and buy a new door and replace it while the House Manager watched.

The next day, at eight, I was in the lounge at Crocket, surrounded by the other fourteen big brothers and a dozen freshmen, some curious and some angry and sullen. Two of the kids had refused to come. My speech was simple. "Guys, I don't have a whole lot to say to you except I'm sorry. What happened the other day should never have happened, and I apologize for what did happen. I was away until yesterday and didn't find out until then. If I had known earlier, I would have apologized earlier. It will never happen again."

"No shit!", commented Greg Morris, one of the kids who had quit.

"Yeah, no shit. We handled the in-house problem. Have any of you heard what happened last night?" Technically, the meeting was secret, but somebody must have said something to somebody else. There were both some shrugs and some nods around the room. "The three guys who did it, Boris, the Hammer, and Mike, are all gone. By tomorrow they'll have moved out. The Hammer is already gone and Boris and Mike were packing as we came over here. That kind of behavior is simply unacceptable."

There were a few shocked looks around the room, including on the face of Greg. I suspected some of these guys figured we would sweep it under the rug. "To you guys, I am simply saying we're sorry, both as a fraternity and as individuals. We failed you. You trusted us and we failed in that trust. All I can do now is apologize and ask for your forgiveness. Some of you have said you don't want to be part of us anymore. I understand that; I truly do. I am asking you to forgive us and join us. Make us better than we obviously are."

Greg looked at me. "Why are you doing this? You weren't even around, and you won't be there next year anyway. Why do you care?"

I nodded. "That's a fair question. No, I wasn't here, and no, I won't be coming back. I could duck this and say it wasn't my fault and let sleeping dogs lie. On the other hand, I'm the Chancellor. I ran for this office and then I held my hand on a Bible and swore an oath to do the damn job and now I have to deal with this shit." I looked around the room at all the kids. "In three years, one of you guys is going to be the Chancellor." There were some murmurs at this, and I smiled. "Yeah, one of you guys is going to be the Chancellor. The rest of us are going to be long gone and history, and some asshole is going to dump something shitty in your lap. Just remember how you signed up for the job and don't run away from it."

I finished by saying, "That's pretty much it. We're sorry. We fucked up. Give us a second chance. Someday you'll be recruiting new brothers. Learn from us and be better than us, and make us better by joining us now!" I stood up and went to each of the pledges and shook his hand and thanked him for coming and apologized personally. Then I grabbed the two big brothers whose pledges had refused to come, and we went and tracked them down over in Hall Hall. One talked to me in his room, the other refused to talk.

Ultimately, four of the six rejoined us, including Greg, the pledge who had quizzed me in the lounge. One in the lounge didn't join us, and the guy who refused to see me didn't come back. Eight new pledges would have been a problem. Twelve gave them a decent chance of staying alive. It still wasn't over, however. Two weeks later the issue came alive again.

It was the last house meeting before Hell Week, and we needed to do the final vote to approve the twelve incoming pledges. This is generally a pro forma sort of affair. The Pledge Master says a name and the box gets passed around the circle. By now everybody knows these guys, and the box just gets sent along. Seniors and crones don't even vote, especially if they aren't coming back the following year. 'You assholes can pick out your own assholes to live with!' is the general motto. About the only guy who even votes, if anybody does, is their big brother, to throw a symbolic white ball.

This meeting was no different, and the first pledge's name happened to be Greg Morris. His name was announced and the box started around the room, starting at the right hand side, where it was mostly sophomores sitting. It kept going, hand to hand, with nobody doing anything, almost up until the end, when Jim Easton ostentatiously took it, reached inside, and dropped a ball in. Most of us just stared at him, including his fellow crones. Jim was finishing up a five year engineering masters program and wouldn't be back next year. He was going against all tradition in voting.

Buddy Ebbits, the Pledge Master took the box at the end of the line and looked inside, and then set it down on the table in front of me. Inside was a single black ball, and you could hear people around the council table gasping. I motioned them with my hands to stay silent. Buddy was ashen faced. This had never occurred in memory of anybody in the house, or even of any of the alumni who occasionally wandered through.

I slowly turned my head over to where Easton was sitting, smirking at me. "Do you really want to do this?", I asked.

"Fuck you, Buckman. Record the vote."

"I'm guessing this is your vote for the rest of them, too?"

"Fuck you. Figure it out on your own."

I nodded briefly and then looked over at Billy, the Scrivener. "Record the vote as Passed." The vote could be either Passed or Not Passed.

There was an immediate uproar as Easton demanded, "How dare you!? You can't do this! It's against the rules!" A number of the other crones and Dregs protested as well.

I waited for the hubbub to die down, and then asked, "Why are you doing this, Jim?"

"I'm doing it for Boris and Mike and the Hammer. You shouldn't have thrown them out! Fuck you, Buckman. Live with it!"

I just shook my head. "Jim, don't do this. They were my friends, too. You and Boris brought me into this house, remember? And Mike and I became polar bears after dueling for my fiancé. Remember that? Don't end it all like this."

"I'll end it the way I fucking want to! Fuck it!"

I just nodded. "So be it." I dropped my gavel and said, "We're going to change things. We're voting these guys in as a group, all at once. I vote 'Passed'. How about you, Mark?" I turned to the Exchequer, a junior.

He looked glum, but nodded and said, "Passed."

I turned my head towards the Provost, also a junior, and he just nodded and said, "Passed."

I turned to Billy, our Scrivener. "Billy?"

"Is this legal?", he asked me quietly.

"It's as legal as we say it is. Now, who's running this place, you and your brothers, or somebody who'd rather burn the house down around your head?"

Easton started yelling "Fuck you, Buckman!" from the corner, as hands held him in his chair.

Billy looked very nervous, but he said, "Passed.", loud enough for everyone to hear.

I turned to my right and looked at Bruno. He didn't look happy, but on the other hand, he had skipped the vote, since he was moving out as well. "You going to make it unanimous, Bruno?"

"This isn't right, Carl."

"And this is?", I asked, hooking my thumb over my shoulder at Easton. More curses came my way.

Bruno looked over at Jim and some of the others. He and they all lived over in Grogans', and there were some angry faces. "I don't like it."

"I'm not asking you to like it. I'm asking you to do the right thing. You know it's the right thing. It's just not the easy thing."

"You're a sanctimonious prick, Buckman, you know that?"

I sighed. "I am many things. I am certainly a prick. I'm not all that sanctimonious, but I am a prick. Passed or Not Passed?"

"Passed, damn you!"

There seemed to be a collective sigh of relief from around the room, along with some shouting from the crones and Dregs. "Mark them all down as Passed, Billy."

Jim Easton stood up and stormed out of the room, vowing to have nothing to do with us the rest of the year. He didn't either, eating leftovers after dinner and skipping out on Hell Week and initiation. I didn't much care at that point. The rest of the crones stayed away from any future meetings as well, and I don't think the incoming pledge class had any idea how close they had all come to being dropped at the last minute. At our last house meeting of the year, during elections for the coming year, when the new brothers attended their first meeting, I simply stood up and told them to run it better than we had. Hell, they couldn't do any worse.

Chapter 46: Graduation

Thursday, May 26, 1977

I made sure I stayed visible whenever the pledges were around the house, and didn't travel anymore on weekends. Marilyn seemed to understand, and she spent a few weekends driving down to see me. I really didn't mind, since she would often come down and spend some time lounging around the pool in one of her little bikinis or the crocheted one piece. I watched one freshman as she sauntered up to the pool and undid the wrap around her hips and dropped it to the side; he was watching her instead of where he was going, and walked straight into the pool. Marilyn blushed when she saw what an effect she had. I liked that effect.

Finally, it was graduation week, the week after finals. For the first time in I don't know how long - years! - I didn't have something to do. I could goof off totally! My classes were over. My dissertation was done. I had passed my orals. All I had to do was hang around the mostly empty frat house for another week. On Friday those of us in ROTC would be commissioned as either 2nd Lieutenants or Ensigns, and on Saturday everybody would graduate. Marilyn came down as soon as her classes and finals ended, and stayed with me for the entire week. After graduation, she would help me move to my advanced training school.

We had all gotten our orders a couple of weeks ago. A lot of the guys got deferred orders, like Joe. He would be commissioned along with me, but he was deferring his service until he got through grad school. Like before, he was heading to Wharton. All of the rest of us were heading out to our specialization training. Bruno was going to Fort Belvoir in Virginia since he was going into the engineers. I was heading to Fort Sill in Oklahoma for artillery school.

I had a week's leave following graduation to get to Sill, which we should be able to do in two or three days. As soon as Marilyn showed up, I went out and rented a panel van and we went down to the storage locker I was renting and emptied it out. Then we went back to Kegs and loaded up all the stuff I wouldn't need over the next week, like my textbooks. Since Joe was going to be around, Marilyn and I moved across the hall to a room abandoned for the summer and camped out there.

That's where we were Thursday afternoon, taking a nap. We had been swimming in the pool after lunch, and I had offered to help Marilyn dry off - all over!

"You just want to take my swimsuit off of me.", she countered.

I tried to look shocked. "Marilyn, how can you say that!? You know the possible dangers of chafing! I'm just looking out for your best interests."

"Why do I think you just want to get me naked and have sex all afternoon?"

"Marilyn, I am disturbed by this conversation. It's not my fault if you can't control your lusts when I'm around."

"Bullshit!"

"Let's go find out. I'll dry you off and you try to control yourself."

Marilyn giggled and took my hand and we scampered upstairs. I have to say, she tried to control herself, but ended up totally failing. First I slowly peeled off her bikini, and then gently patted her down all over, before letting her lay back on the bedcovers. Then I brought out some hand lotion and applied it to all the areas that had been covered by the swimsuit, to make sure they were properly moisturized. This did seem to have an effect on her libido, since she was moaning and writhing on the bed as I did this. Then I used some special moisturizer, the kind on my tongue, to reach deep inside and treat the deepest parts I could reach. That was when she simply lost her composure, and demanded that I have sex with her!

Well, I am a gentleman, and Congress was going to recognize that fact in another 24 hours. I helped her out in this time of need. She pulled me on top of her and used her hands to spread her pussylips and guide my cock inside her. We huffed and puffed our way through a very noisy fuck. Afterwards, still not satisfied, Marilyn played with my cock until I was stiff again, and then I rolled her onto her stomach and crawled on top of her, straddling that plump little ass while I fucked her pussy from behind.

So, there we were, starting to nap, with Marilyn face down on the covers and me face up, when we heard a commotion in the hallway outside our room, on the landing. Then I heard, quite clearly, Joe Bradley tell somebody, "He's right across the hallway. Just go on in, he's probably got his headphones on."

I didn't have a chance to do a damn thing about it. I was just trying to sit up and grab for my pants when the door burst open and Suzie barged in, followed by my mother and father. Suzie's eyes opened wide and her jaw hit the floor. My mother just screamed and dragged my sister back out of the room. The door slammed shut, but I could hear Bradley laughing loudly across the hallway.

"I'M GOING TO KILL YOU, BRADLEY!", I yelled as I climbed to my feet and grabbed my pants. He just laughed louder.

Marilyn had actually fallen asleep, and was rolling over. "What's going on?"

"My family just barged in and saw us lying here."

Marilyn stared at me for a second as I pulled my pants on and pulled up the zipper. I damn near caught my dick in the zipper, which would have been a great way to culminate the afternoon. "You mean..."

"I mean, Suzie and my parents know all about that little mole in the small of your back.", I answered.

Marilyn just gabbled in panic at that, so I tossed her the sundress she had started out wearing this morning, and she scrambled to her feet and pulled it on. I grabbed a tee shirt and pulled it on. Out in the hallway, Dad was calming my mother down, and Joe was still laughing. "I am going to kill Joe.", I told Marilyn.

"I'll help!"

We made ourselves as decent as possible in the little time we had, and I straightened out the bed clothes. Then I looked at Marilyn and shook my head in disbelief, and opened the door to the landing. My family was staring at me with different expressions on their faces. Suzie was giggling and laughing at us. My father had a resigned and embarrassed look. And my mother was red faced and furious.

I remember that when our first daughter Alison was born, the nurse looked at her and then said, 'She looks just like you.', referring to me. All three of us kids take after Mom, quite strongly. Instead, Marilyn and I looked at our daughter, red faced and crying and generally yelling up a storm, and then we grinned at each other, and I replied, 'No, she looks just like my mother!'

"Carling! How dare you!" She glanced at Marilyn and decided to not say much more, since that would be taking our troubles out of the house.

I just shook my head. "Hey, Mom, you barged in on us, not the other way around. We ain't apologizing for anything."

She huffed, "Well, I never!", and glanced at my father, who was trying to study the ceiling.

I couldn't help it. I said, "Well, you had three kids, so I suspect you actually did." That set Suzie to outright laughter and both my parents turned beet red. Marilyn punched me from behind.

Change the topic. "What are you doing here?"

"It's your graduation! Where else would we be?", she answered.

I just stared at them for a few seconds. Yes, it was graduation, and I had invited Suzie to come up. The plan was for her to fly up and I would pick her up. Then we would bring her back when we drove down, and drop her off in Lutherville. I was going to drive the panel van and Marilyn was going to drive my Impala. Then we would continue on to Lawton, Oklahoma. Afterwards, once I was settled in, I would put Marilyn back on a plane to Albany, where she could catch a cab over to Kegs and pick up her car and go back to Utica. I had this all worked out with Dad.

Neither of us counted on Mom, who decided to come up anyway. I hadn't seen her or Dad in two years, not since the first summer I did basic and we went out to dinner that one night. Suzie had visited with Marilyn last summer, before our breakup, but I hadn't seen her in a couple of years, either. I hadn't seen Hamilton since I had busted his jaw three years ago. "We? Where's Hamilton?", I asked.

"He couldn't make it. He wasn't feeling very good."

I breathed a sigh of relief. I turned to Marilyn. "An old jaw injury, I bet." Mom gasped, Suzie giggled, and Dad told me to settle down. I just rolled my eyes. "Where are you staying?", I asked. The original plan was to have Suzie stay in the frat house with us, in one of the empty rooms.

"We're staying up in Glens Falls. It was the closest place with an empty room.", my father said.

I wasn't surprised. There were at least two other graduations this weekend, and despite being the state capital and one of the largest cities in the state, Albany wouldn't have enough hotel rooms available. At least 20,000 people had probably descended on the area. I just nodded. "Well, Suzie can stay here with us. That way you won't all be crammed into one motel room." Suzie looked relieved at that, although Mom was obviously worried about the influence a fraternity would have on her underage daughter. That was crazy, since Suzie was much better behaved than I ever was, now or then!

"What are your plans?", I asked.

Dad answered, "We were planning on having dinner with you. Know anyplace we can get into?"

"Good luck with that.", I replied. "Listen, I have reservations at a couple of places, for tomorrow and Saturday, but you're going to have to scrounge for breakfast and lunch. I was planning on feeding Suzie here at the house. I can make us all omelets for dinner."

Mom looked like she wanted to protest. She obviously had visions of the great matriarch of the family going out to dinner, but forget about a decent place tonight. Dad quickly agreed with this plan and said so.

"Great. You guys go downstairs and we'll get cleaned up. We'll meet you downstairs in half an hour." Mom glanced through the door to the bed we had been frolicking on, and then turned red, and turned around and headed downstairs, Dad and Suzie in her wake.

Marilyn and I grabbed our toilet kits and towels, and I opened the door to my old room. Joe was grinning broadly at us, so I flipped him off, and we went down the hallway to the bathroom, while he laughed behind us. We locked ourselves in the bathroom and took quick showers, but there wasn't any romance involved. We had neither time nor inclination. I had shaved that morning, so afterwards we just wrapped the towels around ourselves and ran back to the room, and then put on clean clothes.

My family was waiting in the formal room. Mom was sitting primly in an armchair, hoping not to touch anything that might contaminate her, while my father and Suzie were wandering around looking at the portraits on the wall. My father looked at one, and when he saw us enter, he asked, "You were your fraternity president?"

I nodded. "Chancellor, but it's the same thing."

"Huh.", he said, nodding to himself.

"You had a dog?", asked Suzie. Trust her to focus on the important stuff.

I glanced at the portraits. In a couple of them Jefferson had been prominently displayed. Hell, he was smarter than most of us. "That's Jefferson. He moved out last year, but yeah, we had a dog."

"What happened to him?"

"One of the brothers adopted him when he moved out." I headed towards the kitchen. "Hungry?"

Along the way we passed a few of the other graduating seniors, and I had to introduce them to my family. A couple of the guys started immediately hitting on Suzie. Well, she had grown up, a lot, since I had last seen her. Now she was Mom's height, about 5'9", a slim and leggy brunette who looked older than her not quite sixteen years.

"Hey, ever hear the phrase 15 will get you 20?", I asked. Dad chuckled, Suzie flirted, and Mom tried to shield her. The guys sloughed this off and followed us to the kitchen.

"What's for dinner?", asked Bradley, coming in with them.

"Nothing for you!", responded Marilyn, shaking her fist at him.

"I'll tell you later.", commented Joe to the other guys.

I just shook my head and smiled. "You guys hungry, too?" Everyone nodded and said they were hungry. "Okay, this is my last meal as the Master Chef. Tonight we're doing omelets. Go set a couple of tables and tell everybody to get their butts in gear and put in their orders." I shooed my brethren out, as my family looked on mystified. I looked over at them. "I'm also one of the house cooks on Sundays, one of the better ones, if I do say so myself, and one of the house specialties is the famous Three Egg Omelet. Marilyn helps me, sometimes."

"You cook?", exclaimed Suzie.

"The way to a woman's heart is through her stomach.", I misquoted.

"Is that what you were doing earlier? Cooking?", she giggled. Dad snorted and Mom stewed at that.

"Never you mind what we were doing!" Marilyn and I went into the pantry and dug out the eggs, milk, and some cheese and ham. By the time I had a couple of small pans on the stove and a small mixing bowl on the counter, Joe was back.

"I got orders for six omelets, and I couldn't find everybody, so there might be more.", he told me.

"Great. In reward for that stunt earlier, you just got elected as the dishwasher. Congratulations!"

Joe just laughed at that. "So who's the Master Chef next year going to be?", he asked.

"Not sure, but I suspect Smitty gets the title. You have to admit, he makes a burgundy and mushroom chicken to die for! I stole his recipe."

Dad asked what we were talking about, and the guys explained the Master Chef vote. He looked at me and said, quietly, "Fraternity president and head cook? It's like I don't know you at all." What was there to say to him? He was right; he didn't know me at all anymore. I just shrugged.

Suzie helped Marilyn, while my folks stood back and watched. They were both excellent cooks - I learned from the best! - and watched their eldest son whip up a bunch of omelets. Hamilton was hopeless in the kitchen. The cooking gene must have been recessive in his case. It was probably hiding behind the normal gene, itself damn near invisible.

The first two omelets went to Suzie and Marilyn, and the next two went to my folks. After that I ran the rest of the brothers in succession, and ended up with another eight before I got to mine. By that time, Marilyn and my family were done, so they sat while I worked on mine. Suzie was asking Marilyn about the frat house, and about where she would stay. I had the answer for that. I swallowed the bite I was working on and said, "My old room from last year."

"It's empty?", asked Marilyn. When I nodded, she turned back to Suzie. "Carl and Joe stayed there for two years. The owners have gone home for the summer."

"I don't know as I like this, you staying in a fraternity house.", commented my mother.

"Mom, she'll be fine. I won't let her drink and nobody's going to run in here and ravish her in the middle of the night."

"What? What if I want to be ravished in the middle of the night?", asked Suzie.

That got Marilyn to laughing, me to groaning, and Mom to start sputtering at my father. He settled it by simply saying, "Shirley, they'll be fine."

"Did you bring your swimsuit? We can use the pool?", asked Marilyn.

Suzie frowned. "No, I didn't know there was a pool here."

"Only frat on campus with a swimming pool.", I said. I smiled at my father. "And there's a nursing school just a block down the road, too."

"Let me guess, there's an open invitation to borrow the pool."

I gave him a pious look. "It's our neighborly duty!"

Marilyn gave me a shot to the arm at that. "Maybe you can borrow one of mine.", she told Suzie.

I snorted. "Good luck with that. You two aren't anywhere close to the same size." Marilyn was at least a cup size or two larger and several inches wider, although she wasn't fat; Suzie was simply very slender, and about as flat-chested as her mother, an 'A' cup with delusions of grandeur. I gave my mother a wicked grin. "Maybe she can simply swim in her bra and panties. Not much difference to a swimsuit."

That earned me howls of outrage from all three women, although my Dad chuckled at the thought.

Afterwards, we went out to their car and brought in Suzie's suitcase and my sleeping bag. Along the way, I pointed out to my mother some of the many redeeming features of the house. "Over there, Mom, that's where we would worship graven images by the light of the moon, and there, at the barbecue pit, that's where we would sacrifice freshmen every spring, to appease the demons." I looked over at Marilyn. "Don't you remember that, honey, all the fun we had and their screams as they were taken up to the high altar?"

"You think you're so funny!", she replied. As expected, Suzie and Dad laughed, and Mom huffed and puffed.

"Don't you remember the good old days, Dad, when you would sit around and roast pledges over the open fire?"

"Don't get me involved with this.", he laughed.

I commented to Suzie, "Dad's just afraid I'll tell you and Mom what really happens in frat houses. Did you know Dad was in Delta Upsilon back in the Dark Ages?"

"Really?"

"Ask him about it on the trip home."

"You really are just full of piss and vinegar, aren't you?", he commented.

"Charlie!", protested Mom.

"Get in the car, Shirley. Let's get out of here and go find a drink!" Dad loaded Mom in the car and waved good-bye to the three of us.

We went swimming after dinner, but Suzie wore one of my frat shirts and a pair of her regular bikini underwear. The shirts are heavy enough that you aren't running a wet tee shirt contest, and long enough they went down past her butt.

The next morning Bruno, Joe, and I loaded ourselves into the Impala and went down to the Armory, where our commissioning ceremony was being held. Leo and Harry were going down with their parents. Marilyn and Suzie were going to wait for my parents to pick them up and then they would all go down together. I hadn't planned on the extra guests, but I was ready for it. Every student got four tickets to graduation, and I had the two spare still sitting around. The last time I did this, I had to get an extra ticket for Marilyn. Mom sort of held up her nose at that, thinking it was for family only, but even then I would have stuck with Marilyn over them in a heartbeat.

I wasn't the honor graduate, but I didn't really care. The honor graduate was a supergeek with Coke bottle lenses on his glasses who was going off to some lab at Fort Meade with a perfect 4.0 GPA. I had good marks, but it wasn't perfect. I didn't mind. That guy was about as much of a soldier as Hamilton. I just smiled at him and rubbed my jump wings and crossed cannons in his face. I did rank high enough that I was going into the army as a Regular Army officer, not just as a Reserve Officer on Active Duty. It's an important distinction. We listened to a speech or two and swore to defend the Constitution from all enemies foreign and domestic. Considering what would become of the Congress over the next two generations, I wondered if it might not be a good idea to start there.

Afterwards, I found my parents in the bleachers coming down to greet me. For the first time I was in a real officer's uniform, in that instead of my collar insignia reading O.C. for officer candidate, now they had my gold bars, one to each shoulder, and my collar insignia had the crossed cannons of artillery. When my father came down, I snapped to attention and threw him a salute. He started for a second at this, and then returned the salute to me. He had been a Lieutenant Junior Grade, the Navy equivalent of an Army 1st Lieutenant, during the war, and outranked me.

I had learned a lot about the military and what was expected of an officer from him, even if he had never said much about his service. I knew that 'the buck stops here' wasn't just a catchphrase, but it really meant something, and I knew the standard he held an officer to. He was totally disgusted over the Pueblo incident, when the North Koreans captured an American spy ship during the cold war. I had to write a paper on it for school at the time (1968) and the ship was poorly officered, poorly crewed, and poorly outfitted. As far as he was concerned, it didn't matter; the captain, Lloyd Bucher, should have tried to ram something and gone down with his ship!

My mother, on the other hand, had a somewhat distressed look on her face. I kissed her on the cheek, and then wrapped Marilyn in a big bear hug, picking her up and twirling her around. She was wearing a lovely knee length halter top sundress, cute and cool. My dress uniform was already getting warm and I peeled off my jacket as soon as we got outside. Suzie unintentionally pointed out today's problem when she gushed, "I love the ring! When did you get it?" She was holding up Marilyn's left hand and looking at her engagement ring.

Mom's face hardened at that. Marilyn hadn't been wearing any jewelry yesterday, because she always took it off when swimming. Marilyn responded, "At Christmas. We had already talked about it and Carl bought me the ring earlier than that, but we didn't ask my folks until Christmas."

My mother's voice was a little icy as she asked me, "Carling, when were you going to tell your family?"

I turned to face her, making sure I had a blank look on my face. "Well, I suppose now's a good a time as any."

"When is the wedding? Is this some sort of an emergency?" Did I knock Marilyn up?

I controlled myself, although Marilyn looked horrified, and even my father was upset by the question. "No, mother, no emergency. Marilyn has another year of college, so it will be sometime next summer. I'll need to report in and talk to my commanding officer about it before I can say for sure. I'll be saving up all my leave for this in any case."

"And are you inviting your family?"

I stared at her briefly. "I don't know yet, mother. We haven't decided yet. I know Marilyn asked me if Suzie wanted to be a bridesmaid. I can tell you flat out, Hamilton is not invited."

Suzie squealed in delight. "A bridesmaid!?" She was practically jumping with joy, and Marilyn grinned at her and nodded.

Mom looked like I had just slapped her. "Hamilton is your brother!"

"Hamilton is a delusional psychotic. Hamilton is not welcome." I glanced over at Marilyn, who was simply shaking her head at me. She didn't want him around either.

"That's quite unfair of you, Carling. Your brother is simply misunderstood by you.", she protested.

I took a deep breath. "Let me be very clear on this, Mother. I have zero interest in seeing my brother again this side of the grave. Marilyn has even less interest. We have talked about this, and her interests are the only ones I care about in this regard. If Hamilton shows up at the church, he will be asked to leave. If he refuses to leave, the ceremony will be delayed while the police are summoned to take him away. Anybody he attended with, and that includes you and Dad, will also be evicted at that time. I don't much care if my side of the church is empty, Mom. You may do as you wish."

Mom looked like I had just pissed on the carpet, and Dad said, "That's enough, Carl. Hamilton won't be there. Now, where is dinner today?"

I just nodded and took a second to calm down. We already had clinical proof my brother was a paranoid schizophrenic, with a delusional fixation on me. I wondered if my mother had similar problems, or simply just heard what she wanted to hear. "I made reservations at L'Auberge. They were for three, but I imagine we can cram two more in. Why don't we all go in your car? We can leave mine here and not need to worry about parking it in Albany."

"That's good." He took Mom's elbow and steered her towards the parking lot. Suzie gave me a shrug and a look that said, 'What did you expect?', and Marilyn simply held my hand tightly and gave me a look of pure relief.

As I expected, two extra places could be crammed in, at least with the help of a couple of twenties in the palm of the maitre de. It was a trifle cold at dinner, with Mom sulking about my latest snub to my brother. He didn't have problems, after all. It was me who had a problem with him. Sort of like John Dillinger being seriously misunderstood by all those bankers.

Saturday was much the same way, with the exception that it was held in the Field House, which was about halfway between Kegs and the campus. It was close enough, in fact, that I decided to walk. It was a warm and sunny spring morning. I simply pulled on some shorts and a tee shirt, and some sneakers, and carried my robes and mortarboard along the way. My parents would pick up Suzie and Marilyn and take them over.

I had been through any number of graduations since that first one. The most important thing to do is be comfortable. There's an awful lot of hurry up and wait involved. (It's sort of like the army.)We had almost a thousand graduates, when you combine undergrads and grad students, and we were all lined up outside the building in the hot sunlight while all our guests were finding seats in the air conditioned building. Pity the poor student who had to wear a suit underneath his robes! Nobody could see through them, so why not be comfortable.

We actually had to practice all this ahead of time. Grad students actually are at the end of the line; we would march through after the undergrads, who would file in and fill up the seats on the floor from the back moving forward. Our main speaker was Jacques Cousteau, the famous French marine biologist and explorer, who made all the television specials. In honor of Cousteau, the School of Architecture, which every year did something ridiculous, marched all their graduating students in with snorkels, facemasks, flippers, and letters painted in white on their mortarboards 'J - A - C -' and so forth, one letter for each student so that when they were all sitting in a line it spelled his name. They must have taken ten tries for each of those TV specials, since Cousteau had the worst accent imaginable, and could barely be understood!

We were not marched up and across the stage to receive diplomas. Instead they simply called our names and we stood up, one discipline at a time. Since I had earned three degrees, I stood up three different times, sort of unusual. Joe Bradley did it twice, once with the math department which he marched in with, and later with the economics department. I was with the doctoral students, and we had special robes and sashes, and special mortarboards as well. Afterwards we all got to escape.

I posed for pictures with my family. Mom was suitably scandalized by my attire under my robes. Nobody else cared, except my father, wearing a suit, who looked like he would have preferred shorts and a tee shirt, too. Since one of my mother's most favorite catchphrases was, "Charlie, you're not wearing that, are you?", you can guess who picked out his wardrobe.

(One of the few humorous aspects when Dad got Alzheimer's was when a visiting nurse did an evaluation of him and remarked in her report that Mr. Buckman was not as independent as Mrs. Buckman reported, since she picked out his clothing. When we three kids read that, we all damn near fell to the floor laughing!)

We all went back to the frat, and then I put on a suit and took the family to a place over on Wolf Road. The wait was longer here, since we had five and not three, but we survived. Afterwards, we packed Suzie up and sent her back to Lutherville with my folks. Marilyn and I spent a final exhausted night at Kegs, and then we took off in the morning.

As we left the parking lot it finally hit me, I was really heading into the unknown. Up until now, I had been doing a repeat of my life, through junior high, high school, and college. That was over now. I had no idea what I was getting into!

Book Four: Army

Chapter 47: You're In The Army Now!

"You're in the Army now,

You're not behind the plow,

You'll never get rich,

A diggin' a ditch,

You're in the Army now!"

We had packed everything imaginable in the van Saturday after getting back to the frat, leaving only some clothing in some bags we could carry into the motels with us. I figured to take three days driving, which would put us near Sill Tuesday afternoon. The plan was to take 90 and 71 to Columbus the first day, then 70 to St. Louis, and finish in Lawton the third day. If we could push further each day than planned, it would make our last day the easiest. This was long before anybody invented the cell phone, so we were stopping every couple of hours for pit stops and meals and map breaks. Marilyn can barely figure out how to hold a map upright, but even she couldn't lose me following the panel van! I didn't report for school until the following Monday, but I wanted to look around ahead of time.

We made it to Columbus in about twelve hours, at which point we were both exhausted. If I wanted to be a truck driver, I would have gone to truck driving school! We crapped out in a Best Western and slept the night away. The next morning we got an early start and made it to Springfield, several hours past St. Louis. We were still tired, but it felt like we were getting ahead of the curve. Tuesday we made it to Lawton just after lunch.

Fort Sill is one of the old time Army bases dating back to the days when Oklahoma was the frontier and the Army was fighting the Indians. Now it's a sprawling and flat place owned by the artillery. It's big and wide and flat and open, the perfect place to shoot things that go a long way and go boom when they get there, even though the Wichita Mountains are visible from everywhere on the post. Lawton is a cow town if there ever was one. It's flat and dusty and the wind blew constantly. Dust was everywhere, including on us when we got out of the car and truck. It was already blistering hot in the early afternoon. We were in the parking lot of a Best Western that we had reservations for the next week at.

Marilyn looked around and said, "And you think Utica's a hick town!"

I looked around and shrugged. "Honey, they don't put the motels in the residential neighborhoods, do they?"

"Do they have one here?"

"I'm sure they do. It's probably very nice.", I said, putting a hopeful spin on things. Looking around I had to wonder. I was expecting a tumbleweed to blow by any second, followed by a cattle drive.

"Have fun! I think I'm going to stay in New York!", she replied.

I wrapped her in my arms and laughed. "I'm only here for six months. After that, I go somewhere else, a regular duty station. Probably a nice, dry lab building in Aberdeen, Maryland. It's very nice there. You'll see." I was shading the truth slightly. If I were to stay in the Army, in Artillery, sooner or later I'd be spending time here as an officer. Pretty much every artillery officer does, sooner or later. Who knew, maybe it was really nice, once I got to know the place. It had to be better than Utica!

We checked in and cleaned up. For the first time since we had left New York, we had enough energy to fool around in the shower together. Afterwards we dried off and got dressed, and went out for lunch. The restaurant in the Best Western featured - guess what? - steaks. I wasn't surprised.

We spent the rest of the day at the motel, resting up and goofing off. Over the next few days we drove around and saw what there was to see of Lawton, which looked bigger than Utica. I think if the Army decided to shoot cannons someplace else, the place would dry up and blow away quickly. Still, there were some nice areas, and some decent restaurants and schools and such. It was better than it had been back when the Indians were protesting the presence of the white man by using bows and arrows, of that I was sure. We found a storage locker place and unloaded everything I wouldn't be taking into the BOQ with me, and then sorted out what I would keep available. After that we dumped the panel van back on the rental company. Otherwise, we just took a vacation for a few days and played hide the salami in our room. I needed to store up some memories, because it was going to be a few months before I saw Marilyn again.

Monday morning I had to go and rejoin the Army. I wasn't entirely sure of the procedure, but based on my (limited) experience with the system, there was going to be an awful lot of hurry-up-and-wait. Report in time was 0900, so at 0800 I kissed Marilyn goodbye and headed over to the base. She would hang out around the swimming pool until I came back. Once I got the schedule straightened out, we would get her to the nearest airport, probably on Tuesday, and fly her back to Albany.

At the gate I was sent to the Staff and Facilities Battalion, where I was sent on to the Artillery School. I would go through check in there. It felt strange to just drive onto a base like this. By the time Parker joined the service, after 9/11, everything was tighter than a gnat's ass. Nobody could get on any base anywhere without an elaborate pass and check in procedure. A lot of bases they even inspected under your car and made you open the trunk up. I parked in a pretty fair sized parking lot and made my way inside, where I found I was just one of many freshly minted butterbars looking for their new home. But I also saw something else, my old buddy Harlan Buckminster! I had no idea he was going Artillery like me! Time for a little fun!

I slipped around the room and came up behind him while he was talking to another second john standing in front of him. The other fellow noticed me and his eyes flicked in my direction, but I held an index finger to my lips. Smiling, I muttered lowly, "Christ, what the hell is this man's army coming to when they let the coloreds become officers?"

Only a few people heard me, and there was some instant consternation. Of course Harlan heard me as clear as a bell, and he whipped around to face me. I just stood there grinning at him. He broke out into a grin of his own and replied, "Hell, I never knew you crackers had figured out how to stand shit six feet tall!"

Harlan lifted me up in a bear hug while I pounded on his back, and then he said, "Damn, it's good to see you! I never knew you were going Artillery!"

"Same to you. It is good to see you! When did you get in?"

"Just a couple of days ago. I've been staying at the Best Western. You?", he answered.

"Same here! How'd we miss each other? My fiancée and I drove out here right after graduation. Once I get out of here, I'll have to figure out how to get her back home.", I told him.

"No shit! At least Anna Lee drove her car. She can get home on her own."

"Anna Lee?", I asked.

"My fiancée. Hey, maybe we can get together after this and have dinner together, the four of us.", he said.

"I'd like that. What's the check-in procedure, anyway? My colonel didn't tell us much.", I told him.

Haran shrugged. "Probably pretty routine. Check us in, get us rooms at the BOQ, meet and greet with the school Commandant, maybe a quick physical. I doubt anything course related will happen until tomorrow."

I nodded. That made sense. "Think we might end up rooming together again?"

"Want to try?"

"Let's ask. What's the worst they can do? Say no?"

Harlan shrugged again. "Sure, why not. Maybe we can go out and find some Orange Army artillery to capture and bring back home."

I laughed at that. "We'll have to tell Marilyn and Anna Lee that story. I don't think they'll believe it unless we both tell it!"

Harlan started laughing at that, too. "So what made you choose Artillery?"

"It was either learn how to rain death and destruction down on the godless hordes while defending our fair nation, or get stuck in the motor pool. I went with option one. I figure I can kill more people that way than with my driving. You?"

"Same thing."

"You ever learn how to drive a standard?"

Harlan just laughed at that. Then things started to happen and we had to quit fucking off and pay attention. The rest of the morning went pretty much like Harlan had expected. Today was check-in day. We were called forward to a counter by a bunch of Spec 4s, had our orders and ID cards checked, assigned BOQ rooms, two to a room, and given a list of do's and don'ts for the BOQ. Buckman comes before Buckminster, so I ended up asking for Harlan as my roommate. The Spec 4s consulted their sheets and shuffled some things and I had a roommate. Then we stood around until we were sent to a large lecture style classroom, where we were seated and our teachers and cadre lined the room. In front was a lectern and a light bird welcomed us and gave us some more rules and regs. After that we did some more paperwork, had our security clearances checked, and went to the Officer's Club for lunch. A captain escorted us and gave us some more instruction on how the club worked, as well as other details on food and lodging. After lunch we were sent off to draw an absolutely outrageous load of textbooks, firing tables, and other essentials before being dismissed to sort things out at the BOQ. Harlan and I swapped room numbers at the Best Western so we could call each other and make dinner plans.

By mid-afternoon I was able to head back to the Best Western, where Marilyn and I loaded most of my gear into the Impala. It seemed pretty simple to get her onto the base, so we drove over and put my stuff in my room. Once we got to the BOQ, we found Harlan and his fiancée moving his stuff in as well, so we did the introductions. Anna Lee was much lighter skinned than Harlan, who was almost pitch black, but she had the same southern accent he did. She was tall and slim, and looked classy. We helped each other move, and then helped our fellow classmates get moved in. Unsurprisingly, I wasn't the only guy with too much stuff to pack in our rooms, so I led a small convoy over to the storage lockers and allowed Harlan to share mine while some of the other guys rented one and split it up between themselves.

Dinner was at the Best Western at 1900. I wore civvies rather than a uniform, and was pleased to note that Harlan had changed also. My first question was to Anna Lee. "So how'd you ever meet this reprobate?"

Anna Lee and Harlan laughed. "We met at school.", she said. "I was walking across the quad and he ran into me!"

"She was wearing these shorts - oh my God!- and...", interrupted Harlan.

"Watch your mouth!", squawked Anna Lee, at which both Marilyn and I laughed. "No need to tell anybody that!"

I glanced at Anna Lee's legs, which were pretty good, and nodded to Harlan and gave him a thumbs up. "No need to explain." That earned me punches from both Marilyn and Anna Lee. I just turned to Marilyn. "You'd better behave or I'll tell them the truth about how we met."

As expected, Marilyn turned red and said, "Don't you dare!", which made the others all the more curious.

I simply smiled at her and said, "You can tell them the romantic version, or my more truthful version."

"You are an evil person.", Marilyn answered. She gave a somewhat limited romantic version, and the other two had me expand on it. The romantic version was the duel. Then Harlan asked for the true version, and I told how she had picked up the bartender at a party, which earned a few squawks from my fiancée. I just shrugged and said I was an officer and a gentleman.

"You may be an officer, but you are no gentleman!", argued Marilyn.

"Well, it was fifty-fifty odds." I looked at my friend. "When's the big day?"

"March 11.", announced Anna Lee. "I finish school in December and we're getting married after that."

"Good for you."

Harlan continued, "It's at the chapel at Ole Miss, in Oxford. You should come. I'm inviting you. Both of you. Come on down." Anna Lee nodded in agreement.

I glanced at Marilyn, who gave me a shrug. "Fine by us. It all depends on where we end up, I suppose. If we can make it, we'll be there. You're invited to our wedding, too, but that's next summer and we don't have a date yet. Want to be one of my ushers?" I asked. "My college roommate is my best man, and you've been my army roommate for a couple of years. Why not?"

He laughed. "Love to. Are there going to be any other brothers at the wedding?", he asked.

I just grinned. "Oh, man, it's going to be whiter than a Klan meeting!"

Harlan just laughed loudly at that, and Anna Lee giggled. Predictably, Marilyn was horrified at my statement. "I can't believe you said that! You're such a ... a..."

I just shook my head at her. "I am many things, babe, but that ain't one of them." Harlan and his lady were looking at me in confusion. I turned to them and said, "Marilyn is convinced that since I am a Caucasian male born south of the Mason-Dixon Line, I am by birth and definition a racist, and that only Yankees have no prejudices."

"Oh, Lord!", groaned Harlan humorously. "What kind of a Yankee?"

"A New York Yankee!"

"They're the worst!", he laughed. He looked over at Marilyn and smiled. "You are aware that slavery was legal in New York until the 1820s, right?"

Marilyn looked like she had been slapped in the face with a dead fish. "No, that's not true!"

The rest of us just smiled and nodded. "1827, I believe. They weren't the last of the Yankee states, either. That was Connecticut, I think, and not for another twenty years or so, either.", I said. Marilyn looked at me and I said, "They teach this stuff in schools."

Harlan looked at me and grinned. "So, how many slaves did your family own, Carl?"

"None, as far as I know. Wrong type of land for that anyway.", I answered.

It was his turn to look surprised. "Shit, man, I was just joking. You mean your family might have been slave-owners?"

I shrugged. "Well, we got here in the 1750s, and Maryland was a slave state, so I suppose it's possible, but the land we owned wasn't suitable for that sort of farming. I have never heard of any branch of the family that ever owned any slaves, but I suppose it is theoretically possible. Hampton House is near where I grew up and it was a plantation with slaves, but the farming we did wasn't conducive to slavery."

"I'm not following you." Anna Lee looked at me curiously, too. Marilyn just couldn't believe the entire conversation.

"There's really only two crops that do well with slaves, cotton and tobacco, both of them high value and labor intensive. Most of the slaves at Hampton House worked in the barns and the main house. Nobody ever grew cotton or tobacco there, that's for sure." Harlan still looked confused, so he must not have that farmer gene in him. "Nobody's ever grown cotton in Maryland that I ever heard of. I suppose you could do it, but the big crops were always sweet corn and tobacco. Lots of tobacco was grown, still is, in fact, but it's all down in the southern part of the state, the flat and wet coastal piece. My family settled in the northern and western part of the state. It's all rolling hills there. Prime for corn and cows, lousy for tobacco.", I told him.

"You learn something every day, I suppose.", commented Harlan. "It's not just cotton and tobacco, though. In Mississippi they also raised rice and sugar, and both used slaves."

I gave my friend a funny look. "Okay, rice I can understand, but sugar? They grew sugar down there?"

He nodded. "Not any longer, but yeah. Now it's all grown overseas or Hawaii or some damn place. We raise sugar beets, though."

"Huh! I'd have never figured on that. I guess I learned something new, too. Makes sense, though, both crops are labor intensive, and sugar is certainly high value. Anyway, like I said, I don't think my family ever owned any slaves, but I can't honestly say it's because we're so morally superior. More like it just didn't make any sense." I just gave a wry shrug.

"There are times I can't believe you.", exclaimed Marilyn. "How can you be so, so, normal about this?"

I just shrugged. "I never said I approved of it. These are just historical facts, honey. Just like the fact that I had a relative on the southern side of the Civil War, as well as one on the northern side. It wasn't like all the southerners in the war owned slaves. I'd be willing to bet that the majority didn't." I held my hands up in a helpless gesture. "It is what it is. It's our generation that has to make it right."

Anna Lee nodded. "It's getting better already. Ten years ago, we probably couldn't have been in the same restaurant with you. Certainly not back home in Mississippi!"

"Wait and see.", I told my fiancée. "In my father's time that was normal. In our generation we know better. Our children and our grandchildren simply won't understand what the fuss was all about." I grinned at them. "They'll have found some other reason to hate people by then!"

That earned me a few rolled eyes and groans, but nobody disagreed with me either.

"Your family happy to see you in the army?", I asked.

Harlan shrugged. "They're okay with it. What they're happy with is that I went to college, even if I do have to go into the army because of it. I'm the first Buckminster to ever go to college, let alone graduate. The idea of becoming an officer is almost like a fairy tale to them."

"Farmers?" It almost sounded like my father's story.

He shrugged again. "Used to be, but there's a new mill outside of Buckminster and Daddy works there."

"The town is named after you?"

Harlan grinned at that. "Not precisely. Buckminster is the county seat of Buckminster County."

I stared at him. "The county is named after you?"

"The county is named after Colonel Rufus J. Buckminster, who was the richest man in that part of Mississippi about 150 years ago or so. One of the reasons the Colonel was so wealthy was the large number of slaves he owned."

It took me a second to figure out what Harlan was saying, and he laughed at the shock on my face. "Don't tell me..."

"You got it, cracker! The Colonel was known to like the dark meat at Thanksgiving."

"Holy shit!" I thought about it for a second. I'd heard of that sort of thing happening, slaves taking the last names of their masters and/or parents. "Does it ever make you feel funny, knowing you're named after this guy?"

"They're long, long gone. I never give it no nevermind. Give us another hundred years and we'll be owning them."

"Holy shit!"

We got off the topic, which had certainly made Marilyn think, and started discussing wedding plans. That was much safer, although incredibly boring to both Harlan and me.

It was Anna Lee who solved my biggest problem. Harlan asked Marilyn, "How are you getting home? We both drove, but Carl said you only had his car."

"I don't know yet. I have to find an airport. Is there one here?", she asked.

I looked at her blankly. "Probably the nearest is Oklahoma City. I think I'll have to drive you there tomorrow after class, but I don't know when. You may have to stay the night there and get a cab to the airport."

Harlan answered, "Lawton has one, with service to Dallas, supposed to be pretty good, too. At least that's what I was told back at school."

Anna Lee piped up. "Why don't I take you there, tomorrow? I'm leaving anyway. I'll just drive home from there."

I looked at Marilyn and nodded to her. "I can call there after dinner and see about getting you a flight home."

"If it isn't any trouble...", said Marilyn.

Anna Lee waved it off. "We'll spend the time talking about our jerk boyfriends and the Army. Christ, we'll probably spend another two days doing that!"

Harlan looked at me and said, "We're in trouble now!"

I gave him a wry smile in return and said, "No shit!" I leaned forward and said to him conspiratorially, "Speaking of civil rights, our mistake wasn't giving women the vote. It was teaching them to speak!" Harlan laughed while Marilyn and Anna Lee squawked and pelted me with rolls.

After dinner I spent some time showing Marilyn just how much I'd be missing her. Then, the next morning, I rolled out of bed, put on the uniform of the day (starched and pressed fatigues), and packed my remaining stuff into my B4. I kissed Marilyn goodbye and took off. I paid the bill but told the clerk Marilyn was leaving later in the morning. Harlan showed up at the desk just as I was leaving, so I waited for him and then we took our two car convoy over to the base. It was time to become an artilleryman.

Artillery school was interesting, and it really meshed with my love for math. Artillery is killing by the numbers, in so many ways. Artillery is called the King of Battle; about 60+% of all casualties come from the big guns throwing the big shells. It's very demoralizing, too. You can shoot back at tanks and infantry and airplanes, but when you're being shelled, you just dig in and pray.

It's all numbers in the way it operates. You are shooting at targets you never see, being called on the radio by people you never know, and doing it all with maps and trigonometry. Do it right and the bad guys die. Do it wrong, screw up the math, fuck up the numbers, and the good guys die. Very, very bad. Even the actual process is by the numbers. You set up the gun, and then it's an intricate dance, a ballet of death, to load the gun, fire the gun, and clean out the gun. One, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, all done to a metronome of destruction. You do this until the bad guys die, and then you get a new target, change the settings, and it's back to one, two, three.

The shells we fired did all sorts of things. Some were just big steel tubs full of explosives that blew up when they got somewhere. Some shells laid out smoke or started fires. There was something called a canister shell, which was very much like a shotgun shell, in case the bad guys were coming over the hill towards you and you needed a really big shotgun blast. (After that, pull your pistol and run away - you're fucked!) They had chemical shells (we didn't use them, but they exist) that put out nerve gas and equally awful things. There were even nuclear shells for the biggest guns, which fired an atomic bomb! (I do not want to be around when they start firing those things off, because you will be on the receiving end of something similar before you ever get a chance to unass the position and move out.) We learned about different levels of fire and different types of fuses and how it all worked.

Nobody calls on the artillery to do happy things. We don't do reconnaissance, we don't patrol, we don't spy, we don't hand out presents and food. If somebody calls for us, it means somebody else is about to die very messily, generally by our throwing something very big and very nasty a very long way at them.

At Artillery Officer School, junior officers like myself learn the math involved, learn the techniques to call in arty strikes, shoot the cannons, and act as forward observers. We have medium-size guns like 105s, big guns like 155s, and monstrously big guns like 8 inchers. You don't want me pissed at you! I will fuck up your whole damn day! We also learned about trucks, which surprised me until I thought about it. You have to haul the suckers around, along with all the gear and ammo and gun bunnies running them. The motor pool in a typical battery is larger than the gun section. Some of the guns come mounted on tracks, as armored versions. We were reminded of the importance of the care and feeding of our guns, though, even when they were motorized, with the admonition, "If the gun don't work, gentlemen, all you'll have is a 53 ton portable radio."

Lots of math and lots of trigonometry are involved. In 1977 they were getting away from using slide rules and some books of tables to do the work. We also had a TI-59 calculator just like I had at RPI my senior year, with some extra ROM chips and slide cards, but they could be temperamental outside of the classroom. The programming for them was actually a version of Assembly language. With my background in math and computers, I was actually spending a lot of time tutoring my fellow students after class. Still, I was definitely happy with my intended field. Armies like cannon-cockers. Some of the great generals had very extensive artillery backgrounds, like Napoleon. Another famous artillery general was Anthony 'Nuts' McAuliffe. He was the guy commanding the 101st at Bastogne, and was the division's artillery boss. When summoned by the Germans to surrender after being surrounded, he replied "Nuts!" and then went on to win the battle.

Most of the great military academies of the world, like Sandhurst and West Point, were created to teach military engineering. They taught one of two things: One, how to attack a fort using cannons or, Two, how to design and defend a fort against a cannon attack.

The other thing we learned at Fort Sill was what was quaintly called 'Customs of the Service.' In other words, all the things somebody decided that 22 year old Second Lieutenants needed to know. This was important stuff, like:

Don't get drunk in the officer's club and piss in the potted palms.

Don't get drunk in the officer's club and puke on your commanding officer's shoes.

Don't get drunk in the officer's club and hit on your commanding officer's wife.

Don't get drunk in the officer's club and hit on your commanding officer's teenage daughter.

With some of my classmates, this stuff needed to be explicitly laid out and explained. I knew better, and Harlan was pretty much an upright citizen, but some of these guys had just been released from a zoo.

Harlan and I were good boys, and for the next six months we studied hard, partied little, and made numerous phone calls home to our sweethearts. Marilyn came out for a short visit before she had to go back to school in the fall, and so did Anna Lee. Mostly, though, we studied. The theory was that if you did well in school, when it came time to hand out assignments, the Army would be good to the people at the top of the standings. Most of the students had already received their eventual assignments, but not all, and if you fucked up in class the Army would be happy to reassign you. The guy at the bottom was probably about to guard an ammo dump in Antarctica. Harlan and I hadn't received our assignments prior to the start of school, and they weren't announced until graduation. I ended up Number One and Harlan ended up Number Two. Harlan got a nice dream assignment for himself, assignment to a mechanized 155 battery at Fort Hood in Texas with the First Cavalry, a top notch armored division. I figured as the winner, and with a doctorate in applied mathematics, I would be assigned to my dream assignment, a lab slot at the Aberdeen Proving Grounds in Maryland, back in my old stomping grounds.

The ways of the Army are mighty and mysterious. I was going to Fort Bragg, the 319th Airborne Field Artillery with the 82nd Airborne. Maybe that stint at jump school hadn't been my smartest move!

Somehow I didn't think Marilyn was going to approve.

Chapter 48: Fort Bragg Redux

There was one other guy in the class, Clarence Bodecker, going to Fort Bragg, assigned to the 321st Field Artillery, and thankfully, he didn't have a car. I dug him up and made a deal, I would rent the cargo van and carry both our gear, if he would drive my car. He didn't have all that much crap, but he had no way to get it there, and I needed to move and drive a car. This way Marilyn wouldn't have to fly out and do the cross country trip again. We were to report in on Monday, December 5th, so we had about a week after graduation to drive there.

It's a fairly simple drive, although it takes fucking forever. Oklahoma City to Little Rock to Memphis to Birmingham to Atlanta to Columbia toFayetteville. Interstates most of the way, although we had to take US-78 between Memphis and Birmingham (which really sucked - terrible road!) We could do it in two long days of driving; instead it took us five! We drove the first day to Little Rock, at which point Clarence decided we needed to stop, and he got drunk in the motel bar. We spent the day in Little Rock while Clarence got over his hangover, and then on Day Three drove to Atlanta. We had an encore performance of Clarence's drinking problems that evening and ended up spending Day Four in Atlanta while he recuperated. Day Five we made it to Fayetteville, and by then I had decided that if I ever was in an airplane with Clarence, I would unhook his static line!

That Saturday I found a storage locker and moved most of my stuff in there, while retaining what I wanted for the BOQ in the back of the Impala. I kept my mouth shut with Clarence while we moved our gear and got rid of the panel van, and then we made our way back to the motel. He had me drop him off at a used car lot on the way back. At that point I politely cut him loose, in the fervent but silent hope we would never run across each other again.

Since I wasn't really an impressionable young kid who couldn't figure out how to scratch his ass, I knew a lot more about airborne operations than the average second john. What I knew did not fill me with confidence. I wondered just how much of a hole I had dug for myself by earning my jump wings.

The 82nd Airborne Division is probably the most famous and exclusive division in the US Army. Most of the time it is called an 'elite' division. When there is an article in the paper or on the news, it's not referred to as 'the 82nd Airborne Division', it's referred to as 'the elite 82nd Airborne Division.' They should have trademarked the name and charged to use the phrase. You can't even apply to join unless you've graduated from jump school, and a lot of the time, the feeling is given out that if they want you, they'll let you know. I'm not quite sure what I was doing there, other than the fact that I had jump school under my belt. Maybe they needed another cannon cocker. Otherwise I was just another very young and very junior officer.

It was certainly very flattering to be honored with entry into this famed institution, but I knew too much about airborne operations to be totally comfortable with it. The fact of the matter is that paratroop operations are very questionable at best. The 82nd and the 101st brag about how they helped win D-Day by dropping into France ahead of everybody else, and tying up German operations, but the history of the Normandy invasion shows quite a different result. Yes, they tied up the Germans, but they suffered horrible losses and casualties, and the Germans they allegedly tied up were actually held back by the orders of Hitler. Throughout the war, airborne operations were plagued by high casualties and questionable results. D-Day, Sicily, Market-Garden, Crete, Finland - they all had the same mixed results.

Looked at from a cost-benefit analysis viewpoint, paratroop operations were remarkably inefficient! If the entire idea is to deliver infantry troops in an organized and effective manner capable of quickly commencing combat operations, the airborne fails in almost every regard. When guys jump out of a lot of airplanes, their groups get mixed up, they land all over creation, there's a lot of injuries, and the troops that land are predominately light infantry troops without a lot of armor or artillery support.

On the other hand, there are those who argue that some of those same operations were saved by airborne troops, and that some of the other operations failed because of other reasons. That's why other people then me wear stars and get paid the big bucks. No matter who's right, the paratroopers take a beating, no matter what!

Consider instead that rather than invest the hundreds of millions of dollars it cost to develop airborne capability during World War II, perhaps a better investment would have been heavy armor (a better tank than the Sherman would have been a Godsend!) or increased numbers of fighter-bombers. The same argument could also be made of long range heavy bombers like the Flying Fortress, which took horrendous losses and could barely hit a target the size of a city.

On the plus side, airborne capability is a must for special operations troops. Special Forces, the Rangers, and Delta Force all draw heavily on troopers who learned their trade in the 82nd. Likewise the techniques learned at Bragg and Benning's jump school influence the Navy SEALs and Marine Force Recon. As infantry, paratroopers are superb, the best in the world. Further, the 82nd was set up so that at least part of the division could be airborne inside of two hours and anywhere on the planet inside of 24. When the President decided that some jackass somewhere was acting too big for his britches, he had the ability to send them directly to his Presidential Palace at a moment's notice and stick a lot of very nasty and heavily armed people up said jackass' rectum.

To compensate for the fact that once they're on the ground the troopers are basically leg infantry, the Army has figured out how to also parachute in a variety of heavy support for them. They can drop artillery, trucks, jeeps, and even tanks. Well, tanks don't airdrop so well, they tend to be too heavy to parachute and tend to fall straight to the ground and make a huge mess when they crash. The Army even developed a special lightweight tank, the Sheridan, with aluminum armor that didn't work all that great, and even it was a touch too heavy to drop from a parachute. What they developed instead was a LAPES system, a Low Altitude Parachute Extraction System, where they strapped a tank to a pallet in the back of a cargo plane, and then flew that plane down a runway or a road inches off the ground. At the proper moment, they toss a chute out the back of the bird and it drags the pallet with the tank on it out the ass of the airplane. It's still damn exciting, but it's a lot safer than trying to drop it from a parachute.

Still, the absolute last thing the airborne actually wants to do is to actually have to jump out of an airplane! The perfect operation would have just a small detachment of pure paratroopers, like Rangers or a parachute infantry company, drop onto an enemy airport and seize control before the bad guys know what's going on. Then the rest of us swoop in fifteen minutes later, before the bad guys have a chance to have an argument with our guys, and drop off everybody else, in perfect working order and no injuries. They walk off the airplanes just like they walked on, organized, safe, and combat ready. AIRBORNE!

I was to report for duty at 0900, so I drove in at 0830 and followed the road signs to In-Processing. As an artilleryman, I was being assigned to Division Artillery, a brigade- level command including the 1st Battalion, 319th Airborne Field Artillery Regiment, '1st of the 319th' as it was called and two other battalions with different numbers. I had been to Bragg twice before, during ROTC training, but they don't bring you near the real army, so I got a bit lost and almost ended up in the wrong building. Bragg is huge, with headquarters for the 82nd, the XVIIIth Airborne Corps, 1st Corps Support Command, and several HQ elements for units stationed elsewhere. I found the right place and parked in a visitor's spot and went inside.

Back when I got my orders for the 319th, I also got a packet from my future owners. It had a variety of letters, mostly form letters welcoming me to the 82nd and the 319th, but there was one I needed to read for sure. When I got to the Replacement Company at DivArty, I was to dig up my 'sponsor'. It was a lot like visiting any big company, in that you go up to a counter and ask where to go, although in this case most of the people are wearing fatigues and jump boots. At the Replacement Company a phone call was made to my 'sponsor', a first lieutenant already in the 319th. He came along and greeted me. "Welcome, my name is Stinson. I'll help run you through and get you where you're going."

"Yes, sir. Thank you, sir."

He smiled and nodded. "You can cut the sir's down to one every hour or so. My first name is Jack. Welcome to the Replacement Company. You belong to them for a few days. They will process you into the system." He then handed me a garrison cap with an Airborne flash and a butterbar on it. "Lose the bus driver's hat. We wear cunt caps in the Airborne." The fore-and-aft, or garrison, cap is known to one and all as the cunt cap, basically because that's what it looks like from a certain angle. I settled it on my head, and he smiled. "Airborne!"

I laughed and gave the proper return - "All the way!"

I was then turned me over to a Spec 4, along with a very thorough check-in list. I really was going to belong to him for the next week! There was a lot of paperwork, I had to get a BOQ assignment, get a medical check (healthy), a dental check (one cavity), finance department (payroll details), and legal (up-to-date will). I also saw the MP office, got an orientation lecture with a few other butterbars, was taught about Fayetteville and the history of the area and the Airborne. Surprisingly I never saw Clarence Bodecker; he was either at a different Replacement Company, or he was nursing another hangover.

I think the worst part was the shot line. The 82nd is ready to deploy at a moment's notice anywhere in the world. Because of that, everybody needs to be inoculated against every disease known to mankind! Said diseases included, but were not limited to, cholera, typhoid fever, yellow fever, dengue fever, and bubonic plague! Personally, I think the theory is that if they don't make you sick, then you can become a paratrooper. I spent the next day as sick as a dog, but still had to go through with my orientation procedure. For real fun, I was informed that this was a requirement once a quarter. I was pretty sure that Harlan, at Fort Hood, had a better deal going on! This would become a recurring event.

One week later, Stinson grabbed me as I finished with the Replacement Company and it was time to join the 319th. First we reported to DivArty, and processed me in there, and then from DivArty we went to the 319th, where we repeated the process. Then a captain found us, and looked us over, then turned to me. "Reporting in, Lieutenant?", he asked pleasantly.

"Yes, sir."

"Well, follow me. You can make your manners to the colonel." He came around the counter and we followed him down the hallway to a closed door. He knocked on the door, and at the muffled, 'Come!', from the other side, he turned the knob. "You're on!", he said with a smile.

We marched into the office and I saw a lieutenant colonel sitting at a desk. On the desk was a small sign saying, 'Lieutenant Colonel Marchlight.' Both Stinson and I marched and came to attention, and saluted, and then I said, "SECOND LIEUTENANT BUCKMAN, CARLING P., REPORTING FOR DUTY, SIR!"

The colonel smiled at the captain for a moment and then looked back at me. He waved a hand sketchily in the direction of his forehead and said, "As you were, Lieutenant." Then he pointed at some chairs and said, "Have a seat, gentlemen."

Both the captain, Stinson, and I grabbed a chair and brought it to the desk, and then sat down. The captain spoke first, "Lieutenant Buckman is reporting in, sir."

Lieutenant Colonel Marchlight grunted, and said, "Welcome to the 1st of the 319th. Just finished at Sill, Lieutenant?"

"Yes, sir, just over two weeks ago, sir."

"You his sponsor, Stinson?"

"Yes, sir.", replied Stinson. That was the only time Stinson was asked anything or responded in the meeting.

Marchlight nodded again. He looked over at the captain, named Hudson by the nametag on his uniform. "What's the plan for Lieutenant Buckman?"

Captain Hudson replied, "Bravo Battery, sir."

Marchlight grunted and gave a touch of a distasteful look, and said, "Well, they need you, that's for sure. Battery B is Captain Harris' outfit. What was your ranking at Sill?"

"Top of my class, sir." The colonel glanced over at Hudson, who shuffled through some papers in a file and just nodded.

"Well, you'll do well, then. Captain Hudson will sort you out and take you over there. Just learn your job and do it well, and we'll never have a problem."

"Yes, sir."

"Very good. Now, I know they teach you that after checking in, at some point you're supposed to visit my home and be social. You may consider that done."

"Yes, sir. Airborne!"

He nodded at Hudson again, who stood up and signaled for me to do the same. Stinson popped up as well. We put our chairs back where they were, and the colonel shook my hand before dismissing us.

Once we were back out in the hallway, Captain Hudson said, "Okay, that's done. I'm the S-1, by the way. What's going to happen next is that I will introduce you to your new boss."

"Yes, sir."

"Come along."

We left the building and walked two buildings back, to another building. I followed Hudson inside and into an office. He immediately said, "As you were.", and nobody got up. "Captain Harris available?", he asked, to nobody in particular.

A Spec 4 answered, "Let me check, sir." He went to an office and knocked, and then opened the door without waiting for an answer. He mumbled something, and then stepped back. "Go on in, Captain."

"Thank you." He motioned me after him and I repeated my reporting-in salute with Captain Harris. We went through the same rigmarole, in which Harris welcomed me to the battery. After the last week I was looking forward to actually being in my battery. So far I had simply been shuffling paper.

If I thought I was going to start working in Battery B immediately, I was promptly disabused of this notion. It was back to school for me! I was to go to Jumpmaster School almost immediately, which I had never even heard of until now. Jumpmaster School was supposed to teach me everything I needed to know to be an expert in jumping out of an airplane. I thought that was what Jump School was supposed to do, but what did I know; I was a just a dumbass second john. It seemed that all officers and noncoms (at least at the sergeant on up levels) must qualify as a jumpmaster to be considered qualified. Captain Harris turned me over to Lieutenant Brimley, who in turn dumped me onto the battalion's S-3. I did five jumps by the end of the week, and that qualified me for the two week Jumpmaster School.

In order to be current as a paratrooper, you need to make at least one jump every three months. What surprised the hell out of me was how they did it - by chopper! The first time it happened I was trucked out to a drop zone, where I was handed a chute and loaded into a Chinook. The CH-47 is a heavy lift helicopter powerful enough to carry howitzers in a belly sling, and large enough to carry several dozen fully equipped paratroopers. This was my first jump from a chopper, and the first time I did it, I asked why. I was told that it was quite common. For one thing, when the Air Force dropped Army paratroopers, the Army had to pay the Air Force for the privilege, and the accounting was a nightmare. If the Army drops the guys, it's a whole lot simpler. Furthermore, since the chopper is moving at a much slower speed, and can pick and hover over good drop zones, it's a whole lot safer for the troops. Operationally, it's a lot like jumping from a Herky-Bird - they drop the back ramp and you take a short walk with a really big last step.

Jumpmaster School teaches you how to send other people out the door. You learn to give jump commands and run a jump. The big thing is to be able to inspect a jumper visually in about a minute and make sure they can jump safely, without killing themselves and everybody else in the process. I passed, which most don't, at least not on the first go, and was sent back to the battery the third week in January.

That next Monday morning I returned to Battery B. Once there, the same Spec 4 who had showed Hudson and me into Captain Harris' office, greeted me and told me to take a seat. Captain Harris was in a meeting and would be out in a few minutes. He pointed at a sidebar and said, "Coffee, sir?"

The curse of the modern military is coffee. It runs on it even more than fuel! If we ever invade Colombia, it won't be because of drugs, it will because Juan Valdez decided to fuck with the coffee! Unfortunately, I can't stand coffee! Tea is fine, but rather rare on an army base. Coffee is everything! "No thank you, Specialist." I sat down on an empty plastic office chair and picked up a week old copy of the Paraglide, the base newspaper, and started reading.

About forty minutes later the door to the office at the side opened up, and a first lieutenant, a second lieutenant, and a couple of sergeants came out, none of whom looked overly happy. Needless to say, I immediately rose to my feet. Captain Harris looked out his door and saw me, and then glanced over at the clerk, Specialist 4 Jones by the name sewn on his fatigues. He said, "The Lieutenant is back with us, sir."

"Yeah? Well, about time. Come on in." He yelled out, "Lieutenant Brimley, come on back in here!" The first lieutenant I had seen leave Captain Harris' office came out of his office and followed me into the battery commander's office.

Originally, artillery regiments were made up of three artillery battalions and a headquarters 'battalion', except that the Army had pretty much abandoned formal regimental structure in the Fifties. Now we had an artillery brigade made up of battalions from three different regiments, none of which actually existed anymore. Furthermore, each of those battalions was actually assigned directly to a parachute infantry brigade. Why they change these things every few years is beyond me.

Likewise, every artillery battalion is made up of three artillery batteries and a headquarters and support 'battery'. Each Airborne artillery battery is made up of a firing element of six guns, depending on usage and caliber, and a support element of everything else. In our case, Battery B, we had the requisition number of six M102 105 mm towed howitzers as the firing element. The support element is actually larger, manpower wise, than the firing element. You had the fire direction control center (who shoots what, and when, and at whom) as well as the motor pool and ammo supplies.

Equipment wise, Battery B pretty much had the regulation gear, although some of it was old. In fact, a lot of it had seen service in Vietnam. Also, according to the book we had about 125 enlisted personnel to fire the guns, drive the trucks, hump the ammo around, and tell us where and when to fire. Again, personnel wise, we had pretty much what we were supposed to have.

Again, according to the book, we had a proper command structure. DivArty was commanded by a full colonel, with a lieutenant colonel as his exec. His staff officers were all majors, although the S-3 was a light bird, too. This pattern continued down a layer, where the battalion was commanded by a light bird and had a major as an exec, with captains as the staff.

There are a lot of reasons for it, some good and some bad, for the fact that there are a lot more staff officers and positions than line officers. Whether you think it's a good thing or not, that's the way it works. They break down as follow:

S-1: Personnel and Administration - This is the equivalent of the Human Resources department at a corporation. The ultimate bureaucrats.

S-2: Intelligence - These guys are responsible for knowing what the bad guys are doing, what the bad guys think the good guys are doing, what the good guys are doing to hide what they are doing from the bad guys, what the bad guys are doing to hide what they are doing from the good guys - after awhile you have a major headache. Their motto - 'We bet your life!'

S-3: Operations and Training - If you've got to be a staff officer, be the S-3! These guys are responsible for actually giving the orders when the commander makes a decision. A good turn as the S-3 is critical to becoming an exec or commander somewhere down the pike. During combat ops, the position is often held by a top subordinate unit commander or the exec. Career line officers want to be the S-3. Remember the line from Orwell about all pigs being equal, but some being more equal than others? The S-3 is more equal than the others!

S-4: Logistics and Supply - Very boring, very critical. Everything you will ever need comes from the supply department. Almost every major military disaster in recorded history has resulted from a general who ignored supply problems. Another popular saying is that amateurs study tactics, professionals study logistics.

Lastly, according to the book, a light artillery battery like Battery B was supposed to have five officers, a commanding officer, an executive officer, a fire direction officer, and two platoon leaders. In practice, a captain was the CO, a first lieutenant was the XO, and three second lieutenants split up the other jobs. (Batteries don't have staff officers.) For instance, the six howitzers might be split up into three two-gun platoons, each under the command of a second john, while the exec runs the other stuff. Also possible, two of the second johns might control three-gun platoons, leaving the third second lieutenant to control the motor pool, etc.

What we had didn't quite match the book. We had Captain Harris as the commander, First Lieutenant Brimley as the exec, and Second Lieutenant Goldstein.

Oh, yeah, and me.

In the most amazing division of labor, I was assigned to control all six howitzers, while Goldstein was assigned to control our motor pool, with the exec running the fire direction center. After only a few days it became obvious why this was being done in this fashion - Second Lieutenant Goldstein was hopelessly incompetent! Despite frequent (and frequently loud!) counseling from First Lieutenant Brimley and Captain Harris, Second Lieutenant Goldstein could be counted on to fuck up anything assigned to him. At least in the motor pool he couldn't shoot a truck at the good guys!

Battery B had had a year of simply terrible luck with their second lieutenants. They had three a year ago, all straight out of AOC, all with high hopes. One had managed to land in the trees and break a leg, and after getting out of the hospital, had transferred to a motorized artillery regiment. One had been caught driving drunk and been cashiered. The third was Second Lieutenant Goldstein, who was well on his way to an OER (Officer's Efficiency Report) that would see him assigned to a mess kit repair company in Duluth, Minnesota, if he was lucky. I was to be the first, hopefully, of a string of new second lieutenants who would bring Battery B back to the path of righteousness.

Nothing like a little pressure on the new job!

Anyway, by the middle of January I was learning my job in a real battery. I also had my list of jobs, which was daunting indeed. I was the junior officer in the battery, so in addition to my 'real' job as platoon leader of six howitzers, I also had what Robert A. Heinlein called the 'George' jobs, all the shit jobs that get dumped on somebody. I was morale officer, welfare officer, pay officer, recreation officer, public relations officer, community liaison officer ... you get the idea. Some of these items took up very little time (public relations officer) and some were major league pains in the balls (pay officer), but they all had to be done. I was glad Marilyn wasn't around, since I wasn't sure if 24 hours in a day would be sufficient.

On the plus side, well, I wasn't some dumb shit kid barely old enough to shave. While I might look like just another junior officer, I had been running small outfits most of my life. It wasn't that I didn't make mistakes, but that I had made every conceivable mistake in another lifetime! I didn't make the same mistake twice, and while I hadn't been in the military before, I had been a foreman and sales manager and most other forms of manager over the years. If there was a way to fuck up, I had done it over the years. Now I could learn from my own mistakes. I also knew the men would be looking for a way to test me. I wasn't too terribly worried. I had been in similar jobs before, I had a thick skin, and a decent sense of humor.

One of the major mistakes made by junior officers is that they think that since they're officers, they must be smarter than the enlisted men. So, you get a 22 year old Second Lieutenant trying to tell an E-7 Sergeant First Class who might be old enough to be his father how to do things. I knew better. You tell the SFC what you want to do - politely - and then ask his opinion of how to do it. If you're really smart, you keep your own fucking mouth shut in the meantime! Another big mistake is that they ignore the chain of command and start directly telling the enlisted men what to do. The chain of command is there for a reason - use it! Like I said, I had fucked up by the numbers 50 years ago; I didn't need to repeat the experience.

The Army, was transitioning between a mostly conscript army to an all volunteer army. The 82nd was a volunteer outfit even during the draft era, simply because all paratroopers are volunteers. We had generally higher quality troops compared to the rest of the Army. Still, pay was low and standards were low. The big changes wouldn't come for a few more years. One of the big changes in the Eighties was the rise in pay and standards. A few years before, I remember being told, the pay officer needed to do his job while wearing his .45, locked and cocked! I never had to do that. We had gone to direct deposit a few years before I got there.

Towards the end of January, that Thursday morning, I came into the battery office at 0700 and found the Captain already there drinking coffee with the battery sergeant, Sergeant First Class Hammersmith, and Spec 4 Jones, one of the clerks. I glanced at the wall clock and then looked at the Captain. "Am I late sir?" He normally didn't show for another fifteen minutes or more.

"Just got out of the house early. You have no idea how much racket a baby can make in the morning.", he said with a smile. The Captain had just become a father for the second time that spring.

I smiled at that. Oh, if you only knew! "And if I'm very careful, I won't for a very long time."

That got an amused snort out of the Captain. I made some tea and set it on my desk, which was in the back corner of the battery office. Only the commanding officer, the exec, and the battery sergeant got their own offices. The captain followed me over. He pointed at a big envelope on my desk with a return label on it from RPI. "What's that?", he asked.

"Not quite sure. It must be from my school, I didn't have an address, so I simply gave them the 319th's name here at Bragg. I'll make sure they get a proper address, sir."

He just nodded. "No biggie. They're probably already asking you to contribute to the alumni fund."

I picked it up and starting opening it with a mini-Gerber combat knife I used as a letter opener. "When do they start hitting up the graduates of Hudson High for that sort of thing?", I asked. Captain Harris was a graduate of West Point, also known as 'Hudson High.' He just laughed at that. I slit open the large packet and then eyed it curiously. "It's what I thought, sir.", I commented with a nod. "My faculty adviser and I were putting together a paper and these are the final edits."

"What is it!?"

"Well, this is my dissertation.", I said, dropping a thick packet onto my desk, and then set a separate packet next to it, along with a number of loose sheets with formulas and graphs on them. "And this is a paper my professor and I wrote based on the work, with both our names on it, for publication later next month. We've been working on it all summer and fall." I was talking to myself as much as the captain as I looked the pages over. Then I remembered he was still standing there. "My apologies, Captain. I'll work on this at home this evening." I started collecting up the papers.

He looked at me funny. "Your dissertation? You mean, like a doctoral dissertation?" He picked up my dissertation and looked at it.

"Yes, sir." I was curious about his reaction. This stuff must have been in my personnel file, but maybe he hadn't read it. (Did a CO actually get to see his subordinates' 201 files? I had no idea.) Maybe I was just another ROTC second john to him.

"You're a doctor?", he asked incredulously.

"PhD, applied mathematics, sir. That was my thesis."

He looked at my thesis and read the title. "Entropic Considerations in Network Topologies? What the hell is that? No, don't tell me, I hated math." I gave him a wry look at that. By now most of the others in the office, including Lieutenant Brimley and SFC Hammersmith, were listening in as well. "How old are you, Lieutenant?"

"Twenty-two, sir."

"You're telling me that you're only 22 and you already have a PhD? What the hell are you doing here?"

I just grinned at him. "Defending North Carolina from the Red Menace, sir!"

That earned me some laughs from the noncoms, and Captain Harris replied, "The only Red Menace around here, Lieutenant, is the mud you keep tracking in here." He handed me back the packet. "And your teacher wants you to present a paper on this?"

"Well, actually, Professor Rhineburg will be presenting it, but my name is on it since I did the research."

"Huh. Did you get clearance for this?", he asked.

"Excuse me? Clearance, sir?" What was he talking about?

"All publications need to be cleared ahead of time, at least at the battalion level and usually at the division level.", he told me.

"Sir? This is my dissertation! I did this back when I was in college. I wasn't even commissioned when I did this work!", I protested.

He just shrugged. "What's in there, the nuclear launch codes?"

"No, sir, it's about designing a computer network."

"Well, I'll make a call or two. Don't sweat it. I doubt they'll stand you against a wall because of this. It will probably only be time at Leavenworth." The enlisted guys and Brimley chuckled at this, and the captain topped off his coffee and headed into his office.

Spec 4 Jones immediately chimed in. "So, Ell-Tee, you're a doctor?"

"Of mathematics."

"Does that mean we get to call you Doc?", he asked with a laugh.

I should have known this was going to happen, and I needed to nip it in the bud. You can't have the men calling you by a nickname; it degrades their respect for the rank. I moved back around my desk and stepped right up to him. "No, Specialist Jones, it does not. You may call me Lieutenant or Sir, is that understood?"

He was surprised to find me in his face like that, and he stammered out, "Uh, yeah, sure."

"What did you say?"

"Yes, sir, Lieutenant, understood, sir.", he answered, coming to attention.

"Much better." I stepped back and glanced at his desk, and noted that he had the PT, or physical training, schedule on his desk, ready for posting. "What's on the schedule for tomorrow?", I asked rhetorically.

"Conditioning Drill 1, followed by a five mile run, sir.", he answered.

That was indeed what was written. "I think there's a misprint, here, Specialist. I think it says an All American mile." An 'All American mile' is 8.2 miles, so named for the 82nd's nickname as the 'All American' division.

Jones looked confused, and took the schedule from my hands. "Uh, no sir..."

"I love to run, don't you, Specialist. I'm sure it was supposed to be an All American run. I'll let you tell everyone to make sure they know, and that you've volunteered to lead the run. I think that shows great spirit. Don't you agree, Sergeant Hammersmith?"

Sergeant First Class Hammersmith simply grinned. "Great spirit, sir!"

"I look forward to it, Specialist!"

I sat down at my desk and bundled up my dissertation, and I heard the sergeant tell the Spec 4, with a laugh, "Nice work, Jonesy, the guys are going to love you!"

Lieutenant Brimley had been watching this from his open doorway, but he didn't say anything to them or to me, and I think if he thought I was out of line, he would have called me into his office and chewed on me a bit. The next morning more than a few jokes were made at Spec 4 Jones' expense about the longer run. Then again, we were young and tough paratroopers; it wasn't something we couldn't do in our sleep.

You run at a pace called double time, but you would break up the run on occasion at a march pace called quick time. During quick time you can sing a cadence, usually named a jody call. At that point, with Jones leading, he sang the cadence, and used this as his chance to get back at me in a novel way, by calling me 'Doc' in the cadence. A cadence is a rhythmic song that the leader sings and then the troops sing back as they run. It keeps time and keeps them amused.

Leader

Runners

"Hey! Hey! All the way,"

"Hey! Hey! All the way,"

"Doc loves to run every day."

"Doc loves to run every day."

"If he was President and had his way,"

"If he was President and had his way,"

"There wouldn't be a fat man in the Army today."

"There wouldn't be a fat man in the Army today."

"Sound off!"

"One, Two!"

"Sound off!"

"Three, Four!"

"Sound off!"

"One, Two - Three, Four!"

The 'Sound Off' lines serve as the chorus after every four line stanza. There are any number of lyrics and songs and verses, most being insulting to someone, especially other services or branches of the Army, and many are hilarious. Jonesy had to add me to the mix, so I returned the favor.

"Airborne arty's here to stay!"

"Airborne arty's here to stay!"

"Private Jones will lead the way!"

"Private Jones will lead the way!"

"He'd rather type than have some fun."

"He'd rather type than have some fun."

"But Private Jones just loves to run!"

"But Private Jones just loves to run!"

That cracked all of them up, especially since I was calling Spec 4 Jones Private Jones! Thereafter, however, my nickname around the battery, and ultimately the regiment, was 'Doc' or 'the Doc', although none of the men said it to my face. I could live with that.

Chapter 49: Bachelor Life

The 82nd is unique in its structure, which is organized around its equally unique readiness system. Alone among all the divisions in the Army, the 82nd is tasked with being able to send troops anywhere on the planet within 24 hours. The average division can take weeks to get ready to move. We do it in hours.

The heart of the division consists of three brigade combat teams; each brigade basically consists of three battalions of parachute infantry plus an Airborne field artillery battalion. Each battalion has three parachute infantry companies plus a battery assigned from the artillery battalion. There are also a variety of other outfits attached, such as engineers, medics, transport, and even a few chaplains who jump in with us. Technically most of these assets, including the artillery, belonged to the division and not the brigade, but that was the way it worked.

The division operates on an 18 week cycle, with each of the three brigades somewhere on a six week element of the cycle. When I arrived, 3rd Brigade was in the six weeks of ready cycle, which was unusual. Normally people transfer in and out during the support cycle. Support is the goof off time, when things are relaxed. People take leaves, officers and men transfer in and out, it's low pressure. It's like being in the regular army, with regular hours and duties.

After support, you go into a six week training cycle. This becomes a lot tougher. You are shooting the guns, maybe doing a jump or two, getting stuff ready to go, and working a lot longer hours. Forget about taking leave, but you'll probably still be able to sleep at home, and you might have to work some weekends.

After training you go to the six week ready cycle. You are ready to go to war. Forget about leave. Kiss the wife or girlfriend good-bye. Within the brigade, it gets even tougher. During the ready cycle of six weeks, each infantry battalion and its artillery battery are on two week cycles of readiness. You can go home, but you can't leave the area, and a lot of the guys stay on the base anyway. During that period, you can't be more than two hours away from going to war. In theory, when the shit hits the fan, they just want to issue you the ammo and load you on the airplane. You have two hours to get assembled and ready to go. All the equipment, ammo, rations, and whatever are pre-packaged and pre-positioned out at the ramps at all times. The other two battalions aren't much better, with four and six hour readiness periods. There are usually readiness drills and exercises to check to see if we are ready to go.

If the President decides that Lower Slobbovia needs to be taught a lesson, the ready battalion will load their planes and be airborne in two hours. No excuses. The rest of the brigade will be airborne in either four or six hours, and most likely the support elements will be gone inside a day. The training brigade gets moved up to the ready brigade; the support brigade supports this and gets ready to move out itself. Leaves are cancelled and all hell breaks loose. Lower Slobbovia is about to be visited by a shitload of teenagers with guns who just had their weekend plans trashed. Lower Slobbovia will wish they hadn't been visited!

You can make the cycle your friend, but don't ever try to buck the cycle. The cycle will always win.

On the other hand, it was very easy to make plans for anything short of war. We had calendars with six week blocks drawn on them, and you could make plans. For instance, my first week in the battery I discussed my impending nuptials with the captain, and was able to tell Marilyn when we could get married. I figured I would need two weeks leave, starting in the middle of the week. The wedding would be on a Saturday, so if I got off duty on a Wednesday before that, I could travel to Utica, do whatever I needed to do on Thursday or Friday, get married, have a week of honeymoon, and then be able to get Marilyn down to Fayetteville by Tuesday after getting back. Since I needed to do this during a support cycle that limited us to a wedding between July 2 and July 30 of this year. If we missed that window, we would have to wait 18 weeks for the cycle to repeat, putting us into November.

I wasn't all that hopeful. This all relied on Marilyn being organized enough to be able to get this taken care of in six months. Marilyn couldn't organize a church cake sale, let alone a wedding. The last time we did this, she postponed the wedding from June to September. Furthermore, she had to get used to the idea that the Army wasn't just going to let me take a weekend off to help. When Maggie got married, Marilyn tried to help and managed to lose, within 24 hours, all the lists and spreadsheets she had asked me to print out. Maggie ended up having me run the wedding. I didn't think it was all that difficult. Pick a date, find a church, find a reception hall, pick a budget. After that, it's just a matter of money. There are lots of banquet halls around Utica, lots of places to buy a dress, lots of limo companies. Just make a list and get it done!

Marilyn wasn't too pleased by my attitude, nor by the fact that I wouldn't be able to come up and help. How was I supposed to participate in pre-wedding counseling? I flat out told her I was a thousand miles away, and the last guy on the planet I was going to listen to about getting married was a guy who wasn't allowed to get married. If her priest required it, she could find another priest. She wanted to know if I was having any of her brothers be in my wedding party; I said I wasn't even having my own brother in it, so I didn't see any need to balance things out. She didn't push that one. I did promise to take some leave during the cycle before the wedding and visit, and we could see the priest then for some of the details.

I did manage to get her to set a date of July 9. The night after I got the schedule from the Captain, I had her call her priest and reserve the date. That date, and most of the others in the window were already taken, but not July 2. That was the date we selected.

After running that last Friday morning of January, Captain Harris got a phone call and summoned me into his office. "Buckman, I told battalion about your paper yesterday afternoon, and they booted it to division. You're to report to the G-2 at division at 1400."

I stared at the captain for a second. "Sir, it's just a report on mathematical techniques!"

"Well, I don't think that you're in trouble, but you need to go over there and find out. I won't let them shoot you without a few last words and a cigarette. My word on it!"

"Yes, sir." Oh, shit, now what! It was just a paper on math! The paper had already been accepted into the Journal of the American Mathematical Society, which I had joined, and which the professor was a long time member of. Furthermore, they were having their Eastern Seaboard Regional Meeting in February, and the professor was scheduled to deliver the lecture during a session on discrete mathematics.

At 1400 I found myself standing at attention in a colonel's office, while he and some captain quizzed me about the paper. How the hell do you explain discrete mathematics, information loss and entropy, and computer networking to people who never learned what a derivative or an integral was? (Okay, that's a bit extreme. They all had to take Calculus I, but by now they had all forgotten it.)

"Excuse me, sir, permission to ask a question?"

"Granted."

"What's going on, sir? Am I in some sort of trouble? This was my thesis, from before I took the oath.", I asked.

The colonel smiled at this. "You're not in any trouble, Lieutenant, far from it in fact."

"Sir?"

"Captain Summers here is from the Public Information Office. We don't get too many mathematical doctors around here and he wants to talk to you. This comes down from on high, too, so it would behoove you to cooperate."

"Cooperate, sir? With what?"

"Captain Summers will explain. Dismissed."

Both the PIO captain and I snapped to attention and saluted, and then left. Captain Summers dragged me back to his office and explained. Nobody seemed to mind the paper, and nobody in G-2, Intelligence, had flagged the paper because it was letting loose the nuclear secrets. Instead, it was a human interest piece for the post newspaper and probably the Army newspaper, the Army Times, the 22 year old PhD mathematician in the Airborne artillery.

My first thought was, "You're kidding me, right?"

No, it got better. Somebody got the bright idea that it was a really good idea for me, in my uniform, to attend the conference in February, in Washington no less, and have pictures of me being mathematical.

"Please, God, tell me you're kidding!", I reiterated. "I'm just a soldier, for God's sake!"

My attitude didn't impress the PIO officer. Astonishingly enough, this joker had actually gone through jump school, just like everybody else in the division. I guess if we ever needed a press release from inside a hot LZ, he would be there to write it for us. In fact, he picked up a phone, and used his authorization code to order up a long distance phone call, and had me call Professor Rhineburg. These guys really wanted this done! I don't know if they had somebody sitting in the professor's office, but he was actually there and not only gave me permission to attend, he wanted me to give the lecture, with him in the audience, and not the other way around. As the Navy says, somebody had greased the ways!

I went back to the battery is a state of shock. I sat down with Captain Harris and explained what had happened. Surprisingly, he wasn't all that surprised.

"Carl, you're pretty unusual. You're a 22 year old kid who has three degrees in math and jumps out of airplanes. That ain't exactly normal. Don't be surprised when somebody notices."

"Sir, I am about the most boring guy on the planet. I'm just trying to do my job."

"Well, the Army seems to think your job is going to include doing something with these scientists, so don't try to fight it. You should have some fun with it."

"Sir?" Fun? This sounded like a monumental pain in the ass!

"When is this thing?" I gave him the dates of the conference, the last week in February. "And who's going? Besides you, I mean."

I shrugged. "No idea. I guess this publicity guy, Captain Summers. Know anything about him?"

"Not a lick. So, you're going to DC, have some fun. It's not going against your leave, so take a few days. They want you there, have them lay on a plane or fly you there. Get separate rooms, and have some fun. There's no lectures at night, are there?"

"I wouldn't imagine so."

"Lots of time after hours for some wine, women, and song.", he replied.

"Sir, I'm engaged!"

"So, I won't tell her if you don't. You're a paratrooper. Just act like you're behind enemy lines and stay out of sight. Hell, if you have to, invite her along.", he said with a grin.

I opened my mouth to protest, and then shut it. I hadn't seen Marilyn very much since graduation, and the juices, so to speak, were backing up. She had flown out to Sill right before going back to school in the fall and that was it. I wasn't sure where we would be, but I'd spring for the room service! "You think we could?"

"L'audace, l'audace, toujours l'audace! Now, get lost, I have work to do!"

I thought about what he said. Before the day was over, I contacted the publicity guy and asked him some details about where we would stay (two separate rooms, the Hilton near Dupont Circle) and transportation (he'd see about laying on a flight) and Marilyn (yes, she can come; no, I don't want to know about her rooming arrangements). That night I called Marilyn to see if she could attend. It would be in the middle of the semester, but a few days in a luxury hotel might sway her mind, especially if I paid for the ticket.

And so it was that on the third Monday in February, after getting laughed at by Captain Harris and Lieutenant Brimley, and ignored by Lieutenant Goldstein, and being joked at in the cadence during our morning run, I found myself in an Air Force turboprop flying out of Pope Airfield at Bragg to Andrews in DC, along with my dress uniforms and Captain Summers. He was in the process of writing my acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in Mathematics already, and I had to gently let him know that Alfred Nobel's wife had cheated on him with a mathematician, and as a result Nobel hated mathematicians, and thus there was no Nobel Prize in Mathematics. I've heard that this is somewhat apocryphal, but it was considered common knowledge in the math business.

Marilyn was flying down at the end of classes, and would take a fair bit longer to get to Washington than I did. She would fly to New York and then catch the hourly Eastern shuttle to DC. Fortunately that landed at National, which is downtown, and not out at Dulles, at least a half hour further away. When she landed she was to call me and then take a cab in. I would meet her at the door and pay off the cabbie. It was still almost eight in the evening before she got there, looking somewhat bedraggled.

I gave her a big, long kiss, and said, "God, you look great!"

She looked in a mirror in the lobby and ran a hand through her hair. "I most certainly do not!"

"Are you hungry? Want some dinner?"

"Yes, but not until after I clean up. I think that was the dirtiest airplane I've ever been on!"

"You should try a Herky Bird flying out of a dirt strip.", I replied.

"I don't know what that means and I don't care. I want a shower."

"Might I suggest something from room service?" I asked, waggling my eyebrows.

"That sounds delightful, but I'll probably fall asleep." I didn't know if this was a yes or no, so I grabbed her two suitcases (we were only going to be there three nights, but she packed two large suitcases) and carried them to the elevator bank. Once in our room, I asked her about room service again, and showed her the menu, and she picked out a small steak. I insisted she unpack, and then called in our orders (two small steaks, medium rare, asparagus with Hollandaise sauce, bottle of champagne, chilled.) I then cleaned up the bedroom, put her empty suitcases in the back of the closet, and laid out something for her to wear to dinner.

I had the lights dimmed appropriately when Marilyn came back out. She had taken her time, too. I had heard the water shut off, but it had been at least ten or fifteen minutes since then before she appeared. She came out of the bedroom with a demure smile and asked, "I assume you wanted me to wear this?"

My heart pretty much stopped when I saw what she had on. I had managed to buy, through a catalog, a couple of nightgowns from Fredericks of Hollywood, and had packed them along. I had seen that she had a pair of white high heeled pumps in the closet, so I had placed them on the bed along with the white gown I had bought her. It was lacy and completely transparent and held together with only a single tie at the waist. She had on the gown and her white pumps and had taken the time to brush out her hair and put on some jewelry and a spray of perfume. She could have given a eunuch an erection!

I swallowed and nodded, not trusting my voice not to crack. "Wow!", I breathed out. I twiddled my fingers in a motion to make her turn around, and Marilyn slowly turned around, modeling the outfit, and more importantly, what was underneath. "The hell with dinner!", I told her, and came closer.

"I'm hungry!", she protested, backing up.

"I've got an appetizer for you!", I replied, slowly following her.

She laughed and kept moving backwards leading me around the room. I finally had her cornered in the bedroom, and had wrapped my arms around her, feeling that deliciously warm body under that almost nonexistent nightgown, when there was a knock on the door. "Room service!"

"Saved by the bell!", laughed Marilyn, pushing me away.

"Why don't you let him in?"

"In your dreams!" She pushed me back and scampered off into the bathroom.

I let the waiter in and moved my briefcase and stuff off the table. I had sprung for the upgrade to a small suite, and the waiter set up our dinner out in the front room. After he left, I called Marilyn back in. She peeked around the corner first before coming out completely. "You thought he might still be here?", I asked with a laugh.

"Knowing you?"

"That would have made his day, that's for sure!"

She giggled and came in and sat down at the table. Her nipples were completely visible through the thin lace, and looked quite stiff. "You look gorgeous!", I told her.

"Why do I think I know what's for dessert?", she replied, smiling at me.

"Do you like the gown?", I asked.

"It's very pretty. Not very practical.", she answered.

"Would you rather dig out your flannel bunny pajamas?"

"No." She smiled as she cut a piece of steak off and bit into it. Mine was from a happy cow, so I assumed hers was, too. "Umm, that is so much better than airline food!" She savored the taste and then sipped some champagne. "I brought down a nighty, too.", she admitted.

"Well, you can wear that tomorrow night, then."

"What if I had brought down my black shoes?", she asked.

"I also bought you a black nightgown, too.", I admitted.

"Well, don't you have everything planned out!? Is it the same as this one, just in black?", Marilyn asked.

I skewered a spear of asparagus and cut it in half, and then ate it. It was from a happy asparagus plant. "You'll just have to wait and find out. Three nights, three different outfits."

"You are just too damn efficient! It must be the mathematician in you."

"Just as long as we aren't being fruitful and multiplying.", I replied. I raised an eyebrow at that. I had packed a box of condoms just in case Marilyn had gone off the Pill since I had been away. I had warned her not to, since unexpected visits, like this one, might happen. The first time we had been away from each other for months and months, and when we finally got together again on our honeymoon, the Pill hadn't fully kicked in yet, and Alison came along ten months later.

Marilyn blushed. "No, we won't be fruitful. I've stayed on the Pill. I was debating it, but stayed on."

I grinned at her. "Excellent. I told you there might be surprise visits. I sure never figured on this!"

After dinner, while Marilyn waited at the table, I cleaned off the table onto a tray and set it outside our door. I had dessert right there at the table, with Marilyn sitting on it, her rump pulled forward and her legs pulled up and over my shoulders. It was an excellent finish to our dinner - certainly Marilyn seemed quite enthusiastic about it! - and when I was finished, I had my pants already undone and I simply lifted her down onto my lap and my cock. Marilyn humped her pussy up and down on me, moaning and whining as I fucked up into her, her tits in my face and smacking my cheeks. I pumped several months' worth up into her tight little pussy when we came together.

We sat there, my semi-stiff cock still inside her come filled cunt, as our breathing returned to normal. The tie holding her gown together was still tied, but it had slipped enough that both her tits were on display. I kept my arms around her and we kissed and necked until I stared hardening up enough for another round, but Marilyn said, "Let's go in there and get comfortable."

"Fine by me." I helped her to her feet, and stripped off my sport shirt and chinos. I had checked in still wearing my fatigues and jump boots from this afternoon, which had raised a few eyebrows. The Hilton gets its fair share of military officers, I was sure, but I was also sure they usually didn't check in wearing combat boots either. I had changed after arrival.

Now, naked, I crawled onto the bed next to Marilyn. She had kicked off her shoes, but still had on her gown. I took my time with her, kissing her on the lips and then working my way down her neck and throat, then along her shoulders, and down to her chest and her breasts. By that time, I had untied the tie on her gown and Marilyn was panting and demanding I make love to her again. Maybe my fingers working her scummy slit had something to do with that. Anyway, I took that moment to crawl onto her and slip inside, and we made love until I pumped out another load. Later, after cuddling some, Marilyn slipped off the gown completely and we had another go, quietly and softly. It was so good to see her again.

Tuesday morning my body clock kicked in and I was up long before Marilyn. I slipped into a sweat suit and running shoes and stuffed my key into a pocket, and I was off. I don't know Washington at all, no more than the average American tourist, anyway, and really had no idea where I was headed. You don't just run anywhere you like in DC, either. There are some damn nasty neighborhoods in that town. I ran down towards Dupont Circle and then back, and continued up Connecticut before turning back. I figured I had gotten somewhere between two and three miles total in. The weather in February was cold, wet, and miserable, but you run a few miles, you warm up. The Hilton had a gym with some Nautilus machines that I pumped some weight on after that. It was almost 0700 when I got back up to our room.

Marilyn was out of bed and in the shower, so I peeled off my sweaty clothes and jumped in with her. My body got clean but my mind got dirty, so we fooled around for awhile in the shower. At one point, as I was slipping into her from behind, Marilyn said, "Is that the phone ringing?"

"Do you really want me to go find out?"

She groaned, and then whispered, "No!" We finished that way under the hot water.

Eventually we left the bathroom, and I saw the phone had a red light lit on it. "I guess there was a call.", I told her. I sat down on the bed and picked up the phone. I ended up calling the main desk and asking for the message; voice mail systems didn't exist yet in 1978. I got a room number and was told to call Captain Summers there. I hung up the phone, and then picked it back up again, and dialed the room direct.

"Captain Summers."

"Captain, this is Lieutenant Buckman. You called for me, sir?"

"Yes, Lieutenant. I was wondering when you were getting up. I wanted to get a few shots of you exercising and running around. You know, even on vacation, our winged warriors are staying in shape, that sort of thing."

I stared at the phone for a moment. 'Our winged warriors?' Give me a fucking break! This guy wasn't just writing an article for the base newspaper, he was making a recruitment ad for all the geeks at MIT! I rolled my eyes and answered, "Captain, reveille was at 0600. I've already run three miles and worked out. I was in the shower when you called."

"Oh. Well, sometime before we go home, we'll need to get a few shots of you running past some of the monuments on the Mall, that sort of thing."

I slapped my head in disbelief. "Yes, sir, understood, sir."

"Breakfast at 0800 in the dining room?"

"Sir, we were about to head there now. 0730 at the latest, I would think."

"Well, all right then. I'll meet you there. Wear your Class As."

"Yes, sir." I hung up. Jump wings or not, this guy was not what I would call a 'winged warrior'. More like a body bag waiting to be filled!

Marilyn was standing in the doorway watching me, still in her Hilton robe. She started saluting me. "Yes sir, no sir, thank you sir..." I jumped up and chased her until I caught her and then gave her butt a smack.

"We need to get dressed and go downstairs. This press guy wants to meet us for breakfast.", I told her.

Marilyn pulled out some nice slacks and a blouse. "Good?"

"Good. I don't know what this guy wants, not completely yet, but I know he wants me looking like a recruiting poster.", I replied.

"Well, you recruited me."

"I still haven't finished recruiting you yet. We can talk about that this week, too."

"You bet!"

We got down to the restaurant by 0735. Nobody else in a uniform was present, certainly not Captain Summers. We waited about five minutes and then ordered some breakfast. The captain showed up closer to 0750. "Oh, good, you didn't wait for me. Sorry about that. I had to clean a spare pair of boots. Mine aren't back from the concierge yet. I needed them polished." I looked sideways at Marilyn, and found her laughing eyes. He sent his boots out?

"Yes, sir. May I introduce my fiancée, Miss Marilyn Lefleur."

"Pleased to meet you. We'll have to work you into our story, too." I rolled my eyes at her, but he never noticed.

"Yes, sir."

Our waiter returned and took the captain's order, and then the captain turned back to me; he wanted to go over the agenda for our trip, and his plans for the story. By the time our breakfast actually arrived, I had to make the time-out sign.

"Sir, let's see if we can't simplify things. This is a scientific conference. I'm here to present a paper tomorrow." I sorted through the schedule for the conference I had with me. "That will be tomorrow morning at 1100. I'll need to be there all morning. After that, I will be having lunch with Professor Rhineburg. I'll need to coordinate things with him, but expect me to be tied up all day tomorrow with the conference and the professor."

Captain Summers didn't look happy, but he seemed to understand. His plans were for pictures of me doing something both military and scientific for the next two days. He actually wanted to see if I could give a lecture at the Pentagon, for Christ's sake! To whom, it wasn't clear. "All right."

"Tonight, the professor comes into town. I'll need to be here to greet him, and at least offer to take him to dinner. If he accepts, that ties up this evening. He's the only reason I'm here, Captain, so we have to offer and do this. He could be difficult otherwise." Okay, professor, I'm throwing you under the bus a bit, but what you don't know won't hurt you. Anything to keep me away from this publicity idiot.

"Okay."

"And there are several lectures this afternoon that I would certainly like to attend. Some of them may even have application to future artillery and military computer needs." In a pig's eye, but he didn't need to know that.

"Well, when will we be able to shoot you running and lecturing? This is the reason we're here!"

"Captain, I'll be up at 0600 tomorrow morning. If you want me running along the Mall in front of a monument tomorrow, that's fine. Just meet me in the lobby and have a taxi ready to take me wherever you need to. I'll even have an official Army tee shirt on for you and the camera."

"0600?", he asked, protesting.

"Excellent, sir.", I agreed, even though he didn't like the idea at all. "Also, I'm sure you'll be able to hang around the rear of the lecture hall with your camera while I'm delivering the paper. I'll be in uniform and looking good, sir."

"Well, certainly we'll be doing that."

"I was figuring to just keep things simple, sir. This morning, I can explain to you my paper and we can talk about computers and the military. That will fill in that blank in the schedule. Okay?"

"Then you don't plan to talk to the appropriate people in the Pentagon about your paper?"

"Sir, I know I'm pretty junior and all, but it's been my experience that if the Pentagon wanted to speak to me, they'd let me know. In the meantime, let 's stay out of their hair and they can stay out of ours."

He gave me a smile that was a touch condescending. "It sounds like you don't approve of the Pentagon, Lieutenant."

"Not at all, sir. It's just that my work is with the troops at Bragg, not at a headquarters."

"Really? I've been hoping to get transferred here, to the head Public Information Office." His eyes were practically gleaming at the thought.

Wow, that would be the last thing I would want! Washington DC is one of the most expensive cities in the country to live and work in, and PIO captains must be a dime a dozen here. "Line over staff, sir, line over staff." He just laughed at that, and then we both had to explain to Marilyn what line and staff meant.

After breakfast we moved out into the lobby and found a corner to sit in. The Hilton, like most high end Washington hotels, had a significant amount of conference room space. There were quite a few mid-sized rooms for individual math disciplines (Discrete Math, Number Theory, Topology, Graph Theory, etc.), a few larger rooms for group discussions and dinners, and even a small press room for all those great math related press releases. The professor and I would be in the Discrete Math room, although we could have justified speaking in the Applied Math division as well.

Already, the morning conferences were starting to fill, as mathematicians gathered and moved from the lobby into conference space. "All these people are mathematicians?", commented Captain Summers.

"We're just like everybody else, Captain." Marilyn started giggling at that.

The captain looked over at her. "Are you a mathematician, too?"

"God, no! I'm going to school for elementary ed. I want to teach kindergarten."

The captain nodded. That he could understand. First he set a small tape recorder on the table in front of us and switched it on. Turning back to me, he asked, "So, explain this paper to me."

I nodded at him. I had given this some thought, since the captain probably hadn't had any mathematics beyond a semester of calculus that he forgot five minutes after the final. "Well, the paper is actually about providing the tools to network computers together. Professor Rhineburg and I developed a system of equations that will allow future system designers to design computer networks."

"So it's not about computers?"

"It's about how to link computers together, into grids and networks of computers. Within a few years they will be cheap enough that most middle and upper class people will be able to afford a computer of their own. The real power will come when people start linking them together."

"People will own computers?", he asked, a look of astonishment on his face.

"You probably already do and don't even know it."

"Impossible!"

I reached into my briefcase and pulled out a Texas Instruments calculator, one of the more expensive programmable models. "This is a calculator. Do you have one?" The captain nodded and said he did, for balancing his checkbook. "Seven years ago these didn't exist. Five years ago, when I started college, they were phenomenally expensive, and the school banned them in tests because they were an unfair advantage to rich people. Three years ago the price had dropped so that this wasn't a problem. Now, every college student in the country has one. This is a computer."

He stared. "That's a computer?"

I pulled out one of the little magnetic memory sticks you could feed it. "I can write programs on here in a language called Assembler, and it can do things quicker than I would ever be able to calculate by hand or look up in a book." I put it down on the table between us. "Do you have any video games at home?"

"What are those?"

"You know, like Pong or an Atari game system."

Captain Summers smiled at that. "I bought a Pong for Christmas. We have it hooked up to an old TV in the den." Suddenly he looked curious. "Are you saying that's a computer?"

"Input, output, memory, processing - you bet, Captain, those are computers. Now, imagine sometime in the future. You have a Pong, and you want to play somebody else with a Pong. You have to combine them somehow, in a network of computers. That's computer networking, and that's the sort of thing our paper will help with."

"Networks of Pong playing teenagers?", he commented, derisively.

"Think about it, Captain. How much do kids spend now on arcade games? How much would that be worth to the first guy who can figure out how to let them do it at home?"

"So what does this have to do with the Army?", he asked.

I pulled my calculator out again. "Do you know how artillery works, sir? We don't actually see the target, so somebody has to give us some map coordinates, and we have to be able to calculate, using geometry and trigonometry, where to aim the howitzer. Right now, every battery and section chief and officer has to have books of tables and a slide rule to figure it out, along with a calculator to do it faster." I waved my calculator at him. "In a few years, every howitzer will come with a calculator even more powerful than this. A few years after that, those calculators will be able to talk to each other. We'll be able to move faster, set up faster, start firing faster, and scoot away faster. It will be safer for us and more dangerous for the bad guys."

I think that actually stunned him for a second. He may have been a publicity asshole, but he knew enough about the military to know that being on the receiving end of an artillery barrage was a really bad thing, and that speed was critical.

"You're serious?"

"Ask me again in ten years, sir. You won't even recognize what we'll be doing then."

"What do you mean by that? What else will computers do for the Army?"

I smiled. Holding up the calculator again, I answered, "Imagine if we put a computer into a radio. You'll end up with a radio that can't be jammed and can't be intercepted by the enemy. Imagine putting a computer into a tank, and getting a targeting system that never misses. Never, ever! One shot, one kill! What if you can give a computer like this to a sniper, who can then pick off targets a mile away and never worry about calculating for wind or drift? What happens when we can have computerized maps? Imagine if soldiers didn't get lost anymore."

"And you're saying computers will be able to do these things?" For once he seemed to respect the idea of mathematics.

"Captain, I can guarantee you that in labs all across the country, these things are being developed. Computers will change America even more than electricity did a century ago. I will make a couple of final predictions. Ten years from now, 1988, the Army won't even seem to be the same, we'll have changed so much. Twenty years from now, in 1998, we will be the most lethal and most feared military on the planet. Technology and soldiers able to use it will change it all."

"Unbelievable. You make it sound like Star Wars."

I laughed at that. "Well, I don't think we'll have spaceships by then."

In many ways, what I had just told Captain Summers was the unvarnished truth. In 1978 we were just on the verge of one of the greatest transformations in human history, the digitalization of the world. Computers ended up in everything.

In 1978, we were still fighting with weapons and equipment that would have been recognizable to a soldier in World War II, Korea, or Viet Nam. Not much had changed. We wore the same uniforms, the same helmets and armor, had pretty much the same weapons, and the same commo and recon gear. Transistors had replaced tubes, but it was the same basic gear.

The army that ripped through Saddam Hussein's army in 1991 was basically invented in the 1980s, with computers in everything. The M1 Abrams tank, the Humvee, the MLRS rockets, the night vision gear that everybody carried, and the GPS units that even privates had - all of these had been invented in the late Seventies and early Eighties with computers. The other thing that changed drastically in the Eighties was the type of training we received. Training ranges became giant laboratories, with computers and lasers and the ability to watch people do it right and do it wrong and figure out how to do it for real.

Another big change was in the personnel who enlisted. During World War II, most armies had mechanized units, outfits with tanks and trucks and armored personnel carriers. One of America's big secrets was that almost all of the boys who got drafted were familiar with motors and vehicles, at a far higher rate than elsewhere in the world. They could keep things running a lot easier. Likewise now, most of the guys we would be recruiting over the next ten years had at least seen calculators and computers and such, at a much higher rate than the rest of the world, and would be able to adapt and train with it quicker.

"What made you join the Army, Lieutenant?", he asked.

I gave him the two minute family-in-the-service-since-the-War-of-1812 speech, and then said, "Besides, I went to college on an ROTC scholarship, so it's payback time. My father had a Navy ROTC scholarship during World War II, and it was the only way for a farmboy to end up in the Ivy League. It worked for him, too."

"So why'd you join the Army and not the Navy?"

I laughed at that. "I get seasick!"

That got the other two to laughing, and then the captain turned his attention to Marilyn. "Let me ask you a few questions. Marilyn, right?"

"Who? Me?", she squeaked, suddenly in the spotlight. I chuckled at this.

"How did you meet the Lieutenant here?"

I just started laughing at that, which got Marilyn stewing at me. Finally she just elbowed me and answered, "We met at a party in college our freshman year."

I laughed some more. "Do you want me to tell the real story behind that night?"

"Not if you want me to marry you this summer!", she answered. I laughed at that and she said, "Asshole!"

I pointed at the tape recorder and her eyes widened. "Please, God, I want a transcript!" To the captain I laughed, "If I tell you the real story, promise to send me a copy! I'll be able to use it for blackmail for years to come!"

The captain laughed at this as well, especially when Marilyn gave me another elbow to the ribs. This was pretty much the end of the interview, especially when he asked her why she put up with me, and I answered for her that, "Artillerymen have bigger guns."

That got her squawking even louder. "You want to get punched?", she asked, waving a balled up fist at me.

I shrugged and smiled. "You hit like a girl."

"Oooh! You are going to get it for that!"

We broke apart at that point. Captain Summers took his tape recorder and headed to his room to start writing his article, and I took Marilyn's hand and we walked through DC for a bit until lunchtime. After lunch, I grabbed my agenda for the meeting and led the way to a symposium on asymmetric key cryptography, which had only been developed the year before, and was about to become a major breakthrough in code making and breaking. I found it all quite fascinating and especially useful to someone like myself with an interest in information theory.

Unfortunately, after about half an hour, Marilyn's eyes started glazing over, and she headed back to our room to take a nap. I promised to try and get up there before dinner. It felt surreal to be listening to the experts discussing one of the hottest topics in math theory and now have a sufficient background to be able to fully understand and appreciate it. Even more, I knew just how important encryption and key systems were about to become. It was quite heady.

About four o'clock or so I was mathed out, so I packed up my stuff and headed up to the suite. I found Marilyn snoring lightly while laying on our bed, still in her blouse and slacks, though she had kicked off her flats. I tossed my jacket on the couch and kicked off my shoes. I sat down on the bed next to her and undid my tie. In doing so, Marilyn woke up and looked over at me. "All done playing with your numbers?", she teased.

"I seem to be stuck on the number 34 and the letter B.", I said with a smile.

"You're such a pig!", she answered, also with a smile.

I leaned over her and pushed her onto her back. "Oink, oink, oink!" Then I put my lips to hers and started kissing her. I kept on kissing her as I brought my hands up and starting playing with her 34Bs, unbuttoning her blouse and slipping her bra up and over them. Marilyn didn't seem to mind my porcine attributes, since she was returning the favor, hurriedly unbuttoning my shirt and trying to peel it off me while it was still tucked into my trousers. After another minute or two, we gave in to practicality, and I sat up. We both quickly stripped naked and then stretched out besides each other.

"I need you, Carl!", Marilyn breathed as I probed her greasy little pussy with my fingers. "Fuck me, honey!"

"Ummmm, not yet.", I whispered to her. I kept fingerfucking her and lowered my lips to her tiny little nipples, now standing up at attention.

Marilyn was stroking my cock madly. "Please, I need it! Don't tease me!"

"Nope!" I twisted around, so that my face was at her glistening shaved pussy, and dove in. Marilyn shrieked happily as I started eating her. "Sit on my face, baby!", I ordered her, rolling onto my back and manhandling her into a 69 position. I thrust my hips upwards, waggling my cock in her face, and Marilyn got the idea. Moments later I felt her hot and wet lips circling my cockhead.

Marilyn had gotten pretty good at giving me blowjobs, now that I knew what worked and what didn't work, and simply told her rather than relying on natural ability. Now, as I lapped at her pussy and clit, she lay there on me, sucking my cockhead and stroking me with her fingers, rather than trying to go for deep throat. It felt wonderful, and I lay back some. "Oh, baby, that's so good, just like that, don't stop, just like that..." Then I raised my head and started eating her again as she continued. It got so good that my hips started pushing upwards, and Marilyn let me start fucking my cock up into her mouth.

"Don't stop ... I need to come, honey, keep sucking me ... oh, I want to come in your mouth! Suck me, suck me..." Marilyn started pumping my cock and suctioning the head of my cock, and I just lay back and reveled in it, my hips pumping skyward. "That's it, that's it ... don't stop, don't stop..." I felt it coming and cried out, weakly, "Yes, yes!", as the come raced up from my balls and landed in Marilyn's mouth. She kept pumping me as she sucked and swallowed. What a great way to spend an afternoon!

Marilyn rolled off me and padded into the bathroom, where I heard her running the water and drinking. Okay, it's probably not champagne, so that's fair. She came back in and climbed back onto the bed with me. God, but she looked so good! I glanced at the clock on the nightstand. "The professor's flight isn't supposed to land for another 45 minutes, and then he'll probably be a good half hour getting his luggage and getting a cab over here.", I commented.

Marilyn was in the center of the bed, with me on her right side, and she grabbed my cock with her right hand and started toying with it. "Whatever will we do to pass the time?"

"Well, I'm thinking we should start practicing for the honeymoon, don't you?"

"You mean, working on my wifely tasks? What about your husbandly tasks?", she laughed.

"Unh unh, that's not important. Remember, your job is to love, honor, and obey. So you need to make sure you're performing those wifely tasks properly."

"Oh?", she commented, still stroking my erect cock.

"I'm going to be a very demanding husband!" I was on my side facing her and laid a hand on her right breast, cupping it and flicking my thumb across the nipple. "I think you know what that means."

"What?"

"Nope, you tell me, and let's see if you get it right."

Marilyn shuddered slightly as I toyed with her tits. "You'll want me to suck your cock, won't you.", she answered lowly. "And fuck you."

"I plan to be a very demanding husband."

"So I'll have to suck you and fuck you every day, won't I?"

"Maybe more than once." Marilyn's eyes were half closed and there was a smile on her face as I said this.

"Well, I've already sucked you, so maybe you should fuck me now."

"Not yet." Marilyn's eyes opened at that and she looked at me, but I slid my right leg across hers and trapped her there on the bed, legs apart. "You'll need to be ready for me to take you when I want to. You'll need to always be prepared." I reached across and pulled her left hand down to her pussy, and pressed her fingers into her slit. "How will I be able to tell if you're ready?"

She moaned lowly. "I'll be wet and juicy." I kept her hand in place, and moved to prevent her from letting go of my cock with her right hand. "Oh, please, I'm so wet and juicy right now! Fuck me!"

"Not yet. We have to talk about your other wifely requirements."

"Oh?", she asked weakly.

I whispered in her ear, "Whenever we're together, you have to be ready for me. No pants, no panties, no bras. No matter where we are, I might need to bend you over and fuck your pussy."

Marilyn whimpered at the thought and her back arched as she orgasmed. I pulled my leg away from her and rolled her onto her side, facing away from me, and then lifted her right leg up. Moments later I had slipped up behind her and pushed myself in from the back. I began rubbing her back and her shoulders, which was a major erogenous zone for her. "Fuck me!", she begged.

"I'll use you for sex constantly. You'll have to be ready all the time. When I come home I'll want you in tiny little skirts and tops, and you'll need to have your pussy wet for me."

"Yes, yes!"

This was turning me on as much as it was turning her on. I pushed Marilyn forward and followed, rolling her over onto her belly as I began fucking her doggy style. "In fact, as soon as I get home, you'll probably need to show me if your pussy is ready for me."

"Fuck me! Fuck me!"

I slipped a hand between us and began toying with her asshole. Then I whispered into her ear, "All of you will be mine! It will be your wifely duty to satisfy me however I want it!"

This mention of the unmentionable was driving Marilyn crazy. She was bucking back at me, driving my cock ever deeper into her, and the loud slapping sounds of my hips smacking her ass were like an aphrodisiac to me. I hammered her from behind. I think she had lost track of her orgasms by the time it became too much, and I spewed out another load into her. We collapsed onto the bed, me on top, kissing and caressing her back and shoulders, and then ultimately rolled apart.

Afterwards, as I looked over at her, laying face down, disheveled and bedraggled, she gave me a shy smile. "You weren't really serious about, you know, back there, were you?" Her eyes flicked back over her shoulder at those sweet, buns.

I smiled and replied, "You never know. Still, if you ever get nervous, a quick blowjob will probably distract me."

That got Marilyn to laughing. "You're so full of shit!"

"Just so you aren't!", I replied, waggling my eyebrows lewdly.

It took her a second to figure it out, and then she cried, "Gross!"

I snuggled up next to her and ran a hand down and began rubbing her ass. I whispered to her, "I'll make you a bet. When the time comes, by the time I get done with you, you'll be begging for it, and you'll come like you'd never come before."

Her eyes widened at the thought, but then she smiled. "Never going to happen."

I just rolled on my back and smiled. "We'll see."

Any further discussion was saved by the bell, or in this case, by the ringing of the telephone. I sat up and grabbed it, to find Professor Rhineburg on the other line. "Lieutenant Buckman.", I answered.

"Carl, how are you? It's John Rhineburg."

"Professor, it's good to hear from you. Where are you? Do I need to pick you up?"

"I'm here in my room. I just got up here. The switchboard put me through. How are you? You obviously made it."

"Yes, sir. I've actually been waiting for your call."

"I hope that wasn't an imposition."

I glanced over at my fiancée lying naked and seductive on the bed. "No imposition at all, sir. I'm looking forward to seeing you again. What are your plans for tonight?"

"Dinner. I'm hungry. Would you care to join me?"

"Yes, sir, I'd love to. Professor, Marilyn, my fiancée, is with me. Would it be all right if she came along?"

"Certainly. I'd love to meet her. Any choice for dinner?", he asked.

"I can't say as I know that much about DC, Professor. The restaurant here is nice, but if you've got any preferences, I'm game. Be expensive. We'll figure a way to charge it to the Army!" He laughed at that and he said he would unpack and clean up and make a few calls, and then call me back. Whether I could charge it to the Army, I had no idea, but I wasn't worried. I owed the man a lot, so I would cover it no matter what.

Marilyn and I got out of bed and decided to clean up. I knew that I needed some food and drink before discussing any husbandly duties my fiancée might have wanted me to perform. Fortunately, the worst husbandly duty of all involves a lawn mower, and I don't think she had that figured out yet! I let Marilyn have the first shower, and then when she got out, I got in. Needless to say, the professor called me back while I was in the shower. I never even heard the phone ring, but Marilyn stuck her head back in the bathroom and said, "Your professor is on the line again."

"What's he want?"

"He mentioned a seafood restaurant and wanted to know if we were interested."

"Fine by me. Okay with you?"

"Sure."

"Okay, ask him what the dress code is and find out when he wants us to meet him in the lobby."

Marilyn left and I finished my shower. When I came out, she said, "Half past in the lobby, and it's supposed to be casual."

I always hate that description. Casual means what, exactly? Casual to the Rockefellers is a blazer and ascot; casual to the Lefleurs means a clean pair of beer goggles. "Did he say what he was wearing?"

She grinned at me. "I knew you would ask that. He says slacks and a sport shirt."

I smiled back. "That we can handle. Why don't you put on a sundress and I'll put on slacks and a sport shirt, too."

On the way down to the lobby, I asked Marilyn, "Did you pack that blue dress I got you in Vegas?" Marilyn blushed but nodded. It had been a few years, but there weren't that many places in Utica to wear a dress like that. I had told her before she came down that at least one night I would take her someplace nice. "I thought so. I noticed the matching shoes. Let's see what we can do about that." I stopped on the way to the lobby and spoke to the concierge about a 'nice' place. He recommended a steak house called Mortons, which at the time I had never heard of but since then have learned was one of the more expensive places in an expensive city. It's where the powerful go to see and be seen. Since it was the middle of the week, he was sure he could get me reservations for tomorrow, and he was extra sure after I slipped him a couple of twenties as I shook his hand. How he knew what I was slipping him without looking at it is one of those concierge superpowers, like flying and X-ray vision are for Superman.

Dinner was at a seafood restaurant down on the Potomac, casual but expensive. Everything on the Potomac in Washington is expensive. Well, that's why I had an American Express card. I had made a solemn vow to never have a credit card on this trip through. I had never had one before until I started working for the Lefleurs. They insisted I get one so I could use one for company expenses and then get reimbursed. Wow, what a disaster that turned out to be! Interest charges ate us out of house and home!

The Amex card is different. You pay it off, in full, every month. End of story. You don't pay, you lose the card. There is no carry over and no interest. So much simpler, and in the long run, so much cheaper. Marilyn hated the charge they made every year, without thinking about the interest charges you weren't paying.

It was good seeing Professor Rhineburg again. He's not one of the television caricatures, tweedy and absent-minded, but was of an average size and height, middle aged and getting a few pounds around the middle, and starting to go bald. He wasn't one of those professors who has his grad students over to his house on weekends, but you got to know him fairly well regardless. I made sure to let him know that he and Janet were invited to our wedding.

Most of the evening's conversation surrounded three topics - the conference the next day, Marilyn's and my wedding plans, and what I was doing in the Army. He was simply astonished that the co-developer of the Rhineburg-Buckman Equations (his phrase, not mine!) had left math behind and was now jumping out of airplanes. I shrugged and smiled. "I like the sense of purpose, like I'm accomplishing something. I need a sense that I'm doing something important with my life."

He looked at me sharply. "And you couldn't get that teaching and doing research. You'd be a natural at that. Hell, you'd make full professor by the time you were thirty!"

I just laughed. "Maybe someday, professor, but for the next four years Uncle Sam owns me. Who knows after that?"

We ended up talking about the upcoming wedding, and Marilyn was complaining that she'd never be able to get it done by July. She gave me a list of problems, and it all came down to the fact that she was completely unorganized. Originally she ended up waiting until after graduation to even try and do anything, which is why we delayed to Labor Day for the actual wedding.

"Where are you going for your honeymoon?", asked Professor Rhineburg.

Marilyn and I looked at each other. She said, "We haven't really discussed it yet. Have you thought about it?"

"Actually, I have. I wanted to talk to you about it this week. You didn't have any ideas?" She shook her head, so I continued, "Ever thought of a cruise?"

Marilyn's eyes lit up at that. "You mean, on the ocean?"

"Exactly."

"My parents took one last year and they loved it! They went to the Caribbean, a bunch of islands down there!"

I glanced over at the professor. "Any ideas? Ever been on a cruise?"

"Janet and I did one a couple of years ago. We enjoyed it. Don't miss the boat, though, or they'll sail without you!"

"A cruise, then?", I asked Marilyn. She nodded excitedly. "So, it's a cruise. I'll take care of it."

"How?"

"By calling a travel agent."

"Oh.", she said.

"See, another thing off the list. I fail to see why this is so difficult.", I replied.

That got Marilyn going again. There was the dress and the bridesmaid's dresses and the tuxedos and limos and the reception and all sorts of things.

I waved her to silence again. "You live in Utica. You don't have to do this by yourself. Your father sells millions of dollars of trailers..."

"Homes!"

" ... every year. There are plenty of limo companies he can hire. There must be a dozen banquet halls around the city to hire. Harlan, Joe and I will be wearing mess dress, not tuxedos. The only tuxes will be your father and Tusker. We'll tell them basic black."

"What's mess dress?", asked Professor Rhineburg.

I turned to him. "It's nothing but an Army tuxedo. Very formal." Marilyn had decided on a relatively small bridal party. Tammy was her maid of honor, and she had two bridesmaids, my sister Suzie and her brother Mark's fiancée, Lauren. On my part, Joe Bradley had agreed to be my best man, and Harlan and Tusker were going to be my ushers.

"As for the dresses, just get Suzie to have Dad send her up there spring break, and you girls go shopping. There has to be a bridal shop or two in Utica." Marilyn has a habit of making things way too complicated. When Maggie got married, she and I ran it, and we had all the details ironed out inside of three months, even including custom tailoring on a third generation wedding dress that both my mother and Suzie had worn.

"I don't know. You make it sound too easy! I don't trust you!"

I laughed loudly at that, and kissed her hand. "Trust me! Would I lie? By the way, I have this delightful little bridge in Brooklyn..."

She turned to the professor. "See what I have to put up with!?"

"I am not about to get involved in this.", he replied, laughing. "Have fun on the cruise!"

After dinner, we all took a cab back to the Hilton and separated until the morning. I told the professor we would meet him for breakfast at eight, the same time I had told Captain Summers. The captain had postponed our jogging down the Mall until the last day, which simply meant more time with Marilyn for me.

Back upstairs, Marilyn and I sat down and watched a little television, with me in an armchair and her on my lap. Not much was on, so we ended up fooling around instead, and then headed into the bedroom to finish what we had started. Afterwards, we went to sleep.

The morning of the presentation I woke up at my usual 0600 time and did my normal morning workout. I ran up and down Connecticut Avenue for a few miles and then pumped some iron in the Nautilus room. Afterwards, Marilyn and I fooled around for a bit and then cleaned up. I was in uniform, and Marilyn was in a nice dress, and we were down in the lobby at 0800 exactly. Captain Summers joined us on the elevator, and we found Professor Rhineburg waiting for us at the entrance to the restaurant.

The captain immediately tried to organize how the conference would be run. I just rolled my eyes as I looked over at my old boss. Fortunately he knew how to handle overambitious underlings, and he basically told the captain (in a polite way) he was just to keep his mouth shut and stand in the back and take a few pictures. The presentation would go the way he and I had planned and written it. We discussed a few last minute technical details, such as how the slides were prepared and hoped the technical staff had loaded them properly. It was 1978 and years away from the wonders of PowerPoint. When we said slides, we meant real photographic slides! You would draw or use various graphic arts tapes and ribbons on paper to create the graphs or formulas, and then send them out to be photographed and turned into slides. You could easily spend hundreds of dollars in 1978 money on each slideshow.

We dawdled over coffee until 0900 and the start of the conference, and then proceeded in. The symposium we were involved in had been moved to one of the larger conference rooms, and there seemed to be a fair sized audience in attendance. We were towards the back. The professor and I sat there with our copies of the presentation, and also with the schedule of speakers and abstracts of the other presentations. We enjoyed ourselves, Marilyn not so much, since this was incredibly boring to her, but she was there to see me speak. Captain Summers very quickly found himself lost, but he was more worried about getting a picture of me in action in any case.

It was about 1100, or maybe a few minutes before that, when it was time for me to present our paper. I stood and walked to the front of the room and moved behind the podium. From the back of the room I could hear the clicking as Captain Summers took my picture. As directed I was in my Class As. I noticed a few members of the audience looking at me curiously, but after I introduced myself and put the first slide up on the screen, they concentrated on the presentation.

The beginning of the presentation simply introduced a few basic concepts in information theory and the calculations of entropy and information loss. Then I went into some basics of network topologies and the effects the specific topology would have on entropy. After that I introduced the formulas and algorithms that the professor and I had developed to calculate and then minimize the effects of the topology on the entropy.

In general, I thought the presentation was well received. There were a few questions asked, especially about second and third order effects, so I flipped back through the slides to one that listed the most common ones and discussed them some more, including ways they cancelled each other out, which I had thought was a mathematically elegant solution. The only odd part was towards the end of the questions, when this round little man in the front row disdainfully asked, "Just how much of the taxpayer's money was spent on this research?"

Well, that was certainly out of the blue! I glanced back at Professor Rhineburg, but he looked as mystified as me. He just shrugged and held up in hands in a look of confusion. It was all up to me. "Excuse me? I don't understand."

"It's a perfectly straightforward question. How much has the military invested in this research, and for what purpose?"

I glanced back at the professor, who now looked really confused. He just shook his head. "None that I know of. Why?" Okay, that second part was really stupid on my part. Never let an asshole get a free question. I should have known better.

"That is patently false! Why else would the military be presenting this topic?!" He was now standing there and pointing a finger at me.

"The military? You mean - me? This had nothing to do with the Army. This was my doctoral thesis." I knew it, but every time I answered I was digging my hole deeper. I should have just ended this whole thing. If I had been looking to the back of the room, I would have seen Captain Summers trying to wave me down and cut me off.

"You mean to say the Army paid for you to do research at taxpayer expense? This is outrageous!"

"No sir. I went to college on an ROTC scholarship. This was all done before I was sworn in. I'm sorry, sir, I don't understand what the problem is. This work was done while I was still a civilian."

"Then why are you here in uniform?"

"Sir, you're here in a suit. I'm in the Army. This is my suit."

"And your job in the Army? Is it to develop computers to kill people?" There were a few gasps around the room.

I was too pissed to think straight. "No, sir, I do my own killing. My job is to keep your children and grandchildren from having to grow up learning Russian!"

"THAT WILL BE ENOUGH, LIEUTENANT!", barked Captain Summers from the rear.

It was automatic on my part. I snapped to attention and replied, "YES, SIR! UNDERSTOOD, SIR! MY APOLOGIES, SIR!"

"DISMISSED, LIEUTENANT!"

Shit! I grabbed my stuff and moved off down the side aisle, past Marilyn and Professor Rhineburg and out through the door, followed closely by the captain. There was quite a stir around us as the audience turned and murmured as I left. The captain pointed me towards a corner and started chewing my ass ragged. Okay, I should have just kept my mouth shut. I knew that. Still, that asshole, whoever he was, pissed me off. I stayed silent and at attention while Captain Summers worked me over. If it was up to him, I don't think I was going to make First Lieutenant in this century.

I was still standing rigidly at attention, which involves keeping your eyes pointed straight ahead, but there's still a trick to using your peripheral vision, and my eyes popped wide open when I saw what was coming. From over the captain's right shoulder I saw Professor Rhineburg and Marilyn coming, along with a small woman in a white Navy uniform. As soon as I saw the eagles on her shoulder, I interrupted the captain by barking out, "ATTEN-HUT!", as loudly as I could.

The captain was as startled as I was, and stopped in mid-harangue and after turning to see what I was up to, snapped to attention himself. The Naval captain, who seriously outranked an Army captain, softly said, "As you were.", and both Captain Summers and I went to parade rest. "That was a very interesting response you gave in there, Lieutenant.", she commented.

"My apologies, ma'am. No excuse."

"Oh, don't worry about it. At ease, the both of you."

Once I went to an ease position, I had a chance to look at the captain more closely, and my eyes bugged out again. The naval captain was Grace Hopper, 'Amazing Grace', one of the founding fathers of computer science and programming, and damn near the only woman to ever have a warship named after her! An Arleigh Burke class destroyer was named after her after her death. Right now she was still only a captain; in the Eighties she would be promoted to rear admiral and end up the longest serving naval officer in history.

I just stared at her, my mouth open. She saw this and said, "What's on your mind, son?"

"You're Grace Hopper!"

"Captain Grace Hopper, if you don't mind.", she replied dryly, glancing over at my professor, who was chuckling.

"Yes, ma'am, sorry, ma'am."

"As I said a moment ago, you made a nice presentation. Don't worry about that jackass, Carnsword. He still thinks Joe Stalin was seriously misunderstood and that communism is the wave of the future."

I glanced at my captain, and muttered, "Good Lord!"

She shook my hand and said, "I just wanted to say it was a nice job there, especially at the end. I loved it!" She turned to Professor Rhineburg and said, "John, it was good to see you again. You did well with him." She turned to go.

I had to do it. "Excuse me, ma'am, can I ask you a favor?'

"Eh, what?"

"Can I get a picture with you? Please?" Christ, a picture with Grace Hopper! I'd plead for this on my knees! "Captain? Can you take a picture for me? I'll pay for the film!"

I towered over the woman, who must have already been in her seventies, but she smiled and stood next to me, and Captain Summers took two pictures, one of her and me, and one adding in Professor Rhineburg. Marilyn declined to get in the shot.

Afterwards, his anger at me forgotten, Captain Summers asked me, "Just who is that captain? She's older than God, for Christ's sake!"

I tried to explain, but fell back on, "Captain, she's one of the people who invented computers. Imagine if we were living a hundred years ago and you had a chance to get your photo taken with Thomas Edison. Wouldn't you do it?"

"Her? You're kidding me!"

"Captain, someday they're going to name a ship after her. No disrespect sir, but I don't think they're going to name any regiments after you or me."

He laughed. "Name a ship after a woman? Get serious!"

"Why not? They named a Polaris submarine after Edison, and he wasn't even in the Navy or the Army!"

Captain Summers laughed at this, and excused himself from lunch, which was just fine with me. After chewing me out, I knew Marilyn well enough that she wouldn't want to eat with him. The remaining three of us, Marilyn, Professor Rhineburg, and myself, went into the restaurant for lunch. Once there, Marilyn, who I could tell was still stewing, said, "Who was that ... that ... that jerk!?" I smiled to myself. If it hadn't been for the professor, she would have said asshole.

The professor smiled and said, "Arnold Carnsword. He teaches applied mathematics at Harvard or Yale, one of the Ivies, anyway. He won a Fields Medal a few years ago."

Marilyn looked confused at that, so I explained. "It's sort of like the Nobel Prize in math, but they only give it out every four years."

Professor Rhineburg nodded in agreement. "He's really quite good. I suspect that if you hadn't worn your uniform, he would have been quite congratulatory. As it stands, I am sure the American Mathematical Society will get a scurrilous letter about the Army's infiltration of the pristine halls of science. Forget about him. He's a left wing kook."

That only slightly mollified Marilyn, but the saying about not beating a dead horse was not invented with her in mind. "Still, he's a jerk! And how come that captain was all over you? You were right!"

I smiled at that. "It doesn't matter how right I was. I was wrong and the captain knew it. Hell, I knew it, too."

"What do you mean, you were wrong?"

"When I wear this uniform, I represent the Army and the 82nd Airborne. We answer to civilians, even civilian jerks. I was out of line."

"No you weren't!", she said, defending me.

I shrugged. I didn't think we would ever see eye to eye on some things. "If it had been one of my men who got into a beef with a civilian, I'd be all over him, and the standard for officers is even higher. I screwed up. You'll probably be married to the world's oldest second lieutenant by the time I'm out of the Army."

"I don't think it was that serious.", commented the professor. "This will blow over."

"Not when Captain Summers finishes writing me up for insubordination, which is entirely possible. Then again, he could just let my captain know, which will hitch a lousy OER on me." The looks of confusion made me explain, "Officer Efficiency Report, my yearly grade, so to speak."

"Well, he was still a jerk!", said Marilyn.

I leaned over and kissed her on the cheek. "Next time I get in an argument, I'll turn you loose instead."

Being an American soldier or sailor can involve a strange dichotomy between ideals and reality at times. We fight, and sometimes die, to uphold our country's freedoms and rights, but often have to legally give up those rights in order to do so. With the exception of the Viet Nam War, most of our fellow citizens accord us a tremendous level of respect, but hold us to ludicrously high standards and mix that respect with a certain level of disdain. They love having us around in wartime, and want to keep us out of sight and out of mind the rest of the time. As the saying goes, we catch bullets so civilians don't have to. It's probably always been like that.

After lunch, I decided to head back upstairs and change out of my uniform. I was sick and tired of math and the Army for the day. Maybe I could change into some civvies and we could do the tourist thing on the Mall. I would have loved to have seen the Wall, otherwise known as the Viet Nam War Memorial, but it hadn't been even thought of yet. I remember the first time I did see it, I cried at the waste of it all.

I sank down into the armchair in the sitting room and stared out the window. Marilyn asked what I was thinking about. I turned back to her, where she was sitting on the couch, looking worried at me, and I smiled. "I was just feeling depressed about this morning.", I told her.

"Carling, forget about it. Nobody will care."

"I don't know, honey. I'm just feeling so depressed. Can you think of anything that might cheer me up?" I tried to act innocently.

"Cheer you up?" Suddenly her eyes widened. "Cheer you up! Did you have anything particular in mind?"

"I don't know, Marilyn, but I'm pretty depressed. I'm going to need a lot of cheering up." I slumped back in the armchair and spread my legs out on the floor in front of me.

She snorted. "Is that what they call it these days?" I just hooked my finger towards her and motioned her closer. "And what if I needed cheering up?"

"I'd return the favor."

She stood up and stuck her tongue out at me. "Maybe some other time."

I laughed at her. "There was this newlywed couple and they wanted to have some silent signals about when they wanted to have sex. So she said that if he wanted sex to touch her left breast, and if he didn't want sex, to touch her right breast. Then she asked him what he wanted as signals. The answer was, that if she wanted sex, to tug on his cock. Then she asked what if she didn't want sex. The answer was, tug on it another hundred times."

"You're so gross!", she said, fighting back the laughter.

At that, I jumped up from the chair and chased her around the room before trapping her in the bedroom. That led to the inevitable, and an hour later we were both cured of our depressions and taking a well deserved nap. After waking up, I decided the tourist thing could wait for another day. I preferred snuggling up to Marilyn, and we tore off another piece before the afternoon was finished.

"Well, my depression is certainly cleared up now. How's yours?", I asked.

"Fine for now, but I might need another treatment later.", she teased.

"I'll see what I can do tonight. Considering how long it's going to be before I see you again, it's almost like I'm trying to store things up."

"When do you think that will be? Are you going to be able to visit before we get married?"

"Not sure. Let me find my schedule." I crawled out of bed and rooted around in my briefcase. I found my schedule and shook my head, carrying it back into the bedroom. "Next month we have Harlan's wedding, and then I can probably finagle a three day weekend. After that, though, nothing."

"Oh my God! We'll never get it done!", she said, back on that kick.

"Marilyn, you'll get it done, because you'll have to get it done!", I said with a smile. "As Doctor Johnson once said, 'When a man knows he is to be hanged in the morning, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.'"

"Ha ha! Is that what you think marriage is? A hanging?", she harrumphed at me.

"I think you need another cure for depression!"

Marilyn squawked at that, and threw a pillow at me. I chased her down and tickled her until she almost cried, and then we cured our depression again. Thank God I was still a young man!

The concierge had come through with reservations at eight. I had packed a nice charcoal suit and looked distinctly un-military. Marilyn had the blue silk halter wrap dress I had bought her in Vegas a few years before, and slipped into some hose and the matching heels she had bought back then. I wasn't sure if she was wearing stockings or pantyhose, or panties, and I tried to find out, but Marilyn made me behave. She did have a wicked smile on her face, though, so I thought I'd enjoy finding out later.

Mortons was very nice, and very expensive. We both had the surf and turf, consisting of a filet mignon and a lobster tail, along with a very nice bottle of Pouilly Fusse. While we were there I glanced around the restaurant in search of anybody famous, and smiled when I recognized Congressman Clarence Long of Maryland. He was the representative for the district my family lived in, and I had grown up knowing his nephew. I mentioned this to Marilyn.

"Really? That's your Congressman? And you grew up with his nephew? Wow! What was he like?"

I grinned. "He was as big a crook as his uncle!"

"What!?"

"He was a real punk. Always getting in trouble and his uncle was always pulling strings to get him out again."

"That's not right!", she protested.

I shrugged and smiled. "Uncle Clarence knows how to get things done. My father used to say that he's so crooked that when he dies they'll have to screw his coffin into the ground."

She smiled at that. "You sound like you approve."

"Maryland may be a small state, but we're just as dirty as those big states. We bow to no one in our graft and corruption!" That got her to laughing, and for the rest of the meal I talked about how we had two governors in a row, Spiro Agnew and now Marvin Mandel, go to prison for corruption.

Later on I got to find out what was under that dress. Marilyn wasn't wearing any panties, and she had stockings, not pantyhose. It was ... inspirational!

The next day was the end of our little vacation. The captain met me down in the lobby that morning at 0600 with a cab and we drove over to the Lincoln Memorial and he took photos of me running around. Then we went back to the Hilton and cleaned up and left after breakfast. Marilyn had a flight right after ours, so I got her on a cab to the airport, and then the captain and I headed over to Andrews for our return flight.

I reported in to the battery office the next morning. Captain Harris immediately ordered me into his office and shut the door behind me, so I figured it was his turn to chew my ass ragged about my argument with that jerk mathematician. I figured wrong. He didn't say anything to me about it, but just asked what I had done and if I had fun. The he reminded me I was back in the Army and to get my ass in gear and my head in the game and get back to work, pronto! Maybe Captain Summers hadn't had time to turn me in yet.

Still, nothing came up over the next few days either, not from Captain Harris or the colonel, so I guess Captain Summers hadn't decided to burn my career. Maybe hearing an O-6 like Captain Hopper say it wasn't a problem changed his mind. Either way, I wasn't going to bring it to anybody's attention.

About a month after the trip, a photo of me delivering the presentation showed up on the cover of the Paraglide, below the fold, with a few paragraphs. Deep inside there was a photo of me jogging and a few more paragraphs. Nothing ever showed up in the Army Times. Strangely enough, I wasn't heartbroken. It was bad enough putting up with Jonesy's jokes after hitting the Paraglide. I didn't need to be any more famous.

Chapter 50: Get Me To The Church On Time

June 1978

Wedding preparations proceeded slowly on Marilyn's end, but they did proceed. Along the way she cried, threatened, screamed, protested, and told me more than once that the wedding was off. I would let her vent over the phone and then calmly move her forward. Suzie visited over the spring break and she was much calmer than Marilyn, despite being a teenager going to her first wedding. The reception would be at Trinkaus Manor, a local landmark and banquet hall in Oriskany, just a few miles from the Lefleur place. It had been there before, too.

I bought an Army mess dress uniform, and made sure that Harlan and Joe got theirs, too. They are really quite expensive, but Harlan was going career, and he might use it again. Joe found a place he could rent one. Tusker promised to get a basic black tuxedo, although basic black for Tusker might involve flashing lights. He might be the most flamboyant of any of us, including the bride and bridesmaids! Tessa promised to rein him in if necessary.

I traveled to Plattsburgh during the support cycle in April. It was just a long weekend, and didn't chew up too much leave time, but it kept Marilyn calm, or at least calmer.

I also made a number of phone calls to Tusker, Harlan and Joe, sorting out the details with them. We decided to skip out on any stag party, since the only chance we would have to be together was the night before in any case, and that was when the rehearsal dinner would be.

Upstate New York in the winter is a miserable place. One thing I knew for sure. Even if I didn't make a career of the Army, no way was I moving back to New York! I shoveled snow for 50 years before, and I was not about to repeat the process. No matter what Marilyn screamed at me, I was going to live some place a lot warmer!

Eventually we got to our summer support cycle, and I was going on leave. I flew out of Fayetteville on Wednesday morning, June 28, with a flight into Syracuse that connected through Washington. The Syracuse airport was a hell of a lot closer to Utica than the Albany airport, and was larger as well, with more flights. Now, in addition to my two trusty B4 bags, I had purchased a new hanging bag, and had in it a suit, my mess dress uniform, and a blazer. It had enough room that Marilyn could put in any formal evening gowns or dresses she was packing. Then again, Marilyn might have so much crap I'd have to go out and buy her a bag of her own, and she'd still use most of mine!

I got into the airport mid-afternoon, just a bit after two, and found a wonderful sight - Marilyn standing there at the baggage claim area! I went right up to her and wrapped her in my arms. "You have no idea how good you look to me!", I told her.

"Just hold me!", she replied, somewhat miserably.

I gave her a big hug and then asked, "What's wrong now?"

"Can't we just elope? Why can't we just elope?"

"Fine by me. We're at the airport. Want to fly out to Vegas?"

"Seriously?", she asked.

"Sure, why not? Of course your parents will never talk to you again, and it will cost us all of our friends, but it's up to you.", I commented.

"You're no help!"

"You worry way too much. It's too late to change anything anyway. Come on, let's get my stuff and go. Where did you park?"

Marilyn said she was in the parking garage, so I sent her back to get her car and bring it around to the baggage claim area. I would collect my stuff and meet her outside. Just then the luggage carousel started moving, so off she went and I waited for my luggage.

Thankfully, none of my luggage went on its own separate vacation. I collected my stuff and hauled it out the door to the sidewalk just in time to see Marilyn waved away by a security guard and be made to circle around a second time. When she came back I just tossed my gear into the backseat of the car. She stayed behind the wheel and I climbed into the passenger seat.

"You see? Nothing is working out! I can't even park and wait for you!", she complained.

"Rule One - Don't sweat the small stuff. Rule Two - It's all small stuff.", I replied. "What happened to the Challenger?" Marilyn had picked me up in a very nondescript Chevy Malibu.

She shrugged. "It's sort of in the shop. I was in sort of an accident."

I looked over at her curiously. Marilyn is not the world's greatest driver. One time she and Tammy managed to drive the Challenger up a dirt road and get it stuck on a rock with all four tires off the ground. Another time, in high school, she managed to roll a car onto its roof. "What's a sort of accident?"

She had the good grace to look a little embarrassed. "Well, a train hit it."

I stared at her in utter astonishment. "You hit a train!?"

"No, the train hit me.", she explained.

"What, it jumped off the track and drove into you?"

"Well, no. I was at a crossing and I was a little too far forward and when the train came through it just nudged me over. That's all!"

I stared some more. "You drove onto the railroad tracks while a train was coming through and then stayed in the car?"

She gave me a peevish look. "That's exactly what my father said! I don't need to hear it from you, too!"

"You're lucky to be alive! Just how bad is the Challenger?" She turned to face the road again and mumbled something. "What was that? I missed it."

"I said it's totaled."

"Well, as long as it's nothing major." I got a raspberry for that. I rubbed my hands over my face. "I think I understand your father a little better now. He's not just giving you away, he's reducing his liability!" That earned me a second raspberry.

Leaving aside Marilyn's driving history, I enjoyed the drive back. Marilyn had on a dark blue tank top that showed some interesting cleavage, and a short denim skirt. I enjoyed watching her.

I had gotten a room at the Sheraton in downtown Utica. It was on Genesee Street, which was the main north-south business street through the city, just south of 5S. It was maybe a couple miles south of St. Peter's, where the wedding was to be held, and maybe five miles east of the Lefleur's and Trinkaus Manor on 5S and 69. I had gotten a block of rooms reserved for family members and any of the guests who wanted to stay over. Harlan and Anna Lee, Tusker and Tessa, and Joe would be arriving tomorrow, and my entire family, including aunts and uncles and cousins would be coming in Friday. The rehearsal was at 1700 on Friday, the wedding was at 1100 Saturday, and the reception was at 1400.

Marilyn thought my use of military time was hilarious.

We drove the Thruway back to Utica and got off at Exit 31, and drove down Genesee Street to the Sheraton. When we got there, Marilyn pulled up to the door and she got out with me. I pulled my bags from the back seat and she opened the trunk up. She handed me a suitcase. "I told my parents I was staying with Tammy. She'll cover for me."

"Oh?", I asked.

"You sound like you don't want me to stay?"

I wrapped her in another hug. "Go park the car and come in, and I'll show you just how much I want you to stay!" I lowered my face and kissed her. At the break, she closed her trunk and got back into the car, while I scrounged up a bellman for the luggage and went inside to check in.

Marilyn returned while I was still registering at the front desk. She was quiet and held my hand and leaned against me while I finished signing in, and then held my hand as we rode the elevator to the third floor. The bellman delivered our luggage and I slipped him a few bucks, and then Marilyn just came up to me and wrapped her arms around me.

"It's all right.", I told her softly.

"I just wish this was all over!"

I rubbed her back. "Thirty years from now, our children will be getting married, and we'll be able to laugh at them and tell them just how awful it was for us and how we survived it all."

"Thirty years! I don't think I'm going to last thirty minutes!"

"In sixty years you'll be able to laugh at your grandchildren.", I answered.

Marilyn gave a small and manic laugh at that. I let go of her and pulled her by the hand over to the bed. Since I hadn't planned on Marilyn staying with me, I hadn't gotten a suite. The room still had a king sized bed, though. I sat down on the bed and pulled her down beside me. She simply leaned against me with her head on my shoulder.

"I think you need to relax.", I told her. I moved backwards on the bed until I was comfortably in the center of it, and pulled Marilyn along with me. I lay down and she lay down on top of me. I reached up and cupped her face in my hands and kissed her softly. She slipped her tongue between my lips and made a gentle moaning sound as I rubbed my hands across her back. She had a thin bra under the tank top, and as she squirmed around on top of me, I responded with an erection.

"I love you so much.", I whispered to her. "I love you, I love you, I love you. I can never say it enough. Every day we will be married, I want you to know that I love you." I felt something warm and wet touch my cheek, and pulled back enough to see that my fiancée was crying. I continued to hold her and comfort her, telling her how much I loved her and how I would love her everyday and forever and ever, and anything else I could think of until she calmed down.

I knew it was just a bad case of nerves. I slowly moved from rubbing her back to slipping my hands under her tank top, and then slid it up her body and off of her. Next went her miniskirt, which I unzipped and pushed down off her hips, to leave her there in her simple cotton bra and panties. I shucked them off her as well, and then I undressed myself as she silently watched me. Once I was naked I climbed on top of her. She was already aroused, and I slid inside her easily. Marilyn wrapped her arms and legs around me tightly, as if to hold onto me no matter what happened, but I simply made slow and gentle love to her, even as I continued to whisper my love into her ear.

I was able to time my orgasm to match hers, and afterwards I lay there on top of her, supporting my weight on my arms while I kissed her face. Marilyn finally smiled at me. "Better now?", I asked.

"Better.", she replied, smiling up at me.

"It's just nerves. Any time over the next few days, if you get a case of nerves, just ask me and I'll help you work through it."

That got her to giggling. "That's mighty generous of you."

I gave her my most innocent look, or at least as innocent a look as I could give while laying on top of her naked. "I am a kind and generous sort of guy, and want nothing more than to know that I am able to help those feeling down."

Marilyn wiggled her ass from side to side underneath me. "Well, I'm starting to feel depressed again. Think you can help with that?"

"It's a burden, but I always try to help." I rolled off of her onto the bed, and took her hand and moved it down to my slimy and come-covered cock. "With a little help from you, I'm sure I'll be up for it."

"I'll help if you will." Marilyn began to slowly fondle and pump my cock back to life, and I took a more active role as well, lowering my face to her tits and licking them and the nipples while I diddled her clit. Marilyn had another orgasm, loudly this time, before rolling on top of me and fucking that tight and hungry little pussy down onto my cock. She had a second, bigger orgasm when she felt me coming up into her greasy cunt.

Afterwards, Marilyn rolled off of me, and I was breathing hard. "I don't know about you.", I told her, "but I certainly feel more relaxed."

"Me, too.", she admitted. She rolled onto the bed beside me and threw a leg over mine. "What about later? I might need some more relaxation then."

"Well, you just let me know, and I'll see what I can do for you. Of course, you'll probably need to make sure it's easy for me to relax you, and you'll have to make sure I know when you start getting nervous."

She smirked at that. "And just how do I make sure you'll be able to relax me?"

"Well, I think that bras and panties just get in the way.", I answered her.

"You really are an oinker!", she laughed.

"I'm hurt that you would think ill of me like that."

"And let me guess. When I need to be relaxed, I should just grab your pants?"

"Communications are the key to a strong marriage.", I piously intoned.

"What would it be communicating if I squeezed your balls?"

I grinned at her. "Probably that you needed a good spanking!" That prompted her to try and grab me, but I managed to escape, and then had her trapped face down on the bed while I swatted her bottom a few times. I kept her in that position until I climbed on top of her for a third round, doggy style.

We were so damned relaxed we fell asleep at that point!

We woke up again early in the evening. It would be nice to say that I spent the rest of the evening madly screwing my fiancée, in every imaginable position, multiple times, without letup. Nice, but not quite true. Marilyn seemed much calmer, and we were both pretty hungry, so we washed up and dressed and went downstairs to the Sheraton's restaurant for dinner. I did manage to hide her bra and panties while she was in the shower, and not just the ones she had worn, but the ones in her suitcase as well. I also hid the sneakers she had been wearing, and set out her high heeled sandals.

After I came out of the shower, I heard her rummaging through the drawers and her suitcase. I came out of the bathroom to find her wearing a Sheraton robe and saying, "You think you're so clever!"

"Is that a question or an accusation?"

"Both!"

"I always thought being clever was a good thing. During the Trojan War, Odysseus was the hero, and he was the clever one."

"Whatever!" She stripped off her robe and pulled the tank top and denim skirt on without her underwear. "Happy?"

"Very! I'm so happy, I'll even return the favor." I grabbed my slacks and slid them on commando style, and then pulled on a brightly colored Hawaiian shirt.

Marilyn snorted and laughed at that, then slipped on her sandals. She stood up and turned around in front of me. "Is this what you wanted?"

"Like you have no idea!", I replied, nodding my head and licking my lips. Suddenly room service sounded like a very good idea!

Marilyn put the kibosh on that. "I'm hungry. Grab the key." I grabbed my wallet and key and followed her into the hallway. We held hands down the hallway and down the elevator.

It wasn't a long wait at all to get a table. Once seated, I asked Marilyn what she wanted to do that night. Movie? Go out to a club? Go bar hopping? "I'm too tired for any of that. I just want to get dinner, have a couple of drinks, and go back to the room. Is that all right?"

"Whatever you say, babe. I just want you to stay relaxed."

She gave me a lewd grin at that. "We'll do some relaxing later on, too. There's something else I need you to help me with, too."

I smiled at her. "What's that?"

She leaned in towards me and lowered her voice to a whisper. "I plan to shave my legs and all again before Saturday. Could you help with that? You know, like before?"

Suddenly my mouth felt dry, and I wished the waiter would show up to take our drink orders. "Whatever you want, honey, whatever you want!", I finally managed to croak out.

If Marilyn was trying to unsettle me, she succeeded. Helping her with her intimate hygiene needs stayed in the back of my mind all through our drinks and dinner. I was even prepared to skip dessert and head back upstairs, but she dragged the evening out, giggling at me as she did so. Now I was the one who needed relaxation!

After dinner I hustled Marilyn back upstairs as quickly as I could. She tried to drag out the torment, by saying she felt like taking a walk or going into the bar, but I all but pulled her along and threw her over my shoulder. It wasn't a long ride up the elevator, but I let my fingers do the walking as soon as the door shut. I had her moaning by the time the door opened again.

Marilyn scampered down the hall to our room, but had to wait until I got there. I unlocked it and we slipped inside, and were in each other's arms before it even shut. "I can't wait! I have to take you! Now!", I told her. Marilyn simply moaned and grabbed my cock through my pants. I was so hard I'm surprised I didn't rip right through them.

We never made it to the bed. I pulled her skirt up to her waist and lifted her up and sat her plump little bottom on the dresser. Her tank top I pushed down off her shoulders, exposing those delicious tits and then I pushed her hands between her legs. Marilyn spread her legs wide, and I unzipped my pants and let them fall around my knees. She grabbed my cock and guided me inside, and I slammed my cock into her pussy as she shrieked happily. She tried to move her hands away, to grab me and pull me closer, but I forced them back down between us. "Make me come!", I demanded, and I forced her fingers to play with both herself and my cock, humping madly into her.

"Fuck me, fuck me, fuck me!", she moaned. Her pussy was making squishy farting noises and I rammed into it. Between her fingers on her clit and my cock sawing back and forth into her, Marilyn was shivering and shuddering in an almost continuous orgasm. I was the one holding us tightly together as I slamfucked that tight little pussy. I had my arms around her and my hands cupping her bottom gripping it feverishly as I pumped into her. Maybe I had rejuvenated some during dinner, but when I came, it felt like I was pumping a river of jism into her. Marilyn squealed happily when she felt me unload, and she wrapped her arms around me when I cut loose.

We were both panting at that point, and I stepped back and Marilyn climbed down off the dresser unsteadily. "That was pretty good.", she commented. "For our second time, maybe you can do better now that you've warmed up."

"I'll warm you up! I'll warm up your bottom!", I replied with a growl. I grabbed her and gave her a couple of swats on the rear.

Marilyn laughed and headed into the bathroom. I pulled my pants back up and grabbed the TV remote, and crawled onto the bed, propping myself up with some pillows. When she came back, she was barefoot, but still wearing the denim skirt and tank top, though now worn normally, and not around her waist. She crawled onto the bed next to me and propped herself up on her own pillows. We watched television for a bit, until I noticed she had fallen asleep. I rearranged her on the bed, and kissed her on the forehead, and then covered her with the bedspread.

I woke up the next morning to an interesting feeling of warmth and wetness in my crotch, and when I cracked my eyes open and looked down my body, I found Marilyn looking back at me, with my cock in her mouth. "What a great way to wake up!", I commented.

"Come in my mouth, honey.", she replied, while jacking my cockshaft and licking me like a lollipop.

What a wonderful idea! I rearranged the pillows to I could watch, and lay back and luxuriated in the feel. Marilyn was naked, so she must have woken up before me, cleaned up and stripped down, and then managed to get my pants down without waking me. I must have really been sleeping! She concentrated on sucking my cockhead while jacking my shaft, and I happily filled her mouth about ten minutes later.

She slipped off into the bathroom, probably to brush her teeth, and I fell back asleep. I must have dozed another twenty minutes before waking up again. Marilyn now had on a bathrobe, and was sipping some coffee made from the mini-coffeemaker in the bathroom. "Morning, sleepyhead.", she said.

I stretched and said, "Good morning." I glanced down and saw I was still naked from the waist down. "Boy, I bet I know what would be a great wake-up call!"

Her eyes twinkled and Marilyn answered, "You only get one wake-up call a day. Nobody gets two. Time to get up and face the world."

I sat up and peeled off my shirt. "You sure about that? I missed that in the rules. Besides, I'm on vacation. I don't have to face the world." I lay back and spread my legs, exposing myself to her.

Marilyn wasn't taking the bait. "Don't you have people coming in?"

"Tusker and Tessa are coming from Baltimore, so figure an hour and a half to Harrisburg, another four hours to Binghamton, and two hours to get here. They won't get here until late afternoon. Bradley is coming from Philly, so he's not getting here until mid-afternoon, and Harlan and Anna Lee are flying into Syracuse at 1400. I haven't got a thing to do until this afternoon." I stroked my cock idly, willing it to life.

Marilyn noticed me, but kept teasing me. "Don't you need to go run around and work out or something?"

"I have some better exercises in mind. Want to join me?"

"Yuck! I don't want to get all sweaty!"

I jumped off the bed and grabbed her. As she giggled and laughed, I tossed her onto the bed and had my way with her, burning up quite a few calories in the process. We did manage to get sweaty, but I promised to help her clean up later. We took a shower together and didn't get down to the restaurant until mid-morning.

After breakfast we walked around the hotel a bit, but the Sheraton isn't actually in one of the prettier sections of the city, not that Utica is well known for its civic loveliness. There are some nice sections over on the Parkway, but the Sheraton is located smack dab in the heart of the business district, and there's nothing around but office buildings and high rises and traffic too dangerous to cross even at the crosswalks. We just goofed off for a bit, did the shaving thing, talked about the wedding and the honeymoon, had lunch and a few beers, and simply waited around for our friends to show up. These were all on the groom's side. Marilyn's maid of honor and one of her bridesmaids were local girls, and Suzie was coming in with my family Friday morning.

It was about four in the afternoon before people started showing up. Marilyn and I had gone down to the bar and were nursing a few beers, figuring we'd catch some people as they came in the front door. From the bar you can get a good view of the lobby. Harlan and Anna Lee actually showed up first. They landed about quarter after two, took thirty minutes to get their luggage and rent their car, an hour to drive from Syracuse, and ten minutes to get lost and unlost on Genesee Street. I noticed them coming in and we went into the lobby to say hello. They were going to check in and unload their gear, and then come back down for drinks with us.

Joe Bradley showed up while the Buckminsters were still upstairs. He was traveling stag, which didn't surprise me. He never chased women back at RPI, although he occasionally claimed a girl back in New Jersey. I never saw any pictures, though. Regardless, if he was gay, he was so far in the closet as to be undetectable. For certain, after living with him for three years, my gay-dar had never gone off even once.

The five of us were having beers at a table in the bar when Marilyn looked out into the lobby and said, "Oh my God!" She turned back to me with a look of mixed shock and awe. "It's Tusker and Tessa!"

"What's with you? You know he's a bit nuts." I figured it was Tusker's appearance which made Marilyn's eyes pop out. I stood up and turned around to see my friends. Tusker looked fine. It was Tessa who surprised us. "Holy Christ!", I exclaimed.

They had seen us in the lobby and waved and walked over towards the bar. Or at least Tusker walked. Tessa was waddling! She looked to be somewhere around ten or eleven months pregnant. She was grinning like crazy as she saw our shocked expressions. "I told him you'd be surprised!"

"Astonished, is more like it!", I replied. "You know, they have a pill to prevent things like this."

"I told him you'd say that, too. The heck with you. Where's the bathroom!?", she answered.

Marilyn and Anna Lee rushed around and the trio headed off towards the bathroom off the lobby. I introduced Tusker to Joe and Harlan, and we carried his gear over to the registration desk. It was the first time any of them had met anybody else in the group, although I had mentioned who was doing what to each of them. Tusker checked in and then waited for the women to return, and he and Tessa promised to come back down and join us in the bar.

Once they had left, I asked Marilyn, "Did she mention anything about them getting married?"

She gave me a wicked grin. "Nope!"

"I think Tusker would have invited us if they had."

Anna Lee commented, "I didn't see any wedding bands or engagement rings."

"Trust those two to be unconventional!" I told the other three. "Tusker and Tessa are two of my oldest friends from home, back in high school. They're even more different from each other than Marilyn and I."

Marilyn nodded in agreement. "He's like a crazy biker type and she's a sweet and innocent college girl like me."

Joe commented, "From the looks of things, not all that sweet and innocent." I had to grin at that. Compared to my buttoned down Army buddies, Tusker was a long haired hippie.

Anna Lee commented, "I'm amazed they were able to travel. She looks like she's about to give birth any moment now!"

"At least you're a nurse!", I said.

"Let's hope it doesn't come to that!", she returned.

Needless to say, topic number one when Tusker and Tessa came back downstairs was when the baby was due. She assured us that her doctor said it wasn't happening for at least another month, but I was wondering about that. I just couldn't believe that was correct. Topic number two was introducing everybody to everybody else. At least Harlan and Joe and I all had our Army background to join us, but Tusker was about as far from the Army as you could imagine.

At one point he asked Harlan, "Now, I've heard from him how the two of you were conquering heroes back in boot camp. Now I want to hear it from you!"

Joe weighed in, "Me too! I went through training the same year, and I just don't believe it."

"Were you Blue Army or Orange Army?", asked Harlan.

"Orange."

Harlan just nodded and said to me, "Well, that explains it."

"He's one of those people.", I agreed.

Harlan turned back to Joe. "I'm not surprised. After the spanking Buckman and I gave you, the Orange Army probably shot the offenders and burned the files. I sure wouldn't have wanted it known by anybody."

"Harlan, I don't know you, but if you've been hanging out with him, you must be full of shit, too!", replied Joe.

Anna Lee laughed, and Tessa giggled, especially when Marilyn commented, "So, you hung around with him for three years. What does that make you?"

We ordered another round of beers, and Harlan and I explained the drubbing that we had inflicted on the Orange Army. That got us into a discussion of what we were all currently doing, Harlan and me in the Army, Joe going to grad school at Wharton, and Tusker and Tessa, still working at the bar and finishing college. Tessa had finished a year ago, but Tusker was only going part-time and getting his Associates in business.

"What do you plan to do when that's over?", asked Anna Lee.

Tusker looked at Tessa, and then over at me, which the others noticed, and then answered, "We're saving our money. We're going to open a repair shop, a motorcycle repair shop. I want to be a Harley dealer eventually."

I gave him a thumbs up and Tessa took his hand and squeezed it. "Carl's been helping us with that.", she said.

I just waved it off. "I just helped you get organized and focused. When's your place going to open?", I asked.

"1980!", they both said loudly, and then laughed.

"Then it's a goal and not a dream. Your next step is what?"

"I'm revising our business plan.", answered Tusker.

"Send it to me after the wedding but before somebody gets born. That's going to take up a fair bit of time.", I said. I just hoped it wouldn't take all their energy and time away from their dealership plans.

Tessa answered, "We already have that figured in. We're staying in our current place instead of getting a bigger one, and saving that money. I'm going to make him keep pushing."

"Then I'll keep pushing, too." That led into a discussion of their plans and Harlan's and Joe's plans as well. Harlan was stationed at Fort Hood, assigned to a self-propelled M109 155mm battery, and Anna Lee was working at a local hospital. Joe figured he had one more year at Wharton before he had to put the uniform on for real. Harlan was planning on going career; Joe was going to get out as soon as he could and go to work on Wall Street.

Me? I had no idea at the moment what I was going to end up doing. I liked what I was doing now, but I couldn't imagine twenty years in the readiness cycle like this. Thank God I was still young. It didn't matter, though, since I had another three years with Uncle Sam no matter what.

Friday we goofed off until my family arrived. Harlan, Joe, and Anna Lee spent a chunk of the day together talking about Army stuff, and Marilyn and I sat down with Tusker and Tessa to talk about their dealership plans. He had sent me a model business plan as part of one of his courses, and after reading his teacher's comments, I offered a few of my own.

My family must have started out at the crack of dawn. They needed to be here mid-afternoon at the latest. The rehearsal was at five, and they needed to check in by four. On the other hand, the saying was that Dad flew low. He never met a speed limit he couldn't break. This was the last day together for Marilyn and me. She would leave and stay the night with Tammy. Neither of us wanted to test the old bit about bad luck when seeing the bride before the wedding. I planned to lock myself in my room and get a decent night's sleep.

This was in marked contrast to my first trip through. Much like this time, I had friends and a wedding party gathered together from all over the eastern seaboard. Then, however, I had agreed to a bachelor party the night before the wedding, and got totally trashed. I was impossibly hungover the next day, and Marilyn never let me forget it! I was sober, but looked and felt like low grade garbage. Not this time, no way, no how!

The rehearsal went smoothly. I had let Marilyn pick the flower girl and ring bearer from her family, since nobody on my side was that young, not even my cousins. Peter was going to be the ring bearer and one of her cousins was going to be the flower girl. Afterwards we had dinner over at a steak house in the Sangertown Square mall. The only awkward part, to me at least, was when I caught Mom explaining my brother couldn't be there because he wasn't feeling well. When Marilyn's parents asked what was wrong they heard me mutter, "Clinical insanity." Mom wasn't amused and Marilyn's parents looked mystified, and I just said he was tied up ("in a straight jacket!", I whispered to Marilyn) and wasn't able to come. I vowed to keep quiet, especially after Marilyn poked me in the arm.

Otherwise things went smoothly. As soon as Suzie learned that Anna Lee was a nurse, she plopped herself down next to her new best friend and started peppering her with questions about nursing school and being a nurse. Suzie had just turned 17 and was a senior at Towson High, with plans to go to nursing school when she graduated. She was planning on getting both a degree in nursing and her RN certification, which always surprised me, since I never really understood they aren't one and the same. Anna Lee took it all in with good grace, having a fresh and eager face to talk to about nursing.

Suzie would be a good nurse. She ended up going to Delaware the first trip through, and they threw them in the deep end right at the start. On her first ambulance ride-along, two weeks into her first semester, they went roaring off to the home of an elderly husband and wife. The husband had a heart attack and died while Suzie was watching. It only got worse. The wife, seeing her husband die, immediately stroked out, and dropped to the floor in front of my sister. They transported her but she never woke up. Two dead on her very first ambulance call! If that didn't scare her off, nothing would. She ended up in orthopedics at Johns Hopkins, and used to tell us the funniest stories!

My father even paid for the rehearsal dinner. He grumbled slightly to Mom, but kept it quiet. Big Bob's and Harriet's family of 13 kids was more than he had originally budgeted for, which was practically nothing. He hadn't even rented a tux for the wedding. I wondered what his wedding present to us would be. On the first trip around, it turned out that he had been keeping track of all the money he had given to me since I went to college, like the $20 he once slipped me, or the $50 he once let me have to make a year's expenses. He totaled up the costs to $600 and told Marilyn and me he was cancelling my debt to him. That was our wedding present. At least this time I didn't owe him any money.

Suzie, on the other hand, got a $25,000 wedding when she got married, complete to 300 guests at the Engineer's Club in Baltimore and a nine piece band. We also got to see my mother lit up like a Christmas tree leading the conga line. I thought that kind of made it worthwhile. By then, of course, I had completely remade my life hundreds of miles away from my family, so I just didn't care about the discrepancy in treatment. Marilyn, however, felt the snub terribly. Her parents gave us a honeymoon cruise as a wedding present, and mine cancelled a debt we didn't even know we owed.

Big Bob and Harriet wanted to give us a cruise again, but since I had already arranged our honeymoon cruise, they switched it to a trip to Hawaii sometime within the next year. I told Marilyn and them that we would go sometime during the winter, when I had built up some more leave and we had another support cycle. They really didn't understand about building up leave and the cycle and how it worked. To be fair neither did Marilyn, and I suspected she wasn't going to enjoy parts of it.

After the rehearsal dinner, Marilyn and I snuck out to the parking lot with Tammy and I tossed her suitcase into Tammy's car. I got a very nice hug and smooch from my sweetie. She also laughed and said, "Thanks for treating my nerves!"

I just grinned at her. "Hey, I'm a doctor! I specialize in treating women's nervous conditions."

Tammy laughed at that. "Does that mean you'd treat me if I got nervous?"

Marilyn tried to give her friend and maid of honor a playful push, but I still had her in my arms. "Forget about it! Besides, he's not that type of doctor."

"I don't know, babe. A doctor is a doctor is a doctor...", I commented.

She wrapped herself around me possessively. "Yeah? Well, you're my doctor now, so nobody else gets any treatments!"

"Okay, but you'd better be pretty nervous, 'cause I'd hate to let these talents go to waste."

She shrieked in laughter at that, and then gave me a good-night kiss. She and Tammy roared out of the parking lot with a squeal to the tires. Tammy wasn't any better a driver than Marilyn. Hopefully they would survive until the morning.

Tusker and Tessa drove back to the Sheraton in their car, and I rode with Harlan and Anna Lee and Joe. As we climbed in, I commented, "I wonder if we can run over to Toys R Us and pick up a car seat for the baby? She looks like Mount Vesuvius getting ready to blow!"

Harlan laughed, but Anna Lee agreed with me. "Hey, I work obstetrics, and I think the doctor got the dates wrong. There is no way she has another month to go. She looks like the baby has already dropped, and not just yesterday, either!"

We made a side trip over to Commercial Drive and bought a car seat and a big carton of newborn diapers. Even if she didn't need them right away, she was going to need them soon enough! Joe picked up a few bibs and onesies for the baby. He and Harlan would make sure they got them after Marilyn and I took off. We also picked up some wrapping paper, and some tape and scissors. Back at the Sheraton, we took everything up to my room, had a wrapping party, and had a few beers.

But that was it for the excitement. I needed to get some sleep (Marilyn's nervous condition had precluded much sleep for the last couple of days.) Saturday the wedding would be at 1100, so I needed to be at the church an hour before that. The limo was to pick up me and my groomsmen at the Sheraton by 0945 and drive us over. Anna Lee was going to drive over with Tessa about half an hour or so later.

Have you ever seen the movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding? Remember the overhead shot of the Greek church, where the bride's side of the church is filled to overflowing, and the groom's side barely has a few pews seated? Marilyn and I used to call that our big fat upstate wedding. It was just about like that. We had about 150 people at the wedding. Roughly 120-130 were from her family. Every aunt and uncle and cousin from Plattsburgh and beyond showed up. It was the biggest collection of shitkickers and hillbillies since the movie Deliverance was filmed. I just whispered to Harlan, Joe, and Tusker that if anybody started asking if they could squeal like a pig, to just start running!

My side was a lot smaller. We just had my family, less Ham, and Suzie was in the wedding, so it was just my parents in the pew. Also, Aunt Nan and her family of five, total, and Aunt Peg and her family of three, total. My grandfather was now in a nursing home getting ready to die in the fall. Before he died just a few days after the wedding, and they didn't tell us until we got home. Also on my side were about a dozen friends and their girlfriends or wives, mostly from college, along with Professor Rhineburg and his wife. Marilyn had a few friends from high school, as well.

The wedding went quite smoothly. Harlan and Tusker did a fine job of seating everybody, while Joe and I sat in a small room behind the altar and swapped lies until it was show time. Marilyn was late, of course, but not by more than fifteen minutes, so by Marilyn's standards she was actually early. It was worth the wait. She had on this beautiful gown with a silk bottom half, and a brocaded corset type top half, though with straps. There was some interesting cleavage on display, along with her well tanned shoulders and arms, and about half her back was bare. No way did she have a bra on!

First came the flower girl, one of Marilyn's cousins, Cindy. The bridesmaids and groomsmen came down the aisle next. Harlan was paired with Mark's fiancée, Lauren, and Tusker was paired with Suzie. Peter came down the aisle looking very solemn and very small. He was only about four and a half years old. Next was Tammy. The three girls were all wearing pastel dresses and hats; Tammy in green, Suzie in yellow, and Lauren in pink. Finally, Big Bob, in a full morning coat tuxedo came down the aisle with Marilyn, looking very proud indeed. Marilyn had a veil held in place with a circlet of silk, and after lifting the veil up and over her head, he kissed her on the cheek and then shook my hand and then he left her with me.

My heart was beating wildly as I watched her. This was the culmination of what I had been working for since November 5, 1968. It was just a few months shy of ten years, and the price I had paid was beyond my imagining, and it was completely worth it. "You look amazing!", I whispered to her. "Every day for the rest of our lives, I want you to know I want to marry you again and again."

Marilyn squealed and threw her arms around my neck, but the priest began clearing his throat and she stopped from kissing me. "Not just yet!", he said, loud enough for the church to hear. There was a lot of laughter at that.

At least this was the good priest, the regular family priest. St. Peter's had several priests, and at least one of them would end up in trouble twenty years down the road for fooling around with the altar boys. Marilyn's parents were furious when this came out. At least he hadn't messed with their kids.

And then we got married. During the preparatory meeting with the priest, I suggested for one of the readings Ephesians 5:22, "Wives, submit yourself unto your husbands, as unto the Lord." Marilyn hadn't been all that amused, at least until the priest suggested adding Verses 23-33, a considerably lengthier passage about how the husband was supposed to take care of his wife. I shrugged and smiled and went along with it. I also made sure she knew later that night, when I got her alone, just what submission involved. That proved a very enjoyable evening! Now, when we got to that point in the ceremony, we started giggling to each other, and it took all our strength not to break out in laughter.

Since all of Marilyn's family was Catholic, and even a few of my guests and bridal party, we had a full mass, including communion. As a result, the ceremony took longer than expected. It was not quite an hour before the priest said we were man and wife, and I could kiss the bride. Marilyn practically jumped into my arms and gave me a scorching hot kiss. Maybe it was because I whispered to her earlier on that I planned on making her submit that night.

We hung around the church for at least half an hour, and probably more, taking pictures in every conceivable combination. Then it was off to the reception. Marilyn and I had a limo of our own, and the wedding party had a larger model for them. Once we got into the limo, Marilyn threw herself into my arms again, and we kissed awhile. When I came up for air, I idly rubbed her half naked back, and asked if she had on stockings or pantyhose. She giggled and said I would have to find out for myself, but when I tried to, by tugging at her hem, she squealed and protested. Before I could find out, we were at Trinkaus Manor, and I had to behave myself.

I had already spoken to the limo driver. At the Sheraton, I had checked out and he had loaded all of my luggage into the trunk of the car, and had then gotten together with the limo driver that picked up Marilyn and now he had all of her luggage as well. After the reception, our driver was to hang around and eventually drive us to the airport in Syracuse. We were staying the night at one of the airport hotels and then flying out in the morning. I told the driver to feel free to have dinner, but no booze, and he just nodded and agreed.

I had been hoping for a drink at that point, but my hopes were crushed almost immediately. The entire wedding party was hustled through the reception to the back of the property, where there was an outdoor garden and arbor where more pictures were taken. I commented to Marilyn that I thought our guests were having more fun than we were, but she just shushed me. She looked radiant and was having the time of her life.

As for the reception, it went pretty much like most receptions. We started off with a receiving line, and then segued into a cocktail hour, where I was finally able to get a drink. Dinner was a plated event, to be followed by live music from the house band. It started at 1400 and would run four hours. Pretty routine. The entire wedding party was seated at a head table, and my parents sat with some of my aunts and uncles. Anna Lee and Tessa had a table with some of my friends from college.

The champagne toast was given by my best man, Joe Bradley, and I knew something was up when he took the microphone and stepped around the head table to be on the opposite side from Marilyn and me. He picked up the mike and started talking. "Hi, I'm Joe Bradley, and as the best man, I need to say something about these two that is both memorable and amusing. I had to give that quite a bit of thought, since they have provided me with an awful lot of stuff to talk about over the years." That got a fair bit of laughter.

"I first met Carl our freshman year at RPI, when we started in ROTC at the same time. A few months later we joined the same fraternity, and a couple of months after that we both met Marilyn. So I probably know the two of them as a couple longer than anybody else in this room, and I thought to myself, the people here would really like to know how our newlyweds first met."

At that point Marilyn's head whipped towards me and she asked, "He's not going to say what I think he's going to say, is he?" I just laughed. "Stop him!" I laughed some more.

Marilyn's concern was noted by several people, including Joe. There were a couple of calls for a full explanation, and Joe just grinned. "Yes, you two, payback really sucks, doesn't it!?", he commented to us, all on the live mike. He turned back to the audience and continued, "Well, as I said, Carl and I both joined a fraternity, and a more drunken and degenerate group of guys you will never find. Carl fit in perfectly." There was considerable laughter at this!

"Then we had a party, and invited all the wicked women we could find to the party, and guess who showed up? That's right, our Marilyn here met Carl at a drunken frat party. Now, Marilyn was actually a shy and innocent girl who was dragged along by her wicked friends." He turned back to us and asked, "That's what you told your parents right, Marilyn?"

"That's true!", she protested. I just kept laughing.

"You bet! Anyway, as soon as Carl saw her, he started drooling into his beer. Then he got up the nerve to ask her to dance. They have been together ever since. Now isn't that a nice romantic story?", he asked. More than a few people applauded at this, but Joe wasn't finished.

"Well, it got even more romantic. One of the upperclassmen also saw Marilyn, and he was pursuing her, too. He kept trying to butt in and dance with her, and ply her with alcohol, but Marilyn was afraid, and begged Carl for protection."

"I did no such thing!", protested Marilyn loudly. I laughed and Joe waved her off.

"It got even worse. The other fellow was so incensed by this he actually challenged Carl to a duel! Can you imagine it? A duel!" He waved towards me. "Carl Buckman is one of the bravest men I have ever met. He actually accepted the challenge, and defended the honor of the woman he had fallen in love with. This is all true. I was there and I was Carl's second. As the challenged, he was entitled to select weapons, and he chose shot glasses and Southern Comfort. He challenged the upperclassman to a drinking contest, and he won! Now, let's give Carl a big round of applause!"

I just rolled my eyes, and it was Marilyn's turn to laugh, as more applause came up from the reception hall. "You're dead, Joe, you're dead!", called out Marilyn.

"That's right, Carl won Marilyn in a fraternity drinking contest! I mean, who could invent a story like that? That was how they met. So let's raise our glasses high and toast them, because things can only get better than that first night!"

We got a rousing round of applause and cheers, and Marilyn and I drank our champagne and kissed as well. It was time for my response, so I stood and took the mike from Joe. "Thanks, Joe. What I say now I mean from the bottom of my heart. You need to stay on that side of the table for awhile, because if you come over to this side, Marilyn is going to kill you!"

He laughed at that, as did the others. Marilyn I wasn't so sure about.

"Now let me explain what really happened that night, and not what Joe says happened." I thought about it for a few moments, and then continued, "Okay, what he said was actually pretty accurate. I remember telling Marilyn afterwards that someday she would be able to tell her grandchildren how men had fought duels over her. What I didn't tell her was that it would be our grandchildren she would tell that story to. As soon as I saw Marilyn and looked into those eyes, I knew it was my life's destiny to be with her and protect her and care for her, no matter what the cost would be. That's a promise I made earlier today, and a promise I will make her every day for the rest of our lives!"

I raised my champagne glass again. "So, let me make another toast, to Marilyn Buckman, the woman I love." I turned to her and added, "I like the sound of that name!" We kissed again, also to much applause, and Marilyn even kissed Joe on the cheek, right after she punched him in the arm.

Everybody settled down after that, and dinner was served. I went with the Chicken Francaise. The other choice was prime rib, and while I like a good steak, I'm not a big fan of prime rib. Marilyn liked the prime rib though. Just one of those differences in life. After dinner, we milled about for a bit, until the band started up. There were about a million kids running around the place, all of them Marilyn's brothers and sisters or cousins. This was a total contrast to a Buckman wedding, where children aren't allowed. Marilyn was irate that her kids couldn't come to Suzie's wedding.

It was at this point that things started to go sideways.

Chapter 51: An Unplanned Guest

Marilyn and Suzie were over at one of the guest tables, talking to Anna Lee and Tessa. I am sure that Suzie was pestering Anna Lee about nursing stuff, and Anna Lee, the obstetrics nurse, was talking to Tessa about her pregnancy. I was over on the other side of the room, talking to Joe and a few of my frat brothers. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed Marilyn, Anna Lee, Tessa, and Suzie all stand up and head out of the room. I commented to Bruno Cowling, one of my frat brothers, a fellow soldier (2nd Lieutenant, Fort Lewis, 9th Infantry Division), and the only Dreg I invited, "What do you think they're doing in there all together? Having a union meeting?"

"It's one of the mysteries of life.", he replied. "Sort of like how you can put two socks in a dryer, and only get one out."

I drank some more of my gin and tonic, and we discussed other mysteries, such as how come you always end up with extra coat hangers in a closet, when one of the waitresses came up to me and tapped me on the shoulder. "Excuse me, sir, but they need you in the back room."

I looked at the others and shrugged, and then followed the waitress across the dance floor and into a side room. I looked around. This room looked like a small lounge, with a bar along one wall, and a bunch of tables and chairs in storage. Over to the side, the four women were in a gaggle. "What's up?", I asked, walking closer.

It was then that I noticed that Tessa was actually sitting down on a chair, and looked awful. She was starting to sweat, and Anna Lee was sitting next to her and obviously tending to her. Suzie was standing on the other side, and Marilyn looked stricken. "Tessa's having the baby!", she exclaimed.

"What!?"

"She's having the baby!", she repeated. I looked at Tessa, who just then groaned loudly.

"You're shitting me, right!?"

Anna Lee answered, "Her water just broke, and this baby is getting ready to join the party!"

"Holy shit!"

Marilyn asked, "What do we do?"

Both Anna Lee and Suzie tried to answer, and Tessa groaned some more. Well, thank God I actually knew the answer to this one. Maggie was damn near born in our bedroom. "Has anybody called an ambulance yet?" The women all stared at each other. Even Anna Lee, the nurse, had missed that one. "Well, unless you want to deliver the baby here, let's do that. You all stay here, I'll take care of this."

I turned on my heel and left Marilyn to join Anna Lee and Suzie caring for Tessa. The first thing I did was barge into the kitchen and find the banquet hall manager. "We need to call an ambulance.", I told him.

He looked alarmed. "What? Why?", he stammered out.

"One of the guests is having a baby."

"She can't do that here!"

"I agree, so call an ambulance." The manager continued to sputter, so I pulled a telephone off the wall and punched a 9 in. Like most such systems, this got me an outside line, so I called 911. I gave them the information, and then hung up.

I turned back and faced the manager. "Where's the clean linens?"

"You can't use our clean linens!", he protested.

"Okay, fine, when the baby dies, you can tell the cops that we couldn't use the clean linens! WHERE ARE THEY?!" I hustled him to the linen storage and grabbed an armful of clean napkins and a few tablecloths.

I took the linens back into the side room, and delivered them to Marilyn, and then went back to the dance floor. By now, a few people knew something was going on, but not what. Tusker came up to me after noticing Tessa had disappeared. "Where's Tessa? What's happening?", he asked.

I grabbed Tusker by the elbow and steered him into the side lounge. "Guess what!? You're about to be a daddy!"

He looked over at Tessa, now laying flat on the floor on top of a clean tablecloth. She noticed him there, but then grimaced and groaned. Tessa and Suzie were in the process of helping her out of her party dress, a very nice, if gargantuan, outfit. This was more than I needed to see, so I flipped around, even though Tusker continued to stare in disbelief. Marilyn came over to join us. "I have an ambulance on the way. Give them five minutes or so, I guess."

"What happened?", asked Tusker, although it wasn't clear to whom he was asking the question.

I tapped him on the shoulder and he turned to face Marilyn and me. "Focus, Tusker, focus!"

Marilyn said, "From what Tessa says, Anna Lee thinks she started going into labor this morning, even before the wedding. She's been having contractions for a few hours. Her water just broke, though."

"What do we do? Do I need to boil water? They always do that on TV?", he said, dumbfounded.

"Only if you're making soup, Tusker!", I answered. "What you need to do is go over there and hold her hand. She's scared."

"Uh, yeah, right." He moved over to the women on the floor and Anna Lee directed him to sit down next to Tessa's head.

Tessa immediately grabbed his hand and clamped down on it, causing it to whiten. "You sonofabitch! You're never touching me again!" By now the girls had Tessa undressed and covered with another tablecloth.

I grinned at Marilyn. "Ah, the miracle of childbirth. Warms the cockles of your heart, doesn't it"

Tessa gave another groan, and Marilyn's face got even paler. "You better not be so happy when this happens to us!"

"I hope you're not trying to tell me something."

That got a smile from her. "No, not that!"

"Good. You stay here and play traffic cop. Nobody comes in but me and the ambulance guys, got it?"

Marilyn gave me a salute, and I saluted her back and headed back out to the reception. By now several other people were milling about wondering what was going on. I just kept saying everything was fine and under control, not that anybody believed me. A few minutes later, although it seemed like hours at the time, a siren sounded in the distance and you could hear the Doppler Effect raise the pitch as it got closer. I went out the front door to flag them down and direct them inside. By now, everybody in the room knew something was happening.

I followed the ambulance crew into the lounge. Tessa was moaning and groaning, and cursing Tusker to boot, but she didn't look like she was about to have the baby on the spot. The ambulance crew brought in their gurney and dropped it down to the floor and took over from Anna Lee and Suzie. I grabbed Tusker and pulled him aside. "Listen, everything is going to be just fine. You ride with Tessa to the hospital. You can catch a cab from there back to the Sheraton later. You going to be okay?"

"Uh, yeah, I guess. This wasn't supposed to happen, you know?" For such a big and tough biker, Tusker was totally bewildered by what was happening to Tessa.

If I was calm and cool, it was because this had happened to Marilyn and me, sort of. Maggie, who managed to do her own thing her entire life, even before that life started, decided she wanted to see the sights early. At eight in the evening, Marilyn announced we needed to call her parents to come and watch over the kids, because she was starting her contractions. Fifteen minutes later she announced, "Carl, call the emergency squad, we're having this baby NOW!"

So I called the emergency squad, and then I called some friends in town and got somebody to watch Alison and Parker. The first three people to show up were the postmistress, the garbageman, and the bartender. After that, about another dozen people showed up to look up Marilyn's skirt. Still, I was holding it together fairly well, right up to the point where one of the eager young EMT types said, "Don't worry, Mister Buckman. We've never done this before, but we've all seen the movies!"

That was when I started worrying!

That was then. Now I smiled. "Hey, shit happens. You're going to do fine. Listen, Joe and Harlan and Anna Lee and I went over to Toys R Us last night and picked you up a few things for the baby. Make sure you get them from us."

He looked a little stunned. "Wow! Really? Thanks, thanks a lot!"

I shooed him back over to Tessa, now loaded on the gurney, with a blood pressure collar on her arm. He hovered around while they worked on her, with Anna Lee helping and Suzie watching. She came over and stood next to Marilyn and me, and I put my arm around her shoulder. "Still want to be a nurse?", I asked.

"You bet!", she gushed. I just laughed and kissed my baby sister on her cheek.

When they were ready to transport her, I led the way out the door and we simply asked everybody to clear the way. We followed them out the door, and waved farewell as Tusker and Tessa were loaded in the back. I stood there with my arm around Marilyn, as Anna Lee and Suzie came up, with Harlan and Joe right behind them. "You two did great.", I told Anna Lee and her assistant. "I don't know how to thank you enough!"

"That was so cool!", exclaimed Suzie.

Anna Lee laughed at that, as Harlan hugged her from behind. "You still want to be a nurse?", she asked.

"Absolutely!"

I gave her another kiss on the cheek. "Go tell Mom and Dad about it. They're going to be very proud of you, just like me."

Suzie scampered off, looking just like the little girl she really was. I turned to Marilyn. "Well, this makes for a wedding we'll never forget."

"Oh my God! I can't believe it!"

"At some point, we're going to have to change and go over to the hospital and check on them before we go.", I mentioned.

That sort of surprised her. "What! Now?"

I wrapped my arms around her and said, "Maybe in a little while, but you know we should do this. They're our friends. We'll just leave early and go to the hospital before heading out to Syracuse. Did anybody find out where they were taking her?"

Anna Lee commented, "I think it was the driver, he said St. Luke's. Where's that? Is it any good?"

I just nodded, as Marilyn answered the question. Utica has two hospitals, St. Luke's and Faxton, while Rome, to the west of us, has Rome Memorial. We were probably still closer to Utica. Any of them should be able to handle what seemed, at least to my eyes, to be a fairly normal birth.

"Let's go in and make an announcement.", I said.

Marilyn's eyes opened wide at that. "You can make the announcement! I have had more than enough excitement for one day!" I laughed at that and we walked back inside with an arm around each other.

The band had finished setting up, but had delayed getting into gear while all the hubbub was going on. Now I walked over to them and asked if they had a live mike. The band leader, the keyboard player, and I talked for a moment about the plans, and then he handed me a mike and flipped a switch on his mixing board. "You're live.", he said.

I tapped the mike a couple of times and heard the thump through the speakers, and then walked out into the middle of the dance floor. "Hello, hello, can everybody hear me?", I asked.

"A little louder please?, came a voice from the back. I looked over at the keyboardist and he turned a knob.

"Is this better?" I could tell it was decidedly louder now, and got approval from the rear of the room. I motioned Marilyn over, and she came cautiously. I simply put my arm around her shoulder before talking.

"Okay, let me make the official announcement, then. In case anybody doesn't know already, today is going to be a double celebration. Jim Tusk, the big red headed guy who was one of my ushers, and his girlfriend Tessa Harper, are having a baby. Tusker and Tessa are some of my oldest friends in the world, and this is their first. They hadn't expected this to happen so suddenly, but hey, life happens. They're going over to St. Luke's right now. That's what the ambulance was for."

There was a murmur among the crowd, as much over the fact that Tusker and Tessa didn't seem married as about anything else. I ignored it and moved along, "Now, I need to thank, again, the staff here at Trinkaus Manor for helping us get the ambulance in and letting us use the lounge." That was total bullshit, but it couldn't hurt. Maybe they wouldn't charge Big Bob for the linen. "I also need to thank Anna Lee Buckminster. She's the wife of my other usher, Harlan. Raise your hands, Anna Lee, Harlan." Again, this was pretty much a waste, since they were the only black people in the entire crowd. "Anna Lee is an obstetrical nurse, so Tessa couldn't have been in any better hands."

"Finally I want to thank my little sister, Suzie Buckman..."

"Woohoo!", she called out, hopping up and waving her arms like the little extrovert she is.

I kept on, though I was laughing, " ... for helping Anna Lee. Suzie's planning on becoming a nurse someday herself. Great job, Suzie!"

There was a lot of applause from the Buckman side of the family.

"Now, it's time to get back to the reception. The band is getting ready to start up, so everybody should be dancing and having some fun. At some point here, Marilyn and I are going to take off and go see our friends in the hospital, but even after we leave, keep the party going, use up all the booze, and make Big Bob go out and buy some more. I don't want anybody to forget this wedding!" I motioned the keyboardist to kill the mike and then handed it back to him.

Big Bob and Harriet were two of the first people to come up to us. "You throw a hell of a party, Bob!", I told him.

"I guess so!", he answered with a grin. "Remind me not to have you at any more parties!" He turned to his daughter. "Having fun, sweetheart?"

Marilyn hugged me. "Yes!"

I called over to the band. "Father-daughter dance, now!"

The band immediately started playing, and the band leader announced an immediate father-daughter dance, which wasn't quite on the schedule, but that was all blown to hell anyway. After that, I danced with my mother, then I danced with Harriet (like dancing with a drunken heifer, she had already had a few Manhattans) while Marilyn danced with my old man. I even managed to sneak in a dance with my wife! Finally we worked our way through a dollar dance, with Anna Lee and Tammy holding the bags for the money. I made sure I danced with both of them, as well.

At that point, I had one last dance with Marilyn, and then I dragged her off to the side. "It's time that we got going.", I told her.

Marilyn pouted. "It's too early!"

"They're your friends just the same as they're my friends. We need to go see them and then head over to Syracuse.

She sighed. "I know. I just wish we could stay longer. You're right."

"Go find Tammy and have her help you with that getup. Have I told you lately just how gorgeous you actually are?"

"Yes, but I love hearing you say it."

I nuzzled her neck and whispered in her ear, "Maybe sometime you can wear it again, and I can find out if you're wearing stockings or pantyhose." That earned me a little shriek and an embarrassed swat from my wife. I headed off to the lounge, where we had already brought in a travel bag.

There was a dichotomy in our travel plans. We were taking a cruise, and at least one night was a formal night, where you were advised to bring a tuxedo if at all possible. My mess dress would certainly work for that. However, Marilyn's wedding dress might never again see the light of day; it certainly wouldn't be suitable for the cruise. Tammy had promised to get it back to the house. After we got back from the cruise, and Marilyn had moved into the apartment with me, her family would ship her stuff to us FedEx.

I stripped out of my uniform and folded that up in my travel bag. I would get it cleaned and pressed on the ship. I then changed into some chinos and a sport shirt, and some much more comfortable boat shoes. Marilyn and Tammy came in during this time, so I simply went behind the bar to finish dressing. I also watched Marilyn changing. She was a little embarrassed, and made me turn away, so I watched her by way of the mirror behind the bar, which she also caught me doing. That earned me a one way trip out the side door to the lawn.

Ten minutes later Tammy opened the door and summoned me back inside. Marilyn had on a nice and simple sundress and some flat sandals, and Tammy was helping her fold the wedding dress up. I rearranged a few things in the travel bag and closed it up, and then went out and looked for the limo driver. He was in the kitchen eating a few pastries and drinking some coffee. I tossed him the bag, and he grinned and snagged it, and headed out to his limo. I then went back to the lounge and found Marilyn and we went back to the reception to make our final good-byes.

Predictably, my mother found the entire event quite disagreeable. Having a baby at a wedding reception like that, especially by people who weren't even married! Shocking! And Marilyn's family, well, really, couldn't I have done better? Children shouldn't be at a wedding reception, and Harriet had her latest baby, Miriam, in a baby seat, along with all the others running around the place. She didn't say that in front of Marilyn, not quite, at least, but she certainly told me about it, both in a previous life and earlier today. I just kissed her on the cheek and ignored her. Dad, on the other hand, found it all quite amusing. "Nothing like a little excitement, huh?", he asked Marilyn.

"I don't want any more excitement!", she replied, to which he and I both laughed. Mom just sniffed.

After that, Marilyn and I made a quick circuit of the room, thanking everybody for coming, and making sure to tell Joe and Harlan to get the baby presents to Tusker and Tessa. Then we scooted out the side door to the limo.

Chapter 52: Cruising

Before we climbed into the limo, I spoke to the driver about our plans. First I asked for his business card, and then I looked it over. "Tom Bouchet? That's you?", I asked.

"That's me.", he answered pleasantly.

"Nice to meet you, Tom. I'm Carl Buckman and this is my wife Marilyn."

Tom laughed. "I sort of had that figured out Mr. Buckman." He glanced at Marilyn, and nodded towards her, "Mrs. Buckman."

Marilyn grinned. "I like the sound of that."

I smiled too. "Well, Tom, here's the deal. Before we head out to the airport, we need to go over to St. Luke's to see our friends. You heard about that, right?"

Tom laughed again. "Oh, yeah!"

Marilyn and I had to laugh at this as well. Probably half the people in the Mohawk Valley would hear about this by the end of the weekend. "So anyway, we need to go over there and see how they're doing before we run out to Syracuse. I know this wasn't part of the deal, but if you can't run it through the original bill, send it to me directly, all right?" I dug out one of my business cards, with my address in Fayetteville.

"We'll figure it out at the office.", he assured me.

I thought for a second. "Are you busy tomorrow?", I asked.

Marilyn looked at me and asked, "Tomorrow?"

"Not for us, but for Tusker and Tessa. They'll need to get back to the hotel."

"Oooh, yes, and get their presents, too. They'll need the car seat just to get there!", added my wife.

I got a few cards from Tom and told him that I'd give them to the proud parents. He could run over to the Sheraton on Sunday and get the presents from Joe and Harlan, and then bring them back, and then cart Tusker and his family as needed. If they couldn't finagle it into Big Bob's bill, send it to me.

Ten minutes later we were at the hospital. I told Tom we would try to keep it short, but we weren't sure what was happening. I held my new bride's hand as we went inside. Marilyn asked me, as we got inside, "You know, we've never talked about it. Do you want kids?"

I gave her a curious look. "Sure. I thought you knew that."

"I wasn't sure."

"Don't you remember that little bit about telling your grandchildren about my duel? You've got to have kids to have grandkids. It's in the rules!"

"You and that duel!", she laughed, giving me a hip bump as we walked.

"Maybe I should have lost!"

"You're awful!" The next question was, "Well, when did you want them?"

I shrugged. "Not right away."

"Two years? Five years? Ten years? How many?"

I knew where Marilyn was going with this. She loved kids, and definitely wanted a houseful.

"We are not having 13 kids! I'll have the damn thing cut off before that happens!", I protested.

That earned me a good laugh. "No way! How about three or four?"

"We'll see. Tell you what. Let's be newlyweds for a bit first. Wait until I either make captain or the Army wakes up and throws my ass out. How about that?"

"Deal!"

"Deal!" We sealed it with a quick kiss.

From the reception area, we were sent off to the delivery area, but I wasn't sure how far that would get us. If the baby was already born, we might get to see him or her through the glass, or not. I hoped to get word to Tusker about the limo for tomorrow. At worst, I could write a note for them and get one of the nurses to slip it to them later.

We looked through the glass wall, but didn't see any babies with a name tag, so we went up to the desk and asked. The nurse's face lit up when she saw us. "Oh, yes, Mister Tusk was wondering when you might come by. He was just asking about you."

"Really?! I wonder why?", I said, half to myself and half to Marilyn. My wife gave me an equally mystified shrug.

"Well, go on into 304."

"We can go in? You mean, they've already had the baby?!"

She laughed. "Just go on in."

Marilyn had already started up, so I followed her down the hall to the third door and pushed inside. Tessa was in bed, looking like she had been pulled through a knothole. Tusker was in a chair, not looking much better, and with a look of both wonder and terror on his face. And there on the bed with Tessa was a small wrapped up bundle with a powder blue skull cap on.

Marilyn scampered up to the bed. "Oh my God! You had the baby!"

"You came!", cried Tessa happily. Both Tusker and Tessa immediately tried to greet us, and with Marilyn they got into a three-way conversation that got increasingly loud, enough so that the baby woke up and let out a yell. We had been followed in by a nurse, who announced it was time to take the baby off to the nursery.

Marilyn immediately moved around and took a look at the baby. "He's gorgeous!"

I looked at the baby, who was bald and red faced and wrinkly, sort of like Winston Churchill on a bad day. I smiled. "You're right, he is good looking." I looked over at my friend. "Who's the father? This baby is way too good looking to be any son of yours!"

Both Tessa and Marilyn yelled at me, but Tusker just laughed. "Fuck you, Buckman!"

"Such language in front of your son!"

Another nurse came in and announced she had to examine Tessa. Tessa reached over and took Marilyn's hand, and then pointed towards the door for Tusker and me. We boogied out the door and the nurse closed it behind us. We wandered down the hallway towards the nursery. "How you doing, man?", I asked.

He gave me a loopy sort of grin. "I don't know. It's like it wasn't real before. Or isn't real now. Or something. You understand that?"

I laughed at him. "No."

"I mean, I thought I was ready, but now, I mean, I don't know ... What if I make a mistake or something? This is a human being?"

I maneuvered Tusker over to a chair and sat him down, and then sat down next to him. "Let me tell you something, Tusker. You're going to make a mistake. You're going to make a lot of mistakes. You ain't going to be perfect. Don't sweat it. You're not going to make all that many mistakes."

He stared at me for a second. "You're not helping, buddy.", he said, smiling.

I smiled back. "Listen, was your father a good father?"

Tusker shrugged. "Yeah, I guess so."

"And you've known other guys who have been good fathers, right?" He nodded, and I continued, "And you know some fathers who have been lousy fathers, right?" Tusker gave me a sharp look at that. I suspected I knew who he was thinking about. "Just behave like the good fathers and not like the bad fathers. How hard can it be?"

He grinned at me. "You really aren't helping!"

"It sucks to be you. How's that for some good advice?"

Now he was laughing. "Asshole!"

The door to 304 opened again. "You ever going to marry the mother of your son?", I asked.

He just shook his head and gave me a rueful smile. "I've already offered. It's her old man, he doesn't want anything to do with me..."

"Who would?"

That earned me a middle finger. " ... and Tessa wants him to walk her down the aisle."

"Hang in there. Being a grandfather might just change his mind. Name him after her father. Suck up to him."

For some reason this made him laugh. "Too late for that."

"What do you mean?"

"I'll let Tessa tell you." He stood up and I followed him back to Tessa's room. "Did you tell her the baby's name yet?"

"I was waiting for you."

Tusker looked at both of us a touch nervously. "He said we should name him after your father, to bring him around."

"Too late for that."

"What'd you name him?", asked Marilyn.

"Buckman James, after these two.", said Tessa.

Marilyn smiled at me. I just stared at my friends. "You have got to be kidding me!" Marilyn giggled at my reaction.

"Hey, we couldn't have done this without you.", answered Tusker.

I rubbed my face. "I think my idea makes way more sense." I looked over at Marilyn. "We can call him Bucky!"

"Good Lord!", she muttered.

"Listen, we have to be going. We have a honeymoon to get to!" I needed to get out of there. Buckman James? We probably had a serial killer on our hands! I gave Tusker the card for the limo company, and explained that there were some baby gifts coming, and then kissed Tessa and Tusker good-bye. Well, Marilyn kissed Tusker, I just shook his hand.

We headed back out and found the limo driver napping in the limo. "Ready to go?", he asked.

"Ready to go!"

He hopped out and let us into the back, and then climbed into the front. A minute later we were pulling out onto the road and heading for the Arterial, and then on towards the Thruway. "Buckman James Tusk! Poor bastard's probably going to grow up to be a mass murderer.", I commented.

"He's no such thing. Now you behave!", replied Marilyn.

I snorted. "You still want kids?", I asked.

"Of course!" She leaned over on the seat and kissed me quickly. "You still want to wait until you're a captain?"

"I'm thinking maybe colonel or general now."

"Too late, you made a deal!" She also stuck her tongue out at me.

I grabbed for her tongue, and we wrestled a bit in the back seat, and also started kissing. Then I got an idea, and leered at her. "You know, we're on our honeymoon now." There was a solid barrier between the driver and the rear of the vehicle.

"Yes."

"You know what that means, don't you?"

Marilyn eyed me askance. "What do you mean?"

I ran my hand along her back, and rubbed her bra buckle. "You agreed to a no undie honeymoon, remember?"

Marilyn's eyes popped wide open. "Oh, no!"

"Oh, yes! You promised, remember?"

"I must have been lying." Marilyn was so worried about her bra, she didn't focus on my other hand, which I quickly pushed under her dress, all the way, until my fingers were at her panties. "That's cheating!", she complained, and tried to push my hand away.

That simply opened up the back of her dress to my flanking assault. While I started to finger her pussy through her panties, and Marilyn squirmed around trying to make me behave, I quickly pulled the zipper on the back of her dress down. Marilyn squealed and tried to reach behind her, but that just let me slip my fingers inside her panties to the pussy I had shaved the other morning. When she tried to react to that, I flipped the catch on her bra. "It would be so much more fun if you didn't fight.", I told her.

"Fun for you, maybe."

I leaned in and whispered in her ear as I licked her earlobe. "Fun for you, too!" I flicked my finger across her clit, and Marilyn groaned and her legs slipped apart. "Do it!", I ordered.

Marilyn did it slowly, but probably more so because of the distraction I was providing than anything else. She pulled her dress down around her waist and then peeled off her bra. I tossed that to the side and then helped Marilyn lift up and I tugged her panties down. I left her with her sundress bunched around her waist and fingerfucked her and sucked on her tits for the next half hour, as we tooled along towards Syracuse.

Mind you, I wanted more, but we just didn't have the time! I'd never done it in the back seat of a moving limo, and I kind of liked the idea. Eventually we had to stop, when I saw the signs for the exit off the Thruway. I allowed Marilyn to compose herself, and zip up her dress, but when she went to reach for her underwear, I grabbed them first and stuffed them in my pockets. This time she didn't argue, but just gave me a wicked little smile. "Are you wearing your underwear?", she asked.

"You'll just have to find out later!"

"I intend to!"

There was a Best Western near the airport that offered shuttle service and luggage storage. We unloaded the limo and I sent Marilyn in while I gave Tom a nice tip. He helped me carry things in, and then waited when we discovered Marilyn had simply gone up to the desk and not started the check-in process. After confirming we had a room for the night, I sent Tom on his way with our thanks.

I did the check-in process, putting everything on my trusty AmEx card. The last time I did this, Marilyn and I were as poor as church mice, and we raided our wedding gifts for any cash in the cards. That was how we paid for the honeymoon, or at least the stuff Big Bob and Harriet hadn't covered. We snuck the gift card box into the back lounge at Trinkaus Manor and giggled as we went through the cards, and I tucked about $600 in cash into my pockets. That was quite a bit of cash in those days! Now I had about two grand in cash, and another couple of grand in traveler's checks. Things were different.

We left almost all of our luggage in the hotel's vault, and simply took a couple of travel bags up the elevator with us. We also left a wakeup call for 0500 the next day. Our flight to New York City was at 0700, and from there we were going to the dock to meet the ship. All of this had been coordinated by the travel agent, and we both had our tickets and tags and identification stashed in my carry-on bag. That I was protecting like my life depended on it, because if I lost it, Marilyn would kill me!

Once we got in the room, Marilyn tossed her bag on the floor and goosed my ass! "That's for being so mean in the limo!", she said.

I tossed my bag over with hers, and started moving towards her. It was a small room and I backed her into a corner by the bed. "I don't think I was all that mean. I think you actually liked it!"

"No, I didn't! You'd better give me back my stuff!"

"That wasn't what you agreed to!", I replied grabbing her and pulling her towards the bed.

"I lied!"

"Wives have to submit to their husbands, remember!", I teased her. I flopped on the bed and pulled her with me.

Marilyn sprawled on the bed next to me. "No, there was some other stuff, too."

"Yes, but only after the submission part!". Marilyn giggled at that, and I started unzipping her dress, while she worked on unbuttoning my shirt and unzipping my pants. While it would be nice to say that our first lovemaking as husband and wife was with candles and champagne and beautiful lingerie, it wouldn't quite be the truth. It was more hurried than that, with Marilyn's dress around her waist, and my pants around my ankles. It was still very, very nice, and I told her we'd save some of the romance for later. Marilyn agreed, and then stripped her dress off while I pulled my remaining clothes off, too, and we went at it some more!

It was about nine or ten that night when we were laying there on the bed, breathing hard and cuddling, that I asked her, "Are you hungry?"

"Not really. Are you?"

"Not enough to go out and try to find a place open now. Maybe a Coke or something?"

"I'd like that."

"You want to go with me?", I asked, grinning.

She looked down at her nudity and smiled. "In your dreams!" I just laughed and pulled on my pants and grabbed my wallet.

The vending machines were down at the end of the hallway. I grabbed a couple of cans of soda, and some pretzels from the snack machine. By the time I got back to the room, Marilyn was asleep. I just smiled. That sounded like a good idea, too. I drank my Coke and ate the pretzels, and then curled up next to my wife.

When the alarm went off the next morning I was not amused. I know I'd been getting up early for years, but sometimes that dedicated exercise and wakeup shit was a bit too much. I dearly wanted to go back to sleep. Then the phone rang with our wakeup call. I slapped Marilyn's ass to rouse her, and she muttered nasty things and pulled the covers over her head. I paddled her bottom some more and she started swinging at me. "Is that any way for a wife to treat her husband?", I asked.

"Do you really want me to treat you the way I want to treat you right now?", she asked.

I steered her in the direction of the bathroom and sorted through the travel bag for my clothes and toilet kit. As soon as I heard the shower running, I went into the bathroom myself. "We don't have time for that.", she told me.

I was already starting to brush my teeth. I mumbled out that I knew it and finished brushing my teeth. I also shaved quickly while she finished up, and then hopped into the shower as soon as she was out.

When I got out of the shower, Marilyn was in the room pulling some clothes on. She had on her bra and panties again, and I just smiled at her. She shook a finger at me. "If you think I'm traipsing halfway around the country without underwear, think again!"

I shrugged and grabbed my pants. "I'll punish you later. I'm too tired to punish you now."

"And just how were you planning on punishing me?", she asked, pulling a sport shirt on.

"I'll have to give that a lot of thought. You're just not submitting very well."

She laughed at that. "You're not going to let that go, are you?"

"Not for another forty or fifty years. Maybe longer!", I replied.

"Much longer.", she agreed, and then gave me a quick good morning kiss.

We packed and were down in the lobby by half past five, just in time to see the shuttle bus leave. We were assured they would be back in ten minutes, so we dug our luggage out of the vault, and lined it up outside the door. The weather had been lovely all weekend long, and looked like it was holding. The last time I did this, Marilyn delayed the wedding until hurricane season, and the weather on the cruise sucked! We went cruising to Bermuda and hit Hurricane Ella on the trip down and Hurricane Flossie on the way back. I fed the fish for the entire week! Now it looked like it should be good.

When the shuttle came back, we loaded up and headed over to the airport, about a five minute ride. Everything went fairly smoothly, much smoother than it would become after 9/11. I had my passport, in red like most military people, but Marilyn only had her driver's license. She did pack our wedding license in her handbag though, since her license still said Lefleur. That was a project for when we got back. We got to the Eastern counter, and before we handed over our luggage, tied onto the handles the special luggage tags for the cruise ship. Once we landed at JFK, our luggage would be directly sent to the ship. We wouldn't need to pick it up at baggage claim.

It wouldn't be much different for us. There would be shuttle buses at the airport for arriving passengers to be driven to the dock. That was a good thing, because I hate driving in New York City, and Marilyn simply refused to even consider it. She's just not much of a city girl. The flight to JFK took about an hour and a half, and was on a fully loaded 727 without any first class. We suffered like sardines, but at least we were together. Once back on the ground, we shouldered our carry-on bags - okay, I shouldered our carry-on bags - and made our way to baggage claim and the exit, to find our shuttle bus. We made it to the port by 1100.

From that point on, it was a matter of hurry up and wait, just like the Army. Our boat was on a seven day schedule. We were cruising to Bermuda. The boat left Sunday afternoon, and would arrive in port very early Tuesday morning. We would stay in Bermuda until Thursday night, at which point we would sail away, and fetch up back in New York Saturday morning. At that point they would off load us and restock the ship with food and booze, and give the crew a night in Sodom on the Hudson.

What Marilyn didn't know yet, but I already knew, was just how much she loved a cruise ship vacation! No question about it, taking a cruise beat out any other type of vacation we ever took, as far as she was concerned. We probably went on at least a half dozen, maybe more, and she just loved them! She liked visiting new ports, and the meals and the shops and the ships themselves, and when they invented balcony rooms that just settled it for her. We never took another cruise after that that didn't have a balcony! As far as Marilyn was concerned, heaven involved sitting on her cruise ship balcony while reading and knitting as we passed by the rest of the world.

We were sailing on the Sun Viking with Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines. We had been on a number of different lines over the years, but always seemed to enjoy Royal Caribbean the most. The Sun Viking was their newest cruise ship. Positively tiny by later standards, she seemed pretty damn large at the time. She carried about 725 passengers, and it seemed like just about as many crew to cater to them. Future ships would be many times larger, with atriums, multi-deck restaurants and theaters, ice skating rinks, rock climbing walls, and even sillier stuff.

My wife (God, I loved that word!) was practically jumping up and down with excitement by the time we finished processing on the dock and were able to board. Her eyes were glowing like a kid at Christmas underneath the tree. Then we started looking for our room. Cruise ships haven't changed much since the days of the Titanic, at least in how they treat the passengers. The more money you have, the higher up in the ship you are. Rich people live on the upper decks. Poor people live at the bottom and row the boat. On our first honeymoon, we were so far down towards the bottom that we were handed oars as we walked on board!

Now we were a little higher. I think there were six decks on the ship, and we were now on the Promenade Deck, which was number two from the top. Maybe number three, but the absolute top deck actually was considered the Owner's Deck, and only had four cabins, all oversized suites. They cost a ridiculous amount of money, something like $10,000 or $20,000 a week, for a room not much bigger than a decent suite in a hotel.

I wasn't anywhere near that silly. We had a small suite, but it was about as much of a suite as a room in your average Holiday Inn. Still, we had a window we could open, not a porthole, a sitting area with couch and chairs, and a king size bed. Marilyn was entranced when we entered our room. I was a little more practical, looking for the bathroom and closet space. There wasn't much, but they made use of every cubic inch of the room. We would survive once our luggage got there.

They promised our luggage would be in our rooms before dinner. They simply loaded it in giant containers straight from the airport into the belly of the ship, and then sorted it out. Marilyn came up to me and wrapped her arms around me. "We're all alone in our honeymoon cabin. Whatever will we do to pass the time?"

I laughed and hugged her back. "Not as much as you'd like. I can guarantee that about two seconds after things get interesting somebody is going to barge through that door with our luggage! Are you that much of an exhibitionist?"

"Maybe not.", she answered ruefully. She looked over at the small built in desk and drawers, and noticed a bottle of champagne in an iced cooler, with a couple of flutes standing next to it. "Champagne?"

"Hmmm?" I turned and saw what she was pointing out. "Well, if we can't fool around, let's have a drink!" I opened the card next to the champagne and read it then passed it to Marilyn. It was from the travel agent. Next I pulled the bottle from the ice and twisted off the wire and popped the cork. Marilyn held the glasses up and I poured them.

We had barely sipped our champagne, when an intercom in the room loudly announced that the mandatory Coast Guard lifeboat practice would start at 2:15 in the afternoon, and that everybody needed to find their lifeboat station and show up there with their life jackets on. This had also been told us during the processing on the dock, and they were pretty serious about it. From past experience I knew they would check your names off a list and if you didn't show up, they would track you down, and not too politely, either.

I found our life jackets in the closet, and found our lifeboat station on the back of the cabin door, and then we searched our map for where we were and how to get there. We finished off our champagne and I poured us some more from the bottle, just as a ship's horn bellowed. It was almost two o'clock! I grabbed my life jacket and tossed it around my neck. "Let's go!"

"Right now?", said Marilyn, startled.

"Sure, why not. We can go on deck, finish our champagne, and be at our life boat station."

"Well, why don't we leave our life jackets here?"

I smiled at her. "Because every other person on this boat is going to be doing that and getting lost and shuffling around with these idiot things on and clogging the passageways. You just watch and see if I'm wrong!"

Marilyn looked at me like I was nuts, but she grabbed her life jacket, too, although she carried it. Now, with me carrying my flute and the bottle, and leading the way, we went out into the hallway and towards the bow, to find an exit to the deck and our boat station. It was really just a lovely day. The ship had already started to pull away from the dock by the time we got there. It wasn't at all like the Love Boat, but it never really was. By 2:15 we were already standing out into the seaways, and the swells around us were getting larger.

At 2:15 all sorts of horns and bells and alarms started going off, all over the ship. The intercom announced that the lifeboat drill was underway, and to get to your lifeboat station with your life jacket. No ifs, ands, or buts, it was mandatory! I poured the last of our champagne into our flutes and put the bottle on the deck, out of the way, and then handed Marilyn my glass while I did up my life jacket. Then I returned the favor. She got it wrong, but I showed her how to do it right. Around us was a barely controlled pandemonium, while passengers rushed around, generally lost, generally without their life jackets on or properly fixed, and generally at the wrong boat station. I just smiled at her. "What did I tell you?"

"You think you're so smart!"

"Yes I do!" We traded raspberries at that. After about twenty minutes, during which time the crew practiced lowering a lifeboat and everybody else stood around and chattered, some more whistles and bells rang out and it was announced that we could leave. Cramming over 700 people back into the ship's narrow hallways while everybody was wearing life jackets was silly. I spotted a bar along the way, and took Marilyn by the hand and led her in. We took off our life jackets and I ordered up another bottle of champagne. "We only live once, babe!"

Marilyn laughed at that, and we sipped our champagne, getting pleasantly, if lightly zonked, while the crowds passed by. Then it was our turn. I put my jacket back on over my head, since it was easier to carry that way, and we headed back to our cabin. Fortunately, our luggage had arrived! I immediately unpacked everything, and stuffed my mess dress into a dry cleaning bag, and then hit a button on the cabin telephone and called our room attendant. A little Filipino showed up about a minute later, and I gave him the bag, specifying it needed to be cleaned and pressed by Monday evening. He assured me it would be, and left.

I poured the last of our champagne into our glasses, and set the bottle aside. "Speaking of uniforms, you're out of uniform.", I told Marilyn.

"Oh?"

"Well, we're not flying now, are we? I think it's time to get you into the spirit of things!" I set my glass down and wrapped my arms around her, and pointedly rubbed her bra catch through her top.

Marilyn laughed at that, and then grabbed my crotch. "The same goes for you, Mister!"

We laughed at that and fell onto the bed and wrestled our clothes off. Today, Marilyn got on top and rode me, while playing with her clit as I fondled her tits. Afterwards, she stretched out on top of me, and this time was a lot slower and sweeter. "I love you, Mrs. Buckman.", I told her afterwards.

Marilyn propped her face up on her hands, digging her elbows into my chest as she did so. "I like the way that sounds."

I rolled over and relieved the pressure of her bony elbows to my chest. "I do, too."

I rolled onto my back again, and raised my right arm and tucked it behind my head. That was when Marilyn noticed a Band-Aid under my arm. "What's that?", she asked.

"Hmm? What?"

"That!", she replied, poking it with a finger.

"That's my scopolamine patch. It's for seasickness."

"You jump out of airplanes and don't get airsick, but you get seasick?" Marilyn has never gotten any form of motion sickness.

"Go figure.", I replied with a shrug.

"How's it work?"

It was my turn to shrug. "It's sort of a Band-Aid, soaked in a seasickness drug. I wear it and then change it once a day. The instructions say to wear them behind the ear, but you can wear them anywhere the skin is thin. Tomorrow I put on a different one, under the other arm."

"And you have to do this every day?"

"Pretty much."

"I guess you really wouldn't do well in the Navy, would you?"

I had to laugh at that. "One time my father was teasing me about it, years ago, and then his father came in. He asked my dad if he wanted to tell me about his time on the PT boats during the war, and my dad shut up big time!"

"No! Your dad was in the Navy and got seasick? That's too funny!"

"I agree!"

We snuggled a bit longer, and then got up and showered together. Not much happened though, since the showers on that barge were about the size of an airplane bathroom. I know you have to get really friendly to make it in the mile high club that way, but in this case you'd have to be REALLY friendly! Chubby people need not apply.

There were two seatings for dinner, 6:00 and 8:00, and we were in the second seating. It was still early for that, but it would be nice to walk around and see the sights. Marilyn pulled out a halter topped sundress from the closet and pulled that on, but when she went to grab some panties, I made a tsking sound and wagged my finger at her. She giggled and put the panties back in the drawer, and then slipped on some low sandals. When I opened my drawer, I picked up a pair of briefs, but she made the same sound and gesture to me, so I laughed and put them back. I wore my chinos and a flowered shirt, and slipped barefoot into a pair of boat shoes. Then we grabbed our keys and my wallet, and headed out of the room.

One thing I learned when Parker was in the Navy, and that's no matter how small a ship might seem, they are still damn big places, with about a million miles of corridors and hallways. The bottom three decks were nothing but passenger rooms. The upper decks also had the bars and pools and restaurants and shops. We kept wandering about until we got to the stern, and found a sign pointing the way to the Viking Crown Lounge. This is a hallmark of the Royal Caribbean Line, and all their ships have one. It's a wraparound bar mounted high up at the rear of the ship. On later vessels it would actually be motorized, and rotate around 360 degrees!

We settled into some very comfortable chairs and a waiter instantly popped up to take our drink orders. Marilyn tucked her dress in carefully, and when I noticed, she blushed. "Don't mind me.", I told her. "I sort of like the view."

That earned me another blush, and a "Behave!" comment.

I lowered my voice some. "Too bad you're not wearing high heels. Imagine, later tonight, after it's dark, all alone at a dark railing, with me behind you ... ummm, wouldn't that be naughty!"

"You're so bad!"

"That's what makes me so good!"

"Maybe later this week. It will have to be very, very dark, though, and very, very late!", she answered. Still, she was smiling at the thought, and that made me smile, too.

We were on our second drink, when it became time for dinner, so I stood, and Marilyn said, "What about our drinks?"

"Take them."

"We can leave with the glasses?"

"Sure. Where are we going to go? When you're done, somebody will take it back to the dishwasher, and it will eventually end up back in the bar, right?", I answered.

"I never thought of that."

"Stick with me, kid, and see the world!".

"You're full of shit, you know."

"So I've been told. So I've been told." I took Marilyn's hand and we rode the elevator down to the restaurant deck, which was a little forward of where we were. We actually ended up going down a deck, moving forward, and then up a deck, in order to get there. We joined the crowd waiting at the doors.

The main restaurant on a cruise ship is a little odd. At breakfast and lunch, it's just like a normal restaurant. You show up whenever you want to at the door and wait for somebody to seat you. Dinner is a lot more structured. There are two seatings, because nobody can build a restaurant big enough for everybody to eat together. On the newest boats, you can have well over 5,000 passengers on a cruise! So they split it in two, an early session for people with children or ancient people who might not last until later without falling asleep, and a late seating for the sophisticates. Well, that's the theory anyway. I prefer the late seating and Marilyn prefers the early. However, she didn't know that yet!

In order to make this all work, they run the evening meal with ruthless efficiency. Everybody crowds up to the doors to the restaurant and waits for them to be opened. Then you rush off to your assigned seating. We were at table 114, but beyond that, we weren't sure. Tables could be two-person, four-person, or even larger groups, the theory being that they can mix people up and introduce them around. Sometimes that works better than others, but it had never been a problem for us the first time.

At 2000, the doors to the restaurant swung open (two sets of double fire doors all gilded to make them fancy - a lot of that sort of thing is on these ships) and we moved inside to find our table. After a bit of searching, we found ourselves at a four-person table, but the only ones there. "Pick a seat, hun.", I told Marilyn. She slid onto one that was facing the center of the room, and I held it for her, and then slid into the one next to her also facing the center.

"Do you think we're by ourselves?", asked Marilyn.

"Not a clue. I guess we'll find out, though." There were probably a half dozen places to eat on board, so it wasn't guaranteed that we would actually see our tablemates every night in any case. We hadn't in my previous trip through.

We weren't alone. About a minute later another couple came up to the table. He was a tall fellow, about my height and size, with a bronze tan, fashionably long curly brown hair, and absolutely perfect teeth. She was almost as tall as he was, at least in heels, slim and sleek, blonde and blue eyed, darkly tanned. They were both in their mid to late twenties, about five years older than Marilyn and me. They obviously worked out, but probably at a health club somewhere. Those tans were too even to be natural. "114?", he asked.

I stood up. "114. Welcome." I held out my hand to him.

He shook it firmly. "Thank you. I'm Harrison Blakewell, and this is my wife."

"Melissa Hockney-Blakewell.", she said, reaching out to shake my hand.

"Nice to meet you. I'm Carl Buckman and this is my wife Marilyn." They both shook Marilyn's hand as well, although she didn't rise, and they settled themselves across from us, with Harrison facing me and Melissa facing my wife.

"Well, it's nice to meet you, too.", said Harrison. "We weren't sure who we'd be seated with. Where are you folks from?"

"I'm from Utica.", answered Marilyn.

Melissa looked at her husband. "Utica, that's upstate somewhere, isn't it?"

"Yes, I think so." He glanced at me. "Utica's in New York, right?"

I nodded. "It's about halfway between Albany and Syracuse, on the Mohawk River. I gather you must live downstate."

"Oh, yes. We have a home in White Plains. We work in the city of course." The way he said 'the city', you just knew he meant Manhattan.

"Sure." I looked over at Marilyn and said, "They're way downstate, in Westchester County."

"And you work in New York? I could never live or work in a big city like that.", commented Marilyn. I smiled at that. Marilyn really would go nuts in any sort of urban setting. Hell, she wasn't all that thrilled living downtown in Albany when she went to St. Rose!

"Oh, I'd never want to work anywhere else!", gushed Melissa. "Of course, in our jobs, if you're not in the city, you're really nowhere."

I looked at them curiously. "Oh? What do you do?"

We were interrupted at that point by an Asian waiter asking for our drink orders. Marilyn ordered a whiskey sour while I ordered a gin and tonic; our tablemates both ordered vodka martinis. "Hmm, what was that?", asked Harrison.

"I was just curious what you do, if you have to do it in New York."

"Oh, yes, certainly. Well, I'm a consultant with McKinsey and Company. Strategic planning, that sort of thing."

"And I'm a stock analyst with Merrill Lynch!", announced Melissa. "Airlines mostly. What about you? What do you do?"

"Well, nothing yet. I just graduated with my teaching degree though, so I'm going to try and get a job teaching.", answered Marilyn.

"Oh, a school teacher! That's wonderful. That's such an important job!" Melissa said this with the sincerest smile and the most insincere tone, as if it was definitely an unimportant job. School teachers were nice, since the public schools needed them, to teach the less fortunate. When they had children, if they had children, they would be sent to private academies, where they would be instructed by educators.

Marilyn really didn't pick up on it, but she was simply a nice girl who had never met anybody like this pair before. She asked, "What's a stock ... well, whatever ... do?"

"I work on Wall Street, of course, determining what stocks are really worth and reporting to our investors and clients. Private clients, really.", she replied. As opposed to the regular clients.

We both glanced over at Harrison. "I advise corporations, you know, the Fortune 500 types, on five and ten year strategies and planning, that sort of thing." He was very pleased with himself.

"Sounds interesting.", I agreed. Corporate consulting - if we can't make money solving your problem, we can certainly make money prolonging it!

It was fascinating watching these two. They were some of the most self absorbed baby boomer yuppie pond scum you could imagine! Quite a bit of their attitude was going right over Marilyn's head, but not all of it. I just sat there nodding and making encouraging remarks as they talked about themselves through dinner. They were Important People, moving up the ladder to become More Important People, and in the due course of time, they would become Very Important People. This went on all through the soup and salad courses, and almost through the end of the entrée.

They were on their honeymoon, too. They had been sharing a condo near Central Park, but had just bought a new home in White Plains. Their reception had been at Tavern on the Green in Manhattan. At one point Melissa commented that she had hyphenated her last name when they got married. This served as a symbol that they were equal partners in their marriage, and that neither one of them was above the other. I had simply commented that I needed to change my name to Lefleur, to reflect who was the real boss of the family. Marilyn laughed and agreed with me.

"What about you, Cal? What do you do?", he asked. It was still only the middle of the main course, and I was expecting these two to keep on yapping about themselves until at least dessert.

"It's Carl."

"Sorry about that." No, he really wasn't.

"Nothing quite that exciting. I jump out of airplanes and kill people.", I answered.

Melissa and Harrison stopped talking and stared at me like I had just taken a dump on the table. Marilyn giggled and punched me in the shoulder. "You're awful!" She turned to them. "He's not really that bad."

Harrison looked very confused at that. "What do you mean?"

"I'm a paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne at Fort Bragg.", I answered smiling.

"You're a soldier?", asked Melissa. The look on her face was priceless, like she had just stepped in a pile of dogshit and couldn't figure out how to wipe it off her shoe. 'You're a soldier?' came out sounding like 'You're a child molester?'

"You bet. I'm a platoon leader in a battery of 105s, 1st of the 319th. Airborne all the way!", I said with a grin.

"Oh my!" She really didn't know what to say to that.

Harrison did. "Oh, so you're an officer then?"

I nodded. "Second Lieutenant."

Well, an officer was at least somebody they might deign to converse with, although I was a junior officer. "So you must have gone to college then. Where was that? West Point?"

"Not quite. I was ROTC at Rensselaer, up in Troy. That's where I met Marilyn, at a party there."

"Oh, like a scholarship, then." I nodded and smiled, curious how they could insult me next. "You couldn't get any other scholarships?"

I damn near burst out laughing at that, but it was Marilyn who rescued me. My wife is not all that much in favor of the military, but she is very proud of me, military or not. She laid her hand on mine and squeezed it, probably because she thought I might punch this asshole. Then she said, "Oh, no, Carl could have gotten plenty of scholarships. He actually got his doctorate when he was 21." I shrugged modestly.

They had both stopped eating and were staring at me like I had grown a second head. "You have a doctorate?", he asked.

"Applied mathematics."

"Well, what in the world did you become a soldier for, then?"

I just smiled. "It's a family tradition to serve and protect our country and her people. My father was Ivy League and served in the Navy. We even protect the yuppies and assholes." Marilyn really squeezed my hand at that, but she had nothing to fear. I was having way too much fun with these two. I just started working on my dinner again. I had herb crusted lamb chops and they were simply outstanding!

Both Melissa and Harrison gave me weak smiles, and then excused themselves, stating they needed to get back to their cabin for a second. I smiled and stood and shook their hands again, and Marilyn waved good-bye, although there was a look of sheer hatred on her face.

I smiled at my wife and lifted her hand to my lips and kissed it. "What a lovely couple! So polite and friendly!", I commented to her.

Marilyn's expression at that was priceless. "Are you kidding me? They're, they're ... awful! I can't even talk about them without getting mad!"

I grinned at her and nibbled my lamb chop. Marilyn hates lamb, so we never had it at home, but I just love it! "Really? Tell me more!", I teased.

"You think this is funny, don't you?"

"No, I think it's hilarious! Those two are the biggest pair of self-centered jackasses I've seen in years! Wait until tomorrow, when I show up in my dress uniform!"

"Well, I think they were just awful. Can we get a different table?"

I shrugged. "I'll check for you. I thought they were funny."

"Hmmpph!"

I smiled at my wife. "They're you and me, you know."

"What are you talking about?', she asked indignantly.

"If it was up to my mother, they would be us. I'd be a professional, married to a professional, and looking down on the lesser breeds like she does. Think about it."

"You're just awful!", she said, laughing.

"I don't know. Have you ever considered dyeing your hair blonde? Like Melissa, you know? Maybe Mom would like you a little more."

"When dessert comes, you're going to be wearing it.", she laughed.

"Maybe my mother was right, after all.", I sighed.

That got her to splutter at me, but neither of us wasted our dessert, which was cheesecake. I commented to her, "I am definitely going to have to do some running tomorrow, or they're going to have to wheel me off this barge!"

"Even on vacation?"

"Run with me."

She gave me an interesting smile. "I can think of lots more interesting things to do in the morning."

"That's also a possibility. I have to say, that's also a definite possibility. Did you have anything specific in mind? I mean, really, really specific?"

"You're just a dirty old man.", Marilyn laughed.

"I'm a dirty young man. Totally different. My father, now he's a dirty old man. He and Mom..." I just waggled my eyebrows at her.

"Gross! I don't even want to think about that!"

After dinner, I stopped at the maitre de's desk near the front of the restaurant and asked if it was possible to change tables. He looked at me curiously, and I explained that there was a little difference in personalities with our tablemates. He, in turn, said he already had a request from them for the same thing. I just smiled and said I would leave it in his hands, and I would remember it at the end of the week. You don't tip on the boat at each meal, but at the end of the week, you give tips in envelopes, to the restaurant staff and the room staff.

Then we went down to the theater for the evening show. That first night, the show was more in the way of an orientation. The cruise director did a little show and tell about the Sun Viking, and gave us answers to all the usual questions, like when is the midnight buffet. (At midnight, that's why they call it the midnight buffet!)

The Seventies is when cruising as a vacation really took off in America. The Love Boat had just started a year or two before, and it depicted a cruise ship off the Mexican and California coasts, where people fell in love, and the crew had all sorts of romantic and hilarious moments. It was incredibly popular at the time, and ran well into the Eighties. Real cruises have very little in common with The Love Boat, but that's not to say they weren't just as enjoyable. Still, the cruise director had to work to fix some misperceptions.

Some of them simply weren't discussed. On the television show, the whole crew was white Americans, with a few blacks or foreigners thrown in for balance. Real cruise ships are totally different. Royal Caribbean was pretty typical. All the officers and bridge staff and engineering staff were Western European (the shipping line was Norwegian and they only hired ex-Norwegian Navy captains to run their ships). All the waiters and busboys and cleaning people were Asian, and if they only made peanuts, it still beat what they would make in a slum in Manila or Jakarta. Finally, all the entertainment and cruise staff were Americans, usually a bunch of Hollywood and Broadway wannabes. The cruise director was actually a standup comic.

After the show, we walked around some more, had a few drinks in one of the lounges, and waited until midnight to see the midnight buffet. You will never go hungry on one of these boats. You have breakfast, brunch, lunch, afternoon tea, dinner, midnight buffet, and any number of other things to snack on in between. They also had about a dozen bars and lounges on board, and while that wasn't covered under the all-in-one price, there were some guys who bellied up to the bar on Sunday and never left until we docked on Saturday!

Tonight was what they considered informal. Monday night, we were out to sea, and was formal, very formal, bring your tuxedo formal. Tuesday we would dock in Bermuda and until we left Thursday, everything was informal. Friday we were out to sea again, and we were formal (although not quite as formal as Monday) that last night. Saturday we would dock back in New York and go home.

No, I didn't molest Marilyn on the deck that night, since we were both tired from a long day. I did let her try to keep me in bed the next morning, and boy, did she try hard! Afterwards, though, I got up and ran around the boat for a few miles, and then went back to the cabin and jumped back in bed with her. That seemed like a reasonable compromise. Afterwards, we cleaned up and went down to breakfast.

We were seated at a table with several other people. Breakfast and lunch seating they tried to minimize the number of tables used, to lighten the load on the staff. There is only a single seating, and you can come in whenever you like, and you don't sit at your assigned table. Marilyn had picked up a copy of the daily schedule for the ship, along with the ship's newspaper, printed somewhere down below. We were greeted by the people sitting next to us, a retired couple from Boca Raton. Marilyn loves this sort of thing, since she's one of the world's biggest gossips. She can sit and talk to anybody, for hours.

We decided on table service, rather than the breakfast buffet. The house specialty was suggested, Eggs Benedict, which Marilyn asked for, but I declined. I ordered two eggs over easy. "What are Eggs Benedict anyway?", she asked after the waiter left.

"You don't know?! You ordered them!", I replied, incredulous.

"Well, I've heard of them."

I just stared for a second. "Unbelievable. I've heard of the North Pole, too, but I don't think I want to visit there."

"Behave!"

"Eggs Benedict is a poached egg on an English muffin, with Hollandaise sauce on it, or something like that.", I explained.

"That sounds like something you'd enjoy.", she argued.

"Yeah, except for the fact that I can't stand poached eggs!"

The waiter brought our juice, orange for Marilyn and tomato for me, and then I sent him back for some Tabasco sauce. When he returned I sprinkled some in my tomato juice, along with some salt and pepper. "You and your Tabasco sauce!", remarked my wife.

I sipped it and it was pleasantly spicy. "That'll get your heart started in the morning. Put some hair on your chest." Tabasco is probably the most popular condiment for soldiers; somebody always has a bottle, even out in the field on exercises.

"You need some more, then.", she commented, causing our tablemates to laugh.

"That is cold, lady! That is cold!", I said. "You weren't complaining about my chest this morning.", I replied, winking at the others.

Marilyn squealed with indignation and swatted me, and then went back to gossiping with the neighbors. She's world class. All of our children over the years would tell me something, like they were getting married or being deployed overseas, and would always warn me not to tell their mother, since it was a secret. (Well, don't tell me then, either, but I can keep my mouth shut!) The typical phrasing used was, "Mom can keep a secret just as long as it takes her to find a telephone!" Eventually that was modified to " ... as long as it takes her to log on to her email!" Invariably, after the kids would tell her, weeks or months later, she would squawk about being kept in the dark, especially after they would laugh and tell her I had been told weeks or months before!

Monday was a total goof-off day, just sailing around the middle of the Atlantic, with no land in sight and nothing to be seen but the occasional ship in the distance. It was clear and sunny and cloudless. I gave Marilyn a wedding present of sorts, a new string bikini, which she protested about when she saw how small it was, but then she put it on, along with a cover-up. I changed into my swim trunks (basic Army issue green) and a tee shirt, and we headed up to the pool deck. The Sun Viking had two pools on the same deck, as opposed to some of the later ships which had more than one pool deck. We found a spot, set out our stuff, and hopped in the pool briefly, then slathered on some lotion to get a tan. Thankfully, Marilyn had been to the tanning booth before the wedding, so she didn't look white as a ghost. I also had some color, but it was mostly the redneck tan of a guy who's out in the sun working. Chest and legs pale, face and neck and arms dark. Well, we don't play with those howitzers indoors!

We spent pretty much the entire day swimming and sunning. At lunch we ate at the poolside café, and we sucked down some beers all day long. By mid-afternoon we had enough, so we headed back inside, to take a nap (eventually) and get ready for the evening. I must admit, I definitely enjoyed taking that swimsuit off her - it was so easy!

We dozed until about five or so, and then we had to clean up and get ready for the evening. Not only was it Formal Night in the HMS Pinafore Dining Room (everything on the ship was named after Broadway musicals - the theater/showroom was called the Annie Get Your Gun Show Lounge!), but before that, at 6:00, we and all the other newlyweds were cordially invited to the Captain's Reception. We would have a formal receiving line and then champagne and caviar.

Marilyn isn't big on dressing up fancy, but she can and will on occasion. I remember when we did this the first time, she had bought a powder blue evening gown with spaghetti straps at the shoulders that could be untied and a tube top so it could be worn strapless. It looked awfully nice and matched my blue tuxedo, which looked awful (not awfully nice) on me. I remember when Maggie commented, "Wow, Mom, you used to be hot!", that what I thought was how young she looked in the picture. Well, I guess we both looked young.

This time, no idea why, Marilyn had bought a black evening gown, sleeveless and mostly backless, with a criss-crossing of tiny straps over the shoulders and across the back, and a pair of long slits, one up each thigh, to mid-thigh. When she came out of the bathroom wearing that dress, my eyes popped out and my mouth got dry, and I asked, "Want to blow off this dinner? I have much different plans now!"

She smiled at this, broadly, and said, "Not on your life!" Then she giggled at me. "Besides, by the time you get out of your getup, I'll be old and gray!"

That much was probably true. My uniform had come back from the shipboard cleaner, and was in our cabin by the time we got back from the pool. An Army mess dress uniform, like all tuxedos, is ridiculously complicated. You have these special high rise pants, with suspenders. Cummerbund (whatever that is for!) A short tuxedo like jacket. More braid than a Park Avenue doorman. You have to wear real medals, not just the little ribbons. Even your officer's cap is different! Just to confuse everybody, the cuff bands and lapels on your jacket had to be in your combat arms colors - red, in my case, for the artillery (infantry is blue, armor is yellow, etc.) Finally, if you were feeling really rich and stupid, and wanted to look like the ultimate pansy, it came with an optional cape, also lined with your combat arms color, so that you could dress like a cavalryman from the Napoleonic Wars! On the plus side, I looked good in it, but that was only because I was in decent shape, and not reed thin like before.

At least I didn't have to wear jump boots with it.

"I'd be willing to give it a try!", I told her.

"Behave! Now get your key and we can go.", she laughed at me.

As we left the cabin, I ran my hand across her ass. "I don't think you're wearing panties.", I whispered to her. She swatted my hand and told me to behave myself, but she also turned bright red, so I suspected I was right. I was going to enjoy the evening!

The various newlyweds in the group all ended up queuing up in a lobby area towards the stern of the boat, outside of a door to one of the larger lounges. Probably two-thirds of the men were in tuxedos, with the rest in dark suits, and all the ladies had on something in the way of fancy dresses. I did notice that I was the only person in uniform, which surprised me a touch, since I had figured more than one soldier or sailor had gotten married in uniform. Still, it's not a requirement, and it's perfectly legal to wear a civilian tux, at least off base and at non-military events. With three out of four in my wedding party in the service, it had seemed like a good idea to me.

As we stood in line to enter and meet the captain, Marilyn began talking to the people right before us. They looked familiar to me for some reason, and it quickly came out that they had been a couple of deck chairs down from us out at the pool this afternoon. John and Mary Smith were only a couple of years older than we were, and he was in a traditional black tux while she had on a dark grey evening gown. Marilyn introduced us. Mary smiled at me and said, "Very spiffy! Is that a uniform?"

John and Mary were much nicer than Harrison and Melissa the other night. She just didn't know anything about the Army. I explained the types of uniforms as we slowly moved towards the front. John commented, "I thought you were in the service earlier, when I saw your dog tags."

I nodded. "I've been wearing them so long, I forget I have them on.", I told him.

"What are they for?", asked Mary. "Some sort of identification?"

"Precisely."

"In case something happens to you, right?", asked John.

"Precisely."

The others contemplated this, Marilyn perhaps for the first time. Her only comments over the years had been that they tickled her sometimes when we were fooling around. Mary then asked, "So why do you have two?"

"Well, originally you only had one. The tradition started in the Civil War. At some of the battles, the men knew the casualties would be so bad, they wrote their names on pieces of paper and pinned them to their backs before attacking. At Cold Harbor and Petersburg, in fact, it was really gruesome."

"You mean...", asked John.

I lowered my voice a touch. "I mean that you could walk across the battlefield from one end to the other without stepping on the ground."

Marilyn looked a little green at that. Mary said, "Yuck!" I just shrugged. Hey, they asked. "So why do you have two, then?", she continued.

"That's some more 'yuck.'" She nodded in curiosity. "Okay, you asked. In the event somebody buys the farm, I take one of the tags with me back to base. Since I might have to leave the body on the battlefield, I take the other and jam it into the teeth so it won't fall out."

Now it was Mary's turn to turn green and Marilyn went, "Yuck!"

"You asked."

John commented, "Not going to be too good looking in the casket, I would guess."

I smiled at that. "You buy it in combat, it's a closed casket, no matter what!"

"Will you two change the subject!?", asked Marilyn.

I just smiled and shrugged. John grinned back. We started talking about his job as an insurance adjuster, which bored me to tears, but the only people who like insurance are other insurance people.

Eventually we got towards the front of the line. Your names were taken by a formally dressed woman from the cruise staff, and then when you got to where the captain was standing, she announced you to him. You would shake hands, perhaps make a little chit-chat, and then head into the lounge for the champagne and caviar. It was then that I had a sudden case of nerves. The captain was in his full dress whites!

So what? So, I was in uniform, too! My rank was a hell of a lot lower than his. Normally it wouldn't matter, since if I was in civilian clothing, there is no requirement to salute or stand at attention. We could have shook hands and moved along. But I was in uniform.

I was moving on automatic. John and Mary were introduced as "Mr. and Mrs. John and Mary Smith." I had automatically given my rank to the lady doing the introductions.

John and Mary moved along, and we stepped in front of the captain. Now what? "Lieutenant Carl Buckman and Mrs. Marilyn Buckman."

It was automatic. I snapped to attention, and said, "Sir!"

Marilyn looked at me in amazement, but the captain smiled and promptly said, "As you were, Lieutenant.", the Navy version of 'At ease.'

"Thank you, sir. I wasn't sure of the protocol, being in uniform."

He reached out and took my hand. "The protocol is that you are a guest in my home. Welcome aboard, Lieutenant Buckman, Mrs. Buckman."

"Thank you very much, sir." Marilyn also thanked him when he took her hand. At that point, to conclude things, I came to attention again, and saluted, and he returned the salute. Then we were off into the lounge.

I could feel several people staring at me, one of whom was my wife. "Do you have to salute everybody?", she asked.

"Let's just say that as a lieutenant, I salute a lot more people than salute me."

"Wow, I wasn't expecting that.", commented John Smith, who rejoined us. A waiter brought around a tray of champagne flutes and we each took one. "You have to salute the captain?"

"I was just asking him that.", chimed in Marilyn.

"I'm not really sure, but I think so, at least when I'm in uniform. Hey, he's a full naval captain, an O-6. In the Army he'd be a full bull colonel. My whole battalion only has a lieutenant colonel. You don't get a full colonel until you get to the regimental or brigade level.", I replied.

"But he's a civilian.", said John.

I shrugged at that. "I don't know about that. For one thing, he might well be Norwegian Naval Reserve. He's ex-Norwegian Navy, that's for sure. For another thing, in America at least, the Merchant Marine Academy ranks right up there with the service academies, like West Point or Annapolis. Like I said, I'm not really sure. I never learned it in any of my lessons."

"So, do you have to salute him all the time?", asked Mary.

I shook my head. "I think that's it. I only have to salute or stand at attention when I'm in uniform, and this is it for me. Even for the next formal night, I have civvies."

"And you have to jump around like that for your colonels in the Army, too?", Marilyn asked.

I grinned down at her. Even in her heels I was several inches taller than she was. "Only if I don't want my next jump to be into a snow bank in Alaska!" Marilyn was going to need some acclimatization to the Army. "It'd be awfully difficult to wear that dress in the snow."

We excused ourselves from John and Mary, and wandered around the lounge. We hadn't been in here before, and the view was very nice, looking out over the stern as the sun dropped towards the horizon behind us. I introduced Marilyn to caviar, which she promptly told me she didn't like. "That just means more for me!", I replied, and scarfed down one of the little hors d'oeuvres on her plate.

"You probably like snails, too."

"Escargot? You bet!"

"Yuck!"

I licked my lips. "Yummmm!"

Tonight we were seated at a different table, with two other couples. We had learned this from a notice slipped under our door in the morning while we were at breakfast. I maneuvered Marilyn past our old table, though, and smiled at Harrison and Melissa, who both promptly looked away. Marilyn smiled at me and nudged me in the side. "I caught that." I gave her my most innocent look, but she said, "You are bad!" We had a nice laugh at that.

Our tablemates for tonight were a young couple like ourselves, the Pulaskis, a pair of newlywed grad students at Ohio State, as well as a couple in their mid-thirties, the Martins, a plumber and a schoolteacher on their tenth anniversary second honeymoon. Very nice people. Tonight's group went much better together. I didn't say anything, but Marilyn told everybody about our evening with the Blakewells. I just shrugged and shook my head listening to her. Marilyn is like my mother in that sort of thing. She can keep a grudge alive forever! (Or as I've told her, there is no horse so dead she can't be beat it some more!)

The funniest part of the night was when Janice Martin commented, "Tomorrow is the 4th of July. I wonder if they do anything special in Bermuda for that?"

I looked around the table, and was pleased to notice I wasn't the only one looking at her curiously. I answered, "If they do anything, it will probably be to have a bonfire and roast an American."

"What? Why?" She really was kind of oblivious. Nice though.

"Well, Bermuda is a British colony or something. The 4th is when we celebrate telling the British to go home and never come back. I know I'm not wearing my uniform tomorrow!"

Janice's eyes opened wide at that and her mouth formed an O. "I never thought of that."

Her husband laughed and commented, "Boy, some people just can't take a joke!" He then teased his wife a little. "Maybe you should check with the visitor's bureau tomorrow?"

I laughed along with everybody else. "I hear it's even worse up in Halifax. That's where all the Tories who got kicked out of the U.S. ended up landing. I've heard they really hold a grudge!"

After dinner was an evening of Broadway show tunes in the theater, and then we went back to the lounge in the aft of the ship, where we had met the captain. Now it was back in business as a lounge, with an oldies band playing songs from the Rat Pack and we did some dancing. We stayed there until late.

Finally, I was getting tired, so took Marilyn's hand and we walked out onto the deck. The breeze, along with the wind generated by the ship's passage was fairly stiff, and it was blowing Marilyn's dress all over the place. "I have to say, honey, I really like the view!", I told her, after one gust proved that she was wearing stockings, and not pantyhose.

She laughed. "It's not funny!"

"I so disagree!" I took her hand and led her somewhat forward, and we got out of the worst of the wind. We continued along the deck, which was dark, but not deserted, and at one point we watched the crew setting up for the midnight buffet. "You only live once.", I told her, pointing at the buffet.

"They really are going to wheel us off the ship!"

"Come running with me tomorrow.", I urged her.

"I'll think about it."

That was good enough for me. Marilyn didn't exercise now, but kept her gorgeous figure because of a good metabolism for a twenty-three year old. Things would change, especially after she had children. If I could get her to start taking care of herself, it wouldn't hurt! Maybe she would live longer and be healthier this time.

We went back inside for another drink, and then back to the deck for the midnight buffet. Tonight was dedicated to chocolate - cakes, fruits, candies, sundaes, anything and everything made with or covered by chocolate. I dipped some strawberries in chocolate and then we went wandering forward with our champagne glasses.

We finished the strawberries and I set the plate down on an empty chair, and then we continued on, slowly, just savoring the moment. When we got to the bow, we set our glasses down as well, and looked out over the dark ocean. Then we heard some giggling, forward and below us. It took us a second to realize there was a young couple a deck below us, in the darkness and shadow, fooling around on the bow. He kept looking around, but never realized he should have also looked up. We couldn't really see all the details, but as we watched, his hands moved to the front of his pants, and then she giggled and knelt on the deck. That put her completely in the shadow, but the look on his face was ecstatic. Five minutes later she was standing up again, and then they giggled and ran off.

I looked at my wife and smiled. Her eyes widened and she said, "No way!"

"I don't know what you're talking about.", I replied.

"You know exactly what I'm talking about!" Just to prove her point, another couple strolled through the area, arms around each other, doing a late night walk around the deck. "See!? Forget it!"

I just smiled and moved closer to her. Marilyn tried to back away, but I had her trapped, with a hand on her back. "Lift your leg. Put your foot up on the railing.", I told her. The railing around the deck had several horizontal rails. The breeze was blowing her dress back, and showing her legs nicely.

"What?", she asked, confused.

I was standing to her right, with my left hand at the small of her back. "Lift your right foot and set it on the railing.", I whispered to her.

Marilyn was nervous, but lifted her foot up about a foot and braced it on the railing. The breeze pushed her dress up even higher, clearly showing me that she was wearing stockings. However, with me close at her side, nobody who was behind us would notice. I placed my right hand on her thigh, eliciting a quiet gasp from her, and then I slid it upwards.

"I think you're enjoying this.", I told her. My fingers were moving slowly, but not finding anything to get in the way.

"Take me back to the room, please.", she begged.

"Why?"

I could feel moist heat from her crotch now, but hadn't moved in far enough to touch any panties or thong she might have on.

"Because I need you.", she pleaded.

"What? What do you need?", I teased her. I moved my fingers a touch more and found her naked and bald slit. I traced her lips, and felt warmth, and if we weren't in a breeze, she would have reeked of her musk.

"I need you to make love to me. Oh, please, let's go in!"

"Make love or fuck you?" I began to touch her slit now, sliding a finger into her greasy little gash.

"Oh, God! Either! Both! Let's just go!" She tugged my arm slightly, but was getting weak kneed, and sagging against me.

I began to diddle her clit, and she gave a quiet whimper. "You forgot your panties. I think you wanted me to do this to you."

Her hands were clutching my arm now. "Oh, please, stop teasing me!"

I held her close and flicked her clit and drove her to orgasm. Then I said, "Maybe it's my turn now.", and slowly pulled my hand out from under her dress.

Marilyn sagged against me and sighed. "No, please, back in the cabin. I'll do anything you want, just not out here..." She sounded exhausted and spent.

I grinned to myself and took her hand. "Anything?", I asked innocently. I led her inside the ship.

"What?", she asked, distractedly.

"You said you'd do anything if we went back to the cabin." I waggled my eyebrows at her.

"Not that!"

I shrugged. "Your words, not mine."

That earned me a laugh. "We'll be back on deck before that happens!"

"You'll never know what you could be missing."

We continued on to our cabin, with Marilyn tugging my hand and giving me sly looks as we went. As soon as we got inside, she was in my arms and kissing me. "Hurry! I need you so bad!", she said lowly.

I tossed my jacket on the bed, and then reached behind her, and undid the catch and the zipper on the back of her dress. This I unzipped, and then I pulled it off of her to pool at her feet, leaving her standing there in nothing but her stockings and heels. I put my hands on her shoulders and smiled. "Just like out on deck.", I said.

Marilyn smiled at that, remembering the young couple we had watched earlier. She knelt at my feet and began working on my pants, while I began to undo my cuffs and bow tie. I reached behind my back to unfasten that ridiculous cummerbund, and tossed that away, and Marilyn giggled and said, "Thank you." Then she had my pants open and was fishing me out. I pulled the suspenders down and that made it much easier for her, and she grinned and thanked me again.

"Stop talking!", I laughed back.

Marilyn licked my cock for a moment, and then opened her mouth and began sucking on my cockhead. Tonight I wanted something more. Placing my hands in her hair, I began thrusting into her mouth. "I'm going to come in your mouth! You keep sucking or it's going to be in your face, but you are sucking me off first!" Marilyn began suctioning my cock, and jacking my shaft. I tried not to be too rough, or to choke her, but I really needed to get my rocks off. "Then, you need to keep sucking and make me hard enough to fuck your little cunt!" I kept telling her what was going to happen, and Marilyn began making little whimpering sounds as she sucked me. I looked down and found only one hand on my cock; the other was between her legs!

Seeing her so turned on just made me even more excited. The come in my balls felt like it was boiling, and I could feel myself getting closer. I tried in vain to prolong it, but Marilyn was suckling my cockhead too hard. "Take it!", I cried, and unloaded into her mouth. I began spurting as she swallowed. Enough came out that it dribbled down her lips to her chin, but she kept sucking. I must have had at least have a dozen heavy spurts before I was done.

She looked up at me happily while using her fingers to wipe her lips and chin. I looked down and ordered, "Don't stop. Make me hard again!" Marilyn averted her eyes and took my still semi-hard cock in her mouth again. She also began using her hands to undo my shoes and socks and strip me totally naked. I peeled off my shirt and tossed it aside. By the time I was naked, I was stiff enough for another round.

I pulled my wife to her feet and over to the couch. I plopped down onto it, in the center, and then tugged on her hips to bring her closer. There was a sheen of excitement in the wetness on her pussy and thighs. "Get on top and make me come again!" Marilyn straddled my thighs and lowered herself onto my stiff cock. She gasped as I entered her, and then squealed when I pulled her tits to my face and began sucking her nipples. Her hands were on my shoulders as she began moving on me, not so much bouncing as writhing all over. I reached up and tugged her hands down so they were between us. "Now, make me come again!"

Marilyn couldn't really reach down and touch me, but her fingers were all over her clit and scraping the topside of my cock when it was exposed. Occasionally it would become too much for her, and she would pull her hands away as she orgasmed, but I would push them back, forcing her into yet another orgasm. The feel of the nylons rubbing against my thighs was amazing. She looked and felt so slutty as she rode me desperately. I kept sucking her nipples and forcing her to pleasure herself. By the time I came again, spewing up into her, she was barely capable of talking.

Marilyn lay against me, breathing hard, as I wrapped my arms around her and nuzzled her neck. "I love you so much.", I whispered to her. "I don't ever want to let you go."

Marilyn roused herself enough to begin kissing and sucking on my neck, working on giving me a hickey. I laughed and sat upright, some, pulling away from her. "Oh no you don't!"

"What?", she asked mischievously, a twinkle in her eye.

I smacked that beautiful round bottom now perched on my legs. "That's the last thing I need around the gun bay!"

"Spoilsport." She leaned forward and tried to lick my neck, and then I felt her trying to apply a little suction.

"Acckkk! Stop that!"

That simply caused Marilyn to throw her arms around me and try to imitate a vampire. I struggled against it, but I didn't want to hurt her, so I ended up picking her up off my lap and carrying her over to the bed, where I dropped her unceremoniously. "You'd better not have been successful.", I warned her.

"Or what? What will you do?", she asked teasingly, and then leaned forward and tried to gnash her teeth at me.

I tossed the clothing off the bed and jumped on it next to her. We wrestled a bit and I had her facing down, and I threw a leg over hers and kept her there. She still had on her stockings and the ankles-trapped stilettos she had worn for me, and now she was beating them ineffectually on the bed. I lay next to her, half on top of her, and rubbed my hands over her backside and her butt. "I think you know exactly what I plan to do to you!"

She began squirming around and I smacked her on the ass again. "Behave yourself!" I rubbed her ass and reached down between her asscheeks to finger her asshole, and then below, to feel the warmth and wetness where our mixed juices had seeped from her. "It will be so much worse for you if you struggle!"

"No, not that!"

"What I'm going to do, you will enjoy!" I could feel myself slowly coming back to life. As soon as I was stiff enough, I crawled on top of her and straddled her legs. I could sense Marilyn's nervousness, and I smiled to myself. Then I sat upright and reached down, and guided my cock into her pussy!

I could feel Marilyn's surprise, and she whipped her head around to see me as best she could. I just grinned at her. "I had you going there, didn't I?"

"You are so mean! You are going to get that hickey yet!", she sputtered. I just slammed my cock up into her scummy cunt and she squealed. "Oh, God, don't stop fucking me!"

I leaned down on top of her, luxuriating in the feel of her warm skin on mine, as I slowly rammed my cock into her. "When it's time, I'll have your ass, but not tonight. Now, make me come again, and really work it. I think this is going to be a good long fuck!" Marilyn began bucking her ass back at me.

I think I was enjoying this honeymoon even more than the last one!

Chapter 53: Married Life

So the rest of our honeymoon went pretty much like our first honeymoon, as well as all the other little 'practice honeymoons' we had taken up to that point. To be specific, we goofed off and screwed our brains out! We hit the beach in Bermuda, did a few tourist type things, ate too much, drank too much - all the things young honeymooners are supposed to do.

On most cruises, for instance to the Caribbean, every night you sail to a different island, so there is no way to see the night life on land. You miss the boat and you are screwed. On a trip to Bermuda, however, it's different. Bermuda is all alone in the middle of the ocean, with nothing else around for about 600 miles or so. Once they park the boat, you just use it as a very expensive and very small hotel room. If you want to hit the nightclubs, feel free. The boat will still be at the dock at 0300. Thursday we sailed home, we had another formal night on Friday (I wore a suit, not the mess dress), and Saturday we docked.

The fun and games all came to a halt on Saturday. New York and the entire east coast was getting hit with intermittent thunderstorms from the moment we docked. It takes just as long to leave the boat as it does to get on. It was back to hurry up and wait, as we went through debarkation, customs, luggage retrieval, and getting a shuttle bus back to JFK. Then we had a three hour wait to fly to Fayetteville, and the plane had to circle the field for an hour while a storm swept through. Then the airline managed to lose our hanging bag, so we had to wait about an hour for them to realize this and start the paperwork to find it.

I didn't know how much money it was going to take, but I swore then and there to make enough money to be able to afford limousines and chartered jets!

It was very late by the time we got into the Impala and drove to our apartment, which Marilyn had never been to before. Shortly after going through the first full round of the cycle, I had gotten myself a two bedroom apartment in a nice garden apartment area frequented by company grade officers. I could have afforded a house, but second lieutenants couldn't afford houses, and I didn't want to stand out. Second lieutenants can, barely, afford two bedroom apartments. If anybody asked, I would say that Marilyn's family had money.

That was technically true. Big Bob was by most standards quite well off. On the other hand, Big Bob also had thirteen kids and never met a dollar he couldn't spend. His company was notoriously cash poor and generally survived on accounting miracles. Ultimately he would sell it to most of his kids, spend the money, mortgage his remaining assets to the hilt, spend that money, and then die broke. I actually had to admire him - he managed to take it with him! He left nothing but about $150,000 in life insurance to the kids, split 13 ways.

As I started to park, I immediately stopped and put it into Reverse, and pulled back out on the road. "What's wrong?", asked Marilyn.

"We need some groceries.", I told her. "I've been gone two weeks and I threw everything out before I left." We found an all night Stop-N-Rob and grabbed some milk and eggs and bread and such, and then went home. I dutifully carried her across the threshold, and then went back and unloaded the car. By the time I was back inside, Marilyn was asleep on the couch. I helped her to bed, put away the groceries, and then went to bed myself.

Sunday we got back to normal. We slept late, stayed home, washed our laundry, and played house. Using the excuse that all of her clothing was in the laundry I had Marilyn wear one of my dress shirts and a pair of stilettos. I kept interrupting her work efforts with a different sort of work. That worked until mid-afternoon, at which point she had enough clean clothes that we could go out. I walked her around the apartment complex, and then we went out for dinner.

Monday it was time to get things back to normal. We got up, and I dressed in fatigues and jump boots, and I got Marilyn alive, so that by 0830 we were out of the apartment and on the way to the North Carolina Division of Motor Vehicles. Marilyn needed a new license, in her new name. She had her New York license and her birth certificate and our marriage license, but still needed to take the tests. After lunch we drove over to the base, and we went about getting her an ID card, so that she could go to the PX, or Post Exchange, sort of a shopping center on the base. It was a long day, but nowhere near as bad as Saturday coming home. Technically, I was no longer on leave, but Captain Harris was, by prior agreement, turning a blind eye to my absence for a couple of days. If your commander cooperated, you could often get someone to sign you in and out with a telephone call so that the thirty days annual leave we accumulated could stretch to cover six weeks, or even more if there was a legal holiday or two in the right place. I had used up my leave during the year, going back and forth to Utica to take care of the wedding, and now I was just over the line.

Tuesday afternoon Marilyn's oldest brother Matthew showed up out of the blue, driving a panel truck with all of her remaining clothes and possessions, and some giant bags and boxes holding wedding presents. She had called her family Sunday morning, and we had been expecting them to ship her stuff FedEx or UPS. Before she left home, she had packed everything still there into boxes ready for shipping. Instead, they simply loaded everything into a truck and sent their truck driver son on a trip south. We unloaded the truck and Matthew spent the night with us, in the second bedroom, and then took off again Wednesday morning.

Wednesday it was back to the battery for me. Marilyn was sort of nervous about this, since we only had the Impala, and this would leave her stuck at the apartment. I told her we would get a car for her. I showed her in the Paraglide a variety of listings for used cars, as well as the weekend swap meet in a parking lot off base. I promised to pick up some cash during the week, and we would go car shopping on Saturday.

I was trying to be careful with my money, careful in the sense that I didn't want anybody to know I had any. It was why I lived in an apartment and drove an old Impala. Second lieutenants with a new wife can't afford a house or new cars. A captain, with a wife who worked, might be able to do those things, but definitely not a lieutenant. It was bad enough being known as 'Doc' Buckman; tossing money into the mix would not be helpful. Fortunately, Marilyn had no idea that I was actually worth not quite three million bucks. Whenever I spent money on her I would always cover it up by saying that I had been saving my jump pay. Since she never knew what a lieutenant was actually paid, she never twigged to the fact that lieutenants can't afford to fly first class or sail on the promenade deck.

After Matthew went back home, Marilyn and I sorted through our wedding presents. We had a disagreement of sorts over this, since she just wanted to rip and tear like a four year old, while I wanted to figure out who had sent what. When she asked why, I told her it was so we could send out thank you cards. I might as well have been speaking in tongues for that, since the Lefleurs never sent out thank you cards. "At our house, if you didn't send out a thank you card, you never got another gift from that person.", I explained.

"Even from your family on birthdays or Chirstmas?"

"We weren't that silly. Still, if you got something from your aunts or uncles or whatever, you had to."

Marilyn simply rolled her eyes at that, and allowed me to make a list. At the minimum, we would send cards to my family.

The results were interesting. There was some cash, which we split in half and pocketed, and some checks, which we put aside to deposit in the bank. I was using the credit union on base, and I resolved to take Marilyn over and get her listed on the account. Only my Army paycheck went into that account; she didn't have access to, or even knowledge of, my brokerage accounts.

We had a large pile of other gifts, too. We got two toasters and three blenders, both of which I already owned, and a pair of fondue sets. I told Marilyn I would put a note on both the battery and battalion bulletin boards, and unload them that way. Suzie gave us a very nice set of serving bowls, and my aunts and their families gave us some nice flatware and some extra Corelleware. Finally, after we went through everything, we couldn't find anything from my parents. We looked all over the apartment, to see if we had left it in the spare bedroom, or if Matthew had put it down somewhere we couldn't find it. There wasn't anything to be seen. Mystified, Marilyn called her parents, and they checked with Matthew, to make sure we hadn't left it in the van, or upstairs in her old bedroom.

Finally, I just shrugged. "Maybe my folks forgot it at home. They'll probably mail it this week. I'll check with Suzie tomorrow."

That was a very strange phone call. The more I thought about it, the more I wondered, so I called Suzie on an outside line from the base the next day. Suzie told me that they hadn't packed any presents other than hers, and that she hadn't seen anything around, and that she would check with our parents when they got home from work. I called her later that night, getting hung up on by Ham in the process, and then calling back ten minutes later and getting Suzie. I could hear my brother on the line, so I told him to get off the phone, and then Suzie started yelling at him, and there was a click as he hung up.

Suzie's voice dropped to a whisper. "It's really weird, Carl.", she told me. "Nobody will tell me anything about the present."

'What do you mean?" I lowered my voice, too. Marilyn was watching television in the living room, and I was on the phone in the bedroom.

"Well, I asked Dad, and he simply told me to talk to Mom. He was acting really strange, too. So I went and asked Mom, and she got real hyper about it, and started yelling about you two and how you had lost the present, but she wouldn't tell me what it was or anything, and I swear, there was nothing in the car!", she answered.

I began to feel sick to my stomach. "She wouldn't even tell you what we had lost?"

"No, and she wouldn't answer any other questions either. I was sent to my room for asking."

"Suzie, I don't think they gave us anything.", I whispered.

"I don't either, and now Dad's embarrassed and Mom's angry you found out.", she admitted.

I was silent for a minute, long enough that I could hear Suzie going, "Carl? Carl?", on the other end. Was my mother that unhappy with me? Or was Hamilton working on her somehow? Or had he destroyed the present?

"I'm here, I'm here. I was just thinking. Suzie, here's a job for you. Go to the store and buy something, maybe a really nice and big CrockPot. Then take it over to Louise's and wrap it and mail it to us. We'll tell Marilyn that they found it at home, and must have forgotten to pack it."

"This is so bizarre, Carl!", she told me. "I can't believe they did this intentionally!"

"It is what it is, honey. You just take care of that and then send me a bill to my office. I'll send you a check." I waited for her to grab a pen and paper, and then gave her my office address.

We hung up and I went back into the living room and told Marilyn my Mom found the present in the living room behind the couch, where it had been kicked, and they were mailing it out. It was years before I ever told her the truth.

The next day, I called my father at his office. "Dad, you got a minute?", I asked.

"Uh, yes. Welcome back. How was the cruise?"

"Just fine, thank you. Listen, I have to ask you, what's going on with the wedding present. Suzie says Mom wouldn't say what it was, but that we've lost it. What's going on?"

"Uhh..." Dad hemmed and hawed for a moment. I could almost hear the gears turning as he tried to think of something.

I pushed a little more. It certainly wasn't the value of the present that I cared about, but I needed to know what was happening. "Did Hamilton destroy it? Suzie says nothing was packed in the car but her present, and we got that. Did Mom forget it? Or wasn't there a present at all?"

"Carl, maybe you should be asking your mother this question.", he replied, ducking the answer.

"No way, I'm asking you. Was there even a present? Or does your answer already mean there wasn't one."

"I don't know, Carl. Your mother said she would handle it, but I don't remember packing anything.", he answered, lamely.

"Okay, well, that answers that question, I suppose. Just curious, Dad, is it me she hates, or Marilyn?"

"Carl, it's not like that!", he protested.

"Yeah, whatever you say, Dad, whatever you say. Good-bye, Dad. Give Mom my love. I'll leave you all alone."

I could hear him protesting as I hung up the phone. There was a time when I would have cried about it, but I just didn't care anymore. I had had it with the drama. I'd let Suzie know what had happened and mail her my old house key.

Within a few days of my being back, Marilyn got a letter at the apartment from the Fort Bragg Officers Wives Group, asking her to join. Marilyn's not a big joiner on that sort of thing, but I pushed her to go to a meeting and meet the others. I knew that she would enjoy it, and I also knew that it would be helpful to her. She was far from home, without any friends, and in a place she didn't know or understand. I also knew, in a mercenary sort of way, that a wife can make or break you. Marilyn would never hurt me intentionally, but what she didn't understand could hurt me unintentionally. I was right, too; she came back babbling happily about some of the other wives she met, and talking about their next meeting. Also, a few of the wives would come and visit and give her an introduction to the Army and the post.

Marilyn adjusted to life in the cycle about as well as I expected her to. She didn't like it, but Marilyn had never given me grief about my working hours before, and I didn't expect her to now. The support cycle was the easiest, and we were still finishing up that. Training cycle was next, and while she didn't see as much of me, I was always home at night, and usually had my weekends free. The six weeks of ready cycle were very unhappy for her. The days were very long, and often there were overnight readiness exercises and drills.

There were, however, a few things I could do to ease her through this. First, we bought a used car, a little red Toyota Tercel with a stick shift and a couple of hamsters under the hood that she loved. That let her get out and around. I also drove her up to Fayetteville State. If she wanted to be a teacher, she needed a master's degree. Fayetteville State is pretty much a black college, but whites could go there, too, and it was part of the University of North Carolina system. There were a number of colleges in the area, but most were either community colleges or religious colleges or undergrad colleges only. If she didn't want to go to a black college, she would need to drive up to Raleigh or Durham, at least an hour away.

Marilyn was nervous about this, simply because Utica and Plattsburgh are pretty much totally Caucasian. Oh, there're some blacks around, but Marilyn had lived a very sheltered life. I don't think she had ever actually talked to a black person until she got to college, and Harlan and Anna Lee were a real shock to her family at the wedding. Still, we picked up a copy of the catalog and some admissions paperwork.

Going back to college would keep her busy. Likewise, when I was on the ready cycle, and stuck on base, I offered to fly her back to Utica for a few weeks, or maybe back to Plattsburgh to visit her aunt. She could drive if she wanted, also. That actually made her eyes light up, although she felt like she was abandoning me. I just wrapped my arms around her and promised it would be all right. I then implied that the rest of the guys and I would head out to the strip clubs, but she tried to punch me at that point, so I just wrapped my arms tighter and gave her some kisses.

The dreaded Orange Army had snuck into Fort Polk in September and captured it, and we were needed to parachute in and send them all back to Orangeland. In point of fact, Army base security was pretty lax, and several times a year the Orange Army was able to capture a base somewhere in the country, requiring the training brigade to go and liberate them. Once a year, every brigade in the division would participate in a major league training exercise somewhere. It's very expensive and very time consuming and very difficult, but it's also very effective. There's a saying in the military, going back to at least the days of Caesar and before then, that the more you sweat in training, the less you bleed in war. That level of training is what takes us from being just the 82nd Airborne to the 'elite' 82nd Airborne.

During this rotation, the entire brigade made a combat drop, including the 319th. As I mentioned before, airdropping artillery is truly a major headache, and to be avoided at all costs if you can get away with it. We couldn't. Battery B dropped rather than landed. Here's a quick quiz for all you fans of the Airborne artillery:

What happens when you airdrop a 105mm howitzer from a C-130 Hercules?

a - The gun lands upside down.

b - The gun lands in a tree.

c - The gun lands in the swamp.

d - The gun lands in the river.

or everybody's favorite:

e - All of the above! The gun lands upside down in a tree in the swamp and then falls into the river!

This assumes that everything is going perfectly. If something goes wrong, you get:

f - The chutes rip to shreds and the gun plummets to earth at terminal velocity and crashes into the General's brand new Cadillac!

I've never actually seen Option F, but I've heard about it! The result is known as Satan's Lawn Darts!

Amazingly enough, on our drop we actually had Option G, which was everything worked properly. When Captain Harris marveled at this, I just reminded him that God was saving up something more creative for us, like all four engines on the Herky Bird would fall off during takeoff, or the Air Force would forget to put a full load of fuel into it, or something even more enjoyable. Still we survived and got good marks doing so.

In January I discovered just how good that deployment was. Lieutenant Brimley was promoted up and out of his exec's slot and sent off to the 321st as a captain in a battery commander's slot. I was being promoted to First Lieutenant and taking over the exec's slot. This was a real surprise to me, since normally it takes at least 2 to 2½ years before you can be promoted to first lieutenant, and I had only been in for a 1½ years. On the other hand, there is something called a 5% list, where a small percentage of officers are promoted earlier than usual; maybe I was on a list somewhere. I was sure I would end up paying for it somehow. I wondered about any future promotions for myself. I was under an obligation of four years as part of my ROTC contract, which left me with a around 2½ years to go. That's normally the minimum length of time required at a first lieutenant's rank before even being considered for promotion to captain. My understanding was that they often waved that promotion under your nose as an inducement to stick around beyond your obligation. If I didn't stay in, I had another two years of inactive reserve obligation, but that was nothing. Short of total war, I would be out.

In any case, I was the new exec. Captain Harris told our other second johns what was going on, and we divvied up their responsibilities. (Goldstein was long gone by then, with an OER that had him watching an ammo dump in Greenland.) We had a nice little ceremony that Marilyn came to, where I got my silver bars, and I settled into Lieutenant Brimley's old office. Almost immediately I began to 'enjoy' one of the responsibilities of the exec's position. The captain is the commanding officer, the 'Old Man', the nice guy; the exec is the 'Hammer' and the designated prick. As a general rule, Captain Harris let the exec handle the Article 15s, the non-judicial punishments, when the troops got stupid. He just signed off on whatever his XO decided (technically only the CO can administer Article 15s.) Now that was me.

Most of the time, the troops were good kids, but the fact was that a lot of them were teenagers away from home for the first time. By the time they made non-com, they usually had matured they weren't a problem, but it wasn't unusual to have the MPs haul some kid in who got drunk and mouthy, or who took a piss on the mayor's lawn, or something equally stupid. If they were lucky, one of the non-coms would grab them before they got into trouble, but occasionally I would hammer them with restrictions, loss of pay, extra duty, or even take a stripe from their sleeve, and reduce them in rank. I didn't have to do it often, but it was necessary, and if I was a hard case, I didn't care. This was still better than giving them a court martial, which would end their career, even if they beat it.

Marilyn decided to enroll in January at Fayetteville State, and that seemed to go well. We had another support cycle in March, by which time I had built up some more leave, so she skipped school for a week and we took the Hawaiian vacation that Big Bob and Harriet had given us. We went to Oahu, which was very nice. I made sure to pack a good uniform, and we drove out to the Punchbowl and to Pearl Harbor to see the Arizona, where I paid my respects. The rest of the time we just goofed off and screwed around.

Suzie visited us during the summer of '79. She had turned 18 and conned my mother into loaning her the car for a week, and she drove down to see us. She told her mother that she was going to the shore with Louise; Louise went to the shore, but with her own family. She and Marilyn had a grand and glorious time. One day I took off and drove her and Marilyn over to one of the small civilian airstrips dotting the area. I had already signed her up, without her knowing it, for a tandem skydive. I had gotten my civilian free fall qualification over the last couple of years. It isn't all that difficult - jump out of the plane, and we guarantee you'll hit the ground somewhere!

Now, armed with a couple of disposable cameras, I introduced Suzie to the jump instructor. She was fascinated by it all. Marilyn didn't mind watching, but wanted nothing to do with going up in a plane and coming down in a silk landing. She took some photos of us on the ground, and climbing on the airplane. Suzie went through the pre-flight and training, and then got on the little Twin Otter. She was hooked up to the instructor, and then I gave her one of the cameras on a lanyard around her wrist. I had the other, and we took a couple shots of each other. Then it was out the door, and I took some more shots of her. She was having way too much fun to take any more photos until we got to the ground.

The base had a family day that weekend, and I brought Marilyn and Suzie out to the base. That was pretty funny. First I had them change into fatigues (which fit them like tents, even in the smallest size) and helmets, which made them look like a pair of green mushrooms. Then I put them on the bus to ride over to one of the firing points and watch us shoot one of the 105s. I even got a few shots of Marilyn and Suzie loading a shell into a howitzer and firing it off, with Suzie 'pulling the tail', or lanyard. Next, we loaded them back on the bus and drove them off to the Sicily Drop Zone, while I went off and made a Hollywood jump. Since all the chutes have to be repacked every 90 days, regardless of whether they were used or not, these kind of jumps are useful to recycle the chutes, and I could build jumps towards getting my master jump wings. Afterwards I let them change back into their regular clothes and we had dinner at the O Club.

Also that summer, Marilyn and I took a long weekend trip back to Utica. Mark and Lauren were getting married, and we needed to attend. With 13 kids, there was always somebody getting married, or confirmed, or something. On my first trip through it got to the point where we had made a joke about it. I didn't wear a suit at work, so I needed just one dark charcoal suit; we were good for one wedding, one burial, one confirmation, and one baptism a year, at least.

Captain Harris arranged for another second lieutenant to join our happy band, along with our other two second lieutenants, Fletcher and Kuzinski. My replacement as second lieutenant truly tested my yearning for command. There's a story that Napoleon was considering promoting an officer to a general's rank. The other generals were all telling him how brave the officer was, how smart he was, how good he was, and so forth. Finally, Napoleon simply said, 'Yes, yes, I understand all that. But tell me, is he lucky?' Second Lieutenant Louis Westerfield was not lucky.

'Lucky Lou', as he came to be called, showed up about two weeks later than originally promised. This was explained by the cast on his right foot and the crutches he was hobbling around on. The cast was the result of dropping a 155mm shell on his foot during the last week of training at Fort Sill. Since a 155 shell weighs over 90 pounds, he broke his foot. Okay, shit happens, and I've done some stupid stuff myself. I introduced him to the battery and showed him his desk, my old desk.

Two weeks after his foot was healed, Lucky broke his left pinky finger when he closed a car door on it. I had to give him credit, since he didn't let that slow him down. The following month he sprained his left ankle during a jump. Six weeks later he dislocated a shoulder. After that he cracked a rib. Then he sprained his right ankle. Lucky spent more time in the hospital than he did in the battery!

After a year of this, in the summer of 1980 Lucky's military career came to a spectacular finish. Just as he jumped, a sudden pocket of turbulence hit the Chinook and tangled his main chute. Lucky managed to cut away from his main chute and deploy his reserve and save his life, but he landed at a much higher than optimum speed. He basically shattered every bone in his left leg, from his thigh bone down to all five toes, and everything in between. He was like an orthopedic surgeon's wet dream! Lucky was medicalled out of the Army.

And so went 1979 and 1980, mostly. The cycle turned, as did the seasons, and the battery improved from the slump it had been in when I first reported in. Captain Harris happily dumped more and more responsibility on me, and as they say, 'what doesn't kill you makes you stronger!' We deployed to other bases for training occasionally, but otherwise we stayed stateside and didn't invade anybody other than Orangeland.

Also, when possible, Marilyn and I visited her family at Christmas and in the summer, for various weddings and such. Sometimes I would simply send her up, if her school schedule allowed but mine didn't. We were able to see our friends on occasion. Harlan and Tusker couldn't visit, but we did make a quick trip up for a long weekend and dragged them over to the shore for a few days in Ocean City. Likewise, in '79 we went down to Fort Hood and stayed with Harlan and Anna Lee, and the following year they returned the favor.

That proved to be a big event in 1980. Somehow, Harlan convinced his superiors that it was necessary for his professional development to learn about the Airborne. This isn't all that big a deal. I would say that the majority of officers, even armored and artillery officers, end up going through jump school. It's one of those items on the things-to-do checklist. What stood out was that afterwards, he was to do a 30 day TDY at Bragg to learn about airborne operations. When Marilyn learned about this, she got on the phone with Anna Lee and worked out the details. Harlan would stay with us, bank his meals and incidentals allowance, and Anna Lee would come out and stay when she could. Neither Harlan nor I were given any say in this, so I wasn't allowed to take him out to the strip clubs like I threatened.

Chapter 54: Plans and Changes

Lieutenants don't run batteries, just like lieutenants don't run companies. Captains do those things. Or at least in peacetime, they do. Things change rapidly when the bullets start flying. If you survive, you can get promoted quickly. During the Napoleonic Wars, the British officer corps had a ghastly toast when drinking, 'Here's to bloody wars and sickly seasons!', since combat and disease were the two guaranteed methods for openings in the chain of command above you! During World War II you had very young and junior officers running things, with second lieutenants running companies and captains running battalions. If you had talent, and didn't fuck up or get killed, you could move up the ladder. The rank would catch up eventually. In fact, our brigade commander had graduated from West Point in 1964 on the eve of the big buildup in Vietnam, and had been promoted to first lieutenant after a year, captain after one more year, and to major after just two years as a captain.

War is planned by old guys and executed by young guys. It's one of the ugly truths about the military.

In peacetime, things moved a lot slower. After the war was over, a lot of those quickie captains ended up waiting up to eight years to make up their time in grade. I had been a first lieutenant for about a couple of years by now. Realistically I wouldn't expect to be promoted to captain for at least another year. It was probable that I would end my four year commitment as a first lieutenant executive officer of an artillery battery.

Things didn't quite work out that way. In 1979, shortly after I became the exec, Captain Harris transferred to Fort Rucker for flight training! I have no idea where he had gotten the desire to fly choppers. In my heart of hearts I hoped he would be happier there than he had been at Bragg. Maybe he'd do better there. By Halloween we had a new commanding officer, Captain Waslow. We continued to improve in our rankings, but Captain Waslow resigned his commission in January 1980 and left the service to find a job in the private sector. His replacement, Captain Ozawa, had a lot of promise, but ended up in a very nasty divorce and left us in April.

Not only was the battery going through a lot of upheaval with the quick changes, but I was getting a lot of unrated time, since neither Captain Waslow nor Captain Ozawa were around long enough to qualify as my rater. You needed at least 60 days working for a new boss for him to rate you, and neither ended up doing the paperwork. Since I rated the other lieutenants and the battery commanders were the senior raters, it was only me that was affected.

I think at that point the battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Buller, simply decided to leave well enough alone. Bravo Battery had become, by any measure, the best battery in the division. We had fewer problems in our drops and landings, set up faster, fired faster, and were more accurate. We had a higher reenlistment rate and fewer problems with the civilian cops. We even had a lower incidence of social disease. This was not to say that the other two batteries were fuckups, far from it. We were simply the best battalion in the DivArty, and we were the best battery in the battalion. Buller simply left me in charge, as an exec without a commander, and gave me another second lieutenant to fill in. Buller would rate me.

Marilyn was happy for me, but didn't really understand. There is simply something about a line command, having the authority, and the responsibility, that you just don't get in staff positions. The closest I could remember was when I was a sales manager for Lefleur Homes, and bossed my own sales lot. This was even bigger and better. It's not for everyone. My father only wanted a staff job; even when he had engineers reporting to him, he stayed away from line positions. He never understood my hankering for line jobs. He had a saying, "Management would be great, if it wasn't for the people!"

In early January 1981 I was called over to battalion. Now that I was effectively in charge of the battery, this wasn't an unusual occurrence. Once in the battalion office, one of the sergeants knocked on the commander's door. At a shout of 'Enter!', I was ushered inside. Lieutenant Colonel Buller wasn't too starchy, but I noticed another officer, another light bird in there with him, so I marched up to his desk and came to attention, and then saluted.

The colonel returned the salute and said, "At ease, Doc. Have a seat."

"Yes, sir." I sat down and looked over at the other lieutenant colonel. He had most of the same fruit salad that Lieutenant Colonel Buller had - some ribbons from Viet Nam, a Bronze Star, similar qualifications - but there were differences, too. He was Signal Corps, for one thing, was a straight leg (not jump trained), and had shoulder insignia indicating he worked in the Military District of Washington. He was from the Pentagon, in other words.

"This is Colonel Halliwell."

"Sir." I stuck out my hand and Colonel Halliwell shook it. I turned back to the battalion commander and gave him a curious look.

"Doc, what are your plans for the future? What was your commitment to the Army?", he asked.

I blinked at that. Whatever I had been expecting, this wasn't it. "Four years, sir. I guess I haven't thought about it. It will be four years this summer."

"Were you planning on staying in after that?"

I opened my mouth, and then shut it again. After a few more seconds, I answered, "I just haven't given it any thought, sir. I've enjoyed my time here, but I'll have to talk it over with Marilyn. I just haven't thought about it." I gave him an embarrassed shrug. We should have talked about it before, but we just never got around to it.

Colonel Buller looked over at Colonel Halliwell, who swung around in his chair towards me. "Lieutenant, when your four years is up, you'll have done four years with Battery B. Let me ask you a question. Is there anything in an Airborne battery you don't already know how to do by now?"

I glanced over at Colonel Buller, but then said, "Honestly? No."

Colonel Halliwell nodded. "Correct answer. You'll have had the battery as an exec and de facto commander for three years by then. The Army is not going to leave you here to make major or colonel in the 319th. It's time for you to move on."

Colonel Buller added, "Colonel Halliwell is right. Oh, don't get me wrong. If we end up dropping into the Fulda Gap or some damn place, I'd want you here. You could probably handle the battalion without a problem. So could your counterparts, too. But since that probably isn't going to happen, what are your plans for the future? Were you planning on making this a career?"

I was silent, and I could feel the eyes boring in on me. I shook my head. "I just haven't thought that much about it. I like it, the Army I mean, and I think I could do it. I have to talk to Marilyn about it." Colonel Halliwell gave me a curious look at that. "Sir, Marilyn knew I was going to be in for four years when we met, and when we married, but she didn't sign up for a career. I have to talk to her about it."

"Fair enough. Interested in hearing about why I came down from the Pentagon to talk to you?", he asked.

"Yes, sir, actually I would. No disrespect, sir, but what's a Pentagon light bird doing coming down here and talking to a two-bit artillery lieutenant? There must be a hundred of us here on the base."

Colonel Buller snorted and seemed to be suppressing a laugh. Colonel Halliwell simply smiled. "Probably. Here's a few more questions for you. How many of those two-bit artillery lieutenants have doctorates in applied mathematics? - Yes, I know what the nickname is for - How many of them made battery commander in under four years? How many have had an unblemished series of OERs marked 'Outstanding, Recommended for Promotion and early attendance at CGS'? Answer me those questions, will you. You know that answer."

I hadn't really given it any thought. My biggest concern at times was simply blending in, but it looked like I hadn't been that successful. "I guess I never gave my career much thought, sir. I just wanted to do the best I could."

"Why is that, Carl?", asked my commander. "Half of those other lieutenants don't think of anything but their careers! Why don't you?"

I looked at Lieutenant Colonel Buller. "It's hard to say, sir. It's just that ... sir, you get out of life what you put into it. If I put a hundred percent into something, I generally get that and more back. I've tried to do that here. If it wasn't working, somebody would have let me know, of that I'm sure."

"Well, it's time for you to give it some thought. Colonel Halliwell came down here to speak to you about that, so give it some thought."

I turned back to Lieutenant Colonel Halliwell. "Sir?"

"There's a job at Fort Sill, in what we call 'The Board', but which is more accurately named the Fire Support Test Directorate. It's not precisely a lab job, but it works with the labs, which is where your PhD comes in handy. They do live fire testing of the various rounds they develop. You'd be working with different batteries assigned to III Corps Artillery - 105s, 155s, some 8 inchers, even a recoilless rifle or two - testing new rounds and explosives. For that we need somebody with active experience. Since we don't have any captains with combat experience at the moment, we looked for top end men in the ready divisions, like the 82nd. Your name is at the top of that list."

"Huh! I'll be honest, that's sort of what I thought I'd be doing when I graduated. I figured I'd be in a lab somewhere. The ways of the Army are mighty and mysterious, I guess."

"I think it was your jump training that landed you here instead.", he commented. "The timing probably worked out to be here instead of there.

"I thought they did that sort of thing at Aberdeen.", I commented.

"They do, but not much. Most live fire testing goes on at either Sill or the Yuma Proving Grounds. It will involve some travel back and forth to both places, not much, but some. Figure once a month, maybe a bit more." I nodded in understanding. He continued, "You know, the Army has been watching you for years now."

"The Army has been watching me?", I asked, incredulous. Leaving aside the math doctorate, I was really just one more Airborne artillery lieutenant.

"Very much so. Remember that article in the Paraglide, back when you were still a green second john?" This confused me, but I nodded that I remembered it. "The PIO captain wanted to run a larger version in the Army Times. Did he ever tell you that?"

"Yes, sir, but it never ran. I figured it wasn't newsworthy or something. I haven't thought about that for years.", I told him.

Again, Colonel Buller snorted and rolled his eyes. Colonel Halliwell continued, "He submitted the article, but G-2 killed it. What you told him about, the use of computers in the Army of the future, and coming developments in weapons and training, that was so accurate that it was buried and classified. You were spot on with what the weapons and development labs are working on, and we want you to be part of it."

"Wow! When would this happen?"

"This fall. I think you'll be available to transfer in September or October."

Colonel Buller said, "When you leave here you'll be promoted to captain. This is a two year slot, after which you'll be transferred out. The last guy who did it went to CGS. The current guy is going to do a tour as an instructor at West Point when he finishes up. I think you'll do well at CGS when your tour is up."

The Command and General Staff College was the Army's grad school. It was a very prestigious one year course at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, and its graduates ended up in senior staff positions. Battalion or regimental commands went to officers who had been to CGS; it was a requirement. I could even earn another master's degree in something national security related. "Can captains go to CGS, sir?", I asked.

He smiled as he answered. "Senior captains, certainly. Junior captains like you would be, that would be unusual. Even more unusual would be making major by the time you got out of CGS that way."

I blinked and sat back and stared at the two men. A two year R&D tour and I make major at the age of 28! Even more, I would probably enjoy the hell out of both the R&D tour and CGS. If I was thinking of going career, this was a no-brainer! I could retire after twenty as a full bull colonel!

After a few seconds, I said, "Well, I certainly wasn't expecting this. Sir, I need to discuss this with my wife. If it was just up to me, I'd probably take you up on it, but it's like I told you before. Marilyn knew she was getting in for four years, but I never talked to her about going career."

"When can I have an answer?"

"This time tomorrow, sir."

He handed me a card with a Washington prefix on the phone number. "Let the colonel know, and then call me either way."

"Yes, sir." I stood up. It was obvious I was being dismissed. "Sir, one thing. No matter what Marilyn says, thank you for considering me. It's an honor. If I say yes, I won't let you down." I shook his hand and then came to attention and left.

I couldn't concentrate that day. My mind was simply whirling with the possibilities. I had to get out of the office, and I went home early. The apartment was empty when I got home. It was about 1630, so I had about an hour before Marilyn got home. She had a late class today, and there had been a practicum in the morning, some sort of student teaching thing.

I changed into some old khakis and a Hawaiian shirt, and then went into the kitchen. Marilyn had left some pork chops thawing on the counter in their wrapper, so they were thawed out. If I left it up to her, we'd be doing something exotic like Shake-N-Bake and canned peas. I could do better.

I started scrounging up the ingredients, and smiled to myself remembering the first time Marilyn tried to make pork chops. It was about a month after the wedding, and Marilyn decided to cook dinner for me, and have it ready to serve when I got home. I drove into the apartment complex and found a fire engine and an Emergency Services truck parked in front of the apartment, lights flashing, with people outside milling around, and black smoke billowing from our apartment! Marilyn was standing outside looking very confused. I jumped out and ran over to her, to wrap an arm around her. "What happened?!", I asked.

Just then, one of the firemen came running out of the apartment, carrying a blackened pan, and he ran up to one of the EMTs. He loudly asked if they wanted to pronounce the victim dead on the scene, or if they needed to transport it to the hospital for an expert opinion. While the firemen laughed and the neighbors started heading home, I just buried my face in my hands and listened as my wife cried and tried to explain what had happened. She had put the chops into the oven and then fallen asleep, and was only woken up by the smoke detector.

Eventually I just gave the firemen and the EMTs my business card and told them to make sure I was on their mailing list the next time they were looking for donations. Then I took Marilyn back inside and we aired out the place and ordered a pizza.

That was even better than the time Marilyn set fire to the chemistry lab over at MVCC with a Bunsen burner. Marilyn has an awesome and unnatural ability in either a lab or a kitchen. For her, they are both places involving great danger and toxic substances.

There was the time she used hazelnut creamer to make scrambled eggs with (hey, it's white, right?), the time she heated up the chili and served it over spaghetti (both are red, never mind those bean thingies), the pasta she decided didn't really need to be stirred all that much and emerged from the hot water as a single giant lump, and so on. The list was endless! The only thing she ever really knew how to cook was Michigan Sauce, a sort of meat sauce popular in upstate New York on hot dogs and hamburgers, and very, very tasty. She could also bake pastries and breads just fine. Otherwise, you took your life in your hands with her cooking.

So today I split the pork chops in two by cutting a long and deep pocket in the sides. Then I diced up a little onion and celery and mixed it into some bread crumbs and made a stuffing, which I packed into the pockets. I took some gravy mix and doctored it up with some broth and diced mushrooms, and set that on the stove. I grabbed some broccoli and pulled out the eggs to make a Hollandaise sauce. Finally, I grabbed a tin of rolls and put them on a baking tray.

Marilyn came home as I was starting to prepare the broccoli. "You're home early.", she commented, adding a hello kiss in the bargain.

"Worried I might find you getting into trouble?", I said with a smile.

"I'm not the one in this place likely to get in trouble! What's for dinner?"

"Stuffed pork chops with mushroom gravy, broccoli with Hollandaise sauce, and hot biscuits and butter.", I announced proudly. "And if you're especially nice to me, some chardonnay."

"What do you mean by nice?", she asked. I simply waggled my eyebrows, and Marilyn laughed. "No, no, no! That's only for the sake of procreation!"

"Are you trying to tell me your parents only did it thirteen times?"

"Exactly!"

"Well that explains it. Maybe if they had practiced a little more, they would have gotten some better results.", I remarked.

Marilyn gave me a raspberry and then said she was going to go change.

I turned on the oven to preheat and went back to cutting the head of broccoli apart. Timing is everything in cooking. Proper ingredients, too. Marilyn didn't understand either concept. She was of the 'just as good' school of culinary delights. Ever read in a cookbook those emergency substitutions? If you don't have butter you can use margarine, it's just as good. If you don't have cream you can use milk, it's just as good. Well, if you do that a half dozen times in a meal, it's just as good as cardboard!

Marilyn didn't immediately return to the kitchen, so I figured she was taking a quick shower. With luck, she would return before dinner was ready, but not early enough to want to help.

I put the pork chops in the oven and started up a double boiler to steam the veggies in. Everything was under control by the time my wife returned. She must have decided some practice was in order, since she had changed into a very short button front denim skirt and had a sleeveless blouse on, but only tied together and not buttoned. She was barefoot, and looked very young and small.

I smiled at her. "I like the outfit."

Marilyn grinned back. "I figured you might."

I nodded and smiled. "I like how you wear the shirt."

"Men! That's all you ever think about!"

I moved over to her and backed her up against the kitchen table. I slipped my hands inside her open shirt and fondled her tits. "I was a bottle baby. I have issues!"

Marilyn moaned happily for a moment, and then pushed me away. "Issues!" She shrugged her shirt closed, but smiled at me.

I went back to cooking. "A businessman was hiring a secretary, and he had three choices. The first woman was a fantastic typist; she could type over a hundred words a minute! The second was incredibly organized, and could make a filing system sit up and beg. The third one was brilliant on the telephone and could talk anybody into anything. So, who did he hire?", I asked.

"Who?"

"The one with the big tits!"

Marilyn shrieked at that and threw a wet dishtowel at me. "You're an awful person. I should never have married you!" Then she laughed and said, "I talked to your sister today. I bet she would agree with me."

"Probably.", I nodded. "What's the news from Lutherville?"

Marilyn told me as I opened the bottle of wine. Following the debacle with the wedding present, my mother had cut all ties with us. Only Suzie stayed in touch, and only when she was alone or off at college. She had even told us that in a bizarre touch, Mom had removed my pictures from the 'Wall of Heroes' and elsewhere in the house. It reminded me of the ancient Egyptian custom where a disgraced individual would have their name removed from everything public, although that's a whole lot harder when the name is chiseled in stone! On the other hand, with Hamilton's diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia, it might make sense. If reminders of me set him off, removing those reminders might keep him under control. I wasn't sure what to think of that.

We talked some more about Suzie's nursing school experiences. Eventually all the timers went off and I served up the pork chops and the rolls and the broccoli. It only took me another few minutes to whip up the Hollandaise sauce, and then we sat down at the kitchen table together to eat.

"I was called over to battalion today. I got a job offer.", I said.

Marilyn looked over at me in confusion. "A job offer? But you already have a job in the Army?"

I nodded. "I was offered a new assignment. That's what I wanted to talk to you about. Have you thought about this summer? My commitment was for four years, and that ends this summer."

"And this new assignment would go past that?", she asked.

I nodded again. "It would be a different post, a different job, everything. I'd leave the division." I told her about the assignment that had been offered to me at Fort Sill, and what would happen after that, at CGS.

"And you want to do this?", she asked.

"Yes, but not if you don't want me to. I told both of the colonels that you knew I was going into the Army for four years, but you hadn't signed on for a career, and I needed to talk to you about it."

"Don't make this all about me!", she said warningly.

"I'm not, but I do want your opinion. What do you think?"

"I don't know. Where's this place, Fort Sims..."

"Sill.", I corrected her.

"Sill. That's where you went to artillery school, right?"

"Right." Marilyn was chewing, but she nodded and I went on. "It's fairly quiet. Without the base the place would probably dry up and blow away. Lawton's bigger than Utica, but it seemed quieter."

"And after that? You said we'd move to Kansas?"

"Fort Leavenworth. It's right outside of Kansas City. If I do well at Sill, and I know I can hack that in my sleep, I go to the Command and General Staff school at Leavenworth. After that I make major."

"Fort Leavenworth? Isn't that where they have that prison?"

"Yeah, but I wouldn't be there. The Army has their grad school there. I've never been there, but it's supposed to be very nice."

"Where would we live?"

I smiled at her and put down my fork and knife. "I'll make you a promise. Whether we stay in or get out, after here, we'll buy a house. Would you like that?"

Marilyn's eyes lit up at the idea. She eagerly nodded. "Will we be able to afford a house?"

Marilyn if you only knew! I was worth a small fortune at that point. I had started 1979 with roughly $3.5 million in my brokerage accounts. Over the course of the spring I had invested it in silver, at an average price of around $7 per ounce. By the summer and the fall, the Hunt brothers in Texas tried to corner the market in silver. The price went to $50 per ounce before collapsing. The Hunts were bankrupted, and ended up going to convicted of market manipulation. I was a whole lot smarter and a lot less greedy. I rode it up and I rode it down, and now I was now worth about $34 million.

"We can afford it.", I assured her.

"Would you still be in the cycle?", she asked warily.

"No cycle. It will pretty much be nine to five, Monday to Friday. I'll probably have to do some traveling, but nothing major."

Marilyn let out a sigh of relief. The cycle could be very wearing on the wives. "Well, if you want to, I'm game. We can give it a few more years, right?"

I smiled at her and gave a sigh of relief, too. The idea of another promotion and advancement made me eager. I could leave the Army and live very well, but this was something I had earned all on my own, without any knowledge of the future. I had done this all on my own, and I found it very satisfying. I nodded, and said, "Thank you."

"I don't know why you like the Army so much, and I probably never will, but I want you to be happy.", she said, reaching across to me and taking my hand.

I leaned over and kissed her. "As long as you're happy, I'm happy."

I stood up from the table and set the dishes on the counter and in the sink. Marilyn helped, and then I grabbed the bottle of wine and my glass, and led her back to the living room. I sat down on the couch, and we started watching television, but not much was happening in the news, and not much seemed to be coming on later. To be fair about it, with Marilyn laying her head in my lap, and stretched out on the couch, she was practically laying naked there. Her tits were showing through the opening in her blouse, and her skirt had slid up around her waist. A nuclear alert on the television probably wasn't going to make me concentrate on something else!

Once the bottle of chardonnay was empty, I got up off the couch, and took our empty glasses out to the kitchen. I refilled them from a wine box and came back out. "Let's watch television in here?", I told Marilyn, nodding my head towards the bedroom.

She wagged her finger at me. "I know what kind of television you want to watch!"

I just gave her my most pious and innocent look. I went into the bedroom and set our glasses on the nightstand, and then turned on the small television we had on the dresser at the end of the bed. Then I went back to the dresser and pulled the drawer open, and pulled out a videotape.

The video cassette recorder was one of the biggest innovations in the pornography business since the original invention of sex. It dragged sex movies out of the sleazy downtown theaters it had been relegated to and brought them into people's bedrooms. Suddenly what had been something that only men watched, alone and in the dark, became something to be shared with wives and girlfriends. I can remember back at Kegs, during the mid-Seventies, when VCRs were still very expensive, whenever the frat would have a smoker and show dirty movies, they would be actual movies. We had a Super 8 projector, and would buy movies from Cinema Arts (known to us as Skinema Arts) down in Troy.

The effect on the videotape business was astounding! By many accounts, by the late Seventies and early Eighties, porn videos, usually sold or rented from back rooms of Mom-and-Pop video stores, accounted for a huge percentage of the sales of the entire video industry, and the majority of the profits!

The VCR also had a democratizing effect on porn. Now, in combination with the new technology of video cameras, you could even make your own porn! Suddenly, all across America, adventurous couples were filming themselves getting nasty. No matter how prudish the local environment, or how stringent the local laws, the genie could not be put back in the bottle. As the saying went, 'It's a billion dollar a year business, but it's not 10 guys spending $100 million each!'

Marilyn came in and saw me, and gave me a smile, and then went into the bathroom. I hit the rewind button and propped some pillows up at the head of the bed, and grabbed the remote control. I had sprung for the 'fancy' VCR! I settled back on the bed as the tape finished rewinding and then hit the play button. Marilyn came out of the bathroom as the credits began rolling. She crawled up on the bed next to me and lay back against the propped up pillows, and I handed her a wine glass. She sipped from it and then snuggled up against me.

Deep Throat was an amazing movie for the time. Extremely explicit, it showed oral sex, vaginal sex, and even a scene or two with anal sex, virtually unheard of at the time. As the movie started, I set my wine glass on my nightstand and put an arm around my wife's shoulders. She drank some wine and then set it down, and cuddled up against me.

As the movie progressed, I quickly had a hand inside her open shirt, toying with her tits, as Marilyn squirmed around and got into position to return the favor. She unbuttoned my shirt and pulled it open, but then continued south, to undo my pants and lower my zipper. I had been hoping for some after dinner action, and had left my briefs in the hamper. She murmured happily and began gently stroking my cock. By the time the orgy scene had arrived, Marilyn had pulled my shirt and pants off, and I had stripped her naked, and she was laying with her head on my stomach, watching the movie as she softly sucked my cockhead.

I wanted more, tonight, lots more! I laid my hands on her head and bare back, keeping her in place, and began to hump my hips upwards, fucking my cock into her mouth. "Just like that.", I whispered to her. "Suck me off and make me come!" Marilyn didn't respond, but her actions were response enough. She began jacking my shaft and suctioning my cock head. I groaned happily and kept her head in my lap, and five minutes later, I was filling her mouth with my jism.

We took a small breather at that point, sitting upright and drinking some more wine, but then we were back laying on the bed together and touching each other. We didn't actually start fucking again until towards the end, during the threesome scene with Linda Lovelace, Harry Reems, and Carol Connors. At that point I shifted over on the bed, and Marilyn got on top in a reverse cowgirl position, so we could keep watching as we fucked.

Afterwards, Marilyn snuggled next to me naked on the bed, while I hit the remote and rewound the film. "Was that the kind of practice you were talking about earlier?"

"Absolutely! In fact, if we got a video camera, we could tape ourselves and improve our performance.", I teased.

Marilyn stiffened at the thought and looked at me suspiciously. "No way! No how! Never!"

"But honey, all the football teams tape their games to learn from. Think of it as taping our game!", I continued.

She twisted around to look at me, and saw the mocking expression on my face. That got me a punch in the ribs. "You can tape your own game! Leave me out of it!" I just laughed at the idea.

I got Marilyn another glass of wine, as she went into the bathroom and cleaned up. She came out wearing a tiny little silk robe I had bought her, and I pulled on my pants and we went out to the living room. It was still relatively early. I continued to top off her glass while I recovered my strength. After a bit, Marilyn saw through my ploy.

She drained her wine glass. "Are you trying to get me drunk?", she asked, smiling at me.

I poured from my glass into hers. "Honey, why would I do a thing like that?" I went into the kitchen and refilled my glass. Marilyn followed and I filled hers as well.

"You probably want me to do something naughty. Or you want to do something naughty." Her eyes were twinkling as she said this, and she was grinning.

"Marilyn! How can you say that? What sort of naughty things could you imagine me doing?"

"You'll probably want to have sex again! Probably more than once!"

I gave her an innocent shrug. "Is that such a bad thing?"

She came closer and rubbed herself against me. "Over and over! You'll probably want to fuck me all night long!" Marilyn must have really gotten drunk! She never talked like that normally, but liquor had been known to bring her horniness to the surface. "You'll probably want me to do things to you!"

"Like what?", I probed.

"Sex things! Things good girls don't do!"

I refilled her glass some more. She was still drinking from it as we stood in the kitchen. "Maybe you're not a good girl. Maybe you're actually a bad girl. Maybe you want to do things that bad girls do! What do bad girls do?"

"They suck cocks!" Marilyn started groping me through my pants.

Well, I certainly didn't have anything against that idea, but I started getting an even more wicked idea. "Well, then, come with me. I want to learn more about this." I took my wife's hand and led her out of the kitchen and back into the bedroom.

Once in the bedroom, I positioned her facing the mirror over the dresser, and stood behind her. Reaching around her from behind, I undid the tie holding the belt around her robe, and pulled it loose. In fact, I pulled it completely off her robe, slipping it from the loops on the robe. Then I peeled the robe from her shoulders and let it slip to the floor. "If you're going to be a bad girl, I'm going to have to treat you as a bad girl.", I whispered into her ear. As I looked at her reflection, her nipples were clearly erect, and she gave a small whimper and shuddered in my arms. I pulled her arms behind her and then gently used the silk tie to her robe to bind her hands loosely behind her. It wasn't tight, but it was secure, and Marilyn wasn't going to be able to resist me.

"What? What are you going to do?", she whispered.

"Treat you like a bad girl!", I answered. I pulled her over and pushed her backwards onto the bed.

Marilyn was almost steaming with desire. Her pussy smelled like her hormones were on overload. She squirmed around on the bed and splayed her legs wide apart. "Fuck me! Please, fuck me!", she pleaded.

"No."

Marilyn gave a quiet shriek of frustration and continued to beg. On the other hand, I had a more elaborate plan in mind. I opened the drawer to the nightstand and pulled out all the various toys I had bought her over the years. There was a regular 6" hard plastic vibrator, a much larger 9" soft model, and a small and thin vibrator that we occasionally used on her rear. I also pulled out the tube of KY I had picked up. Marilyn stared at everything wide eyed.

I turned on the mid-sized vibrator and lightly touched her nipples, first one and then the other. She gasped and arched her back, as the first orgasm swept through her. Then I pulled it away, and she begged me not to stop. I squirted a little KY on the tip and began rubbing it over her pussy, and that just drove her wild. Marilyn was thrashing around on the bed, orgasming like crazy, and begging me to stop and fuck her. "Not yet." I told her.

She was quite distraught when I pulled the 6" vibrator from her cunt but then she noticed me with the larger model. I squirted some more KY on that and slid that inside before turning it on. Marilyn began crying out at that, and humping her pussy up at me, trying to drive it further inside. Then I turned it off. "You're being mean!", she protested. I left it in place and stripped my own clothing off. I knelt at her head and fed her my cock, which she gobbled happily. Then, while she was sucking me, I leaned over and flipped the switch back on.

Marilyn went into overdrive again, and this time was moaning and trying to swallow me whole. I continued to torment her by turning the vibrator on and off. I wasn't planning on coming in her mouth, though. After a few minutes of warm up, I pulled back and then rolled Marilyn onto her stomach. "Please, fuck me!", she begged.

I slipped the big vibrator back into place, and turned it on. Marilyn moaned, and then moaned even more when I dribbled a little KY in the crack of her ass, and slipped the thin little vibrator there. I let her get used to it, and then I slipped it inside. Marilyn began humping the bed, and I knelt there using both probes on her. After a few minutes, I slid the thin vibrator from her, and slowly and gently replaced it with the medium sized model.

This was the first time we had tried this, and Marilyn's eyes opened wide as she felt her ass being expanded. Then they closed again with a blissful look, as I used it to ream her out. Now it was my turn. I straddled her thighs and squirted some KY on my hard cock and lubed it up, getting it greasy and slick. Then I turned off the vibrator in her ass, pulled it out, and very, very slowly pushed my cockhead inside her. Marilyn made a proforma protest, but didn't have a screaming fit. Her fingers seemed to coax me even deeper, tied as her hands were behind her and between us.

"This is what happens to naughty girls who drink too much." I whispered, leaning over and laying on her back. Below us the giant 9" vibrator continued its work inside her, and I could feel the vibrations inside her pussy. "You're a slut.", I whispered, "an ass-slut. You like this, don't you?" I began to slowly pump my cock into her, in and out of her no longer virgin tail. "Tell me!", I demanded.

"Yes, yes, I like it.", she admitted.

"Tell me to fuck your ass!", I ordered her.

Marilyn was going crazy underneath me. This was the hottest sex we had had in years! "Fuck my ass! Fuck my ass!", she pleaded.

I began to hammer her ass even harder. It felt very tight and very hot. She hadn't had an enema earlier, and I didn't want to look down between us and see what was happening, but I just kept pounding my cock into her ass, telling her how much I liked it, while she kept begging me to continue.

"I'm going to keep fucking your ass in the future. From now on, I'm going to fuck your little asshole. I like it!" Marilyn whimpered and thrashed, coming non-stop. "Take it, ass-slut, take it!" I slammed into her and unloaded, filling her rear with a heavy load. I collapsed on her back, only my hips moving as I pumped into her.

Once I was done, I began to kiss her shoulders. It was time to get back to normal. I knelt and undid the ties on her wrists, and then lay back down on her back. I continued to kiss her as she pulled her arms around and massaged her wrists. "That was so amazing. I love you so much!" Over and over I told her how much I loved her and wanted to be with her. Then I pulled her to her feet, and before she could say anything, I led her into the bathroom.

Marilyn's eyes widened as she saw the remnants of our anal sex in my crotch. I simply hustled her into the bathtub and joined her, where we took a very quick and thorough shower together. Only afterwards did we talk about what had happened. It was obvious she was embarrassed; she couldn't even look me in the eye! I laughed and we got back in bed, but I left the light on. She wanted to roll away from me, but I rolled her back towards me.

"Well, that was fun.", I commented.

Marilyn turned about three shades of red. "I can't believe we did that!"

I laughed loudly. "There are two reasons you are so embarrassed. Want to hear them?"

"Do I have a choice?", Marilyn smiled at that, but I could see she was still embarrassed.

"First, because we just did something bad, something naughty, something taboo. Want to know the second reason?"

"What?"

I leaned over and whispered in her ear, "Because you secretly enjoyed it. You came hard, didn't you?"

"Ooohh!" Marilyn shrieked at me, and then she punched me in the side.

I just laughed some more. "Now can we talk?" I didn't wait for an answer. "How are you feeling, you know, back there?"

Marilyn blushed again, but she answered, "It's a little sore, but not as bad as I thought it would be. It's pretty damn messy, though!"

"That just means..."

"I know, I know! It means we're doing it right. Still, it's actually pretty gross, afterwards I mean."

I nodded. "That's true enough. Still, be honest, you had a big one, didn't you?"

Marilyn looked up at me and I caught a little grin. "You really are bad!"

I laughed at that. Back on my first trip in life, I had talked Marilyn into trying an assfuck at about the same point in our marriage, but I hadn't known what the hell I was doing, and had rushed it and hurt her. It was years before I ever got another chance, and she was always nervous about it. As a general rule, she needed to be a little drunk, very relaxed, and very horny, but if I took my time, used a lot of lube, and warmed her up with a toy or two, she lit off like a rocket! In fact, on some of our parents-only vacations, the ones where she only took skirts or dresses, and no panties or bras, it was not unknown for her to have a few drinks and then when we got back in the room, to let me know we could do 'whatever I wanted to.' That was her little code for me to bend her over and pull her skirt up around her waist and pound her ass.

"Maybe I am, but that just means you're bad, too. Listen, this isn't an every night sort of thing..."

"You have that right!", she interjected.

" ... but it wasn't a one time thing either. Was it?", I finished.

Marilyn shyly answered, "No."

I chuckled and kissed Marilyn, and then flipped off the lamp. "Good night. I love you."

"I love you, too."

The next morning I called Lieutenant Colonel Buller and told him I was interested in the position at Sill. He told me it would be a good fit for me, and then ordered me to call Halliwell. That would have been my next call anyway. Lieutenant Colonel Halliwell also told me I was making a smart move, and then told me to plan on visiting Sill in the near future to talk to the people out there already.

Chapter 55: Making Babies

A couple of times a year I would take my accumulated leave and take Marilyn away for a no-undie vacation. She began asking me about children again, and I just kept practicing. Finally, around Christmas in 1980, I gave in to her and said yes to a baby. She had argued that in nine months I'd at least be at Sill and a captain, so we should start now and not then. Mind you, she was giving me a blowjob at the time, so my brain wasn't completely engaged, but I went along with her argument. She promised that we would start in a few days, since she was currently out of commission. I just nodded and put her back to work between my legs. And then I put it out of my mind.

About a week later, I came home to the apartment and found the shades were all drawn, so the room was dark, but about a dozen candles were lit, giving a soft glow to the room. Marilyn liked scented candles, but I could live without them. The smell is too powerful for me. I decided to hold my complaints. I wasn't entirely sure what Marilyn had in mind, but I was really starting to think I was going to enjoy it. Occasionally, especially during the support cycle, when I got home at a normal time, she would greet me at the door in a nightie and heels. Maybe this evening was going to be ... interesting. I sat down and glanced around the room.

I heard the click of high heels coming down the hall from the bedroom and suppressed my urge to jump up and look around. Marilyn had obviously been planning something. She said, "Welcome home, Lieutenant Buckman.", and then came around the corner into my view. She was carrying a glass of champagne in one hand and a bottle in the other. What really caught my eye, though, was what else she had on. Her outfit wasn't a nightie, but something even more eye-catching. She had on my mess dress uniform!

Well, sort of. She had on my jacket, which is short, only coming down to her waist, and open, being held closed by a chain, and she had on my officer's cap. That was about it for the uniform. Otherwise she was wearing a pair of completely transparent black panties with ties on the sides, a garter belt with black fishnet stockings, and black high heels. She had also brushed her hair out, put on a lot of the jewelry I had bought her, and spritzed on some perfume. My eyes were bulging out, along with my pants, and I felt like stammering. "Holy shit!", I whispered, as much to myself as to her.

"Lieutenant, your wine." Marilyn handed me my glass, and set the bottle on the table beside me.

I glanced at it briefly. About half the bottle was missing, which meant that my wife had already been sampling it. I smiled at her. "Been into the champagne already, have you?"

She pouted and knelt down in front of me. "You don't mind, do you? Should I make it up to you?" Marilyn reached out and began fiddling with my belt.

"Uh, yeah, yeah, that's a good idea." I was staring down at her. I must have seen her naked a thousand times before, but seeing her like this was like seeing her anew all over again.

"Drink up, darling.", she chided me, and as I sipped my champagne, she got my belt open and then opened the buttons on my fly slowly, taking her time as she slowly unbuttoned them - very slowly! She'd undo one button, and then rub me through my pants, and then do another, dragging it out. The only reason my cock didn't spring out and give her a concussion was that it was trapped by my briefs.

Marilyn was really dragging the torment out! She stopped with my pants, and undid my shoes and pulled them and my socks off. Then she went back to rubbing my cock through my briefs, and even nibbling through the fabric along my shaft! After that she stood up and came around behind me, to remove my jacket and tie. Then she leaned over from the side and rubbed my cock some more. This caused the uniform jacket to gape open, showing me her tits and erect nipples, but when I moved to touch her, she chided me and said it was all about me, and I should just sit there and enjoy. I argued that playing with her tits would be very enjoyable, but she just smiled and said to behave myself. After that she unbuttoned my shirt and pulled that off, leaving me in only my briefs.

Finally, as if the agony she had been putting me through up until now wasn't enough, Marilyn knelt back down at my feet and tugged my pants and tighty-whiteys off. I felt like my cock was going to explode and paint the ceiling at the same time. Marilyn simply smiled and lightly began to trace her fingers along the shaft, and then lowered her face. Her tongue extended and she began to delicately lick me, like a glass sculpture that might shatter at the slightest touch. She even went so far as to very carefully lick beneath it, around my balls, which I found both scary and exciting at the same time. Then it was back up top, to lick my cockshaft some more.

"Carling, am I doing this right?"

Huh? What? "Huh?"

"Am I doing this right?", she asked plaintively. "I know you like it when I suck your cock, and I want to make sure you're enjoying this. I'd never forgive myself if I wasn't sucking it as well as I could." She flicked her tongue across my cockhead and I groaned.

"Uh, yeah, yeah, great, yeah, you're doing just fine!", I babbled.

"Oh, good, I love to suck your cock and make you happy. I do make you happy, don't I?"

"Yeah, sure, I'm the happiest guy on the planet!", I answered. Whatever, for the love of God, just keep sucking my cock!

"It makes me so horny to see you like this. My pussy gets so hot and wet. Feel how wet my pussy is!" Marilyn stood up and came around the side of my La-Z-Boy and took my hand and directed it between her legs, to rub her through her panties. Yep, she was pretty horny, all right! Drenched in fact, and her musky smell was mixing with her perfume in a way that a man shouldn't be forced to endure for too long lest he die of terminal horniness!

Marilyn then left my hand where it was, and she reached down to stroke my cock some more. "Carling, were you serious about starting a family?"

My mind went blank. "Huh? What?"

Marilyn licked my ear as she stroked my cock and whispered to me. "Last week, when you said we could start a family, remember. When we moved, you said."

"Uh, yeah. I guess so."

"Yes, you said we could have a baby now, remember?"

"I did?"

"Uh, huh! Carling, darling, were you lying to me then?", she asked. She still kept tugging on my dick, though. "Carling, you're not a liar, are you?"

"Uhhhhh..."

"Oh, please honey, I want to feel your cock in my pussy, spurting and making a baby. Please Carling, fuck my little pussy!"

"Yeah, yeah, whatever..." I wasn't thinking anymore! I grabbed the ties on the sides of her panties and tore them loose, and then pulled my wife around so that she was in front of me. She straddled my thighs and lowered herself onto me, and I popped the mess chain on the jacket and began sucking on her tits. Marilyn screamed in orgasm and I joined her about thirty seconds later, spewing up and into her as she rocked and rode on me.

Marilyn sagged down against me and began smothering me with kisses, It took me a few minutes to realize what I had just agreed to. "Wait a minute! What?!"

Marilyn grinned from ear to ear as she sat back upright in my lap. "Thank you, honey. I was pretty sure I could convince you."

"A baby? A BABY! Are you for real?" I shook my head in amazement. What had I gotten myself into now?

"You did promise.", she said accusingly, wagging a finger at me. "You said last week we could start a family."

"But I thought we'd talk about it first."

Marilyn tossed my cap on the floor, and then took off my jacket, so that she was now sitting on my lap naked. "We did, last week!" She cupped her tits and started fondling her nipples.

"That wasn't talking! That doesn't count! You were trying to trick me!"

Marilyn took my hands and lifted them to her breasts, where I began playing with them by automatic reflex. She sighed happily and slipped a hand down to our crotches, while the other went around my neck. She moved even closer, pressing against me and moaned into my ear. "You promised, Carl."

"Holy Christ!"

We hadn't really slipped apart, and my cock was still inside her, and now getting stiff again. Marilyn felt this and began bouncing on me, just enough to start the cycle again. In a few more minutes she was bouncing on me as I pawed her tits and she rubbed her clit, and then I gave her another dose.

At that point, my wife climbed off of me and took my hand and led me into the bedroom. I lay down on the bed, and she returned with the little plastic box of pills. She sat down on the bed next to me and laid them on my chest. She smiled at me but there was a look of worry in her eyes. "Is this all right, Carl?"

I smiled at her. "It's a hell of a time to ask, isn't it? Did we just ... you, know!"

"No, not yet. I mean, it's still early in the cycle. I could start taking them again, but I don't want to, honey, I want a baby." Marilyn looked like she was going to cry.

I just rolled my eyes. "That's a very unfair technique, you know that, right?"

"Well?"

I shrugged. "Did I really say that? About starting a family last week?"

"Yes."

"Was I dressed like this? And were you dressed like that? Any contracts made when both parties are naked are null and void!"

Marilyn grabbed my cock and began playing with me again. "Are you sure about that?"

"You fight dirty!"

"That just means we're doing it right. Isn't that what you taught me?" She kept stroking me back to life.

"How long before, well, you know..."

"We'll just have to keep trying until it happens."

"Okay, get on your back and get in position." I tossed the pills onto the nightstand. "Let's give it the first official shot!"

Marilyn squealed happily and plopped back onto the bed and spread her legs. This round took a long time, since I had already come twice, but Marilyn was very enthusiastic!

The only thing I hadn't counted on was that Marilyn really wanted a baby, so she decided that until she caught, every drop of my seed was going to be used to try and fertilize an egg. No blow jobs until after she was pregnant. She told me this later that night, after dinner, while she was still wandering around the apartment half naked. I told her that once the test strip turned blue, or did whatever it was supposed to do, she needed to have some knee pads ready. Then I slapped her on the ass and told her to get that warmed up, too.

In March we got some interesting news. I should have expected it from the first time, but Marilyn caught during her first month without being on birth control. This had happened the first time also. Whether it's her or me, together we're incredibly fertile! She announced the fact by giving me a blowjob to completion, which she had said wouldn't happen until she was knocked up. I wasn't complaining, since this was a great way to find out! She was due sometime in October.

I told Marilyn that any house we bought would need a large yard, since a boy needed a place to run around in. She wanted to know why I thought it was going to be a boy. She was planning on a girl!

I snorted and laughed at this. "Three pregnant women go to the doctor's office. The first one says she knows she's going to have a boy, since her husband liked to be on top. The second girl nods and says she knows she's going to have a girl, since she liked to be on top. Then the third girl started crying! When they asked her why, she said, "Because I'm going to have a puppy!'"

Marilyn sputtered out her wine and shook a finger at me. "You are an awful person!"

"Woof! Woof, woof, woof!"

We didn't know what we were going to have. While ultrasound exams were in use by then, they weren't common practice, not like twenty or thirty years later. With Alison and Parker, we learned what the kids were going to be by a calculation of the fetal heart rate; above 140 is a girl and below is a boy. Years later we discovered that this test was wholly inaccurate and a complete myth.

In early March I was sent to Sill to talk to the people there about my future job. The brigade was then in the support cycle, so I could spare the time. I took a three day TDY so it didn't count against my leave, and left 2nd Lieutenant Max Fletcher in charge of the battery for a few days. He was still pretty green, but how else was he going to learn? The colonel would keep him in line, and if he fucked up, it was better to learn now rather than later, when it might be more important. Like if the shells weren't just outgoing, but were incoming!

We went through another round of the cycle, and in July Marilyn flew out with me to Lawton to look around. We met with a real estate agent and looked over houses. When she discussed financing options, I simply replied that I already had that under control. Lieutenants and captains don't have the cash to buy houses outright, and I didn't need any gossip. I'd worry about it when we moved, and even then I was only going to say something to my wife. We found a house, a nice rancher in a newer subdivision, a three bedroom on a corner lot, and made a small deposit on it, to hold it until it was closer to the time we would move.

It as an interesting trip, though. By then Marilyn was around six months along, and definitely showing. Still, she was a lusty wife, and didn't argue all that much about leaving her underwear at home during the trip. As much as she might protest that she wasn't 'that type of girl', empirical evidence indicated that she was exactly that type of girl! I certainly didn't complain. If anything, pregnancy made her even hornier.

Marilyn was excited and happy about being pregnant. Me? I was very, very nervous. I had been a father before, and had at least been no worse than average at the job. Nobody ended up in jail at least, although Maggie seemed to push the envelope. No, I was nervous because of what I knew about Marilyn's family.

Not to pretty it up, but when I married Marilyn, I went swimming in the shallow end of the gene pool! The Lefleur family suffers from much higher than average rates of cancer, heart disease, diabetes, kidney disease, and obesity. There wasn't a one of them that didn't have something dreadful happening or about to happen. On the other hand, none of this happened to the Buckmans. We were amazingly healthy, right up to when we got to the mid-70s, at which point we all got Alzheimer's and started drooling.

The worst part was that this genetic disaster passed on down to the next generation. Big Bob and Harriet had 40 grandchildren, which seems a lot but only works out to a touch over three per child. Out of those 40 grandchildren, two had Williams Syndrome, one was autistic, and one died three days after birth from a massive heart defect. Four children out of forty with serious genetic disorders, a 10% rate! That's horrendous, but it was even worse! Of the 40 grandchildren, six were adopted, and those six were all perfectly healthy. It wasn't a 10% rate of genetic disorder, it was almost 12%! We had an almost one in eight chance that our unborn child would be massively disabled. The more Marilyn's belly grew, the more worried I grew.

Back when I was doing all this the first time, we just didn't know. Alison wasn't diagnosed until she was over 18. The autistic grandchild and the dead baby didn't happen until well into the end of the grandchildren boom. Every time it happened, it was a horrible event, but nobody drew any conclusions, certainly nobody from inside the Lefleur family.

Personally, I figured it was from all the inbreeding those shitkickers and hillbillies were doing up north of Plattsburgh. Remember Deliverance? At least two sets of Marilyn's first cousins married each other! Welcome to the Lefleur family! Genetically, at least, my mother was right; I could have done better!

Chapter 56: International Relations

We dropped on Honduras at 0700 on Monday 7 September, 1981. At the time, it seemed as if a combat drop would be preferable to hanging around either the battalion or Marilyn.

I had made a mistake when I went into ROTC lo those many years ago. No, the Army wasn't going into combat for quite a while. That didn't mean I might not get deployed somewhere. The Sandinistas had taken over in Nicaragua, and were making themselves into a real pain in the rear for everybody in the region, and especially for Uncle Sam. It was decided that a show of strength would be a good idea. Operation Southern Shield '81 was put into place, a joint training mission with the Honduran Army, and the 82nd Airborne was tasked to participate. Specifically, a battalion task force would be sent down to Honduras to show the flag and participate in training missions and war games.

This isn't all that unusual an event. The 82nd is pretty much ready to go at any time, and paratroopers are a pretty flexible bunch. It's almost part of the code that things will get mixed up and moved around, and you learn to live with it. In this case, a battalion of paratroopers would be sent, 1st of the 505th, along with their battery from the 319th Airborne Artillery, and would form a battalion task force. In addition, we would have a platoon of combat engineers (Charlie Company, 307th Engineers), a platoon of Stingers (Charlie Battery, 3rd of the 4th Air Defense Artillery), and even some MPs from the 82nd MP Company. The local outfit in Panama, the 193rd Infantry Brigade, was supplying a mobile field hospital, a squadron of Cobra attack choppers, and a squadron of Hueys. The brigade commander even deployed with us, since this was a big deal operation.

Guess which battery from the 319th was spending three months in Latin America! Guess whose wife wasn't happy! Marilyn was seven-plus months pregnant and ten-plus months bitchy. I was not going to Honduras! I was going to be at the hospital with her while she delivered my child! She was getting a divorce! She hated me, the battery, the battalion, the regiment, the brigade, the division, the army, and me all over again! (I guess she hated me twice as much.)

I wasn't too worried about the divorce. She would never be able to get a lawyer in time and be able to serve me divorce papers on the base (Federal property) and I was pretty sure there was a World War II era 'Dear John' law that said she couldn't divorce me until I got home, by which time I hoped she'd be over the mad.

Personally, I was there for all three of my children's births on the first go-around, and the miracle of childbirth ain't all it's cracked up to be. I think my Dad had the better idea - smoke a pack of cigarettes in the waiting room while reading Field and Stream. We were informed of the deployment on Monday, August 31, and I spent most of the intervening week at the battery getting ready. It was quieter!

Life for me in the battalion had taken a decidedly worse turn that summer. Lieutenant Colonel Buller was now Colonel Buller and had been transferred to NATO in Brussels. His replacement, Lieutenant Colonel Morris, did not turn out to be a fan of mine. Far from it. I suspected that if my chute didn't open over Honduras, he would not be sorry.

No, the problem was a personal one, and not one easily fixed. Lieutenant Colonel Morris brought with him a nickname, 'Mighty Mouse', and for good reason; he was only 5'7" tall. His three battery commanders were Captain Mikowski, 5'8", Captain Borisowsky, 5'10", and me, 5'11". He had issues with all of us, and in direct proportion to our height! Mighty Mouse was going to make us better, and fix our problems, whatever they might be, and it seemed that the taller we were, the more problems we had. Mikowski could slump a little and get away with it, and he escaped the easiest, but Borisowsky and I were up shit creek! I had three months to go before I transferred to Sill, and I was happy to be in a foreign country! Borisowsky was facing the brunt of it on his lonesome and would probably be a corporal by the next time I saw him. I was just pleased that Buller had given me a real 'walks on water' OER before he left.

Even worse, the division decided that it would be an insult to our Honduran allies for the artillery battery in the exercise to be commanded by a mere first lieutenant. No, only a captain would do, so my promotion was moved forward, over Lieutenant Colonel Morris' vociferous objections. It was a damn good thing that immediately after this deployment was over, I would be moving to Fort Sill.

So Sunday we loaded the Hercs and Monday morning we dropped on La Paz Drop Zone in Honduras. If it wasn't for the fact that my battalion commander was holding an axe for me, and Marilyn was sharpening it, it would have probably been somewhat enjoyable. We based out of a military airfield near Tegucigalpa. The CIA and some Special Forces types were nearby, doing things they probably shouldn't be doing in nearby Nicaragua, but we had nothing to do with them. We did spend a lot of time training with and teaching the Honduran Army and working with their parachute battalion, but that wasn't all. The field hospital was set up and treated civilians as well, earning some good will. The Hueys would be left behind, since the Army was transitioning to Blackhawks. The engineers were deployed to various places around the area to help build roads and bridges.

This whole shebang was under the command of a brigadier general named Hawkins from Fort Benning who saw Southern Shield '81 as his ticket to the E-ring at the Pentagon. He was constantly climbing up the asses of the majors and colonels involved and making them do it harder and faster and tougher, etc. etc. etc. As a captain, though, I was so far down the food chain that I wasn't worthy of notice. That suited me just fine.

There wasn't a whole lot to do otherwise. My Spanish is limited to 'Mas cerveza, por favor!' and 'Donde esta el baño?' Max, now a first lieutenant and my exec, did a lot better, since his Spanish was quite fluent. Besides, it wasn't like I was going out chasing skirts like some of my troops. Boys will be boys, so I laid in a generous supply of rubbers to keep them safe. Besides, it was the late summer in the tropics and you could melt even at night! You could find some local beer, but it generally tasted like weasel piss, so when possible I would stock up on Heineken, which was usually available and much more expensive. I even made a few jumps with the Hondos (from the C-130s) and picked up a set of Honduran jump wings. A lot of troopers on foreign training assignments do this. I heard of one master sergeant with seven different sets of jump wings from around the world!

I wrote Marilyn a couple of times a week, and she returned the favor. She was still pretty mad at me, and I was starting to wonder about making the Army a career. At some point later in the Eighties the military was going to be seeing a lot more action, and one way or another, I was probably going to catch a piece of it. She was no longer threatening me with divorce, but it did seem likely this would be our last child, and I wouldn't be getting any more chances to start another!

On October 12th Lieutenant Colonel Wilcox tracked me down in the commo bunker. He was the battalion commander of the 1st of the 505th. He had a shit-eating grin as he handed me a radiogram that came in through another route. Charles Robert Buckman weighed 7 lb. 14 oz. and was born at 0305 that morning. Mother and son were doing just fine. The final line read, 'Divorce cancelled. Justifiable homicide being planned.' It took me another 48 hours with the MARS guys, the Military Auxiliary Radio System civilian auxiliaries, to get a call into her. I think I was grinning for two days!

Two weeks later I got a heavy package mailed to me. Marilyn had sent down a bunch of photos and a long letter. It turned out that her mother flew down to spend a week with her, and the following week Suzie did another 'seashore' trip and visited. It was the first I could see of my new son, and it was very disconcerting! All along I had been planning on Parker being born all over again. He was a good boy, a son any father could be proud of, and I certainly was. This child wasn't Parker! He didn't look at all like him. I had just figured on calling him Charlie and thinking of him as Parker, but that just wasn't the case. It was actually very depressing to realize that Parker was gone, a piece of my past totally lost. Alison had died, and now Parker was gone, too. So was Maggie. I was rejoicing over my new son and distraught over the loss of my other children. Very disconcerting! Were they alive somewhere or somewhen in a different timeline or alternate universe? I just didn't know.

A month later we had our last exercise. Hawkins decided that we would do a combat drop in conjunction with the Hondurans and utilize their assets as well. Okay, I suppose that made sense. Fortunately, we weren't going to drop the battery, but would land them on an improvised runway after the company of the 505th and the Hondurans secured a landing zone. Pretty routine stuff. The next day we would clean our gear and pack our bags and get ready to get the hell out of Dodge.

At least that was the way it started out.

The first inkling I had that things weren't working out was when I got called into Lieutenant Colonel Wilcox' office Monday morning, November 9. The brigade commander had flown to Washington the day before, and Wilcox had taken command. He was working out of a Quonset hut, and one of the parachute company captains was already in with him when I got there. It's not as spit-and-polish in the field as it is back home, some I simply knocked on the colonel's open door and said, "You called for me, sir?"

"Yeah, come on in, Doc." He pointed at a chair next to the one occupied by Captain Bob Donovan, C Company, 1st of the 505th.

I sat down and said, "What's up? You in on this, too, Bob?"

Donovan nodded, but it was Colonel Wilcox who answered. "You know Lieutenant Bulrush?"

It took me a second to think of who Bulrush was but it came to me. "FIST Chief with the 505th?" He was artillery, but attached to the infantry as the team leader of the attached 10 man Fire Support Team (FIST). "Yeah, I suppose. I've met him in passing but that's about it. Why?"

Donovan answered, "He's my FIST, and was supposed to drop with us in the exercise, but he just went off to the hospital with a hot appendix."

I nodded at that. "Well, he won't be dropping any time soon."

The colonel nodded and then asked, "I need another forward observer for the exercise. You're the arty boss. Who's available?"

"What about the guys with the other two companies"? I was a little curious, since the FIST Staff Sergeant was normally second in command and would take over.

The colonel shrugged. "Already committed. Besides, I want an officer to go along, since we are doing this with the Hondos."

Well, that didn't leave me with a lot of choices. Every infantry company has an artillery observer element either embedded or designated, and they're regularly trained artillery officers. The only other ones deployed were me and my lieutenants. I shrugged. "That leaves me and my boys."

"I thought so.", agreed the colonel. "Make a choice."

I grinned over at Donovan. "What the hell, why not! I'll do it. Let's see how Max handles the battery while I'm away." I'd act as the forward observer. It was a job for a second john, not a battery commander, but Max needed to be able to handle the battery himself. If it was real combat, I'd sacrifice a second lieutenant and keep the battery myself. "This will be my last jump before I leave the division. Time for a break!"

"HOO-AH!", replied Lieutenant Colonel Wilcox, and Bob and I both laughed. He looked over at Captain Donovan and asked, "Anything else?"

"Nope."

"Then get the hell out of here."

Bob and I stood up and left. I followed him over to where C Company was billeted and went into his office/bunk, where we discussed the planned deployment. It was for Tuesday morning, the next day, and we were jumping from Honduran airplanes, while the Hondurans would jump from the C-130s we had deployed with. "The Hondos have Hercs?", I asked Bob. I hadn't seen any C-130 Hercules around without US Air Force markings, but maybe they had some at another base.

"I guess. I haven't seen any, but they must. Maybe they've got some C-123 Providers. They're similar to the 130s but about two thirds the size. Same operational characteristics, though."

"I guess we'll find out tomorrow.", I replied. I headed out to tell Max and the battery sergeant the news that they were on their own. I wasn't even going to help. I would tell them that I just died after my chute failed and they had to run the show. The battery first sergeant was fairly new, too. It was time to see how both of them shaped.

Well, we sure found out the next day! Mid morning a string of donated deuce-and-a-halfs showed up at the Quonset huts C Company had been assigned to. I had already made my way over to the company with my gear. Donovan and I curiously looked at the trucks, since it didn't seem likely that they would be sufficient for the men and the gear. They weren't. We loaded everything and everybody up anyway, and headed towards the far side of the field, where the Honduran Air Force was set up.

The plan was that the American Air Force would drop the Honduran paratroopers, and the Honduran Air Force would drop C Company. It was supposed to be a drop in the early afternoon, but things were moving very slowly. Now it looked like the late afternoon at best.

It went from bad to worse just about as soon as the trucks stopped. We came around the corner of a row of hangars and found our airplanes. No, the Honduran Air Force wasn't operating C-130s. No, they weren't operating C-123s. The pride of the Honduran air transport fleet was four gleaming C-47s! We must have given them these things right after the Second World War.

"Are they what I think they are?", I asked, staring at the vintage airplanes.

"They can't be!", replied Donovan.

The men were all climbing off the trucks, and they were staring as much as we were. The company sergeant, a first sergeant, came up to us, and asked, "Is this for real, sir?"

"I devoutly hope not!", replied his captain.

"My father probably jumped out of one of these things into Normandy!", said the sergeant. His name was Hightower, and he was the oldest guy in the company, at 32. He actually had seen service in Viet Nam, as had Bob Donovan.

"Are we sure we haven't gotten lost in the old airplane museum?", I commented.

Just then a pair of Jeeps came racing up. The first was full of Honduran officers, all beaming at us, visibly proud of their antique airplanes. Following them was Lieutenant Colonel Wilcox, looking equally horrified. We ignored the gabbling Hondurans and I followed Donovan, along with Sergeant Hightower, as he went over to Lieutenant Colonel Wilcox. We sent the Jeep driver away, and the four of us talked. Okay, Hightower and I just listened, while Wilcox and Donovan talked.

"Are you kidding me?", asked Donovan.

"I just found out myself!", replied the horrified battalion commander.

"Colonel, my jumpmasters haven't ever seen one of these things, let alone jumped from one of them. They don't even know how to rig one of them!" There was a loud clatter from the flight line and we watched as a mechanic dropped a wrench, and a stream of black oil came from one of the engines on one of the Gooney Birds.

"I know!"

"Colonel, we've never ever trained on these things!", he protested. This was quite true. American paratroopers train on C-130 Hercules and C-141 Starlifter planes. I doubted any of us had even been alive when these things were still being used! Even the radio frequencies would be different.

"I know!"

"We can't do it!"

A third Jeep came barreling up, with Brigadier General Hawkins, smiling and looking inordinately proud of himself. We stopped talking while he joined us. "Isn't this great!?", he exclaimed. "What wonderful airplanes!"

The colonel stared at the man. Hawkins was what we called a 'five jump chump'. He had been through jump training, probably back when he was a second john, did his three weeks of training and his five mandatory jumps, and then checked it off his list and never looked back. He knew as much about airborne operations as my son did. "General,", he said, "my men have never trained on C-47s. They're not qualified for this."

"This will be the perfect opportunity for them, then, won't it?"

"Sir, with all due respect, they aren't trained for this. They could get hurt. We can't use these planes.", he said.

General Hawkins did not want to hear this. In fact, for the next five minutes, he did all the talking. Screaming, actually. We were going to get on the planes. We were going to jump. He didn't care that it was dangerous. He didn't care that we weren't trained. He didn't care if we all crashed on takeoff! We were going! Anything less would be an insult to our hosts and a blemish on our (his) record and an international incident. If Lieutenant Colonel Wilcox didn't like it, he could be replaced, as could any other officer who didn't like it!

Lieutenant Colonel Wilcox then told Hawkins to put his orders in writing, which Hawkins refused to do. I had never seen this sort of behavior before. Why Wilcox didn't simply refuse is beyond me, but he backed down at this point. Then General Hawkins got back in his Jeep, after giving us another batch of idiotic orders, and took off.

Lieutenant Colonel Wilcox gave Captain Donovan a nervous look and climbed into his own Jeep. "I'll see what I can do, but start figuring it out. Make sure there is a place on the lead bird for me. If we're doing this, I'm going first." He took off.

Donovan turned to me. "Do you believe this shit?"

There was only one thing to say. "How can I help?"

Donovan motioned Hightower and me together and we headed over to the nearest Gooney Bird. We climbed in and looked it over. It was frighteningly primitive, although lovingly maintained. It was also blindingly obvious we were going to have to quickly learn how to jump out of the side of the airplane. Both the C-130 and the C-141 have both a tail exit system and side doors. Unlike the C-47, they have two side doors, and the tail elevators are high enough you don't have to worry about hitting them when you jump out. We normally jumped from the doors.

The other big difference is in size. Gooney Birds can carry 18 paratroopers. The Herky Bird can carry over 60; the Starlifter can carry over 100. Once you're inside a Gooney Bird, it feels like the inside of a tin shed. By comparison, a modern transport feels like a four car garage!

Hightower spoke up, "Pardon me, sir, but can I make a suggestion?"

"Please, Top, anything!"

"Well, my old man was a jumper back in World War II, with the Screaming Eagles, and he told me once that the real trick with jumping from a Goony was that you had to use both hands on the doorway, and almost dive out, to keep below the rear stabilizer on the plane."

Donovan stared at him for a second and then looked at me. "Oh, joy!"

"Sir, let's get a bunch of cushions or something and start practicing jumping from these things."

Donovan nodded. "Let's make it happen, Top!"

When we got back outside and onto the tarmac, Donovan called together his three platoon leaders and their platoon sergeants. "Here's the scoop. We are jumping out of these C-47s. It will be just like dropping from a Herc. We're just going to have to make a few changes."

Donovan's officers and noncoms stared as he outlined the changes. First and Third Platoons would drop; Second Platoon would stay behind and handle support and service. We would drop light - no heavy weapons, no mortars, no machine guns, no anti-tank or anti-air weapons. A dozen and a half jumpers in each plane. The change even affected the artillery element - me. Normally a FIST element consists of a junior officer, a radio operator, and a couple of security troops at a minimum. Now it was just me and the radio operator. Aside from a half dozen radio operators and medics, it was just a shitload of Eleven Bravos, infantry enlisted. We even cut down on the personal gear we were taking. Since the plan was to do live fire training at a range once we landed, we were issued live ammo, quite unusual. We went with three days rations. It was basically a Hollywood drop but with guns and food.

It was when we got to how the planes would be loaded that I started to wonder. We had four transports and five officers - the colonel, the captain, two platoon leaders, and me. Standard doctrine was that each bird gets an officer. This is combat loading, where everything gets split up, so that no single airplane that gets shot down loses all the officers or all of a single element. Instead, Donovan assigned Wilcox to the lead plane, his First Platoon leader to the next plane, and Third Platoon's platoon sergeant to the third plane. Donovan and I would ride in the last Goony-Bird with Third Platoon, with 2nd Lieutenant John Fairfax. Lieutenant Fairfax was the most junior platoon leader. The other two were both first lieutenants, and seemed quite competent. Fairfax, not so much.

If we were supposed to launch and drop by mid-afternoon, that was looking quite unlikely. The troops moved inside a hangar to get out of the sun and get access to a toilet. Lieutenant Hobart of the Second Platoon got everyone who wasn't dropping back to their barracks, and then organized some food to get sent back to us. Meanwhile the mechanics kept working on the engine on the C-47. Maybe I would get lucky and that was the plane I was assigned to drop from, and it would get stuck on the ground! Maybe I could go out and shoot holes in the tires!

In the meantime First Sergeant Hightower rigged up some cushions and had the troops start practicing jumping out of the doorway of one of the C-47s. After a couple of tries, I really wanted to shoot holes in the tires! On the plus side, since we were dropping so light, we could put 20 men on a plane, not just 18.

According to the textbooks, the first stage of a nighttime aerial assault consists of small highly trained teams of men who act as pathfinders, who drop in early and figure out where they are and then set up flares or radio beacons to allow the follow-up flights to find their way in the dark. Then you'll have several waves of paratroopers who drop in on the bad guys without asking permission. Finally, the rest of the heavy equipment will come in and land at the secured airhead. In general, however, this is so dangerous that it is only utilized for the most critical missions. Even in World War II, after the disaster that was the night drop during D-Day, the Army swore off mass night drops. We were going to do this in the afternoon, but that just didn't work out.

It was late when we finally loaded into the Gooney Birds. The C-130s had already taken off and dropped the pathfinders, come back and dropped the mixed American and Honduran paratroopers, and then loaded up and brought in the heavy equipment! We were now Tail End Charlie, and going to drop in the middle of the night, after everybody else. Lieutenant Colonel Wilcox came back and told us the bad news. He spoke to Bob Donovan, but I was close enough to catch it. "I tried getting somebody at brigade, but I couldn't reach the colonel. It's up to you. I'll back you up, but there will be hell to pay."

Donovan sighed and looked back at his company. "Let's get the show on the road. What the fuck can they do to us? Send us to Honduras?"

Colonel Wilcox left just as the Honduran pilots announced the broken C-47 was fixed. We all shrugged into our gear, and were driven to our planes. I followed behind Captain Donovan and 2nd Lieutenant Fairfax. It was after midnight when we took off. It was Wednesday the 11th by then.

It was a short flight, maybe 100 klicks or kilometers. A C-130 is fast enough you'd barely have time to get to altitude before you were over the drop zone. A C-47 was half the speed, if that. The interior of the plane was in night drop condition, with nothing but red lights on, to acclimate everybody's eyes. Fairfax was looking very nervous. I grinned at him and yelled, loud enough he could hear me over the noise of the plane, "Smile, Lieutenant! We're having fun!"

Fairfax looked very startled at that, and he looked over at his captain, who was grinning back at him through the camo paint. "Sing us a song, Johnny!"

Johnny stared. "Sir?"

I just shook my head and laughed. "Come on, Johnny, you know the words!"

"He was just a rookie trooper and he surely shook with fright,

He checked off his equipment and made sure his pack was tight;"

The rest of the troops heard me start the song, and it took off immediately! We were singing about that poor bastard right up until the ready light went on and the captain signaled for us to get to our feet.

Captain Donovan only had a few more words for us. "Make it fast. Get out the door as soon as you can. This won't be much different than a 141, but slower. So let's all have some fun and enjoy the scenery on the way down!" We all shuffled a little closer to the door, and then the light changed. The captain went out, Johnny went out, and then I went out. By the way, you know how in the movies they all yell 'Geronimo' when jumping out of the airplane? Nobody in the real world does that, it's total bullshit!

There was no scenery to be seen. It was totally pitch black. Just by that alone I knew something was wrong. We were the last ones arriving at the party. The drop zone should have been lit up like a fucking Christmas tree! Instead, there was - nothing! It was total black, and then I heard a rustle as I got close to the ground, and then I felt a piercing pain in my right leg and I slammed into the ground and everything went black.

Chapter 57: The Anabasis of Xenophon

I don't think I was out very long. My right knee made me want to scream, but I couldn't feel anything broken. I dug out a chemlight stick and broke it, and in the green glow I looked around. I was on a slope, with my chute fouled in a tree above me and to the side. I hit the quick release and shucked off my chute, and then straightened my leg. I didn't scream, quite, and I was able to move it and maneuver it a bit. I couldn't feel anything broken, and I couldn't see any blood. Whatever was wrong with me was in the knee joint itself. Very slowly, I hauled myself to my feet.

Once upright, something seemed to slip into place in my knee and I was able to put some weight on it. Maybe I could wrap it and get around that way. I had definitely fucked it up somehow. It still hurt like hell, though.

Around me, I could hear the rest of the company crashing about in the woods. From what I could see from the chemlight, we had landed on a slope in some trees, two things you never ever want to do. I also wasn't the only one hurt, although I couldn't hear any screams. Somebody seemed to be fumbling around to my left, so I twisted in that direction and yelled out, "Who's there? Company C, that you?"

A moment later, a voice came back, "Who's that?", and there was some rustling in the brush. I held up my light and five minutes later a corporal carrying his chute rolled up in his arms crashed through the brush. He looked at me and asked, "Who are you?"

"Captain Buckman. What's your name?"

"Corporal Janos, sir. Third Platoon."

I nodded to him. "You were a few seats down from me. How are you doing, Corporal?"

"Fine, sir. I just need some candy and I'm good to go." Paratrooper candy - extra strength Tylenol!

"You and me both, but I think I'm going to need something more." I turned back towards my chute but twisted my knee as I was doing so, and bit off a curse.

"Captain?"

"Bad landing, Corporal, bad landing. Give me a hand. Drop your chute here and help me gear up. You seen or heard anybody else? I don't think we're anywhere near the drop zone."

Corporal Janos dropped his chute and came closer. He pointed in a vague direction left and downhill. "I think some of the guys landed down below."

"Well, if we left the bird first, I'm guessing the stick is spread out in that direction. Help me on with my gear and let's go find out." The corporal helped me get my shit together, and then helped me down the hill. I thought it would take forever, but eventually we limped our way to a clearing where we found another four guys. Like Janos and me, they were dinged up and very unsure where they were.

I eased myself into a sitting position on a fallen tree and asked who everybody was and where they were in the stick, and where they landed. As I suspected, they were all downhill from where I had fetched up. "Well, take a load off. No sense in hiking around in the dark when we don't even know where we are. I can guarantee we're not anywhere near where the exercise is.", I told them.

At that point some rustling in the brush further up the hill made everyone turn in that direction. From what I could figure out, the only people in that direction should be Lieutenant Fairfax or Captain Donovan. Fairfax came stumbling into the circle of green light from my chemlight and a few others. He was carrying his chute, too.

"Welcome, Lieutenant. Join the party.", I said. "Take a load off."

He looked confused, and came over towards me. "Sir?" I don't think he really recognized me. We hadn't spoken much back at the base.

"I'm Captain Buckman, remember? I jumped right after you and Captain Donovan. Have you seen him?"

"No sir."

"How far back that way did you land?"

"Sir?"

I repeated my question and Fairfax gave me a vague indication of a few hundred yards. Another couple of guys drifted in from the downhill area, and I now had nine men total, including me, not quite half the plane load. It was also very obvious it was only our plane load. None of the other planes' jumpers had been found, and the general rule is that everybody gets mixed up.

Fairfax immediately ordered search parties out into the darkness, without any plan that I could see. I promptly countermanded his orders. "Lieutenant, why don't we wait on that until we get some better light?" I could see several of the men looking relieved as I said that.

"Sir, we have to begin moving towards the exercise area.", he protested.

"Lieutenant, do you know where the exercise area is? I certainly don't, and neither do these men. We should be waiting until sunrise and figuring out where everybody is and where we are.", I answered.

"Sir, our orders were very specific. We need to move out!"

"And I'm countermanding those orders." I took off my helmet and set it on the tree next to me, and rubbed my hands through my hair. My leg was throbbing and I needed an ice cold beer, and morphine!

"Captain, you can't do that!" Rather than speak to me quietly, he had raised his voice and was speaking in front of the group.

I motioned him closer. "Lieutenant Fairfax,", I said lowly, "You're a second lieutenant and I'm a captain, and I'm a line officer in the combat arms, just like you. I hereby inform you that I am taking command. Do you understand?"

"You can't do that, sir! This is my platoon!" The idiot couldn't keep his voice down, and now everybody knew I had assumed command.

"I can and I have. Now, when Captain Donovan gets here I will be happy to relinquish command to him, but for the time being, my orders stand. Drop your gear and get comfortable. It will be dawn in a few hours. We'll worry about things then.", I told him.

He gave me a dirty look, and moved to the edge of the clearing.

One of the men, a Private Martinez, glanced at his platoon leader, and then looked over at me. "Sir? Any idea where we actually are?"

I smiled and shrugged. "Not a clue, Private, not a clue. I wouldn't worry about it though."

"How come?"

"Well, that Gooney Bird dropped us somewhere in Latin America. Tomorrow morning, all we have to do is figure out where the sun comes up, turn left, and start marching north. Sooner or later, we're bound to hit Texas!" Martinez grinned at that, and most of the others chuckled or laughed. The mood lightened considerably. "Listen, guys, we're the Eighty-Second-Fucking-Airborne! We're going home if we have to walk the entire distance! Is that understood!?" A chorus of loud grunts and HOO-AHs rang out in the woods, and I relaxed. "That's more like it! For a second there I thought I'd been transferred to the One-Oh-Worst!" The One-Oh-Worst is the 82nd's favorite nickname for the 101st Airborne, who now rode to battle in helos. That earned me a string of catcalls and insults.

I just smiled and relaxed. After a few minutes one of the guys dug out a big bottle of Tylenol and passed it around. I dry swallowed a half dozen myself, then dug out my canteen and took a swallow.

Just as I predicted, a few hours later, the sun rose in the east. The guys dug out some Lurps (LRRPs), Long Range Reconnaissance Patrol rations, and made what would pass for breakfast. The Army was just starting to issue MREs ('Meals Ready to Eat', or 'Meals Refused by Ethiopians', take your pick) but we hadn't brought any to Honduras. Lurps generally sucked, but they were better than nothing. The problem was that they were freeze-dried, so you needed lots of water, which was in short supply. If we couldn't find potable water, we would need to start using the halazone tablets, which made the water taste lousy, but prevented diarrhea and all sorts of even worse diseases. Damned if you do and damned if you don't. Welcome to the Army.

In the morning light I started to get very worried. I didn't think we were anywhere near the drop zone. I wasn't even sure what country we were in! The drop zone and the surrounding region was an upland plateau sort of place, but this was a lot more mountainous. It was entirely possible the Gooney Bird pilot had dropped us somewhere we weren't supposed to be.

As soon as there was enough light, and the men had at least gotten something to eat, I sent a patrol of four men down the hill, in the direction the rest of the stick had landed. They returned in an hour, leading another eight men, including the senior sergeant in the plane, a Sergeant First Class Briscoe who was several years older than the rest of the men. He had organized his little group last night much like I had, and waited for sunlight before looking around. Most importantly, he had a Spec 4 radio operator with him, along with a radio! I could have kissed the pair of them!

"Greetings, gentlemen! Welcome to the party!", I said as a welcome.

The new group mingled with the group already there. Sergeant Briscoe came up to where I was sitting. Lieutenant Fairfax did not join us. He was sitting alone and pouting. Briscoe glanced at him curiously, but then turned to me. It was obvious he had figured out where things stood, or maybe the patrol that found them told them. "Captain Buckman?"

I held out my hand and shook his. "Welcome to the party, Sergeant. How are your men?"

"Good shape, sir." He pointed down the hill, and said, "The ground levels off somewhat. I think this is the rough section. Who's missing?"

"I was about to ask you that. Captain Donovan hasn't shown up. He jumped before me, so he must still be up the hill. I don't know your men well enough to say who else is missing."

Briscoe looked at the group and started mentally counting off names. "We're missing Privates Masurski and Smith."

I nodded. "First things first. We need to find those men. We need to send out search parties." I talked it over with him and it looked like the stick had landed in a pattern about two klicks long and half a klick wide. The two privates were in the first half of the stick to drop, so they were probably on either side of us or back up the hill. Captain Donovan was almost certainly up the hill.

"Sergeant, I am going to need you to organize the search. I'm not going to be moving much. I fucked my knee up. We aren't leaving here without all our men. Understood!?"

"HOO-AH, sir!" He pointed at my leg. "How bad is it, sir?"

"I'll live, but I won't be doing any marathons for a bit."

"DOC! FRONT AND CENTER!", he called out, and a trooper with medic's insignia bounced over. He was armed just like the rest of the troops. According to the Geneva Convention, medical troops were to be unarmed and festooned with red and white crosses indicating their non-combat nature. Viet Nam had shown that those crosses were excellent aiming points for snipers. Since then most medical troops went about as heavily armed as their patients, and rarely wore any kind of insignia.

"Thank you, sergeant. Leave me the RTO, too. Maybe we can raise somebody on the net."

"Yes, sir!"

Sergeant Briscoe organized a search pattern, with various noncoms and PFCs leading in different directions, and then led one of the groups up the hill in the direction where Captain Donovan should be. The medic, whose real name was Gerald and was called Doc, like every other medic in the Army, wanted to cut my pants from me, but I just stood and dropped my trousers. I wasn't sure how long we were going to be like this, but I didn't need shredded pants along with a shredded knee. Meanwhile, the RTO came over with his radio and tried to call home.

After a few minutes I learned two things. First, my leg wasn't broken, but I had definitely screwed up my knee. Doc thought I had ripped a tendon or some cartilage, but without X-rays, we were guessing. I could walk, painfully, so I wouldn't need to be carried. He cut up some parachute and wrapped my knee with it, along with some parachute cord. It wasn't an Ace bandage, but it did feel better, and I could hobble around.

Second, ET couldn't phone home. The radio seemed functional, but nobody was answering the phone call. This wasn't surprising. The AN/PRC-77 'Prick 77' radio had a range of about 8 klicks at best, ground to ground. We could reach further if there was an airborne antenna, to a plane for instance, but for now, we were at least 8 klicks away from the drop zone, and I was betting much further. He also had an AT-984 antenna which he rigged up, which doubled the range, and still couldn't raise anybody. Then he rigged up his spool of WD-1 telephone wire as an antenna, and still didn't get a signal.

Things started getting worse. Sergeant Briscoe returned with his little group relatively quickly, carrying a body on a makeshift stretcher. The body was covered with a torn parachute, and nobody looked happy. I looked at the men, and at the Sergeant. "Oh, shit!"

He just gave me a miserable nod. "Yes, sir." I hobbled over and he pulled away the parachute, exposing Bob Donovan's lifeless face. "We found him wedged against a rock. It looks like he landed wrong and snapped his neck." He flipped the cover back over the captain.

About a half hour later the other two men came in. Private Masurski had crashed into a broken tree trunk, which had gutted him like a fish. He was dead, too. Private Smith, at least, was alive, if not exactly kicking. He had a multiple compound fracture of both the tibia and fibula in his left leg, and was barely able to hold in the screams as he was brought in. Doc took one look and shot him up with some morphine before examining him any further.

Well, we were all there, all 20 of us. Two dead, one a stretcher case, half a dozen more with strains and sprains, a sullen officer, no communications, not enough food and water, and no idea where we were. I closed my eyes for a second. Maybe I would wake up and find myself having a bad dream after a night at the Fort Bragg Officer's Club!

I opened my eyes and found a bunch of paratroopers watching me. Time to get back to work. "Lieutenant, I want you to see to the Captain and Masurski. Briscoe, we need to do some recon." I dug out the area maps I had been issued in regards to shooting howitzers at things, and quickly came to the conclusion we probably weren't on the smallest scale maps. I found a larger map, showing most of Honduras and the surrounding countries. We were currently facing southward on the side of a large hill or small mountain, with a shallow valley in front of us. A small road ran through the valley below us, from left to right.

I also kept an eye on Fairfax. It was readily apparent he was clueless as to what to do. I wondered how he ended up in the 505th and chalked it up to outstanding scores in his classes at West Point. (Yes, even Hudson High has its share of idiots!) I had no doubt that if asked, Lieutenant Fairfax could give me a textbook answer about "deploying his assets to maximum effect" and "utilizing personnel to accomplish the mission" but he couldn't actually figure out how to order his men to do something. All he knew was how to order his ranking sergeant to get something done. Briscoe glanced over at Janos and silently ordered the corporal to take a couple of men and dig out some body bags.

Fairfax faltered at the point where he had to remove the men's dog tags and jam one into each of their mouths. To be fair, so did Janos; I doubt any of the men had ever done this for real. I limped over and knelt next to Bob Donovan, and Sergeant Briscoe knelt down next to Private Masurski. He took Masurski's dog tag and said, "Like this, sir.", and jammed it into the dead man's teeth.

I suppose we didn't have to do this. I had one of their dog tags in my pocket now, and almost all of us carried extras. Like probably every man in the group, except maybe Fairfax, I had two around my neck, a third sewed into my right boot laces, and a fourth in my left rear pocket. No matter what happened to me, they'd be able to identify the pieces. Still, I knew what I had to do.

"Yeah.", I sighed, and did the same to Donovan. Several of the men made the sign of the cross. Fairfax ran to the edge of the clearing and puked up breakfast. Well, it made me a bit queasy, too. I suspected he had never seen a dead body before, even in civilian life. Still, the rest of his performance was enough to get him shitcanned from the military! I was sure that Donovan, if he had lived, would have given Fairfax an OER that would have gotten him assigned to a Port-A-Potty repair depot for the rest of his career. In Viet Nam his men would have fragged him, simply to get him out of their hair!

I looked back at my wide area map. Assuming that the pilot of the C-47 had simply gotten lost and dropped us when he figured we had gone far enough, we could be practically anywhere in Central America. If he had flown north or east, we were probably still in Honduras, but if he had flown south or west, we might well be fucked! To the south was Nicaragua, then in the hands of the Sandinistas, communist and flagrantly anti-American. To the west was El Salvador, home to a nasty multipart civil war, with most of the parties not caring for gringos all that much, either. In addition, most of the two countries had fairly active drug trades going on in the hills, and the narcos were probably as heavily armed as we were. It was like being in a bad Tom Clancy novel! It was too bad I was the only guy here who knew who Tom Clancy was. He hadn't even started writing yet. We had to know where we were.

"Sergeant, who are the men who speak Spanish the best? Not just mas cervezas, por favor either. Guys who can speak it and read it?", I asked.

Briscoe gave me a surprised look, and scratched his head, but a couple of the men came forward. They were swarthy under their grease paint, with Hispanic features. I recognized one of the men from earlier in the morning. "Private Martinez, right? You speak Spanish?"

"Si, mi capitan!", he said, and then rattled off something else too fast for me to follow.

I looked at the other guy. "You, too? What'd he say?"

The other private said something to the Martinez, generating a big laugh, and then replied, "Private Guillermo, sir. It was something about sending officers south of the border who can't speak Spanish."

I snorted and laughed at that myself. "I can't argue with that. Anybody else?" Two more men came forward, another Hispanic private named Gonzalez and Corporal Janos. I looked at Janos and said, "You speak Spanish? With a name like Janos?"

He laughed. "My father might be Polish, but he moved to Texas and married a Mexican girl from Juarez."

"A Texas Polock? Well, now I've heard of everything. What about you fellows? Where are you from?", I asked the other three.

Martinez and Guillermo were Mexican American, from Arizona and California respectively. Gonzalez was from Puerto Rico by way of New York City. "Okay, my life is in the hands of three wetbacks and a Polish Texan! My mother told me I'd come to a messy end!" That got me a few laughs and even more grins. "Seriously, all of our lives are in your hands right now. More than anything else, we need to know just where the hell we are. There is a very, very good chance we aren't in Honduras anymore. If we aren't, we are surrounded by bad guys, either commies who hate Americanos or drug dealers who hate everybody. Got the picture?"

Suddenly the entire group got serious and silent. I continued, "You four men are going to be our scouts. I want two of you to go east and two to go west along the road and try and figure out where we are. However, I don't want you guys seen. Until we know where we are, we can't take a chance."

They all nodded at that, and then Janos asked, "What if we're still in Honduras?"

"That's different. If we're still in Honduras, then find a phone and get us some help! This exercise is over! However, you aren't to do that unless you are absolutely, positively sure this is Honduras! You know, like a sign saying Welcome to Honduras! That sort of thing, got it?"

"Got it!"

"I want you to only move out about five klicks and then come back. We'll be expecting you in time for afternoon tea, 1600, is that clear?" I got their assents and said to Briscoe, "Sergeant, get these men on their way."

"Yes, sir!" He took our designated scouts and led them aside. They checked gear and grabbed their weapons, and then Sergeant Briscoe led them back down the hillside towards the road.

I then had Specialist 4 Thompson try the radio again, but nobody was on the other end. I had him shut it down to save the battery. He asked, "Captain, what if we aren't in Honduras?" Several of the other men were listening to us as well.

I just smiled and said, "I told you that answer this morning. We start walking north. I figure that if we aren't in Honduras, we're probably in either Nicaragua or El Salvador. Either way, Honduras is to the north. Let's be clear on that, fellows. We all jumped in, we're all going home. Are we clear on that?" I got some smiles back, and a variety of positive grunts and HOO-AHs.

I also added, "Don't forget, I don't care how inefficient the Army is, they aren't going to just up and lose a platoon, are they? Sooner or later somebody is bound to notice we didn't show up in the drop zone! They'll come looking for us, just like we're going to be looking for them."

That got some excited nods and talk, as the men realized it wasn't just them. They had people on the outside to help, as well. Thompson asked, "What do you think happened, sir?"

"No idea. The pilot probably just got lost and decided to drop us and try to find home. Unless he flew out to sea and never looked back, he's probably home by now answering a whole bunch of very rude questions."

"Serve the fucker right!", was a comment I heard from more than one voice. I agreed!

"What if he got lost and crashed? Won't they think we'll all have died in the wreckage?", I heard.

"Who asked that?", I said, looking around. A young private who looked nervous at being singled out raised his hand and gave me his name, Wilson. I nodded to him in acknowledgement. "That sort of thing only happens in the movies. You know, the plane crashes, giant fireball, everything is gone in an instant. What really happens when a plane goes down is that there is wreckage strewn all over the place. Even if the plane crashes, the rescuers won't find our bodies, so somebody will figure out we dropped before the crash. All we have to do is figure out where we are, and then go home." I shook my head and smiled at them. "We're the Eighty-Second Airborne. We survived World War II. We'll survive this, too."

When Sergeant Briscoe returned, he got the men organized for the day, and then sat down next to me. "Excuse me sir, no disrespect, but you're the guy called 'Doc', right?"

I smiled. "Only by captains and above, Sergeant."

"Yes, sir. Like I said, no disrespect, sir. I just wanted to be sure who you were." I just nodded. "You're actually a doctor, sir?"

"Mathematics, sergeant, although that seems like a very long time ago."

"Sir, what the hell is a guy like you doing in the Army?"

I laughed. "You ever meet a recruiting sergeant that actually told the truth?" Briscoe laughed at that too, and then went and checked on the rest of the guys.

And that was the order of the day. Keep morale up. Take care of Private Smith and prepare him to be moved out. Rig stretchers for Smith and the body bags. Get food into the men and find some water in a stream down below to clean with halazone. Wait for the recon teams to return. We cleaned our weapons, and posted security so that nobody could sneak up on us, and instituted a sleep schedule. We even inventoried our ammo, since the Army really freaks out about issuing troops ammo (We had 5.56 NATO for the M-16s and a few frag grenades among the non-coms, along with some light demo gear.) It was all the shit that Fairfax was supposed to be doing, the fucking numbnuts!

The first team, of Martinez and Guillermo, came back after only a couple of hours. They had headed east along the road, but it petered out into a few logging trails after a couple of klicks. They high tailed it back and we all waited for Janos and Gonzalez. Their road must lead somewhere. They didn't come back on time though, which made Fairfax say a few stupid things about punishment. I simply told him that we would give the men some time. Maybe they were chartering a bus.

They returned a little after 1800, on foot, and without a bus. Both men were grinning like little boys who've gotten away with something. Janos produced a road map for northern Nicaragua. "We stole it from a car in this little village down around the bend. We're right ... here.", he said, pointing with a grimy finger at the map.

Janos, Gonzalez, Briscoe, and I bent over the little map, and then I dragged out my wide area map. We were off my map completely, at least a hundred kilometers from where we were supposed to be. No wonder our radio was out of range! I looked around the little group. "Tell me about this town. What did you see?"

"It's called Santa Maria de los Milagros, Saint Mary of the Miracles, and isn't much more than an overgrown village. A few cars, some pickup trucks, probably a store in the center.", commented Janos. "Mostly empty farms around a crossroads."

I looked up at that. "You didn't go into the town did you?"

"No!", answered Private Gonzalez. "We'd have been spotted for sure. We just went down the road until we saw some signs of life, and then slipped up a hillside overseeing the town."

"We also saw troops, sir, Nicaraguan troops, a convoy of them.", said Janos.

That got everybody's attention. There was some hubbub that I waved back to silence. "Numbers and deployment.", I demanded.

"Two convoys, each a half dozen trucks loaded with troops. They looked like deuce-and-a-halfs, but funny, like foreign versions."

"Probably GAZ trucks. They're Russian, either from Russia or second hand through Cuba.", I answered.

The two men looked at each other. "I think you're right sir.", continued Janos. "Anyway, six trucks and a Jeep, looked to be an officer. We had one convoy and then another about an hour later. That one stopped and everybody got out and had a piss call on the side of the road. I didn't get a good count, but it looked like a short company, pure infantry. Lots of AKs, not much else."

Great! I had two companies of Sandinista infantry in the area, and that meant at least a battalion around us.

I looked back down at the road map. The road we were on wasn't even marked, although Santa Maria de los Milagros was a small dot on a larger road. That road ran north. If we skirted around the town tonight, we might be able to head north towards the Honduran border. I outlined my plan to the others. Both Janos and Gonzalez agreed it could be done. The two convoys were heading north, also, probably to reinforce the border in case the Yankees invaded.

Which we had done, by the way.

Lieutenant Fairfax had a contribution at that point. It was a really lousy idea, but at least he was thinking. "What if we steal some cars and pickup trucks, and use them to drive to the border? We could make it there in just a few hours."

A few of the men actually looked hopeful at that idea, but I noticed the more senior troops, like Briscoe and Janos, were more thoughtful. I simply shook my head in the negative. "We need to do this in a way nobody knows about us. The perfect outcome is that we go home without the Nicaraguan Army ever figuring out that armed American troops have invaded the peace loving nation of Nicaragua. We start stealing cars and trucks, the cops and the Army will be all over us long before we ever hit the border. We're going to have to sneak out of here."

"We could capture everybody and tie them up, and cut the phone lines."

"With a dozen and a half guys? And nobody is going to get away? You've been watching too much television, Lieutenant. I wouldn't try it with the whole company. Besides, we are trying to do this without anybody knowing about us. No casualties, no kidnapping."

Fairfax simply pouted. At some point I was going to be tempted to put him in a body bag, just like Donovan and Masurski.

He also protested when I ordered the men to dump their chutes and related gear at the edge of the clearing. He wanted us to carry everything out, just like we would if this was an exercise in the drop zone. Fairfax didn't realize that this was combat conditions, or at least as close as we could get without getting shot at. I made the point by tossing my steel pot helmet on top of the collection of chutes and digging out a boonie hat. I also made a point of checking the clip on my .45, and slinging Captain Donovan's over my shoulder. The other men noticed this and got very serious, and checked their own gear over as well.

We made ourselves comfortable until later that evening. At 2100 we moved out. I had my scouts out ahead of us. The center of the march was the three stretchers, each being carried by two men. Doc Gerald and I were with this group. I had a large stick I was using as a cane, and once I got down to the roadway, could make decent speed with it. Fairfax trailed behind us a little. Briscoe played tail-end Charlie, keeping an eye out for stragglers, and the rest of the men were used for flankers and to alternate with the stretcher bearers.

Our march that night sucked. The town was only a couple of klicks, maybe a mile and a half, down around the bend from where we had landed. If we could have kept going, we could have marched through it in ten minutes, with time to spare. Instead, we spent half the night crawling on hillsides and through the brush around the town, dragging stretchers and me half the time, just to go another two kilometers. Then we couldn't make great time since we had to get off the road several times when traffic came through, once when a convoy of Nicaraguan Army trucks trundled through. Still we made about ten kilometers north of the town when it started to get light, and I called it quits. We holed up a couple of hundred meters off the road in a small notch in the hillside. It was now Thursday morning, 12 November.

I had Thompson rig up the radio again. "Let's call home, see if anybody answers.", I told him. We were still way too far from home to reach anybody on the ground, but maybe they had a plane searching for us.

Thompson set the Prick 77 on a log and did what he did with it. "Whiskey Zulu calling Whiskey Home. Come in please. Whiskey Zulu calling Whiskey Home. Please respond." He tried this a few more times, and told me, "Nothing, sir. I'm going to try an alternate frequency." I just nodded to him. For all my math, I don't really know how radio works. I'd be a fool telling the man his business. He fiddled with a dial, and then repeated, "Whiskey Zulu calling Whiskey Home. Come in please. Whiskey Zulu calling Whiskey Home. Come in please." After several tries, he said, "Sorry, sir."

We holed up for the day and moved again that night. During the day, I kept a couple of lookouts watching the road, and checking on traffic and Sandinista movements. We made a bit better time that night, but still couldn't raise anybody on the Prick 77 before the march, although Thompson couldn't find any faults with the radio. The next morning, the 13th, a Friday, we had made another fifteen klicks. By my estimate we had covered about half the distance to the border.

As was our routine by now, as soon as we made our invisible camp, Briscoe deployed sentries and Thompson set up the radio and made a call home. "Whiskey Zulu calling Whiskey Home. Come in please. Whiskey Zulu calling Whiskey Home. Please respond." He let go the button on the handset, hoping for a response, and there was a sudden burst of static from the earpiece, along with a scratchy voice. Thompson looked up at me in surprise. There were some more scratches coming from the handset. I pointed to it and said, "Well, answer the phone!"

"Whiskey Home, say again, transmission was garbled."

Thompson's face had a look of intense concentration as he tried to hear through the static. Whoever we were talking to was a long ways away, but at least we were talking to somebody. Finally he turned it off. He looked up at me and Briscoe and Fairfax, and said, "I wasn't getting all that much, sir, but I'm to try and call back in another two hours. It wasn't the Army, it was the Navy!"

"The Navy!", I exclaimed.

He nodded. "Yes, sir. I really couldn't get much, but it was somebody called Foxtrot Charlie Niner, and they were an Echo Two Charlie. Any idea what that means, sir?"

Fairfax looked confused, and Briscoe just shook his head. The only thing I could figure was that Echo Two Charlie meant an E2C, a Navy version of an AWACS bird, which flew off carriers and supposedly had more electronic equipment than God. Was the Navy out looking for us, too? I didn't care how we got home, but if the Navy rescued us, we'd never hear the end of it!

"The only E2C I've ever heard of is a Navy carrier plane. Maybe there's a carrier somewhere that can hear us. They say to call again in two hours?"

"Yes, sir."

"So, we call again. Let's get comfortable." I dug another Lurp out of my pack and had Briscoe get a camp organized. We were running a cold camp, so no fires were used for cooking, but we still needed to designate a latrine area, garbage pile, set watches, and so forth. I was beat. After my really awful meal, I napped. I wasn't the only one.

I woke up with a sharp pain when Thompson nudged my right foot, the one on my bad leg. I grunted and gave him a dirty look, but he apologized. "It's time, sir."

I nodded and got to my feet. Briscoe joined up with me and we went to where Thompson was set up. He flipped his switches and spoke into the handset, "Whiskey Zulu calling Whiskey Home. Come in please."

This time the response was immediate and much clearer. "Whiskey Zulu, this is Foxtrot Delta Four. How do you read me?"

"Foxtrot Delta Four, we read you five by five."

"Whiskey Zulu, good to hear from you."

"Foxtrot Delta Four, even better to hear from you!"

"Where are you guys? Say condition."

Thompson looked up at me. "What should I say, sir?"

I nodded. "Let me have it." Thompson handed me the handset. I keyed the transmitter and said, "Foxtrot Delta Four, this is Whiskey Zulu Actual, do you read?"

"Loud and clear, Whiskey Zulu Actual."

I grabbed the map and said, "No map coordinates Foxtrot Delta Four. Best we can figure we're about 50 kilometers south and thirty kilometers east of..." I looked at the map again, and then gave him the map number and coordinates of a village that was on the Honduran map. "We are requesting immediate extraction."

"Whiskey Zulu, you guys decide to go for a walk?", asked the incredulous voice.

"We just land where they drop us, Foxtrot Delta Four. Repeat, we are requesting immediate extraction."

The voice got serious again. "Say condition, Whiskey Zulu."

"We have two dead and one needing immediate dustoff, and we are low on food and water." A dustoff was a casualty evacuation, similar to a medevac flight.

"Whiskey Zulu, be advised, we'll need to pass this along."

"Understood, Foxtrot Delta Four. We'll call again at 1200. Whiskey Zulu clear." I handed the handset back to Thompson. There were a lot of anxious faces looking at me. "Well, I would say this is a good thing. They know we're alive, even if we're not where we're supposed to be. Now we just need to organize a dustoff."

For the next few hours morale was relatively upbeat. We now knew where we were, we had managed to make contact with headquarters, and an evacuation was in the works. The betting was that at 1200 we'd get the word that a dustoff would be made that night, as soon as it was dark and the Hueys could spool up. The reality was somewhat different.

At noon I had Thompson do his thing and took the handset from him. "Whiskey Zulu calling Whiskey Home. Whiskey Zulu calling Whiskey Home. Do you read?"

"Whiskey Zulu, this is Whiskey Home. How do you read?" This was a different voice and response. Foxtrot Delta Four, the E2C AWACS, must be simply relaying us back to Tegucigalpa.

"Reading you five by five, Whiskey Home."

"Say condition, Whiskey Zulu, say condition."

"Same as before, Whiskey Home. Two dead, multiple injured, low on food and water, locals not aware of our presence."

A new voice came over the line. "Put Whiskey Zulu Actual on the line!" This was a request for the Actual, or commanding officer of the detachment.

I shrugged at Thompson, who was following along, and answered, "This is Whiskey Zulu Actual."

"This isn't Donovan!", was the angry response.

I gave Thompson a curious look. I triggered the mike. "Whiskey Home, be advised, this frequency is non-secure."

"Who is this? Where's Donovan!"

I rolled my eyes. This was a violation of every radio procedure in the book. "Captain Donovan is dead. This is Captain Buckman."

"Who?"

Christ! "Bravo-Uniform-Charlie-Kilo-Mike-Alpha-November."

"Where's Lieutenant Fairfax? Who are you? Why isn't Fairfax in command?"

"I assumed command."

"Why?"

I glanced over at Fairfax, who was following this. "We can discuss this back at base, sir. When can we expect pickup?"

There were a few more minutes of blank air, and then the first voice returned. "Whiskey Zulu, at 1400 contact November Lima Four for recon check. We need to pinpoint your location." He gave us a new radio frequency for November Lima Four, and then cleared the frequency.

I looked at Thompson and shrugged, which he returned to me. Two hours later we were on line with November Lima Four. Curiously, November Lima Four had us ignite a pencil flare and then douse it after fifteen seconds, and then repeat the process twice. Afterwards, we were told to call Whiskey Home on yet another frequency at 1600.

A couple of the men asked what was going on. I said, "What I think is that somebody is flying around in a recon bird that can read that flare, and they just found us on a map." Most of the guys started looking up at the sky, but we were under some trees and nobody could see or hear anything. "Guys, I don't think you're going to see anything. It's probably some sort of infrared sensing system. They might be miles away and miles high."

At 1600 we called Whiskey Home again. Extraction would be tomorrow, Saturday the 14th, but we needed to continue north, to a suitable landing zone. At 2100 we started north again. This march was tougher that the previous one. We had to go farther, and skirt around an even larger town, and military traffic was increasing. It looked like we were heading into a fortified area. By 0500 we were exhausted, and the injury list had grown longer. We were almost out of food, and running low on halazone tablets. Private Gonzalez had broken his ankle falling in the dark, and while he wasn't being carried, he was now as slow as I was, and could no longer act as a scout.

I made the men keep moving. My knee was in agony by now, but I kept moving back and forth up and down the line, urging them on and telling them a pickup was ahead. Private Smith said that we should leave him on the road, and that somebody would be able to pick him up in the morning. At that point I gave him a good-natured chewing out. "Listen, we all jumped in and we're all getting out. I don't care if I have to cut the damn leg off and tie a stick to the stump and then kick your peg-legged ass back to Texas, but we are all going out together. You guys have been watching too many god-damned movies!"

Morale was dropping at this point. Our morning radio call was not telling us when we were to be picked up. I was getting the impression that Whiskey Home and General Hawkins wanted us to walk home. Hawkins was a political general, not a combat general, and we weren't his men, but his problem. I had the sneaking suspicion that he would have preferred that we had crashed with the Gooney Bird (if that was what had happened to it) since then he could blame either the Hondurans or somebody else and forget about this mess.

The 1200 radio call confirmed that there was no pickup scheduled for that evening. We were to continue marching north. I had already reviewed our status with Briscoe and the other noncoms. Thompson told me that the batteries for the Prick 77 wouldn't last much longer. We were out of food. When we ran out of halazone, we'd start dropping from dysentery and God knows what else. I'd had dysentery once, back on the first go. It's not enjoyable. We needed a dustoff. Most importantly, our medic said that Smith needed immediate dustoff. He was running out of morphine, and by this time tomorrow would be screaming in agony. In two days time, gangrene would start to set in and he'd have to remove the leg.

After being told to keep marching, I replied, "Whiskey Home, negative on continuing the march. We need immediate pickup. Injuries are increasing and time is of the essence."

Another voice came on the line, Hawkins again, ordering us to keep marching. I looked over at Doc, who glanced over at Smith and then shook his head. "Negative, Whiskey Home, we need immediate pickup. Unit condition insufficient for continued march without further loss."

"Buckman, I am ordering you to keep marching!"

I had just about had it by that point. I knew I was throwing my career down the drain, but I needed to get these guys home. "Whiskey Home, that is a negative. Now pull your head out of your ass and whistle up some Hueys! If we have to make another march it's going to be to the nearest town to find a hospital and a police station to surrender to! Now make it happen! Over!"

There was about five minutes of silence before the original voice came back on the air. "Whiskey Zulu, can you make it another four klicks north? There's an abandoned airstrip north of you."

Briscoe and Janos nodded at this, and I agreed with them; that we could do. Still, an abandoned airstrip? Here? Who the hell would build an airstrip in this neighborhood? There was nobody around. And how could they tell? No way was it on any maps. Who knew about it? DOD? CIA? DEA? Some other three letter agency?

"Can do, Whiskey Home. Four klicks north. We can make it by 2300. We'll call when we get there."

"Whiskey Zulu, this is Whiskey Home. Copy and out."

I decided not to wait. I sent my three scouts out, to find this abandoned airfield, and detailed a few more men to follow them and station themselves along the way. It was slow going, but it was daylight and we wouldn't be falling in the dark and breaking any more bones. We got there a little before 1800 and discovered our next problem.

The airfield wasn't abandoned. The scouts reported that an ancient flatbed pickup truck had rolled in with a half dozen barrels loaded on the back. If I called home and said we had visitors, the pickup would be cancelled. I circled all the able bodied troops together.

"We need this airfield. It's probably being used by drug runners or somebody like that. We need to capture this place, but not make it look like Americans. Only speak Spanish. If you can't speak Spanish, keep quiet. Take prisoners. No killing. You guys are that good. Understood?"

There were enough grins to tell me that Company C was ready for some payback. They were so sick and tired of sneaking north that an assault on a narco airfield sounded enjoyable to them. We crept to the edge of the airfield and waited for darkness to give us cover.

The airstrip itself was maybe a couple thousand feet long, mostly grass and gravel. Whatever flew in and out of here wasn't very big. There were a couple of ramshackle buildings, one of which looked like an empty hangar. The other had a light on in it. We could hear a generator running from somewhere over by the hangar. The pickup truck was sitting next to the lighted building. The barrels were stacked with several others off to the side. Security seemed nonexistent, but somebody must have turned on that light, maybe the truck driver.

As soon as it was dark enough to be hidden, I ordered Briscoe and a few men to the right and Janos with a couple of men to the left. I sent another group forward, towards the barrels, and I limped along after them. I couldn't crawl very well, but the barrels gave us some cover. I tapped one of the barrels, and then twisted off one of the bung caps. "What is it, sir?", asked Private Guillermo.

I sniffed. It was some form of petroleum product, kerosene or diesel fuel or something like that. "Fuel or diesel, something along those lines. Let's get away from here." I didn't want to be hiding in the fuel dump if a firefight started!

I motioned my men forward, towards the lighted building. We stopped at the flatbed truck. We found Sergeant Briscoe and his little group already there. "All clear, sir. Three men inside. Nobody else around. There's a plane inside the hangar. Janos is over on the other side.", he whispered to us.

"What are they doing? Are they armed?"

"Yes, sir, AKs, but we haven't seen anything else. They're drinking, and at least one of them is smoking something and I don't think it's tobacco."

"Narcos!"

"Most likely, Captain."

I just nodded. That was both good and bad. Narcos, drug runners or guards, were very likely to have limited skills and discipline. That was also the bad part, since they were just as likely to get drunk or stoned and wander outside to shoot up the place for the sheer hell of it.

"Let's get them out of there. Cut off the generator. That should stir the pot.", I said.

Briscoe smiled and nodded. He pointed to two of the men and ordered them over towards the hangar. Two minutes later the hum of the generator died and the light went off in the shack.

There was some immediate cursing inside the shack, and a moment later the door to the shack slammed open and one of the men inside stumbled out. There was just enough moonlight to find his way over to the other building and go towards the rear. The men who had turned off the generator would take him down. Guillermo was at my side and whispering a running translation of what was being said inside the shack. It was basically cursing about how stupid Morales was and what the fuck was he up to? Another light came on, from a lantern it looked like, and another man came out and headed towards the hangar.

That left one man inside the shack. We watched the hangar, and after another minute, the light went out. Two down, one to go. The last guy was going to start wondering what was happening, and getting nervous. Nervous people do stupid stuff. We didn't have any flash-bang grenades to stun and disorient anybody. I ordered Guillermo to toss a frag grenade against the back wall from outside, and see if anybody bolted.

Guillermo nodded and moved away, Briscoe and a couple of privates slipped up to either side of the door. When the grenade blew, the shack shook like an earthquake had hit it, and the windows popped out and busted. Two men came flying out the door. One was grabbed by Briscoe, but the other struggled and got the butt of an M-16 to the back of his head for his troubles. He folded up and collapsed to the ground.

"Two men, sergeant?", I whispered to him.

He put his lips to my ear. "Sorry about that, sir. He must have been sleeping. We missed him."

I waved it off. It was unimportant. We had captured or killed everybody and the airfield was in our hands, and nobody knew it was the Americans who had done it.

Well, not until Lieutenant Fairfax bounced up and loudly asked, "Now, what, sir?"

The wounded narco looked up at that, and said, "Americanos!"

"So much for secrecy, Lieutenant. Weren't you there when we talked about the need to speak only in Spanish?", I asked him.

"Sir? I thought that was for the assault teams." What an idiot!

I turned my back on the fool and ordered Briscoe to bring the other two prisoners up, and to get the generator going. Thompson and I went into the shack and found a table and set up the radio. The generator came on, but the lights had all been blown, so we used our remaining chemlights and reconned the area. There were a couple of bottles of something on the floor, along with some cases of beer in the corner. Some of the bottles had been broken, but there was still some beer and liquor. A couple of the men eyed the booze, and that was all I needed to worry about!

"Sergeant! Secure the booze and beer until further notice!"

"Yes, sir!" He pointed at a couple of the privates. "Sit on it. Even look funny at it and I'll have your asses!" Then he turned back to me. "You need to see this, sir."

I followed him out the door, towards the hangar. There was a light glowing inside the hangar. A small single engine plane was inside, and in the back was a load of white bricks of some sort, probably cocaine being transshipped through the airfield. "Abandoned airfield, my ass!", I commented.

"There's some more over here in the corner.", said one of the privates.

"Sir, it's time to call home.", commented Briscoe.

I hobbled back over to the shack and sat down in just about the only decent chair left. Thompson got the radio running and Whiskey Zulu called home. Three Hueys were scheduled to arrive at 0300 at five minute intervals, with a fourth in reserve in case something happened to one of the first three. That worked out to six or seven men per helo, which was about right for a Huey. I called Briscoe and Fairfax over.

"Three birds are coming in at 0300. Lieutenant, you go out in the first bird with Donovan, Masurski, Smith, Doc, and Gonzalez." I glanced at Briscoe.

"You should go too, sir. Your leg."

"My leg will still be there ten minutes later. Sergeant you go out on the second bird with another six men. I'll take the last one with the rest. Understood?"

"Yes, sir.", answered Briscoe.

Fairfax simply nodded and looked sullen. He wanted to get the hell out of there, but he wanted to go last, heroically. If I left him behind, I'd never see him or the men again. He could screw up a Girl Scout cake bake!

I looked over at the two privates guarding the booze, and smiled. "Gentlemen, everybody gets one beer each."

You'd have thought I was handing out diamonds. Everybody's face lit up, and the two soldiers hopped up and grabbed some beers, and took them outside to the others. Briscoe set a couple down on the table for me and Thompson, and then handed one to Fairfax. Fairfax gave a disgusted look at the thought of drinking on a mission, but Briscoe just shrugged and drank it himself. "Now what, sir?"

I ignored him for a moment, as I poured about half the bottle down my throat. It was warm donkey piss, and it was the best tasting thing I had ever had! I belched loudly, smacked my lips, and smiled. "I needed that, sergeant!" I got a room full of laughs for that. "Sergeant, collect up whatever we have in the way of demo gear, explosives, detonators, whatever, anything you can find or finagle. I want to rig this whole fucking place to blow when we leave here."

"And the prisoners? Sir?"

I looked hard over at Fairfax, who had let out the secret that it was the Americans who had fucked up this little way station on the drug road north. "Keep them tied up over by the fuel dump. I'll sort them out later."

Briscoe smiled at this and worked on his own beer. All soldiers like to make things go BOOM! He drained his beer at the same time as I drained mine, and then went outside to make it happen. He had a number of very enthusiastic helpers. When we lifted off, there was going to be a very loud BANG! When he returned, he came with a couple of helpers rolling one of the barrels of fuel with him. We moved out onto the grass while he rigged the shack to blow. In the faint light around us, I could see similar activity in the hangar and over at the fuel dump.

Once that was ready, I ordered a second beer for everybody, and announced that was it. I also quietly told Briscoe to pack up those two bottles of rum we had found on the floor. It was probably rotgut, but I intended to find out once we got home. Briscoe just grinned and nodded.

At 0250 I struggled to my feet and started over to the fuel dump. Briscoe and Janos hopped to their feet. "What's up, Captain?"

"Nothing much. You stay here."

"Where are you going, sir.", he pressed.

I gave him a hard look. "I'm going to release the prisoners. Now, stay here. That's an order."

His look back was as hard. "I can do that, sir."

"My responsibility, Sergeant, now sit down."

Sergeant Briscoe nodded and I hobbled over to the fuel dump. The four prisoners were tied hand and foot behind the remaining barrels. They were talking amongst themselves, and I heard the words "gringos" and "Americanos." Yeah, they knew all about us. I pulled my 1911A1 and put a round into each of their heads. The sound was deafening in the still Nicaraguan night. When we blew the fuel dump, the bodies would be burned up. There would be no witnesses to talk about American paratroopers invading Nicaragua.

Lieutenant Fairfax intercepted me as I limped back. "Sir, what happened?"

"I released the prisoners, Lieutenant." Released them from their earthly bonds.

"I heard shooting."

"I cut them loose and then I fired into the air to hurry them along.", I told him.

"I want to check on them." He turned to go.

I grabbed him with my left hand as I laid my right hand on my Colt. "Get back to your group, Lieutenant. The prisoners are gone. That's an order!"

I was surprised when several of the men came over and positioned themselves between Fairfax and the fuel dump. He got the message, and went back to sit with his group.

At 0255 we turned on the radio and made contact with the Hueys. Janos had rigged up some piles of cocaine bricks soaked in fuel, and I let him set them on fire as landing lights. It wouldn't do to breathe the fumes very long, but that was the least of my worries. Ten minutes later I heard the WHOOP, WHOOP, WHOOP of an approaching helo. I struggled to my feet. A moment later it flared out in the circle of light, and I ordered the group of dead and injured loaded on board. It was gone two minutes later.

Two minutes after the first bird lifted off, the second landed and Briscoe's group took off. Finally it was time for the third Huey. Sergeant Briscoe magically appeared out of the gloom. "You were supposed to be on that bird.", I told him.

"Janos sprained a thumbnail. I sent him out instead."

I smiled at him. I'd have never have gotten these guys home without his help. "Well, it's a good thing. I forgot you had the remote detonators. Everything ready to blow?"

He held up a couple of radio igniters. "Just say the magic word!"

We were interrupted by the sound of the last helo arriving. "You got the booze?", I asked.

In response he patted his pack and grinned.

I grinned, too. "They say stolen kisses are the sweetest. I wonder if it's the same about stolen booze?" I had to yell over the WHOOP, WHOOP of the Huey's rotors. It landed and I pointed towards it. "LET'S GO!"

The other five men ran under the spinning blades and tossed their gear on board and scrambled in. Briscoe had to half carry me over, as my knee was screaming now. He wanted to toss me on first, but I insisted he get on first. I was more than happy to allow him and Spec 4 Thompson to pull me in. We strapped in, and the pilot lifted off. I ordered the crew chief to have the Huey hold in place a few hundred feet up, and then I pointed at Briscoe. "HIT IT!"

He grinned and punched first one detonator and then the other. The first exploded the hangar, in a whoosh of yellow as fuel, cocaine, and airplane lit off. The second exploded the shack, and then started a chain reaction going down through the flatbed truck and on to the fuel dump. Third Platoon cheered loudly, and I told the crew chief to get us the fuck out of there.

My knee throbbed the entire trip home, but I no longer cared. I had gotten my men home. Every once in a while one of the guys caught my eye and gave me a thumbs up. I would simply smile and return it. I was so tired, but I could carry on a little while longer. It wasn't a long trip back to the base. Another cheer went up when the lights came into view. The other three helos were already there, along with a number of men around one of them. We flared out and there was another cheer, and then cheering men crowded around from the other Huey. It was the rest of the Third Platoon that had been on the plane, less Lieutenant Fairfax, Gerald, and the wounded and dead.

I hopped carefully off the bird and we all moved away from it while the pilot shut down the engines. Spirits were high, but I got the men calmed down somewhat. I confirmed that a group of ambulances had taken away the first helo's load. "Okay, Sergeant, once we get some transport, I want you to get the men back to quarters and get them settled in. Get the men fed. I'm heading over to the hospital and checking on the men, then I'll be back to check on you and these guys, and we'll see about those two bottles."

"You should stay at the hospital, sir.", he argued.

I smiled but shook my head. "Later, Sergeant, after we see to the men and those bottles. Priorities, Sergeant Briscoe, priorities!"

Several headlights were now apparent coming towards us. "Transport has found us.", I commented. It looked like we had a couple of deuce-and-a-halfs coming our way, along with a Jeep.

It was Sunday the 15th and the mission was finally over. We stood there and watched as the convoy approached. The Jeep drove right up to us, and I could see that it had three men in it. They got out. The passenger was a very natty and neat major, the driver was an older staff sergeant, and a young corporal was sitting in the back. The major looked at me in considerable disgust. I guess that after a week of crawling through the Nicaraguan countryside I wasn't ready to be presented at high tea. I was filthy, unshaven, and smelled like a goat, in fact. I didn't care. I just stared at him. "Captain Buckman?"

"Yes, sir."

"You're under arrest, captain! The charges are mutiny and failure to obey orders." He turned to his sergeant and corporal. "Take him!"

Chapter 58: More Hard Time

Here's an important safety tip for all you new Provost Marshals - if at all possible, never arrest somebody in front of armed troops. On the one hand, they might disagree with your decision to haul away their friend or leader. On the other hand, they might be so overjoyed to be rid of the asshole they decide to help you take care of justice! It is better to get the offender away from the group and do it quietly and privately.

The major was the provost marshal, and the sergeant and corporal were military police. While I stood there in disbelief, the sergeant grabbed me roughly, and the corporal stripped me of the two pistols I was carrying. There was a loud murmur of disapproval from the Third Platoon, however, and several edged closer. I even heard a couple of their M-16s being charged, which made me very nervous. Somebody had to do something before this got out of hand!

I shrugged out of the sergeant's grasp and marched over to the men I had just come back with. "STAND DOWN! STAND DOWN! YOU WILL STAND DOWN!" The men were visibly cowed by this, and backed up. "This is the 82nd Fucking Airborne and you will act like it! Now I don't know what's going on, but you will not act like a fucking third world pisshole army. Is that understood?!"

There was some grumbling, and the sergeant was moving closer to me. I shrugged him away again. "IS THAT UNDERSTOOD!?"

Sergeant Briscoe answered, "YES, SIR!", and the moment was over. He turned to the rest of the men and shouted, "Third Platoon, PRESENT ARMS!", and the men came to attention. I returned their salute, and Briscoe ordered, "ORDER ARMS!"

I turned back to the sergeant and held my arms out to him to be cuffed. He had a furious look on his face, and my hands were grabbed and wrenched behind my back, where steel handcuffs were placed on them. Then he and the corporal frog-marched me over to the Jeep and put me in the back. The major got back in the passenger seat and the corporal was driving. As soon as I was out of sight of the troops, the sergeant gave me a vicious shot to the kidneys. "You're going to be sorry, now, asshole.", he growled quietly.

I wasn't sure what was going on, but this was not the way things were supposed to be run. As an officer I should never have been manhandled and cuffed by a non-com. It is presumed that as an officer and gentleman, I can be trusted not to attempt an escape. Even taking my pistols was unusual; as an officer I could be asked for my parole and then left armed. Something was going on, and I didn't think I was going to like it.

We drove across the base to a permanent building that had been loaned to us by the Honduran Army. I wasn't quite sure what century it had been built in, but it was old! The small Judge Advocate General detachment, the Provost Marshall, and the MPs were all using this building as their headquarters, probably because it was the least useful building available, and better buildings were being used by more important elements of the deployment. I was dragged downstairs and processed into the system, such as it was. The cuffs were removed and I was stripped down to my skin. The makeshift wrapping around my knee was cut off. My boots were taken from me, along with my watch (a Timex the sergeant took great delight in stomping on the floor; I had left my Rolex back in the States before the deployment), and the picture of Marilyn and little Charlie my wife had sent me. The MP sergeant enjoyed tearing that in two and tossing it in the garbage. I was then issued a bright orange jumpsuit with the word 'PRISONER' stenciled on it, and a pair of orange flip-flops. Then I was shoved into a cell, and given one last love tap to the kidneys by the MP sergeant. I noticed the corporal giving him a disapproving look behind his back, but that didn't do me any good.

Again, this was just extraordinary conduct. If I was to be arrested, I should have been taken to the hospital where I would be treated for my injuries, and then be told I was restricted to my quarters or bed or something of the sort. I didn't know what was going on. Somebody was obviously trying to send me a message, and not a very subtle one, either.

I looked around at my new home. The last time this place had been cleaned must have been before the World War, but I wasn't sure which one. It was a basic 8' by 8' iron bar cage. The lock mechanism to the door was so rusty they had a chain looped around the door frame with a padlock on it. A toilet was at one side, without a seat, and a sink was mounted on the wall, with a single faucet over it. The bedframe was bolted to the floor and had steel springs with a moldy thin mattress laying on it.

The only thing going through my mind was, 'What the fuck was going on?' Mutiny? They hang people for mutiny! Brigadier General Hawkins must really have it in for me, I thought.

I limped over to the toilet and jiggled the handle, but either the water line was blocked, or the valve was shut off. It didn't flush, and it was bone dry. The faucet and sink were better. The faucet handle worked, and a thin stream of water came out. Then the handle broke off completely. The water continued flowing. The sounds of splashing water on the concrete floor made me look under the sink, to where the rusted plumbing was allowing the water to run out into my cell. I watched as the trickle of water went across the floor of the cell and down into a drain in the corner. Great!

I had to pee, so I unzipped my jumpsuit and pissed directly into the drain. I was going to reserve the toilet for Number Two. After relieving myself, I went to the sink and looked at myself in the polished steel mirror, now somewhat rusted and scratched, that was over the sink. I was filthy, and buried under a layer of grime and grease paint. I was also hungry and thirsty. I lowered my face to the faucet and drank the warm and rusty water, and then spent the next hour washing my hands and face as best I could.

I was left alone until about noon or so, when the corporal stuck his head in to see if I was still alive. I asked for something to eat. He didn't say anything, but he came back an hour later and tossed a couple of Lurps into the cell through the bars. You need a knife to open ration packs, which I didn't have, so I spent the next half an hour working the plastic against a corner of the rusty bedframe until I could rip it open. It was better than nothing. You have to be very careful eating Lurps dry, since they are freeze dried and can swell in your stomach and you need to drink a lot of water with them.

I fell asleep on the moldy mattress and slept, exhausted, until the next morning. I almost forgot where I was, at least until I rolled upright and set my feet on the floor. The running water was starting to back up in the drain, and now was covering the floor and running into another drain on the other side of the room. My cell was now a half inch deep lake. I unzipped my jump suit and peed out through the bars in the general direction of the working drain.

I looked in the steel mirror and washed my face some more, and this time tried to get the grime and dirt out of my hair. I felt some gurgling in my stomach, so I figured that either I was hungry or that, more likely, the water wasn't pure, and I was about to come down with the Hondo version of the runs. No more Lurps were forthcoming, but about noon or so, the sergeant and his helper returned to the basement and let me out of the cell. I was cuffed again, and the sergeant said, "I don't care what your lawyer says. You're going to sign the confession or you're never going to come out of here alive." Then I took another couple of shots to the kidneys. The last one made me stagger and drop to my knees, which made my right knee shriek with agony. I was dragged upright again, and then hauled upstairs.

I tried to remember anything about court martials, but the only thing I really knew about military justice was the Article 15s I had handled, non-judicial punishments that didn't involve a court. I had never been involved in a real court martial before.

I found myself deposited on a chair in a small conference room, bolted to the floor, with a table also bolted to the floor. It reminded me a lot of that one morning in Towson all those years ago. Déjà vu all over again! This time the guard made sure to give me a couple of shots to the ribs after I sat down, with a warning to behave and confess, if I knew what was good for me. Ten minutes later the door opened and a teenager came in. As the door opened, I heard a voice say, "One hour, no more."

Okay, he wasn't a teenager. He was actually a first lieutenant with a JAG insignia on his lapels, the crossed sword and quill pen. I hoped this kid was good with the pen, because he didn't look old enough to know what a sword was used for. He smiled at me and placed a folder and legal pad on the table and then sat down across from me. "Captain Buckman?"

"Yeah. Who are you?"

"I'm Lieutenant Dorne. I'm your attorney. I'm pleased to meet you!" He smiled like an eager young puppy.

"Uh, huh. Listen, what the hell is going on? What the hell am I supposed to have done?"

"Well, I have the list of charges here." They had a list? Dorne fumbled through the file and then looked back at me. "Originally, the most serious was mutiny. Then there's failure to obey a direct order, destruction or loss of military property, and failure to follow proper radio procedures. Oh, and insubordination, I almost forgot that one."

"You said the most serious was mutiny. Does that mean that it is the most serious, or that there is something else now more serious?", I asked him.

"Well, this morning they added four counts of murder and a count of resisting arrest. Who'd you kill, anyway?"

"Nobody, Lieutenant. Nobody! What I did was piss off a general!"

Dorne started looking through his paperwork again. "That must be the insubordination and failure to obey a direct order."

"Must be. Let me ask you a question. Who picked you as my lawyer?", I asked him.

Dorne gave me a broad smile. "The Provost Marshal himself! He requested me personally! This is really exciting. It's my first case, and I get a capital case!"

"Oh, Christ!" I shook my head. This was just getting better and better. Almost every JAG ever commissioned comes in as a captain, an O-3, or better. The Provost Marshal, that major who arrested me, must have looked far and wide to find a JAG lawyer so green that he was still only a lieutenant, and had never tried a case before. I wondered if Dorne had actually gone to law school, or if he had done it all by correspondence course. He was so green he thought this was an honor, instead of what it really was, another nail in my coffin.

Dorne started talking about the particulars. "Mutiny is going to be very hard to prove. Case law is definitely on our side. Who were the witnesses to the murders?" I just stared at him as he rambled on.

Finally I said, "Shut up, Lieutenant. Let me ask you a question. Have you been approached about a plea deal already?"

He nodded and smiled. "The Provost Marshal wants twenty years at Leavenworth, but I know we can do better than that! I shouldn't think more than four or five, total..."

"Shut up. Forget it. We're going to trial if I have to. I'm not signing off on any plea deal." This was all political nonsense in any case, with a pissy general trying to fuck me over. Screw him!

Just then the door opened and the corporal came inside. "Time's up. Get lost.", he told Dorne.

Dorne looked shocked, but I barked out, "You will come to attention and address your superior officers correctly, prisoner or not. He's a lieutenant and I'm a captain, and you are a corporal. You should know better. Now we are not through and nobody less than a major is to interrupt us, is that understood?" He stared at me, and I repeated, "IS THAT UNDERSTOOD!"

"Yes, sir."

"Dismissed."

Dorne looked at me curiously, seeing me in a different light. I turned to him and said, "Okay, we need to make this quick. I buffaloed the corporal, but his sergeant isn't going to be as cooperative. I'm going to talk, you're going to listen, got it?"

Dorne simply nodded, so I just continued. "Okay, this is total bullshit. Brigadier General Hawkins has a bug up his ass and its name is Buckman. He wants to bury me and scare me into taking a plea deal. The last thing he wants is an actual court martial. Now, who do you report to?"

"Me?" I urged him to continue and he said, "The Provost Marshal."

Even I knew this was wrong. The Provost Marshal is the senior military police officer on a base, and is in charge of the MP detachment. The JAG Corps are military lawyers, and provide the prosecuting and defense attorneys in a court martial. They had separate chains of command, just like in civilian life. The cops aren't in charge of the prosecutors.

I shook my head. "No, he just houses you here. You actually report to the JAG HQ in DC, right?"

He shrugged. "Yes, sir."

"Well, you get through to somebody higher up the food chain. Hawkins can bury me down here in as deep a hole as he can find, but sooner or later my wife is going to notice I haven't come home or called. Now she doesn't know shit about the Army, but she knows my father and her father, and they know several congressmen." This was a stretch, since Big Bob considered me his daughter's biggest mistake, and I hadn't spoken to my father in three years, but Dorne didn't need to know those pesky details. "Sooner or later, I am going to get a phone call, and the first words out of my mouth will be 'Get me a civilian lawyer!' Do you understand me?"

"You don't want me as your lawyer?"

"Lieutenant, I am a rich man. I know, I know, what's a rich man doing in the Army? Take my word for it, I am a multimillionaire. You don't need to know the details, but the first thing I am going to tell my new civilian lawyer will be that I will pay him a million dollars to take my case, and another million when I walk away with somebody's scalp on my belt. Follow me? Tell that to your boss in DC! Ask him if he knows how much full page ads in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal cost? You know, something about how the US Army invaded Nicaragua and killed two of their own men doing so. How do you think that will look when the Pentagon opens their morning papers? I bet William Kuntsler would love to defend me at a court martial! Now, you are going to find a phone and call your boss back at HQ and get this sorted out, is that understood?"

If I was really going to trial in a court martial, the last thing I wanted was a civilian lawyer. It was my right, but they rarely know what they are doing in a military court, and they are not looked upon kindly by the system. Still, whatever this was, it was political, not military, and that made it different!

The door to the room opened again, this time with a red-faced major, the Provost Marshal, and his staff sergeant sidekick who delighted in sucker punching me. The major glared at the hapless lieutenant and ordered him out. "You! Out!", he barked, and then he turned to me, and said, "And you! No more of your crap!"

Dorne scurried to leave, and I yelled after him, "No deal, Dorne, no deal!"

The major followed after Dorne, demanding to know what I had told him, but I doubted Dorne would tell him. That was privileged information, and Dorne would probably keep his mouth shut. The sergeant stayed behind, and I was released from the table and my hands were cuffed again, and I was hauled back down to the basement. The corporal joined him to assist. The water level had stabilized at about the half inch level; there must have been a few rat holes for the water to drain down through.

There was one difference this time. They had a hook tied to a rope that went to the ceiling, and after I was uncuffed from behind my back, they recuffed me from the front, and then strung me up from the hook. I don't think the corporal was happy about this, but he didn't stop it, and he kept me under control when I started to protest. The sergeant was smiling as he pulled out a pair of black leather gloves. "You haven't been cooperating. The major wants you to cooperate." He waved the corporal out.

I'd like to say that I took the next twenty minutes stoically, never uttering a whimper. That might not be totally true. I didn't cry. I did curse several times. I managed to control my bodily functions. I was given a fairly thorough thumping, but only to my midsection. I think the idea was to soften me up without any damage to my face, so that I would be my usual boyish and charming self in any photos. After enough time lapsed I was just a mass of pain, but I was still quite conscious. Then the sergeant decided to kick my legs, and he connected with my right knee. I remember screaming, and then everything seemed to go black.

I came back to consciousness very slowly, and it was very dark and quiet outside when I did. The bitter taste in my mouth told me that I had thrown up at least once, and there was a wetness and a stench to my jumpsuit that told me I must have pissed and shit myself. I ached all over, even in places that hadn't been hit. Even worse, whatever was living in the water was now living in me. Despite the tropical heat, I was shivering with chills, and I felt myself crap my prisoner's jumpsuit again as I passed out a second time.

When I came to the second time, it was because there was some noise out in the stairwell that led down here to the dungeon, which is what I had taken to calling my home. I was half laying on the foul mattress, and half laying in the water on the floor of my cell, and I was starting to wonder if maybe I had been a mite hasty in my dismissal of a plea bargain. At least it would be drier in Fort Leavenworth.

I heard, "Open this door now, corporal. That's an order!", being barked from the other side of the door. I turned my head in that direction, and that hurt. Still, it was a voice that was new to me, and I would be damned if I would be found laying in my own filth. I crawled over to the bars on my cage and tried to pull myself up.

"JESUS H. CHRIST! WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON HERE?!", screamed the voice. I wasn't focusing all that well, but I had managed to get my left leg under me and by holding onto the bars on the cage, had gotten to a semi-vertical position. My right leg seemed to be nonfunctional, although sheer agony radiated throughout it.

"GET THAT DOOR OPEN! NOW!", yelled the voice.

I focused in on the voice. It was a stocky colonel in a dress uniform, wading through the water towards me. He was accompanied by the MP corporal, but now the corporal looked very nervous. I vaguely heard him say, "Yes, sir.", and he came over and started playing with the padlock.

"Sweet suffering Jesus!", exclaimed the colonel.

I didn't know what was happening, but I knew I was in very bad shape. Left alone, I could possibly die. I had seen dying people before. Still, I had had enough. If I was going out, I was going to go out in style. At least Marilyn and Charlie would be taken care of.

Holding onto the bars with my left hand, I drew myself into as vertical a condition as I could manage, and then brought my right hand up to my forehead. My ribs were screaming, and I knew something had to be cracked in there, maybe even broken. I didn't care. I held the salute, and the colonel stared at me.

"What in the world are you doing, captain?", he asked me.

"My name is Carling Parker Buckman the Second, Captain, Battery B, 1st Battalion, 319th Airborne Field Artillery Regiment, 82nd Airborne Division. I am a serving officer in the United States Army, having neither resigned my commission nor been relieved of it by competent authority. I don't know who you are but you either return my salute or be damned to you!" I just no longer cared. He stared at me slack jawed, and then things went very dark again.

Chapter 59: Colonel Featherstone

When I woke again, everything seemed very bright. Not the bright at the end of the tunnel, just bright, like a bright room. By the time I got around to opening my eyes, I fell asleep again. It seemed like this went on a few more times before I managed to get my eyes open enough to see where I was. I could see a white ceiling of some sort, and I tried to move, but I couldn't move. I could feel things, but I couldn't move. I was able to turn my head, and rise up slightly, and it looked like I was in a hospital room.

I must be alive, I thought to myself. If I had died, I didn't think Heaven was a hospital room, although the odds were very long that I would be anywhere near Heaven. No, the reverse was far more likely, and while Hell might indeed be a hospital room, it didn't seem likely. Maybe Limbo is a hospital room, but I was Lutheran, sort of, and we don't believe in Limbo or Purgatory or any of the other Catholic waiting rooms to eternity.

I tried to move some more, and managed to raise my head a little more. I was strapped to the bed. Well, at least my new prison cell was more comfortable than my last one. That wore me out a little, and I fell back asleep.

The next time I woke up was when a nurse was in the room. She must have been fiddling with something on me, because my eyes came open and she noticed. She smiled brightly at that, and said, "Oh, good! You're coming awake! How are you feeling?"

I opened my mouth, but I couldn't even croak out an answer. She brought over a small cup of water and a straw. "Try this." It was very difficult to drink that way, but I got enough in me to make a response. "Would you like to be up some?"

This time I managed to croak out, "Yes."

She went behind my head and cranked on the bed, and slowly my head raised up. When I was at about a thirty degree angle, she stopped and we tried again with the water. I drained the cup. It tasted like ambrosia. "Thank you.", I whispered. I cleared my throat, and tried again. "Thank you." That sounded a little better, almost human.

"A little more?", she asked.

I sipped some more water, and worked it around and over my lips. I could feel with my tongue that somebody, probably a nurse, had rubbed some Vaseline or something on my lips to keep them from cracking. I cleared my throat some more, and said, "Thank you. What happened? Where am I?" Now I sounded almost myself again.

The nurse looked at me nervously. "Do you know your name?"

"Huh? I'm Carl Buckman, Captain Carl Buckman, 1st of the 319th. Why? Where am I? What is this place?" She looked relieved. Maybe she thought I had amnesia. "What's going on? Am I still in prison?" I looked around the room. My hands were Velcroed to the sidebars of the bed, which was why I couldn't move them. Another reason I couldn't move was that my right leg seemed to be wrapped in bandage and elevated like it was in traction. I wasn't going anywhere anytime soon.

The nurse was still trying to answer the prison comment, when I rattled my arms against the bedrails briefly. "Any chance you can unstrap me? I don't think I'm going anywhere."

That at least got another smile. Pretty girl. "We did that while you were asleep, to keep you from messing with the IVs and lines. If you promise to leave them alone, I'll let you loose."

"I give you my word as an officer and a gentleman, or at least as an officer. The gentleman part is questionable at best." I smiled and waggled my eyebrows at her.

"I think I'm safe enough for the moment.", she replied, and unstrapped my hands.

I promptly used them to scratch myself, moving slowly because of the intravenous lines. "You have no idea how good that feels!" She laughed as I scratched my body and arms. I wasn't in very much pain, although my torso seemed very tender, and I could feel bandages all over my left side. That stopped me. That was new.

"You never said where I was, or what's happening.", I told her.

The smile disappeared. "You'll need to talk to the doctor. I'll let him know you're awake. I'll bring you dinner in a few minutes.", she told me, glancing at her wristwatch.

I just nodded. I wasn't going to get any answers from her. I could see a frosted glass window with wire mesh embedded in it, and when she left, I heard a distinctive click as she latched the door. I must be in a prison hospital ward of some sort. It still beat my last accommodations. Maybe I could call a lawyer from here.

Dinner proved to be some broth and juice. I was promised that if I was good, at my next meal I might get some Jell-O as a dessert. Wow, talk about your incentives! I could barely contain my excitement.

I think it was about an hour or two later when the nurse returned with a doctor. I wasn't sure, since there wasn't a clock in my cell, or whatever it was. Right after he said hello and introduced himself as Doctor Bancroft, I asked him, "Where am I? What's happening?"

"We'll get to that later.", he answered, dodging the question.

"Thanks, Colonel.", I said with a grimace. I knew I was still in a military prison, since he had eagles on his collars under his white coat.

He gave me an odd look at that, but started to examine me, while the nurse, who had first lieutenant's bars on her collars, took notes and wrote things down. It was a fairly standard examination ("Does this hurt? Does that hurt?") after which I learned a little about what was going on, at least regarding my condition.

The date was 24 November, the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. I had been in the hospital for four days now. The first three I had been sedated and unconscious while I healed up. I had gotten an intestinal infection from drinking polluted water, which was why I had the shivers and the runs in the cell, but it wasn't clear whether I drank the polluted water on the hike back to civilization or in my basement cell. In fact, when I asked directly, Doctor Bancroft refused to discuss it. I was on an antibiotic regimen currently.

The bandages and tape on my left side were both to help my ribs heal (three were cracked, but not broken) and to cover the stitches in my side and back. They had opened me up to stitch up some lacerations in my left kidney, which had been discovered when I was pissing blood. A tube was still in place to drain off fluid. That was the extent of my internal injuries. Most of my torso was still a rainbow of colors from the beating and bruising. I was now moving from the mundane black and blue into greens and yellows. The doctor didn't comment on my beating, just on the effects of it. He seemed very impressed that I was able to stand up when I was found. Me, not so much; his clinical detachment was starting to piss me off.

The worst damage was to my right knee, which was why it was wrapped and immobilized. Again, the doctor refused to comment on whether the damage was the result of my bad landing, or my jailer kicking me. Either way, it was serious. He suspected major ligament damage and tearing, and surgery was necessary, at least after I was strong enough.

"Oh, good. That way I'll be able to walk to my hanging.", I told him. He didn't respond.

He also didn't respond when I pressed him on where I was. After the examination he simply left, taking the nurse with him. He did tell me, however, that it was about 1600, and I was going to be eating soft foods for a while. Since I was conscious again, about half the tubes and IVs could be pulled, but I still had a catheter in, and solids wouldn't be a good idea until we could do something where I could walk again, as in walk to the bathroom. At the prospect of using a bedpan for Number Two, suddenly broth and Jell-O looked like good choices!

I slept fitfully that night. My rest was not helped by a nurse taking my temperature every four hours. Breakfast was at 0700. I at least could get the nurses to tell me what time it was when they made their rounds.

At 0800, my delicious repast of juice and yogurt consumed, the latch on my door clicked and my nurse came in. She took my temperature and blood pressure, and then took my tray away. However, as she was leaving, another voice sounded, one that seemed vaguely familiar, saying he was entering, and we were to be left alone. I turned around to see who was coming in.

It was the colonel who I had saluted in the cell in basement. He must have been the one who got me out of there. He came over to the side of the bed and said, "Good morning, Captain Buckman. My name is Featherstone. How are you feeling?"

I eyed this man warily. "I'm feeling better now than I was in that basement."

He nodded and smiled. "Yes, I expect you are. That's really why I'm here, to talk to you about that. I'm from the JAG Corps in Washington."

Well, that explained a few things. Dorne must have been able to contact somebody after all, although whether that was good or not, I didn't know yet. Featherstone had the distinctive patch of the Military District of Washington on his sleeve, a naked sword superimposed over the Washington Monument. The standing joke was that whenever they forgot where they were, they were to look at their sleeves so they could look for the monument and find their way home. The sword was to make a bunch of pencil-pushers feel brave.

"Okay. Where am I?"

"You're at the base hospital at Guantanamo Bay, in Cuba.", he replied calmly.

I wasn't so calm. My most recent memories of Gitmo were from after 9/11, when it became a military prison for terrorists and anybody else the government could convince itself was a national security threat. Ultimately it would house more American citizens than Arab terrorists. "GITMO! You sent me to Gitmo!? Jesus, the Army wasn't bad enough, you had to give me to the Navy!?" Featherstone laughed loudly at this. At least one of us was enjoying himself.

"What the hell am I doing in Gitmo?", I asked. "Doesn't Leavenworth have a prison ward in the hospital?"

"Oh, this isn't the prison ward. Actually it's the NP ward, neuropsychiatric. That's why it's all locked up."

Sweet Jesus! This just kept getting better and better! "The psych ward? You put me in the psych ward?! It's not enough to put me in prison, you have to label me as a Section 8, too!? Why don't you just shoot me with a silver bullet and drive a stake through my heart while you're at it!" I looked away from him for a moment and contemplated my surroundings. I turned back and said, "You know, screw you! I want a lawyer. Get me a lawyer and get the fuck out of here. I don't care who you are. I want a lawyer and I want one now."

Surprisingly, Featherstone just stood there and smiled, and didn't complain about my cursing a superior officer. "Captain, relax, you're not under arrest, and you're not in the NP ward."

"Yeah? You just told me I was in the nut shack. If I'm not in jail, then get me a goddamned phone! I'm calling my wife!" Marilyn wouldn't understand this, but she could call a lawyer for me.

He held his hands up in a placating gesture. "Relax, Captain Buckman. I simply had you stashed here while I sorted out this clusterfuck. As soon as we're done talking, I'll get you a telephone. Just relax and let's talk first."

I nodded warily, and he relaxed some. "Good. Now, just hold on a second, this is going to take some time." He went back to the door and opened it, making me figure that he was leaving me and locking me back in jail. Instead he simply opened it and yelled out to a nurse for a stool. She brought it back and he thanked her, and then he carried it over by my bed. I was still sitting upright from breakfast, and now he could look me in the eye.

Featherstone reached into a pocket and pulled out a pack of Camels and a lighter. He searched around and scrounged up a plastic cup, which he poured some water into. Then he lit up a cigarette, right there in the hospital! I mean, yeah, it wasn't like later years, when the health Nazis would have arrested him, but still! "You mind?", he asked, seeing the look on my face. "That was a rhetorical question. I'm a colonel, you're a captain. I don't care if you mind. Want one?"

"No thanks."

"Okay, let's talk. Lieutenant Dorne got in touch with somebody in JAG HQ. He's pretty green, but he called somebody who called somebody else, and it landed way up at the top of the food chain. I've been assigned to sort it all out. That's why it took a couple of days for us to find you, captain."

"You were sent down by the Pentagon?", I asked.

"Not precisely. The Army JAG office is in Arlington, but not in the Pentagon itself. Nearby, though. That doesn't matter, though. Just be glad Dorne was able to call home. He was under orders not to, but he knew enough to know those were illegal orders. I flew down on a C-11. That's what I had you flown out on, too."

What the fuck was a C-11? "What's a C-11?", I asked.

"Military version of a Gulfstream II. Sweet little bird! They have a newer and bigger version called the Gulfstream III now, a C-20. Sort of like a Learjet. That's not important. I had them load you and a doctor on it and had it fly you here, to Gitmo. That got you out of Hawkins' reach and under the care of the Navy and the Marines.", Featherstone said. He dropped his cigarette butt in the cup of water and pulled another from the pack. He was a chain smoker.

"Huh." That explained the funny looks when I called the doctor 'Colonel'. He was actually a Navy Captain. I looked at the colonel. "So this was all Hawkins' idea? He's the one on my ass?"

Colonel Featherstone gave me a pained look. "Captain, how can you say such a thing! Brigadier General Hawkins knew nothing about your problems! Why he was shocked, shocked that there was gambling going on there!"

I rolled my eyes at the reference to Casablanca. Outstanding movie, although Marilyn never appreciated it all that much. Featherstone had just told me that Hawkins was in it up to his eyeballs.

Featherstone went on to explain, "The general was very disappointed in your improper radio procedures, but certainly didn't consider that much of an offense. Instead, he ordered the Provost Marshal, Major Carmichael, to investigate. It was Carmichael who decided you had violated every precept of good military order and needed to be punished, not the general."

"Uh, huh.", I muttered.

"Yes. Major Carmichael explained, however, that he never knew what was happening in the basement. He had told Staff Sergeant Walsley that he wanted you to confess, but not that you were to be harmed. He just wanted him to talk to you, and convince you of the error of your ways."

"Shit flows downhill, huh, Colonel?"

"You seem to have a succinct grasp of the situation, Captain Buckman.", agreed Colonel Featherstone.

"Crap!"

"Needless to say, once I began investigating, General Hawkins allowed me to clear up all the confusion. I was able to interview all the men who dropped with you, your commanding officer, your regular troops, even the helo crew that pulled you out. That's where I've been for the last few days, after I put you on the plane here. Chasing down everything. That's why I couldn't let you talk to anybody until I got things settled down."

"Is that your job? Pentagon fixer?"

Featherstone gave me a ghostly smile. "Why? You need any tickets taken care of, Captain?"

I snorted at that. Featherstone was the Army JAG Corps hammer, sent out to fix problems. Every outfit has one. He'd never make general, but nobody, not even generals, wanted to piss him off. "So what happened to my men?", I asked.

"Which ones? Battery B or Company C?"

That made me start for a second. I had almost forgotten about Battery B, my regular outfit! "Both."

"Lieutenant Fletcher took the battery back to Bragg a few days ago. They left their 105s behind as a gift to the Honduran Army. They'll be getting new ones back at home."

I nodded at that. I had heard that was under consideration. Now they would have new toys to play with, even if they were the same model as before. "And Company C?"

"They've gone home, too. Private Smith is probably medicalled out, but you saved his leg and his life. The doctors said another day and he'd have lost the leg for sure. The other guys just got some sprains and strains mostly."

"Good. They're damn fine troops, all of them.", I replied.

"They thought quite highly of you, too. By the time I talked to them, Company C was considering an assault on the headquarters building, and Battery B was going to provide artillery support. That idiot second john they had wasn't very popular, that's for sure. What's your take on him?", asked Featherstone.

"I'm guessing that he's the one who filed the complaint with the Provost Marshal."

Featherstone nodded. "He was filing charges before he even made it to the hospital. He barely had a scratch on him."

I just nodded, and then sighed. "Have you ever heard about the four types of officers? I think it was one of the German generals who named them, Von Manstein or Clausewitz, maybe one of the Von Moltkes."

Featherstone looked puzzled for a second and then his eyes lit up. "Ah, yes, I take your meaning."

The specific source is somewhat debatable. The basic truism, though, is that an officer can be either smart or stupid, and either lazy or energetic. Smart and lazy officers make the best combat commanders. Smart and energetic officers make the best staff officers. Stupid and lazy officers are harmless; you can always make them the regimental historian or something, but are otherwise incapable of doing any damage. The only ones you have to worry about are the stupid and energetic officers - like Second Lieutenant Fairfax!

"You said they had him?"

Featherstone nodded. "Second Lieutenant Fairfax has been transferred to a training post with the Rwandan Army.", he said drily.

When the military wants to get rid of an officer, without going through the process of a court martial, the usual technique is to give the officer a lousy OER and then assign him to the ass end of the world until he resigns or retires. Alaska and Greenland in the winter, Saudi Arabia in the summer, that was the perfect way to tell Fairfax his next promotion would be a long time coming. The middle of Africa was certainly an interesting dumping ground.

As would be mine. "Maybe I'll say hello when I see him. Am I doing the Rwanda tour, too?"

"Hmmm?", commented Featherstone neutrally.

"Come on, Colonel, no matter what happens, my career is trashed. I was arrested in front of my men and taken away in handcuffs. The entire division knows I'm a mutineer and a murderer by now! How long before the rest of the Army knows?"

The colonel shrugged and dropped his cigarette butt into the makeshift ashtray. What was it, his fourth or fifth? He must have lungs that were as black as my soul! He pointed at my leg. "Captain, the reason your career is over is your leg. I talked to the doctor before I saw you. You'll never jump again. Hell, you're going to need two or three operations and three months of rehab just to be able to walk! You're history no matter what!"

And just like that I was out of the Army. No major at 28, no Fort Sill and CGS, no battalion or regiment or brigade command. Medicalled out at 26, and don't let the door hit your ass on the way out.

I simply shook my head in disbelief. "So, Colonel, tell me what happened? How the hell did we end up in Nicaragua anyway?"

Featherstone gave me a very serious look. "You are mistaken, Captain Buckman. You were never in Nicaragua. Your Honduran pilot got lost and dropped you in Honduras, not in Nicaragua. Is that clearly understood?" I snorted and rolled my eyes. "I asked if you understood me!"

"Don't push it, Colonel. I might understand it, but I don't have to like it. What's the rest of the fallout from this disaster? You know, the disaster that never happened?"

"It was a training accident, Captain. That's what we're calling it, and it's classified."

"And I was there, remember, so tell me everything if you want it to stay classified!", I pushed back.

Featherstone shrugged. "Well, like you said, shit flows downhill. Wilcox is taking early retirement..."

I must have gaped at that. "Lieutenant Colonel Wilcox? The battalion commander?!"

He nodded. "I can almost sympathize with him, but he should have never let Hawkins jump you from those planes. He should have stood his ground. Your brigade commander would have backed him up. He was absolutely furious when he heard about it." I shrugged and Featherstone continued, "Carmichael is gone, too. I made it clear to him that the only way he was avoiding something even worse was if he testified against the MP sergeant, Walsley. I tossed the book at him. He pled out and is getting two years in Leavenworth and a Big Chicken Dinner." That was a BCD or Bad Conduct Discharge. "He'd have gotten five years if he had fought it. The corporal took an Other Than Honorable discharge, and was damn glad to get it. Hell, the only reason the brigade commander didn't get canned was that he was called to Washington before this happened."

"And Hawkins?"

We were interrupted by a nurse coming in to take my temperature and ask me about lunch ("Chicken broth or beef?") She gave Featherstone holy hell about his smoking in a hospital. As soon as she left, he lit up another cigarette.

"Hawkins?", I repeated.

"Brigadier General Hawkins is now Major General (Designate) Hawkins. He will get his second star effective January 1. Operation Southern Shield '81 has been a rousing success.", he replied, deadpan.

My jaw dropped, and I gaped, my mouth flapping open and shut like a beached fish. After a minute or two, I got my wits together and cried out, "You're kidding me, right? They give him a battalion on a routine training deployment, and he gets two men killed, two medicalled out, two more cashiered, and another man sent to Leavenworth - and they gave him another star! Jesus Christ! Why not just give him the entire fucking brigade! He could have killed us all and made Chief of fucking Staff!"

"That's the way it works, Captain.", he replied. He shrugged. "Not that it matters much, but he had already been approved before this disaster. Maybe it will catch up to him before he gets his third star."

I knew what it was. It was the WPPA, the West Point Protective Association, at work. This was the informal association of West Point graduates, or 'ringknockers', so named because of the heavy and distinctive class rings they wore. They were known to rap their rings on a desk or chair arm on occasion, to let people know that as graduates of Hudson High, their opinions counted more than others.

When I graduated ROTC at RPI, I ranked high enough to be Regular Army, not Reserve. All West Point graduates are Regular Army, even the village idiot. All pigs are equal, but some pigs are more equal than others. The WPPA usually makes itself known by making sure that various graduates of West Point move up the ladder of promotion at the correct pace, or by otherwise getting them an appropriate posting or assignment. Sometimes it can be harmless, like when my old CO, Captain Harris transferred to Fort Rucker for helo flight training. His record with Battery B hadn't exactly been stellar, so the WPPA moved him somewhere else for a second chance.

Now it looked like the ringknockers were circling the wagons around Hawkins. I shook my head in disgust. "What'd they do with the pilot? Give him a medal?"

Featherstone shrugged. "Probably. You're getting one, why not him?"

"Excuse me? What medal? Best behaved prisoner?"

"Try a Bronze Star.", he said drily.

"Right." I stared at him, and he wasn't smiling. "You're serious?" He nodded. "For what?"

"The Bronze Star can be awarded for either bravery or merit, or both. You qualify, Captain, on both counts."

"Forget it! I'll never wear it! It's an insult to the men I was with!"

"You don't wear it for yourself, Captain, you wear it for the men you were with. It's always that way, son, for any medal. Believe me. Wear it for the ones who can't.", he replied. "Hell, if you want to, think of it as a payoff for keeping your mouth shut about this fucking nightmare. It doesn't matter. Believe me, you earned it!"

I looked at Featherstone. He was in his Class As, and for the first time I looked at his chest. He had a Bronze Star with a V for Valor and an oak leaf cluster adorning it, signifying a second award, along with a Purple Heart and the red, yellow, and green Viet Nam Service Medal. Colonel Featherstone hadn't always been a lawyer. I nodded in understanding to him.

"Technically you need to be in either a combat theater or serving with troops in a combat situation, but I convinced your brigade commander that Nicaragua qualified.", he commented. "By the way, what did you do to get your battalion commander so pissed off? He refused to recommend you for the award. I got the recommendation from the commander of the 505th. You don't get the V device, but so what."

I laughed at that. "I kept growing! Mighty Mouse has a problem with officers of height. You'd do even worse!" Featherstone was even taller than I was, by an inch or so. "Unfortunately for me, but fortunately for the battalion, he's disturbingly competent otherwise."

"Well, they can't all be bad, now can they?"

The nurse returned with my broth and gave Featherstone another ration of shit for smoking. He put away his smokes and conned her into getting him a sandwich while I slurped my broth and Jell-O. He made several disparaging remarks about my meal, so I gave him a Bronx salute, which he just laughed off.

After lunch, Colonel Featherstone said, "Take me through the mission, start to finish. I want to hear your side of it. You're the only one I haven't heard it from. Take it from the top."

I spent the next half hour going over the drop, from the time we were trucked over to the Gooney Birds to the time we landed back at the base in the Hueys. "I can figure why Hawkins was pissed at me. What happened? Did he have the MPs waiting for me as soon as the first bird landed?"

"Pretty much. The Provost Marshal snapped up your Lieutenant Fairfax as soon as he landed. He's the one who said you killed the four civilians."

I stopped at that point, and eyed Featherstone for a moment. "I think you meant to say allegedly killed the four civilians, counselor."

He shrugged. "Eh. Maybe so, maybe so. Tell me about them, Captain. Hypothetically, of course."

I took a second to gather my thoughts. No way was I about to confess to jack shit with this guy! "Hmmm ... hypothetically speaking of course. Well, remember, once we were all down, my mission was twofold. First, get all my men back home, no matter what. Second, not to let the Nicaraguans know that they had been invaded. No international incidents."

Featherstone nodded. "International incidents are bad. If you guys had been captured by the Nicaraguans, they could have had you in the headlines for a year. Remember the Pueblo?"

"Quite. So anyway, we captured these four narcos, not soldiers or civilians, but drug traffickers. Unfortunately for us, our resident genius, Lieutenant Fairfax, disobeyed orders and spoke to these clowns in English, so they knew we were Americans. Hypothetically speaking, of course, anything that happened to those men was ultimately his responsibility."

It was his turn to nod. "I heard that already, although not from him. I have to tell you, nobody else corroborated his allegations of murder."

"Then I guess the murders never happened.", I replied.

"Yeah? So tell me, hypothetically speaking, what happened next."

"Nothing, of course. Like all the others told you I went over to the prisoners, who were tied up next to the fuel dump, and released them, then fired four shots into the air to scare them away. It must have worked. Have we heard anything from the Nicaraguans?"

"Nothing. Of course, Lieutenant Fairfax says you simply shot the men and then burned them up in the fire."

"Well, considering that Lieutenant Fairfax and all the men were in the LZ at the time, nobody would have seen me releasing the prisoners, would they?", I asked. "Which is what happened, of course."

"So I was told." He waited a few seconds, thinking about things. My answers must have satisfied his curiosity, or whatever, and he shrugged. "It's over now. Care to make a phone call?"

"Yes, please."

He nodded and stood to go to the door. "Captain, let me just say one last thing to you. I pulled your records before I ever came down here. I've read your fitness reports. I've seen your FBI and CIC background reports. I've even seen your IRS tax records..."

"The FBI and CIC? What are you talking about?", I said, interrupting him.

Featherstone nodded and looked serious. "You were being groomed for major command, Captain. Of course there were background checks."

"Jesus!"

He continued. "I probably know more about you than anybody but your wife. You graduated from high school, for all intents and purposes, at 16. Your family threw you out then, too. I know about your psychotic brother. You burned through college and got a doctorate at 21. You made captain at 25 and were going to be a major at 28. You could have done the R&D stint and CGS blindfolded and standing on your head. Hell, you'd probably have picked up another grad degree there. After that, a nice tour as a battalion exec somewhere, followed by a tour at the Pentagon for seasoning. You'd have a brigade sometime in your thirties. Sound familiar?"

I nodded mutely. He was right. I'd have had a brigade just in time to take them into action against the Iraqis when they invaded Kuwait. Commanding a brigade in the most lopsided victory since the Franco-Prussian War would have been a guarantee of a star by the time I made twenty years. Featherstone kept going. "You've been on a high speed tear through life since you hit puberty. You're already a multimillionaire." He must have seen the surprise on my face, because he then said, "Yeah, I know. I had the IRS pull your tax returns, remember?"

I shrugged at that. "What's your point, Colonel?"

"Just this. You've been on a high speed tear to general. You'd have made it, too. But it's all over now. The thing to remember, Captain, is that this is just another job. Really, that's all it is. It's a good job, an honorable job, a dangerous and exciting job at times. It's certainly a job that needs doing. Still, at the end of the day, it's just a job. That job is now over for you. Your job is not who you are, it's what you do. It's time to go home now and be a father and a husband. That's your job now.", answered Colonel Featherstone.

I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. He was right in many ways. I was a fast burner. Like General Hawkins? Would I have been like him? Burning through people? I didn't like that thought. I had nothing left to prove here. I opened my eyes and smiled. "Point taken, Colonel. Get me that phone and I'll start on that."

"The plan is that tomorrow you'll be flown to Washington, to Walter Reed, for the work on your knee. If you'd like, I can help get your family to see you there."

"I'd appreciate that, sir."

Five minutes later the colonel returned with a telephone and a wire that he plugged into a phone jack behind the bed. Interestingly, it was still a high security area. The phone didn't have a dial, but when you picked up the handle you immediately got a switchboard and had to give the number to be called. When I gave them my home number, Colonel Featherstone nodded and left the room.

"Hello?", answered Marilyn.

"Honey, it's me, Carl."

"CARLING! Where are you!? What's happened to you!?"

"It's all right, honey, it's all right. I just had a bit of an accident and I'm in the hospital now. I'm being flown to Washington tomorrow, to Walter Reed Hospital. Maybe you could drive up. I want to see you and my son. God, you sound good!", I told her.

"Carl, what happened? What's going on? I don't understand! I heard you were in jail!"

"It's all a misunderstanding, Marilyn. I'm not in jail. I've just got a problem with one of my knees. I'll be fine. I'll explain it all when I see you. Can you come up?"

"Yes! How ... yes!"

"I'll get somebody to come over and help."

"I just don't understand what's happening, Carl! Somebody came over from the battery with all your personal stuff and told me you were being court martialed! What's going on?"

I smiled to myself. "It was just a misunderstanding. It's going to be all right, Marilyn. We'll have a long, long talk."

It was the day before Thanksgiving. I really had something to be thankful for this year.

Chapter 60: Starting Over

After our brief call, the phone was removed from my room. I guess Colonel Featherstone wasn't a very trusting sort, or maybe he was just a careful sort. It wasn't important to me. I had come to terms with what was happening.

I wasn't going to hide my money anymore, either. I asked him to arrange a nice suite at a nearby hotel, a good one, like a Hilton or a Ritz, not some damn Super-8. He suggested the Hilton in Silver Spring, which was only a few miles away, across the line in Maryland, and less than a ten minute drive. I agreed to that. He would have somebody from the local JAG office in Fort Bragg call her tomorrow and give her directions, or meet with her on Friday before she drove up. Then somebody from the JAG office in DC would meet her and get her to Walter Reed on Saturday.

After that I said thank you and farewell to the colonel. He told me that he'd follow my case, but that he needed to fly to Fort Rucker in Alabama to sort out some other assholes. I got the impression that was his main job, solving problems that nobody wanted to go to trial or to be in public with.

I knew Marilyn. She would be lucky to get the car packed and on the road by noon. The family joke was to always tell her you had to leave half an hour before she really had to leave, that way she would be on time. It was about a six hour drive from Fayetteville to Washington, unless she got lost and detoured through San Francisco. Hopefully she would notice the Mississippi River before she crossed it.

That meant she would spend the night at the Hilton and see me in two days. That was probably fine by my schedule. That had me spending two more nights here, getting checked and prepped for the transfer, and then being flown in an old C-123 Provider to Andrews in Washington, to be transferred to Walter Reed. I probably wouldn't get there before she did. I just hoped I would have a chance to see her before they started working on me at Walter Reed.

In two days time I was deemed healthy enough to travel. Whatever was wrong with my kidneys seemed okay, but they left the drain in my side. I lost a few more of the tubes in me, but they kept a couple of IVs in place, as well as the catheter. It was a wonderful flight. The Provider was even noisier and rougher than a Herc, and my not quite cute and bubbly flight attendant had a five o'clock shadow.

I was greeted at Walter Reed with a full physical. It was apparent that only Walter Reed's eminent physicians could possibly diagnose me correctly. After all, the Navy ran the hospital at Guantanamo Bay, and it was well known that they still used leeches. (Surprisingly, I heard the same comment from the staff in Gitmo about Army hospitals.) This continued the next morning, until about lunch time, and nobody would tell me if Marilyn or my son were there yet.

They were. I was wheeled in my bed back to my private room around lunchtime. The private room was at Colonel Featherstone's request, because I had told him that Classified or not, I was going to tell my wife what had happened. I wasn't going to tell her what I had done with the four prisoners. Marilyn would never understand or accept that.

I had been giving those killings a lot of thought over the last few days. By some standards I had murdered those men, but not by all standards. According to both the Geneva Convention and the Uniform Code of Military Justice, I was prohibited from killing civilians under any circumstances, unless they were attacking me or my troops. Then again, if I had obeyed the Geneva Convention, I was to turn myself and my men over to civilian authorities and be interned or paroled and released. That was ludicrous.

During war time operations, I was actually justified in some cases in killing people in furtherance of my mission. Again, that didn't apply. If I had been there legitimately on a drug related mission, I could turn my prisoners over to civilian authority for disposal, again, not a realistic alternative.

Or I could just put a bullet in each brain and decide the world was better off without four narcos in it.

Once, when I was working on my MBA, I had taken a class in Personnel Management and Human Relations, taught by a guy who was a vice-president at ATT and chain smoked in class worse than Featherstone. One day, totally out of the blue, he asked for a show of hands. 'How many of you believe in capital punishment?' About half of us, including myself, put our hands up. He nodded and then told us, 'You're the people who will be able to fire people.' He then went on to explain how firing people was very similar to killing them, in terms of self esteem and the consequences, but that managers had to be able to do it.

I often wondered if that was why I always liked line jobs over staff. My father didn't believe in capital punishment (strange in a hard core Republican, at least to me) and hated line positions, where that sort of thing happens. I never had any problems with firing people; it's just part of the job, nothing personal, just do it.

It seemed as if I was the same when it came to actually killing people. I didn't have to like it; I just had to do it. So far I hadn't lost any sleep over it.

Curiously, my mother had no problems with capital punishment, either. She had a cold streak at times. I remember once when she sat on a death penalty jury, and voted to give the guy the needle. He sat on death row for eight years before the Innocence Project got his DNA tested and proved he was innocent, and got him released. As far as Mom was concerned, he was a scumbag anyway, so they should have fried him regardless. She didn't bat an eye when she told me that. Mom wouldn't have minded my killing four narcos, that's for sure!

I saw Marilyn with a baby stroller in the hallway as they wheeled me into my room. I turned to call to her but the orderly was moving too fast. It didn't matter; Marilyn had seen me, too. About thirty seconds later she came barreling into my room with that stroller, followed by a nurse. The nurse was smiling, and she didn't interfere.

Marilyn's face was lit up, but she was also crying, and she damn near threw herself on top of me. "Oh God, oh God, you're home, you're home!" Thankfully she was on my right side, since all the tubes and lines running into me were on my left side. I just smiled and rubbed her back. "You're alive! You're alive!"

I stopped her with a big kiss, and then pushed her upright. "I have missed you so much, but I think we need to let the nurse get in here."

The nurse, named Hawthorne according to her name tag, simply checked my temperature and blood pressure, and then told us what the visiting hours were, and then she bent down over the baby stroller and cooed. "Well, aren't you just darling! And so well behaved, too!"

Marilyn smiled at me, and then bent down to the stroller. "Would you like to meet your son?", she asked me.

Nurse Hawthorne gasped and said, "Is this the first chance you've had to see your baby?!" She raised my bed up so that I was sitting upright, as Marilyn extricated Charlie from his contraption.

"Charles Robert Buckman, this is your father!" Marilyn held our son up to me. He was in blue baby clothes, and had a summer weight blanket around him, and she placed him in my hands.

If I had been expecting Charlie to look like Parker, it wasn't even close. Parker had taken after me and my mother; Charlie was more like Marilyn's family, the men's side, which tended to blond and stocky.

I sat my son in my lap and supported his back. He was about two months old now, and was able to hold himself upright, with some help. He didn't make much noise, but he was looking at me and making the funniest expressions on his face, and then he gave me a big grin. Marilyn was ecstatic! "He knows he's with his Daddy!"

"He's probably got gas!", I replied.

That set the nurse to laughing and she took her leave. Marilyn scolded me, but I just sniffed the air, and told her I thought I was closer to the truth. I held my right thumb up in front of him and he latched onto it. He was still too young to do much more than that, but he seemed pretty normal to me. Certainly I didn't see any signs of Williams Syndrome! You can tell in the facial structure long before any of the other symptoms show.

I counted aloud his fingers. "All ten! What about his toes?", I asked Marilyn.

"All ten there, too." answered my wife.

I grinned at my son. "All ten piggies? I'll check them later!" I glanced back at Marilyn. "What about, well, you know."

"What?"

"Well, can he count to 21?"

It took her a second, but then she rolled her eyes and groaned. "Men! You all think that's so important! Yes, he can count to 21!"

I turned back to Charlie. "I'll take Mommy's word for it. I'm not going to look. Daddy doesn't do diapers!"

"Daddy's a wimp!" Marilyn took him back and sniffed his diaper. "Here, you get to find out now." She handed him back to me and then dug a diaper from the diaper bag on the back of the stroller. She found a flat spot at the end of the bed and expertly changed him. She had been changing her brothers and sisters since she was big enough to pick up a baby. Before she was done, though, she held him up for me to see. "See? Twenty-one!"

"Looks like he can get to 22 and 23 as well.", I commented.

"Men!" After changing him, it was feeding time. Marilyn gave him back to me, and then dug out a blanket from the bag and draped it over her shoulder and her chest. Then she unbuttoned her blouse and took Charlie back, and slid him under the blanket. She was breast feeding him!

"Well, I guess that beats a bottle.", I said. We had discussed this during Lamaze classes.

"He's a little piglet is what he is!" Marilyn grimaced for a moment as he latched on fiercely. "Watch it buster!"

"Well, he's a Buckman, that's for sure!" Marilyn smiled at that. "God, you look so good. I have missed you so much!"

"I've missed you, too. You look terrible, though! You've lost a lot of weight."

I shrugged. "It's that delicious hospital food.", I told her. "It really cuts down on going back for seconds."

"It's more than that, and you know it."

I shrugged again. "I'm home now, and with you guys. I'll get back in shape. Hell of a diet plan, though, isn't it?"

Marilyn turned serious. "Carl, what happened to you? You were just supposed to go to Honduras for a few months and come home. Then you were reported lost and dead, and then you were under arrest, and then you were in the hospital. I don't understand! What happened to you?"

I sighed and told her. It took a good solid hour to explain things, since Marilyn didn't have the military background that Featherstone did. I glossed over the part with the prisoners, simply repeating my story that I released them and fired some shots in the air to hurry them along. (Yeah, hurry them along on their way to perdition. I was sure they would be there to greet me at some point in the future.)

She was simply speechless at the end of it. Charlie had drunk his fill and was snoozing in his stroller. I finished by saying, "And that's it. Now they have to operate on my leg and give me some rehab, and I'm out. I won't be Captain Buckman much longer, honey."

"After all that, they just throw you out? Like garbage? That's terrible! Can't you do something about it!?"

I was surprised by that, since Marilyn isn't the real gung-ho type. She wasn't real big on the Army to begin with. Maybe it was like when you are cleaning out a kid's closet and find the toy in the back they haven't played with in a year. You go to throw it away, and they toss a tantrum about it.

"It will be fine, Marilyn. We won't have to move to Oklahoma now, will we?", I said, putting a good face on it. It still galled me, but I could live with it. "Seriously, I might never walk without a limp again. I'll never have a command again."

"And that's important to you?", she asked.

And right then and there I knew it was. I didn't know what I was going to do in the future, but I knew I would have to be the boss. I looked out the window for a moment and then turned back. "Yeah, it is. It'd be like working in an ice cream store and never getting to lick the scoop. I'd go crazy. Don't worry about it, we'll be all right."

Marilyn gave me a very odd look as I said that. "Carl, we need to talk about that, too. I found your letter."

"Huh? What letter?"

She reached into her purse and pulled out a big manila envelope and my jaw dropped and my eyes opened wide. Oh, shit! That letter!

"You weren't supposed to read that, unless, well, you know!" The envelope had a label on it specifying, 'Open only in the event of my demise.', and had been in my dresser, under my briefs and underwear. I rubbed my hands over my face. Most soldiers have a letter like that, at least in the combat outfits. They either have one already made up, or write it just before they deploy, or sometimes they wait until the last minute and hand it to somebody back at the base before heading out on patrol or a jump. I had written mine back after we got married, and I updated it every few months after that.

"Dear Marilyn,

If you are reading this, then you'll know that I finally managed to make that jump without my chute on properly. Mom always said I'd come to no good, so I guess she was right all along.

You were the best thing I ever had in my life. You are better than I ever deserved. If I was to live a hundred lives, I would want you in each of them. I love you more than you can imagine. Please forgive me for not being good enough for you.

I am sorry I wasn't a better husband to you. You deserved a better man than me. Now, with you carrying our baby, I leave you alone with him (or her) and I wish I could have seen you with him. You will be a wonderful mother, and probably a much better father than I would have been. I am so sorry for that.

Someday you will meet somebody else, a man who will see in you all the wonderful things that I saw in you. He'll be a better man than I was, that's for sure. When it is time for you to move on, know that I want you to be happy. You deserve a good man.

As one last note, I want you to take the inner envelope to John Steiner, in Timonium, Maryland. His address is on the label. John has been my attorney for many years, and he wrote up my will, and will help you through all the probate and paperwork. Listen to him carefully. He's a very smart man, and a good friend.

Again, I love you beyond words and writing. You have been the best thing in my life, and know that no matter what happened to me, my last thoughts were of you.

Love,

Carl"

The inner envelope contained a copy of my will and my most recent brokerage account statements, along with written instructions to John, Missy Talmadge, and my accountant about helping Marilyn manage her money. Marilyn had opened this envelope as well. Both letters were smudged and spotted and crinkled up, and it took me a few seconds to realize it was from tears. I felt even lower than before.

Marilyn was crying as she watched me read the letter I had written her. "How can you say things like that? I love you! I'll never find a man better than you! You know I hate it when you run yourself down like that!"

Oh, shit! I opened my arms and she collapsed against my chest, crying. In doing so, she shifted on the bed and nudged my right leg, which made me want to scream, but I held it in. Better to lose the damn thing than piss her off any more. I just caressed her back and told her repeatedly that I loved her and was sorry for making her cry.

Eventually she relented and sat up again, once more hitting my leg, and I bit my tongue a second time. I also hit the button to call the nurse and get some morphine going! Marilyn picked up the second envelope and waved it at me. "I read through this, but I don't understand. You have a brokerage account that's worth millions of dollars? That can't be right!"

I rubbed my face again, and smiled at my wife. "Actually, it is. Marilyn, I'm a millionaire. A multimillionaire, actually. I'm probably worth about thirty-five million by now, maybe a bit more. I'm not sure, actually."

"You don't know!", she asked, a look of astonishment on her face.

"Honey, it's not like I've had a chance to look at the Wall Street Journal lately. It's not just in cash, it's in stocks, too."

"When? How? Why didn't you say something!?"

"I was going to tell you soon, anyway. I've been trading stocks since I was a kid. I'm very good at it. I made my first million before I ever met you. It's how I could buy a car and have my own apartment back when I was a teenager living in Maryland."

"You should have said something!"

"I was going to. I didn't tell anyone. Can you imagine the nuttiness if they'd known about this at the frat house!? Or girls? How would I know if they loved me or my wallet!? You loved me for me! I was going to tell you when we moved to Fort Sill. I told you I would buy you a house, right?"

"Yes.", she agreed, nodding her head.

"I was going to pay cash, no mortgage. Captains don't have that kind of money, Marilyn. I was going to tell you then."

Marilyn just stared at me, stunned. Finally she just muttered, "Wow!"

"It wasn't a lie, honey! I just didn't tell you everything!", I pleaded with her.

She swatted me a few times with the letters, which got rid of whatever mad she had, which couldn't have been much. "You and your sins of omission and commission! You'd have made a fine Jesuit!"

I smiled at her. "I'd never be able to handle the vows of celibacy!"

Marilyn blushed, and her eyes dropped down to my midsection. When I caught her doing that, she blushed even more. However, she recovered, and said, "Speaking of which..."

"Ah, yes, well, nothing is happening anytime soon. They've got a catheter in me. I have no idea when that's coming out. Soon, I hope. What about you? Are you able to, well, you know..."

Marilyn smiled and nodded. "I'm all healed up."

"What about the Pill? I'm guessing you're off that still.", I asked.

"Yes. I wonder when I can start that again.", she admitted.

I grinned at her. "You're at the U.S. Army's premier hospital in the entire world. I bet you can find a doctor here to answer that question. In fact, I'll bet you a million dollars that you can find a doctor here who can answer your questions!"

Marilyn's face lit up. "But I don't have a million dollars! What if I lose?"

I leered at her. "I'm sure we can find something else of value to wager. Maybe I'll take it out in trade."

Marilyn snorted and picked up Charlie who was fussing and waking up. A different nurse also came in, in response to my call for more pain meds. "You called?", she asked, pleasantly.

"My leg is bothering me. Any chance I can get something for it."

She looked at my chart and nodded. "Give me a few minutes and I'll bring something."

"Thank you. Hey, can I ask a couple of questions?"

"Carl!", protested Marilyn.

"Sure.", answered the nurse, who eyed Marilyn.

I ignored Marilyn. "How long is this catheter going to be in?", I turned to my wife. "Honey, she's a nurse. Trust me, we can ask her."

Nurse Greghams laughed. "Very true. As to the catheter, I can't really say. At least not until after your surgery, but you can ask the doctor tomorrow. Anything else?"

"My wife needs to go back on the Pill. Any chance you can help with that?"

Marilyn squealed in embarrassed outrage, but the nurse just laughed and asked Marilyn what brand she had used. "You'll need to see one of the OB-GYNs, but I can call and see about getting you an appointment."

Marilyn slugged my shoulder, and then sweetly said, "Thank you. Please."

Nurse Greghams laughed some more and then left to get me some hospital quality meds.

It was also time for Marilyn and Charlie to leave. We had been talking the entire afternoon, and still had so much more to say. My son woke up enough to sit in my lap and play with my fingers some more, and then I kissed him and his mother good-bye. I was perhaps more enthusiastic with his mother. Marilyn promised to return early the next morning and we would talk some more. The surgeon was supposed to come along in the morning and go over things with me also, so if the timing was good, she could sit in on it.

The next day was a Sunday. Marilyn got there in time to watch me finishing my juice and toast. I was now eating normal meals, or at least as normal as hospital meals get. Part of the liquids only was that by the time I got to the hospital I had been without food for a number of days, and surviving on Lurps for most of the time before that. If I had managed to get a real meal, I'd have puked it up in no time.

Marilyn was nursing Charlie when the surgeon came in. He had good news and he had bad news. The good news was that he wouldn't have to amputate, and I wouldn't need a knee replacement yet. The bad news was that I had some surgery to repair ligaments coming, and I would need rehab for months. Ultimately I would need a new knee, and in the meantime, I would probably be able to predict the weather. He had a model of a knee and pictures of all the ligaments, and it was just gibberish to me. Worst of all, they wouldn't know how bad it was until they cut me open.

In the early Eighties, most hospital imaging was still limited to old fashioned X-rays. While CT scans and PET scans and MRI scans had all been invented, the equipment involved was ludicrously expensive and very rare. Certainly the Army didn't have this stuff. It would take the coming digital revolution to bring costs down to the point where they would be commonplace. The same applied to the surgery itself. Arthroscopic surgery was still experimental. They were going to have to cut me open the old fashioned way, with long zippers and extensive recovery time. Surgery was scheduled for Monday morning, and Marilyn was asked to stay away. I would be unconscious for hours, and there was nothing she could do; they would call her when I woke up.

Afterwards, Marilyn and I talked some more, for the rest of the day. She had a very good idea, too. "Maybe we can call Suzie and see if she can visit?"

I blinked at that. "It's the end of November. She's in school. You'll have to call her and ask. Maybe she can take a bus? Or she can wait until Christmas, I'll probably still be here then."

"She needs a car.", Marilyn remarked in passing.

That got me to thinking. So did Marilyn and I! "You know, hold that thought. I need to dump the Impala, and you need something bigger for you and Buster. How about a station wagon for you?" Chrysler had not reinvented the minivan yet, not for a few more years.

Marilyn's lips flapped for a moment. "Really? I can get a new car!?"

"Whatever you want, honey. Well, within reason. I don't think Rolls Royce makes station wagons."

"Very funny! What about you?"

I shrugged. "I'll trade the Impala in on a Caddy or a Lincoln. Something nice and big. We can have a car, and a wagon."

"What about my little Toyota?"

"Probably won't get much for it. Why don't we just give it to Suzie? It'd be perfect for a college kid. She could pay the gas and Dad would pay the insurance.", I said.

"What would your parents say if they knew where it came from?"

I shrugged again. "Suzie can lie to them. That would be her problem, not mine."

"We should call Tusker and Tessa as well, invite them down. We haven't seen them since last year!", she said.

That was true. We had kept in touch with Tusker and Tessa since that oh so memorable wedding! They were married now (grandchildren will melt a grandparent's heart!) and were doing well. They had both graduated, Tessa with her Bachelors and Tusker with his Associates in Business, and last year, on schedule, he had opened a small motorcycle repair and sales shop in Timonium. "That's a very good idea! Give them a call and ask them to come down. We can get them a room for the night. When Suzie comes, she can stay in the suite with you, I guess."

She nodded, but then gave me a worried look. "Do you have their phone numbers? I left my address book at home!"

"And that is why the good Lord gave us telephone operators. When you get back to the hotel, get an outside line and call the operator. You can probably get a number for Tusker's business, and if you call the University of Delaware, they can at least find a way to get a message to Suzie. It's too late for either of them to come here this weekend."

Like my last trip through time and space, Suzie had applied to the University of Delaware's nursing school. She was just now starting her junior year. In a couple of years she would have both her BS in nursing and her RN credentials. She was about an hour's drive from Lutherville. "Maybe Suzie can take a bus from Dover to Washington, and you can get her or she can take a cab.", I said.

We talked about future plans, now that I was no longer going to be going career in the Army. Wherever we ended up, I would buy or build Marilyn a house, and we'd get some new cars, and as soon as I could get loose from the hospital, we were going on a nice and long vacation! Beyond that, we didn't make too many plans. We couldn't agree on where we wanted to live. Marilyn wanted to leave the Fayetteville area (too hot, too muggy, too southern) and I refused to move to upstate New York (I spent fifty-plus years shoveling snow up there; screw that idea!)

A lot of time was simply spent getting acquainted with my son. Charlie was only about ten weeks old, but he certainly seemed to have a healthy curiosity about everything. He looked at everything! He couldn't sit up by himself yet, but that little head and those little eyes kept turning around to watch everybody! Otherwise he was nothing but a food processing machine. Mom's milk went in one end, and toxic chemical waste came out the other end. What that child produced was a violation of the Geneva Conventions against gas and germ warfare! Oh, and keep your fingers and car keys out of his reach, since it all went into his mouth!

Monday was not enjoyable. Since I was going to be under anesthesia most of the day, they cut my meals off the afternoon before. Marilyn kept Charlie at the hotel. I signed papers and listened to warnings and then I was asked to count back from 100. I got to 99 and was out like a light. By the time I woke up, it was almost dinner time, and Marilyn was sitting there with Charlie by the bed. I stayed awake long enough to say, "Hello.", and then fell back asleep. By the time I woke up again, it was the middle of the night and they were gone.

They came back first thing Tuesday morning, and we all met the surgeon. The good news was actually more than I could hope for. While there had been extensive damage to the joint and the ligaments, they decided to do the repairs in a single seven hour session rather than two or three smaller sessions. That meant less time in the body shop and more time on the highway, so to speak. The bad news was that there had been extensive damage. I was going to need a couple of weeks before I could try walking on it, and a full recovery was very doubtful. My career was shot.

Two more weeks like this was going to drive me batty. We could still make future plans, though. Marilyn decided to switch Charlie over to formula, and she spent a morning that week talking to a staff gynecologist about going on the Pill. Fortunately, although all of her medical records were still at the Fort Bragg clinic, Marilyn still qualified to see a doctor here. When I was able to get out of here, we'd both be able to do something about the horniness that had been attacking the both of us. We started planning my escape.

That weekend I had visitors. Suzie caught a bus back to Baltimore, but then Tusker and Tessa and little Bucky went down to pick her up, and they all drove down to Silver Springs to see us. Marilyn and I had been joking about Tusker and his family driving down on his bike, with Bucky in a sidecar, but they came down in an old Ford he owned.

That Saturday was the day my catheter came out. Suzie was there when the nurse came in. "Cool! Can I watch?"

I spluttered something incoherent. "Suzie! No!"

"Carl, don't be so uptight. I'm a nursing student. I've seen penises before.", she replied.

"I don't care how many penises you've seen! You're not going to see mine!"

"You're no fun at all."

I shook a finger at her. "Why don't you go home and tell Dad about all the penises you've seen? I'll bet that will be a fun conversation!" She had the good grace to blush at that.

Tusker and Tessa were looking a little frazzled, but otherwise happy. Tessa was doing some part-time work at the biker bar, as well as doing the books for the bike shop and taking care of Bucky. Tusker was working all hours at the shop, and only had Sunday off. On the other hand, they seemed to be treading water with the money, and their little business was growing. They already had two full time employees, and were looking for a third. Bucky had his mother's build and features, but his father's bright red hair, and was a good kid. He was three now, and got into everything.

Suzie told us some unhappy news, also. Daisy had gone to the big puppy playpen in the sky. She had passed away in her sleep a couple of weeks before she had gone back to school. "I'm sorry, Suzie. She was a good dog."

Suzie looked very sad, but didn't cry. I knew she would have cried when it happened.

"How old was she?", asked Tessa.

Suzie looked over at me curiously. "I don't know. How old was she?"

I had to think a bit. When I came back through in 1968, she was young, but not a new puppy. "I'm not absolutely sure, but I think we got her in '65 or '66. It was the summer, that I remember. That would make her 14 or 15. What's that in dog years? Over a hundred, at least!"

"She hung in there!", commented Tusker.

I smiled at him. "That she did! She was a good dog." Suzie and I told a few Daisy related tales. Finally I stuck my finger in front of Charlie, and he latched onto it. "Once we get settled, we'll have to get a puppy for this guy to chase around."

Marilyn's eyes opened at that. "A puppy!" Her family is not a pet type family. They didn't have dogs or cats, or even fish in the fish tank.

I grinned. "All boys need a dog!"

Tessa laughed at that. "My sisters and I all had cats."

That made me laugh even harder. "That'd be even better. My mother is deathly afraid of cats! It's the perfect anti-Mom defense!"

Tusker and Tessa took Suzie back to Baltimore and got her on the bus to Newark. It was a good visit, and after they left, I said to my wife, "I think we ought to move back home."

Marilyn stared at me in disbelief. "Home? Your home? With your family?"

"No, no, nothing like that. I'm not that crazy! No, I mean, to Maryland. You want some place out in the country, and I don't want to shovel snow. There's still a lot of farm country in Maryland. It's not all suburbs. Northern Baltimore County is still very rural. I'm sure we can do something up there."

"I don't know...", she said slowly.

"Listen, once I can get loose from here, we'll drive up and look around. I'll show you! I know there's plenty of farmland and such up past Cockeysville and Hereford."

Marilyn shrugged her shoulders. "Speaking of which, how are we going to do that? You can't drive yet, and the Toyota is awfully small!"

"I have no idea." The more I thought about it, the more I realized I was still at the mercy of the Army. Walter Reed was not about to turn me loose. In fact, once they had done what they could for me, they would ship my sorry ass posthaste back to Fayetteville.

I just nodded. "I can pretty much guarantee you that if you ask the concierge at the Hilton, you'll get some help. They can also point you towards a shopping mall. Don't buy much, but I'll need some stuff. Get me a shaving kit, some sweats and underwear. That sort of stuff, something I can move around in without my ass hanging out the back side. I wear a size 12 shoe, by the way."

Marilyn can be very passive-aggressive about this sort of thing, but finally agreed to pick some stuff up for me. She absolutely hates driving in a city, probably because she's a lousy driver. It's no big deal for me. Back when I was learning the first time through, I learned on the Baltimore Beltway, five lanes at 70 miles an hour!

Marilyn picked up a few things for me, although the sneakers she bought me were the wrong size. I was still stuck at Walter Reed, though. By the end of my second week, my bandages were removed and a much smaller bandage and wrap were put on my knee. I was then transferred to a rehab section, to get me back on my feet. I spent the next week learning to use crutches and starting a delightful regimen of torture, to get me moving my knee and learning how to walk again. I couldn't believe how weak I was. When I wasn't in rehab, I spent time in their gym doing bench presses. I had lost over twenty pounds, between the hike out of Nicaragua and my time in jail, and hadn't come close to getting back in shape. My clothes hung on me loosely.

I spent Christmas in the hospital, with just a few presents, since it was so far from home and none of us had a chance to shop. Marilyn went out and picked up a few things for Charlie, and we promised each other we would do something when I was released. It still took almost four weeks after the operation before I was finally released. I sent Marilyn home with Charlie, back to our apartment. There was no way I could ride comfortably in the Toyota, at least not yet. Besides, it was the Army's job to take me home. I got sent a day later, in a Herky Bird rigged for medical transport, and then an ambulance took me to the hospital at Bragg. I got another physical, had to stay the night, and was scheduled for more rehab. When I was released the day after, Marilyn came with my Impala, and Charlie loaded in the back seat.

As we drove off the base, back to the apartment, I said, "You know, I'm going to miss this, but I sure won't miss not coming home to you. I haven't got a clue what I'm going to do now, but whatever it is, I don't want to travel too much."

"Have you thought any more about that? I mean, what you want to do now?", she asked.

Charlie started fussing, and I twisted around a bit to make funny faces at him and try and distract him. "Not a frigging clue!"

"We'll have to talk about that, I guess.", Marilyn said. I just nodded.

We were at the apartment soon enough and I could stop trying to amuse my son and turn the job over to the professional. Marilyn helped me out of the car, and I was able to use my crutches well enough to walk to the apartment. Marilyn had to unlock the place, since I had left my keys at home before the deployment. Thankfully we had a ground floor apartment, since I wasn't all that great on negotiating stairs yet.

The fact the Army was cutting me loose smacked me in the face when I walked into the place. There on the dining room table were several boxes sent over from the battery. Mighty Mouse must have really wanted my ass gone! I balanced on my left leg while looking through them. One box had the photos from my 'I Love Me' wall, the pictures of me with the unit and the one from four years ago with Grace Hopper. The pictures from my desk, of Marilyn, were also packed up, along with anything personal from my desk. A larger box contained some uniforms and fatigue gear from my office. Surprisingly, there was a box with my gear that had been shipped back from Honduras, including some stuff I had despaired of every seeing again, like my Colt. They must have traced it by the serial number. There was also a note from Colonel Featherstone, rolled up and tucked into the barrel, that my 1911A1 seemed to be 'combat lost'. That brought a smile to my face.

I made my way on through the apartment, looking at everything like it was the first time there. It all looked the same, but different. It was subtle things that were odd; a new shower curtain, the toaster moved in the kitchen, an Afghan on the couch instead of a comforter. I found Marilyn in the second bedroom, where she was sitting in a rocker, feeding Charlie from a bottle. I stood there in the doorway and just watched them, smiling. She looked up at me and said, "What?"

I smiled. "It's nothing."

"Tell me what."

"It's just good to be home. Seeing you two like this, that sort of thing." Marilyn smiled and rolled her eyes. I backed up into the hallway again. "I'm going to take a shower."

"Will you need help?"

She meant help maneuvering and getting undressed, not the kind of help I would have enjoyed. "I'll be fine.", I told her.

I hobbled down to the master bedroom. The apartment only had one bathroom, but it had a door onto the hallway and a second into our bedroom. I leaned the crutches against the dresser, and then sat down on the bed. It took me almost ten minutes to get undressed, with most of the time being spent from the waist down. I no longer had the bandages on my knee, but it was very stiff and didn't bend well or support much weight yet. Naked, I got back to my feet and hopped to the bathroom, supporting myself against the wall.

When I got back out of the shower, I found my wife in the bathroom with me, muttering. She also had a large stain on her shirt. "Your son missed the burp bib."

"My son? Let me guess, he's your son the other times."

She gave me a raspberry and stripped off her shirt. I dried while she stripped and got into the shower. Watching her reminded me of something else that had been months awaiting! I sure hoped Charlie had figured out how to sleep through the night!

I hopped back to the bedroom, and pulled open a drawer to grab some briefs. In doing so, I knocked my crutches to the floor. Thankfully Charlie didn't fuss, but Marilyn opened the shower door and asked, nervously, "Are you all right?"

"I'm fine. The crutches fell to the floor."

"Okay."

It took me another couple of minutes to pick up my crutches, by kicking them one-legged towards the bed, and then sitting on the bed and reaching down to grab them and set them upright again. This was a monumental pain in the balls! Hopefully the rehab would at least get me to a point I could use a cane. Marilyn came out of the bathroom, cleaned up and wearing her bathrobe, and found me still sitting on the bed, naked, and trying to lean my crutches against the dresser again.

She came over and took them from me. "Let me get those." She took them from me and leaned them against the dresser, back at the wall.

I just shook my head in disgust. "Jesus, I better get better soon. I've never felt so helpless in my life!" This was even worse than when I hit my 60s and started using a cane when I walked.

Marilyn sat down next to me on the bed. "You'll be fine. You're already moving ten times better than you were a week ago. You could barely stand with the crutches. In a few more weeks you'll be off them completely. By the time Charlie starts walking, we'll both be able to chase him around!"

I laughed at that. "That would be good. I'm supposed to carry him, not the other way around!"

Marilyn smiled at that, and then looked at me. I was still sitting there naked on the edge of the bed, with my shorts in one hand. She took them from me and tossed them on the dresser. "After he eats, he sleeps, and he's a very good sleeper."

BOING! Carl Junior suddenly woke up! I guess the beating in the basement, which gave me several shots to the groin, didn't wipe me out completely. I looked at her and asked, "Just how long will he be out?"

Marilyn shrugged out of her robe. Boy, did she look good! I thought her tits had grown, too, which I also approved of! "Long enough!"

I pushed myself back on the bed, and propped myself up on a few of the pillows. I also took a pillow and put it under my right knee. Marilyn crawled around me on the bed until she was on my left side. I kissed her, long and hard, and immediately got some moaning and tongue. It was like back when we first started making out. She broke apart and then very carefully crawled on top of me, straddling my midsection. Moments later I was inside her.

It felt ... amazing! It had been months since we had done this, and it felt just like we were back dating. Marilyn gasped and lay down on my chest, shaking in orgasm and humping her tight little pussy down on me. I came very fast. "It's been too long.", I lamented.

"That just makes it better!", she whispered in return. She began squirming around on me, and I quickly hardened again. This time around she lifted herself up so that she was riding me, and I played with her tits while she diddled her clit. We both lasted longer, and Marilyn was on a second orgasm when I blasted off again.

We were gasping for breath, and Marilyn had slid off me to the side again, when Charlie started fussing. Marilyn and I looked at each other and laughed. "Well, better now than five minutes ago."

"How long before he takes another nap?"

Marilyn giggled. "Too long!" She kissed me, and then went into the bathroom to clean up again. Charlie started crying, but I wasn't going to be able to help for a bit. I sat upright and struggled into my shorts, and then hopped around and found some clothing. Marilyn came out of the bathroom and slipped a sundress on, and then went off to take care of Charlie.

I followed her down the hall. I watched from the doorway as she changed a diaper. "Keep it up, Buster! It's only seventeen years and eight months to go before you're out on your ass!"

Marilyn protested, "Carl! Don't say that!", but then Charlie did the fountain trick before she had his diaper fixed properly. "Then again..."

"Ha! Just wait until he starts walking! You'll see! We'll spend the first year teaching him how to walk and talk, and the next seventeen telling him to sit down and shut up!"

Marilyn finished getting a clean diaper on him, and handed him to me. "Your turn, Dad! I'm going to clean up again, and then I'll make dinner."

I played with my son for a few minutes, until Marilyn came back in a different dress (pee-free) and took him back. I hobbled on my crutches behind her to the kitchen, and sat down at the table, with Charlie in his little seat in front of me. I kept him occupied while Marilyn made dinner. Yet another reason to hurry the healing process. The only way Marilyn knew how to cook involved a microwave oven. I was going to lose weight this way, not regain it!

After dinner, Charlie fell asleep again, so Marilyn and I played another round of hide-the salami out in the living room. Then later, he slept the entire night. We didn't, but we didn't complain, either. When Marilyn drove me over to the base hospital in the morning for rehab, we were both sleepy but smiling.

And so it went for almost a month. I was doing rehab every day, along with working on the weights and swimming, which is good exercise for bad joints, since it is low impact. When I was home, Marilyn and I made up for the three months I was away. My mobility and strength improved, and after a couple of weeks I graduated to a cane, and was able to put some weight on my right leg and walk. At that point I started cooking again. We also did some belated Christmas shopping together, since I wasn't really up to driving yet. We spent some time up in Raleigh and I found a lingerie store and took her to it. She was embarrassed and nervous, but we bought a few items we would both like. I also bought her a few items of jewelry.

Then, out of the blue, I got a call at the apartment from Colonel Featherstone. I was actually still in the Army, even though I was assigned to the Detachment of Patients at the hospital, and my four year commitment was long over. I was still getting paid by the Department of Defense. The colonel told me to be in my Class As over at the HQ of the 505th on Friday morning, 22 January at 0900. Marilyn was supposed to be there, too, in a nice dress, along with Charlie. I was being given my Bronze Star, and they would also process the paperwork to medically retire me.

I hadn't worn a uniform since I had been back from Honduras. I had to dig one out and see if it still fit. It did, if a touch loosely in the waist, but not all that badly. I had Marilyn take it out to be cleaned. I might be going out, but I'd do it in style.

It felt weird that morning to put it on, for one last time. I even had my Honduran jump wings on my chest. Marilyn wore a nice blue knee length skirt and a white blouse, with some medium heels, and Charlie had on a little camouflage jumper she had picked up at the PX. I drove us over. I had just started driving again this week, although not for long distances. Colonel Featherstone was actually there waiting for us! That surprised me, since I figured he would be off in Washington or someplace torturing miscreants.

He led me inside to the office area, where he parked me at a table. He played peek-a-boo with my son while I signed off on an interminable pile of paperwork that a Spec 4 clerk put in front of me. They didn't want me around anymore, but they sure seemed to take their time getting rid of me! Eventually I was done, and the colonel took over again. "Follow me. The colonel wanted to give this to you, but he's tied up elsewhere."

We followed Colonel Featherstone down a hallway towards the ready hangar for the 1st Battalion, but didn't go in. Instead, he sent the Spec 4 in, and then two minutes later, he held the door open, and motioned for me to go in first, to be followed by Marilyn and our baby. He came in last.

"ATTEN-HUT!", barked out from a loud baritone to the side of the bay. I stood there in disbelief as the entire battalion, almost a thousand soldiers, standing in ordered ranks and rows, came to attention. There was a small temporary stage at this end of the bay, with flags on it and a small podium.

I was roused by a tap on my shoulder. I whipped my head around to find Featherstone smiling at me. He pointed towards the stage and said, "March! And try to think up something brief to say."

Thank Jesus I had spent the last four years (and a chunk of the four before that!) under military discipline, since I was moving on muscle memory and nothing else. I marched to the stage and went up the side steps, to find Colonel Longworth, the commander of the 505th, and Lieutenant Colonel Small, the new commander of the First Battalion. There was a small X marked in masking tape on the floor of the stage. Lieutenant Colonel Small stopped me when I reached the X and whispered to me to stop and face towards the battalion. As I hit my mark, the loud voice, which I now recognized as belonging to the battalion sergeant major, barked out, "PUH-RADE ... REST!" The battalion snapped into the position of parade rest.

From where I was standing I could see the battalion standing at attention. I think the brigade was on support cycle, but I wasn't sure. Since I was on medical leave, I hadn't been following the cycle. Everybody was in fatigues, except for a few of the officers, like Longworth and Small. Standing in the front rows, in the center, were some faces I recognized, 3rd Platoon, Company C, including one man in civvies, but still standing at attention. There were also a small number of civilians on the side.

I turned my attention from outward to the stage, as Colonel Longworth went to the podium. "All of us here know why Captain Buckman is being honored today. We also all know why we can't state that reason or discuss it. Captain Buckman, please step forward."

At that point the adjutant loudly stated, "Attention to orders!"

I took two steps forward, to another X on the stage, and came to attention (not that I hadn't been before.) Colonel Longworth opened a small folder on the podium and read:

"For courageous and meritorious service while assigned to elements of the 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment. During training operations while attached to Company C, 1st Battalion, 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment, Captain Buckman took command and led his unit with courage and merit. His actions were in keeping with the highest traditions of the service, and reflect great credit upon himself, the 82nd Airborne Division, and the United States Army."

The colonel then opened a small jewelry case and pulled out the Bronze Star. It was the actual medal, a five pointed bronze star hanging from a red ribbon with blue and silver vertical stripes. I knew that inside the jewelry box was the ribbon device, a matching ribbon used when the medal wasn't worn, and a miniature version of the medal to wear on the mess dress uniform. The colonel pinned the medal on my chest while a photographer took photos. Then he stood back and saluted me, and I could see through suddenly watery eyes the rest of the room snapping to attention and saluting as well.

I returned the salute. He dropped his arm and then said, "Captain, you may say something if you wish."

"Stay right there, please.", I whispered. I sidled behind him, so that he was blocking the sight lines, and pulled out my handkerchief and wiped my eyes quickly. Then I nodded and whispered, "Thank you." Colonel Longworth smiled at me and stepped aside, nodding.

I stepped to the podium. I looked out at the sea of green, and realized I would never again be part of something like this. "I'll keep this brief. We are all members of the finest division in the entire United States Army. The 82nd Airborne is respected by our nation's friends, and feared by her enemies. You men are the reason for both that respect and that fear. Thank you for allowing me to serve with you. It has been an honor and a privilege. Thank you." I stepped back from the podium and fought to keep my eyes dry again.

Lieutenant Colonel Small stepped forward carrying something small in his hand. He went to the podium and said, "Captain, I know you're part of the 319th. From now on, this patch says you're part of the 505th." He held up a unit patch with four bendlets surmounted by a winged black panther and handed it to me, and the room erupted in cheers. I took the patch and held it upright, and then shook his hand.

I almost missed the sergeant major dismissing the parade. The colonels had me stick around for photos, and Marilyn and Charlie got in on it as well. Then I was cut loose and got off the stage. I was instantly surrounded by the men I had jumped into Nicaragua with. I also found myself with a few wives as well, although most of the men were single. The one I remember the most was Sergeant Briscoe's (now Master Sergeant Briscoe's) wife, who kissed me on the cheek and thanked me for bringing her husband back.

The civilian who had been standing with the men turned out to be Private Smith, now dressed in khakis and a dress shirt, and supporting himself on crutches. "I told you we all jumped in and we'd all get out, Private.", I said to him.

He smiled and nodded. "I hear you're getting out, too."

"As soon as I leave here, I'm history. How's the leg?"

"Held together by three pins and a titanium plate, but otherwise okay.", he answered with a laugh.

"Maybe you should have let me cut it off and stick that peg leg on you after all!"

He reached out and shook my hand. "Thank you, sir."

A much sadder moment was when I was introduced to an older man, about sixty years old, who had been standing to the side. Lieutenant Colonel Small brought him over, and said, "Captain, I'd like to introduce you to Colonel John Donovan. He was Captain Donovan's father."

I turned to face the father of the man I had jumped into Nicaragua with. He was wearing a civilian suit, but it didn't matter. I came to attention and saluted. "I'm very sorry for your loss, sir. I got to know Bob in Honduras and he was a good man and an excellent officer."

"Thank you, Captain, for bringing him home to us."

"If it had been the other way around, sir, he'd have returned the favor.", I replied. "Sir, is Mrs. Donovan here? I should pay my respects."

He shook his head. "Eleanor took the girls home to Kansas."

"Well, please give her my condolences when you see her next."

"I'll do that, son. I just wanted to say thank you for bringing him home."

I nodded. "We all went in, sir, we all came out. Bob believed in that just like the rest of us."

Colonel Donovan moved off, and I turned to Sergeant Briscoe. "What about Private Masurski's family?"

"He didn't have any. He's in Arlington now."

It was a hell of an end to a young life. Would anybody notice when it was my turn to go? I just nodded, and turned back to Marilyn. "Let's go, honey."

"I'm very proud of you, Carl.", she replied.

I squeezed her hand in response. "Thank you." I tilted my head towards the side door where we came in.

Colonel Featherstone opened the door for me. "So what's in your future now, Captain?"

I looked at him for a second, and then turned to look at Marilyn. I had been avoiding this question for the last month. I turned back to the colonel. "I have no idea, Colonel. I have no idea."

Book Five: Civilian

Chapter 61: Moving Home

Friday, January 22, 1982

The time was over to dance around it. Marilyn and I needed to figure out what we were doing with the rest of our lives, or at least the near future. Neither of us was thrilled with staying in Fayetteville. She wanted to move somewhere more north of here; I wanted to get away from the Army. That part of my life was over, no matter what else I did. Even my deposit on the house in Lawton was gone, it had been nonrefundable.

We had lunch at a small diner near the base. Marilyn dug into her voluminous baby bag and dug out a bottle, and we took turns holding it for Charlie. Otherwise, he was a good boy, and quiet. That would undoubtedly change! We ordered sandwiches for ourselves, and Marilyn reached across the table to take my hand. "Carl, I'm not sure I'll ever understand why you felt you had to serve in the army, but I'm proud of you."

I smiled at my wife. "But you're not sorry I'm out of it, either, are you?"

She smiled back and squeezed my hand. "No, but not as much as you think. It was what you wanted, and that was okay with me. If you can't be in it anymore, I won't complain, but I didn't complain when you were in, either."

I laughed. "Oh, really? I seem to recall a message I got in Honduras about a future homicide!"

Marilyn laughed, too, causing our son to gurgle and look around for her. "Well, the next time you leave me alone to have a baby, I'll make good on that!"

The waitress brought our sandwiches, and I stole Marilyn's pickle and gave her my cole slaw. The waitress chatted with Marilyn and Charlie for a moment, and then went off. "So now what do we do?", asked my wife.

"I guess the first thing is to figure out where to move to. I've been thinking about it and more than ever, I think we should at least consider Maryland. It's where Tusker and Tessa and Suzie live, and also where my investment base is."

"Explain that."

"Well, the names were in that envelope you weren't supposed to open. There's my lawyer, John Steiner, who I've known since I was thirteen, and my broker, Missy Talmadge, and Jake Eisenstein, my accountant. They all live in the Timonium and Towson area."

"I still find that so hard to believe!"

"I'll introduce you to them. Even if we end up in Kansas, you should know them.", I replied.

"Why would we go to Kansas?"

Marilyn could be a bit literal at times. "I'm just saying, no matter where we end up, you should meet them."

She nodded. "Given any more thought to what you want to do?"

"No. Maybe after we talk to the brain trust I'll have an idea. It's not like I'm under any pressure. Even at a 10% return on my investments, which would be low, I'll be making at least $3 or $4 million a year. Probably more - there are a number of opportunities coming up."

Marilyn's eyes glazed over a bit. "Three or four million dollars! A year?! Oh my God! I guess you won't have to ask my father for a job after all!"

I damn near snorted my Coke out through my nose when she said that. "Good Lord, no! Besides, your dad thinks I'm a loser. He thinks I went into the Army because I couldn't get a real job!"

Marilyn made a face, as if conceding my point, but she tried to be a dutiful daughter and defend her father. "He's not that bad!"

"Well, just don't tell him too much about my money. I don't need him thinking that the next time he needs a loan he can call us! My terms would be worse than the bank's! No, I'm not going to work for your father."

She giggled. "That probably wouldn't work out too well anyway."

"No. So, here's my idea. Why don't we move back to Maryland, and get an apartment for a year. I can show you some rural areas and if you like them, I'll build you a house. How does that sound?"

Her eyes goggled a bit. "You'll build a house?"

"Well, no, not me. I'll hire an engineer or architect or somebody to build a house." She simply stared in disbelief some more. "So, what would you like in a house? Start thinking about it."

"I've never even thought about building a house. What do I do?"

I shrugged. "Next time you're at the supermarket, buy one of those house design type books and look through it. Get some ideas. It probably won't happen until the spring, anyway."

"Wow!"

After lunch, we drove home. I was starting to be able to move well enough that it didn't hurt very much, though not for long distances or drives. I had also discovered that wearing a heavy Ace bandage on my knee seemed to lock all the pieces into the right position, and made my knee a lot more stable.

Charlie had fallen asleep on the drive home, and Marilyn put him in his crib. She found me afterwards standing in front of the mirror over the dresser, looking at my reflection, still in my uniform with the Bronze Star on my chest. It felt weird; after I took it off I would never wear it again. Marilyn came up behind me and wrapped her arms around me from the side. "I don't think I have ever told you just how handsome you are in your uniform."

I laughed at that. "I think you must be blind, then. Nobody has ever used my name and the adjective 'handsome' in the same sentence."

"It's true.", she cooed into my ear. "Why, when we got married, and I saw you standing there in your dress uniform, my pussy got so wet I was worried about staining my dress!" She brought her hand down from my waist and began rubbing the front of my pants. "I always get so hot when I see you looking so good!"

My mouth got dry and my pants got tight! She kept whispering to me, and said, "That medal says you're an official hero, so I think you need to be thanked like a hero, don't you?"

I just nodded, and croaked out, "Yeah!"

She licked my ear and then knelt down on the floor. I turned to face her, and Marilyn undid my pants and pulled them and my briefs down to my knees. Then she opened her mouth, and I was inside her, while she used her hands to stroke and jack my cock. "Oh, God, don't stop!", I begged. Stopping wasn't what she had in mind! Marilyn kept sucking and jacking me until I pumped a load into her mouth. She drained me, and then smiled up at me.

"I think that's a good start, don't you?"

"A start?", I asked, leaning back against the dresser and taking the weight off my bad knee.

"Well, I think heroes need a really big thank you! Why don't you change out of your uniform, and I'll change into something a little more comfortable, and I'll show you what I have in mind."

"Uh, yeah, okay!" You bet, honey! Whatever you want!

I finished undressing and pulled on some shorts and a Hawaiian shirt, commando style. I looked into the bathroom at that point and Marilyn was in the shower. "Want to make some drinks?", she asked.

"Gin and tonics all right?"

"Thank you."

I left my cane in the bedroom and limped down to the kitchen, which is where we kept our rather informal liquor cabinet. I cut up a lime and pulled out the tonic, and then made a couple of strong drinks. I carefully carried them back down the hallway to the bedroom. "Where do you want it?"

"In here, on the counter.", she answered. I stepped into the bathroom, but she was still in the shower. "Now, shoo! Go on out to the living room. I'm going to be a while.", I was told.

I headed to the living room, and sank down in the La-Z-Boy. I sipped at my gin and tonic and waited for my wife to show up. Please, God, let Charlie have a long, long nap! I had finished my drink when Marilyn showed up.

It was worth the wait. Marilyn came out wearing a criminally short denim skirt that had a row of tiny snaps up the front, mostly unsnapped, and a halter top that wasn't much more than a bikini top. She also had on some very nice high-heeled sandals. She sauntered over and held up her empty glass. "Care for another drink?" She bent over and picked up my empty glass and flashed me a lot of cleavage.

She headed for the kitchen slowly, really throwing her hips around as she moved out. I struggled to my feet and followed her, just to watch. She smiled and said, "Don't worry, I'll take care of it.", so I leaned against the door and let her do it. She made it a work of art! At one point she rubbed an ice cube over her throat and chest. "It's so hot!", she complained. Then she dropped the ice cube on the floor. To pick it up, she turned away from me, spread her legs, and then bent at the waist, to pick it up. She must have spent some time in the shower shaving! When she was done with the drinks, she told me to head back out and sit down, and she would carry our drinks.

As soon as I had sat down in my chair, Marilyn crawled onto my lap and sat sideways, completely exposing her freshly shaved pussy to me. She sipped her drink for a moment, but then wrapped her arms around my neck and began licking and nibbling my neck. "You made me so hot and wet today.", she whispered. "It made me want to do things, nasty things, naughty things. Do you like how my pussy looks? I shaved it for you."

"It looks delicious!", I told her.

"Well, you hold that thought for later. Maybe after Charlie goes to bed tonight. Right now I have something else in mind. Do you want to know what else I did in the bathroom?"

"Uh, yeah, sure."

"I touched myself, you know, down there. I was trying to take care of things myself, but it just didn't work. It just made me hotter and wetter! Here, see for yourself!" She took my hand and pushed it down between her legs.

She was right, she was hot and wet! I fingered her to a quick orgasm while she wrapped her arms around me and shuddered. As soon as I stopped, Marilyn climbed off my lap and quickly undid my pants. I was pointing skyward and she crawled back onto me, straddling my thighs, and sank down onto me. I peeled her top up and off her tits and we screwed there in the La-Z-Boy until I blew another load into her.

"I don't know what's come over you, but I sure like it!", I laughed. I was breathing hard and needed another shower from sweating so hard.

Marilyn giggled at that. "Well, since you'll be home all the time now, I have to figure out a way to keep you busy!"

"I may need to get a job just to keep from being fucked to death.", I responded. "Hell of a way to go, though!"

"I love you so much!"

Charlie took that moment to wail and announce his presence. We laughed at each other and then disengaged, climbing to our feet. "He's yours.", she said. "I need to go to the bathroom."

"He can wait. I need a shower myself."

Charlie survived another five minutes by himself. Marilyn washed up at the sink while I showered quickly. Happily, I noted that afterwards she kept on her little top and skirt and heels. I was going to get lucky later, it seemed.

Monday morning it was time to start figuring things out for real. I sent Marilyn off with Charlie for a long walk while I started working the phone. Besides, I needed a break! Marilyn had been trying to wear me out, and it was working! Old age was creeping up on me. I wasn't a teenager anymore, where I could go three or four times in a row. I was only good for twice in a row before I needed a breather before screwing her again. Then again, some things improve with age, like technique, and Marilyn was not complaining on that score!

My first phone call was to my old friend, Explorer Post adviser, and lawyer, John Steiner. I dug out my address book and called him shortly after nine. I had no hope that he would actually be there or free, but I could leave a message with his secretary to have him call me. I was actually quite surprised when she said she would put me right through. After a moment I heard his gravelly voice, "John Steiner."

"John, it's Carl Buckman, how are you?"

"Carl! Good to hear from you. How are you doing?"

"Okay. I'm surprised I reached you on a Monday morning! Business slow?"

I got a barking laugh in return. "Funny you should say that. I was supposed to be in a meeting with a client about revising his will, but he died over the weekend!"

"Well, as long as you collected your fee ahead of time...", I joshed back.

"Very funny! What brings you to call me this lovely morning?", he asked.

"Well, several things. First and foremost, I'm moving back home. I got out of the Army on Friday."

"What!? I thought you were going to go career? What happened?"

I sighed. "The short version is that I made one jump too many and screwed up my leg something fierce. I've spent the last month or so in Walter Reed getting rebuilt, and I'm getting medicalled out."

"Walter Reed? In Washington? You should have called me! I'd have come down and visited. Allen, too! He was visiting for a week last month." Allen was his son, the President of the Post when I was in.

"You're right, I should have. How's Allen doing? Where'd he end up, San Francisco, wasn't it?"

John laughed. He said, "He seems to like it out there. He says he's the only straight and single guy in town, and in a supply and demand setting, the demand is high!"

"That sounds like him. He got that degree in economics, so I guess he's the supply part of the equation." I had to laugh. Allen had been a pretty straight laced guy, but he thought with his dick like the rest of us.

"So you're out of the Army? Now what?", asked John, getting back on the topic.

"Well, neither Marilyn or myself want to live in Fayetteville, so I convinced her to give Maryland a shot. What I'm thinking is to rent an apartment for a bit, look around and find a nice piece of property. I promised her I would build her a house and we would settle down."

"Build or buy?"

"I could buy, I guess, but she's going to want some acreage, and I don't want some old falling-down farmhouse. I'll probably end up building.", I told him.

"Well, it would be good to have you back here. What can I do to help?", John asked.

"Well, first of all, I want a nice apartment. Timonium or Cockeysville, that area, two or three bedrooms, ground floor. A nice place, not some dump, you know? Maybe even a townhouse. I haven't got a clue what's available or the prices. Can you dig up a real estate agent or broker for me? Dangle the house or property sale in front of them, maybe they can help with the apartment."

"Well, I'll see what I can do. I haven't looked at that sort of thing in a few years either."

"Well, get in touch with Missy and Jake. Let them know I'm coming back, too. Maybe they'll have some ideas. Also, let them know I'm going to be spending some money in the near future. I'm going to buy a couple of new cars as well as the house or property. They need to know for taxes and stuff."

"Makes sense. Between the three of us, we can figure something out. When are you planning on moving?"

"Another week or so. I'm going to call a moving company today, get some pricing and timeframes, I don't think it will be this week, but if you can get me some answers by the end of the week, we can go from there.", I replied.

"Carl, when I was in the service, they had to move you and pay for it.", he commented.

"Yeah, but it's at their convenience, and only to my address of record, which is my frat house in Troy."

"Figures. Worse comes to worse, you can stay in a hotel for a few days while checking apartments, and then move in. You'll have to come up here anyway to look at property."

I promised to do that, as well as introduce him to Marilyn and Charlie. He agreed to set up a nice lunch date with the others, to introduce my family to them. I also called up both Missy and Jake, to let them know I was going to be writing some large checks in the near future (for some new cars, if nothing else) and to transfer some funds (Missy) and tell me the tax ramifications (Jake). Of course I told them about a lunch date also. Finally, I hung up and went to digging up a phone book to call some moving companies.

Marilyn and Charlie came home, and I gave her a quick synopsis of my results, and then dialed around for a moving company. I got somebody from the local Allied company to make an appointment to see me later that week. After that I made us lunch, Charlie got a bottle, he fell asleep afterwards, and Marilyn and I took a little nap of our own. Afterwards I pulled my pants back up and left her snoozing in the bedroom. I went out to the living room to think.

The Sixties and Seventies were one of the most turbulent times in American history, made more obvious by coming off one of the calmest and quietest periods. From about 1946 to 1960, the nation was quite peaceful. We were unquestionably the strongest nation in the world, and nobody messed with us. Oh, there was the Korean War, but compared to World War II, it was small potatoes, and never fully engaged the public. It wasn't even a war, just a 'police action', like we were out arresting the North Koreans and Chinese.

Domestically, the economy was booming. As the only great nation in the world not rebuilding from the utter devastation of the war, every American who wanted a job could find one. Things were quiet and happy, or at least it seemed that way at the time. For a fifteen year period the country was governed by a pair of presidents, Truman and Eisenhower, who were quiet and unassuming and relatively popular.

The next two decades were totally different. My parents' generation raised a bunch of spoiled brats, the Baby Boomers, who rebelled against everything their parents stood for. Suddenly we were back at war, a big war, an unpopular war, that allowed huge numbers of rich white kids to avoid serving. There was an explosion of drugs, some good and some bad. The Pill allowed women to control their bodies and enter the work force in growing numbers, but totally altering the social landscape in doing so. Recreational drugs like marijuana, cocaine, heroin, and LSD exploded onto the scene and into mainstream communities. Urban violence hit new highs. All the minorities - blacks, women, even the gays - started mouthing off and demanding their rights.

It seemed like there was a war on everything. We got the War on Drugs, the War on Poverty, the War on Inflation, the War on Cancer - we were fighting everybody and anybody. Riots in urban areas were common, as somebody was always fighting over something. We got new civil rights, women's liberation, anti-war violence - nobody was happy about anything. In a twenty year period we had five presidents. One was killed, the next two quit early, and the last two got voted out of office ignominiously.

And now we had entered the Eighties. To almost everyone's amazement, the nation calmed down. There were a lot of reasons, but one that nobody talked about was simply that my generation, the Baby Boomers, simply got tired of fighting everybody! By then we had husbands and wives and kids and jobs. Who has time to protest when they've got to go to the supermarket to pick up the groceries?

Politically, we saw the same thing. We only had two-and-a-half Presidents during this time (Bush 1 was generally considered to be Reagan's clone) and both were considered above average Presidents, although Reagan was loved and Clinton was detested. Economically, America was on a tear. The digital revolution hit everything, and the world center of anything electronic was the good ole' US of A! For almost 20 years investors made a solid 20% return in America. It was almost a golden age.

In retrospect, it was much like a roller coaster. After World War II, the nation had been on a pleasant but gentle glide. The Sixties and Seventies were a lot more like a very bumpy uphill climb, with lots of dips and scares. Then we hit the Eighties and Nineties, where we coasted on up to the very tip-top of the ride, and we all threw our hands in the air and went, "WHEEEEE!" Of course, everybody knows what happens next on the roller coaster, you get a sickening plunge into the abyss!

For right or wrong, Reagan proved to be one of the three most influential Presidents of the century. Teddy Roosevelt led the country to become a global power and broke the backs of the giant trusts and monopolies. A generation later it was his cousin Franklin who led us through a Depression and a World War. He also saddled us with the concept of Big Government - Social Security, jobs programs, and government regulation. All that succeeding administrations did was simply to add on to what FDR had already created to fight the Depression. Reagan came to office with the promise of limiting government. We needed to downsize drastically. Government wasn't the solution, government was the problem! Even though his success at taming the beast was limited, he spawned two generations of deep thinkers who ran wild with his beliefs, and ultimately led to the Tea Party and the demise of the central Federal government.

So what to do with my money? Where should I invest it? Just as important, what did the timing have to be? For the last couple of years, since the run-up with my accounts based on the silver bubble, most of my funds had been in fairly simple investments, some money market funds, and a few big cap stocks like Exxon and IBM. My only real startup, so to speak, was Intel, which I bought during the IPO. The boom, though, was about to start, and was set to go hog wild. I needed to think!

Wal-Mart was an obvious place to invest. So too was Hewlett-Packard. Buying ATT before the split in a few years was going to be a wise decision; after the split, over the next twenty years the Baby Bells and Ma Bell would go through umpteen different configurations, but ultimately would be much more valuable. Keep an eye out for the IPOs for Microsoft and Dell. Intel would capture the growth of the tech market. When biotech started getting big, pick up some Amgen and Genentech. Buy Pfizer at some point. Amazon and Ebay. Pick up Apple after they rehired Steve Jobs. Diversify. Dump anything tech related in 1999, except Apple, before the bubble burst. At some point in the future sell short on both Enron and Lehman Brothers. Dump everything by the summer of 2008, before the start of the Great Recession.

I was going to have to pay close attention to the Wall Street Journal and look for names I would be familiar with, both from an investment standpoint and from a non-investment standpoint. There was no reason I couldn't become ridiculously rich without undue effort over the next few years. At that point, start stashing some overseas for when the collapse came. I would also start looking for homes overseas by then. America became a decidedly uncivil place by 2020.

Eventually Marilyn came out of the bedroom carrying Charlie. Thinking time was over. She dumped our son in my lap and headed into the kitchen to make him a bottle, so I played with him. He had learned how to grab your nose and lips, which was considered great fun! I would protest and he would tug and laugh. Mommy returned, not soon enough for my facial features, and handed me the bottle. "Doesn't seem like an equitable distribution of labor.", I commented.

"You seemed to enjoy the practice. This is the consequence.", she replied.

I stuck the nipple in my son's mouth and he started sucking it down greedily. "Well, yeah, but I'm more the Big Picture, Thinker type! I leave the grunt work up to others."

"Get over it! If you're home, you get to help!"

"Maybe I need to go find a job after all!", I said. That simply got me a raspberry in response. "I'm going to need some serious motivation when he's done."

My wife grinned at me. "Just what did you have in mind?"

"I'm not sure yet, but it will probably involve handcuffs and Crisco."

"On who?"

"Sticks and stones may break my bones but whips and chains excite me!", I chimed. I got another raspberry.

Charlie kept sucking down the formula like he was on a starvation diet, and in no time at all it was inside him. I held the empty bottle up and waved it at Marilyn. "He's a piglet!"

Marilyn nodded and came over. I thought she was going to take him, but she just took the bottle and handed me a burp bib. "Your mother is really asking for it!", I told my son. I put the bib over my right shoulder and laid him down and started patting him on the back. After a couple of minutes I got several very loud 'URP's from the north end, and then got an equally loud 'PFFFFTTTT' from the south end.

"Okay, that does it for fatherly duty today." I stood up and carried him over to where Marilyn was sitting on the couch, reading a magazine. "Mommy can go back to work now!"

Marilyn just looked at our son and said, "Daddy's a wimp! Some hero!" She took him off to be changed.

By the end of the week we had met with somebody from the moving company and started making plans. We would move in two weeks. Next week we would pack our stuff that we would travel with, and then the moving company would come in and pack everything else into a van. We would load our travel stuff into our cars and head north and the moving company would take everything into temporary storage.

Both John Steiner and Missy Talmadge had found us a real estate broker (the same one, in fact, which I thought boded well) and had found us a few apartments. They had overnighted some info to us, and after we got to Timonium, we would get a hotel room and the next day find an apartment. Once that was settled, we would let the moving company know where to bring our stuff. It was a monumental pain in the ass, but nothing money couldn't handle.

The drive north was a pain as well. It was about an eight hour drive, pretty much straight up I-95 and then around the Baltimore Beltway, but we needed to stop every hour or so. We were driving separately and Marilyn had Charlie and needed to feed him occasionally and change his diapers, and I needed to get out and stretch my leg and move it around. It seemed like it took forever to get there. It was probably closer to eleven hours by the time we got off the road in Timonium and found a motel. We were so tired we simply collapsed on the bed and fell asleep in our clothes.

Chapter 62: Back Home

At the time, Timonium wasn't the world's greatest choice for awe inspiring hotel rooms. In fact, the only place I could think of was the local Holiday Inn. Certainly no suites were available, so we crammed into a single room with a king sized bed and set up the port-a-crib in the corner. Saturday we decompressed a little, unpacked our bags, and then loaded all of us up in the rusty old Impala and went out car shopping.

First on the list was a new car for me. It's not that I was any more important than Marilyn, because I'm not. What I am, however, is much more decisive. I knew what I wanted (roughly) and hated shopping for a car. We went to the local Caddy dealership and then the local Lincoln dealership. I was looking for a full size sedan, four doors, big trunk, big engine, screw the mileage, nothing too trashy (no pimp-mobile!), in a silver or gray. No black Mafia staff car. I found a nice Town Car at the Lincoln dealership on York Road and had them do a quick trade appraisal on the Impala. Then I dickered them out of the tax and tags and wrote them a check for the balance. I would pick it up the following week after the check cleared.

Buying a car for Marilyn was a much more traumatic event. She simply couldn't make up her mind, and we drove up and down York Road to every dealership between Baltimore and York. She was always like this. On my first go-around, I refused to shop with her. I would turn her loose and just show up to give a perfunctory test drive and write a deposit check. I remember one time where she wanted me to pick the car. I spent two weeks looking them over, even going so far as to bring her back cars for 'overnights' and she hated them all. Finally I told her she had three days to pick a car or I would buy one for her, whether she liked it or not! "You can't do that!", I was informed!

"Just watch me, honey! Three days!" She picked out her first minivan after that, inside of three days, too.

This time was no different. We made no progress at all that day with her, and none on Monday either. Threats weren't working either. Oh well, I would give her another few days before I issued any ultimatums. What she needed was a station wagon, something she could drive Charlie around in, preferably big and roomy and safe. I was thinking of an Oldsmobile Cutlass Cruiser or a Buick Estate Wagon, but I just didn't care. I'd get her whatever she wanted. What she wanted was something as small as her Toyota, with the cargo capacity of a C-130, and it had to be 'cute!' I had a feeling we were going to end up in a brawl over it anyway, since I wasn't being 'helpful' about it. Jesus Christ, I was paying for it, wasn't I!? How much more helpful could I get?

I got a reprieve from car shopping on Tuesday. We were meeting with the brain trust for lunch at a steakhouse on York Road. Charlie was turning out to be a fairly good kid for taking out (Alison had been colicky as hell!) and behaved as long as we kept pouring formula into the bottomless pit he called a stomach. He wasn't on baby food, not yet anyway, and I dreaded what that would do to his diapers when it happened.

We weren't the first ones there. Once we got inside, I saw Missy Talmadge at a table in the center of the room. As soon as she saw me she had a big smile on her face and stood and waved. I told the hostess we had found our table, and led the way inside. As soon as she saw little Charlie, her face lit up like a Christmas tree. "Oh my God, he's adorable!"

"Missy, I want you to meet my wife, Marilyn, and this is our son Charlie. Marilyn, this is Missy Talmadge, my broker from way back when.", I said introducing them. Missy was the same as when I first met her, small and slim, blonde (now with some frosting to set it off, and a shorter hairdo as well), and perky. She was in her mid 30s.

Missy came around the table and gave me a hug, and then shook Marilyn's hand. "It is so good to finally meet you! Carl has told me about you so often. Your son is so cute!" She bent down and let Charlie grab her finger.

Once Missy had come around the table, I noticed there was a reason for all the family bonding. She was a good four months pregnant! "Congratulations! What's this, your second?", I asked.

"Third!"

"Well, you look fantastic. When are you due?"

"Probably in February. A winter baby.", she answered.

"Well, I guess we know what you did on your summer vacation.", I teased.

Missy laughed and swatted at me. "You're awful. Is he like this at home?", she asked Marilyn.

"Usually he's much worse."

Missy cut off any further remarks when she looked back towards the entrance and waved again. I turned around and saw three men come towards us. Two of the men I knew. There was John Steiner, probably in his late 50s, and Jake Eisenstein, who was in his early 50s. The third man was about Marilyn's and my age, mid 20s. All of the men shook our hands, and John kissed Missy on the cheek.

I introduced Marilyn to the others, but when I got to the young man I was stumped. He responded, "Sorry about that. I'm Jake Eisenstein Junior. I work with Dad."

"Oh, okay." I glanced over at Jake Senior.

He nodded. "Jake just graduated from Columbia Law this year. He wants to get into tax law, so I'm seeing about bringing him on board."

I nodded as well; Columbia Law was a good school. "Your new partner?"

"Not yet, he's not!", said his father drily. "Let's just say he's an associate with prospects. I'm not sure we need a tax lawyer as much as another good accountant."

"Well, this might be a chance to prove it, huh, Dad?" Jake Junior wasn't about to be cowed by his father. Jake snorted in response, and John laughed.

"Well, Carl, you've all moved up here? How bad is your leg, anyway? I see you're using a cane.", said John.

I simply shrugged. "I probably will the rest of my life, unless I get the knee replaced. Maybe even then. It's all ligament and cartilage damage. It is what it is." I held my hands up in a what-can-you-do-about-it-anyway gesture.

"How do you like it up here, Marilyn? You're not a Maryland girl, right?", he asked.

"It's just so unreal! I don't know what's happening any more. I mean, it wasn't two months ago I found out my husband isn't just a soldier, he's got a whole secret life, like in a comic book! He has lawyers and accountants and brokers and who knows what else! I don't know what to think!" Charlie fussed a little and she lifted him up from his stroller and started digging out a bottle. "It's like I just found out my Clark Kent is somebody else." She looked over at me apologetically.

I reached over and squeezed her hand. "That's why I wanted you to meet everybody. No more secrets. I had a reason for that, but the time for that is over. You're going to need to know about this stuff, too."

"No secrets?"

I gave another shrug. "Well, almost no secrets. I'm certainly not going to tell you about my mistress. Mistresses, actually."

That got a laugh out of John and Missy, a snort from Jake, and a blank stare from Jake Junior. Marilyn looked down at our son and said, "Daddy thinks he's so funny!", and then she gave me a raspberry.

That got us talking about the money, and John told Marilyn how we originally met and how I got my initial stake of twenty grand. Missy gave a surprised look at that. "Twenty? You only put fifteen into the brokerage back then. What happened to the other five?"

"Living expenses. It wasn't like I was getting any money from my parents.", I answered.

"No allowance?"

"Not after that. Hamilton was given it, instead."

Marilyn interjected, "Your brother was given your allowance?"

"A fact he repeatedly told me."

"Unbelievable!" Then she looked over at Missy. "So you're telling me that Carl turned that fifteen thousand into thirty-five million"

Missy nodded. "Closer to forty as of the close of business Friday. Your husband rarely missteps on this stuff, and he's very good with leverage and options and calls. Commodities, too. He knows his commodities."

Jake chimed in, "It's almost spooky, but I haven't seen Carl make many mistakes. Sometimes his timing is a bit off, but not terribly, and not in an overly bad way. I don't know where he comes up with some of the stock picks, but the accounting and all is fairly straightforward."

"Wow!"

I took my wife's hand again. "And now I get to do something I really enjoy, which is buy you a few things and take care of you. You need to pick out a car and then we'll look at some property and build a house."

Over lunch we made a broad agreement to what would happen in the near future. Marilyn already had an American Express card. Marilyn was absolutely forbidden to get any more credit cards. (They had been so destructive before!) We would open a new checking account locally, at Maryland National Bank. Missy would put a chunk of money into the checking account so that we could buy property and build on it. Marilyn would have access to the checking account, but not to the brokerage accounts, which would remain in my name, though she would remain my survivor on the accounts. Jake Junior also suggested that I incorporate, in the event I wanted to directly invest in any companies rather than go through the brokerage. I didn't quite follow that reasoning, but I was vain enough to like the name of the company, The Buckman Group. Jake, Jake Junior, and John started talking that over among themselves.

After lunch, we split up, though I made arrangements to meet with them later in the week by myself to sign some paperwork. Marilyn was also getting along well with Missy, and Missy made her promise to call and get together for lunch with her kids. Then we drove down York Road towards Ridgely Road. Tusk Cycles & Repairs was in a small industrial park on the west side of York between Ridgely and Timonium, on the site of a converted gas station. It wasn't very big, but there were a number of cars parked and a number of bikes as well. We pulled over to one side and parked, and then fished Charlie out of the back. I led the way inside.

It wasn't a very big operation, but it was well lighted and clean, and seemed to be split down the middle. One side consisted of the old service station repair bays and was now the motorcycle repair area. The other half was a small office and a somewhat larger showroom, with several gleaming restored motorcycles on display. My advice to Tusker had been to start with repairs and used bikes, rebuilding them and getting a reputation for quality workmanship. I didn't know shit about bikes, but I knew a fair bit about sales and quality. At some point he'd be able to move to a larger setting and then think about getting a dealership.

It seemed to be working. Tessa grinned madly and waved to us from behind the counter, where she was writing up a repair slip, and we just waited at the side and looked things over. As soon as Tessa finished with the one customer, another came forward and started asking her questions, so I wandered around the room and on into the service bay. As I did, a mechanic of some sort looked over and said, "Sorry, sir, you can't come in here."

Tusker turned around at that and his face lit up, too. "It's all right, Joey. I'll take it." He wiped his hands on a rag and came over. "Damn, you made it up here after all! It's good to see you!"

"Damn straight! Good to see you, too." I shook my friend's hand enthusiastically.

"Marilyn with you?"

"And Charlie. They're in the showroom." I turned and went back through the archway and found Marilyn hugging Tessa. Charlie was starting to squirm around some. The two women saw us and a few more hugs were exchanged.

"Where's Bucky?", I asked.

Tessa answered, "He spends the day with my mom. Now that she's a granny all is forgiven. Now she's pushing for number two. I'd offer to let her keep him full time but she'd probably take us up on it! You're back!"

"We got back Friday. Long drive!", said Marilyn.

I nodded. "Between my knee and stopping for pit stops and feeding Charlie, it must have taken us twelve hours."

"Where are you staying?", she asked.

"The Holiday Inn up by Padonia Road.", I answered.

"You want to stay with us?", asked Tusker. "It'll be a little tight, but we'll survive."

I glanced at Marilyn, but I already knew the answer. Unless they had a new place, we'd be packed in like sardines. "We appreciate that, but we're going apartment hunting tomorrow. If we find something, we'll just move right in. Our stuff is in storage right now."

I think they were as happy as we were about that. Tusker just nodded. "So, how do you like it? This is the first you've been here!" My friend was very proud of his place.

I smiled and nodded. "Very nice. Very professional. That's the image you're trying to present. By the time you get to a larger place, you'll be all set."

Both he and Tessa laughed at that. "That better be soon! I had no idea how much room we'd need! We are totally crammed in on both parking, display space, and people. We can't grow any more here!"

"Well, it's better to have that problem than another type. We'll have to talk about that."

Just then a couple of bikers roared into the place and parked. They came in, but Tusker held up a hand. "Sorry guys, you know the rules." He pointed to a sign on the wall that read, 'No Colors.' "Leave 'em outside." That was one of the rules that Tusker and I had talked about. Bikers could come in, but if they were affiliated with a gang, they had to leave their colors, or riding jackets and vests, outside. This place, like the bar they had worked at, was neutral territory. The two bikers grumbled, but they took off their jackets and went outside and laid them on their seats. They were safe enough there; nobody on the planet was stupid enough to steal biker colors!

I looked over at Marilyn. "Listen, we'll let you get back to work. We'll call you tonight and figure out when we can get together." Tusker gave us a thumbs up, and Tessa kissed Charlie and handed him back, and then hugged Marilyn and me again.

After we got back to the motel, I called the real estate broker who was supposed to have apartments lined up, and we made an appointment for the next morning. Marilyn put Charlie in his crib so he could take a nap before dinner. That actually seemed like a good idea, so once he was out, I pulled Marilyn onto the bed and we took a nap, too. Eventually, anyway. Funny, but we didn't go to sleep right away!

The next morning I woke when Charlie started fussing and I nudged Marilyn awake. "What?", she asked blearily.

"You know who is awake."

"Well, take care of him. He's your son, too."

"No way am I going near him until he's got a new diaper. You need a hazmat suit around him."

Marilyn grumbled some and called the father of her son a few choice names, but she got up and took care of him while I headed towards the bathroom. Afterwards, I got out of the shower and fed him a bottle while she showered. We swapped Charlie detail back and forth while getting dressed. Eventually we got out of the room, and that was when I realized I had forgotten to shave.

"What would you say if I grew a beard?", I asked my wife.

"A beard? You?"

"Are you saying I can't grow a beard?" Back on my first trip through, I had a mustache within weeks of graduation and starting my job. By the time we got married, I had a Fu Manchu mustache and muttonchop sideburns that would have made a Victorian era general proud!

"No! Don't be silly. I just can't picture you with a mustache or a beard.", she answered with a smile. "What if it tickles me when you kiss me?"

"That would depend on where I kiss you, wouldn't it!"

Marilyn blushed at that and ordered me to take us to breakfast. I drove to a nearby diner.

"This is getting pretty old.", I told her. "This is not what we could call a healthy diet." Since we had left Fayetteville we had been surviving on fast food and restaurants.

"Let's hope the broker knows something decent.", agreed Marilyn, nodding.

"We'll need to set up a weight room when we build the house. I'm starting to get fat."

"No, you're finally back to where you were before you left home.", she countered.

I knew better and told her so. "I'm out of shape, hun. I need some serious time in a gym, and I have to find a dojo again. How the hell do I do karate or aikido with a cane? Maybe I can call Mister Miyagi again, see if he can help. I mean, I can't even run anymore!"

"This means a lot to you, doesn't it?", she commented curiously.

"I used to be the smallest kid in school and I got picked on by everybody!", I replied with a laugh.

"I just can't picture you like that!"

I laughed some more. "Oh, yeah! When I was in junior high, I was the smallest kid in the entire school, girls included! Tessa could have beat me up if she wanted to!"

Charlie made some sounds from his seat and Marilyn played with him. "Daddy's so funny, isn't he?" He smiled at that. "Daddy wants to be a he-man and grow a mustache!" More gurgles and smiles.

"Daddy's going to get strong so he can spank Mommy on the butt! Maybe Mommy needs to exercise, too, to shrink down that butt!"

Marilyn looked over at me and asked, not in a happy tone, "Are you saying my butt's big?"

DANGER, WILL ROBINSON, DANGER! "No, actually it looks pretty nice. You're not out of shape or overweight..." I paused for effect, and then continued, " ... yet."

"Oh?", she answered coolly.

"Oh! Marilyn, you look great, but you don't take care of yourself. You lost most of the weight from the baby, but not all of it, right?"

"Well, you try having a baby!"

I just grinned. "I prefer my part of the bargain. Seriously, though, you've probably put on about five pounds, haven't you?" Marilyn nodded, so I went on. "What happens the next time we do this? Or is Charlie going to be it?"

"We're having more children and you know it!", she said with a grin.

"Just so long as we practice a lot. Anyway, what if you put on five pounds with each kid? What if it's more? The first five doesn't look bad on you, but after that? Besides, in a few more years you'll be adding a pound or two a year regardless, if you don't take care of yourself. So will I. For our silver anniversary they're going to have to cart both our fat asses around!"

"I'll think about it."

"That's all I'm asking. Maybe we can join a gym and get a family discount." I looked over at my son. "Drop and give me twenty, mister!" I got a burp in response.

"We'll see.", said Marilyn.

We met the broker, Andrea Greene, in the parking lot behind John Steiner's office. After the routine greetings, she said she had three ideas for us. "The first is a fairly standard garden apartment, two bedrooms, one bath, probably similar to what you had down south. The other two are different. Why rent an apartment? Why not rent a house?"

I opened my mouth to protest, but stopped. It wasn't what I had asked for, but why not? "Uh, okay. I guess we could look at that." I turned to face Marilyn, but she had kind of a blank look on her face as well. She hadn't thought of it either. "As long as somebody else mows the lawn."

Andrea offered to load us all up in her Cadillac to drive around in, but Charlie had his car seat and that's a nightmare to move in and out. We decided to follow her on her rounds.

She first drove us over to an apartment complex off Padonia Road, on the east side of Timonium. It was a lot like what we had left in Fayetteville. It would certainly be adequate, but otherwise it was very boring. It wasn't any different than what we had just moved out of. Next we drove into a small development off of Ridgely. The homes here were nice single family units, separate houses on small lots, a little smaller and a few years newer than the one I had grown up in. It was a three bedroom house, but it had small bedrooms and was only a bath and a half. I remained noncommittal, but Marilyn didn't seem to like it.

Andrea picked up on that. Her final selection was about fifteen minutes away, in a townhouse development in Cockeysville. When I was a little kid, Cockeysville was where the country started, and very rural, but that was changing. Now it was seeing suburbs and townhouses, as people moved up I-83 towards the northern end of the county. This place was off of Shawan Road, about a mile from the Hunt Valley interchange.

I was rather taken by it almost from the moment we got out of the car. It was much newer than the other two places, maybe a couple of years old at most. The town houses were in odd shaped three or four house clumps on winding streets. As we pulled in I noticed a van belonging to a yard maintenance company that was hauling a trailer with a couple of large platform mowers. At the place in Ridgely I'd either have to buy a lawn mower or pay somebody; here it seemed it was part of the amenities.

Way back when, on my first trip through, when I was 14 I had my own lawn business. I mowed five lawns every week, one a day, and made decent money for a kid. I also learned I detested mowing lawns! The following year I gave the business to Hamilton, who promptly ran it into the ground and went out of business.

Andrea took us to an end unit and let us inside. It was very new and clean and white. The only problem was that it had multiple levels. You walked into the living room level on one side. To the left and down half a level was the kitchen and dining room, to the left and up half a level were two bedrooms and a bath, and up another half level, over the living room, was the master suite. In the long run my knee was going to be an issue, but for a year, we could handle it. "I thought these places were like condos, you had to buy them?", I asked.

Andrea said, "Eh, yes and no. There's usually a few units available for rent, or with a lease arrangement. I think the idea is that you move in, fall in love, and decide to buy at some point down the road. Do you like it?"

"Give us a few minutes." With my wife carrying Charlie, we went from floor to floor and looked it over. Up in the master bedroom, which was fairly roomy, I asked Marilyn, "What do you think?"

"I like it, but what about your leg?"

"Unless it gets really bad, I'll be fine. I wouldn't want to live here forever, but we can hack it until we get something else.", I answered.

Marilyn asked, "How long will that be?"

I shrugged. I had never built in Maryland before, but I had built homes for customers in New York. "Probably a year. Let's ask. Could you see yourself living here?"

She nodded. "Yes, at least until we build a place of our own."

"Keep thinking about that. Let's ask."

We headed back down the stairs to find Andrea in the living room, smiling. I don't know if she had heard us, or just could read our expressions. "I get the funny feeling you like it.", she said.

"Yes, actually we do. What's the rent going to be like?" The rent proved to be a couple of hundred higher than anything else we had looked at, but this was partly because of 'homeowner's association expenses'; the cost of having the lawns mowed and maintenance fees. Otherwise it was still a bit on the high side, but not outlandishly so. It was also larger than the other two places.

Marilyn asked how long it would take to build a home. She knew something about homes, but only because Big Bob sold trailers. What we were planning wasn't a trailer!

Andrea answered, "Well, first we have to find you a piece of land. There's at least thirty days before we could close on it, what with title searches and financing and escrow..."

"No financing. This will be a pure cash purchase. The same goes towards construction.", I interjected.

Andrea didn't bat an eye. "That certainly simplifies things. We'll run the escrow through the agency in any case. Anyway, after the land clears, you'll need an engineer or architect to sign off on the plans, and then the contractor can get a building permit." She kept on with some different steps, all of which I was familiar with. The bottom line was that we could probably move in sometime next year, in the spring of 1983.

This was rather disheartening to Marilyn, but quite natural to me. I took her hand and squeezed it reassuringly. "This is nothing I wasn't expecting, honey. I'll make a deal with you. We'll take this place, I'll look for land with Andrea, you tell the movers where to put everything, and then we take a nice vacation."

"You're going to look for land and I'm going to move furniture! That sounds like a really lousy deal!", she said, laughing.

I bent down and whispered in her ear, "I bet I can make the bed move!"

That got a squawk and a smack to the arm, but Marilyn smiled. For the next few minutes we were tied up in paperwork, signing some papers Andrea had in her briefcase. Some were for the townhouse and some were for a brokerage agreement to buy property. As per my instructions, she had run everything through John Steiner ahead of time, and I could see his initials on several of the pages. More time was taken when Charlie decided to fill his diaper, drink a bottle of formula, use up a second diaper, and then throw up his formula. It just wasn't his day!

We concluded the day by agreeing to meet Andrea on Monday to look for properties. Then we went back to the Holiday Inn, where I called the moving company and gave them our new address.

Sunday we went over to Tusker and Tessa's place for dinner and a chance to play with Bucky. We made sure to stop at a ToysRUs and picked him up a few toys. They were still in their little apartment that they had moved into back before they got married. All of their money had gone into school and their business.

Tessa opened the door for us and immediately took possession of Charlie. (Now, if I could only figure out how to do that for the next 18 years or so... ) "It is so good to see you again! I'm so sorry we couldn't talk the other day!", she said.

"Well, you were busy.", said Marilyn.

"Is it always like that?", I asked.

"Well, not always, but most of the time. Tusker's doing a lot of service work and rebuilds, as well as buying and selling the used bikes. I mean, you wouldn't believe what he gets when he does a rebuild and then sells it."

"What wouldn't they believe?", asked Tusker, coming into the living room. Over in the corner little Bucky was watching Bugs Bunny on the VCR, so we all retired to sit around the kitchen table. Tusker pulled some National Bohemians out of the refrigerator and we all sat down and relaxed.

"About your rebuilds and resales on the used stuff!"

My friend gave a wry smiled and nodded. "It's true. I'll pick up some old bike that somebody wants to dump for a few hundred, maybe a grand, strip it down and clean it, rebuild it, repaint it, and BOOM! Classic motorcycle! I'll make ten times what I paid for it."

"Wow! None of that means anything to me, but it sounds good." Tusker knew I wasn't a biker. The only time I ever rode a motorcycle back on the first go, I ended up laying it in the gravel. That wasn't enjoyable, but the bad part was when Marilyn landed on me and broke two of my ribs and put me in the hospital for a couple of days. In Aruba! I learned my lesson! "That pays for the place in Timonium?"

"The service work pays for it. The bike resales and rebuilds are the profit.", answered Tessa.

Tusker grinned. "She's the real businessperson in the room. I can follow along easily enough, but she's the brains of the operation."

That was it for the time being. We talked about old times and new, about my getting out of the army and moving back up to Maryland. We told them about getting an apartment in Cockeysville and made them promise to come up as soon as we got our furniture moved in.

Tusker smiled at Marilyn. "You're going to love it here. The weather's great. You can ride almost ten months a year."

"You can ride. I'll drive, thank you.", she said.

"I don't know, honey. I think you'd look pretty hot in your leathers and colors, with Charlie in the sidecar. Talk about your motorcycle mamas! You and Tessa can form your own gang!", I teased.

Tessa started laughing at that, and she got up and went into their laundry room, coming back out a minute later with a tee shirt of her husband's. On the back it read, 'IF YOU CAN READ THIS, MY BITCH FELL OFF!'

I laughed at that. "One of the guys in my battery had a shirt like that, only it was written upside down and it read, 'IF YOU CAN READ THIS, PICK ME UP AND PUT ME BACK ON THE BAR STOOL!'"

"I don't know about riding. I'll give it a year, but otherwise I'm heading back to New York in the summer. I did three years down in Fayetteville and it was too hot there!"

"Marilyn, that is why the Good Lord invented air conditioners! At least you never had to shovel snow!" She shrugged in agreement at that. "Besides, when we were kids, I can remember Willard Scott on the Today Show, every winter morning telling people where the coldest spot in the country was, and it was always one of two places, either Mooseprick, Minnesota, or Old Forge, New York. How far was it from your parent's house to Old Forge? Thirty minutes? Less?"

"There's no such place as Mooseprick, Minnesota!", she protested.

"That's not an answer, that's an evasion!" Tusker and Tessa laughed at that. Tessa remarked she had heard Willard talking about Old Forge a few times.

Tusker ordered out for a couple of large pepperoni pizzas, and Bucky surprised Marilyn and me by eating an entire piece by himself. Tessa commented, "He's got a very healthy appetite!"

"Which he uses to run around madly!", added his father.

Marilyn and I looked at each other, and then over at Charlie, who was wide awake and looking around at the rest of the world. "Is that a good thing or a bad thing?", I asked her.

"I'm not sure!"

"So what are your plans now?", asked Tessa. "After you move into your apartment?"

"Got anything lined up for work?", asked Tusker.

Marilyn looked at me. "Nothing specific. I'll probably get involved in the stock market, investing, that sort of thing.", I said.

"Like in high school?", he asked.

For a second or two I was stock still, and then I tried to recover. "Huh? What?"

He grinned. "Thought I didn't know, didn't you?"

"What do you mean?"

"The money, man! I knew you had some sort of gig making some serious bucks. What was it? You can tell now."

"What are you talking about?", asked Tessa, looking at her husband.

I looked over at Marilyn and sighed. She said, "Go ahead, tell them. I still can't believe it myself."

"Tell us what?", Tessa asked.

"How'd you figure it out?", I asked my friend.

"It was the money. Your folks wouldn't have coughed up for that apartment any more than mine would have. And you always had major cash on you. Whenever you had me pick up booze for you, you'd give me twenties or fifties. Who the hell back at Towson High in those days had fifties? You and the drug dealers, and you didn't use drugs; I'd have known!"

I nodded. It was a habit with me when I worked for LeFleur Homes. I was always traveling and looking at job sites, eating on the road and paying for expenses with cash. I always kept three or four hundred in cash on me at all times.

I shrugged. "I'm pretty good in the stock market. I've had a brokerage account since I was a teenager. Remember that fight I got into on the school bus back in junior high?"

Tusker shook his head, but Tessa nodded. Tusker had gone to Cromwell Valley, I think. "Sort of. I remember three guys tried to beat you up.", said Tessa.

"Oh, shit! I bet that was a lot of fun! For them!", commented Tusker.

I smiled at him. "Maybe not so much. Anyway, the long and short of it was that I sued them and got some cash out of it. Not much, but some. The deal I made with my folks was that I would save it for college, but I didn't put it in a bank, I put it into a stock brokerage account. I've been pretty lucky, too. I'm not going to get into details, but I don't need to work for somebody else."

Tessa looked stunned, but Tusker had an I-told-you-so look on his face. "I knew it! That's why you knew so much about setting up our shop!"

I nodded. "That is correct! And that is why I am going to give you some more help. What are you planning to do there? Your business is too big for your location!"

"I don't know yet, but we have to do something. I'm already looking to hire another mechanic, and I could use somebody in the lobby, but we don't have enough room for the people we have.", he groused.

"And what did I tell you that you had to do way back when you told me you wanted a bike business?"

"Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know, make a plan! You're a real pain in the ass at times, Buckman!", he replied with a laugh. "Is he like this at home? Always making plans?", he asked Marilyn.

I laughed and answered for her. "Are you kidding? In the Army you can't go to the bathroom without a five point action plan, to make sure you do it in a proper, efficient, and military manner!" Everybody laughed at that. "So what are you going to do?"

"I'm going to make a plan!", he said while flipping me the middle finger. Charlie reached out for it, which made Marilyn and Tessa laugh. Tusker dangled it in front of my son, who grabbed for it and tried to put it in his mouth. "That's really gross!", commented Tusker.

"Dig out your old business plan and use that as a start. Your new goal is to get a bigger location. Outline what you want in a bigger location and be specific. It's not just a bigger service bay, it's 'I've got 1,200 square feet now and I need 3,500 square feet plus a paint shop.' That way when you go to the bank for financing, you can show them specifics."

That got a grimace from both Tusker and Tessa. "That'll be fun! It was like pulling teeth to get the bank loan for where we are now. I thought they were going to take Bucky as collateral.", she said.

"Standard operating procedure.", I commented. "If you need money they don't want to lend it, if you have money they'll lend you all you want!"

"Maybe I should borrow the money from you!", laughed Tusker.

Suddenly things began to move in slow motion, with a clarity to them, and I just sat there stock still for a minute, as the room revolved around me. Everybody else turned to face me, and it was Tusker who said, "Hey, Carl, it was a joke! Don't sweat it!"

I shook my head and came out of the little trance I was in. "No, it's what you said. There's actually a name for that sort of business. It's called venture capital, where you invest in new businesses in the hopes they grow bigger. They do it in Silicon Valley all the time, for computer companies and such."

"I don't follow.", said Tessa.

Her husband was just looking at us blankly. "What, sort of like a bank that loans money, but not a bank?"

"Sort of. It's not really a loan, either, it's capital in equity."

"You'd better start using small words and big pictures, buddy."

I grinned at him. "Okay, let's say I have this idea for a new computer gizmo that's going to change the world. I start a company and start to work on it, but the banks have never heard of it and won't loan me any money, since I haven't sold any yet. Following me so far?" The others nodded, although this was flying way over Marilyn's head, I could see. "So, I go to a venture capital company and make a deal with them. They give me the money, and I give them a chunk of the company. They now own some of the stock in the company."

Tessa looked over at her husband. "You mean they give away part of the company to the bank?"

"That's pretty much it. The venture capital company is betting that my new gizmo will work and everybody will want one and I'll sell lots of them and the company makes a fortune. At some point down the road, the company puts their shares up on the stock market and the venture capital company can sell their shares and make a buttload of bucks."

"But you've also lost control of your company.", countered Tusker.

I shrugged. "Maybe, maybe not. It all depends on how much money they put up in the first place, and how much of your company you had to give away to get the money. A lot of those big companies, the owner still has the biggest amount of shares, but maybe not even half the shares. He still controls it, though."

"And you want to do this to a bike repair shop?"

I waved my hands at him. "Hey, I'm just talking about how it's done. Theoretically, yes, it could be done. Realistically? Nobody's going to put a motorcycle dealership on the stock market." They looked a little relieved at that.

I turned to face Marilyn. "Maybe I can figure out a way to become a venture capitalist? I've got the money. After we get back from vacation, I think I'll look into that."

"Wait, you're serious about loaning money out, like a bank?", asked Tessa. "You have enough money to do that!?"

I turned towards her. "Yeah, actually, I do, at least at a small level."

"Whoa!', she commented slowly.

"I'm still the same jackass I was when I came in here, Tessa.", I told her.

"Yeah, but ... whoa!"

"You mean, you actually have enough money to loan us to expand?", asked Tusker.

I needed to tread carefully here. "Yes, I do. That doesn't mean I would be any easier to work with than a bank, though. If I do something like that, it would have to be as a business, not as a friend. That doesn't mean we wouldn't be friends, but you have to do that as a business, right?"

"Wow! I just never thought about that!"

"Well, start working on that updated business plan. At that point you can start talking to your bank and see what they have to say. We might all just be sitting here whistling Dixie for all I know. Maybe it won't be so bad." I shrugged. I'd have to talk to Jake Eisenstein and his namesake tax lawyer about something like this, in any case.

We started talking about Bucky and his latest adventures, and about our plans for a new house and moving into the townhouse. We also finished off the beers in the fridge. Eventually Bucky got fussy and needed to go to bed (which was set up in a corner of their living room), and we bundled up Charlie. As he saw us to the door, Tusked tapped me on the shoulder and asked, out of hearing of the women, "Were you serious about being able to loan money to businesses?"

I nodded. "Yeah, I could do that. I need to talk to my accounting people but it could happen. Listen, I'm serious, too. If I do that, that part has to be business. I won't be as much of an asshole about it as a banker would be, but it has to be business, you know?"

Monday Marilyn and I split up. I was sick and tired of her complaining about cars, so I had her follow me over to the local Toyota dealership and turned her loose. Then I kissed my family good-bye and left to meet with Andrea and look for property. Most real estate people don't want to deal with raw property; since they work on commission they make more money selling a house than just the land it's sitting on. Still, she had made a commission on the apartment, and I think she had me pegged as a trust fund baby she could squeeze some future work out of. I wasn't averse to that. If she did a good job, she'd be the first one I'd call in the future.

The requirements I had laid out were relatively simple, and I figured she'd be able to match something up. I wanted about twenty acres, maybe more, in a rural setting, but not ridiculously far from civilization. Maybe an old farm property, but I was flexible. I wanted something near to a main road, and not mountainous, although there really aren't any mountains in Baltimore County. I just didn't want to need four wheel drive to go home in the winter, which had been a necessity in New York.

We met behind John's office again, and I parked my car and switched to hers. Andrea must have been fairly successful since she drove around in a Caddy. Look successful and you'll be successful, I suppose. We quickly got on the Harrisburg Expressway and headed north. It was about fifteen minutes later that we got off the highway at Mount Carmel Road. "When we talked it didn't sound to me like you were looking for one of the old horse properties in the Hunt or Oregon Valley areas, and the farm properties in the Cockeysville area are starting to get expensive, as developers snatch them up for new home construction."

"I've heard that was happening." Actually, I had seen it, before. The entire corridor would become a giant subdivision for increasingly expensive homes. No thank you! "That won't cut it with my wife. She's going to want some acreage outside of town, not in a subdivision."

She nodded. "I understand. There's still quite a bit of available property in northern Baltimore County, especially if you head over to the west side, near Carroll County."

"Sounds good to me. Were you saying earlier that some of the old money places in the Hunt Valley and Oregon Valley areas are for sale?" You would see some of these places as you drove along the Expressway. Huge rambling horsey places with corrals and fences and ludicrously expensive thoroughbreds. Old money! Did you know the official state sport of Maryland is jousting? This is where you would go to joust!

Andrea laughed. "Anything is for sale if the price is right, but I think the right price might involve the gross national product of a small country to afford them. Certainly not in the budget you gave me!"

"I'm just looking to build a nice house, not a castle."

We drove west on Mount Carmel Road about ten or fifteen minutes. Then she turned right and drove a hundred yards up a side road, and then parked. "This is the first place I wanted you to see.", she announced.

"Where are we? Are we still on Mount Carmel Road or is this Lower Beckleysville Road in Carroll County?", I asked.

"We're still in Baltimore County, just, anyway. It turns into Lower Beckleysville just a bit further on. It's the Hereford school district. What do you think?"

Well, Andrea earned her commission right then and there. We ended up looking at two more places, one more in Carroll County and one back in Baltimore County, but this was the one. It was a bit over 25 acres on the north side of Mount Carmel Road, with about two thirds being an abandoned farm field and the other third a wooded area that had never been cleared. It was on the side of a hill with a very shallow slope, so that it rose at most about fifty feet from Mount Carmel Road to the northern edge of the property. It would be nothing to grade a flat area in the center to put a house and yard, sited to look down onto the road. We were very close to the Carroll County line, maybe a couple of stone's throws away, and closer to Hampstead than to Hereford, but Mount Carmel Road/Lower Beckleysville Road is a major road and was maintained well. After looking at the next two sites, we drove back to this one and I walked the property.

I was sure Andrea could count her commission check as she saw me walking the site and planning things. This was the place, and I told her so. I memorized the location, and we went back to Timonium. I would drive Marilyn out here Tuesday.

Well, no we wouldn't. As I suspected she would, Marilyn found a nice new Toyota at the dealership, a brand new Tercel, just like her old one. I was to go with her tomorrow to buy it. We also had a message from the Lincoln dealership that the Town Car was ready to pick up. The check must have cleared. (That wasn't the message, we were told the 'dealer prep' was finished, but really, everyone knew better.) When I asked Marilyn about the Tercel, she got very excited and told me all about it, and gave me a blow-by-blow description of her day.

"I wonder if we'll be able to pick it up faster if I give them a certified check tomorrow?", I commented to her.

"The salesman wanted to know about what we were doing with the old one and I told him we were giving it to your sister, so he made an appointment for me to leave it with their shop to be looked at."

I was on the verge of making a comment about how they had seen her coming, since repair work is a real profit center, but I stopped, my mouth wide open. "You know, actually, that makes pretty good sense. Let's see what it needs. Suzie won't have any time or money to fix it."

"I know it's overdue for an oil change.", my wife said. "When do you want to get it to her?"

"Let's shoot for Friday. If we do car stuff tomorrow, maybe they can work on it so we can pick it up on Thursday and drive it out there. Did the moving company call and say when they would be able to move us into the town house?"

"Wednesday."

"Perfect. We do car stuff tomorrow, move in on Wednesday, settle in on Thursday and look at some property, and visit Suzie on Friday.", I told her. Marilyn nodded in agreement.

Well, the plan sounded good. It didn't quite work out that way, but it sure sounded good. We ended up spending the entire day Tuesday taking care of the two cars, picking mine up and turning over the Impala, looking at Marilyn's new Tercel, running around town getting a certified check from my new bank, switching all Marilyn's crap from her old car to the new one. It was late in the afternoon we finally got it all sorted out. We had insurance through USAA, a small and not well known outfit with excellent service that is operated for the benefit of military officers. I'd heard of it in glowing terms in my first life; now I took advantage of it, since I qualified.

Wednesday we went over to the town house. The movers were late and Charlie was acting fussy, crying and not eating. Worst, he was pulling and tugging at his right ear, a sure sign of an ear infection! We didn't have a doctor yet. We didn't even have phones in the town house yet, so I had to run around and find a phone in the complex' office to call John and ask for his pediatrician's name, from when his kids were young, but the nurse told me they were booked and suggested taking Charlie to the emergency room. By the time the movers showed, Charlie was screaming. Marilyn would never find the hospital on her own, so I had her go back to the Holiday Inn and try to calm our son down.

I stayed behind at the town house and directed traffic. I knew I was getting some of it wrong, but I wanted the stuff in and the movers gone, so that I could get back with my family and take Charlie to the hospital. I'd just have to move stuff around properly later on. It was a very long day. I got back to the motel, we loaded up a crying baby, and headed to GBMC, where we sat around waiting for a space in the emergency room. It was late when we got out of there, well after dinner. Charlie was on amoxicillin for a week and we stopped at a drive-thru for some food.

Charlie was still fussy on Thursday, which made Marilyn rather short with me. I moved everything in the town house where she wanted it and it still wasn't right. Some of the crap we just stored in the spare bedroom next to Charlie's room. He eventually settled down and took a nap, but we kept moving stuff around all day. Friday we stayed home rather than visit Suzie. Charlie was just too fussy. I went back to the Holiday Inn, packed up everything, and officially checked out, none too soon for my taste.

Amazingly, Charlie was starting to settle down by the time I got back, and Ma Bell showed up to plug in some telephones. I had ordered an 'expedited' install, so the cost was just slightly less than the cost of the property I was looking at. Maybe we could have twins, and I could sell one of them to pay for the phones.

Our first phone call was to Suzie. She had given us a number for her suite, which certainly sounded nicer than the slums that passed for dorm rooms at Rensselaer. It was a Friday afternoon, so the odds were good she didn't have any classes, and we got lucky. Marilyn and I had originally wanted to just drive up there and say, "Surprise!", but we came to the conclusion that was probably a lousy idea. We would have to make sure she had time to take it over to Delaware DMV, and get insurance on it.

That part was a bit of a stickler. I had no qualms about giving her the car, and I knew she'd love to have it. It was a reliable little beast, and perfect for a college kid, yet had no real resale value. Still, Suzie would have to foot the bills, and insurance on a 20 year old wouldn't be cheap. Dad would be happy to pay, but the family couldn't know I had given it to her. Dad couldn't keep it a secret from Mom; Mom would come up with all sorts of reasons she couldn't have it; Hamilton would probably torch it if he knew where it came from.

I dialed her number and after a few rings a female voice came on the line. "Hello?" There were sounds of giggles in the background.

It wasn't Suzie, so I decided to have some fun. "Is this the residence of Suzanna Elizabeth Buckman.", I asked, in as officious and pompous a voice as I could muster.

"Uh, yeah, sure."

"Please don't say anything, but is she currently in this residence?"

The girl on the other end started acting serious. "Yes, she's here. What's this about?"

"This is Doctor Rufus T. Firefly, from the Johns Hopkins Clinic for Advanced Venereal Disease. Don't be worried, but we have a team on the way to the residence. We'll need to quarantine her for exposure to Herpes Simplex 14, the infectious version. Don't get any closer than you have to but..."

I heard a sharp bang as the phone on the other end of the line clattered onto a hard surface. Next, faintly over the line, I heard the girl yelling, "Suzie!"

"What?", yelled my sister's voice.

"Some guy says you've got the clap!"

"WHAT!?"

Marilyn was looking at me from across the room and giving me the evil eye. "She's going to kill you, and I'm going to help her!"

"Who is this!?", demanded my sister's voice angrily.

"Suzie, it's me, your brother Carl. What's wrong?"

"Were you fucking with my roommate?", she demanded.

"Suzie! How can you say that?"

"YOU ASSHOLE!", she yelled. Then I could hear her turn away from the phone and yell, "It's my asshole brother!" Then she got back on the phone with me and asked, "Just what did you tell her?"

"Who? Me? Nothing! Oh, maybe there was a question or two about you and venereal disease..."

"YOU ASSHOLE!"

I laughed. "Is that any way to speak to a guy who's about to give you a car?"

It took her a second to respond. "What did you say?" This was asked in a much more normal tone.

"We moved back home and I just bought Marilyn a new car. You want the old one? We're getting it serviced for you right now."

"Are you serious?", she asked, excitedly.

"You bet. You want it?"

"Sure!"

"Okay, hold on. Marilyn's here. You two sort it out." Marilyn had come over, with Charlie on her hip. I handed her the phone and moved into the living room. As I settled into my La-Z-Boy, I heard Marilyn start swearing about me along with my sister. After they talked for a bit, and I came back over. "Let me talk for a minute."

Marilyn handed me the phone and Charlie grabbed my nose. I pulled back and said, "Suzie?"

"What's up? This is great!"

"You're going to have to tell Dad some sort of story about this. You can't let them know that I'm giving you a car. It will be too much trouble. Dad will put you and the car on his insurance, but when he asks where you got it, just tell him somebody in the dorm moved out or something, and you got it for a song. Spin him a line of BS.", I told her.

Suzie was slow in answering. "Okay, I can do that, but you know you're going to have to settle this someday. You can't avoid them forever. Sooner or later you're going to run into them."

"Maybe so, but let's make it later. Did you and Marilyn figure out when we're bringing it up?"

Both Suzie and Marilyn answered, "Next Friday!"

I nodded at my wife and chatted with my sister a few minutes more, and then hung up.

Marilyn smiled at me. "You're a good brother, even if you are a jerk."

"That's a hell of a thing to say to the father of your infant child!", I replied.

"He has to learn about you sooner or later. Your daddy's a stinker!", she told him, holding him up towards me. Then she sniffed. "Peee-yewww! So are you!"

I held my fingers up in a cross, to ward off the evil spirits, and backed away. Marilyn just rolled her eyes and ordered me to nuke a baby bottle for a few seconds. She changed a diaper, and then fed and burped him while I watched. Then, Charlie was dumped, sleeping, into his crib in his bedroom. Marilyn came back down the stairs and into the living room, to find me back in my recliner. "I'm exhausted.", she said wearily.

Chapter 63: A Gentleman Of Leisure

"Me too!" I reached out and tugged her towards me. "Sit down and rest." I pulled her closer and my wife twisted around and sank down onto my lap in the recliner. I idly rubbed her back, but when my fingers rubbed against her bra buckle, something not quite so restful came to mind. I began moving my fingers around her bra straps and buckle under her t-shirt. "You know, I'm pretty much a gentleman of leisure these days. I would think that the woman I was married to would understand that sort of thing."

Marilyn snorted at that. "Is that what you call yourself? A gentleman of leisure? Try unemployed!"

"How about self-employed?", I countered.

"So?"

I tugged on her bra buckles and playfully snapped her with it. "Well, I simply think that the wife of a gentleman of leisure should be trying to keep her husband happy."

"Happy?", she asked, laughing. "You have anything specific in mind?"

"Well, I'd think you'd be trying to be creative about it.", I teased. I snapped the bra buckle again.

She laughed some more. "Your sister is right, you really are full of shit!" Marilyn sat upright and pulled her t-shirt up and off, and then quickly removed her bra. I smiled at her. "Is this what you had in mind?", she asked.

I put my hand on her breast and cupped it, and began flicking the nipple with my thumb. "Well, it's certainly a start!"

I helped Marilyn out of her clothes, and then she returned the favor for me, and we made love in my recliner, with it laid as far back as possible and Marilyn laying on top of me. La-Z-Boy is supposed to have a really good warranty, and we can't be the only people to have ever done this, but it'd make for a hell of an accident investigation if anything bad were to happen.

Afterwards we lay there, naked in each other's arms, idly resting and planning on a second bout, as long as Charlie stayed asleep. Marilyn laughed and said, "You know, maybe I should divorce you and take half your money. Then I can get my own teenage boy toy to take care of my needs!"

"I think I can still handle your needs.", I replied.

"Are you kidding? I'll be able to afford two teenagers as boy toys!"

"I'll handle your needs!" I wrestled Marilyn out of the chair and onto the floor, where we ended up with me on top, and being a bit more vigorous then we were in the chair. Afterwards we cuddled and I smacked her bottom for being a tease.

At that point, Charlie decided to announce himself. I groaned and Marilyn got to her feet. We dressed and she went off to take care of our son. I followed after her and then continued up to our bedroom. I stripped and took a quick shower, and then pulled on some shorts and a flowered shirt. I went commando. I also rummaged around in the closet and found a simple sundress for Marilyn and tossed that on the bed as well.

I went back downstairs to find Marilyn changing Charlie's diaper again, and putting a fresh outfit on him. "Daddy took a shower.", she told him. "Now Daddy gets to play with you while Mommy takes a shower!"

I chuckled at that, and took him from her. "Yes, Mommy is smelly and needs to clean up. Mommy stinks!"

"Those boy toys wouldn't make fun of Mommy!", Marilyn replied.

"I'm too tired to cook. Want me to order a pizza?"

"Sounds good!"

I nodded and juggled Charlie around, and then Marilyn headed up to our room and I took Charlie down to the living room and then on down to the kitchen. I put him in his seat and grabbed the phone book and went through the Yellow Pages until I found a place that would deliver.

Marilyn returned just after I hung up the phone, wearing the sundress but barefoot. She gave me a hug and said, "Maybe I'll keep you around after all."

"Good idea. Wine?" I pulled a bottle of Chianti out of the little wine rack on the counter, and held it up for her.

"Sounds good!" She took over taking care of Charlie and I dug out a couple of glasses and opened the wine. I glanced over at Marilyn and noticed the absence of panty lines through the thin cotton of her dress. That boded well for later.

We goofed off until the pizza arrived. Marilyn handed me a pad and pen and had me follow her around and make notes of everything we needed to do to the town house and what we needed to buy. Some I agreed with, like a bunch of book shelves (I have a lot of books), and some I wasn't thrilled with, like painting the various rooms (I detest painting and wallpapering.) By the time the pizza arrived I wondered if I was going to need a second notepad.

While we ate, I quizzed Marilyn. "Where do you want to go on vacation?"

"Vacation? What vacation?"

"I'm sure I told you that after we moved, we'd take some time off. Well, we moved. Let's take a vacation."

"I thought you were just joking."

"I never joke about goofing off!", I replied.

She gave me a double-take when I said that, but then said, "Well, what did you have in mind?"

"Let's dump Buster here with your parents for a week or two and go somewhere, just the two of us. You tell me where, and I'll make it happen!"

Marilyn was just not being very inventive with vacation ideas, so I tossed out a few. It was the beginning of March, and while Maryland was nowhere near as cold and snowy as upstate New York, it was still winter, or at least the end of winter. A vacation south would be an excellent choice. "How about the Bahamas?", I asked.

Marilyn blinked and looked at me curiously. "I don't know. What's it like there?"

I shrugged. "Don't know. Never been there. Let's find out."

"Just like that?!"

"Sure, why not?"

"You mean, just go?"

"Well, maybe I should find a travel agent first.", I replied.

"When?" She smiled and shook her head. "I can't believe we can just up and go somewhere."

"Get used to it. It's what us gentlemen of leisure do. Just don't forget what we expect of the women in our lives."

Marilyn snorted and laughed. "Just make sure there's only one woman in your life!"

I lifted my glass of Chianti. "Old English toast - 'To our wives and our lovers, and the hope they never meet!'"

Marilyn smiled. "Keep it up, smart ass! Next time I see your brain trust, I'm going to ask them about divorce in Maryland!"

I gave Andrea a call and rescheduled a visit to the acreage on Mount Carmel Road for Monday afternoon. By then Charlie should be well enough to go out again, and Marilyn should see what I had in mind. I also took her grocery shopping and we stocked the kitchen, and while we were at it, I had her pick up a few house design books. I had a few things in mind, but she needed to think it over, too. We spent the rest of the weekend playing house and looking at plans.

On Monday we drove out to Mount Carmel Road and met with Andrea. As I suspected, Marilyn liked the location as much as I did. "How big is it?", she asked excitedly.

Andrea looked down at the file in her hands, fumbling with them in her gloves. It had snowed lightly overnight, probably the last snowfall of the season, and it was chilly. Charlie was all bundled up, but he was sleeping and we had left him in the running car. "It's 25.24 acres. It's just under 1,000 feet of road frontage down there on Mount Carmel, and just over 1,100 here on the side we're parked on."

"How come it's available?"

I looked at my wife and shrugged. "Good question." We both turned to Andrea.

"The previous owner was a farmer, but after he died, neither of his sons wanted to become farmers. One of them lives in Baltimore and the other moved out west somewhere. The original farm was split, half on this side and a larger piece actually on the other side of Mount Carmel Road. The farmer down there...", she said, pointing towards the east, " ... he bought the piece across the road, leaving this piece."

"What's the farmer raise?", I asked, curious about my future neighbors.

"Not completely sure.", admitted Andrea. "Sweet corn, probably." Andrea turned and pointed up the hill slightly. "My understanding is that there are some apple trees over there."

I looked where she was pointing, and made out several apple trees, looking bare and gnarled in the late winter breeze. I grinned at Marilyn. "Sold! You need to learn to make apple pies!"

"I already know how to make apple pies, and you know it.", she said with a smile.

I turned to the real estate broker. "Okay, this is looking pretty positive. I'll give you a deposit today, but it needs to be contingent on a few things. Has a survey been done on this piece?"

Andrea nodded. "Just this past summer, when the property was subdivided. That's current. What else?"

"I'm going to want a perc test run. I won't close on the property until I know the land percs and the septic won't cost more than the land." I knew that out here, we weren't near municipal water and sewer lines. We'd need a well and a septic system.

Andrea nodded, but a bit more slowly. "I can do that, but I don't think the owners are going to pay for it themselves."

"Well, we need to run it anyway. I doubt it will be a problem. I don't think I've ever heard of drainage problems out here, but you never know. I'll give you enough of a deposit to pay for the perc. Can you arrange it?"

"What's a perc test?", interrupted Marilyn.

After thirty plus years in construction, I knew all about them, but Marilyn's father would have never explained these details to one of his daughters, only his sons. "It's short for a percolation test. It tests the soil for a septic system."

"You need a perc test to get a septic system designed. There's no sewer lines out here to tie into.", answered Andrea.

"Well, what is it?"

It took me a second or two to understand, but then I nodded. "Oh, it's real simple. You dig a hole in the dirt and dump a bucket of water in the hole, and then time how long it takes for the water to drain. If it doesn't drain, but sits there like a swimming pool, you fail the test, and you need a very expensive septic. If it drains quick, though, everybody is happy."

"And here."

I shrugged. "Probably pretty good. Maryland farmland is not noted for its clay. It's mostly sand and loam mixes, I think." I looked back at Andrea. "Do you want to do the paperwork here, or go back to the office?"

"We can sit in my car. I can arrange for a perc test, but I won't promise the sellers will absorb the cost."

I waved that off. I wasn't going to quibble over the cost of the test, but I wasn't going to buy the property without a test. We checked on Charlie (still snoozing happily) and then got into Andrea's car and did the paperwork. She expected to be able to close between 30 and 60 days from now. John Steiner would handle my legal work. Finally, we shook hands and climbed out of the car. I wanted to look around the property some more, but Andrea wanted to get back to her office.

"One last question. Just curious, but which airport is closer, Philly or BWI?"

She smiled. "You're not that far away from things. Philly's probably over two hours away. BWI will be a lot closer, maybe an hour away. Why?"

"Just trying to figure it out. We'll probably want to travel a bit, and with my bad leg, flying is a lot nicer than driving.", I explained.

"Well, maybe you can get a feeder flight out of Westminster."

Huh? "Westminster?"

She pointed west, towards Hamsptead and Westminster beyond. "Yeah, maybe twenty minutes that way. There's a small regional airport. It's mostly small aircraft and some corporate type jets and stuff, but maybe you can catch a connecting flight to BWI."

"Really! I had no idea there was an airport out here! That would be a lot nicer." I turned to Marilyn. "Want to go exploring?"

"No. You can go explore. I want to get Charlie home and get dinner going." Almost on cue, we heard our son start to fuss and cry inside the car.

"Okay. You take care of him. I'm going to look around a bit more." I turned back to Andrea. "Andrea, thank you for everything. Get any of the paperwork and reports to John. Marilyn and I are going to be out of town for a few weeks, but I'll check in with John at some point." We shook hands again.

I left Marilyn with Charlie and wandered out into the field. I walked around it for a bit, trying to visualize placing the home, and even went over towards the apple trees. I was smiling as I got back to the car. "Happy?", asked Marilyn.

I smiled back. "Happy! I'll do my exploring tomorrow."

Marilyn snorted at that and leaned across the seat to kiss me, and then we loaded Charlie back into his seat and headed home. We looked through the books on home plans some more, trying to settle on a design. I already knew we were going to end up modifying the plans, but not by how much.

Tuesday morning I kissed my family and drove out towards Westminster. I had an address from the phone book, but otherwise was winging it. I figured I should be able to find an airport. It was not quite three quarters of an hour from where we were living, but like Andrea had said, maybe half that distance and time from our new place.

I found it easily enough, or at least easily enough after I stopped at a local gas station in Westminster and asked direction. The airport was a single mile-long paved strip serving light aircraft and business jets, but was surprisingly modern. A plaque near the door announced it had been modernized extensively just a few years ago, and everything still looked new. It was supposed to be a relief airport for BWI, Baltimore Washington International, between Baltimore and Washington. In case BWI vanished, it was long enough to send jets to in an emergency, I guess.

I walked in and found my way over to an information counter. A harried looking young girl came over and asked, "Hi, can I help you?"

"Maybe. Are there any charter companies here at the airport, or is it all private plane owners only?", I asked her.

"No, sir, I mean, yes, sir!", she replied. I simply gave her an amused look and waited. "I mean, yes, sir, there's charter planes here. It's not just private owners."

"Can you point me towards one of them?" I was trying valiantly not to laugh at the poor girl.

She pointed across the lobby area to a hallway and a door. "Over there."

"Thank you." She went scurrying back to her other work, and I chuckled and headed over to the hallway.

I chuckled and turned towards the hallway and went down it. The first door was open and labeled "Executive Charters", which sounded promising. I looked inside and saw a middle-aged man sitting at a desk looking over some charts, and wearing a semi-military shirt and slacks. I knocked on the door. He looked up and said, "Can I help you?"

"The girl out front pointed in this general direction and said the air charter companies were down here.", I said. "But I'm not sure she was sure."

"Pretty little blonde, a bit ditzy?" I nodded. "That's Brenda. A sweet girl but a real airhead."

I grinned at the description. "I bet she makes up for it in other ways."

He laughed. "I'm too old and married for that, but you are right. How can I help you? Looking to charter a plane?"

"Yeah, but I want to know how it works."

"Well, have a seat. I'm Lloyd Jarrett."

"Carl Buckman."

"So, Carl, where do you want to go?", he asked.

"Well, first, I want to take my family up to Utica for a few days. After that, we'll come home and I want to travel to the Bahamas. Can that be done?"

He nodded. "No problem. Just say when."

"So, Lloyd, how does this work? For the last few years most of my flights have been one way. The Army made me climb on board and the Air Force made me jump out rather than land."

Lloyd laughed at that. "Paratrooper?" I grinned and inclined my head in assent. "I know what that's like. I have some buddies who fly C-130s for the Maryland National Guard and they occasionally do their two weeks a year down at Pope. You might have jumped from one of their flights."

Lloyd had the look of a military man, with the stocky build and short hair cut of a pilot. "Maybe so. You?", I asked.

He shook his head. "I fly A-10 Warthogs for the Guard."

"A fighter jock.", I said with a smile. "Well, I want to fly charter to a few places, and not commercial, so, again, how does this work?"

"Rates are based on the size of the plane and the distance we fly, usually expressed in a cost per hour and the number of hours. You usually end up with a flat fee on a flight. We take most major credit cards."

Executive Charters had a mix of planes, with a couple of Beechcraft King Airs, a Learjet 25, and a de Havilland Twin Otter for cargo purposes. They also had access through a network of charter companies to larger planes, including Gulfstream IIs and IIIs.

"Do you normally get guys like me just asking to fly places?", I asked.

Lloyd shrugged. "Not so much, but it's more like you're younger than the norm, by far."

"I'm in investments these days.", I replied, temporizing. No need to get into the money with everybody. I could always run the bills through 'The Buckman Group'. I was starting to be thankful that Jake Junior had me start up the corporation.

Lloyd just nodded. "Still, most of our work comes through corporate travel departments, or a few high end travel agents."

Now we were getting somewhere! What I had in mind for Marilyn and me would involve a high end travel agent of some sort. "Such as?"

Lloyd gave me a few names and numbers for some travel agents he had worked for, and then took me out to the flight line and showed me a couple of his planes. Eventually I thanked him for his time and took his card. Lloyd had been very helpful; maybe I could have the travel agent use his company.

I had lunch at a small place in Westminster, and then drove back to the town house. Marilyn was busy trying to feed Charlie as well as do the laundry, so I rescued her by taking my son. She thought I was getting off easy until he spilled his bottle all over me and then burped up the rest on top of that. I took him up to the bathroom and stripped off both our clothes and we took a quick shower together. I'm not sure whether he liked the shower or not, but it certainly seemed to fascinate him! I returned him naked and clean to his mother to redress.

"I can't believe you gave him a shower!", she exclaimed. Charlie wriggled and giggled in his mother's arms as she struggled to put a fresh diaper on him.

"Hey, a man's got to do what a man's go to do! He's a natural at it! He'll never want to take a bath now."

"Men!", she exclaimed. She finished dressing him and then dumped him back in my lap.

I waited until Charlie got sleepy and then put him in his crib. Afterwards I grabbed the phone and started dialing a few of the travel agents that Lloyd had recommended. I made an appointment to meet one of them, a Taylor Hannity of Dream Vacations, at our house tomorrow afternoon.

I'm not quite sure why I selected Ms. Hannity from the names Lloyd had given me. Maybe it was because she didn't seem to bat an eye when I asked her to meet at our home. The other two wanted to meet at my office or theirs, and were curious when I said I didn't have an office. Ms. Hannity never missed a beat and simply asked for the address and the time to be there. Maybe she was familiar with the habits of rich people. Or maybe I needed to get an office to meet people in. I would have to give that some thought.

What in the world would I do with an office? What would I do there? Hide from Marilyn? That didn't seem like a productive use of my time, even if I wanted to be productive, which I was ambivalent about to begin with. I sort of liked just goofing off!

Taylor showed up the next day at 2:00 in the afternoon. By then we had been in the town house for almost two weeks and everything was basically put where we wanted it to be. The walls were still white primer, but it was a good primer and simply looked like a stark white finish coat. I could live with it for a year, especially since the alternative was having Marilyn hector me into painting and wallpapering. If Marilyn decided she wanted colors, maybe that office idea would pay off after all!

The doorbell buzzed at us and I said, "I'll get it.", and headed towards the door. I opened it to find a trim brunette in her mid-thirties holding an attaché case. "Hello. Ms. Hannity?"

She gave me a dazzling smile and held her hand out. "Call me Taylor. Mister Buckman, I presume?"

I shook her hand and nodded. "Call me Carl. Come on in ... I turned and said, "Marilyn, our guest is here."

Marilyn came closer and said, "Ssshhh! I just put Charlie down for his nap. You wake him and he'll be fussy for hours!"

"How old is he?", asked Taylor.

"It will be five months next week.", answered my wife.

Taylor smiled again. "That's a good age. By this time next year this place is going to look like a war zone. Kids that age can get toys out faster than you can put them away!"

"This time next year I hope to have that problem in our new house.", I replied.

"Oh?"

I nodded. "Come on in. Let's sit down and talk." I led the way to the dining room. "Please have a seat. Can we get you anything? Coffee? Tea?"

"Coffee would be lovely, thank you."

I'm sure it would be, if I knew how to make coffee. I don't drink it, so I don't know how. Marilyn smiled at me and said, "I'll do it. You want some iced tea?"

"Please."

She snorted in laughter at me, which mystified Taylor, and went to the kitchen. I smiled at Taylor's quizzical look. "I can't stand coffee and Marilyn knows it. I don't even know how to make it."

"Well, don't go to any trouble on my behalf."

I waved off the concern. "Don't worry, she always has a pot on the Mister Coffee."

"So, exactly what did you have in mind, Mister Buckman. What kind of dream vacation do you want?"

"Well, several things come to mind. I suppose that at the top of my list is that I can't stand flying commercial. Even if we travel to the same old places everybody else does, I don't want to spend the entire day in airports. I did enough hurry-up-and-wait in the Army. I don't need to keep doing it now."

"Is that where you got the limp?", she asked.

Marilyn brought back two cups of coffee in one hand, holding them by the handles, and a glass of iced tea for me. "Cream or sugar?", she asked.

"Black is fine, thank you."

"I take sugar in mine." She sat down next to me and asked, "What'd I miss?"

"I was just asking if your husband got his limp in the Army."

I gave a wry shrug. "I made one jump too many with the 82nd Airborne. Now I'm in investments. As I mentioned, this is only temporary. We just bought some property out near Hampstead and are going to build a house. I promised Marilyn to take her on a nice vacation once I was out."

"Sounds like fun. Well, you already know we can handle flying with charter operators. What did you have in mind?"

I glanced at Marilyn, and then pressed ahead. "Two trips, actually. The first is to her family in Utica. That won't be any too fancy.", I turned to my wife. "You were saying we need to get Charlie baptized, right? You haven't even joined a church down here, and all your family is up there. We can fly Suzie up with us, take a weekend, give him the bath, and then leave him with your folks while we fly off on our vacation."

"You make that sound so simple!", she answered.

"That's because it is simple.", interjected Taylor smoothly. "Simply give me the dates and I can arrange it. Will you want a car while you're there? Do you plan to stay with family or will you need a room? Any preferences?"

"That's what I've been saying!", I added. "The only reason I want to fly is because seven hours in the car is going to really bother my knee!"

"Okay, that's one trip. What did you have in mind for your vacation trip? That will be just the two of you, correct?"

I nodded. "We talked about that. Neither of us have been to the Bahamas. However, I don't want to just stay in a hotel on the beach. I'm thinking something a little more exotic."

Both women asked the same thing at the same time, "Just how exotic?", although Marilyn asked it in a much more suspicious tone.

"Okay, I'm thinking a private villa of some sort, on the beach, but private. Not too private, though, since we'll want to go into town and see the sights or whatever. No desert islands. Is that sort of thing possible?"

Taylor nodded. "Certainly. The only question is how fancy you want to be and when you want to go. Some times of the year are more popular and more expensive, or might already be booked. The Bahamas are actually a bunch of islands, although quite a few have small airstrips that private jets can fly in and out of."

"How much lead time do we have to give you?"

"Well, I would prefer a few weeks, but I can show you some ideas in a day or two."

I smiled at Marilyn and nodded. "So I'm not actually as crazy as my wife thinks I am."

Taylor laughed. "No, not hardly. I think I know of a few places you might like. Private, but not too private. Maybe a place you can work on your tans without any tanlines?"

Marilyn turned bright red, and I just laughed and nodded. "I think you have the general drift."

"If I call you in two days, will you have figured out when you can do your christening? Maybe we can do the vacation trip the week after that."

"We'll figure it out and I'll call you tomorrow.", I assured her.

We showed Taylor out, and I laughed at Marilyn's embarrassment. Then I chased her upstairs and showed her my technique for getting her out of her swimsuit. That kept us busy until Charlie woke up.

That afternoon, I had Marilyn call her Mom and see about getting St. Peter's for a christening. Harriet in turn called St. Peter's and got the first date available, which was Sunday, April 4. I then called Suzie and checked that April 4 was free for her.

"I guess so. You want me to drive to Utica? Can't we wait until the summer?", Suzie asked.

"You let me handle that. I'll let you know. Just be free that weekend, okay?', I assured her.

I turned to Marilyn. "Call your mom back. April 4 it is. I'll give Taylor the message." It was after five, so I left a message on her answering machine, and asked Marilyn to remind me to call her the next morning.

Taylor called us by 9:30 the next morning. We gave her the dates, and she said she would have some suggestions by the next day, and asked if she should come out again at the same time. Marilyn and I agreed to that, and Taylor came out at 2:00 just like before.

This time Marilyn had some fresh coffee brewed, and had a sugar and creamer set on the dining room table. I had to take two looks at them. They were a brand new and matching Raggedy Ann and Andy set. "You're kidding me, right?"

"They're cute!", protested Marilyn.

"They're atrocious!", I replied.

"They came with matching salt and pepper shakers, too."

I stared at her for a second. "Oh my God! My mother really was right about you!"

Marilyn simply stuck her tongue out at me and gave me a long and loud raspberry.

I turned to Taylor. "Wherever we're going, put me in the Learjet. Put her in a Goony Bird with only one engine!"

"She's right, they're cute.", laughed Taylor.

"You can sit with her on the Goony Bird!"

Taylor and Marilyn laughed at me, and Taylor pulled some files from her attaché case. "The first trip is certainly the easiest. You can fly out of Westminster, drop into the nearest airport to - your sister, I believe you said?"

I nodded. "My sister, Suzie. She's a student at the University of Delaware. I think that's in Newark."

Taylor's eyes unfocused a little as she thought for a second. "Yes, that's the main campus. I think the nearest airport is actually Philadelphia International. You could fly in there, pick her up, and then fly to the Oneida County airport, which is near Utica. Would that be close?"

Marilyn nodded. "That's closer than Syracuse."

"Okay, then. That's the travel arrangements. I would have a car waiting for you at the airport, and we can put you up for the weekend at the Sheraton. Would you want separate rooms or a nice suite for all of you?"

I grinned at my wife. "Do we keep her in the suite with us, or give her her own room and hope she doesn't get into trouble?"

"You're a mean brother! Give her her own room."

"Okay, but warn her about your brothers. In my family, at least, we don't think of a family reunion as The Dating Game!"

"Oooh, I'll get you for that!", Marilyn protested, laughing.

I turned to Taylor. "You'll notice she didn't deny that." Taylor didn't respond, though her eyes had an amused light to them. "I'd say two rooms at the Sheraton. And a decent sized car at the airport, maybe a Caddy or a Town Car, something that size. We'll probably bring enough gear to send Charlie into combat."

Taylor made some notes. "I'll let you know of the final details and you can let your sister know about the itinerary. That Sunday you simply reverse course. You drop the car off at the airport, fly to Philly and then back home. When will you want to go on your vacation?"

I looked at Marilyn and we shrugged at each other. "Maybe a day or two later?"

Marilyn said, "We'll need to do the wash and repack. If we fly home on Sunday, I don't see how we could travel again before Tuesday."

"Makes sense.", I agreed. "If we fly home the following week, how do we get Charlie back? Fly back up to Utica?"

"Why not fly directly from the Bahamas to Utica, pick him up, and then fly home?", asked Taylor.

I had to laugh at that. "Won't that freak out your parents!? They'll never believe us when we have them drive over to the airport and see us climbing out of an airplane!" I looked at Taylor. "What kind of an airplane?"

"Well, the first weekend, the distance is so short, you won't save any time in a jet. We can put you in a nice turboprop like a King Air. Going to the Bahamas is another thing. I'm figuring a Learjet for that."

I looked over at Marilyn. "Holy Christ! I told you to stick with me and see the world!"

"I just can't believe this!"

Taylor looked at us strangely. "Do you mind me asking a personal question?"

"Let me guess - what's with us and this vacation?", I responded.

"Yes. You're not my usual clients."

I grinned and nodded. "Okay, short version. I'm a very good investor in the stock market. However, until now, for the last few years in fact, I've been the property of Uncle Sam. I was an officer in the Army, in fact. After I ripped up my leg, I was medicalled out. I'm still a very good investor, but now I plan to goof off a little."

"You do realize what this vacation is going to cost, don't you?"

"When I said I was a good investor, I meant it. My net worth is around $40 million right now, and rising. Start buying tech stocks, Taylor. We are at the start of a long boom period in American finance."

Taylor blinked at that. "Wow! And you were a soldier?"

"Do you only want the poor people protecting you?"

"Wow!"

Taylor pulled out several colored brochures and spread them around the table. "Now, these are just a few possibilities. They're a mix of things in the Bahamas. Like I said the other day, the Bahamas are a bunch of different islands, most of which are quite lovely and have a small airport on them. The biggest island, well, there really isn't much of a biggest island. The capital is Nassau." She pulled out a map of the Bahamas and pointed to an island in the center of the small archipelago. "There's nice places here, but also some on these other islands. It all depends on what you want."

I looked at my wife and shrugged. I had been to the Bahamas before with her, back on my first trip, but always on a cruise ship, where we never stayed on the land. I didn't know much more about the place than what Taylor was saying. I turned back to our little lecture.

Taylor pulled out one brochure. "This is one possibility. It's in Nassau, the Graycliff, five stars, very discreet, very upscale, an old time estate converted to a very nice resort. Then again, there are also some places nearby, more conventional resorts, but also very modern. That's a possibility."

Marilyn looked interested, but it wasn't quite what I had in mind. "What else do you have there? I was thinking of a sort of villa or house, not really a hotel. Something more private than that."

"But not so remote as to be a desert island, right?"

I thought briefly back to my hike back through Nicaragua. "No, not that remote. Maybe a place we could get a nice car for the week and go into town if we wanted."

Taylor nodded. She put away the brochures on the hotels and pulled a few others out. "Here's something you might like. This is on Eleuthera." She tapped the map on a different island. "This is called La Valencia. It's a private estate that can be rented. It's right on the ocean, almost a thousand feet of private beach, plus a very discreet staff."

"How do you get there?", I asked. The place certainly looked lovely on the brochure.

"It's near the island capital, sort of, called Governors Harbor, and there is a small airstrip there. It's certainly large enough to fly a Learjet in and out of. It also takes flights in and out of Nassau and Miami.", she explained. "Rent a car for a week. Oh, by the way, they're English originally, so they drive on the left."

I snorted at that. "Maybe we can save on the jet fuel for the ride home if we die while driving on the wrong side of the road."

"I'll drive.", said Marilyn.

"Now I know I'm going to die!"

Charlie woke up at that point and we all took a break as Marilyn tended to our son. She came back down five minutes later with Charlie in a fresh diaper and a clean onesie. He was deposited in my lap while Marilyn scurried off to the kitchen to prepare a bottle. Taylor made a few funny faces at him, and then took him from me and played with him a bit.

Marilyn returned to find Taylor making raspberries with our son. "Typical man, get a woman to do your job for you.", she commented.

"He's so adorable! Mine are all older than him.", commented Taylor.

"How old?", asked Marilyn.

"My oldest daughter is twelve and my son is nine. The baby is our youngest girl and she's already seven."

"What's your husband do?", I asked.

"He works for the telephone company, but we don't know whether he'll stay with AT&T or go with one of the regional companies."

"He should be safe either way.", I commented. "Ultimately the value of the various Baby Bells will be greater than that of the mother company. I put a flat million into shares of AT&T after the court agreement was made. I intend to stick with it after the breakup." Taylor blinked at this announcement. While I couldn't remember all the values and foolishness, for the next thirty years and beyond the various Bell companies and Baby Bells and the original national Bell bought and sold various pieces of each other and their competitors. The ultimate result was a very strong phone system and very valuable stocks.

This seemed like the kind of vacation I had in mind. Taylor told me she would make the various arrangements over the next day or two, and asked how I wanted to get them. It was at times like this that I missed more modern communications methods. Forget about computers - fax machines were still in their infancy! Modem speeds were practically nonexistent. Fiber optic didn't exist yet. Cell phones had been invented but still hadn't been rolled out to the United States. I told her to simply mail it to me. I gave her my American Express card number and we wrapped it up for the day.

The next few weeks went quietly. Andrea's engineer did a perc test and the property passed, so we gave the word to John to start the work on the title and the closing. We would close on the property after we got back from vacation. Marilyn and her mother chattered frequently about the christening and they made arrangements to do a double christening. Mark and Lauren were christening their second child, Justin.

I spent quite a bit of time teasing Marilyn about what I was going to do to her once we got to the Bahamas. That got her very turned on for a few days, but then she had her period and that put a kibosh on any fun and games for most of the week before we left. Well, better than during our vacation week, which we both agreed on.

I converted part of the spare bedroom into an office, buying a desk, a small filing cabinet, and a small copy machine. Jake Junior had me bill this all through The Buckman Group, since it would be a business expense. Theoretically I could have claimed some portion of my home expenses towards office costs, but that's one of those items the IRS red flags for special attention. At my income level, everything gets audited in any case, but why ask for trouble?

At some point I was going to have to ask John about actually running a business. Right now all of my money was tied up in the stock market, or some more liquid assets that I could tap for quick cash. As my wealth grew, however, was I going to need to hire an accountant or bookkeeper for the Buckman Group? What about a secretary? Get an office somewhere? That sounded like more of a pain than anything else. Right now it didn't take all that much time, but would it be less expensive to bring it in-house rather than outsource it?

Was I about to become a business?

Chapter 64: Vacation

On Friday, April 2, Marilyn and I packed up all our stuff for the weekend and loaded it in her car. We would drive up to the Westminster airport, unload it into the plane, and then leave the car for the weekend. I felt like I was climbing in and out of a clown car. It was very nice and very cute - and very small!

"Honey, why are we using your car?", I asked.

"Because the car seat is already set up for my car."

"Well, why don't we buy a second and put it in my car? Same type, same model, same everything." We had gotten this very expensive and elaborate contraption that you could unhook from the car and use as a carry around baby carrier, and then put onto wheels as a stroller.

Marilyn didn't have an argument against this, and we decided to get a second one for when we came home. As it was, with Charlie in the passenger seat, I drove and let Marilyn ride in the back, which seemed very confusing to our son. He kept trying to turn around to look at his mother.

Lloyd Jarrett turned out to be our pilot, and he loaded our gear into a Beechcraft King Air. By the number of bags Marilyn had packed in the trunk, you'd have thought we were making a pilgrimage to Mecca. I just had my B4, but Marilyn had a jumbo suitcase, and Charlie had even more stuff. "You do realize,", I asked her, "that your mother has everything imaginable that he's going to need! She only had thirteen children!"

"It's not the same!"

I just stared at her for a moment and then shook my head. My wife would learn. Eventually, after we had our children, we used to joke that the first one is utterly special. The second child isn't so special, but is still kind of nice. By the time the third comes along, they're all just spare parts! You're too tired to find anything special about them! We used to joke that after we got rid of them all, we'd buy a one bedroom trailer from her father and move into it, and then throw carpet tacks on the living room floor to keep them from coming back! It didn't quite work out that way.

We had gotten a call from Taylor a couple of days after we had made our arrangements with her. She had heard from Lloyd Jarrett that a better choice for airport would be New Castle in Wilmington. It was closer to Newark and vastly easier for a small plane to fly in and out of, and even more vastly easier for passengers. We got the directions to Suzie.

Lloyd got us loaded and settled in, with me in the copilot's seat (I made a solemn promise not to touch a damn thing!) and Marilyn and Charlie right behind us. Charlie was turning out to be a good traveler. He didn't cry or fuss much, and seemed to enjoy it all. The trip to New Castle was barely an hour long, and we had hardly gotten up to altitude when it seemed like we were starting down again. It was a little louder than I liked, but what do I know about airplanes. Lloyd kept up a pleasant chatter about the plane as we flew, and it certainly seemed nice and plush.

New Castle turned out to be pretty quick to fly in and out of. Lloyd told me that it was an ex-Army Air Corps base from WW2 that was just on the edge of being commercially viable for scheduled service from an airline. It was big enough and well built enough to handle commercial traffic, but nobody had figured out how to make any money doing it. The airlines mostly used Philly, and northern Delaware was just too small an area to support an alternative airport. When we landed and taxied to the terminal, we just parked and Lloyd and I climbed out. A door to the side of the terminal opened, and Suzie came out, looking quite bewildered. I waved to her and she just stared at me. I motioned her forward, and she came closer, dragging a suitcase on wheels.

"Hey, there kiddo, you look surprised!"

She stared at me. "When you said we were flying, I thought you meant in a real airplane!"

Lloyd rolled his eyes. I said, "Suzie, this is a real airplane. You think I can charter a 747?"

"You chartered this plane?!"

"Come on, let's get on board. We can talk about it later." I took her bag and folded away the handle. Lloyd loaded it aboard, and then motioned for Suzie to get on. This time I sat in the back with Marilyn and Charlie.

As soon as she saw the others, Suzie forgot her questions. She hugged Marilyn and then started playing with her soon-to-be godson. Charlie gurgled happily at her and tugged on her fingers.

As soon as we were loaded, Lloyd got into action and was on the radio, getting us clearance to taxi to a runway and take off. I couldn't complain about the speed or efficiency of everything, and it was a lot more comfortable than flying commercial. A King Air isn't the biggest bird in the sky, but the seats were very nice and they sure beat six across seating in the tail end of an overloaded 727.

We arrived at the Oneida County Airport after another couple of hours, and I marveled at it all. We had gotten to Westminster just a bit before nine this morning, and now it was just barely afternoon. If we had tried to do this all flying commercial it would have taken all day to go through two airports, and we would have ended up an hour away from Utica. After 9/11 you could add another four to five hours in security checkpoints. This was so much better!

We hadn't talked about it during the flight, since I didn't want to get into it with Lloyd, and it was still a bit noisy. Suzie's mystification increased when she found a Caddy waiting for us at the airport's terminal (a shed with delusions of grandeur!) I was able to drive the car up to the airplane and Lloyd helped me load everything up. Then he took off with a promise to return Sunday afternoon at 2:30. That would give us enough time on Sunday to baptize Buster and then have a nice dinner.

We drove over to the Sheraton and put Suzie in her room, and then went up to ours, which was a small suite. It's not that we were being snobby, but the suite gave us a place to put Charlie in his crib. No, we hadn't brought the crib. I had been able to keep Marilyn from packing that, too. No, we would use one provided by the hotel. Suzie simply dumped her stuff in her room and followed us up.

She looked around the suite, and simply said, "Okay, what gives?"

"Hmm?", I asked blandly. I went into the bedroom and returned with a bottle of whiskey from my suitcase. "Drinks, you two?"

"Please!", called out my wife. Suzie simply nodded.

I found an ice bucket and sent Suzie down the hallway. "Find us some ice and I'll tell you all about it."

"What about lunch?", asked Marilyn.

"Are you hungry?"

"Yes."

"Okay." I took the ice bucket back from my sister. "Let's go downstairs and have lunch, and we can talk there."

Marilyn changed Charlie while Suzie watched, and then we loaded him into the stroller and headed out. We'd have a nice lunch, a drink or two, and then head over to the Lefleurs.

We made it to the dining room and didn't have to wait. Charlie was behaving well, so we just gave him a bottle. The rest of us ordered sandwiches and beers. Finally, Suzie wouldn't be put off any longer. "Okay, no more stalling. What's with the private planes and the Cadillac and the suite at the Sheraton? Did you guys suddenly become rich or something?"

Marilyn gave a bit of a shrug and simply pointed at me. I looked at my sister and gave a smile. "Close enough. I've been investing in the stock market since I was a kid, and I've done well."

"Like what? How well? Are you a millionaire or something?"

"Yes, that's exactly what I am.", I answered.

Suzie just stared at me for a second or two. "Are you serious?"

"You bet! Now, you have to promise not to tell anybody. This is just private, between family members and a very, very few friends. Promise me you won't blab it to anybody."

Suzie gave a big grin. "Won't Mom be surprised! Or do they know already?"

Marilyn and I looked at each other, but we weren't smiling. I turned back to my baby sister. "See? That's why I said not to say anything. No, I've never told them, and I don't want to tell them. I haven't talked to them in four years. Can you think of anything good that would happen if they knew I had money and had moved home?"

"You moved home!?"

"I thought we told you that. We're living in Cockeysville. We bought some property in Hereford and plan to build a house in the spring."

"HOLY SHIT!", she exclaimed, a little too loudly. Several people turned their heads to look at her, and she gave a guilty look and lowered her voice. "Holy shit! I had no idea!"

"We moved back a couple of months ago, when I got out of the Army. We're renting a town house right now. When you come home for the summer, you'll have to come out. The development even has a pool."

"Cool!" Suzie turned to Marilyn. "I had no idea!"

"Neither did I! He kept it a secret, even from his wife!", grumped Marilyn.

I shrugged and failed to look all that sorry. "Yeah? Well, there's a reason for that. People act differently when they think you're rich. I have friends now that I would have never had if everybody had known I had money, and the friends I did have I would never know why they had become my friends."

My sister looked startled at that, and when she glanced over at Marilyn, my wife shrugged and nodded in agreement. "I love your brother, but I don't know what I would have done if I had known he was rich when I met him. What if I had been too afraid to even talk to him? Or what if some beautiful blonde had been chatting him up instead?"

I smiled at my wife. "That wasn't a concern. I prefer brunettes ... Ouch!" Marilyn had slugged me in the shoulder at that comment. I looked back at my sister. "It's just, well, keep it under wraps, okay?"

"Just how rich are you?"

I shook my head. "Does it matter? I'm rich enough I can fly on chartered airplanes and take my wife on nice vacations. How rich do you need to be?"

"How?"

No way to explain that one. "Remember long ago when I had that fight on the school bus..." I gave her the quick and simple explanation. I finished, however, with, "Don't tell the family."

"You know I wouldn't do that!"

"I know, it's just ... it would become a problem." Charlie was snoozing peacefully, so I ordered another round of beers. "How's the family?"

"It's okay. Hamilton's working for the phone company now. Aunt Nan and Aunt Peg got him a job there. He works the midnight shift in the billing department, I think. It's something to do with computers, anyway. Did I tell you that before?"

I nodded. It's what had happened before. "Is Mom on his case about going back to school?"

Suzie grinned. "Of course! He's actually started part time at UMBC."

I snorted at that. Back before, he had spent seven years going to school part time at UMBC, and then dropped out with only 6 credits left to go, giving some bullshit statement about a conflict over the course scheduling. He simply refused to ever finish something properly. It was part of his mental problems. He just threw it all away.

"How's Mom and Dad?"

Suzie shrugged. "Mom's Mom. She's just like always, as long as nobody mentions you. You're the one who caused all the trouble. I don't know whether she just says that to hide the fact that Hamilton's a jerk, or whether she actually believes it. Probably both."

I just nodded. What more could I say?

"Dad asks about you from time to time."

My ears perked up at that. "Oh? Like what?"

"Well, he knows that you and I still stay in touch. It's just that sometimes, every few months, it will just be the two of us in the house or driving, without Mom or Ham, and he'll ask if I've heard from you, if you're all right."

I felt a cold and painful fist closing around my heart. Without my brother, couldn't I have had a decent relationship with my father again? What made my brother so hateful? What had changed in me this time that made him so much of a problem? I missed my Dad. "What do you tell him?", I asked quietly. Marilyn reached over and took my hand.

"Nothing you've asked me not to say. Usually just that you are fine and happy. He doesn't know about Charlie or getting out of the Army or moving home. If he presses, I simply tell him he has to ask you directly. I did offer to give him your phone number, but he hasn't asked for it. Maybe you should call him?", she said.

I shook my head sadly. "And say what? Listen, if he asks, give him the number. I can pretty much guarantee, though, that if he calls, it won't be from home, where Hamilton and Mom can throw a tantrum. He'll call from the office."

"I'm sorry. It can be pretty weird at times. As soon as I'm out of school, I'm moving out and getting an apartment."

We talked about her classes for a bit. Suzie was finishing up her junior year, and had another year to go. She was sharing a suite with three other girls, and they planned to stay together the next year, too. When I asked her about her love life, she blushed and told me to mind my own business. That just made me laugh and push harder. If you can't tease your baby sister about boys, what's the world coming to? Marilyn was happily torn between defending Suzie and asking questions of her own.

Charlie woke up and fussed, so I paid for lunch and we went back to our rooms. We planned to change him, clean up a bit, and then head over to the Lefleurs for the rest of the day. I told Suzie to come up in about 30 or 40 minutes. I told Marilyn we needed to get ready immediately.

The family reunion with Marilyn's folks was interesting, to say the least. We had traveled up here frequently over the years, since Marilyn was very close to her family. I should say that Marilyn frequently traveled to Utica. Quite a few times were when I was in the ready cycle, preparing to invade some far off place on a moment's notice. If it fit with her schedule for school, I would often fly my wife home for a week or two. This, however, was the first time I had visited in over a year, and Marilyn hadn't seen them since her parents had come down in the fall when Charlie was born.

It started simply enough, but like I suspected, it got complicated quickly enough. "How was the drive up?", asked Harriet.

"Well, actually we flew. Carl's knee gets stiff when he sits or drives for a long time.", answered Marilyn. I just nodded agreement.

"Oh, so you drove here from Syracuse? What, did you upgrade the rental car?" Harriet was looking out the window to the parking lot and could see the Cadillac.

"No, we had that waiting for us at the Oneida County Airport in Whitestown. Carling arranged a charter flight. We flew to Philadelphia and picked up Suzie, and then flew here. It's so much faster if you don't have to go through a regular airport!"

I rolled my eyes slightly. Both Harriet and Big Bob turned to face me. "You chartered a plane?!"

I shrugged and smiled. "Come on, let's go in and sit down. Can I get a beer?" I led the way into the kitchen, limping and using the cane. Marilyn was right. I tended to stiffen up when I was sitting in a chair for a few hours. It was worst in the morning when I crawled out of bed. I felt like I was moving like an old man then. Then it would get better during the day, and get stiff again in the evening.

Once in the kitchen, I got out a few beers, and Marilyn set Charlie in his seat on the kitchen counter. I smiled at my son and said, "You've still got a few years to go, Buster!" Marilyn laughed and started feeding him a bottle. The kid was an absolute piglet!

I turned back to my in-laws, who were still waiting for my explanation. "I have a confession to make. I've already told you about most of my history. It was all true. What I didn't tell you was that I have a pretty good ability at investing on Wall Street. Actually, more than a pretty good ability. I have kept it a secret until just recently, but now that I'm out of the Army, I've told Marilyn, and a very, very few friends, and now I'm telling you. I am a millionaire."

Big Bob looked like he had been smacked with a two-by-four, and Harriet looked like she simply didn't believe me. They both exclaimed, "WHAT?!"

"It's true!", said Marilyn. "When we moved to Maryland, Carl introduced me to his lawyers and accountants. They said it was all true!"

"You're kidding us, right? This is just some sort of joke.", said Big Bob.

"I was a millionaire before I ever met your daughter. I am worth considerably more than that now.", I answered.

"How much more!?", he demanded angrily. It was like I had set out to fool them somehow. Well, okay, I did, but not in a bad manner. Most guys would want to marry into the family to get their hands on Big Bob's money. Instead, I was richer than him!

I sighed. "As of last week I had a touch over $40 million. That's mostly in stocks and commodities, though. I only keep about a half million of it in checking and savings accounts."

They just stared at us with open mouths. Big Bob was considered very much a success in his chosen profession, selling house trailers to people who couldn't afford anything else. He was honest and fair, sold only better quality house trailers, and was thought well of in the business. He would expand the business to cover most of upstate New York before he sold it to his kids. He knew most people in the business nationwide, and was constantly consulted by his suppliers, since Big Bob was a Big Deal.

And now he had learned that the guy his idiot daughter had married, who was stupid enough to join the Army because he couldn't get a real job elsewhere, and who he would probably have to support the rest of his life, so his idiot daughter and her children wouldn't starve and be homeless, was many times wealthier than he was. It was a wrenching change in his worldview.

There wasn't much for me to say at this point. Suzie just sat there and watched it all, and Marilyn just smiled at me and held my right hand, while using her free hand to pour formula into Charlie. Big Bob and Marilyn stared at us some more, and then looked back and forth at each other.

Finally he asked, incredulously, "Are you serious?!"

"Yes."

Marilyn piped up. "Listen, when we come back from our vacation, come out to the airport and meet us there! We'll be flying back here in a jet!", she said excitedly.

"A jet!"

I nodded to them. "Right now we're planning on a Learjet but that could change, I suppose. It's not like I own the plane. The charter company promised it, but if it breaks or something, they have to send something else." I shrugged. "I mean, it's not like we really care which type of plane it is." I looked at Marilyn and grinned. "It sure beats the hell out of flying commercial!"

"Unbelievable!", finished Big Bob.

"I told you years ago, sir, that I would take care of your daughter. I meant every word!"

"Unbelievable!"

I didn't even bother asking the Lefleurs to keep quiet about this. That would have been simply impossible. Marilyn can't keep a secret to save her life, but she comes by this honestly. Neither of her parents can keep a secret either. In fact, the entire family blabs and gossips like a bunch of old women!

Friday night was pizza night, and the whole family was there. Now, with the kids getting older, it was just getting bigger. Mark and Lauren were there with their little one, and Luke and John had their wives there. Even the high school boys had a couple of girlfriends over. There were just a huge number of questions for us. Many of them were on purely domestic type things. How old was Charlie? Where were we living? What kind of house were we building? (Real simple answer - no idea! Marilyn hadn't done much more than look at the books.)

A few of the questions were about me and the Army. Was I out? What happened to my leg? Why did I limp and use a cane? The questions didn't end when Marilyn gave her folks a present. I had no idea she had done this, but she taken the pictures from the ceremony where I got the Bronze Star and had one of them, with her, me, and Charlie, standing with Colonel Longworth, done up nicely. She must have had it done at the PX before we moved, since it had a formal 'Army' type look to it. It was laminated to a walnut plaque, with a representation of the medal at the top, the picture, and then a copy of the citation at the bottom.

I think I stared at that plaque as much as her family did. It had only been a few months, but it already felt like a lifetime ago. I had let my hair grow longer, and had grown a mustache and goatee. (Marilyn thought it looked nice, and every once in a while I tried tickling her with it. She didn't seem to mind my efforts, especially if I tickled her in special places!) It was like Colonel Featherstone had said, that job was over, I had a new job as husband and father.

"When did you have this made?", I asked.

"The photographer sent me the prints and a copy of the negatives, and I called Missy Talmadge about the plaque. She said that the brokerage does similar things, and gave me the name of a company in Towson. Charlie and I drove down there."

"Without getting lost?"

Marilyn gave me a raspberry, and then said, "Yes, Mister Smarty Pants, without getting lost! I also had one made for you. You can put it on the wall of your office, someday, when you have an office."

I just stared into space for a moment. The plaque was now being passed around the kitchen as the kids ripped through the pizzas. It just didn't feel real anymore.

It felt real enough a moment later. Mark and Lauren were sitting at the counter with us, with the two baby seats side by side. It was funny sitting there watching Charlie and Justin looking at each other curiously. Mark had grown up a lot since high school, at least in that he didn't try to push my buttons intentionally any more. He was still an arrogant son of a bitch, but not as bad as before. Maybe his wife had him on a leash. "Why did they give you a medal?", he asked. At least the tone of the question was one of information seeking, not derision.

"Uh, I can't really say. It's classified.", I said. Even as I said it, I knew it sounded lame.

"Classified?"

I glanced at Marilyn, but for once, she didn't feel like talking about it. She hadn't said anything to Tusker or Tessa either. It seemed that if I invoked national security, she could actually keep a secret! "Mark, when I was in the Army, I had a Top Secret clearance. That mission was classified Top Secret. I am simply not allowed to talk about it."

"I thought you were down there training.", he commented.

Lauren agreed. "That's what Mom said when she and Dad went down after Charlie was born. You were off in Honduras on some training thing." Of course, Mom and Dad were Harriet and Big Bob. "That's where you hurt your leg, right?"

I nodded. "Yeah, that's where I hurt my leg. Listen, everything the Army does is training, right up until the point when it isn't, you know? Anyway, that's all I can tell you. It's legit. It wasn't faked."

"You can't say anything?", pressed Mark.

I felt my jaw tightening, and Marilyn squeezed my hand. I just took a deep breath; Mark was being curious, not an asshole. I said, quietly, "Mark, Top Secret is Top Secret. I am not allowed to discuss it with anybody without the proper clearance. There are things that happened on that mission that I haven't even talked to Marilyn about."

Then I simply pushed my way away from the counter and smiled. "Besides, it's all ancient history. That seems like a different me. Now I just live at home with my family."

None of the boys said anything to us about our money. The little ones didn't know or understand, and the big ones were generally too polite. I got much more grief over my beard. While Big Bob was always clean shaven, most of his sons grew beards on and off over the years. Matthew had a mustache, Mark and Luke both had trimmed but full beards, and I knew that a number of the others would grow them over the years as well. Both Mark and Luke wanted to know if the goatee was because I couldn't grow a full beard. I asked them if they had any hair on their balls, or if they only had it on their face. I didn't ask them that where their mother could hear, just their wives. It was a fun night, actually.

It was after nine when we all headed over to the Sheraton. The next morning we slept late, had breakfast at the hotel, and then drove back over to the Lefleurs. It was actually a lot quieter, since Mark and Luke and their families weren't around, and most of the high school boys were off somewhere. We just hung around for the day, with Marilyn giving her mother detailed instructions on taking care of Charlie. Harriet put up with this with considerable humor, since she could write books on taking care of babies. Hell, by the time we got back, they'd probably have him potty trained, weaned, and driving a truck!

Saturday night we had hamburgers at the Lefleurs. Think of charcoal briquettes on buns. Still, I had to suffer through one meal that weekend. Sunday would be better.

Sunday turned out very nicely. We didn't go to the Lefleurs at all. Instead, after breakfast, we dressed in our Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes and drove directly over to St. Peter's. The day was quite chilly, since it was only the first weekend in April. It was still well inside the snow period for upstate, which is usually considered anytime between Thanksgiving and Easter. Even that isn't a sufficient time frame. It can snow anytime in November, and right into May. Most farmers don't even plant until May. This was a real difference to Maryland, where the seasons seemed to start six weeks earlier. We bundled Charlie up and hustled inside the church.

Matthew and Suzie were going to be godparents to Charlie, and this was considered quite unusual to the Lefleurs. Both were single, and Suzie wasn't even Catholic. Their tradition was that only married Catholic couples could be godparents. Marilyn didn't realize it yet, but the only godchild she would get, out of over forty grandchildren, was one of Suzie's kids. Mark and Lauren had selected her oldest brother and his wife as godparents.

After the mass and the double baptism, we headed over to Grimaldi's for lunch. They had a banquet room upstairs, and I had let Marilyn sort this out with her mother and Lauren. We had a big group, what with Lauren's family, and it just seemed so much simpler this way. On Friday night I told Mark I would pay and then he could send us a check afterwards. As it was, by the time you added in the Lefleurs, Lauren's family, the older boys' girlfriends, Luke's wife and her family, and my little brood, we were somewhere between 40 and 50 people. No way could we do that at the Lefleur household, even if we catered it.

It all went very smoothly. At least we got Charlie baptized, so my wife could rest easily. Up until now, I had threatened to spritz him with the sprayer at the kitchen sink, and intone "Now you are a Lutheran!" That would usually give her apoplexy, thinking that the heathens had finally gotten their hands on our child. I would usually just laugh and then threaten to do it secretly, so that when Charlie did make it to Heaven some day, St. Peter would send him to the Lutheran section.

Before we left, Marilyn spent another half hour telling her mother how to raise our son, to the point where Harriet simply took the baby seat with Charlie in it and ordered her daughter away. At that point I rescued Harriet by pulling Marilyn away and hustling her and Suzie out to the car. We were there about half an hour early, but Lloyd Jarrett was already there, sitting in the lobby and reading the Utica Observer-Dispatch. We had a phone number to call to return the car, so I found a phone and made the call, and then went back out and left the keys under the front seat. Lloyd had a lot less to load in the King Air without all of Charlie's gear!

The flight home was even quicker. We landed at New Castle and practically tossed Suzie out as we rolled down the runway. We had her and her luggage unloaded in just a few minutes once we got to the terminal, and then we buttoned up again and turned around for the taxiway. We got permission to fly out very quickly. I guess Sunday afternoons aren't heavy traffic days. I wondered if New Castle even had heavy traffic days. An hour later Lloyd landed back at Westminster.

"Will you be flying us Tuesday?", I asked him, as we unloaded our luggage from the King Air.

"No, I've got a flight in the King Air to Chicago. I have another pilot who's going to fly you down. He used to be Air Force, too."

"What'd you do after you dropped us off in Utica on Friday? You hang around Utica?"

"God forbid! I flew home. Your bill would be a whole lot higher if you made me stay in Utica!"

"That's kind of why we live in Maryland, you know.", I said, agreeing with him.

"Now, if you want me to hang around in the Bahamas, just let me know. Maybe I can load the wife and kids into the cargo hold, or they can sit on the wings or something."

I just laughed at that and thanked him, and then Marilyn and I got in her car and drove home. It was a touch wearing flying around like this, but compared to flying commercial, it was a breeze! We got back to the town house just in time to catch the evening news. I warmed up some leftovers from the refrigerator, and then we cleaned out everything that would go bad over the next week. I made a couple of trips out to the dumpster with garbage bags. I left enough to live on during Monday, but otherwise cleaned out the fridge.

Chapter 65: Off To The Bahamas

Tuesday, April 6, 1982

We spent the next day unpacking and repacking our bags for the coming vacation. We just tossed our dry cleaning from the weekend into a pile in the corner of the bedroom. That was really just my suit and Marilyn's dress from the baptism. We had several suitcases and a hanging bag. I teased Marilyn about cutting down on luggage by eliminating all her underwear.

Marilyn grinned at me. "I think you have ulterior motives!"

I gave her my most innocent look. "Marilyn, how can you think that of me? I just worry about taking all that luggage with us."

"So it has nothing to do with wanting to see me running around without my bra or panties on."

I held my left hand up, with the middle three fingers extended and the thumb and pinky folded over. "Scout's Honor!"

She gave me a double take at that. "I thought you did that with your right hand."

"Oh, well I guess it doesn't apply then."

"Did you want to help me pick out my clothing?", she said teasingly.

"What an excellent idea!"

We spent the rest of the evening going through some of her outfits. She would try one on, I would comment on it, and then she would take it off and I would have my way with her! It took us a long time to sort through her closet and dresser, but it was sure worth it! I bet Victoria's Secret could really boost sales if the models boffed the customers!

Monday we packed and rested. Marilyn spent some time taking a bubble bath, and then afterwards invited me upstairs to help her shave. That kept us both occupied the rest of the afternoon. By God, that pussy was clean enough to eat off of, which I did! By dinner time, the refrigerator was empty and we ended up going out for Chinese.

We got up at 8:00 the next morning, ate breakfast (bagels and juice), cleaned up, and finished packing. We left the town house about an hour later, and drove to the airport in my car, and not Marilyn's little clown car. One of these days Chrysler would invent the minivan and I could buy her a "Mom bomb" I could fit into. We were figuring that if we could get to the airport by 10:00, we'd be in good shape. According to the map, the Bahamas were about 1,000 miles away, and the Learjet was supposed to cruise at about 500 miles an hour or so, so we should get there around lunchtime.

I drove up to the terminal and around to the charter area, where we saw a small jet sitting on the tarmac near the building. "Is that it?", asked Marilyn, wide-eyed.

It looked tiny, at least compared to an airliner, but I could see the distinctive wing tanks of the first generation Learjets. "I told you, honey, stick with me."

Marilyn turned to me and laughed. "You've told me a lot of things over the years!"

I smiled at her. "And the check was in the mail, wasn't it?"

"What else?"

"I would love you in the morning, right? I did!"

"And what else?"

I gave my wife a big shit eating grin. "And I wouldn't come in your mouth!"

"That's the one! Liar, liar, pants on fire!"

We both laughed at that, and then I parked the car. I popped the trunk. Marilyn grabbed her purse and climbed out. She was wearing a new sundress, halter topped and mid thigh length, along with a pair of medium heeled sandals. It was warm enough that we didn't need coats or jackets, at least as long as we stayed in the sunlight, and by the afternoon it would probably be very pleasant. I suspected it would be even more pleasant a thousand miles south of Westminster. I grabbed our bags and pulled them from the trunk. We had three suitcases and a hanging bag, and Marilyn stood there smiling expectantly. At least I got her to carry my cane.

A pilot came out of the terminal and headed over to me. "Mister Buckman?"

I dropped the suitcases. "That's me!"

"Okay, excellent! I'll be your pilot. I'm Jim Johnson." He was in his mid-thirties. Lloyd had said he was ex-Air Force. I suspected that he was a flyboy who had gotten to the point in his career where he was spending more time flying a desk and less time flying a fast jet, and it wasn't fun anymore. It was time to get out and either fly 747s for Continental as a junior pilot, or fly fast and nimble little private jets for a charter company. I bet Jim had chosen option 2.

I stuck my hand out. "Carl Buckman, and this is my wife, Marilyn."

He turned to her and shook Marilyn's hand. "Pleased to meet you. Just checking, but you're going to Eleuthera in the Bahamas, right?"

Marilyn looked confused and turned to me. "I thought you said this was in a place called Governors Harbor?"

"That's the airport on Eleuthera.", I answered, and she looked relieved. To Johnson, I said, "Yes, that's right."

"Just checking. I'd hate to get there and find you wanted to go skiing in Canada or something.", he said with a smile.

I laughed. "Has that ever happened?"

He rolled his eyes. "Not to me, but it happened to a friend of mine."

"Well, you got it right this time."

"Then let me give you a hand with that. Do you have your passports handy?"

Marilyn immediately began pawing through her handbag, but I simply reached into my back pocket and pulled them out. We had Marilyn's, from when she had changed her name after we got married, and my new blue one, from when I had surrendered my red military version to get my new civilian model. "How does that work, anyway?", I asked.

"A Bahamian customs officer will be at the airport. You have to stay on the plane until he clears you."

Okay, that made sense. But later? "What happens when we fly home? Are there customs officers in Utica?" That just didn't sound right. There couldn't be customs people at every Podunk airport in America.

He shook his head. "No. For one thing, we'll need to tank up on the way back. We can't make it there in one hop. So we'll fly to someplace in between with customs officers, and then go through customs. Once we're inside the US, we can refuel and fly where we want to go without problems. At that point it becomes an internal flight and nobody cares."

"So we fly to Miami and go through customs there."

"Probably north of there. I'm thinking Charlotte. "It's big enough to have a customs office but not too big to get lost in the shuffle, and it's about halfway to Utica. Why in the world do you want to fly to Utica, anyway?"

"Our baby is staying with Marilyn's family. Otherwise, I'm with you!" Marilyn stuck her tongue out at both of us, which simply made me laugh.

Jim simply smiled and grabbed a couple of the suitcases. I followed him over to the jet and passed him the bags as he loaded them into the jet. Afterwards, we stepped back and Johnson allowed us to climb up the stairs into the plane. As a gentleman, I allowed Marilyn to go first. The fact that I liked watching her legs as she climbed up the stairs ahead of me was simply coincidental!

And it got me to thinking.

I stood there hunched over (it was surprisingly short, between four and five feet high) in the front of the cabin looking around as the pilot climbed on board. He was followed on board by a good looking blonde who was wearing what looked like a stewardess outfit. I looked at her curiously. "These little babies need a stewardess?"

"Flight attendant!", she answered with a smile. "No, not really. I'm Jim's wife. I occasionally fly with him."

"Hi. Carl and Marilyn Buckman."

"Samantha Johnson. Let's get you buckled in and airborne. Once we're at altitude, we have a bottle of champagne courtesy of your travel agent."

"Well, that's nice. I'm sure I'm paying for it somehow, but it's still nice.", I replied with a smile. Then I glanced back to where Marilyn was sitting. There were six seats on the jet. three rows of two seats. Marilyn was sitting in the first row, with her legs crossed and showing a lot of very nice thigh. I turned back to Samantha and lowered my voice. "Let me ask you, where do you sit during the flight?"

Samantha looked past me towards Marilyn, and then gave me a small smile. "I think I can ride up front with Jim. We actually have a partition door between the cabin and the cockpit."

I returned the smile. "That would be very nice." I turned and moved into the cabin. Marilyn was sitting on the right side of the jet and looking out the window. I sat down in the seat across the aisle from her.

Marilyn turned to me and said, "I can't believe this!"

"I have to admit, it definitely beats the last airline I flew routinely."

"Hmm?"

"You know, me and a hundred of my closest friends, and we didn't even have to worry about whether we were going to crash when we landed! We weren't going to be on board then!"

"Yeah, but I bet you didn't have seats this comfortable."

"And we didn't have a flight attendant serving champagne, either."

"Champagne! It's the middle of the morning!"

"It must be five o'clock somewhere. If you don't want any..."

Marilyn interrupted me. "I didn't say that!"

At that point Jim Johnson came out of the cockpit and headed to the door, and pulled the folding stairs up into the plane, and then pulled the top portion of the door down and closed us up. "Let's buckle up, folks."

He went back into the cockpit and Samantha came back to do the flight attendant bit. "Do I need to tell you how to buckle your seat belts?"

"I think we have it covered."

Just then a whine started from outside as the engines began starting up. Samantha moved into a fold-down jump seat next to the cockpit door. I looked over at Marilyn. "In the event of an emergency, do you know the proper crash position?"

"What?"

"You bend over, put your head between your legs, and kiss your ass good-bye!"

"Shut up! You can't say things like that on an airplane."

I laughed at her. "What? I'm going to upset all the other passengers?" That simply got me a raspberry.

I faced forward and considered my seat. The seats on this bird were really nice and luxurious leather, big, wide, and soft. They must have been made from a very happy cow. The cabin wasn't all that big, but it still beat the back end of a 727, with a screaming four year old on one side and a sweaty overweight Shriner on the other side, coming off a hangover and reaching for an airsick bag.

Of course, not all 727s are like that. In my first go-around I had flown private jets several times. Most of the times were with various trailer suppliers, but back before that, I had been with ITT for a time and had flown a few times on one of their corporate jets. This was back when ITT was one of the largest conglomerates, and had a fleet of jets. Their pride and joy was a 727 rigged up as a corporate jet. Leaving aside the super-plush seats and ample legroom, it had meeting rooms and a bedroom. On entering the plane, we had been greeted by a steward who told us that as soon as we got to altitude he would take our drink orders and ask how we wanted our steaks cooked. It was a bunch of us flying back from Seattle to New York on a red-eye, and they got into a high stakes poker game in the back. We had been scabbing in a pulp mill on strike, living in the mill, and making about three times our normal pay with nowhere to spend it. There were thousands riding on that table, which is way more than I felt comfortable with.

At the time I was working in a lab in New Jersey and got tapped to work on the West Coast for three months in an emergency. While out there, separated from family and friends, we all went native. I grew my hair out to my shoulders, and for the first time grew a full beard. Once a month they would fly us home to see our families after working 84 hour weeks. When I went over to the lab to check my mail, people stared at me and moved away from the hairy mountain man moving down the hallway. Of course the best moment was that first time I flew home and got into the apartment after Marilyn had left for work. I was beat, and climbed into bed and went to sleep. That afternoon I woke up to my wife screaming in the bedroom. She didn't know I was coming home and didn't know who the hairy bearded guy sleeping in her bed was! Of course, about ten seconds after she figured out who I was, she was in the bed with me. It had been a long cycle on the West Coast.

Anyway, that 727 set the gold standard for corporate jets, that and the Playboy DC-9 that Hugh Hefner owned briefly. This bird wasn't that fancy, but she was pretty nice, and she apparently could haul ass. Once we taxied to the runway, Jim Johnson put the pedal to the metal and I found myself pushed heavily back into the seat. It didn't seem like very long before he rotated off the runway and started climbing like a raped ape at a crazy angle. I looked over at my wife and found her looking at me with a mixture of disbelief and awe. I just grinned back.

It was well under ten minutes before we were at cruising altitude and leveled off. At that time, Samantha unbuckled from her jump seat and got to her feet. She popped open a hidden cabinet and pulled out a pair of champagne flutes. These she handed to us, and then she opened a different cabinet to reveal a hidden wine cooler. Inside was a bottle of Dom Perignon. She pulled this out and popped the cork carefully, and then poured some into our flutes. Then Samantha set the bottle into a holder built into the wall of the cabin in front of me. "I'm going forward now. I'll let you know when we're about ten minutes out from Eleuthera." Then she headed towards the cockpit, and a minute later a full partition slid shut closing off the cockpit.

I looked over at my wife and held out my champagne flute towards her. "Here's to our vacation. We earned it!"

Marilyn looked over and laughed, and then clinked her flute against mine. "We earned it?"

"You had a baby and I blew apart my knee. We earned it!"

She smiled and sipped her champagne, and I did the same. In fact, we finished our glasses and I refilled them. I also undid my seat belt and tucked it down into the seat and out of the way. Marilyn noticed me and did the same.

I patted my right knee and smiled at her, and gave her a 'come along' motion with my index finger. "Have a seat."

"We can't do that!"

"Do what? We're just going to sit and talk."

Marilyn rolled her eyes and carefully got up, and then twisted around to sit on my lap sideways. Since I was in the left hand seat, I had my glass in my right hand and Marilyn had hers in her left, with her right arm around my neck. I pulled her face down to mine and gave her a quick kiss. "Who knows, maybe by the time we get back, your parents will have sold Charlie to the gypsies and it will be quiet again."

"You are a heartless and evil person.", she replied with a smile.

"You think so? Wait until he hits the teenage years and grows up to be just like his old man! You'll be happy to move him out of the house then."

Marilyn gave me a disapproving look. "I think you're just making it all up. No way could you have been like you say you were when you were a teenager."

I just smiled. My left hand snaked its way up to the zipper on the back of her dress. Ten seconds later I had flipped the hook-and-eye catch and pulled the zipper down. "Carling! You can't do that here!"

"Now, how old do you think I was when I perfected that little maneuver? It wasn't after I met you, not hardly!"

Marilyn tried to reach around with one hand to zip up her dress, but I already had my hand inside, caressing the skin of her lower back. "You can't do this!", she protested.

"Do what? This?" I quickly reached up and pulled the tie holding her halter top up.

Marilyn squealed and pulled her hands around to her front. "Carl!"

"You complain way too much!", I commented. I finished off my champagne and tossed the flute over into her seat. Then I placed my hand on her knee and slid it up and under the edge of her sundress.

Marilyn squealed again and moved her hands to her lap, which simply dropped her top down and exposed her breasts. "We're going to get into trouble!"

"Ever heard of the mile high club?" I kept pushing my hand up her dress, and began running my fingers across the front panel of her panties.

"Yes.", she answered weakly, her resolve weakening as her pussy got hot and moist.

"Well, why do you think I asked the stewardess to close the door?"

Marilyn's head spun to look at the door, and the whipped around to me again. "You didn't!?"

I just grinned like a madman. "Why do you think she told us she would let us know ten minutes before landing?"

Marilyn's eyes widened at that. "Oh my God! You didn't!"

I laughed. "Yeah, now sit up a bit and give me a hand." I tugged her dress down around her waist, and then had Marilyn lift up enough so that I could pull it down and off her. As I moved down past her hips, I also reached out with my fingers and tugged her panties down, too. I tossed her clothing onto her seat, so that she was now sitting naked on my lap, wearing nothing but her high heeled sandals and a nervous smile. I put my hand back between her legs and began fingering her pussy. "You are so beautiful!", I told her.

"Oh God!" Marilyn moaned as she arched her back, and I lowered my face to suck on her tits. Ever since Charlie came along, I think they grew a full cup size; she was now about a C+. "Unh ... unh ... unh...", she grunted, her body shivering beneath me.

I let her come that way and then relented. "Lift up a bit.", I ordered her. As soon as she lifted off my lap, I undid my belt and zipper and pushed my pants and briefs down and off. "Now, twist around. This flight isn't long enough for us to get too silly." Marilyn cautiously moved to twist around and straddle my hips and then lowered herself onto my cock. She was very juicy and turned on, her nipples, normally so small and faint were now engorged and pointing out at me. "Oh, yeah, that's it!"

"You're so bad! If we get in trouble it's all your fault!", she answered, lifting up and dropping down onto me.

"Yeah, right, that's why you're on top, because I'm the bad guy, right!", I laughed. I put my face back down and began sucking her nipples, first one and then the other, as she bounced on my cock. Marilyn was letting out little keening noises as she orgasmed, and her cunt was spasming around me. It was rippling around my cock, and it felt exquisite! After a bit, I just groaned and pulled her down onto me, hard, as I lifted my hips up and out of the seat and blasted my jism up and into her pussy.

Marilyn sagged down against me, and then she stirred and looked around guiltily. "I guess we'd better get dressed."

I smiled at her. Glancing at my wristwatch, I just rubbed her back and kept her on my lap. "I think we've got a little time. If I was really motivated, you could have some more fun."

"If you were motivated?"

"Well, if you were to tell me about what you wanted me to do this week to you, that would probably motivate me." I rubbed my hands along her back and down to her ass. "Any ideas coming to mind?"

"I think you just want me to talk dirty to you.", she whispered. "I bet you already have some things in mind that you are going to want me to do."

"Oh, like what?" I kept up the gentle massage along her back and bottom. I had slipped out of her pussy by now, but I could feel myself starting to get stiff again.

"She gave a small whimper, and then said, "I bet you plan to fuck me all this week!"

"Oh?"

"You're going to fuck my pussy, aren't you?"

I leaned in and licked an earlobe. "What else?", I whispered. I was definitely stiff now.

"You're going to make me suck your cock and swallow your come, aren't you?"

"Yes. What else?" I rubbed my hands across her rear, and slid my fingertips down into the crack of her ass.

Marilyn's eyes opened wide. "You're going to fuck my asshole, aren't you?"

I lifted her bottom up and Marilyn moved to position my cockhead at the entrance of her pussy. Once in line with the target, I dropped her down onto me and pushed both her hands between us, to play with her clit and rub my cock as it moved inside her. "Yes. I'm going to fuck you all week long. By the time the week is done, you're going to need a vacation from your vacation. You'll be taking all your panties and bras back home unused."

I kept telling her graphically what was going to happen, and Marilyn whimpered as she moved on top of me. I kept her hands trapped between us, and Marilyn's body responded, moving her from one orgasm to another seamlessly. This fuck was longer, but even better than the first one, and I held out into her third orgasm before I blew my load. We were both a bit sweaty at that point.

Marilyn climbed off my lap. "Where's the bathroom?", she asked.

I looked around and smiled. "I don't think there is one."

"Oh, shit! I wanted to clean up!"

I looked at my watch. "We'll be on the ground in another half an hour." I grabbed my pants and briefs and pulled them back on, and then stood in the aisle and tucked everything back into place.

Marilyn grumbled and dressed again, and pulled her panties back on as well. "I feel like I'm squishing!", she complained.

"It's nothing these guys haven't seen or heard of before." I sat down and grabbed our champagne glasses. I poured the rest of the champagne into them and handed a glass to my wife. "Cheers! Here's to a great vacation!"

Marilyn rolled her eyes, and then smiled. "To a great vacation. Just don't do anything that will get us thrown in jail."

"Where's the fun in that? Jail's overrated, anyway!"

Marilyn just groaned.

A few minutes later the intercom went off and Samantha announced, "Governors Harbor in about ten minutes." Ten minutes later the partition opened and Samantha came back out to meet us. "Okay, seats and tray tables in the upright position.", she said with a smile. "We're going to be descending any moment now. Have you enjoyed the flight?"

Marilyn turned beet red, but I just smiled and nodded. "It was everything we could have asked for. Thank you."

"Well, a week from now let's hope you have just as nice a time flying with us." She took away the glasses and the empty bottle and hid them away, and then sat back down in the jump seat with us.

I looked over at my wife and smiled. "I'll be looking forward to that next flight." Marilyn simply stayed red faced and looked out the window, although she did smile at me before she turned away. I simply chuckled at her.

The airport wasn't very large, and I really couldn't see much of it on the approach. All I could see was crystal clear blue water. Eleuthera couldn't be very big. Eventually, out the window I noticed sand and concrete getting alarmingly close, but he flared out at the last minute and floated us onto the runway with barely a whisper to the tires. Then the engine roar went into overload as Jim flipped in the thrust reversers and we were pressed forward as the little jet slowed down abruptly.

After the landing we taxied up to the terminal and our pilot got on the intercom and warned us both to stay on the airplane until we were released by Bahamian customs. After we stopped, he shut down one engine and came out and repeated this to us. He waited until there was a knock on the door, and then he opened the door on the Learjet. Sunlight flooded in, along with humid air that smelled of the sea.

I took a deep breath and unbuckled my seat belt. "We ain't in Kansas anymore, baby!"

The customs officer came on board and looked at our passports but didn't bother stamping them. In those pre-9/11 days, you could travel anywhere through the Caribbean, Canada, or Mexico with just a driver's license and no passports or visas. Jim and I unloaded our luggage and carried it in the building, and then I shook hands with Jim and Samantha, who had followed us in.

"Flying home now?"

"Tomorrow morning.", she replied. "We'll spend the night in town and fly out at dawn. We have friends down here and we'll stay with them."

"Well, that sure sounds like fun. It's almost like it isn't even work!"

She just grinned and nodded. We waved good-bye and shuffled over to the rental car booth. I hadn't specified anything fancy, so we were just getting a small car. This surprised me quite a bit. The Bahamas, like most of the British Commonwealth, drives on the left hand side of the road (the wrong side to Americans) so the proper type of car would have the driver positioned on the right hand side of the car, opposite to American vehicles. However, since the Bahamas is so close to the US, most of the vehicles are actually imported from there, and are left hand drive cars. I was quite used to driving the Chevrolet Cavalier we ended up with, even if it was generally a piece of crap.

I might die by driving on the wrong side of the road, but at least I would know how to drive the car I would end up wrecked in!

We got a map of Eleuthera and directions to get to La Valencia. It turns out it's pretty hard to get lost on the island of Eleuthera. There's only one road, which runs the length of the entire island, the Queens Highway. Once you left the airport we found ourselves on this one road and headed south. The airport is a few miles north of the town of Governors Harbor, and La Valencia is in the town of North Palmetto Point. We got there twenty minutes later.

I didn't kill anybody on the drive down, not even Marilyn, who complained the entire time we were driving. "You're going too fast! You don't know how to drive like this! You're not in America anymore! Stay over! Stay in your lane!" I wondered if I could hire that Honduran pilot who had dumped us in Nicaragua. He couldn't have been any worse to drive with than my wife!

Chapter 66: La Valencia

We drove into the little town of North Palmetto Point and found the rental office. I parked and we went inside. A little bell rang when we pushed open the door, and a tall and slim black man came out from the back. He was wearing lightweight slacks and a polo shirt and sandals. "Can I help you?", he asked.

"I certainly hope so. We're Carl and Marilyn Buckman. We're supposed to have a reservation for the next week. La Valencia?", I responded.

The man relaxed and smiled. "Yes, please come in. Welcome!" He came towards us and shook our hands when we met. "My name is Jonathan Finch and I'm the resort concierge. La Valencia is only a few minutes from here. Let me get the keys, and you can follow me out there." Mister Finch spoke with a distinct English accent, but I could hear the sing-song cadence of the islands in his voice. He went into the back again and then came out with a set of keys and some papers. "Just follow me. We can do all the paperwork out there."

We followed him out of the office and got back in our rental car. It wasn't five minutes later when we were driving down a long driveway towards the beach. He parked and we parked behind him.

Well, it was simply gorgeous! It was done in a Spanish style. The place looked immense, and we could hear the surf from the far side of the building. It wasn't clear to me if it had been a private home that had been converted to a resort or was custom built as a high end resort, but it simply looked unbelievable. There was supposed to be a staff, but whether they were full time or part time wasn't clear either. Either way, just standing there in the sunshine, it made me think this was precisely what I had asked Taylor to find for us!

Finch came over to us and said, "Let me have your keys. I'll see that your luggage is put in the master suite. Will that be satisfactory?"

"Certainly. Thank you." I handed him the car keys and let Finch lead the way. I took my wife's hand and we walked up the path to the house.

Once inside, Finch motioned for us to stay in the foyer, and he stepped into another room, and I could hear him speaking to someone, and then he came back out. "One of the groundsmen will be along in a moment to unload your car. Here, let me show you the master suite."

It was almost too much to take in at once. The foyer led into the living room and dining room combination, which was bright and airy, with tile floors and twelve foot ceilings, and a variety of wicker furniture with cushions. It looked to be roughly the size of our entire town house! Down a short hallway to one side was the master suite, which was quite large, with a gargantuan four poster bed in the center, and plenty of dressers and cabinets. This room had a master bathroom that was simply sybaritic in detail, with a whirlpool tub, a shower large enough for both Marilyn and I and all our closest friends, and even a bidet.

"Perhaps you would care to freshen up before I show you around?", suggested Finch.

"Yes, please!", piped up Marilyn. She scooted into the bathroom and closed the door.

I simply nodded agreement and followed the concierge out into the living room again. "When she gets out, I'll do the same."

"Of course. Could I offer you something to drink? Coffee? Something harder?"

"Only if you will join us."

He smiled. "It's still early in the day, so perhaps just some coffee."

"Well, you and Marilyn can have coffee, but if possible, I'd prefer tea.", I replied. After all, this place used to belong to the Brits, so maybe they still did tea.

He nodded and went off to the side room again. I just wandered around the room looking at things. When he came out, he said, "Mrs. Wilkes will bring it out in a moment."

"Mrs. Wilkes?"

"Yes, she's the caretaker. She's normally here every morning, Monday thru Friday. I'll introduce you both to her. Mrs. Wilkes actually runs the place. The rest of us are simply tolerated guests.", he said with a smile.

"I quite understand.", I said, laughing. Marilyn came out at that moment and I excused myself and went into the bathroom. I simply had to take a leak and wash my face and hands. I noticed, however, that Marilyn had taken her panties off and had tossed them in the corner. I guess after sitting in them, 'squishing' as she called it, she preferred going commando after cleaning up.

I returned to the living room to find Wilkes and Marilyn sitting at the dining room table, as a very large and very black woman served coffee and tea from a tea service and tray. "Tea, sir?", she asked, in a much heavier dialect than Wilkes had.

"Please, and cream and sugar. Thank you."

"Yes, sir." She poured me some tea. "It is Earl Grey, sir." I nodded my acceptance, and she continued. "I am Mrs. Wilkes. I am the caretaker for La Valencia, and supervise the ground staff. I am here in the mornings, until noon, during the week. If there is anything I can do for you, I am normally in the kitchen." She pointed to a room to the side of the dining area, and I realized that when Finch had gone in search of somebody with our car keys, he must have gone looking for Mrs. Wilkes.

"Thank you." I glanced at my watch, and it was almost two in the afternoon. "I'm sorry we got here so late. I hope it doesn't mess up your schedule."

She waved it off. "No problem, sir, no problem!" She left the service and lumbered back to the kitchen.

I stirred some cream and sugar into my tea. "So, Mister Finch, I'm curious. Is La Valencia an estate used for rental part of the year, or was it designed for rental to begin with? What's the story about this place?"

He smiled at me. "Well, actually, it's a little of all of that. The original estate was built back in the Twenties by an Englishman who made his money smuggling rum into Miami during Prohibition."

I smiled at my wife and the said, "Sounds like my kind of guy!"

Marilyn rolled her eyes. "Spare me!"

I had to laugh at her. Then I told Finch, "Keep going. After Prohibition?"

"Well, Sir Douglas - that was his name - died during the Blitz in the War. His son, an only child, died at Arnhem with the Paras. After that, the government took it over, and for the next twenty years it went through a succession of owners who all tried to turn it into a vacation resort or hotel. The original building was a Victorian monstrosity."

"Not this place."

"No, the current owner bought it in the Sixties, and about two weeks later it burned to the ground..."

I laughed at that. "We call that Jewish lightning back in the States."

He smiled and nodded. "I have heard the term. Well, he built the current structure, along with several others in the area, and designed them specifically as resorts for those individuals seeking something above the normal thing you'd find in Nassau."

Expensive and high end, in other words. Well, if what we were paying was any indication, it was money well spent, even if the clientele was limited to the rich. "Well, it's really very nice. What is your job?"

"Well, the title is concierge, but I am really the manager of the various properties for the owners. Still, if you want to do something not here, just call my office and either I or my assistant will make the arrangements."

I must have looked confused, and I glanced at Marilyn and noticed her brows furrowed as well. "Like what?", she asked.

"Oh, well, say you wanted to go deep sea fishing or snorkeling or set up a dinner party or something. Just call the office and we can help you."

"Ah."

He handed me a business card with his name and number on it. "Perhaps you would care to look around the grounds and the resort?"

"Sure thing." I stood up and Marilyn stood with me. "Who owns the resort now?"

Finch simply smiled. "The staff at la Valencia prides itself on its discretion."

I shrugged and waved it off. "Just curious." We followed him through the house. The kitchen, where Mrs. Wilkes was, was spotless and large. There were some basics and staples in the refrigerator and the pantry, but that was about it. She could serve us breakfast and lunch, with an unspecified amount to be tacked onto the bill. Anything after noon, however, would have to be specially ordered. That seemed fine to us, since we planned to go out for dinner.

Beyond the kitchen, were two more bedrooms, each with their own bathroom, although these opened up to public spaces. It would be very easy to split the resort into separate apartments, in case you brought a group of people down. Everything was done in white tile, with high ceilings and lots of windows and doors. It was very spacious and open.

Along the back side, facing the Atlantic, the various sections all opened onto a huge veranda and deck, with a swimming pool built in. From there you could walk down through a palm tree forest to the beach, or just wander through the palm trees. The beach was at least a thousand feet long and private, and the property was at least as large as our 25 acres back home, and very private. There was a groundskeeper in the morning who cleaned the pool and kept everything running and the grounds neat.

After lunch it would just be Marilyn and me. Hmmmmm...

When we got back to the house, Mrs. Wilkes had already left, as had the groundskeeper, and after inquiring whether we needed anything and signing some papers, Finch left us with a few brochures about island activities and his phone number. Then it was just Marilyn and me. However, before I could get funky with my wife, she said, "What are we doing for lunch?"

My own stomach growled as I contemplated the answer. We smiled at each other. "Maybe you should have asked Mrs. Wilkes before she left." I led the way into the kitchen.

The kitchen was modern and had just about every appliance known to mankind. In fact the only drawback that I could see was that it was all electric; my preference was for gas. Regardless, I could work just fine in an electric kitchen. The fridge had the basics - eggs, milk, butter, and the like - so I asked Marilyn, "Omelet?"

"Sure. Anything I can do?"

I grinned. "Get undressed."

"Carling!", she protested.

"It was worth a try." I turned away and started searching through the drawers to look for a frying pan or skillet to use. I found a small pan and then went back over to the fridge. "I think it's just scrambled eggs. No ham or cheese..."

Marilyn was standing there in her high heeled sandals and a smile ... and nothing else! "Is this what you had in mind?"

"Uh, yeah, yeah..."For once my big mouth was speechless. Marilyn just looked amazing. She had lost almost all her baby weight, with the exception of her tits, which were larger. Her pussy was puffy and moist looking. Her legs looked perfect, and you could see where she had been working on her tan. She was now 26, and damn near perfect.

"Well, you did tell me to get undressed, and a wife is supposed to obey her husband, isn't she?", she asked teasingly.

"I always liked that portion of the vow."

I pulled the eggs and milk out of the refrigerator and dug out a mixing bowl, all the while trying to keep an eye on her. It got to be a problem when I tried opening the refrigerator door from the wrong side. "Problem?", Marilyn asked.

"Yeah, why don't you come around over here, so we can talk."

"Talk? I though you wanted to look."

"Po-tay-to, po-taht-to." Marilyn laughed at that and came over, and I lifted her up onto the counter. "Now isn't that better?"

"Are you going to return the favor the next time I cook?", she asked.

"Aren't you still under a court order from the Fayetteville Fire Department prohibiting your cooking?"

"Very funny! Maybe I should get dressed and let you cook by yourself?"

I chuckled and leaned in to kiss her on the lips. "I cook better when your oven is hot!"

"You're disgusting!", she said with a smile.

"Maybe I need to check the oven temperature. I prefer a moist heat, too."

That earned me a raspberry. Still, Marilyn sat there on the counter, inspiring me, so to speak, as I whipped up some eggs and poured them into a hot buttered skillet. Even better, her pointy little nipples and wet bare pussy made me think she was enjoying her part of the meal. I poured a couple of glasses of milk and set them on the kitchen table, and then split the eggs onto two plates. And then I scraped them off of one of the plates onto the other, leaving a pile on a single plate.

"What're you up to?", asked my wife.

I pulled a chair away from the table and sat down on it. "Come here, take a seat?"

"Oh?" Marilyn hopped down off the counter and came closer. "What did you have in mind?"

I set the plate down on the table at my side, and then pulled her closer. I kept tugging so that Marilyn was forced to sit on my lap, facing me and straddling my legs. "Well, I was thinking..." I forked up some eggs and held them to her lips; Marilyn opened her mouth and I fed her the eggs. " ... that if I was feeding you, you'd be free to use your fingers elsewhere."

Marilyn moved her hands into her lap, between us. A moment later, I felt her fingers tracing across my belt and zipper. "Is this what you had in mind?"

I ate some of the eggs and smiled as I chewed them. After I swallowed them, I answered, "Yeah, I think you're getting the idea." I fed her some more eggs, and we traded bites for a bit. After a few minutes, I felt my belt getting loosened. Thankfully, I had adjusted myself before sitting down, so that Carl Junior was pointed north. Just after my zipper was tugged down, Marilyn's hand slipped inside and began stroking me.

I quickly fed Marilyn and myself the eggs, without even drinking the milk. As soon as I could I set the plate and fork on the table, to put my hands elsewhere. My left hand went around her waist, and down to caress her rear and hold her against me, while my right hand began playing with her tits.

It was Marilyn's turn to be aroused. Her back arched and I lowered my face to her chest, lifting her breasts up one at a time to begin sucking on her nipples. Marilyn continued to tug on my cock, but her efforts became quite distracted. She pressed her lips against mine, and as our tongues played with each other, I could taste the scrambled eggs again. Marilyn hurriedly unbuttoned my shirt and began rubbing herself against me.

I lifted up and Marilyn helped me push my pants down, and then she sank down onto me. "I love you so much.", I whispered to her.

"I love you! I love you! I love you!", she told me. Marilyn was pressing herself against me tightly, her arms wrapped around me as she humped herself up and down on the cock deep inside her. "Fuck me! Fuck me!"

I moved against my wife as she rode me. Her eyes were closed and a blissfully intense expression suffused her face. When I finally exploded and blasted into her, Marilyn's back arched again and she gasped in orgasm.

Afterwards, she sagged down against me. "I love you.", I whispered in her ear.

It took her another couple of minutes to rouse herself, at which point Marilyn climbed off my lap. "I think I need a nap.", she said, holding out a hand to me.

"Dishes can wait." I got to my feet and kicked off my pants and stripped off my shirt, and then allowed her to lead me to our bedroom. I figured an encore in a more comfortable setting was in order.

We took a nap, a real one, after our 'nap', which while quite enjoyable, hadn't been all that restful. Marilyn fell asleep with her head on my chest, and I had to ease her off me so I could get a little sleep myself. We cleaned up when we woke and I drove us up to Governors Harbor to a small restaurant that Mr. Finch had recommended. Afterwards, we drove home, took a quiet walk on our private beach, and then went inside. We made love one more time before falling asleep.

The next morning I woke at about seven. My kidneys were telling me I needed to get up now, despite it being a vacation. I went to the bathroom, and left my wife snoring, face down on the bed in the zillion count sheets. This place was pretty nice. I pulled on my swim trunks and padded barefoot out through the patio door to the 'back yard', the immense veranda and porch that looked out over the pool and on down to the beach. The sun was already up and it was very pleasantly warm. Charlie was probably buried in snow in upstate New York right now, but he was welcome to it!

I felt like I was moving very slowly as I wandered around the veranda, looking at things in the morning sunlight. I remembered a line from The Electric Horseman, with Robert Redford and Jane Fonda. In it, Redford played a broken down rodeo cowboy, and Fonda once asked him why he looked like he was hurting in the morning. His reply was that some parts just took longer to wake up than others. I felt like that some days, more now than before.

I was out of shape. I wasn't fat, but I was starting to get soft. It was easy enough to stay in shape in the Army, because the troops usually had some form of PT every day, and I would join them for it. If the 'Old Man' can do it, they can do it without bitching, too, and it will be a very bold and stupid lieutenant who complains when his captain is working out.

Now, the only exercise I had been getting was with the rehab program, and that was effectively over. I had been doing some weights and swimming, but that had really been on hold. I had been thinking about putting in a pool at the new house, but that might not be until next year, and the pool at the town house complex wasn't open during the winter. My knee really prevented me from running, and I hadn't joined a dojo since moving home. Hell, I could probably get pushed around by an underdeveloped Brownie Scout right about now.

As I thought about it, I realized that I hadn't even practiced either aikido or tae kwan do since last summer, before I had deployed to Honduras. Prior to that I had kept up with my practice, even joining the clubs to be had on any large army base. I wasn't the toughest guy on the base, not by a long shot, but I certainly held my own and often managed to surprise an opponent.

I moved across the patio and down to the palm forest and on down to the beach. I looked up and down the beach, but it seemed pretty empty. I didn't have my glasses on, but I couldn't even see a blur of activity. I wondered if I could even do a kata still. I moved into the trees and found myself a flat piece of sand. I needed to at least try something. I began to slowly go through the motions of the most basic kata I could imagine.

The kata is a combination of training and exercise. It is common in almost all eastern martial arts, although often to different degrees depending on the art. There are different types, from slow and simple movements that act as a warmup, up to quick and furious combat maneuvers. Done properly, it is a balletic dance of precision and skill. Done improperly, you look like an arthritic Parkinson's patient.

I moved like the latter.

I focused on simply loosening up and getting my muscles used to the movements again. I tried to bring back my old precision, although at the expense of any power or strength. Some of the poses required strength, though, and I found myself pushing to hold them, though it was definitely for less time than I had previously been able to work. I kept the speed down and tried not to push the knee too hard. After about thirty minutes of this, I found myself shaking with exhaustion and nerves. Those Brownies would be able to knock me on my ass - easy!

"CARLING!" I heard Marilyn calling for me and slowly moved in the direction of the beach, where her voice seemed to be coming from. I found her calling my name on the beach, and heading towards the northern end. She looked like she had pulled on a bathrobe and flip flops.

"Here!", I called back, and kept moving towards her.

"Where have you been?", she asked, concern in her voice.

I pointed back behind me. "Just down there."

"I've been calling for you for ten minutes! Where have you been? What're you up to?"

"I just needed to get out and clear my head for a bit. I was just doing some exercise."

Marilyn smiled and looked relieved. "Oh, okay. I thought maybe you had gotten lost or something."

I had to laugh at that. "Marilyn, this island ain't all that big! It can't be more than a mile or two wide in most places. All I have to do is walk towards the sun and in less than an hour I'll find myself someplace wet and salty!"

She smiled at me. "You think you're so smart. What if you were walking the length of the island, not the width?"

I smiled down at her. "Then if I haven't hit the water after an hour, I'll just make a hard right turn and find the water after another short walk."

"You've just got all the answers, don't you!", she protested.

"And I've got an answer for you!", I replied, crudely grasping my crotch.

Marilyn squawked and laughed and moved backwards away from me. "That's not an answer! That's a problem!"

I advanced towards her, but she kept dancing backwards away from me. I was just beat enough that catching her would probably leave me breathless before I had my way with her. I stopped and stood there with my hands on my hips and looked around at our surroundings.

"Carl, what's wrong?", she asked.

I turned back to look at my wife. "It's me. I tried to do some katas and they damn near killed me. I am so goddamn out of shape it's not funny."

Marilyn gave me an odd look. "You're fine. It's not your fault your knee is shot. You're already moving way better than the doctors thought you would ever move. Look at you! You didn't even bring your cane out here!"

I chuckled at that. "A cane in the sand? I don't think so." I took her hand and walked back down the beach. "I was thinking earlier, I haven't done any training since last summer, before I went to Honduras. I need to join a gym and a dojo. I have to get back into shape."

"You're not out of shape!", she protested loyally.

"Well, I'm certainly not in shape.", I told her.

"Why is this so important to you?"

I led her up towards the palm trees and found a spot on the sand, and sat down. Marilyn sat down at my side, facing me. I looked out at the sea rolling in for a moment, and then turned to face her. "You've never seen me not in shape, but it's not a pretty sight. I've told you before, but I don't think you believe me. Back when I was a kid, right up into my teen years, I was always the smallest kid around. I was short and skinny and weak. It was pathetic! I used to get the crap kicked out of me on a routine basis. I finally just cracked and had enough of it. You heard the story. When I was 13 I just said enough was enough; they can kill me but I've had enough. That fight on the school bus - it was like I was out of control almost."

"I can't imagine you like that. Normally you're so much in control!", she commented.

"I think it's because of that. Ever since then, if you think I've been successful, it's because of the control, the discipline. Physically, it was the workouts and the running and the aikido. Mentally it was always the preparation and homework. I can't control the world around me, but I can control myself. So much around us is so totally random. I can't control my family - God knows I would like to! - and I can't even control you and Charlie, but I can control myself."

"You worry me, at times, always trying to be in control. Some things you can't control."

I just nodded. "I know that. It's like I said, though, the discipline and control is about me, not anything else. I can't change how the world is going to behave or what is going to happen to us. I can only change what I have control over. I can control myself, my thoughts, my actions, my behavior. Whenever you have seen me at my worst, it's been when I have lost that control. I have to fight that constantly. It is so easy to give in and lose control."

"I have never seen you like that!", Marilyn protested.

"Oh yes, you most surely have! Don't you remember that weekend when I got into it with Mark and your parents? I lost control then! I was so out of control I damn near lost you! You were the one who kept me in control then. You rescued me that weekend."

Marilyn looked startled at that, being reminded of that Thanksgiving weekend all those years ago. "One time!"

"One time too many. There have been other times as well. What I'm saying is that I function better when I don't lose control."

"Is this an Army thing? Is this because you can't be in the Army anymore?"

I had to smile at that, but it also made me think. "No, but it's related. I think one reason I did well in the Army is because the Army is all about control, control and discipline and purpose. It was easy to stay controlled, and that control allowed me to control my men and my unit."

"And now you don't have it anymore." It was a statement, not a question, and I just nodded.

"And I don't know what I'm doing anymore. I suppose I always knew the day would come when I couldn't do it any longer. I mean, I always knew that sooner or later the Army would catch on and hoist my ass out the door, but until it happens, you just don't think it will happen to you."

Marilyn took my hand. "Well, this week you're on vacation! We'll worry about the future when we get back home. Maybe we'll just have to find you a job after all!"

I laughed at that. "God forbid! It's bad enough that I have to put up with my own bullshit! There is no way I could ever put up with someone else's!"

"So the exercise? It's not like you're fat! My God, Carl, you are in tremendous shape! I wish I was as in shape as you are!"

I grinned at that. Marilyn was sitting there on the sand and her robe had shifted enough for me to realize that it was all she was wearing. I liked her shape, just like it was! I shook the thought off, at least for the moment. "It starts out slowly. You ease off and slow down. Maybe skip out a day a week. The next thing you know it's two days, then three. Eventually you notice that you are goofing off more than you are exercising, and your pants are a bit snug. Then you've put on five pounds and you need the next size up. So you decide to lose the weight, and end up killing yourself to lose the weight, and it never really comes off, and you get tired of the fight and gain another five pounds. After a while, you're fat!"

This was precisely what had happened to me the first time, although I had never been one for exercise then. My natural lankiness and wiry build had kept my weight in bounds until I hit my thirties, but after that, it was always a pound or two a year, and it wasn't a positive thing. It's one thing to be 5'11" and weigh 185, it's quite another to weigh 245.

"It translates into other things, too. Do you know the quickest way to make a small fortune on Wall Street?", I asked.

"How?"

"Start with a large fortune!" Marilyn groaned at that, so I said, "So I study. Every day at home I read the newspaper and the Wall Street Journal and magazines. It's a discipline, so that when an opportunity comes along, I can react first."

Marilyn nodded, not understanding perfectly, but nodding regardless. "I worry about you. Nobody can be in control, not always."

I reached over and took her hand. "That's your job. You keep me sane. I'll control everything else, you control me. Listen, don't worry about me. I'll be fine. I'll get to the gym and a dojo when we get back home. Maybe I can get back in trim and learn how to move again."

Marilyn leaned over and hugged me, and in doing so, her robe shifted and gaped open in the front, exposing her tits. SPROING! Carl Junior popped to attention! I held onto her and leaned backwards, pulling her with me to the sand. I slipped a hand inside her robe and began fondling her breasts.

"Carl! We can't do that here?"

"Why not? Who's going to see?" I tugged loose the belt holding the waist of her robe closed, although Marilyn tried a pro forma protest. "You're the one who came out here in nothing but a little silk robe!"

"I was looking for you!"

I peeled her robe open and lowered my face to her chest and began flicking my tongue over her nipples. "You found me."

"Carl! What if we are seen?", she asked me this even though she was starting to pant.

"By who? Mrs. Wilkes? You think she hasn't seen crazy Yankees doing this before" I sucked her tits some more and slipped my hand between her legs. For all her complaints, Marilyn was quite wet.

"Carl!"

"Just don't scream my name loudly!", I teased. "We wouldn't want them investigating!" I reached down and pushed my swim trunks down around my knees and then pushed Marilyn onto her back. She automatically spread her legs and I crawled over her, and sank down into her. She moaned and I whispered to her, "I think you actually came looking for me so I could give you a good fucking!"

"Oh, God! Don't stop, don't stop!"

I pounded into her pussy, praying to God that the sand didn't get into anyplace inappropriate. That would be very unpleasant. Marilyn had her arms and legs wrapped around me and I fucked down into her, driving my cock into her as I whispered how she wanted it so much. Her moaning was constant and incoherent by the time my back arched and I spasmed my jism into her.

Marilyn kept her arms and legs tight around me as I sagged down onto her. Eventually she relented and untangled herself, saying, "I can't believe the things you get me to do!"

"Are you complaining?"

"I didn't say that."

"Didn't you enjoy that?"

"Stop trying to put words in my mouth!", she teased.

"What would you like me to put in your mouth?"

"You are an evil person!" I was pushed away and Marilyn stood up and tied her robe around her again.

I stood and pulled my swim trunks back up. Then, holding hands, we went back up to La Valencia. As we got closer, we could see Mrs. Wilkes standing out on the veranda waiting for us. I whispered to Marilyn, "I think I like your outfit. Why don't you keep it on?"

"Because I need a shower! You got me all sweaty."

"And that's my fault?", I asked incredulously.

"Yes, it's your fault!", she answered in her most superior tone.

I just laughed and waved Marilyn off to the bedroom while I went over to Mrs. Wilkes. "Good morning, Mrs. Wilkes. It's a lovely day, isn't it?"

"Yah, chief, dat it is.", she answered in her sing song accent.

We talked briefly, and I got the distinct impression that without Mr. Finch around, she spoke in a much heavier dialect. On some things she needed subtitles! Still, I told her that tea and some fruit would be good for me, and that Marilyn preferred coffee and maybe some cereal. I stuck my head inside our room and yelled into the bathroom confirming this. Mrs. Wilkes said it would be in the dining room when we came out.

I thanked her and went inside. Marilyn was just getting out of the shower, and refused to be enticed back in, saying she was hungry. I slipped off my trunks and took a quick shower and then shaved, before slipping my trunks back on, along with a polo shirt. When I came out of the bathroom, Marilyn had left the bedroom, so I tracked her down in the dining room. She was sitting there in a lacy beach cover-up that I could see a swimsuit through, and was having Kellogg's Corn Flakes and orange juice along with her coffee.

"I told Mrs. Wilkes that if she had any fruit salad, you'd probably like that.", said my wife.

"Yes, thank you." I nodded to Mrs. Wilkes and thanked her as well, and she went back into the kitchen. There was a large bowl of fruit salad on the table, and a serving bowl, so I helped myself to a large helping, along with some juice.

I turned my attention back to Marilyn. "I like your dress. Too bad you had to bring underwear along."

Marilyn looked at me with considerable confusion, before looking down and seeing what I was referring to. Then she gave me an exasperated look. "This is not a dress, this is a beach cover-up, and this is a swimsuit, not underwear!"

"Oh. Well, it would be an interesting dress, too.", I said with a leer.

"For a hooker!"

"Do you charge by the act or by the hour?", I asked.

"In your case, it'll be cheaper if I charge by the inch!"

Marilyn doesn't zing on me all that often, but when she does, it's memorable. I spluttered out my juice all across the table and started coughing. She laughed uproariously as I got my breathing under control. "That is cold, lady, cold!", I protested.

"That'll teach you!"

"I think you've earned yourself a spanking!"

"You'll never be able to catch me, Gimpy!"

I tossed my napkin to the table and Marilyn shrieked and ran out of the room, heading towards the bedroom. I caught up to her and captured her before she could make it outside through the patio door. The pounding I gave her had nothing whatsoever to do with a spanking!

Afterwards, as we were both trying to catch our breath, I rolled off her and Marilyn rolled onto me. "Was that supposed to be a punishment?", she asked. "If it was, I plan on being very, very bad!"

"I'll keep that in mind. Maybe the real punishment will be that I don't punish you that way!" I sat up and grabbed for my trunks. "Come on, Mrs. Wilkes must think we're barbarians!"

We collected ourselves and headed out to the dining room, but Mrs. Wilkes was much too efficient; the table had been cleaned off, even where I had sprayed out my juice. Marilyn even noticed Mrs. Wilkes smiling at us from the kitchen, and turned beet red in embarrassment. I just laughed and sent her off to the bedroom to dig out the sunscreen and beach towels.

We went down to the beach and I spread out our towels on the beach. I had my sunglasses on now and it looked truly deserted. Marilyn stripped off her cover-up and I got my first glimpse at her swimsuit. "Is that new?", I asked.

"You noticed!"

"I'm a guy! We always notice women in swimsuits. We try and figure out how hard it would be to take it off."

"And how hard do you think it would be?", she giggled.

"Not very!" I think this was Marilyn's first string bikini, and the bottoms had ties on the side. It still wasn't as extreme as what they would become in another twenty years (it had a back, for instance) but it looked pretty good on her. "I'm just guessing here, but I don't think you got advice on that one from your mother."

"Tessa, actually."

I thought of Tusker's little blonde honey of a wife and had to smile. "It must drive him crazy when she wears something like that at the beach!"

"She says it does, and she likes it that way!"

I laughed at that, and started rubbing the suntan lotion on. I tossed the bottle to Marilyn and she did the same. Then we oiled each other's backs and ran down to the ocean. The water was warm and clear and calm. I limited my exercise regimen to floating around and slowly chasing after my wife as she floated in the water. Eventually we got waterlogged and headed back to the beach, where we put some more lotion on. We both agreed that the sun would probably broil us otherwise!

Before lunch time, we were both feeling well done, and we gathered our stuff and headed back to the house. Mrs. Wilkes offered to make us some sandwiches, and we got her to do grilled cheese. Mrs. Wilkes spiced it up with some hot pepper and something else I couldn't place, and then she took off. We were on our own again. I cleaned up and then Marilyn and I made love again in our bedroom.

About an hour later, while Marilyn dozed, I just wasn't feeling sleepy. What I was feeling was thirsty, and not just for orange juice. I stirred myself upright and smiled as I looked down on her rump, now starting to show some color from the sun. I slapped her on the ass and woke her up. "What?", she grumbled.

I stood and tossed my trunks to the side. "Come on, get up. We need to go shopping."

Marilyn rolled over and looked at me. "Shopping!?"

"Shopping! In a couple of days we are going to be on our own for the weekend and will need to fend for ourselves. That and I could do with a drink, and I don't mean more orange juice! There must be a liquor store somewhere on this island!" I headed off to the bathroom for a quick shower.

When I came out, Marilyn was still lazing in bed, so I slapped her on the ass again. "Come on, up and at 'em!", I ordered. "Time's a'wasting!"

Marilyn grumbled and called me several names, none of which were printable, so I slapped her on the ass again and got out of the way while she started swinging. After a moment she crawled out of bed and hit the shower, too. By the time she got out, I was in cutoffs and a Hawaiian shirt.

Marilyn found me in the kitchen, looking through the pantry and the fridge and writing down a grocery list. She had pulled on a pair of shorts and a halter top, and was in her flip flops. "Ready?"

"Almost. Give me a second and then we can go." I jotted down a couple of things and then went back to the bedroom, where I slipped into my deck shoes. I grabbed the car keys and said, "Okay, let's go!" I slipped on my sunglasses and led the way to the front door.

We drove up to Governors Harbor and spent the next couple of hours shopping. Aside from some food and snacks for the weekend, we also needed some liquor, beer, and wine. It's not like we were being drunks and alcoholics, but I knew from experience that laying in the sun for an afternoon, it was easy to go through a six pack or more between us without getting drunk. Likewise, Marilyn and I enjoyed a bottle of wine in the evening, so I picked up several bottles of red and white. As for liquor, rum was pretty cheap, and there was even a local rum, produced by a branch of Bacardi, made on one of the other islands. While I've never been a big rum drinker, Marilyn liked it, so we picked up a bottle and some Coke to mix with it. After a couple, they start tasting better to me.

It wasn't until we were going through the little grocery store we found that I really thought about what my wife was wearing. "I thought you didn't pack any shorts."

"Huh?", she asked, looking over at me.

I looked down at her, and moved my eyes to her shorts. "Remember, you weren't going to be wearing any shorts or pants. You broke the rules."

"That was your rule, not mine!", she countered.

"I think you're going to need to be punished!"

"Didn't we go over that earlier today? What did you have in mind?"

"You'll find out. I'll think of something." That earned me a raspberry in return.

Marilyn found out a few minutes later. We carried the groceries out to the car and loaded them in the back seat. We had already picked up the booze, so we were ready to go back. Before we left, even before I put the key in the ignition, I told her, "Now, get undressed."

"WHAT! HERE?!", sputtered Marilyn.

"You wanted to know what your punishment was. This is it. Take your shorts off."

"Here? In the parking lot? You're crazy!"

"Go ahead, do it. Nobody can see you. Come on, do it!"

"You're crazy!" I just sat there and smiled at her. "Come on, let's go!"

I just shook my head and smiled at her, and shook the keys at her. Marilyn made a grab for them but I yanked them out of her reach. "Nope. Shorts first, then we'll go. That's the punishment."

"No!"

I put the keys back in my pocket. "Then I guess we sit here until you decide to take your shorts off."

Marilyn stared at me. "You're serious? You want me to get undressed in the parking lot? Come on, let's just go back."

I shook my head. "No." I smiled and pointed at her lap. "Shorts."

Marilyn groaned and rolled her eyes. She grumbled, "I can't believe what you make me do!", and unzipped her shorts and lifted up pushing them down off her legs to the floor of the car. "Now, let's go!"

I smiled. "Now, that wasn't hard, wait. See? Nobody even noticed! Now, the panties."

"Okay, but start the car!" Marilyn lifted her ass up off the seat again and slipped off her panties.

I started the car and put it in gear. "See, that wasn't hard at all, and nobody even noticed." I got on the Queen's Highway and headed north.

After a few minutes, Marilyn looked around and said, "This isn't the way back to the resort, is it?" I just smiled and shrugged. "Where are we?"

"I thought we'd take a little drive around first. Now, take off your top, too."

"CARL!" I glanced over at Marilyn and smiled at her. Marilyn simply rolled her eyes at me. "When we go to jail, I am blaming you!" She leaned forward and undid the ties holding her top on and pulled it off. Then she slumped down so only her head was visible from outside the car.

I just laughed and then turned the car around at the next empty spot on the highway. I reached over and took her hand and pushed it into her lap. "Now, get warmed up for when we get back.", I ordered.

"You are such a bastard!", she whispered at me. I just laughed, but when I glanced over at he, I could see her fingers working on her clit, and her nipples were stiff. I ostentatiously adjusted my cock in my shorts, and not just to be lewd; she had my cock nice and stiff with this display!

"You need it, don't you?", I asked. I reached out and tweaked an erect nipple.

Marilyn's back arched and she hissed out a quiet, "YES!"

I chuckled and kept fondling her naked body with my spare hand. When we got to the turnoff to La Valencia, I slowed and turned off the road, but didn't remove my hand until it was time to stop and put the car in Park.

Marilyn gasped and collapsed into the seat. "You are cruel!"

"We'll see about that." Marilyn bent over and picked up her clothing, but before she had a chance to get dressed, I took it from her. "You won't need that."

"Carl!"

"There's nobody around. Come on. The sooner we get this stuff inside, the sooner we take care of your needs."

"You bastard!" I smiled as she said that, and Marilyn smiled back, shaking her head in disbelief.

I tucked Marilyn's clothing into the bag containing the wine bottles, and carried it and the case of beer inside. Marilyn, wearing nothing but her flip flops and a smile, got the bag of groceries and the bottle of rum.

We went into the kitchen, and my wife looked mightily distracted. She almost looked at me pleadingly. I set the wine and beer on the counter, and then took the bag of groceries from her and stuffed it in the fridge. "Okay, come on."

I took Marilyn's hand and led her out of the kitchen. She was practically skipping with delight. However, rather than take her into the bedroom, I led her over to the couch in the living room. "Kneel!", I ordered.

Marilyn kicked off her flip flops and knelt on the couch. I pulled off my shirt and pushed my shorts off. Then I moved up behind her and slipped my cock inside her pussy. She gasped and began humping her cunt back at me, fucking herself against me furiously. I grabbed her by her hips and began fucking her back. "From now on...", I teased her, " ... no more shorts and panties."

"Uhhh, uhhh, uhhh..." Marilyn was babbling as I fucked her cunt. She had been orgasming endlessly from the moment I had plugged into her. Now, as her pussy spasmed around me, I felt myself getting closer.

"As soon as I come, you start sucking me and getting me hard again, so I can fuck you some more!" That just seemed to make her even crazier, and she pushed back even harder, burying me even deeper. I kept giving her orders as to what she would do to continue my sexual use of her., which seemed to turn her on even more. Finally I just grabbed her hips and held her against me as I unloaded into her.

As soon as I finished coming, I sighed and pulled out, and twisted around to sink down on the couch, smiling at the world. Feeling me leave her empty, Marilyn looked over her shoulder at me with glazed eyes. She saw me sitting there and her eyes went to my slimy cock. She immediately turned around and put her face into my lap. Her lips opened and she took my slowly softening cock into her mouth.

I had almost forgotten my ridiculous orders to keep me hard so I could fuck her some more. Still, as I looked down at her head bobbing in my lap, I had to think that it was actually a pretty good idea! I wrapped my hands in her hair and guided her movements. As soon as I was stiff enough, she pulled her head away and lay back on the couch. She spread her legs wide and reached between them, to spread her pussy lips apart and show me the creamed pink inside. "Fuck me!", she demanded.

I nodded and smiled, and crawled on top of her. I forced her fingers to stay between us, rubbing my cock and her clit as they ground together. This fuck took longer, but not by much. I fucked her hard down into the couch before filling her a second time.

We both lay there together on the couch as we came down from our orgasms. "You know, now that I think about it, you can keep wearing shorts, if it always ends up like this.", I commented.

Marilyn tried to slug me in the side, but ended up tangled in my arms. "I can't believe we did that!"

I wrapped her up to keep her from punching me, and kissed her. "You liked it, you know you did. It turned you on just as much as it turned me on. Tell me I'm wrong!" Marilyn blushed and turned her head away, but wouldn't deny me. I simply laughed and leaned down to kiss her neck. We made love one more time that afternoon, laying there on the couch, and this time we made love, and didn't just fuck each other silly, taking our time and going slowly. By the time we finished, we were exhausted, sated, and happy.

And hungry! We got off the couch and took a joint shower, but refrained from fooling around, and then dressed and went out to dinner. I wore some chinos and a short sleeve shirt and my deck shoes. I had Marilyn wear her halter top from this afternoon, but instead of shorts, I pulled a denim miniskirt from the drawer, and had her pull it on, along with some high heeled sandals. I left her panties in our impromptu hamper, a pile in the corner of the bathroom.

As we climbed into the car, Marilyn said, "Just don't expect me to drive around with you in the nude again!"

I grinned over at her. "You loved it, and you loved what happened later even more!"

Marilyn grinned back. "Just drive!"

I laughed and drove.

The next morning I did my exercising out on the veranda, rather than down at the beach. Marilyn saw me and came out and watched for a moment, and Mrs. Wilkes saw me through the window and gave me a strange look. What in the world are these crazy Americans going to do next? I simply smiled and nodded to her, and then ignored her. I felt better today, a little looser and not so arthritic, although I still wasn't flowing gracefully in the kata routines.

Marilyn came out towards the end of my session, wearing a bikini and a cover-up, and carrying a cup of coffee. "Feeling any better today?", she asked.

"A bit. I'm still really rough.", I replied. "Care to join me?"

She laughed. "NO!"

"You should, you know. It would be good for you."

"Are you saying I'm fat?"

I chuckled and stopped, and came over to the table she was sitting at. I plopped down in a chair next to her. "I didn't say that. I said it would be good for you."

"Well, I'm on vacation, and if I want to get all sweaty and yucky, I can think of a lot more fun ways than that!", she answered.

"I'll get to that next!", I answered with a leer. Mrs. Wilkes chose that moment to come out with a tray, carrying a pitcher of juice and some fruit salad. She set it down and said she would be back in a moment with coffee and tea. I thanked her and poured some juice for myself.

"What about when we get back home?", I asked. "You should join me."

She waved her arms around in a bunch of fake karate chops, and yelled "HI-YAAA!" I just rolled my eyes. "No thank you. I'd feel silly."

"No, not that. I mean the exercise."

Marilyn went back to the "Are you saying I'm fat?" response.

Okay, there were danger signs abounding, but maybe I could work through them. "No, not yet, but that day is coming." I got a dirty look at that, so I explained. "Let me explain myself. No, you are not fat now. In fact, your shape is damn near perfect. The problem is that unless you start taking better care of yourself, it won't stay this nice. Right now you are at an age where your metabolism is high and you are still in your twenties and fairly active. You don't have to pay attention to anything now if you don't want to."

She nodded and looked at me in a superior fashion. "But that's going to change, and sooner than you think. What do you weigh, 125? 130?" Marilyn wouldn't answer me, but the look on her face made me think it was closer to the second number, not the first. "Five years from now, we'll have had another kid or two, and you'll have added another five pounds with each of them, at least. What will you end up weighing after three kids and not working out and putting a couple of pounds on every year? You know what you'll be like, you'll be like your mother!"

Marilyn's face clouded up. "Be nice! You'd have a problem, too, if you had 13 kids!"

I just smiled and nodded. "Not in a million years, but that's the thing. It just kind of creeps up on you. If I put on 50 or 60 pounds, it will be bad enough, but I'm seven inches taller than you. At your height, that weight would make you look like a beach ball. Besides, it will be good for you, you know that. It will be good for your heart."

Marilyn grumbled but shrugged her shoulders. "When we get back, I'll look into joining a gym. Maybe there will be one with a family plan."

"Just so you don't expect me to go to your karate classes!"

"It's aikido and tae kwan do, and no, I won't expect that." I counted that as a victory, but Marilyn is lazy and doesn't have the organization or drive that I do. I would have to make sure we went together, and not give her a chance for an excuse. Fortunately, it wasn't like we needed to go to work. "Maybe I'll teach that to Charlie."

"Then you can go to school and explain how come he gave the kid in the cafeteria a karate chop!"

"Maybe I'll wait on that."

"Good idea!"

I smiled at her. "In the meantime, did you want to work up a sweat another way, or go down to the beach?"

Marilyn grinned at me. "Beach!"

I stood up and collected our breakfast fixings. "Okay, I bet we can work up a sweat down there, too."

"You are so full of crap, it is not funny!" She stuck her tongue out at me and went inside. By the time I had finished carrying things in, she had a beach bag in her hand and was headed down to the beach. I went into the house and slipped into my shoes, grabbed my straw hat and a beach towel, and followed her. Once down at the beach, I followed my wife down into the water. We played grabass for a bit, but then I caught her and wouldn't let go, and I worked her swimsuit off her and we fooled around in the surf. By the time we got back to the house, Mrs. Wilkes was already gone, although the bed was made and the laundry had been done.

And so it went for the next few days. We spent Thursday and Friday and Saturday on a second honeymoon, which went pretty much like the first one. In other words, we goofed off and screwed our brains out! Once Mrs. Wilkes left for the day, Marilyn became much more relaxed about running around in the buff. Thursday afternoon, I stripped Marilyn, and then as she lay there, I rubbed suntan lotion all over her front, with the excuse that I was helping her take care of the tan lines. Of course I wasn't all that helpful, since after working her up, she dragged me on top of her and wrapped herself around me as I fucked her. Friday it rained most of the day, so we just stayed inside and goofed off. Saturday we got a little more adventurous. Marilyn was laying face down on the beach and sunning her back, when I offered my help. After undoing the ties on the swimsuit, I oiled her all over, paying special attention to her rear. I rubbed the oil into her asshole, and then lubed up my cock and assfucked her long and hard under the hot island sun. Afterwards we ran down to the water to clean up.

Saturday night things got ... complicated.

Chapter 67: Complicated

Every evening we would go out to dinner. There are a number of small inns and restaurants in Governors Harbor, although none of them are very fancy. A lot of them are just bars that offer food, usually seafood. That was fine; we didn't have to get dressed up and we both loved seafood. Besides, the island is pretty small. It stretches almost 90 miles long, but is really just a big beach in the middle of the ocean, and there are maybe 10,000 residents in about a dozen little towns up and down the length of the island. The biggest is Governors Harbor, but that can't be more than a few thousand people, with the rest spread all over, and the only industry around is fleecing Yankees of their dollars.

So we helped them out by going to dinner every night and having a few drinks in the bar. After dinner we often would go back into the bar for a few more drinks, or maybe find a different bar and have a few drinks there. I kept my drinking under control, but didn't mind if Marilyn wanted to get a little crazy. Friday night, in particular, we stayed out late, after the storm had passed, and did a little bar hopping. Like any vacation town, weekends are the crazy nights, and my wife was no exception. On the way home she got silly and began playing with herself and demanded that I pull off the road and take care of her. Always a gentleman, I did just what she asked me to do!

Saturday Mrs. Wilkes was away, so we had the place to ourselves. We did the dinner and bar hopping routine again, this time parking in a central spot in Governors Harbor and walking from bar to bar. We would have one drink in each bar and then move along, seeing the sights and simply enjoying the beautiful Caribbean night. Over dinner, Marilyn said, "I almost wish we didn't have to go home."

"Charlie might notice in a few years, don't you think?"

"I said almost. We'll have to bring him down here some day." I simply smiled and nodded, but I didn't answer, so she asked, "You don't agree?"

"No, I agree. He'd love it. What kid wouldn't?"

"Do you think we could do that sometime?"

"Sure.", I told her. "Whenever you want to. At least until he gets in school."

That made her smile, but then she gave me a curious look. "By then we'll probably have another child or two. What about then?"

"What about what? If we bring one down, we'll probably have to bring them all down."

Marilyn nodded. "Here?"

"Wherever. Listen, give me a few years and we'll buy a place down here. How about that?"

That shocked her. Her mouth opened and nothing came out! Finally she said, "We can do that?"

"Sure, why not?"

"Here?"

I shrugged. "If you want to. Let's look at a few other places first, before we get too attached to any one place."

"Oh."

"Let's make a deal. For every family vacation we take, let's also take a mommy and daddy vacation, like this one! For the next few years we'll try different places. When we find an island we like, we can buy a place."

"Can we afford that?! I mean, can you afford that?" She gave me an odd look as she asked that question.

"I can afford it, which means that we can afford it. Still, I'd prefer to wait a few more years. How about we wait until I'm worth about a hundred?"

"A hundred?"

"A hundred million. Probably another two or three years. Shouldn't be any longer than that. I don't know what these places cost, but they have to be more than our place back home."

Marilyn stared at me briefly, and then just smiled and shook her head. "Do you hear the way you talk? A hundred million dollars? What was your original plan? To become the first billionaire artillery captain in history?"

I had to laugh at that. When she said it that way, it really sounded ridiculous. "Nah, I'd be at least a major by the time that happened!" We both had a laugh at that, but then I commented, "Actually, I wouldn't be the first billionaire in the service. You know who Sam Walton is?" Marilyn gave me a curious look and shook her head. "He's the guy who started Wal-Mart and he made a fortune doing it. One of his kids didn't want the corporate life and went into the Army. He was a Green Beret in Nam, I think. I know he got a Silver Star."

"Huh. You know what that means?"

"What?"

"That you weren't the only screwed up guy in the Army!", she laughed.

I had to laugh. "Not hardly!"

We finished our dinner, and I asked Marilyn again if she had thought about the house back in Westminster. I had packed our housing plans books and I told her we would have to look at them in the morning. Marilyn has a horrible tendency towards procrastination. She was perfectly happy with being presented with a fait accompli that she could complain about for the rest of her life, and beyond.

After dinner we started walking, going from oceanfront bar to oceanfront bar. It was Saturday night in the islands, and things were kind of loose. For some people it was their first night on the loose, for others it was their last chance to get nuts before heading back to the States. We were the oddity, people going from midweek to midweek. Eleuthera isn't a big tourist spot relative to Nassau, but there are still a number of small resorts and hotels, and you can fly there direct from Miami without having to change planes in Nassau. The crazy and rich Americans were on the loose, and the locals were out in force to help them get more crazy and less rich.

It was after eleven when we entered a place called Blackbeard's Parrot. Lots of fake pirate crap on the walls, lots of drunken American tourists at the tables and the bars. By midnight all the casual people had packed it in and gone back to their hotel rooms, you know, the thirty-somethings who went out for a drink while the kids watched television and slept. Now it was the hard partiers. I was ready to pack it in myself, but Marilyn was having a fine time, and ordered herself another rum punch every time the waitress came around.

I was still nursing my drink, although my wife was on her third, and I laughed as she came back from the ladies room and joined a conga line that was snaking its way through the room. When she came back, she ordered another rum punch. "You are going to be sorry for that tomorrow morning!", I yelled to her over the din.

Marilyn laughed. She had worn a sundress with a tube top tonight, and she jiggled her tits at me inside the dress. "You're an old fuddy duddy!", she replied. When I rolled my eyes at her and groaned she just laughed some more.

"Here, your turn to watch your shit." I pushed her purse across the table. "Nature calls and I have to answer." I stood up and headed towards the back of the bar, past a young blonde laying on the bar with her boyfriend doing tequila shots from her belly button. Christ, what next? Jell-O shots? I kept moving back to the bathroom.

It felt like I was standing there at the urinal about a year, pissing everything out that I had been drinking since dawn. Eventually, a gallon or two lighter, I zipped up and headed over to the sink and combed my hair. No, I didn't wash my hands. Old joke:

Two fellows go into a bathroom and take a leak side by side. Afterwards one guy goes and washes his hands. When he notices the other guy leave without washing up, he says, 'When I was at Harvard, I was taught to wash my hands after going to the bathroom!' The second guy nods and goes, 'Well, when I was at Rensselaer, I was taught not to piss on my hands.'

I straightened myself up and smiled at the bloodshot eyes in the mirror. I was still holding my own, but Marilyn was going to be so hungover in the morning! Laughing to myself, I left the bathroom to see what mischief my wife could get into now. As I walked past the bar, the blonde had been joined by a brunette friend who was also getting shots licked off her. Now, if I could only get Marilyn up there, and get a few photos, I would have blackmail material for the rest of our lives!

That was when all hell broke loose!

I heard a high pitched scream and then Marilyn's voice yelling, "STOP! THIEF!", and a black guy came running towards me, in a direction that looked like he wanted to run out the back of the bar. I just sort of vaguely noticed he had a couple of purses in his left hand, but Marilyn was still screaming, and at least one other woman had joined in. I never even thought about it, but as he ran past, I raised my left arm and whipped it forward, and caught him across the throat in a move known in football as 'the clothesline." I also put some force into it, as much to make sure I stayed on my feet as anything else. I caught him straight across the throat and his head and neck came to a complete and utter stop. His legs and torso, however, kept moving, with the amazing effect that his legs came out from under him and kicked upwards, and then he slammed down to the floor, hard and dazed.

If only that had been the end to it. Unfortunately, I had seen this guy sitting at a table with another guy, a white guy, and they seemed to be a 'salt and pepper' team of thieves. He yelled at me and came forward swinging. He also was carrying a purse in his arm, and that went whipping towards me. I stepped back and caught his arm as it went around, then grabbed it and twisted him up and over, and dumped him upside down on the floor. I kept twisting, though, and dislocated his shoulder, taking him out of the fight. Thief Number One was starting to get up again, so I kicked him in the face and busted his jaw, and he was lights out. Then I kicked Number Two and busted his knee.

"CARL! BEHIND YOU!" Marilyn was still screaming, and I turned to see what her problem was. As I did, a third guy swung at me, and he wasn't carrying any purses; he was carrying a large knife! Apparently the team was actually three guys, two black and one white, with one being the backup for the other two. The knife flicked past me twice, as I backpedaled and screaming women blocked my path. Jesus Christ, what a clusterfuck!

My attacker seemed to know what he was doing and was feeling aggressive about it. I guess the plan was to punish me for fucking with his buddies and then try and get them out of there. The knife kept slashing at me, but not wildly enough to act upon, and a few times he came close. Then he made his mistake, when he lunged forward, hoping to skewer me on the point. I twisted to his outside and wrapped his arm up, breaking his wrist and his elbow, and then I lifted him up and rammed him backward and down, throwing him to the floor and following him down. His head bounced on the barroom floor and I pulled my hand back for the coup de grace, and then hands grabbed me and pulled me away.

I struggled for a moment, wondering just how many attackers there were, when Marilyn came around in front of me, a look of horror on her face. "Carl! Stop it! It's all right, it's over! You got them!"

Seeing her in front of me was like a bucket of cold water to the face. "Wha ... what?"

"It's over, you got them.", she repeated.

Behind me, the guy who had me wrapped up said into my ear, "It ovuh, mon! Dey down!"

Outside I could hear the peculiar sound of a European style police siren winding up as it got closer. I sagged down, and turned to face the guy behind me. He was a gigantic black guy, and I recognized him as one of the bartenders. "It's over?"

He nodded and loosened his grip on me. "Yah, dey down, mon. No more, mon!"

The bar was total chaos by now, The two girls on the bar were now cowering behind it, the second robber was screaming on the floor, most of the bar's clients were streaming out through the front, and to top it all off, a squad of police came barging in through them. I just leaned back against the bar, shaking as the adrenaline washed through me. Marilyn crept through the crowd and came over to my right side and wrapped her arms around me. At that point Marilyn leaped away and stared at her hands. They were red and wet. "Carl! You're bleeding!"

"What? No I'm not! I can't be!" I shook my head. "That must be someone else's."

"No, it's not!"

I looked down at my left side, where Marilyn's hands had been. Big mistake! My left bicep and my entire left arm were red. "Oh, shit!" That third guy, the one with the knife, must have been better than I thought he was.

I fished out my handkerchief and slapped it on my upper arm. It looked like I had a long cut across the arm, maybe not that deep, but deep enough that I was bleeding steadily. I looked over at my wife and she was white as a ghost. I glanced back behind the bar and saw a sink. "Honey, I'll be fine. You go back there behind the bar and wash your hands. That dress is too pretty to ruin."

"Carl?"

"Go wash up. I'm not going anywhere." I had my hand clamped on my arm, trying to keep up pressure. It hadn't hurt before, but that was changing quickly. Now I was at the 'stinging like a bitch' stage! Shit!

That was about the end of the evening in the bar. I think we turned out the entire police force on Eleuthera that night, at least a half dozen, along with a few ambulances. I spent most of my time calming Marilyn down. Nobody even asked me any questions. A large Bahamian cop grabbed me by my right arm and tugged me outside and put me in the back of a police car. Marilyn demanded to go with me, and she went in the other side. Then he drove us to a different part of town. To be fair it wasn't a very long drive.

We stopped in front of a brick building, but that was about all I could see. I figured I was at the local jail, but the cop who had hauled me away wasn't saying anything. He just took me by the right arm and hustled me inside. It looked like a hospital actually, and definitely had that medical institution smell. Marilyn followed along behind us. A woman in a white uniform pointed to a room down a small hallway, and we went in. There was a medical table in the center of the room, and I was led to it, so I climbed on and looked around.

Marilyn was standing there next to me, holding my right arm like she would never let me go. "Come on; get up here next to me." I scooted over as best I could.

Marilyn hopped up next to me. "Where are we? What's happening?"

I gave her my best smile, even though my arm was really starting to bug me, and I was still dripping. "Well, either this is the local hospital, or the local jail has a really great medical plan!"

"Jail?"

"Maybe the Bahamas have coed jails! We could be cell mates!"

"We're going to jail?" Marilyn looked scared.

I shrugged. I looked over at the cop who had brought me in, and was still standing in front of the door, blocking any escape. "Do the Bahamas have coed jails?", I asked. He didn't answer, but he smiled. I leaned over and whispered in Marilyn's ear, "If this is a jail, it's a hell of a lot nicer than the last one I was in!" Marilyn's eyes opened wide at that. She was sobering up very quickly!

After five minutes, a guy in a white coat came in. "I'm Doctor Bellinger. Let's have a look, shall we?" Doctor Bellinger was as black as the ace of spades and spoke with a distinct British accent, so I figured he came over from England. Then again, on some of the islands, they end up trying to out-British the British. He peeled the handkerchief off my arm, and pulled my shirt sleeve up, which only started the bleeding up again.

"Hold on, Doc. Let me take off the shirt." I winced as I moved my arm around, but I got the shirt off and tossed it on the floor in the corner. It was a lost cause in any case.

Bellinger poked and probed at the cut for a minute, and then said, "Well, you'll need some stitches, but it's not life threatening." He pulled out an oversized band-aid and slapped it on my arm, and then said, "I'll be back. I need to see to your other handiwork in the meantime. They need to get sent to Freeport. A helicopter is on the way."

Great! That didn't sound too promising, especially since he was calling them 'my handiwork.' This wasn't looking all that positive. I think I really stepped in it this time! I suddenly felt very tired.

I climbed down off the exam table and went over to the sink on the side of the wall. I washed the blood off my hands as best I could, and then dried off with some paper towels. Not only was my shirt cut up, my chinos were red with blood on the left side, and ruined also. I needed to rest, but unless I wanted to lie down on the floor, the exam table was it. I looked it over, and then pulled an extension out at the bottom and cranked the top half into an elevated position. Then I kicked off my shoes and lay down on the table. Marilyn curled up at my side, very nervous. Our silent guard stayed by the door.

I woke up a few hours later when the door to the exam room opened up and the doctor came back in. I shook Marilyn awake and we both sat up on the exam table. Marilyn's face showed that she had been crying. I just hugged her with my good arm and said, "Everything will be all right. Just you wait and see."

My left arm was starting to throb. Bellinger didn't help it when he yanked off the bandage he had slapped on me earlier. The wound started bleeding again, and he examined it closely, and then he began opening drawers and cabinets, setting up for the stitches. Thankfully, he pulled out a hypodermic needle, so I suspected I would get some pain shots first. Some places I've seen, that's sort of optional at best. "Not too deep, and fairly clean, so we'll simply scrub the wound out and give you about six stitches. How does that sound?"

"Fine by me, Doc. Do we get to leave then?", I asked hopefully.

He snorted at that, and a glance over at the cop showed him smiling. Well, it was worth asking.

"Now, this might sting a little." The next thing I knew he had squirted something on my arm and was rubbing a small brush over it. Sting? A little? It felt like my arm was about to come off! The blood started flowing again, and I suspected Bellinger was getting back at me for screwing up his night.

I swore under my breath. "Doc, if that's what you call a little sting, I don't want to be around when you think something is going to hurt!"

"It's a good clean wound. We'll let it drain a moment, and then start sewing you up." He washed off the surface again, and rubbed some Betadine on it. Then he filled his syringe with Novocain or something and started injecting me around the cut. That didn't feel all that good either.

I looked over at Marilyn. "Whatever happened to good old morphine?"

"Later.", commented the doctor, "Afterwards I'll give you something for the pain." He opened a clear plastic envelope and removed a curved needle with some thread attached. "Now, don't complain or I'll make sure the scar is ugly."

I turned my head away. I'm pretty good around blood, but if I watch, I'll flinch. I couldn't see what he was doing, but Marilyn's eyes were wide. I grinned at her. "I thought chicks dug scars."

"You're not funny!"

I didn't feel any pain, but the tugging on the flesh as the stitches were pulled through and knotted was disconcerting. About halfway through this, there was a knock on the door and the guard opened it. A slim man in a police uniform came in, and from the way the guard looked at him, I figured he had to be of some importance. Doctor Bellinger stopped what he was doing and glanced over at him. The new man said, "Don't stop on my account." He had a Bahamian accent, but used the Queen's English and not the local dialect. Come to think of it, so did the doctor.

"I wasn't planning to. He'll be all yours in a few more minutes."

"That's all right. This will give us a chance to get acquainted." He came closer and stood to my side, and watched what the doctor was doing, and then faced me. "My name is Assistant Superintendant Javier."

"Hello. I'd shake your hand, but I'm a bit occupied at the moment. Or will you be slapping the cuffs on me when my hand comes up?", I asked.

"Why don't we talk about that, Mister Buckman."

I raised an eyebrow at him, in curiosity. "You know my name." Nobody had even asked me up to this point.

"Indeed, I do. Mister Carl Buckman, of Cockeysville, Maryland." He put a hand in his pocket and pulled out what looked to be a couple of driver's licenses. "And Mrs. Marilyn Buckman, also of Cockeysville, Maryland. Husband and wife, I presume."

"How did you get my driver's license?!" I moved my right hand back to my pants pocket, but it was empty. My wallet was gone!

Assistant Superintendant Javier smiled and nodded. "Yes, we found your wallet, also your wife's purse. Was that the reason you attacked those men?"

I had to be very careful. This man was smart, and I could easily talk myself into big trouble. Back home, in the States, I'd just shut up at this point and demand a lawyer. Here, things were different. This wasn't the United States, I no longer had any constitutional rights, and I might never see a lawyer. I wasn't afraid; the Bahamas are a civilized place and had a British common law legal system, but it would be best to watch my mouth and not be funny.

"I did not attack them, Assistant Superintendant. I think you have been misinformed."

"Then maybe you should tell me what happened."

I took a second to collect my thoughts, simply nodding in understanding. Fortunately, Doctor Bellinger took that moment to finish his sewing, and he started commenting. "Well, if you didn't attack them, I'd hate to see what you could do if you were attacking them!"

"Thank you, Doctor!", said Javier, pissed at being interrupted.

I kept my mouth shut. Better that he be angry at the doctor than at me. When the doctor didn't respond, he turned back to me, "You were saying?"

"I was saying, I didn't attack anybody." I gave him a straight retelling of the events of the night from the moment I stood up to go to the bathroom to the point where I was grabbed by the bartender. By the time I finished, the doctor had finished with me, but he was leaning against the wall listening in, with no intention of leaving.

"So, you're telling me that you were attacked by three armed men, and all you got was a cut on the arm, and all three of them are in the hospital?", he asked.

Always turn a hostile question back on the questioner. "Are you saying that it makes more sense that I would attack three armed men?"

He didn't answer either. He'd be a dangerous poker player. He changed the subject. "What is that around your neck?"

For the life of me I couldn't figure out what he was talking about. It took me a second to realize what Javier was referring to. "My dog tags? These?" I lifted them and jangled them. I still wore them, and realized I probably always would. I had kept my draft card back the first time around, tucked in my wallet behind my Social Security card.

"You are a soldier?"

"I was. I left the Army in January.", I told him.

"Why?"

Was his theory now that I was a crazy soldier killing for no reason? I reached down and pulled up my pant leg, exposing the zipper factory that my right knee had become. "I made one jump too many."

"A jump?", he asked, confused.

Marilyn spoke up at this, angrily. "My husband was an officer in the Eighty-Second Airborne, and decorated for bravery! Why are you treating him like a criminal?! Those men stole my purse, and a bunch of others, and he stopped them! Why are you arresting him!? You should be arresting them! Let us go!"

I took her hand and pulled her close. "It's all right, just settle down. Things will be fine." I wrapped my arm around her shoulder and hugged her. The last thing I needed was to have Marilyn thrown in jail with me. If nothing else, she needed to be free to call a lawyer!

Javier looked at me with a wry smile. "Are you sure you were the soldier and not your wife?"

"My wife is very protective.", I replied, also smiling.

He turned to face Marilyn. "You are not under arrest. You have never been under arrest. I simply wanted you kept together so we could talk. We have already arrested those men. I simply wanted to hear your side of everything."

Marilyn was still looking mulish, but I just patted her hand. "They've been arrested?", I asked.

Javier nodded. "You are an extremely fortunate man, Mister Buckman. We have been after this gang for several months. If they are who I think they are, you are lucky to be alive."

Marilyn gasped at that, but I just gave him a curious look. "Oh?"

"Yes, they are a mix of pickpockets and strong arm thieves. They go from island to island, which makes it difficult to track them or know if it is the same group. Two of them are pickpockets, and they go through and lift wallets, like yours, and then when they leave, they race through and steal purses. The third man takes care of anybody who tries to stop them. We think this is the same group that killed a German tourist in February, with a knife. You are lucky."

I thought about it for a second, and then looked over at my wife, who was white as a ghost and shaking. I just hugged her some more. "No Assistant Superintendant, I'm not. They were just very unlucky. I was in the airborne artillery, but we were all combat soldiers. Those men are lucky. I knew guys who would eat them for breakfast."

He snorted at that. "Well, I'd prefer if you didn't tell the reporters that."

"Reporters? What reporters?"

He grinned at me. "The reporters outside the clinic. This is a very small island, and very peaceful. The local reporter for the Guardian is out there, and probably the fellow for the Journal. This is national news!"

I stared at him in disbelief. "Oh, please, you have got to be kidding me!" He shook his head and I gave my wife a horrified look. "This just gets better and better! The next time, I'm letting them take the purse, the wallet, and you!"

"I'm not talking to any newspapers!", she told me.

"Shit!", I muttered. Then I looked over at Javier. "Okay, but if you want me to behave, you need to get me some clean clothes." I looked at Marilyn, and she had some blood on her sundress. "Her, too."

"Mmmm?", he replied, noncommittally.

"Mmmm! Yes. You know where La Valencia is? Send Mister Talkative here out there and bring us back some clean clothing. Then I'll see your reporters and sing the praises of the Bahamas. Sound reasonable?"

"Reasonable." He motioned our guard out. "So, you are staying at La Valencia." He looked at me curiously. He must have known what it cost to stay there.

"You know it?"

"I know it. I shall also have a talk with Mister Finch. I know him, too."

"It's a small island, isn't it?"

"And very friendly and peaceful. Remember that when you talk to the reporters.", he replied.

"Well, then why don't you be friendly and get one of your officers to drive our car back to La Valencia for us. No way am I up to driving around tonight. Or is it the morning already?" I turned to Bellinger, still listening in. "Hey, Doc, what about those painkillers you mentioned. My arm is starting to kill me!" The Novocain had worn off and my entire arm was throbbing. "I'll be able to say the words friendly and peaceful better if my arm doesn't hurt so much!"

Doctor Bellinger left and came back with a bottle of pills. "These are Tylenol with codeine. Take one now, and don't drink while you are taking them. They should have the pain and inflammation down in a day or so, but if you still have pain after that, come back and I can give you something a little stronger. These should be good, though."

I nodded to him and popped open the bottle. I dry swallowed one, and then said, "Thanks. I've had them before. These should be okay." Codeine is not my drug of choice, since it makes me nauseous. In fact, most opiates make me nauseous. If nothing else, this would keep me from becoming an addict to pain pills. I'd take another after we got out of here and he wasn't watching. Marilyn would complain, but that's pretty much a wife's main job, and I didn't need her doing her job in front of the doctor.

The doctor left, and Assistant Superintendant Javier excused himself, saying he'd be right outside. Marilyn and I shrugged at each other and sat back down on the exam table. "Are we really going to have reporters out there?", she asked in disbelief.

"It must be a slow news day in the Bahamas.", I answered.

"Why are you being so nice with that Javier guy!? He was awful to you!"

I smiled at that. "He was just doing his job. Trust me, he could have been a whole lot worse!"

"How? How could he be any worse?!", demanded Marilyn.

"Well, for one thing, he could have thrown us both in jail!", I said with a laugh.

"Jail! For what?"

"Well, let's see. A couple of drunk foreigners start raising hell in a quiet local restaurant. The wife, dressed provocatively, by the way..." Marilyn looked shocked at that, but I continued. " ... starts dancing around the place and bothering people. Her husband, equally drunk and rowdy, gets in a barroom brawl, wrecking the place and putting three innocent locals into the hospital with life threatening injuries. How does that sound for a scenario?"

"That's ... that's crazy!", she sputtered.

'Yeah? Well, it's also highly possible! What if there's a fourth guy in the crowd, who swears I attacked them? What if the bartender or a waitress is in cahoots with the bad guys? We end up in jail while the cops sort things out. I've been in jail, honey, and you wouldn't do well there."

Marilyn stared at me for a few seconds. "You're serious."

"It happens. Now, the odds of anything bad happening in the Bahamas are pretty remote. The U.S. is right next door and the locals know where their money comes from. Still, why take a chance? If I need to smile and say nice things about the Bahamas to the reporters, it is a cheap price to pay. Trust me, by this time tomorrow, this will have all blown over and we'll be able to finish our vacation quietly."

"You bet it will be quiet! I'm not leaving the villa!"

I just laughed at that and hugged her with my good arm. What I had outlined happens every year, somewhere in the world. The Caribbean is pretty tame and safe for tourists, but there are any number of shitholes around the planet where trapping and imprisoning Americans is considered both sporting and profitable.

It was approaching dawn when there was a knock on the door and Assistant Superintendant Javier and his silent minion returned with an armload of clothes. "Your car has been taken over to La Valencia. After you are dressed, we'll go outside and see the reporters and then drive you home."

"They're still out there?", I asked.

He grinned. "Three of them, now, and they have cameras!"

I just rolled my eyes and groaned. Then I noticed his silent friend smiling at us. I turned to him and said, "Can you even speak? I haven't heard you say one thing tonight!"

"Didn't have anything to say.", rumbled out of him in a thick accent. Then he went back to being silent.

I looked over at Marilyn. "Words to live by." I got a dirty look in return.

Javier and the constable (I had learned just enough to know that regular cops start out as constables, very British) left and we sorted through our clothing. I stripped down and washed off as much as possible of the blood and Betadine where it was showing outside of the bandage. I pulled on some fresh clothing, khakis and a long sleeved shirt. I rolled the shirt sleeves up above my elbows, but not so far as to show the bandage. I slipped back into my blood spattered shoes, but hoped that nobody would notice them. Marilyn took off her dress and put on a clean sundress. She hadn't been wearing anything under it last night, which I generally approved of, and the police hadn't brought over any underwear. Now, while I still approved, I was too tired to contemplate any fun and games. I knew that as soon as we got back to La Valencia we would both sleep like rocks!

Dressed, I opened the door to the exam room and looked outside quickly. It was just Assistant Superintendant Javier and his silent partner, who was holding a plastic garbage bag. "Throw all your extra clothes in here." We bundled everything up and he handed the bag to the constable, who turned and headed for the rear of the building. Javier, Marilyn and I turned the other way and headed for the front door. "Remember, honey, friendly and peaceful!", I said to Marilyn. Javier laughed.

As soon as we hit the lobby a flash went off and I stopped to blink my eyes. There were three men in the lobby, two black and one white, and at least two of them had cameras pointing at us. Another flash and I stopped. "Hold on, fellows, give us a chance to say hello! We're not going anywhere." It was time to try and control the situation. I put my right arm around Marilyn's shoulders and smiled. "Better?" Javier stepped away and the cameras flashed again.

"Wow, it must be really quiet in the Bahamas to have all of you out like this!", I commented, grinning at them. Defuse, defuse, defuse...

All three immediately started talking, all at the same time, and generally the same damn questions over and over. What happened? Why were we there? Who were we? Why were we arrested? How bad were my injuries? Did I know the thieves and killers? How was I able to capture them?

I could feel Marilyn tensing next to me. She was tired and nervous and definitely not in her element. I just gave her a reassuring hug. "Calm down, fellows! I'll answer your questions, just one at a time, just one at a time. Let's do this in order." I pointed at the one on the right. "You first."

"Who are you and where are you from?"

"Who are you and where are you from?", I returned.

"Michael Westcott, Nassau Guardian. You didn't answer my question."

I reached out my hand and he instinctively took it. I shook his hand and said, "Nice to meet you, Michael. I'm Carl Buckman and this is my wife Marilyn. We're from Maryland, in the States. Next?" I turned to the guy in the center.

"Gregory Hancock, the Tribune. What happened?"

That started a civilized conversation. I shook Hancock's hand and gave them a brief synopsis, downplaying everything, and trying to be gracious and polite. In particular:

It was all very minor, nothing to get worked up about. It was over before you even knew it had started.

Injuries? What injuries? We were just brought here to be checked out! We're fine!

Everybody should thank Assistant Superintendant Javier for arresting the criminals so quickly. What great policework!

This is the sort of thing that can happen anywhere, so, no, we don't have any bad feelings about Eleuthera or the Bahamas.

Everybody has been so friendly. We're having a great time.

The island is so peaceful and quiet. We recommend vacationing here, and we'll be sure to visit again.

Marilyn was asked several questions, but she just made some general noises for the reporters, and then I amplified on them. She did let out that I was a decorated and medically retired combat soldier, which really got them interested, so I had to explain that. They scribbled everything down. Thank God they didn't have any recorders or video gear, but that stuff was still somewhat pricey in those days.

"Hey, I'd love to keep talking to you, but Marilyn and I are pretty beat. We really need to get back to the resort and get some rest. Otherwise we'll never be able to enjoy the rest of our vacation here." I had deliberately avoided any mention of where we were staying. Better to seem like normal tourists staying at some resort than millionaires staying at an exclusive and very expensive villa.

The reporters immediately started asking more questions, but we just nodded and smile and the Assistant Superintendant shuffled them out the door. When he returned, we simply followed him out the back, to a police car with our silent driver. Fifteen minutes later we were back at la Valencia. We got out and grabbed our bag of clothing and said thank you. Mr. Talkative simply nodded and gave us a little salute before driving off.

I stood there in the driveway as the sun rose and looked at my wife. "I'm going to bed!"

"Me too!"

Chapter 68: Hero

Back inside, I took another pill and drank about half a beer while getting undressed and climbing into bed. Marilyn had already fallen asleep by the time I got into the sheets. I tried to close the drapes and shut out the daylight, but the entire place had been designed to be light and airy. Even the curtains seemed bright. It didn't matter. I was out like a light in about thirty seconds and didn't wake until dinner time.

I woke to find myself alone in the bed, but I heard the shower running, so my wife couldn't have been up much earlier than I was. I lazed there a few minutes, getting back into things, until I crawled out of bed stiff and sore. I picked up my beer to finish it, but it smelled flat and stale and made my stomach churn. I took it into the bathroom with me and poured it down the sink.

My wife stuck her head out of the shower and asked, "How are you feeling?"

I smiled at her. "I'm fine. You?"

"I'm not the one with the stitches."

I waved it off. "I'll be fine." I took the empty beer bottle and padded out to the kitchen. In one of the drawers I found a roll of duct tape, so I carried it into the bedroom, along with a plastic bag.

The shower was off, so as soon as Marilyn was finished drying her hair I asked her to come out. "Here, let's make a covering of some sort and duct tape it over the bandage."

"Won't that hurt when you take it off later?", she asked, tearing a length of tape off the roll.

"Honey, I need a shower!"

Marilyn shrugged and nodded, and between the two of us we taped the bag over the bandage so it would be watertight. So armed, I headed into the bathroom and took a long and hot shower. Afterwards I had her tear it off, which hurt worse than the stitches! "Yowza! Watch it!", I yelled.

"You should have shaved your arm before I did this.", Marilyn commented.

"I will never ask you to go get waxed.", I replied. If it was anything like this, it really had to suck!

"I don't understand."

Probably not, now that I thought about it. Marilyn shaved, and occasionally plucked an errant eyebrow. She wasn't into waxing. I explained, which earned me a loud, "Forget it!" I just nodded in agreement.

"I guess we're not going swimming anytime soon.", she said.

"Not me, anyway. You can, and I can watch. I'll be happy to oil you up in between laps.", I offered.

Marilyn had a robe on. "What are we doing for dinner?"

"Go out, I suppose."

"I don't want to go out. I've had my fill of going out for the time being.", she replied.

I shrugged and held my hands up. "I don't think we have much choice. There's nothing in the fridge, or at least not enough to cook. We only got some snacks and stuff, unless I do omelets the rest of our stay."

"No.", she answered, grumbling slightly.

"Get dressed. We'll go get a pizza, maybe bring it back."

"Okay."

We dressed quickly and sorted through some of the flyers that Finch had left for us, finding a nearby place that did pizzas. I grabbed the flyer and the car keys, and we went in search of dinner. It was Sunday night, and relatively quiet. We placed our order and then sat down at a table over in the corner.

Marilyn was looking around the room covertly, and I noticed. "What are you looking for?", I asked.

She leaned forward and lowered her voice. "I'm wondering if anybody has seen us in the paper yet."

I thought about it for a second. "I doubt it. By the time those guys got through sending in their stories this morning, the morning edition was already out. That means it will be delayed until tomorrow, and maybe not even then. This has got to be a really small story. 'Tourists robbed.' Like that's never happened before! It will probably be in the middle of the back section, buried under an ad for wrinkle cream."

Marilyn looked hopeful at that. I was certainly hoping it would be true. Maybe we could have a tornado or earthquake in the meantime. I didn't remember anything happening in the spring of 1982, but maybe I had forgotten a disaster.

Marilyn got quiet while we were waiting for the pizza to come over. "What's up, honey? Sorry we came?", I asked. She had a bit of a nervous look on her face.

"Oh, no, it's not that. I mean, it's actually been a lot of fun, at least until the other night, and like you said, that sort of thing can happen anywhere."

"So, what is it?"

"Okay. Now, don't get angry. Just let me speak." I nodded and made a rolling 'move it along' motion with my fingers. "Last night, in the bar, when you were in that fight, you almost looked like you were going to kill them."

I just smiled and waved it off. "Oh, you know me, take no prisoners and that sort of thing."

My wife wasn't smiling. "That's what I mean. I mean ... Carl, don't be angry with me ... before we left Fayetteville, I heard stories. I mean, just rumors, not even stories, whispers, even. I never believed them, but last night, watching you in that fight, I started believing them."

Suddenly I started getting very nervous and still. I knew where this was going, and didn't want to go there. "What did you hear, honey?", I asked her quietly.

Marilyn lowered her voice to a whisper. "When you were in Honduras, and that last jump dropped you and your men in Nicaragua, and you captured those drug runners, I heard at least two wives saying that you killed those men rather than let them talk about what happened afterwards, and that you burned their bodies." She looked very guilty as she said this, guilty and embarrassed to be bringing it up.

"Okay."

"Well?"

"Well what? You haven't asked me a question yet."

My wife rolled her eyes. "Well, is it true or not?"

I sat back and looked out the window to the pizza parlor towards the beach. I turned back, just as our order was brought out, so I delayed my answer a minute longer. Finally, when we were alone again, I answered very carefully. "Well, I have heard that accusation made. From a legal standpoint, that would be impossibly hard to prove. As far as I know, there have been no charges from any Nicaraguan authority demanding my extradition for any charges related to that mission. Nobody seems to have reported our presence, so the Nicaraguans have not made any protests. Certainly any talk like that could compromise security and cause an international incident, so it would be best to not even ask such questions."

She gave me an angry look. "You haven't answered my question. Saying you can't be found guilty is not the same as saying you are innocent."

"Does it matter whether I am innocent or guilty?"

'Yes!" She looked around to see if we were being overheard, and then lowered her voice again. "Carl, before last night I could just ignore it and pretend I never heard those rumors, but last night, in the bar, you looked like you were going to kill those guys. I have to know what kind of man I married."

"You picked a hell of a place and a time to ask me this!", I replied gesturing at our surroundings.

"Please, Carl, I need to know."

"Well, let me ask you a question. What if we had been at war, in combat, and while being shot at, I had killed four men. Would I have been the man you thought I was then?"

Marilyn shook her head. "But you weren't in combat."

"Marilyn, that mission was as close as I ever want to come to combat. If I did what you are asking me I did, it was necessary to the completion of the mission, not because I am a bloodthirsty killer. I only had two things I had to absolutely accomplish - get my men home, every last one of them, dead or alive, and keep the United States out of a shooting war, which is what could have happened if those four men had talked. I accomplished my mission."

"That's about as much of an admission as I'm going to get, isn't it?", she asked.

"If the question is, if I'm the kind of man who could kill another man, then the answer is yes, I could do that. If the question is, have I done that already, I am not going to answer. You already know the answer; you just don't want to admit it to yourself."

"And last night?"

I had to shrug at that. "I don't fight for fun. For fun I'll go to the gym or the dojo, and there are rules and referees. In a real fight, there are no rules and no refs and people get hurt. I've never lost that kind of fight and don't plan to. The question for you is whether you can live with a man who will do whatever it takes - whatever it takes! - to keep you and your children safe."

"I don't know what to think.", she replied, quietly. Then she put down her pizza. "I don't think I'm all that hungry anymore."

I guess that wasn't all that surprising. I sighed and stood up. Marilyn went outside to the car while I paid for our meal.

It was a silent ride home. Marilyn didn't even look at me, and I could see tears forming in her eyes. Back at La Valencia she didn't say anything, but simply went inside and went into the bedroom. I didn't feel like drinking a lot, but I wasn't really all that tired. I grabbed a beer from the fridge and went out onto the back veranda and watched as the night deepened and the stars began showing.

I wasn't sure what the result of this was going to be. I wasn't worried that Marilyn was going to divorce me and throw me out of the house, but she was sure thinking about me in a way she had never thought before. I suppose at some point, every wife has to ask herself, just what kind of man she married? There's always something that they don't know about us. We have a secret vice - we're a secret drinker, a cockhound, a gambler, an addict. Or maybe we're a criminal or mentally disturbed or abusive. Sometimes the secret is a good one; Marilyn couldn't complain about not knowing I had more money than I let on. Sometimes it's a harmless secret, like the fact that I am both a lousy handyman and lazy.

I finished my beer and went back into the house. The bedroom door was closed, so I went into the kitchen and got a second beer. Tonight I wasn't going to get drunk, but another beer would be fine. Then I would curl up on the couch and get some sleep. It wasn't the first time I had slept on a couch and it probably wouldn't be the last. It was the first time on this go-around.

In my first life, Alison had been very colicky, and a couple of times I had gone out to the car and slept in the car, just so I could get enough sleep to go to work in the morning. Another time, while Parker and I had been on a Boy Scout camping trip, using Marilyn's car as a people transporter, we had been sideswiped by a car in an accident in Pennsylvania. Marilyn had been furious over that, and I ended up sleeping in the living room a couple of nights while she worked it out.

It was late when I heard the door from the bedroom open. I had been nursing that second beer for over an hour, and I set it aside when I noticed my wife coming over. She was wearing her satin robe and looked very sad. I was laying on a chaise lounge. "Want to talk?", I asked. I moved over and patted the edge of the chaise.

She sat down next to me. "I'm sorry about how I behaved earlier.", she told me quietly. "I wasn't being fair to you."

"It's all right, don't worry about it.", I told her.

"I'm so sorry. I shouldn't have said anything."

I reached out and patted her hand. "You didn't do anything. It's all right. I simply surprised you. I'm sorry about that."

"I guess I never thought about things before."

I nodded. "I know. Marilyn, your problem is that you think I'm a better guy than I really am. I work hard at being the kind of man you think I am, but sometimes I slip up. All I could think about when I was in Honduras was how much I wanted to come back to you and see Charlie. I'm sorry when I don't live up to your expectations."

Marilyn started sobbing and lay down in my arms on the chaise lounge. I wrapped my hands around her back and held her. She just cried and repeated over and over, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry..." Eventually she stopped and pushed herself upright. "I think I understand better now. You really are better than you think you are, but you're also a lot tougher and harder than I thought you were. You're strong, but you're ruthless. Does that make sense?"

I shrugged and made a half smile. "Yes."

"How did that happen? What made you so strong but so hard?"

I sighed. "I don't know, hun. Hell, look at my family. The only way I could get out of there with my sanity was by being strong and hard and tough, and yes, even a little ruthless. I'm sorry I'm not the guy you want me to be. What happens to us now?"

"What do you mean?"

I felt a chill as I said the next words. "Do you still want me? Is there still an us?"

Marilyn's jaw dropped when she heard those words. "WHAT?! Carling! No! It's not like that at all! I think I love you more than ever now. I just never thought about it before, not like this."

I sighed and smiled. "You had me worried there."

"Sorry about that. No, you be tough and I'll be soft and somehow we'll meet in the middle. How about that?"

"That sounds fine by me.", I answered.

"Come to bed, Carl. You're my hero, so let me give you a hero's thanks."

I smiled at that. "I think I like that idea. You know, as the rescued fair maiden, you are going to have to really, really work at thanking me. Us heroes kind of expect it!"

Marilyn stood up and I climbed to my feet after her. "Don't push it. You weren't that much of a hero!", she laughed.

"And you're not a maiden, either."

"And whose fault was that?" She took my hand and led me inside.

We were late getting up the next morning. In fact, I completely skipped out my morning exercise routine, sort of. I was actually getting a totally different sort of exercise, and getting sweaty doing it. Marilyn was working out with me, and she got sweaty as well. It must have been very aerobic, too, since we both were panting at the end of the routine.

A clatter in the living room roused us. Marilyn swung her head around afterwards, from where she was laying on top of me, and said, "Mrs. Wilkes must be cleaning up from the weekend."

"Yeah, you were pretty sloppy.", I replied with a straight face.

That earned me a shot to the ribs. "You can be eliminated!" She rolled off of me and climbed to her feet. "Well, somebody needs to take a shower, and I think you are too lazy to move."

I sniffed the air theatrically, and said, "You're right somebody does need to take a shower. Off you go."

"I was going to invite you to wash my back, but just for that, you can stay in bed!"

I looked down my torso and saw that Carl Junior needed the rest. "I'll just take a nap. Somebody kept me up all night long."

Marilyn gave me a harrumph and went off to the bathroom. I put my hands behind my head and smiled. I actually did doze off for a few minutes, but woke up when my wife tossed a wet washcloth at me. I rolled out of bed and smacked her on the ass as we passed each other, her leaving the bathroom and me entering.

Fifteen minutes later, I was showered and shaved, and dressed in shorts and a polo shirt. I also had forgotten about my new stitches, and I ripped the wet bandage off and tossed it in the garbage. The line of stitches on my arm looked red and angry, but was relatively pain free. Maybe Mrs. Wilkes could scrounge up a bandage for it. No swimming for me the rest of the trip, though.

I looked at myself in the mirror, studying my nose. Most people never noticed that it was broken all those years ago. Maybe they thought it was supposed to be kind of bent down and a little spread out. One thing I could certainly say, my body really showed the beatings I had taken over the years. I scarred easy. Now my arm was just one more addition to the zipper factory.

Another reminder was my right knee. It had improved enough so that while I walked with a slight limp, it wasn't hard to push it too hard, and then it hurt like the dickens and I needed the cane. Since the fight the other night, it was hurting me. I had skipped on the cane when we went out for pizza the other night, but I needed it now. I grabbed it and went out to the living room.

I hobbled over to the dining room table, where Marilyn was sitting and drinking some coffee while reading the newspaper. That was unusual in itself; my wife rarely reads the newspaper. She looked up at me and grinned at me. "Morning!"

"You really don't have to worry about me getting in fights, hun. The way I'm going, the next time I decide to get into a fight, you're going to have to push me into it with a wheelchair."

She laughed and pushed the newspaper over to me. "The middle of the back section, over a wrinkle cream ad, huh?"

"What are you talking about?" I looked at the paper where she was tapping it with a finger. "Oh, shit!" There, just below the fold, on the front page of the Nassau Guardian, was a picture of me, flanked by Marilyn and Assistant Superintendant Javier, under a headline, 'Tourist Captures Killer Gang!' I looked up at Marilyn and said, "You have got to be kidding me!"

"Read it!", she laughed. "Why, if I wasn't already married, I'd want to marry a guy who was that heroic!"

I flipped my wife the bird, which just made her laugh harder. Then I read the story. Leaving aside the parts about the amazing tourist who caught the robbers, it was pretty obvious that Assistant Superintendant Javier hadn't spent Sunday lazing on his porch. In fact, reading between the lines, it sounded like he had gotten at least one of the gang to roll over on the others. In addition to a whole mess of robbery charges related to the pickpocketing and purse stealing, murder charges had been levied against them, related to the death of the German tourist Javier had told us about.

Mrs. Wilkes bustled in from the kitchen with some juice and fruit salad for me. She saw me reading the newspaper and asked, "Dat be you?"

I looked up at her and grinned. "It wasn't that big a deal, Mrs. Wilkes."

She just shook her head and cried out, "You be crazy, mon!"

I put my head back and laughed loudly at that. Marilyn smiled over at me, and then said, "I've been saying that for years, Mrs. Wilkes." I just laughed some more. I waved them off and the two women chatted a bit about the night in the bar. After a bit, Marilyn and Mrs. Wilkes scrounged up a bandage and covered up the stitches for me.

The real surprise came about an hour later. There was a knock on the front door, and while Marilyn and I looked at each other curiously, from where we were sitting in the living room, Mrs. Wilkes hustled out of the kitchen and opened it. There were some subdued words said, and then Mr. Finch came in. I promptly climbed to my feet in greeting.

"Mister Buckman, Mrs. Buckman, good morning. Might I have a word with you?"

"Sure, come on in." I glanced over at Marilyn with a bit of mystification. She looked back the same way. We hadn't had anything to do with Finch or his office since we got there, other than a restaurant recommendation or two. I stepped out of the way and he came into the living room.

The first thing he saw was the newspaper on the coffee table. "Ah, you have seen the paper already.", he said with a smile.

"Yes, Mrs. Wilkes brought it this morning."

"That was quite a remarkable thing you did, capturing those three men. They were very dangerous men!"

I waved a hand. "Really, Mister Finch, the paper made it sound much more dramatic than it really was."

"That is not what Assistant Superintendant Javier told me.", he replied.

"Don't listen to him, Mister Finch! Carl was just as heroic as they reported. Too heroic, if you ask me!", commented Marilyn.

I laughed at that and reached out and took her hand. "I promise, no more heroics." I turned back to our concierge. "So, you talked to the Assistant Superintendant."

"Oh, yes, he called me Friday night, or really Saturday morning, to ask about you. Both of you, actually."

"Both of us!? Whatever for!?", asked my wife.

I had to smile at that. She can be a bit naïve at times. "Standard police work, honey. You always check on everybody.", I told her.

"Precisely so.", agreed Finch, amiably. "The Assistant Superintendant is a very thorough man."

"I gathered as much from the newspaper. It seems that Assistant Superintendant Javier has made a nice little string of arrests and cleared up a number of crimes here."

"Yes, it would seem so. I have to tell you, as a citizen of the Bahamas, these men are very unusual. The Bahamas is a very quiet and safe place, and crime is very unusual! You should not think this sort of thing is common!", he said.

I glanced at Marilyn and smiled. She smiled back. "Neither of us thought anything of the sort. We have found it quite lovely here, and hope to come back some day."

My wife chimed in, "Really, everyone here has been terrific. Some day we will have to bring our children here for a visit."

"Oh, there are so many things for children to do! How many do you have?"

"Just one now, a baby boy, but we plan on a few more.", she said.

He nodded. "So this was in the way of a second honeymoon, then?"

"Yes it was."

"What a terrible way to see it end! Allow me to make it up to you. I know you leave tomorrow. I want to invite you to a small dinner party at my home tonight. I know a number of the local people and they would all love to meet you and thank you for your help."

"Well, really Mister Finch, that's just not necessary. It really wasn't that big a deal.", I protested.

"No, I insist. Mrs. Wilkes told me how you have been cut and how she bandaged you up this morning. I know Assistant Superintendant Javier would like to see you once more before you leave."

I looked over at my wife and shrugged. "I guess dinner is taken care of tonight."

"Fine by me.", she agreed.

"Okay, Mister Finch, but we really don't have anything fancy to wear. We're just a couple of tourists on vacation. My wardrobe is pretty much limited to clean khakis and a shirt."

"I promise, that will be fine. We will be very informal. Shall we say seven this evening? Mrs. Wilkes can give you directions. It is very close by."

"We look forward to it, sir. Thank you." We shook hands and then he left. After he left, I commented to Marilyn, "I think that is what they call a command performance."

"I think you're right. What do we do?"

"Well, today, let's just get in the car and drive up and down the island, one end to the other. I want to see more than what there is here."

She nodded. "Okay, let's get ready and go. Give me five minutes."

I smiled at that. Five minutes to Marilyn is closer to thirty minutes to normal humans. I used the bathroom myself, and then waited for Marilyn to get ready. Once she appeared, I tapped my watch and said, "Five minutes on the dot, honey!" She immediately started protesting, but I just waved it off and moved her out the door.

First stop was to gas up the Cavalier. I wasn't too sure how long the drive was, but I knew it would be a few hours. Gas is not cheap outside of the States. I remember the first time we drove in the islands, in my other life, I thought it was pretty reasonable, until I figured out that the prices listed were for liters, not gallons! Ooops!

Eleuthera is about a hundred miles long, and the Queens Highway is the main drag the entire length of the island. In most places it's the only drag; the island is very narrow and it's the only main road. We sent the day driving it, first north past Governors Harbor, all the way up to Spanish Wells, and then turned around and drove back and beyond. We kept going all the way down to Bannerman Town, where we had lunch. Then it was back north again, to La Valencia, where we took a nap before dinner.

At six, we got ready to go out. It was pretty simple for both of us. Marilyn pulled on a calf length halter top sundress and a pair of high heeled sandals, and she looked pretty good. My choices were limited, and I decided that in the future I'd be sure to pack at least a sport coat. I pulled on some clean khakis and a long sleeved dress shirt, and then rolled the sleeves up, but not high enough to show the bandage. I didn't even have socks, and it had totally slipped my mind to buy any while we were out and around, so I simply slipped into my deck shoes. They were going to have to take their heroes as they came. I grabbed my cane and we headed out.

The address I got from Finch was only about five minutes away, if that. It was a little north of us, back towards the airport, in what I suspect was an upscale neighborhood. It was certainly very neat and tidy, although it wasn't beachfront. I suspected beachfront property was too valuable for anybody local. Better to live a little inland and use that beachfront to fleece the Yankees. The address seemed correct and there were several cars already in the driveway, so I parked and Marilyn and I headed towards the door.

I knocked on the door and a few moments later, Finch opened the door. He smiled broadly when he saw us. "I'm so glad you could make it.", he said.

"Everyone here has been so pleasant, how could we not.", I replied. "Thank you for inviting us, Mister Finch."

He opened the door wider and ushered us inside. "Please, call me Jonathan."

"Thank you. You already know us as Marilyn and Carl. I'm glad we were able to find you. I'm still getting used to driving on the wrong side of the road."

"Here we think of it as the right side of the road, or more accurately, the correct side of the road."

"I'll probably get used to it just in time to go home and get in an accident back home.", I said with a laugh.

"Maybe I'll have to drive when we get home. You've been doing all the driving here.", commented Marilyn.

"Come in, let me introduce you to a few people."

"I just hope nobody is expecting anything fancy. Marilyn looks good in anything, but I wasn't planning much. I mean, I'm on vacation, right?"

"You have an interesting way of spending your vacations.", commented somebody coming in from the side. I looked over and found Assistant Superintendant Javier coming closer. "What do you do when you are working?", he asked with a smile.

"As little as humanly possible.", I replied. I reached my hand out and shook his. "It's nice to see you again, Assistant Superintendant. Is it still Assistant Superintendant?", I asked with a smile.

Most of the other guests, along with Finch, were dressed relatively informally, with slacks and a dress shirt being the norm for the gentlemen and dresses for the ladies. Javier, however, had his uniform on. "It is still Assistant Superintendant, at least for the moment.", he responded with a smile.

"You are still in uniform?"

"It was a long day. I was still handling details from this weekend."

A third man came up, along with a woman. They were both in their forties, and he had the look of somebody who thought he was important. He also had a big white smile on his dark brown face. He promptly put out his hand, and said, "And you, young man, are the reason for all those details. When you go fishing, you go after the big fish, don't you?"

I shook his hand, and so did Marilyn. "If you ask my wife, Marilyn, she'll tell you my fishing license has been cancelled."

"For good!", chimed in Marilyn.

That got everybody laughing. At that point, Finch announced our presence to the rest of the room, and then introduced everybody. To be perfectly honest, I forgot all of their names almost as soon as I met them, but I was polite. The important looking man who had joked about fishing was the local Member of Parliament for Eleuthera, sort of the equivalent to the local Congressman back home. Jonathan Finch was a member in good standing of the local Big Shots Club. Also present was the Mayor of Governors Harbor, a couple of members of the local town council, a banker, and a couple of other business types. Most of them had their wives with them, and most of them were black, which wasn't surprising, since it is a majority black country. Only the banker and one of the other businessmen were white. Javier was the only man without a wife at his side.

Also present was a face I had seen the other night, though he was alone, also. I eyed him curiously. "We met the other evening, didn't we?"

He nodded and smiled. "You remember! Michael Westcott of the Guardian. My editors want me to do a follow-up piece. How are your injuries?"

I simply smiled at him. "Injuries? What injuries?"

"Are you saying you didn't get half a dozen stitches at the clinic early Saturday morning?"

I smiled and looked over at my wife. "Do you know what he's talking about?"

She gave me a dirty look. "Very funny. Don't make me the bad guy." She turned back to Westcott. "My husband is in fine shape. If he did receive any stitches, they are healing just fine. If he ever pulls a stunt like this again, I'll give him some stitches he won't be laughing about!"

He laughed. "So you aren't happy about this?"

She snorted. "My husband is a brave and heroic man, but there are times I wish he wasn't so brave and heroic. He scared the daylights out of me!"

"So, tell me what really happened that night.", he pushed.

He might have been the local stringer for a very sleepy island, but Mister Westcott knew the questions to ask. "Okay, here's the bottom line. I came out of the bathroom and heard my wife scream. That's when I saw a guy running towards me with her purse, so I stopped him. Then the other two attacked me, so I had to stop them also. One of them had a knife, but he didn't really hurt me."

"Your cane - did you hurt your leg?"

"No, not at all. I injured that last year. Really, if I hadn't heard Marilyn scream, I'd have been happy to just let things be. I'm actually a very peaceful guy. I think you should be talking to Assistant Superintendant Javier. I think he's done the really hard work here."

"How so?" By now the MP and the Mayor were near us and listening in.

"Well, the easy part was stopping them and capturing them. He was able to link them to all these other crimes, including a murder. That's really good police work, and is a lot tougher than just catching a few bad guys. Because of him, they are all going to jail, right?"

"For a very long time!", answered the Member of Parliament. He started pontificating about the wonders of the Bahamian justice system, and I was happy to let him run with it.

Dinner was a number of local seafood dishes and vegetables, all done with some interesting island spices. The cook proved to be Mrs. Wilkes, and when Finch told us this, Marilyn and I both commented that we should have had her cook a meal or two for us. Throughout dinner, we assured everyone of the same talking points from our first interview with the reporters at the clinic - 'These things happen!', 'Everybody has been so nice!', and 'It's been so friendly and peaceful!' It was a little more political than I would have liked, but what can you expect when you are dining with politicians.

I did have an interesting conversation with Javier, who was seated across from me at the table. "So, Assistant Superintendant, I'm not all that familiar with your title. Is Assistant Superintendant a rank or a position?"

He nodded in understanding. "We use standard British ranks in the Royal Bahamian Police. You start out as a Constable, then you move up to the Corporal and Sergeant ranks, and then to Inspector and Chief Inspector, then to Assistant Superintendant. I think the closest thing to your thinking might be Lieutenant or Captain. I am the second ranking officer assigned to Eleuthera. Superintendant Musselwhite is in Nassau right now."

"Well, the next time we visit, maybe you'll have a different title."

"Maybe.", he said with a smile.

The Mayor had to chime in with that. "You'll have to hire Mister Buckman here as your constable. He can catch them and you can send them to jail."

"Don't give my husband any more ideas!", warned Marilyn.

I simply shrugged and smiled. "I don't know, hun. You have to admit, the working conditions seem pretty nice." Marilyn pushed me in the arm and everybody laughed. I just shrugged theatrically to the others. "I think the Assistant Superintendant is going to have to catch his own criminals."

"That's more like it!", she agreed.

Marilyn answered a few questions about our family and home, and also a few about my service in the army. She was the one who told them about my black belts and the Bronze Star and my leg, which I would have been happy to let slide by. I could see the reporter's eyes widen, and knew he had more stuff to feed his editor for the next edition.

All in all it proved an enjoyable evening, and certainly beat going out to a restaurant. We assured one and all how much we enjoyed the Bahamas and that we would certainly return some day. Then we thanked our host and beat feet. We were both tired and needed some sleep. Tomorrow morning we were flying out, back to the real world.

Chapter 69: Home

The flight home Tuesday morning was uneventful. We woke up and hustled to get our bags packed. Thanks to the efforts of Mrs. Wilkes, we had very little in the way of dirty clothes, so we just dumped that in one bag and packed the clean clothes in the others. We also had a bag of some souvenirs for Marilyn's family, and a little steel drum to bang on for Charlie. He was a little young, but hey, all kids like to play the drums!

Jim and Samantha were flying us again in the Learjet. When Samantha asked if she should sit up front with Jim again, Marilyn turned a dozen shades of red and sputtered out an incoherent, "That won't be necessary!" I just laughed until I turned red myself. My wife said, "I can't believe the things you get me to do!"

First stop was at Raleigh-Durham, not Charlotte. For some reason Charlotte wasn't able to handle our customs inspection. We made it to the terminal, and waited a few minutes while we refueled for the customs officer to show up. We filled out our forms and when he asked, 'Do you have anything to declare?', our mutual response was, 'We need a vacation from our vacation!' He laughed, stamped our form, and waved us on our way.

While airborne on our next leg, I had Jim send a radio message ahead to have the terminal call the Lefleurs to let them know when we would land. This was to be a quick stop. We weren't going to have a car waiting for us, and Marilyn's family was supposed to drive out with Charlie and load him and all his gear onto the Learjet. I hoped to be out of there inside of an hour.

When we floated in for a real greaser landing, Marilyn looked out her window and squealed, "They're here! I can see their car!" I looked over at her side, but the angle was wrong and I couldn't see anything. It felt good to be almost home. Marilyn was excited to be back. She turned to look at me with a big smile. "I really loved it, but I missed Charlie, too."

"Next vacation, we'll take him too. I think he's a little young for Disney, though."

"That's not important. We'll take him, too. Besides, I've never been there either.", she answered serenely.

I shrugged. "Just remember the deal. For every kid vacation, you and me take an adult vacation. Start making a list of places you want to go to."

She simply smiled and shook her head. We pulled up to the terminal and shut down. We wouldn't need to refuel for the quick trip down to Westminster. After the hatch was opened, we looked out to see Harriet and Big Bob staring at us. We climbed down, and I waved as Marilyn scurried over to her parents. I limped along slowly after her. My leg was still bothering me since the bar fight. I was going to have to get to a gym and a dojo that could work some strength and flexibility back into my knee.

It was a lot cooler in upstate New York than it was in the Bahamas. I was sorry I had left my jacket in the car in Westminster! I gamely hobbled over and shook Big Bob's hand. "Welcome back!", he said.

"Thanks. It's good to be home. How was Charlie?", I asked with a nod towards where Marilyn was cooing over our son. He had a big grin on his face, so he obviously still remembered Momma.

"Oh, pretty good. He's a healthy eater, that's for sure." He looked back at the little jet. "This is for real? You really can charter a jet?"

"It's for real.", I assured him. "Want to see what it's like?"

He gaped at that, so I touched his elbow and urged him forward. He followed me along, and I let him climb inside. He looked around, and his first comment was, "There's not a lot of headroom, is there?"

Well, no there wasn't. "There's bigger jets than this, but for this trip, this was big enough. Man, it really beats going through airports and sitting back in coach. Fast, too! We left Westminster, back in Maryland at ten in the morning and landed in the Bahamas by noon. You spend that long just sitting around in the airport waiting for a regular plane to load. You can't beat that!"

"Unbelievable!"

I grinned at him. "Next time you and Harriet want to take a vacation by yourselves, let Marilyn know. I'll set it up for you."

He stared at me when I said that, but I just smiled and shrugged. Why not, it would be good for family relations. I remembered a trip made a couple of years ago, when the entire family - kids, fiancées, girlfriends, etc. - less us (I was on ready cycle), 20 in all, drove from Utica down to Orlando in a five car convoy. It took three days with that crowd. Wouldn't that have been simpler if they had flown charter and then rented a couple of large vans while down there? Probably cheaper, too, when you figure in hotel rooms and meals on the trip down and back. I had been on that trip the first time through and it was a fucking zoo!

"Well, this is really something, I have to say that!", he said.

"Trust these two to leave us with Charlie and all his gear!", groused Harriet from the bottom of the stairs.

Big Bob ignored the complaint and said, "Mother! You have to see this! Come on up here!"

Harriet grumbled and handed Charlie's bags up the stairs to the pilot, and then lumbered up the stairs. She immediately began oohing and ahhing herself.

"Make way!", sounded from the bottom of the stairs. Marilyn came up carrying Charlie in his car seat. Samantha immediately moved through the press of people and they figured out how to secure him on one of the seats. Marilyn told me I was being evicted from my seat for our son, and she would sit across the aisle from him, so that he could see her during the flight. It was a short flight, barely an hour, but better to see Mommy then spend the time screaming. Charlie was a good traveler, from what I could see, but better to be safe than sorry. I was moved one row back.

Big Bob and I went back to his car to find anything else left behind, but Harriet and Marilyn had grabbed it all earlier. We shook hands and Marilyn kissed her parents good-bye, and then we went winging off to Westminster. Charlie was the best kind of traveler; he was sound asleep before we ever got to cruising altitude.

When we got back to the town house, Marilyn and I were thoroughly exhausted. Despite the private jet, we had still been on three flights through three airports and it had taken the day. Charlie woke up as we landed and was pretty good, but he was hungry, so he squawked until Marilyn fed him and I had to handle the luggage myself. It was late in the day, and after we got into the town house, I was immediately sent back out with a grocery list. Add to that a very funky smell from the refrigerator, where we found a bottle of formula from a week ago. Ahhhh - Home Sweet Home!

Wednesday morning I called John Steiner and asked him how the paperwork was going with the property purchase. He indicated that everything was fine, and that we should be able to close next Friday. Then he invited me to lunch, and I told him I'd meet him at noon in Timonium. He wanted to see me about something, but didn't want to get into it on the telephone.

I got to the steak house at twelve, just in time to find that I was following John into the parking lot. He got a spot near the door, but I had to go around to a different row, so we didn't actually meet until I got to the front door. He smiled when he saw me. "Nice tan! Been down in the islands, have we?"

"How'd you know? Did we tell you?" I had to think about it. Marilyn and I hadn't been secretive about the vacation, but we hadn't specifically told anybody about it either.

"Yes and no. You told me you were going away, but not where. You did mention something to Missy, I think, or maybe Jake, about the Bahamas. I simply put two and two together."

I nodded in understanding. We went inside and got to a table quickly, despite the lunch crowd arriving. We both ordered small steaks and salads, and ice teas. John said he was a working man and didn't need a drink. I joked I wasn't a working man and could have a drink if I wanted, but then ordered an iced tea anyway. No point in making my friend uncomfortable.

After the waitress left, he looked at me and asked, "How's your arm?"

"My arm? My arms are fine. What are you talking about?"

"The cut on your arm and the stitches. That's what I'm talking about."

My eyes popped at that. "How do you know about that!?", I asked.

He reached inside his suit coat and pulled out a folded up page of the Tuesday edition of the Baltimore Sun, from the local section. 'Local Hero Foils Robbery, Catches Bahamas Killers', was the headline for the piece. "What the hell!?", I exclaimed quietly, looking up at John.

"That's what I said!", he replied.

I looked back down at the paper. The Associated Press had picked up the piece from the Nassau Guardian and run it on the national wires. The Sun had, of course, picked up the piece. It was a no-brainer for them; local boy makes good and all. I ran through it quickly, and it was just a basic rehash of the original Monday morning piece.

I looked back up and just shook my head. "It really wasn't like that." I folded the paper up and passed it back.

John refused it. "No, you keep that one for your scrapbook. I have one all for my own."

"You have a scrapbook?"

"Sure, I put in it all the news pieces about my clients who've been in bar fights and gone to jail."

"Maybe you need to start one about lawyers who do stand-up comedy.", I replied.

John snorted at that. "Do you have life insurance? Should I be finding you a broker?"

I laughed. "Wow! Your wife feeding you Wheaties these days? You're sure full of piss and vinegar for an old fart!"

"I just don't want my billable hours being cut when you end up in the morgue!" We both laughed at that, then he asked, "So, tell me the truth, what really happened."

I shrugged. "It wasn't all that heroic. Marilyn and I were out barhopping on Saturday night - I mean, we were on vacation, right? - and we were in this one place, late. Nice joint, a little crazy, but not in a bad way. When I got up to go to the bathroom, there was this chick laying on the bar, with her boyfriend doing body shots out of her belly button."

John rolled his eyes. "I don't know if I should be jealous or disgusted. Please, please, don't tell me you had Marilyn do that."

I laughed. "No, but I think I'll mention it the next time. Anyway, I head off to the can, and when I come out, now there's two broads on the bar getting body shots..."

"Naked?"

"No, it wasn't that crazy. So I'm actually kind of watching them, when I hear Marilyn scream. I turn around and see this black guy running my way carrying a bunch of purses, including hers, so I stopped him..."

"By putting him in the hospital."

I ignored this. " ... and then his two buddies, who were also thieves, came after me, so I stopped them, too. I wasn't trying to stop a crime wave. I just heard Marilyn scream. You'd have done the same thing."

"Right, just as soon as I can get Helen into a bar to do body shots."

I had to grin at that. I had met Helen Steiner a number of times, going back to when I was in Explorers with John and Alan, and while Helen was a lovely lady, she wasn't exactly shaped for body shots. "I want photos when you do that!"

That got me a smile. "I'll be needing a lawyer for that, a divorce lawyer!" He reached over and tapped the paper. "Your father called me."

I sighed. That was an easy one to predict. As long as I had known my family, we had always gotten the Sun, and my father would have certainly read the local news. Hamilton, too, now that I thought about it. Mom and Suzie, not so much. I nodded but didn't say anything.

"He asked about you, if I had talked to you lately."

"And you said?"

He just shook his head. "He knows you're one of my clients. Leaving aside any ethical issues about talking about my clients, I do not want to get into this with you two. You need to work it out on your own. I told him to call you, and gave him your phone number."

I just nodded sadly. "I know. Suzie has told us the same thing. She told me that Dad asks every once in a while, but is afraid to say anything in front of Mom or Hamilton. She gave him the number also. What the hell am I supposed to do, John? He won't even call me from his office. I think he's afraid of what Mom will do if she finds out he still thinks he has two sons."

"I don't have any answers for you either, Carl."

We let it go at that, and over lunch I told him about the trip down and where we stayed. He was very impressed with our dinner with the Who's Who of Eleuthera, although I had to remind him it's a very small place. Then we talked about the property and what we were going to build.

I asked him, "So, know any good home builders?"

"Like contractors?" I nodded as I chewed. He shook his head. "I think you need more than just a contractor. I think you need a professional outfit, one of the big builders. You're going to need an architect, blueprints, permits, all that stuff. Your average contractor isn't going to do that."

I thought about that a second. Back when I was with Lefleur, we often had customers who wanted a package deal, a turnkey project. I had occasionally been forced to be the general contractor myself, and I'm just not cut out for it. I can do it, but I don't enjoy it. "Okay. I'll buy that. Know any good professional builders?"

He shrugged. "Nothing rings a bell, but I can't say as I've ever looked. You can call that real estate agent and ask her if she knows any. Heck, on your drive home, just pull into one of the new developments along the way and find the sales office. Those are mostly run by a big outfit. Ask them. For what you want, you'll want a big outfit."

"Okay, maybe I'll do both. If you think of anything, let me know."

It was a long lunch, a working lunch in a lot of ways, and it was close to two when we left. On the way home, I thought about what John had said, and as I passed a development, saw a sign stating that it was part of Pulte Homes. That was a name that rang a bell. They were a big national outfit of home builders. They would certainly be capable of the job, but would they want to? I was a single house, and these guys thought in terms of hundreds and thousands of houses. Only one way to find out.

There was a young fellow in the sales office, a demo model of a split level. He seemed young, anyway, at least to me, although we were probably the same age. He simply seemed green, like he had just been hired the week before and didn't know his product or his system or his company. Well, we all have to start somewhere. "Hello! Welcome to Maplewood Manor! How can I help you?", came rushing out, almost before the door was shut behind me.

"I'd like to talk to somebody about building a house.", I replied.

"Well, I'd be happy to help you! Please have a seat." He waved me to a chair in front of him, and picked up a clipboard with a questionnaire. "First things first. Can I have your name, please?"

"Carl Buckman." I was really starting to figure that this kid wasn't the fellow I wanted to speak with. For one thing, he hadn't even introduced himself. Maybe I was supposed to simply read his name tag and leave it at that.

He asked me a few more standard questions, address, phone number, and such, and then asked, "And when would you like to move in?"

I held my hands up in a 'time-out' manner. "Hold up a moment ... Scott.", I said, reading his name tag. "I have a few questions first." He looked at me blankly. "Do you build in other locations than this?"

"Well, Maplewood Manor is owned by the Pulte Group, which has developments all across America..." He started a spiel on the wonders of Pulte.

I stopped him again. "No, I mean, I own my own property already. Do you build on private property or only in a development?"

This really confused him. "You mean you don't want to live in Maplewood Manor?"

"I am buying property already. Now I need to build a house on it."

We were now off the charts completely for this poor guy. "I don't know."

"Is there somebody who would know?" No way was this kid going to last as a professional salesman. I should know, I had sold homes for over thirty years.

"Well, you could speak to Mister Marsbury.", he said after a few seconds contemplation.

"That would be fine."

"He's not here now."

What a fucking moron! "Well, do you know when he'll be back? Will it be today?"

He smiled and nodded. "Yes, probably in about fifteen minutes. Do you want to wait for him?"

No, I asking because I'm just checking up on you! I was rapidly losing patience. This kid was what we called in the Army a 'soup sandwich.' "Please. Do you have a demo unit I could go through while I wait?"

"Sure, we have one right across the street. You'll be able to learn about living in Maplewood Manor."

"I'm not moving into Maplewood Manor, remember? Listen, when he gets back, send him over to find me."

"You want me to send him over there?"

"Please."

"Well, okay, I guess I can ask him."

I just shook my head and walked out of the office and across the street in the development to the demo unit. At least in the Army you have to pass an IQ test to get in. That did not seem to be the case at Pulte Homes. It was not an auspicious beginning.

The demo unit was a nice looking home. I knew enough construction to figure out that if they were cutting any corners they were well hidden, and the specs listed on the brochures were certainly adequate. We'd be looking for some items on the higher end, but not because this stuff was bad. I looked through some literature and samples while keeping an eye out through the window back to the office. After about fifteen minutes a car pulled up at the sales office and a fellow in his forties got out and went inside, after glancing at my car parked there. A few minutes later he came out and walked across the street towards me.

He came inside. "Hello?", he called out.

I came around the corner from the kitchen. "Hello."

"Mister Buckner?"

"Buckman, Carl Buckman."

He just rolled his eyes for a second and stuck out his hand. "Bill Marsbury. Pleased to meet you."

"Same here. What name did Scott give you?"

Marsbury rolled his eyes again. "Yeah, sorry about that. He misheard you as Charles Buckner."

I simply smiled. "Is he somebody's relative?", I ventured.

I got a sharp look and a smile from that. "The project foreman's nephew. I just haven't had the heart to let the foreman know he ain't working out."

"Hey, it happens."

"He did say you wanted to build, but not here. Is that correct?"

"Yes, that's it." I filled him in on my plans. "Now, I'm looking for an outfit that will draw up the plans, build the house, and act as the GC. Can you do that, or if you can't do you know who could. I'm not looking for a mansion, but I am looking for good solid workmanship and reliability."

Marsbury had been nodding as I went through my ideas. "Sure, we can do that. We don't get the same benefits of scale as when we do it here in a development, but it's not out of the question. I'll need to do a site appraisal before I can say for sure, and I'll want to see the plans. Is this something you've gotten plans for already, or seen in a book of plans, or something?"

"Marilyn - she's my wife - and I have been through a few books and I've penciled a few things out. I don't have anything with me, but this was a spur of the moment drive. I was talking to my lawyer and he suggested I get one of the big professional outfits to do a turnkey for me. I saw the sign as I was heading home."

"Well, we're a big professional outfit. We can build you your house. I'll need to see your drawings. When can you come in with them? Or would it be better for me to visit you?"

As much as Scott had been unimpressive, Bill Marsbury was the opposite. This guy had his shit tightly packed. I could work with this guy. "Which is more convenient for you?"

"Where do you live?"

It would be easier to do this if he could visit us. That way we wouldn't have to pack Charlie up for a trip. He promised to come out Thursday afternoon. We shook hands and I left feeling good about it.

My reception was a little mixed back at the town house. I filled Marilyn in on my day. It was disconcerting to her that I didn't have a regular nine-to-five job with a fixed schedule, but she would get used to that very quickly. I had often had a very flexible schedule at Lefleur Homes, with going to different lots and seeing customers and traveling to job sites. No, Marilyn wasn't quite used to the idea of having money and being able to spend it.

Marilyn wanted me to get competitive bids on the house construction. Me, I could care less. This was just one of those differences in us. I was always going to be much more concerned with speed, quality, workmanship, reliability, and other such factors. Price, simple cash amounts, was way down on my list. Life was too short to worry about saving money on every possible thing. I can remember back on the first go-around, when we were going to have a party and she spent half a day going from store to store to find the absolute best deal on tiki torches. I remember asking her afterwards, "So you spent four hours and ten bucks in gas, driving all around Utica, to save five bucks on tiki torches? Do I have that right?" She tried to argue, but it totally failed.

On the plus side, this was one of my benefits as a salesman and sales manager. Research shows that you sell the same way you buy. The salesman who goes to five separate stores looking for the absolute best bargain on something for his own use will also be the salesman who thinks it is perfectly acceptable to send a customer on his way who wants to 'think about it' a little more. Fine, send them on their way, right until they land in front of me, and I ask them 'What are you waiting for?' and sell them something. I was never able to convince my wife of this, and we often had lively arguments about sales techniques. One thing she couldn't argue about was that I kept food on the table and kept my sales averages well above average.

Thursday afternoon, Marsbury showed up on time. Marilyn was closest to the door, and she let him in. I heard him introduce himself, and then he was inside. "Honey, Mister Marsbury is here!", she cried out.

Charlie fussed when he heard Marilyn's voice. He was cutting teeth and tended to be cranky, another reason not to travel with him. I brought him towards the door, trying to soothe him, but he demanded Mommy as soon as he saw her. I motioned the builder in and gave my offspring back to Marilyn. "Come on in. Sorry about that."

"That's all right. Call me Bill. How old?"

"Charlie's about six months or so. I'm Carl, of course, and this is my wife Marilyn."

Marilyn shook his hand while juggling our son. "Sorry about this, but Charlie's teething and gets cranky. I'm glad we can do this here."

"It's my pleasure. You're very close to my office. Where do you want to do this?"

"Let's sit around the dining room table.", I suggested, and led the way. We settled around the table, and I looked over at Marsbury, who dug a scratch pad out of his briefcase, along with a pen.

"Let me ask you a few questions, first. Would that be alright?", he asked.

Good technique, ask permission to quiz the buyer. I was liking this guy. "Please."

"Where specifically do you plan to build? Do you have the property now?"

I nodded. "We are in the process now. Our offer has been accepted and we will be closing in a week or two. In the meantime we can access the site; it's just bare land right now, no improvements."

"Where precisely is it?"

"Out on Mount Carmel Road, in Hereford, out near the county line. It's still in Baltimore County, though."

"Have you given any thought to what kind of house you are looking for? Are there any features you want, or don't want?", he asked.

Good, ask open-ended questions, get the customer talking. This guy was a pro. "Actually, yes. Marilyn and I have been looking through some books of plans, and have some ideas. Can you build like that? Or do we have to use your own plans?"

"Either way. We often have plans similar to what you are interested in, and can modify them accordingly."

I dug out one of the books of plans and opened it to a page Marilyn and I had liked. I had drawn on it with a pencil. "Something like this, the Somerset, but larger, maybe about 3,500 square feet. It definitely has to be a rancher, though. My leg probably is not going to get better, so I want everything on one level."

"I noticed the limp yesterday."

"I hit the trees jumping with the 82nd Airborne. It's a bit shot.", I told him.

Marsbury nodded. "Will handicap access be a requirement?"

That surprised me. I looked over at my wife and saw her staring at me in surprise. I simply shook my head. "I don't think I'm going to end up in a wheelchair anytime soon, but wide hallways and doors, and a large bathroom wouldn't be a bad idea. I don't need anything special, though."

"That's fine. Specialty items, though, can run extra. By the way, how much were you planning to invest?"

Good, use words like investment and budget, not price, very professional. "Let's table that for the moment. I'm more concerned with quality and workmanship than the price. This is going to be a cash deal. I know this home is larger than you normally build, but I want something nice. We've got 25 acres, so I don't think a sprawled ranch is going to look out of place.

He nodded. "Okay, let's take a look at this." I turned the plan book around and pushed it over to him.

Marilyn and I had gone through the books and found a very interesting plan. It was basically in the shape of an H, with two long vertical pieces connected with a horizontal crosspiece. On the right side, the long vertical piece was actually four bedrooms and two bathrooms with a short central hallway. On the left side was a large eat-in kitchen, the utility room, and a garage. In the center, the horizontal section, was actually a large great room and dining room combination. We had modified this all somewhat, making the house four bedrooms rather than the original three, replacing the garage with a library/study and an exercise/weight room for me, and just generally making it all larger. Now it had a half bath off the kitchen, for instance.

Marsbury murmured to himself for a few minutes, and made some chicken scratches on his note pad. After a couple of minutes, he pulled a book of plans from his briefcase and flipped it open, finally settling on a plan. He placed that before us and said, "It's not identical to what you have here, but it's close. The easy way to do this would be to take our plan and do a modification."

I looked it over, nodding to myself. It was close, and I had read enough prints and plans over the years to know exactly what would be involved. I pushed it over to Marilyn, so she could see. Fortunately, Marilyn can read plans, too. Over the years, working with Lefleur Homes, that had been useful to her. "It's close, isn't it.", she commented to me.

This model was called the Berkshire. "Similar. It needs to be bigger, and it's missing a bedroom and we need to change the garage totally, but it's a place to start. I like how the study opens up onto the great room as well as the kitchen. I would want to keep that. That's a nice little touch."

"Can I take your book here, with your drawing? I'll want to give that to my engineering people.", he asked.

"Sure."

"Okay, anything else? Basement or crawlspace? Any particular features inside or outside?"

"Yes. Okay, here goes, get your pencil ready." He smiled and nodded to me. "I'm not sure what the building code specifies, but I want 2x6 sidewalls with a good insulation package; a 5/12 roof with a good insulation package; no attic, it won't be necessary; 40 pound roof load at least; everything on 16s; crawlspace, no basement, so we need to design the mechanicals into the first floor; brick exterior; decent sized overhangs; minimum 30 year shingles; good quality double pane windows, double hung."

Marsbury was jotting notes down feverishly. I waited for him to finish, and he commented, "You know a fair bit about construction. The building code here isn't this stringent."

"Marilyn's family does construction, sort of, up in upstate New York. Way too far for them to build, though. As for the specs, I'd rather be overbuilt."

"Okay, anything specific about the inside?", he asked.

"No carpets. I'm going to want laminate or hardwood flooring throughout. We can always put down throw rugs. Forced hot air heating and central air, of course. A nice kitchen and appliance package. We'll probably want to talk to your kitchen designer on that. We both want something relatively bright and airy. Like I said, I'm more concerned about quality and workmanship and scheduling. I promised my wife I'd build her a nice house, so it needs to be nice."

He smiled at that. "I think we can handle that. It's going to take me a few weeks to get some drawings going on this. I can make a guesstimate now, but without the drawings, it won't be accurate, and I can't do drawings without some form of deposit. Are you prepared to do that now?"

Excellent, go for the money. You're not a pro without the money. "I can write a check. I assume that at some point somebody is going to have to visit the property with me, with us really, to stake out the site."

"We can't stake it out until you have your closing. We can walk the site and examine it first, though, and get an idea."

Yes, let us know the limitations. "Fair enough." I wrote out a check and we did some paperwork and Marsbury was on his way.

"That seemed awfully quick, honey.", remarked Marilyn.

I smiled at her and shook my head. "Here's the alternative. We do this with three more guys. This takes us another two or three weeks. Nobody gives us a price or drawings without money anyway. All we end up doing is wasting the better part of a month. Let's say we save some money but the project takes longer than planned. That means that next year we are still living here, and paying somebody else's mortgage. We don't save a cent!"

"You say so.", she remarked dubiously. I simply chuckled.

In 1982 it was going to take us several weeks to get preliminary drawings back from their architect or engineer. Thirty years later it could be done in an afternoon, by somebody sitting at a computer console, and manipulating digital plans. In the here and now, it meant somebody was going to have to sit down at a drafting table with pencils and T-squares and triangles. Commercially available CAD programs were probably already on the drawing board (so to speak) but wouldn't be viable for a few more years, when computer hardware became more powerful and the first computer literate engineers were trained.

We had Tusker, Tessa, and Bucky over on Sunday for the afternoon and dinner. This was the first chance they had to visit us in our new digs. Bucky found it all quite fascinating and kept climbing up and down the stairs, exploring everything over and over. Our friends had read about us in the newspaper also, and they quizzed us about our vacation. I got us off that topic, only semi-successfully, by asking about their growth and expansion. Tusker told us they had been working on their business plan, but had hit a snag. "We don't know what a new place will cost us, so we can't figure the budget.", he admitted.

"Okay, so call the guy you bought your current place through and ask him.", I replied.

Tessa smiled and nodded. "That's what we did, but we simply found that place by driving around, and the agent who handled it moved to Texas. Neither of us have a name for a new real estate agent."

"Do you think Andrea might know somebody?", Marilyn asked me.

"Maybe. It can't hurt to ask.", I said.

"Who's Andrea?", asked Tessa.

"She's the woman we bought the property through. She's a real estate agent or broker or something. Maybe she knows somebody.", answered my wife.

I nodded approvingly. "That's a good idea. I'll call her tomorrow and ask her. If she doesn't do it, I'll bet she knows somebody."

Tusker looked at Tessa and nodded. "That would be good. We've been working some budget numbers and think we know what we can afford, but aren't really sure."

"Have you talked to your bank yet?", I asked.

That earned a sourpuss face from both of them. "They aren't really interested. They want to see another year or two of business before they do any expansion financing. They even suggested we go elsewhere in the future."

That made me curious. "What, are you late with your payments or something?"

"No!", barked Tusker.

"Settle down, he's just asking!", said Tessa to him. She turned our way and said, "I just don't think they want to do business with a biker, even a successful biker. I don't know if they have a new manager or owner or what, but for the last six months, they've been pretty cold."

I shrugged. "Well, that's why they have other banks. We'll just have to find you a new banker."

"Yeah, sorry, man. It just pisses me off at times. I mean, I make my payments, we've got a growing business, we're profitable, I'm hiring employees - I mean, we are doing everything they say we are supposed to do, right? - and they treat us like something to be scraped off the bottoms of their shoes! Why? Because I have long hair and tattoos and ride a bike? That's just bullshit!"

"Watch your mouth, honey. Bucky can hear you.", said Tessa.

"Charlie, too.", commented Marilyn.

"Sorry.", he said contritely.

I just shook my head. "Wow, long hair and tattoos! Now that I think about it..." Marilyn, Tusker, and Tessa threw napkins at me. I was chased out of the living room and sent to cook dinner.

Chapter 70: Becoming An Entrepreneur

Monday morning I called Andrea Greene at her office and left a message. She returned the call around noon. "Yes, Carl, how can I help you? Is everything still on track with the closing?"

I should have known her first thought was to our current deal. "It should be. I talked to John Steiner last week and he indicated the closing was the end of this week. I'm calling you about something totally different."

"All right, what's on your mind?", she asked.

"Do you get involved with commercial real estate at all, or do you know somebody who does?"

"Yes, I can handle it. I do a little of everything, jack of all trades, master of none, I suppose you can say. What do you have in mind?"

"Well, it's not for me. A close friend of mine has a business, buying and repairing and selling motorcycles, and he's doing very well. Unfortunately, his present location is just too small! He is busting out at the seams and needs to relocate and expand. Can you help him?", I asked.

"Probably, but I think I need to meet him first and see what he needs."

"When can you do that? This afternoon? This week?"

She hesitated slightly, and I could almost hear her flipping through an appointment book. "I'm free this afternoon after two, but then not again until Thursday."

"Okay, give me five minutes to confirm this." I hung up and called the cycle shop. Tessa agreed they would both be there. I called Andrea back and gave her the address and promised to meet her there.

Then I got off the phone and Marilyn put me to work doing the laundry. I was definitely starting to think about getting an office, simply to hide from Marilyn when she was in a house cleaning mood.

After lunch, I grabbed my briefcase and kissed Marilyn and Charlie good-bye. I was starting to tote around with me a mini-office in the briefcase, including all the details of the land purchase and the house construction. Now I was adding to it with my planner and address book. Maybe I really did need to set up an office.

I got to the cycle shop a few minutes early. I didn't see Andrea's car yet. Tessa noticed me and we waved at each other, but I decided to stay outside and wait for Andrea. She showed up about ten minutes late. "Sorry I'm late! I get lost in these old industrial parks."

"It shouldn't be a problem. Come on in, let me introduce you." I held the door to the shop for her and ushered her inside.

Tessa was already coming around from behind the counter to greet us. "Hi, there, I'm Tessa Tusk. Welcome to Tusk Cycle!"

Andrea held out her hand. "Thank you. I've never been in a motorcycle shop before. What do you do here?"

"Well, we do some repairs and maintenance for bikers, but a lot of what we are doing these days is buying and selling used bikes. Tusker - he's my husband, Jim Tusk - he gets these old bikes in and then rebuilds them and then resells them. Like this one.", she said, pointing at a gleaming chrome and purple lacquered Harley. "He picked this one up as a junker for about a thousand, put another thousand into it in parts, rebuilt it and repainted it, and we just sold it this morning for ten thousand!"

"Very nice!", I commented.

"I wouldn't have picked you as the motorcycle type, Carl.", said Andrea with a smile.

"Who? Me? No way!", I said, waving my hands.

Tessa just laughed at that, and then a booming laugh came in from the garage. Tusker came in wearing grease stained overalls and wiping his hands on an old rag. His hair was done up in a pony tail, and his five o'clock shadow showed it was around half past four. "Carl? He's no biker!"

"Tusker, meet Andrea Greene. She's the broker we're buying our property through.", I said.

He smiled and nodded, and kept wiping his hands off. "Don't bother shaking. I get pretty messy in there. I just ripped the engine off a '52 Indian Chief that has seen better days. When I get through with it, though, it will be a collector's piece!"

"I have no idea what that means.", I told Andrea. "Tusker and Tessa are some of my oldest friends, going back to high school. I told them they needed to expand, but they have no room to grow here."

"Yeah, that's an issue.", agreed Tusker. "My service bays are too small, as is the showroom here, and there's no parking for our customers, let alone the employees, and I need to hire at least one more person as it is."

"We have got to move!", chimed in Tessa.

Andrea nodded sympathetically, and then began looking around the place. She did ask one interesting question - "Did you buy or lease this place?"

My friends looked at each other for a second, and then said, "Lease. Why?"

"Well, if you had bought it, you'd have to sell it, right?" They gaped at each other. They had never thought of that. Andrea continued, "If you leased it, you can simply end the lease, or even break out of it early."

"Is that what we should do on a new place?", asked Tessa.

Andrea shrugged and smiled. "Don't know yet, we'll have to see. Let's find you two a better place first and then worry about the finances."

I piped up at that. "Andrea, do you know a decent commercial bank? Their current bank is giving them grief."

"Maybe. Who is your current bank?"

I gave a blank look in reply and looked at my friends.

Tusker answered, "I think it's Clifton Trust now. We started out at Berkshire, but I believe they got bought last year."

Andrea gave them a strange look. "Why them? They're a residential building and loan!"

Tessa said, "Well, they were the only bank we had. We both had checking and savings accounts there, and we borrowed ten grand from our parents, five from each, and did everything else with credit cards when we started."

I buried my face in my hands. If I had been around, I would have helped them arrange a decent financing package, but I had been off in Fayetteville at the time. If they could survive with those interest rates, they were doing well. I rubbed my face for a second and then looked over at Andrea. "I think we can find them some better financing." To my friends I said, "No wonder your bank doesn't want you around. They're a residential mortgage bank, not a commercial bank. Give me a few days and I can find you something better."

"Try Maryland National, they can handle this.", agreed Andrea. She turned back to Tusker and Tessa. "Listen, give me a few days. I don't have anything off the top of my head, but I can find something for you. Here's my suggestion - move a bit further out, say Cockeysville or north of there. The price will be lower and for the same payment you can get a larger piece. It will be simpler to modify an existing property than develop raw land, too."

Tusker and Tessa looked at each other, and nodded. "I can't believe it's going to happen. It seems awfully fast!", he said.

"Hey, Tusker, if it was a bike you just picked up, you'd hustle it out, right, so that you can resell it and make your money back, right? You wouldn't let it sit around. Same thing here. The sooner we can do this, the sooner you can grow your business and the sooner you can move out of your apartment and the sooner you can hire Andrea to find you a house.", I told him.

Andrea laughed at this, especially when Tessa elbowed Tusker and told him to shut up.

I spent most of the next morning on the phone with several banks. No, I didn't know any bankers in particular, but yes, I can read the phone book and figure out who to call. By lunchtime I had something in place and told Marilyn.

Her attitude surprised me. "Why are you doing this?", she asked.

"Well, they are paying rates too high and need to expand and get on a business footing.", I responded.

"No, I mean, why are you doing this? Why aren't they?"

"Well, I am pretty good at this business stuff, you have to admit that.", I said with a smile.

Marilyn was serious, however. "Yeah, but when did you become their boss?"

"What in the world are you talking about?"

"Are they your friends or your employees? Did you tell them to do this or did they ask you?"

"Marilyn, it wasn't like that! You know me better than that.", I protested.

That earned me a smile. "Yes, I know you. I know you better than you know you. You can be real bossy at times. These are your friends, not your second lieutenants!"

I snorted at that, but it made me think. For revenge, I toasted some bread for lunch and made myself a couple of sardine sandwiches. Marilyn loudly protested the smell, and I retaliated by threatening to teach Charlie about sardine sandwiches and anchovy pizzas. That brought another round of protests. It reminded me of the first time she came to my family's house in the summer, during my first go, when my mom had a crab feast. I love steamed crabs, and showed Marilyn how to tear one apart and eat one. Afterwards, my mother asked Marilyn if she wanted a second, and Marilyn made a classic reply - 'Do I have to?' I damn near died of laughter.

I decided to take Marilyn's advice to heart, even if I didn't admit it to her. I'd never hear the end of it. I'd be hearing 'I told you so!' until the day I died. She can hold a grudge and beat a dead horse with the best of them, like my mother.

I got a call from Tessa the middle of the next week, just a day after our closing on our property. I had pointedly avoided asking Andrea how things were going, and she hadn't volunteered anything. Tessa said they had looked at a place and wanted me to come out and look at it. I met them at their place, and they turned it over to the staff and we drove in their car out to the prospective site. It was off York Road, north of Paper Mill Road, at the site of an A&P grocery store that had gone out of business.

My first thought was that it was certainly large enough for them, as in, it was too big. "Well, it's certainly bigger than what you have now!", I commented, as we climbed out of the car.

"But not too big for what we want.", said Tessa.

"Are you kidding? This place is huge!", I said.

Tusker clapped me on my shoulder. "You forget, this isn't going to be just for the repair shop, this is for a dealership, remember?"

"Yeah, I guess so.", I said slowly. Now that I looked around, it would probably be good for that. Tons of parking, lots of glass windows, and a cavernous space inside. It was a little plain looking, but that wouldn't be a problem. "Have you been inside?"

"Last Friday. Andrea gave us a key. Come on in." He unlocked the front door and we stepped inside.

It looked like an abandoned grocery store. Most of the store shelves had been removed and you could see in the cracked old linoleum where they had been. The checkout aisles were still in place, although the cash registers were all gone. It was a little cluttered and messy, but nothing that a crew couldn't clean up in a few days. Tusker was talking excitedly. "We put the bikes for sale up here, in the front, facing the windows. Over on the side there we can do an office, and a counter for Tessa and whoever. In the back is a loading dock, and we can bring in bikes or parts back there." He led the way through some swinging doors to the stockroom area. This end looked pretty trashed, with a lot of debris and some pooled water at one end.

I pointedly walked over to this spot and looked up at the ceiling. "We talked to Andrea about this. We told her that the price would have to be reduced to cover the repairs and cleanup on the place.", he said.

I smiled up at him. "Very good. That way I don't have to say anything. Marilyn says I've been too bossy lately."

That set Tessa to laughing, and Tusker remarked, "You? Bossy? Never!", at which point Tessa really broke down.

"Keep it up, laughing girl!", I told her. I scratched the side of my face with my extended middle finger, and got Tusker to laughing as well. "Same to you, too, buddy!"

After a few minutes more of looking around, I agreed that the site was suitable, especially if they had a dealership of some sort. "Do the payments work out?"

"They do if we can keep up our level of sales and increase them slightly. We'll need a bank loan to cover transfer costs and setup, also operating capital.", answered Tessa. She was always the real business head of the team.

"I left some phone numbers of banks in my car back at your place. I'll give them to you when we get back. You two can make your own phone calls!" That got me another round of laughter. Maybe Marilyn was right, after all.

The rest of the week I spent with Marilyn and Charlie, and one day we drove out to the property on Mount Carmel Road to meet Bill Marsbury. He had a quick preliminary drawing to show us, though not any blueprints, and we used the drawing to pound some stakes in the ground. It was really getting overgrown, and he promised to have a brush hog, a giant industrial size lawn mower mounted on a tractor, sent out to clear it. We also looked over the plans and drew a couple of minor revisions on them, then initialed them. The way it looked, the top of the H would be pointed west, towards the side road where the driveway was. The bottom of the H would be towards the center of the property. It was all fairly level, or would be so after some grading, and would enable us to have a big back yard.

"What are you planning on doing back here?", asked Marsbury.

"Nothing right away, but in another year or two, maybe a swimming pool.", I told him.

"A swimming pool!?", gasped Marilyn.

"Well, I was just thinking, anyway. If you don't want one, we don't have to." I thought she would have been excited by a swimming pool.

"No, I mean, yes, that'd be great! We can do a swimming pool?"

"Sure, unless you just want the little inflatable one for you and Charlie to sit in. I want to watch you huffing and puffing on that."

Marilyn began carrying Charlie around, him in his little jacket and sun cap, telling him how 'Daddy was going to dig a swimming pool!' while Marsbury and I just shook our heads at each other. I simply commented lowly, '"Daddy's not digging anything. Daddy will pay somebody to dig. Daddy's way too lazy!" That got Marsbury and me to laughing. After a few more minutes, Marsbury took the preliminary drawing and headed back to his office.

Another day I spent in a long meeting with the brain trust. I wanted to start making plan for the future, and needed their input, not so much on what to do, but on how to do it. We made plans to meet over at John Steiner's office. We met after lunch on Wednesday, him, me, Missy Talmadge, and the two Jakes.

When the meeting started, John commented, "I'm not really sure why I'm here, Carl. I know I handle a lot of your legal work, but it's not that involved, and I don't do anything with your investments. It's not that I'm not happy to have you over, but I'm curious."

"Fair enough. Two reasons. First, I trust you. We've known each other a long time, and I trust your judgment. We might disagree on something, but I know you won't knowingly get me in trouble." John nodded his head in agreement with that. "The second reason is about the future. The last week or so, I've been helping a friend of mine expand his business, and spending some time doing it, too. Marilyn commented to me that it wasn't like they were my employees or my business. Another time we were talking and it came up that maybe I could do some investing other than the stock market, like in local businesses. Private equity or venture capital, that sort of thing." I looked over at Missy. "You've heard of that sort of thing, right?"

"Sure. You're on the small side for that, but everybody has to start somewhere."

I turned back to John. "So it doesn't hurt to get your thoughts on things. Same with Missy. As for Jake and Jake, I can just about guarantee that there is a right way to do things as well as a wrong way, and I'd bet I'll pick the wrong way."

That got a chuckle for everyone. "So, what's on your mind? Which topic first, the market or your local business?"

"Market first." This I was fairly sure on, just not the timing. The late Seventies and early Eighties had been a time of economic stagnation for the country. I can remember working for a lab where we were getting cost of living increases simply to keep us ahead of the inflation adjusted salaries of the kids being hired right behind us. It's one of the things that killed both the Ford and Carter presidencies. Now, in the late spring of 1982, we were in the depths of a recession. My string of market successes despite this made sure the others would listen.

Everybody leaned forward, in anticipation, which I though faintly amusing. There used to be a commercial by one of the big investment companies, where a broker would say something like, "What we think...", and immediately the entire room, restaurant, theater, or whatever, would go silent and lean in his direction. "I know it's hard to believe, but we are on the verge of the biggest market bull run in history. I know it sucks now, and it will probably get worse, but in a few months, the market is going to take off like a rocket! We need to be prepared. Missy, you're going to be handling the stock transactions, as well as anything else related to Wall Street, and you two guys are going to have to make sure I don't lose my shirt on taxes and costs."

The others stared at me. "You're kidding me, right? The market sucks right now.", said Missy, with the others nodding in agreement. "I mean, I know my job is to sit around and blow smoke up your butt, but that's the truth, and you're smart enough to know it."

I grinned at that. I was probably the only guy at the table who knew where that particular expression came from. "Regardless, it is about to happen. I know this like I heard it on the news. We are about to enter a prolonged period of time when the market is going to go straight up. Oh, I'm sure there will be a few burps and bumps along the way, but the long term forecast is for significant growth."

"What could possibly be the cause of this?", asked Jake Number One, the older Jake, my accountant.

"Computers.", I replied.

"What about them? We've had computers for years?"

"No, not like this. I'm not talking about the mainframe computers I did all my programming on back in college. I mean the little ones you can buy from IBM."

"I've seen them,", countered Jake, "but they're practically toys. They break constantly, and you need to have a degree in computers just to run one."

"Carl, I bought one myself, from IBM. They work, but you need to program them yourself. I'm a smart guy, but it's a real pain. Most people won't even bother.", added Jake Junior.

"Yeah, I know, and they don't have much memory and they are expensive and cantankerous. I know all this. Let me ask you this question - what use is a baby? They are expensive and cantankerous and break constantly and so forth and so on. Sooner or later they grow up, though, and get real useful!"

"So, you're saying they get more useful in the future?", said John.

"Precisely! It's all about Moore's Law."

"Moore's Law? Who's Moore?", asked Missy.

"He's the head of Intel, one of the companies I own stock in. Anyway, he discovered, a number of years ago, that the number of circuits on a chip doubles every two years."

"I'm not following you.", said John.

I pulled out my calculator. "Okay, here's a typical calculator. Actually it's more than that, it's a scientific calculator. It cost me about $50. It has a chip inside with transistors and circuits. In two years, according to Moore's Law, that chip will have twice as many components." The others were still looking blank, so I pressed on. "In two years, this calculator will be twice as powerful. Or maybe half the price. Or maybe half the size! Two years after that, one quarter. It's an exponential relationship. In ten years time, the size of the components will be a fraction of their current size, the price will be lower than now, even after inflation, and the power will be immensely larger."

"So, you want to invest in computer companies?", asked Jake Junior.

"No, absolutely not! That's the totally wrong conclusion. In ten years time, computers and components will be as cheap as dirt. It will be a commodity business. No, I want to invest in the companies that write the programming for the computers, the software!"

That stunned them. They just looked at me like I was crazy. I pushed forward. "Let me tell you a story. You know how IBM introduced the Personal Computer a year ago. What you may not know is that IBM only made the magic box. The program that runs the whole thing is called DOS, and it was written by an outside company called Microsoft. They bought the program, called an operating system, from this Microsoft. Without it, nothing can happen with their computer, it just is an expensive paperweight." The others were nodding, they knew about the IBM PC, even if they didn't own one.

"So, anyway, IBM screwed up. They thought like you guys do, that the money is in the box. That box will be a commodity in a few years, and IBM will lose its shirt. They make money selling programming and services, not commodity black boxes. Instead, they let Microsoft keep all the sales rights to DOS, the operating system. Microsoft can sell it to anybody who makes a computer. It's like cars. IBM makes cars, but Microsoft makes the gas. Anybody can build a car, but wouldn't you rather be in the gas business?"

John caught on first. "Which would you rather do? Sell razors or sell razor blades?!"

"You got it!", I said.

Around me, the others were staring at me and each other, like I had just explained quantum mechanics to them. "Ten years from now, history will look at this decision by IBM as one of the classic screwups in business history. What I want to do is invest with the guy who runs Microsoft."

"Who's that?", asked Missy.

"I looked him up. He's a fellow in Redmond, Washington, named Bill Gates. Microsoft isn't on the market yet, but when he does an IPO, I want to grab a chunk. If you can look into it, see if he wants to do a private placement now. I would definitely cough up a million or two now."

"What else comes to mind?"

I shrugged. "It's almost endless. Sometimes I see a name in the Journal or the news about a company and it makes sense. Sometimes I see one that sounds great and it makes no sense. It's as important to know who to avoid as it is to know who to buy. Here's a name for you, Autodesk. You all know I'm building a house. It is going to take an engineer or architect at least two weeks to draw my blueprints by hand. Suppose you can get a computer to do it and then print it out. How long would that take you? How much does it cost to pay for an architect for two weeks? I know the company is working on a new product for this."

"And this has an effect on the country? The economy?", asked Jake Senior.

I nodded. "Imagine it's a hundred years ago, and this fellow named Edison has just come up with this product called electricity. How many fortunes were made from that? What happened to the American economy? What if you could invest with Bell and his telephones, or Morse and the telegraph? That's where we are today. Right now I've got a chip in my calculator. Look at cell phones, what will happen to them."

"You mean those gigantic bricks? Nobody will want one of them.", protested John.

I nodded. At least he knew about them. "It's a brick now, but apply Moore's Law. In two years time it will be half the size, two years later, half again. In ten years, it will be the size of my calculator and fit in my pocket." John's mouth snapped shut as he started to think about things.

Jake Junior looked thoughtful. Then he asked, "How do I get in on this? Not just me, but the rest of us? Say you're right. What about us? Can we invest, too?"

I shrugged. "Fine by me. I have no personal problem with you investing along with me. Just remember, timing is everything, and if I get out of something, it means something. Remember, never to gamble more than you can lose."

"Okay, but it's not like a few years ago, when you bet everything on oil or silver. You're a lot more diversified now.", he pressed. I just nodded and Jake continued. "What about the Buckman Group? Can I - we - buy into that?!"

Well, that took me by surprise. I sat there and looked at him, and then looked at the others as well. They seemed surprised, but weren't protesting. "You're serious? You want a piece of the action, too? I've had my own money at risk here. There won't be a free ride."

He waved that off. "No, no, nothing like that. Maybe we could buy shares or something?"

I stared at him. I thought about my answer carefully. "Jake, I don't want to rain on your parade, but I'm worth almost fifty mill right now. There is no way you can come up with a twenty percent share of that."

"No, but you're not against the idea, are you?"

"No, not really, but it won't be free, either."

"Can you give me a week or two to think something up? All of us? I haven't asked the others yet, but now I want to!"

I cocked my head and smiled. "I sure wasn't expecting this. What about you guys? Do you want in, too?"

John answered first. "Depending on price and terms, yes, I could see doing it."

"I've been watching you since you were a kid. I'm in.", said Missy.

"I'm like John.", said Jake Senior. "It would depend on price and conditions, but yes, I'd at least want to know more."

I just nodded for a moment, as my mind went at light speed. I had never considered this before. "Okay, a few ground rules. You guys hear them out and then get together and figure this out." Everybody nodded and I continued, "Rule One - I'm the boss. I'll have the majority of the funds and I will run things. Rule Two - everybody is going to have to cough up some cash, and it won't be a trivial amount. Rule Three - if you work for the Buckman Group, you work for me, not anybody else. Think that one through."

Jake thought it over. "Give us a few weeks to sort it out. Can we do that?"

"Fair enough. Until then, we leave things as they stand. Missy, you look into that Microsoft thing. We'll meet again next week, and go over the local business items then." I was intellectually beat, and wanted to go home and think about things. We ended the meeting and I left.

Chapter 71: The Buckman Group

Was this something I even wanted to do? Right now I was worth just shy of $50 million. By 1982 standards that qualified as 'Fuck You!' money. If I worked at it, I could see myself at $500 million, which was 'Fuck the World!' money. With a team behind me, we could add another 0 to the number. When you get to $5 billion, it's 'Fuck the Universe!' money! Yet to get that kind of money, and not spend my every waking hour thinking about it, I needed a team. No man, not even one with knowledge of the future, can do it by himself.

I didn't tell Marilyn what the meeting was about, preferring to keep my counsel on it. Besides, she had very little interest in investing or Wall Street. She was much more of a hands-on practical minded person, and not one for high finance. As long as the bills were paid, and I was around to nag, she was happy as a clam.

Instead, I called John the next day, and made arrangements to see him for lunch the following day. We met at a steakhouse in Timonium.

"I was wondering if you were going to give me a call.", he said.

"Were you aware of what Jake Junior had in mind?"

"No. I'm not surprised, but he didn't ask us ahead of time, or swear us all to secrecy or anything like that.", replied my friend. "What did you think about his idea?"

"I was going to ask you the same question.", I answered.

John smiled. "It's your business, not ours. It's your opinion that's important. Do you have a problem with it?"

I shrugged. "Not in any moral sense. I mean, it's not like I would have had a problem if any of you had hung on my coat tails on these trades."

"I think that's a violation of SEC regs, for Melissa, at least.", commented John.

"Huh. Really? I guess that makes sense." I thought about that for a second, then asked, "So, what did you think about the idea?"

"It depends. I'd be in favor of the idea, but I need to know the cost and how it would be structured." I nodded; it was a nice and safe lawyer-like answer, but it made sense. John continued, "The question is how we eventually get the money out? How do we earn any income without selling shares or stocks? As it stands, the vast majority of your money is tied up in equities. Your personal expenditures are relatively low compared to the amount you have invested. You have to juggle your portfolio to buy different stocks, but it's relatively low key. You don't actively trade, day in, day out."

I shook my head. "Not my style. That just sounds like a great way to rack up trading commissions. I would much rather buy a quality stock for the long term, and hold it and watch it grow. Or the opposite, find a company in trouble, and ride it down the chute. I'll make more from the steady rise or fall than what I'll make playing the market on a daily basis, at least on a net basis."

"Exactly. The devil is in the details here. I'm most concerned with the structure and reimbursement details."

"How so?", I asked.

"Well, take me and Jake - father, not son - we're both of an age, we're stable, we've got some cash or stocks, we can probably come up with a buy in figure, as long as it isn't in the millions. Melissa, too, for that matter, although she's not as old as Jake and me. I'm curious, though, on where young Jake is going to come up with the buy-in. If he plans to use his income from the company to pay off a loan to buy his share, then how does he make a withdrawal to pay for the loan?"

I gave a bewildered look. "No idea. Here's another question - can we all get along and do this? If we do this, it's going to be fairly small and tightly held. Can you get along with everyone? Missy? Can the two Jakes?"

He nodded. "That part I'm pretty comfortable with. We've all known each other for a number of years now, except for young Jake, and I don't see him as a problem. He's ambitious, that much I can tell, but that's not a problem for a young man. You young fellows are supposed to be ambitious!"

I snorted a laugh out at that. We talked a little more about how we could structure the Buckman Group, and make it more than just a nice name on a business card. I was already starting to get some ideas of my own. By the time we finished, we were dawdling over coffee and tea, and we broke apart. I drove home, found Charlie was taking a nap, and then chased Marilyn around the bedroom until I caught her. She didn't run all that fast.

Two weeks to the day after Jake brought up the idea, he called for another meeting over at John's office to discuss his ideas. I suspected that John had called him and gone over some of the questions we had raised that day at lunch. He had been a busy little beaver in the meantime. Like John said, Jake Junior was ambitious.

I wasn't terribly surprised by this. I remember thinking, back on the first trip, how I was the same age as Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, and why was it them and not me. Now, Jake was looking at me and seeing somebody who was only a couple of years older, and he was wondering how to get his hands on the goose with the golden eggs.

I listened as he laid out his proposal. Some of it was enough to make the toughest accountant's eyes glaze over. There was stuff about S corporations and C corporations and capital gains taxes and distributions and shares, and God only knows what else. After about an hour and a half, I made the time-out sign. "Okay, so we can do this, have it be legal, not go to jail, and make a few bucks. Let's go back to the questions I posed a couple of weeks ago."

He nodded. "Okay, correct me if I'm wrong, but the percentage of shares would be based on the amounts we have invested. If I have $49 million and you have $1 million, then I have 98% of the votes, right?", I asked.

"Right." He tried to expound on this but I just waved him off.

"Okay. So it doesn't matter what our titles are. You can call yourself the Queen of the May, but I still get 98% of the vote, right."

He grinned at that. "Right!"

"Okay, ground rule two - everybody coughs up some dough. Did you have a figure in mind?"

At this, Jake got a little more nervous. He was almost stammering, as he said, "Well, I wasn't sure what you had in mind, but I would imagine we can all come up with about $100,000." He almost said this as a question. I simply gave him a half smile and made a thumbing gesture, indicating 'Up!' "$150,000?"

I smiled again. "Let's make it simple. I want to see a real commitment from anybody involved in this, and setting this up will take some cash. If you want in, let's make the buy-in an even $250,000, a flat quarter million."

That woke them up, but nobody ran screaming from the room. Well, Jake Junior looked like he was about to puke. John and Jake Senior slowly nodded, Missy nodded even slower. Jake Junior started sweating. His father had to put his hand on his arm and say, lowly, "Don't worry, we'll handle this."

Missy asked, "What did you mean by setting this up would take cash?"

"Well, if we are going to do this for real, make the Buckman Group a real company and not just a business card and a mail drop, we'll need an office, some desks, furniture, computers, a bunch of stuff. Stuff like a real company."

She nodded in understanding. "Anything else? You had three rules."

"Well, it sort of goes with the real company, idea. No man can serve two masters, that sort of thing. You can't work for other people, too."

She nodded easily. "That won't be a problem for me. To be blunt about it, you are far and away my largest client. They already tried to take you away from me last year, remember?"

I vaguely remembered getting a phone call from somebody at the investment firm's Private Investment Group (PIG, nice acronym!) last year, suggesting how they would be better suited to handle my accounts, rather than a mere broker. I had turned them down, and then called Missy to ask what was going on.

Missy continued, "My bet is that I can save you enough on commissions to cover any salary I might get, as well as what I'll lose out elsewhere. The capital upside is worth it in any case. I'm in."

John was a touch slower to respond. "I have enough savings that I can convert some of it to cash. However, I do have a problem with suddenly dropping all my other clients. I can certainly agree to not take any more on, but I will need time to unravel the rest of my practice."

Jake Senior agreed with John, although he had a partnership to transfer clients to, and would need to unravel the partnership. His son looked like he was swallowing a turd; he didn't have clients beyond the accounting partnership, and wasn't a partner, and he had nowhere near a quarter-million dollars to invest.

I nodded in understanding. "Okay, here's a counterproposal. John, you and Jake have two years to unwind everything outside of the Buckman Group. Missy and Jake Junior, you can start immediately. Your shares vest immediately; theirs vest 50% now, 50% in two years, or whenever they are fully with the Buckman Group."

Jake and John nodded slowly at this, and I could see the gears working in their minds. I kept on. "Here's something I've been thinking about. I think that $49 million figure for me is probably accurate?" Jake Senior nodded and shrugged. "Okay, that makes the $1 million buy-in equal to 2%. Let's make things sporting, and give everybody here an incentive to do this right, and not just ride along. Over the next five years, we will automatically increase that 2% to 10% with a stock option program. Does that sound interesting?"

There was dead silence at the table. Everybody was running numbers in their head, but the gist was simple. They cough up a quarter million now; they make many, many millions down the road.

"Sign me up!", breathed Jake Junior quietly. Missy gulped and swallowed, and nodded wordlessly. Jake Senior nodded.

Only John said anything, "So in five years..."

I smiled at him. "So, we do this for real. What happens if we grow this company to $1 billion in assets? You guys are splitting 10%, or $100 million. That makes you each worth $25 million. Are you in?"

Suddenly it was my old friend sweating. "Sweet Jesus!", he muttered.

Jake Junior smiled broadly. "I'll start doing the paperwork!"

John muttered, "Unbelievable!", and then he put a hand on young Jake's arm. "Okay, start your paperwork, but until we do this, I am still legally Carl's lawyer, and so are you. This violates about a zillion ethics rules if we don't get a third party to vet the paperwork."

"Agreed.", said Jake Senior.

Missy solved the problem. "I know some guys who know some guys. I'll get somebody from New York to review it all, an outside source." The others all agreed with this, and we broke apart. In the meantime, we would continue going as we had been, and the others would start making their plans for coming up with the buy-in.

In the meantime, something interesting happened. I was contacted by the State Department! It seemed that the Bahamian government wanted to give me an award or a plaque or something for helping their police catch that gang of robbers. They wanted me to come down to Washington to receive the award. I told them I'd let them know.

They had contacted me through John, who I had listed as my contact back when I was talking to Assistant Superintendant Javier. He asked me what I was going to do.

"Ignore it, I think. I have zero interest in going to Washington.", I told him.

He gave me a disappointed look and shook his head. "Don't be silly. If you ever want to go back to the Bahamas and not be persona non grata, you go down to D.C. and make nice. You should know better than that!"

"John, this is all blown way out of proportion to what really happened."

"So what? You go down, you make nice, you come home. Everybody is happy. Take Marilyn. Smile. Do I have to do all your thinking for you?"

I just rolled my eyes. "Yes, Dad, I'll behave."

I called back the under-under-under-assistant who had called me and arranged a date to come down the next week. Then I called my wife. She was kind of excited about it, and hung up on me and called Tessa. Tessa and Tusker would watch Charlie for a night, and we would go down and spend a night in Washington. I wasn't all that thrilled by the concept. Washington was built in the middle of a malarial swamp following a tug-of-war between Maryland and Virginia; Virginia won, and the capital was carved out of Maryland. It would be very warm and humid the day we stayed.

Taylor got us a suite at the Hay-Adams Hotel, very nice and swanky in an old school sort of way. We drove down on a Tuesday morning, and met the Bahamian Ambassador and a State Department flunky Tuesday afternoon. There were some kind words said, a few photographs taken, and then we left with our plaque. Afterwards, I took Marilyn to dinner and chased her around the bedroom afterwards. Wednesday, we slept late and then came home to rescue our friends from our son.

Then it was back to work for me. It turned out that by the time the papers were drawn up, reviewed by everybody, reviewed by a Wall Street lawyer, and people coughed up the cash, it would be at least three months, and this was considered moving swiftly. In the meantime, we would keep going the way we had been. Meanwhile, the Buckman Group's first client/investment called me.

It was Tusker. He and Tessa asked me to come over to their shop about a month after I had seen their new location. Only it wasn't theirs yet. They were still at their old site, and were looking rather grim.

After the usual greetings, I asked, "So, what's up? How's the move going? Did you ever figure out some better financing?"

Tusker looked like he was sucking a lemon, and Tessa answered dejectedly, "I don't think it can happen."

"What! Why not?"

"We can't get any financing! Even the commercial banks won't loan to us!"

That surprised me. "Okay, truth time. Are you missing payments? Have they said your business isn't big enough to handle the payments? They must have a reason."

Tusker loudly protested, "Hey, we make all the payments on time! We always have!"

I just waved him down. "Hey, great, but it's a question that has to be asked. So it's not your credit rating then?" Both of them shook their heads. "So what is it? You can't make the payments on a new loan?"

"No, that works out, too. It's us; we have no assets other than the business. Everyone wants loan guarantees or for us to sign our house off as a guarantee. We don't have a house! We wanted to invest in the business first.", cried Tessa.

I rubbed my face for a second. I had run across this before, way back when. Typical banker behavior. My friends were doing everything they were supposed to, but it still wasn't enough.

"Well, nothing new, I suppose. There's an old statement about bankers - the only time they'll be happy to lend you the money is when you have enough money not to need it. Which bank had the best deal?"

"Maryland National."

I nodded. Maryland National was a decent sized business bank; they would grow to become much larger, but for Tusker and Tessa, it was a good bet. "Give me a few days to sort this out. Give me a copy of their latest proposal, and tell Andrea not to let it slip away. I'll have some answers in a day or two."

Tusker still looked unhappy, but Tessa began to look hopeful. I took the paperwork home and called Jake Senior. He wasn't in, but his secretary took a message. Jake called me back about half an hour later. The call arrived while Marilyn was napping in her chair, and I was on the floor chasing Charlie around as he crawled across the living room. This was a new thing he had just learned, and he thought locomotion was just the cat's ass!

When the phone rang, Marilyn snorted and looked around. I stood up and said, "It's your turn to chase him around. He's faster than me."

"What makes you so special? He's faster than me, too!"

I laughed at that and picked up the phone. "Buckman Child Experiment Laboratory. Do you have a child you'd like us to experiment with?"

Jake laughed on the other end of the line. "Too late, he's already a lost cause. You called?"

There was a crash from the other end of the room, where Charlie managed to get into something. His mother hopped up to set it right, and I sat down to talk to Jake. "Yeah, I've got some business for the Buckman Group. I've got a friend that I've been helping over the years, just giving him some advice on building a business and all, no money or anything. Anyway, he needs to expand his business, and the banks are giving him some grief. I need to figure out how to help him. Can I come over to see you?"

"Today's shot, but how about tomorrow morning?"

"Sure, 9:30?", I asked.

"Make it 10:30. You have any paperwork on him?", Jake asked.

"I'll bring what I have. I'll see you then." I hung up. I didn't know how, yet, but I knew we could sort this out. I turned around to smile at Marilyn. She was busy chasing Charlie down again, as he headed towards the coffee table. Fun times were starting!

The next morning I met with Jake at his office and went over Tusk Cycle's operation and current problems. He agreed with me that Maryland National would be a much better fit than Clifton Trust. He also understood when I said that Maryland National wanted them to tie their non-existent home in with the loan. "My problem is that these guys are doing everything we say they should be doing to get ahead. They're saving, investing in a business, they've both been to college. They are living in a crappy little apartment and putting all their money into the business, with a three year old living on a cot in the dining room. There has to be a way to help them."

"How important is this to you?"

"Pretty important. They are some of my oldest friends. We go back to high school together. He was one of my groomsmen and she damn near gave birth at the reception!"

That earned a grin from Jake. "That must have been fun!"

"Like you have no idea!", I laughed.

"Okay, here's what I see is happening. The bank is looking for collateral, in case these two go belly up." I nodded, and he continued, "For instance, if they get a dealership, the factory probably has the title to the bikes, or the bank that does the floorplan, which might be through the factory anyway. You understand floorplanning?"

Oh, Lord, yes, I understood it. Trailers have it, too. I nodded. "Marilyn's family sells trailers. Same deal there."

"So what happens if they default? The bank is stuck with an old commercial building and a bunch of rebuilt used bikes. Since your friends have no equity in the deal, they don't have any skin in the game."

"Any ideas?", I asked.

He grinned at me. "This is where we can do some things as the Buckman Group. For instance, any work I or the others do is absorbed as our cost. Currently, they are billable hours to you."

"I had figured that part out already.", I said drily.

"Would it be okay to call them, ask them a few questions? I've got a few ideas in mind."

I shrugged. "Fine by me. Let me use your phone and I'll call them, let them know what's happening." I reached across his desk and picked up the phone, and Jake pushed a 9 to get an outside line. I made a quick call to Tessa and simply told her that a fellow named Jake Eisenstein was going to call them later, and that he was my accountant and had a few questions for them. Then I left him with their paperwork from Maryland National, and told him to use my name if he needed to call the bank directly.

The following week, I got a call from Jake. "You still want to help your friends?"

"Sure thing."

"Okay, be at my office next Wednesday at 1:00. I'll let them know to give a check to Andrea in the meantime. I've got John doing due diligence now on them."

"Really? How's it going to work?", I asked.

"I'll explain it next Wednesday." He hung up, leaving me mystified but hopeful.

I called Tusker and he wasn't completely sure either, but he did indicate that Jake had asked them if they would be willing to have me as a minority owner, at a 10% level. They had both said yes, which made me think I was providing some guarantees, using my credit in place of theirs.

The following Wednesday, after lunch, I drove over to Jake's office. I met Tusker and Tessa in the parking lot and I could tell that Tusker was nervous, being a long haired biker type meeting with businessmen. I told him to calm down, he'd be fine. Tessa had on a business suit, and Tusker was scrubbed free of all petroleum products, and had a suit on also. We went inside to find the entire brain trust inside I introduced them to Jake, Jake Junior, Melissa, and John. "I wasn't expecting everybody to be involved.", I commented.

John answered, "If we are doing this, we all need to be in the loop. Jake ran some of the numbers. I was in touch with Andrea, the seller, and Maryland National."

I nodded. "Jake Junior is setting up the paperwork and legal documentation I guess." He nodded in agreement, and I turned to face Melissa. "And you?"

"I ran numbers for John. It's been fascinating!"

"And we have a plan in place?"

"We do!", answered Jake Junior. He extended a hand to his father, who began the explanation.

Basically, I would invest $50,000 in Tusk Cycle in exchange for 10% of the business. This valued the firm at half a million, which was ludicrous, but that was discounting the value of the work that Tusker and Tessa were doing. I was never going to actually work there. Further, I would keep an interest bearing account at Maryland National for a few years. In turn, that account would act as collateral on a loan Maryland National would make to Tusk Cycle, providing them with the ability to buy the old grocery store and renovate it (three year lease with an option to buy) and move their operation. There were some other provisions in the paperwork about the length of the loan guarantee and certain covenants as to accounting standards, but nothing I hadn't run across before.

Tusker just sat there, his mouth open. Tessa was a bit more animated and happy. Tusker said towards the end, after all the terms had been reviewed, and a copy of the paperwork provided to them for their own lawyer's review, "I just don't know what to say. We've been talking about this for the last week, but it's just starting to sink in. We can really do this!"

Tessa leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. "You are our hero! I promise we will pay everything back! This is tremendous!"

Some of the others chuckled when Tessa kissed me; I was embarrassed. I got over it by saying, "You bet you'll be paying back this loan! Remember Snidely Whiplash? I will really enjoy evicting widows and orphans! You'll think about Ebenezer Scrooge and wish I was that nice!"

We sent Tusker and Tessa on their way, with instructions to have their lawyer call John about any questions and to set up a date to close all the paperwork. Afterwards, we just sat around the table and smiled at each other. "So, we can really do this sort of thing?", I said in wonder.

"We really can.", agreed Jake Senior, grinning back at me.

"Well, let's get this Buckman Group thing all set up, and do a few more.", I answered, grinning.

It was the end of June before all the lawyers and outside people agreed on everything, and we all signed the papers. On June 30, we all sat down in John's office along with a couple of New York lawyers who had reviewed all the paperwork. They started passing around papers and we all started signing. Then everybody coughed up a check, although Jake Junior's face was a little strained as he handed it over. He had borrowed some money from his father, and some from the Buckman Group, to be paid back out of his salary. We ended up with the following structure.

John Steiner - Chairman of the Board - He was older, seasoned, and made a good impression as the 'grown-up' running this thing.

Carl Buckman - President and Chief Executive Officer - Left unsaid was that the vast majority of the company stock was in my hands.

Jake Eisenstein, Sr. - Treasurer - Well, he was an accountant, after all.

Jake Eisenstein, Jr. - Vice President of Operations - We had to give him a title, and he was pretty ambitious. I could see him actually running the daily operations when we got bigger - if he worked out!

Melissa Talmadge - Vice President of Investments - She had all the brokerage and SEC credentials, and would handle anything we needed to do in buying and selling stocks.

Jake Senior brought his secretary, Grace, from the accounting office with him; John's stayed with his practice as he began to unwind it. She had already told him she was going to retire soon, anyway. Jake Junior, as the head of operations, was told he was in charge of finding us some cheap office space. He was pretty excited about that; John, his father, and I just sort of rolled our eyes at this, but figured we could keep an eye on things. I was looking at him like one of my young but promising lieutenants. Everybody starts out somewhere.

Afterwards, I went home and told Marilyn. She wasn't very impressed, as she was putting Charlie in his crib for his nap. "Business, business, business! I've got important business here!"

"I'll give you some important business!"

Marilyn looked at me and smirked. "That's not all that important." She took Charlie's dirty diaper and carried it out of the bedroom and down to the kitchen, with me following and protesting.

"I think you need a good spanking, with that kind of attitude."

"Ha. Ha. Ha. You are so funny."

"What?!" I advanced on my wife.

"Oh, no you don't! You can behave!", I was told.

I moved closer, and Marilyn tried to get past me, but I trapped her in a corner of the kitchen. "I think you need a spanking!" I pulled her into my arms, and brought my hands down to smack her on the bottom. She was wearing tight jeans, and there was a loud 'SMACK!' sound as a result.

Marilyn's eyes popped open! "Don't you dare!" She struggled in my arms to get loose.

"You earned it with that attitude." I gave her another smack on the bottom. Marilyn continued to struggle. "You'd better behave, or you'll earn one on your bare bottom.", I told her.

That caused her to laugh. "That's no threat! As soon as you see my bare bottom, you think of things other than spanking me!"

I grinned at that. "Oh, really? Maybe I need to do an experiment!" I pulled my hands around to her front and began fumbling with her zipper.

"Oh, no, I don't think so!", protested my wife. She was really laughing hard now. She tried to keep her pants on, while I tried to reverse the decision. I think it all came down to motivation - I was very motivated to pull her pants down, and she wasn't really all that motivated to keep them pulled up. After a few minutes of laughing struggle, Marilyn's pants and panties were down around her knees.

"Okay, now, let's check!" I turned her around so that she was facing the counter, and knelt down behind her. I could see the faint marks her panties had left on her. I began to lick her butt, even as I tugged her clothes down and off her bare feet.

Marilyn murmured happily as I worshipped that perfect ass. Grinning, she looked back behind her and said, "I told you you wouldn't want to spank me when you saw it."

"Hmm..." I stood up behind her and undid my own pants, pushing them down and off, and Marilyn leaned forward over the counter. My cock had been stiff since I had started undressing her, and I pushed it inside her from the rear. "Maybe you were right after all."

"Told you so!"

I pushed in, and then smacked what I could of her asscheeks, drawing a squeal of outrage. "And maybe you weren't!"

Marilyn pushed back, but that just seated me inside her that much more firmly. I reached down and rubbed her ass as I fucked her, and then gave her another quick smack. She squealed again, and then said, "You're not funny!"

I kept pumping into her. "Well, if you want me to use my hands elsewhere, take your top off." She had on a tank top and a bra. Marilyn peeled them off and I reached around to grab her tits. "Now, isn't that better?"

"Fuck me, you son of a bitch! Fuck me!" She was very excited now, and pussy juice was sloshing around my cock and down my balls. "Fuck me!"

I stopped talking and concentrated on screwing her. Marilyn began moaning in orgasm, and after a few minutes more I slammed forward and groaned myself, as I unloaded inside her. It felt like I would come forever before I finished!

I sagged against her back, and nibbled on her ear. Marilyn pushed back against me and raised her head up. "I think you need to let me go."

"I kind of like you this way."

"Well, I need to clean up, and so do you." She pushed back some more, and I slipped out and shuffled back myself. My wife turned around and put her arms around my neck. "That was fun. We should do that more often."

"Like later?", I said hopefully.

"Maybe! If you don't start spanking me again." I moved my hands down her back, and she backed against the counter. "Behave!"

I had to laugh at her. "Okay, I'll behave, but you have to dress to make me behave."

"Oh?"

I leaned in and whispered in her ear. "A very short skirt and a very small top would probably distract me from that, don't you think?"

Marilyn giggled. "And what about your son? What's he going to think when he sees me like that?"

"Let him get his own girl!" I stepped back and grabbed both of our clothes, and then led my naked wife back through the town house to our bedroom. Charlie was still asleep. I tossed our clothing in the hamper, and then dragged her over to the bed. "Maybe we can work on your wardrobe later."

My wife giggled again, and got on the bed with me. "Afterwards, I am going to clean up, and you can deal with the little monster." She grabbed my cock and began stroking me back to life.

"That's the fruit of our loins you are talking about."

"Exactly! Now I know where he gets it from!"

"I think you need another spanking." Marilyn just smiled and rolled onto her back, and spread her legs apart. "Well, maybe not." I climbed on top and got into position. "Maybe not."

Afterwards, I was too tired to spank her. Maybe that was her secret plan after all. Fuck me to death and inherit my wealth! What a way to go!

Chapter 72: Microsoft

July 1982

Being a gentleman of leisure turned out to be more work than I thought it would! First off, after we got back from the Bahamas, I had found a gym and a dojo. I had joined, and just as I had threatened my wife, I signed us up for a family plan. I just didn't tell her about that until after I got home.

Marilyn's response wasn't all that bad. After all, how could she complain about something so healthy, right? No, the complaint came the next morning when I woke at 7:00 and smacked her on the ass. "Time to get up and go to the gym!"

Marilyn struggled to focus on me, "Wha ... what?"

I tapped her butt again. "Time to get up! You need to get up and get ready."

Marilyn rolled over and told me, "Go away."

"Come on, lazy bones, time to work out. You promised, remember?" I pushed her shoulder until she rolled over and swatted at me.

My wife grumbled and opened her eyes. "You were serious? Do you know what time it is?"

"It's time to get up and go work out!" I pulled on her arm and got her to sitting upright.

"We can't leave Charlie here."

"We'll take him with us. He'll be fine! Come on, we'll get him used to exercise."

"I hate you." Marilyn rolled out of bed and took another blind swing at me. "I need a shower."

I pushed her towards our closet instead. "Shower afterwards. You're going to exercise remember? Shower at the gym. Now toss some clothing in a bag." I chivvied her into dressing in a sports bra and tee shirt, and some plain panties and an old pair of shorts. I dressed for a workout and then pointed her towards the door. I tossed some clothing and my toilet kit into a gym bag and then got her to do the same. Charlie was already awake, but he was a fairly happy fellow in the morning. Momma changed his diaper and dressed him in some clean clothes, and we bundled him up and drove to the gym.

Marilyn never really took to working out like I had. She had never been a really physical person, and had always relied on her youthful metabolism to stay in shape. Eventually she hit her 30s and they hit back, especially after our third child really caused her to 'blossom'. She never lost the baby fat that time. For me, I knew just what would happen to me, and how bad that was, and I was not about to let that happen again.

We made a compromise, to go three times a week, Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, in the early morning. We did an hour workout, although they ended up pretty much separate. Marilyn liked walking on the treadmills, which I just couldn't do anymore. I spent most of my workouts on the Nautilus machines. Aside from the upper body workout from pumping the iron, I could also use my leg muscles on some of the combinations, without the impact of running on my right knee. As long as I kept the impact down, it didn't bother me too much, but it was kind of sensitive. I always started each workout with a long kata session before any other exercise, to warm up and loosen everything up.

Charlie found this all quite amusing. He was a happy child. Parker was much more reserved and sober, even as a little boy. I still thought about Parker, how he had been and what he had grown into. He was a son any father could be proud of, but now he was gone, off in a time and a place I couldn't fathom. I occasionally felt the pain of a loss that never existed in the here and now.

Which did not mean that I wasn't very happy with Charlie. If nothing else, he was hilarious to be around. All kids get into everything, but Charlie outdid them all. Even worse, he was impossibly clumsy and ungainly, not in any kind of neurological sense, but in the sense that you could trust him to be a disaster! He would crawl everywhere, and if he brushed against a pile of books or magazines or Marilyn's knitting, he would just go through, spreading chaos all around. Once he figured out standing and walking, the entire town house would be at risk!

By July, he had figured out how to squirm his way out of his seat. This was discovered one morning at the gym. It was the first Wednesday in July, the week after we set up the Buckman Group. I was over in the section with the Nautilus machines while Marilyn was around the corner on the treadmills. Suddenly, around the corner, came Charlie, crawling for all he was worth, with one of the gym attendants, smiling, in semi-hot pursuit. He saw me and came over, in high speed four wheel drive. I sat upright and laughed as he got closer, and then scrambled after him myself. The little bastard had closed on me and then scooted off in another direction! I grabbed him and tucked him under my arm and went in search of his mother.

Marilyn was still churning away on the treadmill, watching a television tuned to the Today Show, the baby seat at her feet and off to the side. She had been totally oblivious! I came around to her front, between her and the television, and held up our son. He was gurgling and happy, and grinning at the world. "Lose something?"

Marilyn stared at us, so startled she stopped walking. The treadmill was still running, so her feet slid out from underneath her and she had to grab the rails and hold herself up. She slammed the STOP button. "Where did you find him?! How did he get loose!?"

"I found him around the corner, making a break for it. As for how he got loose, you'll need to ask him. He isn't talking much, but give him some time, maybe you can wear him down." I thrust him at her, and she took him from me.

"It's baby handcuffs and manacles for you, Charlie!", she told him. Then she handed him back to me. "Keep him. I'm going to shower and dress, and then it's your turn." I took our son and Marilyn headed off to the locker room.

I knelt down and strapped Charlie into his seat. "We're not waiting.", I told my son. I carried him into the men's locker room. I set his seat on the bench and kept an eye on him as I pulled off my sweaty crap and grabbed my towel and toilet kit. And Charlie in his seat! I set him on a counter across from the shower and left the curtain open as I showered quickly. I managed to shower, shave, and dress, and pack Charlie and me up and get out to the lobby, long before Marilyn did it just for herself!

She started at seeing us. "How did you get out here before I did!?"

"I live a clean and efficient life, and am filled with a wondrous and righteous need to live better than my fellow man. Or woman, in your case."

"I think you're full of shit!"

I covered our son's ears. "You use that mouth to kiss your son!?" I picked him up and smiled at him. "Mommy says bad things!" I told him, earning a happy gurgle.

Mommy took him away. "Daddy's going to sleep alone tonight!" I grabbed our bags and followed Mommy and Charlie to the car and kept my mouth shut. Daddy preferred sleeping with Mommy.

My trips to the dojo were normally by myself. Marilyn never really cottoned to watching me practicing martial arts. It mostly seemed like weird exercise to her, and then after seeing me in the bar fight, just made her very uncomfortable. It was a part of my makeup at odds with her view of me.

Usually every other day I would drive out to the property on Mount Carmel Road to check on the progress of the house building. Things had started, but it was a maddeningly slow process building a house using conventional construction techniques.

By the Nineties Lefleur Homes had begun selling modular homes as well as trailers. The pace is vastly quicker than with conventional 'stick building'. In a stick built house, you have to build the basement first. Then you build a floor, and then you build the walls. Only at that point can you build the roof. With modulars, at the same time as the basement is being dug and built, in a factory hundreds of miles away the walls, floor, and roof are all being built at the same time. When the pieces are finished, they are craned into place and bolted together, all inside a closed factory. Bathrooms and kitchens are installed, and then the whole kit and caboodle are freighted away. A house might spend only a week or two in a factory, versus months or more being built in the field.

In 1982, modular construction was still in its infancy. Oh, there were companies that did it, but it was for relatively small and simple rectangular boxes, not for what we were doing. Here, too, the computer revolution would change things. Over the next twenty years technology as applied to design and construction would make modulars a high end method for building million dollar mansions.

But that was for the future. No, I didn't make myself a nuisance. I stayed out of the men's ways and didn't ask a million damn fool questions. I knew what they were doing, and it was obvious to me that they knew as well. I did make sure the foremen knew my name and number, so if they had any questions, they could call. It seemed obvious that I would be able to move in sometime during the decade. It wouldn't go beyond that.

I studiously avoided going over to Tusk Cycle. I might have been a part owner, but I wasn't an employee and didn't know the business. I did go over once a month to review the books with them, but that was it. Well, that wasn't exactly all. Right after we closed on the deal with them, Andrea had a crew out to the new site, fixing the roof. The owners wouldn't reduce their price, but they did agree to pay to have the leak in the back fixed. After that was fixed, they had a big weekend planned. They shut down the old shop and their employees and everybody and their brother pitched in to move everything from one place to the other. We even invited everybody at the Buckman Group in to help. Marilyn, Tessa, and Missy handled baby duties, while the rest of us cleaned and scrubbed and sorted and arranged and then cleaned some more. By Sunday evening they were back in business and the rest of us were wiped out.

There was also work with the new company. We all agreed to meet every Monday morning to discuss the business and plans. The first few weeks were in John's office, but after that, Jake Junior had us begin visiting some offices to see if we liked them. We were trying to compromise on location. Everybody else lived in the Timonium and Lutherville areas, but Marilyn and I lived west of Hereford. Jake found us a nice office park a few miles south of Hereford on York Road, and we leased half of one floor. Then we divvied up the offices. There was a front lobby area, with four separate and equal offices branching off it, and then a hallway towards the rear. The hallway had a conference room on one side and a fifth office and a storeroom on the other side. I took the fifth office, across from the conference room and the others took the front offices. Jake Junior was then assigned to make the place habitable and get some furniture and office equipment going.

There was one thing I did which surprised the others. I went out and bought the best computer I could buy. While the others had seen them, and Jake Senior had even had bought a home computer for his kids to play with or for games, they were still very exotic in 1982. I spent what was a small fortune at the time for an IBM 5150 PC with a CGA video card and color monitor and dual 5¼" floppy drives, with PC-DOS as the operating system. I had been away from math and computing for years, and needed to get back to it.

I kept it at the office and went there to study and practice programming in DOS and GW-Basic. I also bought a matching unit for home, since I could store stuff on the floppy disks and take them back and forth. That didn't work out so well. Marilyn balked at putting it on the dining room table and Charlie would see it and want to play with it.

We had a big meeting in my new office once it was livable and I had refamiliarized myself with DOS and Basic. It felt like I was moving back to the dawn of time, but I had done a shitload of DOS and Basic programming back in the day. I looked around the room and then pointed at the computer on a side desk. "That machine there is the future, and I want to invest in it.", I told them.

"You want to buy stock in IBM?", asked Melissa.

I shook my head. "Absolutely not. Remember when I told you about computers a few months ago? There are three parts of any computer system. You have the hardware, the box and the TV screen and the keyboard and all the hard parts." I reached over and rapped lightly on the metal case to the computer.

"Next you have two types of programs. One is called the operating system. It tells the box what to do, how to make the pieces run and turn on and turn off and do stuff. That's the second part of the system."

"And the third part?", asked John.

"Those are the programs that you run, like an accounting program or a typing program."

"And those aren't the same as an operating system.", he replied, with a half question and half statement tone.

"No." I grasped for an analogy. "It's like a railroad system. The computer is the rails. They go everywhere and you absolutely need them, but without any engines or the cars, they are pretty much useless. The operating system is the locomotive. It drives around on the rails and can do things, but by itself, it's pretty useless. What it needs is cargo to haul around, the boxcars and tankers and whatever. Those are the programs, or applications. Following me?"

He nodded slowly. The others were watching the two of us, but not weighing in. "And you can't do anything without all three pieces, rails, locomotives, and cars."

"Precisely."

"Okay, and you don't want to buy the companies that make the hardware, the rails in your analogy.", he asked.

"Nope. It's just like with the railroads. Any idiot can make steel rails and lay them out on the ground. The guy who can make the cheapest rails wins. It's a commodity business and nobody makes any money, at least not for very long. No, you want to be the guy building locomotives and boxcars.", I answered. "I want to invest in the operating systems and the application programs."

Jake Senior chimed in at that. "For all the types of computers out there, or just that IBM type you bought?"

"IBM. Within a few years almost everything will be an IBM or an IBM compatible anyway. All those others will be gone.", I told him.

"All of them!? I just got the kids a Commodore 64!"

I shrugged and gave him an evil grin. "So, if we do this right, in a few years, you'll be able to afford to buy each of them an IBM computer."

"Shit!", he said disgustedly.

I explained how the IBM open architecture allowed them to greatly increase the speed of innovation and improvement, but made the hardware end of the business a game for suckers. I also explained, like I had done before, how Microsoft and their operating system, was going to be the big deal in all of this.

"So you want to invest in Microsoft?", asked Missy. I nodded and she continued. "I looked into them a few months ago, when you first mentioned their name. You can't buy them. The company isn't publicly traded. By the way, they aren't in Redmond, but in Bellevue."

Damn! That was right! They moved to Redmond later! "It's just a different Seattle suburb. Anyway, that just means I can't buy them on the stock market. We can offer to invest, however. When they do an IPO, we make a small fortune. That's if we sell. If we hold our shares, we make an even bigger fortune down the road."

"So, what's the plan?", asked Jake Junior.

"The sooner we do this, the better. I promise you all, this is the company to do business with. It will only get more expensive in the future." I looked at Melissa and said, "I want you to find out as much as possible about Microsoft and the founders of the company. Most of all, I want to get an appointment with Bill Gates as early as possible. I'll fly out and meet him as soon as he'll see me. This week or next."

Next I turned to Jake Junior. "Okay, Vice President of Operations, I want some cash to buy stock with. Figure out how to raise $5 million in cash by the time I fly out there. If we have to sell some stocks, which ones? Can we free up some cash by using margins or selling options? Can we do this without going broke or going to jail?"

The young man goggled at me. "Five million?"

"More if we can. I don't want to buy the company, but I want a piece of the action." I looked at the other two men and said, "And keep an eye on them and help them. If I can do this, I want to do it quick, so figure out the mechanics of doing this and doing the paperwork and the due diligence. The longer this takes, the higher the price will be and the lower the amount of stock we can buy."

Everybody kind of stared at me and each other for a moment, but then they left. John lingered in the doorway. "You think these things are worth investing five mill?"

"John, if you could have invested five million with Thomas Edison a hundred years ago, what would it be worth now?"

He rolled his eyes and left. I thought about what I was doing, and then drove home. As a budding tycoon, I wanted a little afternoon action with Mrs. Tycoon.

And so I found myself flying out to Seattle-Tacoma on Monday, July 19. Missy had gotten me an appointment to meet with Gates on Tuesday morning. I figured it was a little ostentatious, and reckless with the company money, to charter a flight direct, but I did take one of Lloyd Jarrett's turboprops to Philly, where I caught a non-stop American flight to Sea-Tac. I did insist on flying first class.

I had offered to take Marilyn, suggesting we could do another little parents-only trip, but she had put me off. "Remember, one trip for us, one trip for the family. You owe us a family trip, first."

"We can stick Charlie in one of those doggy carriers down in the luggage compartment.", I countered.

"Forget it! Anyway, we still need a real family trip. I was talking to Anna Lee yesterday and she said we hadn't seen each other since last summer, and she's right!"

I gave her a wry smile at that. It was true. The last time we had seen our friends was right before I deployed to Honduras. Now, Harlan had gotten his promotion to captain and was assigned to the 25th Infantry, commanding a mobile artillery battery. "You're right, we need to visit them. Where are they stationed, anyway?" I knew he was with the 25th, but for the life of me I couldn't remember where they were based.

Marilyn grinned. "Hawaii!"

I grinned back. "Well, I'm willing to support the troops if you are. Let's figure two weeks, not just one!"

"You always amaze me with the sacrifices you are willing to make. I'll call her back later. They are six hours behind us, or something like that."

We ended up making plans to fly out and visit them at the end of July. In the meantime, though, I had to go meet a man who was probably the smartest businessman in America since the end of the Second World War, and try to buy a piece of his baby. A baby he wasn't overly thrilled about selling a piece of. Melissa had told me that from the sound of things on the phone, I was on a fool's errand.

I flew out on Monday, so that I would be rested and fresh on Tuesday. I packed light, with just a few days of clothes in my hanging bag and my briefcase. I left my return trip date open. If things worked out, I would stay as long as I needed to make the deal. If Missy was right, I'd be flying home on Wednesday.

I rented a car at the airport, and headed out. Bellevue was east of Seattle, and I needed convenient, not fancy. I found a Holiday Inn that would meet my needs just outside of Seattle. I went inside, checked in, dumped my crap in the room, and went down to the restaurant for dinner and a drink. No, I wasn't going to get lit up, not if I wanted to hold my own with the man who would one day be the richest man in America.

I recalled what I remembered about Gates from reading about him in what would be the future. We had relatively similar backgrounds, in that we grew up in wealthy suburbs. His family was definitely better off than mine. While my father was a successful engineer, his was a very successful lawyer. We had both gone to good schools, although I seemed to recall he went to a private school, but I just wasn't sure about that. I do remember how he dropped out of college to start Microsoft.

It was very difficult to get any financial information on the company, which wasn't at all surprising, since they were not a publicly traded firm. Further, in 1982, they were a very small fish, and not really on anybody's radar. Melissa's best guess was that they were somewhere in the low 20s in sales, that is to say, annual sales in the low $20 million range. Profits and cash flow were anybody's guess, but they were profitable, that much I did know. In the DOS days, the coding was relatively simple, and their per unit costs were mostly the cost of packaging and shipping the diskettes. Until they had their IPO, they financed almost everything internally.

So, why would he sell? As I had told John, Gates was using the standard Silicon Valley startup tactic for hiring - pay a decent enough salary, but promise them the world with stock grants and options. Sooner or later his own people would begin looking for a big payout, and he would be forced to sell a piece to generate a market and let people cash in. Still, that was probably for a few years hence, not now.

I needed to convince the shrewdest businessman of our generation to sell me something he didn't need to sell!

My appointment was for 10:30 on Tuesday. I left the motel around 10:00 and got there with a few minutes to spare. I was in his office at the agreed time.

Bill Gates looked just like his future press clippings and articles would depict him, a somewhat rumpled looking guy in glasses, wearing slacks and a button down dress shirt without a tie and with the top button undone. In other words, he looked like a nerd. I, on the other hand, had dressed neatly, in a charcoal suit and a white dress shirt, and shined shoes. I was going for the businessman look, which might or might not work out here. I even had my good cane, a nice ebony and brass gift from Marilyn for Father's Day. I also had an old and beat up oak cane for around the house.

His office wasn't all that glorious, but it did have a few armchairs and a coffee table to the side. "Thank you for seeing me, Mister Gates. I appreciate this."

"You're welcome, Mister Buckman." He eyed my limp and the cane.

I smiled. "An old injury from my last job. I think flying aggravated it a bit. I get a little stiff at times."

"What happened?"

"Well, I used to be a paratrooper, and I made one jump too many.", I answered.

He held his arm out, gesturing to the armchairs, and I selected one and sat down. He chose a chair opposite me. "Well, please have a seat. I'm curious why you're here. It wasn't quite clear over the telephone why you were coming."

"Thank you." I reached into my pocket and pulled out a silver business card holder and slipped out a card. When we started the company, I had business cards made up, crisp white with a slightly pebbled finish, lettering in a glossy black ink.

The Buckman Group

Private Equity and Capital

In one corner we had our address and phone number, diagonally across we had our names and titles. I had ordered two sets made for myself. Both of them listed me as Carl Buckman, President and CEO, but one set, what I called the 'Nerd' cards, had the letters 'PhD' after my name. I gave Gates one of the nerd cards.

He looked at it and said, "Excuse me, Doctor Buckman. What did you get your degree in?"

"My bachelors and masters I got in mathematics, my doctorate is in applied mathematics. I worked in Set Theory, mostly Information Theory and Topology, but really, I liked all aspects of the field.", I replied.

He looked at me oddly. "You have me curious. I was under the impression you were here to talk to me about an investment. Or are you looking for a job?"

I laughed at that. "Investment! Really! I have a very nice job back home, and a family and friends. I have no interest in moving across the country. Thank you for the offer, though, if that's what that was." I grinned as I said this.

He gave me a brief smile, but not much of one. He'd be a hell of a poker player, I suspected. I recalled at that moment that he didn't play poker, but that he was a world class bridge player. "Well, it wasn't, but it did make me curious. So, you are here about investing with us, in Microsoft? I don't recall ever even hearing about your firm."

"We're a new company, only a few months old, really. We've just started in the private equity business, although I've been actively investing for a number of years now."

"So, this is your business, then. Not family money, with you on the letterhead?"

I shook my head. "Roughly 98% of the stock in the Buckman Group is in my name. I'll be blunt about it. I've been investing on Wall Street since about the time you started playing with computers back in high school. Probably before then. I've had a brokerage account since I was 13. Now I'm doing it for real, just like you and computers and programming."

Gates looked at me curiously. "Since you were 13? And how old are you now?"

"Your age. Maybe a bit younger. I was born in November of '55, you were when? Earlier that year, right?"

"October. So what made you get degrees in math and not business?"

"Good question." I smiled at that. More than a few of those late nights down at Amos Eat-Me had made me ask the same question. "I think I just wanted to prove I could do it. Same thing when I went into the army. I wanted to test myself, to see if I was good enough. Nothing good comes unless you push yourself."

"So, you made enough money to come to me and invest, while going to school and being in the army? Just how much money?"

"Well, I'm certainly not planning on divulging our holdings, but let's put it this way. We're prepared to write a check for several million dollars, and we won't be investing more than ten percent of our capital in doing so."

Gates sat back in his chair and considered me for a second, but I couldn't see what was going on in his mind. "I'm curious. Even if I wanted to do this, why should we choose you? I've probably had a half dozen investment companies in to see us this year alone, all of them with names and sizes much larger than yours."

I nodded. "It's going to get worse. Next year the number will be ten times that. The following year you'll need to hire a secretary simply to handle the calls and tell people NO. The year after that, she'll need a secretary."

"You haven't answered my question."

"Okay, what do we bring to the table? Well, cash for one thing. Cash that you can use to hire additional programmers, cash that you can use to develop new products, cash that you can use to figure out how to put your products on everyone's desk.", I answered.

He waved it off. "Everybody offers cash."

"But do they offer me? I am going to make a guess here. The usual guy you see from the investment companies is a businessman or a lawyer. He doesn't own a computer, or if he bought one, he either gave it to his kids or to his secretary to try and figure out. I not only have a computer, I've been writing code since I was 17. I may not be in the league of what you guys out here do, but it doesn't scare me off, either. I can understand your business at the most intimate level, and if I can't help you, at least I won't hurt you."

I detected a faint glimmer of interest in this. "So you've been writing code? With DOS?"

"Well, DOS is just the operating system. I made myself a little application shell to run programs with. Right now it doesn't have much use, but I figure in another year, we'll be seeing computers with installed hard drive memories, and it will be very useful then. I'll be buying computers for the entire staff then. Right now, it would be a waste of time."

"How so?"

I smiled at him. "Right now, I am the only person in our company who has probably even seen a computer. The commands have to be typed in at the A: prompt. Now it's one thing to ask a geek like me to do that, but your average customer is a lot more like the people I work with. I've got a couple of lawyers, a stock broker, an accountant, a secretary or two. To really make the computer usable, you need something a little friendlier to the user."

"Go on."

"Well, I'm sure you are aware of the research going on down at the Xerox PARC complex." That was a shot across the bow he couldn't ignore! Xerox PARC invented most of the concepts in modern computers, from graphic interfaces to the mouse to laser printers. Gates' eyes popped wide at that.

"What do you know about that?", he asked, half sitting upright, moving from his traditional slump.

I waved it off. "I know what Bob Taylor is doing down there is state of the art, and that Xerox doesn't have a clue, and that you do. So does Steve Jobs. You know of him, right?" Gates nodded, speechless. "He knows about PARC, too. Here's a word of advice, free of charge, regardless of whether we invest - pay attention to PARC. The things they are working on will change the world. Buy the patents, invent it yourself, I don't care, but incorporate what they are doing as soon as you can."

He sat there for another minute, and then abruptly stood up. "Stay there. I'll be back in a moment." Then he went out of his office. Mystified, I stayed in my seat. What was he up to, summoning the Microsoft police?

He returned a couple of minutes later with a piece of paper in his hands. He thrust it at me and said, "Sign this. It's a non-disclosure statement. Then we can talk."

I tried to keep my joy off my face. We didn't have a deal yet, but he was at least willing to talk about it! I read over the paper and signed my name. The Buckman Group had its foot in the door!

I was invited to lunch, which was a little amusing. I was the only one dressed up, so to speak. Everybody else emulated the boss. I did get to meet Paul Allen, who was as wildly bearded as Bill Gates was clean shaven. There were three others, all some sort of senior programmer or executive. Over lunch I was asked about my degrees. These guys were some serious techies and wanted to know my credentials.

One of them, I forget who, asked, "Where did you go to school?"

"Well, when I was in high school, I also took about two years worth of classes over at Towson State. That's a teaching college outside of Baltimore. Later, after I graduated, I went to Rensselaer, up in Troy. That's where I officially got all my degrees.", I said.

"So you were going to high school and college at the same time?", asked another.

I nodded. "Sounds crazy, right? I just figured that if the school would pay for college that way, it meant I didn't have to."

"What was your thesis on?", asked Gates.

"I combined Information Theory and Topology and examined the effects of a network's topology on information loss. It probably deals more with the engineering side of the issue than what you are doing, at least for the moment.", I answered.

Allen, who had been relatively quiet up to this point, said, "I've heard of work in the field, but it was several years ago. A collaboration of some sort, I think it was something called the Rhineburg-Buckman Equations or something. That stuff?"

I swallowed what I was chewing, and nodded. "I'm the Buckman. Professor Rhineburg was my thesis adviser. I haven't talked to him lately, probably not for a few years, but I think he is still working in the field. Nice guy, really good."

Gates and Allen looked at each other, and the other three just eyed me curiously.

After that, I was asked about what I thought of computing in general, and I gave my standard speech about the future of computing, and how it would change the world. I altered it, however, to speak on topics that I knew Microsoft was involved in or would become involved in. I mentioned the need to move beyond the command prompt, to move to a graphic interface, to work with faster and more powerful processors, and finally the need to control critical applications like typing and spreadsheets.

"What about your specialty, networking?", asked Gates.

"I think that is going to be probably the biggest change of all, but not for another generation. It all depends on how fast speeds on the connections can be raised. Right now you have the ARPANet and the NSFNet, but they are limited. It is going to grow from there, but one of the biggest barriers will always be how fast the computers can talk to each other. Worst of all - every time you raise the transmission speed of the network, somebody else is going to increase the size of the file to be transmitted. It's a never ending cycle."

I must have impressed them as somebody who knew what he was talking about, even though it was straightforward History of Computers 101 from 2020. After lunch, I found myself closeted with Gates again in his office. I don't know what else he had planned, but he must have had his secretary reschedule them.

"You mentioned an investment. What kind of numbers did you have in mind?", he asked.

"Let me ask a few questions first, for background.", I responded. He nodded, and I asked, "What are your revenues and income for the last fiscal year? By the way, what is the period for your fiscal year?"

"It ended at the end of June. Our financial results are, of course, confidential.", he countered.

"Yes, but before we ever finalized anything, I would have to have our financial team look at the books and run their numbers. The nondisclosure agreement would apply to them as well, of course."

"I'd still be interested in the investment size."

We could dance around this the rest of the afternoon. Screw it. "I'd be willing to put up $5 million, provided the terms were right."

It was hard to read his reaction, disdain or glee. He simply asked, "What terms would you want?"

"Nothing too difficult. An appropriate piece of the company. We can argue about the valuation, but that's why I asked about the financials. A board seat. That's all. We won't tell you how to run the company. We won't tell you when to do your IPO. We won't tell you we have to run the IPO. We just want a percentage of the company.", I replied.

"How big a percentage?", asked Gates.

Well, he hadn't thrown me out. It reminded me of the old joke about a man who asked a woman if she would become a millionaire's mistress for a million bucks. She said, 'Yes.' Next he asked her if she would sleep with him for $100, and she asked, 'What kind of a woman do you think I am?!' His answer - 'We've already established that; now we're just negotiating.'

"Financials first."

He looked at me for a moment, and then said, "Our gross revenues for the year ending in June were between $24 and $25 million. Our gross income was between $5 and $6 million."

"Thank you." This was roughly in line with what Missy and Jake had come up with. Sales were on the high side, income was on the low side. I had been guessing gross margins of 25-50%. I knew the net income was going to be lower yet. I started doing some numbers in my head.

I looked over at my host. "I was thinking that for the $5 million, that should be worth about ten percent of the company."

Gates smiled for the first time. "That only values Microsoft as worth $50 million. That seems awfully low."

"What do you think it's worth?", I countered. Time to dicker.

"Several times that. Maybe $150 million, at least."

I shook my head. "Six times current sales? Thirty times current earnings? I would think that would be an extraordinary valuation, don't you?"

"As you said earlier, over lunch, the future is going to be digital. This is the chance to start at the ground floor with the company that will lead the way."

"The future will be digital, but the question is, will it be Microsoft? There are other companies out there as well. I can always take my money down to Palo Alto and see what other companies are doing. Heck, I can just take my money and buy land in the valley, and wait for somebody to pay us top dollar for the land!"

We went back and forth for several more rounds. I wanted to get in, but I wasn't going to slit my throat for the privilege. Likewise, Gates wanted the cash. I was offering almost his last year's gross earnings for a piece of the pie, and probably over a 50% premium over his net earnings.

It took us another hour, but we settled on a rough valuation of $100 million, which would make my offer equivalent to 5% of the company. Anything more would have to wait on our analysis of the financials. "When do you want to do this?", he asked.

"I'll call home before the end of the day. I'll get my team out here by the end of the week. I'll stick around until then. When can you make it official?", I responded.

"I'll need to meet with the board, and Paul, of course."

I nodded and stood up. "Well, you need to make your calls and I need to make mine. Speed is of the essence in the digital world, speed of the computers and speed of the deals. I want to make this happen as soon as possible."

"Understood. Go make your phone calls." We shook hands and I left.

I drove back to the Holiday Inn and dug out my address book. It was well after five on the East Coast, but I didn't care. I called Jake Senior at his home, and caught him before he went to bed.

"How did it go?", he asked. "Do you know what time it is here?"

"It's time for you to make some flight reservations. I want you and Junior out here as soon as you can, to review the books.", I replied.

"So it went well?"

"Better than I had hoped. He offered us five percent of the company and a seat on the board. I told him I would stick around until you two flew out here."

I heard Jake whistle on the other end of the line. "I'll make the calls in the morning...", he started.

I laughed. "Make the calls now! I want you two out here as soon as possible, and pack extra clothing. You guys can live out here until this is finalized! Call Junior tonight! Move, move, move!"

Jake laughed through his grumbling. "Okay, give me your number and get some rooms booked. I'll call you in the morning. I'm also telling John to smack you for keeping me from my beauty sleep."

"Lost cause, Jake."

"After he smacks you, I'm going to smack you for being a smartass!"

We hung up and I called Marilyn, and told her I wouldn't be home for a few more days. My wife was pretty good about my hours and travel. It had never been a problem before, and it wasn't this time either. She told me to come home soon, and that we were going to go see Harlan and Anna Lee in a couple of weeks.

The two Jakes flew out Wednesday afternoon, and I introduced them to Bill Gates the next morning. He in turn introduced his finance people, and we sent them all off to start working. Back in his office, he commented, "They seem competent. How did you build your group?"

"Well, three of them have been with me since I was a teenager. John and Melissa were my lawyer and stockbroker when I was 13, Jake, the older Jake, was my accountant. Jake Junior is Jake's oldest son, and he just joined his father as a tax lawyer. The first three I have known since I was a kid, and I trust them with my life. Junior I trust, too, and I trust his father to keep him in line.", I laughed.

"If the numbers work, we can do this in a few weeks time.", he told me.

"We'll make it work." I excused myself and said good-bye to the Jakes, and then left. I had an afternoon flight back home.

Chapter 73: Work and Home

Friday morning I met with John and Missy in our offices. "I gather it went well.", commented John.

I nodded and smiled. "I thought it went very well. I'll let you know after we sign the papers. Until then, nothing is definite."

"You have learned wisely, Grasshopper.", he said, imitating the television series, Kung Fu.

"Thank you, Master.", I replied, bowing towards him.

"Great, now we have you two doing bad television.", said Missy. "So tell us, how did it actually go?"

"Good. I think what did the trick was my math background. I told them that no matter how many different bankers and investors they saw, I was going to be the only one who actually understood whatever the hell they were talking about. Paul Allen, one of the cofounders, actually knew about my work with Professor Rhineburg up at RPI."

She nodded in understanding. "So you'll be our board member and the main contact."

"Sounds like. I mean, we can talk about it if anybody has a problem with it, but in this case, I think it's a necessity. As we go forward though, that will probably change."

"I think it should either be the person who brings in the deal, or somebody we all agree on.", said John.

I nodded, and Missy asked, "May I assume you will be getting directors and officers liability insurance through them?"

I actually had my mouth open to answer, but I realized I wasn't even sure what she was talking about. I motioned for her to continue. "What are you talking about?"

"Liability insurance, in case Microsoft, or any company, does something that causes a law suit. It protects you from expenses involved in any litigation.", she answered.

I looked over at my old time lawyer. "Really?"

"Really. I'll call Jake and make sure it's included in the deal. Usually it's a package deal for all the directors and officers in a company."

"Do we have it? Speaking of which, do we have any insurance on us? You know, in case old geezers, not to mention any names, fall down?"

John smiled. "It's a good thing Missy is here, otherwise I'd tell you about old geezers and young whippersnappers. Yes, I made sure we had insurance before we ever moved in here."

I looked over at Missy. "See why I keep old geezers around?"

"You have any smart comments to make about women?"

"God forbid! You'd tell Marilyn and I'd never hear the end of it!"

That earned me a laugh, and they left. I made a phone call to Taylor Hannity, the exotic vacation broker. She agreed to meet me for lunch.

We met at a place off York Road, a nice steakhouse in Hereford. Once seated, I asked her, "Have you ever done any corporate work?" I thought she told me she had, but I wanted to be sure.

She nodded. "To be fair, most of my jobs have a corporate billing. Even if it's a personal vacation, most of it goes through a company. You're a perfect case in point. It's a founder or officer, and even if it's a personal vacation, I bill the company. If they pay the company back, it's none of my business."

I shrugged and nodded in understanding. We were interrupted by the waiter taking our orders. When we were able to talk again, I asked, "What about more routine stuff? You know, regular flights, business trips, that sort of thing."

It was her turn to shrug. "I can. It's not exactly my specialty. A lot of companies will have a secretary or department that specializes in that."

"Well, we've actually gone and created a company." I slid across one of my non-nerd business cards. "We're not very big, and I just can't see us hiring somebody to handle travel arrangements. I'd much rather sub it out to somebody who knows what they're doing."

Taylor was studying my card. "So what do you do? What is... private equity and capital?"

"We invest in companies, preferably smaller companies, new companies, provide seed capital, that sort of thing."

"Such as?"

"Well, for instance..." I thought for a second. "Let's say you wanted to start a travel agency, but you don't have enough money to do it. Maybe I give you the money, but I take a piece of the company for the Buckman Group. Then, if you ever sell the agency, we get our piece of the pie. Hopefully it's worth more than what we put in originally."

She nodded thoughtfully. "You think I should start a travel agency?"

I shook my head. "That was just an example. We'd probably never invest in something that small. Besides, I wouldn't actually suggest you do that. I think that would be an excellent way to lose your shirt."

Taylor bristled a bit at that. "Are you saying I couldn't run a travel agency?"

I smiled and held up my hands plaintively. "No, but let me explain. It's more complicated than you can imagine." She nodded and let me go on. "There are two different things going on here. First, there is the commodity business. Joe Schmoe calls up and wants a couple of tickets to Miami, a cheap hotel room, and a car for the family. Money is very important. If he can do it cheaper, he will. He and the family are flying in the back of the plane, booking the cheap room facing the parking lot, and getting the special from Avis. Right?"

"Right, but that's not what I do!"

"Exactly. You do exotic imports, this guy wants a Chevy and cheap. What is going to die in your business is that commodity end."

"How so?"

"Do you have a computer, or at least a terminal?", I asked.

"I use a terminal. A lot of what I do is on a phone."

"Okay. That terminal is hooked up to a computer system on the other end. Now, you've seen these new computers right, the little ones you can put on your desk. Well, right now, they are pretty anemic, but they are getting more powerful by the day. What is going to happen is that in a few years they will be powerful enough that you won't need a special terminal, you'll be able to use a cheap computer. How does that affect the travel agency business?"

Taylor thought about it for a second, and then longer, as our meals were served. "Well, it makes it cheaper to run the business. That'd be a good thing, I would think."

"Initially, it is. But then what happens? Computers keep getting cheaper. A few years later, they are so cheap that everyone has one on their desk, either at work or at home, and any Tom, Dick, or Harry can make those reservations, without going to you and paying your commission. What happens to the business then?"

Taylor's eyes widened as she contemplated this. "That will never happen! The airlines don't want to have to deal with everybody who calls! They'll want to deal with somebody who knows what they're doing!"

"They could care less. They pay you a commission. They won't pay somebody else. With the money they save, they'll figure out how to do it!"

What I was describing was simply the coming history of the travel agent business after the invention of the Internet. And, like most other travel agents, Taylor had a hard time believing it. It was like I was telling a buggy whip maker that those new-fangled automobile contraptions were going to kill his business off. Some learned, more than a few didn't.

"Now, you won't be hurt very much.", I assured her. "You run a very specialized business catering to a high end client. They, like me, want personal service and the price isn't as important as the result. But don't ask me to invest if you start a new low end business."

"Huh!" Taylor looked a little struck by all this. "I am going to have to give this some thought."

"Also, think about the outsourcing I described. Earlier this week I had to go out to the West Coast, flying commercial, getting a crappy room and a crappy car. I flew back and now I have two other people out there. There is some more travel coming up. I'd prefer using somebody who knows us and who I knew, and who can offer us something better than the Holiday Inn and the economy Chevy Cavalier."

"Can I call you Monday?", she asked.

"Call me in the morning, and if the answer is positive, you can come out and see the operation. At the minimum, I have two guys stranded on the West Coast right now, and Marilyn and I are planning on a trip to Hawaii in a few weeks. That just came up a few days ago, by the way, but we are going to want to spend a couple of weeks out there. We don't need a fancy villa, but we'll want something nice. I can talk to you about it on Monday."

Taylor was quiet the rest of the meal, trying to digest what I told her would happen. It was the truth, though. The airlines hated the travel agents, who cost them millions of dollars a year in commissions. Once the Internet came around, and customers with computers could book flights directly, most airlines stopped paying commissions entirely, killing the industry. The few travel agents left became niche players, much like Taylor already was.

I spent part of the weekend at the office with John and Melissa, on telephone calls out to Bellevue with Jake and Junior. I was really missing modern communications! As soon as we could, I swore to get a modern digital system in, with conference calls, plenty of lines, and all the whistles and bells that businesses needed. As soon as cell phones shrunk down from the brick size to something we could carry, everybody was getting them, too. Even speakerphones were exotic in 1982. After lunch on Saturday I called it quits and went home. John was still talking to Junior about legal shit, and I just didn't care.

On the plus side, Jake Senior told us, in pretty much an awestruck tone, that we were really on to something out there. He also told me that he was negotiating our percentage up, from five to six percent. I warned him not to get greedy and blow the deal, and he promised not to.

Marilyn celebrated my good news by handing me several baby gates, to be installed across the stairwells. Charlie was becoming adventurous. "This isn't quite the way the hero gets welcomed in the movies.", I told her.

"You were expecting something a little more intimate?", she commented.

"Well, yeah!"

She lifted our son up to eye level, where he squawked and laughed. "You did the intimate thing a year and a half ago. Now, get back to work."

I took our son and juggled him as he laughed. "Mommy's not funny. Mommy needs to treat Daddy nicer!"

Marilyn took Charlie back, and handed me a bag with the baby gates. "Daddy's pushing his luck. Daddy can't chase Mommy until the baby gates are installed."

I snorted at that. "Yeah? Then Mommy better get ready, because baby gates are going in!"

I spent the rest of the weekend alternating chores and chasing Mommy around.

Monday morning Taylor called and told me she wanted to talk some more about my proposal, so I invited her to the offices. We met mid-morning, and I introduced her to John and Melissa. "I'm talking to Taylor about outsourcing our travel needs.", I explained.

"Good idea.", commented John. "I was talking to Jake last night and he and Junior are staying in a crappy Holiday Inn in Seattle. There has to be something better than that. It was also a pain to drive down to BWI. They had to get his wife to take the pair of them down, and will need to be picked up when they get back."

"Yeah, I told them to call and maybe I'd free up to do it.", added Missy.

"Do you see a need for this kind of travel in the future, routinely?", asked Taylor.

I glanced at the others, and then nodded. "Probably. It might come in spurts. Right now we are doing business with a company out in Washington, and I've traveled there for a few days, we have another two guys out there now, and probably I'll be going back, as well as these two. Then we might be doing something elsewhere."

John quickly interjected. "We should have done this before, but you'll need to sign a non-disclosure agreement. What we do here is confidential. You can't speak about it, or where we travel to."

"I would never do that!"

He smiled, and said, "I never thought you did. It's just the lawyer in me."

"Just what do you do here, anyhow?", she asked, curious.

Missy gave her a quick rundown of the private equity and venture capital business, and then tossed in, "There will probably be some travel to New York, too, to see people on the Street."

I hadn't thought of that, and I nodded in agreement. "Westminster is the nearest airport. Maybe we can get connecting flights or something from here to larger airports if we are flying commercial. Of course, someday, when we're big enough, we'll just buy our own fleet of jets." I said this with a laugh. "Hey, you never know!"

"I like that idea!", agreed John.

"Something to work for.", said Missy.

I decided to break it up for the moment. "Okay, let me take Taylor into my office. We can work out some details. Priority One is to get the two Jakes into decent quarters closer to where they are. Priority Two is to get Marilyn, Charlie, and me to Honolulu in a couple of weeks. We are visiting an old army buddy and his family who's stationed out there."

John snorted. "How come all of your army buddies are in Hawaii and all of mine are in Nebraska? Something's not quite right about that."

"How long are you going to be gone?", asked Melissa. "What if they need you in Bellevue?"

I nodded towards Taylor. "That's what we're going to be paying her to figure out." I turned to her. "You can sort that out?"

"Absolutely."

We made a deal where any of us, or Jake's secretary, could call Taylor at her office and make arrangements for travel. The bills would cross either my desk or John's, so we would keep some control on things. Further, vacations, nice high end vacations, would be available. If we closed on the Microsoft deal, I was going to give everyone involved a week wherever they wanted, my treat. We got a message out to the two Jakes to call Taylor at her office about a better hotel, and then she and I sorted out heading out to Hawaii.

At that point, I announced I was done for the day, and handed Taylor off to John to get the non-disclose signed. Then I drove out to the Mount Carmel Road building site. The excavation was done now, and the crawlspace had been poured. The framing was going to start next week. I needed to take Marilyn over to the kitchen designer for a last minute meeting. That was scheduled for after lunch. I went home and made sandwiches for all of us, and then I loaded her and Charlie up and we headed out.

Back when I was selling homes, it was gospel that what sold the homes were the bathrooms and kitchens. Marilyn wanted a fancy bathroom. That was pretty easy. Separate tub and shower, double vanity, decent size linen closet. That was what we had before, or almost. On the first go, we had a combo tub and shower unit. Now I had the room to do both. I made sure the shower was two-person (in case we both needed to get clean at the same time) and I made the tub unit a big whirlpool type, which she loved.

The kitchen I wanted big and fancy. The kitchen was an important part of the house, and very important to a cook like me. Marilyn could get by with a microwave oven, and be convinced it and a refrigerator was all she needed. Me, not so much. I wanted a double oven and a gigantic fridge, with a freezer unit in the utility room. Lots of cabinets and counter space, and a large island. I debated getting a Sub-Zero fridge, one of the enormous types, but then I remembered a trick we used to do in the days I was selling homes. Clayton had a setup where they would park two matching refrigerators side by side, with the doors opening towards each other. If you lined them up right, got them close together, and leveled them up right, it looked like a Sub-Zero at a fraction of the cost.

I also made sure we had a dishwasher. Marilyn thought that was silly, and on the first go, wouldn't spend the money. She insisted that she was the only one in the house who knew how to wash dishes properly, by hand, with a dishcloth. Brushes or scrubbies wouldn't do. The kids and I were constantly picking through the dishes to find clean ones. We argued about that for over thirty years, before I scraped up enough money to rebuild the kitchen.

That afternoon, we signed off on the final details and specifications. I wasn't going for anything exotic. I didn't need Italian marble countertops; a decent Formica with a beveled edge was just fine. The same went for the cabinets. I didn't need handmade frosted cherry (which my mother had done). A fairly standard light stained maple from a regular production cabinetry company was quite fine. I'm not a snob, but I did want functionality and practicality. I selected for a number of oddball drawers and cabinets, so I could hide different types of pans and appliances and cutting boards. It would be good looking and practical and comfortable. I wasn't pushing for Better Homes and Gardens.

Then we all went home. I was enjoying this gentleman of leisure lifestyle! I teased my wife about fooling around, but Charlie wasn't sleepy. Fun and games would have to wait until after dinner. Marilyn did some knitting and I read some magazines, and we goofed off the rest of the day.

Chapter 74: Hawaii

I had been to Hawaii twice before, once on my first time around, and the other with Marilyn on the trip her parents gave us for our wedding. My first time, way back when, we had stayed at a resort on Hawaii itself, the Big Island, and while we did a little traveling, we never left the island. On the trip this time, we had stayed at the Hilton Hawaiian Village, which is on Waikiki Beach near Diamond Head.

This time was going to be a bit different. Harlan and Anna Lee might be living in paradise, but they wouldn't be living on the beach in paradise. Harlan, despite being an all around great guy and fine fellow, was just another regular payday captain in the army. He had made Captain at about the time I was being discharged. They told us they had a place on base, and Schofield Barracks is pretty much in the center of the island, not on the waterfront. I talked to Taylor about it, and she had actually been out there. She suggested the Royal Hawaiian - why stay at the same place as before!

Flying to Hawaii is one of those forever flights, because that's how long they take. Taylor's itinerary had us getting ferried to BWI by Lloyd Jarrett in a turboprop, and then flying nonstop to LAX, where we would catch another flight to Honolulu. No matter what, it takes an entire day to go there and an entire day to get back. I figured in another couple of years, we would be able to charter a plane even for this, and not just to go to the Caribbean. At the moment, unless it was company business, I thought it was a bit extravagant.

I was also worried about what my friend would say. He knew me as just another asshole captain in the Army. He knew I had blown my knee out, and that I was medicalled, although I had yet to tell him about the vacation jaunt in Nicaragua. He didn't know, though, that I had serious money. He was bound to find out, sooner or later, and I just hoped it didn't screw things up. Most of my life I had hidden my wealth, although that was becoming more difficult. Originally it had just been my lawyer and accountant; now it included all of the Buckman group, Marilyn and her family, and Tusker and Tessa. Very soon and it would become impossible to hide; I would only be able to disguise the extent, not the existence.

I just hoped it wouldn't screw up our friendship. Big money can change things between people.

We flew out of Westminster at oh-dark-hundred, before dawn, in order to catch the earliest possible flight to Los Angeles. Marilyn had screamed at the inability to take more than two large suitcases, but I kept reminding her that where we were staying we could get housekeeping to do the laundry. (I didn't tell her what that would cost; why cause trouble!) Because of the time difference, we made it into LAX around 11:00, and then transferred to a different flight. That left a little after noon, which got us into Honolulu around 5:00 in the afternoon by my watch. Just to make it more confusing, they don't have Daylight Savings Time in Hawaii, so we were landing at 2:00 PM Hawaii Time. Even with first class seating, and even though Charlie had been an absolute perfect angel, it was still mind-numbingly exhausting!

Anna Lee and Roscoe met us at the gate. Roscoe was sleeping in a stroller. As soon as we came through, she jumped up and down and waved to us. I was too tired to do anything other than wave back, but Marilyn dumped Charlie on me and scampered over and gave our friend a big hug. I trailed behind, burdened by my son and his gargantuan diaper bag. I swear, I could carry him inside it!

"Hi, Carl! Good to see you! Oh my God, that must be Charlie!", gushed Anna Lee excitedly. "Oh, I want to see him!"

I handed him across. "Here you go, then. Feel free to keep him. Send him back in about 17 years or so." I handed the diaper bag to my wife. "Your son smells. I think he needs a new diaper!"

"Some father you are!", answered Marilyn. She smiled down at Roscoe, who was stirring awake. "Hi there, Roscoe! Remember me? It's your Aunt Marilyn!"

Roscoe took one look around at the busy terminal and let out a wail. I just rolled my eyes. "You two handle offspring. Let's get out of everyone's way. It's safer." The women took the babies off to the bathrooms and I dug out the luggage tags and waited for them to return.

They were gone the better part of fifteen minutes. Anna Lee led us down to Baggage Claim, and it's a good thing she did, since the signs made no sense whatsoever. She pointed me towards the carousel. We had Marilyn's two suitcases, my B-4 and a hanging bag stuffed to capacity, and a suitcase and rolled up stroller for Charlie. I got most of the stuff and dragged the suitcases out of the throng and dumped them in front of Marilyn. "Hold onto these. We're still one short." I dove back into the mass of people and got to the front just in time to see my hanging bag disappear around the other side of the carousel. I had to wait another few minutes for it to circle around before I could grab it.

I bulled my way out again, and got in front of the ladies, who had wisely pulled everything back towards a wall. I dropped the hanging bag on top of the others and bent backwards, stretching. Then I leaned forward and got a hug from Anna Lee. "It's good to see you."

"Same here! Oh, Carl, your son is adorable!"

I glanced over at Charlie, now sitting in his stroller. He had slept most of the flight and now was looking around curiously. Next to him was Roscoe, now about a year-and-a-half old, who had stopped fussing and was working on a bottle of formula. "Really? Adorable?" I looked over at Marilyn. "Did we get an adorable child someplace? Was there a mix-up at the airport?"

"You are an awful person.", she replied. "I don't know why I married you!"

I simply held my hands out, palms towards each other about a foot apart. "Do you really want me to answer that?"

That earned me a squawk of outrage from Marilyn and a loud laugh from Anna Lee. "You sound just like Harlan.", she said.

"Hey, I've seen your husband in the shower, back in boot camp. You know what they say about black guys? It's just not true." That got another set of laughs and squawks.

"I'm going to tell him you said that. So where are you staying?"

"The Royal Hawaiian." I dug out my paperwork. "Know where it is?"

"Sure. Do you have a car reserved?"

"Supposed to. Where's your worse half?"

"He had duty. He'll see you tomorrow. He's taking a few days off."

The rental cars weren't at the airport, but offsite, so we had to wait around for a shuttle bus over to the rental area. I grabbed as many bags as I could carry, and hobbled and waddled my way over. The ladies each grabbed a bag and started pushing the strollers. At that point Anna Lee and Roscoe took off, Anna Lee promising to meet us over there in her car. Between the shuttle bus and the line at the counter it took us almost twenty minutes to discover my reserved full size Ford was not available. I could, however, rent a full size Lincoln for only a small upcharge. What a racket! I was too tired to care and if I argued I'd probably lose the Lincoln. I signed on the dotted line and got the keys.

We loaded everything up in the car, and then we found Anna Lee as we left the rental area. She was driving a blue Ford Fairmont Futura, probably the world's ugliest car. She had the window rolled down and was waving at us. She yelled out, "Follow me!" We nodded back and followed her out of the airport. It wasn't hard to follow her, since the Fairmont was easy to see, with its two tone paint job and weird vinyl roof.

The Royal Hawaiian was not just one more of the big towering behemoths lining the beach west of Diamond Head. It was an older style hotel that was startlingly pink in an age of concrete and glass. I would have preferred a bungalow of some sort, but they simply didn't exist in an area convenient to us. We had a suite reserved. Who knew - maybe we could have a luau and get Gidget and Moon Doggie to sing. Still, after an entire day on airplanes, it looked like heaven.

Our two car caravan pulled up to the front, and Marilyn and I got out. Anna Lee stayed in her car. We walked over to her, and she said, "I can't stay. I need to get back to the base and start dinner. You've got our number?"

"Yeah. I don't know what ours is, but if you call the main desk, I'm sure they'll put you through.", I replied.

"Great! I'd get out and help, but I'd probably have to put my car in parking, and these places cost a fortune. We'll talk tomorrow." She waved and took off.

Marilyn and I headed over to the car, where a bellman approached us. "Checking in, sir?"

"Yes, and can we get a valet to take this off our hands?"

"Certainly, sir." He made a hand motion and a second man came over. We got the luggage loaded on a cart, and I handed over our keys and a tip to the valet, getting a receipt in turn. The bellman led us to the front desk.

I laid my paperwork down on the registration counter.

"Aloha!", said a perky and pretty tanned Oriental girl. "Checking in?"

"Aloha to you, too. Yes, please, we are. We're the Buckmans." I slid my reservation notice across the counter.

Keani, that was her name according to her name tag, took the notice and went through her paperwork on her side of the counter, to pull out a set and start sorting through it. "Yes, sir, one of the Royal Hawaiian suites, the King Kamehameha Suite, very nice."

"Great! Right now I would almost settle for a beat up No Tell Motel. Where do I sign? I have been flying since dawn!"

She laughed and slid the paperwork across to me, with several Xs where I needed to John Hancock them. "Sorry about that, but if Paradise was easy to get to, it wouldn't be Paradise."

Marilyn laughed and I snorted. "I hear you. Of course, this is about as close to Paradise as I'll ever get. Saint Peter's never going to let me through the Pearly Gates." That got laughs all around.

King Kamehameha must have done well for himself. We had two bedrooms, a gigantic living room and dining room, and a small wet bar. I tipped the bellman, and Marilyn turned Charlie loose to look around.

"It's gorgeous!", said Marilyn.

"It's not bad.", I said, agreeing with her. I opened the sliding glass door up and was hit with the warm tropical breeze. I could look out at the beach and the ocean lapping slowly at the sand. "I really can't argue with you."

"We should have them stay with us for the weekend.", added Marilyn. "We've got the second bedroom. We can put the boys out here in the main room and they can have the other bedroom." She looked over at me for confirmation.

"Sounds good to me. Let's ask them. No reason not to.", I said, nodding.

We unpacked, and then the first thing I did was to call back to the office and leave the phone number to the suite on the answering machine, with a note that we were six hours behind them, so don't call when they came into the office. That would be three in the morning, and I would be cranky.

I unpacked my stuff and grabbed my toilet kit and a towel (we had towel and linen service.) After a quick shower and a change of clothes, I went out into the living room and lay down on the couch. I was just going to wait for Marilyn to come back, but I woke up about two hours later. It was still light outside, although Marilyn was snoring in the bedroom. I shook myself awake and looked in on her; she had simply collapsed on the bed still in her travel clothes. Charlie was curled up next to her.

I sat down next to her and nudged her shoulder. She grumbled in her sleep and tried to roll away. I nudged her again. "Come on, sleepyhead, wake up."

"Go away.", she grumbled.

"Come on. If you stay asleep now, you'll be up all night. Go get cleaned up and we can go eat."

Marilyn grumbled some more, but swung her legs off the bed and sat upright. "What's for dinner?"

"Seafood and booze. Lots and lots of booze!" She just nodded and went into the bathroom. Charlie stayed sleeping on the bed. I looked him over and propped a couple of pillows around him to keep him from rolling off the bed in his sleep. Out in the living room I found a book showing the restaurants and services at the Royal Hawaiian. I shook my head as I looked over the list or rooms, since they all looked alike. I remembered learning during my Information Theory classes that the Hawaiian language only has twelve letters, less than half of what is in the English language. When you have a small symbol set, information density is limited, so you have large words that all look and sound alike.

We went downstairs and had dinner and about three or four drinks. We were too tired to do much more than push the stroller around the place and look at the beach. After the late local news, which is always interesting when you are in a foreign place, Marilyn and I went to bed and fell asleep, exhausted.

The next morning we were woken up by Charlie, yelling up a storm in his crib. Marilyn and I nudged each other, trying to get the other one to go to work. I won, and Marilyn grumbled and got up, throwing her robe on to retrieve our son. I climbed out of bed, too, and headed into the bathroom. I returned to find her changing his diaper. "You want more of this?", I commented. Marilyn had recently begun quizzing me about when we could make the family bigger.

She grinned at me and handed me a very young man. "Absolutely! Don't you?!"

"That is questionable at best."

Marilyn laughed. "Go warm up a bottle and feed him." I was dispatched to fatherly duties while my wife went into the bathroom. I knew she would be in there the rest of the morning.

I set Charlie down for a moment and pulled on some gym shorts, and then he and I headed towards the kitchenette. I made some formula from powder and started warming it up in the microwave. I don't mind the input; it's the output that is the problem. Afterwards, I handed him the bottle and he fielded it like a pro. I took him and his seat outside to the patio and looked around.

Marilyn came out dressed in shorts and a tank top, with regular industrial strength underwear beneath them. This was another reminder this was a family vacation and not a 'mommy-daddy' vacation. She found me under the sunlight and Charlie gurgling happily and waving around his empty bottle. "Is this how you take care of your son!?", he protested.

I looked over and waved at Charlie, who waved both arms back at me. "He doesn't seem any worse for the wear. Where could he go?"

"Daddy thinks he's so funny!" She picked him up and carried him back inside. "You don't even have a sunhat on!", she told him. I rolled my eyes and looked back out at the sea for a moment.

"What's for breakfast? He might be satisfied with a bottle, but I'm not.", asked Marilyn.

"Hey, back in college, that was the breakfast of champions."

"Well, we're not back in college. Don't give your son any ideas.", she answered primly.

I laughed at her. "Give me a break. He's not even a year old yet." I looked at him and said, "Do as I say and not as I do. When you're old enough, I'll tell you about what Mommy was like in college." Almost in response, Charlie started gurgling happily and flapping his arms. "He likes that idea!"

My wife's eyes widened at that. "You wouldn't dare!"

I mimed toking on a joint, at which Marilyn squawked in outrage, and headed towards the bathroom. "Give me a few minutes and we'll go out for breakfast."

Breakfast was one of the strangest meals I'd had in a long time. Good, but strange. We ate in the main restaurant of the Royal Hawaiian, and you had the usual suspects - eggs, pancakes, bacon, and so forth - along with some tropical highlights like passion fruit/orange juice/guava juice mix. I ordered my standard eggs over easy with bacon. Then I said to Marilyn, "I'm kind of surprised they don't have Spam on the menu."

"What's Spam?", she replied.

I smiled and shook my head. "All those years around the Army and you don't know what Spam is? Are you sure you're an American?"

Marilyn stuck her tongue out at me. "So? I've heard of it, I guess. What is Spam, anyway?"

I gave her a wry smile. "S-P-A-M, Spare Parts, Assorted Meats!" That was the standard Army answer. "Actually, nobody knows for sure. I think it's all the leftover pieces of ham you get when you carve up a pig. They grind it up and cram it into cans. It's not the worst stuff in the world. Hell, my old man eats scrapple, that's even worse!"

"What's scrapple?"

"I'm not entirely sure, but from what I've seen, it's the stuff rejected by the Spam people."

Marilyn said, "Yuck!" I just nodded in agreement.

"Anyway, I mention that because Hawaii has four times the per capita consumption of Spam as anywhere else? It dates back to World War II.", I told her.

"What's it taste like?"

I shrugged. "Like ham sausage, sort of. It's okay. I prefer it sliced or cubed, and then fried." Heaven knows, if you hang around the army long enough, you'll get to eat Spam. "I'll get some with my eggs and you can have some."

There was a message light lit on the phone when we got back to the room. Before I could check on it, the phone rang again. I was closest, so I picked it up. "Fortress of Solitude, Superman speaking."

A loud bass laugh came from the other end. "In a pig's eye! If you're Superman, I'd prefer Lex Luthor!"

"Harlan, how they hanging?"

"Just like always, one below the other. You just getting up?"

"We've already been out to breakfast. We just got back."

"Well, drive on up. I'll meet you out at the main gate. Half an hour.", he said.

I looked over at my wife "Make it an hour. Half an hour to drive and half an hour to get Marilyn out the door." I hung up and turned to Marilyn. "Let's put everything away and go."

"Okay, first we need to change a diaper." She picked up Charlie and headed towards his bedroom.

We made it there in just under the hour I had allotted. Marilyn didn't take as long as I thought she would, but we had to get the car from the valet and get directions back to the highway. We ended up on H2, which ended just after you passed Wheeler Air Force Base and dumped us on Wilikina Drive. Harlan was sitting in the Ford Fairmont on the grassy shoulder of Wilikina. I beeped the horn at him and he simply waved, and then made a 'Follow Me!' gesture and pulled out. I followed him through the gate and to a residential area. He pulled up in front of a small duplex. I parked behind him and we all got out of our cars.

"Damn, boy, every time I see you, you just keep getting uglier and uglier! I almost didn't recognize you with that faggoty mustache and beard.", he asked.

"When Halloween comes around, I'm buying an eye patch and a sword, and I'll pretend I'm a pirate. You're still as ugly as ever. Who'd you have to blow to get a cushy gig like this?"

"Screw you." We shook hands and then he looked over and said, "Marilyn, what are you still doing with this guy? You could be doing so much better!"

"I keep telling him that, too." She handed me Charlie in his car seat. "Where's your better half? I need a beer and somebody to complain to about men." She kissed him on the cheek and then headed towards the house.

"Is that any particular men, or just a general men?", my friend asked me.

"Probably both. Say hello to the latest transgressor." I lifted up the car seat and Charlie looked at Harlan with wide eyes.

"Damn, he's too cute to be your son." As we watched, Charlie's little face screwed up and he looked like he was concentrating, and then he relaxed happily. "I think I know what that means."

"It means it's time to go inside and find his mother!"

"We're having sandwiches for lunch and a barbecue later.", said Harlan.

"Sounds good!"

We went inside and then on through to the back yard. All the windows in the house were open, and the breeze was blowing through. "No air conditioning?", I asked.

"Don't have one. Don't need one. Same with the furnace. Don't have it and don't need it. However, we do have a fireplace.", he told me.

"A fireplace?!"

Harlan grinned. "Everything was built before the war, and they used blueprints from somewhere on the Mainland. Since officer's quarters had fireplaces, well..."

I just shook my head in disbelief. That sounded like perfect Army thinking.

I remember when I was on the Big Island my first time through, seeing the construction standards and telling Marilyn that if I even looked at blueprints like that, I could get arrested back home. Housing construction was marginal at best compared to stateside, but it was satisfactory for paradise. It never got hot enough to need to cool down and never got cold enough to need warming. There were no floods or blizzards. Most homes had no insulation. On the Big Island, where the topsoil was only an inch deep, if that, and under which was volcanic rock, a lot of houses had the water and sewer lines lying on top of the ground. Un-fucking-believable!

I gave Charlie back to his mother and grabbed a chair around the table on the back patio while Harlan went back inside and grabbed some Budweisers. Marilyn picked up Charlie and held him to her nose, then looked daggers at me and took him inside. "I think I just got busted.", I whispered.

"No shit, Sherlock!", he said quietly back.

Roscoe toddled out through the open door, wearing his diaper and a t-shirt/shorts outfit. He had a binkie in his mouth and came over to me, looking up at me with curiosity. Who was this new guy in his house? Satisfied, he kept moving along, to a Little Tikes playhouse in the corner. "He's growing like a weed.", I commented. The last time I had seen him he hadn't been much younger than Charlie was now.

"Tell me about it! It's a good thing I'm in shape, because he has more energy than Anna Lee and I do together."

"Charlie, too. He's just figured out crawling, and he doesn't go around things, he goes through them!"

The moms came out of the house, with Anna Lee carrying Charlie and Marilyn holding a beer and an iced tea. She set the iced tea down in front of Anna Lee. Charlie was deposited in his seat on the side of the table and the ladies sat down with us. I cocked my beer bottle over at our hostess. "Not drinking?"

She shook her head and smiled. "I can't, or at least, I shouldn't."

"Huh?"

Anna Lee gave Harlan a sly smile but didn't say anything else. It was Marilyn who twigged to it first. "Oh my God! Congratulations!"

I looked at my wife. "What are you talking about?!"

"She's pregnant, silly!"

I swiveled my head to my old friend, who was grinning back at me. "I assume you had something to do with this."

"So I've been told. She keeps telling me she's going to get an outside contractor, though."

I snorted and rolled my eyes. "Well, congratulations the pair of you. Now I will never hear the end of it from her."

"That's right!", gushed Marilyn. "We need to catch up!"

"Catch up? With him around, I can't even catch my breath!", I answered.

"I can chase one while you chase the other."

I stuck my tongue out at her. "Then we can't do it. With my leg, I'll never be able to keep up."

Marilyn simply wagged her finger at me. "Forget it! I don't want to hear it!"

I just rolled my eyes and drank some more beer. Marilyn and Anna Lee sat there and discussed baby and maternity related topics, which interested me not in the slightest. I shifted my chair around to keep an eye on them, but more to face Harlan.

He did the same. We talked about when the baby was due, and then the conversation invariably drifted to the Army. "So, what's the army got you doing out here, defending this little slice of Heaven?", I asked.

"It's like I told you before, I've got a battery of M109s here with the 25th."

I smiled. "The Electric Strawberry needs self-propelled 155s?" The shoulder flash of the 25th Infantry was red with a lightning bolt through it; it looked exactly like a bright red strawberry with a lightning bolt. "Which brigade?"

He shook his head. "None of them. We're divisional level. The brigades are still using motorized 105s, like you had."

"As long as you don't have to hump around those shells. I used to have a second lieutenant who managed to drop one on his foot while training at Sill. He showed up two weeks late in a cast." We laughed through a description of Lucky Lou.

"Man, I can't believe you are out. I always figured you as a lifer.", Harlan said after going back for another round of beers. Marilyn and Anna Lee had gone off to the kitchen to make ham and cheese sandwiches, with Roscoe following them, and now we were on our third beer of the afternoon.

"It's the knee, man, no way around it."

"Just how bad is it?"

I shrugged. "Most of the time I just have a bit of a limp. What happened was I ripped up a bunch of ligaments and messed up most of the cartilage in the joint. I can walk okay as long as I keep a brace or bandage on it, but forget about any distance, and no running either."

"How'd it happen?"

"This is what happens when you leave a perfectly good airplane in mid-flight, before they have a chance to land and stop. I had a really bad landing. Simple as that.", I replied.

"When was this, when you were down in South America?" The Buckminsters had visited us in Fayetteville the summer right before I had visited Honduras. "The last time I saw you you were still a first lieutenant exec of a company of 105s, about to be promoted and sent to Fort Sill. The next thing I hear, you're a captain somewhere south in taco land. What gives?"

I shrugged. "Sh..." I glanced over at Roscoe, who was in earshot, and amended myself. " ... stuff happens." Anna Lee and Marilyn gave me superior looking nods of approval. "We got tasked to provide a battalion task force to go down to Honduras to train their army. That's in Central America, by the way, not South America."

"Whatever. Nobody cares. Keep going."

"So, we had a battalion of paratroopers, and my battery got tasked to be the support battery, plus the usual whistles and bells for support. Then the State Department weighed in on things. I had been running the battery as an exec without a captain just fine, but that wasn't good enough. We needed a captain, so division rushed my promotion through and gave me the battery officially. By the way, that really pissed off my CO. I was glad to be away!"

"Hmmph!", grumped my wife. "I wasn't so thrilled!"

"It's not like they asked me about any of it, honey."

"So your bad jump was in Honduras?"

I drained my beer and reached for another. "Uh, yeah."

It must have sounded odd to Harlan. He looked at me funny and asked, "So, what happened?"

"It's like I said, I had a bad landing."

Marilyn grabbed her handbag and reached inside. "You might as well tell him the rest. He's going to learn sooner or later."

That sobered me up some, and I sat upright and was saying, "Marilyn, stop it..."

She didn't. She pulled out a mini-photo album and flipped through it, and opened it to a small picture of me getting the Bronze Star at my discharge parade. I simply groaned when Harlan picked it up and looked at it. "What is that?"

"Carling got the Bronze Star.", answered Marilyn.

I muttered something under my breath, and Harlan handed the photo album to his wife. "The Bronze Star? They don't give the Bronze Star out for bad jumps. Just what the hell did you do?"

"It was nothing really!"

"Carl, it wasn't nothing, and you know it!", protested Marilyn.

"It's classified.", I answered back.

"Who are they going to tell!?", she replied.

I just shook my head in exasperation. Marilyn simply didn't believe the concept of security applied to her. She couldn't keep her mouth shut if you stapled her lips together! "Marilyn!"

"Come on, buddy, give!", said Harlan. Anna Lee looked on curiously, too.

I rubbed my face. "Okay, this is what happened. We were down there training the Honduran Army. Really routine stuff, good neighbors and all that crap. So, anyway, we're nearing the end of the deployment, when the general running this whole shebang, a frigging one jump chump, comes up with this great plan to cement US-Honduran relations. He's going to have the Honduran Air Force drop the American paratroopers and we're going to drop the Hondurans."

Harlan was following this closely. He also understood my reference to the straight leg, since he now had his paratrooper wings as well. "Okay, I'm following you. I'm guessing this didn't work out too well?"

I snorted and shook my head. "Not hardly. Here's where it gets crazy. One of the paratroop companies was missing their FIST officer, and I got tasked to provide one from my battery. No biggie. My mistake was that I said it was going to be my last jump in Honduras and my last jump with the division. As soon as I got back home I was going to Sill. So rather than pick one of my second lieutenants, I went myself. I mean, the whole thing was supposed to be a daytime milk run, almost a Hollywood jump, only with light weapons."

Harlan nodded slowly. "And?"

"And the Honduran Air Force was using C-47s, not 130s or 141s. It was an absolute disaster!"

It took Harlan a few moments to figure it out. A look of horrified comprehension suffused his face when he did. "C-47s? You don't mean..."

"Bingo! We were jumping from World War II era Goony Birds!"

"Holy shit!"

"Harlan!", scolded his wife.

Roscoe didn't seem to notice, though, and Harlan just waved her off. "So, what happened?"

I sighed. "It was a world class soup sandwich. One of the birds blew a piston, and it took us until the middle of the night to rebuild the plane. Instead of being the pathfinders, we ended up tail end Charlie, dropping at the end of the exercise. Mostly that went well, but the plane I was on, the pilot got lost, and after a bit, he just turned on the green light and dumped us out. It took us most of a week to get back to civilization."

"You weren't over the drop zone?"

"Harlan, I'm just glad he didn't drop us in the ocean! He didn't have a clue where he was."

"Okay, so that really sucks. You blew your knee out landing where you weren't supposed to." I just nodded at that. "So they still don't hand out Bronze Stars for getting lost."

I laughed at that. "No they don't. Okay, here's the story. The captain of the company, who I was jumping with, he broke his neck on landing. A private got killed on landing, and another one ripped up his leg worse than I did. The platoon leader I was jumping with was a numbnuts second john who couldn't find his ass with a flashlight and a map. I had to take over the stick of troopers and get them back home. That's what I got it for."

"No, there's more than that."

I looked at him and then shrugged. "Okay, but remember, this is totally classified. The entire operation took place in Honduras. We landed in Honduras. We were lost in Honduras. If you were to ever hear any rumors about any other events taking place, it would be your responsibility as an officer to report those rumors to G-2."

Harlan's eyes widened. "What kind of rumors?"

"Rumors that the Goony Bird dropped the stick not in Honduras, but a hundred miles to the south, in a different country, where they were in the middle of a hostile Communist army and surrounded by drug runners. Rumors that it took them three days to get to a place where they could catch a dustoff, all the while avoiding the Sandanistas. And especially any rumors that the dustoff had to take place at an occupied drug running airfield, which needed to be captured during a nighttime combat assault. If you ever hear rumors like that, you should immediately report them to higher authority, so they can track down these total untruths. Got it?"

"Shit!", he whispered. Anna Lee was kind of staring at us both. Marilyn had a little half smile on her face.

I smiled. "It wasn't all that impressive. The combat assault simply rousted out a bunch of stoned out drug guards, or so the rumor says. Now remember, those are simply rumors. The truth is that we were on a training mission in Honduras. Hey, it's over. We made it home, I got to a hospital, end of story. I'm a civilian now, and now you can tell me lies about what you are doing to protect the homeland from the godless Communist hordes."

We talked some more. With any luck, Harlan would have his chance to shine in a few years. With some real luck, Harlan would be able to grow old without having that chance to shine. My little taste of something that wasn't just a training exercise was more than sufficient for me. I was now a devout pacifist!

"So, what are you doing now? You got out in January. What have you been doing since then?", asked Anna Lee.

Marilyn answered excitedly. "Well, we moved back home, Carl's home, not mine, in Maryland, and now we're building a house! Next time you are back there, you'll have to come and visit us!"

"You're building a house?", asked Harlan.

I nodded. "That was kind of the deal. I didn't want to move to upstate New York and she didn't want to live near the city, so we made a deal. I would buy some rural property and build her a house. We closed on it this spring and they just started the framing. I am hoping to move in this fall sometime. Hoping, anyway." I knew enough construction to know it always took longer, and cost more, than the most pessimistic initial estimates.

My friend gave me a bit of an odd look and said, "So, who do you do for work now?"

Marilyn started to answer that, but then she shut her mouth and looked at me. I answered obliquely. "I went into business. I'm with an investment company with some people I knew from before I got into the army. Now that I'm out, it's what I do."

"An investment company? You mean, like stocks and bonds, that sort of thing?"

I nodded and shrugged at the same time. "Sort of. It's mostly investing in different companies, some startups, that sort of thing. I'm in operations and planning. Speaking of which..." I turned and looked at Marilyn. "Before we left, I was talking to John. There's a good chance I might need to fly out next week for a day, to sign some papers. It's not definite yet, though. I left the number to the room with the office, so they might call us."

"And what are we supposed to do?"

"Honey, it's not like I'd be stranding you in the desert. Heck, you and Anna Lee can go and sacrifice Charlie and Roscoe to the volcano gods. Maybe you can get a two for one deal going." That earned me a raspberry.

One amusing moment came when Harlan tasked me to help him harvest some mangoes. They had a mango tree in their yard, and it turns out that mango trees are very fruitful and if you don't pick them and do something with them, the ripen quickly and start rotting and the fruit flies are incredibly bothersome. We were to take a big bag of them back to the Royal Hawaiian with us. We hung around the rest of the afternoon, and as the day ended and turned towards evening, Harlan set up the grill and we did some burgers. Charlie was still working on formula plus some rice, which looked like something out of Oliver Twist. More gruel, please! Roscoe, on the other hand, was eating a hamburger and bun, though very, very sloppily, and drinking from a sippy cup. More to look forward to.

It was starting to get dark when we broke up the party. We made plans for the Buckminsters to come down to the Royal Hawaiian tomorrow and go swimming with us. I would be able to show them the plans for the new house, which I had in my briefcase. Later, during the week, Harlan would get me into the base and I would have a chance to see his command. This would be interesting to me, but not to Marilyn. I still wouldn't be able to see his M109s. According to Harlan they were simply too powerful and long ranged to be fired on Oahu, so they were mothballed. When they wanted to fire them, they would barge them over to the Big Island and take them up into the mountains, where it can get damn chilly, surprising everybody.

Otherwise, we goofed off. We were on vacation. I teased Marilyn a number of times about how the next trip we made, without Charlie, was going to be different, and that I had Taylor looking for clothing optional resorts. That definitely got her saying "NO! NO! NO!" (Just like Roscoe was starting to say!) but I just laughed at her. Then I told her that there were actually resorts for swinging and swapping, which pretty much blew her mind! I didn't know if the Hedonism resorts were up and running yet, but it didn't matter, since we would never have gone to one in any case. Still, it was fun to watch her reaction! I told her I could compromise, sticking to the clothing optional package, but she wasn't even buying that idea. She kept protesting and I kept laughing.

We didn't spend our entire time with the Buckminsters. We spent several days just on our own, sightseeing. Also, a couple of evenings we left Charlie with our friends and went out to dinner on our own, and we returned the favor, taking Roscoe while Mommy and Daddy had a date night. Roscoe wasn't thrilled about that ("NO! NO! NO!") but we ignored him and he settled down. One of those nights for us, we went to see Don Ho at his new domed showroom next to the Hilton Hawaiian Village. Taylor had gotten us tickets. The show was nice, and Marilyn certainly enjoyed it. Me, well, it was nice, but Tiny Bubbles was never all that big with me. Cute dancers, though. It was just good to get out for the night!

I stayed in touch with John during the vacation. It was easier if I called the office at 9 AM Hawaii time, which was 3 PM Eastern time. If John wasn't in the office, I would try him at his old office, where he was tidying up old business. That was when I confirmed I would need to fly to Seattle again, before my vacation was over. Closing documents needed to be signed on Tuesday. I had him let Taylor know, and she would arrange transportation. I wanted a quick day trip, without any staying over. She could call me with details and send me an itinerary and whatever I would need. Likewise, John could send me any paperwork I needed to take with me.

On Friday and Saturday several envelopes showed up by way of FedEx, then known as Federal Express. One envelope had some documents related to the investment, with John's comments jotted in the margins; I would sign the clean versions on Tuesday. Another envelope was from Taylor, and had instructions for my flight to SeaTac and back. That I looked at with considerable interest.

For her part, Marilyn was not amused by the flight plans. It was about a five or six hour flight from Hawaii to Seattle, and because I would be traveling west to east, I would add another three hours to the trip. If I was to arrive in Bellevue at 9 AM Tuesday, I needed to fly out around midnight Monday night. I could catch a cab and leave the Lincoln for Marilyn. I kissed her good-bye and told her I would call when I got there.

The only airport big enough to handle international traffic was Honolulu. Even travel back and forth from the Mainland required that you go through a Department of Agriculture screening station, sort of like Customs but a lot less invasive, since they can't allow any new species on the islands, and fruit flies from the islands can't be allowed loose on the Mainland. The charter base was across the runway, on the other side of the airport, from the main terminal.

The pilot was waiting for me in the charter operations office when I got there. He looked up when I arrived. "Are you Mister Buckman?", he asked.

"Yes, I am, Captain. Are you the pilot?"

"Yes, sir. We're all prepped and ready, just waiting for you."

"I apologize if I've kept you waiting. I'm ready when you are."

"No apologies necessary, sir. Luggage?"

I shook my head. "It's just a day trip. We'll probably head back a few hours after we land. I just need to sign some papers and meet a few people. My only luggage is my briefcase." I lifted it and showed him. I had repacked it prior to the trip, with the paperwork related to the Microsoft deal.

He pointed to a poster on the wall and asked, "Any fruits or vegetables?"

"Nope."

"Well, then let's get going."

Taylor had outdone herself this time. It was my first time in a chartered jet since the vacation trip to the Bahamas. That had been in a Learjet, and while very nice, it was small. However a Learjet only had a range of about 1,500 miles and Hawaii to Washington is almost twice that. To fly that far you need more fuel, which means a bigger plane. That bigger plane turned out to be a Gulfstream II. If the Learjet was luxurious, the G-II was simply sybaritic! Best of all, the cabin was large enough that I could stand upright without my head going through the roof.

"I was told to prep the plane with a couple of bottles of champagne, one for the flight there and one for the flight back.", said the captain, pointing to a small refrigerator in the front bulkhead.

I laughed at that. "My travel agent is being a bit too thorough. I am certainly not drinking before my trip. Maybe on the way home." I told the pilot my plans, to sleep on the trip. He dug out a blanket and a few pillows for me, and promised to wake me before we began our descent.

"Well, we don't have a flight attendant, just a copilot. Take a seat. I'm sure you know how to use a seat belt.", he said.

Through the doorway to the cockpit, I saw the back of a second man in the copilot's seat. I smiled and nodded. "And in the event of an emergency, bend over, put your head between your legs, and kiss your sweet ass good-bye!"

"You've flown with us before! You already know the important stuff!" He headed into the front office and I grabbed a very comfortable and plush seat with a good view out the right side. A couple of minutes later the engines whined into life, and we began to move.

I didn't actually see anything; once we got airborne, it was pitch black out. I reclined the seat and caught some shuteye. It had been a long day and it was late. I had showered and shaved and changed my clothes before we left, putting on a suit. Now I kicked off my shoes and tossed my jacket onto the seat opposite me, and decided on forty winks.

True to his word, the captain announced over the intercom we were approaching SeaTac about half an hour before we were scheduled to land. I stretched and rubbed my eyes, and then moved the seat upright. I wasn't fully rested, but I was still better off than if I had stayed awake. I unbuckled and shuffled back to the bathroom, which was small, but functional. I used the facilities and washed my face. I didn't have a toothbrush, but I swilled some water around my mouth. Maybe I could do that once we landed.

As the plane began to descend, I headed back to my seat. I decided that if travel like this was going to be more common, I needed to develop a 'go bag' similar to what a lot of us had in the 82nd. A lot of experienced soldiers make up a special bag that they can grab whenever they are heading somewhere with no notice. They keep it in their car or their office or wherever. It might typically have a small toilet kit, a change of underwear and socks, a bottle of their favorite booze, some cash, and (usually) a handgun and spare ammo. I figured something like that would be very useful, though maybe not with the gun.

I was presentable by the time we had landed at SeaTac. A limo was waiting for me at the charter center, but it was simple, not one of those ridiculous stretch Hummers that would be popular in another twenty years, but simply a large and comfortable Cadillac with a driver.

Still, first things first. I looked at my watch and said, "I need to find a drug store and grab some breakfast. Something simple, Mickey Ds or something like that. Can we do that?"

"Can do! Which do you want first?"

I thought for a second. "Drug store, then breakfast."

We headed out and found a drug store, where I bought a toothbrush and some toothpaste, and then we headed to a McDonald's for a quick Egg McMuffin. This was definitely a guilty pleasure. You know they have absolutely no redeeming nutritional value and are loaded with salt and cholesterol and fats, but they just taste so good! After breakfast I scurried into the bathroom and brushed my teeth, tossing my new gear into the back of my briefcase.

I hustled my ass back out to the limo (the driver had turned down my offer of breakfast) and gave him the thumbs up sign and told him to move us along. We got to the Microsoft offices a few minutes before nine. I found both Jake and John waiting for me in the lobby. Jake had been staying in Bellevue since we started this project; John had flown in on the first available flight this morning, flying commercial out of Philly. We greeted each other, and then Jake led us into a small office he had commandeered during his and Junior's due diligence work.

"Everything all set?", I asked.

Jake nodded. "The schedule is that we'll do the signing at ten, in the main conference room, followed by some champagne and snacks, I believe."

"Champagne at ten in the morning.", remarked John, shaking his head and smiling.

"Let's just make sure we do the signing before the champagne!", I laughed.

"No kidding!"

"I have to tell you, Taylor was just a little too efficient with that flight she got me. She had two bottles of champagne loaded on, one for each leg of the flight. I skipped it last night, so now I have two bottles still on the plane. They are going to have to pour me off that thing!"

Both Jake and John laughed at that. "So, you have one, and share one with Marilyn. How's your vacation going?", asked Jake.

"Just fine, until I left her all alone on our vacation. I'll make it up to her, maybe with that bottle of champagne." I looked around. "Where's Missy and Junior? I thought they would be here, too."

John shook his head. "Jake Junior decided to head home. We didn't need his signature on anything, so he took off Friday night. Missy was supposed to come, but changed her mind at the last minute." I gave him a curious glance, and he continued, "Something's going on with her. I think there's a problem or two on the home front."

I grimaced at that. We had designed the operation to be closely held and to stay that way. If one of us died, the Buckman Group had to buy out the shares of the deceased at the market value. A spouse could not inherit the shares. I didn't know what a divorce would involve, and didn't want to find out. "We'll be flying home this weekend. Maybe I can ask her next week. Or you can ask her when you get home. I've known Melissa almost as long as I've known you, John, but I can't say as I've ever met her husband."

"Me neither. Then again, maybe it's nothing. I'll let you know when you get back. There's nothing we can do about it now, in any case."

"Don't borrow trouble from tomorrow.", added Jake. I nodded agreement.

We started discussing what was going to take place, and then a secretary came in and ushered us to the conference room. The Microsoft team was already inside, and a number of papers were laid out on the conference room table. Introductions were made first. I remember that Bill Gates was wearing a suit and tie, which was unusual for him. Also present was his father William Gates, Jr., a prominent Seattle attorney in his own right, and who was obviously involved in the stock purchase. He shook hands with me, and I lingered in front of him. "It's very much a pleasure to meet you, Mister Gates. I have to say, your son must make you very proud. This is quite an accomplishment." I waved my arm around lazily, as if taking in the entire company.

"Thank you, Doctor Buckman. Bill has said many kind things about you. I think his most interesting comment was that he wished you had gone to work for him when you got out of college, and not the army.", he said with a smile.

I smiled and shook my head. "I think I have the independent bug as much as he does. I do have to ask, though, what did you think when he told you that he was dropping out of college to start up a computer programming company?"

He glanced over at his son and grinned hugely. "I thought he was nuts!" We all laughed at that, Bill Junior also.

After that, we all sat down around the table and started reviewing paperwork and signing. On our side of the table, it was John as chairman and me as the president; on the other side it was Bill Gates and James Towne, the new president of the company. He was supposed to be the designated grownup, but I knew it wouldn't last. They were just too different. Also in the room was Dave Marquardt, who was on the board and represented Technology Venture Investors. They had bought six percent of the company a year ago. The Buckman Group would probably be the last outside investor until the IPO. Eventually, after we had all suffered from terminal finger cramp, it was finished. John slid a check across the table. Several bottles of champagne were brought out and we had a quick celebration.

It was during this period that Bill came up to me, with one of his senior programming developers, and asked, "Remember when you were out here the last time. You commented on a menu program you had developed. Did you ever do anything more with it?"

I had almost forgotten that during the signing, but I had been a good Boy Scout ahead of time and was prepared. I set my champagne down and went over to my briefcase. "Actually, I did do some work ahead of time, in case you were interested. I just forgot about it until now." I pulled out a 5¼" floppy and some printouts, and handed them to Gates, who handed them off to the programmer. "Put that into a PC and run it from the command prompt.", I said. I laid the documentation out on the table and picked up one of the pens we had been signing with.

I noticed the rest of the room staring at Gates and me as I led him through the printout on the menu program. I ran down through the logic and discussed shell operations and non-shell operations, which were important in that period of limited memory. "Most of it I wrote in Assembler, since I don't have access to your source code. I never gave it a name. If you want it, it's yours. Just send me something to assign it to you." We then had a brief discussion of programming choices. "If you guys can't tighten this up and clean it up, I've invested my money with the wrong people.", I finished, smiling.

"I really wish you had come here instead of the Army.", smiled Bill.

I simply shook my head. "We'd have butted heads at some point. Besides, my home is back east, not out here."

Later, when we were in a corner, Jake gave me a funny look, with John joining him. "You really do understand this stuff, don't you?", he commented to me.

I nodded. "I really do."

John asked, "So, why did you give them that program? Why didn't you go into business on your own?"

"It's only going to be useful for the next few years. After that the computers will be more powerful and the programming environment will have changed. Besides, I don't need to be a competitor. You watch. Bill Gates is like a shark after chum. He will run roughshod through this industry. I don't need him chasing me." Then I just grinned at them. "Besides, that would be like ... work! I'm too lazy for that!"

John rolled his eyes and Jake snorted. The meeting broke apart before noon.

I led the others outside, stopping on the front walkway to take a deep breath. I looked at the others and said, "You have no idea guys, but we just became a billion dollar company! Jesus Christ! I am going to drink those two bottles of champagne on the plane. I have been having nightmares something was going to derail this at the last moment."

"A billion dollars? Us?", asked John incredulously.

"I know the upside is big, but that big?", asked Jake.

I snorted and took another deep breath. "You just have no idea what they are doing. In five years, this place will have done an IPO and will have a billion dollar capitalization. What's six percent of a billion dollars? What will it be in ten years? Ten billion, twenty billion? Come on John, even a lawyer can figure this out! What's six percent of twenty billion dollars?"

John's eyes bugged out at that. Jake commented there would be some dilution at the time of the IPO, but I just waved it off. "Guys, if we can find a few more deals like this, we are all going to make a fortune!" I saw my driver standing by the limo, and I waved him towards us. He got back into the car, and I turned back to Jake and John. "Gentlemen, this has been a good day for us. I want to thank you both, and make sure you thank Missy and Junior for me. I'll be back in the office on Monday in any case, and I'll thank them as well." We shook hands and I got into the limousine and left.

I had too much nervous energy on the flight back to Hawaii to nap, and not enough energy to do any more work. I sorted some papers in my briefcase before saying 'Fuck it!' to myself. At that point I looked inside the mini-fridge and found the two bottles of champagne, and pulled a bottle out, and then grabbed a flute. These I set on a table, and then I knocked on the door to the cockpit. The door popped open and the pilot came out. "What can I do for you, Doctor Buckman?"

I smiled at that. Very few people called me Doctor anymore. It might be useful as tech credentials, but that was about it. "I think I'm going to have a drink, some of that champagne, but before I do that, I have a question to ask. Can I make a phone call from this plane?"

He shook his head. "Not really. I can have the tower relay a message to somebody, but we really aren't rigged for that."

"Okay, I wasn't sure. Would it be possible to get a message to the charter office to call my wife and let her know when we are scheduled to land? Later, I mean, not now, say an hour before we land."

"Sure thing. Want to sit up here? The view's better.", he asked, pointing to the co-pilot's seat. "Joe can move if you want."

I waved him off. "The last thing you need is me sitting up here drinking and playing with all the buttons. Maybe some other trip!"

He laughed and nodded, and moved back into the cockpit. I just shook my head and smiled. I knew my limitations, and I somehow figured that being a pilot was beyond them! It's one thing to jump out of airplanes, quite another to drive them. I closed the cockpit door and went back to the table and grabbed the bottle of champagne. Moet & Chandon, one of the good ones. I knew I was paying for it, so I might as well enjoy it. I carefully removed the wire cage and popped the cork, and then filled my flute. The G-II was flying as smooth as silk, and as I looked around the cabin, I decided that this really was the way to travel!

I decided to mention it to Marilyn. If before the goal had been, even if only jokingly, to build my equity to $100 million, so I could buy an island getaway, maybe I needed to think bigger. How much do you need to be worth to be able to afford your own G-II or G-III? Five hundred million? A billion? A fellow could get used to living like this!

I drank my first glass of champagne, and then set down my glass and rooted through my briefcase for a pad and a pen. What other good stocks or situations were there for us to invest in? Dell started up in the Eighties, I remembered. I jotted Michael Dell down on my pad. Who else? I thought about Steve Jobs, but the time to invest with him was in the future. Don't invest with Steve Jobs I, the developer of the Apple computers, invest with Steve Jobs II, the inventor of the IPhone and the IPod and the IEverythingElse!

I knew that if I was to see the names in the paper, I would be able to recollect what they were up to and whether to invest or not. I also needed to split the investments into two categories - buy and keep for a good, long time, and buy and keep until something bad was going to happen! The first category would probably be Microsoft, but the second might include some companies with a hot technology that would wow the world for a few years, and then fall by the wayside. For instance, buy Motorola when their cell phones took off in a few years, but then dump them for Nokia, and after that, dump Nokia for Research In Motion (the Blackberry) or Apple. This was a good long term project for Melissa. If she couldn't do it, she would know the best investment research firms to track down the info.

I sat there and sipped my champagne and made notes. After a while, I noted my handwriting was getting sloppy and my champagne bottle was empty. That was when I realized I didn't want to make any more notes! I collected my wits enough to cram my crap back in my briefcase, and then buried the dead soldier and pulled his brother from the fridge. No use flying on only one wing, which was a singularly inappropriate metaphor when actually flying, I realized.

I was in the process of opening the second bottle when the intercom chimed, and the captain came on, to announce, "We'll be starting our descent in about five minutes, Doctor Buckman. We should be back on the ground in Honolulu in half an hour. I radioed ahead and the charter office was going to call your home number."

I would have thanked him, but couldn't find a speaker button, or even if we had one, so I just yelled loudly, "THANK YOU!" I had no idea if he heard me, so I poured myself another glass of champagne, and sipped it as the plane nosed over and powered down and made a slight turn. I continued sipping my glass as we landed smoothly and taxied to the hangars.

After we came to a stop, the pilot came out of the cockpit and smiled as he saw me. "Feeling happy, are we?"

"Feeling very happy, captain! This is definitely the way to fly!"

He laughed. "Well, let me get the door open, and you can tell that to your reception committee! You can't leave until the Agriculture people release you, but somebody's already on the way."

My reception committee? I looked out the right side window but didn't see anything, and it was only when the pilot started opening the hatch that I remembered the door was on the left side of the plane. I got up and looked out a left side window, and muttered, "Oh, shit!", to myself. Not only was Marilyn there, but so were Harlan and Anna Lee, and the boys! They were going to witness good old Carl Buckman climbing off the plane half potted! Nothing to do but brazen it out.

I pulled my jacket on, grabbed the bottle of champagne in one hand and my briefcase in the other, and made it to the stairs without stumbling. The bright Hawaiian sunlight was almost blinding as I got to the door, so fumbled my sunglasses on before leaving the bird. I stopped on the top step and threw my arms wide. "Hail the conquering hero!"

A guy in a uniform came up, smiling. He was walking an adorable beagle wearing a vest. I handed him my declaration form, swearing I didn't have any fruits, vegetable, soil, seeds, or animals. He glanced at my form and said, "Well, Killer, he carrying anything?" The beagle started sniffing me and my briefcase.

"Killer? That's Killer?", I asked.

"You don't think he looks terrifying?", he asked, smiling.

"Only to pussycats."

Killer failed to find me in violation of the law, so I was waved through. I waved to everyone again.

"He's drunk!", commented Harlan.

"Carling! You've been drinking!", complained Marilyn.

I simply grinned and came closer. "Just the one bottle, honey. I've hardly touched this one!"

Harlan laughed, even as he stared at the plane. Marilyn was not as amused. "This one? You've had two bottles of champagne!?"

"Well, I haven't finished this one yet. Here, want a drink?" I passed her the bottle. "Go on, it's the good stuff!"

Marilyn stared at me in disbelief, until Anna Lee laughed and said, "Go ahead, I'll be the designated driver." Marilyn groaned and gave me a dirty look, but then she lifted the bottle to her lips and took a swig. She passed the bottle back to me, and I took a swallow, and then passed it to Harlan.

Harlan looked at the label and shook his head. He took a healthy swallow as well, and then asked, "Okay, what gives? Just what the hell do you do?" He climbed on board the Gulfstream and looked around, and then came back out. "Unbelievable! What the hell do you do that has you staying at the Royal Hawaiian and flying around like this?"

I looked over at Marilyn, who had taken another sip from the champagne. "Well, go ahead and tell them. No use hiding it anymore." She handed me the bottle again.

I shrugged and had another swallow. "Okay, here goes." I reached into my pocket and pulled out a business card holder, and pulled one of my cards out, and handed it to Harlan.

Harlan looked at it, looked up at my smiling face, and then looked back down at the card. "President and CEO of the Buckman Group, Private Equity and Capital? What the hell is this?"

"I told you I worked for an investment company, right? That's it. I own the company. I'm the Buckman in the Buckman Group."

Both Harlan and Anna Lee stared at me for a second. I had another swallow of champagne, and passed the bottle to Marilyn. I chuckled as Charlie tried to take it from her. His mother kept it out of his reach while she had another swallow, and then she passed it to Harlan. "Here, finish this off."

Harlan finished the bottle off and we set the empty in the back seat of the Lincoln. "So, you're rich, right? You have to have some bucks to be in, whatever this is. What is private equity and capital, anyway?"

I leaned back against the car. "Let's go back to the hotel. We can explain it along the way."

"You can explain it.", said Marilyn. "I don't have a clue what you do. Hell, I didn't even know you had money this time last year!"

"Hey, I never lied to you. I just never told you everything. There's a difference.", I protested.

"Whatever! Come on, let's go, and you can explain it all. Maybe they'll understand it better than I do."

I didn't explain all that much for the five minute drive back to the Royal Hawaiian. The boys were getting fussy and Roscoe was smelling like he needed a change. We bundled the boys inside and spent ten minutes sorting them out. I was tempted to open another bottle of wine up, but decided I would probably pass out if I did. Finally, when the boys were in cribs or sleeping, Harlan asked for an explanation. "So, what is this Buckman Group, and what is private equity?"

It took me about ten minutes to explain private equity and capital to the Buckminsters, both of who seemed to understand the concepts. The Buckman Group also seemed to go over, although Harlan asked the inevitable question - "So where did you get the money to start this? Is it family money?"

I shook my head. "Definitely not. For one thing, my family doesn't have this kind of dough, nowhere near it, in fact. For another thing, I'm the black sheep of the family. I've never received a penny from them. I haven't even seen my family since the wedding, and that was the first time I had seen them in years. Except for my sister, of course. She and I are close, but that's it."

"Why not?", asked Anna Lee. "What's wrong with you and your family?"

I smiled and shook my head. "I haven't had anywhere near enough to drink to start talking about my family. No, trust me when I say I never got the money from them. I did it the old fashioned way, I earned it. I've had a brokerage account since I was thirteen years old, and I am very, very good at picking stocks. By the time I got to college, I didn't even need a scholarship, I could have paid my own way if I wanted to."

Harlan's eyes goggled at that. He was as patriotic as the next guy, but a big piece of why he went army was the ROTC scholarship. "So why did you take the ROTC scholarship?", he asked.

"Why not? I wanted to go in the army anyway, even if just for a few years. I gave the Army four-and-a-half years and a blown knee and seventeen live paratroopers in the end. They can't say they didn't get their money's worth out of me."

"So, how much are you worth?"

"How much are you worth, Harlan? That's not a question people ask, generally. Millions. If this Buckman Group thing works out as well as I think it will, billions. That's why I never told you anything. People get weird when they know you have serious bucks."

"Billions?!", said both Marilyn and Harlan. Anna Lee just stared with her mouth open.

"Probably within ten years." I grinned over at my wife. "Just remember that the next time you think you want to kill me. The longer you hold off, the more you'll be able to inherit!"

"There's times I think it would be worth it!", she said, and then gave me a raspberry.

I waggled my eyebrows at her lewdly. "That's not what you said before!" That got me another raspberry.

"So, what were you signing on?", asked Harlan.

I shook my head. "As of now, that's confidential. In a few years' time, when the company goes public, I will be able to tell you, but for right now, I can't say. I will say, it's going to be very, very big!"

"Huh." He thought for a second. "So, can anybody buy into this group?"

"Sorry, but we are very closely held. I have four partners in this, and they all had to cough up a quarter mill each. That being said, you never know. Some day we might want to do a sale ourselves. If that happens, I'll let you know."

Harlan rolled his eyes. "Man, I never knew a millionaire, let alone a billionaire."

I grinned. "You still haven't! Give me ten years, though, and I'll have that and more!"

"Unreal!"

"Listen, I'm still the same guy who smacked the Orange Army around with you way back when. I am not about to start buying mansions around the world. The next time you are back on the mainland, plan to take a few days and visit us in Maryland. You'll see! Yes, we're building a house, but it's just a simple rancher. We don't have servants or chauffeurs. I promise you, nothing has changed. We'll do a barbecue on the deck, just like the others we've had."

Harlan rolled his eyes. "Maybe not! We don't need to try and set the deck on fire like we did in Fayetteville!"

"Oh, shit, no! That was all Marilyn's fault anyway!" Marilyn flipped us both a middle finger as we recounted the last barbecue, last summer before I went to Honduras. Marilyn had come out to the rear balcony and tripped on the little hibachi grill, kicking it over and spilling hot coals all over everything. Harlan and I had to hop around and put it out with the only thing we had available - our beers!

It's like I said before. Anything involving Marilyn and food has a tendency towards disaster. She has superhuman powers in this regard.

Chapter 75: Back Home

We flew home on Saturday. Harlan and Anna Lee were treating us like normal again by Wednesday, which was a damn good thing. They were too good a pair of friends to lose because they couldn't handle our having money. Tusker and Tessa had handled it well, but Tusker had figured it out on his own. We made them promise to visit us sometime in the summer of '83 when he had built up some leave.

We flew home on Saturday, and since the time zones are working against you, we landed sometime on Sunday. We were both totally exhausted, and fell asleep as soon as we got to the town house. It was at times like this that I truly envied Marilyn's ability to fall asleep anytime and anywhere, within ten seconds of closing her eyes. Now, if I could only figure out a way to control her snoring...

Monday morning I woke up early, did my workout, and then cleaned up and left early. I drove over to the house and discovered that the framing was finished and it was actually starting to look like a house, and not a war zone in the mud. Happy, I headed back towards civilization and went to the office. We had our regular Monday morning meeting, and it was pretty positive.

"Well, I'm simply going to start off by saying thank you to everybody here. There were a whole lot of ways this thing could have fallen through, and it didn't. This was what will prove to be a potentially gargantuan deal.", I told them. "So, here's my agenda for today. First and foremost, thank you all. We worked hard, we worked as a team, and we got this accomplished faster than I thought we could. I just came back from vacation. Now it's your turn. Everybody needs to call Taylor and schedule a vacation."

John and Jake looked surprised at that, Junior had a thoughtful look, and Missy smiled, but otherwise seemed a touch distracted. Jake said, "A vacation?"

I nodded. "I don't care whether the company pays for it or I pay for it. Everybody gets a week. Get crazy, Jake."

"Huh?"

I grinned at him some more. "Let's put a limit on it. You get one week anywhere in North America or the Caribbean, airfare, rooms, whatever. Take a cruise, go skiing, hang-glide over the Grand Canyon. I don't care. Take your wife, too, if you want. Or your mistress. Hell, take them both!" That got me a bagel thrown in my direction. "Just call Taylor and sort it out."

Junior smiled and muttered, "Wow!" The others just looked at each other and smiled.

"Second item on the agenda. We need to debrief what we did right on this deal and what we did wrong. We can always improve. We'll be doing more deals as time goes on. How do we do them better? Third item - over the next few days I want to meet with each of you individually. Same questions, what are we doing right, what are we doing wrong, how do we do things better? The final item is what do we do next? I want to go over that with you all as well." I looked around the table and saw everybody nodding in agreement and understanding. I grabbed a notepad and a pen, and said, "Let's get started."

The next few days were busy and productive. If nothing else, doing the Microsoft deal had boosted our confidence that we could actually pull something like this off. Maybe we weren't all crazy! There were some valid concerns. For one thing, we would need to boost the staffing on the legal and accounting ends, in order to do the due diligence and reviews necessary. If we did that, then we needed to start accounting for costs involved in the purchases and investments, so we had to set something up for that. There was considerable concern about where we would come up with the next few deals. If we got big enough, people would come to us, but for the time being, it was much more likely that we would need to find the deals, and not the reverse.

By mid-week it was obvious to me that John had been correct about Melissa. She was definitely distracted about something. I asked her about it when we met one-on-one. "Melissa, is everything all right? You've seemed a little distracted lately."

She shook her head. "No, nothing's wrong."

"Are you sure? I've been noticing you're acting differently lately, and it's not just me. John and Jake mentioned it also."

She reacted angrily to that. "Is that what you guys do? Gossip about me behind my back?"

I held up my hands pleadingly. "Missy, you've known us a long time now. You know we wouldn't do that. We're your friends and we're worried for you. Are you feeling all right? Is it your health? Or is it something at home?"

That got a bit of a response, if only in the way her eyes flickered around. "My health is just fine. I don't see why this is anybody's business!" I just sat there silently and waited for a further response. A few seconds later she sighed and continued, "It's not my health. It's Bob. We've been drifting apart. It's only getting worse these days. When I told him the other night about the vacation trip, it was like he didn't care."

It was my turn to sigh. Personal lives are a minefield for a boss to get involved in, but Melissa was the type of person who wore her heart on her sleeve. Some people can compartmentalize their work and personal lives, but some can't, and Melissa Talmadge was the latter. "Has this been going on for some time?", I asked.

That got me a shrug and a nod. "I had been hoping that the baby would bring us closer again, but it hasn't. Things have been shifting, sort of, since last year."

That made me think a bit. Melissa had had her baby the first week of July, so it was now a couple of months past that. "I don't know what to tell you on this one, Missy. Do you think it's over?"

"I don't know. We haven't said anything, but something's wrong. I mean, it's been a couple of months now, and he and I, well, nothing, you know."

I gave a wry grimace at that. Missy was a good looking woman, and had certainly lost the weight she had gained with the baby. If her husband wasn't taking care of business again, there was something wrong. As delicately as I could, I asked, "Do you think his interests have ... shifted?"

She looked at me some more and shrugged. "If you're asking is he cheating on me, I don't think so. I mean, I know the wife is always the last to know, but there's no strange phone calls, he's not suddenly staying late at work, or taking sudden trips. There's no lipstick stains on the collar. And I'm not fooling around on him, either. I think we're just drifting apart."

"Well, I don't know what to tell you. If there's anything that I or the rest of us can do, let us know."

"Is it that obvious? Is it affecting what we're doing?", she asked.

"It's obvious, but it's not a problem. We just want you to be happy."

"I wish I could separate myself like that. You seem to be able to do it. How do you keep your business and personal lives separate?"

I scratched my head at that. "Years of practice, I guess.", I answered. "I've always been able to do that, even as a kid. Maybe it comes from having to keep secrets from a psychotic family. It's not always great. I know Marilyn would like me to be more open at home, and sometimes I'm not. You can be too separated, and that's what I have to watch out for."

We split apart at that. I didn't know how to help, but I knew it wouldn't help if I blabbed it out to the others. I just mentioned that she was having a few issues at home, and to leave her be.

It was now into early September, and it was obvious to everybody that the severe slump the stock market had been in for a few years was ending. We were getting concrete indications that the coming computerization of almost everything was underway, and was having a profound effect on the entire economy. Missy and I went over our holdings and where we thought they were heading, and began shifting the portfolio. For years we had been invested in a high oil cost and recession based portfolio. Now we were going to shift into a tech mode. That was where the biggest returns were.

Our next investment was in late September, and was brought to us, surprisingly, by Jake Junior. He announced it at a Monday morning meeting in a roundabout manner. "What's the procedure for introducing a business proposal?", he asked.

I looked at the others and shrugged. "I think you just did. What's up?"

"Well, I have this close friend from college, and he's gone into business for himself. This is sort of like you and your friend Jim Tusk, I think. Anyway, back when we graduated, he wanted me to go into business with him, but I was already planning on law school. We've stayed in touch, and he's invited me back on board a couple of times. I want to help him, but I don't want to leave here, and I am pretty sure he is looking for an investment, and not just me. He's legit, though, not just looking for me to bring money.", he stressed.

"What's his name? Do I know him?", asked Junior's father.

"It's Barry Bonham. You met him a couple of times, at school. He was my roommate my junior and senior years."

"What kind of business is it?", asked John.

"Well, that's the thing. It's not anything computer related, and I know that's where we're headed. It's a pet supply company."

"Pets?!", asked John.

Junior nodded sheepishly, as if it was embarrassing. "It's called 'Tough Pup', and they make pet toys and chews."

Tough Pup?! That name rang a bell! A good bell! "Like what?", I asked.

"Well, you know, tug of war toys and ropes, rawhide chews, for dogs. Really good ones, too! The ropes and toys are practically indestructible!" Junior was getting excited about this.

"Where is this company?", asked Melissa.

"Here! Well, Baltimore, actually. Barry rented an old warehouse over in Pimlico and set up inside it. He's been in business for a couple of years, and has been growing the business, but to get bigger, he needs capital, and nobody wants to invest. He was telling me that unless it had a computer in the name, nobody was interested."

I snorted at that. If he thought it was bad now, wait a few more years. I remembered a company named Tough Pup that made all sorts of pet supplies, it was a brand name for Hartz or Sargent or one of the big pet care companies. Maybe this was how it started out!

I looked around the table and shrugged. "I think it all depends on the company's growth potential and how much we would be on the hook for and how much we would get out of it. I like the idea of investing locally. It's not like Baltimore is overflowing with jobs, either."

Jake Senior and John nodded agreement, and Missy simply shrugged. "We'll need to know more, a lot more.", she said.

"Agreed.", I added. I looked over at Junior. "Well, let's figure this out. You're obviously the point guy. Get together with your buddy and work up a business plan. You mentioned my friend Tusker. Before I ever loaned him a penny, I made him go over the business plan a dozen times, with all sorts of stuff detailed, just like in business school. He might be your friend, but we have to do it like a real business."

Junior's eyes lit up. "So, we'll do it!?"

His father squashed that. "No, we'll think about it! We'll want to see a plan, we'll need to review the books, see the facilities, meet the principals - you know, like a business!"

I smiled at Junior. "Jake, we'll give it a fair shake. Give it a shot. We're here to back you up. Meet with your friend and see what he has to say, and then go to work on it. This is your baby. Let's see how it goes."

After the meeting, he bounced out full of energy. The rest of us simply smiled at each other and shook our heads in amusement. His father said, "I'll ride herd on him. I won't let him screw this up, if it's real."

"Just remember, you're not just his partner, you're his father.", I told him.

Jake snorted. "At home I'm his father. Here I'm his partner and I'm going to ride him ragged. Let's see how he likes it in the big leagues." That got a laugh from the rest of us.

A few weeks later, Marilyn decided to have a birthday party for Charlie. Just how much a one year old gets out of this is beyond me, but I wasn't asked, and any opinions I had were not to be volunteered. Of course Tusker, Tessa, and Bucky were invited, and so was Missy and her brood, along with several moms and babies from around the town house complex. I simply wish she had done the party on Charlie's birthday, October 12, which was a Tuesday. That way I could have pleaded work or something, and skipped out. No, she did it on the Saturday before, and I was stuck. I love my son, but exactly what a one year old was going to do was questionable at best.

Charlie was now walking, sort of, somewhat unsteadily, and with the same manic energy as a Marine hitting the beach - he didn't go around obstacles, he went through them! I was detailed to put several items together. Some assembly required, no batteries included, etc. etc. etc. It's too bad the party was non-alcoholic. Both Tusker and I would have enjoyed it more.

We would close on the Tough Pup investment in November, and Jake Junior was our man on the Board of Directors. He was nervous about it and I sat him down in my office to talk about it. "What am I supposed to do as a director?", he asked me. We were scheduled to sign the papers at the end of the week, Friday November 19.

I smiled at that. Calendar wise, at 27 I was only a year or so older than Jake; experience wise I had many decades on him. "You do what has to be done. Here's a hint, though. God gave you two ears and one mouth, so use them in that proportion. Keep your mouth shut, to start with, and just listen. It's their company. We're just buying a piece of it, not the majority, so they get to decide what to do."

Jake nodded, so I continued. "For one thing, the most important thing for you to remember is who you work for. By that I mean the Buckman Group, not Tough Pup. You're our representative. Always remember that whatever you do over there, and whatever they do, will reflect back on this company and on me personally. We can always make some more money. We can't always make a new reputation!"

"Carl, I would never..."

I held my hands up to forestall him. "I never thought you would, or you would never have been invited in. All I'm saying is you need to keep an eye on the things that you are involved in. This goes to your personal life, too. The last thing in the world anybody wants to see in the newspaper is your name, Jake Eisenstein, Vice President of the Buckman Group, in the police blotter for drunk driving or something equally stupid."

Jake smiled and rolled his eyes. "My old man would kill me!"

I smiled. "I'll hold you down and let him! Anyway, as far as the business goes, your biggest job is to understand what their plans are and to let us know about them. They seem like a good operation, otherwise we wouldn't be doing this. Learn from it. Keep your mouth shut. If you don't understand something, ask them. Always praise in public, always chew somebody out in private. Management 101 stuff. Have some fun, too. Maybe you'll meet a girl who'll be impressed by your being on the Board of Directors of something!"

Jake's eyes widened at that. He was single, and as far as I knew, between girlfriends. He grinned. "I don't think I'll tell my mother that idea."

"Maybe not.", I agreed.

That Friday morning we all drove down to Pimlico to sign the papers. Despite his tough persona with his son, it was obvious that Jake Senior was very proud of how Jake was working out. For this deal, we had hired a couple of tax lawyers to review what we were doing. There's just a shitload of crap that has to be reviewed! One thing I noticed on this last trip was a bulletin board with pictures of various dogs and puppies on it. These guys really loved their animals!

We had some time before the signing, and I was looking over some of the photos, when a young black girl came over and put a Polaroid on the board, showing some black and brown puppies, along with a note about how they were available for adoption. She looked up at me and asked, "You looking for a puppy, mister?"

I laughed. "Haven't really thought about it. You guys are big into your pets here."

She smiled and nodded. "It's practically a requirement. You coming to work here?"

"No, not really. You work here?", I asked.

She nodded. "I'm over in the rawhide chew section."

I noticed she had on a hair net and a white smock. "That your uniform? What do you do with rawhide chews?"

"We have to be real clean over there. I do quality control. You don't want a bunch of sick puppies, do you!" She was a nice girl, maybe about twenty, tops, with a very earnest look to her.

"No, that would be a really lousy thing to do. You like your job?"

"Yes, sir." She tapped the picture of the puppies. "You looking for a puppy? My brother's got a new litter. They're adorable!"

I looked at the photo again. Momma was laying on her side, with a bunch of brown and black puppies surrounding her. Momma looked like a beagle, but I wasn't so sure about the father. "Hadn't really thought about it. What type are they?"

"Well, the mother is a beagle. The father is what we call a traveling man! We think he's the boxer from next door, who managed to jump the fence.", she answered, laughing.

I had to laugh as well. "A boxer and a beagle! Now there's a mix for you! Depending on who's who, it's either assault or ambition!"

"There's no cost. We just want them to have a loving home."

I gave it some thought. We would probably be able to move into the new house by Christmas, although we might take it slow. We had a number of months more to go before the lease on the town house was up. I liked dogs and had raised a number of them over the years. The puppies looked awfully cute, too.

A boy needed a dog. A house needed a dog.

I reached out and tore one of the little tabs off the sign, with a phone number and name on it. "Is this your name and number?"

"Yes, sir. The dogs are at my brother's down the street. You interested?"

"Maybe. How old are they?"

We talked a few minutes more about the puppies, and the girl repeated several times how nice they were. At that point, John's friend, Barry, the owner of Tough Pup, came out and asked, "Everything all right?"

The girl looked a touch nervous, but I just smiled and said, "Taniqua - ", I turned and faced her. "Did I get that right?" She nodded mutely. "Taniqua is trying to talk me into a puppy for Christmas."

"How's her sales pitch?"

"Pretty good. I think you need to move her off the line and up the ladder."

At this point Taniqua twigged to the fact that I was more than just hanging around the bulletin board, and got very nervous. "Excuse me, Mister Bonham, I'll get back to work!" She scooted out of there quickly.

I just smiled at Bonham. "She seems like a nice kid."

"She is. Are you really looking for a dog?"

"I'll need to clear it with the boss, at home, but I might be. We're in a town house now, but we'll be in a new house by the end of the year. I've had dogs before."

He glanced at the photo and smiled. "I can't imagine working here if you didn't like dogs. Cats, too. Once we get the funding, we're already thinking about cat toys."

"Good. I think the market for that is even larger." We went into the conference room to sign papers.

I talked to Marilyn about it that night, and wasn't surprised when she said yes. While the Lefleur family hadn't owned pets, Marilyn certainly had nothing against them, and over the years we owned many dogs and cats. Saturday I called the phone number and got the directions to Taniqua's home and we drove down there. It was in Pimlico, about half a mile from the race track, in a nice and neat black working class neighborhood. Marilyn was a touch nervous, but I had been in the area before, and it was quite safe. My father's parents had owned a home in the neighborhood back before all the whites moved to the suburbs. Only the color changed; it had been a working class neighborhood before and still was. We met Taniqua, who was still living at home, and then she walked us down the street to her brother's house. We set Charlie down to inspect the puppies, and five minutes later were the proud owners of a mutt!

She was just two months old, and barely weaned. Momma wasn't looking at us very happily, playing with her baby. Charlie thought this was all just marvelous! He wanted all of them! I'm not that crazy. Taniqua asked who I was and what I was doing at the company, so I told her, and her eyes just about popped out of her head. I laughed and told her to tell her boss that she moved one of the puppies out, and ask him about that job in sales.

Five minutes after we got home, while Charlie stood there and watched, the puppy peed on the carpet. I was in the kitchen scrounging up an old newspaper to start paper training her. Marilyn called out, "Oh, honey, your dog just made you a present!"

I came back just in time to see the puppy starting to poop. "Oh, good Lord! You little dummy."

Charlie was fascinated. He was also just starting to talk. He had figured out 'Ma' and 'Da' and was now in the point and babble stage, as well as trying to repeat whatever he heard. You spend the first year teaching them to walk and talk, and the next seventeen telling them to sit down and shut up! His eyes lit up and he started going, "Dum dum dum dum."

And that's how Dum-Dum got her name.

Chapter 76: Suzie's Graduation

Saturday, May 28, 1983

The house was mostly complete by Thanksgiving, but there were still enough items on the punch list to keep us from moving in. The kitchen needed some more work, as did the hardwood floors, and the driveway was going to be gravel until the following spring, when the weather would allow us to lay down some blacktop. We were ready to move in by Christmas, but that was just too hectic. We would wait until January.

Dum-Dum got some nice presents at Christmas. Following the closing on the investment, everybody at the Buckman Group was added to the list for Tough Pup Christmas presents. We all got a gift basket with Tough Pup chew toys and rawhide chews, including some rope toys from their new red, white, and blue All American Pup collection! It warmed my heart to know that my dedicated service in the armed services of our great nation allowed us to protect our right to have patriotic puppies! Dum-Dum growled and tried to pull my arm from the socket when we played with the ropes. She was an official Tough Pup!

Marilyn's family, all bazillion of them, came down the week between Christmas and New Years. They were on the way to Orlando and the time shares they had bought there. We offered to put them up for the night, but we only had the one spare bedroom, and they had a convoy of five cars and about twenty-some people! I made arrangements for them at the nearest motel, and let her parents and youngest siblings stay with us. The little ones camped out on the living room carpet in blankets. We did take them up to the new house, and they oohed and ahhed appropriately. We promised to come up in the spring, after the move, and stay for a few days before taking another parents-only vacation.

Business went smoothly. I hunkered down with Missy to come up with names of various investment possibilities. I also took her out to Bellevue for a board meeting, and introduced her to Bill Gates. The three of us tossed around various company names that he was familiar with, through his contacts on the west coast. One thing I had quickly figured out was that the venture capital business was much more about the size of your Rolodex than it was your wallet.

Our next technology deal was with a guy named John Walker, who lived in the San Francisco area. He had bought his company, Autodesk, in 1982 for $10 million, but that was mostly in deferred royalties. They were definitely cash-poor and idea-rich. Bill got us in the door and we put in 500 grand, which got us ten percent, and an option for another million before the IPO. I knew this was one of the companies that would last and be an industry leader, so I handed over my money and let him think he had put one over on us. This was going to become another multi-billion capitalization company.

We did a couple of small deals in the Baltimore area, and hired a couple of additional people for the tax law and due diligence aspects. They got a decent paycheck, but they didn't become partners. By our accounting, the value of our investments was already worth quite a bit more than what we had started with, between the general market rise and the specific private equity deals we had done. When some of these outfits did their IPOs, we would be worth a fortune. Everybody started tossing ideas around for new investments. John, Jake Senior, and Melissa knew the local business environment better than I did (especially John, a very well connected lawyer), and Melissa and I were able to network with people for Silicon Valley deals.

Missy's marriage collapsed shortly after the turn of the year. She didn't talk much about it, but I got the impression that the pair just drifted apart. She never said he was catting around on her, and I didn't think she was the type to fool around on him. John helped her find a decent lawyer, and while he didn't take her husband to the cleaners, he did keep him from getting his hands on Missy's shares in the company.

Missy moped around for a bit, and Marilyn and Taylor got to talking about it, and they decided to do an 'intervention.' They roped Andrea and Tessa and a few other women they knew into a Chippendales party. Okay, I don't know if they were technically speaking the 'Chippendales' dance group, but it was a bunch of male strippers. She had done this a few times my first time around, too, and I knew exactly how it would turn out. I smiled when she told me she'd be home by eleven or so. As I expected, she came home somewhere around four in the morning, drunk as a skunk (they had rented a limo, I insisted on that), and horny. She had her way with me, I rolled over and went back to sleep, and Marilyn had a two day hangover the rest of the weekend. I have no idea what Missy did when they got her home, but she seemed happier afterwards.

Dum-Dum proved fairly easy to train, Marilyn not so much. It's easy to train a dog and I had done it several times over the years. As soon as you catch them pooping or peeing in the wrong spot, you grab them, yell at them, rub their nose in it, and smack them with a newspaper. This is pretty standard stuff. On the other hand, Marilyn had never raised a puppy before, and thought I was heartless and cruel, since I was beating a poor and defenseless animal and rubbing their nose in it. I should only yell at them, or something like that, and I swear she actually found a book that she thought agreed with her. It didn't, but it was so full of New Age bullshit, it was hard to tell. I had Dum-Dum trained by February.

The nice thing about the town house layout turned out to be the multi-level aspect to it. Our room was upstairs, and I made Dum-Dum sleep down in the kitchen, walled off by a baby gate. She whined, but you couldn't hear her upstairs. Charlie just loved his new buddy, and they chased each other all around the place. Once she was housebroken, and we let her have free run of the place at night, she mostly slept in Charlie's bedroom, which was just fine with Marilyn and me! On my first trip, we once had a dog that slept in bed with us, between and perpendicular to us! It made for difficulties in the romance department.

We moved into the new house the week after the Chippendales episode, and if Marilyn was still feeling under the weather, she had only herself to blame. Strangely, she didn't appreciate my informing her of her own culpability in this state of affairs. In fact, every time I laughed at her, she extended her middle finger and said words that an impressionable young lad shouldn't hear his mother saying!

The night after we moved in, the lights went out. We had a county-wide blackout. The next day I ordered up an emergency generator. What a pain in the balls!

I hate moving! This was the second time in a year we had done this, and both Marilyn and I vowed not to move again until they put us into pine boxes. I had a local moving company handle it, and it went smoothly, even if the entire process is a clusterfuck.

Everything in the house was muddy by the time we were done. One thing I had learned over the years is that all those beautiful construction site pictures had grass magically edited in. A real construction site is a muddy disaster! We had grass seed planted, and some hay blown around as cover, but it would take several months for anything to look like something other than raw construction.

By April Charlie's language skills had developed to the point where he was speaking in complete sentences. "Dum-Dum poop!" is a sentence, right?

In April I took a couple of weeks off and made some arrangements with Taylor for another nice vacation. First we drove up to Utica in the Town Car, since it was the only thing big enough for the three of us plus Dum-Dum in a car cage. That was a long trip; by the end of the trip I was wishing we had Dum-Dum in the seat and Charlie in the cage! We stayed a few days with the Lefleurs, with Charlie and Dum-Dum living at the house, while Marilyn and I stayed at the Sheraton. Then we got a lift over to the Oneida County Airport, where Taylor had a Cessna Citation II waiting for us.

Our vacation was going to be in the Caymans, which was a place we had been to several times in a previous lifetime. The Citation II wasn't as big as the G-II I had ridden in from Hawaii to Bellevue and back. It was a bit larger than the Learjet we had last year, with a longer range. I teased Marilyn about rejoining the Mile High Club, but she refused, pointing at the open doorway to the cockpit. I laughed and told her they could put their headphones on, and Marilyn's eyes opened wide and she stared at me until I broke down and laughed at her. That wasn't on my list of fetishes.

Taylor had rented us a villa on Grand Cayman, on the inner North Sound side of Seven Mile Beach. It wasn't quite as large and as private as the estate on Eleuthera had been, but it was still private. Marilyn managed to work on her all over tan around our pool. I liked the place, but then I had always liked the Caymans. It consists of three islands, Grand Cayman, Little Cayman, and Cayman Brac, but almost the entire population lives on Grand Cayman, around 50,000 or more. The place is clean and civilized and modern, and simply very nice. There are a lot of restaurants and places to go and things to see and do.

I got Marilyn to talk about what she might want in a vacation home. "You're serious?!"

"Sure, why not?"

"I thought you were joking."

"I'm always serious about goofing off.", I said with as straight a face as I could muster.

My wife snorted at that. "That's true enough. So you're serious about this? We can buy a place somewhere?"

I nodded. "Yeah, why not? I don't want to do it until we're worth about $100 mill, but I figure that's only another year or two, tops. Also, we're only talking one place. I'm not going to buy a place on a half dozen different islands. So, what do you want in a vacation spot?"

Marilyn shook her head in mystification. "I have no idea!"

"Well, compare this place to last year, in Eleuthera. That was a lot smaller island, lower population, but the place we stayed was larger and had a much bigger beach and was more private."

"Oh." Marilyn gave it some thought and shrugged. "Maybe something in between. La Valencia was simply gorgeous, and it was so private, but there wasn't anything to do there. Maybe something like that on a bigger island?"

I nodded and smiled. "Okay, that's a good start. For our next trip, let's ask Taylor about that. I want something that we can take the kids to for family vacations, but also come to by ourselves for an adult vacation."

"Just how adult did you have planned?"

I smiled at her. We were just back from lunch, and we were both wearing t-shirts and shorts. Well, I was wearing shorts, and Marilyn had on a denim skirt, and I knew she had nothing else on. I crooked my finger at her and said, "Let's talk about that.", and we spent the next few hours discussing in detail just what kind of adult vacations would be planned.

Both Dum-Dum and Charlie were growing like weeds. Dum-Dum was a bit of an odd looking mutt. She looked sort of like a small boxer, at least in shape and form, with bow legs and a barrel chest, and both parents had been short haired, but her head and face looked like her beagle mother, although a bit wrinkly. She was putting on about a pound or two a week all through the spring, but then leveled out at around 35 pounds. Charlie didn't grow that fast, but he seemed to take after his mother's family, with the blond hair of his uncles and a stocky build. He sure didn't look like any Buckman I'd ever met!

During May, a date occurred that I was simply dreading. Suzie was graduating from the University of Delaware, with both her Bachelor's in Nursing and her Registered Nurse credentials. I had missed it the first time around, but I couldn't say that I was too busy now. In fact, Suzie really wanted me to come, and Marilyn was pushing for me to go.

Hamilton had loomed over the graduation on the first time through, with his failure to finish college. I had felt unbelievable pressure to succeed from my parents, to graduate, to marry, to have children, and to be successful. In later years, after talking to Suzie, she had told me the same had occurred with her. I remember how I felt so incredibly relieved when she graduated from college, simply so she could carry the burden of the family name along with me.

Now, things were even worse. My much greater success and independence had driven my brother over the edge, along with Mom, and Suzie found the pressures intolerable. She already had a job lined up at Johns Hopkins, and an apartment, and didn't plan on moving back home.

We argued several times in the weeks leading up to the graduation. "This is simply a lousy idea, honey.", I told Marilyn. "There is no good reason for me to go, or you for that matter, and many good reasons not to. Suzie will understand. We can take her to dinner or have her out to the house."

Marilyn looked at me in a manner to scare me! "Your sister loves you dearly and has specifically invited you to be there. You are going to her graduation. If you die along the way, I am to drag your corpse to the show! You will be there!"

"This is you and Suzie trying to get me and my family back together, and it won't work. Why can't you just accept this?"

"Because we love you and we know it kills you to be apart from them. Your father wants to talk to you, and you want to talk to him, I know you do!", she answered, in a pleading wail.

"It doesn't matter! None of this matters! This isn't about me or my dad, or even my mom. This is about Hamilton, and not one blessed thing the two of you cook up will change the fact that my brother is a raving lunatic, at least as far as I'm involved. This simply won't work."

We argued some more and she stomped away. We had several such arguments in the days leading up to the graduation, and I wasn't winning any of them. Finally the day of the graduation came. We left at the crack of dawn in my car, with Charlie bundled into his car seat in the back. Dum-Dum we locked into the laundry room, with water and some Puppy Chow. It takes about an hour-and-a-half to get to Newark from our house, no matter whether you drive down to the Beltway and around the city to I-95, or cut across northern Baltimore County to pick up 95 directly. Both Charlie and Marilyn slept on the way. I was simply praying for a massive car crash to delay us for eight or nine hours.

Graduation was being held in the college stadium, which is certainly big enough, but made me wonder what would happen if it rained. Delaware is a fair sized state school, much larger than RPI, and would probably be graduating about 4,000 students. If everybody had four guests, and I knew that was probably low, there were probably going to be at least 16,000 in the throng. Joy!

I was right. The place was a zoo. The stadium only holds about 20,000 people, and it was full. Thankfully the weather held off and was nice. I had on a lightweight suit and Marilyn was wearing a very pretty dress, and even Charlie had on a new outfit. We sat there through the ceremony, couldn't see where Suzie was, never heard her name being called, and waited until we could escape. Marilyn had a much better opinion of it all then I did. Afterwards we were to meet Suzie at one of the numbered side gates, so as soon as everybody got up, we headed down to the gate.

We maneuvered down to the designated gate, which was near where we sat, and waited for my sister to show. I couldn't see any sign of my family, so maybe they were the ones in the car crash. I could always hope.

I looked over at Marilyn and thought she looked good. I thought the same about myself and Charlie. I felt like an idiot worrying about how we looked in front of people who weren't expecting us and didn't want to see us. Objectively, I was probably about as good looking and healthy as I had ever been in my life, either lives. I was staying fit, about 185 or so, and since I had gotten out of the service I had let my hair grow out. It wasn't long, but it showed some of my natural waviness, and I had trimmed my mustache and goatee earlier in the week. I was still my natural dirty blond shade, and I hadn't started graying yet. I was in a good suit, a muted light charcoal plaid, and I had my good black and brass cane. Marilyn looked just as good. She was still going to the gym with me most mornings, even if she grumbled and complained about it, and was far more toned and in shape than in our previous life. Today she was wearing a very nice blue print knee length dress, along with medium heel open toed pumps. Even Charlie had on a nice clean blue and yellow outfit, along with a little 'Blue Hen' sunhat on, all of which had been a Christmas present from Suzie. (The school colors are blue and yellow, and the school mascot and teams are the Blue Hens.)

After about five minutes we heard a squeal and Suzie came running towards us, her gown flapping in the breeze, and one hand up and holding her mortarboard on her head. "You made it!"

She looked more than cute, she looked beautiful. She had really blossomed as she grew up, and was very much the image of her mother, although she smiled a lot more. As soon as she got closer she waved at Charlie. "Charlie! Remember me? I'm your Aunt Suzie!"

Charlie's face lit up, and it was obvious he did remember her. He babbled out, "Aun' Soo! Aun' Soo!", and struggled to get out of his stroller. Marilyn set him loose and he toddled over to Suzie, who laughed and picked him up.

"Well aren't you a big boy!"

"Aun' Soo! Aun' Soo!" Both Marilyn and I smiled at this. Not all of my family was fucked up. Charlie reached up and began grabbing for Suzie's tassel, which fascinated him. Eventually she simply took her mortarboard off her head and put it on his, and he crowed with laughter. "Aun' Soo!"

"Oh my God!", I heard from the side, in a very familiar voice. I turned away from my sister and my son, to face my mother. She was standing there on the walkway, as people moved around her, a look of disbelief on her face, her mouth open and her eyes wide. She was still as tall and as slim and as coldly beautiful as ever. Following behind her, on her right side was my father, also with a startled look on his face, and on her left side was Hamilton, with a much less accepting look. It was more like sheer hatred on his part.

"Hello, Mother, Father." I said. Around me I could feel the temperature dropping. Marilyn inched closer to my side, and then went behind me and took Charlie from Suzie.

"You're not supposed to be here!", hissed Hamilton.

I turned to face him. "Good morning to you, too, Hamilton." I turned away from him and looked back at my mother. "You're looking well, Mom. You, too, Dad."

Hamilton was on the verge of saying something more. His face was red and had nothing but rage on it. Mom laid a hand on his arm to restrain him, and my father glanced at him nervously. "I didn't know you were coming, Carling.", said Mom.

I didn't have to answer, since Suzie piped up, "I invited him."

Mom looked at her. "You should have mentioned something to me."

Suzie simply answered, a touch belligerently, "Carl is my brother, and he will always be invited to any family events with me."

Across from me, my father visibly winced at this, but his eyes never left Charlie. He half-whispered, "Is that..."

"This is our son, Dad. Charles Robert Buckman."

"We named him after both our fathers.", added Marilyn, unnecessarily, to my mind, anyway.

Mom was very tight lipped, but Dad was on the verge of crying. He looked good. His hair was totally white by now, and he had lost some weight, but he had it to lose. I guessed he was about 235, which was about 15 or more pounds down from the last time I had seen him, at the wedding.

He tore his eyes off his grandson and looked at me. It had been four years for him as well. He looked me over and eyed the cane. "What happened?"

I shrugged. "I made one jump too many. I'm out of the service now, Dad."

"Nice kid.", sneered Hamilton. "Who's the father?" Marilyn and Suzie looked daggers at him, and Mom tightened her grip on his forearm. I ignored him. I was on the verge of saying something to Dad, when the idiot had to pipe up again, he couldn't stand to be ignored. "I asked who the father was."

I looked over at my brother. "We heard you the first time, Hamilton. We're simply ignoring you. Now behave and let the grownups talk. Thank you."

Hamilton's face reddened further, but Mom kept a grip on him.

Dad looked over at Marilyn, who was now holding onto Charlie tightly. Charlie could sense something was amiss, and was clinging to her. "What do you call him?", he asked.

"Charlie.", she answered. She turned her face to our son and said, "Charlie, this is your grandfather. Can you say hello?" Charlie simply turned his head away and tried to hide.

Dad said quietly, "Charlie.", and then looked at Marilyn. "Can I hold him?"

Marilyn looked at Charlie, and then at me. She looked nervous, so I answered, "I think Charlie's a little shy. Maybe later, after he gets used to you."

Dad didn't like it, but he just nodded. He turned back to me and asked, "When did you get out?"

"About a year and a half ago. I had a bad landing, Dad, and blew my knee out."

"It was more than that, Carl.", interjected Suzie. She turned to Marilyn and asked, "Did you bring it?"

"I made sure to pack it.", answered my wife. I looked at Dad, and then the two of them, and wondered what they had cooked up. I didn't have a good feeling. Marilyn handed Charlie to Suzie, and then rooted around in his gigantic diaper bag, strapped to the back of his stroller. She pulled out a large package, wrapped with some gift paper, and my stomach dropped. She handed it to my father. "This is for you. It was from Carl's last drop."

"This is a mistake.", I said quietly.

My father looked at me for a second, but then turned away and opened the package. It was what I suspected it to be, a duplicate of the plaque that Marilyn had made for her family, the one with the photo of me getting the Bronze Star and the commendation underneath it. He looked at it and then looked up. "What is this?"

"That is from when your son was awarded the Bronze Star. Carl saved his men..."

Dad's head swiveled to me, and I interrupted Marilyn. "That's classified, honey. I can't say anything about it." I just wanted this to be over. This was just a horrible mistake.

"You won the Bronze Star?"

It was too much. I watched the rest of it like watching a car crash in slow motion on television. Practically screeching, Hamilton yelled, "You shouldn't be here!", and then grabbed the plaque out of my father's hands and dashed it to the ground, where a corner broke off. "GET OUT!"

Mom stared in shock. Dad simply roared, and backhanded my brother across the face, viciously. Hamilton went flying off his feet, as everyone around us turned to stare. Dad advanced on him and looked like he was going to kill him, with his arm brought back for another blow, and Mom blocked his path. "Charlie, get them out of here before they cause any more trouble!", she demanded.

I thought for sure Dad was going to hit Mom. He had never done this before, not even when he got Alzheimer's and got aggressive and lost his mind. He brought his hand back to strike her, and then stopped. Around us I noticed several men debating whether to get involved. "Shirley, I've had it with him and I've had it with you! They haven't caused any trouble. He has and you have!" He was pointing at Hamilton, cowering on the ground. "Thanks to you two I've lost a son, and now I've lost a grandson. I don't want to see either of you again." He turned on his heel and marched away.

Suzie was utterly dumbfounded, crying as her wonderful plans collapsed. Charlie was crying too, scared by what was going on. Marilyn tried to comfort him. I looked at the shambles, and kissed Suzie on the cheek. "I think it's time we left. Call us when you get home." I motioned Marilyn to start for the parking lot, and pushed the stroller away. I left my mother and brother behind with Suzie, and the broken plaque I left on the ground.

What a fucking disaster.

Charlie calmed down once we got him into his car seat. It took me several minutes to work my way out of the crowded parking lot, and get on the highway. Marilyn was crying quietly on her side of the car. Once it was safe to do so, I reached out and took her hand. Every fiber of my being wanted to scream out, "I TOLD YOU SO!", but I refrained. After a bit, Marilyn stopped crying, but she looked miserable and ducked my gaze. It was a long and silent drive back to Hereford.

We got home in the early afternoon, and while Marilyn made something for Charlie, I made something for Marilyn and myself. I simply did up a couple of ham and cheese sandwiches, and cracked open a couple of bottles of beer. We ate in the living room, which I normally was loathe to do. We had done that a lot in my first life, and I had learned my lesson. The dining room is there for a reason - use it!

I was half laid back in my La-Z-Boy, when Marilyn set her plate down and came over. I looked up at her and she said, "Move over." I smiled and she crawled onto my lap and laid her head on my shoulder, sighing as she did so. It wasn't romantic; she just needed a cuddle. Across the room, Dum-Dum spotted an opportunity and leaped into action, running across the room to stare at the remainder of my wife's sandwich, and then grabbing it before anybody could say anything. Marilyn sat upright and cried out, "Why you little ... oooh, nothing worked out today!" She lay back down against me. I just quietly rubbed her back.

Eventually she said, quietly, "You were right."

"Hmmm?"

"I said you were right, about the graduation."

"I heard you the first time. I just wanted to hear you say it again. It might never happen again in my lifetime.", I teased her.

"Very funny! Do you want to get punched in the nose?"

I hugged her and laughed. "I just wish I had a tape recorder going. I could play it back over and over, for the rest of my life!"

"You are really asking for it!"

I laughed some more. "It's just too easy. You know what else I want to do?"

Marilyn snorted and nudged me in the side. "Say 'I told you so?'"

"Bingo!" That got me another nudge to the side. "Nothing to do about it now. Suzie will call us sooner or later, and let us know what's going on."

Suzie didn't call us later, she came over that night! Dad had dragged Hamilton up to Newark the day before graduation, for the nurse's pinning ceremony (I guess nurses get a special pin for being an RN) and had brought up a U-Haul van to take her stuff home. They had loaded it and left it overnight. Hamilton would follow Dad home after graduation, driving the van. After the disaster following the graduation, Dad had stomped off to the parking lot and left Hamilton and Mom behind. Mom was reduced to riding home with Suzie, with Hamilton following behind them in the van. Suzie dropped Mom off and peeled out of the neighborhood before Mom could stop her. Dad wouldn't let either her or Hamilton back in the house!

We let Suzie stay the night, in one of the spare bedrooms. She drove back the next day and Dad helped her move into her apartment. He told her he had thrown both Mom and Hamilton out, and was calling a lawyer on Monday.

What a clusterfuck! The road to hell may be lined with good intentions, but in this case, I was the one going to hell, and my sister and my wife had the good intentions. I didn't want to find out where this was all going to end up, but I didn't like any of it.

Chapter 77: Reunion

Saturday, June 25, 1983

Intellectually I knew that my family's meltdown was not my fault, but rather the fault of my insane brother and his equally culpable mother. I was as much a victim as anybody. Emotionally, I knew otherwise. They were all the same people as on my first trip through, only I was different. That made it my fault, ipso facto, ergo sum, quod erat demonstradum, etc. etc. etc. Intellect had nothing to do with it.

Marilyn helped me. She simply couldn't understand my family; she had no idea how to react to them. Her family was so much closer. It was one of the things I found so appealing on my first time around. I had spent far more time with them than my own family.

Over the next few weeks things continued to fall apart back at the Buckman homestead. Dad had been absolutely serious about not letting the pair of them back into the house, and Mom had to load Hamilton into her car and spend the night at a motel. They stayed there until Monday, and then snuck in when Dad went to work. He got home and then threw them back out on the street. I heard from John Steiner that Dad was going a bit loco himself, and wanted John to be his divorce lawyer. John had refused and had given him the name of a good divorce lawyer in Towson. Dad didn't back down and Mom was served papers by the end of the week. John did mention that he didn't think Dad knew anything about the Buckman Group, so presumably Suzie was keeping her counsel on that.

On the plus side, the only person in the family who knew my address was Suzie, and she had come to the realization that giving it out would be a really fucking bad idea! My dad had our phone number, but it was unlisted, so nobody else could get it. He didn't call. Suzie told us that Mom was trying to enlist our aunts and uncles on her side of the fight, which probably wouldn't work out so well, since they were all on Dad's side of the family. I hadn't seen or heard from them since the wedding, either, so presumably I was not one of the good guys as far as they were concerned.

Suzie asked me if I wanted to use this chance to get back together with my dad, but I killed that idea real damn quick! I didn't have any use for him either. After putting up with this since I was fourteen, he had burned all his bridges with me. I knew that he loved Mom far more than he loved us kids. What if he decided that the way to get back in her good graces was to hurt my baby? I couldn't believe that he would actually have the gumption to stay away from her for good. They'd get back together. No way was I about to chance it. I just didn't trust him anymore.

What a damn nightmare!

There was nothing to do but slap a smile on my face and pretend everything was just peachy. On the plus side, it had been forever since I had really been involved with my family, other than my sister, so I still didn't have anything to do with them. It was simply depressing, but it didn't have any day to day impact on me. Marilyn worked at keeping my spirits up, and watching Charlie and Dum-Dum was amusing in its own right. I argued several times with my wife over which one of them was smarter, occasionally on different sides of the question. How much trouble could a 20 month old boy get into? The answer - an immense quantity!

Two weeks after the graduation we had our official house warming party. Everybody from the Buckman Group was there, along with their families (not including Missy's ex-husband), along with Andrea and Taylor and their families, Bill Marsbury and his foremen, some friends of Marilyn's from her church, Tusker and Tessa and Bucky, and Barry Bonham and his family. We just kind of threw it open to anybody who wanted to come. Suzie showed up, too. The weather was fine and we held it out on the back deck, which was brand new, and did hamburgers and hot dogs on an immense Weber gas fired grill Marilyn got me as a pre-Father's Day gift. That and a couple of galvanized steel tubs full of ice, beer and soda, and a bunch of lawn chairs, was all we needed to have a very nice time. Even Dum-Dum got in the act. Somebody, probably one of the little kids, managed to let her out into the back yard without being put on her tie-out, and she ran romping all over the yard until Jake suckered her with a hamburger and we could grab her and re-incarcerate her in the laundry room. We already had the back yard staked off for a potential future swimming pool and fence, but wanted to delay that for another year.

Marilyn was still making noises about another baby, which I had resigned myself to. I agreed that the next vacation was going to be a family vacation, maybe to Disney World in the fall, when Charlie turned two, and then over the winter we'd do a parent's vacation, and start working on our next child then. That got her so excited I got very lucky that night! If somebody had invented Viagra back then, I could have used it!

And then we had the next big event of the summer. Why I agreed to it I will never know. Marilyn certainly wanted to go, and Tusker and Tessa were behind it, and they talked Marilyn into pushing it. I think she actually got me to agree when I wasn't wearing any pants, so by all rights, the contract was illegal and invalid. Still, I couldn't get out of it.

It was 1983, and it was the 10th Reunion of the Graduating Class of 1973 at Towson High School.

I had only gone to my 20th reunion before, and that was because we had planned to be visiting Maryland that week anyway. On my first trip through, Towson High was something that I endured and survived. I hadn't even bought a high school ring until my mother found out and forced me to buy one. Certainly by the time the reunions started, I was hundreds of miles away, and had absolutely nothing in common with my old life.

I didn't have any excuses this time. I had missed the 5th reunion because I was living in North Carolina at the time, but now I was only 20 miles away or so. Either Tusker or Tessa must have given my new address to the planning committee, since we found several invitations and reminders in the mail. Marilyn wrote them a check for two tickets without even asking me if I wanted to go.

It's no use arguing with Marilyn when she gets something into her head. For proof of that, we only had to go back to Suzie's graduation. This wasn't going to be that bad, but it was probably going to be pointless. "Honey, it's been ten years. Nobody will even remember who the fuck I was."

"Tusker and Tessa will remember you!"

"That's it! Nobody else will know me, that's for sure.", I replied.

"How do you know that!?"

I just smiled at her and shook my head. "Honey, I wasn't even there half the time. The last couple of years, I spent half the day over at Towson State. Trust me; nobody will know who I am."

"Well, I want to go, so you have to go."

Why she wanted to go to a reunion of a school she had never attended mystified me, but so much about my wife always would mystify me. I sort of liked it most of the time. I just smiled and shrugged. "Okay, we'll go. We can stay for an hour or so, and after we get tired of the blank stares at my name badge, we can leave and go out for dinner or something."

Marilyn squealed happily and kissed me on the cheek, and then scampered off to call Tessa and tell her that we would be going. I just rolled my eyes.

The morning of the reunion, I told Marilyn that we would go, but to dress for going out to a nice dinner afterwards. I would dress casually - chinos and a dress shirt, no tie - and toss a sport coat in the back of the car. Marilyn decided on a button front long denim skirt and a peasant top. She wore some high heeled sandals to look classy, but she kept laughing about how we would end up staying the day at the reunion. She was up to something, but I had no idea what.

The one thing I definitely wanted to do was to take my new toy. I had been over to Tusk Cycles a few months ago when one of his customers drove up in a Mercedes Benz 380 SL, a new one, and I saw it through his front window. Memories came flooding back of the 380, which I thought at the time was one of the most beautiful cars ever made. Even the way they built the hard top, with the lowered center section, looked exotic. I just stared at it through the window while my buddy dealt with his customer. The next day I drove down to Towson and went to the Mercedes Benz dealership.

They had one in the showroom, and it was like getting an instant erection! Back before, the idea that I could ever actually afford one of these cars was like the idea that I could ever actually become an astronaut and go to the moon. They only built them in the late Seventies through the mid Eighties, and I always stared when I saw one. To me, they were the sexiest car around. I wanted to have a mid-life crisis so I could solve it by buying a sports car; never mind that I was nowhere near mid-life.

I left the dealership that day, but came back about a week later, and this time I convinced myself to take a test drive. I wasn't going to actually buy one, but it wouldn't hurt to drive one. The sales rep must have thought I was nuts, or maybe he had seen this before. I took the drive, which was sort of like a mechanical wet dream, and then left the dealership again. A week later I was out with Marilyn and Charlie and I stopped into the dealership again to show her the car. I think the cat was out of the bag when the salesman smiled and said, "Welcome back, Mister Buckman."

I looked guilty when Marilyn commented, "Been here before, have we?" I hemmed and hawed, and she just rolled her eyes and said, "Well, how much does it cost?"

"If you have to ask the price, you can't afford it.", I told her.

She gave me a "Hmmppphh!" at that, and then looked at the sticker in the window, at which point she gave a small shriek and said, "You've got to be kidding me!" The sales rep never batted an eye; I at least had the good taste to blush with embarrassment. "Oh, hell, do what you want!", she said, shaking her head.

"Seriously?"

"It's your money! Feel free to waste it!" She juggled a laughing Charlie and said, "Daddy's being silly!"

So I bought myself a dark blue 380 SL model. Dealer prep - waiting for the check to clear - took a few days. The day I could pick it up, Marilyn and Charlie drove me down, and then I drove it back, stopping at Tusker's to give him a ride. He agreed with me, it was like an orgasm on wheels. He also, even more importantly, offered me a place to store the hard top if I wanted to drive it with just the soft top or topless.

So, if I was going to the reunion, I was taking the 380 and Marilyn and I would dress for an afternoon and evening out. The reunion was bound to be a bust, so we could do a date night afterwards. Marilyn had joined Our Lady of Grace over in Parkton, and had a babysitter in the form of the fourteen year old daughter of a friend in the parish. Becky arrived around 11:00 or so, and Marilyn gave the poor girl a complete breakdown of Charlie's entire life and every conceivable emergency. I finally rescued Becky by dragging Marilyn out the door.

The reunion was being held at the Loch Raven Tennis and Swim Club, north of Dulaney Valley Road on the Jarretsville Pike, north of the reservoir. Becky had assured us she would be fine for the afternoon and into the evening, and in fact was looking forward to it, since it was worth extra money for her. It was about a half hour drive to get there, and Marilyn had a rather self-satisfied smile on her face most of the time. I couldn't figure it out, since I just couldn't understand why Marilyn had wanted to go to my reunion. My wife was astonishingly unromantic about the schools she went to. She never went to any of her reunions, or even her graduations for that matter.

It was just before noon when we pulled into the parking lot. It was surprisingly full, with about a half dozen motorcycles parked over at one side. "It looks like Tusker and his friends are here already.", I told Marilyn, pointing at the bikes.

"I never have figured out how you ended up hanging out with the bikers! It's not like you ride."

"Not in a million years!", I said, laughing. "I might be an organ donor, but I want to hang on to them a little while longer. Listen, I'm just not that judgmental, and mostly they weren't either. I remember one time when the vice principal, a real tool of an asshole, was giving out a lot of shit. He had this little VW Bug, so I rounded up a few of the bikers and a few of the lacrosse players, and we picked it up and carried it over to the school entrance and wedged it between a couple of the pillars at the front door, sideways, so it couldn't be driven out. He was so pissed!"

"You're so pleased with yourself over that, aren't you?!", she responded primly.

"You're damn right I was pleased. I'll bet you never did that with the nuns." Marilyn was almost apoplectic at the thought, so I just laughed at her some more, and teased her about getting back at the nuns, perhaps by smacking them with rulers. Thank God I never had to put up with parochial schools!

I parked the car and we got out; I left my cane in the car for later. My knee was better early in the day, generally, so I might not need it until later. I reached out and we held hands as we walked across the parking lot. There were a couple of really gargantuan tents behind what looked like a clubhouse, and several tennis courts and a swimming pool over to the right. Nobody was playing tennis or swimming, though, and it was a beautiful day, so it made me think that the reunion group had reserved the club for the day. Regardless, the only way to go in was through the clubhouse, so I opened the door and ushered Marilyn inside.

There was a big banner stretched across the far wall, 'WELCOME BACK TOWSON HIGH 10 YEAR REUNION!', and below that was a long table with what looked like spread out name tags. Behind the table were three girls, women actually, and they looked familiar. Also on the table was a pitcher of beer and several Solo cups. I looked around the clubhouse for a second, and then walked towards the table. I figured it to be a registration table.

Before I could say a word, a short brunette squealed, "Oh my God! You made it! Carl Buckman!" The other two women grinned madly at this. The little brunette came scampering around the table and wrapped her arms around me. "It's been so long!"

What the hell?! I glanced over at Marilyn, mortally embarrassed by whoever this woman was, now embracing me in front of my wife. Marilyn, however, was anything but shocked. She was grinning madly at me.

The little brunette stepped back. "Carl! I can't believe you don't remember us!" She tapped a name tag on her substantial chest - 'TAMMY (BRAXTON) BRONSON'.

I glanced at the name tag and it all came flooding back. It was Tammy Braxton, one of my old girlfriends! She was also about six months pregnant! Oh, God, could it get any worse? I was being hugged by an old girlfriend in front of my wife! Nothing to do but brazen it out! "My, God, Tammy, I can't believe it! You look great! So you ended up marrying Randy after all?" I turned to Marilyn. "This is my wife, Marilyn. Marilyn, this is one of my friends back in high school."

Marilyn smiled. "I thought so."

Tammy looked my wife over and said, "Well, she's definitely your type!", which caused Marilyn to grin broadly, even more so at my discomfort.

"Huh?"

"Short, curvy, brunette!", answered Tammy. She threw her arms out in a modeling pose.

Then I noticed that one of the other women behind the table had come out, too. She struck the same pose, and on her name tag it said, 'SHELLEY (TALBOT) MOORE'. She was now back to being a frosted blonde, but she told Marilyn, "I was a brunette when we dated."

I looked over at Marilyn and swallowed. "We were just friends."

"I'll just bet you were friendly!", said Marilyn. Behind the table the third woman, a tall and slender blonde, simply smirked and tried to stifle her laughter.

"I'm so glad you could come! Tessa said she was going to get you to come. It's been so long!", said Tammy.

Tessa? She was involved in this? I began to smell a rat! "Oh?" I glanced over at Marilyn, who was grinning and nodding and laughing at me. "Tessa talked to you about this?"

"You know it! She told me I'd get to meet all your old girlfriends and talk to them about you. I couldn't wait!"

"Oh, sweet suffering Jesus! No, please God, no!", I said. I could see my life flashing before my eyes! "Marilyn, I swear, we were just friends!" I reached over to the table and poured myself a beer into a clean cup.

Tammy inserted herself between my wife and I, and Shelley got on the other side of Marilyn, and they began steering her through the clubhouse towards the rear. "We have got so much to talk about!", said Shelley.

"We used to call it the Carl Buckman Experience.", I heard Tammy say, just before they left the room.

At that I spewed the sip of beer out and across the lobby. "Oh my God! This just keeps getting better and better!"

The blonde, whose tag read, 'JOY (GAYLORD) SIMPKINS', just laughed at me. "So you had a type?! All those times I flirted with you and you never acted on it, now I know why. I could have dyed my hair, but no way was I doing anything about the short and curvy parts."

I remembered Joy now, a very pretty, but tall and slender blonde. I didn't remember her flirting with me, but it had been many years. "Sorry about that." She just laughed, and then handed me a couple of nametags. "I think this is going to be a disaster.", I told her.

"Karma's a bitch, Carl.", she laughed.

"How come we're here?", I asked, deflecting the conversation. I waved my hands at the surrounding tennis club. "Why'd we meet here and not down in Towson?"

"You don't like it here?", she asked, a touch defensively.

"No, just curious."

She nodded. "The price is right. It's free!" She gave me a big smile. "My husband and I own the club!"

"No kidding, well, good for you! It looks very nice. I guess that explains it, then."

She waved me on through, and then turned to wave at somebody else coming in. I didn't even look behind me at them, but just shambled on through. My thoughts were on what trouble my wife was getting into.

The first person I ran across who I immediately recognized was Tusker, who was sitting at a table on the right side with a few of the other bikers from back in the day. He saw me and laughed. "Well, look what the cat dragged in! Where's Marilyn?"

"Filing for divorce. Do you know what Tessa has done?! She told Marilyn that she would introduce her to all my old girlfriends! I'm a dead man!"

The rest of the table exploded in laughter, Tusker included. "Oh, it's worse than that! After you agreed to come, Tessa got on the phone with some of her old friends and they made a list, and invited as many of them to come as they could! Your wife is about to find out all your old secrets!"

I stared at him. "Oh, tell me you're joking! I might be divorced, but you are about to become a widower, because I am about to kill your wife! How could you let her do this!?"

Tusker poured me some beer. "Oh, buddy, you deserve this!", he said, laughing.

"Some friend you are!" I clipped my nametag on, and then shook hands with the rest of the table, some of whom I remembered, some of whom I didn't. After a few minutes, I excused myself and went in search of Marilyn.

I found her at a table, surrounded by about a half dozen women, all of whom I recognized, none of whom I particularly wanted to see talking to my wife. "Ladies, good to see you all." There were several squeals and waves, and Linda Bravo jumped up and kissed me on the lips, as the rest of the table snickered. I handed Marilyn her nametag. "Just remember, we were all just friends, that's all, just friends."

Linda piped up, "That's not the way I remember it!"

"Oh? Well, maybe I should go find your husbands and let them know just how friendly all of you were?!"

There was a gabble of noise at that, some protesting but most laughingly telling me to go ahead. Tammy waved it off and said, "Go ahead, see if I care. He already knows, don't you think!"

That was true; Randy had started dating her after we broke up. "Maybe I'll tell him the truth about you, then."

"Honey, please! What I learned with you, I refined. Nobody talks about the Carl Buckman Experience anymore. Now it's the Tammy Bronson Experience people want to know about!" That earned me a tableful of catcalls and laughs, and I just surrendered the field to them.

I wandered around the tents. The reunion was doubling as a crab feast, which I heartily approved of. There was some fried chicken if you didn't like crabs, which Marilyn didn't, but it had been a few years since I had steamed crabs, and as soon as I could peel my wife away from the hen party ratting me out, I would have some. I suppose it was like any reunion. Some people you remember, a lot you don't, and even more you realize you didn't know them before to begin with.

I found myself sitting at a table with Tusker, Randy Bronson, Ray Shorn and his wife, Mike Misner and his wife, and Katie Lowenthal. Katie was still single (and looking hotter than hell, she had lost all the weight from high school!) and Tessa and Tammy were still talking to Marilyn. I looked at Randy and Tusker, and told them, "I am going to kill your wives for this."

Tusker just snorted. Randy said, "Live by the sword, die by the sword, man. You earned this."

"Oh?"

He gave me a look of disbelief. "Are you kidding me? You were the biggest cockhound in school!"

"Me?!"

"You!", agreed Katie. "Everybody knew it! Just because nobody complained didn't mean it wasn't true."

"We were just friends.", I protested.

"Yeah? It's a good thing Tessa's a blonde and not a brunette, since then I'd have to punch you out!", added Tusker.

"Some friend you are!", I told him.

At that point, Marilyn, Tessa, and Tammy came back. I made room and Marilyn grabbed a seat next to me, and Tessa sat next to her husband. Running out of seats, Tammy sat sideways on her husband's lap. He wrapped his arms around her. I smiled at them. "I always knew you two would end up married. How many years has it been now?"

They looked at each other and smiled. "It was just last year."

"Last year? What kept you?"

Most of the others laughed at that, although Katie looked mystified. She had been in California going to medical school and doing an internship. "Oh, we got married.", said Randy.

"Just not to each other!", added his wife.

"What?!"

"Well, after graduation Randy went to Maryland, and I went to Penn State. We talked about staying together long distance, but it just didn't work out.", said Tammy. Randy just grinned and hugged his wife's ample belly. "We both met other people and we both got married as soon as we got out of school."

"And we both figured out a year or two later it wasn't working and got divorced.", added Randy.

"Then we met again a year ago, and realized we were meant for each other." Tammy twisted around and kissed him on the cheek. "Thank God we didn't have any kids! This will be our first, for both of us."

"Huh! Well, you two must have been fated to be together then. Congratulations!", I told them.

That got us started talking about our kids. We admitted to having a 20 month old, and Tusker and Tessa told about having Bucky at our wedding. Ray and his wife had two, Mike was an intern, but he and his wife had one. At that point we all got up and got in line to bring back some steamed crabs to the table. Conversation was a little limited for a few minutes after that. You can eat or you can talk, but it's hard to do both. Marilyn finished her chicken before the rest of us were even halfway through the crabs. Well, Katie, too, since she didn't like crabs either. That was okay, even if a bit strange for a true Marylander. We discussed it and decided not to have her stoned to death.

Tusker asked what everyone else was doing these days, and Ray said he worked for a paving company in Columbia as an engineer. Ray's wife stayed at home with their two kids. Randy and Tammy worked for an insurance company in Baltimore, which was how they met up again. Mike and Katie were still interns, Mike in Delaware and Katie in California. Then everybody looked at Tusker and me. I just waved my hand and said, "I work for an investment company out in Hereford. We live out there now, over towards Hampstead." Heads swiveled to the Tusks.

Tusker simply smiled. "You are now looking at the newest Honda motorcycle dealer in the state!"

I must have lit up as well. "Congratulations! It came through?!"

He nodded and reached out to shake my hand. "I just got the word yesterday. Next week I have to review the floorplan documents and then I'll place my first order."

"That is simply tremendous. We'll talk next week." A few of the others looked at me curiously. "My company invested some money in Tusker's business. I'm the point man."

We were taking a break after the first round of crabs, and Tammy said, "I just have to ask, did you actually do all the stuff you said in your speech?" The rest of the crowd looked at me curiously.

"My speech?" It took me a second to recall. "You mean my valediction speech? Oh my God, I haven't thought about that thing in ages! I was such an asshole with that thing. I figured everybody was going to boo me off the stage!"

Marilyn looked at me and asked, "You gave a speech?"

Ray laughed. "He was valedictorian. He had to give a speech."

Marilyn looked at me accusingly. "You never told me you were valedictorian!"

"I've never told you a lot of stuff."

"So I am finding out!"

I laughed at that, but then Tammy hopped up. "I've got a copy of it somewhere." She scampered off.

"Good Lord! Somebody actually kept that damn thing?", I asked incredulously.

Randy nodded. "She had some stuff stored away, as did a few other people. She dug it out for the reunion."

"I want to hear it.", said Marilyn.

"It was bad enough the first time around. I'm not sure I can stand it twice.", I replied.

"It was a pretty good speech.", countered Katie. "That's not just me, either. I heard it from a few other people, too."

"It made me change my major from pre-law to engineering.", added Ray.

I stared at my old friend. "You're kidding me, right."

"Nope. Pissed my old man off, too. I became a civil engineer. The pay might not be as good as a lawyer but it's not bad, and I probably sleep better at night."

Huh! I didn't know what to say to that, and not sound like a total jerk.

Tammy returned in a couple of minutes with a plastic bag with a copy of the Baltimore Sun inside. "Did you know they printed your speech in the Sun?"

"It must have been a real slow news day.", I told her.

"Read it!", asked Marilyn.

"No!", I told her.

"Then I'll read it.", said Tammy, and damned if she didn't! She opened the bag and pulled out the yellowed newspaper and opened it to the page on the graduations, and read it out loud. I probably turned about five shades of red, as the others at the table listened and watched me.

After Tammy was done, Marilyn said, "Wow! That was great! You wrote that?"

"That's me at my most pretentious!", I told her.

"No, that's you! You're all about taking control and responsibility. That sounded just like you!", she argued.

"So, tell us, did you do all that stuff?", asked Katie.

"What stuff?"

"At the end. You gave three different commitments. Did you do them?", she pressed. The others around the table also wanted to know.

"Uhhh..."

Not content to let it go, Tammy picked up the newspaper again and scanned through to the appropriate part. "Okay, here's the first -... go to a school that teaches science and engineering... - you did that, right? Weren't you going to school for math or something?"

Marilyn answered, "Doctor Buckman earned a doctorate in mathematics at 21."

Around the table there was a buzz, including from the two real doctors, Katie and Mike.

Tammy nodded. "Okay, yes on that one. Next, where was it, oh here -... I will be a soldier... - Well?"

"Captain Buckman won the Bronze Star as a paratrooper with the 82nd Airborne.", said Marilyn.

The buzz got louder at that, and Marilyn got out her wallet picture of me getting the medal.

"Well, Doctor and Captain! We're two for two! Now, for number three! -... my final commitment is that when the time comes, every April 15th, to pay my taxes, I will do so with a smile... - So? Do you pay your taxes with a smile?"

"I think I was reaching with that one!", I answered, laughing.

"What about the part before that, about making some money?", asked Randy.

I glanced at Marilyn and the Tusks, and shook my head. I didn't want to get into that with these guys. Tusker sidestepped it a touch. "Okay, I am not going to go into details, but if you go out to the parking lot right now, there's a brand new Mercedes 380 SL out there that I know for a fact he paid for in cash. Does that qualify?"

"Thanks a bunch, buddy!", I protested.

There were a few whistles at that. I just waved them off as best I could. Then I stood up. "I need some more crabs and beer. Who's with me?"

The most curious event of the day occurred an hour or so later. I had been circulating around the room, meeting a few more people, and introducing Marilyn to them, and had returned to the table we had been sharing with Tusker and Tessa. Out of the corner of my eye I saw somebody approaching from my right. "Captain Buckman?", he asked tentatively.

The others eyed me curiously, and I swiveled my head. "Well, I used to be, but that seems a long time ago." I looked at this new person. He was a large man, blond, crew cut, heavily muscled, wearing a pair of worn fatigue pants and a very tight camo pattern tee-shirt. For some reason he looked familiar, very familiar. I slowly stood up, now favoring my right knee, and turned to face him. "You look familiar..."

"Yes sir, I'm..."

Suddenly his speech pattern came back to me, along with the Texas accent. My eyes opened wide and my jaw dropped for a second. "Corporal Janos!?"

"Yes, sir, you remembered me." He stuck his hand out and I reflexively shook it.

"Corporal Janos! I will be damned! What in the world are you doing here?"

"It's sergeant now, sir, and I'm attending the reunion.", he told me.

"Well, good Lord, have a seat. Sergeant? Well deserved, very well deserved. I thought you were from Texas. What are you doing here?"

He nodded and grabbed a seat across from Marilyn and I. Tusker and Tessa were at our side, and watched all this curiously, and Katie and Tammy came up as well, standing and listening in. I introduced Marilyn again, and then named my friends, and said, "Well, don't stop. What brought you here?"

"My wife. This is her reunion."

"Your wife?! She went to Towson High, Class of '73?"

"Yes, sir!"

"What was her name, then, I mean?"

"Jennifer Goodwin. Did you know her?", he asked.

I searched my memory in vain, but couldn't come up with anything. Neither could those around me. "Sorry, Sergeant, but it was a big school. Maybe if I saw her..."

Janos promptly popped to his feet and let out a shrill whistle, heads turned and when he spotted his wife, he made the hand signals for 'You', 'Me', and 'Regroup'. I noticed a woman working her way through the tables and come over. When she got closer, he said, "Jennie, this is Captain Buckman, he was with us in Honduras. I told you about that, right? He went to school here, too!"

I stood up to reach across the table and shake her hand. Her face looked marginally familiar, but not anything more than that. "It's Mister Buckman, now. You were Class of '73, also?"

She had a light alto tone. "Yes, but I'm sorry, I don't recognize you either."

"It was a big school. Don't worry about it. Your husband saved my bacon in Honduras.", I told her.

She grinned and gave him a one armed hug. "We had just started dating then. We got married last year."

"Jennie's actually a year older than I am, but it's not like it matters anymore. I was Class of '75 back home.", he said.

"What do you do, Jennifer?", asked Marilyn.

"Waitress and bartender in a restaurant near the base. It's a good job. No matter where he gets stationed, I can always find a job as a waitress or bartender." She had the look of a professional waitress or bar staffer. I nodded. She was right, there was always work like that near an army base.

"Congratulations. He's a good man." I turned to Janos. "So, still with the division?"

Janos sat down, and his wife made herself comfortable on his lap. He shook his head. "No, sir. Last year, after you got your medal, I put in for Ranger School. I made it through that and got my third stripe."

"I'll be damned!" I turned to Marilyn. "No wonder why we got back! We had an Airborne Ranger with us!" To Janos, I said, "Rangers Lead The Way, right Sergeant?", repeating the Ranger motto.

"You led us, sir. That numbnuts lieutenant would have gotten us all killed! What the hell happened with him, anyway? After you got arrested, he was never seen again. And what was with you getting arrested, anyway?", asked Janos.

The table erupted with questions! Arrested? What was that about? Well, I couldn't say specifically, and I didn't want to break the Top Secret classification, so I had to dance around it. I just waved it down. "That was just a misunderstanding, nothing more. That idiot lieutenant complained that I had taken command illegally, and I had led a mutiny. Once we got back to headquarters and they sorted it out, they cut me loose. A doctor took one look at my leg and had me flown to Walter Reed. It was nothing, really."

"And the lieutenant?"

I had to grin at that. "Last I heard he was sent to the Congo as military liaison to the cannibals. With any luck, he became dinner!"

That got me a laugh from Janos, who then said, "They probably got indigestion."

Tusker chimed in. "I have to ask! I know he got a medal and I've seen the picture Marilyn has, but he won't tell us what happened! He just keeps saying it's Classified! If you were there, what happened?"

I interrupted Janos before he could say anything. "Sorry, but it's Classified!"

"That's bullshit!", protested Tusker.

"Okay, I'll tell you a little bit." I drank a little more beer, and then leaned forward. I lowered my voice, and said, "You have to swear never to tell anyone!" I waited for a moment, and when nobody said anything, I pushed, "Well? Do you swear?"

Tusker gave me a startled look, and said, "Okay, I swear." Around the table, the others nodded and agreed. Across from me, I could see Janos starting to smile.

I nodded theatrically, and then glanced around to see if anybody else was listening. "Okay. This all happened in Honduras. The brass was very nervous about the health of the men, and the medal was because of that." I paused for as much dramatic effect as I could muster. "Our unit - we had the lowest incidence of venereal disease in the entire battalion!"

Around me the table exploded in laughter and outrage. I just sat back and smiled as Tusker sputtered. "It's true, just ask the Sergeant. He was there."

Janos was laughing too hard to do much, but he nodded and said, "Yes, sir, we were as clean as a whistle!", and then started laughing some more when his wife nudged him in the ribs. He laughed, and then picked up his Solo cup of beer. Holding it out towards me, he got serious, and said, "Absent companions."

I knew the old toast, and I knew I was now part of that tradition. I picked mine up and tapped my cup to his. "Absent companions." We drank some beer together.

At that point, Jennie announced they had to get moving, and she crawled off Janos' lap. As he stood, I stood also, and said, "Sergeant, it was really good seeing you again. I'm out now, but if you or any of the men need anything from me, look me up."

"Yes, sir, thank you, sir. It was a real privilege to have served with you, Captain." Then he stood straight and gave me a textbook salute, straight from the field manual. I returned the salute, and then shook his hand. He departed, as the others stared at me.

I ignored it and sat down again, my thoughts going back to that miserable march in Nicaragua. Marilyn noticed me lost in my thoughts, and said, "You okay?"

I smiled and nodded. "Yeah. You never know who you're going to meet. I'd have never made it home without Janos and the others. He was the first guy I found when we landed, and he was my lead scout on the ground. Hell of a soldier. He'll be a good Ranger."

"What the hell happened?", asked Katie.

I just shook my head. "It really is classified. I can't say. Hell of a story, though." I smiled and shook my head.

I had a surprisingly good time, and promised we'd come back for the next reunion, especially if the women would promise not to tell Marilyn any more stories. At the end of the afternoon, after washing up in the restroom, I met my wife at the door, and we headed out to the parking lot. As we walked, hand in hand, she swung her hips and gave me a bump. "So, exactly what is the Carl Buckman Experience?"

Chapter 78: The Carl Buckman Experience, Part II

"Give me a break! There is no such thing as the Carl Buckman Experience!"

"That's not what your friends said.", teased Marilyn.

"We were just friends!", I protested.

"Yes, it certainly sounded friendly!"

I refused to answer, but unlocked the car and opened the door for her. As I went around to my side, I couldn't help but think about the movie, still years in the future, with Tom Cruise and Jack Nicholson, A Few Good Men. - 'I want the truth!' 'You can't handle the truth!' - I redid it in my mind as 'I want the Carl Buckman Experience!' 'You can't handle the Carl Buckman Experience!' I chuckled to myself as I opened the driver side door.

Marilyn started up again as soon as I got in the car. "I think there is a Carl Buckman Experience, and you're embarrassed to tell me what it is!"

It was too much for me! I stopped putting my key in the ignition and just started laughing. It was just too much. I kept laughing long enough for Marilyn to start getting pissed at me. Eventually, as she started to stew, I calmed down. "Okay, you want the Carl Buckman Experience? I don't think you can handle it, but I'll give you a shot."

"You'll give me a shot?!", she asked incredulously.

I kept laughing. "The others had to work their way up to it, but I'll let you have a shot at the title."

"You'll give me a shot at it! You are such a ... a ... a jerk!" That just made me laugh some more.

After a minute more, I turned the key in the ignition. I grinned at her. "Do you really want the full Carl Buckman Experience? I warn you, it will ruin you for other men. Once you've had the Carl Buckman Experience, no other man will ever be able to satisfy you!"

Marilyn snorted and had a twinkle in her eye. "I'll just have to take the chance."

"Well, it might be safe ... for me, at least."

"What?!"

"Well, the others I had sign a waiver of liability, but since you're my wife, you can't testify against me in a court of law."

"Oh, you are so full of crap!"

"Okay by me, but don't say I didn't warn you!" I put the car in gear, but only drove up to the entrance to the tennis club. I hopped out and said, "Just wait, I'll be back in a moment."

I went inside and found a pay phone. I really missed cell phones! They had just started coming out this year, and we had bought some stock in Motorola, but the phone was the DynaTac system, and about the size of a brick. I was thinking about getting one and simply keeping it in the rear of the car. It would be a few more years until they came out with something a lot more portable. Once I found a pay phone, I called home and told Becky that we wouldn't be home for several more hours. I was taking Mrs. Buckman out to dinner and we probably wouldn't be home until after dark. I promised her a nice tip, and she laughed and thanked me, and said she would call her mother and let her know. I hung up, and contemplated the rest of the day.

I gave an evil laugh as I climbed back behind the wheel. "I just called Becky to let her know we were going to be home late. Are you sure you're up for this?"

"Give me a break!", laughed Marilyn.

"Don't say I didn't warn you!" I put the car back into gear and headed out of the parking lot. Marilyn just laughed some more.

I decided to drive up the Jarrettsville Pike to Jacksonville, and then head west on Paper Mill Road until I got to the Harrisburg Expressway. Once we got on the Jarrettsville Pike I looked over at my wife and smiled. "Ready to start the Carl Buckman Experience?"

"What? Here? Now? I thought it was something you did in bed!"

"Oh, no, no, no! The Carl Buckman Experience isn't something that can be mass produced and distributed! No, we at the Buckman Group have developed highly customized tools and systems to bring the full experience to each client on an individualized basis! It is different for each client!"

"Yeah, right! You are so full of crap!", laughed Marilyn.

"So, are you ready?"

"Sure."

"Do you trust me?"

At that she looked over at me. "What?"

"Do you trust me? If you don't trust me, the Carl Buckman Experience can't be fully savored."

Marilyn rolled her eyes, and then said, "Sure, I trust you. What now?!"

"Okay, that was your final warning. There is no turning back now."

"Whatever! You are still full of crap!"

I shrugged. I let it go for another mile or so, and then as we approached Jacksonville I told her, "Okay, take off your panties."

"What!?", she protested. Her head whipped around towards me. "Is that what you used to do with those girls?"

"I told you, each customer gets their own unique experience."

"Now I'm a customer? Don't think I'm going to be paying you!"

I laughed. "Trust me, by tomorrow morning, you'll be taking out full page ads praising the service you'll be getting!"

Marilyn laughed at that, so I reminded her to take off her panties. She laughed some more, but then agreed. She unbuttoned her skirt almost to the waist, and then reached under and shimmied them down off her hips and legs. I noticed they were simple white nylon bikinis, nothing too extreme. "Toss them in the back." The 380 really didn't have a back seat, just a small area with some fold down seats that nobody ever used. Right now it simply had my sport coat and my cane.

"Happy?", commented my wife. She tossed them in the back, and then began to button her skirt back up.

"Hold on there. I didn't say anything about buttoning back up. In fact, finish unbuttoning your skirt."

Marilyn's eyes opened wide at that. It wasn't the first time we had done this, but up until now it had always been late at night when we were alone, or maybe taking a parents vacation. She reversed course and undid all the buttons on the skirt, and laid it open, so that she was now naked from the waist down, except for her high heeled sandals.

"Now, lose the camisole. That's what you have under your top, right? A camisole?"

Marilyn turned back to look at me, but I just gave her a serious expression and nodded. "I can't do that! People will see!"

"Not my problem.", I told her.

Marilyn gave me a dirty look, but then pulled her peasant blouse top up from her waist, and above her boobs, and then pulled her arms out of the sleeves, leaving it around her neck. She repeated this with the camisole, then managed to put her arms back in the sleeves of the blouse, pull it down, and then pull the camisole up and through the top of the blouse and over her head. That went behind her. "Happy now?"

"We are only just getting started!", I told her. I looked her over closely as we stopped at a light. She looked pretty good there! Marilyn blushed as I inspected her. The peasant top wasn't sheer or tight but it was obvious she was naked beneath it, and her nipples were beginning to stiffen.

As we started up again, I said, "Now begin to touch yourself." She looked at me oddly at that, and I nodded. "Go ahead, you know what to do." Marilyn stiffened slightly as she slipped her hands between her legs. Her back arched slightly as her body began to respond. "Now, I want you to tell me what all the ladies were saying was the Carl Buckman Experience."

"That's cheating!"

"That's market research! We need to make sure that your experience is different!" I smiled over at her. "Be explicit. Be very explicit!" I reached over with my right hand and tweaked a nipple through her blouse; Marilyn moaned and arched her back in response. I pulled my hand back and said, again, "Tell me!"

"You're mean!", she answered. It was difficult for Marilyn to talk about such things to me. I would often tease her when we were making love, and my wife was perfectly content to writhe and moan beneath me, but not happy when I made her tell me her fantasies or desires. Still, she would when sufficiently prodded, and I kept prodding her.

It always astonishes me that women will talk among themselves about stuff that if a guy talked to them about, would have them calling the cops! It seemed that what most of the ladies at the table had mentioned to Marilyn had to do with one of two topics, my willingness to eat them out (which for quite a few of them was something completely new) and the fact that I knew so many different positions. In retrospect, I wasn't surprised, since that sort of thing only comes with practice, and let's face it, I had a hell of a lot more experience than they did back then.

I also tormented Marilyn during the drive by frustrating her. After a few minutes, when I sensed she was getting close to orgasm, I said, "Stop! Put your hands on the dashboard!"

Marilyn stopped and turned her head. "What? What are you doing?"

"I said to stop!", Marilyn was still playing with herself, so I reached out and tugged her hands away. "Now, behave and stop."

Her eyes widened and she gave me an angry look. "You are just plain mean!"

I laughed at that. By then we were on the Harrisburg Expressway driving north. After about five minutes, I relented. Reaching over, I flicked her nipple through her top and said, "Back to work!"

She groaned, and put her fingers back on her clit, slumping down and spreading her legs wide. There was a definite aroma of her musk in the car. I kept driving north, past our normal exit to Hereford, and Marilyn was out of it; she never noticed. A mile or so later I ordered her to stop. I heard a half muttered, "Bastard!", from her.

When we hit the Pennsylvania line I allowed her to start again. Marilyn hissed at me, but put her hands back between her legs, and asked, "Where are we going?"

"It's a surprise!" To me, too, since I wasn't sure what I was up to, not at all! I just wanted to do something memorable for her. I kept letting her touch herself for a few minutes, and then stopping her until we hit the outskirts of York, and an idea came to me. I pulled off the highway and said, "Put your skirt back on." Marilyn hurriedly moved to comply, but I stopped her after a moment. "No, only button the top four buttons." I pulled into a small strip mall that had a drug store.

I parked outside the drug store and said, "Now, you are to go in there and buy a home enema kit."

Marilyn's eyes widened to the point of panic. "I can't go in there dressed this way!"

"You can and you will! Give me a break. Nobody here knows you or cares. You could wander in there in a string bikini with a sign around your neck saying 'Rent me!' and nobody would care. Now, get out of the car and do it. Do you have any money in your purse?"

Marilyn groaned and rolled her eyes. "Yes!"

"Then go, and don't think you can cheat. I'll be watching!"

I did, too. I got out of the 380 about a minute after Marilyn went into the store, and followed her surreptitiously through the store, and watched her find an enema kit and take it up to the counter. As I told her, nobody cared or noticed. I followed her out to the car, and let her back in. The bag went into the back, and I ordered her to undo her skirt again.

I think some of Marilyn's nervousness was about what the enema kit signified to her. Anal sex was something we did on occasion, and while Marilyn certainly enjoyed it, it was also something terribly taboo to her.

From the drug store, we drove to Harrisburg, with me alternating allowing her to touch herself with not touching herself, and I drove to an industrial part of town, and pulled into the parking lot of an adult video store. "Now, we are going in together.", I told her. "Only button the top two buttons on the skirt."

"Just two?", she asked weakly.

I gave her a big grin. "Don't complain or I might make it just one!"

It was late, but the store was still open. I led her inside, and Marilyn was very nervous. I expect she thought that white slavers were about to descend upon us and whisk her off to parts unknown. She clung to my arm as we went inside. I had been here once before, to buy a vibrator for her. It was about what you would expect, simple industrial concrete block construction (cheap), no windows (nothing to break when the natives rioted), and nondescript. Inside were several aisles with various toys, videos, and magazines, all sexual in nature.

Marilyn had never been in an adult store before, and it was all I could do not to laugh at her. From behind her, I leaned down and whispered in her ear, "Your custom tailored Carl Buckman Experience involves you leaving your comfort zone and exploring what you are capable of. I'll bet you've never seen a place like this before." Marilyn couldn't even answer, but simply shook her head. I prodded her and we started going down the aisles.

Marilyn's eyes were as wide as a five-year-old's on Christmas morning. There were things in that store she had never heard of before. I kept up the torment, asking her what she thought of different vibrators, did she want a large one or a small one, long or wide. I had already determined to simply have her pick a vibrator and a movie, and then have her go to the counter and pay for them herself.

The movie I had her pick was called Anal Island, about a group of tourists who visit a Caribbean island where everybody mysteriously ends up having anal sex with each other. She selected a fairly average sized vibrator on her own, but we had frequently used toys before. Remembering a few times we had gotten playful, when we went through a section with bondage equipment, I had her select a pair of fur padded handcuffs, and by the way her breath caught in her throat and her nipples crinkled, I knew that was a hit. Then at the counter, I whispered into her ear to select a couple of tubes of flavored lubricant. Her face was red but her nipples were standing at attention when she finally opened her purse to pay for everything.

Outside, the first thing she said to me was, "I can't believe the things you get me to do!"

"We at the Buckman Group pride ourselves on the Carl Buckman Experience, and work hard to make sure it is memorable." I stepped up behind her and rubbed against her rump. I knew she could feel me stiff inside my pants. "We work very hard."

Marilyn whimpered. "Okay, you win! Please, can we go home and fuck! Just take me home and fuck me! Please?"

"Oh, but the Buckman Group has an entire evening of enjoyment planned out for you!" No we didn't, I didn't have a clue actually, but I wanted to keep her guessing. Certainly, seeing her frustrated like this was quite interesting.

Still, we had to get home and get Becky back to her family. Once in the car, I allowed Marilyn to put the batteries in the vibrator and give it a test. We got back on the highway and I drove south, back towards York, and through, towards the Maryland line. A few miles north of Maryland I pulled off the highway and drove to a small Italian restaurant. I teased her that I was going to make her sit half naked at the bar, but they didn't have a bar, and we were seated at a booth towards the back. It was dark enough that I had my wife undo all but the top button of her skirt, and when the waiter wasn't around I slid closer and slipped my hand between her thighs under the table cloth. It was like a sauna there, she was so hot and moist.

When I touched her there, Marilyn almost jumped out of her skin. "Please, let's go home and go to bed! I need you so bad! Please, let's go!"

I shook my head, and we had a quick dinner and a glass of wine. I wanted to get to bed, too, but it was almost as much fun teasing her as screwing her would be. Almost.

On the way home, as the sun sank in the west, Marilyn used the vibrator on herself, and I stopped teasing her and allowed her to come repeatedly. It was less than a half hour drive, and she got herself off at least three times. Finally, as we neared the house, on a small bend on Mount Carmel Road around the corner from the house, I pulled over. "You'll probably want to get decent, unless you really want to shock Becky."

"I don't think that would be such a good idea!" Marilyn giggled, and tossed the vibrator in the bag with the other purchases, and reached behind her and grabbed her clothing. The panties went into the bag, but she managed to pull her camisole back on and not look so much like a wanton harlot out for a good time.

"Not unless you want to get burned as a witch! The rest of the Carl Buckman Experience will have to wait for later."

"There's more?", she asked, eagerly.

"The best part!"

I waited for her to finish getting dressed, and then put the car back in gear. We drove around the corner and looked up at the house. Flashing red lights were in the driveway.

Chapter 79: Trouble

"What in the hell?", I said, half to myself and half to Marilyn. Suddenly I was glad we had gotten our clothing back together. I turned up and into the driveway, and parked behind the Baltimore County Police cruiser with the lights flashing. When I had laid out the grounds, we put in a large circular driveway, able to hold more than just the two cars we had at the time. At least we weren't blocking him in.

I climbed out of my side of the car and looked around. At the front door a policeman was talking to Becky, who was holding Charlie in her arms, and Dum-Dum was on her leash, straining to get loose. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary, but what was going on? Everybody had turned towards us when I pulled into the driveway. I limped over as Marilyn ran towards her baby. Charlie didn't seem all that bothered, but simply held his arms out towards his mother, who took him from Becky. Dum-Dum tried to climb up Marilyn's leg to play.

"What's going on?", I asked. Both Becky and the officer tried to talk at once, with Dum-Dum barking and Charlie talking up a storm to Marilyn. I made the time out signal. "One at a time."

"Who are you?", asked the police officer

"I'm Carl Buckman, and this is my wife Marilyn. We live here. What happened?"

Becky was nodding in agreement. Any further response was stopped when another car pulled into the driveway and Becky said, "It's my mom! I called her, too."

Lauren Devlin hopped from her station wagon and came running up. "Are you all right? What happened?" She looked very accusatorily at both me and the cop.

I just shrugged. "We just got here, too." I turned back towards Becky and the officer, Branson according to his name tag.

"Who are you, ma'am?", asked Branson.

"This is my mother. I called her right after I called the police.", answered Becky. "I thought I saw somebody and I got scared."

My eyes opened at that, and I looked at Branson. "We got a call about a suspicious vehicle, and I was routed out here. Whoever was here, they weren't here by the time I got here."

Dum-Dum was being a real nuisance by now, what with all these visitors here to play with her. I took Charlie, who was very curious, but otherwise fine, from Marilyn, and she dragged the mutt inside. She really didn't miss any of the conversation. Becky tried to explain what was happening, but her mother kept badgering her for more details. Mom seemed more concerned than Becky.

The gist of it was that Becky had noticed a green car driving up and down our side road three or four times, parking several times near the driveway. The driver never got out, and she couldn't clearly see who was driving the car, but she thought it was a man. The first time she hadn't thought about it, and Becky was hazy on how many times it happened. Once she had seen the car parked there, but when she went to a different window to get a better look, the car left. Another time, she only saw the car as it pulled away. When the sun started to go down, she got nervous, and eventually called both the State Police and her mother.

As Becky went through her story, Marilyn and I looked curiously at each other. It got stranger when the police officer started asking everyone some questions. Did we know anybody with a green sedan? Did Becky know somebody with a green sedan? Who knew we were going out tonight? Who knew Becky would be here alone? It was curious to consider that maybe somebody was following Becky and not us, but maybe it was a disgruntled boyfriend.

Nobody knew anything, and Officer Branson decided it was time to go back on patrol. I delayed him for a second. "Becky, your family lives in Hereford, right?" I looked at both Becky and Lauren as I asked this.

Becky nodded and Lauren replied, "Yes, about five miles from here, back down Mount Carmel Road. Why?"

"Well, maybe Officer Branson can follow you and make sure everything is okay. Better safe than sorry, right?"

Both women looked relieved at that, and Branson agreed to follow them home.

Next I pulled out my wallet. Good babysitter wages at the time might have been a couple of bucks an hour, maybe $20 for the night. I pulled out a pair of fifties. I laid one in the palm of her hand and said, "This is for taking care of Charlie. He obviously had a fine time and is none the worse for the wear, and a nice tip on top of that." Then I laid the second fifty next to the first one. "And this is for being smart and brave and knowing what to do. That's worth a nice bonus."

Lauren protested it was too much, and Becky just gabbled, "Oh my God!" That was probably more money than she would make the rest of the month combined.

I smiled. "It's not too much. You did the smart thing, and we appreciate it. Besides, this way I get guaranteed future baby-sitting service!"

"Meaning what?", asked Lauren, curiously.

"Meaning that even if Becky didn't want to babysit, or couldn't, you know she's going to tell her girlfriends at school and church. Marilyn will be able to line up any number of girls to help!"

Lauren laughed at that and Marilyn groaned. "Okay, enough of you being a businessman. Let's let Lauren and Becky go home, and I need to change Charlie and put him to bed. This is way past his bedtime!" She hugged Lauren and Becky, and headed inside. I shook Branson's hand and gave Becky a shoulder hug, and waved as they all left. Then I cleaned out the back of the car and followed my wife inside.

I let Dum-Dum out of the laundry room, where Marilyn had locked her, and put her on her tie-out in the back yard. Then, while she did her business, I took Marilyn's purchases down to our bedroom and dropped them off. I could hear her in Charlie's room reading him a bedtime story, and trying to get him to go back to sleep. It had been an exciting evening, and he wasn't interested. I smiled to myself and then went back and let Dum-Dum back in. She ran around in circles in the living room until I sat down in my recliner, and then she jumped up with me, and I rubbed her belly while she licked my face, and I calmed her down.

When Marilyn finished with Charlie, she came out looking for me. "Hey, that's my seat!", she protested to Dum-Dum.

Our dog looked up at her with supreme indifference. "I think Dum-Dum thinks it's the other way around.", I told her.

"Lazy mutt!"

I chuckled and sat upright, dropping Dum-Dum to the floor (gently). "You want some wine? I think I could do with a drink?"

"Me too!", agreed Marilyn. She followed me out to the kitchen, where we had our wine rack on the side counter. I pulled out a bottle of Louis Jadot Macon-Villages Chardonnay, and dug out the corkscrew. Marilyn plopped onto a bar stool and asked, "Do you think there's a problem?"

"What, with what Becky saw?" Marilyn nodded. "No, I don't think so. She doesn't know what she saw! A green car that may or may not have been stopped on the road, but that she didn't see very well - you did see that her glasses have lenses like the bottoms of a couple of Coke bottles, right? For all we know, somebody up the road just bought a green car, and was out taking a test drive."

"So you think it's nothing?"

"Probably. Just keep an eye open the next few days. If you see anything odd, let me know.", I assured her. Seriously, it sounded like absolutely nothing to me. The only reason anybody could possibly be looking the place over was if they wanted to kidnap Charlie for ransom. But how would they know I had any money? I wasn't well known in the business field, and even in the private equity business we were small potatoes. Nobody had written about us in the paper or a magazine. If it was a kidnapping attempt or setup, it seemed incredibly amateurish. Why drive back and forth around the house first? It had to be a neighbor.

"It kind of put a damper on the festivities, tonight!", commented Marilyn, with a wicked smile to her face. "I was planning on getting ready while you took Becky back home. I wasn't figuring on having Charlie awake when we got home."

I gave a light laugh at that. "Kind of killed the mood, huh?" I smiled and shrugged. "We'll have to plan a crazy night by ourselves this winter, when we take that Mommy-Daddy vacation."

We kept chatting for a moment, keeping an ear out for Charlie, who woke up once and Marilyn had to settle him back down. He was over-tired, a strange concept unless you have small children, and didn't want to sleep. He was fighting it, but I knew once he did fall asleep, he would be out all night. When my wife came back, I topped off my glass and then poured the rest of the wine in her glass. "I think I'm going to sit and read for a bit." I told her.

"I'm going to take a quick shower." Marilyn took her glass of wine and headed for the bedroom. I nodded and followed her, but stopped in the living room and sat down. Dum-Dum was in the room, but gnawing a bone on an old throw pillow in the corner.

Fifteen minutes later I decided I needed to take a piss. The hall bathroom was too close to Charlie's room, so I continued down to our bedroom to use our bathroom. Marilyn wasn't in the shower, but was in the bathtub, up to her neck in bubbles. I looked around, surprised she was bathing and not showering. The bag from the drug store had been opened, and the enema kit had been opened and was set on the vanity. Marilyn's razor was sitting on the side of the tub. Her wine glass was empty and she had a very wicked smile on her face.

"My glass is empty, Carl. Can you get me a refill?", she asked sweetly.

"Uh, yeah, sure."

"Good. I decided I didn't want to go to sleep after all."

"Back in a bit.", I told her. I headed back to the kitchen. I guess the evening wasn't going to be a total bust after all! I cracked open a second bottle of Chardonnay and topped my glass off again, and then carried it and the bottle back to the bedroom.

I stopped in my tracks when I saw what Marilyn was up to. No longer under the bubbles, she was now sitting up on the edge, her legs splayed wide, with a coating of shaving cream at her crotch and a razor in her right hand. BOING! I might not be a soldier anymore, but I was sure standing at attention!

Marilyn smiled innocently at me. "I like to be really, really smooth. Don't you like that, too, honey?"

It took me a second to respond. "Uh, yeah, absolutely!" I filled her glass from the bottle, and watched her shave her pussy clean.

"I really want it smooth. Come here, feel if it's smooth enough.", she asked.

Well, I'm nothing if not helpful! I set my glass down and went over to Marilyn and put my fingers to her pussy. My wife had a dreamy smile on her face as I ran my fingers over her pussylips and down into her slit, and played with her clit. I kept it up until she grabbed my arm and sighed in orgasm. "I think it's pretty slick.", I told her.

"All right, hand me my glass and get out. I'll let you know when I'm ready. Just don't drink all the wine."

I smiled at that, and Marilyn sank back down under the bubbles. I swallowed some of my own wine, touched it up, and then left the bottle next to the tub, so she could pour her own. I set her glass on the tub and wandered out of the room. I stopped in our bedroom. The Boy Scouts always say to be prepared, so it was my turn. I hadn't been wearing an undershirt, but I had worn some briefs. I pulled my pants off and stripped out of them, and then pulled my pants back on commando fashion. I also kicked off my shoes and removed my socks.

What the hell! I had been looking forward to some fun and games when I got my wife home. She wanted the 'Carl Buckman Experience' and I wanted to give her one! I went back out to the living room and sat back down in the recliner. I wanted to watch Marilyn some more, but she had something in mind. If it involved the enema kit, I wasn't interested in watching. I went back to reading my magazine.

It was about half an hour before Marilyn came out of the bedroom, and it was worth the wait. My wife had a pair of ankle strapped stilettos on, and a very sheer baby doll top, and nothing else but a spritz of perfume and a smile. She came over to where I was leaning back in the recliner, and leaned down. Her own musk was combining with the perfume to create an entirely new type of scent, something that would be worth billions if it could be bottled and sold. She began rubbing the front of my pants, and then whispered into my ear, "I really think I want the full 'Carl Buckman Experience' tonight. You up to it?"

I swallowed and nodded. "A man's got to die sometime. Tonight's as good a time as any, I suppose." I dropped the footrest on the recliner and stood up, and then followed her swaying ass down the hallway back to the bedroom.

Marilyn had done some cleanup in the bedroom, too. The television was on, and the remote control was set by my side of the bed, and there was an empty videocassette box by the television, so that must be cued up and ready to go. Likewise, she had put several of her toys on the nightstand, along with one of the tubes of flavored lube she had picked up earlier. Even the lights had been dimmed. Marilyn must have wanted the full shot tonight!

I sprawled out on the bed and Marilyn climbed on after that, snuggling up against me and throwing a leg over mine. She was on my left side and her head was laying on my chest. I grabbed a pillow and added it to those behind me, propping me up some, and then reached over to the nightstand and grabbed the remote. I flicked the proper button and the movie started.

We cuddled through the beginning, which involved three pairs of beautiful twenty-somethings arriving at a Caribbean island resort. The first scene was when the first couple hit their room and immediately got undressed and had sex. The blonde was extremely ... pneumatic! ... and the guy looked like a steroid freak body builder. It didn't matter to Marilyn; my wife was rubbing herself against me and very quickly had my shirt and pants undone and was reaching inside to stroke my cock. I helped by lifting my hips up off the bed and she pushed my pants down my thighs. Then I handed her one of the tubes of lube and she opened it and squirted some on my cock, and then proceeded to give me a very nice hand job.

At the start of the second scene, Marilyn stripped my shirt and pants off completely, and said, "I think I know where you want to put this."

"Oh?"

"You're going to fuck me with it, aren't you?"

I smiled. "Maybe yes, maybe no. Any other ideas?"

She began stroking me again. "You probably want me to suck you first."

"Good idea!" I pushed Marilyn's face gently towards my mid section, and she shifted around on the bed. On screen, a busty brunette told her boyfriend, while they were out walking through the 'jungle' (which looked suspiciously like southern California) that she was feeling strange primal urges to get her ass fucked. They stripped off right there in a 'jungle glade' and got it on. Marilyn gave me head throughout this scene, and I held her head in place while she sucked me off completely, swallowing my load.

I sighed contentedly afterwards, and we both had some more wine. Marilyn was pretty lit, and she was going to have a headache in the morning, but tonight she was supremely horny. I set my wine glass back on the night stand and began playing with her body, and I could sense she was ready. Still, I needed to come back to life. During the third scene, the obligatory girl-girl scene between a pair of blondes, I had my wife get into a sixty-nine with me, and I ate her while she sucked me back to life. The last scene we watched was the second blonde getting a TP session on some sort of jungle altar, and that was when I began playing with Marilyn's asshole, lubing it up with my fingers and opening her up with the new vibrator. She was moaning as loudly as the girl on the video by the time I knelt behind her and slipped my cock into her ass.

"You wanted the Carl Buckman Experience, didn't you?", I whispered in her ear, as I fucked slowly into her rear. "Is this what you had in mind?"

"Oh, God! Fuck me!", she begged.

"Only sluts want the Carl Buckman Experience.", I whispered, "Ass sluts! Sluts like you!" I kept pumping into her, slamming my cock into her greasy asshole, teasing and tormenting her as she whimpered and moaned. Marilyn's hands were beneath her, diddling her clit furiously as I assfucked her, and I could feel her squirming and writhing beneath me. It became too much. I grabbed her hips and rammed into her, collapsing down onto the bed with her, and unleashed another pulsing load into her backside.

We lay there for another couple of minutes, catching our breath and getting back to normal. I slipped out of her rear, and Marilyn and I headed into the bathroom. She used the toilet and I washed up at the sink. When I came out of the bathroom, I ejected the tape, now in another scene, and put it and the toys away. I finished my wine, and slipped on a pair of clean briefs. Marilyn came out a minute later, blushing with embarrassment. "Well, was it what you expected?", I asked teasingly.

Marilyn turned beet red at that, and didn't answer.

I laughed, and we finished cleaning up and getting ready for bed. We crawled under the covers and I turned out the light on the nightstand, and Marilyn twisted around to kiss me good night. Then, with the lights out, she whispered, "It was better!"

I went to sleep with a smile on my face!

Chapter 80: More Trouble

We didn't give the suspicious green car any more thought. Neither of us saw anything out of the ordinary. Nobody was driving past the house and stopping, nobody was following us around, nobody was watching us. At least, not that we could tell. All I knew about counter-surveillance was from reading spy novels and mystery novels, and who knows how correct those are. Marilyn would have been oblivious anyway. We never gave it any more thought.

At least not until a couple of weeks later. Mid-July, I got a panicked call at the office from Marilyn, who was at the grocery store with Charlie. I was in a meeting with Missy and John about a possible investment, when Grace knocked on the door and told me to pick up the phone, it was an important call. I looked at the other two, mystified, and shrugged my shoulders. I told them to stay seated, and grabbed the phone. "Hello?"

"Carl?! You have to come get us, we're stuck at the mall!" It was Marilyn's voice, sounding half exasperated and half scared.

"What do you mean, you're stuck at the mall?" Across from me, Missy smiled over at John. I knew this sounded like Marilyn being crazy about something.

"It's the car! All the tires are flat!"

Well, that made me sit up in my chair. All four tires flat?! I've had flat tires before, who hasn't, and back in a previous life I once lost two tires on a construction site. But all four? That pushed the odds way beyond anything to be expected. "Where are you at?"

"The Hunt Valley Mall."

"Was there anything else disturbed on the car? Anything broken?"

"I don't know. I didn't look. Why?"

I didn't answer directly. "Don't worry. I'll be along in a few minutes." Marilyn told me where to find her in the mall, and I called the meeting short.

"Is everything all right?", asked Missy.

I made a waffling motion with my hand. "Eh. Marilyn's car has four flat tires. She's stuck at the mall and I have to go pick her up. Can you get Grace to find a tow truck or a wrecker to go out there with some new tires? Maybe the Toyota place can do something." I grabbed my jacket and headed towards the door.

John caught up to me and laid a hand on my shoulder. "Hold on a second, Carl. Something's wrong here. Four flats isn't an accident, it's vandalism." I opened my mouth to argue, but couldn't. He was right. It was way too unlikely to be an accident. "You should call the police."

"Call the cops? For vandalism? They won't be able to do anything."

"Maybe, maybe not. Didn't you say a few weeks ago that your babysitter saw a car at your house? How do you know it's not the same thing?"

"John, that's crazy!"

He pushed back. "You should call the cops. I'm your friend as well as your lawyer. Listen to me." He turned me back to my desk and pointed at the phone.

I muttered, "This is nuts!", and then dialed 911. The Baltimore County Police said they would send somebody in about fifteen or twenty minutes, which would allow me some time to get over there and find my wife and Charlie.

I looked over at John, who was leaning against the doorframe and smiling. "Happy now?"

"Happy."

"You know, I already had one mother. Look how that worked out!"

He laughed. "Get out of here. Go find Marilyn and take her out to lunch. She's too good for you anyway."

"Very true!"

I took off and drove to the mall. Fortunately I had driven my Lincoln to the office that day. It was only about ten miles away, if that, and I found her and Charlie standing outside one of the entrances to the mall. Charlie was sitting in his stroller, and Marilyn was talking to one of the Rent-A-Cops at the entrance. I pulled up in front of the entrance, and Marilyn finished her chat and pushed the stroller and her purchases towards me. I climbed out and waved at Charlie, who waved back. The security guard took off.

"What's up?", I asked.

"Well, it's the car. The tires are flat, and the guard at the security office thought it looked weird. He said I should call the police. What do you think?", said Marilyn.

"I already did that. Come on, get in, and let's go to the car. Where'd you park, anyway?" She pointed, just in time to see a Baltimore County patrol car come into the mall road. I flagged him down. He rolled down the window, and I asked, "Were you sent over to check on a vandalism complaint?"

He nodded. "You the one who called it in?"

"Yes, sir. I just got here. I'm loading my wife and son in the car, and then we'll go over there, if that's all right."

"Yeah, sure." He picked up the dashboard microphone and started mumbling into it, so I went back to the car and loaded Marilyn's bags into the trunk, while she put Charlie in his car seat. Then we drove through the rows of parked cars to where Marilyn had left her Toyota.

The security guard was right, something did look weird. It didn't look like anything random, and none of the other cars nearby were touched. Things got stranger when the cop knelt down and touched the valve stem on the rear right tire. Then he moved forward to the front tire. He looked up at me and said, "Your valve stems have been cut. This isn't just flat tires."

"Cut!", I exclaimed. What the hell?! I turned to stare at my wife in disbelief.

He checked all four tires, and then looked over the rest of the car. He stopped at the gas cap cover and looked at that carefully. He repeated the inspection at the trunk and hood latches. "Somebody was trying to get into your gas tank and trunk, too." He went over to his patrol car. Before I knew what was happening, he had called back to his dispatcher and requested a crime scene investigator to come out. He made another call about five minutes later, after the wrecker from the Toyota dealership showed. It was decided to have the tow guy load the car on the flatbed and haul it to the Towson impound yard, which was close to the lab people.

All during this, he was peppering both Marilyn and me with questions. Did we have any enemies? Did we have any recent problems with neighbors? Were we involved in any law suits? What did I do for a living? What did Marilyn do? Did we have any other children? It was mostly background, but when Marilyn mentioned the problems the night of the reunion, you could see his ears pricking up, almost like a dog on a scent. That caused another call to headquarters, to talk to an investigator of some sort.

When the car was loaded on the flatbed, he released us, with instructions to follow the truck to Towson and go inside to ask for a Detective Lewis Carstans. Then he took off, to go back on patrol. I looked over at Marilyn. "What the hell is going on?"

"No idea!"

"One of your old boyfriends back in town?", I asked, jokingly.

She snorted. "It's more likely to be one of your old girlfriends!"

That made me scratch my head. It made more sense then I wanted to think about. If this was related to the green car at the house, the night of the reunion, then it made a lot of sense. What if somebody at the reunion was trying to get back at me for something? What? Who? Why? None of this made any sense to me.

Detective Carstans asked us the same questions that the patrol officer had asked, and he asked for any details of the night of the reunion we could think of, which weren't many at all. At least I knew the date, so he could go through their records and find the patrol officer who had come to the house. Then he took our fingerprints, both mine and Marilyn's, to compare against anything they found on the car. I couldn't believe they were taking this that seriously!

Marilyn fed Charlie some cereal she had in her bag; the kid went through Cheerios like I could go through salted cashews! It still wasn't enough, and he was getting fussy by the time we were finished. It would take a couple of days to process the car (read that as 30 minutes to process it, 15 minutes to figure it out that nothing was there, and 2 days of hurry up and wait while this happened. They would call us when we could pick it up. I wrote off the rest of the day and drove us all home. Marilyn could drive my Town Car for a few days and I would drive the 380.

Let's face it; the rest of the day was shot for us. We settled Charlie down by stuffing food into him. He was a bottomless pit. I was going to need to start a second corporation just to keep him fed. Then I made us a very late lunch, and we sat down in the living room to talk while our son napped. Neither of us could make any sense of this. Could it have been an ex-girlfriend? Everybody seemed happy the day of the reunion, and I hadn't seen any of them for ten years. Hell, I hadn't been involved with any of them since I was 16! That was a ridiculous amount of time to hold a grudge this serious.

Two days later we drove to Towson and picked up the car. Detective Carstans said the forensic report was inconclusive. The valve stems had definitely been cut, but they couldn't tell by what. What was interesting was that there was a palm print, the same print, on the car body panels at each tire location. We looked blankly at him, and he demonstrated by kneeling down and placing his left hand on the body panel while he mimed cutting the stem. Same print, same location, each tire. If we ever caught the guy doing something else, we could use his prints to tie him to this, too. Or her. Nobody knew if it was a guy or a girl.

Marilyn wanted to know if they could use computers to find who it was, by comparing fingerprints or something. I shook my head. That sort of thing would take massive computing power and databases of prints, and wouldn't be seen for another twenty years or more.

I was slower to forget about this incident, and I tried to stay more vigilant. Still, whoever it was, they weren't targeting me. They were targeting Marilyn! Two weeks later Marilyn's Toyota was vandalized again, this time while she was at the grocery store. A couple of witnesses reported that somebody had driven up to her car, while she was inside shopping with Charlie, and hopped out. Whoever it was, and the eyewitnesses couldn't agree on anything other than that he or she was driving a green car, had taken a tire iron to Marilyn's car, busting a headlight, driver's side mirror, and a couple of windows and the windshield. Then he or she jumped back in the car and took off.

This was getting very serious! Whatever was going on was obviously directed at Marilyn, and the level of violence was escalating. The Toyota was put back through the wringer by the cops, and they found a few more prints, some of which matched the prints found earlier. Whoever was doing this, they weren't being all that careful. Now we had two detectives questioning us, and they took down the name of every girl I had ever dated, if I could remember them, and quizzed Marilyn about everybody at the reunion she had talked to.

They also started asking me about my family, and that really set me back on my heels! The only person in my family who would do this was Hamilton, but I just couldn't believe it. I went through my family history with them, but didn't have much to say. I hadn't seen any of them since the wedding, except for the disastrous college graduation of Suzie's and that was a month before the stalking started. I gave out the information I could, but it wasn't much, and I never heard any more from the cops about my family.

Marilyn was very nervous when we left the police station that day. I drove over to the office and we told what was going on to John, who immediately called a security company. I didn't like it, but I liked Marilyn being threatened even less. Marilyn was going to get a bodyguard, at least during the day when I wasn't around. The security guards were from a company John had used in the past, and the company was owned by a former Secret Service agent. We also had a guard posted at the office.

Marilyn wasn't amused by any of this. Neither were some of my friends from high school, who suddenly found themselves being questioned by the cops about a guy they knew ten years before. Hell, I wasn't amused!

After a couple of days at home with Marilyn, she decided to go shopping, so I called the security company and got somebody to come out. Once they left, I did something I didn't think I would ever do again. I went into my den and unlocked the bottom drawer of my desk. Inside was a small case with my .45 Colt from the Army, along with my web belt holster. I didn't know what was going on, but I just didn't like it. I took it out to the kitchen and scrounged up some cleaning supplies, and knocked the dust off it. I didn't like the results, so I put it in a towel, and went out to my car, where I put it in the back of the 380, and then I drove into Parkton. I knew of a gun shop in the town and needed a cleaning kit and some ammo.

While I was there, I asked the guy behind the counter about a concealed carry permit. Maryland is a relatively liberal and Democratic state, which means they don't just let you wander around carrying a loaded piece! In general, they would prefer that you didn't, but they couldn't get around that pesky Second Amendment and ban handguns completely. It sounded like all I needed to do was prove I was an upstanding citizen and have documented proof I was in danger, generally a police report of some form. By now I had this crap in spades! I added a shoulder holster for the Colt.

I took everything back home, and cleaned the gun properly. Then I left Dum-Dum in the laundry room, while I took the gun and a box of ammo up into the woods on my property. I paced off a reasonable distance, and then pulled the gun from my pocket. I stared at it for a moment. I hadn't fired it since Nicaragua, and when I got it back in Fayetteville, I had simply put it in a drawer. Now, cleaned and loaded, it was as deadly again as it had been when I had used it to kill the four narcos. Ancient history. I flicked off the safety and put seven rounds downrange, aiming at an oak tree.

Three hit. I reloaded and got another four in the X-ring, so to speak. I worked my way through the box of ammo until I was back to my old self, where I felt confident with the gun again. I would need to go to a shooting range to get better, but at least I wasn't going to shoot myself in the foot. I went back into the house, released Dum-Dum from jail, put her on her tie-out, and then cleaned the gun again.

I let Dum-Dum back in and played with her for a few minutes, and then put her back in jail. Marilyn, Charlie, and the bodyguard came back at that point, and I had the guard stick around. Marilyn was curious, but I explained I needed to go out for a while. I tossed the Colt and the holster into a plastic bag, scrounged up some paperwork, and carried it all out to the Mercedes. I drove down to Towson and went to the police department.

Lew Carstans handed me the form to fill out to get a concealed carry permit, and then he talked to me about carrying a gun. It was a depressing conversation. "Carl, I sympathize with you, I really do, but forget it. You'll never get a permit."

"Why not? I can show all the ID, get the references, show my military separation papers, and you know there's a threat. What's the big deal?"

He shrugged. "Listen, it's not up to me. The State Police and the State Attorney General simply aren't in favor of the Second Amendment. Go ahead and fill out the paperwork. In ninety days it will be turned down. Absent a documented threat to your life, like bullet holes in your car, and not your wife's, or a job requirement like being a security guard, they simply won't issue a permit."

"Ninety days? Are you kidding me? We could be dead in ninety days!" This was insane!

He shrugged. "They just don't care about that. Better that you be dead then they issue a carry permit, and I am not kidding you about that. There are even rules against deputies and corrections officers carrying weapons while off duty. They just don't like it. In your case, since the threats are against Marilyn, she might - repeat, might - be able to get a permit. You, as her husband, don't have a chance."

"So, what am I supposed to do until we're dead?", I asked sarcastically.

He lowered his voice. "You never heard me say this. If you were to carry a gun, and a cop stopped you and arrested you, you've got enough money and lawyers to get out of it."

"This is nuts!" I drove home.

I had to think about this. If Marilyn didn't like having a bodyguard, she was really not going to like me carrying a pistol around the house! Best to brazen it out. Once I got home, I sat her down in the kitchen, while the security guy was still there, and I told her what Lew Carstans and I had discussed. The security guard weighed in on this, describing the steps he and his security company had gone through. Surprisingly, Marilyn's only comment was to make sure I kept it away from Charlie. I swore six ways from Sunday to keep it locked up if I didn't have it on me. Otherwise she was fine. She was really spooked by all this! The security guard asked me a few questions, and I had a few for him as well. He carried a 9 mm Beretta, and we talked shop for a few minutes. I don't think Marilyn even knew he was armed until that point. Then he took off, after checking schedules with us. I needed to get to the office for a few days, so he promised somebody would be by in the morning before I left.

The guard was carrying an M9 Beretta 92 9 mm with a magazine carrying 15 rounds. My Colt .45 could only carry a 7 round magazine, with an additional round in the action, since it had a single stacked magazine. More modern guns, the Berettas and Glocks and Sig Sauers, all had double stacked magazines, where the rounds were side by side. If something happened and I couldn't handle it with 8 rounds, I was probably well and truly fucked, regardless. On the other hand, if I got it out and on target, I was also confident the target was going down, and going down hard. Nines reportedly didn't have the same stopping power. I had never fired one, but that was what I had heard, at least.

Nothing much happened for a few more days. Marilyn didn't like the fact I left the gun on the nightstand, but Charlie was still sleeping in a crib. I couldn't see the sense of having the gun at home and locked away in the den. Dum-Dum was an excellent guard dog; she would immediately jump on any intruder and try to lick them to death. I wanted something a little more lethal at hand.

A couple of days later, while Marilyn and Charlie were in a store in Towson with the bodyguard trailing along behind them, her Toyota was firebombed, along with the two cars nearest it. That made the local news. The cops investigated some more, but short of assigning a surveillance team 24/7, we had to wait until whoever was doing this made a mistake.

Marilyn chafed a bit being with a bodyguard, but I couldn't blame her. This eased some once she got used to it, and learned to accommodate the requirements. She needed to plan her days out ahead of time, and let the guard know her plans, so somebody could always be around. If I was home, and Marilyn and Charlie were home, I could handle the detail. After about a week we had a routine down. Nothing really happened during the two weeks since her little Toyota was trashed. During that time, we usually had one or two guards around during the day. When we both left the house, a guard was left with Dum-Dum, in case whoever it was came after the house.

We still had no idea who it was. Lew Carstans had already ruled out all the potential names we had come up with, like my ex-girlfriends. He had checked alibis for them and determined that no single person could have been at every instance of harassment and vandalism. The same was true of any names Marilyn could come up with. As for my family, we got nothing. Dad drove a grey Toyota and didn't know where I lived. Hamilton drove a red Nissan, and lived with Mom in an apartment in White Marsh. Suzie was living in an apartment down on Charles Street. Besides, the evidence was pointing to a man, not a woman.

It was very frustrating. It even affected our love life; who would dare to start fooling around at night when we were worried somebody might be outside the house. Everything was locked down, but still, who knew?

Two weeks after that, on the night of August 18, a Thursday, was the next incident. It was late at night, probably about midnight. The security guys were long gone, and it was just the three of us plus Dum-Dum. We had taken to joking about the mutt, but she was actually a decent watchdog. She had incredible hearing, and as soon as somebody would come to the house, she would perk up and jump around and make some noise. Of course, she would try to lick them to death, but as long as we knew somebody was around, I could handle the rest of it.

Anyway, it was about midnight, both Marilyn and I had gone to bed, although nothing had happened. Marilyn was too nervous to get romantic, and I wasn't going to push it. Just as I was about to drop off, Dum-Dum started going nuts. She came running into our bedroom and jumped up on the bed, barking towards the window. Then she would jump off the bed, race over to the window that faced the road, bark some more, and then run back and jump back up on the bed. She kept doing that and driving both Marilyn and me crazy.

Marilyn said it first, "Something or somebody is out there."

Before I would have made a comment about rabbits or deer, both of which we had wandering the property. Now, I wasn't so sure. "Yeah.", I responded, and I rolled upright. I immediately grabbed the Colt and stood upright, dressed only in my briefs. I grabbed Dum-Dum by the collar and said, "Knock it off!" She jumped back up onto the bed and Marilyn grabbed her and calmed her down. I went to the window and looked out.

There was nobody in sight. There were no cars on the road. There was, however, a flickering glow out on the lawn. I couldn't make it out, so I moved to the dresser and put on my glasses, and then went back to the window. The lawn was on fire!

"Call 911! The lawn's on fire!", I told Marilyn. I grabbed my pants and slipped them on, and then headed out of the bedroom. Marilyn was already grabbing for the telephone. On the way out the door, I cocked the hammer on the .45. Barefoot and shirtless, I slipped out the front door to try and figure out what was going on.

It was a Molotov cocktail, but something had gone wrong. It looked like some sort of liquor bottle, but it was laying on the ground, in the middle of some burning fuel of some sort. Whoever had thrown it, they had missed the house. Or weren't they aiming at the house? This was getting really serious!

I went back inside. Marilyn had a robe on and was looking at me nervously. "Did you call 911?", I asked.

She nodded. "They said they would send out a police car and the fire department. What is it?"

"I'm not one hundred percent sure. Let's wait until they get here." I went back to the bedroom, and slipped into a pair of loafers and then pulled on a shirt. I tried to tuck the pistol into the back of my pants, but couldn't figure the trick of it. It seemed a lot easier on TV shows. I couldn't get it to stay, so I just held it in my hand. When people with flashing lights began to show up, I put it on the end table in the living room.

First to arrive was a Baltimore County policeman. The fire department showed up with a rescue squad truck and a pumper. The pumper was sent back to the station and the guys in the rescue truck put out the remaining flames with a hand held extinguisher.

"Is that what I think it is?", I asked, though not to anybody specific. The police officer looked from me over to one of the firemen, and I followed his gaze.

The fireman nodded. "If you think it's a Molotov cocktail, then you're right."

"So, why is my lawn burning, and not my house? I mean, don't get me wrong, but isn't that the general idea behind these things?" Marilyn was standing in the doorway, still in a long robe and slippers, and looking nervous. I turned to her and said, "I think you should call the security company. This is getting a lot more serious."

Marilyn's eyes lit up, and she scurried back inside. I turned back to the fireman, and asked, "So, what happened with it?"

He shrugged. "Don't believe all the stuff you see in the movies. These things are a lot trickier than you would believe. The fuse can fall out, the bottle might not break, hell, half the time the guy throwing it sets himself on fire! You only use these things when you can't do it a better way. My bet? Whoever threw this had never done it before. He didn't throw it hard enough or far enough, and the bottle landed on the lawn. The glass didn't break, the rag came out, and all the gas spilled and started the lawn fire."

The second fireman, the guy who had used the fire extinguisher on it, said, "We should save the bottle. Maybe they can get some fingerprints or something off it."

"I think that's a very good idea.", agreed the cop. They scrounged up a bag to carry the empty bottle in, and the police officer put it in the trunk of his car. The rescue truck cleaned up and left, just about the time a car showed up with a pair of security guards. We filled them in, and the police officer left.

One of the security guys started patrolling outside, while the other came into the house with me. Charlie had slept through everything, bless his little heart, but Marilyn was very nervous, and looked to be on the verge of tears. "We need to get you and Charlie out of here. I don't know who is doing this, but it's getting worse. ", I told her.

The security guard who came in with us was a supervisor. He said, "I agree with that. We don't have a handle on who is doing this, but whoever is doing this is an amateur. That doesn't mean he's not dangerous, but he's going to get caught sooner rather than later. So far he's been lucky. Is there a place you can go?"

Marilyn looked confused. "No. Where would we go?" I didn't know, either. I just shrugged at her.

The security guy started asking about places - vacation spots, summer homes, my family, her family - that sort of thing. When he mentioned Marilyn's family and summer places, something came to mind. "Sacandaga Lake!"

"What's that? Where's that?"

Marilyn answered. "My folks have a summer place in the Adirondacks, on Sacandaga Lake."

"Would they let you stay there?", he asked.

"Uh ... I guess so. I can call them in the morning."

"No, not from here. Call them from somewhere else. Not your office either.", he told me. "We don't know what capabilities this person has. Don't use the phones."

I started at that. I stared at both him and Marilyn for a bit. Wiretaps? This was getting crazy! "Let's set it up. I know where we can call from tomorrow. I want a guard with the two of you until this is over. We'll fly you out tomorrow."

"No, wait! What about you!?"

"I'm staying behind. This is going to end, one way or the other."

"NO!", Marilyn cried, loud enough to wake Charlie, who started fussing.

I ignored him. "Yes. We need to finish this. We get the two of you out of here, and we hide my car somehow. I'll be the bait." Since Marilyn's car had been torched, she had been using my Lincoln while I had been driving the Mercedes.

This did not seem a good plan to my wife. She ignored Charlie long enough for him to fall back asleep, and tried to argue me out of it. On the other hand, after a few minutes, the security guy started tossing some ideas into the mix.

Marilyn and I went into the bedroom and I pulled out the suitcases, much to my wife's distress. We continued to argue, even as I opened them up and pulled open her dresser drawers. It finally came down to, "Marilyn, we have to do this. You won't be safe until you and Charlie can leave. Charlie won't be safe without you. I have to finish this. If somebody comes after me, I can handle it, but only if I'm not worried about you. This won't take long. Whoever is doing this is getting crazier. It's escalating. If we get rid of the 380, and leave the Town Car, maybe whoever it is will think I'm the one who's gone, and try to come after you again."

Marilyn kept arguing, and was crying, but I insisted. Neither of us got any sleep that night, but we got her bags packed. In the morning, we packed Charlie's stuff, and then I drove over to Tusker's. He asked what was going on, but I wouldn't tell him. I just asked to use his phone and he left. My buddy knew about the problems we had been having, so he assumed it was something to do with that. I called Harriet and gave her the Reader's Digest condensed version of the story. That simply meant I had to repeat it all to Big Bob five minutes later. He didn't like any of this, but he went along with it. That was all I wanted, or expected. I hung up and left, telling Tusker I would explain it all to him soon, but I had to keep it secret for the moment.

By noon, everything was in place. Lloyd Jarrett had a plane warmed up at the Westminster airfield, and a small convoy of security people had Marilyn, Charlie, and Dum-Dum out of the house and on the road, taking the 380 with them. I would have given anything to be with them, but the plan still made the most sense, and I stayed behind. The security guys would brief the people at the office. (Even they had been investigated; they all had alibis for the various incidents.)

It was very quiet around the house after they left. I finally got a nap mid-afternoon. It would take some serious surveillance assets to track Marilyn's movements, and whoever was doing this simply seemed determined and crazy, but not all that sophisticated.

I stayed in the house for the next few days, with only the Town Car out front. Carstans came out the next day, after having been briefed by the security company, and we talked inside. He had a preliminary report on the bottle from the lawn. It was a champagne bottle, and the heavy glass had kept it from breaking. There was a partial print that matched one of the prints we already had found on Marilyn's car. It was the same person, but we still didn't know who. On the other hand, it seemed to be a man. The size of the handprint from the tire stem incident had been measured and was way outside the range for a woman. This meshed with a couple of reports that said it was a man in the green car.

After about two weeks on my own, without even the ability to call Marilyn, I was starting to go stir crazy. One of the security guys would come out every morning, the same time, and bring in some groceries in a small van with a security marking on it. If anybody was watching, it would look like we had taken some precautions, but not much. I stayed in and out of sight. I would give the security guy a message to forward on to Marilyn, just to let her know I was safe.

It happened on Labor Day weekend, Saturday, September 3rd. The guard had just left, and I was using the bathroom in our bedroom when I heard something. It sounded like the side patio door being opened. I zipped my pants as quietly as I could, even though it sounded like a freight train, and then tiptoed out to the bedroom. I had left the Colt on the dresser. I hadn't heard anything else, and was starting to wonder if I was just getting spooked. Then I glanced out the bedroom window and saw a green Buick parked in the driveway.

Oh, shit!

Thank God I was barefoot, because whoever it was would have heard my shoes on the hardwood floor. How they didn't hear my heart pounding was a different question. I thumbed the hammer back on the Colt, but kept my index finger extended along the barrel. I carried the gun down at my side. I slipped out the door to the hallway and began moving slowly towards the great room. When I got to the great room, I peeked around the arched opening and didn't see anybody. I did see the patio door was open, and I heard somebody off towards the side of the kitchen, down by the laundry and weight room.

Bronze Star or not, I have no idea how the infantry guys do this for real without having a heart attack. I swear I was terrified. I moved across the great room towards the kitchen, expecting to have somebody come around and blast me to shreds. I kept going until I made it across the room to the archway near the kitchen. I could hear somebody moving around in the kitchen clearly now. I said a silent prayer and looked around the corner.

"Hamilton?!"

Chapter 81: Consequences

Saturday, September 3, 1983

I stared at my brother, standing there in my kitchen. Of all the various scenarios that had run through our minds, my family was never included. Yes, they had been questioned, but it had never seriously crossed any of our minds. To the best of our knowledge, the only person who even knew where we lived or even our phone number was Suzie, and she certainly wasn't involved. However, there he was, standing in my kitchen, a look of sheer hatred on his face, and carrying a gigantic Bowie knife.

"Hamilton?!", I repeated. "What are you doing?"

He stopped and sneered at me. "Nothing, now. You surprised me. Where's the bitch and the brat? The car is outside."

Hearing him call Marilyn a bitch brought me back to reality. My brother was the one behind everything. He had been the one to vandalize and torch her car, he had been the one who tried to firebomb my home, he was the one trying to kill us. "What are you doing? Why are you doing this?"

"It's all your fault! You're the reason we had to move out. You're not supposed to be here! THIS IS ALL YOUR FAULT!"

"Hamilton, that's crazy!" I was staying out of arm's reach of my brother. He was still holding that ridiculous knife, and the way he was talking, he was almost raving.

Saying the word crazy was not my best choice. Hamilton's face turned red and he started sputtering and screaming. "I'M NOT CRAZY! DON'T EVER SAY THAT AGAIN! DON'T CALL ME CRAZY!" He advanced on me.

Screw that! I slowly stepped back, staying out of range. My gun hand was down by my side and he hadn't twigged to the fact I was also armed. I didn't want to provoke him any further than he already was. I held up my left hand and said, as soothingly as I could, "Hey, okay, sorry about that. Why don't you sit down? We can talk this over."

He sneered at me. "No, I'll just come back someday when the bitch is here. I'll talk to you later." He lowered his arm and started to turn away.

I felt something cold and clammy grip my heart. Hamilton wanted to kill Marilyn and Charlie, and only then kill me! I fought down the urge to vomit. "Wait! Hamilton!", I called to him.

He turned to face me, and brought the Bowie knife up again. "What?"

I brought the Colt up and fired twice, hitting him in the chest, both times. It's not like in the movies, where people go flying across the room. Hamilton simply fell backwards, to lie on the kitchen linoleum and begin leaking. I kept the gun trained on him and got closer, but it was obvious he was dead. I had hit him center of mass, just like they tell you to, and one or both of the heavy slugs had blown through his heart. Probably out the back, too, since massive quantities of blood were now seeping out from underneath him.

I felt shaky as the adrenaline washed through me. I took a deep breath and fought the urge to toss my cookies. After another minute, I set the pistol on the kitchen counter, and moved off to the bedroom. I slipped on my shoes, and then grabbed the phone. I dialed 911.

"Emergency! What is the nature of your emergency?", said the voice at the other end.

"There's been a shooting. You'll need to send the police and the coroner." I gave my name and the address.

If the operator felt anything emotionally about these calls, she didn't let it through on the phone. "Is the shooter still present?", she asked.

"I'm the shooter. I won't leave."

"Please stay on the line."

"I'm sorry; I need to make a few more calls." I hung up, which was probably a crime in itself, but I really didn't care. I called John Steiner. As expected, he told me to be cooperative but to keep my mouth shut until he got there. No surprise there. I hung up on my long time attorney, with the realization I needed him now more than ever.

I went back out to the kitchen. Hamilton was still lying there, surrounded by a pool of blood. Part of me was thinking I should have done this years ago. Part of me was thinking I should have drowned him at birth. Most of all I was just saddened by the waste of it all. Now my family was completely and utterly destroyed. There was no going back from this, even though I had to do it. He was insane. He would have killed my wife and my son, and then tried for me. It would have never ended. Even if I had managed to capture him, or had told the cops what had happened and they had brought him in, he would have gotten out sooner or later. Unless you are foaming at the mouth crazy, or can be proved to be a menace, they have to let these nut jobs loose again. They wouldn't have locked him up for good until after he had killed somebody!

I heard the siren long before it got to the driveway. Leaving my brother where he lay, I went to the front door and stepped outside. As soon as the police arrived I very slowly raised my hands above my head. The first car there was a Maryland State Trooper. He got out of the car and gave me a hard look. "Are you the person who phoned in the shooting?", he asked, his right hand on his pistol butt.

"Yes, sir."

"Are you still carrying the gun?"

"No, sir."

"I want you to move very slowly, and lean against the door, with your legs spread and your hands on the door frame."

"Yes, sir." I assumed the position, which everybody knows who has ever seen a police show on television, and found myself quickly but thoroughly frisked.

At the end, slightly more relaxed when he didn't find me carrying a weapon, I was allowed to stand upright again. "You'd better take me inside to the body. Is anybody else here?"

"No, sir."

He kept his hand on his gun butt and I walked slowly ahead of him. We went into the kitchen, where he took in the gruesome scene, along with the pistol on the counter. "You want to tell me what happened? What's your name?"

"My name is Carl Buckman. As for what has happened, I have already contacted my attorney, and he has told me not to say anything until he is present."

At the mention of my lawyer, the cop's face hardened. "Who is the victim?"

"His name is Hamilton Buckman."

By now we could hear more sirens approaching. The clusterfuck was beginning. "Was he a relative?"

"My brother."

"Oh, Christ.", he muttered. Then he nodded, "Well, put your hands behind your back."

I guess he figured possession was nine points of the law, or something. I turned away and put my hands behind my back. Shortly after that I felt handcuffs going on. It wasn't the first time I had felt them, but this time it seemed a lot more significant.

I just stood there silently while the circus came to town. Next on the scene was a Baltimore County Police car, followed closely by an ambulance. Maybe the coroner wasn't coming; maybe they only got the body after the hospital pronounced it dead. The ambulance guys didn't waste more than ten seconds determining Hamilton didn't need their professional talents, so they just sat down in the living room while more cops showed up.

Next up was a Baltimore County Police sergeant, who knew something about the case, and who argued I should be turned over to them. No dice. I was probably a valuable bargaining chip for the Troopers, so I got hustled out the door and put into the Trooper car. I sat there, mute, for another ten minutes while the sergeant and the Trooper argued, and then the Trooper solved the problem by driving me over to the barracks in Westminster.

I gave my name to the cops in the barracks, again, and was dumped into a holding cell. John would have to dig me up there. It turned out he didn't. Before he ever showed, the sergeant and a lieutenant from the Baltimore County Police showed up, and they got custody of me. I was recuffed and loaded into a Police car and driven down to Towson. That was fine with me; Towson was where Carstans was based and I suspected he was going to be involved in this mess very quickly.

I waited in the holding cell in Towson about three hours before I was yanked out and taken to an interrogation room. Inside I found Carstans, a Baltimore County Police lieutenant, a Maryland State Trooper sergeant, John Steiner, and another man I had never met before. Almost immediately as I showed up, the sergeant and the lieutenant started arguing again over who had possession of me. I was cuffed to the table.

Carstans slipped around them and came over to me. He asked, "Was it your brother who did all this?"

I was on the verge of answering when I felt John's hand on my shoulder. "We need to talk to our client." I just looked over my shoulder at him and nodded. The unknown man next to John must have been another lawyer.

Carstans just nodded and muttered an assent. He went to the door and knocked on it, and it opened. The sergeant and the lieutenant kept arguing as they went out the door.

Once we were alone, John sat down. "How are you doing, Carl?"

"Okay, I guess. Better than Hamilton is doing." I turned to the other fellow and asked, "Who are you?"

John answered for him. "This is Robert DeAngelis. He's a criminal attorney here in Towson, probably the best in the county."

"Mister Buckman.", he said by way of greeting.

"Pleased to meet you. I'd shake your hand but, well..." I rattled my handcuffs and smiled at him. I turned back to John. "A criminal attorney? You can't handle this?"

"It's one thing for me to dig you out of a school fight when you're thirteen. It's quite different when you've killed somebody. You need him, Carl."

I turned back to DeAngelis. I shrugged and said, "Nothing personal. Welcome aboard. Has John told you what's been going on in my life?"

DeAngelis had a pleasant baritone and a look of confidence and surety. He probably did great with juries, especially if they had a lot of women on them. "Yes, but we'll get to that in a moment. First, have they processed you into the system yet? Fingerprints, photographs, that sort of thing? Have you been booked yet?"

"No. I've just been sitting in a cell since I got here. I think they're still trying to figure out who owns me.", I answered.

He smiled at that. "That actually makes things a touch simpler. Now, I want you to tell me what has happened, right from the start. Just imagine I've never heard of you or your case, and have never talked to anybody about you. Start from the beginning."

For the next hour and a half, I went through everything with the pair of them, starting with the night Becky called the cops the night of the reunion. About halfway through the talk, there was a rap on the door and Detective Carstans came in. "Any idea when we can talk?", he asked.

DeAngelis answered, "We'll let you know.", dismissing him.

Carstans snorted and smiled. "You just do that. By the way, for the time being, you belong to us. That can always change, though, so be nice to me." He left and I finished my tale.

One interesting thing that DeAngelis asked about several times was the knife that Hamilton had carried. "And you say that it wasn't your knife? It wasn't a kitchen knife or something like that?"

"No, no way. It looked to me like a Bowie knife or something. It was ridiculous, way too big to be useful. Besides, I know the knives around the house, it was nothing like them."

"How so?", he asked.

"Well, there's the butter knives in the kitchen, and the steak knives, and the kitchen knives - you know paring knives and chef's knives and stuff. I got them all as a set, you know what I mean?" He nodded and I continued. "Other than that, I have a pocket knife, a Buck knife with a lockback blade. That's in my bedroom right now. In the den I have a couple of Gerber combat knives, including a mini-knife I use as a letter opener, but they're nothing like what he had with him."

He quizzed me some more about the knife and also the timing of his visit today. I also had John tell him some more about the security company who was watching over Marilyn and Charlie.

The one thing I left out was that Hamilton was on the verge of leaving, when I called him back and shot him. I knew enough to know that if I said he was advancing towards me, I could call itself self defense. What really happened, which was just as much a case of self defense to my mind, would probably be called murder. I would have to take those last few seconds to the grave with me. Hamilton would probably meet me in hell to exact his revenge.

I asked a question. "When can I call Marilyn and let her know what happened?"

"Maybe later today. She won't be able to come home, though. Right now your house is a crime scene.", said John.

"Yeah.", I sighed. "Still, she'll be better knowing this is over. Do we talk to the cop now?"

John looked at DeAngelis, who nodded. John went to the door and knocked on it. The door was opened and John spoke to whoever was on the other side. The door shut again and we waited another ten minutes for Carstans to show up. He had a thick folder with him.

First, however, John said, "Let's get the cuffs off our client first. You know him by now. He's not a flight risk and he's not dangerous."

Carstans shrugged. "Probably not. Try not to run on me, Carl. I'd hate to let the Staties shoot you." He undid my cuffs.

I immediately stretched and then rubbed my wrists. "Thanks, Lew.", I said to him.

"You want to tell me what happened now?", he asked.

I glanced over at DeAngelis, who nodded, and told Carstans everything. He already knew about the firebomb attack, and how I had sent my family away for safety. He also knew I had owned the Colt. He hadn't been out to the house, but the reports were already filtering back that the bullets went in the front, so it wasn't like I had chased Hamilton down and shot him in the back. DeAngelis stressed several times that any knife found needed to be examined and possession needed to be determined, and how it wasn't my knife. If Hamilton was the owner of the knife and brought it into my house, it was case closed, self defense.

"When can our client be released?", asked DeAngelis.

Carstans stared at him. "That's a very good question, counselor. I'm not even sure he's going to be released."

"Detective, please, you know and I know this is never even going to trial, let alone jail time. Why don't you save the state the cost of a trial they will never possibly win and let him loose now?"

"Maybe it will and maybe it won't, but that isn't for me to decide."

I held up my hand for a moment, and then leaned over to whisper to my two lawyers. "Does it help any if we can prove that Hamilton was crazy? I mean real go-see-a-shrink crazy?"

"You have proof of that?", asked DeAngelis.

"I have a copy of a psychiatric report, stating he was a paranoid schizophrenic. I also have a copy of a police report from when he was a teenager and tried to sabotage my car." I turned towards John. "Remember, that's the reason I moved out of the house back then."

He looked at DeAngelis and nodded.

DeAngelis sat upright, so John and I did, too, and he said, "Detective, would it make any difference if we offered proof that the deceased was clinically insane, and had threatened our client before?"

That made Carstans sit upright. "Really? Why didn't you ever tell us this before?"

"Hey, until today, Hamilton wasn't even on the radar screen. I had no idea he was involved. I don't even know how he found us! Besides, with all of the people you asked me about, we never knew who was important. Marilyn and I've known he was nuts from the time he was a kid!"

He didn't say anything, but left again. Half an hour later, he returned. "Okay, you can go. For now! I need to know where you will be, and how to reach you, and you can't move back home. That's still a crime scene and hasn't been released yet."

John handled that. "Can we send somebody over to get clothes from the bedroom at least? I can get somebody from the security company over there."

Carstans agreed to that, and John said he would put me into a suite at the Hyatt downtown, under his name. I would stay there until they needed me, after the investigation was over and the house could be released and cleaned up. I promised to get the various reports on Hamilton to both the cops and the lawyers, and I was led outside. DeAngelis made a comment about how there weren't any reporters yet, which made me cringe. John loaded me in his car, and we drove down to Baltimore.

It was the early evening, and it had been a long day, and I hadn't eaten anything since breakfast. I was tired and hungry. I sat there in the car while John went inside to make arrangements, and only got out when he came out to fetch me. We went directly to the elevators and then rode up to a mid-size suite. He left me after telling me to call Marilyn and order room service. Under no circumstances short of a hotel fire was I to leave the suite, and if anybody called, I was to let him know before answering any questions. I was on lockdown, which suited me just fine. John would handle calling my father, who was far and away the best grounded of my parents.

I'm ashamed to say that the first thing I did was call for a meal. Only after I ordered a burger and a beer did I call the camp at Sacandaga Lake. The telephone was answered by the security guard, who had already been alerted by his boss. John had been busy. He set the phone down and got Marilyn to pick it up.

"Hello? Carling? Is that you?"

"Yes, honey, it's me. You can come home now. It's all over."

"What happened?! Who was it?!"

"It was Hamilton, Marilyn. He finally cracked up. He was coming for you and Charlie. It's safe now, you can come home.", I told her.

"What happened? Did you catch him?"

"I killed him. Come home, honey, I'll tell you all about it. It's over now."

"Oh my God!", she cried.

"Come on home, honey. It's safe now." I had her put the security guy on the phone and told him to confirm it with his office, but that the situation was over and Marilyn and Charlie and Dum-Dum could come home now. He was to get them to the Hyatt, however, and not let them near the house. Dum-Dum would need to be kenneled at the vet's. We hung up. There was too much to tell on the phone.

I spent the weekend at the Hyatt, and half the time I was on the phone with John and the security company. Mid-afternoon Sunday, one of the security guys showed up at the suite with several plastic bags of clothing, including a couple of suits and underwear and khakis and a bunch of other stuff. He also dug through my desk in the den to find my file on Hamilton, with the copy of the psychiatric report and police report from when he tried to vandalize my car in high school. He also told me that the house was a disaster. The cops had basically been through everything, looking for weapons, knives, guns, and anything to tie me to Hamilton (as if being his brother wasn't enough!) Worse, although the body was gone, enough people had rampaged through to track blood all over the place. He even had to kick out a reporter who had ignored the crime scene tape and was going through photographing my wife's lingerie. He handed me all the film he had confiscated, and we yanked it from the canisters and rolls and destroyed it. A security guard was now on site to keep the curious away.

Marilyn arrived just before six, just in time to see her loving husband being discussed on the local news. Fortunately, nobody had any photos of us. Unfortunately, somebody managed to track down and stick a camera in front of my mother, who told the entire world that I was Lucifer incarnate and generally ranted like a crazy woman. Then the cameras segued to a shot of my father punching out a reporter on the front lawn of the house in Lutherville. This was a clusterfuck and a half!

I told Marilyn the chilling story of what had happened, including Hamilton's plan to kill her and Charlie first. She simply cried and shivered in my arms. That night she just slept in my arms, exhausted.

On Tuesday we got the word from John that the District Attorney was not going to be pursuing any charges against me. They had been able to verify that Hamilton actually was crazy, and they had found the knife and traced it back to the store where our mother had purchased it for him for Christmas the year before. Furthermore, although Hamilton drove a red Nissan, our mother owned a green Buick, and she let him drive it whenever he wanted. Thanks, Mom, a whole bunch! The autopsy had shown that one bullet had blown through his heart and continued on out the back (it was found in the wall of the kitchen), while the other had gone through his sternum and heart, and then buried itself in his spine. Either shot was immediately fatal.

Marilyn asked me if I thought my mother knew what Hamilton was up to, and I said 'No." That seemed farfetched even for my mother, but the fact we could even raise the question was chilling. The house was released as a crime scene, and I contacted the contractors for the kitchen and the flooring to come in and start ripping out and replacing. I wasn't going to let Marilyn see what had happened. A cleaning company was brought in for everything else.

The media frenzy was not letting up. Cain and Abel was just too good a story to let go, especially when Mom kept stirring the pot. Then she had a nervous breakdown and ended up in Sheppard Pratt under observation. That was reported, too.

Bob DeAngelis found part of the problem. The State Troopers were having a pissing contest with the Baltimore County Police over me. They wanted me arrested and charged with first degree murder. (They were claiming I had 'lured' Hamilton to my home and then 'trapped' him in the kitchen, and that this constituted 'intent', the prerequisite to a first degree murder charge.) They didn't care that it would get thrown out of court, since they had done their job by getting a murderer off the street, and the courts and prosecutor's offices would take the blame for letting a killer go. DeAngelis said it really wasn't about me, but about budget issues. It didn't really matter though, they were leaking like a sieve, pushing edited versions of everything they were copied in on right out the back door to the media.

I told John I would do a single press conference, but it would be by our rules. He was to bring in one print reporter from the Baltimore Sun, and one local television reporter from either WBAL, WJZ, or WMAR. They could share coverage or go without. In return, I would make a statement, and then answer questions, as long as they were polite and didn't misbehave. Under no circumstances would we allow them to see inside our house.

John made some phone calls, and the best we could do was a counteroffer, one print reporter, one shared camera, but a reporter from all three television stations. He agreed and Thursday morning a camera was set up in a conference room downstairs at the Hyatt. That way everyone could make the 6 PM news. Wednesday afternoon he and I sat down and made copies of the various police and psychiatric reports, and wrote out my initial statement. We also ginned up a short biography for me, but left Marilyn out of it.

The next morning, I dressed in a conservative suit in order to do the press conference. Surprisingly, Marilyn dressed in a nice blue knee length wrap dress and a pair of heels. "Where are you going?", I asked her.

"I'm going with you.", she told me.

"Marilyn, this is not a good idea. Just because I have to swim in a cesspool does not mean it has to be a group swim!"

She came over to stand in front of me, a hard look to her face. "Carl Buckman, if you don't know me better than that by now, I really will be disappointed. I married you, warts and all, and if this is the worst of your warts, I'm not impressed. I am going to stand beside you, just like I always will, so get over it."

I felt like crying, but big boys don't cry, so I shrugged and said, "You're going to be sorry!" I shrugged my suit coat on, grabbed my cane, and took her hand. Somebody from the hotel was watching Charlie, and Marilyn and I left the room and headed downstairs to the conference room.

John stopped me outside the room. "Are you sure about this? Last chance!"

"Too late to stop now.", I told him.

He turned to my wife. "You?"

Marilyn gripped my hand hard enough to tell me how scared she actually was. "Yes."

"Give me thirty seconds, and then follow me in." He slipped inside the door, and I mentally counted to thirty. Then I opened the door and went inside, with Marilyn behind me. At a podium in front of the conference room, John was standing. "Let me introduce Carl and Marilyn Buckman."

Almost immediately a young man started yelling out, "Mister Buckman, how does it feel to have murdered your brother?!" He kept yelling questions at me as I approached the podium. John's face was red with fury, and he was yelling back for the reporter to be quiet. I just gave John a quiet smile and waved a hand at him to get him to calm down. The reporter kept badgering me, and I noticed he was the only one of the four to be doing so. I simply smiled and put my right elbow on the podium and leaned forward, resting my chin in my cupped palm. I just stood there, chin resting on my palm and smiling, until the guy ran down.

When he stopped, I stood upright and said, "Does everyone understand the format of this press conference? First I am going to make a statement and then I will take questions. All right?"

Big Mouth immediately cried out again, "How does it feel to have murdered your brother?!"

I waited for him to run down again, and the asked, "Excuse me, who are you?"

"Bob Turcos, WJZ-TV. Answer my question!"

"Mr. Turcos, did you or did you not agree to the format of this press conference when you agreed to participate?"

"Journalism cannot be suppressed in this fashion...", he began, pompously.

"Agree or leave. You will no longer be part of this press conference if you do not agree to simple courtesy."

"You can't do that!"

"Mister Turcos, I can do whatever I want. You all want to talk to me, not the other way around. Now, we are acting like adults.", I said, pointing to my wife and John, still seething to the side. "And your counterparts are acting like adults.", I added, pointing at the other reporters. "You, on the other hand, are acting like a four year old who wants more candy. Now grow up or leave."

The asshole immediately started protesting, so I left the podium, took Marilyn's hand, and left the room. John stayed behind. I stopped in the hallway outside the room and Marilyn said, "So much for that."

I smiled. "Give it five minutes."

"What?"

I just smiled and patted her hand, and waited two minutes. Then John came out of the room, giving me a surprised look when he saw us standing there. He came over, and I asked him, "Are they going to behave?"

"How did you know?"

"The others want this too much, and that jackass is the junior in the bunch. You think they all don't know each other, and each other's bosses? Is he going to behave now?"

"They chewed his ass ragged and I told them I would try to get you back."

"Go back in and tell them we'll be back down in two minutes." John laughed and I shooed him back down the hallway.

Marilyn looked at me. "You think you're so smart!" I just laughed at her.

Two minutes later we went back into the room, and the asshole kept quiet. His face was red, however, and I knew he would have the rudest questions at the end. I strode up to the podium and pulled my statement out, and then waited for the camera operator to give me a signal.

"Thank you for coming. My name is Carl Buckman and this is my wife, Marilyn. As you know, last Saturday I found it necessary to defend my life with deadly force during an attack by my brother, Hamilton Buckman, at our home. It is our intention today to detail the events that led up to Saturday's fateful events."

For the next fifteen minutes I detailed the increasing harassment, from the stalking to the vandalism and burning of Marilyn's car to the firebombing attempt at the house. Then I segued into Hamilton's past history, including his psychiatric diagnosis and the police report from when he tried to sabotage my first car. I also detailed the forensic evidence, specifically the fingerprints left on everything, which all matched up to the prints taken from his body. Summing it all up, I finished with:

"Finally, I would like to comment on all this in general. I understand the public interest nature of this tragedy. Brother kills brother, Cain and Abel, that sort of thing. Keep in mind that it was my family that was harassed, my home that was invaded, my life that was threatened. If it hadn't been for the fact the criminal was related to me, none of you would care about this, and the whole thing would be buried on Page 17. I have committed no crime and the police and district attorney have acknowledged this. Thank you."

At the end of this, John came to the podium again, and said, "We have copies of each of these reports. Now, I will hand these out, and Carl and Marilyn will give you all fifteen minutes to review this documentation. After that, we will begin the question and answer portion of the press conference. All right?"

"That wasn't part of the deal!", argued Turcos.

I stepped back in front of the podium. "Then you don't want any supporting documentation or a chance to review them?", I asked in my most incredulous tone.

One of the other television reporters, the guy from WBAL, told Turcos to shut up. I nodded to John and left the room with Marilyn. Behind us I saw John passing out clipped stacks of documentation.

We waited out in the hallway almost twenty minutes, until John came out and signaled us to return. I went back to the podium, and this time I brought Marilyn up to stand next to me. Almost immediately Turcos started yelling out questions again. I sighed and turned to him. "Please, for once in your life, try to act like one of the big kids! I am going to start on the left and work my way to the right. Everybody gets a question, and then we move to the next, alright?"

Turcos turned bright red again, but he shut up. I turned to the left and said, "Please, your name and who you represent first."

"Jim Murray, the Baltimore Sun. You say you had no idea it was your brother who was making the attacks on you and your family, but your mother is reported to have said that you have a vendetta against your family. Care to comment?"

"I had no idea who was coming after my family. I had only seen my brother once in the last nine years, and that was in May. As we have shown you, he has a documented history of mental illness and of attacks against me. As for my mother, all I can say is that she is deeply distraught, and is currently under observation and treatment at Sheppard Pratt, and that this is not the first time she has been there. I won't be saying any more about her, she is still my mother, no matter what she says about me. Next."

I turned to the next person on the right. He introduced himself as Jonathan Markham, from WBAL. He wanted to know more details on the various attacks and the harassment, which I gave him. Next in line was the loudmouth from WJZ, Bob Turcos. He was the youngest of the bunch, and was trying to move from Baltimore to a larger station, hopefully on my back.

Or Marilyn's back. He directed his question to her. "Mrs. Buckman, what is it like being married to a man who some are claiming is a cold blooded murderer?"

Well, I wanted to murder the bastard myself, but Marilyn gave him an angry look, and then calmly replied, "My husband is the bravest man I have ever known. After sending our son and me away to safety, he had his car hidden, so that he could impersonate me. He set himself up as a target for a madman! We owe him our lives! I met Hamilton several times, and he was insane. He wanted to kill me and our son, and Carl stopped him. That was a very stupid question!"

I cringed at that, and Turcos smiled. Never give an asshole a break! Before I could move to the fourth reporter, the guy from WMAR, he spouted another question, "Then why are there so many reports stating otherwise, from official sources, that your multimillionaire husband is buying his freedom from the Baltimore County Police?!"

Marilyn gasped in disbelief, and I stepped back in front of the podium. I kept my face calm. I hadn't expected that attack. "Have your official sources stated anything for the record, and if not, have you considered their motives in making such outrageous and unsupported statements? You have here copies of official documentation, in some cases going back a decade or more. I would suggest you check your facts a lot more carefully."

Jim Hallstead, the reporter from WMAR, asked, "So there is no truth to these stories that the County police have shown you preferential treatment?"

"I think it is a slander on the outstanding police that we are fortunate to have in Baltimore County. I have met a lot of police officers and detectives during this trying time, and I never found them anything less than professional and caring. Their work was first rate."

He pressed on. "So, why, then, didn't they have you and your home under surveillance? They could have caught your brother before he got into your house!"

I simply shook my head. "Do you have any idea how many police officers it would take to maintain that kind of long term surveillance and protection detail? I think you guys are watching too many of the police shows on your networks. No police force in the world has that many officers available for a long term surveillance and protection."

Turcos interrupted again. "Isn't it true that your money was used to gain you police access and action that ordinary citizens don't get?"

I stared at the guy for a moment. "First you say I am using my money to get away from the cops, and then you say I was using my money to get them to hang around me. You want to try making up your mind? No more questions from you, you keep butting in on the grownups!"

At one point, Hallstead asked how Hamilton was able to find us. I nodded at him and commented, "That's actually a very good question. The detectives and I have tried to figure that out, and we don't really have an answer. Our best speculation is that it was because he worked in the billing department at the phone company. Our number is unlisted, and we don't publicize the address, but we think he was able to find my address through our phone bill."

Turcos popped up and shouted out, "Are you planning to sue the telephone company over this negligence?"

Oh, good Christ, spare me from this idiot!

And so it went for the next half an hour. Turcos kept interrupting with idiotic stuff that he had been fed by 'official sources.' It was obvious the others had gotten the same information, but only the guy from WJZ was buying into it. A couple of them asked about the Buckman Group, and I simply said I was the president, and we were an investment company. Turcos demanded we open our books to him so he could verify how much money we were paying to keep me out of trouble. I just laughed at him and answered we were a private company, and the IRS seemed happy with us, and that was all I was going to tell him about it.

Finally I just called it to a close. Nobody was asking anything new, and Turcos was getting even goofier. We excused ourselves, and John went into the hallway with us. "I am getting in touch with that idiot's boss. If he starts spouting that crap without any kind of verification, I am going to sue their pants off!"

I shrugged. "Don't forget, never get in an argument with people who buy ink by the barrel. Same goes with television. Let's see how bad it is tonight on the news." There wasn't a whole lot that could be done about it in any case.

"I have VCRs taping all three channels, and am cutting out the stories in the newspaper!"

"Listen, I'll be in on Monday, but until then, I am just staying here with Marilyn and Charlie. If it starts to die down, we're going to try to take a walk around the Inner Harbor this weekend."

"I've had Grace taking messages and sorting them out. She'll give them to you on Monday. You're going to be returning calls all morning long!"

"Thanks!", I said wryly. "I need to get back to the business. I feel like I've just been wasting my time on all this! It feels like it's never going to end."

"For what it's worth, by this time next week, somebody else will be on the news. These guys have the attention span of a puppy, and about the same IQ. Next week somebody else will be caught doing something or getting hosed over and nobody will remember you. Go upstairs and play with your son. That's the important thing to concentrate on now."

We shook hands and Marilyn and I went upstairs, to play with Charlie. Thankfully, the only thing Charlie was noticing about all of this was that he missed his 'Daw-eee!' - his 'doggie' who was currently in the kennel. Truth be told, it had been almost a month since I had seen Dum-Dum, and I missed her, too. Just like I missed my home, my brand new home, now with blood stains tracked throughout it and our possessions dumped everywhere. It would be at least another week before we could come home, although the cleaning service was promising miracles.

When would this ever end!

Chapter 82: Back To Normal

It did end, of course, and not with a bang, but with a whimper. Sort of, anyway. That sounds a lot more poetic than what it felt like at the time.

That evening, the lead story on all three local stations was the press conference and the reports we had provided. WMAR and WBAL pretty much gave the truth, although they couldn't help sensationalizing it. WJZ reported that I was the owner of a shadowy investment company with unreported ties to local politicians, and that it was doubtful that the truth would ever come out. The Baltimore Sun gave a very thorough breakdown of the reports, along with a second report on some of the wilder stories being reported by unnamed official sources.

That was pretty much it for the news. By Friday we were way down the list of things to talk about, although WJZ kept us on their headlines. Then that issue went away. My friend Turcos landed a job at a TV station in Philly, and left Baltimore so fast it took his ass a week to catch up! By Saturday I was able to take Marilyn and Charlie for a walk around the Inner Harbor area, with only a few people pointing at me (and then hustling their children away from the 'killer'.)

Monday morning I drove out to Hereford and went to work for the first time in almost four weeks. The welcome was heartening, a standing ovation when I came in the door. I thanked everybody, and then moved off to my office, with John and Grace following me. John had gotten all our phone calls to the house routed to the office, and Grace had been taking the messages. Grace had broken down all the messages into different categories. In one pile were the purely business messages, including calls from both Bill Gates and John Walker asking why I had missed their board meetings and why I wasn't returning their calls. Another group was from various reporters, and got shitcanned. A third pile was from people known to be friends, like Tusker and Tessa (who knew what was happening) and Harlan and Anna Lee (who didn't). I grabbed those first. Another very large pile was of people who were just calling to offer either support or tell me I was a murdering bastard who was going to hell. That pile got shitcanned, also. Finally there was one more small pile of messages, from people who had been investigated by the cops, and who called angrily to demand I leave them alone. Shelley Talbot was in this group, as was her husband, who was threatening me as well.

I spent the morning on the telephone. First I called my friends. Tusker was angry with me for not letting me in on the problem and letting him help. How he was going to help neither of us knew. I simply invited them downtown to dinner; Tessa would sort his ass out just fine. I couldn't call Harlan until the afternoon, since they were six hours behind us. I called the various companies on the west coast we had invested with, and apologized for being out of contact. I promised a trip out west to discuss things in a few weeks. I let Bill in on my problems, since we had started to become friends. I would have never have thought I would ever be friends with a guy like Bill Gates, but he was a pretty decent guy

I spent the day at the office, not even going out for lunch, and then drove back down to the Hyatt. Despite the closeness to the house, I didn't drive out. I didn't want to see what was going on. I was starting to contemplate simply selling it and starting over. I mentioned it to Marilyn that night over dinner. She gave me a very hard look and set her fork down on her plate. "That is my house. That is my home. You may move out if you wish, but I am moving back home. Is that understood?"

I smiled at her. So much for that idea. "Okay."

"Is that clearly understood?"

"Okay, okay, we are moving back. I get it."

She nodded and picked up her fork again. "Good. And you need to get out of this funk you're in. It is getting old."

"What are you talking about?"

She set her fork down again, and then leaned towards me. "Do you remember last year, when we were in the Bahamas, and you told me that you would protect Charlie and me - the exact words were that you would do whatever it would take to keep us safe. Remember that? Remember when you told me that? You asked me if I could handle it, and I said I could. Well ask yourself the question now. Can you handle it?"

I stared at her for a second, and picked up my own fork to work on my own meal. Then I set my fork down again. "I don't know." I stood up and carried my plate into the kitchenette. I had barely eaten anything, and what I had eaten was sitting like a lead ball in the pit of my stomach. I went into the sitting room and sat down in an armchair facing the window. It was dark out, but the view over the Inner Harbor was well lighted. I could twist my head and see the houses up on Federal Hill and the lights on the walkway over by the Torsk.

Marilyn was quiet as she moved around behind me, cleaning up and taking care of Charlie. Then she came in and sat down on a couch near me but not next to me. I just sat there and wondered what I was doing.

By now I was well into my 90s in terms of experience. When I came back, I just had a few goals in mind. Survive junior high and high school. Meet Marilyn again. Win her again. Have a few bucks and not live paycheck to paycheck. What more does the average guy really want, or need? There was nothing in that list about being valedictorian or getting a doctorate in math or joining the Army or becoming a hero or starting an investment company or becoming a multimillionaire. Certainly there was nothing in that list about destroying my family, which I had most certainly done. Hamilton was dead, my mother was in and out of the loony bin, my parents were divorced, and even Suzie had told me she couldn't talk to me or see me for awhile.

What had I become? What was I becoming? What would I become?

I had never killed before, never even been in a situation where that could happen. Now it seemed routine to me. Back on my first trip, I had only been in one fight after I got out of junior high school, and that was nothing but a tussle in a pizza joint. Now I had lost track of them. What kind of monster had I become? What was next for me? Serial killer? Had I been like this before, but suppressed?

I sat there looking out over the Inner Harbor until my bladder complained. I roused myself and found Marilyn asleep on the couch. I tapped her on the shoulder and said, "Time to go to bed." Marilyn got up and went into the bedroom while I went into the bathroom. When I got out, she was asleep again. I went to bed without any answers, only more questions.

The next day Marilyn insisted on coming out to Hereford with me, and she had Charlie ready to go on time. There was no arguing with her, so we drove out, and she dropped me off at the office, and then she continued on. I wasn't sure where she was going, but she had to be as stir crazy as I was by then. At lunchtime she returned, and after parking the Town Car, she brought our son in for a visit. Missy and Grace wanted to talk to her about what she had been through, and most everyone else said hello as well. Not everybody, however, since there were a couple of new faces in the accounting department that didn't know her. She was just the boss' boss' wife.

At the rate we were growing, we would be needing some larger office space before the end of the year. That was one of the good things that had occurred. Jake and Missy had spent some time with me over the last couple of days outlining our current financial position and holdings, and we had discussed future investments. In our first year of operation, The Buckman Group had achieved a rate of return of almost 50%, most of which we had kept in the firm. I couldn't believe what they were telling me, but Jake laid it out for me. Our Microsoft investment had, in its first year, roughly doubled in value, at least on paper, and that wasn't the only investment we had with an incredible rate of growth. Even Tusk Cycle was worth far more than it had been, and looked to be growing even faster. Tusker and Tessa were working their asses off!

Jake and Missy even raised the topic of growing even faster, by becoming an investment company for real. Currently we were just investing our own money (mostly mine, but they had ponied up some cash, also). What if we were to sell investment partnerships, or Class B shares with lower voting rights; we could raise a lot of money and also begin collecting fee income on our work. I had no idea how that sort of thing worked, and was a bit skeptical, but I told them they could look into it. One thing I told them, for sure, if we did something along these lines, we would need some people who actually knew more than we did about it, and the whole thing would have to be squeaky clean for me to go along with it.

When it came time to go to lunch, Marilyn kept driving, which surprised me, since she normally lets me drive when we are together. Instead, she drove us out Mount Carmel Road, and to the house. "Charlie and I came out here this morning and looked around. Now it's your turn."

"I was wondering where the two of you went. I wasn't sure if you were going shopping or what.", I replied.

"Also, you need to get your other car. We can't be sharing this one down in Baltimore."

She was in an 'I will be obeyed!' lecturing mood, so I just said, "Okay."

There was a van in the driveway from a flooring company that had been one of the subcontractors on the house. We pulled into the driveway and got out. It was with considerable trepidation that I got out of the car and went inside.

Marilyn led the way inside, carrying Charlie to keep him from wandering off on his own. It looked like a mess, but a somewhat organized mess. The cleaning company had come and gone, and they had taken care of a lot. The kitchen, unsurprisingly was in the worst shape. There was a patch on the wall where the drywall had been ripped out and replaced. The island had been unbolted from the floor and the linoleum had been taken out. The fellow who was there from the flooring company told me that new linoleum was scheduled to be brought out tomorrow, and he had a crew of guys coming to install it and then rebuild the kitchen. Also, I was lucky - the bloody footprints through the rest of the house had all been able to be scrubbed and sanded off the hardwood floors, although they needed to be refinished, starting tomorrow. Only some of the throw rugs would need to be thrown out.

I went through the house with Marilyn. The damage was mostly cosmetic. The cops had been through everything, even Charlie's stuff, and clothing was strewn all around. My desk in the den wasn't any better, and the locked drawers had been busted open with a pry bar. The desk was ruined and would need replacement. Our kitchen knives and my knives in my desk and bedroom had all been taken away. I had no idea why, since Hamilton had brought his own knife. I called DeAngelis and told him about the condition of things. There was very little he could do; since there was a bona fide reason to search (a dead body) they didn't even need a warrant. He did think he could get the Troopers to release my possessions, including my knives and my gun.

I went back through the house to find Marilyn and Charlie straightening up his room. Well, Marilyn was straightening; Charlie was playing with his toys. At least he had his priorities straight. I kissed my wife farewell and headed to the office in the 380. I would meet her again in Baltimore that evening.

The next day I got a call from Carstans telling me to drop by his office. He had all my stuff and was releasing it. He couldn't explain why the Staties had grabbed my knives, but they had turned them over along with my Colt when they turned me over. The forensics report on the gun matched the autopsy results. The bullets had been fired from the gun at a distance of six to seven feet, with a ballistics match and the proper level of powder residue. No surprise there. I went over after lunch and picked it all up and thanked him. He had been pretty decent throughout the whole affair, even if the State Troopers had been assholes.

We moved home on Friday. Marilyn and Charlie had spent the week cleaning up everything the cops had tossed around, all except my office. We checked out of the Hyatt that morning and I had a small heart attack with the size of the bill. I started totaling up all the expenses of this nightmare and had another heart attack. When you added in the cost of the security detail on Marilyn and Charlie, flying the bunch of them to Sacandaga Lake, the lawyers, and the repairs and cleaning to the house, I was about two hundred grand out of pocket! DeAngelis' bill alone was over ten grand! When I mentioned this to John he simply shrugged and told me to pay it, smile, and say thank you. If I had been arrested and charged, and then gone to trial, we would have just started adding zeros to the check! I told him that I was obviously in the wrong business, and he laughed and threw me out of his office.

How do normal people do it? Mostly, they don't. While some of the house damage costs are covered by home insurance, good lawyers and security companies are beyond the average person's means. In cases like this, if they have somebody stalking them, they end up hurt or dead. If they kill their attacker, they go to jail. DeAngelis had told me it was even money that I would be charged with murder, since they could argue I had a duty to leave Hamilton in the house and run away. Hell of a system!

I spent Friday evening cleaning my den, with Charlie playing with his toy trucks on the carpet and Marilyn puttering around the house, wandering in and out of the den and serving me iced tea. I was going to have to buy another desk, but I got everything sorted out and put away properly. I silently showed Marilyn my Colt, which I had kept locked in my desk. That was no longer an option. When Charlie was looking at something else, I slipped it inside a plastic bag and put it up on top of my tallest bookcase. She didn't look happy, but until I could lock it up again, that was the best I could think of. I just wanted to pack it all away. If I never had to use it again, that was just fine by me.

By eight, Charlie was asleep. Marilyn stayed up with me until I went to bed at eleven, even though she normally goes to bed earlier than me. She followed me into the bedroom, but went into the bathroom ahead of me. Nothing too unusual about that, so I turned down the bedspread and stripped down to my briefs. When Marilyn came out of the bathroom, we switched places, and I took a leak. When I came back to the bedroom, Marilyn was slipping on a white chemise with a red cherry print that I had bought her for Valentine's Day. I crawled into bed and Marilyn crawled in next to me.

I turned off the lamp on the nightstand, darkening the room. "Good night."

Marilyn rolled towards me and kissed me, but tonight she laid her head on my chest. I felt her hand on my chest near her face, but then she slowly moved it down my body.

I hadn't been with Marilyn since before I had flown her and Charlie to the Adirondacks. This last week, after I got loose from the cops, staying in the Hyatt, hiding from the world and ducking everybody, I had been staying up late and thinking dark thoughts. Now, it seemed like it was a lifetime ago. "Marilyn, I don't know..."

"Ssshhh ... Don't worry, I know."

I shut up. Marilyn began kissing my chest as her hand slid lower down my torso. It took me a moment or two, but by the time her hand reached the waistband of my briefs, Carl Junior was getting pleasantly stiff. I was very happy when Marilyn continued kissing my chest, lower and lower down my body, even as she reached inside my briefs and began stroking me. Marilyn stopped long enough to tug my briefs off, and I lifted up enough to give her some help. Then she began kissing me again, moving her lips ever closer to my stiff dick, which was straining to get into her mouth.

I groaned when Marilyn began licking my cockhead, as she gently pumped my shaft. I knew she had to taste my pre-come, and Marilyn was licking it up like an ice cream cone. My hands were in her hair and running down across her shoulders and back, and I began humping my hips up, trying to drive myself into her mouth. After a few minutes of this, Marilyn opened her mouth and moved her face lower, and took me deep into her mouth. I groaned again.

I began to moan and whisper to her, "That's it ... don't stop ... like that, just like that ... suck me, suck me..." Marilyn continued sucking and pumping as I got ever closer. "I'm going to come ... oh God, I'm going to come ... suck it, suck it ... don't stop..." Then it happened, I just started coming, and Marilyn kept pumping and sucking as she swallowed a month's worth of jism.

Marilyn finished me off, and there was enough light coming in from outside to let me watch her licking her lips and her fingers. Then Marilyn crawled up my body. I expected her to kiss me and say something, but she kept crawling, until she was sitting on my face. Marilyn didn't say anything, but she didn't have to, I simply got to work. I began licking her pussy, and when she began moaning and moving around on my face, I reached up and grabbed her ass and pulled her down against me. It was her turn now to whine and whimper, and I kept it up until she was shaking and shivering with orgasm.

At that point, Marilyn gasped and crawled off my face, and since I was stiff again, decided to save a horse and ride a cowboy. I wasn't complaining. She rode me and pulled her chemise off, so that I could suck on her tits while she did so. After I came, we collapsed in each other's arms and fell asleep.

I woke up the next morning feeling better than I had in weeks. I was alone in the bed, but I could hear my wife fooling around down the hallway and taking care of Charlie. I got up and took a quick shower, and pulled on some pants and an old fatigue shirt I used to putter around the house in. I went out to cook breakfast for Marilyn and myself. So far this was shaping up as a fairly normal weekend. What wasn't normal was what I found when I went out to the kitchen. Marilyn was feeding Charlie, and had on a blouse tied under her breasts and an extremely short denim skirt.

"I like the outfit.", I told her. "Charlie have any comments on it?"

Marilyn blushed, and grinned at me. "He hasn't said anything yet."

"Well, I certainly approve, but I have a funny feeling your days of running around like that in the house are sadly coming to an end. Wait until he tells the other kids at nursery school about how Mommy runs around half naked in the house."

"You wouldn't say that, would you Charlie?!", she said to him, while he stuffed Cheerios into the hole in the front of his face. He gabbled something out and kept stuffing them in. He was up to using a spoon, sort of, but usually finished off with his fingers.

"Maybe he'll be busy playing with Dum-Dum later.", I added.

"I certainly hope so!" Marilyn turned to face me and grinned. "It's been almost a two month long dry spell, and we'll never be making him any siblings at that rate."

Siblings? "Uh, si ... siblings?", I stammered out.

"Remember how we talked about that. We were going to start working on that this fall? Well, buster, it's the fall!"

Oh, shit! "I thought we were going to take a family vacation first, and then work on it, maybe over the winter."

"Change of plans. Charlie and I called the two weeks at Sacandaga Lake a family vacation. We're starting the other project now!"

I glanced over at our son. "Charlie called it a vacation? Since when does he get a vote? This isn't a democracy! This is a benevolent dictatorship, and I'm the benevolent dictator!", I protested.

Marilyn stood upright and slipped around behind and to the side of Charlie in his high chair where he couldn't see her. She popped her tits out of the blouse, and then pulled her skirt up to her waist and started fingering her slit. "You sure about that?"

I stared at her, suddenly hungry for something other than bacon and eggs. "You fight dirty!"

She dropped her skirt and played with her nipples. "Charlie needs a baby brother or sister."

Hearing his name, Charlie started yammering around his food in his mouth. I just rolled my eyes to the heavens for strength. "Brothers! Girls are yucky! They have cooties and stuff! Boys only!", I told him.

Marilyn laughed at that. "See if you get any more of my cooties! Make breakfast!"

"Yes, ma'am!"

I dug out the skillets and eggs and bacon, and started to work on breakfast. Marilyn cleaned up our offspring and put him in his playpen in the great room. Dum-Dum followed and they watched Saturday morning cartoons together. My wife returned to perch decorously on a bar stool while I cooked. "Are you dessert?", I asked.

"Sounds good to me, but it's only until this afternoon. Tusker and Tessa are coming over for dinner."

"Oh?"

"Remember how you invited them to dinner down at the Hyatt this weekend? We're not there anymore, so they're coming out here."

I nodded. I remembered inviting them. "Fine by me. I haven't seen them since I sent you two up north. I guess I should explain what happened."

Marilyn agreed. After breakfast, which we ate in the kitchen, Marilyn checked on Charlie, now napping in his playpen, and we tore off a quickie in the kitchen. Later that day, right after lunch, we did it again in our bedroom. That was it, however. The Tusks were coming over, and we had to behave. Marilyn changed before they came over.

Tusker and Tessa and Bucky got to the house about five or so, and it was surprisingly good to see them again. The last time I had seen him had been when I used the phone at his dealership to call Big Bob and Harriet when I had flown my family to safety. Then, I hadn't been able to tell them anything, but they had learned a lot, mostly wrong, from watching the TV news the last couple of weeks. While Bucky played with some toys, and Charlie pestered Bucky, the four of us sat down in the living room to talk about what happened.

"Man, you should have told us! We could have helped!", exclaimed Tusker. Tessa was nodding along with him.

"It was just too dangerous. We couldn't figure out who was doing it or why, and every time he did something it would get worse. What if he had started going after my friends? He tried to firebomb our house! What if it had been you?", I replied.

"Still, you should have said something.", he argued.

"The police didn't want anybody to be told.", answered Marilyn. "Since we couldn't figure out who it was, we didn't know how they were getting any information on us."

"How did he find out what you were doing?"

"Best anybody can figure out, he found me through the billing department of the phone company. He was probably able to monitor who I was calling that way, too.", I answered. That was a nicely chilling thought.

"Jesus Christ!", muttered Tusker.

Eventually we got off that topic, and onto something a lot more amusing, how Tusk Cycle was coming along. It was now about three months since they had become a Honda dealer, and their most recent quarter was showing some excellent numbers. The numbers were so good, in fact, that they had just bought a house! "Congratulations! We had no idea!", I commented for the both of us.

Tessa said, "Well, Bucky can't live in the dining room forever, and certainly not with a baby brother or sister."

It took us a second to catch on, but then Marilyn squealed and jumped up to hug the pair of them. I shook Tusker's hand and said, "Uh, is this congratulations or condolences?"

"Very funny, jackass!", he replied.

"It's congratulations!", said Marilyn, wagging a finger at me. "Don't forget, we're trying, too!"

That caused Tessa to squeal happily, too. Tusker gave me an amused look, and I said lowly to him, "I think I like my end of the deal better than her end."

He muttered back, "No shit!"

"Come on, let's get a drink." I led him out to the kitchen, and opened up the bar in the bottom of the island.

"Is this where...", he asked.

I pointed at the other side of the island. "Right there, and I was over there." I pointed towards the archway. "He had a Bowie knife, for God's sake! Who the hell has one of those? It's like a small sword!"

"Christ!"

Dinner was coq au vin, my signature chicken, ham, and wine sauce over rice meal. While I was preparing it, we opened a bottle of Pinot Grigio and shared it around. Bucky and Charlie kept wandering through, and they got some crackers. We were still talking about Hamilton and the stalking and attacks, and Tessa wanted to know why they had been questioned by the cops.

"I think it was standard operating procedure for them. They had this detective talking to everybody! We had no idea who was doing this, and they kept asking us questions? Who did you go to school with? Who do you do business with? Who knows Marilyn?"

"And you had no idea it was your putz of a brother?"

I simply shook my head. "No clue! I hadn't seen him since May, at my sister's college graduation." I hooked my thumb over at my wife. "She and my sister decided I needed to be reunited with my family. Boy, did that turn out to be a bust!"

"Don't blame us! We were just trying to get you back with your father.", protested Marilyn.

I snorted. "Yeah, look how that worked out!"

"What happened?", asked Tusker.

"Hamilton lost it and went crazy. Then my father punched him out, and when my mother tried to stop him, he threw him and my mother out of the house. Now Hamilton's dead, my mom's in the loony bin, my folks are divorced, and my sister won't talk to me. Please, nobody try to fix my family again."

Marilyn stuck her tongue out at me and gave me a raspberry, which Bucky noticed and imitated. That got him a mild rap on the noggin by one of his father's knuckles, and then he was sent off to play in the living room with Charlie and the dog.

Tessa asked, "So what was Hamilton's problem? Was he really crazy?" Everyone looked at me.

I nodded. "Pretty much. We have a psychiatrist's report from a few years ago that said he was a paranoid schizophrenic, and that he had a fixation on me. I was the cause of all his problems. The older I got and the more successful I got, that just meant I was doing something to hold him back. If I had just been some routine schlub, he'd have probably ignored me."

"Tell them about the pictures.", prompted Marilyn.

"What pictures?", asked Tessa.

I shrugged. "This part actually made some sense. My mother removed all the pictures of me from around the house, like I didn't exist or something. Suzie and I thought she did it to calm him down, pretending I wasn't around. That's probably why he freaked and broke down when he saw me in the spring. It pushed him over the edge."

"And you never connected the dots?", asked Tusker.

I shook my head. "No. It wasn't like it started the next day. His car wasn't seen at the house for another month, and it wasn't even his car. The first vandalism didn't happen until July. We had no idea what he was up to. I think he was either building up his courage or just getting crazier over time. Nobody knows."

"Damn!", he muttered lowly.

We promised that our next meal would be at their new house after they moved, and that if they needed help moving, to just give us a call. Tessa offered to give us Bucky for the day, which we laughingly agreed upon. At five, he was more nuisance than help. At least they didn't have a dog to help mess things up!

Chapter 83: The End Of The Year

And thus ended 1983, a momentous year for so very many reasons. Tusker and Tessa had a new place to call home by Christmas. We helped them move in and kept an eye on Bucky as needed. By the time they moved in, Tessa was visibly showing; she's slimmer than Marilyn to begin with, so when she shows, everybody knows!

My hopes that the death of my brother had finally been put behind me were just that, hopes. My mother sued me in civil court for his wrongful death. Every reputable lawyer in town turned her down, already knowing what had happened and who they would go up against, but she found a shyster ready to take the case on a contingency basis, and he had me served one day at the office.

Q: What's the difference between lawyers and lab rats?

A: There are some things even lab rats won't do!

I dumped it on John and DeAngelis. DeAngelis promptly invited the shyster to his office and explained the facts of life. Specifically, he laid out the evidence and said we would countersue my mother, since she was the person who had bought Hamilton the knife he had brought to the house and loaned him the car he used to stalk us. The crook promptly dumped my mother's lawsuit. I got another bill from DeAngelis, for another five grand.

I kept him on retainer, though, since my parents then started suing each other, with me being named willy-nilly. That was when we learned that my parents had managed to secretly disown me back in the fall of 1978, shortly after I married Marilyn, without letting either me or John Steiner know. I guess they really didn't like my wife. That was very upsetting, for both of us. I tried to stay in touch with Suzie, but she told me that our parents were trying to use her to fight each other and me, and she had stopped returning any calls from them and was getting an unlisted number and a new apartment. She would call me when she could talk, but otherwise it was best to leave her alone for awhile.

The Buckman Group kept moving forward. After a year and a half of operation, I was noticing several interesting trends. Jake Junior was definitely ambitious. He really wanted to grow the outfit and do bigger deals, and wanted to hire some specialists from Wall Street to help. I kept an eye on him, but otherwise let him. I still did the strategic guidance - I kept an eye on which companies he wanted to work with and red-flagged some that I knew would be a disaster. I did let him lose a little money on one or two that I knew wouldn't work out, simply so he would learn from the experience. Missy's role was interesting. Technically she was just a stock broker, but she had the world's biggest Rolodex. If we needed to find somebody, the odds were she knew someone who knew someone. Very useful. After the collapse of her marriage, she was supporting three children. She could afford decent child care now, as well as some good vacations with them. What she did about male companionship, I never asked. About once a quarter we would travel to the west coast to confer with people in Bellevue and Silicon Valley.

At Christmas time I took a few weeks off and we went up to Utica, all four of us. Charlie and Dum-Dum stayed at the Lefleurs while Marilyn and I started our vacation early. We spent an inordinate amount of time explaining to Marilyn's family what had happened that summer and fall, and I got some pretty strange looks from some of her family. It was one thing to know that I had been in the Army, and that the Army was involved in killing, but that was a whole different level of abstraction than sitting down to dinner with a guy who had shot his brother. I worked my way through it; it was still better than being on the news for a week.

Marilyn had taken care of all the arrangements with Taylor, simply stating that we wanted something about as private as we had done on that first trip to the Bahamas, but on a larger island with some night life on it. Other than that, it was all supposed to be a surprise to me, and for once, Marilyn kept her mouth shut. Two days after Christmas, we got Big Bob to drive us over to the Oneida County Airport, where a G-II was waiting to whisk us away.

By that time, the need to fly away for a Mommy-Daddy vacation to make a new little Buckman had vanished. The incredibly potent combination of Buckman spermatozoa and Lefleur ova had done its usual magic and Marilyn had caught in late October. Marilyn had insisted on going, however, since (her words, not mine) it was her last chance to wear a swimsuit without looking like a beached whale! I figured I would be delicate about it and simply said that meant there would be more of her to love. She replied, "Does that mean I can stop exercising with you?"

"No, by keeping your weight down, you get more love per pound!" That earned me an elbow to the ribs. Sometimes being a mathematician can get you in trouble.

Marilyn had bullied me back into exercise and aikido practice. While she had been away at Sacandaga Lake, I had stayed home, out of sight, to lure the stalker into showing himself. I won't say I was flabby by the time it was all over, but I needed to start up again. By the time I felt comfortable getting out of the house, without worrying about running into a reporter on the front lawn, it had been over a month.

We were still planning on doing a pool in the spring, as soon as the weather broke, with a fence around that as well. We'd have another big barbecue then, and combine it with a pool party. I remembered how Big Bob had always done a big party every Fourth of July, for company and family, and it had always been a good time. Maybe we could do that sort of thing here.

So Big Bob drove us over to the airport and helped us load our stuff on board, and then Marilyn and I peeled off our winter coats, tossing them inside the car, and scampered inside the plane. It was cold out there! As soon as we were onboard, the pilot closed the door and locked it up. This was a fellow I had never met before, and all he said to us was, "Welcome aboard. Please sit down and buckle up. There is some champagne in the cabinet and glasses here." He tapped a built-in cabinet in the front bulkhead. "As soon as we get to cruising altitude, I'll let you know, and you can unbuckle and move about."

One thing I was learning about these small jets was that every one of them was different, even if they were the same model. When you bought one, either new or used, there existed a whole industry set up just to custom remodel the interiors. This one differed slightly from the one I had ridden from Hawaii to Seattle. There was a half bath in the back, and there was a cabin door separating the cockpit from the passengers, but the arrangement of the seats was slightly different. With this one, two of the seats were facing aft, so that a fold down table between them could be lifted up and everybody could work or play cards.

Marilyn moved me along until I was in one of the chairs in this grouping, and I sat down facing forward. She surprised me, however, by sitting down in the seat facing me, and not across the aisle at my side. We both buckled our seats, and the engines began their whine up to speed. "I really need this.", I told her with a smile. "I have a funny feeling next year is going to be hectic."

"Oh?"

"Well, let's face it, I mean, you're going to have some different priorities soon enough, right?", I said with a laugh.

"My priorities won't be changing that much."

"Oh?"

"No.", she replied. Then my wife surprised me by spreading her legs apart in the seat as she faced me. She had been wearing a short sundress under her winter parka, and now I looked at her closely. It was strapless, with an elastic tube top, and was knee length. Otherwise she was wearing a pair of high heeled sandals, and I surmised some underwear. Well, so I thought, anyway. She spread her legs apart, and quietly tugged her dress up her thighs a touch, until she could see me staring at her freshly shaved pussy. "I don't think my priorities have changed that much."

The engine pitch went higher, as the pilot put more power on them, and we began taxiing away from the terminal. "Do you have a matching bra?", I asked.

Marilyn smiled, and pulled the tube top down. Her 34Cs popped into view causing me to smile. She may have started out as a B cup, but after Charlie was born, she blossomed to a C. I wondered what another child would do. If she could keep her weight in check, I wasn't one to complain about even bigger tits. I'd be happy to buy her a new wardrobe if her shirts and blouses got too tight.

A man's got to do what a man's go to do, right?

"I think I'm going to like this vacation.", I told her.

Marilyn giggled. "Let's just hope they keep that door shut. I told Taylor we wanted a plane with the cabin door that was shut..."

"You told her that?", I blurted out. That was so unlike Marilyn.

She giggled and nodded.

"What did she say?" Great, if Taylor blabbed even half like Marilyn, most of northern Baltimore County knew I was a member of the Mile High Club by now!

"She winked and asked me to tell her what it was like. Then we told Grace and Missy."

"You didn't!" Holy Christ!

"Jesus! No, I didn't! You call me gullible! No, I just told her to get a plane with a cockpit door. If she drew any conclusions from that, then she has a mind as dirty as yours!"

I slapped my head. I knew I was going to get teased about this at the office, no matter what. "You know, if we were to ever buy a place down in the islands, we'd have to let your family go down if they wanted. Could you imagine if we were to fly your parents down like this? What if they were on a plane with a closed cockpit door?"

"Gross! I don't want to think about that! Yuck, yuck, yuck!", protested Marilyn loudly.

At that point the engine power increased dramatically, and I was pressed back into the seat as the pilot released the brakes and began speeding down the runway. Marilyn was leaning forward, towards me, since she was facing me, and it did some interesting things to the way her boobs were sitting on her chest. Marilyn passed the time by teasing me, with her skirt pulled even higher, and one hand between her legs and the other playing with her nipples.

A few minutes later, the jet leveled off, and a light chime came over the cabin intercom. We were free to unbuckle our seat belts, and the co-pilot said he would announce when we were about fifteen minutes out from our destination. Unfortunately, he didn't say what that destination was, and Marilyn still hadn't told me. I just hoped the guy was driving us south and not north. I hadn't packed any warm clothing, and it looked to me like Marilyn hadn't packed much at all!

Marilyn popped her seat belt off and pulled her top back up, and then stood up. She went to the forward bulkhead and fiddled around with it until the door to the refrigerator popped open and she pulled forth a bottle of champagne. She waved it at me, and said, "Woo hoo!", and then rooted around in a different cabinet and found a pair of champagne flutes. She brought them back to our seats and handed the bottle to me.

"Didn't anybody ever teach you not to shake a bottle of champagne?", I asked.

"You're a fuddy duddy!"

I rolled my eyes and smiled. "Okay, so I'm going to aim this at you."

That made her open her eyes. "Don't you dare!"

I just shrugged noncommittally. Marilyn sat down again and I very carefully opened the bottle up. The cork popped loudly and flew around the cabin, but it didn't foam and fizz everywhere, so I took that as a success. I poured the champagne into the glasses she held, and then set the bottle into a very convenient holder on the side of the cabin. One of these days I'd be able to afford a plane of my own, and it would definitely have to have some champagne bottle holders scattered around!

We clinked glasses and sipped. "Here's looking at you, kid.", I said, imitating Bogart. It totally went past her. The only movies she was familiar with were the ones Disney made.

"Cheers." She smiled again, and spread her legs on the seat, slumping down slightly and allowing her skirt to ride up her thighs. I watched and nodded approvingly. "Any ideas about how I can keep from spilling my champagne on my dress?"

"Well, one certainly comes to mind."

"I thought it might. Hold my glass." I took her glass in my left hand, and Marilyn sat upright and pulled her dress up and off. She was now facing me naked, wearing nothing but her high heeled sandals and a smile. "Better?"

"Well, if you do spill anything, just let me know, and I'll see about licking it off you.", I offered.

She slipped a finger into the glass and rubbed a few drops of champagne over her right nipple. "I'll remember that." She continued to tease me while she sipped her champagne.

I was rock hard inside my slacks. When I finished my champagne, I tossed the empty glass onto the seat next to me and stretched out. Marilyn giggled and finished hers off, and set her glass aside as well. "Would you like me to help you get comfortable?", she asked.

"Please!"

She giggled again, and then slipped down to the floor and knelt at my feet. Marilyn unzipped my pants, and pulled them and my briefs down to my ankles. "You're violating the rules, remember?", she said when she saw my shorts.

"Punish me later, if you don't mind."

Marilyn's slow motion blow job was punishment enough. She licked and teased my cockhead with her tongue while she slowly ran her fingers along my shaft. I ended up pulling her face forward and demanding she finish me off, and I held her head to my crotch until she suctioned the come from my balls. I sighed, then, and Marilyn reached out and grabbed our glasses, and I refilled them. "That was a nice snack.", she said, "but can I get something a little more filling in a few minutes?"

"Happy to oblige. Come over here and let me have a nibble or two."

Marilyn came over and straddled my thighs, and we had another glass of champagne while I sucked on her tits and my cock got stiff again. As soon as I was hard enough, we finished our glasses and tossed them aside again, and then Marilyn crawled forward and impaled herself on me. She rode me while I ran my hands across her ass and back, and I sucked her nipples. She came at least twice before I did, and since I had already come once, I lasted a fair bit before I filled her pussy.

Marilyn glanced at my watch and said, "I don't think we have enough time for another round. You're not as young as you used to be."

"Hey!", I protested. "You're older than I am!"

"I'm just approaching my sexual peak. You're already going down the far side. Anyway, we need to clean up and get dressed." She stood up and grabbed her dress, and then went to the bathroom in the back. I stood and pulled my pants up. When she came out, we swapped places, and tucked in my shirttails and otherwise made myself presentable. When I returned to my seat, Marilyn was sitting in the seat next to me, and we finished off the bottle. Then my wife took a nap while I looked out the window at the blue ocean and white clouds until the pilot announced we were fifteen minutes out and were beginning our descent. I still didn't know where we were going!

We landed on what looked like a very sunny tropical airfield. As soon as we taxied to the terminal, we stopped, and the co-pilot came out. He popped the door and said, "You have to stay on board for customs, but welcome to Nassau."

I looked out the open hatch. "I assume you are not referring to Nassau County, Long Island, because that would be very disappointing."

Marilyn laughed behind me. "You don't know?", he asked, incredulously.

"No idea. This was all her idea." I leaned towards him and said, "I'm not really her husband. More like her boy toy, if you know what I mean."

Marilyn laughed some more. "I think I want a refund! It's the Bahamas, you dork!"

The guy laughed, and pointed out the door. "Whatever. Tell it to them. Bahamian customs has arrived."

I dug out our passports and we went through the usual rigmarole, and then we deplaned. Marilyn had a cheat sheet from Taylor she was referring to, and at the rental counter we found a Cadillac waiting for us. Considering the price of oil, it was probably worth its weight in gas, but it was definitely better than the POS we had on Eleuthera. We loaded all our stuff in the trunk, and then Marilyn had me drive while she gave me what were purported to be directions to a house rental office. We only got lost twice. "Left ... no, the other left ... right, no not right, left..." When Marilyn uses a map, if the road she is on is marked in red, she starts looking out the window for red pavement.

Thankfully, our journey ended about five miles later at an office on the outskirts of Nassau. Once inside, we found ourselves being greeted by a large black man named Peepers about twenty years older than us, who was the rental agent. He greeted us, grabbed a few papers, and ushered us back outside. We were to follow him to the villa.

We drove south, across the island, to a road that ran along the beach, and then headed west a few miles, before driving down a long road to the waterfront. The view was simply breathtaking! There was a long beach, white sand, palm trees, and then back away from the beach was the villa, low slung in a modernistic concrete and glass style. "Welcome to Hougomont.", said Mr. Peepers.

"Hougomont?", I said. "Wasn't that the name of a location at the Battle of Waterloo?"

"Something like that, I believe.", he replied. "Lovely, isn't it?"

"It's beautiful!", gushed Marilyn.

I simply nodded in agreement. I looked around, and it seemed like almost a mile or more of beach front. "Is all of this part of the estate?"

Peepers smiled. "Sorry, but no. This is actually the first of a series of villas here along this stretch of beach, perhaps ten or so, going from about there, all the way to down there." He pointed with his hands at the long stretch of beach, running east to west and facing south. "Would you like to see the house now?" He made an ushering gesture, and we moved up the foot path to the house. I could see at the side a place to park the cars near a side entrance.

The house was quite modern, but not sterile, which some designs are. The walls were done all in white, with what looked like Jackson Pollack knockoffs on them. Very modern. Six bedrooms, five baths, lots of glass looking down over the beach, one side facing an infinity pool, and then down to a deck with another pool, and a path to the beach. Very nice. I was going to have to thank Taylor for finding a way to spend so much of my money! This place must cost a fortune!

Marilyn looked very excited by it all. Maybe that made it worth it.

Peepers explained the rules of the villa. Unlike La Valencia, there was no custodial service, although he could arrange it if necessary. Likewise, there was no breakfast or meal service, again, unless we ordered it up. I assured him we could rough it, and then made sure we got a map and some directions to some nearby stores. I signed a few papers, got a key, and then he left.

"Isn't this great!", gushed Marilyn.

"Great.", I said, smiling down at her.

She gave me a very sly look. "It's almost deserted. Nobody will ever be able to see you chasing me around on the beach."

I wrapped my arms around her. "Now why would I be chasing you around the beach? I'm on vacation, and that sounds a lot like work."

"You'd be chasing me around to have sex with me!"

"Maybe I ought to let you chase me around. I am a cripple, after all.", I replied.

Marilyn's response was to reach between us and grab my crotch through my slacks. "I don't think so!" Then she pushed me away and scampered towards the living room.

Well, two can play at that game! I chased her around the living room, making sure to keep between her and the front door, and managed to corner her by the dining room. Marilyn bolted for the door, laughing and giggling, but I grabbed a wrist and pulled her over to the couch. She struggled, sort of, in between laughs, and I ended up laying on top of her, with Marilyn face down and her skirt pulling up over her rump. I quickly undid my pants and pushed them and my briefs down, and then pushed my wife's legs apart and entered her from behind. Reaching around, I tugged her tube top down, and we humped madly there on the couch.

Afterwards, I rolled off her, and Marilyn twisted around to lay half on my side, half thrown over me. "I told you you'd be chasing me around.", she told me.

I moved my free hand and swatted that nice little rump. "I don't think you were trying too hard to escape."

"Did you want me to?"

"Just keep wearing clothes like this, and I'll keep chasing you.", I said, smiling.

"I'm hungry. We need to get something to eat.", she said.

I had something else in mind. "I'm not quite dressed for that, right now." I took her hand and placed it on my sticky, soft cock. I held it there until it started to get stiff, and then Marilyn began stroking me back to hardness. As soon as I was ready, I rolled on top of her, and we made love again on the couch. Then we got up, cleaned up, and dressed again, me in some clean khakis and a sport shirt, Marilyn in a different sundress.

Lunch was handled first, at a small outdoors restaurant near the beach, followed by shopping for groceries and booze. Afterwards we went back home and put everything away, and took a nap (a sleeping nap, not the other type), and then just hung around for the rest of the day. It was a long day, with a lot of travel, and we just goofed off until the evening. After dinner (burgers and fries) we sat out on the deck and just watched the sun sink in the west. Then we went inside, went to bed, made love, and went to sleep.

And so things went for our week in Nassau. Technically we were on the island of New Providence, which has the capital city of Nassau on the north coast. Paradise Island is separated by a small strait from New Providence, and can be reached by a short causeway; they are treated as one island. The whole island is fairly small, only about 5 miles long by about half that wide. We spent our days goofing off and playing grab ass on the beach. At night we would go out to dinner and maybe find a night club or bar. There was a casino on Paradise Island that we visited one night, and I got Marilyn to shut up and let me concentrate at the blackjack table long enough to win enough to put a dent in our vacation bill.

Mostly we screwed around. The day after we got there, Marilyn came out to the deck pool in the morning after breakfast in her satin robe. I was taking a breather after some exercise, and she came out with a towel. She lay it down on a long cushion, and then turned to me and said, "Can you rub some suntan lotion on me?" At that, she untied the robe and dropped it to the deck, and was standing there in her birthday suit. "Oh, dear, I forgot to put on my swimsuit! Should I go back in and put it on?"

"I won't tell if you won't."

Marilyn giggled and lay down on the towel, and pulled another cushion over and tucked it under her head. I grabbed a bottle of suntan lotion and squirted some on her legs, a long thin line up each. These I worked in slowly, and then I repeated the process on her arms. Long before I got to her torso, Marilyn's nipples were stiff and pointy, and her pussy was puffy and moist. I squirted some more lotion on her body, and started massaging it in, working north to south. Marilyn was whimpering while I oiled her breasts up, and was almost humping herself up at my hands when I moved them down to her pussy. When she began demanding that I fuck her, I smiled widely and pushed my swim shorts down and got on top of her. Marilyn was almost babbling, "Fuck me! Fuck me! Fuck me!", as I pounded into her sweet little pussy. Her arms were wrapped around me, and her legs were lifted and crossed behind my back, and she was hanging on for sweet life as I slam fucked down into her.

Eventually I groaned and exploded, my balls churning as I pumped a heavy load into her greasy little snatch. I collapsed on top of her, for several minutes, and was surprised when, after I rolled off of my wife, she rolled over onto her stomach. "Don't forget to do my back!", she said, sighing happily.

So I oiled up her back and did her that way, too. I aim to please!

One afternoon we drove into Nassau and spent some time wandering around the shopping district on Bay Street. It's not quite Rodeo Drive, but it's probably about as close as the Bahamas is going to get. Or at least it was until the Nineties, when some of the new megaresorts set up shop. There were a number of high end shops like Gucci and Louis Vuitton, and some absolute schlock and tourist traps. While window shopping outside one place, I realized it primarily sold clubwear for twenty-somethings, you know, the beautiful and rich, or for girls who were trying to find the beautiful and rich. Laughing about it with Marilyn, I dragged her inside. "Let's find you something to go clubbing in tonight!", I told her.

"You're kidding me, right?", she replied, in her most incredulous tone. Maybe that was because she was looking at a black leather mini-dress, with the accent on the mini, which had a series of cutouts up the side. No way could any woman wearing it wear anything under it.

A clerk, a gorgeous young girl who looked barely old enough to drink legally, came up. "How can we assist you this afternoon?"

I grinned at the girl. "Where would you wear an outfit like this here in Nassau?", I asked. I glanced at the price tag, and was astounded to find it had four digits in it. I guess Commodore Vanderbilt was right; if you have to ask the price, you can't afford it!

The sales clerk started gushing about various clubs, none of which we had heard of, but which seemed to be near or associated with some of the resorts, and the Princess Casino on Paradise Island. I nodded, and said, "So, what would you recommend for my, uh, friend."

"Your friend!", exclaimed Marilyn. "We're married!"

I patted her hand and winked at the sales clerk. "Yes, I know, just not to each other. It's all right, honey. Your husband has no idea we're here! He thinks you're in Cabo!"

Marilyn was just gaping at me, especially after the clerk nodded and lowered her voice to a conspiratorial tone. "Trust me, your secret is safe with me. Just use first names only, and pay in cash when you have to.", she told Marilyn.

I smiled and nodded. "It's like I told you, darling. My wife thinks I'm at a board meeting in Paris. We're perfectly safe."

Marilyn gave me a look that threatened to fry me, but then smiled at the clerk. "I'm just waiting for the divorce to kick in, and then I'm going to take the lousy bastard for every cent he's worth!"

"Good for you!", said the girl. Then she sized Marilyn up professionally. She held a hand out to the mini-dress and said, "This would work for you, but it really works best if you're taller, you know, longer legs. What we need is something that plays to your highlights."

"Oh?"

The girl nodded. "Your figure! It's to die for! I wish I had your ... bust." She glanced at me. "You need to go have a seat, and let us girls do our thing." Marilyn gave me another dirty look, and then allowed herself to be pulled away.

Over the next half an hour, Marilyn was trotted out in several different outfits which generally showed a lot of cleavage. I would give enthusiastic approval to each. Finally she came out in a scarlet red outfit. Marilyn looked very nervous about this one, although the clerk was very confident. It was essentially backless, with a halter top that was deeply cut down the front and with a loose cowl front that allowed her to move freely inside it. The most interesting feature, however, was the calf length skirt, which was slit up each side practically to the waist. Marilyn even had on a pair of matching red stilettos, and she looked around to see if anyone else was in the shop to see her. Her lack of underwear was obvious, although if she moved carefully, she wouldn't show anything.

"Holy shit!", I exclaimed. At the clerk's order, Marilyn slowly turned around. It was also obvious that Marilyn had been tanning without a swimsuit. "Wow!"

"Carl, I can't wear this!", she protested.

"Oh, baby, that's the one! Why your husband would let you go is a mystery to me!" For that I got another dirty look and she flipped me the bird. I just laughed. "We'll take it!" Marilyn simply stared at me in disbelief, and was led away by the girl. She came back out about ten minutes later in her original clothing, a tee shirt and denim skirt and low sandals (no undies) with the girl carrying the red dress and stilettos in boxes.

"What about the other dresses? I thought you liked the green mini-skirt and bustier combo."

I agreed and took both of them, even as my wife just shook her head. I just gave her a hug as the girl packed everything up and took my American Express card. "I can't believe your husband would ever let a fox like you go.", I told her.

Marilyn kicked me in the shins. "Very funny! I think I really will divorce the bastard now!" I just laughed and moved out of range of another kick. "I will never be able to wear a dress like that!"

"You'll wear it tonight! We'll go to that club at the Princess Casino. I'll even put on my suit. We'll look like trendy jetsetters out for the night."

She laughed at that, because otherwise we were just incredibly boring back home. The she whispered, "Maybe tonight, but in a few weeks more, I won't be able to fit into either dress!" She pantomimed what her belly was going to grow to.

"So we'll go out two nights, and you wear each dress once."

"If we get caught, my husband is going to kill you!"

I just laughed at that.

That night I begged, cajoled, and pleaded, and finally got my wife to wear the red dress to the night club at the Princess. I wore the suit I had packed, and Marilyn wore the dress and red heels. She refused to go to dinner in the outfit. I got her to wear all of the jewelry she had brought and that would at all look good on her, a pair of large gold loop earrings, several gold necklaces, and a pair of heavy gold bracelets. She looked amazing! She had to move carefully, and I think the valet saw more than she wanted him to see when she climbed from the Cadillac. The walk to the night club took us through the main lobby and the casino, and heads turned as we went though, and I heard several whistles, which made her both blush and smile at me. "I can't believe the things you get me to do!", she told me several times.

Marilyn had several drinks that night, and pretty much raped me once we got back to Hougomont. I let her have her way with me. Afterwards, as we lay in each other's arms, I whispered to her that her husband must be crazy to let a woman like her divorce him. She let out a muffled squawk and tried to elbow me in the ribs, so we wrestled around on the bed and ended up making love again.

Lucky guy, Marilyn's husband. She decided not to divorce him after all!

Chapter 84: Progressions

John sat me down in January and did the Dutch uncle routine. As much as I wanted to pretend I was an average suburban dad, I wasn't, not anymore. I was a multimillionaire, and at the pace we were growing, I stood to become the richest man in Baltimore County and maybe the entire state in the next ten or fifteen years. I needed to start acting like it, and start taking security seriously. What if the next crazy we ran up against wanted to kidnap Charlie or Marilyn? I tried to protest, but I couldn't. Too much shit had happened. I had a sit-down with the head of the security company we had used.

Some of the problems were simple. While I wasn't planning on living under lock and key, I could at least put in a fence around the place. The driveway was rearranged so that somebody would have to go a gate further away from the house, and then loop up to the house. The good news - since Maryland is relatively warm most of the year, the fencing contractor could put in a fence even in the winter. The bad news - Do you have any idea how much over 4,500 linear feet of fence cost?! Even the cheap galvanized steel chain link fence wasn't cheap; something more decorative and strong would (and did) cost me an absolute fortune! I offered up my first born male child but the contractor laughed and turned the offer down. It wasn't enough!

I also rebuilt the house. The house had a brick façade all the way around, but I had the windows ripped out and bullet proof glass installed, and the doors were replaced with all steel frames and steel cores. I also had a professional quality alarm system installed. Yes, somebody could still break in, but they were going to have to work at it.

I balked at having armed guards living with us. I did, however, buy a piece of property across the road from the driveway. If it came down to it, I could put in a discreet little guard shack over there. Likewise, we arranged to have Marilyn continue with a traveling escort. I wasn't sure what we would do when Charlie and his sibling(s) went to school. I wasn't worried about anybody coming after me.

We weren't completely safe, because that is simply impossible. We were certainly safe against an average burglar or kidnapper. To get into the place would require a pro, and would take longer. Of course, if a pro got in, it made for a completely different set of circumstances. It was the best we could come up with - you buys your ticket and you takes your chances. Even the Secret Service can't keep somebody perfectly safe. The best you can do is raise the cost to a level the bad guys aren't willing to pay.

Within just a few weeks of our return home, Marilyn was showing a noticeable baby bump and any hope of wearing either club outfit again would have to be delayed for a year or so. Marilyn told me that her obstetrician wanted her to come back in a few weeks, at the end of February, for an ultrasound examination. I didn't think too much about it. Marilyn hadn't had one for our second child before, in what was then 1982, but that was at a small clinic in upstate New York. Now it was 1984 and we lived, relatively speaking, in the big city. It was more common.

Marilyn was quite excited by it all, and wanted me to come with her. "We can find out if it's a boy or a girl! Which would you prefer? A boy or a girl?"

"Ten fingers and ten toes, honey. After that it doesn't matter." I just wanted another healthy child.

"You're no fun! Which would you prefer?"

I smiled at her. "A boy, of course! Girls are yucky! I might get cooties from them!"

She blew me a raspberry. "I am going to tell your daughter that her father is an awful person!"

I snorted out a laugh. "Truth in advertising!"

Charlie didn't care about this at all. He was not quite two-and-a-half, and even though Marilyn told him he was getting a baby brother or sister, it just didn't register. To be fair, I am sure my mother told me at the same age that I was getting a sibling, and I didn't remember it either. If I had known, I could have drowned him at birth and saved myself infinite aggravation!

And so it came about that the last Friday in February, the 24th, 1984, I found myself driving Marilyn to her doctor's office in Cockeysville. I sat there in the waiting room with Marilyn surrounded by some very pregnant women, quite uncomfortable with it all. I remember at one point leaning over to my wife and asking if I should announce her husband wasn't able to make it, so she had brought her boyfriend instead. Marilyn shook her finger at me and warned me in no uncertain terms to "Behave!"

Eventually it was Marilyn's turn, and the nurse asked her to go back. Then she turned to me and asked, "Do you want to come, too?"

It's one thing to head downtown when I'm in bed with a woman, it's quite another when her legs are up in the stirrups! I swallowed hard and gurgled out, "Uh ... uh ... that's okay. I'll stay here." She gave me a smirking smile and led Marilyn down the hallway. I felt like every woman in the waiting room was staring at me and finding me wanting.

Twenty minutes later, the nurse reappeared. "Mister Buckman? Could you come with me? The doctor would like to see you along with your wife."

That jolted me out of my complacency! Doctors never want to see the relatives unless something really bad is happening! "What's wrong? Is Marilyn all right? What happened?"

"Your wife is fine, Mister Buckman. Just come on back and the doctor will talk to you."

That just meant that it was so awful it couldn't be mentioned in public! I walked down the hallway as scared as I had ever been in my life. The nurse opened the door and motioned me forward. Inside my wife was up on the exam table, her legs stretched out and not in the stirrups, and covered with a sheet. She was looking at me with a smile. "What's wrong?!", I blurted out.

"Nothing's wrong, Mister Buckman. Your wife is fine.", answered Doctor Harrington. She was a middle-aged woman with a strong face and a bright smile.

"Then what's the problem?"

The doctor rolled her eyes, so this must be a common enough occurrence. Marilyn answered, "Well, I thought you might like to see the ultrasound!"

"Oh!" I breathed deeply. "I thought ... never mind. Yeah, okay, sure."

"You don't sound very enthusiastic about it.", she said peevishly.

"No, I'm fine. Sure, let's do it."

She looked only slightly mollified, and I moved closer and held her nearest hand while the doctor started her procedure. The ultrasound equipment was located on a rolling cart. She threw some switches, turning on a cathode ray tube monitor, and then she washed her hands and squirted some jelly on the end of a flat ended tube sort of thing, the transducer. The sheet was pulled away from Marilyn's midsection, showing her oversized belly, and Doctor Harrington placed the flat end of the tube against Marilyn's stomach.

Marilyn jumped at the contact. She blushed and said, "It's chilly!"

Doctor Harrington laughed and said, "We keep it stored in the freezer, next to the stethoscopes. It will warm up in a moment." She began moving the wand around and ghostly black and white images began flashing on the monitor. "Okay, here we go!"

For the life of me, I have no idea how anybody actually can read this stuff. The same goes for X-rays. It's all black and white and weird shades of gray, and none of it looks like the pictures in the human biology books I've seen. Of course, I can't see shit in a microscope either.

The doctor was still talking, half to herself and half to Marilyn. I wasn't paying all that much attention, just standing there by Marilyn's head and holding her hand. Then I started paying attention when she said, "Well, that's interesting! Look at that!"

Huh?! "Look at what?", I asked. I just stared at the screen, looking at blobs of gray and white.

"Your children."

I stood there dumb for a couple of seconds, and then replied, "Excuse me?"

Marilyn was grinning madly by now. "Twins!"

Doctor Harrington smiled and, while holding the wand against Marilyn's belly, traced a pair of blobs on the screen with the index finger of her free hand. "That's one head and that's the other."

I stared in disbelief. "Oh my God!"

I almost missed Marilyn asking, "Boys or girls?!"

"Girls!"

"Holy Christ!", I exclaimed. Now it was Marilyn holding my lifeless fingers. I just stared at the screen in horror!

"What's wrong?", asked the doctor, looking at me with concern.

"Carl! What's wrong!?", demanded Marilyn.

I stared at them, first the doctor, and then at Marilyn. "Twin girls? You're sure?"

The doctor smiled and nodded. "Well, we won't know for sure until July, but I'd put it over 90%."

"Twin girls?" Suddenly I felt light headed. The nurse grabbed a chair and pushed me into it. I took a deep breath and looked at my wife.

"Isn't this exciting!?", she said.

Exciting? This was a disaster! All I could think of was what Maggie had been like as a teenager and what having two of her at the same time would be like. Yes, I knew Charlie and Parker were nothing alike, and I knew these girls would be nothing like Maggie, but still! Maggie hadn't been a bad kid, but it's never a good thing when your daughter knows all the deputy sheriffs in the county by name!

"You know what twin baby girls grow up into, don't you?", I asked.

Marilyn was smiling now. "Tell me, what?"

"Twin teenage girls! Marilyn, how could you do this to me! One at a time would be bad enough, but two!"

"You bastard!" The doctor and the nurse just laughed at me, and Marilyn sputtered indignantly. Then she brightened even more. "Just wait, the next time we'll have triplets! One, two, three!"

I slapped my forehead and groaned. "That's an arithmetic progression - one, two, three, four. What if it's a geometric progression!? One, two, four, eight ... oh, my God! Marilyn! We're getting a divorce!" Marilyn just laughed at me now. The doctor snorted and rolled her eyes.

I just sat there shaking my head while the exam finished and Marilyn got dressed. Marilyn was ecstatic about the idea of twin girls. I just shook my head in disbelief. At one point, she got so bubbly, I had to ask, "So, who's the father? There's never been twins in the Buckman family!"

"You bastard!", she laughed. "There have been a few in the Lefleurs."

"Yeah? You guys have also been known to marry your cousins!"

She gave me another raspberry for that one. "These are all yours!" I was told. She wrapped me in a big hug. "This is so exciting!"

"Ancient Chinese curse - 'May you live in exciting times!'"

"You're just a fuddy duddy!"

"Let's go." I loaded Marilyn back into my car and headed, not towards Tusker and Tessa's to retrieve Charlie, but kept going, down to the Dodge dealership in Timonium.

"Where are we going?", asked my wife.

"You'll see." I pulled into the lot and parked in front of the showroom. "Out!", I said.

"What are we doing here?", she asked.

I smiled at her. "Do you honestly think you can cram Charlie and a pair of twins into your midget-mobile? You need something a bit bigger."

"I like my Toyota just fine.", she protested.

I nodded. She had liked her Toyota, but way back when, on the first trip through, after she drove her first Dodge Caravan she fell in love with the whole minivan idea, and kept buying them for the next thirty plus years, even after the kids were out of the house. "Just give it a shot. You need the room."

We headed inside, where we were descended on by a pack of hungry wolves. Well, at least one hungry wolf. He took one look at Marilyn's baby bump (which was really more than just a bump these days!) and gave a big smile. He was already spending his commission check!

To be fair about it, when Chrysler invented the minivan in the mid-Eighties it was a marketing breakthrough. It was a station wagon for baby boomers who wouldn't be caught dead in their parents' station wagon! Built on a car chassis, it was roomy and comfortable, handled nicely, wasn't ludicrously expensive, and really fulfilled a need. Chrysler had only started selling them a few months ago, and nobody else had anything like them. For the next thirty years we probably drove every single type, and the Chrysler versions were generally above average. They invented them, and pretty much defined what they could do and be.

We talked Marilyn into a test drive, and as I suspected, she liked it. It handled like a car, not a typical van, and she liked that. Then I had the sales rep show us one of their fancier Dodge Grand Caravan models with all the whistles and bells. By that point the guy was practically drooling. I started signing papers and the asshole damn near came in his pants.

From there we drove over to Tusker and Tessa's, where Tessa was being terrorized by our son. Bucky was now almost six years old. He was off at school in the first grade! With two pregnant women in the room with me, I was suffering from estrogen overload. Tessa was as excited as Marilyn about our having twins. I wondered how happy she would be when we called on 'Aunt Tessa' and 'Uncle Tusker' for baby-sitting duties.

And, slowly, life began getting back to normal. I wasn't sure how normal normal was going to be, what with twin girls coming into the picture, but my family's disaster began receding from my thoughts. We were no longer in the papers, I could go somewhere with Marilyn or Charlie without worries about anybody pointing at me and whispering, I didn't have to worry about reporters tracking me down. Mind you, the Buckman family was generally in the shitter. My parents were now divorced, Mom blamed me for everything, and Suzie hadn't talked to me since the shooting. She had sent me a letter apologizing for causing all the trouble (by inviting me to her graduation, I guess) and stating that she was taking a job at the Mayo Clinic, and asking that I not chase after her. Dad? Who knew! I had killed a son of his and he hadn't talked to me other than through lawyers. What a miserable clusterfuck!

The Tusk's second child was also a son, and he was born on Friday, April 20, 1984. I remember that day because I ended up watching over Bucky for a few hours. He was home from school because it was a teacher's conference day, and right after lunch I got a call at the office from Tusker. Tessa was having contractions, none of their parents could be reached, Marilyn couldn't be reached (out grocery shopping), and could I come over and watch Bucky until somebody else got there? I just laughed and agreed, and then left the office. From Hereford to their house was less than fifteen minutes.

It was Bucky who opened the door for me when I walked up their walkway; he must have been watching for me out the living room window. "Hi, Uncle Carl! Mom says you're going to stay here until Nana and Papa get here!"

"So I'm told. How you doing, Bucky?"

"I'm okay."

"Where's your Mommy and Daddy?" The Tusk's cars were both out in the driveway, so they were still here.

"They're upstairs. They said they have to go out and I have to stay here with you. Nana and Papa are coming over, too." He didn't seem overly concerned. I wondered how much he understood about what was happening. I was about the same age as he was when Suzie was born, but that hadn't been good. My mother had gone into labor in the middle of the night, after Hamilton and I were asleep, and the next morning I woke to find the next door neighbor watching us and our parents gone. I was only five-and-a-half and got scared and started crying. Bucky seemed a whole lot calmer, or maybe it was simply because he was awake to get used to it.

"That's cool. We'll just goof off until your Nana and Papa show up." I wasn't sure which set of grandparents were Nana and Papa, but I had met both and Bucky would be in good shape.

I heard a clatter up the stairs, and Bucky's parents came down the stairs, Tessa in the lead, groaning and waddling, with Tusker behind her carrying a small suitcase. He was a lot calmer with this child than he was with the last one! He saw me and smiled. "Great! Thanks a bunch, man!"

"It's cool, guys. Bucky and I are just going to hang out. We'll drink whiskey, play poker, watch dirty movies, and smoke some cigars. You know, guy stuff."

"Yeah, guy stuff!", chimed in Bucky.

Tusker grinned at this. Tessa was less amused. "Guy stuff! I hate you, Carl." She turned to Tusker and said, "I hate you, too. I hate all men. You are never going to touch me again!" After another groan, Tessa headed for the door.

Tusker just grinned at me. "Didn't she say that once before?", I asked him lowly.

"I heard that! This time I mean it!", she said loudly.

"What's a dirty movie, Uncle Carl?", asked Bucky. He was way too smart for my good.

"It's a movie about pigs at a farm. Forget about it.", I answered.

"I hate men!", repeated Tessa as she headed out the door. Tusker just laughed and shook his head and followed his wife outside. Bucky and I waved good-bye through the picture window.

Okay, we didn't drink whiskey, play poker, watch dirty movies, or smoke cigars. We had milk and chocolate chip cookies and played War with a pack of cards Bucky found. Nana and Papa turned out to be Tessa's parents, who got the message first and came over to rescue their grandson. Bucky proudly announced we were doing 'guy stuff', which amused his grandparents considerably. They took over and I headed home, to tell Marilyn the good news.

We attended Carter Henry's (he was named after both grandfathers) christening at St. Paul's, which was Tessa's church from when we were kids. That was very uncomfortable, since both my parents were there, though sitting in separate pews. My father started to cry when he saw us with Charlie, and Marilyn so visibly pregnant. He sat there staring at us as we walked down the aisle. Marilyn got very nervous, and picked up Charlie in her arms, and held him tightly, while staying behind me. She wasn't letting them get anywhere near her family! Thankfully, Mom hates 'creating a scene' so she didn't have another meltdown there in the church. I had heard from John Steiner that she was seeing a psychiatrist on a regular basis now, and taking medication.

One other curious thing occurred in April. I became a philanthropist! It all came about when I was doing my taxes, which I actually had to sign off on every quarter. Actually, I had an accountant from Jake's old firm do them for me, since at my income level, the last thing I needed to do was fuck up my taxes. He was at the office reviewing them with me when he commented that I could afford to significantly raise my level of charitable contribution, especially considering the tax advantages of doing so. When I asked how much he thought I could give, he gave it a little thought, and then commented, "Well, a hundred thousand would be well within the range, probably more."

I sat back, stunned. A hundred Gs? That was almost as much as I made in my best year on my first go around. It wasn't like I was being a cheapskate, I gave the local fire department several hundred every year, going back to when Marilyn almost burned down our apartment in Fayetteville, and I always gave to the Red Cross and the United Way, but I was off by several orders of magnitude. I grabbed the phone and called in Jake Senior for confirmation.

He came through the door and asked, "What's up?"

"Tell him what you just told me.", I told the accountant.

This fellow gave me a confused look, and then turned to Jake and said, "Well, I was just telling Mr. Buckman here that at his income level a significant increase in charitable donation would have a positive impact tax-wise."

Jake nodded and shrugged his shoulders, and then turned back to me. "Yeah? So?"

"Tell him the amount you told me!", I added.

"A hundred thousand would be well within the realm of reasonable donation, and more could be accommodated.", added the accountant.

Jake looked at me again, and repeated, "Yeah? So?"

I stared at him briefly. "A hundred thousand dollars?! Are you serious? What the hell would I give a hundred grand for?"

Jake rolled his eyes, and then grabbed a chair and sat down. "Give me a break! Okay, let's make it simple. What do you give out now?"

Back on the first trip around, I had religiously given the local volunteer firemen $25 or $50 every year, I always gave RPI $75 or $100, and the local Boy Scouts or Red Cross always got a handout. Some years it had hurt, especially after the Great Recession hit, but I always gave something. Marilyn had always given a $20 to her church every week, and I figured she was doing the same now. This time around I had added a zero to most of the figures. I outlined what I had donated the previous year.

He looked at me for a bit, and then said, "That's it? You're a real cheapskate, Carl!"

"What!?"

"Carl, you do know that charitable contributions are tax deductible, right? Anything you give to charity effectively lowers your income by that amount, thereby reducing your tax liability by whatever percentage your income would be taxed at. If you were in the top tax bracket, you would get taxed at a 50% marginal rate. You give a hundred grand to charity, it is the equivalent of only giving fifty grand."

"I'm not in the top tax bracket?" Just how much money did you need to be in that bracket?

"Yes and no. Most of your income is in the form of capital gains, since most of your money is in investments, which means you pay 20%. Still, donations cut your income by a certain percentage. You should come up with a number and give it away."

"Huh! It's like a business!"

"Damn straight! Treat it like a business. Determine how much you want to give, who you want to give it to, and make sure you get receipts."

"Don't just let it out in dribs and drabs, either.", added the accountant who started this all. I turned to him with a curious expression. "Say that you want to give ten thousand to heart research. You'll do more good in the long run by picking one charity for that and giving that one all ten than you will finding ten charities related to heart research and giving them one each."

"Huh." That made sense, I guess.

Jake grinned at that. "Maybe you get some perks out of it, too."

"Like what? A free heart transplant?", I asked.

"No, but say you give money to the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. Give enough and maybe they throw in season tickets, hmmm?"

I stopped at that. Smiling, I replied, "Actually, I like the orchestra every once in a while. I am going to have to give this some thought." I turned back to the accountant. "One hundred thousand?"

"Why not figure that for 1984 and you can review things in six months."

"Anything else?", asked Jake, rising from his chair. "Or can I get back to work so you have money to give away?"

"Yeah, actually, stay seated. I think I am going to need some cash this year.", I told him.

"Oh? How much?"

"Probably a few million."

That perked Jake's ears up. "Oh?"

I nodded. "I think so. Listen, back a few years ago, when Marilyn and I took our first trip to the Bahamas after I got out of the Army, I told her that we could buy a place like that someday. Well, anyway, we got to joking about it, and I said that if I ever got my net worth up to a hundred million, I would do it. I never thought much more about it for a while, but then we started this company up, and we have been doing well. I would think we'll be at that point by the end of the year, don't you?"

"Probably over that. We haven't even included the value of the investment you are making in that Michael Dell fellow - Is he really worth it? You once said to never buy a hardware company! Why buy this guy, who is building a hardware company?"

I nodded. I had just gotten Dell's name from Bill Gates, who didn't want to invest, but as soon as I heard it, I knew I did. I had made a quick trip to Austin and moved Dell's plans forward by at least a year's time by a judicious yet reasonably small investment. "Trust me on this one. What he's doing isn't building a hardware company. He's building a whole new type of production system. It's like Henry Ford a hundred years ago. You wouldn't be investing in the car, you'd be investing in the guy who invented the assembly line. Michael Dell is going to invent a whole new way to buy computers."

"You say so." Jake shrugged. The amount we had invested was well under a million, and gave us twenty percent of the company. Ten years from now that chunk would be worth billions. "So what about the Bahamas?"

"So, I told Marilyn that we would buy a vacation place when I got to a hundred mill. At the time I was half joking, but now that I'm at that point, we're starting to get serious about the idea. I need to figure out how to do it."

"You got a place in mind?"

It was my turn to shrug. "Maybe. I haven't started asking price or anything, but the last place we stayed was new and looking for a buyer. I can find out."

Jake stood up again. "Okay, you make a few phone calls and find out what the numbers are. I'll talk to Jake and Melissa and figure out how to do it. I warn you, however, it will probably dilute your ownership slightly to drag that much cash out. Not much, but a few percent."

"It's going to affect your taxes, too.", added the accountant.

I nodded in understanding. If we had a company worth $100 million and I owned 90%, then I was worth $90 million. However, if I took $10 million of my money out and spent it, then the company was worth only $90 million and my chunk was only $80 million, meaning I now only owned about 88% of the company. "It's probably going to change over the future anyway. Your son and Missy are still talking about creating investment pools and bringing in outside money, and using other people's money for investments, and not just ours."

Jake nodded. "He's definitely feeling ambitious. How do you feel about that?"

"I know it can be done and other outfits make money doing it. I have no moral objection to any of this. I would say we try this on a small scale, keep a close eye on the whole thing, and give it a shot. If it works, we can repeat it, and the next one can be bigger. You?"

"Pretty much the same. If he screws up, I'll hold him down while you give him a thumping."

"How about we tell him to put together a proposal for the next board meeting. He and Missy can figure out about where I am coming up with cash by then, too."

Jake nodded and wandered off, whistling happily. I would have a sit down with Jake Junior and go over his ideas for expansion sometime soon, too. I could see how opening up the firm to outside investors could make me even richer, and grow us that much faster. If I owned 90% of a $1 billion company, I was worth $900 million; if I owned 70% of a $2 billion company, I was worth $1,400 million. Either way, my cut was enough to make me the boss. I needed to sit down with Missy and find out how the big investment outfits ran this stuff.

So I sat down with Marilyn that night and told her we had to give away some money. She was very excited. She wanted to give it all to the Catholic Church! I put an immediate kibosh on that idea. It was my money, not hers, and I was nowhere near as religious as she was. If she wanted to put a C-note in the offering plate every week, rather than the twenty she had been giving, that was fine. That was five grand a year. No way in hell was I giving them one hundred grand to play with. I was going to hell anyway, and Marilyn couldn't commit a hundred thousand dollars worth of sin if she lived ten lifetimes! We picked out several different places to donate money, including the local firehouse, the Red Cross, our colleges, and so forth. I would talk to John about some other ideas, and see if he had any thoughts. The idea of season tickets down at the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra was intriguing, too. Back on the first go, when I had been living in Lutherville, or even just visiting, it hadn't been all that difficult to con my parents out of their tickets every once in a while. I like an occasional night of the classics. It makes me look classier than I really am!

Chapter 85: A Growing Family

Monday, July 23, 1984

Marilyn seemed to be growing by leaps and bounds herself. She seemed to be getting bigger every time I looked at her, but she disagreed, and it wasn't a subject to dwell on. She'd get very upset with me if I mentioned it, alternating crying and yelling at me. I made sure she was working out with me every morning, and she swore that she wasn't gaining any more weight than she had with Charlie. How she could tell, I wasn't sure, since there was no way in hell she could see down past her belly to the scale on the floor!

I wasn't sure what was going to happen. On our first trip through, we had three children, and Marilyn gained weight with each one. With Alison she put on about five pounds that she never really lost, and the same happened with Parker. When Maggie came along, her weight just went to hell! She ballooned by over 60 pounds during the pregnancy, and didn't lose very much at all afterwards. For the next twenty years, Marilyn was heavier than I was. It had been a killer for her health, too. For years she was heavy enough to be a borderline diabetic, and all the weight messed up her joints, screwed up her blood pressure, and generally had her taking a half dozen pills or more a day.

On the other hand, this time around, Marilyn was working out with me three or four times a week, and was generally in a lot better shape than she had been before. It wasn't like she was fat the other time, but she simply relied on her twenty-something metabolism. Now she was toned and fit. Maybe, if I kept her working out with me now, she wouldn't let herself go. I wasn't blaming her for this, though. Back then, I hadn't been any better, and had eventually grown fatter than she was.

Every father should go through the experience of having twins. It's an excellent penance for your earlier sins. Not only was Marilyn peeing for three, she was grumpy for three. I began to debate the merits of visiting Honduras and Nicaragua again.

As soon as the weather was favorable, I had the pool contractor in and digging up the back yard. This was a fair sized project. I wasn't going crazy and putting in an Olympic pool; I would be happy with a 20'x40' swimming pool, 3' deep at one end and 8' deep at the other. Still, a pool is more than just a pool. We had to extend the deck over to the pool edge area, run power for lighting, pumps, and filters, and put up some fencing so the insurance company wouldn't go totally bat-shit. The contractor wanted to do a pool house as well, but by the time that idea was raised, Marilyn was running out of patience and I tabled it for a year or two. On the plus side, the sound of the excavator revving up drowned out her complaints to me.

Part of Marilyn's problem centered on the fact that she was pregnant during a hot and humid summer, blamed entirely on me. She seemed to think that if we were living in upstate New York, the summers would be delightfully balmy and blissful. I seemed to recall they could be just as miserable as Maryland summers, just not as long. When I commented that she would have complained about having twins during a Maryland winter, she threw a wet dishcloth at me.

I escaped the worst of this thanks to Carter Henry Tusk. Marilyn was heavily involved in the baby shower and after the birth would frequently head over to the Tusks' to gossip with Tessa and some other friends. Tusker called me once to complain that they were sitting around damning all men and warned me to take Charlie and head for cover. I offered to turn the swimming pool excavation into a bunker, but he was caught before he and Bucky could escape.

The pool wasn't completed until the beginning of July, just a few weeks before our daughters were due. It was definitely looking like daughters. A follow-up ultrasound had failed to detect any sort of dingle-dangle on either fetus. Regardless, the pool was usable just in time for a small heat wave, and Marilyn spent several days floating weightless in the water wearing granny panties and an oversized tee shirt of mine. We were delaying the summer barbecue until August, since our regular time of June or July was simply too much for her to help with. Tessa brought Carter over several times, to commiserate with Marilyn and show us the baby.

Bucky approved of his new baby brother. He was a boy, which was a lot better than a girl! I was almost to the point of agreeing with him.

The plan was that Marilyn have a C-section instead of doing it the normal way. That made sense, since I knew that with multiple births, most doctors refuse to do it any other way. I did tell Marilyn to ask her doctor what type of C-section she was getting, the traditional vertical cut, or the 'bikini' cut, which is lower down and runs the other direction. Recovery times are supposed to be better that way, and scarring is supposed to be a lot less, as well. She promised to ask.

Doing it this way seemed to promise to be a way we could schedule things a lot better. She would be able to schedule something 9-5, as opposed to the middle of the night, like Maggie did. When we headed to the hospital, I was to first call her parents, and then pack Charlie up and take him over to visit Tessa and Bucky and Carter. Charlie loved hanging out with Bucky. At six years old, Bucky was like a god to my son. I wasn't quite sure what Bucky thought about this, but he seemed to handle it well.

The big day happened to be Monday, July 23. Marilyn started having contractions about 8:00 AM, and I could tell by the look on her face that this wasn't a false alarm. She had never had that sort of thing with any of our kids the first go through, and I hadn't heard of it with Charlie. She just grabbed the kitchen counter and looked over at me with a worried face. "Carl..."

"Is it time?", I asked.

She nodded, and then panted briefly while it passed. "Yeah, I think so."

"Time to make some calls?"

"Please." She sat down on a bar stool at the kitchen island, and I grabbed the phone off the wall. The first call was to Doctor Harrington's emergency number, and she told us to head down to GBMC. The next call was to Big Bob and Harriet, and they said they would drive down and arrive by that afternoon. I told them that I would leave a key over the back door, in case I wasn't home yet. Then I called the Tusks and told them Charlie and I were on the way.

Marilyn had two more contractions during this time, so I didn't think it was going to be a long labor. I had enough time to let Dum-Dum pee in the back yard before I locked her in the utility room, then we hustled Charlie out to the minivan and put him in his car seat. I grabbed our bags and helped my wife waddle outside. We dropped Charlie off, and then made it to the hospital by about 9:15.

At 9:16 Marilyn's water broke. She got loaded onto a wheelchair and hurried off to the maternity ward, with me following. Doctor Harrington found us a few minutes later helping Marilyn onto a bed, and after taking a look up Marilyn's dress, she smiled and said, "It's show time!" I turned green and Marilyn looked panicked. "You'll be fine. We're going to get you wheeled into the delivery room, I'm going to go change and scrub up, and then we are going to meet your new daughters."

The nurse piped up, "We're going to have a multiple?"

Doctor Harrington nodded. "Twins."

"Ooh, goodie! I'll make sure we're all set."

I doubt it was twenty minutes later, but it sure seemed like hours, before the nurse came in with an orderly and Marilyn was wheeled out of the room. I followed along, but didn't get very far. This was surgery and they weren't going to let me in to watch. That really didn't bug me all that much; while I don't get squeamish at the sight of blood, I don't feel all that compelled to join in, either. Marilyn was getting a general, so she would be out of it anyway. I found a seat in the hallway and waited to find out what was happening. I suppose it was the same way back when my Dad was waiting for my Mom to deliver us, although I didn't smoke two packs a day like he did then. I even paced up and down the hallway for a while. An hour and a half later, Doctor Harrington came out into the hallway and found me.

"Your wife and daughters are fine, Mr. Buckman. Everything went as smooth as silk.", she announced.

I think I exhaled for the first time in three hours at that. "Daughters. Huh."

She smiled. "You don't approve?"

I gave her a wry smile. "I'm still getting used to the idea of twins. It's not like I can send them off for a refund, right? Ten fingers and ten toes?" Were my babies healthy!?

I got a grin in return. "Twenty fingers and twenty toes!"

"Oh, well, yeah, right." I just smiled and shook my head. Twins! "Can I see my wife?"

"You can see her, but she's still out of it. She probably won't wake up for a few more hours. Your girls are in the nursery."

"Can I see them? Can I hold them?"

"You can see them, but that's about it. You can come back in a few hours and maybe Marilyn will be awake then. You should call your families.", I was told.

That brought me up short. "I don't have a family.", I said. "Marilyn's parents are coming down, but they live in New York, and probably won't get here for a few more hours."

"Well, she's in the recovery room right now, but you can wait back in her hospital room. Or go home; there's really nothing for you to do now."

"Thanks, Doctor." She pointed me towards the nursery, and I did the squinting-through-the-glass routine. Even with my glasses on, I couldn't read the labels on the bassinets, and I couldn't tell one baby from another anyway.

Then I went to her room to wait for her to come back from recovery. I had made a big mistake when Parker was born. He had come into the world in the late afternoon, and Marilyn looked like she had been dragged through a knothole. She was in and out of it. After seeing our son and visiting with her, she had sent me away. So I went away! I came back bright and early the next morning to find her fuming at me for doing what she wanted me to do! She wanted me to use my Jedi mind reading abilities to know that I wasn't supposed to do what she told me to do. (This ranks up there with 'You don't need a Christmas list. If you really loved me, you'd know what I want!')

Marilyn was back in the room by the early afternoon, by which time I had managed to grab lunch in the cafeteria and call Tessa with the good news. Marilyn slept until about four, at which time she woke up groggy. I held her hand while she came to, and then a nurse came in to check her out. She wanted to see the girls, but then fell asleep again.

I just rolled my eyes. I turned to the nurse and said, "Listen, I'll be back in a couple of hours. I'm going to go home, find her parents and our son, and bring them back. Just tell her I haven't abandoned her, okay?"

She laughed and shooed me out.

I found Harriet and Big Bob at the house, with Dum-Dum running around being a nuisance. She was put outside, and I had a chance to talk to my in-laws. "Welcome! When did you get here?", I asked.

"Half an hour ago.", answered Big Bob.

I glanced at my wristwatch; they must have gotten here by half past three. "You made good time."

"How's Marilyn?", asked Harriet.

I smiled. "Good. Asleep, when I left her. They had to do a C-section with the twins, so they gave her a general. Give me a few minutes to shower and change, and then we'll go. Alright?"

Dum-Dum began scratching at the door, so I let her in and then went to our room. We could put Marilyn's parents up in the spare bedroom. All three kids' bedrooms were slightly different in size. Originally, Charlie had been in the largest of the three, next to our room, but he had been transferred across the hall, so the twins could share a room. Charlie didn't mind, or didn't really notice. Big Bob and Harriet would have the room at the end of the hall.

I took a quick shower and changed my clothes, since I had been sweating nervously all day. Now, fresh and sweet smelling, I was ready to go back. I found Big Bob playing with Dum-Dum, so we locked her away again, and then I loaded my in-laws into the Town Car. I knew we wouldn't be using the minivan for all the kids until we left the hospital in a few days. From the house we drove over to the Tusks and retrieved Charlie, who was eager to see his grandparents and his mother. I think Tessa was eager to get him out from underfoot as well. She promised to come over tomorrow, and leave her boys with Tusker.

We got to GBMC by about six, and I held Charlie's hand as we walked through the parking lot. He was now at the stage where he only had two speeds, fast and faster, and he wanted to tear through. We got up to her room just in time to see a pair of bassinets being wheeled in.

Marilyn was awake and propped up in the bed. She looked pale but awake, and her eyes lit up when we all came in. She was about to say something, but a nurse handed her a small bundle. "That's one. Does the father get the other?", she asked, smiling.

"Absolutely!", I answered, and the other bundle was handed to me. I looked at my daughter, who looked a lot like her mother, sort of. "Which one is this?", I asked.

"You don't know?!"

"Well, yes and no. They look kind of alike. Is this number one or number two?"

She nodded and looked at the bracelets on their wrists. "You've got number one, and your wife has number two. Do you have names yet?"

I looked over at Marilyn, who grinned and nodded. "You really want to do this?", I asked.

"Yep!"

"They are going to curse your name when they get old enough. Last chance to change your mind!?"

"Nope!", she said.

"Okay." I turned to the nurse. "Got your pen handy?"

She pulled a pen from a pocket and grabbed the clipboard from where it was hanging at the bottom of the bed. "Shoot!"

"The oldest here is Holly Marie." I spelled it for her, so that we didn't get a repeat of how Marilyn got her name. "And her sister is Molly Lynn." I spelled that, too, and looked over at Marilyn. "I get that right?"

Marilyn smiled broadly. "Yes!"

I came around to the side and bent down to kiss Marilyn. Then I held my bundle up next to hers to compare. I thought they looked the same. I didn't think there was a test for identical versus fraternal, but they looked alike.

Charlie tried to butt in. "Let me see!", he said.

"Hi, Charlie.", said his mother, but he ignored her. He was trying to get a view of what I had.

Big Bob and Harriet went around the other side of the bed, and I bent down to show Charlie his new sister. "This is your new sister Holly." I told him.

"She's a girl, right?"

I nodded. "They're both girls."

"Can we get a boy?"

Big Bob and Harriet spluttered in laughter. I just gave Marilyn a look. Turning back to my son, I answered, "You'll have to talk to your mother. I'm in management. Mom handles production."

Charlie turned to face her, and Marilyn said, "Thanks a bunch! See if you ever get to see the assembly line again!"

"How are you doing, sweetheart?", asked her father.

"Good. Tired. How are you doing? How was the trip?"

We all chatted for a bit, passing the babies around and oohing and ahhing appropriately. The nurse came in after a half hour, and wanted to see if they would eat. Since Marilyn planned to breast feed for a few months, this involved a bit of work. Big Bob, Charlie, and I headed for the hallway, while Harriet gave her daughter a hand. With one baby, a woman can throw a blanket over that side and cover things up, but not with two! Maybe Marilyn was going to have to work the problem in series and not in parallel.

We stayed until they tossed us out, and then I drove us over to a Friendly's for dinner. Charlie was asleep by the time we got home. Big Bob and Harriet weren't far behind him. Tuesday I showed them around the latest changes to the house and the new pool, and then I had them follow me over to the hospital in their car. That way they weren't shackled to me all day long. On the way over we drove over to my office to tell everyone the good news. I also gave the approval to Jake Junior and John to go ahead with our move. We had outgrown our original office space, and were now going to lease a much larger space in the same business park, one which could handle double our current roster. I hoped it would be enough. I drove over with my in-laws and showed them our new digs.

The Lefleurs didn't stay at the hospital too long this morning, just long enough to say hello and pass the news from home. After half an hour Charlie was bored and fussy, so they took him home. I stayed with my wife and our daughters. By late morning she wanted to rest, so I took off with a promise to come back later. I grabbed some lunch, went to the office and did some paperwork and checked my mail and messages, and at the end of the day went back to the hospital. They had Marilyn up and walking, slowly, after we left Monday night, and she was able to move even more now. Tuesday night they were going to remove her catheter, and if that went well, she could come home on Wednesday.

The doorbell buzzed on Wednesday morning, and Charlie got to it first, racing through the house trying to beat Dum-Dum. He opened the door, and I heard his little voice saying, "Aunt Tessa! Hi! Mommy's not here!"

The door opened up and Tessa came in, shooing Dum-Dum in front of her. She had a car seat with Carter in it, and a giant diaper bag. "I know. I came over to keep an eye on things while your Daddy goes and brings Mommy home." She looked up as Big Bob and I came into the foyer. "Hi, Carl. Everything still on schedule?"

I nodded. "Should be. I called and nobody said anything was going wrong." I introduced her to Big Bob and Harriet. Tessa had met them at our wedding, but that was six years ago, and she had other things on her mind that day.

Tessa said, "Well, you go on over whenever you want to. Charlie and Carter and I will stay busy. I need to be out of here by two at the latest, or Tusker will have to go home for Bucky."

"Who's Bucky?", asked Harriet.

"Buckman James Tusk, our first son. He was born when we got to the hospital in Utica, during the reception.", she answered with a laugh.

"You named him Buckman? After him?", asked a curious Big Bob, tilting his head towards me.

Tessa laughed, and I just protested, "It's not like that!"

"Carl and Tusker are, like, best friends.", explained Tessa. "And Tusker would never have gone to college or been able to go into business without Carl pushing him."

"And now we're Uncle Carl and Aunt Marilyn, and they're Uncle Tusker and Aunt Tessa.", I finished. "Let me get my shoes on and I'll go get Marilyn's minivan ready. You guys need to get one of them, too.", I told Tessa.

"Maybe this fall, we'll see. I'll talk to Marilyn about it." She kept chatting with my in-laws.

I finished getting ready and went outside to see if I needed to prep the minivan. I cleaned up some of Charlie's crap, and then came back inside. I had a surprise for Marilyn, a brand new side-by-side twin stroller, which I had kept hidden in the trunk of my car, along with a pair of matching car seats. The stroller went into the back of the van. The car seats took fifteen minutes of assembly and installation. I looked forward to the day when they would have doors on both sides of the minivan.

Big Bob rode up front with me on the drive over, with Harriet all the way in the back, and the two empty car seats in the middle. The actual pickup was somewhat anticlimactic. Our daughters were asleep the entire time, Marilyn was moving slowly, but she was moving, and her color had improved, and we got everybody wheeled out to the van in a reasonable time. I went off and drove the van back to the front entrance, and the nurses inspected the car seats and loaded us all in. Then we drove home.

Charlie and Dum-Dum greeted us at the door. Charlie wanted Mommy to pick him up, but she had to decline, saying she wasn't feeling all that well, but she would, soon. Then Marilyn went to our room to use the bathroom and clean up, while I brought our daughters inside. They slept through everything, thank the Lord! When Marilyn returned, she promptly headed for her La-Z-Boy and reclined it. Both Charlie and Dum-Dum climbed up and kissed her, and she survived that, so I pulled Dum-Dum off, and Marilyn hugged and kissed her son back. Then he went wandering, while she rested and chatted with Tessa and her mother.

Marilyn fed the girls one at a time although she alternated sides with them. She just lay there in her recliner with a comforter draped over her while she did this. Her father was a little uncomfortable about it all, but Harriet had seen some of her other daughters-in-law doing this, too. I puttered around making lunch and keeping Charlie busy, although he seemed quite fascinated by it all.

A little after three, an unholy racket erupted in the driveway. Tusker came roaring up with a motorcycle, and when I looked out the front door, I saw that he had a sidecar on the thing, with Bucky strapped in, wearing a helmet and goggles and grinning maniacally. I turned back to the living room and said, "Marilyn, you are going to have to see this to believe it!"

"I'm not moving!", she protested.

"Your loss!"

I held the door open, and Bucky led the way in. "Hi, Uncle Carl! Hi, Aunt Marilyn!" He trooped in without taking off his goggles or helmet. Marilyn's parents stared at the sight.

"Good Lord! You've had him out riding again?", asked Tessa.

"You bet! We're going to stop by the dirt track on the way home and practice a little more, too!", answered my friend.

"Practice what?", I asked.

"Riding! Bucky's in his first motocross this Saturday! Want to come out and watch?"

I rolled my eyes. Harriet and Big Bob looked horror stricken. "He's too young for that!", Harriet protested.

"No he's not. He's in the Pee Wee division. He's pretty good, too. A real natural. Wait until Charlie wants to try!" Tessa just smiled and shook her head.

I groaned at the thought, and Marilyn protested mightily, but I knew better. Charlie idolized his older friend. If Bucky did it, Charlie would have to try. "We'll see. It's going to be a few years, though." I promised to try and make it to the race, but I wasn't sure if I could, while taking care of Marilyn. If I went, Charlie would want to go, too. Boys and their toys!

Marilyn's parents stayed until Sunday, allowing Charlie and me to go to Bucky's first race on Saturday. He did okay, too. He didn't win, but he made it through each of the various heats, didn't get hurt, didn't dump the bike, and finished in the top half of the riders.

Charlie's eyes were gleaming! I knew what he had in mind! Marilyn was going to kill both Tusker and me!

Chapter 86: Fall 1984

I came home from the office on Friday a week later, and was greeted at the door by my son. "Hi, buddy, what's up?"

"Mommy's crying.", he told me.

"Mommy's crying? What's wrong?"

"I don't know."

"Did you do something?", I asked.

"I don't know.", he repeated.

"Did I do something?"

"I don't know."

I just nodded down at him. "Okay, I'll go talk to Mommy. I'm sure we did something." He headed back to the living room and I followed him. I dropped my briefcase in the living room, and then went down the hall to our bedroom.

As Charlie reported, Marilyn was sitting on the bed in her fluffy bathrobe, crying and looking very sad. I loosened my tie and sat down on the bed next to her. "What's wrong?", I asked. I put an arm around her shoulder and hugged her against me. Marilyn started crying again and leaned her head on my shoulder. "It's all right, what's wrong?", I asked soothingly.

I was worried that my wife might be experiencing post partum depression. She hadn't on our first time, but we didn't have twins then. Or was this just some routine thing? Marilyn jumbled out the story in her usual confusing fashion, and I just nodded and listened and smiled to myself. She was working on toilet training Charlie, which was generally going okay, but he had a couple of accidents today. The girls were squawking and wanted to eat at the same time. Dum-Dum got into the pantry and started eating her kibble from the bag. She missed two phone calls. Blah blah blah, nothing very life threatening.

The real kicker, though, was when she tried to dress in some pre-pregnancy clothes, and couldn't fit into her old jeans. Not her 'skinny jeans' either, just regular stuff. "I'm still fat and ugly!", she wailed.

I tried to keep from laughing, biting my lip to do so. Charlie came in then, and he must have heard her, because he came up and wrapped his arms around her knees and said, "That's okay, Mommy. We still love you."

I cracked up at that point and started laughing. I hugged Marilyn again, and agreed, "Yes, Mommy, we'll still love you even though you're fat and ugly!"

"You're awful! I hate you both!", she screamed at me. I just laughed harder and fell back on the bed, with Marilyn still hugged up against me. I laughed for several more minutes, while Marilyn complained about men in general and Charlie protested he still loved her.

After a few minutes, I pushed myself upright, and smiled down at our son. "Mommy will be fine. You need to go on out to the living room now, while Daddy talks to Mommy."

"Okay!", he scooted on out of the room.

Marilyn sat upright. "Great! He'll still love me if I'm fat and ugly! Should I kill him now or later?"

"You can't kill him. Don't forget, one of these days he'll be the one to pick out the old folks home we get sent to!"

"You're no help at all!" Still, she smiled at me as she said this.

"Come on, get up, there must be some clothing you can fit into. No more of this." Marilyn grumped at me some more, but I pulled her to her feet and nudged her towards the dresser. "Listen you went through this with Charlie, too. Yes, you're bigger now than before, but you didn't grow much more with the girls than with him, and we're going to get you back in shape." This was true. Charlie had come in at just shy of 8 pounds, but his sisters had averaged just over 5 pounds each.

"Hmmph!"

We were standing in front of the mirror over the dresser and I wrapped my arms around her from behind and hugged her. "You know what you need to do. You're going to eat sensibly and work out with me every morning and you'll be back in shape in no time flat."

"What if I don't lose all the weight?"

I grinned at her. "Depends on what stays bigger!" I waggled my eyebrows at her.

"Men! You can forget about that! That's never going to happen again! Ever!", she protested.

I smiled at her in the mirror and rubbed against her rump. I knew it was going to be a couple of months before anything could happen anyway. "We'll see. I think you'll want another Carl Buckman Experience before too long!"

"NEVER!"

I laughed and pushed her towards the closet. "Now, get dressed. You can have a drink again, so I am opening a bottle of wine. No excuses."

Marilyn calmed down after that. She began walking on her treadmill again every morning with me while I worked on the weights and did some katas. (Charlie would sometimes come in as well, and try to lift the weights just like his old man. He wasn't very successful, but it made me laugh regardless.) Sometimes she walked while feeding the girls. I found that interesting but not arousing. That's not one of my particular kinks. She claimed that she was going to wean them onto bottles after a few weeks anyway, which was fine by me. I could hold out on any urges I had - and I was definitely feeling some urges - until she was all healed up and no longer lactating. Her mood improved immensely a week later when she had lost a couple of pounds and fit into a pair of jeans again.

Marilyn continued to proclaim, for a little over two months, that I was never again going to satisfy those urges. That changed by the end of September. She had her eight week checkup with Doctor Harrington, who pronounced the girls healthy and Marilyn healthy, too. She didn't tell me her plans, but that night, after putting the girls in their cribs, she went into our bedroom and changed into a pink peignoir set I had bought her for Christmas. I was glad Charlie was a sound sleeper, because otherwise he would have been very surprised to see what his parents were up to out on the couch in the living room!

The business moved ahead quite nicely through the fall. We created our first investment pool for outside investors, the Buckman Investment Pool. Missy wasn't really qualified to run it, but she was definitely qualified to dig through her endless Rolodex and find somebody who could run it, with our supervision. She and Jake Junior got our blessing and thanks. They raised $25 million and we put it into a number of different companies throughout the fall and winter, some of which I remembered from history, and some of which I didn't. This was a different kind of business. While the Buckman Group invested in shares of the Buckman Investment Pool, we sold shares to others (minimum investment, $250,000) and took a management fee off the top and got a managing partner's cut of the profits and distributions. There was a different dynamic involved, to a certain extent, in that we were more interested in pushing these investments to an IPO, so we could generate a big return on the investment, although we reserved the right to hold onto the shares after that.

Harlan, Anna Lee, Roscoe, and their new daughter, Mary Beth, visited us in October. Harlan saved up a year's leave and flew the family home. The big problem in living in Hawaii is that it takes you a full day to fly anywhere on the east coast, and a full day to fly back, which just kills your vacation and leave time. They visited for a long weekend, Friday through Monday, and we put them up in the spare bedroom, with Roscoe bunking with Charlie and Mary Beth bunking with the twins. Friday was the 12th and we celebrated Charlie's third birthday. That Saturday we went to a Pee Wee motocross race, and watched Bucky win his first race! Very exciting, and Charlie thought it was just fantastic! Then we went over to the Tusks' and had a barbecue.

(Previously I would have taken Harlan, a really big football fan, to a Colts game down at Memorial Stadium. That spring, however, the Colts had decamped in the middle of the night to Indianapolis. My mother was as big a fan as Harlan, and if she hadn't been homicidal before, she probably was now! Oh, well... )

In November, I made arrangements with Taylor for a family trip to the Bahamas again, and we stayed at the same villa, Hougomont, that we had stayed at in the spring. This time we took the kids, to see how the place worked with children and whether it was practical to take kids back and forth. Holly and Molly were a handful, and Charlie was only slightly less trouble, but we survived. By the middle of the week, I called the real estate office down there and had Mr. Peepers over, and we started haggling over price. I bought Hougomont plus the two empty parcels, one on each side. That gave us well over 1,000 feet of private beach, and plenty of room for privacy. John overnighted me a check for $1,000,000 as a deposit, and I promised to fly down for a quick trip before Christmas to close on the sale.

At Christmas, Charlie got a bicycle and a helmet. He fell a lot, but he kept trying, going in circles in the driveway. He would make 'VROOM VROOM' sounds as he pushed and rode it around. Bucky was facing some future competition!

We gave Charlie his bike about a week before Christmas, actually. We were going to Utica for Christmas, and taking a few weeks off for a long family vacation in the Bahamas. In a few years the kids would be in school and that schedule would rule. For now we were still fairly flexible. We kenneled Dum-Dum for a couple of weeks and then flew up.

As I mentioned once before, the Lefleur tradition is that they celebrate Christmas on Christmas Eve, actually in the afternoon, not the evening. There were now so many kids and grandkids that adults pulled names from a hat in the fall, and they were only responsible for that child, and you didn't buy for everybody. Nobody could afford buying a present for every single person! Today, however, Marilyn and I were going to break the rules.

Everything went fairly normally. Santa showed up about 1:00 and did all the 'Ho, ho, hos!' and handed out a small present from Big Bob and Harriet to each child. They also had to pose for a picture with him. Even the adults had to sit on his lap! Afterwards, Santa was sent packing, and the presents for the kids were passed around, which always ended up in a whirlwind of wrapping paper and a cacophony of noise. Normally after that happened, a bunch of folding tables and chairs would be brought out for dinner. However, before that happened, Marilyn and I interrupted things.

"Excuse me! We have something to say.", I said to the room. It fell on deaf ears. Nobody was listening to anybody, just to the screaming kids running around. "Excuse me!" Nothing. I looked at my wife. Maybe she could bring order to the chaos. It was her family, after all.

"You need to be louder."

"I was loud."

"Well, yell, then!'

I rolled my eyes. Great! I stood up and waved my arms, and then yelled out, "EXCUSE ME! WE HAVE SOMETHING TO SAY!" At that point the adults, at least, looked in my direction. The kids kept yelling, but the parents saw me standing. I repeated myself, "EXCUSE ME! I NEED TO SAY SOMETHING!"

Marilyn's family started shushing the little ones, and I turned to my wife. "Okay, they're your family. You want to say this?"

Marilyn waved me off. "This is your idea."

"Some help you are!" I turned back to the others. "Okay everybody, give me a minute or two, please." Most of the others nodded, including Big Bob and Harriet. We had told them of our idea before, and they liked it, and now they started telling everybody to be quiet and listen.

"Thank you. As most of you know, for the last few years I've been in business down in Maryland, and we've been pretty lucky and done fairly well. Anyway, this year I bought, uh, actually, we bought a vacation home in the Bahamas. This family has been very good to me, and Marilyn and I would like to offer everyone here some time there. If you'd like to use our place for a week, let us know, and we'll make the arrangements for you. All you'll need to do is get to the airport."

As expected, the room broke out in a state of barely controlled pandemonium. The kids didn't understand any of it, but they sure understood the word vacation! The teenagers were interested, too, and wanted to know when. It was the older Lefleurs, Mark, Luke, and John, and their wives and children who wanted to know more.

Marilyn and I had decided on some ground rules ahead of time. They could call Marilyn and schedule something and Marilyn could keep a schedule (or more likely tell me, because I wouldn't lose the schedule!) We'd pay for flights out of Syracuse, which was the nearest big airport. I wasn't paying for them to fly down on a chartered jet, but I would cover business class. Syracuse connected to New York, for instance, and New York has daily flights to the Bahamas. They would have to pay for their own food and amusements while down there. We had decided the same rules would apply to any of the original brain trust at the Buckman Group, too.

If somebody didn't like it, they didn't have to go!

We figured that no matter how you added it up, this only added up to about eight to ten weeks per year of people going through the place. The odds that there would be a conflict were low. Besides, I knew enough about my wife's family to know that they were pretty close. It would not surprise me if several of the boys and their families wanted to go down together. There were enough bedrooms to accommodate grownups, and the kids could always sleep on the couches. Or they could sleep on the beach, for all I cared. If I caught them I'd throw them in jail and fine them!

Over the next few days we talked to all the older kids about this, and reviewed the ground rules and grabbed a calendar. Mark and Lauren scheduled a week in April, and Luke and John and their families decided to share a week in May. We would sort out the flying part when we got back to Maryland. I explained how we subcontracted travel arrangements out and would figure out the specifics in a few weeks time. In the meantime, we were on vacation, and weren't going to worry too much.

We showed everybody some photos we had taken the last time we were down there. It seemed unreal to some of them. Well, half the time it still seemed unreal to me! Part of the reason Big Bob and Harriet were so enthusiastic about the idea was that they were taking the first trip. When we flew down on the Friday after Christmas, we took them along. Their vacation included a flight on the G-II that Taylor had chartered for us. For once they left the kids home. Even the youngest was now six years old, and there were enough older kids at home to watch them for a week. Winter was the slow season for Lefleur Homes anyways, so they could take off.

I think a big part of the reason we offered to bring them and they agreed to come was to see if it was all true. Were the photos real? Did we actually have a place on the beach? Was this bullshit? For a long time, Big Bob and Harriet had figured that they were going to have to support their idiot son-in-law who couldn't get a real job and ended up in the Army. The idea of me owning an investment company and supporting Marilyn on my own was just barely sinking in. The idea I was worth so much more than that really hadn't registered at all!

Taylor had made sure the jet was stocked with a couple of bottles of champagne. Big Bob drank some, but he was much more of a beer kind of guy. Harriet and Marilyn got a little tanked, on the other hand, but not out of control. Charlie was very excited by it all; the twins slept the entire trip. That was a blessing in and of itself! They were now teething, and when one would start crying, she would set off the other one. When I die and go to hell, it will be packed with teething twin daughters! A minivan and a Cadillac were waiting for us at the airport, so that we could split apart and drive separately if we wanted to. From there, we drove to Hougomont and I fished the keys from my pocket.

Well, if we were trying to impress the relatives, it worked! It reminded me of the time when Marilyn and I had lived in northern New Jersey on the first go-around, and her brother Mark and her Aunt Lynnette came down to visit us. We took them to Rod's 1890s for dinner, a very nice place Marilyn and I liked to go to, with a private Pullman dining car on one side, and a two story bar/dining room with an open well connecting the rooms. The pair of them had just gawked like a pair of rubes right off the farm. We got the same impression this time around from Marilyn's folks.

As vacations go, it was nice and went well, although I would have preferred more alone time with my wife. We hadn't done a parents-only vacation since before the girls were born. Still, there were a couple of nights we wanted to go out on our own, and her parents played babysitter, and they went out a night or two on their own also. If we were trying to impress them, it worked. Yes, I know they had been to our home in Hereford, but that simply looked like a nice suburban rancher. Hougomont was a lot more impressive, and we obviously owned it. For one thing, they came with us one day to buy some furniture; the furniture in the place wasn't ours, but was the demo stuff from when it was still a demo unit.

Big Bob and I talked business and politics several times. He was a die-hard and hard core liberal Democrat; I was a much more moderate Republican. He didn't think much of Reagan. I think Big Bob was hoping for the return of FDR! I was more ambivalent on the subject, and kept my mouth shut. If you want to keep your friends, don't talk religion or politics. Some of what Reagan did I liked, some I didn't, and the guy tended to invent the truth he wanted to believe in. Maybe that's just part of being a politician.

On business I was on a lot firmer ground. For one thing, back on my first try, I had spent as much time in the trailer business as he had, and could speak with some authority. I knew a lot of the history of the business and how it operated and why, and could speak intelligently, and my money made him at least consider my opinions.

It was still strange, though. Way back when, I had first started working for Lefleur Homes in the summer of 1984. Back then, I had been an industrial chemist. That was what my degree was in, and even my MBA was geared towards running a factory. Unfortunately, my specialty was in specialty organics and pharmaceuticals, and I ran head first into an industrial nightmare.

A few years before, Congress had decided, in its infinite wisdom, that Puerto Rico needed more jobs and that the best way to do that was to give tax breaks to pharmaceutical companies who put up factories in Puerto Rico. Well, that certainly sounded good at the time. Puerto Rico is a part of the U.S. and jobs are good, right? Enter the Law of Unintended Consequences! Cue the drum roll. Half the pharmaceutical companies in America built brand new factories in Puerto Rico, got them running, and then shut down all the old factories back on the mainland! New factories could be depreciated faster and had lower operating costs, and the new employees got paid peanuts compared to older (now unemployed) unionized employees in the northeast.

Lots of Congressmen got free vacations to Puerto Rico courtesy of the pharmaceutical companies, too. They were called fact finding tours. It's surprising how many facts are hidden in the beach sand and at the Bacardi refinery.

I bounced from factory to factory, company to company for seven years, getting laid off as companies shut down. Eventually I landed at a German chemical company as a junior foreman, and worked my way back to the top of the QC department. I was the only guy on the line with one college degree, let alone two, but since German chemical companies are run and managed by chemists with PhDs, I was told I would never rise higher than a senior foreman.

I threw in the towel at that point and got out of the business, selling insurance for a brief period. Big Bob offered me a job at his Cooperstown office, his first satellite office, and I jumped at it. I was never sorry, at least not until the Great Recession hit, and even then I knew that if I was an employee and not an owner, I wouldn't have survived.

I worked for Matthew in the office as a salesman for that first year, learning the business, with the understanding that if I worked out, I would eventually run the office. I worked out better than they expected, and took it over in January of 1985 - right now, in fact. Matthew went back to being the dispatcher and driver. On this trip through, Matthew was still running the office and unhappy about it. Big Bob's problem was that he didn't trust anybody but family to run things (for one thing, he could treat family like shit and get away with it!) and all the older boys had been put into the delivery and setup sides of the business. Only Mark had gone into sales, and he ran the Utica lot. The next available boys were Gabriel and Rafael, still in college, and Michael, still in high school.

Big Bob asked me what he should do, and I told him he would either have to hire outside sales professionals or promote an existing salesperson. He nodded and agreed, but I already knew what would happen. He ended up doing both over the years, never trusting a one of them, and would fire them all within six months. Eventually his younger sons got through school and he put them in, treated them like shit, and was happy. Hell of a way to run a railroad!

House trailers are not necessarily a good product or a bad product. Like most things in business, it comes down to a question of who you're dealing with. In that regard, the trailer industry has nobody to blame but themselves! Some of the homes are built as nicely as any stick-built home, and some of the dealers are as honest and trustworthy as you can ask for. Big Bob had a good reputation in that regard, and he only sold high end homes. However, as a whole, for most of their past, trailers had been rickety death traps sold by salesmen who failed the ethics qualifications to sell used cars. The factories all knew it, but they didn't care; they just pumped out tin boxes as fast as they could and as cheap as they could to whoever lined up at the back door with a truck and a check. The death trap part ended in 1976 when Congress began to regulate the business and put in a building code, but the damage had been done. They were still being sold by dealers who were crooks and that never really changed.

A big part of the problem was the ridiculously low cost of entry into the business. It was entirely possible to become a trailer dealer without ever actually having to make an investment. You could lease the property. The homes would actually be floorplanned by a bank or the manufacturer and all you have to pay would be the interest. You use one of the homes as an office, so the bank owns that, too. You lease or rent all the office equipment. The factory will ship the homes, and you can subcontract out the installations. You've got absolutely no skin in the game!

A cure existed, but Big Bob and I didn't agree on it. The industry needed to consolidate around a handful of major players, and most importantly, begin taking responsibility for their product with the buyer. A trailer factory didn't sell to the buyer, it sold to the dealer and the dealer sold to the buyer. However, if you bought a home and it was a lemon, the dealer had no legal requirement to even answer your phone calls. The warranty was through the manufacturer and the dealer didn't even need to have a service department. You would have to call some company you might never have heard of to ask for help, and they would get to you the next time they had a truck in the area. Since you might live in New Hampshire, and most of the manufacturers were in Indiana or Pennsylvania, you might be shit out of luck for six months or more! This totally skewed the dynamics of the industry. Manufacturers didn't want to deal with buyers, only dealers. Dealers didn't want to be held to any kind of requirement to service what they sold. Buyers were totally screwed unless they found an honest dealer like Big Bob. That was just one of the many problems in the industry.

The only way things would ever change was by legislation and regulation, and on this Big Bob and I disagreed. He thought the present system was just peachy, and I was simply horrified by it. I knew what was going to happen. The reputation of the industry got so bad in the Nineties that when the Great Recession hit and the banks began shutting down credit, they stopped financing trailers. No financing means no buyers means no sellers means no manufacturers. The entire industry collapsed. Some dealers had begun selling modular homes by then, like we did, but the housing business was in the shitter no matter what.

Anyway, we discussed this quite amicably and simply agreed to disagree. He did have a rather oblique question as to how I invested in companies and industries, and I returned with an equally oblique reply about how we bought ownership positions, and didn't lend money. I suspected he was looking for a cheaper bank loan (well, fair's fair - who wouldn't!?) but I'm not a banker.

So the week went well. As the owner of the property, it was a whole lot easier dealing with Big Bob and Harriet then when we were their guests. Regardless, they were going to go home with glowing reviews of Hougomont, and the kids were going to love their vacations. It was the least we could do for Marilyn's family, a family that really had gone out of their way to welcome me both this time and last.

Chapter 87: An Ordinary Life

I'd like to say how every day for the next few years was exciting and filled with thrilling stuff, but it wasn't. Marilyn and I are actually really boring, and we led boring lives. That suited us both just fine! We're really very average people, just ones who didn't have to worry about money. We lived in a fairly average suburban rancher. Yes it was a little larger than the average, and it was on 25 acres, but it would not have been out of place in most developments. That suited us just fine. Neither of us wanted a castle, and besides, castles need servants. The entire idea of servants made both of us feel kind of creepy.

If the idea of servants was creepy, the idea of armed security people were even more so. The Buckman Group continued to grow, and I continued to become more wealthy. Still, at the time Marilyn was being stalked, we had increased security at the office, with a professional security guard in the lobby. Now, after our move to the new offices, we paid a lot more attention to that sort of thing. The door between the lobby and the rest of the offices was locked, and the lobby had both a receptionist and a security guard (dressed professionally, not like a rent-a-cop.) A guard was on duty even after hours, since some of what we were doing was quite confidential. We couldn't chance a break-in for espionage purposes.

After the disaster with my family, I kept security at the Mount Carmel Road residence, as well. No, we didn't install a guard shack, but when Marilyn and the kids went anywhere, they were trailed by a black GMC with dark windows. Likewise, when Marilyn went into a store, a professionally dressed security guard would follow her at a distance. Tessa once joked that they were being shadowed by the War Wagon. I didn't have any personal security. I wasn't worried about myself, only my family.

Marilyn loved her minivan. I kept two cars, a big Cadillac or Town Car that I kept for driving larger groups with, and my little 380 SL, which I would drive whenever it was just me or my wife with me. If I was going out to dinner with Marilyn, we took the 380. If it was with the family, we took her minivan. The Cadillac (I replaced the Town Car in late 1984) didn't actually get driven all that much.

Marilyn cut her hair. Before, it had been long, going several inches down her back, but after the girls were born, she cut it in a shag, shoulder length. It was still curly, but I think she figured that as a 30 year old married woman, she couldn't have long hair anymore. Who comes up with these rules? On the plus side, after Marilyn got back in shape with a decent workout routine with me, her tits had grown another cup size. I approved, but I was hoping that she drew the line at this. If we kept going with this pattern, after our next child she'd be so top heavy she'd fall on her face. D cups were just fine by me!

Holly and Molly, as far as we could tell, were identical twins. Marilyn and I could always tell them apart, however. There was something about them, from the time they were born, that subtly differentiated them. Maybe it was the way their hair curled, or the pattern of faint freckles on their noses. Something about them that only their mother and I could sense separated them. They were also the spitting image of their mother, as best we could tell from pictures of Marilyn at that age. It was spooky, but we first figured it out when Aunt Lynette pulled a black and white picture of Marilyn from a photo album and showed it to us. They were identical!

Marilyn was a stay-at-home mom, and that suited the both of us. Charlie didn't start kindergarten until the fall of 1985, and we would still have the girls at home for a few more years. Marilyn was a housewife and took care of the kids and the laundry and the cleaning. I worked in an office and cooked dinner. How mundane and boring can you get? I'd come home, play with the kids and Dum-Dum, listen to Marilyn tell me about her day, and then watch television with her after we put the kids to bed. It wasn't a bad life.

In many ways, it was what I needed to do with my life. The fall of 1983 had been one of the worst times in my life, certainly worse than having to leave home as a teenager, even worse than my jaunt through Nicaragua and having to leave the Army. Having Marilyn and Charlie stalked and attacked, especially by my brother, and the subsequent arrest and publicity and family breakdown, it had all been just too much for me. I wanted nothing more than to put it all behind me and live quietly and anonymously with my family.

Going into the office gave me a routine. I could have just sat back and counted my money, but I knew how to do better than that, and I liked having an impact. We were now investing in companies that I would never have heard of from before, and our investments were doing well. It wasn't just the big names I knew from before, where I could just buy a stock at the date of the IPO and tuck it away and be a playboy. I was making a difference, helping companies start and grow.

My original brain trust had been one of my biggest advantages in all of this. John and Jake Senior were cautious and acted like the grownups. Jake Junior kept growing the company. He and Missy started up a second investment pool, Buckman Investment Pool II (we're real inventive in this business), and did as well with it as they did with the first. This time around, we allowed insiders, the members of the brain trust, to buy shares directly, and both Jake Junior and Missy did just that. I happily agreed to this - golden handcuffs are much better than golden parachutes when running an operation! I also let Harlan and Anna Lee know that they could invest with us, without becoming a full partner. They put some of their pension money into shares. At this rate, the Buckman Group was going to be a major player in the private equity business in a few years.

I supervised and worked with the others on identifying investment targets, but then stood back and let the professionals do the work. If that meant I got to go home early one or two nights a week, nobody seemed to mind. I also made sure that we could take some vacations. We tried to take at least a week at Hougomont with the family and another week by ourselves. During the summer we took another couple of weeks. If I got really lucky, we would leave the kids with the Lefleurs every once in awhile, and I would take Marilyn on a business trip to the west coast by ourselves. I introduced her to Bill Gates in the summer of 1985 during a board meeting in Bellevue, and then we took a quick side trip to San Francisco and rode the trolley around. I like cities, Marilyn not so much. She does like nice restaurants and hotel rooms, though, so I just made sure we had a limo on standby for traveling. We also did the same thing when traveling to New York for whatever reason. We'd stay at the Four Seasons and I'd make sure to take Marilyn to a Broadway show or two. Cats was excellent, but I really looked forward to seeing Phantom of the Opera when it came out in a few years.

We had begun giving away money to charity in 1984. Serious money, anyway, at least by my old standards. Five grand a year each to the Hampstead and Hereford Volunteer Fire Departments was a significant sum to them. While we were actually in the Town of Hereford in Baltimore County, we were physically closer to the Town of Hampstead across the county line in Carroll County. Be safe and give to both! We also donated to the Jacksonville and Reisterstown Departments, just in case. Most of these towns offered mutual aid support to each other. It was a good idea to cover all the bases. Besides, those crazy bastards run into burning buildings! Everybody else, those of us in our right minds, runs out! They needed the money for psychiatric treatment! Let's add in some money for the local ambulance and EMT companies, too.

The Red Cross got a healthy chunk. If there was one outfit that could be counted on to show up during a catastrophe, it was the Red Cross. God save you if you have to wait on the government for assistance. (Unless, of course, you were in a hot air balloon that was losing lift, and you could get Congress to start talking about the problem. They could fill it with plenty of hot air, and nothing else!)

Rensselaer got a nice piece of the pie. I had always given them some bucks, now I gave them more. Marilyn never quite understood why I gave them money every year, but she never quite understood all that the school gave me - like her! I would have never have met Marilyn if I hadn't gone to RPI. I offered to donate money to MVCC and Plattsburgh State, but Marilyn wasn't interested.

A few other outfits got some money, too. I gave to the USO, and the 82nd Airborne has a charitable scholarship fund that would get some money. In general, the Army had been good to me. Okay, Hawkins was an asshole, but the vast majority of the outfit had been good people.

The interesting thing is how much nicer they treat you the more money you give somebody. It doesn't matter whether it's a college or the Red Cross or the United Bumfuck Charitable Trust, the result is always the same. You're a fish on the line, and they want to reel you in.

$0 to $250 - You are classified as a Guppy. Thanks a lot, we'll put you on the mailing list, we'll send you a receipt.

$250 to $500 - You are now upgraded to a Minnow. You get a much nicer thank you letter and get upgraded to our premiere mailing list, so we can ask you again in six months.

$500 to $1,000 - Anybody who gives this much has to be a Big Minnow! The thank you letter is computer printed, but signed by hand, and in the future you get a phone call asking for money from a Junior Fisherman.

$1,000 to $5,000 - You have moved up to Flounder. Everything is done by humans now, generally a Senior Fisherman, and you will probably get a call and an invitation to lunch from a Super Senior Fisherman.

$5,000 to $25,000 - If you're this rich, you get an immediate upgrade to Mega Flounder! Congratulations! You now will be offered oral sex from the Super Senior Fisherman, be placed permanently on the Monthly Fishing Mailing List, and be given a brass plaque on the classroom/storage-locker/large-piece-of-expensive-equipment of your choice. Keep paying though, or that item will be 're-donated' in the future by another Mega Flounder.

$25,000 to $250,000 - Wow! You are a Tuna! Your item will never be re-donated, at least not until it breaks and has to be replaced. The Super Senior Fisherman has now been replaced by a Senior Executive Fisherman, and the oral sex has been replaced by anal sex, giving or receiving, your choice.

Anything above $250,000 - Now you are a Whale! They hand you the keys to the place and offer you free coeds/interns/assistants. The number is determined by just how much you fork over. With enough zeroes on the end of the check, they name the place after you. You have reached the peak of the food chain!

As far as RPI was concerned, I was a Mega Flounder, a fish they had managed to sink a big hook into and they were planning on reeling me in for years to come. Much effort would come in the future to convert me to a Tuna and beyond. Dollar signs were flashing in the eyes of Dan Berg, President of RPI. Berg was a non-entity as far as I was concerned, but I was hoping to get him to offer the coeds both to me and Marilyn.

When I was at Rensselaer, the President was a zero named Richard Grosh. To be fair, I'm sure he was a nice guy, and beloved by his dog, but as far as the students were concerned, he was a nobody. Our senior year, 1977, however, he was replaced by a real superstar, a guy named George Low. Low was an RPI grad who had grown up to become a senior administrator at NASA during the Apollo years, which gave him some really serious street cred at RPI. Even better, he was very personable and frequently met with the students and gave standing room only lectures on space related stuff. Hell of a guy! Unfortunately, he died in 1984 of cancer, and was succeeded by a number of nobodies for the next fifteen years, when another science heavyweight, Shirley Jackson, a world class physicist, took over. For the next few years it would be Berg chasing after me and my dollars.

My worries about geometric progression came true by the start of 1985. No, Marilyn wasn't pregnant again, but the twins started crawling around. They weren't twice as troublesome as Charlie had been - they were four times the trouble! It was an exponential relationship. Unlike Charlie, they didn't go through obstacles, but they got into everything, even the stuff we had childproofed. We set up a large playpen in the living room and dubbed it 'The Jail.' Several times a day they would get into something they shouldn't be into, and get corralled and put in jail.

In the summer of 1985 Dum-Dum lived up to her name. One night in August she was barking up a storm by the patio door, so we put her out on the tie-out, and she went racing out, barking madly. Big fucking mistake! She was barking because a skunk managed to slip inside the fence around the pool. Moments later Dum-Dum came roaring back and tried to come inside. Marilyn opened the door, and then yelled and we dragged the dog back outside. Tomato juice was supposed to kill the smell, and we found a can and I went out and we gave her a bath, but oh God did she stink! I looked around and didn't find a dead skunk, so I didn't even have the satisfaction of knowing the little bastard had paid for his sins. Dum-Dum and the deck stunk for days!

In the fall of 1985 I revived an old pastime of ours, old to me at least, from my first life, new to Marilyn. I taught her how to make jams and jellies. On our property in Cooperstown we had about five acres of mostly scrub, but it had an abundance of blackberries and elderberries and a few apple trees on it. After we started picking berries, we decided to try making jam. It isn't very high tech at all, it's fairly easy, if time consuming, is relatively cheap, and it works. Every year we would do several batches of blackberry and elderberry, and Marilyn would go out and buy blueberries and strawberries. The apples we made pies from and she learned how to cook them into apple sauce. Then we cooked up some pumpkins and made pie filling.

We called it all 'Buckman's Berries' and put it in Mason jars and saved it and gave it to friends and family. Since the only way to do it required the both of us working on it, it was an excellent way to do something together on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon. We would do a few batches and chat and talk about the kids or the business or the school or anything, and just work together for a few hours. It was good for us then, and it was good for us now. I knew all the little tricks, because we had done it for almost forty years. The end result was jam better than anything that Smucker's ever made, because ours was made with love! For Maggie's wedding, she had us make 140 jars of strawberry jam as the combination wedding centerpieces/place-tags, and we made jam for weeks before the wedding!

As for the pies, well, there is no such thing as a bad pie!

Like most parents, we found the most hilarity with our children. Charlie liked me to take him to Bucky's races, and Marilyn was happy to let us go and get out of her hair. The babies didn't like the noise and would fuss a lot. Once Charlie was comfortable riding his bicycle, he and Bucky started dirt biking around the lower half of our property. We figured this out during the summer of 1985, when the Tusks were over for a Saturday barbecue. As we all sat there on the back deck, we watched as the Daring Duo headed up the hill into the woods, and dragged back a fallen down tree. Well, Bucky mostly did the dragging, but Charlie tried to help. When we asked, mystified, what they were up to, plans to build a jump ramp were announced. Marilyn was not amused, and threatened both Tusker and me if Charlie got hurt.

Tusker and I just shook our heads in disbelief. This deserved another beer, at the minimum! We had a pair of adrenaline junkies on our hands.

It became quite apparent that both Bucky and Charlie were little daredevils. We got to calling them Batman and Robin. Bucky would come up with some crazy stunt and Charlie would join in. It wasn't like Bucky even had to talk my son into it, either. Charlie volunteered!

This all came to a painful head in February of 1986. It doesn't snow all that much in Maryland, but it does snow, and we got several inches one Friday night. The next morning we called the Tusks and invited them over to go sledding. By ten or so they pulled up in their minivan and piled out. Their house was a nice high-ranch model with a wonderful finished basement set up as a playroom/prison for their boys, but they lived in a development and only had about a quarter acre of flat lawn. We, on the other hand had a nice gentle slope perfect for sledding.

Once they arrived, we quickly dressed the kids and went outside. Holly, Molly, and Carter got propped up in a toboggan and Marilyn and Tessa began pulling them around the back yard, inside the pool area where Dum-Dum could be turned loose inside the fence. This worked for about fifteen minutes before they started getting chilly and fussy. In the meantime, Charlie and Bucky disappeared up the hill with their sleds. We took the little ones inside and left the boys to their own devices. They'd come in sooner or later.

They did. Mid-morning we saw them from the breakfast nook, looking out through the patio door as we sat there sipping hot chocolate. Bucky was half supporting Charlie, who seemed to be holding his arm and limping. I looked over at Marilyn, who was shoveling rice gruel into Holly and Molly, and asked, "Now what have those two gotten into?"

She glanced out the window and said, "Don't know, but they're your problem. I'm in charge of girls. You're in charge of boys, remember?"

I grunted in acknowledgement of our pre-baby agreement. Tessa stood up and went to the patio door and let the boys in. It was obvious that Charlie had a look a pain on his face, and was favoring his left side and cradling his left arm. "What happened?", she asked.

Charlie limped over to his mom, and Bucky answered, "We crashed."

"You crashed?", asked his father.

"On the ski jump.", he answered, nodding happily.

"What ski jump?", I asked. As soon as the words were out of my mouth I knew they were the stupidest words I had ever said. What was I thinking?! They were little boys! Of course they had a ski jump!

Bucky started talking and pointing, and I just looked over at Tusker and said, "This I got to see!"

"Me, too!"

We stood up and slipped on our boots and coats, and I grabbed the leash for Dum-Dum. Tusker and I followed Bucky out through the patio door with Dum-Dum straining at the leash, and were led down to the bottom of the hill. "We crashed here.", we were told, with Bucky pointing to a big pile of snow.

Tusker and I looked at the pile, and then at each other. "Just how did you two knuckleheads manage to do that?", asked his father.

"Well, we started up there, and then when we got here we crashed.", was the explanation, accompanied with a lot of pointing.

We continued quizzing Bucky, and then sent him back to the house. I stood there looking at everything for a moment. The plan was simple enough, if audacious, and bird-brained to the point of idiocy. The boys mounded snow up down at the bottom of the hill, down near a small bump close to Mount Carmel Road. Then the intrepid pair grabbed their toboggan and headed up the hill, all the way to the tree line about three hundred feet uphill from the house. The plan was that they would start as far up the hill as they could, race down the snowy slope, hit the ski jump, and be launched into the air. At that point, airborne, they would sail over the drainage ditch, over the fence, over Mount Carmel Road, and finally come down for a gentle landing in John Caples' cornfield, a distance I conservatively estimated at well over one hundred feet.

It was impossible, of course. The slope was too gentle, the jump was too shallow, the distance was too great. Evel Knievel with jets up his ass couldn't have made that jump! Instead, the boys had scooted down the slope, blown through the pile of snow, and tumbled ass over teakettle into the ditch, where they finally fetched up against the fence.

I looked over at my buddy. "Can you believe this shit?"

Tusker smiled and shook his head. "All too easily!"

We headed back in, Dum-Dum leading the way. We got inside and I said, "You won't believe what these two were doing."

Marilyn was pulling her coat back on. "I'll believe it later. We're going to the hospital now."

"WHAT!?"

"Your son has a broken arm.", she announced.

"What?!" I turned to Charlie, who was sitting at the kitchen table, still cradling his arm and looking unhappy, but not crying. I knelt down in front of him and asked, "What's wrong, buddy?"

"My arm hurts.", he answered, still cradling it.

"Here, let Daddy see." I reached out and looked at his arm as best I could, despite his histrionic complaints. It was obvious something was wrong, and there was a big lump under the skin at his wrist. I looked up at the others, and nodded. "I think you're right.", I told Marilyn.

She snorted. "I ought to make you put that in writing. I might never hear it again!" She went to the utility room and grabbed Charlie's coat.

"When can Charlie go out and play again?", asked Bucky.

Marilyn looked like she was going to yell at Bucky, but then her face softened. "Not, today, Bucky. Charlie got hurt and we have to take him to the doctor."

"Oh." Then he looked worried. "Are we in trouble, Aunt Marilyn?"

She smiled, as did the rest of us. "No more than usual, Bucky. No more than usual." To me she said, "You stay here with the girls. The last thing we need is all of us going to the hospital."

"Emergency room at GBMC?"

She nodded. "You're in charge of the girls."

I eyed my daughters, now imprisoned in the jail, and wondered who might be getting the better part of this deal. Marilyn put Charlie's right arm into his coat sleeve, and then zipped it up, rather than try to force his left arm through the sleeve.

Tessa and Tusker decided to take their pair home at this point as well. "Call me later and let us know how it went.", Tessa said. They took off and I helped Marilyn get Charlie into his car seat, and they left as well.

They returned several hours later, with Charlie's arm wrapped in a gigantic Ace bandage, and an appointment to see an orthopedics doctor on Monday. Yes, he had a broken arm, specifically his left radius bone was broken down near the wrist. Monday morning I went to the office as normal, and Marilyn dropped the girls off with me for a few hours while she continued on with Charlie. They returned around lunchtime, with Charlie in a big white plaster cast and an even bigger smile. This was just so cool! He couldn't wait to go sledding again, and this time they would get the ski jump right!

God save me!

The whole office signed Charlie's cast and we sent them on their way to go to Friendly's for ice cream. I debated calling Andrea and having her book me a flight to Timbuctoo. I wasn't sure I wanted to be around when those two figured the ski jump out!

The ski jump idea got a lot closer the next summer. On Bucky's eighth birthday, his father got him a larger motorbike for motocross racing. Bucky got a 65 cc. dirt bike, and Tusker asked Marilyn and me if we wanted his older and smaller 50 cc. bike. Marilyn wasn't all that thrilled, but we'd never hear the end of it if we didn't at least give him a shot at it. Tusker gave us the bike; we simply had to go down to his store and buy him a helmet and some racing leathers. Tusker sold them, too, and I think they cost more than the bike! Tusk Cycle was a full stop shop, and would happily relieve you of all the money in your wallet, and then sell you a biker's wallet. On the other hand, since I was a part owner, I was recycling my money. Sort of.

Regardless, Charlie was in seventh heaven with that thing. Once we got it home, he started it up and put on his helmet and then immediately began riding. It turned out that Bucky had been giving him lessons whenever the various parental units weren't looking! Within two days, Charlie was riding all over the property, driving Dum-Dum crazy, and carving our 25 acres into a dirt bike track.

Marilyn watched him with considerable trepidation. What she secretly wanted, I knew, was for Charlie to have an accident, nothing serious, but enough of one that he would convince himself to stop riding a motorcycle. I knew better. I wasn't any more thrilled than she was, but at almost five, Charlie was as much of a biker as his Uncle Tusker. By the end of the summer, we let him ride in his first official race. He placed second, and wanted to know when he could come back again, because he wanted to win! His mother and I congratulated him, and then looked at each other with concern. We had created a monster!

Chapter 88: Celebrity

In July of '86 my happily anonymous life came to an end. I suppose I should have realized it was going to happen, but it just never occurred to me. It was my fault, of course, but I never thought it through.

I made the cover of Fortune magazine.

If I had stayed home and just counted my money, nobody would have ever have known about me. No, I let my friends, people that I trusted, talk me into becoming a businessman, so it was all my fault.

I should have known better. When you become successful, people want to know about you, and other people start writing newspaper and magazine stories about you. In this case, Fortune decided to write an article about the venture capital and private equity business. Well, that was our business, and we were one of the smaller but more successful firms in the field. It was probably inevitable that this would happen sooner or later, and it's better to be in the newspapers for being successful than for going bankrupt.

Looking back on it, we figured that the press first learned about us when we were listed in Microsoft's prospectus prior to their Initial Public Offering, or IPO. As owners of 6% of the company, we were named. By July, the prospectus for Adobe Systems was out as well, and we were listed there, too. We had already been named in the IPO for Autodesk the year before, but nobody had come to ask us then. Three tech companies going public in the space of a year, with the same small and unknown private equity outfit listed? That was too much of a coincidence!

We had prepared for this eventuality, to a certain extent. We had created brief bios on all five of the principals in the company, both for SEC purposes and for various prospectuses. These were limited to our professional qualifications and history, and pretty bland. 'Mr. Buckman graduated from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1977 and then served four years in the United States Army... ' - that sort of thing. We worked them up for all of us.

Initially, Melissa got the call from the New York office of Fortune, asking for a response and assistance in a story about the private equity and venture capital business. When I asked her why she agreed to help, her response was simple. "They're going to write a story either way. You want them to print that the Buckman Group was unresponsive and secretive?"

I grimaced but agreed with her. In Hollywood they might say that the only bad publicity is no publicity, but that didn't necessarily apply to us. Her response had been to send them our curriculum vitae, and we generated a nicely bland press release acknowledging our involvement with the recent IPOs. I never gave it another thought. I figured they would focus on the big name firms out on Sand Hill Road, like Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital, or maybe a couple of the New York or Boston firms. We would be, at best, a blip in a paragraph at the bottom of the piece.

It didn't quite work out that way. They never explained why, but it had to have been the three big tech IPOs in a row that made us known. It wasn't like we handled them, either. We just owned pieces of the three hottest offerings in a year. Who were we? Where did we come from? How did we operate?

Both Melissa and John agreed we had to cooperate. If you don't control your story, somebody else, somebody who doesn't have your best interests at heart, will control it. I couldn't fault their logic. I simply reminded everybody that we couldn't speak about non-public deals or divulge confidential information of any sort. Any communications would be by one of the five of us.

The reporter showed up on Wednesday morning a little before ten. Missy had warned us all he was going to be there in the morning, but I didn't give it a lot of thought at the time. When he didn't get there at nine, I figured he would show when he showed, and went into a meeting in my office with Jake Junior and a couple of the tax lawyers and accountants. At ten, John knocked on my door and came in without waiting for a reply. He found us working at my conference table, and we all looked up when he came in. "Quick, guys! It's the boss! Look busy!", I said, and picked up some papers in front of me and shuffled them. We had pulled this stunt on John before, so everybody picked up their papers and rattled them loudly.

John turned to the man behind him and said, "See what I have to put up with? Are you sure you want to interview anybody here?"

There was a pleasant laugh and a tall, slim figure came around from behind John and stepped into the room. "I'll take my chances."

"On your head be it!" He came closer and said, "Carl, this is Geoff Colvin from Fortune Magazine. Behave or I'll tell Marilyn on you."

I dropped the papers on the table and stood up. I came around the table and extended my hand. "Mister Colvin, welcome to the Buckman Group." I turned back to the others. "We'll finish this up later, but you guys have the general idea. Pack it up and get to work. Jake, stick around a bit."

Jake nodded and leaned towards the others to speak quietly. I turned back to Colvin. For some reason he looked familiar, but not completely. Then it hit me. In another thirty years or so he would be one of the senior editors at Fortune and a nationally recognized speaker on business - and bald! "I'll behave. He really will tell Marilyn on me! How can we help you, Mister Colvin."

"Call me Geoff. Who's Marilyn?"

"I'm Carl. Marilyn is my wife, and she is already convinced I'm not ready to play with the other children yet. If John tattles on me, I'm a dead man." Jake came over to my side as the others filed out, and I introduced him. "This is Jake Eisenstein, Jr., our Vice President of Operations. I'm sure you'll want to talk to him about your story. He actually makes things work around here."

"I'm sure I'll be talking to him, but maybe later.", he answered smoothly. He wasn't being palmed off, not yet, anyway.

"And on that cue, I'm going to go and earn my living. Nice meeting you, Mr. Colvin." Jake shook hands and departed, leaving me in my office with the reporter.

I ushered the writer over to the corner of my office, where I had a sofa and a few armchairs set up around a coffee table. When we got our new offices I made sure we had someplace to work (the conference table) and chat, besides just my desk. I could meet people comfortably as needed. I knew enough about Colvin to know he was a very sharp guy, and I didn't need to be antagonistic.

"How was your trip? You managed to find us, I see.", I started.

"Yes, eventually. I was told that your company was in Baltimore, but it's not, is it?", he said.

"Not precisely. We're in Baltimore County, not the City of Baltimore. We're probably forty minutes away from the downtown area."

"So, what made you start a company out here?"

"Very simple. It's where we all live. My entire team is from the northern Baltimore suburbs, including me. I live even further away from the city, so we put the office here as a compromise."

"Baltimore is not what comes to mind when somebody mentions venture capital.", he replied.

I shrugged. "Money is fluid, as are ideas. A hundred years ago you might have been right. Now, the world gets smaller by the day. Communication gets easier and cheaper. How will we be communicating a hundred years from now? We could be anywhere on the planet and communicating instantly without even thinking of distance."

"So you think we'll all be separated in the future, spread out over the planet?"

I shook my head. "Hardly. For one thing, the long term historical trend is for increasing urbanization. By sometime in the early 21st century the majority of humans on this planet will be living in metropolitan areas. We aren't separating, but congregating. Second, there will always be a need to sit down with others over a cup of coffee at a diner and shoot the breeze and toss ideas around. In that regard, we are at a disadvantage here, but it's a very nice place to live."

Colvin was a smart, well-read, and articulate talker, not terribly surprising for a top notch writer. We spent several minutes discussing future trends, and then I asked, "So, Geoff, what brings you to Hereford?"

"Well, you and the Buckman Group. I started writing an article on the face of venture capital and private investing in high tech areas, and for the last few years, you and your company have been popping up. I'm here to find out why.", he answered.

"Well, we'll be happy to talk to you, but you understand that we can't discuss any current or upcoming deals. We've signed confidentiality agreements, that sort of thing. Otherwise, I'll introduce you to the people who really make things happen around here."

"My understanding is that you're the one who makes things happen. It's your name on the door, after all."

Great! I just waved this off and smiled. "No one man can do all that you think I can. I have several partners, and this is a team business." I stood up and said, "Let me show you around."

Colvin got up and I led him out of my office and down the hallway. I pointed at John's closed door, and said, "You've already met John. He's our chairman of the board, and is one of the designated grownups."

"You have more than one?"

"Number two is Jake Eisenstein. He's our Treasurer." Jake's office door was open and directly across from John's. When we looked in, he was looking at us and scratching his head, but he was scratching it with a middle finger. "Jake's not only old, he's grumpy, too!" I continued down the hall and stopped at Missy's door. It was open, but I knocked on the doorframe anyway.

"Hello?", she said, looking up from her computer screen.

I stepped inside, bringing Colvin with me. "Melissa, I'd like you to meet Geoff Colvin, from Fortune. Geoff, this is Melissa Talmadge, our Vice President of Investments. Melissa deals with a lot of the stuff involving Wall Street."

Missy rose up and came around her desk. "Hello. Welcome. I think I talked to either you or your editor once or twice."

"Both, actually. First me, then him."

"Well, you obviously made it. You find us okay?"

He nodded. "Yes, but I didn't know you were actually so far from Baltimore."

I commented, "He got the county mixed up with the city."

Missy smiled and gave a small shrug. "They're not precisely the same thing. You drive down?"

"I flew, actually, but I wonder if that was such a good idea. We must be an hour from the airport."

She nodded. "If I need to go to New York, I usually take the Metroliner from Penn Station, and then take a cab or limo in Manhattan. You don't have to come in from JFK that way." I nodded in agreement with that. In another life, I had frequently taken the trains from Albany to New York, and then from New York to Baltimore. I thought it beat the bus or flying all to hell.

"I'll keep that in mind.", replied Colvin. "What made you guys decide to operate way out here? I'd think downtown Baltimore would be the business district."

"Yes, to a certain extent it is, although a lot of stuff has moved out of the city. It's just that, well, we're all from the Towson and Timonium area, and we didn't want to work in the city. When we set up things, Carl was building his house out in the sticks, so we compromised and came here. Office rents are a lot lower, too." She looked at me, and asked, "Have you introduced him to everyone?"

"Yes, though Jake Senior was just in passing."

"Why don't we all get together over lunch? We can run down to the Wagon Wheel.", she said.

I glanced at Colvin, who nodded. "Fine by me. Let the others know. I don't think anybody has anything else planned today."

She shook her head. "Nothing much this week, but next week is jammed, remember. I have to spend a few days in the city, and you and Jake Junior are flying out to the west coast."

"Dig us up at lunchtime, and we can go over." I led Colvin back to my office and we sat down. "Okay, shoot!", I said, starting the interview.

Until lunch, Colvin asked me a variety of questions about the three deals we had done with the three tech firms. He also wanted to know why I was going to the west coast. That question I deflected, since it was to meet with a few outfits we were not public with yet. He took that rejection with good grace.

A little after noon, Melissa stuck her head in the door and announced they were heading over to the nearby restaurant for lunch, so I stood and we followed. I drove Geoff over with me, and they followed in Melissa's mom bomb minivan. The Wagon Wheel is actually over towards Parkton, but is a decent local restaurant. Lots of comfort food, and the pies are first rate.

Over lunch we were all quizzed about how we had all first gotten together and what our backgrounds and histories were. Then, after lunch, I dumped him on John, and let him make the rounds with everybody. The next day was more of the same, only a photographer showed up, and took individual photos of us, as well as a group portrait or two. The only disquieting note came on Wednesday afternoon, when Colvin asked if he could meet Marilyn. I hesitated at that, and he pushed a bit. "You know, meet the wife and your children, get a little background, that sort of thing."

It had been a few years, but the thought of my children in the public eye again made my blood run cold. I answered slowly, but precisely. "I realize that to a certain extent I am newsworthy, and by extension, my wife is also, but my children are not. They are minors, and my understanding of the law is that they may not be photographed or mentioned by name without my express consent, and that consent will not be made. I do not wish to cause you trouble, but this is nonnegotiable. Is that clear, or do I need to bring one of my lawyers in?"

"Understood, sir."

I nodded in appreciation. "Thank you, but I have my reasons."

The issue came out a month later. I know this because Melissa came into the office after lunch carrying a half dozen copies. She came into my office with a big shit-eating grin on her face. "Carl, can I get your autograph?" She dropped one on my desk, and I just stared!

I figured we might have been part of a blurb, or maybe a boxed paragraph besides the article on private equity groups. Instead my picture was on the cover, sitting on the edge of my desk, one foot on the floor and the other dangling, a smile on my face, wearing a good gray suit. The cover article was titled, 'The New Face Of Venture Capital'. "Oh, Holy Christ!", I exclaimed.

"You're famous, boss!"

"You're fired! This is all your fault! Yours and John's. Go tell him he's fired too! You're all fired!"

Missy laughed at this and left a copy on my desk. You could hear the uproar throughout the place as people began reading the story.

I couldn't help it. It was like watching a car crash in a race. You know you shouldn't be watching it, but you can't tear your eyes away. I knew I had work to do, but I had to read it anyway. I got up and closed the door to my office.

One of the first things Carl Buckman said to me after I introduced myself was, "I can't imagine why anybody would want to read about me. I have got to be the most boring guy on the planet!"

Not hardly.

I rolled my eyes at that. I remembered saying it, and it looked like it was coming back to haunt me. What else had I blathered on about?

Buckman, 30, is the President and CEO of the Buckman Group, a virtually unknown private equity and capital firm. Unknown, that is, until they were discovered to be the venture capitalists behind three of the biggest and hottest tech IPOs of the past decade. Now they hold ownership positions and board seats on three of the fastest growing companies in Silicon Valley - Microsoft, Adobe, and Autodesk - and they are just getting started.

The company is the creation of Carl Buckman, one of the most intriguing Renaissance men to be seen in recent years. In an industry filled with accountants and lawyers, he is neither. His own story is even more interesting than that of his company. A combination of triumph and tragedy, he is one of the most unique individuals to shake up Wall Street in recent history.

I debated crossing things out with a black Magic Marker, but realized I would do better with a paint brush. I wondered if the fire sprinklers would go off if I burned the thing. I kept reading.

Physically, Buckman is just under six foot tall, with a tough and wiry build. His nose was obviously broken and never rebuilt properly. He is extremely fit; he spends an hour every morning exercising and lifting weights. His voice is a gravelly baritone, and he speaks with a distinct southern accent. He is normally courteous and well spoken, but that can change. When I asked if I could meet his wife and family, for background purposes, the temperature of the room dropped precipitously, and I was told in no uncertain terms that his children were off limits. "Or else!" Buckman is extraordinarily protective of his family. He has good reason to be. More on that later. [Editor's Note: Fortune does not publish photographs or names of minor children without a parent's permission.]

Wait until Marilyn reads this shit! I was never going to hear the end of it!

The article seemed to alternate between segments about my personal life and discussions of what the company was doing. It was very obvious that Mr. Colvin had done his research. He had quotes from both Bill Gates and John Warnock of Adobe about what I had brought to the table besides money. A typical paragraph was:

When asked by Gates why Microsoft should accept an investment from a relatively unknown company, Buckman boldly replied, 'Because of me. Everyone else you'll ever deal with will be either a lawyer or accountant. I'm the only guy you'll ever deal with who can actually understand what you do.' Then, at the closing of the deal, after signing the paperwork, Buckman gave Gates the code, free of charge, to create a DOS menu system, the highly popular Batch Menu Builder system, which he had written in his own spare time. The program was embedded, virtually unchanged, in DOS 2 and all subsequent versions. The system, which allows average users to create DOS menu systems, was considered internally at Microsoft to be almost as valuable as the money Buckman invested.

I snorted at that. The only thing I did with that was to point out to Bill, who was notoriously non-user friendly in his coding, that somebody other than us geeks had to use the stuff. This was a big difference from my first time through, when I had to do that just for Lefleur Homes and our network. Still, the story went on.

That he could do such a thing came as no surprise to the people who know him. Carl Buckman is considered by most to be a mathematical prodigy. At the age of 14 he entered his junior high school's science fair. Rather than get one of his teachers to help, his faculty adviser was a professor at nearby Towson State College, and the project resulted in his first two published papers. By 16 he was spending half the school day at Towson State. At 17 he was valedictorian of his high school class. At 21 he had earned his doctorate in applied mathematics from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. His thesis adviser, Dr. John Rhineburg, explained that Buckman's work provided a theoretical underpinning for advanced computer networking. Rhineburg reported that both MIT and Stanford had contacted him about offering a position to Buckman upon his graduation.

Interesting! John Rhineburg had never told me about any job offers, but maybe he just told them I was already taken.

And then he walked away from it all. When he graduated from high school he had turned down every scholarship but one. He had applied for an ROTC scholarship. Buckman has frequently commented that his family has a tradition of military service going back to the War of 1812. Every generation has produced soldiers and sailors, and it was now his turn. Even more so, rather than select the Signal Corps, where his mathematical skills would be most useful, he went through parachute and artillery training and joined the elite 82nd Airborne Division as an airborne artillery officer.

By all accounts, Buckman was as successful an Army officer as he was as a mathematician. Within three years he was commanding an artillery battery that was reportedly the finest in the division, and he was promoted twice, both times earlier than expected. Then on his final mission, now classified Top Secret, he earned a Bronze Star, very unusual during peacetime, and was injured badly enough to force his exit from the Army. He still has a limp that gets worse as the day gets longer. By the end of the day he needs a cane. He has never been heard to complain once.

How the hell did Colvin get this stuff?! Did he somehow get his hands on a copy of my DD-201 service record?

When asked where his initial funding came from, Buckman looked surprisingly sheepish and John Steiner, the Chairman of the Buckman Group laughed. Most of the other principals were laughing at this as well. According to Buckman and Steiner, it all started after a schoolyard fight on his 13th birthday, when three bullies tried to take his lunch money. When the fight was over, Buckman had a black eye, but the bullies were crippled and in the hospital. The laughter was over two related items, that either Carl Buckman could be intimidated or that the three attackers thought they could beat him up. Among his friends, Buckman is considered both fearless and lethal. He has multiple black belts in the martial arts.

Buckman escaped the fight with a black eye, but it didn't end there. He was arrested and expelled from school. That was when he met Steiner, then his father's attorney. Between the two of them, and each gives the other the credit, they got the police to investigate, the charges to be dropped, Buckman to be reinstated in school, the three bullies to be arrested, and then capped it all off by suing them for damages. He got $15,000 for his efforts, and immediately began investing in the market. He was a millionaire by the time he turned 18.

There was a section recounting our lunchtime conversation about how we set up the company.

Buckman built the Buckman Group around what he refers to as his 'brain trust.' The first member of the group was his lawyer, John Steiner, who had helped him get his seed money originally. The second and third members were Melissa Talmadge, his stockbroker, and Jake Eisenstein, Sr., who was his accountant. The newest member is Eisenstein's son, Jake Eisenstein, Jr., a tax lawyer who had recently graduated from law school and was working at his father's accounting firm.

"None of us had a clue what we were doing.", commented Buckman, over lunch with the group at a local eatery. "Jake Junior was green and ambitious, I was just out of the Army and clueless, the grownups had never done anything like this either. I think we succeeded because we didn't know we weren't supposed to."

"Carl is really loyal, and that's a very nice feeling. It makes you want to justify that faith.", said Talmadge. "By all rights, I was a mistake. I was a stockbroker, basically a salesman, and what Carl needed was really a stock analyst. He thought I could do the job." The others all nodded at this, including Buckman, but they also commented that Talmadge earned her paycheck from Day One. Certainly the Group's latest effort, creating and marketing investment pools, owes much of its success to her efforts.

A lot of the story was puffery. I am nowhere near as interesting as Colvin must have found me. Still, portions were surprisingly painful.

If Carl Buckman's public life is an unending stream of successes, first academic, then military, and now financial, his personal life has been anything but. It wasn't supposed to be like that.

The oldest son of upper middle class professionals in Baltimore's wealthy northern suburbs, Carl Buckman was destined for a similar future. That was only the surface picture. His mother was a cold and abusive perfectionist who doted on his younger brother. His father was a weak man who loved his wife more than his children. His younger brother, Hamilton, suffered from paranoid schizophrenia and was fixated on destroying Carl. Only his younger sister, Suzanna, was at all normal, and her only goal was surviving the family and escaping.

Buckman's mother had an idealized dream of her eldest son as a corporate drone, with detailed plans for him. Carl's life was planned from the moment he was born - the schools he would attend, the Ivy League college he would graduate from, the type of girl he would marry, the job he would take, the home he would live in. Buckman's successes meant nothing to his parents, since they were not the successes they had planned for him. He rebelled by becoming even more successful.

Worst of all was his psychotic brother, the favored child. The older Hamilton got, the more aggressive and dangerous he became towards Carl. By 16 Carl was living with his possessions under lock and key, and sleeping in a locked room, just to survive. At that point his parents solved the problem by evicting the troublesome son - Carl! He moved into an apartment that he paid for himself with his trading profits.

If there is one constant to Carl Buckman's life, it seems to be his wife Marilyn. They met freshman year at a fraternity party, where various accounts have him winning her in a drinking contest. Regardless, they have been together ever since. They were married in 1978 shortly after she graduated from college. Unfortunately, Marilyn was not the woman his parents wanted him to marry. A few weeks after the wedding they secretly disowned him.

In 1983 it all came to a head. Now out of the army and living back in Maryland, he had begun the Buckman Group. Suddenly his wife was being stalked, and her car was vandalized and then burned. Following an attempted firebombing at their rural home, Buckman brought in bodyguards for his family and flew them to a secret location. He stayed at home and kept his service pistol handy. The police investigated and questioned close to a hundred people, friends, family and business associates, even going back as far as high school and quizzing his old girlfriends. Nothing turned up.

It turned out to be his brother. Hamilton broke into Carl's home armed with a 14" long Bowie knife, essentially a short sword, with the announced intention of killing Marilyn and their son. Instead he found Carl and attacked him. Carl was forced to shoot and kill his own brother in his kitchen. Forensics tied Hamilton to the earlier attacks. It was ruled self defense, but that wasn't the end of it. His mother was hospitalized briefly herself. His parents divorced and tried to play their daughter Suzanna off against each other and against Carl. Suzanna, a nurse at nearby Johns Hopkins Hospital, was forced to leave and run away from both of them, and is now working in California at an undisclosed hospital.

I had told Colvin Suzie was working in San Francisco. No need to let him chase her down. I kept tabs on her through the security company, but she was living her own life now. She was reportedly telling people she was an orphan.

I read the story twice, groaning each time. My afternoon was totally shot! I packed my briefcase and headed out the door. If I got lucky, Marilyn wouldn't have been down to the post office box to pick up the mail, and she wouldn't see the magazine. I had been subscribing to Fortune since I was a teen. She never read it, but I figured she might read this one.

I was delayed getting out of the office when half a dozen people asked me to sign their copies of the magazine. Most of them I signed, "Get back to work! Carl Buckman", which elicited considerable laughter. John really made my day when he announced he was going to buy a picture frame and frame the cover. Just what I needed!

When I got home, everything looked normal, but the post office box had already been emptied. Charlie was running around the back yard, jumping in and out of the swimming pool, and Dum-Dum was barking and chasing him and jumping in herself. I didn't see Marilyn, which was unusual, but I found her inside the house, sitting at the kitchen table, watching our son through the patio door and drinking a cup of coffee. The twins were napping in jail.

My copy of Fortune magazine was on the kitchen table, and open to the cover article. The article had opened with a group picture of the five of us grouped around the front of my desk and laughing. Marilyn looked up at me and smiled. "You're famous!"

"I'd rather be anonymous.", I replied.

"Good luck with that!" She went back to reading, and then looked up and said, "You're in charge of your son. I want to find out more about you."

I snorted at that and dropped my briefcase. I went out through the patio door to the pool area. Dum-Dum immediately started barking happily and scrambled up the steps at the shallow end. "Oh, shit! NO!" The dog bounded towards me and tried to jump up on me, and when I pushed her away, she paid me back by shaking herself vigorously. She only weighed 35 pounds, but she must have had at least that much in water in her fur. My suit was going to the cleaners. I rubbed her head and she ran back to the pool and jumped in again. Charlie never got out, but simply waved and said hello.

I waved back and then went inside. "One of these days we need to invent a doggy water vacuum. Shove a wet Dum-Dum in one end, straight from the pool, and five minutes later a dry and fluffy Dum-Dum comes out the other."

Marilyn smiled at me. "I never knew you were so wonderful.", she teased, tapping a finger on the article.

I muttered something and went to the bedroom to change. Our daughters were still snoozing. I tossed my now wet suit jacket and trousers into the pile for the dry cleaners, and pulled on some swim trunks and a sport shirt, then wandered back to the kitchen barefoot. Maybe I could jump in the pool, too.

"Since when do you get to decide who I can and who I can't speak to?", asked my wife.

"Huh? What are you talking about?"

She waved the magazine at me. "Since when do you get to decide if I talk to a reporter?"

"What? That wasn't about you, that was about the kids!"

"You should have asked me!"

Charlie came in at that moment, dripping on the kitchen linoleum. I looked outside and saw Dum-Dum sleeping on the deck. "Are you guys fighting? Cool!", he said.

I looked over at Marilyn and just rolled my eyes. She snorted out a laugh and said, "No, we weren't fighting. Mind your own business."

"You want fighting? I'll show you fighting.", I said, balling up a fist and waving it around in the air.

"I want fighting!" Charlie came over and balled up a fist of his own, and made a wild roundhouse wing at me, all the while laughing. I blocked the fist with my own, and then gently reached out and poked him in the nose. He jumped back a few feet and then ran from the room, to turn and run back to the archway. "Let's fight!" I balled up both my fists and advanced on him, at which point he yelled 'Can't catch me!", and ran squealing and laughing down the hallway.

Kids! I turned back to Marilyn and wrapped my arms around her. "Want to fight?"

"No!"

"You sure? I hear make-up sex after fighting is pretty good!"

"You're more trouble than you're worth! I think I'm going to turn all the kids on you, see how you fight your way out of that!"

Charlie came screeching back through, yelling, "You can't get me! You can't get me!"

Marilyn pushed away from me and tried to snag our son. "If you wake your sisters up, I'll catch you alright!"

I headed outside. "I'm going for a swim. You should put on that little string bikini and join me."

The girls began fussing. Marilyn answered, "In your dreams!" I laughed and left, while she went to the twins. Charlie was banished outside a minute later, and he jumped back into the pool. Dum-Dum continued sleeping on the deck in the warm sun. Charlie must have worn her out. I pulled off my shirt and did a cannonball into the pool near my son, and then did a few laps, while he laughed and tried to hold me back. We horsed around, and the next time I looked at the dog, she was laying on her back, all four paws up in the air, squirming around with an itch, and snoring. Charlie really had worn her out!

Dinner was hamburgers on the grill, with the girls working over cut up burgers without rolls, and their brother, mother and me eating cheeseburgers with all the fixings. The twins were covered with ketchup and grease when they finished, and I offered to just dunk them in the swimming pool, but Marilyn called me a barbarian and took them inside for baths.

"Daddy, what's a barbarian?", asked Charlie.

I laughed. "I guess it's me. You'd better go ask your mother about that." I laughed some more, when he ran off after Marilyn.

A moment later I heard his little voice going, "Mommy..." I laughed some more.

I swam a bit more, and then went inside and opened a bottle of Pinot Grigio and brought it and a couple of glasses outside with me. Marilyn was in the laundry room at the time, searching for some clean pajamas for the kids, and I held the wine and glasses up and tilted my head towards the back deck. "Let me get these guys to bed first.", she said.

Twenty minutes later she came through the patio door and flopped down beside me on a chaise lounge. "Tell me again why I wanted children.", she told me.

I chuckled and poured her a glass of the Pinot. "Can't help you there. I just wanted sex. You're the one who wanted kids!"

"You're no help!" She took the glass from me and said, "Thank you! Thank you!"

"What did you tell Charlie about barbarians?"

Marilyn laughed hard enough to spill a drop of her wine. "Speaking of barbarians - He's a whole tribe all on his own! I can't wait until school starts and he goes all day long, and not just mornings."

I glanced over at her, and noticed the drop of wine on her tee shirt. "You spilled some wine. Take your shirt off."

Marilyn rolled her eyes. "Forget it! You have ulterior motives! I fell for that once before, and look what happened!" I smiled and topped off her glass. After a second, she drank some more, and then said, "No, no, no! That's not going to happen! You're just trying to get me drunk and have your way with me!"

I gave her my most innocent look, and just gaped in a silent protest. I kept topping off her glass, and when the bottle was done, I went inside and opened a second.

Marilyn promptly held out her glass for a refill. "It won't work, you know.", I was told.

"What won't work?"

"Getting me drunk and thinking it will make me horny!"

"Never crossed my mind!" I had to laugh at this, since the way my wife was talking, she was getting both drunk and very horny! "I'm shocked you could think that of me!" I poured some more wine in my own glass. "Sure you don't want to take you shirt off? What if you spilled some more wine?"

Marilyn snorted and sipped some wine, but then she sat upright. Setting her glass down, she peeled her shirt off and tossed it on the table. Then she took her glass and lay back on the lounger. She noticed me watching her, and said, "Don't get any ideas! It's hot out here!"

"Whatever you say, honey. What about your shorts?"

"It's not that hot!", was her reply. I just shrugged. Five minutes later she unzipped her shorts and pushed them off as well, to leave her in her panties and bra. She looked at me accusingly and said, "It's still warm. Don't get any ideas!" She finished her wine and I poured her some more.

"I didn't say anything.", I said innocently. I glanced at my watch. It was almost eight, and while it was still light out, the kids were in bed. I looked at Marilyn out of the corner of my eye. Working out with me in the mornings had done her a world of good. She had a few stretch marks, but nothing to be ashamed of, and she was fairly tight and toned. Her bikini cut scar was mostly gone, and what there was was hidden by her underwear. She had on 'everyday' underwear, but still looked pretty good. I could feel my dick stiffening as I looked at her. Then I saw her glancing in my direction, and she had a ghostly smile on her face.

"You know, if you're still hot, maybe you should jump in the pool.", I said.

"If I go inside now to change, I'll wake up the kids."

"Go swimming in your underwear."

Marilyn smiled to herself, and then said, "I couldn't do that! It's not right."

"I won't tell if you don't."

She smiled some more, and then sat upright. "It really is warm!" She stood up and went towards the pool. I pulled my shirt off and followed her by just a few seconds.

Marilyn tried to swim away from me, towards the deep end, but she knew I was behind her and wasn't trying too hard. I swam behind her, closely, and ended up 'herding' her over towards the shallow end, at about the four foot level. There I trapped her against the side of the pool, with my arms holding onto the sides of the pool, trapping her in front of me. "I don't actually think it's all that hot.", I said.

"No?"

"I think it's you that's hot!" I reached behind her and flicked the catch on her bra, and pulled it off. I tossed it up on the edge of the pool. Then I pushed her panties down. I missed catching them, but didn't want to bother looking for them at that moment. Next went my own swim trunks, which ended up around my left foot, but at least didn't go floating away.

Marilyn reached down between us and spread her pussy lips apart, and guided me inside as I pushed closer to her. I pushed completely inside in a single motion, and she whimpered as I bottomed out. Then she wrapped her arms around my neck and raised her legs, to wrap around my waist, and I began fucking her against the side of the pool. If the hard tiles of the poolside bothered her, Marilyn didn't let on. I couldn't really pound into her, what with the resistance of the water and the position, but we definitely made waves before I filled her pussy with jism, and then pistoned it out into the water surrounding us.

My wife sighed happily as we clung to each other afterwards. "You know, it won't be long before we won't be able to get away with this!"

"Huh?"

She nodded towards the house. "One of these days we're going to look up and find somebody looking back!"

I smiled at the thought. "Another good reason to take vacations without the kids. I think we are due for another trip to the Bahamas."

"Without the children?

"What else would we be without?", I teased.

"Any underwear?"

I helped Marilyn out of the pool and led her over to the grass, where there was a towel spread out from earlier in the day. I pushed her down onto the towel, and then had her lay face down with her legs spread apart. I moved behind her and entered her again, and began moving. I whispered in her ear, "I think we should take those two party dresses we got you. Maybe look for a few more."

Marilyn moaned and thrust back at me. The sound of our two bodies slapping wetly was magnified in the still night air. The only thing louder was her cries of, "Fuck me! Fuck me!", and my grunts. When I began whispering how I was going to assfuck her on the beach, it drove us both over the edge, and I unloaded again. We collapsed on top of each other, and lay there until we could catch our breaths.

"Should I call Taylor and schedule a week before Charlie goes back to school?", I asked. I sat upright and then climbed to my feet.

Marilyn took my hand and got up as well. She kissed me and giggled, "You bet!"

I wandered around the pool area and retrieved our clothing. Marilyn looked around and said, "Where's my underwear?"

I looked around. I had her wet bra, but not her panties. "In the pool, maybe? You'll need to look for them in the morning."

"Well, what if it gets into the pool filter?"

"Yet another good reason to only go skinny-dipping." I took her hand and led her away from the pool. "We'll worry about it in the morning."

Chapter 89: Letters To The Editor

We made a parents-only trip to Hougomont in mid August, and did pretty much everything we had talked about around the pool that night. We didn't pack any underwear, we did pack some club dresses for Marilyn, and we did screw every way possible down there. I even went skinny-dipping with her one afternoon and then used the suntan lotion as lube for an assfuck on the beach. It was an excellent diversion before coming home and getting back to normal.

Normal was really rather... normal! We put Charlie in the local elementary school, Fifth District Elementary, which, despite its totally unimaginative name, seemed like a nice enough school. Besides, the most important part of any school is whether the parents want their child to succeed. I could put Charlie in the fanciest prep school in the country, but if I don't do my job as his father, he'd flunk. Neither Marilyn nor I would allow our kids to flunk that way.

We had debated putting Charlie and the girls in parochial school, but I was resistant. For one thing, Fifth District was barely five minutes from our house, right down Mount Carmel Road in Upperco. Our Lady of Grace was in Parkton, at the corner of York and Middletown, and probably fifteen to twenty minutes away. Secondly, my taxes were already paying for the public schools, and while I could buy both schools out of petty cash, it seemed really wasteful.

Finally, I just have an inherent bias against parochial schools. I did just fine in public schools, both this time and the last, and I was nowhere near as impressed with the job the Catholic schools in Utica had done with the Lefleurs. Or it could just be that what little religious belief I've retained, I still consider myself a Lutheran, hard core Protestant, and more than a little skeptical of Catholicism and their schooling. Well, all except the Jesuits, who have a solid reputation as scholars, and run some first rate colleges. You might graduate a convert, but you'll have learned how to think!

If there was a problem with Fifth District, we could always reconsider. Until then, it was a whole lot closer to run down the road. Charlie didn't seem to mind. You know those commercials where the child tearfully clings to his parents rather than climb on the school bus? (Marilyn had driven him to kindergarten last year.) Forget it! Charlie scampered down the driveway, climbed up the steps into the bus, and never looked back! I had gone outside with Marilyn to watch this momentous occasion. Marilyn and I just looked at each other and laughed. "Isn't this supposed to be real sentimental? Isn't he supposed to cry or something?", I asked.

"So much for missing Mommy and Daddy!", she replied.

"Wait until he starts asking to ride his little motorcycle to school." Marilyn just rolled her eyes at that. I stood there for a moment watching the black GMC following behind the bus. It had followed the bus from the bus garage, would hang around in the parking lot of the school, and then tail the bus home again. Fifth District wasn't thrilled, but I bought them off with a new computer system.

I gave Marilyn a quick kiss good-bye, and then climbed into my car to go to the office. "I'll be back by 5:30 or so."

Charlie was still five when he started first grade, just like I had been. In Maryland the cutoff date was the calendar year, so if you turned six by December 31, you started school when you were five. Charlie was an October baby, I was born in November, and Hamilton had been born in December, so we all started school at five. The twins, born in the summer, would start at six. It didn't seem a problem for Charlie, though. While Hamilton and I had been small as little kids, Charlie was big for his age.

The article in Fortune proved to be a mixed blessing. Now that the world knew of us, people started beating a path to our door. It got worse when somebody at Dell blabbed that we were involved with them, too. Mike Dell wasn't too amused when this all came out, but the article in Business Week clearly stated it was a Dell insider who spilled the beans. Both Business Week and Forbes ran articles on venture capital and high tech, and we were listed prominently with the other outfits who specialized in this area. At least I didn't make the cover, though my picture was on the insides in both magazines.

I was a little embarrassed by it all, but Marilyn took it with a great sense of humor. After reading the Forbes article, she had spent the rest of the night teasing me about it, whenever the kids were out of earshot, and gushing about how she got to sleep with a celebrity! I ended up giving her a good swat on the behind, which earned me some more laughter, and then later, after she put the kids to bed, I gave her a totally different kind of punishment!

Business wise, the publicity was generally a good thing. It gave us a lot of legitimacy in the industry, which brought both business and employees to our door. We began to debate opening a California office, maybe in the Palo Alto area, and trying to figure out how we would run that. It would mean additional travel for both me and Jake Junior, since neither of us wanted to move. He had started getting serious about a girl in the Perry Hall area, who was divorced and shared custody of their son with her husband, and who wasn't about to move. One possibility was finding somebody at one of the Sand Hill Road outfits and enticing them to jump ship and start up a new branch. We'd have to cut him in for a piece of the pie, for sure, but there just might be benefits to it. Fortunately, I remembered a lot of the names who made it big in the business, and I knew which ones to avoid, no matter what their pedigree was.

As for the new business, some was good, a lot was bad, and some was just ridiculous. We were approached by one guy who wanted us to back him on a chain of vending machines selling fresh roasted peanuts! This guy was convinced that people across the country were dying to stand next to a vending machine for five minutes or more so that they could get fresh roasted peanuts from it. The craziest ideas would get tacked to a bulletin board in the break room and was known as the 'Hall of Shame!' That one certainly qualified.

In early 1987, one of the strangest opportunities opened up. I became an author! Well, co-author, I suppose, and really, more like a glorified editor. It all came about because of one of my more innocuous habits. Generally speaking, it's harmless, and almost never gets me into trouble. Most of the time nobody even knows about it. I certainly don't advertise it, although it's not really very shameful.

I write letters to the editor.

It started innocently enough. On my first go through, when I was 14, I had read an article in Popular Science about canoeing, and I wrote back, adding my two cents worth about something I can't remember anymore, but it got published two issues later. It was like that first hit on the crack pipe, and I was hooked! Over the years I kept reading magazines and newspapers and smoking the crack. What I didn't realize when I started it, but learned later on when I had to edit the company newsletter, was how desperate most publishers and editors are to fill in all the white space.

I had letters published in everything from the local newspaper to major national magazines. An article on pharmaceutical sales techniques in Time earned a response that was printed. Two scholarly notes on Iran and ship building programs got published in the Proceedings of the Naval Institute. One amusing time was when a local bridge in Otsego County was closed for repairs, and took three years to reopen. I wrote in the Oneonta Daily Star how I wasn't voting for the local state senator until it got fixed, and I urged other readers to do the same. Within two days I was placed on the senator's mailing list and received weekly updates on all he was doing about the bridge. Marilyn thought this was just as funny as I did. Another time I wrote a response to an article in the RPI alumni magazine after they wrote that KGS had bought a new chapter house in 2010 that had once been a home for unwed mothers. My response was that this was quite appropriate, since so many Keggers had spent so much time helping girls fill the home to begin with. That earned me some hate mail from that generation of Keggers and general applause from everybody else.

Nothing had changed on this go around. You write a letter that either vents about something or refutes some asshole. Nine chances out of ten, the editors shitcan it anyway. It doesn't matter, since just writing it makes you feel better anyway, and gives you a reason to turn to the Letters page first.

In this case, the Baltimore Sun had written an article about the cost of maintenance on the Bay Bridge. Some jackass had written saying that the cost was excessive and that taxpayer money shouldn't be spent maintaining a bridge that was incorrectly and incompetently built to begin with, and that the contractors should be sued. I had responded with an even longer piece that countered that the cost was not excessive, that it was well within the expected costs forecast originally, and that maintenance needed to be performed on all equipment. My response got picked up and published on the op-ed page as a guest editorial, which surprised the hell out of me. My note sparked a number of responses, both pro and con, which was probably why they published it in the first place.

One of those responses turned out to be very interesting. A professor of civil engineering at UMBC wrote back with a lengthy dissertation on infrastructure maintenance that was way too long and technical for the Sun to publish, but they sent it to me along with a personal note. Maybe I wanted to talk to this guy. I read through his stuff and quickly jotted a note back to him, letting him know I had received his information from the Sun, but that they didn't plan to publish it. I agreed with much of what he was saying, and thanked him for the interest.

What happened next surprised me. I received a second note, sent directly to me this time, with about a two inch thick stack of scientific papers, some by him, and some by others, on the effects of deteriorating infrastructure and the costs of repair. It was actually rather interesting. I spent the better part of an afternoon at the office working my way through the papers, and then figured out his phone number over at the college. Then I called him and thanked him, and he invited me to a symposium he was a part of on Thursday evening, on Infrastructure Requirements and Maintenance.

And that was how I met Professor Harold Johnson. Wednesday night I told Marilyn I would probably be late coming home on Thursday, and that I would probably be eating in town. When she asked why, I explained about the papers I had gotten. "Going back to being a scientist?", she teased.

I put on my best haughty demeanor, and answered, "I'll have you know I've always been a scientist, and you lesser breeds should recognize my inherent superiority!"

"Oh, really? Maybe such a superior person should sleep in the library tonight, so that the ideas in those books can seep in."

I came around the kitchen island and hugged her shoulder. "No, I think that if I sleep with you, maybe my superior ideas and thoughts could seep into you!"

"With an attitude like that, nothing else is going to be seeping in!", she replied.

"Hmmm ... Maybe I could come up with a special sleep teaching technique." We kept teasing back and forth until after dinner. Later that night Marilyn allowed me to sleep in our bed, and I worked on that special technique with her.

UMBC, the University of Maryland - Baltimore County, is in Arbutus, down on the southwestern side of Baltimore. It is right next door to Catonsville Community College, otherwise known to us locals as either USC, the University of Southern Catonsville, or UCLA, University of Catonsville, Left at Arbutus. Depending on the time of day, it is about 40 minutes from Hereford. Run down to the Beltway and then turn right, and travel around the city. The symposium was at 7:00 PM, so I drove down to Towson, had some dinner in town, and then drove down to Arbutus.

The symposium was held in a lecture hall in the Engineering Building. I parked in a lot to the west of the building and went in. Traffic had been heavy on the Beltway, so I got there about fifteen minutes late. I slipped in a door in the back of the room and sat in one of the rear seats. The symposium had professors of engineering and economics and political science, and the audience was composed of what looked like grad students for the various professors. No surprise there. I must have been the only member of the general public to attend, and I wouldn't have been there if I hadn't been specifically invited.

Nothing new was discussed, although I generally found it interesting. Most of the discussion was about roads and bridges, and how the nation's infrastructure was deteriorating. This was pretty much true at the time, and was only going to get worse. By the time of the Great Recession, vast areas of the country were being left to rot without any maintenance at all. If a bridge collapsed, it was left that way, and the residents were shit out of luck. Potholes became the new roadways. Putting up traffic cones was cheaper than replacing guardrails when somebody went off the road. Nobody at the symposium came up with any ways to stop the problem, and at the end the grad students left, their mandatory attendance duly noted.

It was just shy of 9:00 when the meeting broke up, and I got out of my chair and walked down the aisle to the front of the lecture hall. Dr. Johnson was the resident expert on bridges and roads. I stepped over the low railing around the stage area and went up to him. "Professor Johnson?"

He looked up at me. "Yes? Can I help you?"

I smiled and put my hand out. "Carl Buckman, Doctor. You invited me to the symposium, remember?"

"Oh, yes, thank you for coming. It's nice when we can get somebody other than just us academics to one of these things."

"I quite agree. I remember those days myself."

"Oh?", he asked.

I handed him one of my business cards with the PhD behind my name. "Yes, a few years ago I was a grad student myself."

His eyebrows raised slightly. "Where did you go to school?"

"Rensselaer. I got a doctorate in applied mathematics about ten years ago. It seems like another lifetime."

"I know RPI. I got my bachelors at Clarkson."

"Do you still follow hockey?", I asked. Clarkson-RPI had been a major Division I rivalry for years.

He grinned. "Not for many years. It was always good for a date, though." I smiled and nodded along with him. "I should have known by your response to that idiot letter to the editor you had a mathematical background. I just wish more people cared about these things. Nothing gets done until something terrible happens."

"It's the nature of the beast, Professor. When times are good we don't want to spend the money. When times are bad we don't have the money to spend. Unless you've figured out a way to re-engineer humans, nothing happens unless you make it happen.", I answered. I glanced at my watch. We were the last ones in the lecture hall, and it was after 9:00. "I suppose we need to leave. It looks like they are about to lock us in for the night."

"I wish we could talk longer."

I was on the verge of saying goodbye, but for some reason I postponed it a bit. "I could do with a late bite to eat. How about you, Professor? Anywhere nearby we can grab a cup of coffee or something?"

He looked a little startled at that. "Not really sure. I think most of the local diners are closed. We might find a sandwich shop or something. There's a pretty nice place down South Rolling Road on Frederick, Russel's, but it might be pricey for a cup of coffee."

I waved this off with a smile. "My treat. It feels good to get back into the scientific world." Johnson gave me an odd look at that, so I said, "I'll explain when we get there."

I waited while the professor packed his briefcase and then followed him outside. Five minutes later I followed him into a parking lot on Frederick. I led him inside. Very nice, large, with lots of tables and a few booths. By now the evening rush was long over and we were among the last wave of diners.

The hostess seated us in a booth and gave us our menus, and a pretty young waitress came over. "Hello. My name is Gretchen and I'll be serving you. Can I get you gentlemen something to drink while you decide what you want?"

I smiled and nodded. "It's been a long day. Can I get a gin and tonic?" I looked over at Johnson and said, "Remember, my treat."

He smiled back and ordered a Manhattan. Then, after Gretchen left, he said, "Well, I don't turn down too many free meals. What do you normally do? What's your day job?"

I nodded. "Ah, what did I do when I left RPI with my doctorate?" He nodded, and I said, "Well, for a few years I worked for Uncle Sam. I went to school on an ROTC scholarship, so after graduation I went into the Army. When I got out of the Army, I started an investment company. That's what I do now."

"You started an investment company?", he asked incredulously.

I smiled. "Mathematics offers a number of very lucrative career choices, Doctor."

"I guess so."

We chatted a few minutes about RPI and Clarkson, and I admitted that I had hurt my leg in the Army, and that was why I used a cane. When the waitress came back with our drinks, she asked, "Ready to order now?"

I had glanced at my menu, and knew what I wanted. "Are the crab cakes good?"

"The crab cakes are great!"

"Sounds good to me." I handed Gretchen the menu and we looked at Johnson.

"I'm sold. The same for me, please."

"Two crab cake orders coming right up." She left.

I sipped my drink and it was just what I needed. "Ahh, that hits the spot. I have to drive tonight, so I can't have more than two, but it's been a long day."

Johnson drank some of his and gave a childish grin. "I feel like I'm breaking the rules, drinking on a school night. My wife and I usually just have a few drinks over the weekend."

We chatted a little more. Johnson was a few years older than me, perhaps 35 or 36, married to an English professor at the college, with two girls, both in junior high school. He was a fairly average fellow. The absent-minded professor stereotype is just that, a stereotype. Shortly before the waitress brought out our crab cakes, he asked, "So, why did you come to the symposium?"

"Well, I think just because you invited me. I doubt if I would have even heard of it otherwise."

He shook his head. "I just wish more people were interested in the infrastructure they depend on. Nothing ever happens until something collapses and somebody dies."

Gretchen came out with our plates at that moment, so I was delayed in responding. I did order a second round of drinks. Then, after sampling my crab cake (very tasty!), I said, "Without a decent advertising and public relations campaign, you'll never get people to care about infrastructure. It's just not very sexy, and it costs money."

He shrugged. "I know. You're right. What do you do about it?"

"Not really sure. I can tell you one thing, though. If what you're doing isn't working, don't continue doing it in the hopes it will suddenly work. Do something different. Even in the little things."

"Like what?"

Thankfully I had just started chewing a piece of crab cake, so I had a few seconds to think. I had opened my fat yap without thinking. I held up a finger as a timeout while I chewed and swallowed, and then washed the bite down with my gin and tonic. "Okay, well, something simple. I was reading your papers. They had titles like, oh, 'Adverse Oxidation Effects On Infrastructure Cost Scenarios'. Nobody outside of the engineering field will ever read that. What regular people will read, what politicians and newspaper people will read, is 'Rusty Bridges Cost Money!'"

"Well, yes, but that's not how technical papers get written!", he protested.

"I know that. I've written some myself. What I'm saying, though, is that if you want to get the attention of people who aren't technical, you can't write technical. You have to write in terms they can understand and relate to. They won't understand scenarios. They'll understand a bridge collapsing and their taxes going up. You need to gear your public information to the public.", I answered.

I continued, "That's just one thing. I'm sure there are others. For instance, politicians love to be photographed opening a bridge or breaking ground doing something. You need to convince them that it's just as sexy to be photographed filling in a pothole or placing a traffic cone on the street. Tell them how it makes them look practical and thrifty. Hit them over the head with dollars, not tech reports and journals."

He smiled. "You sound like somebody without very much trust in our public servants."

"I trust them to do whatever they think will get them re-elected. Convince them that filling potholes will get them re-elected, and they will fill in potholes."

"That's very cynical."

"That's very realistic.", I replied.

He thought for a second and said, "You should run for office."

I practically spit out my drink. "Not in a million years!"

"Then how will you ever get things to change? If you don't help, who will?"

"Figure out a different way, Professor. I haven't sunk that low, yet.", I responded.

After our late dinner, I thanked Johnson for an interesting evening and went home. I got to bed around midnight. Marilyn was already fast asleep, with Dum-Dum warming my side of the bed. I let the dog out to pee in the back yard, and when she came back in she went to Charlie's room. I climbed into my pre-warmed bed and fell asleep.

Friday morning Marilyn was snuggled up against me. As per our normal schedule, she woke up before me, and headed into the bathroom to get a shower first. Since Marilyn's normal morning routine takes thirty-plus minutes, I caught a few more winks. Dum-Dum woke me a few minutes later and whined until I put her out in the back yard. While she peed, I went into the bathroom and did the same. I returned to let her in and then headed back to the bathroom for my shower and shave.

"Morning! How was your lecture?", asked Marilyn.

"Interesting, and it was a symposium, not a lecture."

"Only you would care about the difference."

I had to smile at that. "Sorry I got home so late. I ended up talking to the professor late. Did you stay up waiting for me?"

"No. After I got the kids to bed, I fell asleep on the couch."

"Well, sorry about that."

Just then, the girls came stumbling into our bathroom, gabbling about breakfast. I hastily wrapped a towel around my waist. "You two are going to get an anatomy lesson one of these days!", I protested.

"It'll be a short lesson.", commented their mother.

"Oh, that is cold, lady! That is cold!"

Marilyn blew a raspberry at me and then herded the girls back out through the bedroom and down the hall. I hopped in the shower and did my morning ablutions in about half the time it takes Marilyn. On the other hand, a major portion of her regimen includes rubbing body lotion all over - and I mean all over. On kid free vacations, I tended to treat this as a spectator sport. I had decided that there was a certain downside to complaining about this use of her time.

That was about it for my re-immersion in the world of science, or so I thought. I took the afternoon off and we drove the kids up to Deep Creek Lake for the weekend. It's very scenic up there in the springtime, and I remember that in another lifetime, Suzie and her family had frequently gone camping up there. Now Suzie wouldn't be camping at Deep Creek.

In no possible way would I ever want to take Marilyn camping. No matter how much enjoyment I would get in watching her fumble around in the woods, it couldn't possibly match the overall nuisance she would prove.

I knew this for an absolute fact, and a certain portion of my psyche, the dark and demented portion, longed for the day when she would attempt camping. The deal we had made back when she told me she was pregnant the first time was that I would do boy stuff and she would do girl stuff. So, I would be the adult with Charlie in the Boy Scouts, and Marilyn would join the Girl Scouts with Holly and Molly. Charlie was already a Tiger Cub, and I was his designated adult. Charlie was finding this to be loads of fun, and was looking forward to when he was old enough to go camping overnight, when he made it to Webelos. I was looking forward to the day when Marilyn had to go camping with the Brownies, or whatever age group of girls went camping. With any luck, one of the other parents would make a home movie, and I could bribe them into giving me a copy. I would be willing to pay a serious bribe to get movie footage of Marilyn stumbling around in the wilderness!

For this weekend, however, we simply stayed at a lakefront cabin and did some hiking and tourist type stuff. Sunday afternoon we drove back to Hereford and hosed off the kids and then put them to bed for a nap. Monday Marilyn would pick up Dum-Dum from the kennel and I would go back to the office.

By the end of the week, however, science reared its ugly head again. Harry Johnson called. "Doctor Buckman, I wanted to call again and thank you for coming to the symposium, and for dinner afterwards. I hope you didn't get home too late."

"Nothing I wasn't expecting. Thank you for calling."

"Do you remember how we were talking about what you could do to help me?", he asked.

My brow wrinkled at this. Either I had forgotten this part of the conversation, or Harry Johnson was a better salesman than I had figured. "I remember telling you I wasn't ever going to run for office."

He laughed at that. "I remember that, too. No, I'm talking about other things I could do to bring the problem to the public's attention."

That part I remembered. "Okay, I remember talking about that. Did you have something in mind?"

"We could write a book!"

I stared at my phone for a second. It almost sounded to me like Johnson had said something about writing a book. "Excuse me?"

"I said we could write a book."

"That's what I thought you said. For a second there I thought Timothy Leary had gotten loose with the LSD again. A book?"

Harry laughed. "I'm serious. Let me explain. Last fall I was approached by Simon and Schuster about a book on infrastructure. I turned them down. I tried to get started, but it was a disaster. You could make it better, a lot better."

"I am definitely thinking that Timothy Leary is on the loose again."

"Give me a chance. Let me talk to you about this. Please."

I rolled my eyes to the ceiling, but I agreed. The earliest that we could meet was Thursday after lunch. Harry agreed to drive to my office this time, since I had driven to see him previously. I let Grace know I had an appointment.

On Thursday Professor Johnson showed up at our offices around 1:00 PM. I had given him the directions, but I never really explained what the place was like. My intercom buzzed and Grace said, "Mister Buckman, your appointment is here."

I hit the button on my phone and said, "Out in a second." Then I stood up and left my office, going down the hall. I found Johnson in the lobby, looking around in a somewhat bewildered fashion. "Harry! Good to see you again!" I held my hand out to shake his.

"Carl, thank you. What is this place? What do you do here?", he asked.

I smiled. "Remember how I told you my degrees were in applied math?" He nodded, and I continued, "Well, the application is money! We're a private venture capital firm."

"Wall Street? That sort of thing? And the company is named after you? You must be pretty important, then."

I smiled at that. "You could say that. I'm the majority owner. Come on back to my office."

"How come the receptionist didn't call you Doctor Buckman?"

Trust a scientist to worry about titles. One place I worked, on my first go, was a research lab, where the size of your desk was based on your college degree. Lab techs didn't get a desk, lab techs with an associates degree got a rickety standup desk, a bachelors degree earned you a four foot long desk with drawers on one side, a masters upgraded you to a five foot desk, and PhDs had a six foot desk with drawers on both sides. "I'm lucky she said 'Mister.' Most of the time it's Carl or 'Hey, you!' We're pretty informal around here."

Once in my office, I directed Harry over to the lounge area, where I had my couch and the armchairs. "Okay, shoot! What's this about a book?"

Harry explained his ideas. Last year, in 1986, he had been approached by the non-fiction arm of Simon and Schuster, the publishing house, about writing a book about infrastructure and economics based on a series of papers he had written. At the time, he had turned them down, because it was obvious that what they wanted was something he didn't know how to write. Like I had said the other night, they needed something in layman's terms. They came to him because he was a leading authority in the field.

They came back to him last month, shortly after the Schoharie Creek Bridge on the New York State Thruway was washed out. The time was right for a book on the subject. I actually knew a fair bit about this, since in my previous life, I knew about the bridge. Unfortunately for the sake of the book, the collapse was not due to poor maintenance, but because unprecedented flooding had washed the supports out from under the bridge. Ten people died.

The more Harry talked, the more I warmed to the subject. In a way, it reminded me of my valedictory speech, which had been reread at the reunion a few years ago. Taxes are what we pay so we can have bridges and roads and sewers and water and stuff. This shit is boring and expensive and nobody wants to hear about it, but it is also important!

I sat there and listened, and about the time when Harry began to repeat himself, I held up my hands and made the Time-Out gesture. "Okay, I think I am getting the gist of this. Now, how do you see this book working? Break out the relevant sections. What makes this book special? Why should anybody buy this book?"

Harry Johnson was not accustomed to thinking like this. In his academic world, you wrote dense papers with arcane stuff for fellow specialists, published it in specialized journals, and talked about things to other specialists. I had never written a book either, but my life had never been the pure science and engineering lifestyle. Harry began stumbling through some ideas and slowly a vision began forming in my mind.

In the work section of my office, near the conference table, I had a wall full of white boards. I motioned for Harry to follow me and I grabbed a dry erase marker and began outlining various sections of the book. "For one thing, we can't make this just about roads or bridges. Infrastructure covers a lot of other stuff - dams, sewer systems, water systems, canals - all sorts of things. Nobody is going to read about just one thing, but if we do a just a chapter or two on each item, we can do a survey style book for the public."

"I don't have information on those things. My specialty is bridges and roads.", he protested.

I shrugged this off. "So what?! You know who does know this stuff, you can find the relevant papers and technical info, and you can make sure we credit everybody involved. Then we have to find relevant and current examples of problems, and put them in the appropriate chapter."

"There was a dam collapse in Italy a couple of years ago. We could put that in the section on dams.", he offered.

I shook my head. "No, we need American examples. Don't get me wrong, I am sure it was a tragedy, but American readers won't care about disasters somewhere else. We'll need examples from places the readers have heard about and can relate to. They won't care about stuff that happens overseas."

"That's incredibly callous!", he protested.

Unfortunately, he was right. I sat down on the conference table and nodded to him. "I know. This is a situation where we're both right. The problem is that I'm talking about a book designed to appeal to the American reader. People can be very insular on these things. For one thing, like I said, they at least will have some idea where a location in the U.S. is, and may have heard about it on the news. For another thing, you tell the average guy on the street that a bridge in a foreign country collapsed, they will immediately figure, 'Of course it did! It was built by a bunch of foreigners!' It won't matter if the entire work force went to MIT or not."

"That's awful."

"Yes it is, but very human. Take a look at our own news on TV. A fishing boat that sinks with three people drowning will get more television time on the news than a ferryboat in the Philippines that sinks and loses a thousand!" I just shrugged and held my hands up in a what-can-you-do-about-it gesture. "It's not fair and it's not right, but you know it happens."

"So you see this book as appealing to the average reader?"

I had to think about that. "You know, I just don't know. We'd need to talk to the publishing house about that. I would think it would appeal more to the college educated intellectual types rather than high school educated readers. The guy who reads Scientific American, not Field and Stream. Also, probably the readers of political books."

"Why politics?"

Professor Johnson really was a babe in the woods. "Infrastructure means money, money means politics."

"Oh, yes."

"So, still interested?", I asked him.

"Yes. Are you?"

"Yeah, actually, I am. I'll need to do some of this at home or after hours, but I get a certain amount of leeway with my schedule. It helps to have your name on the door. Who do you see doing what?"

"You'll have to do most of the writing, with me providing the technical information."

"Okay, but you'll need to go through and edit it, and then I'll have to edit your edits, and then the publishing house will probably toss the entire thing anyway and make us start over again from scratch.", I answered.

That made Harry smile. "Fifty-fifty split?"

"You can even have top billing." I held out my hand and we shook on it. Then I went to the door to my office and opened it. "HEY! WE GOT A LAWYER AROUND HERE?", I yelled out the door.

A couple of people down the hallway stopped and stared at me, and then both John and Jake Junior stuck their heads out of their doors. "What have you done now!?", asked John.

"Just the man I want to see." Junior just rolled his eyes and smiled, and went back into his office. John came down the hall and entered my office. "John, this is Professor Harold Johnson from over at UMBC. Harry, this is John Steiner."

"Nice to meet you. I'm Chairman of the Board, otherwise known as Carl's lawyer and bail bondsman. What'd he do now?"

"I'm hurt, John, hurt at that.", I protested.

John ignored me and looked at Harry with a smile. "We're going to write a book. I don't know why he called you in.", answered the professor.

John looked over at me. "You're going to write a book?!"

"Yeah, maybe. Know anything about publishing or writing?", I asked.

"No. Should I find somebody who does?"

"That might be a good idea." I turned back to Harry and said, "You get in touch with whoever you know at Simon and Schuster and let them know you're interested in something. No matter what, though, don't sign anything unless we get a lawyer to look at it."

"Right! Got it."

"Does Marilyn know you're planning on writing a book?", asked John with a touch of amusement.

"No, not yet."

"This ought to be good. Listen, I'll find you somebody who knows about books, and you're going to take me to a very expensive lunch to tell me all about this."

"Deal."

John took his leave and then Harry shook my hand again and left. I just shook my head. What had I gotten myself into now?

Chapter 90: Eat Your Peas

And so it began. The following week Harry called his contact at Simon and Schuster, and a literary agent took the train down and met us for lunch. We outlined our ideas and he told us their ideas and we pretty much came to a compromise on that. We were left with a tentative contract for our review, along with a proposed time frame for publication, and we promised to get it back to them in another week. One thing I was expecting and found I was correct with - there are a lot fewer zeroes on the checks when you're dealing with non-fiction than with fiction.

Regardless, that wasn't our primary motive in any case. Yes, money would be nice, at least certainly to Harry, but his big reason was to publicize the need to take better care of our infrastructure, and mine was to get back into science, at least in a roundabout way. I figured that my skills at communication and knowing how the world worked would complement his skills in engineering and analysis.

Marilyn's reaction was not at all the one I was expecting. After I explained the idea, she just nodded and said, "Good! You need to do something different."

"Huh?"

"Carl, you get bored doing the same thing over and over. You're getting that way now, with the firm. I can tell." I didn't know what to say to that, and she continued. "Seriously, you're not just about making money. I know you've sometimes wondered what it would have been like to teach instead of going into the Army. Give this a shot."

Well, I actually knew what it was like to teach at the community college level as an adjunct, but I was curious about teaching at the four year college level full time as a professor. I wasn't going to do that, but this was an interesting idea. Could I write a book, or just half a book? I gave my wife a big hug and a smooch, which grossed out Charlie, and then called Harry and said my wife was game. A week later John's publishing lawyer friend had approved and we signed some papers and were authors-to-be.

The timing worked out. As soon as school was out, we packed the kids up and flew down to Orlando for a vacation at the House of Mouse. Harry would spend the time we were gone digging up some technical reports and journals on each of the various topics we had outlined for each chapter. Once we got back, I would start pulling things together and writing the 'popular' version. I made sure that we had the same word processing software, WordPerfect 4.2 for DOS, so that we could edit stuff easily and swap diskettes.

Disney World was old hat to me personally, since I had been there several times in my old life, but Marilyn had never been there, and certainly not the kids. The one thing I had never done before, though, was to stay at a Disney hotel on the site, and I figured that would be a whole lot easier. Charlie was not quite six, and the girls were almost three and potty trained. I had Taylor book us a suite in Disney's Contemporary Resort, the gigantic A-frame structure that had the monorail going through it. It's so expensive that the only people who stay there have more money than sense, so I certainly qualified this time around.

If you've ever been to Disney, you already know what it's like. If you've never been to Disney, there is no describing it. Hordes of families with kids cram into the place on vacation weeks when school is out. If you can go a different time, do so. We couldn't, not any longer. On the plus side, staying at a Disney resort allows you to beat the crowds to the starting gate in the mornings, with a direct monorail ride to the entrance. You can have breakfast with Mickey some days, and they have the Mouseketeer Club, which is a babysitting service if parents need to escape their loving offspring.

In 1987, Disney World consisted of just the two theme parks, the original Magic Kingdom and EPCOT. They were already building the Disney-MGM Studios complex, but that wouldn't open for a few more years. It was still more than enough for us to see. Marilyn and I alternated duties, with one of us pushing the twins' side-by-side stroller and the other trying to corral Charlie whenever he came in arm's reach. I lost track of the times I sat in the little boat with Holly and Molly as we went through 'It's A Small World' - I could sing the damn song by heart by the end of our stay! They loved it! I mimed hanging myself to Marilyn while she took a picture of me floating past one spot. On the other hand, she got the girls while Charlie and I explored Adventureland and Frontierland. Since I don't do roller coasters, I let Marilyn take Charlie on Space Mountain. He made her take him on that three times!

(I did Space Mountain once, on the first trip through, with Marilyn's little brother Paul, when he was only Charlie's age. It was brand new and I had no idea what this gigantic silver Hershey's Kiss was. After we got off, with me shaking and swallowing hard, Paul looked up at me and said he had been so scared he had almost cried. I just put my arm around his shoulder and said, "Me, too, buddy! Me, too!")

I'm not sure who was more exhausted at the end of each day, the kids or the grownups. We spent two days in the Magic Kingdom and one day in EPCOT, saw the fireworks every night, and spent another day over at Sea World. By the time we flew home, I was thoroughly theme-parked out.

Then Marilyn got really silly. "Could you imagine doing this with four children?", she asked.

I swallowed hard and looked over at her. "Are you trying to tell me something?"

She started at that. "No! I'm just saying, if we had another child..."

"Come here for a second. I haven't punched you lately, and I think I'm way overdue!"

Marilyn laughed at that and ignored me. Jesus Christ! Four kids!? That wasn't funny!

When we got home, I got to work writing. I spent most afternoons and several hours every evening working on the book, although a lot of the time was going through various reports with a highlighter, and trying to turn truly awful scientific jargon onto something that could be even remotely interesting to an average human being. I usually spent a few minutes at the end of the day on the phone with Harry, asking him to find me examples of an issue that were from this country, not someplace else.

After the introduction, we had a chapter on roads and the highway system. From roads we segued into bridges, from bridges we moved on to water systems, which led to septic systems, which led to flood control sewers, then dams, etc. etc. etc. Part of each chapter was a history lesson, on why this stuff was important and how it had affected the growth and prosperity of the United States. One helpful thing, to me at least, was that way back when, I had been an avid viewer of the History Channel and the Discovery Channel, which had yet to be invented. It was amazing the oddball stuff that I retained.

We had the book mostly done by mid-August. The one thing we had the most problem with was the title. Non-fiction books like this need two titles, a main title to catch people's attention, and the sub-title to tell what the book was really about. You know, like Horny Sluts In Action: The Effect Of Birth Control On American Economic Productivity. Nobody pays attention to productivity; everybody pays attention to horny sluts. (Okay, that might be a little extreme, but not by much!) Our sub-title was pretty straight forward, America's Crumbling Infrastructure And the Need To Rebuild It. What we needed now was something in the way of a title, and both Harry and I kept coming up with a blank.

First we tried The Coming Crisis, next came The Coming Collapse, then we were stumped for a bit, and went back to Crisis, and then on to The Looming Disaster. That one lasted a week before we both decided it really sucked. By that point it seemed like the real looming disaster was the book. Simon and Schuster sent back a first draft with more red edits than book. Fortunately, most of the red simply required us to move things around some and cut and paste some sections.

And then it became easy, because the publishing house named it. Our agent/editor went through the second draft and found it acceptable, and used something from the prologue.

Eat your peas!

That's what you were told when you were little. Eat your peas and you'll grow up big and strong. Maybe it was your Mom who told you, or your grandmother, or maybe Aunt Tilly, but they all told you to eat your peas. If it wasn't your peas, it was your corn or your carrots or your green beans. Whatever it was, you had to eat it so that you would become big and strong.

Needless to say, you didn't want to! That stuff was yucky! It was a weird color and tasted bad and was mushy. You weren't going to eat it! They couldn't make you! No! No! No!

What you really wanted to do was eat dessert. Dessert was fun! Dessert tasted good! Dessert three times a day was a great idea!

It didn't quite work out that way. Mom or Granny or Aunt Tilly made you eat your vegetables - or else! No dessert unless your plate was clean. You might sneak a green bean to the dog occasionally, but they usually caught you and made you eat two for every one you dumped on the floor. Eventually you got to dessert.

At some point you grew up. By your teens you realized that vegetables could actually be tasty, and you knew they were good for you, and you were mature enough to work your way through them. Mom and Granny and Aunt Tilly no longer had to yell at you and could pass along their wisdom to your younger brother or sister.

Infrastructure is a lot like the vegetables at dinner. Nobody wants to eat them, but you have to, because they'll make you big and strong. Everybody wants dessert, the fun stuff we do with our money - lowering taxes and raising benefits. The difference is that even though as adults we know to eat our vegetables at the dinner table, we don't always know this the rest of the time. At home you know that if you only eat dessert, sooner or later your teeth will fall out and you'll get weak and flabby and eventually you'll get sick. It's the same with infrastructure, the roads and bridges, the sewers and water treatment plants. If you ignore them, sooner or later a nation gets weak and sick.

So read this book and eat your peas! You'll grow up big and strong!

So the book was titled Eat Your Peas! America's Crumbling Infrastructure And the Need To Rebuild It. We sent our final draft, along with everything on diskette, to Simon and Schuster, and after it was accepted, Harry and I took our wives out to dinner in the Inner Harbor. We felt both exhausted and exhilarated. I had never done anything like this before, and neither had Harry.

It turned out that the next step involved printing and publishing, none of which either of us had to do anything with. We didn't even have to find anybody to do a review of the book, so they could come up with the blurbs on the back cover. Simon and Schuster had some tame celebrities to do that. I mentioned to Harry that we would probably get tapped for that in the future on somebody else's book. He just shrugged and nodded agreement. The cover art work involved a dinner plate full of peas and a fork. There would probably be a book tour in the late fall, but what that would involve nobody was sure.

In the meantime, I needed to make some money! Some serious money! We were on the verge of the biggest market ripple since the start of the bull market in 1982. Now, five years in, the market was about to take a serious nosedive, a major dump that would be called Black Monday. The problem was that I wasn't sure when it would happen! All I remembered was the name, Black Monday, so I was reasonably sure it would happen at the beginning of the week, and that it had been in the fall.

So, what to do about it? First off, come up with a believable cover story! This wasn't me betting big on silver or oil all on my lonesome. I now had a major operation watching me. Throughout the spring I had been commenting to some of the others, especially those involved in trading operations, that the market was getting overheated, that a correction was due. By the summer I was saying it louder, and in July I had Missy, Jake Junior, and our trading team sit down with me one evening and we developed a few strategies.

What happens if the market tanks? How much warning might we get? What do we do about it? With our money? With our clients' money? What do we do after it tanks and we've hit bottom? We outlined some scenarios and I started paying close attention to the market. I knew it would be in the fall, but to me that meant September, October, or November. That's a pretty big window.

It happened in mid-October, the 19th, and the trading team picked it up overseas first. The Hong Kong market collapsed first, followed almost immediately by Australia and New Zealand. The turmoil moved westward, smacking London and the other European markets next, before hopping the Atlantic and pummeling the U.S. On the plus side, American markets and exchanges had the most warning, and we were hurt least of all. Hong Kong lost over 45% on their market, and the effects mitigated slightly as the tidal wave went westward. The American market, reflected in the Dow, only lost 22%, a still horrendous blow.

Why did it collapse? Who knows why, but the fact was that after five straight years of stellar returns, something was bound to happen. The market had grown softer, certainly since the springtime, and was getting nervous. The American Navy was trading shots in the Persian Gulf with the Iranians for a few days already, and that had the energy markets spooked. There was some profit taking, some general correction to the market, and the automated trading programs went crazy, overreacting and forcing the rest of the system to overreact.

The Buckman Group did well, however. My motto is that there is just as much money to be made on the downside as there is on the upside. What made the difference was that everybody else only suspected a problem, and I knew it for a fact. It made our reflexes much faster. Missy and the trading team worked up some strategies to both take some profits and short some stocks when I called a 'Code Red'. Then, when the market bottomed out, we could flip the switch, call a 'Code Green', and cover our positions and catch the rise. Another factor was that this wasn't a long lived blip. The market would generally keep rising through the rest of the decade and right to the end of the '90s.

Midnight on Sunday the 18th, Missy called me at home with knowledge of the Hong Kong crash. I knew immediately that this was the big one I had been waiting on. I told her to assemble the team and to be in the office at 4:00 AM. I rolled out of bed and told Marilyn I was going into the office. I showered and dressed, made myself a hot tea and finished it off, and then drove into Hereford and let myself in. Missy showed up at 3:30, lugging some doughnuts from an all night Dunkin Donuts franchise.

The others all arrived by 4:30, some of them looking bleary eyed and nobody was in their usual suits. I didn't care. Everybody logged onto the market networks and we followed the turmoil in London. They all turned to look at me nervously. I just nodded and said, "This is it. I'm calling the Code Red." Then I went to the break room and made myself some more tea, and snagged a cream filled bun. It was out of my hands.

We had a small trading operation, with Missy overseeing three traders. We didn't touch our tech positions, and certainly not the companies we were on the boards of. We only messed with the stuff we had liquid, and I didn't trust to the automated programs - I wanted humans making these decisions. By 8:00 we started seeing the early birds come in, and it was obvious to them that something was happening. By the time John and the two Jakes showed up, the market news was boiling, and I spent almost as much time calming them down as I was spending keeping Missy and the traders calm. None of them had ever been through this before. I shuttled in and out of the trading room, keeping a smile on my face and calmness in my demeanor. I was nervous myself; one misstep on our Code Red and Code Green scenarios could really fuck us over!

Well, let's be fair about it. I had never been through this before either, but I at least knew how it was going to end. By the end of the day, the Dow lost 22%, but the Buckman Group gained 10%. Tuesday morning I called the Code Green bright and early, and we picked up another 20%. By the end of the week, we had picked up another 20%, and at that point I called it off and we went back to our normal trading routines.

Missy and the traders were nervous wrecks by then, and I was working overtime to keep them sane and centered, but it worked. At the close of trading Friday, I posted the increase in our net worth on the wall, and then led a round of applause by the entire office. I also doubled their bonuses for the year and gave each of them a week at Hougomont for a vacation. I went home and had several drinks!

In one week, the Buckman Group had become a billion dollar operation.

Otherwise things went along normally. Charlie started second grade and the twins started pre-K. The house at the end of the day was only slightly less noisy and confusing than the main trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange. I would come in the front door, and be greeted with a kiss from Marilyn, reach down and scratch the head of a manic Dum-Dum, wave to Charlie who was heading outside to get into some sort of trouble, and try and figure out which of my daughters was trying to climb me. Sitting in my recliner only let the girls and Dum-Dum climb on top of me easier. Marilyn would bring me some iced tea.

It was a very good life. I knew it would come to an end someday, but that didn't mean it would end badly, just that it would end. It reminded me of my previous life, when I would go camping with Parker and the Boy Scouts, and Maggie was young and would be bringing all her girlfriends over. I could see the same dynamics going on now. At the time I had thought it was barely controlled chaos, but later, when they grew up and went off to college and their own lives, I discovered I missed it.

Now, I simply savored it.

Chapter 91: Oprah

At the end of October our literary agent called. Our book had "tested well" (whatever the hell that meant) and the initial publication run had been increased. Now they wanted to do a book tour, and wanted to schedule us for this. So far we had been conversing on a conference call, but at this I scratched my head and asked the agent to take the train down with details. Then I called Harry down at UMBC and asked him what he thought about this.

"Well, I can't do it! It's the end of the semester and I can't just break away for weeks at a time!", he protested.

"I figured you would say that.", I replied. "Let's talk to this fellow and see what he says. Maybe I can break free for a few days. Have you ever done anything like this before?"

"No, never.", he replied.

"Me neither."

The next day the agent showed up and we met in Harry's office at UMBC. The plan was to release the book officially on October 27, a Tuesday, and we would start our tour by the end of the week. Harry and I just looked at each other and rolled our eyes. Nothing like a little warning! That was next week! The tour was to start on the east coast and work its way west, and last about two weeks.

"This is crazy! I have classes! I can't just leave for two weeks!", protested Harry.

I nodded. I pulled a calendar off of Harry's wall and started reviewing the time frame. "You have us starting this tour on Friday the 30th and going for two weeks." That would take us through the 13th, although they might keep it going if it went well.

"Uh...", the agent stammered.

"Let me see your proposed schedule.", I asked. He handed it over and I looked it over. "How definite is this?" We had television and radio interviews in Boston, New York, Cleveland, Chicago, St. Louis, Denver, Seattle, San Francisco, and LA, with a few other places penciled in the margins. San Antonio, Atlanta, and Miami were noted as possibilities towards the end of the schedule.

"What about Baltimore and Washington?", asked Harry. "I could do those, I suppose, if the timing was right."

"Those were secondary markets.", commented the agent.

"Secondary to publishing, maybe, but Washington is a primary market for the type of people who will be reading this book.", I replied. "Let me ask you, what's a typical day for one of these things?"

"Well, normally you would fly to the city the night before. The next morning we try and have you do a morning talk show on the radio. After that, a book signing at a local bookstore, the bigger the better, then maybe another radio show or a local television station to be interviewed by one of the local people. Maybe another book signing after that. In New York and LA we'll try and get you on one of the late night shows. Then, after that, you fly to the next stop."

"And who does this? Do we both have to be there?", I asked. I knew that this could help sales of the book, but Harry had a real dilemma with timing.

"Oh, no, we only need one at each location. In your case, we could split you up and have you do different parts of the country."

"Okay. So do you go with us? Does somebody meet us at each location? How does that work?", I pressed.

The agent started going over the mechanics of it all. No, nobody would travel with us. That would be too expensive and time consuming. We would get a schedule, and fly from city to city, take a cab from the airport, and stay in a local hotel. The rule was to travel cheap and save your receipts. We would get a daily budget - and allowance.

I rubbed my face with my hand. I looked over at Harry. "I'll let you do anything local or in DC. I'll handle the travel parts, but I am calling the limit at two weeks. Anything after that, and you can travel." I turned back to the agent. "Get the schedule finalized and sent to me as soon as possible and I'll have my travel agent set up my flights. With any luck, in New York and on the west coast I'll be able to schedule some visits with some outfits I do business with. Any chance you can simply give me a lump sum payment based on the per diem allowance?"

That took him by surprise. "That would be very unusual! What if your charges are less than that?"

I barked out a short laugh. "Trust me, they won't be."

"How can you be sure?", he asked.

I shook my head and smiled. "Because charter flights cost more than the per diem you'll be allowing, and I won't be catching cabs or staying at the Best Western. I'm not doing this for the money, but just so the book gets out there and noticed. This is important." The funny thing was just how much I believed it, too. I had always believed in the importance of infrastructure, and now, after going through Harry's work and the other reports I had read, it meant even more to me.

"The money's not important to you?", he asked, confused.

I shook my head. "I don't think I ever mentioned this at the beginning, but any of my share of the proceeds I'll be donating to the Red Cross. I assume you can handle this?"

"Exactly what do you do?"

I gave him an odd look at this. I had provided him the same bland biography we provided everybody, but he obviously never connected the dots. "I'm president of the Buckman Group. We're an investment company. I thought you knew that."

"Well, yes, but you're listed as Doctor Buckman, along with Doctor Johnson."

"Right, I have a PhD in applied math from RPI. I thought you knew that already." I looked over at Harry and he just shrugged his shoulders back at me.

"So what is this Buckman Group? Do you work for your family or something?"

Oh, Lord! "Let me make this very simple for you. It's my company. We're an investment firm and do private equity and investment deals. I am worth about three quarters of a billion dollars. I'll have my staff handle the transportation details. With any luck, I'll be able to meet some clients and investors in my off hours."

"You're worth a three quarters of a billion dollars?", asked an incredulous Harry Johnson.

"There's no need to bow to me, Harry. Kissing my ring will suffice." I turned back to the agent, who was just staring at me. "It's not that big a deal. I'll have my travel agent arrange for a small plane to fly me around, a car and driver in each city, and a decent hotel room. If there are any changes to the schedule, get them to her. I'll give her a heads up when I get back to the office."

"How come nobody's ever heard of you?", asked the agent.

"Because I don't advertise. We're not a public company. We're very private." It amused me at times. I had qualified to be on the Forbes 400 list for the last three years, but they had never twigged to me. That probably wouldn't last, but as long as it did, I would enjoy the anonymity. Besides, I was way down the list. My friend, Bill Gates, was much higher up than I was.

He left shaking his head, and Harry and I chatted a little while longer. He had seen our operation, but never really understood the amounts of money tied up in the business. He asked about getting involved, but I told him the minimum buy-in to our pools was currently set at a fifty grand, and we weren't structured like Merrill Lynch or one of the other stock brokers. Then I told him it wasn't that big a deal. In many ways I still considered myself a mathematician.

That night I told Marilyn over dinner what was happening. She knew about the book, of course, since I had often spent a few hours at night working on it in my study. She also knew we had sent it off, finished, and had met Harry and his wife. "When does this start?", she asked.

"Next Friday, I think, or maybe the following Monday. I can't imagine we would get all that much accomplished over the weekend."

"And you'll be gone for two weeks?"

I shrugged. "I guess so. I've never done this before. I don't know whether it will be enjoyable or a pain in the tuchas. I am betting it will be the latter."

"What's a tookis?", asked Charlie.

"It's what gets walloped when you interrupt grownups.", I replied with a smile.

"What's walloped?", asked Holly.

"That's when Daddy spanks the two of you for being girls.", he told her.

That got the twins to squawking and Marilyn to laughing, and Charlie hopped off his seat and ran off to the kitchen with a big smile on his face, while I simply muttered under my breath about my smart-assed son. "Oh, brother! And you wanted kids?", I asked Marilyn.

"Well, I know what you wanted!"

"We'll talk about that later!", I answered. "You know, he'll be the perfect soldier some day. He just loves to pull the pins on hand grenades and toss them around." That earned me a derisive snort.

In one way, I was glad to get out of town. The Securities and Exchange Commission had decided to investigate the Buckman Group's 'miraculous' returns on Black Monday and the following week. This was our biggest single return in a one day or one week period since we had started the firm. They were naturally curious, and asked for some 'informal' talks. Of course, if you wanted to stonewall, feel free. They'll simply crawl up your anus and take up residence until you decide to cooperate.

When I made my first million betting on the Yom Kippur War raising oil prices, I was such small potatoes nobody knew my name. When I made my next big killing on the Hunt Brothers and the silver market, I was still too small to notice. They were betting billions, and I was betting a few millions. The biggest chunk of cash since then was in private equity, investing with Bill Gates and Michael Dell, and the other direct investments we had made. Black Monday had gone back to my pattern of gambling on the market, only now with hundreds of millions of dollars. Somebody had noticed.

I wasn't going to delay the book tour over this. Melissa was going to be point on this one. She had the various SEC credentials. Most importantly, she could sit there and testify on a stack of Bibles how we had spent the spring and summer discussing the weakening market and developing plans to counter it. She and the various traders could swear how we discussed it ahead of time, that she had been the one to call us into the office, and how we had made the Code Red and Code Green calls based on the market moves and the other's input. Unless they could prove I was a time traveler, we were going to be pretty safe.

To a certain extent, I had debated with myself making the big gains, even though I was probably inviting Federal scrutiny. Still, I couldn't get past the fact that while we would make a fortune, it wouldn't be off a single company. The big charge that brought down so many Wall Street high fliers was insider trading, where an Ivan Boesky or Martha Stewart knew somebody on the inside and made bets in a single stock. We had bet on the market as a whole. Nobody could track this to a single stock or company. We would be safe.

Sunday night, November 1, I drove over to the Westminster airport, where Taylor had a Beechcraft King Air waiting for me, along with a pilot. I was flying into Logan in Boston, well within the plane's range, about an hour and a half flying time. If I was flying commercial, which is what Simon and Schuster had planned, it would take me half the day. There was a limo waiting for me at the charter office and I was at the Ritz-Carlton fifteen minutes later. If there is one truly wonderful thing about having serious money, it is the ability to fly charter.

The next morning, I was in the studio of WBZ, "NewsRadio 1030", getting ready to sell the book. Glamorous, it ain't. Small rooms, cramped spaces, listening to idiots yammer half the time. I had ten minutes from 7:46 to 7:56, with a commercial break in the middle. Then it was out of there and off to WRKO, AM680, "Boston's Talk Station", to repeat it all from 8:31 to 8:41. The topic was the "Big Dig", a new tunnel across the harbor which had been part of a federal roadwork bill passed into law over President Reagan's veto. Some people were for it and some were against it. I just said that if we don't take care of bridges and roads, they collapse. I didn't tell them that the Big Dig would be a colossal boondoggle. That wasn't because it was a bad idea, but because Boston politicians have enough graft and corruption in their veins to make any politician proud!

After that I did two book signings, at which a total of four people showed and only two bought the book, and then went off to WCVB, Channel 5, the local ABC affiliate, for a brief talk there. That might get cut down to 60 seconds and slipped in if it was a slow news day. Again, the topic was the Big Dig.

From there I went to the hotel, packed my crap up and went to the airport. I didn't know or care if it made it to the news. My only thoughts were about how in the world anybody actually put up with the horseshit of a book tour! This was Day One, and we had nine more to go, not including the intervening weekend.

Monday night I flew to New York, and I had two nights there. Tuesday I did some radio stations and a book signing, and nothing was scheduled for the afternoon. Melissa had taken the train up, so that we could talk to some people on Wall Street. I took a nap in the afternoon, and then we had dinner with some people from Prudential and Bain. Wednesday morning I did a local talk show on WNBC after the Today Show was over, and then went to a book signing. The big doings were later that day, fifteen minutes on the Late Night With David Letterman. That was a pretty big deal!

One of the things Harry and I had been told before we went off on our tours (and I was already wishing I had the short and local tour) was to try and find a way to 'connect' with the local host or audience. In Boston this meant talking about the Big Dig. In New York, I focused on something else. If you can do it humorously, all the better. This is part of 'humanizing the news.' Slap a smile on your face as you announce the bridge collapsed and killed two dozen nuns and schoolchildren.

Letterman: So you say that it's a good idea to block traffic at all times of the day to fix potholes.

Me: What I say is that if you don't fix the potholes, sooner or later the road collapses, and traffic is blocked anyway.

Letterman: But shouldn't these things last longer?

Me: They do, but you still have to keep fixing them. This is nothing new; we've been doing it a long time. For instance, well, I'm not very familiar with New York, but I've been told there's a small town somewhere to the east of here. I've never been there myself, but I think the name is ... Brooklyn? Maybe you've heard of it?

(Audience laughter!)

Letterman: Yes, I've heard of the place.

Me: Anyway, this town - again, I don't know much about it - it has this bridge, and I'm told it's pretty nice.

(More audience laughter!)

Me: Seriously, though. The Brooklyn Bridge is a prime example of infrastructure that is maintained properly and can last forever. It's over a hundred years old, and is a landmark to the entire world. It's something the citizens of this city [and here I waved my arm towards the studio audience] can be justifiably proud. It would cost billions of dollars to replace, so a few million every year in maintenance is cheap insurance!

From New York I went to Cleveland, and from Cleveland I was going to Chicago, but that got changed. Instead I went to St. Louis, and Chicago would be the end of the tour. I spent the weekend in Redmond with Bill Gates, generally just goofing off. He couldn't believe the amount of time I was wasting doing this book tour. Sunday night I flew down to San Francisco. Tuesday I went to Los Angeles, where I spent two days, and on Wednesday did The Tonight Show With Johnny Carson.

That was interesting! Talk about meeting a living legend! He did Carnac the Magnificent that night, and that was just amazing. I sat there in the Green Room and watched in utter disbelief - I was about to meet an American god! As I had been told, Carson didn't schmooze with the guests, either before or after they came on, and he ran the operation tightly. I asked if I could get a photo standing next to him, and was refused, but they did have a photographer who could take shots when we were on the set together, and that was plenty good enough for me. I don't really remember what we talked about, and it probably wasn't my best appearance, but I didn't get the bum's rush, which he was known to do on occasion.

It didn't matter. I met Johnny Carson!

Thursday was Houston, and then I flew to Chicago to finish the book tour. If I never did this again, it would still be too soon. Still, Chicago looked to be interesting. Simon and Schuster was happy with the reaction and sales (even if nobody showed up at the signings - what a waste of time!) and I was booked as a guest on the Oprah Winfrey Show. This was the only time I was booked for a nationally syndicated daytime talk show.

In November of 1987 she was still doing her show from the studios of WLS in Chicago. Right now it was done there, but I knew that within a few years, she would build a much bigger Harpo (Oprah spelled backwards) complex elsewhere. That day, though, I ended up down in the Loop at WLS.

Oprah wasn't yet the big deal name she was going to become. She was only a year older than I was, and had only been on the air nationwide for about a year. The nightly shows I had been on had a different format. They were basically a standup comic doing some material and running through whoever was lined up, bing, bang, boom! They taped in the late afternoon or early evening and aired later that night. Oprah was more likely to tape a week or two ahead of time, her studio audience was mostly women, and her viewers were mostly women, also. The woman herself was an American success story. Born dirt poor in rural Mississippi into an abusive family, she clawed her way into school and college and eventually made it big beyond belief.

As an interviewer, her skills were at heart an immense empathy, which was why she played well with women and often did well with the 'crisis of the week' which she would highlight. She was not considered a tough interviewer, but nobody much cared. She was also immensely well read, and was the only interviewer who had actually read our book! Every other interviewer received highlights and suggestions from Simon and Schuster, and it was doubtful that anybody had even read those. Oprah had read our book, and she blocked out an entire half hour to talk to me!

I had never much cottoned to her show back on my first go, simply because it was a daytime woman's show. Too many tears, too much tabloid nonsense, too many 'crisis of the week' style shows. On the other hand, I knew Marilyn and Alison liked her, and you can't say she didn't make it to the big time. She was already a 'big deal', and was getting bigger!

In person she was quite personable and smart. The first half of the show had been some celebrity chef and how to cook something with vegetables. After he got done, they cleared the smoke out of the studio and wheeled the kitchen set away, and it was just the two of us in chairs in front of the audience. Oprah introduced me, saying, "And now I'd like to bring out the author of a new book called Eat Your Peas! America's Crumbling Infrastructure And The Need To Rebuild It. This book is a fascinating look at what is happening with our roads and bridges and dams. Please help me welcome Doctor Carl Buckman!" The applause started and an assistant signaled me to go, so I walked around the curtain. Unfortunately for me, my knee had been acting up for a few days, and I needed the cane, even as early in the day as it was, and I was limping.

I came over and switched my cane to my left hand and held out my right to Oprah. "Thank you for having me on your show."

We settled ourselves on our chairs, and she started with, "So Doctor, explain what you mean about eating your peas!"

"Well, first, call me Carl. I almost never use the title. And second, I have to say, I'm not the author, but the co-author. The other guy who wrote this book, whose idea it really was, is Professor Harry Johnson, and he's back home teaching engineering to students, so that our roads and bridges stay safe." That got quite a bit of applause.

Oprah smiled at that. "Well, that is pretty important. Still, what does that have to do with eating peas?"

I spent a few minutes talking about how as a parent we always were trying to get the kids to eat their vegetables, which got us talking about how the tricks we used on my children and what our mothers had made us do. That played very well with the mostly female audience. Then we got into a little more substance, about how eating your vegetables made you strong, and that as a nation our infrastructure made us strong.

"You mentioned in the book that it was the Erie Canal that made New York the city it is today. How is that? The canal is 150 miles away from New York.", she said.

"That's true, but the real outlet to the canal is not Albany or Schenectady, it's at the end of the Hudson River, which is New York. This gets into a bit of the history of America. If you look at a map, there's at least a half dozen major ports up and down the East Coast." I started ticking them off on my fingers. "You have Boston, New York, Philly, Baltimore, Norfolk, Charleston, and Savannah, for instance. Each of them has a fine port and a good anchorage. So why did New York become the biggest seaport on the East Coast?"

I continued, "Let's go back in time a couple of hundred years ago. There's no cars, no trains, no decent roads, and a few hundred miles to the west, there's this big mountain range. It's actually very difficult to get through the Appalachian Mountains to the lands on the other side. If you were a farmer in Ohio, for instance, it was actually cheaper to send your grain down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers to New Orleans, load it on a ship, and sail it to New York, than it was to try to drive a mule train overland."

There were some incredulous murmurs at that, but I just smiled and nodded. Horses and mules would eat their weight in grain hauling stuff that distance. Oprah said, "So the Erie Canal solved that problem?"

"It's incredibly cheap to ship stuff on a barge. Shipping costs dropped to one-twentieth of hauling things overland. The Erie Canal was the biggest infrastructure project of the era, like the interstate system of its day. All of a sudden, you could ship corn or wheat or ore from the Midwest to the East Coast quickly and cheaply. Trade grew over the course of the 1800s by an incredible margin. It went the other way, too. Now the East Coast could ship cloth and plows and glass and all sorts of other expensive and exotic items to the Midwest. One of the most important items shipped was salt! To make salt you needed sea water, and the lakes and rivers west of the Appalachians are all fresh water. And it all shipped over the Erie Canal to the Midwest."

"And that was here in Chicago?", she asked. "Why not any of the other cities on the Great Lakes?

"Well, they were helped too. It was at this time that all the big cities of the Great Lakes area were founded or grew big. Cleveland, Detroit, Milwaukee - all of them made the big time after the Erie Canal opened up the Midwest. The big thing that Chicago had going for it is that within just a few miles from here, the rivers stop draining north and east, and start draining south. The people here in Chicago are pretty smart! They saw what was happening elsewhere, and how much trade was going to New York. They looked around and figured out that if they built a canal of their own, they could ship stuff from the Great Lakes down the Mississippi, and that gave them access to the entire center of the nation."

"It's like two ends of a giant bridge, between the East Coast and the Midwest.", she commented.

"And that's why this stuff is so important! It's not just that we have roads or bridges or canals or sewers or dams. This stuff shapes how a country grows, and if you don't take care of it, it stops growing. We're seeing that now with the Interstate Highway system."

"How so?"

"Well, the interstates are like the canals of the last century. Look at the changes in society in the last thirty years, the growth of the suburbs, the increase in trucking, the changes to the inner city. Now, the highway system was developed in the late Fifties, and most of the roads and bridges have 40 year life spans. If we don't start taking better care of them now, we are going to see some pretty spectacular collapses over the next ten years!", I told her.

"What caused your interest in this subject? You're a mathematician, not an engineer.", Oprah asked.

I smiled at that. "It was just by chance. Harry, that is Professor Harry Johnson, my co-author, and I exchanged some letters to the editor by way of the Baltimore Sun, and that's how we met."

Oprah's eyes opened wide. "The Baltimore Sun!?"

I grinned and nodded. "That's right. We share that in common, don't we? You worked in Baltimore for a few years before you made it to the big leagues, here in Chicago. I remember watching you on the news every once in a while."

She excitedly added, "Yes, I worked for WJZ!"

"I remember you from back then. Harry and I are both Baltimore boys. He teaches engineering down at UMBC in Arbutus, and I live and work up in Hereford."

"That brings up another question.", she said. I looked at her curiously, and she segued into what I had hoped could be avoided. "You have a most interesting biography! You went to college and earned your doctorate in mathematics at the age of 21, is that correct?"

I nodded. "Yes. I went to Rensselaer in Troy, New York, and got my math degrees there."

"But you didn't go into research or teaching! You entered the Army."

Again I nodded, with a shrug and a smile. "Well, I went to college on an Army scholarship, so at some point Uncle Sam was going to come calling for some payback"

"What would a mathematician do in the army?", she asked, somewhat incredulously.

"Oh, there's any number of things! Codes and cryptography, signals, engineering - I was in the artillery, and that's a huge amount of mathematics!", I answered.

"Is that where you hurt your leg?"

I wasn't sure how much info was in my bio that had been sent out. The average host could care less. "Yes, I made that one jump too many and landed wrong."

"Jump? You were a paratrooper?"

I smiled and nodded again. "I had a battery of 105s with the 82nd."

"I don't know what that means."

"Sorry. I commanded Bravo Battery, 1st Battalion of the 319th Airborne Field Artillery Regiment, in the 82nd Airborne Division. At least until this happened.", I said with a wry shrug. "Don't ever jump out of a perfectly good airplane!"

There was a smattering of applause at this. A decade earlier I might have been booed, since the Viet Nam War had been so unpopular. Still, we hadn't become so wildly enthusiastic about our soldiers as we would be following Desert Storm. I just smiled and nodded to the audience as they politely applauded.

"And now you work for an investment company? Or own an investment company? I understand you are part of the Buckman Group. What is that?"

"We're in the private equity and capital investment business. We're small and private."

Oprah finished the interview with a few questions about my wife and children, and then we broke for a commercial and that was it. I was yanked away, and she finished the show talking to the audience and the camera, and happily for Harry and me, she gave a healthy plug for the book.

After the show, before I could head out to Midway for the flight home, Oprah buttonholed me and asked me a few questions about the Buckman Group. I gave her my card and told her to have one of her investment professionals contact Missy. For a variety of SEC related reasons, I couldn't act as a salesman myself.

And then I got the hell out of Dodge and went home. By the time I landed back at Westminster and drove home, dinner was over and the girls were already in their pajamas. I was mobbed happily by the kids and Dum-Dum, and Marilyn gave me a kiss that boded well for later that night.

"So, how did it all go? Did you have fun?", she asked.

"The next time somebody asks me to write a book, go find my gun and shoot me! Please!"

She just laughed.

Chapter 92: Same Old, Same Old

I made it back home the week before Thanksgiving 1987. It was enjoyable to just get back to normal again. For Thanksgiving I did the whole stuffed turkey routine, but I really missed my Mom's oyster dressing. Marilyn simply refused to allow me to bring 'those disgusting things' (the oysters) into the house. I occasionally wondered what my family was up to, but after the lawsuits were done, I ignored them. Suzie I kept track of, but I never contacted her. She had changed her name to Buckner shortly after arriving in Rochester. I wasn't sure how secure that actually made her (compared to Buckman, anyway.) It would probably keep the casual reporters away, if they were trying to track any relatives of mine, but any sort of a pro could find her in under a day.

Charlie was now a little over six, and the girls were about three-and-a-half. Charlie was pretty rambunctious, but not in an overly bad way. He was just a boy. One of his teachers advised us to have him tested for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, and Marilyn and I shut that idea down real fast! Charlie was simply a boy, and did routine boy stuff. He didn't need to be drugged. A routine grab-him-by-the-scruff-of-the-neck and an occasional swat on the bottom were sufficient to keep him in line. On the plus side, there was none of that 'Wait until your father gets home!' bullshit. Marilyn was more than happy to keep the kids in line on her own.

Occasionally he got stupid. One time he got into a tussle in school with a classmate, Johnny Parker, and the two knuckleheads did the 'My father can beat up your father!' routine. We got called to school and met the Parkers, who were equally exasperated with their offspring. I stood and shook Johnny's fathers' hand and said, "Mister Parker is my friend, and I don't beat up my friends!" Then we made the boys shake hands.

Afterwards, I enrolled Charlie in karate classes at the dojo I went to. Marilyn wasn't at all in favor of this, figuring he would just get in more trouble. I knew better. The first thing they teach you in any of the martial arts is self discipline. Then I told my son that if he ever used anything he learned in karate class in a school fight, his next session would be with me! His eyes opened wide at that!

The twins were an absolute delight. They were constantly running around outside and bringing back dandelions and grasshoppers and salamanders and such. In this they were a lot like Maggie, who had brought back every conceivable critter she could get hold of. I knew it wouldn't last. Sometime around when they hit twelve, the hormones would kick in, and my little angels of sugar and spice would morph into the evil twin spawn of Satan.

Have you ever wondered who came up with the idea of dowries? Then you've never had daughters! A dowry is where a man pays another man to take his daughter off his hands. The longer she hangs around, driving him crazy, the more he's willing to pay. In this regard it's similar to divorce, where a man pays his wife to go away. I pointed this out to Marilyn once, and she wasn't amused. Go figure.

We tried to live fairly normally, like your average suburban parents. We're just not a flamboyant pair. Okay, when traveling we flew by a private jet, and had a limo or car waiting for us, but back home I drove a car and Marilyn drove a minivan. We didn't live like hermits, either. Every summer we had a big barbecue/pool party and anybody who could come up with a reason was invited. We had the office and teachers and neighbors and friends over. After Charlie joined AYSO soccer, every fall, during soccer season, we had another one for the entire team and their parents, and it just got bigger when the girls got old enough to play.

Until now most people knew I had money, but generally not that I was ridiculously wealthy. After my face was on the cover of Fortune it was known, and when half the housewives in town saw me on Oprah it just got worse. Generally it wasn't bad. It also didn't hurt that we were easy touches for local fundraisers. Still, some people thought that since I was Mr. Moneybags, I should foot the bill completely, so they didn't have to contribute.

The only time it became an issue was in the Scouts. Charlie was now in the second grade, and was a Wolf Cub Scout. It came to a head in early '88, before the annual Blue and Gold Dinner. It's actually pretty cheap to run a troop or pack. The leaders are all volunteers, usually parents of the Scouts, and work for free. A common joke in any troop or pack is "I'll double your pay if you do such-and-so!" - which was meaningless, since your pay was zero to begin with! There are some costs for camping trips and hikes but they weren't much more than food and some badges, maybe $5 to $10 per event, and the boys (read that as parents) coughed that up for each event.

You could actually run a troop or pack for maybe a grand or two a year. Back on my first go, in New York, we had done the occasional bottle drive, to collect bottles and cans and return them for the nickel deposit. The boy and a parent would spend a Saturday morning driving around and collecting, and then sorting out and returning various bottles and cans, and get smelly and sticky and yucky in the process. Everybody had fun. Maryland didn't have nickel deposits, so we sold Boy Scout popcorn, sort of like the Girl Scouts with cookies, only not as well organized. Again, generally everybody has fun and eats a lot of popcorn.

Well, we were at one pack meeting talking about this and some woman pops up wondering why certain parents weren't pulling their weight! She shouldn't have to drive around and she had to work and she shouldn't have to sell popcorn, when some parents, who she wouldn't name, could obviously afford to do more! I just looked at my wife and we rolled our eyes, but otherwise kept our mouths shut. The Cubmaster immediately popped up and said that there was no way we were going to have an income tax on the parents of the boys, and that helping to raise the funds was good for the boys' confidence and pride, and they generally liked it. She gave a loud "Harrumph!" and sat back down, to glare at us for the rest of the meeting.

After the meeting, the Cubmaster buttonholed the woman and told her in no uncertain terms how things operated. Shortly after that, she yanked her son from the pack. It was his loss. I had enjoyed Scouting, and so had Parker. Now it was Charlie's turn and he was taking to it like a duck to water. It certainly never hurt a boy to be involved, and he generally learned a few useful things. I had been with him all through Tiger Cubs, and it looked like I was going to keep going in the future.

Some of this took time, and ever since I had started work on the book, I had scaled back my time at the office. Now I scaled it back a little more, and stopped going in on Fridays. I spent most of my time schmoozing clients and attending board meetings of companies we were involved in, and otherwise just let Jake Junior run the show. Missy, too, since she had really grown into the investment job. In some ways I was even more proud of her than I was of Junior. John began cutting back his time, too, but he was in his 60s and had earned a break.

Over Christmas, we took a couple of weeks off and went to Utica and then Hougomont. The difference was that this time, on the way south from Utica, we landed at Westminster and picked up the Tusk family, and flew them down with us. We had room at the house, and really enjoyed ourselves. We spent a lot of time running after Holly, Molly, and Carter as they chased seagulls, and trying to keep Bucky and Charlie from swimming to another island. It was also really convenient to have ready babysitters for when one set of parents wanted to go out without the kids. Marilyn and I wanted to invite the Buckminster clan down for a week, too, but Harlan had made major, and was in Germany as a battalion exec. We might not see them for another year or two!

I skipped my 10th reunion at RPI in '87. Somehow it just felt weird. That seemed so long ago, and like a different life. I had been a scientist then, and only in ROTC so I could pledge Kegs and meet Marilyn again. Life had been so simple. I just wanted to find Marilyn again, and then settle down without any money problems. Instead I had gotten a doctorate, gone career in the army, become a zillionaire, and written a book. I wasn't sorry about any of it, but it sure seemed strange at times!

One thing did work out about having money - it was easy to get babysitters! Like I had told Marilyn back in 1983, on the night of my high school reunion when Hamilton had first started stalking us and had scared poor Becky Devlin, that girl wasn't about to keep her mouth shut about the tip I paid her! The Buckmans were known as generous tippers, and we had a choice of girls to babysit the kids.

We did a date night about once a month, usually out to dinner and a movie, or sometimes down to the Meyerhoff to see the symphony. Date night would always involve stockings and not pantyhose, and Marilyn usually went braless and commando style, and we often detoured on the way home to go parking. If any of the babysitters noticed that Mr. Buckman was always smiling when he got home, and that Mrs. Buckman was always giggling, they didn't say anything.

I surprised myself when I got a call early that spring from Simon and Schuster. They wanted me to write another book. The surprise was that I didn't hang the phone up on them! They wanted another book similar to the first one, but on a different topic. The topic was to be political economics, which we had touched on in Eat Your Peas! Specifically, they wanted me to expand my thoughts on how politicians were constantly starting things without ever figuring out how to pay for them, like the various Social Security/Medicare/Medicaid programs. You pick a field, there was a program started by a politician, with no idea if it worked or how to pay for it.

I was intrigued. A big part of Eat Your Peas! was that our politicians lacked the discipline to finish what they started and make it work. You had to hold their feet to the fire. When I was a kid, it was the Democrats who would pass all these crazy programs as part of LBJ's 'Great Society', and the Republicans were constantly hounding them because the Democrats couldn't pay for this stuff. The Republicans weren't any better, since they cut taxes under Bush II, and radically raised spending.

I told them I would need a co-author or two, somebody to do the research, maybe an economist, to help. The nice thing about academics is that they always have these students around who need extra credit or a paper or a thesis, and you can tap them to find things out. If they found somebody for me to work with, we could write it and have it ready by the fall. When I told Marilyn, she just laughed and asked when she was supposed to get my gun to shoot me.

Tessa and Marilyn coerced me into attending our 15th high school reunion in June of 1988. It was pleasant, but not as fascinating as our 10th. To be honest, it brought back a lot of memories of Hamilton and my family. The collapse had started that night. Well, it started a month earlier, during Suzie's graduation, but Hamilton started stalking us that night. I ended up explaining what had happened to several people, including Shelley Talbot and her husband. The cops had questioned them, but they had questioned just about anybody from high school who knew me, and she wasn't the only girl they talked to. Worse, several people I barely knew treated me as their long lost buddy, and then hit me up for an investment in their business. I wasn't sorry to leave at the end, and we simply went home. I wasn't sure I would come back for the 20th.

Meanwhile, we continued to just live our normal lives. Charlie was really getting into the whole dirt bike and motocross thing! Many weekends would see us taking him and his bike to a race somewhere. He was actually pretty good, and was winning some of his races and climbing in the standings. He finished the season in second place overall, which only made him want to do better.

There was some real high comedy with this. The twins had gotten over their fear of the noise and crowds, and now were eager to go and watch. However, since they were so small, they insisted we put them up on our shoulders to watch the races. I would load one of the girls up, and Marilyn would load the other. That was still a problem, in that I was still seven inches taller than Marilyn, so one girl was always sitting higher than the other. If the ground was uneven, we could stand so that Marilyn was up higher than me, but in mid-June we were out near Hagerstown and our spot was level. The girls kept fussing and we kept swapping them back and forth. Finally, Holly, who was sitting on my shoulders at the moment, said, "Daddy, you need to get a taller Mommy!"

I tried to keep the smile off my face as I looked at Marilyn, who was starting to stew. Molly got in on it then, adding, "We need a Mommy your height, Daddy!"

I did my best to keep a straight face, and told my wife, "You know, they're right! I'm thinking maybe blonde, blue-eyed..." I held my hands in front of my chest, like I was playing with a pair of bowling balls.

"Very funny, the three of you!" I just started laughing, and for the rest of the afternoon, every time we swapped the girls, I would start laughing again.

It got worse that night, back at the house. After dinner, with the kids all washed up and fed, and Marilyn and I laying back in our recliners, the girls came into the living room and went up to their mother's feet. I noticed Charlie, however, hanging back by the archway, so I knew he was up to something. Marilyn was laying back, barefoot and watching the news with me, and the twins went up to her and each went up to one of her feet. Then they looked over at their older brother.

"One foot for each of you. You have to pull evenly.", he told them.

Holly and Molly grabbed their mother's ankles and began pulling. Marilyn looked up at all of this and said, "What in the world are you two up to?!"

"Charlie says that in order to make you taller, we need to stretch you!", answered Holly.

Unbelievable! I slapped my face and turned to stare at my son, who was grinning from ear to ear and scampered off down the hallway. Then I started laughing helplessly as our daughters tugged on Marilyn's ankles. She was laughing too, and ordering them to stop, it wasn't going to work!

"It will work better if you start to tickle Mommy's feet.", I told them.

That really got the girls to working, and Marilyn, who is very ticklish, started crying out! "No, NO, NO! Stop it! Don't tickle ... NO! ... Stop!" She began kicking her legs up and down, and the girls kept trying to hold on. "Stop!" She looked over at me. "Get them to stop!" I just laughed until my sides hurt and the tears came. Marilyn had to finally reach down and snag the girls and drag them into her lap, and tickle them back. For years after I could tease her about her height by telling her we'd get the girls to pull her ankles again.

Then, in late June Marilyn blackmailed me into something I wasn't at all sure I wanted to do. Well, maybe blackmail isn't the proper term. Fraud doesn't seem right, either. Coercion, that's what it was, coercion! I was totally unprepared for her idea. My pants were on the floor, and Marilyn was giving me a blowjob, when, right at the point where I should have been happily sighing in bliss as she swallowed, she stopped and said, "Carling, I was thinking, maybe we could have another child..."

All contracts entered into when the parties aren't wearing pants are to be considered null and void! All contracts entered into when the parties are exchanging bodily fluids are to be considered especially null and void! I couldn't even argue about it at the time, since we were sixty-nining, and Marilyn was sitting on my face at the time she made this announcement. I was being smothered and sexually tormented at the same time. It's just not fair!

This time I didn't cave in completely. First I made her finish me off, then we discussed it reasonably and rationally. By that I mean that I agreed to it. Marilyn agreed that if she didn't catch immediately, she was to give me blow jobs and let me fuck her ass when she was on the rag. Then we sealed the deal missionary style.

I'm not completely sure that any of this made for a valid contract. I seem to remember something from a business law class about the elements of a contract, and I don't ever recall oral sex being part of the list.

Anyway, by the end of August, Marilyn had missed her latest period, which she enthusiastically told me about that night. Very enthusiastically, too, as in lock Dum-Dum out of the room and break out the handcuffs and lube enthusiastic. She was expecting our next child in May of 1989.

We decided to call the new book Paying the Bills: America's Need For A Balanced Budget. While I am personally socially liberal, without a doubt I am a fiscal conservative. This new book gave a history of political economics in America, and showed the effects of entitlement growth, and the effect on government policy. I had almost no hope that anything would ever be done about the problem, because people just didn't want to deal with the problem.

Much of it dated back to FDR, who simply cranked up the printing presses to pay for the New Deal. One of those programs of his was Social Security, which was considered by most, and sold to the public as, a government run annuity. You paid into the insurance fund, and then at the end, you retired and collected what you had paid in. The reality was that Social Security was actually a massive Ponzi scheme. It was never funded, and politicians routinely increased what was being paid out and routinely cut the taxes needed to fund it. There was never a requirement that you could only get out what you had paid in. It was a pyramid scheme that depended on ever increasing numbers of young workers to pay for older retirees.

That was just the start. The Great Society brought us medical insurance programs like Medicare and Medicaid, which did the same thing. Sold to the public as insurance programs, they were anything but, funded entirely out of current revenues and taxes. By the Eighties the numbers were becoming large enough to worry about. By the Nineties they became scary, and by the turn of the century they were totally out of control. By some calculations, the bulk of American taxes and borrowing were going to pay for mandated entitlement programs.

Paying the Bills detailed these issues. It wasn't new stuff, but it was important stuff. The average politician wanted to do two things - lower taxes and raise spending. These were the things that got them re-elected. The American public didn't want to hear the truth, that they couldn't have their cake and eat it too. They wanted a steady diet of cake, cake, and more cake! A politician who promised them cake, and then told them it was good for them and non-fattening and, best of all, free, got elected. Very few presidents were able to balance the budget, and most of the time it was by accounting miracles and tricks. Some of these we exposed and some we simply recited the problems with.

Ultimately the problem was with the American public itself. They knew they were being lied to, but that was still better than facing the music and paying the piper. Every poll ever taken showed that the American public wanted these programs, along with every other government subsidy or handout available. They simply didn't want to pay for them, definitely not at the level necessary. It would require a national sales tax or value added tax, and income tax levels would need to rise significantly, as in they would probably need to double or more.

So how was it all paid for? Simple! First, simply crank up the printing presses and print more dollar bills, but that caused inflation, and had the problem in that it added to the deficit. Second, and ultimately more corrosive, was to borrow the money. The U.S. had the world's best credit rating, but eventually even America can only borrow so much money before people figure out it can't pay it back. That was the ultimate problem and cause for the Great Recession. Economies are cyclical, and recessions and depressions happen with regularity, but it makes a whole lot of difference whether you have money in your pocket when it happens, or if you owe the bank a shitload of money. It's no different for countries.

Paying the Bills came out just after Thanksgiving, and proved a sensation, though perhaps not in the way we had intended. It had been an election year, and George H.W. Bush had handily beaten Michael Dukakis, one of the most ineffectual candidates the Democrats had ever run. Within days of publication, it had made the New York Times Non-Fiction Best Seller List, and was the talk of the chattering classes across the country. Liberals condemned the book, saying it vastly overstated the costs of these wonderful programs, and that I wanted to throw the old, sick, and poor off the American gravy train. Conservatives, on the other hand, lauded these ideas, but said I had overstated the costs involved - we didn't need to raise taxes, but lower them! Worst of all, newly elected President Bush had famously (and stupidly) made his 'Read my lips! No new taxes!' pledge, and here I was saying he was wrong.

Joe Throttlemeyer, my co-author, an economist at Penn State, couldn't handle the nonsense and he dumped all the questions on me. For this book, my name had been listed first, and I thanked him ever so sweetly for giving out my number. Two weeks after the book came out, our agent at Simon and Schuster called me and told me that the Sunday talk shows wanted me. I had eschewed a book tour this time, but I couldn't turn down This Week with David Brinkley. Saturday night I drove down to Washington and spent the night in the Hay-Adams again, but without Marilyn. We had stayed there when I received the award lo those many years ago from the Bahamian government. She was staying home with the kids and promised to tape the show.

Welcome to the big leagues! David Brinkley was not Oprah Winfrey! He was a smart interviewer and had been around the Washington news game since before I was born. He was not going to be a pushover and ask puff questions. Worse, I wasn't his only guest that morning. He had me on along with 'The Lion of the Senate', Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy, perhaps the most liberal Democrat in the Senate. Kennedy had already been quoted disparaging the book. Nothing like a friendly audience to give you that warm and fuzzy feeling.

Mercifully I went through the makeup business fairly quickly. I had felt like an idiot doing it before going onstage with Oprah, and I still felt like an idiot. At least I didn't have to do it with Kennedy in the same room. That would have probably been awkward. I don't know why we had to do makeup, anyway. If you're a dark complexion they want you lighter, otherwise they want you darker, and not so shiny, and the camera adds ten pounds and all sorts of horseshit is going on. I left makeup and was sent off to the green room. I bet that Kennedy got his own dressing room. Then again, he had a house in Washington, on DuPont Circle I believed. Maybe he would just show up already polished and primed.

Eventually I was called out during a commercial break, and put in a chair at a table across from Brinkley. I looked around uncertainly, noticing where all the cameras were. Kennedy came out, all smiles, and greeted half the crew by name, and immediately sat down at his chair, a few feet away. He had probably done this a hundred times before. I was ignored, being beneath the great man. The setup was so that they could focus on each of us without anybody interfering with a shot of somebody else.

Brinkley started off by introducing the topic, and giving a quick synopsis of the book, and was surprisingly fair with it. Then he turned to me and asked, "Doctor Buckman, throughout your book, you state that any number of government programs have costs far higher than what have been stated by a number of people, and that in order to pay for them, taxes have to be dramatically increased. Surely you don't expect tax rates to be doubled, as you suggest in your book?"

"It's not a matter of what I expect to happen as it is that these are basic facts, and we need to acknowledge them if we are to have any hope of stabilizing the finances of this country. If you go to the store and buy something, sooner or later you have to pay for it. Congress has gone to the store and has bought a bunch of things. They've bought pensions, which is what Social Security is, and medical insurance, which is Medicare and Medicaid, and highways and dams and water treatment plants. Somebody has to pay for this stuff. Right now, we're just getting by, telling the entire world that, 'Sure, we're good for it.', but sooner or later the bill is going to come due, and the bill will be beyond belief."

"Senator, your response?"

Senator Kennedy gave a lengthy discourse on how the costs were nowhere near what I was stating they were, and that this simply was the Republican mantra of killing off needed social programs. He could have rambled on for the entire show, but Brinkley cut him off.

"Doctor Buckman, do you really advocate ending these social programs? What do you expect the millions of people who are on Social Security and Medicare to do without them?", he asked.

"I have never said we should end these programs. We have done a lot of good with Social Security and Medicare, for instance. What I am saying, though, is that we have to pay for them. My employees have pensions and health care, but I pay for them, in full, up front. If I stop paying, they don't get them. As it currently stands, we are only paying a fraction of the cost, and promising the world we'll pay sometime in the future, but that future keeps getting farther and farther away, and the amount we need to pay keeps getting larger and larger. At some point in the next thirty years - in our lifetimes! - the numbers will get so large we won't be able to pay, no matter what we do!", I replied.

"That is simply not true!", interrupted Kennedy. "Doctor Buckman surely knows that payroll tax deductions are paid into a trust fund, a trust fund which fully pays for all future benefits!"

"And Senator Kennedy surely knows that money is a fungible commodity. Payments into the trust fund are immediately and automatically used to buy Treasury Bills, so the funds immediately flow into general revenues, and the Treasury Bills simply add to the budget deficit.", I countered.

"It is astonishing that at a time like this that a seemingly intelligent man like Doctor Buckman would be so willing to consider shutting down essential social programs that keep our weakest and most vulnerable citizens alive! It is simply unconscionable and unspeakably heartless!"

"Your response?", prompted Brinkley.

I smiled. "Well, my wife would surely agree that I'm unconscionable and unspeakable and heartless, but that's a totally different subject. It is complete nonsense to say that I want to shut down Social Security or Medicare. This is a wealthy and powerful nation, and there is no reason we can't have a strong safety net for all our citizens. What I want is for our political leaders to honestly explain how they plan to pay for it. Right now we aren't paying for it, and we don't have a plan to pay for it."

"Which is simply not true. Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid are vital to the lives of millions of people, and this pathetic attempt to eliminate these programs is simply horrid in a modern society."

Brinkley looked at me, and I countered. "Again, I repeat, I have no desire to end these programs, simply to pay for them. Listen, I'm not a lawyer, or an economist, or a politician. I'm a mathematician, and the one thing they teach you how to do as a mathematician is to add and subtract. When I tell you that two plus two equals four, then it equals four. It doesn't equal five, and it doesn't equal six, and it certainly doesn't equal twenty-two. The math doesn't add up, and unless we develop a way to pay for these programs, we'll be bankrupt in our lifetime. If I ran my company this way, my company would be bankrupt and I'd be in jail!"

Brinkley called the argument to a close at that point and we went to commercial. That was it for me. I got hustled off the stage and got sent off to a dressing room to clean off the makeup. Kennedy went elsewhere, and I never saw him again. I cleaned up and left and drove home.

I got back to Hereford shortly after lunch, and was greeted by my son, who ran up to me saying, "You were on TV! I saw you on TV!"

I grinned down at him. "Really? You sure it was me?"

"Mommy said it was you!" He grabbed my hand and pulled me out of the foyer and into the living room.

Marilyn was coming out of the kitchen and she laughed at us. "The TV star is home! How was it?"

I kissed my wife hello, and then grabbed for Holly as she scampered past. She giggled and scooted free, and then ran down the hallway with Molly and Dum-Dum. I snorted at them and then told Marilyn, "I need this like I need more holes in the head!"

"You were great! I don't think Senator Kennedy knew what hit him."

I just shook my head. "I bet your old man isn't too happy with me. How dare I dispute the great man!?" Big Bob was a major fan of the Kennedy family.

"Well, you're my great man, so who cares what my father thinks. Have you had lunch yet?"

I shook my head and followed her into the kitchen. Lunch was ham and cheese sandwiches and iced tea, with the kids and the dog running through on occasion. Afterwards, Marilyn pushed me into the living room and hit the remote on the television and the VCR. I was too tired to do much more than sit there and vegetate while Marilyn rewound the tape and then started it up again.

"Hey! You're on TV again!", yelled Charlie as he climbed up on the couch.

I snorted. "It must be magic." He kept babbling and we finally had to tell him to be quiet - or else! That made him quiet down, but it also bored him, so he scampered away again.

The first half of the show went pretty much like I remembered, with Kennedy and me sparring. I kept telling him the numbers didn't add up, and he kept saying I was an inhuman monster to consider throwing sick and old people out with the garbage. The curious part was during the second half of the show, when Brinkley called out his discussion panel of fellow journalists, the Roundtable. Today's panel consisted of George Will, Sam Donaldson, and some other fellow I didn't recognize. If I had known they were there that day, I might have stuck around to watch. I had been watching the Sunday morning talk shows for years, both before and after my recycle. I didn't recognize the third guy with Brinkley, so he never made it big, but I just loved Will and Donaldson. Donaldson was on the liberal side of the fence, and Will on the right, but they were smart and articulate and just plain interesting!

The discussion focused on two specific areas, whether Kennedy or I won the debate and whether we were correct, and what effect, if any, this would have on the future Bush presidency. The answer to the first part was that I had the facts on my side and Kennedy had emotion on his side, so Kennedy lost the debate and won the election, so to speak. As for the second question, it was universally agreed that politicians couldn't care less about the facts, and that there was going to be no effect on government policies.

It made me wonder why I ever wrote the damn book to begin with.

Chapter 93: Wreckage

That wasn't the end of it, of course. Both Time Magazine and the New York Times came calling, since Paying the Bills came out in time for their yearend gift ideas and non-fiction book lists. The Times quoted me as 'one of the leading young intellectuals of the fiscal conservative agenda', which made me wonder just how many of them were there. There obviously weren't very many at all, if I was a leader. Time did a puffy human interest piece, and I let my mouth run away with me. They pushed how Kennedy was still damning me as a billionaire out to savage the sick, poor, and elderly, so I hit back. A few memorable quotes included, "I earned my money. Senator Kennedy's father earned his money." and "Senator Kennedy's family gave him millions. Mine gave me the back of the hand when they threw me out at sixteen." The one that made the most news was, "The day I start using Ted Kennedy as a moral compass we'll be throwing snowballs in hell!" That last line might have been over the top, but the man was a drunk with a zipper problem, who bought his way out of more problems than I can remember. I heard about that one from a number of people, including Marilyn's parents.

John chewed on me to watch my mouth. It wasn't that he disagreed with me, just that I needed to be careful what I said. What I did could reflect on the company, and not all of our clients and investors would agree with me. Missy chewed on me since she was a good and loyal Democrat. I promised to behave myself in the future. That promise didn't last too long. Shortly before Christmas I was invited to speak at a meeting of the American Conservative Union in Washington, and that made some headlines, too, when I stood up at the podium and said that while I was fiscally conservative, I was not a social conservative, and if the Republican Party wanted to stay relevant in the future, they needed to keep their noses out of people's religion and bedrooms. That made both Time and National Review.

It wasn't all politics or business, though. Two weekends after Thanksgiving, Marilyn and I took a long weekend by ourselves down at Hougomont. Tusker and Tessa took care of the girls. Charlie and Dum-Dum stayed with the Parkers (yes, the same Parkers who he wanted me to punch in the nose or something. He and Johnny were now best friends.) We left Friday morning and flew home Monday afternoon, and packed very light. Pregnancy made Marilyn very horny, and she didn't spend much time wearing anything more than high heels and sunglasses.

Realistically, this would be our last child. We were now 33 years old, and we had spaced the kids out some. By the time Marilyn wanted another, it wouldn't be possible. After 35 a woman's fertility starts dropping drastically. By 40 her childbearing years are over. Forget about the tabloids and their reports of women in their fifties and sixties giving birth. Those types of events are one in a million, and require massive medical support to allow.

I teased my wife several times about what our son thought about all that athletic activity going on around him. She responded that I was getting old, and that the athletics were slowing down! Why, I was only able to make love twice in a row anymore, and that just had her getting warmed up! My response? Quality, not quantity! It made for a pleasant argument, and we tried to solve it many times that weekend.

Yes, we were having a boy. The ultrasound showed that the littlest Buckman was a male Buckman! That made us start picking names. I suggested Carling Parker III, as the start of a dynasty. Marilyn put the kibosh on that! Then, at Christmas in Utica, she found a book on the history of the saints from her mother, and suggested some saints' names, like with her brothers. I rolled my eyes and took the book from her hands. After I went through the index I came up with Nicholas Cayetano.

"Nicholas Cayetano!? Where did that come from?", she asked, taking back the book.

"The patron saints of prostitutes and gamblers.", I replied, keeping a straight face.

"Carl! That's not funny!", scolded Harriet.

"No, it's not!. Now, behave!", ordered Marilyn.

I shrugged and smiled. I turned to Mark, who was sitting on the couch next to me. He was grinning back at me. "So, who was the patron saint of trailer salesman?", I asked.

He laughed while Marilyn stewed. "That would be Saint Big Bob!"

I laughed, too. "Sorry, that name is already taken." Charlie's middle name was Robert.

Marilyn protested, and then looked up the patron saint of salesmen, who turned out to be Saint Lucy. Unless the youngest Buckman turned out to be a drag queen, Lucy wasn't going to cut it. We spent the next few minutes coming up with other strange patron saints (Saint Drogo, patron saint of ugly people, got a lot of commentary around the kitchen table, with everybody claiming that this brother or that brother qualified) but never came up with an answer. We tabled it for a bit longer.

We took the kids down to Hougomont again right after Christmas. That would probably be our last vacation until after the birth. In January we settled on James Ryan, though I was still making a strong push for Nicolas Cayetano.

In January we all went over to Fifth District for the winter concert, featuring Charlie in the chorus. He was as much of a soprano as any of the girls. I whispered that to my wife, earning a giggle and an elbow in the ribs. I was glad when we left, though, because the weather was closing in. It doesn't snow all that much in Maryland, but it does snow somewhat, and the locals simply can't handle it. They don't get enough snow to need the investment in plows and sanders like they do up north. When you get more than about half an inch, they start shutting down the state. We had almost an inch when we left the concert, and there was an announcement for everyone to drive carefully, because it was getting slick. Joy!

It was slick as snot out on Mount Carmel Road. It was about a five mile drive, and I was going very slow. We made sure the kids all were buckled in, and Marilyn grumbled about the seat belt across her expanding waistline, but she buckled up, too. We drove home slowly.

Then there was a light and the sound of crashing metal, and things got very dark.

I came to with that sickening feeling of a bright light, and a smell you don't get outside of a hospital. It took me a few seconds to realize what was happening, and then I tried to sit up, but I was strapped down and could only thrash around. I settled down and tried to figure out what was happening, and somebody in white came around. "Mister Buckman! Calm down, please. Calm down!"

I lay back and nodded, and said, "Where am I? What happened? Where's Marilyn? Where's my children?" At least I could talk. When I woke up in Gitmo, I was so dehydrated I couldn't speak. Now I just had a blinding headache.

"Calm down, Mister Buckman. A doctor will be in shortly.", she answered.

"What happened? Was there a car wreck? WHERE'S MY FAMILY!?"

"Stay calm, Mister Buckman..."

"I need to know about my family!", I yelled.

The curtain opened up, and a doctor stepped in. He put his hands on my shoulders and pressed me back down. I didn't even realize I had levered myself up. "They're fine, Mister Buckman!", he told me.

That calmed me some. "Where are they? What happened?"

"You were in a car wreck in the storm. Your children are fine. They just got some bumps and bruises. You can see them later."

"Marilyn! WHAT HAPPENED TO MARILYN!?", I demanded.

"Calm down, Mister Buckman. Your wife is in surgery right now, but she's alive and should be okay. Now, you have to calm down! Your family is going to be all right!"

I sagged back into the bed and my heart stopped pounding. Then I started thinking. Surgery? What was wrong? "The baby?"

The doctor's voice caught at that, and I saw him glance at the nurse. I already knew the answer before he said anything. "I'm sorry, Mister Buckman, but there was nothing we could do."

Oh shit! Shit, shit, shit! I started crying for little James Ryan, and for Marilyn. She would never forgive me for this! I was the one driving, I was the one responsible. It was all my fault.

I lay there in the hospital bed sobbing for a few minutes, until I remembered the doctor and nurse standing there. I opened my eyes and looked at them through blurry eyes. "Where are our children?", I asked with a raspy voice.

"They're here, in the hospital. We're keeping them overnight. We'll let you see them in a few minutes, if you wish."

I just nodded. They must be terrified. "What happened?"

The doctor turned halfway and raised a hand, signaling to somebody. A Maryland State Trooper came closer. "Trooper Margolies can go over that with you."

"Mister Buckman, I'm sorry to meet you this way. Can I ask you some questions?"

The trooper was a short and swarthy man with dense curly hair, who looked like he had a Mediterranean heritage. "Yeah, sure. What happened?" I wiped my face. I must have looked like hell.

"That's what I wanted to ask you. Do you remember what happened?", he replied.

I shook my head, which damn near killed me. I called out to the nurse, "Hey, can I get some morphine or something? My head is killing me!"

She came over and shook her head. "Maybe later, but you've had a concussion. We can't chance it right now. Maybe later."

"Shit!", I muttered. I looked back at the trooper, moving my head slowly. "Sorry, but no. I just don't remember anything. I saw a bright light, and then things went blank. What happened?"

He shrugged. "You got t-boned near Fifth District Elementary. You were going home, correct?"

"Yes."

He nodded. "It happened about a mile west of the school, going towards your home. We talked to the other driver. He reported that as he approached the intersection, he lost control. For what it's worth, there was a lot of black ice on the roads. There have been a lot of accidents."

"So he hit us? Where? Marilyn's side?"

"Marilyn is your wife?", he asked, referring to a notebook.

"Yeah."

"Yes, sir. He impacted your car on the right front quarter panel. That pushed you across the road and down over an embankment. Your car rolled over a couple of times and landed on the roof."

"Jesus Christ!", I exclaimed quietly. Back on the first go, I had been in fender-benders, but never in something serious. How the hell had we lived?

"The first people to get there were some other parents behind you. They had a cell phone and were able to call it in. I got there about five minutes later, and we got an ambulance right after that. The sliding door had popped open and blown off, but all of your kids were still in their car seats, hanging upside down. All of you were."

"Jesus! Where are we?", I asked.

"Carroll Hospital, in Westminster. It was the nearest emergency unit."

"I want to see my kids." I looked around slowly, focusing on the nurse. "Hey, I'd like to see my kids now." I turned back to the cop. "What happened to the other driver?"

He shrugged. "He's somewhere else. He busted an arm and cut his face up. I'm not telling you his name, not now." He stopped as the nurse rolled a wheelchair up. "Mister Buckman, I don't want you looking for the driver. It was an accident, nothing more. You weren't responsible. He wasn't responsible. The weather was lousy. He wasn't driving fast or crazy. He wasn't drunk. It was just an accident."

"Yeah.", I replied, tiredly.

It was about four in the morning. The nurse handed me a hospital robe; I was wearing the outfit that had my ass hanging in the breeze. I had no idea where my clothes were. The trooper helped the nurse put me in the wheelchair, and then said he would finish with his paperwork. The wheelchair had an IV rack attached, and the IV bag connected to me was hung from the rack. I was wheeled out of the room and down a hallway. A few minutes later I was in a room with my children. They had managed to cram in a third bed into the two bed room. My daughters were sleeping, my son was crying.

His head whipped around when he saw me. "Daddy!"

"Hey, buddy, how you doing?" Charlie looked scared and banged up, but otherwise okay. He had some bruises on his face, and a couple of Band-Aids over his right eye, but otherwise seemed fine. As soon as the wheelchair stopped, I stood up and reached out and took his hand.

"Daddy! There was an accident. Where's Mommy?" He grabbed onto me and hugged me.

I simply rubbed his back and hugged him. The nurse moved my IV bag to a rolling rack.

I turned back to my son. "It's okay. Mommy's getting taken care of by the doctors. I'm going to stay with you guys for a while, okay."

"Yeah!"

"So just quiet down a bit and lay back. Don't wake your sisters. I'll stay with you."

Charlie lay back on his bed, and I held his hand until he fell asleep. I stayed with him until the morning. Around eight in the morning a doctor came around. Charlie and the girls were still asleep, so I stepped outside of the room, dragging my IV rack. A nurse had swapped it out earlier, so with the constant hydration I was pissing like a racehorse. I was looking forward to losing the damn thing.

"When can I see my wife?", I asked.

"Mister Buckman, your wife is in recovery now. She's resting and will be able to see you in a bit."

"How is she? What happened?", I asked.

"You know she lost the baby?" I nodded. He continued, "The impact was just to the front of her position. The worst part was that the seat belt compressed on her abdomen while she was hanging there in the seat upside down. It was just too much. Mrs. Buckman broke her right ulna." He used his left hand to point to a place on his lower right arm. "There were some internal injuries, so that's why we had to do surgery. That, and to remove the..."

I held up my hand. "Yes, my son." Not just a dead fetus.

He shrugged and nodded. "Yes, your son. You children were better off. Your daughters got a few bruises, but they were practically cocooned in those car seats of theirs. You really got some good ones. Your son..." He looked at me for a second, and then said, "Your older son, Charles, was a little more banged up. He got some bruises, and a few cuts over his right eye, and he has a greenstick fracture on his left radius. He won't need a cast, but will have to keep it wrapped for a couple of weeks. Otherwise your children will be fine."

"When can I see Marilyn? Does she know about the baby yet?"

"She's been unconscious."

"I need to be there."

He glanced back at the room where the children were sleeping. "Is there anybody who can come and stay with the children? Can you call some family?"

If only! "I have no family, Doctor, and Marilyn's is in New York. Do you have a phone? I can call some friends."

He directed me to a telephone, and I called the Tusks. Tessa answered it, and promised they would come over, but it might be a few hours. They had to get a babysitter, and then come out. The storm was over, but nobody was quite sure how the roads were. I just reiterated that I needed somebody to sit with the kids while I sat with Marilyn. She promised to be there as fast as possible. Then I called the security company. They would get some people over here as well.

I heard my daughters fussing, so I went back into the room. Charlie was still out, so I sat with the girls, who were very scared and crying. The kids had been awake all through the crash and the rescue, and were terrified. I had slammed my head into the driver side window, which had knocked me out and given me a concussion, and Marilyn had been out as well. I couldn't imagine the kids hanging there upside down while their parents were lifeless around them. I just sat there on the bed and held them while they cried and whimpered. Charlie eventually woke up, but once he saw me with his sisters, he calmed down and smiled.

I wanted to get up and go see my wife, but the girls would act up whenever I tried to move. I was rescued about an hour later when Tessa showed up, along with the security team. "I got here as fast as I could! The roads are fine today. Tusker was waiting until the neighbors showed up to watch the boys, and then is going out to the house to bring some clothes out here."

"Oh, jeez, I never even thought of that!", I replied.

One of the security guys said, "We can handle that, Mr. Buckman."

I looked over at him and nodded. "Okay, either one of you guys go over to the house, or call your office and send somebody over. Please?"

"Yes, sir, we'll handle it." He stepped out of the room and pulled out a cell phone.

Tessa turned back to me. "How are you? What happened? Where's Marilyn?"

I took a deep breath. Where to start? "We got hit by another car last night, on Mount Carmel Road, and got rolled into the ditch. The kids are banged up, but okay." Tessa came over and sat on Holly's bed, and the little girl instinctively wrapped her arms around her. The kids didn't have any IVs, so I lifted Molly up and set her next to Tessa.

Tessa hugged the girls and looked across the room at Charlie. "How you doing, Charlie?"

"Okay, Aunt Tessa. Where's Mommy?"

"Your dad's going to check on that. You can come over here, too, if you want."

He clambered down off his bed and climbed up next to Tessa. She looked at me and asked quietly, "Marilyn?"

"She's alive. She got the worst of it, and was in surgery. I haven't been able to leave the kids to go see her." I leaned over and whispered in her ear, "She lost the baby."

"Oh, shit!"

Molly looked up at that and said, "That's a bad word. Mommy yells at Daddy when he says that."

Tessa smiled at the girls. "Well, I'm very sorry." She was crying, but looked at me and said, "Go! Go find her and stay with her. I'll watch these guys."

A rather officious nurse came around when I stepped up to the counter in the hallway. "Is she a relative?"

"Yes, an aunt. The kids' uncle will be along later. Can I go see my wife now? And when can I get this IV out!?"

"The doctor has to say when that can be removed. You can't see your wife yet, she's not out of recovery.", she told me. Her tone was one where the patients and their families were the major annoyance in her life. She wasn't a nurse so much as a bureaucrat.

I started seeing red, and fought to keep my temper under control. "Nurse, get that doctor and get him here now, or get yourself a lawyer. You have ten minutes!"

"You can't speak to me that way! Now, you get back to your room before I call Security!"

"Then you call them right now. The clock is ticking. I want a doctor and I want to see my wife. Now!" I just stood there and waited.

Well, damn if she didn't call Security! A beefy rent-a-cop showed up, listened to the nurse for a second, and then grabbed the telephone. He called for a more senior nurse, who showed up quickly and called for the doctor. The rent-a-cop and the first nurse traded dirty looks, and he took off.

The doctor showed up about ten minutes later, took one look at my chart, and ordered the IV yanked. This doctor and the nurse got my polite thanks. He then scrounged up a pair of slippers (I had been wandering around barefoot up to this point!) and pointed me in the direction of the elevators. The senior nurse took me up a floor and down a hallway to where Marilyn was.

Marilyn was awake, and looked awful, but she was able to look at me. As soon as I saw her, I knew she knew she had lost our child. She just started crying; it looked like she had already been crying. I went over to her and simply held her hand. I couldn't sit on the bed without disturbing her, and she had all sorts of lines going into her. I cried, too.

"The kids?", she asked.

"They're fine. Tessa's with them right now. They just got some bumps and bruises. They'll be fine. Once I woke up, I spent the night with them. They wouldn't let me see you until now."

"Oh, Carl, I lost the baby!", she wailed. "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry!"

"I know, I know. It's not your fault. I was driving. It was all my fault. I'm so sorry!" I got as close to her as I could, and leaned down and hugged her as best I could. Marilyn's body was just racked with sobs, and I cried with her.

After another hour, Marilyn was moved from the recovery room to a regular room, mercifully empty except for her. By 9:30 the surgeon showed up and talked to us. He confirmed what everybody else had told us. Marilyn would be fine, but that she lost the baby, and they had to operate to repair some internal damage and bleeding. She would be in the hospital until Monday or Tuesday. The kids could come by later, but only for a few minutes.

I followed him out the door. "Doctor,", I asked him lowly, "how long before Marilyn can have another child. This was going to be our last."

He just shook his head. "I'm sorry, Mister Buckman, but the damage was too severe. Your wife can't have any more children."

That dropped in my stomach like a ball of cold lead. "When can we take our son? We'll need to arrange a funeral."

He gave me a horrified look. "I'm very, very sorry, Mister Buckman, but we couldn't save ... your son wasn't ... there won't be a funeral, sir."

Shit! He was just so much medical waste, to be disposed of. I started crying again, but thanked him and let him go his way. It wasn't his fault.

It was mine.

I don't think I had ever felt lower. I had killed our son with my lousy driving. I think that if I didn't have to take care of our other children, I might have gone off and found some deserted corner of the hospital and quietly killed myself. Maybe Marilyn could find somebody better. She couldn't do any worse.

I went back into Marilyn's room and sat with her, holding her hand. She cried until she fell asleep, and I felt her grip loosen. I was all cried out at the moment, and when I looked up, I saw Tusker standing in the doorway. I stood up and wrapped my robe around myself, and then shuffled over to him. We went out into the hallway.

"Hey man, how you doing?", he asked quietly.

"I've been better."

He handed me a bag of clothes. "I just saw Tessa. She's down in the room with the kids. I gave them some clothes, also. She told me about Marilyn."

"I killed our son, Tusker."

"No, you didn't." I started to argue, but he stopped me. "No you didn't. Now shut up. It wasn't your fault. You're going to go get dressed, and we're going to get the kids home, and then it will be tomorrow, and tomorrow you'll think it was your fault just a little bit less. Then you're going to make it through that day, and the next day you're going to think it was your fault just a little bit less. This is never going to get better, but you will make it through, one day at a time, until you know it wasn't your fault."

"I really fucked up this time, Tusker."

"Right, whatever, get through today first." He looked around and found a nurse. "Is there a place he can shower and clean up?" We were pointed to a bathroom down the hall; the individual rooms didn't have showers. He pushed me towards it and then pushed me inside with the bag of clothes. "Get cleaned up and get dressed."

When I came out, I found Tusker sitting there on a bench. I had stuffed the hospital gown and robe into a hamper, but still had on my slippers. I went up to the nurses' counter, where the bitch who had pissed me off earlier was missing. Maybe she had gone off shift. A new nurse came over. "Any idea where my clothes are?", I asked.

"Marilyn's, too!", added my friend.

She shrugged. "Not really. Did they actually admit you to the hospital, or just to the emergency room?"

It was my turn to shrug. "Just the ER, I think."

"Maybe they have them."

"Probably the same for my kids?", I asked.

She held her hands up in a perplexed look. "Either there or on the floor where they were admitted."

I went back into Marilyn's room, and found her awake again. My head was still pounding, but not as bad as earlier. When she saw me, she didn't look as bleak. Tusker came in with me. "I thought you'd left me.", she said. I swallowed hard and tried not to gape at her. Had I sunk that low to her? I started to tear up again. She saw the look in my face, and her eyes opened wide. "I was just making a joke! I know you hadn't left me!"

"I'm sorry. I was getting cleaned up."

She grabbed for my hand. "It's alright! We'll be okay. How are the kids?"

"Tessa's with them. They'll be fine.", said Tusker.

"Go see them. They need to see their father.", she replied.

Tusker took the bag of clothing from me. "Go find the kids. Tell them you saw Mommy."

"Yeah.", I said quietly. I shuffled out of the room towards the elevator. The bitchy nurse was back, and gave me a dirty look. I went down to the kids' room, and found them sitting there with Tessa reading the girls a Dr. Seuss story, Green Eggs and Ham, which was one of their favorites. There must have been a library cart in the pediatric wing.

They all looked up when I came in, and clamored to know how Marilyn was. "Mommy is awake and wanted me to check on you guys again. She has to stay here for a few more days, but if you get cleaned up and dressed, maybe I can sneak you in to see her."

Charlie had already gotten into some clothes. Tessa pulled the curtain around the girls' bed, and I asked her, "Seen the kids' clothing?"

"No. Maybe you can ask the nurse."

I just nodded and headed out to the nurses' station. This bunch was a lot friendlier. They didn't have the clothing, but a nurse called the Emergency Room and found it all down there. They sent an orderly to go fetch it. Well, not Marilyn's since it was covered in blood and had to be cut off of her. The kids and I could leave once a doctor came around to sign us all out - around noon! In the meantime, they could get dressed and go upstairs and see their mom, if they went in with me, one at a time.

I went back into the room. Tessa had the girls in the bathroom, washing and scrubbing, and Charlie was sitting there reading the book again. I sat down next to him and read it with him. 'Say! I like green eggs and ham! I do!! I like them, Sam-I-am!' "Sounds delicious to me.", I commented.

Charlie grinned up at me. "Sounds kind of yucky!"

I laughed. "Watch it, or I'll make green eggs and ham for breakfast someday!"

"Close your eyes!", ordered Tessa, and I slapped my hands over my face. Charlie did the same, and a pair of squealing girls giggled and ran back behind their curtain. Ten minutes later, the curtain opened up and they came out. "Let's go see Mommy!", said Tessa, taking each one by hand.

I led the way with Charlie, and Holly and Molly alternately dragged Aunt Tessa along, or tried to hold her back, one of their games with her. My children, the living ones, were getting back to their normal playful selves.

Upstairs, the bitchy nurse looked like she wanted to have us all thrown out, but I think somebody must have chewed her ass out, because she only said, "One at a time!"

I ignored her and ushered the kids through the door. Tessa and Tusker stayed outside. All three children squealed, "Mommy!", and tried to run to her, but I held them back as best I could. Marilyn was sitting up slightly, and her face lit up like a Christmas tree when she saw them.

"You can't jump on Mommy! She's not feeling very good.", I told them.

"No, but if you climb up here carefully, I could really use a hug and a kiss!", she told them.

Charlie was first, and scrambled up the side of bed and wrapped his arms around her and kissed her cheek. Marilyn winced, but returned the kiss. I thought it better to lift the girls, and do it more gently than Charlie. First Holly and then Molly got to say hello and kiss her.

"Are you guys okay? Were you scared?"

I smiled when the girls said they had been scared, but Charlie said, "No! It was like the time I dumped the bike last fall at Endicott!" I just rolled my eyes at that, and tried to stifle a laugh. Trust a little boy to say he wasn't scared, when I knew he had been terrified.

I only let them stay for about ten minutes, and then herded them out of the room. Then I stayed in the hallway with them, while Tusker and Tessa stuck their heads in. Tusker came out first, when the women started discussing 'female shit' (as he whispered to me.) Tessa came out ten minutes later.

Tessa said, "Okay. We're taking the kids down to their room and waiting for the doctor to release them. Go see your wife and then come back and join us." I went inside and saw Marilyn, who essentially gave me the same instructions. I kissed her goodbye and went downstairs.

Both Tessa and Tusker had a car seat in their cars, so we split the twins and stuffed Charlie in with Tusker, and they took off, followed by one of the security team. Then I went back upstairs. Marilyn was waiting there in her bed, and held her hand out for me. I took it, and she pulled me down to hug me. Then she pushed me upright. "You need to go home and take care of the kids."

"I need to be with you.", I answered.

She shook her head. "I'm not going anywhere. Tusker and Tessa have their own children. They can't do both things. You need to go home and get them back into a normal mode."

I knew she was right, but I argued anyway. "What about tomorrow?"

"When you get home, you need to call my parents. Maybe they can come down. If they can't, you need to call some of the names on the babysitter list on the wall next to the kitchen phone. One of those girls will come out after church. They can watch the kids and you can come over here."

"But..."

She wagged a finger at me. "No buts! I'm not going anywhere for a few days. You need to do this and you know it. Now, you should go home. You look like hell!"

I just slumped down on the chair. I knew she was right, but I couldn't be both places at once. We just held hands for another half hour, until a nurse came in. I was kicked out and Marilyn told me to go home.

I went down to the lobby and realized I couldn't go home. Marilyn's minivan was all messed up and gone. The second security guy took me home in his car.

Tusker was waiting for me with the kids; Tessa had gone home to take care of the boys and rescue the neighbor. As soon as I came in, Tusker took his leave, and I was able to get the kids settled down and back to normal. Then I had to make the phone calls. Marilyn's parents were tough. I had to tell them we lost the baby. They promised to drive down Sunday afternoon. Then I went down the babysitter list until I found somebody who could come over Sunday after church. Finally, I went into my bedroom and took a shower and then scrounged up an ancient Tylenol with codeine and washed it down with a beer. If I could just make it through the day, maybe a massive dose of aspirin or Tylenol would help.

I fumbled through the rest of the day running on autopilot. I read to the twins and got the kids to bed, and then fell asleep in my recliner with Dum-Dum in my lap. We skipped Sunday school and church the next morning, and I waited until Janey Marocoski was dropped off by her mom. I climbed into my Caddy and drove back to the hospital. My headache was now down to a dull roar, and I could control it with Tylenol. I sat with her until about dinner time, and then promised to come back in the morning. She was to be released then.

Marilyn's parents arrived just around the time I got back to the house. They stayed with the kids while I drove Janey home and paid her. I got home just in time to have Harriet serve up something warm and awful for dinner. Her culinary skills had not improved. The kids didn't care, and I just smiled and ate it. I filled them in on the accident after dinner.

The biggest thing I told them was that because Charlie and the girls had been buckled up, they had remained safe. Back on the first go, in 1990, Mark and Lauren had been traveling to Florida in the winter for a vacation. They hit some black ice in Pennsylvania in the middle of the night, and lost control of their minivan, and rolled it down an embankment on the highway. This was eerily familiar. There were two big differences, though. First, only Mark and Lauren, riding up front, were buckled in. Their four children in the back, trying to sleep, were allowed to be unbuckled. When the minivan started rolling, they bounced around the inside of the van like pinballs in an arcade game. Every one of them had multiple broken bones, and two needed to be airlifted to a trauma center. Worst of all, their oldest girl, Nicki, was thrown out through the side door of the van and broke her neck when she was thrown into a tree.

The second big difference was that it was late, and Mark and Lauren had switched driving. Mark was dozing in the passenger seat when Lauren hit the black ice. No matter what my differences with Mark, I always admired how he handled the accident. It would have been so incredibly easy to blame his wife, and so incredibly destructive. He never said anything to her.

Now I pushed Big Bob and Harriet to let the others know to keep their little ones buckled up no matter what. Maybe they could learn from our tragedy, like I had learned from that one. Was that a different somewhere or somewhen? I couldn't figure out the causality of it. Very odd.

Sunday I called the Trooper Barracks and found where the minivan had been hauled away to. I drove over and retrieved what I could from it. All the stuff from the glove box, like the registration and insurance, came with me, along with what could be salvaged of the various possessions inside. I didn't want to chance the car seats being any good; I would just buy new ones. The thing was totaled. Even my cane, which I had set between the seats, had gone flying and broken.

Monday afternoon they released Marilyn to go home and rest in bed. Despite Marilyn's parents being down, I went and picked her up myself. Big Bob is pathetically helpless about anything domestic, like handling kids, so Harriet had to stay home, and Big Bob never traveled anywhere without her, not even to the store. So they stayed home with the twins, after I loaded Charlie on the school bus, and then I drove my car over to the hospital.

We were cleared to leave shortly after lunch. Marilyn had a number of bandages covering her lower abdomen, and a lot of bruising around the area. She moved slowly and tentatively, but she was able to walk from the wheelchair to the car when I brought it around. I drove slowly back to the house.

Big Bob had to hold onto Dum-Dum when we got home. I got my wife into her recliner and covered her with an Afghan. Dum-Dum was going apeshit out of control, and I had to smack her twice to calm her down. Then I let her scramble into the recliner with Marilyn, which calmed her down to normal. Marilyn winced as the mutt moved around, licking her face before settling down at her feet. Then I carefully let the girls cuddle with her. It would have been a beautiful little scene if it wasn't for the fact that she had been damn near killed by my driving a few days before. After a bit, the girls got bored and took off, but Charlie climbed into the chair with her when he came home from school.

Marilyn's parents stayed until Wednesday, when they took off. I took the week off while Marilyn recuperated. Quite a few of Marilyn's friends from the office or church called or came over. Tessa brought the boys over after school a few times.

Things got a little tense on Wednesday. That evening, after the kids were put to bed, Marilyn asked me to help change her bandages. Up to that point it had been her mother or Tessa who had helped. The bruising had begun to fade by then, but there was no hiding the ugly red zippers along her lower abdomen. These were larger and not as neatly stitched as the now almost invisible scar from her C-section with the girls. I applied the antibiotic ointment as instructed before putting on some fresh gauze and tape.

When I looked up, I found Marilyn crying. "What's wrong? Did I hurt you?" Marilyn turned away and began crying into her pillow without answering me. I climbed up closer on the bed, and I tried to pull her towards me, but she resisted and stayed turned away. "Marilyn, what's the matter?" She just kept crying.

I couldn't do anything but try and hold her, but it was like she didn't want my touch. I just sat there. I couldn't figure out what I had done wrong, but then I realized she was angry with me. I was the guy who caused the accident, who caused her to lose the baby, and caused her to get all messed up. Of course she was angry with me! I let her go and rolled away from her. No way would she want me even touching her! "Tomorrow I'll get a nurse to come out. I'm sorry. I won't touch you."

That only made things worse! She sat upright and slapped my face, hard, and then tried to hit me again. I just grabbed her arms and held her, so that she didn't hurt herself. "Marilyn! What's wrong?! I told you I'd get you a nurse. That way you won't have to put up with me! What do you want!?"

"You don't want me! I'm damaged goods! You don't want to touch me!", she blubbered, and she struggled in my arms.

"Marilyn, that's nuts! Of course I want you! You're the one who moved away from me! I just thought ... well, I thought ... I mean, I'm the one who caused all this. I thought you didn't want me touching you!"

She kept blubbering, and managed to slap me again. "This is not about you! I can't stand to have you see me like this! I feel so ugly!", she wailed.

Oh Holy Christ! I never heard of such a thing! Who the hell would be so callous as to think that? I just wrapped her in my arms and held onto her, rocking her like a baby. "I love you! You're just a little banged up. I still love you. You're going to get better." I just repeated this stuff over and over until she calmed down.

"Now, can we talk?", I asked. She nodded silently. "Okay. I guess I understand. You can't have any more children, so that makes you less of a woman?"

She nodded. "Yes! Doesn't it!? Didn't you want another child?"

I shrugged and smiled. "Yes, but that isn't going to happen. That has nothing to do with how much I love you. If you want another child, we can always adopt, I suppose."

"No!", she said, shaking her head. "It wouldn't be the same. I mean, unless you wanted to."

I shook my head, too. "No, it's not the same. We've already got three great kids. You were woman enough to make them. Are you worried I won't find you attractive any longer?" Marilyn averted her face and wouldn't answer, so I knew that was part of it. Partially this was my fault, since the exercise routines she did with me had kept her weight down and she looked a whole lot better this time than on my last time. I wrapped my arms around her again. "Right now you look crappy because you're crying and upset. I don't care about the scars or bruises. You're supposed to look lousy right now. Give it a few weeks."

"You're sure?"

I breathed a sigh of relief. She was starting to sound normal again. "Okay, let's give it a few weeks. You're a mess right now. If the scars don't heal nicely, we can find a plastic surgeon to work on them."

"A plastic surgeon!"

"Sure, why not? Maybe he could work on the scars, if there are any." I just shrugged again. "Seriously, if you need to see a doctor for that, or for anything else, we'll take care of it. I know we can't do anything until you heal, but you're still my wife and I still love you. We'll get you through this. Maybe you should see somebody, you know, a psychiatrist or therapist or something."

That got me an amused snort. "Like Hamilton did?"

"Like Hamilton didn't! Maybe he would have turned out differently if Mom had let him be seen by a doctor."

"Maybe we should both go.", she told me.

I just nodded. "Maybe. Let's wait a few days, see how things go."

It turned out that we didn't end up seeing a therapist. Over the next few days, Marilyn kept healing, and she spent as much time healing me. After about a month, she felt well enough that she very nervously reached over to me one night in bed. The lights were off, and I guess that made her feel somewhat safer. It didn't matter. Carl Junior had been going without for a month, and he quickly responded. We made love twice that night, once with her on top, and once with me on top, and that seemed to convince her I was still interested in her as a woman. That was getting ahead of myself, though.

Chapter 94: Family Business

Over the next few weeks we all started healing. Charlie wore an elastic bandage on his arm for a couple of weeks before the X-rays showed his arm wouldn't fall off. He wasn't all that impressed, however, since he wanted a big bandage and a really cool scar to show off in school, and he didn't get either. Boys! Holly and Molly had hardly anything wrong with them, and were just fine.

I took the rest of that first week off and played nursemaid and cook. By the following Monday I had worn out my welcome. Once Marilyn could move around easier, she threw me out and told me to go to work and get out of her hair. I left her my Cadillac and took the 380, promising to pick up a couple of car seats for the twins. Next weekend we'd go car shopping for her and pick up another mom bomb.

One night I sat down with my wife after the kids went to bed. I had with me a copy of my will, as well as a copy of hers. "I want to talk about these.", I told her.

"What?"

"Our wills."

"Oh! Feeling a little more mortal these days, Carl?", she teased.

I nodded, but wasn't feeling all that humorous at the moment. "Aren't you?"

Marilyn shrugged. "Maybe a little. What's on your mind?"

"Well, right now you and I are each other's inheritors. If I die you get my money and if you die, I get yours, remember?"

"Well, considering that all the money is in your name, I'll do better bumping you off than you will bumping me off.", she laughed.

"I'll keep that in mind. I'm taking all the sharp objects away from you." Somehow I wasn't too worried. Marilyn might talk me to death, but that was her most dangerous ability. "The thing is, when we wrote these, it was right after we got married. I was nowhere near as wealthy as I am now. I mean, you didn't even know how much money I had, did you? These are just really standard wills."

She nodded. "Yeah, so? What's the problem?"

"What if we had both died!? It all goes to the kids, right? I am worth a billion dollars! Do you want little kids to have a billion dollars to play with?"

Marilyn looked at me curiously, but then her eyes slowly widened, and I could see the chipmunks inside pedaling furiously as she started thinking it through. Nobody had ever heard of Paris Hilton yet, but there was always some jet set kid with Daddy's credit card and more money than sense in the tabloids. However, nobody had the kind of money that our kids would get if we bought the farm together! The closest I could think of was Gloria Vanderbilt, who became a multimillionaire at the age of 18 months, and ended up in years of court cases and custody battles.

"Wow! I mean, I never thought of that! What do we do?"

It was my turn to shrug. "I've been thinking about that, but you have to agree with me. Right now Tusker and Tessa are named as the guardians of the kids, and I don't see changing that, do you?"

"No, they'd be real good.", she agreed.

"So, if the kids are being taken care of, I was figuring I'd just give it all away."

Marilyn stared at me. "What? Give it all away? Give away a billion dollars?"

I grinned back at her. "Sure, why not! It's not like we can take it with us, right?" My wife just stared at me with wide eyes and an open mouth. "Okay, maybe not everything, but at least ninety percent. If we leave them ten or twenty million apiece, they'll be able to do whatever they want in life, and that's not even ten percent of my holdings. Marilyn, you really don't understand my money. I make more in a day than we spend in a year. If we bought a half dozen vacation spots, and jetted from one to the other, we still wouldn't begin to touch the money we have. Let's give it all away, do some good with it!"

She just stared at me and shook her head in disbelief. "This is crazy!", she replied. "You're serious? You would give away a billion dollars?"

"Probably more. We're only 33 right now. What if we live to our sixties or seventies? At some point we'll be some of the richest people in the world. Just how much money do our kids need? There are very few good things I can think of that would happen if the kids became instant billionaires!"

"Holy shit!", she exclaimed. Marilyn shook her head. "I need to think about this!" I nodded sympathetically. It was a lot to take in. "Want a drink?"

"Sure." I got up and followed her into the kitchen. I was wearing my regular slacks and a Hawaiian shirt. Marilyn had on pajamas under her heavy robe. She was still on the mend, and we hadn't gotten around to testing out how well the stitches were holding, so she wasn't trying to get me drunk and have her way with me, not yet, at least. She sat down on a bar stool at the island and looked at me expectantly.

I stared back. "Wait a minute! You invited me out here for a drink, and you want me to make the drinks?", I exclaimed.

"Thank you, dear."

"Christ on a crutch!" I grabbed a bottle of semi-dry Riesling off the rack. "Wine okay?"

"Thank you."

I just rolled my eyes and pulled a corkscrew out, and opened it up. I poured two glasses and sat down at the corner of the island, facing her. "You really know how to push your luck!"

"Giving away your children's money isn't pushing your luck!? They'll starve without you!", she said teasingly.

"It's my money, not my children's money, and if they can't survive on twenty million, they're too stupid to pass their genes on to the next generation!", I replied, snorting at the thought.

Marilyn wagged her finger at me. "You'd better be nice to me. What if I decide to divorce you and take my half of your money?"

"Just how nice do I have to be?", I asked lewdly, waggling my eyebrows.

Marilyn blushed. "Men!" She shook her head. "You know, this is one of the most bizarre conversations I have ever had! We are talking about just giving away billions of dollars! What in the world would you do with that kind of money?"

I smiled at her. Just her asking that question made me think she would go along with the idea. "I have no idea. We are talking about some really serious money, like curing cancer or stopping malaria or something. I have absolutely no idea. I mean, the numbers are just staggering! I'm not talking about making the kids' school a little better. With the amount I can spend, I could buy every school in the state, and have enough left over to buy the school buses, too! What do you think we should do?"

Marilyn just stared at me, dumbfounded. I don't think she ever really comprehended the financial resources I had at this point. Yes, I went to work and always had some money for nice Christmas presents and we had the vacation home and a nice car, but the only really extravagant thing I did was fly charter and use limos in strange places. In this I was strongly influenced by the likes of Warren Buffet. His kids all went to public schools and he ate in local restaurants and was a boringly normal guy - and one of the richest men on the planet! (He also liked flying in private jets; he said it was his one serious vice.) Last year he had announced his plan to give away almost all of his money, too. I found that quite interesting.

If you are going to be a billionaire, there are a lot worse examples to emulate than Warren Buffet. Hell, if you're a human, there are a lot worse examples to emulate than Warren Buffet!

"I don't know. I'll have to think about that.", commented Marilyn. "Can you do that? Just give it all away in your will?"

"Yeah, I guess so. I think what we would do is set up a charitable trust, and then, when I die, most of my assets go into the trust. Then a trustee, maybe even you, gets to decide how to give out the money. Some of these trusts last for years and years, and give out millions every year. Howard Hughes' trust is worth billions, and he died back in the Seventies. They give out hundreds of millions a year to medical research."

"Huh. I just don't know what to say."

"Well, will you at least think about it?", I asked. "I don't think I can legally do it without you agreeing to it. I wouldn't want to try, in any case." I refilled our glasses. "We need to do something in any case. As it stands, if we don't really do some serious estate planning, when we die, the government will make out like bandits. Inheritance taxes will kill it all anyway."

"Well, give me some time. This is just unreal!", Marilyn replied.

We finished off the wine and chatted about some outlandish charities to give the money to. I suggested a home for unwed mothers, as long as I got to be the father. That got her spluttering up her wine while I laughed at her. She wanted to donate it to a charity for out of work trailer salesmen, which made me almost cough up my wine as well. We went to bed laughing at it all.

A couple of weeks later I had her come to the office and speak to John and Jake Senior. They had been on my ass for years about this, and now they got to do some serious estate planning. Missy weighed in, too, and used her bottomless Rolodex to find an estate guy from New York to fly down and sit in.

That was how the Buckman Foundation started. We put a few million in now, the money I was giving away anyway, and got used to the idea. Marilyn was made the trustee, but she had no real authority as long as I was still around. She was happy to let me run it, anyway, since she just didn't have the grasp of all those zeroes. There were sure a lot of them!

In mid-March, I loaded Marilyn on a plane and had her flown to Miami, and I took a couple of weeks off to play Daddy. I had a limo meet her at the airport and take her away to a clinic run by a top-notch plastic surgery operation. We had been referred there by a doctor at Johns Hopkins. It seems that the best plastic surgeons are in Hollywood or Miami. Marilyn's abdominal scarring wasn't severe, but it made her very self conscious, and they promised that they could reduce it substantially. I told her to ask for a discount package on a pair of DD cups and a face lift, which she refused.

Marilyn came back with just a trace of red on her abdomen, which was supposed to heal and be practically invisible. She was ecstatic about the work done, and told me about the most amazing things they were doing with hair transplants. No, I wasn't bald, not yet; yes, I was starting to get thin in the back. I countered by asking her if she had her tits done, and then checked them out later. They were still her original equipment, but after a couple of weeks missing them, I didn't mind.

In June we flew up to Utica and dumped the kids and Dum-Dum on Marilyn's parents, and then we flew to Hougomont for a week, and then took a small seaplane with our luggage to Puerto Rico, and took a cruise through the southern Caribbean. We hadn't done a cruise since our honeymoon, and Marilyn and I deserved an extended vacation. We didn't take one of those ridiculous owner's suites for twenty grand a week, just one of the fairly big suites one deck down. At Hougomont we worked on Marilyn's all-over tan, but on the ship I talked her into wearing a couple of really skimpy one piece suits around the pool. The work at the clinic had been so good she didn't feel self-conscious about it.

After the cruise, we flew back to Utica and landed in a different type of family problem. That summer her parents had bought a new home over in one of the nicer sections of Utica, just off the Parkway, and had torn down the old farmhouse out on the property and put a new modular office building up on the spot. We went over to see it (I had seen it way back when, but this was all new to Marilyn.) She was a bit sad to see her old home destroyed. I thought the thing was a firetrap and a rat motel, and wished I had pictures! Harriet sidetracked us, and said that Big Bob wanted to see me in his office. I glanced at Marilyn and shrugged, and wandered over.

I should have stayed in the Bahamas! In Big Bob's office was a second man, tall and cadaverously thin and bald, who I also knew from the past. It was Mark Falwell, Big Bob's accountant, and his presence could only mean one possible thing.

Big Bob wanted me to loan him some money.

Big Bob was a wonderful guy. He was an excellent father, a generous donor to church related charities, and well thought of around Utica. He was an excellent Mom-and-Pop scale businessman, selling a quality product, treating his customers honestly, always paying his debts, and servicing his products far better than the industry standard.

He was an absolute disaster at running a large scale commercial enterprise.

I had known the man for decades, and I admired Big Bob immensely. Aside from some initial pushing and testing back when we first met, the Lefleurs had welcomed me to their family, and they proved far more of a family than mine had ever been. Still, Big Bob had his issues, and they all directly related to Lefleur Homes.

Big Bob ran his company with several priorities. First and foremost, he pulled cash out of that sucker like there was no tomorrow. If it was a cow he would have drained so much milk that the thing wouldn't be able to stand and move to another plot to graze. Second, one of the family jokes was that he had to grow the company, just to give all of his kids a job. He treated Lefleur Homes as a giant employment agency dedicated to hiring his children. Third, he did whatever he could to lower his tax liability, which is generally a good thing, unless your business decisions related to this are detrimental to the growth and operation of the company.

A final priority was operating his company as a growing and profitable firm. This priority was way, way down the list of important priorities. It was such a low priority, in fact, that most years his company barely turned a profit. Mark Falwell was the poor bastard with the unenviable task of resolving these priorities. I'll give the devil his due, though. If Mark had to dance around the accounting standards, he danced like Fred Astaire.

The cash suction priority was handled through any number of means. Before I met Big Bob and got to know the company, I had heard of these tricks, all legal, of course, but I had never seen any single outfit use them all. For instance, for many years, while the house was on the property, the electric feed was on the office with a subfeed going to a panel box in the house. That way the company paid the electric bill for the family. He used the same technique with his telephone bills, running the house line off the company switchboard. All the cars the family drove were company vehicles. The summer house on Sacandaga Lake was listed as branch office, so all the costs there ran through the firm. Whenever Big Bob and Harriet went out to eat, which was three or four times a week, the bills went through the company.

The most amazing technique, which sucked cash as well as lowered taxes, involved the other priority of employing his children. Since all of his children went to parochial school, which he had to pay for out of pocket, he had two basic choices. If six children were in parochial school at any one time, and if the yearly tuition averaged $3,300, he needed $20,000 to pay for it. Choice One - pay himself enough money so that after taxes he has twenty grand left over. Choice Two - hire all six kids at no show jobs for enough money so that they could pay their own tuition! Their tax rate was nonexistent.

Marilyn was just the first kid who did this. It got bigger, actually. Eventually, the kids were getting $5,000 or more a year, and would be expected to buy their own food, clothing, and other supplies. If they went to college, it continued, with their college tuitions. This lowered the amount Big Bob had to pay himself to care for his children, and moved income from his higher tax rate to his children's lower tax rate. As far as I knew, the kids never actually saw the money, and Big Bob and Harriet controlled it completely. It was the most amazing scam.

The other problem related to family was that Big Bob put all his kids to work. Okay, lots of family outfits do that. Big Bob wasn't the guy who invented nepotism. Big Bob simply took it to the extreme, and did it badly. He ran the company like his family. So, since in a good family (unlike mine) all the children get the same weekly allowance, apply that principal to the company. All family members get the same pay. Mark, who was serving as Big Bob's general manager, got paid the same amount as Ruth, who was functionally illiterate, had an IQ in the high 80s, and cost us more money than we paid her. Sales managers, like Gabriel and Michael, were paid salaries - and you never pay a salesperson a salary! You pay them a commission, and then turn them loose to make as much as possible, but that would mean they might make more than their brothers. You had secretaries, truck drivers, setup trainees, and salesmen making the same money as the general manager of the firm.

Then there was the general corporate structure. Lefleur Homes was actually an amalgamation of any number of companies. The original farm was owned by Harriet, who then leased the land to Lefleur Homes (at three times the going rate for farmland.) Lefleur Homes was owned by Big Bob, not Harriet. Then, when we opened the Cooperstown facility, which I ran through the Eighties, he created a new corporation, Cooperstown Acres, so that if we discovered radioactive waste on the property nobody could grab Lefleur Homes. Lefleur Homes would lease the Cooperstown Acres property. To make it more interesting, Big Bob gave shares in Cooperstown Acres to all thirteen children. He did this stunt every time we started a new sales center, creating a new corporation, and then had one of the existing companies loan money to the other company. One side effect was that this allowed him to funnel cash, through rent payments, to family members who didn't work for the company.

To say that this made everything ridiculously complicated would be an understatement! After he died, it took us five years and three family lawsuits to sort it all out. Some of the kids didn't talk to each other for years.

It was a real eye opener when I discovered the extent to which Big Bob was draining the coffers. Through the Eighties I ran the Cooperstown office, and I was the first person to ever run divisional level profit and loss statements. Prior to this, they only ran them at the corporate level. Big Bob was so impressed by this that in the Nineties I was yanked to Utica and named the comptroller. This was all Big Bob's idea, since I hated accounting, but short of quitting a really well paying gig, I had to do it. So, I started doing division level P&L statements throughout the company - including general and administrative expenses, the cost of running the headquarters.

You can't figure accurate costing until you know what all the G&A expenses are, because a portion of those expenses have to be allocated to each division. As soon as Big Bob discovered this, he shut me down in no uncertain terms. I was not to examine the books in headquarters! Still, I soldiered on, since I was a good little comptroller.

It wasn't that hard. If you know all the costs assigned to the divisions, and you know all the costs of everyone who works for headquarters, and you know all the other costs you can nail down, then you can subtract them from the total costs of the entire corporation. What's left had to be the costs for Big Bob and Harriet, the only people not being accounted for until then. This is really a simplistic explanation, but if you look at the numbers carefully, you can work it all out.

By my calculations, which I told Marilyn and a few of her more responsible and senior brothers, by the mid-Nineties Big Bob and Harriet were pulling about fifty grand a month out of the company, or an average of about half a million a year. It was no wonder they could afford a house on an acre of waterfront on Sacandaga Lake, two boats, and fourteen weeks of time shares in Orlando (one week for them and one week for each child, whether they used it or not. Marilyn and I only used it three times in thirty years.)

Ultimately this left the company chronically cash poor. Everything you could see or touch was mortgaged to the hilt, in some cases with multiple mortgages, and the banks were constantly pushing Big Bob to tighten up his operation, and imposing rigorous loan covenants. It looked like they were being tougher than normal this year, and Big Bob wanted to find some money somewhere without those pesky restrictions.

Like his billionaire son-in-law!

In no way did I want to give him cheap money - he'd just blow it. The only discipline he acknowledged was the discipline required by the banks.

I just kept my mouth shut and listened to Mark lay out a suggestion that the Buckman Group loan Lefleur Homes a buttload of money. Big Bob was ambitious, I'll give him that much. He wanted $4 million as a floorplan loan, which would allow him to increase the number of homes they had on display, remortgage the properties at headquarters and the other locations, and provide another $2 million in lines of credit for operating capital. All in all, as I added it up in my head, he wanted the Buckman Group to retire all his old debt and provide extra debt, to the tune of a total of $8 million dollars. The company only had annual sales of $20 million! It was all I could do to keep from both laughing and crying. It was the definition of chutzpah!

It was actually even worse. Since his beloved son-in-law would never be so crass as to actually demand repayment on anything, Big Bob would be free to keep borrowing from other sources. I might as well just pile the dollar bills on his desk and set them on fire.

On the other hand, turning him down could fuck up my marriage. It was like the line in The Merchant of Venice - 'My daughter! My ducats!' I would probably have to do something, but what?

I listened and thought for a moment, and then tried to answer very, very carefully. "I have to tell you, Bob, this takes me by surprise."

"Carl, Harriet and I have told you, call us Mom and Dad.", he responded with a smile.

I only gave a half smile in return. "If we are doing business, it will need to be Mister Lefleur, hmmm?" Big Bob didn't look as if he liked the sound of that, though Mark seemed content with it. "First things first - the Buckman Group is not a bank. We are not empowered to make business loans, nor have we ever done so. The same applies to the floorplan business. We have nobody who would be able to do the monthly verifications necessary in any case." Floorplan lenders make a monthly drive-through on a sales lot, to check that the home or car or RV is actually there, and hasn't been sold off without the loan being paid back. If you don't pay the floorplan off when the vehicle leaves, then you are 'out of trust', and have just committed title fraud. A bank will shut you down fast enough to make your head spin!

Mark nodded in understanding. "Perhaps an alternate choice might be to provide a loan guarantee to an alternate floorplan source, where they already have the mechanisms in place.", he said, a little too smoothly. He already knew we weren't doing the floorplan.

"Uh huh.", I replied in my most noncommittal voice. "As I said, we aren't a bank, and anything of this nature would require approval by my board of directors, and that is not a guarantee. The Buckman Group buys equity in a company, stock positions. Is that what we are talking about here? A sale of stock to us?" That was a nice shot across the bow.

Big Bob took it as such. He looked like I had just pissed in his coffee cup. "That wouldn't be fair to the other kids."

I didn't make a response other than a subtle shrug of the shoulders. I turned back to Mark. "What's going on here? You are looking to replace all of your financing. Why? What's wrong with your existing package?"

"GE is making noises like they are getting out of the floorplan business, or at least changing their rates and terms. Very few local banks are going to be interested in floorplanning homes.", explained Mark.

"What about Greentree or Conseco? Tammac? GMAC?" These were all names that had been in the floorplan business at one time or another.

Big Bob's eyes opened wide as I rattled them off. I don't think he realized just how much I knew about his business. Mark took it in stride. In many ways he was a much more sophisticated businessman than Big Bob. "Most of them don't want the entirety of the business, so we would need to split floorplan between them, and there would probably be some changes in secondary agreements involved."

"In other words, they want stricter loan covenants, don't they?" Loan covenants are requirements that the borrower agrees to, above and beyond the repayment of the loan. Typical covenants might include maintaining a maximum debt to equity ratio, prohibitions on other financing or on the use of the financing, requirements for independent auditing of financial results, minimum cash flows, and so forth. Even if you are current on your loan payments, if you violate a covenant, you are in technical default and the loan can be called. It's a gun the bank can hold to your head to make sure you don't waste their money.

Mark grimaced slightly, and Big Bob looked like he was swallowing a shit sandwich. "There have been some indications that loan covenants might become more restrictive.", replied Mark.

I nodded. "Well, I can understand that. I would imagine any new lender would want to build a history before relaxing on the covenants. Certainly if that was the type of business the Buckman Group was in, and we took on a new client, we would expect similar sorts of covenants in place." Another shot across the bow - we would be just as pushy as the banks.

This was not working out like Big Bob had figured. He was looking at this like a father, and I was looking at it as a business. He really couldn't conceive of any of his children not going along with him on something business related, and he had absolutely zero control on me, other than the fact that he could turn his daughter against me. He tried telling me about the wonders of the business and I just asked about what the proposed covenants were that he didn't like. Emotion versus logic, but I was the one with the money.

After a few minutes I made the time-out sign. "Give me a few minutes. I want to talk to Marilyn first." I stood and left the room, and Big Bob immediately lowered his head and started talking quietly to Mark. If I was a betting man - and I was - I would have bet that Mark had already told him this was a crappy idea and I wouldn't go along with it. If I was smart enough to make my kind of money, I was too smart to invest in Lefleur Homes!

I left the office and found Marilyn chatting with her mother in the kitchen of the new building. I came up behind her and tapped her on the shoulder. "We need to talk.", I said.

Her face lit up when she saw me. "Mom was just saying you're investing in the company!"

I looked at Harriet but didn't smile. "Yeah? Like I said, we need to talk."

Both Harriet and Marilyn stopped smiling. Marilyn stood up and I led her outside. I walked away from the office building and over to the home lineup, where I sat down on one of the steps and Marilyn sat down next to me. "What's up? You don't look happy."

"I'm not. Did you know about this ahead of time?"

"No, Mom told me what was happening after you went and saw Dad."

"You had absolutely no hint about this?", I pressed.

"No! Like I said, she only told me after you left. Why? What's wrong? You don't want to invest in the company?", she asked.

I sighed. "Not in a million years! They don't want me to invest in the company. They want me to loan them eight million dollars with no restrictions on what they do with it! We're not a bank! We buy and sell stocks and pieces of companies! We don't loan money! This is insane!"

"That's not the way Mom explained it to me. Eight million dollars? What in the world? You don't want to loan them the money?"

"It's like I said, we don't loan money. We buy portions of companies, and only if they are well managed and growing companies. If I was the owner of this company, the first thing I would do is fire your father, and then I'd fire half your brothers and sisters! They're a disaster!"

"Carl!"

"Marilyn, I love you with all my heart, but it is the God's honest truth. Your father is an absolutely great father, and an absolutely horrible businessman. Get rid of him, and stop running this place like an employment agency for your family, and you could grow this company to three times the size it is now! No sweat! It'd be easy!"

"Carl! That's awful!"

"Yeah, I know. So you tell me. What do you want me to do?"

She looked at me confused. "What do you mean?"

"I mean that you're more important to me than eight mill.", I told her.

That made her eyes open wide. "He really wanted you to loan him eight million dollars? Whatever for?"

I shrugged. "What it is is that his banks want him to stop blowing his money on shit and keep it in the company, and they won't keep lending to him until he starts acting like a grownup. He figures that his good old son-in-law can loan him the money and not notice that he's screwing around."

It was her turn to sigh. "I want to protest, but I really can't. It sounds like him. Can you do something for him?"

"Honey, for you I would give him the money, but I can't put the company at risk. There's more than just me there, you know. If I do this, it will have to be out of my own pocket."

"That's just insane. He expects me to make you go along with him, doesn't he?"

I nodded. "You're the loving and dutiful daughter, and I'm just the idiot she married."

"Well, you're my idiot! Do you want me to tell him no?"

"No, just be with me when I tell him no." I stood up. "Let's go bell the cat."

Marilyn took my hand and I helped her to her feet. We walked back to the office holding hands. I knocked on Big Bob's door and found him still inside with Mark Falwell. I introduced him to Marilyn. "I asked Marilyn to be here during the discussion. Maybe you'd want Harriet to be here, too?"

He gave me a very strange look at that. Harriet was a woman, and thus had no place in a business meeting. Still, he shrugged and went to the door and yelled out, "MOTHER!"

Harriet came scurrying in. She found the rest of us seated, and she sat down as well. "I want to discuss a counterproposal. First off, the Buckman Group will not be making any loans. As I said earlier, we aren't a bank, we buy equity. If you want to sell us your company, then we can talk, but we won't be loaning any money."

"On the other hand, you are my father-in-law, and I care quite a bit for the family. Bob, I don't know what you need the money for, and I don't want to know, but if you need cash, I'll give you some money. I'll write you a check today for a million or two, or whatever you want, no questions asked, as a gift. Or I can have a bank check overnighted to us tomorrow. Do with it whatever you want. Your choice. But I won't loan you or the business the money or invest in the business. This would be from me, not the Buckman Group."

I think everybody looked shocked at this. Marilyn seemed happy, her father not so much. He started stewing about not needing charity, and how Lefleur Homes was such a great place to invest. I just sat there and let him run down, and then he stood up and stomped out of the room, followed by his wife. That left me with Marilyn and Mark. I looked back at the door they had left through and said to Mark, quietly, "Now that the kids have left, you want to come up with something reasonable I can do to help?"

"I told him you wouldn't go for it."

I shrugged. "Big Bob has a terminal case of selective hearing disorder. He only hears what he wants to hear." Marilyn giggled at that.

Mark gave a wry smile and nodded. "So true, so true. Some kind of loan guarantee would be sufficient. We can arrange floorplanning over at Rome Savings Bank if you put some money into an account there to act as collateral against the proceeds. That gets us the floorplan covered, and he'll just have to live with the loan covenants."

"What's he want to do with the other money?", I asked.

"A whole fleet of new vehicles, and a fourth lot down in Binghamton."

I rolled my eyes. He now had three lots, with the third being in Syracuse; the Sacandaga Lake home didn't count in this. "Tell him to buy rebuilt haulers and cargo vans, it will cost him only fifty cents on the dollar, and a better choice would be going north towards Lowville. He'll pick up more traffic out of Watertown and the Adirondacks there." Binghamton turned out to be a money pit back on the first go-around. "Hell, the banks just want him to run this place like a business! Is that so hard?"

Mark didn't answer, and I waved it off anyway. "Put something together I can live with, and I'll do it out of my own pocket, but I can't tie up my company. Unlike Big Bob, I have to look my partners in the eye, even if they are junior partners."

"I hear you." We stood up and shook hands, and then exchanged business cards. Afterwards Marilyn and I headed out. We drove back to her parents' new house, while Mark explained the facts of life to Big Bob. I was actually pretty glad that we were leaving the next day to go home. Mark and I could negotiate the terms of the guarantee by phone, and overnight any paperwork back and forth. Big Bob would just have to live with what Mark and I came up with.

Don't mix business and family. It never works.

Chapter 95: A Dinner Party

Whatever my desires are to stay quiet and out of the spotlight, I have an annoying tendency to open my fat yap every now and then and spout off about something. This manifested itself in my co-authoring the two books, and getting into a high profile pissing match with a U.S. senator. I promised Marilyn I would behave, and she just nodded and shook her finger at me, and then I turned around and accepted a speaking engagement in front of the American Conservative Union. I think at that point Marilyn gave up on making me behave, and just focused on making me be polite.

I continued talking, scheduling things when convenient. I was invited to appear on Meet the Press at the end of March, and Marilyn pushed me to go, simply to get me out of the house and out from underfoot while she recuperated. I drove down to Washington the night before and went through the same process as before, and found myself in a panel discussion with three reporters on one side, and me and a fellow named Grover Norquist on the other side, discussing balancing the budget. Yes, that Grover Norquist, the fellow who singlehandedly introduced gridlock to Washington by getting Republicans to essentially gut the federal tax system and destroy the federal budget process. In 1989 he simply seemed an interesting gadfly. The damage he managed to do didn't become apparent until much later. I was chosen because Paying the Bills had recently been quoted by several Democrats as an example of what was wrong with the Republican Party. This had generated a reprint, and more media interest. We were considered the 'new, young faces of the Republican Party.'

Garrick Utley was the host at that time, and he had Tim Russert and some other nobody with him as the reporters. Norquist's position was that government was simply too big, and ate up too much in the way of tax revenues. The only way to make government smaller was by cutting taxes. Starve the beast, and the beast will get smaller. This narrative, which he had been spouting since his college days in the late '70s (he was a year younger than me) fed directly into Ronald Reagan's worldview - "Government is not a solution to our problem, government is the problem!"In a number of ways, he was an interesting man, and unlike what some said, was not a radical bomb thrower. The problem was that the world was a lot more complicated than he made it out to be. There is a saying that for every serious problem there is a solution that is quick and simple - and wrong! This was just such a solution.

The panel discussion started with Utley letting Norquist talk for a few minutes about the wonderful things that would happen once we cut taxes and forced the government to live on a reduced diet. He used the 'starving the beast' line twice. Then Utley turned to me. "Doctor Buckman, in your book Paying the Bills, you argue that taxes need to be maintained at current levels, or actually be raised, to meet budgetary demands. That's pretty unusual talk for a Republican, isn't it?"

"That's not really what we said in the book. What we said was that the current budget scheme is not working. Revenues don't match our outlays. We need to do one of two things, either increase revenues, or decrease outlays. If you don't decrease what we spend, and it is wholly unrealistic to think that Congress or the President plan to do that, then revenues must be raised to a level sufficient to pay for the outlays."

Norquist immediately piped up. "But that just makes the problem worse. We can't keep feeding money to Washington in the vague hope that the problem will be fixed. We have to turn off the spigot, and the sooner the better!"

Russert, who was one of NBC's rising stars, turned to me for a response. "So why won't reducing revenues, 'turning off the spigot' as Mr. Norquist says, work?"

It turned my head to face him. "Because it is simplistic and unrealistic. Imagine the following scene. Tomorrow morning you get called to a meeting with your bosses here at NBC, and they have the following words for you. 'Tim, you know how the camera adds ten pounds? Well, we saw you on the show yesterday morning and you were looking a little chubby! So we have a solution for you. We are cutting your pay ten percent, and that way you won't be able to buy as much food, so you'll eat less!' Think that will work?"

The reporters on the other side of the table exploded in laughter, although Norquist wasn't amused. After a moment, Russert said, "Please, God, don't give them any ideas!", through a huge smile. "Then he looked at the camera and said, "Maureen, it's not true! Don't divorce me yet!"

I continued, "You can see, though, it won't work. Your income is now cut by ten percent, but you still have mortgage payments and car payments and saving to put your kids through school, and now you have to pay a divorce lawyer because your wife thinks you're chubby, too! So, what do you do? Well, if you're like most of us, you start putting stuff on your credit card."

Norquist popped up. "No, what will happen is that you'd have to adjust, by lowering your expenses! Outlays will have to be cut to match lower revenues!"

"Never going to happen! What will happen is that you start paying for things with the credit card. Now, for you and me, and presumably Tim over there, sooner or later we are going to max out our credit cards and the credit card company will cut us off and we'll go bankrupt. The United States is the same way. Right now we are paying with Treasury bills and bonds, borrowing against the full faith and credit of the government, but what happens when budget deficits go from the billions into the trillions? What happens when the rest of the world realizes we can't pay back the money they have loaned us?"

There was nothing I was mentioning here that was unusual, at least to me. It was the history of political economics circa 2020. By 2010 the Chinese, who were the big buyers of American debt, were running a foreign policy not to our liking and holding us hostage to their plans. By 2020 they were buying American companies for pennies on the dollar, and paying for them with American debt. That's how GE ended up a Chinese company, and Maggie ended up in Canada.

Norquist kept arguing that this wouldn't happen, that this would force politicians to reduce costs and eliminate programs. I just countered, saying, "Again, it sounds great, but it won't happen. Politicians spend money! It's what they do. Fish swim, birds fly, politicians spend. They can either tax and spend, or borrow and spend, but they all spend. There is no legal or constitutional requirement for them not to spend. The only way to get them to balance the budget is by requiring that every new program must contain the provisions necessary to fund it, in full, from Day One."

We went around like that for another couple of minutes before Utley brought it to a close. Afterwards I watched the rest of the show from off stage, although Norquist stormed from the studio. Utley, Russert, and No-Name talked about the discussion, and there was considerable amusement at Russert's expense, with mention of 'Chubby's' new diet plan and how his wife was dumping him.

When the show broke and Utley was left on stage to do the finish, Russert came back and found me watching. He laughed as soon as he saw me. "I'll never hear the end of this! It's all your fault!"

I simply had to laugh back. "You'll just have to start on that diet then. It's either that or the bosses are going to give you a haircut!"

He laughed some more. "I don't think Grover likes you all that much."

I shrugged. "He's fixated on taxes as the be all and end all of fiscal policy. It's a simple approach, and that allows him to sell it to people who want a simple approach. It fits in a sound bite. It's not important if it's right."

"So, when are you going to run for office?", he asked, turning reporter on me.

"Never going to happen! I couldn't afford the pay cut.", I said, laughing.

"Well, it was good to meet you, even if I do have to go home and rescue my marriage now.", he said, sticking out his hand to shake mine.

I laughed and took it, shaking it in response. "Listen, if you're ever in Baltimore, call me. We'll get a babysitter and I can bring my wife and you can bring yours, and all of you can yell at me. I'm sure I'm going to hear about this one from Marilyn!"

"I'll do that."

I drove home, and Marilyn teased me about getting poor Tim Russert a pay cut and a divorce in just ten minutes. It got me to thinking, though. Tim was going to eventually die at the age of 58 of a massive heart attack caused by a coronary thrombosis. A fat plaque was going to block one of the arteries in his heart and drop him like a stone. What if I could somehow get him taking better care of himself, lose a pound or two? Would that make him live longer? It was working with Marilyn, who was in much better shape now than in our first life. Tim Russert was too good a journalist and too good a man to let die so young.

I knew so much of what was going to happen in the world, the bad things. It was so tempting to get up on my high horse and yell, "The Marine barracks in Lebanon will be bombed!" or "Pan Am Flight 103 is going to be blown up over Lockerbie, Scotland!", and it wouldn't have meant a damn thing. As soon as somebody asked how I knew that, what was I going to say? "I'm a time traveler from 2022 who has travelled to an alternate space-time reality." That buys me a one way ticket to a room at Sheppard Pratt. Maybe Mom and I could get a group rate.

We did end up having dinner in Baltimore later that summer, although without our wives. He drove up to see me after an article came out in April in The Economist. I had enough material left over after we wrote Paying the Bills, that I could write a lengthy piece on public unionization. I showed it to Simon and Schuster, and though they turned it down, they passed it along to The Economist, who ran it as a cover piece. This had surprised me, and Eat the Strike! made a stir among the chattering classes in Washington.

My premise had been that while unionization had been an overall plus in the private workforce, as far as the public workforce was concerned it had been a disaster. Politicians had no incentive to control a public union's demands. In the private sector, if Ford, for example, gave too much pay and benefits to their unions, sooner or later their costs would be too high and they would lose money to their smarter and cheaper brethren at GM and Chrysler. In the public sector there was usually no other alternative (if you let the police go out on strike, who are you going to call when there's a robbery?) and the politicians who cave in to exorbitant demands, especially in pensions and long term health care, probably won't be around to clean up the mess anyway.

I ran some of the numbers and showed what would happen in the future, when the baby boomers currently employed began retiring after 2000. By 2010, some cities began mass layoffs of city workers to pay for pensions. This was seen in police and fire departments and teachers. The most pernicious effect was in accelerated pension vesting for hazardous duty. This was the concept where somebody in a dangerous job, a policeman for instance, would get credit for extra years when they retired. If they retired after 20 years, they might get credit for an extra 5 years, and get a pension based on 25 years. Otherwise, they could retire at 15 years and get their full 20 year pension. The theory was that since their jobs were so hazardous and so physically demanding, they were wearing their bodies down by an extra 5 years. What happened was that other unionized groups began demanding similar rights, even though they didn't have the same excuse. So police secretaries began getting extra credit because their jobs put them in police stations with criminals, even though they were never anywhere near them. The net effect was to massively increase pension and health care liabilities.

After the article came out, I was on both Meet the Press and This Week with David Brinkley again. Marilyn teased me by saying that I should get an apartment in Washington if I was going to spend so much time down there. I teased her right back, saying it would be a great place to stash my mistress, which got her hooting and hollering at me. Later that night I showed her all the sorts of things I had my mistress do for me. I also was featured on the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, with me broadcasting from Maryland Public Television in Owings Mills, which I had also done during the hoopla after Paying the Bills came out. Louis Rukeyser had me on twice to do his show Wall $treet Week with Louis Rukeyser, which he ran from there.

Not every article was related to economics or politics. In the fall of '89 Fortune was back on our doorstep, followed closely by Forbes. Back in 1986, following the publicity surrounding our initial successes with Microsoft, Autodesk, and Adobe, we had managed to snake the Staples deal out from under Mitt Romney and Bain Capital. Now that Staples had gone public, we had made another big killing. Even better, the Bain deal would have been done mostly with invested capital, and not with a whole lot of Bain money; our deal had been predominately our money, with some invested money on the side. Their deal had the lowest risk, but our upside was far higher. The best part, at least for the firm, was that I had very little to do with the deal, being focused at the time on tech deals. This was totally Jake Junior's and Melissa's project.

Fortune was the first to piece it all together, tracing it with somebody inside Staples and a rather disgruntled junior VP at Bain who had lost his job when they lost the deal. Our team had kept their mouths shut, unsurprising since we had been the winners. Now that the deal was public and Staples' stock was blowing through the roof, we could talk. I let Jake and Missy do most of the talking. Fortune was focused on the deal, Forbes was focused on me. Their piece focused on the growth of the Buckman Group and my rise in the standings of the Forbes 400. I found this massively distracting. Let them talk about Jake and Missy; they had earned it. The day of the IPO, I had a tub full of chilled champagne bottles brought to the office (along with limo service home!)

In late October, John invited Marilyn and me to a dinner party at his house. What I found curious, though, was when he mentioned I should wear a suit, which was a bit more formal than usual. "Yeah, okay. Marilyn to wear a dress, too? She can't wear her bag lady sweat suit then?", I asked.

"I'm going to tell her you said that, and Helen, too, so they can both hit you."

I laughed. "They probably hit like girls!" That got a laugh out of John.

And so, the third Friday in October, Marilyn and I drove over to the Steiners. When I was a kid, John had lived in Timonium, in a mid-sized Cape Cod style home off Timonium Road. Now, however, after his investment in the Buckman Group had paid off, they had bought a new home out in a development in Hunt Valley. Bigger house and bigger property and very nice. Not quite a McMansion, but close. We got there at seven, which is when he said cocktails would start.

We weren't the first there. Both of John and Helen's kids, Allen and Rachel, had left the nest years ago, so I knew it wasn't their cars in the driveway. We walked up the driveway and rang the bell, and Helen opened the door. She had a cordless telephone to her ear and looked terribly distracted. "Oh, good, you're here! ... No, some people at the door...", she then said into the phone. I smiled at Marilyn. Helen kept on with her two way conversation until her husband came up to us, and took the phone from her hands.

He spoke into it. "This is wonderful news, Pumpkin! You come home next week and visit, and your mother can plan the rest of your life for you. Bye!" He hit the END button.

Helen gushed, "Rachel just called! She's engaged!"

"Congratulations! Now we know what you're going to spend money on next year, John.", I said, grinning.

"Don't laugh! You have two.", he replied.

I shrugged. "Maybe I'll get lucky and they'll just live in sin."

That earned me an elbow in the ribs from Marilyn. I turned to her, smiling, and found her wagging a finger at me. "My daughters are going to be married in a church!"

"Yes, but are they my daughters? How do I know you didn't subcontract out the first half of the job? I only know I was there for the second half.", I responded. That earned laughter from the Steiners and spluttering from Marilyn. John led us through the foyer into their living room.

There were five other people in the room, a couple in their late fifties, another couple in their forties, and a young man a few years younger than Marilyn and I. John made the introductions. The older couple were Bob and Millie Destrier, and the younger couple were Rich and Renee Miller. The single guy was Brewster McRiley, otherwise known as 'Brew.' I didn't recognize any of them from anything business related, so I wondered why I was meeting them like this.

John made me a gin and tonic, and Marilyn got a whiskey sour, and we chatted for a bit with the other guests. They seemed to know me, although I didn't know them. The Destriers were from Frederick, and Bob owned a farm supply operation out there. The Millers and McRiley were from out of town, however, Alexandria, down in Virginia, and I never quite learned where they worked. Bob noticed my cane, which I had left leaning by the archway to the foyer, and asked, "If you don't mind my asking, how did you hurt your leg?"

"I don't mind.", I answered. "I used to be a paratrooper, and I made one jump too many. I had a bad landing and had to leave the service."

"Really? You were in the Army?", asked Rich.

I nodded. "Eighty-Second Airborne. I had a battery of 105s."

"You were an officer?"

"A captain. Bravo Battery, 1st of the 319th."

"I was Navy.", replied Rich. We talked for a bit about the service. He had seen duty on a destroyer out of Norfolk after college during the Viet Nam era. I mentioned my father's service during World War II.

There were a number of questions from Rich Miller and Brew McRiley about the two books I had written, along with the article in The Economist. There were also a number of questions about my appearances on the Sunday morning talk shows, and a couple of the speeches I had given over the last two years. After a few minutes, I realized I was being interrogated! It was gentle and polite, but I was answering a whole lot more questions than I was asking.

During a lull, I cornered John over by his bar. "John, who are these guys? What's going on?"

"What do you mean?", he answered. "Refill?"

"Please." I handed him my glass, and Marilyn slid hers across the bar to him also.

He started making fresh drinks. "They're just some friends of mine. I've known Bob and Rich for years. The young fellow, Brewster, I just met. He was brought by the Millers."

I sipped my fresh drink. "Yes, but you didn't really answer my question, did you?" I smiled at him and let it pass.

Over dinner there were a few more questions - political questions! I tried to beg off, saying, "I learned a long time ago not to talk about two things - religion and politics! You get in trouble otherwise."

"Well, maybe so, but I think we've all seen you on television. I loved that debate you had with Ted Kennedy! He looked like he was going to blow a gasket! Who is this young upstart daring to argue with me?", said Bob.

"The argument with Grover was interesting, too. He told me he wasn't very amused with you. He thought he was the featured speaker, and instead you got the reporters laughing at him.", added Brew.

I looked over at McRiley. "You know Grover Norquist?"

"I've known him for a number of years.", he admitted, without explanation.

We continued in this vein through dinner. Over dessert and coffee, Bob Destrier asked, "Have you heard anything about Andy Stewart running again in the Maryland Ninth?"

I shrugged at that. Andy Stewart was the long serving Democratic Representative for the Maryland Ninth District, which covered most of northern Baltimore, Carroll, and Frederick counties. "I am assuming he will be. He hasn't made any announcements stating that he isn't. Why, have you heard anything?"

"No. The last I heard he was running again, but he's probably looking at a primary challenge. He's vulnerable.", he replied.

"Good. He's not the world's greatest Congressman." In my opinion, actually, he was a self serving dipstick. In this he ranked right up there with most of the rest of Congress. "Who's going to run against him, Jenkins or Blusinski? Or are we going to have a contested primary?" Tim Jenkins was a contractor in Frederick who had run and lost against Stewart in 1988. Ted Blusinski was a County Commissioner in Carroll County, who had publicly announced his interest in running.

Curiously, the others all looked at each other before answering, so I should have known something was up then. So I'm stupid. Instead, Miller shook his head. "Neither. Tim Jenkins was recently diagnosed with lung cancer. He won't be running for anything."

"Damn! He was a nice guy. I met him a few years ago when he hit me up for a donation to the local clinic in Frederick.", I replied.

"Yes, he told me that.", he said.

"What about Blusinski?" Ted wasn't what I would call a friend, but he was a county commissioner and I knew him. I had met pretty much every local politician, for the simple reason that they all had their hands out. I refused to donate to their election campaigns, but I was known as an easy touch for a local firehouse or clinic or police department benefit.

John answered that one. "Keep it under your hat, but Ted Blusinski is going to be in a different kind of fight next year. A grand jury is sitting in Annapolis and an indictment is pending. It seems his accounting practices were a little lax in regards to a certain set of building permits in Westminster."

I rolled my eyes at that, especially when Bob added, "Maybe he can get Ted Agnew's old cell."

Then I just looked around the room at the others. "So, Tim and Ted are out. What am I doing here? Who are you guys? I know John is with the Republican committee in Baltimore County, but I've always thought every man should be allowed one vice."

That got me a nudge in the side from Marilyn, and Brewster chuckled. John snorted and asked, "So, what's your vice?"

I grinned and looked at my wife, and then waggled my eyebrows. The rest of the room laughed, even as Marilyn blushed redly. I got another elbow in the ribs at that, making me laugh.

"So, I repeat, who are you guys? Republican organizers? Are you looking for a donation?"

It was Rich who answered. "Well, Bob is the head of the Republican Committee in Frederick County. John you already know, and he's the head of the Republican Committee in Baltimore County for the Maryland Ninth. I'm with the Republican National Committee out of Washington, as is Brewster here, and I'm involved with recruitment, finding new candidates to run for Congress."

I nodded in understanding. "And you want me to think up some names of candidates? I guess I can come up with some."

McRiley laughed, and John slapped his head and muttered. Rich answered, "No! We're here to recruit you!"

The blood roared in my ears for a second, and then I shook it off. I looked around the room. Marilyn's face looked stunned, and the others looked expectantly at me for an answer. I shook my head for a second and smiled. "You know, I must be losing my hearing. I thought I just heard you say you wanted me to run for Congress."

"You heard us right.", agreed Bob.

I laughed loudly at the others. "That is the most ridiculous idea I have ever heard of, and I hear ridiculous ideas on a daily basis! What on God's green earth would make anybody think I wanted to be a politician!?"

The others started talking all at once. It was Renee Miller who overrode the others and spoke up. She had been quiet up to this point, but she said, "You're a national figure, whether you realize it or not. Your books, your speeches, your appearances on television - these things have put you in the national spotlight. You have a history of standing for law and order, even at your own risk - yes, we know about your capturing the gang in the Bahamas. Whether you want to be or not, you are now one of the next generation of Republican thinkers. This is your time to do this."

Rich agreed with her. "This is your time. If not now, when? Are you just going to continue speaking truth to power, or are you going to work for that power, and then grasp it and use it to build a better country."

I stared at them for a second. "What were you before you got into politics, a used car salesman?"

"Carl, that was out of line!", commented John.

I turned to face him. "John, this is nuts. Stewart won't even have to run a campaign! All he'll have to do is print up ten thousand posters with my picture and the words 'Billionaire Murderer!' underneath. There is nothing I can do to change that. I would have a better chance of winning with a picture of me in a Nazi uniform at Auschwitz!" I leaned back in my chair. "Now, you tell me, how does anybody campaign for election when they are a billionaire murderer?" I gestured for him to start.

It was the young guy, Brew McRiley, who answered. "I think you're overstating the situation by a long shot. Break that down into two parts. First, the billionaire label. There isn't a single Congressman who isn't already a millionaire or about to become one. The Jeffersonian ideal of the citizen-servant didn't even exist in Jefferson's day. Second, you aren't a murderer. You defended yourself in the sanctity of your own home against a diagnosed psychotic, and validated the Second Amendment while doing so."

I stared at this kid for a second. He couldn't even be thirty, was clean-shaven and small and spare, with short trimmed hair. "Ladies, pardon my French, but sonny, just who the fuck are you!?"

He didn't bat an eye or back down a notch. "I'm the guy who's going to be your campaign manager."

"Well, you made a trip for nothing. Why in the world would I want to do something that stupid?'

"Because I've listened to you. Because I've read your books and articles. Because I was at your speech at the Conservative Union last year. I believe in you, Mister Buckman! Why don't you!?"

That set me back a peg. Whatever he was, this kid wasn't an ass-kisser, which was the usual run of the mill political types I ran into. I shook my head in disbelief. "It still doesn't matter. The Democrats could run Lucifer for election, and the campaign posters will still read 'Billionaire Murderer!' Why should I drag my family through a mud pit when the entire idea is hopeless?" I glanced over at Marilyn but she simply had a stunned expression on her face.

Bob Destrier asked, "Do you want Stewart to be in Congress for another two years?"

"No, but..."

"Do you think you could do a better job than he could?"

"Yes, but..."

"Then what is the problem?! What's the problem, that you're a billionaire or that you're a murderer? We know the first part is true. Is the second part true? You were the only one there that day. Was it murder?", he demanded.

I stood up without answering and went over to the bar, and poured myself a shot of whiskey. Everybody was quiet behind me. That awful day in 1983 came welling up inside me. I drank down the shot, and then turned to face them. "Yes, I was the only one there. I shot and killed my kid brother - my kid brother, for God's sake! - and more than a few would argue that I did just that, murder him. You think those posters are going to be bad? Wait until they trot my mother out to say on camera that I'm a murderer! My own parents disowned me, for God's sake! You don't think that's going to make a wonderful family values campaign ad?"

I went over to the corner I had left my cane in, and took it. I walked back to my wife and held out my hand. "I think we need to go home, honey."

Marilyn silently stood up and took my hand. I looked at the others. "Folks, I hate to break off like this, but it is time we go. Thank you for an interesting evening."

John followed us to the door. "We're going to talk about this on Monday.", he told me.

"Oh, I think I can agree with that.", I said, and not too pleasantly, either.

It was a quiet drive home, and whatever conversation there was was limited to the vague and innocuous. I just couldn't get the image out of my mind of that day in '83, with Hamilton bleeding out on the kitchen floor. The bastard still was bugging me, six years after they buried the son of a bitch!

We got home, and I paid the baby-sitter off. She had driven over in her own car, so I didn't have to drive her home. The girls were already in bed, and Charlie was heading there. I said good night to him, and Marilyn headed off to tuck him in. I sat down in my recliner and just stared at the television, which wasn't even turned on. Dum-Dum jumped on my lap and lapped my face.

Marilyn came back into the living room and sat down in her recliner, prompting Dum-Dum to switch to her chair. "Well, I wasn't expecting that, tonight."

"I can't believe John set me up like that! Set us up, really. I can't believe they think I want to run for Congress!", I agreed.

"That's not what surprised me.", she said. She was scratching Dum-Dum's head and the little mutt was whining happily at the attention.

"Hmm?"

"No. What surprised me was seeing you run away."

I turned my head and stared at her. "What?!"

"Oh, I don't mean it like that. It's just ... listen, if you don't want to do this, then just say, thank you but no, I don't want to do it. Don't try to duck out on it."

I just shook my head. "Marilyn, you have no idea how ugly this will get. Wait until Stewart goes after you and the kids! Wait until Charlie comes home from school with a black eye when some kid calls his father a murderer. What about the girls? They don't even know about this yet!"

"I am a grown woman! Don't try to hide behind me and the children. If you don't want to do this for your own reasons, fine, but don't say it's because of us. I'll handle it just fine, and it probably won't be the only black eye Charlie ever gets. He's too much like you. No, you ask yourself if you think you can do something good. You already know the answer to that! I've read your books and heard your speeches, too."

Marilyn stood up, and Dum-Dum came back over to my lap. My wife bent down and kissed my thin spot on the back of my head. I tried to reach around and swat her, but couldn't reach. She giggled and said, "It's late and I'm tired. I'm going to bed. Just remember, I love you, no matter what you decide."

I sat there after my wife went down the hall to our room. I went out to the kitchen and opened the liquor cabinet, and poured myself a shot of whiskey. I sat down on one of the bar stools at the island while Dum-Dum slept on in my recliner. I just stared at the shot for a bit. Was I running away? Could I bring something to the job? Could I actually do something like this?

Was my wife ashamed of me?

I had nothing to prove and so much to lose. To go through all that it would take to run for Congress and then lose ignominiously would be almost too much to bear. To say I could just go back to my old life at that point was naïve. It would certainly affect the business. At that point I should just move to the Bahamas and start over again.

Was my wife ashamed of me?

Could I do it? It would take a year just to run and find out I had lost, and had lost my reputation in the process. Why would anybody in their right mind actually want to go through this? As the saying goes, the cream rises to the top, and then curdles. Andy Stewart had probably started out an idealistic asshole. Where had he gone wrong? What would this do to me?

Was my wife ashamed of me?

I drank the shot of whiskey, savoring the burn as it slowly went down my throat. I poured a second, and put the bottle away. I drank the second shot, and then put the glass in the kitchen sink. I stood up and turned off all the lights, and then limped down the hall to the bedroom. Marilyn was already asleep. I went to the bathroom and then climbed into bed.

Marilyn seemed normal again the next morning, and I tried to tuck it all away in the back of my mind. We took the kids to soccer, and then drove them to Friendly's afterwards for ice cream. Dinner was hamburgers, and we simply avoided the topic the rest of the day. It was like Marilyn had forgotten it all, but I hadn't. "You ran away.", kept echoing in my head.

I watched the Sunday morning news shows until noon, stewing at the nonsense I saw. I knew what needed to be done, and what I could do, but I couldn't bring myself to do it. I stared at the television, and then grabbed my jacket and the leash, and took Dum-Dum for a walk around the property. I had only one thing to think about.

Was my wife ashamed of me?

When we came back into the house, I turned Dum-Dum loose, and let her chase the twins around the kitchen. I glanced over at where Charlie was watching television, and Marilyn was loading dishes into the dishwasher. I limped over to the telephone, and dialed a number I knew by heart.

John Steiner answered. "Hello?"

"John, it's Carl. I'll do it."

Chapter 96: In the Running

After I hung up the phone, Marilyn looked over at me from the dishwasher. "I thought you told me you didn't want to run for Congress."

"I thought you told me you did want me to run for Congress!"

"I never said that! Besides, you never listen to me anyway.", she responded with a smile.

I stared at my wife for a moment, and was interrupted in my reply by the twins racing through. I snagged Holly and asked, "Do you know where Mommy keeps the camera?"

"No."

"Well I want you and Molly to go look for it. I'm going to strangle Mommy and I want a picture for when I go to jail."

The two girls squealed and giggled and ran out of the kitchen. Marilyn gave me an amused look and said, "That's not going to get you the family values vote!"

"You are pushing your luck, lady!"

That got her to laughing at me, and she threw the dish towel at my head. "Dry the dishes and put them away, Congressman!" I made a rat tail out of the towel and flicked it at her rear. "You just lost the women's vote, too!", she added.

"Yeah? Well, I just picked up the exasperated husbands voting block, so I'm covered."

Tuesday morning John convened a meeting in my office. When we had talked on Sunday, he had told me not to talk to anybody about this but Marilyn, and that Marilyn wasn't to tell her friends either. Or family, a pack of lefto pinko Commies if ever there was one! Okay, my words, not his.

Tuesday we had John, Brew McRiley, Bob Destrier, Rich Miller, and Jack Nerstein in my office, and we bolted the doors, closed the drapes, and lowered the Cone of Silence. Jack was the equivalent of John in Carroll County, the head of the Republican Committee for the Maryland Ninth. He had been out of town on Sunday. It was time to talk politics.

It was Jack who started it off. "I heard you turned down the idea on Sunday. What made you change your mind?"

A good question. "I talked it over with Marilyn, my wife, over the weekend. She told me not to worry about her and the kids, but to do it if I thought I could make a difference. I think I can."

"What kind of difference?", asked McRiley.

I smiled at him. "I thought you wanted me to run?"

"I'm serious. We'll need something more than just platitudes and feel good stuff to do this. We'll need to develop what makes you different and what makes you right. Answer the question."

"You're a pushy little bastard, aren't you!? Okay, what do I believe in? My biggest position is going to be the need to balance the budget. Fiscal policy in this country is a disaster. If we can't draw a distinction between me and Stewart on that, we all need to rethink this!"

"There's more to it than that. What about on social issues? Where do you stand on gun control? Abortion? Are you pro-life? Defense? What about the Republican platform?", asked Rich.

"If we make this about social issues, we are screwed! Maryland is one of the five or six most liberal states in the nation. If we start harping on Democratic hot buttons, they will bury us.", I replied.

"We're not that liberal, Carl.", responded John. "Maryland voted for both Reagan and Bush, remember."

I shrugged. "Maryland voted for Reagan in '84. In '80, they voted for Carter. In '84, Jesus would have lost against Ronald Reagan, and in '88 my eight year old could have beaten Mike Dukakis. You ain't making your point, John. We can't make this about Democratic hot buttons. We will go down in flames!"

We spent some time going over the 1988 Republican platform. Somebody actually had a copy of the platform, so for each item we marked off where I stood. Sometimes it was amusing. McRiley asked, "What about gun control?"

"I'm in favor of gun control. I always hit what I aim at!", I answered. That set the others to laughing, and that was written down as a line to be used. I thought it was a bit glib, especially when the last thing I had hit was my brother.

It was less amusing when they got to abortion. Pro-life or pro-abortion? "I'm pro-choice, guys.", I told them.

That set Destrier and Miller back a peg. It was Destrier who pushed, "That's definitely not in the platform, Carl."

I shrugged unrepentantly. "Then it's not in the platform. You want a pro-life candidate, then fine. You go find one and see how he does. You will piss off three quarters of the woman in the district and half the men, but hey, what do I know? I will say this until I am blue in the face. If you want to win this election, you have to focus on economic issues. If you want to lose, focus on social issues. This is Maryland, not Arkansas."

"Meaning what?", asked Miller.

"Meaning, this is not the Bible Belt! Now, there are plenty of rural areas in Baltimore, Carroll, and Frederick counties, but this district is becoming more and more suburban. They have pushed out from Baltimore and Washington along 83 and 795 and 70. There's a whole lot more soccer moms and commuting dads than farmers. You start thumping a Bible and you will be playing to deaf ears! We need to play to what the people want, which is how the Republicans are going to help their pocketbooks and keep them safe, and not tell them how to pray and behave."

Miller looked like he was about to explode. "This is a Christian nation! Are you even Christian? It certainly doesn't sound like it!"

That caused the others, the locals and Brew McRiley, to stare at Rich Miller curiously. "Is that what this is about? I need to be vetted by a church before running? Oh, boy, that ain't going to go too far!", I told him.

Miller calmed down slightly. "No, but we can't have you making disparaging remarks like that in public."

Again, I shrugged. "That's fine, I won't. What happens when somebody stands up while I'm speaking and wants to know about some social issue? Abortion or religion or evolution or birth control or something? What do you want me to say then?"

"Well, we can simply create ahead of time some neutral sounding quotes that won't contradict the platform.", he told me.

"Uh, huh." I glanced at the others. John looked a bit horrified by this all, McRiley was rolling his eyes, and Destrier and Nerstein looked like they wanted to dump Miller in a river somewhere. I got the overall impression they wanted the guy to drop it.

I was right. Nerstein smoothly interjected, "Well, let's table that for the moment, shall we. We can develop some responses more closely attuned to local needs." The rest of us just nodded.

We all took a potty break at that point, and when Miller headed out to the bathroom, I leaned over towards Jack Nerstein and asked quietly, "Do you think I should mention my wife is a Democrat and a Catholic to him?"

Jack, who I had met a few times before at fire department fundraisers in Hampstead and Westminster, grinned and shook his head. "No! He's a hard core evangelical. He'd probably have her tarred and feathered."

"Great! We'll just have to get them together!", I replied.

Destrier chimed in at that. "Just keep your mouth shut until we can send this guy home. Let us work with you on the local stuff."

I nodded in agreement.

When we got started again, the topic was what I had mentioned at the dinner party. No matter what I believed in or didn't believe in, we had to overcome the issue of the Billionaire Murderer campaign posters. Everybody seemed to feel that the 'billionaire' part of the poster was a non-issue. "Stewart's a millionaire himself,", commented John, "and he doesn't even live in the state!"

I looked at him curiously at that. "He doesn't? Isn't that, like, a requirement?"

He shrugged. "Eh. Not really, but residency is kind of questionable in a lot of things. He mostly lives in Alexandria, Virginia, and has an apartment in Cockeysville, just inside the limit. He's never there, but it allows him to claim he lives here. You actually live here, full time, year round!"

"Speaking of money, how much is this going to cost me?", I asked.

That got me a few stares. "Well, under normal circumstances, I would say at least a half mill, but with what Stewart is going to pull, double that. If we don't raise one million dollars, we won't have a chance.", answered Brewster.

I shrugged at that. "Okay. I assume we need to set up some kind of a bank account. Can I just start with the half million, or do I need to deposit the entire amount up front?", I asked.

You could have heard a pin drop at that. Miller's jaw dropped to the floor, and the locals simply stared in disbelief. It was McRiley who answered. "You are going to pay for the campaign?!"

"Uh, yeah, why not? Is that illegal or something?" Maybe this violated some sort of campaign finance rule, but I didn't think so.

"Oh my God! No, it's not illegal, it's just damn near unheard of! You need to collect campaign contributions!", he replied.

"Uh, huh. Let me make sure I have that straight. I am going to spend the next year of my life selling my soul to whoever wants to cough up some cash. Then, after I get elected, I promise to vote their way so they keep coughing up cash. That's the way it works, right?"

"Well, yeah! Haven't you heard, the definition of a good politician is one who stays bought!", he replied.

"You're almost as cynical as I am. I like that.", I told him. "That's how Stewart made his money, isn't it? Campaign contributions, and some of it stuck to his fingers, right?"

The others nodded. Destrier commented, "It's not quite as bald as that, but in effect, yes. He's a man of the people, don't you know?"

John added, "It's illegal now, but at one time, any money you raised above what the campaign cost you could keep as income. That's really sticking to your fingers!"

Rich Miller brought us back on track. "If you don't take campaign contributions, but pay for a campaign out of pocket, you'll be accused of buying the election."

"Flip that around.", I said. "Instead say that I can't be bought! What campaign contributor could possibly afford to buy my vote, on anything?"

"Holy Christ!", he muttered to himself. I got the feeling that Mister Miller was starting to wonder at the wisdom of putting me on this path. I wasn't feeling all that sympathetic to him.

"Let's table that for the moment. We can figure a way to handle campaign contributions. Maybe we can funnel them directly to the RNC.", added McRiley. The RNC, the Republican National Committee, was always looking for money. They often provided extra funding above and beyond what an individual could raise on his own, and my understanding was that a candidate could divert contributions the other way as well. Some of the big name politicians, the ones who could command top donations, but were assured of re-election, often sent money to the national organization, and in return got lots of political favors they could call on in the future. Miller's eyes gleamed at the thought of contributions going to the RNC. That would probably earn him some Brownie points, also.

"That would be best.", commented Destrier. "By taking campaign cash, you are promising the contributors that they will have your ear, regardless of whether you agree with them or not. You're going to need their support."

Brewster chimed in, "You're in investments. When they make a contribution, they are buying shares in Carl Buckman, Politician, Inc. They're going to want you to succeed so that their investment pays off. After you get their money, then you ask them for their time, which is even more important."

Miller said, "You ever heard the line about grabbing them by their balls and their hearts and minds will follow? That's for amateurs. Grab them by their wallets and their hearts and minds will follow!"

I nodded in understanding. "That makes sense. I never thought that through. I've got a lot to learn, don't I?"

"You do, so be a quick study.", said John, which got a few chuckles around the room.

McRiley wanted us to get back to the topic of my brother. "Just how bad is the murderer part of the equation going to be?", he asked.

"Bad enough. Are you old enough to remember it? This was six years ago, back in 1983. What grade were you in then?", I asked.

"Droll, very droll.", he responded. "I was in law school at the time, Yale, if you must know."

"Really? You know what you have when you bury a lawyer in the sand up to his neck?", I asked.

"Yeah - a good start. Are we going to trade lawyer jokes the rest of the day? Trust me, I've heard them all!", he riposted, and quickly, too.

"Carl, before you piss off the other five people in the room, all of whom are lawyers by the way, why don't you go over what happened. Get it out in the open, right here and now. I was there at the time, but they weren't, and they need to hear it from your side, because you're right, we will surely hear it from the other side.", said John.

We broke for a bit and I got my assistant to bring in some coffee, and some tea for me. After we were all settled around the table again, I said, "Okay, this is going to take a bit of time, but hear me out. John knows all about this. He's been my lawyer since I was a kid, and I do mean kid. I've known him since I was 13."I pointed at Brewster. "You don't know about this, though, right?"

"I've read your bio. The best one I found was the one from a few years ago in Fortune magazine. After lunch, we'll be reviewing that. Once we announce your name, you can guarantee that Stewart's team will do the same."

I nodded and turned to the others. "You guys know about this?"

Both Bob and Jack admitted to seeing it in the papers and on the television back when it happened. Miller didn't know anything more than what was in that magazine bio McRiley was referring to.

"Okay. Well, let me just start out by saying that if you look up dysfunctional in the dictionary, you'll see a picture of my family there.", I started. It took me about fifteen minutes to take the others through my family, specifically related to the fact that my brother was a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic and my mother was depressive, which John and I had found out through the security agency we used.

Then I got to Hamilton's final meltdown. "So, anyway, that's just the background. After I got out of the Army, I moved back home and John and I, and the others, started the company. That was in '82. I don't think my family even knew I was back in town. We met again in the spring of '83, when my sister invited us to her college graduation. Hamilton freaked out, big time, and he and Mom and Dad got into it. Dad threw the pair of them out, and my mother and Hamilton ended up in an apartment in Towson. Hamilton figured it was all my fault, and decided to go after my wife and son, and Charlie wasn't even two yet. Over the next few months he began stalking Marilyn, vandalized her car repeatedly, and even tried to firebomb the house."

"Couldn't you get the police involved?", asked Miller.

"Oh, they were involved, all right. We got them involved almost immediately. They ended up checking alibis on almost a hundred people, but Hamilton slipped through it all.", said John.

"Right. By then we had a security company bodyguarding Marilyn and our son, and I sent them away. I stayed home, and stayed in the house with my old Army pistol, in the hopes that whoever was doing this would make another run at us, and he did. We had no idea it was going to be my brother, but he broke in one day with a gigantic Bowie knife, and when he found it was me, and not my family, decided to attack me instead. I had to shoot him."

"Jesus!", whistled Brewster. He looked around the room. The three locals all nodded their remembrance of it. Miller looked a bit horrified. McRiley rubbed his jaw for a moment, and then took over. "Okay, let me ask a few questions. Did you own the gun legally?"

I shrugged. "It was my .45 from when I was in the Army. The cops didn't bitch about it and the Army never came looking for it.", I answered.

"Hmmm, interesting. Where were you when you shot him?"

"We were in my house. In my kitchen, actually, maybe six or seven feet apart. It was all fully investigated by the cops.", I said.

John interjected, saying, "It was really obvious what had happened, and Carl wasn't even brought up before a grand jury. It was simply dismissed as self defense."

McRiley waved this off, and kept asking me questions. "Were you ever arrested and charged with anything, even if the charges were later dropped?"

"Never. I've never been arrested for anything. I mean, they handcuffed me and took me to the station, but once there, I was questioned and released and sent home again." Technically true though I have seen the insides of more than my fair share of police stations. "There was this one time in college when some buddies and I got busted for falling asleep on the beach in Florida. Does that count?"

"You fell asleep on the beach?", asked Brewster incredulously.

"Yeah.", I said with a shrug. "You know, a summer road trip? Anyway, we all fell asleep one night on the beach, and a couple of cops rousted us for their nightly quota and threw us in a holding cell for the night. We paid a fine and got the hell out of Dodge. You can't tell me that disqualifies somebody for Congress. That was in college for Christ's sake! We were 18!"

"No, but I wouldn't brag about it, either.", he answered. I just shrugged. I hadn't thought about it in years.

"I remember it now.", tossed in Destrier. "It made all the papers and the TV stations. Big story at the time, you know, Cain and Abel, that sort of thing, but it all went away years ago. There wasn't a crime, and not even a scandal, really. Your mom didn't handle it well, as I recall."

I shook my head. "She spent a week ranting about me, and then ended up hospitalized. My parents ended up suing each other and me, and it all got tossed out of court. My sister moved out of state to get away from it all."

McRiley listened a bit more, while Miller looked like he had just swallowed a healthy heaping spoonful of sewage. I was guessing that he had bought the general version of my bio without looking any deeper. Now he was looking at a disaster in the making. It was McRiley who spoke up. "Well, it's an issue, alright, but not insurmountable. It all depends on how we play it."

"How we play it?", I asked.

He nodded. "You flip it around. You didn't kill your brother, you defended your wife and child and upheld the sanctity of the Second Amendment." Most of the others were slowly nodding their heads. Brewster continued, "Normally I'd say to release this early on, but not this time. Let Stewart release it. The smart trick would be to sit on it until right before the election and then dump it before you can react. This is too juicy. Somebody will dump it early on. That allows us plenty of time to defuse it. What's your mother going to do about this?"

"Shit. She'll go nuts again."

"Bad?"

I stood up and paced around the room. This mercenary little bastard was going to use my whack job mother to deflect the grief from me. 'No wonder his brother was nuts! Look at his Mom!' What a clusterfuck! Did I owe them anything, though? They had made this life a living hell for years. "Hell! I don't know. She might not say anything. The only things she hates worse than me are Catholics and Democrats! That's why she had me disowned. Marilyn is a Catholic and a Democrat. I might as well have married the bride of Frankenstein as far as my parents are concerned. She'll freak if she thinks that running me down is helping Andy Stewart."

"Christ, Carl, I never even thought of that!", admitted John.

"Are you serious?", exclaimed Jack.

John shrugged. "It wasn't the Cleavers. Carl moved out when he was sixteen, and not a moment too soon, either. Still, being reminded he killed her beloved Hamilton might push her over the edge, and she'll decide to speak out to the reporters. You know they're going to track her down, Carl."

"I'm sure. Based on what happened the last time, if she says anything, she'll go off the wall and blame me for everything up to and including the fall of western civilization. And then she'll have another meltdown, quite probably on camera, and get carted off to Sheppard Pratt for another vacation. I just don't know.", I admitted.

Brew pushed some more. "What about your father?"

"Oh, that's easy. The first reporter to get in his face is going to get punched in the nose. It happened the last time, too. Probably on camera, too."

"And your sister?"

I shook my head. "It's not an issue. She changed her name and moved to Minnesota. She hasn't been home in years. I've tried to throw off anybody curious by saying she was in California." She was still a nurse at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, and had married a Minnesota State police officer and they had a couple of kids, as well as one of his own from a previous marriage. She didn't know it, but I had the security company keep track of her and give me an update every few months.

McRiley grimaced. "That was a mistake. Stewart's people will track her down in about ten minutes."

I stared at him for a second. "How? I thought that was why you changed your name, to separate yourself from your past?"

The lawyers in the room all rolled their eyes. "Forget it. They'll track her old credit cards, her nursing license, even her name change paperwork. Wait until they trot her out on camera. What will she say?", said Destrier.

"I don't know.", I said with a sigh. "I'll have to talk to her. I haven't talked to her since she left."

"Is there anything good to all this?", asked Miller, the guy from the RNC.

"Absolutely!", answered Brew. "This plays out on several levels. You have the defending his family part that I mentioned earlier, along with the Second Amendment issues. When his family goes bonkers, we play up his ability to overcome his background, how Carl has risen to each new height. It plays to the need to build a story. Everybody already knows the Andy Stewart story. Now we can play a new one for our guy."

We broke for lunch at that point, by which I meant that we sent out for sandwiches and stayed in my office. I insisted that we not talk business over lunch. That made for a quick lunch, though, since everybody wanted to start grilling me about my bio. These guys were prepared, too. In addition to the Fortune article, they had a copy of the bio we had originally prepared for the SEC and a copy of my Army service record. I was also told to sign a few releases, in order to obtain copies of my school and college transcripts.

There is no goodness to be found in any modern candidate for office, only varying degrees of badness. Jesus Christ could not be found good enough. ('Whipping the moneylenders from then Temple? That's civil disobedience! You're increasing regulation on small businessmen! You know, the job creators!')

We started right at the beginning. "Tell us about this fight you had when you were thirteen.", demanded Miller. I shrugged and explained what had happened. Everybody but John had questions. What happened to the three boys? What are their names? Where are they now? Have you heard from them again? What other fights did I get into? With who? What happened to them afterwards? Were there any witnesses? (No idea. I don't remember. No clue. Not since that day – it was twenty years ago!... )

We got into some incredibly personal details that afternoon. Do you do drugs? Have you done drugs? What types? When? Why did you stop? Have you ever hired a prostitute? Have you ever had a homosexual experience? Are you cheating on your wife? Have you ever had an affair? Has your wife ever had an affair? Do you have any movies or pictures of you or your wife naked?

Miller got into religion again. Where did I go to church? Nowhere. Marilyn and the kids were Catholic, and I was Lutheran. I would take them to Mass a few times a year, but I wouldn't join a separate church. He grimaced at that, but a few looks from the others kept him under control.

Nobody seemed happy that I had joined a fraternity in college. All fraternities are sources of drunkenness and moral depravity. ('Hey guys, that was why I joined!' – I was admonished that I wasn't being helpful.) When they got my transcripts they would be examined. My military service record was ripped apart. I refused to explain what happened on the final mission in Nicaragua, and simply cited national security and the top secret classification. Still, I had to come up with the names of any commanding officers I could remember. When we got to my time with the Buckman Group, my tax records were demanded. I had known that would happen, but I balked at releasing the corporate records.

Marilyn's family was probed, too. I had to provide names and addresses for their home and business. Had any of them been to jail? (Not a problem – Harriet would kill them when they got out!) I didn't have addresses for the brothers, but private investigators would find them and check on them.

I didn't remember huge numbers of answers. Some of the questions related to events from my teens. Not to worry, they would have private investigators pick through my life.

Through all of this, I was repeatedly informed that if I thought this was bad, wait until Andy Stewart started doing it. Forget about privacy. Sealed records would be unsealed, personal records would be opened, my garbage would be examined, my phone records would be pulled, my credit cards would be fair game, my driving and police records would be looked into and published. If I had a speeding ticket, it would be front page news. Forget about any promises of privacy, they were meaningless. Any government records might as well be sent directly to Stewart headquarters.

Of course we would return the favor, but Andy had been in the business for a long time. He knew how to hide things he wanted hidden.

Is it any wonder nobody wants to run for office?

We worked until dinner and beyond, and I was told this was just the start. Nobody had found anything that seemed to invalidate me as a candidate. That obviously meant they had to search some more. However, it would be a few more days before they could ask me some more questions, and I was to use that time to get in touch with my sister.

Everybody but John left, and he stayed behind in my office. "Welcome to public life.", he said to me. "Do you really want to do this, Carl? You were right the other day. This will get ugly at some point. Andy Stewart is not going to go gently into that good night. It will be more like being dragged kicking and screaming through a septic system. He will play dirty."

I dug out the whiskey and poured us a couple of glasses. I slid one across the coffee table to him and then sat down and sipped my own. "John, I have been dancing around my family for over twenty years now. At what point am I allowed to live my life without giving two shits about them? They disowned me for Christ's sake! I have spent most of my life trying to make my family proud of me. Everything I've ever done - valedictorian, getting a doctorate, the military, the medal, starting a company - none of it was ever good enough! Screw it; I'm going to do this for me!"

He just hung his head and shook it. "I'm sorry about this, Carl. I never understood them. How did it ever come to this? I just don't know them anymore." It was his turn to drink.

"They did it to themselves, John. I am washing my hands of them."

"I'm sorry, Carl."

I met McRiley in my office the next day, to go over some of the legal and paperwork aspects of my running for Congress. My first question was whether this meant that the others had approved my running for Congress. He waved this off as a given. In some ways, my ability to pay for the campaign on my own meant that I actually had a chance. It wasn't going to be cheap, and Republicans had never been able to raise much money in the district.

I asked him if he had ever done this before, because he sure seemed damn young to me. It turned out this was his second Congressional campaign, but the first he had been an assistant on, last year down in the Maryland Eighth, Connie Morella's seat. "So, now you're shooting to do this on your own?"

"Something like that."

"Listen, nothing personal, but do I have to use you? Don't get me wrong, but are there rules on these things? Am I required to use the campaign manager assigned to me?", I asked.

He snorted at that. He leaned back in his chair and put his feet up on the corner of my desk. "No, you can use whoever you want for that. And just to be clear on this, I am not doing this out of the goodness of my heart, either. I will be a paid employee of the campaign." He named a figure which made my eyes water, but on reflection, I realized it was not unreasonable for an essentially mercenary figure whose job could disappear at any time.

"I'm curious. How does somebody go about becoming a campaign manager? I've never met one before."

He shrugged. "I've always been interested in politics and the law. I was in the Young Republicans Club at Harvard, where I did my pre-law. I'm actually from Hagerstown, if you can believe it. I studied political science at Harvard. Then I went to Yale, and was active in Republican politics again. At that level it's all unpaid volunteer work. When I graduated I clerked for a judge in Towson, and got involved with the local party groups, again, unpaid. Two years ago I managed to work my way up to assistant manager, and that I got paid for. When Miller started looking around, he asked me to look into you and I tagged along. So far I'm doing this on my own dime, but that is going to have to change at some point."

He outlined the plan he had come up with. The filing deadline was in January, and we wouldn't file until that time. The primary would be in April. Nobody else was planning on running, at least as far as anybody knew, although it was theoretically possible somebody else could decide to run. Certainly there had been nobody nosing around any of the party big wigs. The issues with both Tim Jenkins and Ted Blusinski happened too late in the game for anybody else to start thinking about them. Their problems weren't even widely known yet.

Another paid position was going to be the campaign finance manager, an accountant who would oversee all expenses and contributions. Again, it's a bit of a specialized field, and a good one wouldn't be cheap, but could be paid out of the campaign budget. We would also have a variety of lawyer types as counsels, also paid professionals. Then there was the matter of finding a campaign headquarters. The perfect spot might be an unused section of a strip mall on a short term lease. I gave him Andrea's phone number, since she would be the best to handle that.

Finally, he asked, "So, are we doing this or not? And if yes, am I your guy or not?"

"God save me, but yes, and yes."

"Good. I'll be back in a week's time with a finance manager. I want you to get a haircut and shave your beard and mustache off by then."

"You want me to shave?", I asked, confused.

"You look like a pirate. Nobody elects pirates.", said Brew.

"Yeah? Checked out the Senate lately?" Actually, life would be a lot more interesting if we did elect pirates, but I suppose that wasn't going to happen.

"Do you go anywhere for Christmas?"

"Yeah, we have a vacation home in the Bahamas."

"Well, take your vacation over Christmas, because after that you won't get one until after November 6.", he ordered.

"You know, the last time I took orders like this I was in the Army.", I said, smiling.

"You think it's bad now, wait until after we are officially running. Have a check ready next week for a hundred grand, and we'll start setting up everything officially. We'll set up a campaign account, and start preparing the paperwork." He stood up. "We're going to win this! You won't be sorry."

I smiled at him. "I think I already am."

Chapter 97: The Rottingens

I made a few phone calls that afternoon to the security company we used. I needed an updated profile on Suzie's situation. Brewster and John had spooked me about the possibility of Suzie being used against me. I also told Marilyn I was going to travel out to Rochester to see her and talk. Marilyn asked if she should go as well, and I simply said that it was better if I made the first visit alone. I didn't want to overwhelm her. I just didn't know enough.

The report came back, pretty much the way it had before. Now, after talking to the various lawyers, I realized just how much was available without any kind of effort. It had her address and unlisted phone number, valuations of her home from county tax records, and her salary at the Mayo Clinic. It also had the same information on her husband, a State Police officer, including his work history and a summary of his first marriage and subsequent divorce. It had the names and ages of their children, as well as the schools they went to.

Their work schedules were listed as well, and they were pretty normal day shifts. I packed my bags and ordered a plane gassed up for a flight to Rochester on Friday. Knowing my luck, they would be spending a long weekend camping or something, but I had to take a chance. I needed to do this in person, and not on the phone. On the phone, Suzie could duck me if she wanted to. Before I left the house that morning, Marilyn stopped me and said, "Give your sister my love. Tell her we'd like to see her for a visit."

I nodded. "I'll let you know how it goes."

I was booked into the Kahler in downtown Rochester, right next door to the Mayo Clinic. I was tempted for a second to make my visit there, but that would probably just cause problems. No, it was best to do this at her home. I had a secure driver and a small limousine at my service, so after checking in and unpacking, I had a late lunch or early supper, and then we drove out to her home. I was glad I had worn my heavy lined trench coat and gloves! It was cold in Minnesota in the winter! Once again I was reminded of the wisdom in moving back to Maryland and not New York. This place was even colder than upstate New York! Why the hell anybody actually wants to live in the snow is beyond me.

My driver drove us out into the suburbs and eventually turned into a rabbit's warren of streets. A few minutes later he pulled up to a mid-sized colonial and stopped. Lights were on inside, and I could see a few shadows through the curtains. "We're here, sir.", commented my driver.

I glanced at the number on the side of the house and it matched the address on the dossier. I tucked that inside my coat and pulled on my gloves. "Thank you. I don't know how long I'll be. It could be quite a while."

"Yes, sir, understood. Do you think there's any kind of security risk, above the usual, I mean?"

I almost laughed at that. "Probably not. The lady inside is my sister. You have family?"

He did laugh at that. "Yes, sir. That's the most dangerous type of situation."

"Very true. Well, if I think I'm going to be awhile, I'll come out and let you know." I let myself out of the car and walked up to the front door. "Here goes nothing.", I muttered to myself.

I pressed a button on the side of the door and I could hear a bell ring on the inside. I heard the scamper of very small feet rushing and then a little face peered out of a sidelight at me. "Somebody's at the door!", cried out loudly.

In response, a much deeper and louder voice said, "Out of the way, I'll open the door." The little feet went scampering off again, and a few seconds later the door opened. It was a stocky guy, but shorter than me, with a shaved head and no neck, who looked like a serious weightlifter. "Hello.", he said.

"Hello. Sergeant Rottingen?"

"Yes."

"Could I see Mrs. Rottingen, please?"

He eyed me curiously, but then half turned down the hallway. I could see the little face who had peeked at me through the window looking around the corner at me. I just smiled at him and he ducked back out of sight. I smiled at that. Bullet-Head called out, "Suzanna!?"

I heard a familiar voice yell back, "Who is it?"

"Somebody for you."

"Hold on."

I heard a clatter coming from the rear of the home, and then a woman with short blonde hair was backing down the hallway towards us, scolding a child mildly and drying a sippee cup with a dish towel at the same time. After a moment she turned and looked at her husband, and then, getting closer, turned to face me.

"Long time, no see, Suzie.", I said.

Well, damned if she didn't drop the cup and drop dead in a faint! Bullet-Head grabbed her from behind and picked her up easily.

I looked at him and said, "I guess I should have called ahead of time."

He gave me a hard look, and then said, "You must be Carl Buckman."

"Yes, I am."

"Well, come on in. I've been wondering when we'd be meeting you. Come on in." He stepped back and I let myself in, closing the doors behind us. He led the way into a front living room, where I found myself being stared at by three boys, the oldest of whom was demanding to know what was going on. Their father ordered them out of the room and laid Suzie down on the couch. He gently tapped her on the cheek a few times until she stirred awake.

She looked around in confusion, and then saw me standing there a few feet away. At that she turned white as a ghost. Her mouth began moving but no coherent words were coming out. "Suzie, why don't you give me a chance to talk to your husband?", I asked.

Her husband nodded and pulled her upright. "Go upstairs and freshen up. I want to talk to your brother for a bit.", he told her.

She looked at him wildly. "You know?!"

"I've known for years, Suzanna. Just give us a few minutes."

My sister looked at us both wildly, and then left. Her husband pointed at an armchair and ordered, "Sit." Then he sat down in a matching chair a few feet away.

I sat down and said, "Thank you. You know who I am?"

He shrugged. "The only people who could have caused that reaction in Suzanna would have been her family, and you're not old enough to be her father, so you have to be her brother. You're Carl Buckman, right?"

I nodded and repeated, "That's me. Suzie doesn't know that you know?"

"Suzie ... I've always known her as Suzanna. Strange, isn't it?" I just made a wry smile and shrugged. "My name is John, by the way. I met Suzanna shortly after she moved to Rochester and started at the Mayo Clinic, and we hit it off almost immediately. At the time, she told me she was an only child, and her parents back home had been killed in a car crash. Anyway, we kept seeing each other and it was getting a lot more serious, and I wanted to know more about her, but it was like nothing had happened before she showed up in Rochester. I'd been a cop long enough to know something wasn't right."

I nodded, and he continued. "So, anyway, before I asked her to marry me, I had a detective buddy of mine run a background check on her. I mean, was I about to marry a mob hit-woman or something? A day later he told me her parents weren't dead, but she had changed her name and left home after one brother killed the other brother. That got us both to wondering and we checked it out with the local cops."

"And you never said anything to her?"

It was his turn to look embarrassed. "And let her know I had been investigating her? Whatever the problem was, it didn't involve her, so I let it slide. We got married in the winter of '84."

I smiled at that. "And now we both have to let her know her secret is out. Don't be too hard on her. It's not her fault that her family was a disaster. She was the only normal one in the bunch! She was just trying to escape."

At that point the three boys came around the corner and looked in. The oldest one, who looked to be about ten or eleven, said, "Dad, is Mom all right?"

John's face softened and he said, "Your mom isn't feeling good right now, and she's lying down. She'll be fine. Now, you guys scoot. I need to talk to Mister Buckman, here."

The two older boys looked at me curiously. The baby, a two year old, toddled off to his father. John picked him up and said, "Whooh! Somebody stinks! Jack! Get back here!"

The oldest boy came in and looked at his father with horror. "No! Dad! No!"

"You just got promoted! I don't want to hear it!" There was another pro forma protest and a final order of "GO!"

We looked at each other again. "He's my boy from my first marriage. Suzanna's more his mother than his real mom. I have full custody, and Suzanna's offered to adopt him, but his mother won't hear of it."

"I bet Suzie gets the evil stepmother jokes, though."

That earned a big grin. "More than you can believe! Anyway, tell me more about her family."

We talked for another fifteen minutes or so, until Suzie came back down the stairs. She was still white faced, but was now clutching a small box of some sort. She looked terrified, but came into the living room, followed closely by the toddler, who ran up to her and wrapped his arms around her knees. The older two boys came around the corner and stared. Jack, the oldest, said, "Mom, what's going on? What's wrong?" He gave me a dirty look.

"Nothing's wrong. I ... nothing's wrong."

"Who is this guy? Did he say something to you?!"

"Jack! You don't talk like that to grownups!", said his father.

Suzie reached over and pulled her stepson to her side and hugged him. "It's all right. He just surprised me. This is your Uncle Carl."

That earned me a very confused look. "I don't have an Uncle Carl."

"This is my brother, Carl, so that makes him your uncle."

"You told us you didn't have any brothers or sisters."

"I know. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to lie, but ... someday you'll understand. Jack, this is your Uncle Carl."

"Nice to meet you, Jack. You're named after your father?"

That earned me a surly, "Yes sir.", but nobody minded. I was also introduced to Alex, the four year old, and Harry, the toddler. I already had their names from the dossier, but there was no sense in introducing that element yet.

Suzie shooed the boys out of the room, so it was just us three adults. She turned to face her husband. "You knew?"

"I've known since before we got married."

"You knew and you didn't tell me?"

He shrugged. "Tell you what? That I knew you were lying to me? That I didn't trust you and had you investigated? None of it seemed that important, so I let you continue on. You can tell me at your own speed."

"Even after your last wife, you married me?" Suzie was crying now, quietly. I got the impression that John Rottingen's first marriage had not been a joyful union.

"I guess I'm attracted to screwed up ladies.", he joked. Suzie groaned at that, and kept crying. He handed her a tissue.

She wiped her eyes and blew her nose, and then looked over at me. "Carl, why are you here? How long have you known about me here?"

"I've known about you being here since you moved. My security company has an investigation arm. I had them trace you and keep an eye on you."

The Minnesota State Trooper eyed me coldly at that. "You've had us under surveillance?"

I raised a hand pleadingly. "Absolutely not! I've simply had them give me a periodic update as to phone numbers and addresses, that sort of thing. About like what your detective friend and you did to track down Suzie's background.", I pointed out.

I turned back to my sister. "Suzie, I don't claim to understand why you think you had to run away like that, but both Marilyn and I honored your wishes. Now, though, I have to talk to you. Things are changing."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean that your little secret is about to come out. As a businessman, nobody cares about who my sister is. As a politician, they care. I'm going to be running for Congress next year, and people will be looking into my background. You need to know before reporters start camping out on your front lawn and asking your kids a bunch of questions.", I told them.

Both their eyes opened wide. "Oh, Christ! You're serious, aren't you?", asked John.

"Very. The experts back home all seem to think my opponent will stop at nothing to discredit me. My killing Hamilton will just be the start. They think he'll go after Mom and Dad, too. I used to tell people you had moved to California, but I stopped when my lawyers said that would turn back and haunt me. He'll come after you, too."

Suzie rolled her eyes. "What does he want me to say, that you should have let Hamilton kill all of you?"

"He doesn't care what you say. You left, so there has to be a big bad secret involved. Throw enough mud at me, maybe a voter thinks I'm dirty."

"Nobody's camping on my front yard!", avowed her husband. "I don't know about Maryland, but you start harassing a trooper's wife in Minnesota and you'll find out about the limits of freedom of the press real damn fast!"

I shrugged and nodded. "Fine by me. They were a pain in my tail back the first time around on this."

There was a bit of commotion in the family room and Suzie got up to sort it out. She came back in a moment later. "Little ones need to go to bed. Give me a few minutes and I'll be down again." She left at that.

I turned to John. "Is there a place I can stash my driver? He's out in the car."

"You have a driver?"

"Slash bodyguard. I usually have security when traveling. Uh, he's armed, if that's a problem."

My brother-in-law muttered under his breath. "He'd better be licensed. I've had more than enough fun and games tonight."

I went out and brought in the security driver and we stashed him in the family room with a cup of coffee. I went back to the living room and talked to John some more. Suzie came back after a bit and sat down with us. She was quiet, and then picked up the box she had brought down earlier. She called out, "Jack! Come on in here!"

He came zooming back in. "Yeah?"

"Come on over here. I want to show you some pictures. I've had these saved away, but I won't lie anymore. These are from when I was younger." She opened the box and started going through them with her stepson and husband, who then passed them over to me.

It was a wrenching look into the past. Not everything was bad, not by a long shot! Especially when we were little, and before Hamilton and I hit our teens, there were a lot of smiles on our faces. Young Jack was absolutely awestruck when he saw the photos I had taken of Suzie when I gave her that tandem skydive in Fayetteville, which made me laugh all over again. There were some shots of her at college, and on the occasional trip out to see us. Then they all stopped suddenly. She collected the pictures and put them away.

"Why did you change your name?", he asked.

She sighed. "I wonder that myself at times. I had to move away. It was just too crazy at home. Maybe someday you'll understand better."

He turned to me and said, "It was your fault, wasn't it?"

Suzie gasped and John looked angry. I just answered, "Yes, it was." I held a hand up to forestall the others. "This is going to be hard to understand, but as you get older, it will make more sense. My brother had a disease, a mental disease..."

"You mean he was crazy!"

"Yes, that's the easy explanation."

"Like on TV, right? Brothers are always crazy on TV!"

I snorted a laugh at that. "Wait a few years, and I'll tell your brothers you said that." That earned me a big grin. "Anyway, my brother was very sick, and one day he came to my house and tried to kill my wife and my baby. I mean, could you imagine somebody trying to come into your house and trying to kill your mom and your brothers?"

Jack's eyes widened. "Whoa! For real?"

"For real. They weren't home, though, but I was, and then he tried to kill me. I had to stop him."

That got us another, "Whoa!"

"Jack, I think it's time for you to go to bed. We'll talk some more tomorrow, okay?", said Suzie.

He looked at me. "So, it's your fault, but it's not? That's what you meant?"

"You're a smart guy, Jack. We'll talk again.", I told him.

The boy headed out of the room. His father looked after him, and then glanced at Suzie and me, and then followed his son up the stairs. "Why did you leave?", I asked my sister.

"I had to get away from Mom and Dad. You know that. They were as crazy as Hamilton and you were involved and I had lawyers chasing me about it, making me pick sides. It was easier to just move away and start over again."

I nodded. "I know that, but why change your name and never call? It wasn't any easier for us than it was for you."

"Carl, you were always the strong one in the family! You made me strong, not the other way around! I had to leave!", she cried.

"You couldn't even send a letter? Not even to your godson?"

At that she broke down and began crying. I sat down next to her and put an arm around her shoulder, and she began crying into my shoulder. That's how her husband found us a few minutes later. She looked up as he entered and went to him and began crying onto him. I looked at him and just shrugged my shoulders. Now what?

She sniffled to a stop and said, more to him than to me, "I got all caught up in the lies. Once I changed my name it was easy to pretend I had a new life. Each lie led to another, and then another, and there was no going back, and I was ashamed to admit it. I'm sorry, I'm so sorry!" She started crying again.

John Rottingen nodded towards the door, so it was time to take my leave. "Can I visit again, tomorrow, before I go home?"

Suzie silently nodded. "Come over after lunch tomorrow.", said her husband.

I nodded and collected my driver, and we headed out. It was too late to call my wife, so I simply went to bed. I slept late, and then called Marilyn mid-morning.

"How did it go?", she asked.

"Okay, I guess. She fainted dead away when she saw me at the door, but her husband already knew she had been lying about her background, and he married her anyway. I guess that's a good thing.", I replied.

"It means he loves her, you nincompoop!"

I chuckled at that. "I guess it does. I'm to go back after lunch." I told her more about the conversation last night, and Marilyn reiterated that I was to invite her and her entire family for a visit, as soon as possible. I promised I would do so, and gave her my love, and then we hung up. I cleaned up and dressed, and then headed downstairs. I was able to get in a workout in their Nautilus room, and then went back upstairs, showered and shaved, and dressed. I called my driver and told him I planned to have lunch and wanted to be picked up at 1:00 at the front entrance.

By half past I was back at the Rottingen's. Suzie was looking a lot calmer, although I don't think she had slept much. She told me, in fact, that she and her husband had stayed up half the night talking.

The years had been relatively kind to my sister. She was still blonde, but it looked like some of the highlights came from a hairdresser. She had put on about twenty pounds, but it was fairly evenly distributed. Her face was a little puffy, but that could have been because she had been crying so much in the last day or so.

Today I was invited into the family room. Suzie showed me around the first floor of the house. I could tell she was proud of her life and her family. John warmed up to me a bit more, especially after I asked how he and Suzie had met. "I got sideswiped in my cruiser and broke my arm, and ended up on her floor over night. She was my nurse."

I smiled. "That sounds like a really cheesy made-for-TV movie.", I told him.

"Pretty much!", he admitted. "I asked her out on a date, and she said yes."

"That was in 1983?"

"March 1984. We got married in December."

"And a baby the next fall?", I commented, looking over at Alex. "Fast work!"

He nodded and smiled at her. "It was worth it."

Suzie blushed deeply. She turned to me and said, "I can't believe I haven't asked about your family yet. How are Marilyn and Charlie? Did you have any more children?"

"Marilyn's fine. She keeps getting prettier every year. Charlie's eight now. He races motorcycles, if you can believe that!"

"Oh my God! You let him?!", she gasped.

I laughed at that. "Remember my friend Tusker, the biker? He owns a couple of cycle shops now, and his son races them, too. They got Charlie into it. In 1984 we had twin girls, Holly and Molly..." I pulled my wallet out and passed over a few photos.

"Twin girls! Oh, I'd die to have a little girl!", she exclaimed.

"Fine, come on over and I'll sign the paperwork.", I responded.

"Forget it!", said John. "One would be bad enough, but no way do I want two!"

"There's always the old fashioned way.", teased his wife.

"Three kids is about three too many!", he replied.

At that moment Alex commented loudly that Harry was stinky, which made all of us laugh. Suzie took care of that problem, and then came back over. "How are Mom and Dad? Do you see them anymore?"

I shook my head. "No reason to. Were you aware that they disowned me after the wedding? I haven't heard from either since the craziness after I shot Hamilton. Mom tried to sue me, but I think you know that."

"I didn't know they disowned you. I guess that's why you didn't get a wedding present.", she replied. Suzie had to explain all of this to her husband, who simply stared in horror.

I got us off the topic, saying, "Marilyn has ordered that you come and visit us, all of you. I was thinking maybe you could come see us for the holidays. You'll need to come to sign the papers, anyway."

"What papers?", she asked.

I gave a wry smile. "Way back when, before everything went to hell in a handbasket, I put some shares in the Buckman Group away for you. I always figured I'd give them to you as a wedding present, but you took off before I could give them to you."

"Shares? I own a piece of your company?", she asked, confused.

"Well, at the time it was $50,000 worth. I don't remember how many shares that actually worked out to at the time. Since then, it's grown quite a bit more valuable.", I said, smiling. I should have brought out a financial statement for her. "I'll have to send you a statement. You have to sign some paperwork before you can cash them or whatever."

"How much are they worth now?", she asked.

I looked at the three boys. No need for them to hear the surprisingly large number. "Let's just say that you won't need to scrimp and save for college funds and mortgage payments."

Suzie slowly turned to stare at her husband. "Oh my God!" Her jaw was open and she was gaping like a fish.

He stared back at her, and then turned to me. "These are what, shares in your company?"

I nodded. "When you were investigating Suzie's past, my name must have come up."

"Yeah, as an investor or something. What are you, a millionaire or something?"

I pointed a finger towards the ceiling. "Billionaire, actually. About one point five, specifically."

It was his turn to gape. "So, the bodyguard business..."

"There's a reason for it. Back home, Marilyn and the kids are usually tailed by security. When I travel, I take protection. I usually am safe enough at home on my own, though. That's what I meant by offering security last night. I can offer security if you think it's needed when reporters start coming around.", I replied.

He shook his head. "I'll just have my friends shoot them."

"Sounds good to me." I thought about my schedule for a bit. "Listen, the best time to come would be over the holidays. Why don't you come down to the Bahamas with us?"

"The Bahamas?!"

I nodded. "We bought a place down there several years ago. Hey, it won't cost you a thing. I'll send a plane for you. We're bringing Marilyn's folks down for a few days, too, to break the news to them. They're Democrats, so they just might disown their daughter."

Suzie gave me a sharp look. "That's not funny, Carl!"

I shrugged. "Maybe not." I looked around at their children and their house, and then turned back. "Listen, I should get out of here, give you guys some time to talk." I pulled out a business card and wrote our home phone number on the back. "That will get you to me at the office, or Marilyn at the house. We're in the same house as before, but we added a pool way back when. Call Marilyn. She's dying to hear from you. I'll let you know when I file for Congressman. Make sure you let me know if any reporters come around."

I stood and took my leave, collected my driver, and left. I made it back to Westminster by early evening.

Chapter 98: The Powers That Be

The next day, I shaved off my beard and mustache and went to my regular stylist at the mall for a haircut before I went to work. Everybody stared, and I called the brain trust into the office. "What's with the beard and mustache? You look like you're going back in the army!", commented Jake Junior.

"That's why I called you all in here. Have a seat." We all sat down around the coffee table. "Okay, I have something to tell you all. John already knows this, but now you have to hear about it."

"You're not sick, are you?", asked Missy, a concerned look on her face.

John snorted out a laugh at that and I gave him a dirty look. "Only sick in the head. I am filing next month to run for Congress in the Maryland Ninth District as the Republican candidate."

"Holy Christ!", she exclaimed. Jake Junior's reaction was pretty much the same.

Only Jake's father's face didn't have a strange look on it. "I can't say I'm surprised. What with your books and speeches, and the appearances on TV, I figured it was just a matter of time before somebody asked you to run. Was it John here?"

I nodded. "Yeah, we've been planning this for a few weeks. I got drafted by the various county committees and the RNC in Washington."

He just nodded in understanding.

Jake Junior and Missy looked at each other. It was he who spoke up next, and I knew before he opened his mouth what the question would be. "So, what happens to the Buckman Group?"

I nodded. This was a pretty big deal, and no matter what happened, there would be some changes. "Okay, very good question. First things first. The election isn't until November 6, so we have damn near a year to worry about this. While I'm running, I will still be in charge, but pretty much like now. In other words, you guys are doing the work and I am reaping the benefits." Normally that line would get a chuckle from the others, but not today. Too serious, I guess.

I shrugged. "Okay, not so funny. Listen, there are two possible outcomes. First and foremost, I am running as a Republican in a liberal Democratic district in a liberal Democratic state. More likely than not, I am going to go down in flames that will make the Hindenburg look like a birthday candle. On November 7th I may have to hightail it out of town to escape the laughter!"

Jake Senior looked thoughtful and nodded at that. "Maybe, maybe not. You're not all that conservative, and you're probably smarter than Andy Stewart. You have a chance."

"Okay, so outcome number two - I win. Then we have to make some changes. I can't run this place and be a Congressman at the same time. That doesn't mean we shut this place down. This place is too good to break up. No, I resign, but I keep my shares, and the rest of you keep running it. We are not going to shut down this place! We have all worked too hard to do that."

There was a brief sigh of relief around the room, and some nods. I turned to Missy, a potential wild card. "What are your feelings about this? I know you're a Democrat." Then I looked at the two Jakes. "What about you guys?"

Jake Senior admitted he was a Democrat and Junior replied he was a Republican. Senior's response was, "You can't be any worse than some of the idiots in there now. Hell, I'll vote for you."

Missy smiled. "I'm a little more dedicated than that, but I won't be leading any protest rallies outside your door. You'd better be nice, though. I know where we keep the stash of silly photographs!"

That got some laughter, and then we turned to business. We had to craft a response to media inquiries, and Jake Junior was designated the responsible 'talking head.' We needed a statement that would both reassure our investors and our clients, and demonstrate corporate neutrality. Then we worked on my responsibilities. Missy pointed out that since I was a director at Microsoft, Dell, and Adobe (I had given up the one at Autodesk) I had a fiduciary responsibility to inform them, and possibly resign my directorships. I knew I would be making some phone calls that afternoon. I wondered what Bill at Microsoft would think of this.

I got a call from Rich Miller to be available Tuesday afternoon of the following week to be in Washington. The reason – meet the powers that be! I had a command performance in front of the Minority Leader and Minority Whip. That would be Bob Michel and Newt Gingrich. In one sense I was expecting to meet them ahead of time, but in another, I was a touch surprised. There were 435 Congressional seats in the House, the majority of which were Democratically controlled. Would they be meeting all of the contenders one on one? That would be well over 200 meetings. Maybe they would split them up? Or maybe this was so important they would take the time? I just didn't know.

I quizzed Brewster on this and he said it was important that I attend. He didn't need to be there, but Miller would be, to sponsor me, so to speak. I could assume that they would have some sort of background on me, whether provided by Miller or somebody connected with the Maryland Ninth. Michel I knew very little about; he was on the way out, so to speak. He would be retiring in a few years. Newt I knew quite a bit about! He was brand new to the Whip position, getting it when Dick Cheney was selected by Bush 41 as his Secretary of Defense. Over the next decade he would rise to become one of the most powerful men in Washington, and then self-destruct and be cast out.

I drove down Tuesday morning and Rich and I went to lunch. Our appointment was at 2:15. I asked, "So, am I meeting with both Michel and Gingrich? Together? One and then the other? Is it a group thing?"

Rich shook his head. "Actually it will just be Newt. I found out this morning that Bob had to fly back to Chicago for a funeral."

"As long as it wasn't his own.", I quipped, which earned me a smile. "What's Gingrich like?"

That got me a little shrug. "Smart, very smart, that's for sure. He can turn on the folksy country charm when he needs to, but don't let the down-home West Georgia good old boy routine fool you. He has a doctorate in history and taught college before running for office. You two will get along on that score. You've got the accent, too. How'd that work for you up north, by the way?"

I grinned. "City girls just love a country boy, don't they.", I replied with my thickest drawl.

That earned me a smile and a snort. "I'll bet. Anyway, he's one of the sharpest political minds in the city. He's got a memory like an elephant, too, and an ego even bigger. Don't ever piss him off. You'll have to drive a stake through his heart and shoot him with a silver bullet to be free of him."

We had to wait about ten minutes in Gingrich's anteroom before we could see him, but I didn't get the impression he was playing power games with us. When the door opened, a few people scurried out, and we were shown in only about five minutes after that.

Newt stood and came around his desk, smiling and extending his hand. "Doctor Buckman, it's a pleasure to meet you." He turned and shook hands with Rich Miller next. "Rich, good to see you again."

"Thanks for seeing us, Newt."

"I appreciate the opportunity, Congressman. By the way, you don't have to call me Doctor. I almost never go by that.", I said.

He showed us over to a sitting area and we sat down. "Why is that, Mister Buckman?"

"Please, call me Carl. It's just that I haven't been an academic since the late Seventies. I keep it on my business cards because some people seem to like that sort of thing, but it's almost a totally different life now." I explained. I cocked my head to the side a touch and asked, "How do you feel about that? You have an academic background even more than I do. I've never taught, for instance. Did you enjoy that?"

"Yes, or at least some parts of it. I don't think anybody can really enjoy reading some of the term papers I received.", he answered lightly. "Were you ever tempted to teach?"

"I never really gave it any thought. Maybe if I hadn't gone to school through ROTC, but that trumped everything. I had to do a few years before I would get the chance."

"I never served, myself. I sometimes wonder what I missed. Did you like your time in the Army?"

I nodded. "Quite a bit. Before I was injured, I was planning to go career. When I blew out my knee, that ended my plans."

"Career? With your kind of money? That would have been pretty unusual, wouldn't it?", he commented.

"You know about that? Well, unusual, yes, but not unheard of. There have been other officers and soldiers with money. Look at the Kennedy's, for instance."

"That was their family's money, not their own. I must admit, I am curious why you are running for Congress. I've seen your name on the Forbes list. You can buy a Congress! What in the world do you want to give up being an influential businessman for, and become a junior Representative?"

I laughed at that. "I've been asking myself that for a couple of weeks now. The quick answer is that I was talked into it by some friends and my wife, and someday I might just be on speaking terms with them again." That earned a chuckle, but Gingrich was watching me closely. "The more accurate answer is that money isn't everything. I'm actually a fairly simple fellow. I don't have a dozen houses or boats or sports cars. My family lives nicely but simply. I have more money than I will ever spend, and I passed that mark several years ago. About that time I started wondering about the direction our country was headed. If we just go along our merry way, I think we as a people and as a nation have some serious problems ahead of us. I've written about this since then, and given a few speeches and talks. Those friends I mentioned, and my wife, they told me to put up or shut up. To make a real difference I needed to get involved, and not just with money. I needed to step up." I held my hands wide. "So, here I am."

"This isn't a neat and clean business, not compared to actually running a business.", he remarked.

"That just means you've never been involved in running a business.", I countered. "If you mean that it's not like anything I've ever done before, that I will agree with. I thought I knew a lot about politics, but I am getting a masters class right now." I smiled at him. "Any advice?"

"Maybe. What are your primary focuses? You should be talking to somebody who can help."

That made me smile. "In many ways, I think I am. My biggest personal focus is in balancing the budget. We can't keep continuing in this fashion. It is unsustainable. I think the only way we will possibly do that is by taking control of the House back. The Senate, too, of course, but the budget starts in the House. If we don't do that in 1990, then we do it in '92, and if we don't do it then, we do it in '94. We don't stop fighting until we can take control and balance the budget. Then we fix the rest of it."

And there it was. I was proffering myself at the altar of Newt. The man had two main concerns, balancing the budget, and most important of all, taking control back of the House of Representatives. By telling him that was my interest, I had just gotten the backing of one of the most powerful Republicans in Washington. I knew it was true, too. Suddenly there was a gleam in his eyes, and you could almost see his dick getting stiff!

We didn't speak much more that afternoon, since he had other people scheduled as well, but I had accomplished what I needed to accomplish. By linking myself to Gingrich I was linking myself to the most powerful Republican leader of the decade. The trick would be to ride his coat tails as long as I could, but then to distance myself from him when he blew up, which he invariably would. Neat trick, if I could pull it off.

Oh, yeah, and get myself elected in the process!

Chapter 99: Changes

As 1989 ended, we did the normal stuff before life would change utterly in 1990. Charlie was now in the third grade, which made him a Bear Cub Scout. He thought that was pretty cool, but still didn't want to wait another year before he could go camping.

Holly and Molly were in kindergarten, and Marilyn had them in the local Girl Scout 'Daisy' group. I was curious how that was going to work out. Neither Alison nor Maggie had liked the Girl Scouts up in Cooperstown. Of course, they sold some Girl Scout cookies, which I'm always a fan of. Thin Mints and Shortbreads are my favorites, but Samoas are pretty good, too.

We did two weeks at Hougomont this winter break. The first week we invited Big Bob and Harriet down, and took the kids with us. While there, we broke the news of my running for Congress to them, which certainly bamboozled them. While they were fairly proud of me, they were also Democrats and I was a Republican, and therefore the enemy. We had several lively discussions over beers around the pool that week. At least they didn't threaten to disinherit their daughter.

At the end of the week, Big Bob and Harriet flew home. From Utica, the plane would fly on to Rochester, where it would refuel, spend the night, and then pick up the Rottingens and fly back to Nassau. They would arrive tomorrow morning.

For the next day, we just walked the beach and watched the kids play. We also talked an awful lot about what would be involved in the oncoming election campaign. One of the things that Brew had said was that any vacations we had during the campaign season had to be taken in the district, and were going to be photo opportunities as well. No flying off to our multimillion dollar island vacation home. No, we needed to do some family activities in the area. You know, like normal people. Ridiculously rich normal people.

We didn't think it would be that much of a problem. The kids liked it at Hougomont, but the girls were too young to care, and Charlie was now at the point where he was getting busy. If we didn't go away, that meant he could ride his motocross bike in another race, and he was turning out to be a very tough competitor. I'm not sure I was ever going to understand the scoring system, but he seemed to have it down pat, and he was routinely placing in the top three on the races he entered, and was likely to finish this season at the top of the standings. He was actually doing better in his age group than Bucky had at that age.

My sister and her family flew in the next morning. I met them at the airport with a minivan we had rented for them; Marilyn stayed at Hougomont with the kids. Marilyn and Suzie had several long talks on the phone prior to this, and my wife had repeatedly told my sister to feel free to pack anything they thought they might need. They wouldn't have to worry about luggage restrictions.

I hung around the terminal chatting to the Bahamian customs officer. Before we could load their gear up, he would need to admit them to the country. Once the hatch had been opened and the steps unfolded, he went on board. A minute later he returned, smiling and nodded to me. Suzie came out next, carrying Harry in her arms, and she look stunned. "It's suddenly hit me that this is real!", she cried out to me.

I had to laugh at that. "Come on, let's get you and your stuff into the van. I picked up a couple of car seats, and Marilyn and I put them in, but you'll need to adjust them." I waved at Jack who had scampered out the door and down the steps. "Hi, Jack! You bring any stuff?" John came last, holding Alex's hand. "Welcome to the Bahamas! Let's get your gear!"

"This is unreal! You own that plane?", he asked.

"Huh? No, it's just a charter. I've been thinking about it, though." I shook his hand. "You want to know the truth? The best thing about having my kind of money? It's not the houses or the vacations or the cars or whatever. It's being able to not fly commercial! No waiting around airports, no luggage limits, no being crammed into miniature seats, none of the stuff that makes flying more nightmare than dream."

Suzie was put in charge of corralling her sons and loading them into the minivan, and the pilot, copilot, John, and I unloaded their bags and put them into the rear. They had taken us at our word, and packed tons of stuff! Or maybe it just seemed that way. Our kids were out of the toddler stage now, and that was a huge amount of stuff right there! Finally we got everything inside, and I waved goodbye to the pilot and copilot.

"Ready to start your vacation? Okay! I'll drive, but later, you can use the minivan as you need to. We have one of our own here. Next stop, Hougomont!" I started the minivan and put it in gear.

"What's Hugo-whatever you said?", asked Suzie. She was sitting in the middle row, where she could fuss with the boys.

"Hougomont. That's the name of the house."

John looked funny at me. "You gave your house a name?"

"Eh, not really. It had a name when we bought it. Hougomont was the site of a famous piece of the Battle of Waterloo. No idea why they named the place that. It's more the name of the estate. You'll see when we get there.", I replied.

A few minutes later I pulled into the driveway and rolled down to the house. Marilyn was out there, practically jumping with joy. Charlie and the girls were there too, but more controlled than their mother. They were simply curious. They really didn't understand my family's ... problems.

I pulled up to the house and said, "End of the line! Everybody out!"

Marilyn pulled the side door open almost before I had the minivan in Park. "SUZIE!"

"Oh my God! Marilyn!? I can't believe it!" My sister fumbled with her seat belt and then managed to get it off. She jumped out and the two women began hugging each other and crying.

"Holy Christ!", I muttered to myself.

John asked, "Are they going to be like this the entire week?"

I could only shrug. "Probably not. At some point they're going to dehydrate. Come on, let's get unloaded. They're in charge of offspring."

He turned and told his oldest. "You get to help. Grab some gear and take it ... well, follow us."

I dragooned Charlie into helping as well, and we carried the first load inside. We were only using three rooms (the girls shared a room just like at home – they liked to be together) so there were enough rooms for the others. We gave the largest remaining room with a bathroom to Suzie and John, put Jack in his own room, and put Alex and Harry together. If Alex and Harry couldn't put up with each other, we could split them and combine Charlie and Jack. We went back for a second load, and Marilyn and Suzie were still yapping away. Marilyn was holding Harry, and Molly and Holly had taken Alex down towards the beach.

"Okay, ladies, take it inside, and grab some stuff on the way.", I told them. We waited a few minutes while they grabbed kid stuff, and then I led the way inside again. Marilyn showed her sister-in-law where things were, and I dropped my load off. I turned to John and asked, "Care for something to drink? Beer? Wine? Mixed drink?"

He smiled at me. "A little early, don't you think?"

I glanced at my watch. It was a little after noon. "It must be five o'clock somewhere. Anyway, we should probably feed the kids." I led the way into the kitchen. I opened the fridge and lifted out a couple of bottles of Red Stripe, and gave him a quizzical look. He nodded, so I opened them. I pushed one across the island to him. "What do the kids eat? In my experience, little ones can be picky."

"Jack and Harry are pretty good. All Alex eats is boiled hot dogs!"

I snorted and opened the freezer and pulled out a package of hot dogs. "We can cover that. Hey, when I was his age, all I would eat was Braunschweiger and apple butter sandwiches! Drove my mother nuts for years."

He gave me an odd look at that. "Literally?"

I blinked and smiled. "That was a figure of speech. Mom's issues go way beyond me."

"Your sister filled me in on some of it."

I sat down on a bar stool, and sipped my beer. "John, I had no idea how much this all hurt my sister. I was going through a living hell at the time, but I didn't see what she was going through."

He sat down across from me. "What was she like growing up?"

I shrugged. "Normal. She was always the normal one. Hamilton was the crazy one. Mom went along with anything he wanted, and Dad went along with anything Mom wanted. I was the boy genius and ne'er-do-well nobody wanted around. Suzie, well, she was just normal. She's five and a half years younger than me, so it wasn't like she was always around me. We went to different schools. By the time she started growing up and dating, I had already escaped. I made sure to stay in touch with her in high school and college, if simply to make sure she was safe. I figured she was doing all right; she was Dad's favorite and Hamilton never went after her like he did me. Maybe I was wrong about that all along. She told me before she graduated from college that she already had an apartment lined up and was moving out as soon as she got home." I drank some more beer. "Maybe if I had been there for her, she wouldn't have run away."

"Running away brought her to me.", he replied.

I smiled at that. "So, please, make her happy. She's a big girl now, but I never wanted anything else for her."

I led him out through the patio door onto the deck and showed him around. Maybe I was getting jaded, but John was astonished. He couldn't believe we owned almost a quarter of a mile of prime beachfront property. After a bit we went back inside.

At that point the rest of the crew came in. Marilyn carrying her baby nephew, Suzie shooing Alex in front of her, and Holly and Molly wandering in behind the others. Out the window I could see Charlie showing Jack around the beach and deck and pool. "I should have known the two of you would be drinking!", protested my sister.

"Outrage? Or jealousy?", I commented.

Suzie refused to answer, so Marilyn simply pulled two more bottles of beer out of the refrigerator. "Glass?"

My sister smiled and shrugged. "The bottle is fine for me."

"You're still a Buckman, all right, barbarian to the core!" She poured her own beer into a glass.

I simply made a funny face at her and gave her a loud raspberry. The others laughed. Marilyn stuck her tongue out at me, and then we made lunch. Boiled hot dogs. We could get creative later.

My sister and her family stayed the rest of the week with us. We kept the kids a couple of nights and let Suzie and John have some adult time out on the town, and they returned the favor one night. The rest of the time, we talked. There was a lot of catching up to do. The twins spent a lot of time playing with the littlest Rottingens, although by the end of the week Alex's constant trailing around after them was proving quite exasperating, and Charlie delighted in showing Jack all the various hiding places and nooks and crannies around the place. At the end of the week, we all loaded onto the plane and flew back to Westminster. They came out to the house for a night with us to see our regular home. The verdict – appallingly normal! Marilyn and I were happy with that and sent them on their way the next day.

It was good to have my sister back in my life, and I was really glad she had found a good guy and a good life. Still, things just weren't the same anymore. Maybe too much time had passed. Maybe we had both changed too much. I wasn't sure how that was going to work out.

Chapter 100: The Race Begins

One thing I did with Brewster was to start spending some money. In the military they teach you very early on the value of reconnaissance. In business, it's no different. If you are going to win, or just even hold your own, you need to know who you're going up against, and what they have planned. In the Army you can add espionage to the mix. That's a bit frowned on in the business world, at least if you get caught, so we generally avoided that, but I knew of companies that did it.

Why should politics be any different? Andy Stewart was not going to conduct a gentlemanly campaign, not against Bill Worley, who had already announced a primary battle, and certainly not in the general election against me. The more information we had on him, the better. The first thing that McRiley and the accountant and I agreed on was the need to have Stewart investigated.

One aspect was to look for 'gotcha' moments, where he had said one thing and voted for something different. Why would a dedicated public servant do such a thing? Not to seem cynical about it, but perhaps he had been paid to change his mind. That led to a second subject for investigation, Stewart's campaign finances. Who was donating money to Stewart, and what were they getting in return?

The sort of thing we needed was his financials, as well as some very discreet inquiries into everything else. Specifically, how had a guy who had never once worked in the private sector, but had always worked for the government somehow, become a multimillionaire? Inquiring minds wanted to know! We needed to hire a forensic accounting team, and perhaps not look too closely at the techniques they used to get some of the information we asked for.

Who was to do all these wonderful things? A quick answer was to hire a clipping service, to go through newspapers and magazines and find anything being reported on Stewart. John suggested we expand the search to what they were reporting on me, since Andy was certainly going to do that. We needed professionals to do the investigating of the finances, but for a lot of the other work we needed volunteers. There was no way I could afford paid personnel to do all the scut work; that would blow through our campaign budget way too fast. I needed campaign volunteers, and fast. One of our first priorities after officially announcing my candidacy was to start rallying the troops. McRiley laid out a timetable and a plan for doing this. We would start out with captive audiences, the local Republican groups. One problem we had was that there was only a couple of colleges in the district, Carroll Community College and Western Maryland College in Westminster. College kids make for great volunteers, but on the downside, they are usually Democrats. Win some, lose some. I would certainly rely on whatever resources the local Republican committees had available.

Campaign finance was one area where I had the advantage. The estimate we had out of the RNC was that it would cost approximately $350,000 to run for Congress this year, but that was a national average. I knew that number would skyrocket; I remembered reading (back on my first go) that by 2010 the cost would be three times that, and by 2020, it would double yet again. Senate runs could cost five or six times as much, easily. For a typical Congressman, every moment of their day is spent trying to come up with cash for their next campaign. That's their job, and if they can work on laws or fix the country in the meantime, that's nice, too. They have to come up with at least $500 in campaign funds every day for two years to even have a chance. If you have a primary battle, or a rich competitor, you can double or triple those numbers.

The need to pay for a home and schools in the D.C. area only made it worse. Various ethics rules allowed for some of those speeches to be considered not as fund raisers, but as personal educational discussions, which could be considered income. Income that could go towards paying their local mortgage. Income from book sales was also income and not allocated to the campaign. There was never enough money to go around.

So, how to come up with that cash? Congressmen are constantly holding fundraisers, dinners, and speeches where they can pass the hat and collect money. A $100 a plate dinner, with 50 paying guests, collects $5,000, with maybe only half of that going into the coffers. That covers five days worth, but there are only so many dinners and speeches you can give. Also, there is a limit to how much you can charge. Presidents get $10,000 and above; Congressman wannabes get maybe $50. You end up constantly begging for money.

Enter the lobbyist. He'll be happy to funnel some cash to your campaign, because he knows you'll be happy to give the group he represents an adequate hearing and consideration on their concerns. The quid pro quo is obvious - vote our way or there is no more cash. There are thousands of lobbying groups in Washington. Some of them compete against each other and some duplicate each other. The money comes from various corporations. Even Big Bob and Lefleur Homes hired lobbyists. They paid a small amount on every home they sold to the New York Manufactured Housing Association in Albany, which funneled some of their proceeds to the Manufactured Housing Institute in Washington, and there were at least another half dozen housing related lobbying groups I knew of, not including the ones for construction and real estate.

The other option is to elect rich people who could finance their own campaigns. Yes, we would be happy to take donations, and Brew and I were working on some fundraisers, but if you can write the big check yourself, or get a few rich friends to help, it becomes vastly easier. Congress was rapidly becoming a millionaire's club; the Senate had been one for years. Brew was figuring I would need to raise more than the average, because Andy Stewart was a power on the Banking Committee and was going to have a fat war chest courtesy of the banks who liked him. We would need almost a million dollars, he thought.

What does the money get spent on? At the heart of every campaign is a small group of paid professionals, like Brewster and our accountant, Mike Finnegan. Add in a few media consultants and pollsters. Stir in a few lawyers for extra flavor. You have expenses related to a campaign headquarters - ours was in a strip mall in Westminster that Andrea found for us - plus office expenses related to that. Somebody has to pay for flyers and banners and posters and billboards. A huge expense is advertising, specifically television and radio. Realistically we were going to have to match Andy Stewart ad for ad. He had a campaign fund of at least a mill and a half, although he'd probably have to spend at least a third of that fighting off Bill Worley. We even joked about donating to Worley, to force Stewart to spend more!

So, with the official race not starting until the end of February, we spent the time until that point getting ready and preparing. For instance, I started hitting every pot luck dinner and pancake supper in the district! I wasn't sure how much Stewart was aware of me, and we didn't get hit by any reporters in the meantime. We assumed that once we started getting volunteers, at least one of them would be a plant from the Stewart campaign. We would return the favor. Need-to-know stuff was held closely by me and the professionals and the long-time party people like the local committee chairmen.

I asked Brewster if I would need to debate Stewart at some point. They are always on the schedule for Presidential campaigns, and even the Vice-Presidential candidates could be expected to debate. What about Congressmen and Senators? Brew laughed. "The last thing in the world Andy Stewart wants to do is stand up next to you and be caught in photos. He's sixty-three, going on a hundred and sixty-three, and just had a hip replaced. Without makeup and airbrushing, he looks like death warmed over! You, on the other hand, are young and vigorous and studly."

"I don't feel that way in the morning, let me tell you. You've noticed the cane, right?"

He laughed again. "So what!? You're a wounded military hero, and he's a lawyer. He says anything, and you can smack him with the cane."

"I was injured, not wounded. There's a difference."

"Po-tay-toe, po-taht-toe. Nobody cares!"

The Maryland Ninth had a northern boundary of the Pennsylvania line. Below that we had a rough semicircle shape. It encompassed Northern Baltimore County to about Cockeysville, and then went west through the middle of Reisterstown and on south of Westminster, before turning north again around Thurmont. It was mostly northern Baltimore and Carroll Counties, with just enough of Frederick that I needed to campaign out there. There are some changes in the electorate as you traverse the district, as well. Baltimore County is relatively suburban and sophisticated, Carroll County similar though more rural, and northern Frederick County can be very conservative. You go much further west and you end up in the Appalachian counties, and parts of those look like Deliverance is still playing.

Shortly after we filed in January, I began speaking to some of the Republican groups, working my way west. A typical one might be at the local high school. I was introduced as 'a decorated soldier and local entrepreneur, a man who lives in the district and not one who has moved out of state, and somebody whose children probably go to school with yours. He is nationally known, and you've probably read his books and seen him on his appearances on Meet the Press and This Week with David Brinkley.' I suppose there was a semblance of truth to that. I would then come out on stage, or from wherever they had me stashed, waving and go to the podium. We had blocked out a fairly standard stump speech, which didn't say much, but had some wonderful sound bites to it.

I would give my speech, and then, in a thoroughly scripted 'impromptu' move, would come around the podium with the microphone to take questions from the audience. Depending on what was there, I might lean against the podium or sit on the edge of a table. Then, towards the end, I asked everybody for help. I couldn't do this alone, I needed their help, I needed their money, I needed their support, I needed their time. Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera...

When the audience was first collecting in the room, everybody was asked to sign in and give their name and address. The volunteer sheets did the same. Brewster said we could expect to follow an 80/20 rule with the volunteers; out of every 100 people who signed up to help, 80 would duck out and 20 would help. Still, you always got their names and numbers. We could call them for donations and sell or give their names to various Republican fundraising outfits, and anybody who helped would go into a special category to be called on during re-elections.

There were some basics that had to be learned and obeyed. Fortunately I knew several of them already, from my experience as a salesman on my first go. Every donor got a thank you, from a form letter up to a handwritten note. Big donors got the note plus a phone call. If they volunteered to help, I was to personally call each one and ask how and when they could help. If I couldn't reach them, I needed to leave a message. Brewster had a computer system installed in campaign headquarters with some rudimentary software to follow this stuff, and he gave me a daily phone list of people to call and thank/beg/plead/cajole.

I wondered what Larry Ellison would think if I contracted Oracle to develop the database software needed to track donors and volunteers, and automate communications. Was I thinking ahead of the curve or behind it? I had never paid attention to that in the past. It would take too long to help me now, but in the future? Who knew? We would just have to survive this election first.

Brewster gave me a rundown on what the volunteers would actually be doing. He said, "Everybody thinks they are in charge of the bee hive. Some of them are real worker bees. They will make signs, wave signs, put signs up, make phone calls, drive people to the polls, trail Stewart's appearances with tape recorders, you name it ... You never get enough worker bees."

"Worker bees – got it!", I replied.

"The next best category is the queen bees. These guys actually have some management chops to them. They can figure out where to put signs, how to run a phone tree, supervise the worker bees. They can also work with the worker bees without pissing them off. Very useful.", he continued.

"Queen bees.", I said, nodding.

"The worst category is the drones. They volunteer for whatever damn reason, maybe just to say they worked on a campaign, but they don't actually work, and they occasionally piss off the people that do."

"So why keep them?", I asked.

"Because they might just know somebody who is useful, like a major donor or the head of a local company. You don't want to piss anybody off by proxy."

I rolled my eyes at that. "Any other bees?"

"Killer bees! Those you get rid of! Killer bees are wonderful people you don't want anywhere near you, like the paroled rapist or porn star who just happens to agree with your politics and wants to help."

"Yikes! You get those?"

Brewster nodded and grimaced. "Scary thought, isn't it!? Your – and my – biggest job is figuring out what category to put the volunteers. This thing is going to get very big very quickly, and the two of us won't be able to do it all. We need some of those queen bees as quick as we can get them!"

At the end of every stump speech, I would get some questions. Some of the questions I got were pretty straightforward. How do you plan to balance the budget? (Cut expenses and require that all future programs specify how they are to be paid for as part of the legislation.) What do you feel about the defense budget? (We need to maintain a strong defense budget, but the best way to do that is by making sure our economy is strong - a weak economy will mean a weak defense.) The serious questions we worked out some answers ahead of time.

Some of the questions were trivial - Where do my kids go to school? (Fifth District Elementary.) How old am I? (Thirty-four, but I'll be thirty-five by the election.) Is my wife here? (No, she's at home with the children.) Some were silly - Boxers or briefs? (Only my wife gets to know that answer!) Some I could laugh off - How rich are you? (Really, really rich!)

Some were loaded guns! Pro-life or pro-choice? Do I believe in evolution? Have I been washed in the blood of the lamb? A lot of these types of questions got raised in the more conservative northwestern part of the district, although the abortion one could be anywhere. Sometimes things went well and sometimes they didn't. A typical exchange might be one that I had with a fellow out in Thurmont. We were meeting in a hall provided by the local Chamber of Commerce. During the question and answer period, this fellow stood up and wanted to know if I was pro-life or pro-choice.

"Pro choice.", I said.

As I expected, there was a low murmur of disapproval from the crowd. Sometimes it ended at that, but in this case, the fellow wanted to argue with me. I let him ramble about a minute before I made a time-out sign and interrupted him. "Excuse me, but I know this is important to you. What's your name?"

"Why do you need to know that?", he asked belligerently.

"Because I'm a polite guy, and it's nicer to call you by your name than by saying 'hey, you!'", I replied, smiling.

That got a few chuckles around the room, and I got an answer a lot less belligerent. "Tim Timmerman."

"Tim, I'm Carl. Nice to meet you. Okay, like I said, I know this is important to you. To you abortion is wrong. We're ending a life. I understand that, I truly do. To me it's a matter of women's health and control over her own body. Now, you and I are probably never going to agree on this, am I right on that?"

"It's wrong! Killing the unborn is a sin!"

Great, the guy is on the religious side. "Okay, Tim, I understand you, but like I said, I don't agree with you. That leaves you with a couple of questions. Ready?"

He looked startled at that. "What?"

"First, is that the only thing you care about? And I mean the only thing at all! Because if it is, I'll respect you, but I'll tell you, right now, not to vote for me, because I don't think I'm changing my mind on this one."

That caused a stir. A politician who said not to vote for him? They must have been expecting me to say something mealy-mouthed and promise to consider it or something. I could see several people looking at each other in confusion. I just pushed on. "And here's the second question to ask yourself. Do you think Andy Stewart is going to agree with you? You already know the answer to that one."

I stopped talking to Tim and addressed the group as a whole. "And that is something for everybody to think about. Let's be fair about this. There are probably going to be some things I believe in that you might disagree with. It might be the budget, or programs like Social Security or Medicare or Welfare, or defense. It might be something else, like abortion or gun control. There are probably going to be some things we are just going to have to agree to disagree on. You all have to ask yourself if you can live with that, or if you have to go with Brand X - and you know he's going to be a lot more liberal than I am on this stuff. I'm here to tell you how I feel and plan to do the job. I am not going to sit here and lie to you and tell you something I don't believe."

Sometimes this defused the situation nicely. I remember after the meeting, as I was shaking hands, I met Timmerman again. He tried to convince me about the evils of abortion again, and I spoke a little more on it with him. "Tim, in some ways I agree with you. My wife and I love our kids. We have three. Last year we were in a car wreck and we lost a fourth child while Marilyn was still pregnant, and it was just devastating to us. It was simply terrible, and now we can't have any more children. We could never do this ourselves. Marilyn agrees with you, by the way. She is totally pro-life. She and I disagree on this, and I think you and I are going to disagree as well." He looked a bit perplexed as he realized I was missing the horns and tail, and shook my hand and departed. A few minutes later I saw him head over to the 'tip jar', the big jar we kept on a table for contributions, and drop a twenty in it. He saw me looking at him, and we nodded at each other.

(I dug his name out of the sign in sheets the next day and called him and thanked him and asked him to work for the campaign. He turned out to be a very useful queen bee.)

Sometimes it bombed. Somebody got up on his high horse at a meeting at the Westminster High School and demanded to know if I believed in evolution. After I said yes, I was denounced as a godless heathen who was going to burn in the fires of hell and damnation. School security had to drag him out. That made the evening news the next day. Joy!

Chapter 101: Getting Ugly

I had predicted that the race would get ugly and it did, in a hurry. Andy Stewart had a tough fight with Bill Worley, and he spent far more money than he planned to. In April he eked out a narrow 52-48 percent win, and then immediately turned his sights on me. He had neither the record to run on nor the inclination to do so. He went negative immediately.

Every political campaign has both positive and negative aspects to it. Every candidate promises to run only a positive campaign, a campaign that focuses on his or her accomplishments, and the wonders they will perform. Only their opponent will run a negative campaign, because, of course, that's just the type of person they are! Right off the bat you are going negative! Negative campaigns focus on your opponent's faults, either real, perceived, or made up. The theory is that if you can't make the public love you, then you can at least get them to hate the other guy!

I tried to stay positive, but McRiley immediately began preparing ads to go after Stewart. In this we were helped by the nasty campaign between Worley and Stewart. We saw what had worked for both men and what hadn't, and could move on from that.

Andy started low key but slimy. For Memorial Day, Andy claimed I wasn't patriotic enough! He was one of those guys who always wears a flag lapel pin, and I wasn't. We both went to various Memorial Day parades in the area, and we heard from some people that Andy was loudly claiming that I was disrespecting our nation by not wearing a flag pin. Brewster immediately came to me and handed me a bag of flag pins, large ones, and told me to always have one on me.

"You don't think this is going to look like we're reacting to him? I put one of these things on, and the next thing you're going to hear is that I'm only doing it because I'm scared of him.", I told him.

"In this case we are scared of him." He pushed the bag towards me.

I pushed it back. "No we're not." What I couldn't figure out was why Stewart was attempting this. He must have known I was a decorated veteran by now.

"Carl, you are speaking to the American Legion in Parkton this Friday night. You don't wear one of the flag pins, you might as well write off their votes."

I put the bag in my pocket, just to humor Brewster. "You worry too much, Brew. Come with me to the Post Friday night. It will be fine."

We got a babysitter for the kids that night, and Marilyn and I both went to the Legion Post in Parkton, where Brewster was to meet us. I had on a nice blue blazer and white shirt, with pressed khakis, and the only thing patriotic was a red, white, and blue striped tie. Marilyn was wearing a very pretty knee length dress, also in red, white, and blue, though it was a flowered print. I didn't have a flag pin.

Brewster took one look at me and immediately pulled a pin from his pocket. I noticed he already had one in his own lapel. "Did you forget, or were you just planning to piss these guys off?"

I stopped him. "Behave Brewster. I know what I'm doing. Now, knock it off and watch."

Before I was called up to speak, I met with several people, many of whom were wearing a flag pin on their lapels. By now I knew Andy's whispering campaign was in full stride, since almost everyone was glancing at my bare lapel. That was fine by me. When I was introduced, I decided to grab the bull by the horns.

I picked up the microphone and spoke into it. "Thank you all for inviting me here to the Post. It's a pleasure to meet you all, and I can say that I already know a few of you. Right there in the second row is my neighbor, John Caples, who owns the farm across the road from me. My wife Marilyn and I have bought a lot of sweet corn from him over the years. I also saw Bill Elliott and Barry Henderson; didn't know you guys were in the Legion. Thanks for inviting me." It was a typical American Legion crowd, with some old timers going back to World War II and Korea, and others from Viet Nam and more recent conflicts.

"Anyway, before I get too much further along, let's get something taken care of. I would bet that everyone here has now heard the complaints that I don't wear an American flag pin in my lapel. Is that true? Have you all heard that?", I asked. I looked around and smiled. "Go ahead! Raise your hands!"

There was a fair bit of surprise at my bringing this up, and several voices spoke up in agreement. Slowly a few hands were raised, and then eventually most of the room raised their hands. In the back I saw a couple of reporters jotting in notepads. I wondered whether they had been invited by Brewster, or more likely, by Andy Stewart.

"I've certainly heard the stories. Where better to address the issue than here at the American Legion. My answer is this. I think we've all been taught that actions speak louder than words, right?" I looked out over the room and smiled at the number of people murmuring to each other and nodding their heads. "Okay, then. I'm just not the kind of guy who really wears much in the way of jewelry or pins. I don't wear much more than my wedding band, my college ring, or my watch." In each case I held up the appropriate hand. "Well, there is something else I wear." I moved my spare hand under my tie and unbuttoned my shirt. I reached inside and pulled out my dogs tags. "I still wear my old dog tags." I tucked them away, and then reached in my left pants pocket. "And here's one last piece of jewelry I could wear if I wanted."

This was the reason I wasn't worried about the lapel pin. Let them all stare at my lapel. It was pretty obvious to me by now that Andy still didn't really know who the hell I was. He must have researched me beyond the fact that I was a billionaire murderer. I pulled out the oblong metal case that military decorations are presented in and set it on the podium. There was a loud murmur as people saw me lift the top up. I hadn't opened this since I had gotten it years ago, except for earlier in the day, when I dug it out of my desk drawer. I pulled out my Bronze Star and held it up for the audience. "I'm not one to wave around my medals, but I think you all know what a Bronze Star is." I pinned it to my lapel.

"Now, in case anybody here thinks I went down to Sunny's Surplus this morning and picked this up, here's something to read. Marilyn?" I gestured to my wife, and she stood up and came over, and opened up this gigantic purse she had. "Folks, this is my wife Marilyn. Now, to be honest, she earned this even more than I did, because while I was deployed overseas, she was back home in Fayetteville having our son. Anyway, she had this plaque made up for me. We'll pass it around for you to look at. The photo is from my retirement parade. You've seen my cane; it was from my last jump, when I earned that. Back then I was known as Captain Buckman, Bravo Battery, 1st Battalion, 319th Airborne Field Artillery Regiment, 82nd Airborne Division." I motioned Marilyn to hand the plaque to somebody in the audience.

"Now, when Andy Stewart was 24, he was going to law school. When I was 24, I was commanding some of our nation's finest troops! When he was studying how to sue people, I was studying how to defend them! When he was firing lawsuits at people, I was teaching my lieutenants to fire 105s at them! If Andy Stewart wants to thump his chest and wave his flag pin, great! I'm not going to thump my chest and bray like an ass. I used to defend the real flag! Now, ask yourself, who do you think is more qualified to figure out the real issues with our nation's defense, Andy Stewart or Carl Buckman!?"

The room was stunned, but then erupted in applause. I kept going. "Now, I'm not going to sit here and brand myself a hero. Andy Stewart picked this fight, not me - but I will finish this fight! I will bet long odds that some of you out there earned medals. You know why I don't wear this routinely, because you don't wear it for yourself, you wear it for those who can't. I look around this room and I see men who served just like me. Some of you were drafted. Some of you volunteered." I gave a big grin, and continued, "And some of you volunteered one step ahead of the draft board or a judge. Yeah, I know how it works." That got some chuckles around the room.

"Why are you going to vote for me? Because I'm the guy who knows what it takes to keep your sons and grandsons prepared as best they can be. Not safe, but prepared and trained and supported. I won't promise to keep them safe, because you and I both know it can be a dirty and dangerous business. However, if they get hurt, I'm the guy who spent time at Walter Reed, and knows what it takes to make sure their medical treatment is the best it can be. Then, when they are out of the service, I'll be the guy who can make sure that they are treated properly as veterans, just like you would want! And guess what? It might not be your sons or grandsons! More girls are enlisting every day. It might be your daughters and granddaughters!"

"Now, who do you want making sure your concerns are being addressed? Andy Stewart can wrap himself in the flag and sing himself to sleep with the National Anthem, but do you really think he's the guy to help you, to help your children and grandchildren? Or do you think a guy who served like you is the one to help? I can help because I understand. Can Andy Stewart say that?"

I pushed it a little bit longer and ended up with a standing ovation. I was also asked to speak to the post in Westminster, which I accepted. Brewster was astonished, both by my speech and by the level of donations I received. I just laughed at him. "Brewster, I told you not to worry. Just watch. Andy Stewart is going to learn about this and shut down this attack real damn fast!"

John Caples came up to me at the end of the evening. He was a quiet and weathered man about ten years older than myself. "Carl, I had no idea you were in the service."

"Same here. Viet Nam?", I asked him.

He nodded. "Da Nang, '68 to '69." He picked up the plaque from where it was laying. "That's a pretty vague citation."

Another man with us laughed. "That's the kind of citation you get for when you're somewhere you're not supposed to be and doing something you're not supposed to be doing, and nobody is allowed to know about it."

I smiled. That was about as perfect a description for that Nicaraguan hike as I could imagine. "Close enough!"

Afterwards, Brewster excitedly told me we needed to push the Bronze Star and heroism as campaign hot buttons. I shut him down in no uncertain terms! "Brew, this is not a winner for us.", I told him.

"The Republican Party always looks good on defense and national security. This plays to that.", he replied.

We were outside in the parking lot at that point, so I just leaned up against the car. I shook my head. "Listen, I don't know why Andy decided to pick the fight, but he screwed up. He should have gone after me on the Bronze Star itself."

"What do you mean?"

"Brew, I'm not saying I didn't earn the damn thing, but it's not like on television. Things got very messy on that mission. I'm actually kind of surprised he didn't have that already."

McRiley shrugged. "He's tied in tight to the various banking regulators, but as far as I know, he doesn't know shit about the military. Maybe he simply saw the medal and decided not to push on a hero, but then why push the flag pin routine? Maybe he just doesn't know what any of it means."

"I don't know either, buddy, but in my opinion, let sleeping dogs lie."

Andy Stewart shut down the flag pin campaign quick enough, but immediately began pushing elsewhere. The obvious one was that I was trying to buy an election. No matter what I did, I was too rich. If I gave money to a local charity, I was trying to buy their support. Then, no matter what I gave, it wasn't enough, and with my massive funds, I was being cheap. He loudly called on both the IRS and the SEC to investigate how I had come about by my ill gotten gains (he actually used that phrase) and when both agencies ignored him, he called on the Attorney General and the Justice Department to investigate how I had bribed the investigating agencies.

There was a small grain of truth to some of what Stewart was claiming. For years I had been donating to any number of local civic and service groups. Five or ten thousand dollars was a lot of money for a volunteer fire department or health clinic, and I routinely gave a few hundred thousand every year to groups all over the area. Most were in the district, simply because I lived relatively close to the center of the Ninth. Brewster simply made my routine donations into photo opportunities. We never gave any campaign speeches at these events, but if asked, I was always able to say some kind words for the people involved and the fine and necessary work they were doing.

To be fair about it, Stewart was doing many wonderful things by giving away money, also. At least once a week he would have a press conference or a photo opportunity and be shown talking about a new government grant, or tax benefit, or road improvement. Of course, the money he was giving away didn't cost him anything, whereas mine did.

We pushed back on two fronts. One was the Horatio Alger story about how I had built my business from nothing, even to making a drive-by movie of my parent's house. They no longer lived there, having sold it as part of the divorce. Still it showed I hadn't grown up in a mansion. The other front was the negative one. I had made my money in the stock market. How did Andy Stewart, who had been working in the public sector non-stop since he got out of law school, build a net worth of over $20 million? When reporters started questioning our information, we released some very carefully sanitized versions of the info our investigators had uncovered. No account numbers were given, but banks were named. The result was a predictable level of chaos, with Stewart fulminating about the release of the information and dancing around whether it was true or not.

A big part of Andy Stewart's money was due to his position as the fourth highest ranking member of the House Committee on Financial Services, also known as the House Banking Committee. As such, he had taken over a half million dollars in the last ten years from various banks and Wall Street finance companies as campaign donations. Even better, leaving aside whether Andy had ever dipped his fingers in the till inappropriately, was the way members of Congress got to legally benefit from insider trading.

Very specifically, if a Congressman learned something as a result of his routine Congressional duties there was no prohibition against playing the stock market to profit from this knowledge. As a private citizen, I could go to jail for buying or selling stocks based on information I learned in a board meeting. Like in any number of other matters, the federal laws on insider trading did not apply to members of Congress or the Senate. If Stewart learned something from a banker or lobbyist, it was perfectly legal for him to call up his broker and act on it. Stewart was heavily invested in the banking business.

It might have been legal, but it was definitely tacky, and I enjoyed watching him squirm under repeated questioning from the Baltimore Sun and the local television stations. I didn't enjoy the second half of the 'Billionaire Murderer' label I predicted would be tossed around. There was no way in the world I could label Andy Stewart a killer. He was proudly declaring his push for strong gun control laws, and tying this to me as well. Not only was I a murderer of my baby brother, my ownership and use of a gun validated the need for control of guns.

For starters he dug up all the mud that had been tossed back in 1983, especially the various allegations originally tossed around by the State Police in their pissing match with the Baltimore County Police. Some of those allegations, reported by that jackass WJZ reporter, were that I had used my wealth to buy my way out of jail. (If only! If I could have done that, I would have used it to bury the whole damn mess!) Then he started going after the rest of my family. My father, quite predictably, punched out a reporter outside of the condo in Perry Hall he had bought with his half of the house proceeds. Equally predictably, my mom was waylaid by a camera crew at the door to her apartment, made an incoherent statement, and then ended up hospitalized at Sheppard Pratt for 'exhaustion.'

I heard from John Rottingen early on that reporters from Baltimore were calling. They hadn't shown up on his doorstep yet, but at least one managed to find his unlisted phone number and bug them at home. They were taking it pretty well so far. So far I couldn't see any of the local television stations or the Sun coughing up the cash to send somebody out to Rochester to bug them in person. I asked him to keep me informed, and then let Marilyn know the latest.

Brewster had the media people working overtime on this, because it was pretty much as awful as we had thought it would get. We ended up with a television ad that seemed to go over well.

(Extreme close-up of a giant Bowie knife, slowly pulling back until you saw a hand holding it angrily. Over laid was a slow, deep voice.)

"Carl Buckman's family was being terrorized by a psychotic madman. A stalker came after his wife. Her car was vandalized and firebombed. Their house was firebombed. On September 3rd, 1983, he broke into their home with a fourteen inch long knife and announced his intention to butcher his wife and infant son, and then attacked Carl Buckman. Carl Buckman killed his attacker. His attacker was a known paranoid schizophrenic with a history of violence."

(Pause.)

"He was Carl Buckman's brother."

(Longer pause.)

"Was the last sentence really that important?"

(Different baritone voice.)

"There's a reason for the Second Amendment!"

We did that in print as well as radio, deflecting the murder into a defense of the Constitution. I wasn't so sure how well that was going over. Polling just didn't say.

The strangest part was when Andy Stewart tried to turn my family's abandonment of me when I was young back against me, as if it was my fault. If they had thrown me out and disowned me, then it must have been my fault. I must have been evil to deserve the treatment I received.

By August it was getting totally surreal. The national news had begun following the story of the billionaire running for Congress, and Stewart's narrative of my murder of my brother and my denouncement by my mother, who finally calmed down enough to give a statement damning me. It culminated with a dual interview on Meet the Press. Andy refused to meet with me, since that would be a debate. He went to the NBC studios in Washington, while Brew and I drove down to the WMAR-TV studios on York Road in Towson. I would be broadcast from there.

The regular moderator, Garrick Utley, was out sick and the duties of host were being performed by Tim Russert. I had met Russert before, during an appearance on the show the previous year, and two dinners since then. We were friendly, but I wasn't ready to call him a friend, and I didn't think he was going to be favorable to me.

The interview started out pretty normal. We were introduced with a quick head shot and a hello from each of us, and then Russert turned to the camera and announced that we were the contenders in " ... one of the nastiest campaigns in recent American history. On the one side we have the Republican contender, Carl Buckman, billionaire investor and one of the leaders of the 'Young Republicans' vying for public office. His opponent is eight term Democratic Congressman Andy Stewart, a member of the House Banking Committee, now fighting for his political life."

Tim turned to Andy, and asked, "Is that a fair assessment, Congressman? Is this a fight for your political life?"

Andy snorted derisively. "Hardly! Carl Buckman's candidacy is a symbol of the Republican Party's contempt for the struggles the average American is having in today's difficult economy. They are running a billionaire with a bottomless wallet who plans to buy a Congressional seat. I have called on both the Federal Election Commission and the Department of the Treasury to investigate this flagrant violation of the election laws in the State of Maryland."

"Mister Buckman, are you trying to buy the election? Have you heard from the FEC or Treasury Department yet?", asked Tim, turning to the camera he was using to talk to me.

I smiled and shook my head. "The Federal Election Commission and the Treasury Department? Those are new ones. The Congressman has been complaining about me to the Maryland Board of Elections, the IRS, and the Securities and Exchange Commission, and they've all told him to go jump in a lake. I can't imagine who's next. The real issue is that somebody dared to actually run against the Congressman, and who has a program aimed at solving the very problems he admits his constituents are having a problem with under his representation."

Russert turned back to Stewart. "Congressman, Mister Buckman is not the first wealthy man to run for office, and more than a few of them have been Democrats. Jack Kennedy comes to mind, and it wasn't even his money. It was his father's."

"That may be true, but Jack Kennedy was representing the people. Carl Buckman is only representing himself. He has a history of eliminating his problems, problems like his brother, a problem he eliminated by murder!"

Tim knew of the current allegations being thrown around by my opponent, but hearing me being bluntly called a murderer was still unusual. Most politicians would weasel around it, calling me a killer, or saying 'alleged' or 'presumed.' He had a shocked look on his face as he turned to face me. "Those are astonishing allegations, Mister Buckman. What do you say to them?"

"It's simple, Tim. Congressman Stewart is a liar. There are no allegations of a crime. Does the law allow a sitting Congressman to lie and slander anybody he wants? He is lying to you, just like he has been lying to the voters in the Maryland Ninth. What else has he been lying about?"

Stewart didn't even wait for Russert to ask him anything. He immediately protested. "I did nothing of the sort. Carl Buckman killed his brother and then used his fortune to cover it up! His own family knows the truth about him. They threw him out of the family when he was sixteen, and then had him disinherited and disowned a few years later. Who would know him better than his own parents?"

Off camera I could see Brewster wincing. We knew it was coming, but it still sounded terrible. Nothing to do but brazen it out. "Yes, I killed my brother, a paranoid schizophrenic with a long and documented history of aggression towards me and my family. I covered up nothing, and was thoroughly investigated by both the police and the district attorney." Then I reached into my inside jacket pocket and pulled out a sheathed Bowie knife. I unsheathed it on camera and held it up. "This is the knife that my brother came after my family with. I got it from the Baltimore County Police Department after the investigation was over. He brought this into my home and told me he planned to butcher my wife and baby son, and then he attacked me and I killed him. As for my mother, she has a history of instability, and she is the one who purchased this weapon and provided it to my brother, along with the vehicle he used to carry out his attacks on us. I'm not sure how seriously you should be taking her statements."

"That's the knife?", asked Russert, his eyes wide open.

"I have the evidence tag available, along with photos to verify it.", I replied.

"That's almost a sword!", he exclaimed. I nodded silently, and Russert turned to Stewart, visibly angry at being upstaged. Wild accusations are great, but I had evidence!

"Movie set props aside; Carl Buckman cannot deny his cold blooded killing of his brother!"

"Cold blooded!? Movie set props!?" I was outraged! "Does this look like a prop!" I held up my left hand and drew the blade across my palm. A red bead of blood welled up, and I held my hand up to the camera. "This is what my brother wanted to do to my wife and son. Andy Stewart would have been rooting for him, I'm sure, since at least it wasn't a gun!" Then I stabbed the knife point down into the surface of the mahogany table I was sitting at, to leave it standing vertically.

The screens immediately went blank. Tim Russert knew he had lost complete control of the show and he pulled the plug, going to commercial. I held my hand over the desk, slowly dripping blood, while I fished out my handkerchief. It wasn't a bad cut, nothing I hadn't had happen over the years from any number of things, but I was sure it looked gruesome on camera. A staffer from WMAR ran out and then came back with a first aid kit. Brewster came hustling up to the desk. "Jesus Christ, Carl! What the hell were you thinking there!?"

"He just pissed me off!", I responded.

"Jesus Christ!", he repeated. He took the first aid kit and fished out some gauze and some tape. He kept muttering while he bandaged my hand. Around us people were staring at me.

Finally he sat back and stared at me. I shrugged at him. "I guess I fucked up big this time."

I was surprised when he answered, "I have no idea. I just have no idea what to make of this, or what is going to come of this. I just don't know."

"You staying in?", I asked him.

"Are you?", he replied.

"It's too late to back out now. I'm going to have to see this through, one way or the other. I might be going down in flames."

"Shit! Well, it's too late for me to back out now. Either you lose by the biggest margin since the Civil War and I have the shortest professional career in political history, or you win big and I run the next Presidential campaign."

I laughed at that. I stood up. "Let's get out of here. I need to go home so that Marilyn can yell at me."

As we headed out to my car, Brewster asked, "Just how rich are you? Really rich or ridiculously rich?"

"Beyond that. Ludicrously rich."

"Buy an island rich?"

I laughed. "Sure. Why?"

"Because if we lose, you're going to have to buy an island and move there, and I'm going to have to move next door."

I laughed. "Then we better not lose!"

My reception at home was about what I expected. Marilyn's first words to me as I entered the door were, "ARE YOU CRAZY!? YOUR CHILDREN WERE WATCHING THAT SHOW!" Then she stomped off irately.

My children, on the other hand, took it much better than their mother. All three wanted to see, so I took off the bandage and showed them. Holly and Molly thought it was 'Gross!' and Charlie thought it was 'Cool!' I checked it out. It wasn't actually all that bad, being not a whole lot more than a bad papercut, and a lot more dramatic looking that it really was. I rebandaged it with a giant Band-Aid and went back to the living room. Marilyn was unhappy with me the rest of the day.

It was no surprise when all three networks ran the scene that night on the evening news, along with the mandatory "What you are about to see is graphic and violent, and you may want to turn away." warning. Since they ran it at dinnertime, this just guaranteed a wider audience. Several commentators raised the possibility that I wasn't all that stable. Curiously, though, several also spoke out about the tactics and slanders by my opponent.

Monday morning's Baltimore Sun featured a video capture of me holding the knife up to the camera, along with Brew McRiley's spin, and Stewart's denouncement of my 'detestable' tactics. Still, there was a lengthy piece about the incident in 1983, and how Stewart had gone beyond the limits of spin to outright lies. In 1990 the truth still mattered; it would be another 22 years before the Romney campaign began lying outright and commenting that 'We're not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact checkers.' (Not that Obama was any better, but at least his people were tactful enough not to brag about it.) It got stranger from there. Mid-week, WJZ managed to track down Bill Worley, who had gone through this nonsense during the Democratic primary. He stated on camera, "Andy Stewart would sell his mother for a vote, and then haggle over the price!" So much for party unity!

Brew had a poll run mid-week. We had done these a few times since the primary ended, and I had been consistently trailing Stewart, not by much, but by more than the three percent margin of error. For the first time, we were in a statistical dead heat. I had picked up some among men, but even more among women, who seemed to think it was a good idea to protect my family. Polling ain't cheap, and we wondered whether Andy knew this.

By now the national press was reporting on us. Both Time and U.S. News and World Report called for telephone interviews on Wednesday. The Saturday after the show was the weekend for the annual summer party, and a reporter for Newsweek showed up on Friday, not knowing about it. What the hell! We invited him along with the other political reporters in town. Brewster had made me invite everyone we could think of.

This was going to be our biggest party ever. We had started out back in 1983 with just the people from the office and the business, the Tusks, and a few others who had been involved in the purchase and construction of the land and house. Since then it had grown. Now, along with the core related to the Buckman Group, we had people from Our Lady of Grace, Fifth District Elementary, families of the kids' friends, and this year various political types from around the district. Everybody was warned to bring swimsuits and an appetite. We had a rental company bring in a gigantic red and white striped tent, and plenty of tables and chairs, and we had the bathrooms in the main house as well as the pool house. Marilyn and I had even installed a monstrously large grill station on the deck, the type where it is permanently installed with a fixed gas line going to the main tank behind the house.

We kenneled Dum-Dum for the day in Hampstead. That little mutt was one of the sweetest and friendliest dogs I've ever owned, but she was also very excitable, and tended to jump and race around. Last year she had scratched one of our guests' children with her claws. No harm was done, but the little girl was scared. You knew somebody was going to let her out of the house without being on the tie-out, and then she'd run loose. It was safer for us and for her to put her in the kennel for the day.

By late morning people started to show up. Tusker and Tessa and the boys were among the first, and the first thing we did was get the keg station going. The new grill center was totally in stainless steel, had a pair of eight burner grills, six side burners for pans and pots, and built in cold storage underneath. At the far end it even had a cooler capable of holding a pair of half kegs of beer. The beer distributor had brought out a pair of kegs two days ago, along with some bottle beer and soda, and the kegs were cold. Tusker took one look at the system and pronounced it, "Awesome!" I laughed and delegated him to run the keg. We got the first two beers.

Tessa helped Marilyn bring the food out, before getting a beer of her own. Marilyn went with a wine cooler. Then, as guests arrived, Marilyn and I greeted them. You could tell who had been to a previous party. They showed up with their kids already wearing swimsuits, and with spare clothes in a bag in their car; the kids promptly made a beeline for the pool and jumped in. People who never had been there before, arrived fully dressed, and with a swimsuit in a bag. They were directed to the pool house if they wanted to change. Parking was simple - anywhere in the front yard and around to the far side of the house. No way did we have enough driveway to hold everybody! One of the security guys, in shorts and a sport shirt, directed traffic.

The press connection was looking problematical. The Newsweek reporter, a guy named Bill Grass, showed up around noon, after spending half an hour driving all over northern Carroll County, lost. Already present was a reporter from the Sun, Fletcher Donaldson, a young fellow in his mid-twenties. On the other hand, of the three local television stations, only WJZ sent a truck out, and as soon as they figured out that the summer barbecue party really was a summer barbecue party, and not a gathering of the Republican powerful, they took off without even recording any B-roll or doing a voice-over.

Donaldson introduced himself and then promptly stuffed his notepad in his pocket, grabbed a beer, and began circulating. When Grass arrived, he was the only guy wearing a suit. I just shook my head in amusement and waved him over.

"Mister Buckman?", he asked.

I smiled and shook his hand. "Call me Carl. What in the world are you dressed for? This is a party, not a convention! Lose the jacket and tie, and roll up your sleeves, or you don't get a beer." He blinked in surprise, but then complied. I tossed his jacket and tie inside the house, and then handed him a beer. He still wasn't as informal as I was (shorts, Hawaiian shirt, straw hat, sunglasses, and deck shoes, no socks) but he wasn't completely stiff now. I had Tusker pump him a beer, and refreshed mine as well. "Now, welcome to the party!", I said.

"Thanks. I didn't know what to expect."

"We've been having this little shindig ever since we built the house, back in '83, and it just keeps getting bigger every year. Last year we started doing a smaller one in the fall, when the kids are playing soccer. We don't have the pool open then, but we bring over the teams, and let the kids run around. It's fun."

"It looks it." Just then a pair of small ones, maybe four or five, went racing through the kitchen area, so I corralled them and sent them back out the way they came. They went screeching away and headed towards the pool.

"I'm not big on rules, but they might burn themselves on the grill.", I explained. I drank some beer and waved at Brewster, whose eyes widened when he saw me talking to somebody who looked like a reporter. I smiled over my cup. "I bet you didn't start the week thinking you'd be attending the party of some two-bit Congressional wannabe this weekend."

"Is that what you think you are? A two-bit wannabe?", he asked. Brewster arrived as the question was raised, and his eyes popped open.

"I think that's what Andy Stewart thinks of me. What do you think?", I asked.

"I don't know yet, Mister Buckman..."

"Carl!", I interrupted him.

" ... Carl. I have to tell you, I've been covering politics a long time now, and I've never seen anything like what I saw Sunday morning. What in the world were you thinking?"

I shrugged. "I'm not sure now. Mostly I was just incredibly pissed off!" Brew winced at that, since serious people don't say the words 'pissed off.' Screw it, I might be going down, but if so, I'd go down in flames! "The man's a lying scumbag, and I just got angry! That's all it was. I lost my temper."

Tusker had been listening in from by the beer keg. He laughed at this, and Grass looked over at him. If he thought I was informal, I wondered what he thought of Tusker. Tusker had on cutoff shorts and a sleeveless 'Harley Davidson' tee shirt, and sandals, with his hair tied together in a pony tail. His shoulder tattoos were quite visible. "Remind me not to piss you off.", he laughed.

"You're not helping much, buddy.", I told him. "I didn't need to have a party in order to get grief. I am getting a perfectly fine load of grief from my wife already, thank you very much!"

"Your wife isn't happy about this?", Grass asked.

Tusker laughed again, especially when Marilyn came up from behind the reporter and answered, "No, she isn't, and if he ever pulls a stunt like that again, I'm going to kill him!"

"Yes, dear, I promise! I'll behave!"

She wagged her finger at me and said, "You'd better!", and then stood on her tiptoes and kissed me. She turned to the reporter. "If you want to try fitting into a pair of Carl's shorts, I can try to find some, but I don't think he's your size."

"That's all right. I'll be fine." Grass was probably about twenty pounds heavier than me, and it was mostly around the middle. Marilyn left, going out to the back yard and greeting some people from Fifth District. She was wearing a tight pair of shorts and a tank top, and looked cuter than hell!

"In case you didn't figure it out, that was the long suffering wife of the candidate.", I said. "And this is Jim Tusk, my best friend."

"Really? Don't take this wrong, but you don't look like the best friend of a billionaire."

Tusker laughed. "Really? You don't say! You're probably saying he looks like a crazy biker."

"Actually, yeah."

Both Tusker and I laughed at that. "Can't imagine why!", I laughed.

"Well, I am a crazy biker. On the other hand, I'm also the biggest Honda motorcycle dealer in the state, and with any luck, I'll pick up Harley Davidson this year."

"Did you hear back from them?", I asked.

"I'll tell you about it later." To Grass he said, "Carl's actually in business with me. He owns ten percent of the dealership."

"You own a motorcycle dealership?"

"Sure, why not? The financials were good, they had a good business plan, and simply needed some angel investing. That was back in '82. We've known each other for twenty years or so, going back to high school. He might look like a crazy biker, but he's the smartest biker since Malcolm Forbes! He and Tessa do all right."

Tusker started handing out a few cups of beer to the guests, and we both refilled our own glasses. I had the grills turned on, and Marilyn brought out a giant Crock-Pot full of Michigan Sauce. "Is the grill ready?", she asked.

"Pretty much."

"Well the little ones are going to be getting hungry."

"Okay." Marilyn went back inside, to check on things. I pulled a stack of burgers and some franks from the refrigerator under the grill. I opened the top of the grill, and started tossing on some burgers and hot dogs. Marilyn brought out a stack of paper plates, and we started lining up some rolls. We had a whole separate table for condiments and veggies and other stuff.

Grass kept asking questions, almost as much about my business as about my politics. Jake Junior introduced him to Barry Bonham from Tough Pup, which had just announced a major expansion. Even though the economy was slowing, people still were paying to take care of their pets. He asked the business people what would happen if I were to win, and they all pretty much shrugged. "Whatever happens, we're not shutting the company down. I won't be running it, but what we've built is too good to stop.", I explained. The others all agreed with me.

And then we had to stop talking, as the meat cooked and people started lining up for lunch. Some of the little ones had eyes bigger than their stomachs, and wanted two of everything. I would just laugh and tell them to come back for seconds, there was plenty more. Charlie's friend Johnny Parker came through a second time, after everybody else had firsts. Johnny asked, "Can I have another burger?"I drank some more beer, and smiled over at Bill Grass.

"Please!", prompted his mother, standing behind him.

"Please!", he said.

"I don't know. Do you want a Republican burger or a Democratic burger?", I asked, giving his mother a wink.

Lurlene Parker laughed at this, and Johnny looked perplexed. "I'm too young to vote."

I looked over at Grass. "I'm courting the independent vote!" He snorted and laughed. I put a burger on Johnny's bun, and sent him on his way.

Lurlene held her plate and bun out as well. "What's the difference between a Republican burger and a Democratic burger?"

"Republican burgers are juicy and delicious. Democratic burgers get dropped on the ground."

That got another laugh. "Today I'm a Republican."

"Yeah? Why do I think that is going to last only until you get your burger?"

I put a burger on her bun and sent her off after her son. After she got a few feet from me, she looked back over her shoulder and yelled out, "Vote for Stewart!"

"You're killing me, Lurlene, you're killing me! I swear to God, I'm going to raise your taxes, Lurlene!"

She laughed maniacally and wandered off. A minute later I saw her laughing with my wife and a few of the other women. I knew I was going to get requests for a few more Republican burgers before the end of the day. The first request came from Fletcher Donaldson. His I mimed dropping on the grass.

The party began winding down around six or so. We suffered through the usual stuff. A little boy stubbed his toe running around the pool and had to get bandaged up and sent home. Somebody had too much beer and was napping in the pool house. A little girl managed to step in puppy poop that we had missed during the cleanup and cried. By seven it was down to just about a half dozen of us, Marilyn and me, the Tusks, Brew McRiley, Jake Junior and his fiancé, and John and Helen. The reporters had gone and we were all just sitting around the back deck.

"Screw it.", I announced. "We're doing the cleanup tomorrow."

"I am with you!", agreed my wife.

"So, Carl, what are you going to do after you win?", asked Junior.

"That assumes I'm going to win. Right now it's too close to call.", I said, shrugging.

He snorted. "Have you ever lost at anything? You're going to win!"

I laughed and looked at my wife. "Who are you voting for, me or Andy? Who'd you vote for in the primary?"

There were several astonished reactions around the group, since most people weren't aware Marilyn was actually a Democrat. She immediately protested, "You, of course!"

"Okay, you get a Republican burger next time.", I told her, which got quite a few more laughs.

"How are you going to live in Washington?", asked Tessa.

I made a wry face at that. "No idea. Whenever I've gone there before, we usually stayed at the Hay-Adams, but I don't think I can do that long term."

It was John who said, "Get an apartment or buy a house. Something big. You'll need to entertain occasionally."

I nodded in understanding. "I've heard that." I looked over at Marilyn who looked back, curiously. "Cocktail and dinner parties, etc, etc. If I win, we'll have to buy a house down there. You don't want an apartment, do you?"

"No. Does that mean we have to move!?"

"No. You mean, away from here? No way! I bet it's close enough I can drive down, stay a night or two, and then drive back easily enough.", I told her. No way did I want to move!

Marilyn looked relieved at that. Then John said something interesting. "Why drive? Fly! It can't be a half an hour by plane or helicopter. Go from Westminster right to downtown DC at National."

I gaped at my old friend for a moment, and then turned to Marilyn. "You know, that might actually work! I might even be able to make it home for dinner some nights. Or you could bring the kids down occasionally. I know you hate driving."

"You can drive, I'll fly!"

Melanie Something-or-other, Junior's fiancé, stared at us for a moment, and then she exclaimed. "You would fly back and forth to Washington from here!? That would cost a fortune!"

Some of the others laughed, since Melanie obviously didn't know how much money I had. It was compounded when John added, "Sure, why not? You've been wanting to buy a jet for a few years now. This is a good excuse!"

"Give me a break! I am not buying a G3 - and you know that's what we'd need anyway - just to fly fifty miles back and forth! We'd barely get the wheels up before we were landing again! That's silly, even for me!"

John laughed at me, and Melanie gaped. "You'd buy an airplane?"

I just waved a hand. "Yes, but not to commute like that! For that trip I just need a Piper Cub on steroids."

Junior asked, "So, what happens with the company after you leave? They'll never let you run it and be a Congressman at the same time."

"No, that won't happen. I'll still be the majority owner, but they can't make me sell my shares." I glanced over at John, who simply smiled and nodded back. "Okay, now's as good a time as any. If I win, and right now that's a damn big if, well, I've already talked it over with John and your Dad. If I win, you'll be named Chairman, and Missy will be named President. John goes into semi-retirement as Chairman Emeritus, and your father stays as the Treasurer, and they still run around and smack your heads. You and Missy going to be able to get along that way?", I asked.

Junior nodded slowly, thinking about it. "We can live with that." I raised an eyebrow the way he said it. "I've talked to Melissa about it. We thought we might get to run it. We just thought I'd be President and we'd make her the Executive VP, or something like that. We weren't expecting John to leave, at least not right away..."

"I'm still here, you know. I'm not dead yet.", interjected John drily.

Jake Junior gave him a raspberry, and then said, "Anyway, we've talked it over, and we can make this work. I really think we need to open an office out in Silicon Valley, now. You've been handling that end of the business, but I think we're going to have to hire a pro out there, maybe buy a small firm or something."

I nodded in agreement. "Okay, start putting out some feelers. Get Missy cranking through her Rolodex. Talk to Dave Marquardt. Maybe he'd be interested in a joint venture, or if not, can help with names. Like I said, this is all a big if, but if it goes right, then we need to have something in place by the end of the year, no later."

Melanie gave her fiancée a strange look. "I thought you said you worked at a brokerage."

He smiled. "No, I said an investment firm. And I do work there. Now, vote the Buckman ticket, so I can run it, too." He looked over at me and laughed. "You need a campaign contribution? Maybe something to push you over the top and move me into your office after you leave?"

"Funny, very funny!"

"Shut up, Carl! Take the check!", ordered Brew.

"Holy shit!", she muttered.

Chapter 102: The Westminster Diner

Wednesday, October 3, 1990

Political campaigns, at least in America, are designed to produce winners by wearing the participants down to a nub. The survivor gets elected. There comes a point where you have to wonder just how many hands can be shook, how many rubber chicken dinners do you have to eat, how many old people do you have to make nice to? It really helps to be rich, since doing all of those things and actually trying to earn a living are impossible. Early on you start wondering whether it's all worth it. You start saying there just has to be a better way to pick a government!

America made a big mistake way back when we revolted against the British. Most people think it was in allowing slavery, but considering that half the colonies were slave states, we'd never have broken loose fighting that battle, then. The big mistake was that in our desire to rid ourselves of all things British, we got rid of a parliamentary system of government, and saddled ourselves with the mess we have now. Most Europeans look at how we elect our government and shake their heads in disbelief. When they hold elections, they just announce them and then everybody has six or eight weeks to make their bets and vote. Congressional and Senate races in America go for about a year, and Presidential races typically run at least two years, regardless of what the rule books state. It's a miracle anything actually gets accomplished!

As you go through it, you really start thinking there has to be a better way to do things, because there can't possibly be a worse way!

Wednesday, October 3, was supposed to be a relatively normal day. It was a long day. I started out with a few hours over at the office, mostly answering and returning phone calls and emails. The Sun had sent Fletcher Donaldson out to trail me around for a day, a day-in-the-life type of exercise. Brew and I shrugged our shoulders. The Sun still hadn't gotten around to endorsing anybody and we didn't dare to chance pissing them off. The Sun is a Baltimore City paper, but it's read all across the state.

It was going to be a long day, with a radio interview in Westminster, two visits to old folks homes in Reisterstown (known as 'senile silos' in the business), a visit to a ladies book club in Taneytown, and then finishing up with a rubber chicken dinner and a speech at the American Legion hall in Westminster. Thursday and Friday I would get to repeat the process in Baltimore County. I just kept repeating to myself that I only had another month to go. We were still in a dead heat with Stewart.

Donaldson got to campaign headquarters mid-morning, and spent some time chatting with some worker bees. I got there about eleven. Then I took off with Donaldson riding with me. Brew had a cold and was under the weather, so it was just me. It shouldn't be a problem. By now I pretty much had the stump speech ingrained on my DNA, even with the changes we made from time to time to answer Stewart's latest nonsense. We had taken to using a line from the movie Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, which wouldn't be made for many more years to come. Whenever somebody started spouting something pro-Stewart and patently false about me, I would just hit back with, "I'll make you a deal. I'll stop telling the truth about Andy Stewart the same day he stops telling lies about me!"

In the meantime, you smile a lot, shake hands, and pray to God they remember to pull the lever next to the big 'R' on November 6, if they remember to get out of bed and go vote. There has to be a better way!

We finished up around 8:30 or so, and I just wanted to go home, but as we drove through Westminster I felt my stomach rumble. The rubber chicken dinner had been especially rubbery tonight, and I just pushed it around the plate some, all the while thanking them for my delicious meal. I began to wonder which circle of Hell I was going to end up in, and settled on the Eighth Circle, for Fraud. I only had one more to go before I was hopelessly doomed.

I saw a light up ahead, near the corner of Manchester and Baltimore, near the mall. "You hungry?", I asked Fletcher.

"Not really."

I smiled and shrugged at him. "Well, I need something to forget about that delicious chicken dinner. You can have coffee if you want."

"Sure, why not!"

I nodded and pulled into the diner's parking lot. It was getting late and it was after the evening rush. I had been here any number of times over the years. It's a nice place owned by a Greek immigrant and usually staffed by members of his innumerable family. We parked and went inside.

I held the door open for Fletcher and then followed him inside. At that hour there was a man at the cash register near the door, and I recognized him as the owner, Nick Papandreas, although he didn't recognize me. He greeted us and showed us to a booth about four down from the door, and said a waitress would be out in a moment. As we followed him, I noticed a woman, a young woman, sitting huddled up in the first booth inside the door, sipping a cup of coffee. We sat down, and it was just by chance that I had the seat facing the door, and Fletcher took the seat opposite me, so that his back was to the door.

A girl who looked like she was college age came out from the back of the restaurant and saw Nick pointing at us. She said something to him and smiled, and then grabbed a couple of menus. She approached and flashed a big smile at both of us. "Hi there, fellas! Can I start you off with some coffee?"

I smiled back. "Coffee for my friend, and I'd like some tea, please."

"Sweet tea?"

I shook my head. "Hot tea, please."

"Sure thing!" She gave us the menus and said, "Back in a jiffy!"

Fletcher twisted his head to watch her leave. "Cute kid."

"They're all cute at that age. I think I was born older than that.", I replied with a smile.

When the young lady returned with our coffee and tea, I asked, "So, are you Nick's daughter or niece?"

She laughed. "Neither. I'm a second cousin, but we all call him Uncle Nick. Care to order?"

"Well, I'm not up for a meal, but if you have any pie left..."

"Best pie in the county! We have apple, cherry, blueberry, and strawberry still available."

I set my menu down and looked at Fletcher. "I don't know about you, but I could do with a nice slice of pie."

He nodded and agreed. "Apple for me, a la mode, please." He set his menu on top of mine.

"Sure thing, sugar.", she said to him. She turned to me.

"Cherry, a la mode, too."

"Nothing like cherry pie on a night like tonight.", she replied, winking at me.

I chuckled and waved her on her way.

Fletcher smiled. "I think she's flirting with you."

"Yeah, and a married candidate for Congress is going to try something with a reporter across from him. Right!"

He laughed at this. "Still..."

"Fletcher, of course she's flirting with me. Waitresses flirt with their customers. That's like saying birds fly in the air. It gets them good tips. Aside from that? I'm damn near twenty years older than she is, and married to boot." I waved my ring finger at him. "If she didn't kill me one way, Marilyn would kill me another way!" He just laughed at that.

As I talked to him, I had one eye vaguely on the young woman in the booth by the front door. I had taken my glasses off after sitting down, and didn't bother putting them back on, but something about her seemed a bit off. Maybe it was the way she had her jacket wrapped around her, or the way she seemed to be holding her left arm, or the sunglasses she was wearing when it was dark out. She just seemed a bit off to me, but I didn't pay her all that much attention. I couldn't see what she was eating, but she seemed to be dawdling over it. Then again, maybe I was just seeing something that wasn't there.

Nick's second cousin returned with our pie, and flirted a little more with us. At that point I stopped paying attention to the girl at the front, and Fletcher and I just talked politics while we ate. It was a quiet night. Nick said something to the waitress and he went back into the kitchen. That was when things changed.

A big guy pushed through the front door to the diner and started looking around. He was dressed in what looked like mechanic's coveralls, but torn and greasy. He looked dirty and disheveled. He was very tall and fat, but probably the kind that had some muscle underneath. I saw the waitress go up to him and say something that I couldn't quite make out. He ignored her and pushed past her and kept looking around her. She protested, and he shoved her aside, startling her. She staggered against the counter, and then ran back into the kitchen.

That was when I noticed the woman sitting at the booth near the door trying to slide down in the bankette seat and slip under the table. The big guy saw her out of the edge of his vision and turned towards her. "WHERE THE FUCK DO YOU THINK YOU'RE GOING, YOU STUPID CUNT!?", he roared. Then he reached out and grabbed her arm, causing her to cry out.

Fletcher and I stopped talking, and he turned around in his seat to see what was going on. "What the hell?", he commented.

"I don't know, but I don't think it's good.", I replied.

"GET UP, BITCH! WE'RE GOING HOME! MOVE YOUR FAT ASS, YOU STUPID FUCKING CUNT!"

At that point Nick came hustling out of the swinging doors to the kitchen, followed closely by his cousin. He looked angry; she looked nervous. "What going on?! You get out of here!" I don't know how long Nick had been in the country, but he still had his heavy Greek accent.

"FUCK YOU!" The newcomer swung and connected with Nick's chest. It wasn't much of a contest. Nick looked like he was in his early fifties, and it was obvious he had eaten too much of his fine cooking. The big guy was bigger, at least a foot taller, and a lot heavier. Nick went back on his ass.

"Uncle Nick!", screamed the waitress, who went running towards Nick.

The big guy roared and grabbed a carafe of coffee and swung it at her. He caught her on the side of the head and the carafe shattered. She went down like a sack of potatoes. Then he turned back to the young woman in the booth and grabbed for her again. She began to fight against him, but when he grabbed her arm, she cried out again and slumped in the booth. "GET UP, BITCH!"

"Oh, shit!", I said, as much to myself as anyone else. I reached across the table and tapped Fletcher on the arm. He turned back to me and I reached into my coat pocket. I pulled out my cell phone and pushed it across the table. It was a Motorola MicroTAC which I got last year to replace my original DynaTAC 'brick.' "You stay here and call the cops." Then I stood up and slipped off my suit coat; I had pulled off my tie in the car on the drive over. Fletcher was watching the big guy, so I snapped my fingers to get his attention. "Stay here and call the cops." Then I turned and went towards the big asshole at the front of the diner.

"Time to go, buddy. Get lost.", I said. "The cops are on the way."

Behind him, I could see Nick scrambling on the floor to get to his feet. I couldn't focus on that, though, because the big guy roared at me and swung his right at me in a wild roundhouse swing. Now that I was closer to him, I could smell a delightful aroma of four days of body odor, overlaid with enough beer to cause a contact buzz. Great! The roundhouse right missed me by a mile, and as I stepped closer, he threw a left at me. I focused on his timing, and he came back with another right.

It was my turn. I let the right swing past and then stepped behind his swing. My right hand grabbed his wrist and my left grabbed his elbow. Then I twisted and pushed him forward as hard as I could. Never counter power with power. Instead let the attacker's power work against him. He went face forward and I put my weight into the move, and slammed his face down into one of the booth tables. There was a satisfying crunch and he almost bounced off the table. This time I pulled him back up and twisted his arm so that he went backwards. I kept twisting and kicked his legs out from under him. I put my weight into it again, and he went down on his back all the way to the floor, with his head bouncing twice on the tile. He was out like a light.

I doubt it took fifteen seconds, including the swings he took at me, and I wasn't even breathing all that hard. My first reaction was how angry Marilyn would be with me, but I smiled at the thought and shook it off. She'd get over it.

I found Nick on the floor next to his waitress, who was sitting upright, although she was bleeding from a cut on the side of the head. I knelt down next to them both, just as a couple of men came through the swinging doors from the kitchen. They were dressed in white tee shirts and had aprons on, so they must have been cooks or dishwashers. They stared in disbelief, and I yelled at them to call the cops. They scurried into the back again. I looked over my shoulder and saw Fletcher talking to somebody on the phone, so maybe he got through already. A second call couldn't hurt.

The girl was showing signs of coming around, so Nick and I lifted her up and set her on one of the seats at the counter. Her eyes fluttered open, and she mumbled, "Wha ... what..."

"Hi. What's your name?"

"Huh?"

"What's your name?", I asked.

She focused on me. "Amy. What happened?"

"Amy, how do you feel?" It looked like a relatively minor cut just above her right jawbone, but it was freely bleeding, as head wounds have a tendency to do.

"My head hurts." She reached up to touch it and yelled, "Oww! What happened?" Then she looked at her hand, now with blood on her fingers. "I'm bleeding!"

I looked at Nick. "Mister Papandreas, you got a first aid kit?"

He moved behind the cash register and grabbed a white box with a red cross on it. Then one of the cooks came back and said, "The cops are coming. What the hell happened?" Nick started telling him and Amy what had happened.

I stayed focused on Amy. "Okay, darling, this is going to hurt a touch, so don't move." Then I reached out with my right hand and gently plucked a couple of shards of glass from the cut on her face. She was a bit of a mess, covered in blood and coffee, and I was debating whether to let the blood flow freely or put pressure on a head wound. All I knew about first aid was the stuff they teach you in the Boy Scouts and boot camp.

I didn't have to make the decision. We all heard a siren and I looked up to see some flashing lights approaching. The first vehicle to show was an ambulance. Two guys came running in with what looked like oversized tackle boxes, and Nick started telling them what happened.

I stood up and motioned for the cook to come over. I leaned over the counter to him. "Think you can make a couple of pots of coffee? I think it's going to be a long night."

He glanced past me to see a Westminster Police car pull up, also with lights flashing. "I think you're right.", he said.

"And get me the makings of some hot tea while you're at it, please?", I asked. He nodded and went back into the kitchen.

I looked around and found Fletcher still yapping on the phone. I went over to him and said, "You can hang up now. The cavalry is here."

He covered the mouthpiece and said, "Oh, that was my first call. I'm talking to the night editor now."

"What?! You're calling the paper!?", Jesus H. Christ! This was turning into a real three ring circus!

Fletcher Donaldson just smiled at me with a really wicked shit-eating grin, and then he started talking into the phone again. Short of smacking the bastard and taking my phone away, it was out of my control. I rolled my eyes and went back over to the counter.

The cook came out with a cup of hot water and set it and a tea bag down on the counter in front of me. "This thing is going to be a real clusterfuck.", he said to me lowly.

"My friend, you have no idea!", I replied.

By this time the policeman was inside the diner, and he was using a radio to call for backup and a second ambulance. The EMTs had put some gauze and tape on Amy, who seemed mostly shaken up, and were now working on the fat jackass who had started all this. He looked like he had a broken nose and jaw, so they were immobilizing his neck and preparing to put a breathing tube down his throat. That woke the bastard up, so he tried to fight off the EMTs, which got the cop into it as well. I stayed out of it. It took a second cop and another pair of EMTs to get this asshole strapped onto a gurney and restrained, and they never did get a tube down his airway!

By then we had a third police car show up, along with the second ambulance. The third car was a sergeant, and he started talking to Nick. I found it amusing that every cop who came in called Nick by his name. If this had happened any other moment of the day, there'd have been half the police force in northern Carroll County there, drinking coffee and eating a donut. We just got lucky.

The jackass got hustled out, strapped to the gurney, and one of the cops peeled out after the ambulance, because the asshole was still cursing and fighting. The EMTs started working on Amy again, but they decided she needed to go to the hospital, too, for a few stitches and X-rays. The sergeant started asking who all of us were, and I said, "My name's Carl Buckman. Listen, that young lady over there..." I pointed her out to him, it was the young woman the asshole was trying to grab. "I think she's hurt, too. That guy was trying to haul her out of here, but every time he grabbed her, she was crying."

The sergeant raised an eyebrow at this, and nodded to one of the EMTs and a spare policeman, and they went over to her. She was still crying, and when they helped her off with her coat, I got a better look at her. She had a black eye under the sunglasses, and was a good six months pregnant. There was a real suspicious bump on her right forearm, too. The EMT took one look at her and said, "Miss, you're going to the hospital, too. I think your arm's busted. Did that guy do this to you?" She didn't answer, but just kept crying.

The sergeant looked back at me. "Nice catch. Now, who are you and what are you doing here?"

"Like I said before, Sergeant, my name is Carl Buckman. I'm with the guy over there, and we just came in for some pie and coffee."

"And you're the guy who took him out?"

I nodded. "That would be me."

"Stick around."

He headed towards Fletcher, and I decided to follow. Fletcher was still yammering on the phone to his editor, probably working on his Pulitzer Prize speech. The sergeant asked, "Who are you and who are you talking to?"

"Fletcher Donaldson, Baltimore Sun. Who are you, officer?"

"A reporter!? How the hell did you get in here already?"

"I was already here. I'm with him.", Fletcher said, pointing at me.

"Yeah, well call's over. Hang it up."

"But I'm talking to my editor."

The sergeant was nowhere near as impressed with Fletcher's ongoing use of his First Amendment rights as Fletcher was. "Hang it up, or I'll hang it up for you.", he growled.

"Got to go.", Fletcher said into the phone, and then he flipped it closed.

"Thank you. I'll hold onto that.", I said, and took it away from him and stuffed it in my pocket.

By now a plainclothes cop had arrived, and the cook had brought out a couple of pots of coffee and a plate full of doughnuts. None of us were going anywhere until this got sorted out. Amy and the young girl at the center of all of this were hustled off to Carroll Hospital in the same ambulance. The rest of us started making statements.

Donaldson was writing things down as fast as the cops! I just ignored him as best I could. This was undoubtedly the end of my political career. A fight in a diner, and with a reporter present. The only way this could possibly have been worse was with video.

Guess what? It got worse! We had video!

Nick had a couple of video cameras in the diner, and one of them was aimed right at the front of the diner, where the cash register was, along with the first few booths. The sergeant and the plainclothes guy found it and started watching, and then called me over. Fletcher tagged along like an eager puppy. There was no sound, so they asked me to provide a running dialog.

"You handled yourself pretty good there. You want to explain that?", asked the plainclothes cop.

"Sure. What's your name?"

"I'm Lieutenant Hughes. So, what gives?"

"Real simple, Lieutenant. I have a couple of black belts, aikido and tae kwan do. And I used to be in the service. I was a paratrooper. This guy, whoever he was, didn't worry me. Who was he, anyway?"

The lieutenant looked mystified at that; it was the sergeant who answered. "That is a wonderful fellow named Haywood Collins. She's his wife. They have a dump apartment north of town, and we go out there about once a month on a domestic. He likes to use her for a punching bag, and she won't leave him, and we can't make her."

I shook my head. "Crap! Do you know how many of these things end up with dead wives? Any way we can get her into a shelter or something?"

"We've tried, but she always goes back."

"Maybe if he's in jail she can break free from him.", I said. "I'll charge him with attempted assault on me, if I have to."

Lieutenant Hughes shrugged. "Fine by me, but this guy really screwed up this time. We have him dead to rights on assault and battery on Nick and the waitress, and even when he grabbed his wife. You'll just be icing on the cake. This guy's going to be spending a few years in Hagerstown. Maybe we can get her loose from him by then."

"She has got to be terrified of him. Any chance we can get her in a shelter before then? What if he gets out on bail?", I asked.

"Who the fuck is going to bail this loser out!? Nah, he's got a few priors. The judge is not about to let him loose, and the ACLU ain't going to make a Federal case over this guy.", said the sergeant. "We can get in touch with a shelter. Maybe they can help. Maybe there's something the hospital can help with." He shrugged.

"What's it to you?", asked the lieutenant. "Besides, where the hell have I heard of you from? For some reason I've heard of you."

I rolled my eyes at that. "Great. Two hundred grand in television ads, and all I get is you might have heard my name. I'm running for Congress!"

It clicked, and his eyes opened wide. "Holy shit! It is you! That's where I've seen you!" Several of the cops came over at that point and shook my hand, and even Nick came over.

Well, I suppose it was nice to be recognized, but a month from now, I'd be ancient history. If Marilyn didn't kill me, Andy Stewart was going to beat my brains in about my fighting in a diner.

"Hey, any chance I can get out of here? My wife is going to kill me.", I said.

"Sure, just give us a number to reach you at. The DA might want to hear from you, too."

I gave him a couple of my business cards. "Listen, give one of those to the shelter when you find one. I'm a pretty easy touch for charities, and that might tip the balance about getting that girl some help."

"Sure."

"And keep this guy here. Throw him in jail! Give him the rubber hose treatment! Reporters are a pain in the ass!", I said. I turned to Fletcher. "You need a lift back to your car?"

He smiled. "No. I'll get a lift with the cops, unless they want me to spell their names wrong."

Hughes and I just rolled our eyes at that. He said, "I'm really liking the rubber hose idea."

I shook a few hands and headed home. It was late when I got home, a bit after eleven. Marilyn was sleeping in her recliner. I momentarily debated leaving her there, but she'd get pissed at me. I simply made enough noise that she struggled awake. Dum-Dum wandered sleepily out of Charlie's room, yawned, and then went over to the patio door to be let out. I put her out on her tie-out while Marilyn got out of her chair. "You're home late! Big night?"

"Sort of. You'll read about it in the papers for sure tomorrow."

"Oh?" That woke her up.

"Oh!" I needed a drink, but it was too late, and I didn't want to open a bottle or get too involved. I settled on some iced tea.

"What happened?"

Marilyn waited until I was sitting in my recliner, and then crawled onto my lap after letting Dum-Dum back in, and laid her head against my shoulder. She cuddled there while I told her about my latest adventure in the wonderful world of campaign politics. Afterwards, she said, "And you think this is going to hurt your campaign?"

"I think it's going to kill it! Fighting in a diner? With a reporter watching? I might as just well hang it up now, and save everybody the trouble of the election.", I told her.

"Well, I think you're wrong, and I'm proud of you.", she told me.

"Huh?" I was obviously too tired to think. "I figured you'd be really pissed at me."

Marilyn sighed. "Well, I'd probably be happier if you were a really quiet salesman and home every night at five, but that's just not who I married. I married a hero, whether I like it or not. You weren't going to let those girls get beat up, and if you lose the election, so be it. I'd rather you be an unelected hero than an elected coward."

"Huh!"

"You know what Andy Stewart would have done, don't you?", she asked, teasingly.

"No, what?"

"He'd have run out the back door, and then complained the cops didn't get there fast enough!"

I nodded. That sounded true enough. "That's our Andy! He's going to make hay out of this for sure."

"I think you are worried about nothing. Either way, though, you need to relax. Want me to help you relax?"

That made me smile. "Sure! Here?"

"No, silly! Your children are getting too old. We don't need them wandering out into the living room to see that!"

"You're no fun anymore. You're an old married lady now!", I laughed.

"We'll see about that. Anyway, I am going to call Taylor tomorrow, and tell her we're going to the Bahamas, just you and me, the day after the election. We'll get my parents to come down and stay with the kids. Win or lose!"

"Sounds like a plan." I began tugging the zipper down on her sweatshirt. "Sure about the fooling around part?"

Marilyn grabbed my hand and stopped me. Laughing she said, "Forget it! In the bedroom!" Then she climbed up off my lap and headed towards the hallway, giving her rear a nice shake as she did so.

That worked, too.

Chapter 103: The Women's Vote

I was wrong about the effect the fight would have on the election, very wrong. Brew McRiley called me about seven in the morning, while I was still struggling to wake up. Marilyn answered the phone and then passed it over to me. I heard Brew's voice even before I got the phone in my hands. "CARL! CARL! PICK UP! COME ON, CARL!"

I fumbled the phone for a moment before I could get it to my ear. "Brewster, calm down! What!?"

"Why didn't you call me!?"

"What? Huh? What are you talking about?"

"Last night! You should have called me!"

I sat up in bed, remembering the disaster. "Brew, I figured I would let you get a night's sleep before telling you we were all out of jobs."

"What are you talking about!? Haven't you read the paper yet?!", he gushed. He was almost frothing at the month with excitement.

"Brewster, it's only seven. The only thing I've read is the alarm clock. What's going on?"

"Jesus, Carl, I had to read about it in the Sun! This is great!"

Great? Something didn't sound right! "Brewster, what the hell happened? Andy have a heart attack while laughing at me?"

"Carl, what are you talking about? This is great news! You made the front pages of the Sun! They damn near put you up for sainthood!"

"WHAT!?"

"Go read the paper!", he ordered. "I need to work on this!"

Marilyn asked, "What's going on?"

"Damned if I know. The Sun is doing something strange, I guess." I grabbed my bathrobe and stumbled down the hall and went to the front door. The newspaper was in a tube on the same post as our mailbox, and I had it open before I ever got back to the house. There it was, a quarter page article, just below the fold on the front page. 'HERO CANDIDATE STOPS ASSAULT, SAVES DINER!' There was even a photo of the Westminster Diner, and I have no idea how they did that, since I didn't see Donaldson with a camera. I stopped reading and headed back to the house.

By the time I got back to the house, the phone was ringing again. It was a request from WBAL for an interview. I stumbled through telling them yes, but to check with my campaign manager. As soon as I hung up, there was another call, this time from WJZ. How did they get my unlisted number? I was going to have to change phone numbers again.

At the next call I simply told Marilyn to answer and take a message. I sat down at the kitchen table and spread the paper out. Fletcher Donaldson had really outdone himself. He must have been staying up late on this one. After I left, he managed to get interviews with Nick and Lieutenant Hughes, and he must have driven over to the hospital and gotten in to see Amy and Collins' wife. The story continued on to page three, and there were separate but attached stories on domestic violence and the need for more women's shelters. He even managed to dig up the story they had on me from back in 1982, when they picked up the AP report on the fight in the bar in the Bahamas. The man had been very busy last night!

Another couple of calls came in while I was reading, and Marilyn told people I was in the shower, but then she said, "It's Brewster, and he doesn't believe you're in the bathroom." I didn't get to argue; she simply handed me the phone.

"Yeah, Brew."

"This is great! Did you read the Sun yet? We have to jump on this right away!" McRiley was so excited he was babbling! It was like a political orgasm to him.

"I'm reading it now, Brew."

"Great! I'll meet you at your office at nine! Wear a good suit! We're going to be doing some interviews! We have to follow this up!" He hung up before I had a chance to say another word.

I hit the button on the phone to hang it up. Marilyn looked over at me and asked, "Well?"

"Brewster's so excited he just came in his pants."

"That's disgusting!", she said, grimacing.

"I agree!" I stood up and headed back to the bedroom. "I'm under orders to get to the office by nine. I'm not sure who's working for whom." I headed back to the bedroom. I hadn't even brushed my teeth yet.

I hung around long enough to kiss my daughters before they went to school (Charlie didn't get kisses, he was a big boy!) Then I kissed their mother, perhaps a little more enthusiastically, and headed out. When I got to the office, I got a standing ovation as I entered the lobby. I just rolled my eyes and ordered everybody back to work! That earned me a mixture of laughs and raspberries. John and Brewster simply grabbed me and hustled me into John's office.

"You're supposed to call me when you get involved with the cops!", said John.

"I'm supposed to call you when I get in trouble with the cops. I wasn't in any trouble!"

"There's a first time for everything, I suppose.", was his response.

"Hey, it wasn't anything somebody else wouldn't have done."

"Yeah, but it was you.", said Brew. "Now we build on it. This is great!"

"How so?", I asked.

"Okay, so far you and Andy are running neck and neck. Now, that's not bad, considering you're a complete novice and he's the incumbent, but it's still too close to call. We need something to move you ahead, far ahead, and this is it. This helps on two fronts. First, it really shows you as the 'law and order' candidate. Normally that benefits the Republican candidate, and you were polling ahead on this, but this really cements it. The important part is the women's vote. Women normally vote Democratic over Republican. There's a real gender gap, and it is very difficult to close! You just nailed the gender gap!"

"Huh?"

"Listen, you already have them half in the bag because of your stand on abortion and women's health issues. Fletcher Donaldson just reported you wanted to donate to a woman's shelter. Were you serious on that?", he asked.

"Absolutely. I have no problems with that.", I told him.

John just nodded. "And that takes care of the women's vote. If the gender gap is normally on the order of ten to fifteen percent, and you just broke even, that gives you at least a five percent edge over Stewart."

"Huh!", I said, as it sank in. "We probably should be polling again."

He nodded. "We need to ride this. I've got you set up for a lunchtime interview down at WJZ and then something in the early afternoon with WMAR and WBAL."

I nodded. "What do you think Andy's going to do? Newton's Third Law, remember. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction! He's going to do something."

McRiley blinked as he gave it some thought. It was John who answered first. "He's going to label you as an out of control vigilante."

Brew nodded. "Good, very good. That's what I'd do. Then I'd get creative!"

"And lie.", I said, feeling like I was sucking a lemon.

"Andy doesn't lie. He's just morally flexible.", said Brew.

"Like a rubber pretzel!", I retorted.

John laughed. "Okay, get out of here the pair of you. I have to earn a living, you've got to make phone calls and answer emails, and you've got to figure out our response to Andy.", he said, pointing first to me and then to Brewster.

"Already working on it!", assured Brewster.

At the appointed time, Brew and I drove out for the rest of the day. As usual, once I had agreed to run for office, I had been driving either the Caddy or Marilyn's minivan. The 380, my beloved 380, was up on blocks for the duration. The day after the election, one way or the other, I was going to drive it around! In the meantime, I had to be seen in an American car. If somebody commented on my driving around an expensive car, I usually said one of two things. "You got to love that big Detroit iron!" was the first thing, usually along with, "It's a great car!" If they were still pissy, I would just say that I wasn't going to apologize for being successful.

The WJZ interview was live on their noon news broadcast. The other two would be aired on the six o'clock news, as would highlights from the WJZ interview. Everybody wanted to know the gory details and how I handled the problem. I simply reiterated a few key points, like the fact that the first thing we did was call for the cops, that I had several black belts and knew how to handle myself, and that I simply did what anybody else would have done. The interview with the guy from WBAL was the last of the day, and by the time I did that one, Andy Stewart had just denounced me as a rogue vigilante. I was asked for a response, so I simply chuckled and said, "Well, I think it's pretty obvious what Congressman Stewart would have done, and it's the same thing he does on everything related to the safety of the citizens of the Maryland Ninth - nothing!"

Throughout the day, while I drove us around, Brew was busy yapping on his cell phone, a MicroTAC like mine, only he carried a pair of spare batteries around with him. He just smiled after we heard what Andy had to say, and then gave me marching orders for Friday. Marilyn and I were to meet him at the Westminster campaign headquarters at eleven in the morning, looking 'presentable' (by which I guessed a suit for me and a dress for Marilyn.) He had a grin on his face like a cat dining on a canary dinner.

As we drove over the next morning, Marilyn asked, "Do you know what Brewster has in mind?"

I shook my head. "Not a clue, but he is having way too much fun with this. He's got something big planned."

"He's like an evil puppeteer!", she said, laughing, her hands making controlling motions over an invisible marionette.

"And I'm the puppet!", I agreed.

I wasn't surprised when the campaign staffers applauded when we entered the campaign office, and then Brewster yelled out, "I give you the next Congressman for the Maryland Ninth!", which got me another round of cheers and applause.

"Thank you! Thank you! Now let's make sure this happens!", I said back, smiling. "What do I need to do to help you do that?!" I wandered around asking what people were up to and making encouraging noises. You have to make sure the 'little people' know they're appreciated, because there are no little people. The lowest level person in an organization, any organization, can screw things up royally if they get pissed at you. If you start treating them as little, you will be sorry, and sooner rather than later!

At half past, Brew bundled us back outside and into my car. "Will you tell me what is going on?", I asked.

He smiled at me. "We are going over to the Westminster Diner for a press conference..."

"At the diner?"

" ... where the Chief of Police is going to endorse you for Congress!"

"Holy crap! That's my first endorsement, isn't it?"

Brew nodded. "With this one, I bet we can get a bunch of others. We're also going to announce a $5,000 contribution to the local women's shelter, and Nick and the waitress are going to be there, too."

"Well, haven't you been a busy little beaver.", I told him.

"So get in the car and drive!", he ordered.

I got in the car, and turned to Marilyn. "Did you bring the checkbook? Chuckles here is enjoying himself so much he never mentioned bringing the checkbook!"

"Drive!", ordered Brew. "And think of something nice to say on camera. 'Thank you!' would be appropriate."

"Screw you, Brewster.", I said with a laugh.

It was only a few minutes to the Westminster Diner, and it was obvious that Brewster McRiley really had been a busy little beaver! There was a podium with several microphones on it out in front of the diner, with a Westminster Police car to the side, and several cameras in front, in position to catch both the diner and the police car in the background. Both WMAR and WBAL had vans in the back of the parking lot, and there were heavy electric cables running around the area.

There were several people in the doorway to the diner I recognized. Nick Papandreas was in a suit that looked a touch tight around his middle, Amy was looking nervous and had a large white bandage on the side of her head, and the Westminster Chief of Police, George Tilden, was standing there and drinking from a cup of coffee. I waved at them, but Brew held me back from going over to say hello. Both Amy and Nick waved back, and George nodded and gave me a two fingered salute.

Instead, Brewster went over to the trio and spoke to them, mostly to George, but also to Nick and Amy, gesturing towards the podium. Then he went over to a couple of television reporters, and after talking to them, moved out of the way. Suddenly, a pair of camera operators lifted their cameras and lights came on. For the next five minutes the on-air talent talked to the cameras and adjusted their hair and then did it all again. I assumed that this would end up being cut and edited before it actually went on the air.

Then it was time, and George strode up to the podium and set some papers on it. George was about ten years older than Marilyn and I, and I had met him several times over the last few years, usually when he was accepting a check for the police fund. Now it looked like it had been money well spent! Brewster whispered for Marilyn and me to move into the shot, but to stay back and to the side of George.

George glanced down at his speech, but then looked up and waited for the red lights to light up on the cameras. Then he started talking. "Thank you for coming. My name is Captain George Tilden, and I am the Chief of Police of the Westminster Police Department. Two nights ago there was an incident here at the Westminster Diner. Since then there has been a great deal of attention from the press as well as political interest in the case."

"The facts of the case are as follows. On Wednesday night at approximately nine in the evening Mister Haywood Collins entered the Westminster Diner in search of his wife, Jolene Collins. Mrs. Collins had run away from her husband earlier in the evening. Mister Collins located her here at the Westminster Diner and attempted to forcibly return her to their home. Mrs. Collins resisted, attracting the attention of the owner of the Westminster Diner, Mister Nicholas Papandreas. Mister Collins then assaulted both Mister Papandreas and Miss Amy Smith, a waitress at the restaurant. At that point Mister Carl Buckman, a patron of the restaurant, subdued Mister Collins. Subsequent to this, paramedic and police units arrived on the scene to provide medical assistance and transport Mister Collins, Mrs. Collins, and Miss Smith to the Carroll Hospital Center."

"This morning, Haywood Collins was transported to the Carroll County Courthouse and arraigned on multiple counts of assault and battery. He is currently being held at the Carroll County Detention Center. Bail was denied due to a prior history of violence towards his wife. Mrs. Collins and Miss Smith were released from the hospital yesterday morning and were both sent home at that time. Mister Papandreas' injuries were treated at the scene."

"There has been considerable interest in this case due to the fact that Mister Buckman is currently running for Congress. In light of this fact, I have taken a personal interest in this case. I have personally interviewed all the police officers who answered the call to the Westminster Diner that evening, all of the paramedics and ambulance personnel, and a number of the employees of the restaurant. I have also reviewed security videotape from the restaurant, and copies of these will be made public at the end of this press conference. Allegations have been made as to the conduct of Mister Buckman, allegations of excessive force and vigilante behavior."

"These allegations are false. Eyewitness testimony clearly shows that the first thing Mister Buckman did was arrange for a call to the police. The video clearly shows that his actions used the minimum of force necessary to subdue Haywood Collins, and then after Collins was subdued, he immediately released him and began treating Miss Smith for her injuries. He has cooperated fully with this investigation. These are not the actions of a vigilante."

"The officers who responded to the assault that night were wearing protective vests purchased with a donation made by Mister Buckman. The paramedics who treated and transported Mrs. Collins and Miss Smith did so with equipment provided, in part, by a donation made by Mister Buckman. They were treated at the Carroll Hospital Center in an emergency room also supported by a donation from Mister Buckman. After Mrs. Collins was treated for her injuries, Mister Buckman then offered to make a donation to the Carroll-Coleman Women's Shelter to make sure that she was kept protected."

"There is no question that Carl Buckman is a friend of the law enforcement community. He is a friend of the fire department community. He is a friend of the health care community. One of the most amazing things to me is that Carl Buckman isn't even a resident of Westminster. He doesn't even live in Carroll County; he lives on the other side of Hampstead, in Upperco. I've asked around, and he supports police and fire departments and hospitals and clinics all over northern Maryland. It is for these reasons and many others that I am endorsing Carl Buckman for Congress!"

From around the scene there was a lot of applause from various policemen and the employees of the diner. George stepped back from the podium and Brew nudged me forward. I shook hands with George, and then I stepped up to the podium. I looked at the cameras and said, "I would like to thank Chief Tilden for both his kind words and his endorsement. Even more than an endorsement of my run for Congress, this is an endorsement of my belief that the police and fire departments and emergency squads are the first line of defense for all of us, and they need to be supported by all of us. When I was a kid, there was a popular bumper sticker that said, 'You don't like cops? Next time you're in trouble call a hippie!' Back in the Sixties that sounded pretty funny, but the older I got, the less funny it seemed. Policemen and firefighters and paramedics and doctors and nurses truly are the first line of defense all of us have, and I promise that as Congressman, I will do everything I can to support them. I urge everyone here to do the same."

I paused and there was a round of applause from around the group. I made a few other quick campaign remarks, and then asked if anybody had any questions. I knew they would. The first one was easy - 'Can you tell us in your own words what happened that night'

"Sure. Well, it had been a pretty normal day so far, with several campaign events and a dinner at the American Legion. I got to meet a lot of really nice people that day. I had with me a reporter, Fletcher Donaldson of the Baltimore Sun, who was doing a ride-along with me. Anyway, it was the end of the day, and we decided to stop for some coffee and pie at the Westminster Diner before calling it a day. We had just been served when this really big guy comes in, totally out of control. He grabs this woman in one of the booths, and then smacks around Nick and Amy. I grabbed my cell phone..." I lifted it out of my belt holster and showed it. " ... and handed it to Fletcher, and told him to call the cops. Then I got up and told this guy to leave the diner. That's when he started swinging at me."

The reporter from WMAR asked, "How were you able to subdue Haywood Collins if he is so much bigger than you?"

I smiled at that. "Haven't you ever heard that the bigger they are, the harder they fall? Seriously, though, I have two black belts in the martial arts and have been in these types of situations before. I was never in any danger, and somebody needed to stop him before he killed somebody!"

"Congressman Stewart has claimed that you only did this for the headlines.", commented WBAL.

"Congressman Stewart claims a lot of things. It doesn't make them true."

"Then why didn't you wait for the police to arrive?"

"Because there simply wasn't time to do that. Haywood Collins was about to haul this woman out, dragging her if necessary. I had no idea she was his wife, but I suspected she was a relative. By the time the police arrived - and I do not mean to imply that they were late showing up - he would have left with her. Unless the police were in the parking lot already, he would have gotten away. What would have happened then?! You do know that most violence against women comes from family members, don't you?" I wasn't sure of the exact statistics, but I knew this was true.

"Why did you feel the need to make a donation to the women's shelter?", asked Fletcher.

"Domestic violence and spousal abuse is a national problem, but right here and now, it's a problem that we can help with on a local level. I didn't know it at the time, but Jolene Collins was six months pregnant, and was suffering from a broken arm and a black eye. Her husband has been using her as a punching bag for years. She was so afraid of him she only left after he threatened their unborn baby. A shelter can protect women like Jolene Collins and give them options for the future. I urge everybody here to support shelters like this."

Some of the questions were unexpected. "Are you a regular diner here?"

I blinked at that one. "Well, I have eaten here a few times. I mean, who hasn't!? Still, it's not like I'm a regular on a first name basis with Nick Papandreas."

"Had you ever met Mister Papandreas before?"

I shook my head. "No, we had never been introduced before, although I knew who he was."

"How did you know who he was?"

Good Lord! Time to draw this to a close! "Probably because his picture is on the menu. Listen, I think it's time to close this down. I appreciate all of you attending and I promise you all that once I am elected I will do my best to support the first responders in our community. Now, I want to take my lovely wife Marilyn inside for some pie and coffee, and then we have to get home for when the kids get home from school. Here's an endorsement from me - Nick Papandreas and the Westminster Diner serve up the best pie! Now, come on in. The pie's on me!"

I stepped away from the podium and led Marilyn over to the side and introduced them to Nick and Amy. I wasn't the first politician Nick had ever run across, but the young waitress was starstruck. She wasn't quite stuttering, but she was tongue-tied and red-faced. I teased her a touch, and Marilyn put her at ease by asking her if she was a Democrat or a Republican.

Amy shyly admitted, "Democrat.", as she blushed in embarrassment.

"That's okay. I'm a Democrat, too. I still haven't made up my mind who I'm voting for. Is this going to be your first election?" Marilyn and Amy started talking, and I led them inside. Amy insisted on being our waitress. A handful of other people from the crowd came in. Brew McRiley and George Tilden sat with Marilyn and me in the same booth this all started at the other night. I pointed out what I had witnessed and how it went down.

The security video made the entire event the lead item on all three Friday night news shows, and by Sunday had made the national news. I drove down to Washington with Brew and we made the round of the Sunday morning talk shows, this time without Andy Stewart able to toss in his two cents worth. That was fine by me. CBS had even commissioned a poll in conjunction with the Sun that showed me for the first time leading Stewart, and by a ten point margin to boot.

This was just totally surreal to me. I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop. I mean, really, there was no way anybody was going to vote for me for Congress.

Chapter 104: Momentum

The campaign continued to gain momentum after the diner incident. During the next month I picked up another fourteen endorsements from various local police chiefs and fire department captains. We were on a roll! Okay, the Sun had endorsed Stewart, but everyone had known that was going to happen. He was a Democrat and the Sun was a City paper, which heavily favored the Democrats, and they had endorsed him for every election he had run to date. It wasn't an issue for us; we didn't expect it to matter to anyone out in the Ninth.

Andy Stewart was running scared. He was spending money like he owned a printing press, and he had bankers donating cash to replace it. We matched him ad for ad, and what surprised me was how many donations I was pulling in. It wasn't all coming out of my own pocket. I was constantly calling people and thanking them and writing notes to them. He was slinging mud left and right, and any semblance to the truth was accidental. He brought up the 'billionaire buying a seat' theme, the 'murderer' theme, the fact I was disowned, that I was a 'rogue vigilante', I was 'unstable and mentally deranged' (that one he got from some shrink he bought who never even met me.) He even claimed that I didn't need a cane and that I was faking the limp for sympathy! We just released the medical report from Walter Reed declaring the damage to be permanent and qualifying for a medical discharge from the Army.

One of the silliest points in the entire campaign came when Andy Stewart dug up my valedictory address from Towson High and used highly edited excerpts to show my many flaws. "We are the largest, the richest, the most privileged, and the most pampered generation of Americans yet born" and "Ours seems to be a legacy of entitlement" and "We will be known as a bunch of whiny bastards." He even sliced words out of multiple sentences. All these were plastered in ads and television ads to show how out of touch I was with my own generation and with my fellow citizens.

We responded by taking out a full page ad and reprinting the speech in full. It was too long to make a television ad out of, but we did highlight some of the better phrases and had an actor with a nice deep baritone repeat them. Brewster was all over me about not telling him about the speech. He loved it and would have used it earlier in the campaign. I simply told him I had forgotten it; it happened seventeen years before, for Christ's sake! Brew just chewed my ass and asked what else I had forgotten. (How do you ask for something that somebody has forgotten? There's a major logical inconsistency in that!)

At that point even the Baltimore Sun began to be exasperated by their favorite son. They began reporting a tally of the lies coming from Stewart headquarters. The Sunday Sun two days before the election even ran a cheeky cartoon on their editorial page. It showed a couple examining two identical graphs, one showing a rising line called 'Buckman's Poll Figures' and the other showing a matching line called 'Stewart's False Claims'. One character was saying to the other, 'It looks dead even to me.' That one we cut out and put into a scrapbook.

And then, suddenly it was over. I campaigned right through Sunday and Monday and called it quits at dinner time. Marilyn's parents drove down Monday. My wife had told them that no matter what happened in the election, we were going on a vacation, and we needed them to babysit for a week. Tuesday we got a sitter for the kids and then we drove her parents over to campaign headquarters and showed them around. The place was practically deserted, though. We had done what could be done. There would be no more ads, no more interviews, no more mailers or flyers, no more posters. We had a few people in making phone calls to see if supporters had made it to the polls yet, and a few volunteers were out driving old folks to the polls. Otherwise, we were done. If we hadn't won by now, there was very little we could do on Election Day to change things.

At lunchtime, we drove Big Bob and Harriet over to the Westminster Diner. They had seen the video, like about half of America had. To be honest, when we walked into the place, I damn near died laughing. Nick Papandreas had festooned the place with "Buckman for Congress!" posters, which simply astonished Big Bob. A hard core Democrat from before he was born, it was a wrenching change in his worldview to realize that by this time tomorrow his baby girl might be married to a Republican Congressman!

Nick came out of the kitchen as we came in the door, and he rushed over to us. My hand was shaken so vigorously I thought it was going to come off, and he gave Marilyn a hug. "Come in, come in! I get you a good table!"

"Nick, thank you! I want to introduce you to some people. These are Marilyn's parents, Bob and Harriet Lefleur. Bob, Harriet, this is Nick Papandreas. He owns the Westminster Diner."

"Welcome! It's nice to meet you! Come, follow me!" He led the way over towards a large round table on the side, and then snapped his fingers at a young man who scurried over. "Get water and have Anastasia come out."

"Sure thing, Uncle Nick."

To Big Bob and Harriet I said, "Nick's got more relatives working for him than you two do."

We sat down, and Nick stood there at the side. "Anastasia will be your waitress today."

"Where's Amy?", I asked.

"She has school today, but she'll be in this evening."

"How's she feeling? She alright now? No scarring?"

"No, she's fine. A little scar, but it is fading away. I tell her tonight you asked.", he replied.

I smiled. "You do that, but more important, you tell her to make sure she votes for me. I need all the help I can get!"

"I do that, too! I tell everyone, 'Vote for Buckman!' I tell all my family, too! I a Democrat, but I tell them to vote for you."

I laughed at that. "If I can get your entire family to vote for me, I'll win for sure! Thank you, Nick, I appreciate it."

"After that night, I have to vote for you. That was a bad night. Me down, Amy down, that poor girl getting beat up in my own restaurant ... that was a bad night! Congressman Stewart, he should be ashamed of himself!"

Harriet was just sitting there open mouthed, listening to all this. Some more customers came in, and Nick went off to help them. A twenty-something waitress came out of the kitchen and smiled at us. She looked as Greek as Nick did, but her accent was pure Maryland. "Uncle Nick bending your ear, Congressman?"

"I only get to be Congressman if enough of your family votes for me.", I told her.

"Uncle Nick will get you in. Just keep coming around for lunch when you're here.", she replied.

"That's a campaign promise I can keep, for sure."

Anastasia gave us our menus and gave us a few minutes to look at them. I went with one of my favorites, a Reuben and a chocolate shake. After she took our order, Big Bob said, "So this is where you had that fight?"

I nodded. "Yeah, right over there." I pointed towards the entrance and cash register. "The one girl was in that booth, and Nick and Amy, the waitress who got clobbered, were over there. You guys saw that on the news?"

"We saw it. We weren't sure we liked seeing you on the news that way." He glanced over at his wife, and Harriet just shrugged her massive shoulders.

"It wasn't my idea. I couldn't let him just keep beating people up, though, could I?"

Marilyn came to my defense. "Let's face it. I married a hero!" She leaned over and kissed my cheek, and I blushed.

"You know, if Nick really does get his family to vote for me, I'm a shoo-in, but I'll have to keep eating a lot of meals here."

After lunch, we drove over to Hereford and I showed the Lefleurs around the office. We had expanded even more since the last time they were around, and now we had the entire office building in the office park. (There were still three other buildings around us.) We had moved some of the legal and accounting functions upstairs, and left the traders and partners downstairs. After that, we drove to the high school and voted. It was rather strange to see my name on the voting machine, but I pulled the little lever and smiled. Then we went home and rescued the sitter.

Over dinner Charlie asked, "Are we going to have to move if you win?" The girls were still a little young to understand about the election, and only pointed out when Daddy was on the television, but Charlie was a bright little shit! He had learned about some of this stuff in school already.

"I wasn't planning to. Why?"

"Well, won't you have to go to Washington? Isn't that, like, really far away?"

I nodded in understanding. "Ah, well, it's not that far away. It's a couple of hours by car. Maybe I'll have to get a girlfriend down there and stay at her place when I'm in Washington." I winked at Marilyn's parents as I said this.

Charlie started laughing. Marilyn fell into the trap, though, and started hooting and hollering! "There's not going to be any girlfriends! You'll be coming home!" She kept going like this for another minute, and even the Lefleurs were laughing at her. She then did the usual finger wag and said, "You think you're so smart! See if I ever vote for you again."

"You told me you were voting Democrat, that way we'd cancel each other out."

"Smartass!"

"Better than being a dumbass.", I responded.

"With you, they're the same thing!"

Holly and Molly were laughing at their mother now, too. I just sat there and smiled.

The polls were going to close at eight, and we wanted to be at the campaign reception before then. We had rented the Westminster Best Western, which was about the biggest banquet hall in the area. Anything bigger was down inside the Beltway, probably. We had a podium set up at one end of the room with a few flags behind it, and space for cameras and reporters in front of it. I figured we would get a few of each, considering the colossal nonsense we had gone through with this campaign! Oh, and the free drinks for the reporters wouldn't hurt, either. Everybody else simply got tickets for two free drinks, after which they had to buy their own.

We got there around half past seven, and found the place surprisingly filled. It was more than just the campaign volunteers, too. My partners at the Buckman Group were there, along with the Destriers and Jack Nerstein. Brewster McRiley was running around, nervous as all get-out, and driving people nuts.

I finally grabbed him and pulled him out of the room. "Brew, you're going crazy. Now settle down before we tie you into a chair." I led the way to the suite we had booked as our little headquarters. The powers that be followed along.

"But there's so much to do.", he protested.

"No, Brewster, there isn't. It's all over by now, except for the counting. There's nothing left to do except give a speech and have a party." I pushed him towards an armchair and pushed him down into it. "Now, stay there. Do you have a girlfriend? Do I need to have her sit on you to keep you in place?"

He smiled at me. "No, no girlfriend."

"A boyfriend then?"

His eyes popped open. "Jesus, NO!" I just smiled at him until he realized I was goofing on him. "Marilyn's right, you really are a son of a bitch!"

"There you go. Now calm down and relax. Have fun and say thank you to all the volunteers. Either we win and I give a victory speech and we have a party, or I lose and I give a concession speech, and we all get drunk and cry. It's what us mathematicians call a binary outcome, a zero sum game. I will let you stand up if you promise to go find a beer and have a drink."

Brew rolled his eyes but promised, and I laughed as I sent him out. John and Jack Nerstein came in with some Solo cups and a bucket of ice, and a bottle of whiskey and a bottle of Sprite. We poured ourselves a round of drinks. "Mud in your eyes, gentlemen!", Jack said.

"Down the hatch!", I agreed.

"Skoal!", said John. He drank some, and then asked, "You ready for this?"

"It's too late to back out now." I had another swallow. "I don't know which scares me more, losing and having to face people afterwards, or winning and actually having to be a Congressman! What in the fuck do I actually know about being a Congressman!?"

"Well, you can't be any worse than Stewart, and maybe we get some good out of you.", answered Nerstein with a smile.

"Boy, there's a rousing campaign slogan - 'He can't do any worse than the current asshole!' Remind me not to have you involved in my next campaign." Both men laughed at that.

We had a couple of televisions around the place, one out in the big room and another in the suite's bedroom. One was tuned to WMAR and the other to WJZ. At eight, Marilyn and Helen Steiner came in, along with Brew and Missy, and we started watching. All they said at eight was that the polls were closing. They didn't offer any predictions based on exit polls yet. We all had a round of drinks. Helen asked, "What are you going to do with the campaign headquarters?"

I shrugged. "If I lose, we clean out and I slink off home and cry. If I win, though, I was thinking of just buying it. We can make part of it my local district office, and leave the other part for storage and future campaigns. Ask me again tomorrow."

"I'll ask you again, tonight!"

We were running a war room in a corner of the main room, with a couple of phones set up. At about a quarter after eight, we started getting calls from various precincts around the district, and they started writing totals on a blackboard. We had a lead at the start, but when the total is less than one percent of the vote, it's meaningless. By nine, however, the lead was pretty significant. There were approximately 210,000 votes that would likely be cast in the election, and the running total was 19,571 for me and 17,223 for Stewart. The television stations still weren't calling it, though.

I was too keyed up to think. I made myself another drink, and Marilyn followed me, and I made her one as well. "You need to calm down." She pushed me down on the couch and then sat down next to me. People came in and out, and every once in a while somebody would let out a whoop as another precinct was phoned in.

The lid blew off the place at ten. There was some screaming out in the main room and Jack Nerstein yelled, "You won! You won!"

I started to get up off the couch, when a worker bee ran in. "WBAL just called it. You won!"

I turned to stare at Marilyn, who was just staring back. Brew McRiley went to the television in the living room and switched it to WBAL, but stopped as the WMAR news came on at the top of the hour. We stopped there and watched. "We now have a stunning upset to call. In the Maryland Ninth, with 38% of the vote in, we are predicting that Republican billionaire investor Carl Buckman will unseat the eight term Democratic incumbent, Andy Stewart. In what is widely considered one of the nastiest campaigns across the country this election season, Buckman is beating Stewart by over twenty points."

There was a graphic on the screen, with both our names listed, and the vote count. Buckman was listed as 48,995, 61%, and Stewart was listed as 31,047, 39%. The total vote count was specified as 38%. There was a big check mark next to my name, and my picture was on the screen. Then there was a blip, and the results went to 52,325 and 32,029, and the percentages went to 62% and 38%.

Around me everybody was damn near screaming, but I just stared as the announcer went on to call the Maryland Fourth. I turned to my wife and just stared at her. "Holy shit!", I muttered.

Marilyn's face was as lit up as everyone else's. She squealed and threw herself at me, and I grabbed her by sheer reflex. I felt numb. Brewster grabbed my hand and started shaking, and I just looked at him and stared. "Carl! Carl?"

"Holy shit!", I said to him.

Brew laughed at me. "Yeah, holy shit. Dude, you need to sit down!" He pushed me back towards an armchair. "Make a hole! Dead man walking!"

Marilyn was laughing at me, and after I was pushed down into the chair, she sat on my lap and wrapped her arms around my neck. I finally came around when she began kissing me, so I returned the favor. She pulled back after a moment, as my friends laughed at me. "Wake up, Dopey! You won!"

I finally grinned back at her. "Holy shit, I won!"

Marilyn kissed me again, but then hands were on me, pulling me to my feet and slapping my back and shaking my hand. "Now what?", I asked, to nobody in particular.

"Now we wait until I can confirm this with Stewart's people.", replied McRiley. "In the meantime, don't drink anything more. I want you sober when this goes on television."

"Shit!", I muttered. I turned to Jack. "Hey, you think you can call anybody over at the police station? Maybe they could send somebody over to run a few breathalyzer tests. You know and I know, somebody is going to get wasted here tonight."

"Maybe even you!", he replied, smiling.

"Yeah, just maybe!", I answered, grinning back at him.

I circulated around the room, shaking some hands, and waiting for a call to come through. After a few more minutes a cell phone rang. We crowded around as Brewster pulled it out and answered. I couldn't really hear what he was saying, but he had a very consternated look on his face, and then he hung up the phone, shaking his head. He looked up at us and said, "Well, now I've heard everything. Andy Stewart isn't going to call to concede."

"He thinks he's going to win?", I asked.

"No, he's just not going to call you and concede."

I looked around me and found some other very confused faces. "I'm not following you.", said John.

Brew shrugged and said, "I'm not sure either. That was his campaign manager, Bart Billings. Bart told me that Andy knows he's lost, and they talked about it, but Andy refuses to call you and give you the time of day. He said to tell you to go..." Brew looked around and saw the women in the room, and stopped. "He said to tell you to go, uh, pound salt."

I gave him a very confused look. "So, what does that mean? He's going to contest it? Demand a recount or something? Wait until the election is certified?" That wouldn't happen for several more weeks.

"No, he's conceding, I guess, he just doesn't want to talk to you."

"Christ, what a prick!", commented Bob Destrier. "Sorry, ladies!"

None of the women seemed to care. His wife, Millie, however, asked, "So, what do we do?"

"Let's throw it back into his face, force it on him.", I replied. "I go down there and make my victory speech, and specify that we have heard from his staff. If he wants to complain about it, he can take it up with the news stations tomorrow. Let him answer their questions." There were a lot of agreeing nods around the room. "Okay, let's do it!"

I made a few shooing motions towards the door, and everybody started heading out into the main room. I checked my appearance in a mirror, and took a deep breath. I turned to Marilyn, who was standing next to me, and said, "Show time!"

"Let me go first. I need to tell the reporters you're coming in, so they can report it live, or whatever. Give me five minutes!", ordered Brew.

I nodded and we waited. After a few minutes one of the worker bees, a wildly grinning car salesman who had joined the campaign after hearing me speak at a Chamber of Commerce gathering, came running up, to tell us Brewster said we could go. As I left the room, cheers erupted, along with some applause, from some people in the hallway. I just grinned at everybody and continued on into the main room, where the pandemonium became truly raucous! I went up to the podium we had put at the end of the room. We had a backdrop there, along with an American flag and a Maryland flag. The noise continued until I made some quieting motions, and then things got quiet. I looked over at McRiley, who was talking to the reporters. Some really bright lights came on and then he turned and gave me the go-ahead.

"Thank you. We just received a call from the Stewart headquarters conceding my victory tonight in the Congressional race for the Maryland Ninth. This is it, folks. We won!"

There was a bunch of cheering and applause, and it took a moment to get things under control.

"I have so many people to thank for this, I'm not sure where to start. First and foremost, I have to thank the voters who voted for me. They have placed an awesome trust in me. I promise not to abuse that trust, to be a Congressman that every citizen of the Ninth can be proud of, whether they're a Republican or Democrat."

There was a smattering of boos at the mention of the Democrats, but I had been expecting that. I held my hands up and said, chidingly,

"Now, let's be fair. There is no possible way I would have won without the votes of a lot of good Democrats, people who are trusting that I will represent them better than they have been represented in the past. I am not the Republican Congressman, I am the Congressman for the entire Maryland Ninth, for all of us, Republican and Democrat, and I welcome and appreciate their support!"

"Next, I have to thank the people in this room, and elsewhere - you guys!"

There was a lot of cheering at this.

"This is a team sport, and you were the team! I wouldn't be up here without you! I could never have done this alone! Thank you for all the hard work you've performed! I won't forget it!"

"Next, I need to thank the people responsible for getting me into the race in the first place - John Steiner, Jack Nerstein, Bob and Millie Destrier! They were the ones to convince me to give it a shot. I've spent the last year alternately thanking them and cursing them, and I'm still not sure which I want to do more, but they got me into the race, for better or worse! We can always figure out a way to blame them!"

That got some laughter.

"I have to thank Brewster McRiley, our beloved campaign director. I had no idea what I was getting into when I started this. Brewster did, but he never told me! Brew come up here!"

Brewster was dragged up to the podium amidst more than a little joking, and I gave him a one-armed hug around the shoulders. Then I sent him off.

"One of these days I might just forgive him!"

More laughter, and then I reached out and took Marilyn's hand and pulled her close to me.

"And finally, more than anybody else in the room, I need to thank my wife, Marilyn. No matter what happened, Marilyn believed in me and supported me, just like she has since we first met back in 1974. Whatever I've done in my life, she's the one who said I could do it. No matter how dark it seemed during this campaign, Marilyn believed in me. She's the reason you can all be sure I'll do the best job I can as Congressman, because whatever I do, I want to make her proud of me, and not ashamed. So thanks, honey, because none of this means anything without you by my side!"

I looked down and found her crying. I was on the verge of saying I was sorry, but then she wrapped her arms around my neck and kissed me. I handed her my handkerchief and she wiped her face and gave me the best smile in the world.

"Okay, so much for the great words! This is a really big night, and I think it's time to party. Now, let's not get stupid and drunk and crazy. We're going to check everybody as they leave and take your car keys away if you can't drive. I have no intention of ruining this night, and I'm going to need your help to make me the best Congressman I can be. Can we all agree on that?!"

There was a mix of cheers and good-natured jibes. Then somebody popped a cork on a champagne bottle and passed it forward. It had been years since I had drunk champagne from the bottle, but I had some, and then passed it to Marilyn. More cheering erupted as we drank the champagne and laughed.

Then we stepped away from the podium and I passed the bottle around. Marilyn looked up at me and grinned. "Now what?"

I smiled and shook my head. "I have no fucking clue!"

Book 6: Politics

Chapter 105: Vacation

Tuesday, November 6, 1990

I should have expected what happened next, but I didn't. Brewster's cell phone rang and he held it up to his ear, and then his eyes got wide. He grabbed my shoulder and said, "Come on, back to the room!"

"What's up?"

He slipped the phone back into his holster. "The President is going to be calling."

I stared at him for a moment. "The President? You mean, the President?"

McRiley began dragging me out of the room, and the other pros and Marilyn followed me. Out in the hallway, where it was quieter, he said, "Yes, that President! Not the President of the Baltimore Elks Club, the President of the United States! He calls all the new Congressmen and congratulates them." He kept hustling us back to the suite.

Once inside, I looked over at my wife, who looked as shocked as I did. For all my money and 'power', I had never even seen the President at any kind of event, only on television, and certainly never talked to him. Brewster's cell phone rang and I jumped at the sound. I whirled to face him and he was speaking into it, and then he passed the phone to me. "Is it him?", I whispered.

He shook his head. "No, it's Gingrich. Say hello."

I took the phone. "Hello?"

"Carl, it's Newt Gingrich. How are you doing tonight?"

"Pretty good, sir. Thank you for calling.", I replied.

"Congratulations on your victory. That was one nasty campaign. I'm glad you kicked his butt."

"No more glad than Marilyn and I are. I think she was even angrier than I was."

I could hear a chuckle. "When you come to Orientation, I'll want to meet her, so she can tell me how bad it was. I'll want to meet you again as well. We'll need to figure out how to boot out some more Democrats."

"You can count on me, Congressman."

"I'll let you go, Carl. You'll be getting a lot of congratulations tonight. We'll talk soon."

I gave a good-bye and the phone call ended. I handed it back to Brewster. Almost immediately it rang again, and his eyes raised as he answered it. Then he looked over at me. "Is that him?", I whispered again.

He answered in a normal voice. "No, but it's the White House switchboard. I'm under orders to keep the line open for the next ten minutes and he will pick up at some point. Don't run to the bathroom in the meantime."

I suddenly had an incredible urge to pee! Oh Christ! I ran across the room and went into the bathroom, dropped my trousers and pissed and took a dump. What if I missed the president of the United States because I was in the bathroom!? As soon as I could, I wiped my ass and pulled my pants back up, and flushed as I raced back out to Brewster. Marilyn was laughing her ass off against the wall. McRiley simply handed me the phone. "Here, you hold the damn thing! He hasn't picked up yet."

I stared at it and held it up to my ear, but got nothing but some Muzak. After a few minutes more a woman came on the line and said, "Hello?"

"Yes?"

"Please be prepared for the President to be on the line in one minute." At that I got some more Muzak.

I swallowed hard and damn near came to attention. Then there was a click on the line and I heard George Bush – only he wasn't talking to me! "Okay, which one is this one?", he asked, like he was talking to someone else, and there was a muffled reply.

Major buzzkill!

He came back on the line. "Congressman-Elect Buckman, this is George Bush. Congratulations on your victory tonight!"

I stood a little straighter, which I have since learned is pretty normal, and answered, "Thank you, Mister President." I looked over at Marilyn and mouthed 'The President!' and pointed at the cell phone. She just laughed at me.

We spoke for just a couple of minutes, if that. Apparently it's a tradition that the President calls every newly elected Congressman and Senator, so he probably had a bunch of calls to make. He made a pro forma comment about looking forward to working with me, and a few other pleasantries. I finished with, "It will be an honor and a privilege to work with you, sir. Thank you, sir."

Brewster McRiley was giving me a big smile at that. "Laying it on a bit thick there, Carl?"

I smiled but shook my head. "That was the President of the United States, Brewster. It will be an honor and a privilege to work with him."

"You really are a true believer, aren't you?"

I had to laugh at that. "Very much so, I'm afraid."

"Don't worry, we'll beat that out of you.", he replied. I laughed some more.

I also got congratulatory phone calls from Bob Michel, the Minority Leader, and Lee Atwater, the Chairman of the RNC. Even William Donald Schaeffer, the Democratic Governor of Maryland, called to congratulate me. I smiled to myself afterwards. If my mother knew I was being congratulated by the Democrats, she'd disown me all over again!

It's a good thing I mentioned to Brewster that we were running off to Hougomont for the rest of the week, because he immediately began protesting loud and long! Wednesday he had a full schedule already planned for me! This involved two things, going on television and talking to reporters, and calling back everybody important and thanking them. He would allow us to vacation starting Thursday, but only after talking to every other human in the Ninth District before then.

It was after midnight when we got home. George Tilden had gotten one of his patrolmen to station himself at our door with a breathalyzer. He was pretty good natured about it, and we only had one guy get mouthy. We loaded him in a taxi and took away his keys. I kept an eye out for people and a few got sent home with somebody else driving. Interestingly, I was tested as well, and I passed, but Marilyn failed, which got her to giggling. The cop and I just rolled our eyes at that, and I loaded her in the car and took her home.

We went inside to find both her parents sleeping in our recliners. The only question I had was whether they fell asleep before or after the announcement. It was more than possible that they had fallen asleep ahead of time and didn't know that their son-in-law was a congressman-elect!

Dum-Dum woke up and madly scrambled over, so I grabbed her leash and took her outside. The ruckus woke up Big Bob, and he started climbing out of his chair as I went outside. Dum-Dum didn't take too long to do her business, and then we went back inside. She wandered back to Charlie's room to sleep. Harriet was lumbering up out of her chair.

"You win?", she asked.

I smiled over at her daughter. "Let me guess. You two fell asleep before the announcement?"

Big Bob laughed and nodded. "I think so."

"I won. I'll be the next Congressman from the Maryland Ninth.", I told them.

They stared at me for a moment. "Huh. You know, it's kind of hard to believe. I don't know as I've ever met a Congressman before.", he replied.

"We're pretty normal, Bob.", I said, grinning.

Marilyn laughed hard at that. "Don't push your luck, Carl. You haven't been sworn in yet!" Then she yawned.

"I need to get some sleep. Come on, Mother, let's go to bed. See you in the morning. Congratulations." He led Harriett down the hallway.

I followed my wife into our bedroom. "When do we have to be at the airport?", I asked. Marilyn had sorted it out with Taylor. "Oh, that's right, we aren't going to the airport."

"As soon as we wake up, I'm calling Taylor and sorting it out.", Marilyn replied.

"Fucking Brewster.", I muttered. We both shook our heads at that one.

The next morning we explained to Big Bob and Harriet that we would be delaying our trip by a day, and they agreed to help. By breakfast time Brewster had called and set up a schedule with reporters and television stations, and both Marilyn and I were to be at headquarters ASAP! Or sooner! We finished breakfast, shaved and/or showered, and were at campaign headquarters by nine. We were greeted by more people than I would have expected, and were cheered as we walked in the door.

I waved to everybody and then was dragged away into my office by Brew. "What's with all the people out there?", I asked.

"I asked a few people to come in, to help shut down and clean up. Be nice to everybody and thank everybody, and maybe they'll help us out again in two years, right?"

Understanding dawned on me. "Right, so I make sure I call or speak to all the volunteers. Got it!"

I ended up driving into Baltimore to talk on camera to the various television stations, but I spoke to Fletcher Donaldson of the Sun by telephone. Yes, we were excited by the win. Yes, we had to thank all the people who supported us, with donations and with time. No, I haven't talked to or heard from Andy Stewart. No, I haven't heard what he was saying about us (he was damning me left and right, and some of his statements were almost certainly actionable!) I won, and it was all water under the bridge.

Yadda, yadda, yadda! Be polite, don't say much of substance, thank everybody under the sun. In between interviews, Brewster had a list of names and times for me to call and say thank you, and some I had to promise to meet between now and when I was sworn in.

It was after dinner before Marilyn and I got back to the house. She was as frazzled as I was, but the day wasn't over. Waiting for us in the driveway was the head of our security detail, Henry Donaldson.

I got out of the car, and said, "Henry, is there a problem?" I glanced at the house, but nothing seemed out of the ordinary.

Henry saw my look, and he simply shook his head, and replied, "No, not yet, but there will be. We need to talk."

I stopped. "Is there a problem?", I repeated.

"Sorry. No, nothing is wrong with the kids or the house or your family. This is about the future."

"Okay. Well, come on in. We can talk in the den." I shrugged at Marilyn, and she gave me a perplexed look in return.

We went inside, to hear everybody clamoring that they saw me on television, and Big Bob indignantly commented about the bile Andy Stewart was still spewing. We laughed at it all. I told Big Bob that we had talked to Brewster McRiley about Stewart, and he was calling him in the morning. Andy got a one day free pass. If he said anything starting tomorrow, we were going to sue his pants off.

I made a round of drinks for everybody, including Henry, and then the three of us headed into the den. Charlie tried to follow us in, but we scooted his butt back out the door. Then we settled into chairs. "Well, what's up?", I asked. "Everything seems okay."

"We need to talk about your security situation. Congratulations on winning, but that just complicates things." I tried to wave him off, but Henry was dead serious. "Mister Buckman, I've been doing this long enough to know what I'm talking about. I was on the Detail for President Reagan back at the beginning of his first term, right after the shooting. If you don't mind me saying it, you've been lucky so far."

I was really tempted to blow him off, but then I remembered something John had once said about listening to the experts you paid for. Henry Donaldson seemed pretty serious. "Okay, so explain that."

"Sir, you are a billionaire and a politician. One or the other would be bad enough, but the two together? You are an incident just waiting to happen! Combine that with your penchant for rescuing people ... what would have happened if it had been a gang and not just one guy at that diner? You run your personal security as if you were inviting disaster."

"As long as Marilyn and the kids are safe, I can generally handle myself."

"Sir, I beg to disagree with you. First, while your children and wife are generally safe when they are being tailed around by my crew, you usually dismiss them when you are there. You can't be both husband and father and security. It won't work. As for taking care of yourself, you are asking for trouble. All it takes is one insurance fraud crew managing an accident and you could be in huge trouble."

"Insurance fraud?", asked Marilyn.

He nodded to her. "Imagine this – your husband is out driving home from somewhere when a beat up car full of people pulls up in front of him and slams on the brakes. Your husband rear ends them, and then they sue for all sorts of stuff. If they are really professional, they do it at a location where they have cameras, you know, 'friends' who just happened to be nearby. They will sue you for all sorts of medical bills, and then for causing the wreck, and traumatic this-that-and-the-other. It happens all the time."

I glanced over at my wife, who looked horrified by the thought. "I've heard of that happening, but I thought it was just in books or bad television shows.", I said.

"It's a multibillion dollar a year insurance problem. In your case, the danger is not in the insurance fraud aspect, which does not really affect you, but the publicity and the chance for blackmail."

"I'll be damned.", I said, to nobody in particular.

"So, what does this mean for us? What do you want us to do?", asked Marilyn.

"We need to treat security much more comprehensively. Both you and Mister Buckman need to handle security more professionally. There will be some changes, not so much for you and the children, but definitely for Mister Buckman.", he answered.

"What kind of changes?"

"The house is fairly secure, but we need to put a gate across the driveway, and monitor visitors more closely from the station across the road. We are already tailing the school buses to school and keeping an eye on Charlie and the twins. Ma'am, you should be having one of our drivers with you everywhere. We can make it either a man or a woman, but they can't be following you anymore, they need to be driving you."

"Good God, it's sounds like what the President has to do!", she exclaimed.

At that Henry and I looked at each other and smiled. "It's not even close!", he said. I just laughed and shook my head. Henry continued, "You tailor the response to the likely security threat. In the President's case, nobody really worries about insurance or blackmail, but everybody worries about kidnapping and assassination. I don't see assassination as a problem here, although kidnapping is a possibility."

"Really?"

He shrugged. "Yes and no. All those pictures of the missing children on milk cartons and such – the majority are either runaways or custody disputes. Actual kidnappings are very unlikely; the number is on the order of a few thousand a year or so, depending on how you calculate it. Now, that's a serious problem, but it's not many when you figure this is a nation of almost 300 million people. The level of surveillance we have maintained is enough to stop anything but a professional kidnapping for ransom, which is something you only see on bad spy movies or television."

"It's different with the President and his family.", I told Marilyn. "That's where the bad movie scenarios actually kick in, both for kidnapping and murder. The problem is that if somebody is willing to pay the price in bodies, they can always kill or capture their target."

"So don't run for President.", I was ordered.

"Congressman was bad enough. I have no idea why anybody would actually want to run for President.", I countered. "So what do you want out of me?", I asked him.

"You can't be doing things on your own anymore. From now on you have a driver and a bodyguard full time. We can dress them appropriately so they blend in. That stunt at the Westminster Diner? No more! What if Andy Stewart had been behind it, and the husband and wife team had been actors? You'd have been in Hagerstown, not him. No more of that stuff!"

Huh! It's one thing to have your wife complain about that. It's her job to complain about everything. It's quite another to have a professional complain.

"One other thing. Mrs. Buckman, I am not trying to be indelicate, but I have noticed that you don't have any tan lines..."

I snorted and began to laugh. I knew immediately where this was going! Marilyn turned beet red and spluttered, "You mean ... you've seen ... oh my God!" Marilyn frequently tanned topless by the pool while the kids were in school, and when it was just the two of us at Hougomont she often wore even less. I was going to miss that.

"I don't want to be indiscreet, but a photographer with a telephoto lens could probably rent a helicopter for a thousand or two a day, and sell the photos for five to ten times that, more if Mister Buckman was with you and, well..." He left the sentence hanging. Donaldson at least had the decency to look a touch embarrassed to be bringing this up.

"Oh my God!" Marilyn wouldn't even look at him, or me, for that matter.

I couldn't take it any longer. I leaned back and laughed loud and long, at which point Marilyn reached over and punched me in the arm. That only made me laugh more. No more sex on the beach.

Eventually I stopped laughing, and the looks Marilyn was giving me indicated that sex on the beach, or anywhere else for that matter, was no longer a possibility in this lifetime. I simply smiled and asked, "So, we're going to the Bahamas tomorrow. Do we need to cancel that, too? Or do you have a crew on standby for this?"

"I'd like to send a man and a woman with you. They can report back on any changes we need to make in the routines down there."

"Okay, but they need to be here mid-morning, or it's wheels up without them."

"They'll be here by nine."

I stood up at that and walked Henry out, agreeing to make the changes necessary. I knew I wasn't going to like some of them, but I also knew I had been lucky so far. He was right, being a billionaire and a Congressman was going to take some work.

I showed Henry out and headed back into the den. Harriet had put the kids to bed, and she and Big Bob were dozing in the living room. Marilyn looked at me sheepishly when I entered the den, and that just made me laugh some more. "The secret is out! You could have cost us the election!", I teased.

"You're not funny!", was the riposte, although she began to giggle.

"If I'm not funny, then how come you're laughing?"

"Do you think anybody actually saw me? I've never been so embarrassed in my life!"

"You mean besides me and your other boyfriends?" That earned me a squawk of outrage. I sat down at my desk and twirled around to face her. "Well, if we can't have incredibly hot sex outside, we'll just have to have incredibly hot sex inside."

"Keep laughing and you'll never have any sex anywhere!" I laughed at that, and Marilyn gave me a "Humph!" and stood up and headed for the door.

I made a long arm and got her around the waist as she passed me by. "I bet I can change your mind."

"Oh? How?", she said snidely.

"Like this!" And with that statement I pulled her skirt up and grabbed the waistband of her pantyhose, and pulled them and her panties down.

"Carl!", she squealed. She looked wildly towards the closed door to the rest of the house. "We can't! Not here!"

I kept pushing her pantyhose down below her knees to her ankles. "Your parents are snoozing, so you'd better not scream too loudly." I lifted her up and spun her around so that she was sitting on my desk, her bare bottom on the calendar/blotter. I pushed her knees apart and put my face between her thighs and began to eat her out. For all of my wife's complaining about her parent's coming in, she was very excited and very wet. Almost immediately Marilyn began to whimper and squirm around on the desktop. I glanced up and she had her eyes closed and was biting on one knuckle; the other hand grabbed the back of my head and pulled me into her pussy and kept me there!

I chowed down through a couple of orgasms for my wife, and then pulled my head away. She was looking at me in a dazed fashion. I unzipped my pants and pushed them and my briefs down to my ankles. "Your turn.", I told her.

Marilyn slid off the desk and down to the floor. My cock was stiff as an iron pipe. I didn't want or need any sort of 'foreplay', so when she opened her mouth and took me inside, I pushed forward and put my hands in her hair and fed it to her completely. It felt good, really good, and she sucked me and jacked my shaft, and I don't think I lasted two minutes.

After swallowing my load, Marilyn licked her lips and sat back on her ankles. "I bet the President doesn't have to worry about helicopters buzzing the house and taking photos. He can probably have them shot down!", she said, giggling a touch.

I smiled down at her. "No, but I bet the Russians have satellites that could take photos! Wouldn't that be a kick!?"

I stood up and helped Marilyn to her feet. We pulled ourselves together and grabbed the glasses and headed back to the living room. Marilyn's parents were both snoring in the recliners. I rolled my eyes at Marilyn. She scooted down the hall to the bedroom and I woke them and sent them to bed. We readied ourselves for bed, made love, and then fell asleep.

Any hope I had of an early morning quickie was destroyed when Holly and Molly decided to join us when the sun rose. They came running into our bedroom and jumped on the bed. The two peppered us with questions about what we would do by ourselves in the Bahamas (I chuckled at that and got a dirty look from their mother) as well as what would happen when I started my new job. Were we moving? Were they going to a new school? What would happen with Dum-Dum? Were we getting a divorce, so that Daddy could move and Mommy could stay behind!? (I whispered to Marilyn that sounded reasonable, and got punched in the ribs for my trouble.) Some of the questions we had heard yesterday, and they wanted to know more.

Marilyn chased the girls out of the room and we both headed into the bathroom. I debated joining her in the shower, but with three kids and her parents in the house, it didn't seem like a real bright idea. I brushed my teeth while she showered, and then it was my turn. I was still dressed and out of the bathroom before she was.

We answered a bunch of questions over breakfast, but then we loaded the kids on the school bus. No, we weren't getting a divorce. (We had to explain that one to Marilyn's parents, who got a kick out of it.) No, we weren't moving. No, they weren't changing schools. Dum-Dum was going to be just fine. Charlie had a bunch of questions, too, but he was a bit more practical. His were related to figuring out what he could get away with while Mom and Dad were away for the next few days! He headed out the door and I just looked at Big Bob and Harriett. "He's all yours! Don't call us unless he gets kidnapped. I'm going to make the kidnappers pay to give him back!"

"He's too much like his father.", said Marilyn.

"Yeah? Well, then, I'll just do like my father and not bail him out of jail!"

Marilyn snorted. "You've always gotten out of jail on your own, just fine."

Big Bob and Harriett looked at each other at this. "You haven't really been in jail, have you?"

I just gave them a really wicked grin. "So many times I've lost track! Five or six times, at least! Ask your daughter someday."

"Don't get me involved in your legal shenanigans! Bail yourself out!", Marilyn answered, really making her parents worry.

"We need to pack." I grabbed the luggage from the utility room as Marilyn loaded the dishwasher, and I dragged the luggage into our bedroom. We weren't going to be gone all that long. Today was Thursday and we would fly home on Monday. Just long enough to work on our tans, engage in repeated mindless sex, and drink a lot of rum, all out of the reach of reporters and Andy Stewart. At least we hoped we would be out of reach of everybody. Henry Donaldson's talk last night made me wonder.

Packing was simple, at least for me. Some khakis and Hawaiian shirts, a sport coat and a couple of dress shirts for going out to dinner, a pair of socks or two, and not much else. I was wearing khakis and a Hawaiian shirt, and deck shoes without socks. Marilyn packed light, too, at least as light as she ever packs. I think she had two outfits per day, plus spares. No bras or panties, though. I teased her about that and she showed me her bag. Then she sent me out of the bedroom, since she needed to prepare for the trip. "What more do you need to prepare for?", I asked.

"I'm taking a bath and shaving.", she said. "All over!"

I swallowed hard and finished packing my bag and the hanging bag and dragged them out to the living room. About an hour later Marilyn came out of the bedroom wearing a calf-length sundress with a halter top and a row of buttons down the front. She had on some high-heeled sandals. "You should wear a jacket. It's cold out.", said her mother.

She nodded. "I can leave it in the car at the airport. We're leaving you the van. We'll take Carl's Cadillac to the airport."

Or not. Promptly at nine, the doorbell rang and we opened it to find a pair of security people standing there with Henry. Out in the driveway I could see a small gray limo idling. "I'd like to introduce Joe Bonnano and Marie Telluride. They'll be going with you to the Bahamas. In addition to your personal security, they'll also be examining security at your home there. Joe used to do diplomatic security for the State Department and Marie was in the FBI."

That seemed impressive enough. Big Bob and Harriet were a bit concerned, though. "Is there a problem? Have there been any threats?", she asked.

Henry responded, saying, "Nothing of the sort. We simply talked it over and we plan to increase security on the Buckmans. Now that the Congressman is in the public eye, there might be some possible problems in the future. We just want to be ready."

I wasn't sure how reassuring that was to my in-laws. He was still talking to them as we kissed the kids good-bye and hustled out the door. "Let's go before they get nervous.", I said.

We were directed to the limo, and tossed our bags in the trunk, alongside two other large suitcases, presumably belonging to Joe and Marie. Joe was a big beefy guy who looked like an Italian Mafia hitman, but I knew the State Department wasn't hiring thugs, so he had to be pretty smart. Marie had that serious professional look I've occasionally seen in businesswomen who decided their career was more important than home life. Both of them looked like they could clean up nice and accompany us anywhere we needed to go.

Twenty minutes later we were at the Westminster airport. It was about 9:30, and there was a G2 sitting on the tarmac. I didn't see any other planes ready to go. "I hope that's for us.", I told my wife. "Is this what you worked out with Taylor?"

We immediately got a lesson in security. Rather than just open the door and hop out, Joe told us to wait. He got out of the car, looked around briefly, and then opened the door. On the other side of the car Marie was continuing to scan the area. I knew I would get used to it, but it was a little disconcerting. Joe accompanied us inside, while Marie stayed with the car.

Normally I made the travel arrangements, but this time Marilyn had done it. I had been too busy campaigning, and we had decided that either way, we were going away. Most of all, we had a very limited window to do this. In a week and a half, on Sunday the 18th, both Marilyn and I had to be in Washington for a week of freshman orientation. It was going to be like heading back to college!

We parked at the charter office and headed inside. A fellow standing at the counter looked up at us. I recognized him as a pilot we had used before. "The Buckmans, right?"

"You remembered.", I said.

"It's not hard to when you've been on the news so much lately. Ready to go?"

"I've been ready! I need a vacation after all of this!", I replied with a snort.

He laughed at that. "I bet you do. Well, if you have any luggage, let's get you loaded up." He came around the counter and followed us out to the limousine. He grabbed the suitcases while I carried the hanging bag. Marilyn took off her jacket and tossed it on her seat, grabbed her purse, and headed towards the plane. Our security detail each grabbed a suitcase. I patted my pants pockets and confirmed I had our passports, and we headed towards the G2. Ten minutes later we were settled in and climbing to altitude.

Once we were level, a chime rang and the pilot came on and announced our remaining flight time and said we had some champagne cooling in the fridge. I smiled over at Marilyn. "You and Taylor have everything planned, I see."

"I have to admit, this really beats flying coach.", replied my wife. She unbuckled and went forward. A small refrigerator was built into the forward bulkhead, and she retrieved a bottle of champagne and brought it back to me. Then she went forward again and found where the glasses were.

I turned to face our security team. "I don't know if you're allowed to partake, but you're invited, I guess. Or is that verboten? I've never really had bodyguards before."

Joe replied, "No, that would really sort of defeat the whole purpose, wouldn't it? Don't mind us, though. Feel free to have a drink." Marie simply smiled.

"Uh..." I glanced over at Marilyn. I guessed another round in the Mile High Club was out. I pointed at the seats in front of ours, which were facing rearward. "Come on up here, we need to know how this works." I turned back to face the front of the plane, and they unbuckled and came forward. Joe sat down in front of me and Marie sat in front of Marilyn.

I stripped off the foil and wire cage, and then carefully popped the cork, making sure to hold it away from me in case it got fizzy. I handed Marilyn her flute and then set the bottle into the holder. "Okay, teach me about what we have to do. How does this work?", I asked. It felt very weird drinking in front of them.

"How much experience have you had with bodyguards?", asked Marie. It was practically the first thing she had said so far. She was a very quiet type.

I glanced at my wife a moment before answering. "Some, but not much. Back in 1983 Marilyn was being stalked, and we brought a team in to drive her around and eventually take her out of the state, but that all ended when my brother was stopped."

"When you killed him, correct?"

"Correct. Since then, we went a lot lower profile. The kids and Marilyn would get a tail whenever they were out, but when I was with them, I handled things. When I travel I usually get a driver when I'm away, but nothing else."

"Mister Donaldson explained why that's no longer really sufficient?"

Both Marilyn and I nodded. "We want to keep it low profile with the kids, as long as we can.", I responded.

Marilyn added, "We don't want them being driven around in armored cars."

That earned a smile from both of them. "We can handle that. The biggest change will be the Congressman, here.", said Joe. He turned to face me. "Here's a few ground rules. Don't leave a setting until somebody has had a chance to look around and wave you forward. We can do that very discreetly. Don't just jump out of the car and run in somewhere. We'll open the door for you to let you out, and then open the door of the building and look in first."

"We won't hover over you, either, but we will be in the background.", said Marie. "We'll be dressed appropriately for the occasion, and just look like we're mingling in. If it's something in Washington, where you'll be in a secure situation, we won't even go in."

"So if I'm in the Capitol building?", I asked.

"Once you go inside, we'll just stay with the car or head to the office or something. You have to call us to tell us to pick you up. We won't be over your shoulder in meetings."

Joe said, "When you reserve a room, try to reserve one with a maid's bedroom, that sort of thing. Otherwise, we can just stand post in the hallway."

"Generally, you can ignore us. Don't ask us if we want a drink or want to eat or whatever. We'll make arrangements for that. Don't think you're being rude to us. Just go about your business, whatever it is.", said Marie.

"Huh. Uh, are you two carrying? You know, guns? Now?", I asked. Joe opened his jacket to show a small automatic. Marie simply nodded. "How does that work overseas? What are the rules in the Bahamas? I would prefer not to need to bail out my bodyguards. You're supposed to bail me out, not the other way around."

That earned a few chuckles from everybody. "We will need to make some arrangements. We should be safe, but try to avoid getting us in a gunfight.", was Joe's smiling reply.

I glanced at my wife. "Good advice.", she commented drily.

The four of us chatted for the rest of the flight, mostly about Joe's and Marie's backgrounds and experiences, which were totally alien to Marilyn and me.

Eventually we were on approach to Nassau and descended to land. The strange part came when we taxied up to the terminal. As always, we parked away from the terminal and waited for a Bahamian Customs officer to come out. Normally this doesn't take all that long, since Nassau isn't the world's busiest airport, and they are used to having a number of small planes land. Instead, the pilot popped the bulkhead door open and yelled back, "We've been asked to hold for Customs. It'll be a few more minutes."

I went forward. "Anything unusual?", I asked.

"Not that I know of. You guys carrying the crown jewels?", he replied.

"Not us!"

We shrugged at each other and waited. He kept one engine running to provide power to the air conditioning, since otherwise it's just a big metal tube in the tropical sun.

About ten minutes later, he said, "Okay, it's showtime." He shut down the engine and came back and opened the door as a pair of Customs officers approached.

That in itself was unusual, since we had never had more than one check us out and wave us through. Maybe the second guy was a trainee, but I didn't think so. For one thing, the first officer didn't do any more than glance at all of our passports. He said, "Mr. and Mrs. Buckman, would you please come with me?"

"What's wrong?", I asked.

"Nothing's wrong. We simply need you to come inside for a moment. This will be cleared up shortly. This officer will stay with your luggage."

The pilot looked very alarmed at this, figuring we were smuggling something. On the other hand, who the hell smuggles shit from the U.S. to the Bahamas? It goes the other direction! I motioned for Joe and Marie to stay seated. They couldn't do anything with the cops involved in any case. What were we going to do? Yank up the stairs and blast our way down the runway? This wasn't an old rerun of Miami Vice.

Marilyn and I shrugged in confusion and then climbed down the steps and walked with the Customs guy inside. We were led into an office where a slim man of average height in a police uniform was waiting, seated behind a desk. The Customs officer handed him our passports. The second man glanced at them and then at us, and looked at the Customs officer and tilted his head towards the door. The Customs officer nodded and silently left.

The police officer turned back to us and smiled. "Welcome back to the Bahamas, Mrs. Buckman, Mister Buckman. Here, you may have these back. Thank you."

I took our passports and put them back in my pocket. "Is there some sort of problem, officer?"

He brought his hand up to his heart, and answered theatrically. "Oh, I am heartbroken! You don't remember me! And yet I remember you so well! Allow me to re-introduce myself to you. I am Assistant Commissioner Javier. We met back in 1982."

Marilyn continued to look mystified, but it came back to me. I looked closely at the policeman's face. It looked a bit older, with a few more lines, and a trace of gray at the temples, but I could tell who it was. "The last time I saw you you were an Assistant Superintendant, if I remember correctly. Might I assume that Assistant Commissioner is a step or two up from that?"

He smiled broadly. "Oh, yes, several steps. That is why I am here. It seems that you, too, have had a promotion since those days!"

I gave a modest shrug and a nod. Then I noticed Marilyn, and I turned towards her. She said, "Carling, what is going on?"

"Ah ... Marilyn, allow me to introduce you to Assistant Commissioner Javier. When last you saw him, he was but a humble Assistant Superintendant on the island of Eleuthera, and he was talking to us in the clinic where I was being sewed up after the bar fight. Remember that?"

Marilyn's eyes popped wide open at that. "But that was years ago! What's wrong now?!"

Javier had a big grin on his face. "Oh, nothing at all. I am simply here as a humble messenger. You have been invited to dinner by the Prime Minister at Government House on Saturday evening."

I stared at him for a second. "Dinner with the Prime Minister? Who? Us? Why?"

Javier laughed at me. "Yes, you! Who else! Why? Why is because you are now a member of your Congress! We try to be polite to them. Why else!?"

I turned to face Marilyn, who looked as stumped as I was. "I'll be damned!" I turned back to Javier. "We don't really have a choice in this, I am guessing."

He held his hands out in a placating gesture. "Of course you have a choice, but the smart choice is to say yes and get to meet the people who own the island your house is on, hmmm? Please, it will be very pleasant. The Prime Minister, your Ambassador, a few other people ... nothing too elaborate."

I rolled my eyes and looked at Marilyn, who gave me a wry look and shrugged. I shrugged back, and then said, "Well, when you put it that way ... It better not be too elaborate. We're on vacation, and I left my tuxedo at home!"

"That won't be necessary. A suit would be fine, or perhaps a sport jacket even. Did you bring one? No? Well, we have many fine shops you can visit by then."

"Great. You'd better be there, too, buddy."

"Oh, of course. I'll even have a car sent round for you on Saturday evening, eh?"

"Fine." Then I thought of something. "How did you learn I was a Congressman? I haven't even been sworn in yet. And how did you get this job?"

"The second part is the answer to the first. I am in charge of special investigations for the Prime Minister. When the interest in you surfaced recently, it was placed in my hands.", he answered.

"Interest in me? What possible interest could the government of the Bahamas have in me? You've never had any before!"

"But you weren't a Congressman before, were you."

"Still..."

He gave me a wry shrug. "Blame it on your reporters back home. Somebody called our embassy in Washington about the events back in 1982. Nobody there really knew anything about it, so they called the home office and asked them. Well, that was eight years ago, so it got passed along to the Assistant Commissioner of Special Investigations to look into. A candidate for the American Congress was in a bar fight? How extraordinary! So I looked into it, and discovered that somebody with the same name visits us on a regular basis and actually owns a home here. A billionaire, no less! Well, why don't we get the original police officer to see if they are the same people? What a bright idea! And here we find ourselves now."

"And it just happens that you are that officer. That is quite the coincidence.", I said.

"That really is a coincidence. But anyway, once we knew who you were, the embassy was told to watch the news and let us know if you won. I also contacted the maintenance company that takes care of your home here, and asked them to let me know about your schedule, and they told me you were coming here this week. So, we simply put two and two together. You won, and you're here, and now the Prime Minister would like to meet you."

"Well, far be it from me to rain on anyone's parade. Please let them know we will be happy to attend. Simply call and let us know the time the car will come out. What exactly does the Assistant Commissioner of Special Investigations investigate, by the way?", I asked.

He chuckled at that. "Anything the Prime Minister wants me to."

I suddenly had a bright idea. "Assistant Commissioner, do you have a few minutes. I just found myself with a security detail, and we need to know a few rules. Could I have them speak to you?"

"Of course."

I left Marilyn in the office and went back to the plane. I climbed up the steps and said, "Everything is kosher. I can explain it later. Listen, if you two wanted to find out about carrying a weapon here, I have just the man to help you. Leave them on the plane and come with me."

Joe and Marie looked mystified, but complied. Joe took his out of his shoulder holster and left it on his seat. Marie must have been carrying hers in her handbag, because she left that behind. I introduced them to Javier, and then I went back out, to explain things to the pilot and copilot, and start unloading our luggage. They helped me carry it over to our minivan parked at the terminal. I also made sure we moved the security detail's luggage.

When we made it back to the plane, we found Javier on board with Joe and Marie, inspecting their identification and carry permits from Maryland. He nodded to them and handed everything back. All I caught was that they needed to run into town tomorrow to see him and he would give them something official. That was for them to sort out. When we got back, Henry could figure out something long term. Another crisis resolved.

We drove directly to Hougomont. As the Assistant Commissioner had mentioned, we had been using a maintenance company for years now. While we didn't want staff around during our visit, we did want the place properly taken care of between visits. They handled all the yard work and maintenance, and cleaned and did the house laundry (sheets and things) after we left. They would clean out the fridge and tidy things up, too. Some of the guests we let use the place when we weren't around could be a bit sloppy. Also, there was a standing list of staples to be checked on in the kitchen cupboards, and some liquor to be restocked in the cabinet. We didn't need to stop on the way there to pick up groceries. We would probably have to reevaluate some of these things in light of the new security situation.

Marilyn teased me as we left the airport. "Wow! An invitation to meet the Prime Minister! You Congressmen must be pretty important! I guess I did alright dumping my tycoon boyfriend for somebody as important as you!"

I snorted and laughed. "Now I get to tell you to behave, or I'm going to tell your husband you're cheating on him!" She just laughed at me.

Once at the house, we unloaded the minivan and carried the luggage inside. Ours went into our room, and we let Joe and Marie use a couple of the spare bedrooms. They said this was only a temporary thing. We should give serious consideration to building a small security building out of sight somewhere on the property. I'd have to give that some thought. We had the acreage, but I had just never considered it before. Then they disappeared, to wander around outside and check out the property.

I took the opportunity to follow Marilyn into the bedroom. Earlier, I had failed to detect any underwear under my wife's dress. If we couldn't fool around outside anymore, we would just have to fool around inside!

I waited until Marilyn came out of the master bath and stopped her. With one hand I cupped one of her breasts through the dress, while I used the other hand to begin unbuttoning her dress. She smiled, but said, "What will they think?!"

"Remember, they said to ignore them." I slipped my hand inside to begin toying with her breasts directly, eliciting a pleasant shudder in her.

"Oh, God, they are going to think we're ... oh..." Her eyes fluttered as she came from my flicking her nipples.

"So what! We are!"

I pulled her over to the bed and sat down on it, where I was able to finish with the buttons. Marilyn shrugged off the dress and crawled onto the bed with me. Marilyn returned the favor by stripping me naked as well. We slipped onto our sides, facing each other, and while I suckled her nipples and fingered her slit, Marilyn began stroking my cock. Within five minutes she was moaning and demanding, "Fuck me! Fuck me!" I rolled her on her back and Marilyn tried to pull me on top of her, but I resisted. I threw a leg over hers and held her in place on her back, legs spread, and I reached across to grasp the arm which had been flailing around, and placed that between her legs. I held her hand there, forcing her to pleasure herself, as she moaned and demanded to be fucked.

Eventually I relented, and smiled to myself as I rolled between her legs. It was like sinking my cock into a hot and soupy swamp of pussy juice. Marilyn gasped and wrapped her arms and legs around me tightly, and I began to plow my cock in and out of her. She was babbling to me, "Yes, yes, fuck me, fuck me...", over and over. My cock was making squishing noises as I pistoned in and out of her. I couldn't take any more. I gave a final hard thrust and buried myself inside her as I sagged down on top and my cock and balls spasmed out a heavy load.

I lay there for a minute or so, catching my breath, and then rolled to the side. Marilyn rolled with me, and I could feel the wetness leaking from her as she snuggled at my side. "Ummm...", she murmured. "Let's do that again."

I smiled and snorted with laughter. "Fine by me, but you're going to have to do some motivation. I'm a little tuckered out at the moment."

"What did you have in mind?"

In response I simply reached up and pushed on the top of her head gently. Marilyn giggled and said, "I thought it would be something like that!" She licked her way down my chest and didn't stop until she was able to lick the sticky mixture of come and pussy juice off my cock She went slowly, and I had ample time to enjoy it as she cleaned me up and then began to suck my cockhead. I was debating letting her finish me off this way, but Marilyn decided to save a horse and ride a cowboy. Once she deemed me stiff enough, she rose up on her knees and straddled my waist, to sink down on top and bury my cock inside her that way. She leaned forward and began rubbing her tits in my face. "Suck my nipples, please, suck my nipples!"

I reached up and grabbed her tits and brought them to my lips. I switch back and forth, alternating, and my wife began whimpering. Her hips were going crazy, humping her pussy up and down on my cock, as I flicked her nipples with my fingers and tongue. Before I could come again, she had lifted up and her fingers were between us, rubbing her clit furiously as she orgasmed again. She collapsed on me.

"What about me? I'm not done yet!" I rolled her off of me and pushed her face down onto the bed. It was my turn, I straddled her from behind and slipped my still hard prick down between her thighs and forward into her cunt.

"Oh, God! Oh, God!", she began to moan. "Fuck my pussy! Fuck my pussy!"

I hammered into her from behind, and she came twice more before I unloaded into her slimy cunt a second time. Then I rolled off of her and collapsed, sweaty and panting, on the bed. "I think I like this a lot more than going to a dinner with the Prime Minister.", I commented. Marilyn rolled towards me and snuggled some more. I idly rubbed my wife's naked back, but wasn't figuring on a third bout. I wasn't eighteen anymore, and needed some recharge time these days.

"I have a feeling that that is going to become more common. You're Mister Important now!" Marilyn lifted her head up on my chest, and crossed her arms, to lay her head down so she could look up at me. "I think you need to plan ahead for this sort of thing."

"Maybe. I mean, I'm still the same old asshole I've always been, though."

She smiled at me. "I know you're an asshole, and you know you're an asshole, but not everybody else knows. Seriously, from now on we're going to have to make sure to pack some suits and dresses for when we go away. Wait until we're somewhere and some lobbyist tracks you down or something."

"If a lobbyist tracks me down while I'm on vacation, I'm going to place the umbrella from one of your silly drinks in a very tender location and then open it!"

"Cute. No, seriously! You'll be polite. You won't be an asshole. You'll take his money."

"You are very wise. I grovel at your feet, oh wise one!", I said. At that I heard a growl coming from between us. "That was you, I think.", I told her.

Marilyn blushed, but tried to deflect it anyway. "I think it was you!"

"Marilyn, I know better. You're a Lefleur, after all."

"What do you mean by that!?"

I laughed. "I've been around your brothers too often! Their favorite sport is competitive flatulence!"

She began laughing. "They aren't that bad!"

"Don't forget the belching contests at Christmas!"

"You're awful!" Just then my own stomach growled. "See! That was you, not me!"

I smiled and rolled her off me gently. "Let's get cleaned up, get dressed, and go out. We can have either a late lunch or an early dinner."

Marilyn's stomach growled again, and she giggled and agreed. We both took quick showers and dressed casually, and then headed outside. We found Joe and Marie sitting on the back porch, drinking juice. It was time for a late lunch or early dinner. We took Adelaide Road into Adelaide Village and stopped at a bar along South West Bay for a meal and a few rum punches. We ate a pile of conch fritters and then some fried grouper. At one point I asked Marilyn if she wanted to go shopping, but she said no, it was too late in the day. So we just sat there in the afternoon sun and sipped some punches while looking out at the bay, and then had an early dinner after that, and drank a few more rum punches. No they didn't have to pour us in our car at the end of the day, but it was a close run thing.

Friday morning in paradise involved rain and Advils, but we weren't in too bad a shape. Marilyn and I blamed each other for being of low moral character and leading the other to drink and ruin. By lunchtime, though, we were feeling fine for going out. We needed to do some shopping for Saturday night.

"I think our best bet would be some of the shops over on Paradise Island.", I told Marilyn.

"I can't just wear a sundress? That police officer said it wasn't very formal.", she countered.

I smiled at her, perhaps a touch indulgently. Marilyn simply isn't a very formal lady. While she did have several evening gowns for when we went down to the Lyric, playing dress-up hadn't been big on her games list when she was a little girl. It had been for Suzie, I recalled. I wondered if she still got to play dress-up with her State Trooper husband and family. I shook the thought off. "Commisioner Javier was being polite, but let's face it, it might not be black tie, but we need something more than clean shirts and a new denim skirt."

"Maybe I should have voted for Andy Stewart after all!", Marilyn said.

I stopped in my tracks and grinned. "Is that an admission you voted for me?"

Marilyn blushed as I caught her out. She had been telling me all along that she had cancelled out my vote. "No! I wrote it in! Mickey Mouse!"

I just laughed and led the way out the door. Joe and Marie went with us, of course, which felt very weird. Once we got over to Paradise Island, we found a place to park and then we went window shopping for a bit. We happened to go into a men's shop first, but that was simply coincidence. The suit for me wasn't going to be a problem. I take a size 42 Long straight off the rack, and we just needed to pay through the nose for the pants to be hemmed by the next day. I picked something in a nice flax colored linen, which was light enough for the islands and still formal enough for a dinner. Unless Javier was wrong about needing a tuxedo, I'd be okay.

I also bought some underwear, socks, a couple of ties, and a new pair of shoes that I prayed wouldn't hurt my feet. I had a pair of dress shirts to wear with the suit. So much for a casual vacation!

After lunch, where I fortified myself with a couple of beers, we went shopping for Marilyn. Marilyn took longer, a lot longer! Normally I hate shopping with her, this time I detested it! She has to try on everything, wants my opinion on everything, doesn't like what I have to say, and then chews on me before trying something else on. Then we would repeat the process down the street! I'm a guy, a member of a species possessed of both an X and a Y chromosome. Our primary interest in women's dresses is how difficult it will be to remove them!

At one point she came out of the dressing room with something on and turned around in it and actually asked me, "Does it make me look fat?"

I rolled my eyes at this. By now I had lived almost a century, and I knew the answer to this is always NO, but I was losing patience and was hungry. I twirled my fingers and made her turn around a second time. "Yeah, it really makes you look huge! I mean, your butt is simply enormous! I think the Navy is going to retire an aircraft carrier and land planes back there..."

"CARLING!"

"It's fine, dear!"

"You're no help!"

I stood up and gave her a hug. "You are absolutely gorgeous. You can wear anything. Now just pick out something so we can go get a drink!"

"OUT!"

"I saw a bar across the street. See you later!" I scrambled out of range, followed by Joe, leaving her and the shop girl to commiserate about the worthlessness of men. In the end, as I knew she would, she bought two dresses, plus all the necessary underwear and pantyhose required, although she drew the line at shoes. She had a very nice and dressy pair of high heeled sandals that would be fine. A clerk was sent to summon me in the bar, or at least summon my American Express card, so I paid off my bar tab and went to pay for Marilyn's spree and carry everything. I was not asked my opinion on what she had purchased, and was not even shown it!

That had blown the entire afternoon, so after we loaded the car, we stayed and had dinner at the Paradise Beach Hotel, and then we went over to the casino. I prevailed on Marilyn to give me a few hours alone at the high stakes blackjack tables and earned enough to pay for the shopping and some incidentals. I know, I know, what's a billionaire need to count cards for? I didn't gamble often enough to be on anybody's banned list. I cashed my chips in, took a check for a bit over $20,000, and found my wife at the $1 slots. Talk about your differences! We had one last drink, and then went home.

Saturday was actually the first day we had a chance to work on our tans. The weather had cleared and neither of us had any need or inclination to leave Hougomont. We slept late, worked on our tans, swam in the pool, walked on the beach, and took a very strenuous nap in the afternoon. We told each other it was so we would be refreshed in time for the dinner party. That was sort of true. After screwing each other ragged, we did get some real sleep.

While we were walking on the beach, a call came in and was picked up on the answering machine. A car would be sent around at half past seven. Drinks were at eight, and dinner was at nine. That was quite a bit later than Marilyn was used to, although I've always been more in tune with that schedule. At six, before we started getting ready, I cooked up a couple of hot dogs for each of us, to tide us over. We might be dining with the elites of the Bahamas, but around the house, we're incredibly average.

Promptly at seven-thirty a black Lincoln drove up to the front of Hougomont. I was still working on my tie, but Marilyn was still trying to decide on which of the two dresses she was going to wear. She had bought a red number which I liked, and a blue outfit. I finally decided for her by suggesting she wear red tonight and blue next weekend in Washington. There was a knock on the door and Joe went to open it. A large black man was standing there in a dark suit. I glanced out a window and saw the Lincoln idling. I went to the foyer. "Hi, you're here to take us into Nassau?"

"Yes, sir, to Government House.", he replied.

"Well come on in. Mrs. Buckman is going to be a few minutes. Unless you have lights and a siren on that thing, we're going to be fashionably late." I stepped out of the way and motioned him inside. I went over to a mirror and finished with my tie. I turned back to the driver, and asked, "You've taken people to these things before. Is this going to be all right?"

He looked at me and nodded. "That will be fine. Sir Lynden is not that formal."

"Sir Lynden?"

"Sir Lynden Pindling, the Prime Minister."

"Huh. He was knighted?"The driver nodded, and I said, "I don't think I've ever met a knight before. Knowing my luck, I'll spill my drink on him and end up in the dungeon."

The driver smiled. "You'd better not spill your drink then."

"I'll just blame my wife. I presume they do that in the Bahamas, too."

"I think they do that wherever they have husbands and wives, sir."

I laughed and nodded. "I'll hurry her up!"

Considering we were in police custody, so to speak, Joe and Marie were able to stay at Hougomont. I managed to hustle Marilyn out the door fifteen minutes later, and we made it to Government House almost on time. Nobody seemed to think this was a problem. We didn't seem to be dressed improperly. The men were all wearing suits, although theirs were mostly darker, and the women were mostly wearing knee and calf-length dresses. Marilyn's outfit was knee length, and had a V neckline that showed enough cleavage to keep a fellow interested. Our driver let us out of the car and pointed us up the walkway.

It was Assistant Commissioner Javier who found us coming in, and he did the introductions. It seemed like he had definitely risen in the ranks following the capture of the gang on Eleuthera. Well, that was fair enough. He had taken what could have been a very nasty publicity debacle and handled it quite nicely. There were about two dozen people there, but the only two I really paid any attention to were the Prime Minister and the U.S. Ambassador to the Bahamas, a political appointee of George Bush's whose sole qualifications seemed to be that he had just lost his Senate seat to the Democrats but gave a lot of money to the Republicans.

The dinner was interesting. Both the Ambassador and the Prime Minister seemed curious about the billionaire who had managed to buy a deluxe oceanfront villa without anybody knowing he was there. Some of the other gossip was amusingly catty. It seemed that Sir Lynden was known among his countrymen as the "Father of the Nation", the leader of the country since they gained their independence from Britain back in the Seventies. However, there had been a number of allegations about payoffs from South American drug cartels for allowing shipments through the country, and a recent audit of his accounts showed that he and his wife spent a whole lot more than they earned! Nobody in the Bahamas seemed to care, though, and he remained popular. I wondered what Javier thought about any of that.

The Ambassador, Chic Hecht, got me alone at one point and gave me some tips about living in Washington. He was actually one of those rare politicians who moved back home after his term in office was over. He had business dealings back in Vegas that he had wanted to stay involved in. That was as opposed to Andy Stewart, who had probably put his condo in Cockeysville on the market the day after the election.

Otherwise, we simply drifted around the room and talked to various Bahamian government flunkies and some people from the American Embassy. I gave everybody my standard litany of how much we liked it down here and how I was just a private citizen. A few of the Bahamians wanted to know about my investing in the local economy, perhaps loaning money. I countered by explaining we weren't a bank, but only took equity positions in companies, and we didn't know the local laws regarding that. Everybody promised to get back to me, and I promised (silently) to dump it on Jake Junior.

Over dinner I made a few comments to Prime Minister and to Ambassador Hecht along the lines that while I couldn't imagine how a simple Congressman could help them in their work, they should feel free to call me after I was sworn in. I would do whatever I could to assist. What the heck, it didn't hurt to be polite, and who knew, maybe I could help. No reason not to.

I did make one offer to Javier. I knew that the FBI has various law enforcement classes and training available to foreign police forces, and that this is often considered a useful and prestigious thing. Perhaps Congressman Buckman could help make arrangements for him or any of his fellow officers? That seemed very interesting to him.

One of the most interesting moments came when Ambassador Hecht managed to speak to me and maneuver me outside into a garden. He was subtle about it, but I picked up on it easily enough. "Congressman, I wanted a chance to speak to you without anybody overhearing us."

"I noticed we were moving away from the others, Mister Ambassador. What's on your mind?"

"Call me Chip..."

"Carl.", I responded.

" ... Carl ... Anyway, I just thought I should let you know that there is a very good chance that your house is now under Bahamian surveillance. I can't be sure just how intrusive they will be, but I am sure that you will be watched, and your movements monitored. I just figured, you know, a word to the wise."

I felt a cold lump growing in my stomach. "Why would they take that chance? It's not like I'm an enemy, or the U.S. is an enemy. Are you sure about that?"

He shrugged. "No, but it is likely. You are an American Congressman. How do you even know that it's the Bahamians doing it? Maybe a different foreign power is doing it. Who knows? You probably can't do much about it, but forewarned is forearmed."

I thought for a second. Earlier, Javier had said that he had contacted the property maintenance company and they had told him our plans. I was fairly certain that he would be the first call they made in the future, after we let them know when we would be arriving. I nodded slowly. "I have the funny feeling that if the Bahamians are doing it, my friend Assistant Commissioner Javier would be the one responsible. What's he do, anyway?"

Chip shrugged. "From what I've seen, he's a decent enough cop, but he's also a political cop. I don't see him ever becoming Commissioner, but he'll definitely end up as the guy who whispers in the Commissioner's ear."

"Well, I'll just have to keep my sins away from here. No use looking for trouble, is there.", I said, smiling.

Chip nodded again, and we headed back inside. "Forewarned, forearmed.", he repeated.

We made it out of Government House without causing an international incident and fomenting a war in the Caribbean. Sunday we goofed off and Monday we flew home. On the plane home, while Marilyn took a nap, I had a quiet conversation with Joe and Marie in the back of the plane. We could always look into checking for bugs another time.

It was time to start becoming a Congressman. God help America!

Chapter 106: Orientation

Things began getting hectic for me as soon as we got back. We packed Granny and Gramps back to Utica, and went back to being Mom and Dad for a week. Tuesday, at the office, I had to begin making things official. I called the brain trust into the office, and went over the plans we had worked out, and then we called everybody into our biggest conference room. It was tight, but we made it. Then I stood up and I made the following announcements:

Starting in January I was going to have a whole new job. I was going to leave the company. As if anybody could have possibly not known this!

The Buckman Group was not ending. We had a great thing going here, and we were going to keep going.

Effective December 31, I would resign my position as President and CEO. I was keeping all my stock, so keep working hard! Meanwhile, I had to start getting out of here.

Effective December 31, John was becoming Chairman Emeritus. Jake Senior was staying as Treasurer. They were still the grownups.

Effective December 31, Jake Junior was becoming Chairman and Missy was becoming President. They were effectively running the place now anyway, so let's make it official.

I'm not going to disappear! Expect to see my smiling face every once in a while. Besides, the voters might catch on, sooner or later, that I was clueless and throw me out!

This outfit was just about the best thing I had ever built in my life, short of my kids, and I was immensely proud of the work they had done. Thank you!

After the meeting, I shooed everybody back out, but I asked one of the secretaries to stay behind. She was Cheryl Dedrick, and the closest thing I had to a personal secretary-assistant. She had also been one of my earliest supporters, and had been a very useful queen bee during the campaign. She would be perfect for what I had in mind. I led her over to the coffee table and said, "Cheryl, have a seat. I wanted to talk to you about something."

"Of course, Mister Buckman, er, Congressman Buckman.", she said, smiling. She sat down in an armchair and I sat down in a chair facing her.

"Cheryl, let me ask you, have you enjoyed working with the Buckman Group? With me?"

"Yes, sir." She looked confused. "Mister Buckman, is there a problem? Have I done something wrong?!"

My eyes popped open at that, but then I realized I had started this out all wrong! I waved my hands and quickly answered, "No, no, it's nothing like that! No, you're doing just fine here. I have a job proposition for you."

"Oh! For a second there you had me going. Is this something new, here? I mean, now that you won't be here, who will I be working with?"

I smiled. "Yes, that's the problem, isn't it? Here's my idea. Mister Buckman won't be here, but Congressman Buckman is going to need somebody manning the office in Westminster. Cheryl, would you be interested in working for me at my local office?"

Now it was her chance to open her eyes wide. "Wow! I never expected that!"

"I wasn't doing a very good job of asking about this when we started. I apologize for that. No, I am going to need somebody I know and trust back here. I plan on getting back here a lot, since we're so close, but I am going to be using the campaign offices as my local office. You were part of the team that got me there, so how about coming to work for me as my local rep? You live in Westminster, right? It would actually be a much shorter drive, wouldn't it?"

"Yes, sir. Westminster would actually be closer.", she agreed.

"Okay. Here's the deal. I don't know what the pay would be, but you'll be a government employee of some sort. If things don't work out, we'll keep a place available here, including accruing for seniority, pension vesting, and such. Personnel will write a letter stating you can come back at any time if it doesn't work out, you know, like when the voters catch on I don't know what I'm doing." That earned me a laugh. "We're going to have to make some phone calls to figure this out. Now, do you want to talk it over with your husband?"

She shook her head. "No, he won't have a problem with this. I'm your gal for this! This is great! When do I start?"

"I don't know yet, but let's tell the others." I stuck out my hand and we shook on it. Then I led her down the hall and we told the new Chairman and President. They both gave us a thumbs up. Then I sent her off to find a note pad and a pen, and we started making some plans.

Talk to Brew McRiley.

Talk to Andrea Greene about leasing the campaign offices.

Talk to Andrea about buying a home in D.C.

Arrange for accommodations in Washington for the Orientation week. Talk to Taylor Hannity about a hotel room for the week, maybe longer.

Get the final details for the Orientation week,

and finally

Talk to Brew McRiley!

I really needed to talk to Brewster. He needed to give me some last minute instruction on how Congress worked before I got there. Sure, we had Orientation coming up, but I didn't even know what I needed to know before I got that far! Behind the scenes in Congress are thousands of people who never make the evening news, but if you don't do it right, you will be history.

Back when I was in the Army, they had long experience with new people coming into new commands, and they had developed schools and introductory courses so a new officer, no matter how bad he was, didn't seem like an idiot when he got somewhere. The reverse had been the case with the Buckman Group, but we had the benefit of not actually knowing what we were doing anyway. We made it up as we went along. I had a feeling that Congress might be closer to a shark tank, and I would need to at least know how to dog paddle before I got there.

I had debated asking Brewster if he might be interested in a position as my Chief of Staff, but I shot that idea down almost as quickly as I came up with it. McRiley wasn't interested in politics as a means to get anything accomplished. He saw it as a game, and liked to play the game. He was a mercenary and simply moved from campaign to campaign, playing the game, and winning or losing. For him, winning simply meant an opportunity to move to a bigger campaign. No, while I would get a lot of information from him, he wouldn't be part of my team, at least not until I was running again.

I cornered McRiley and got him into my office after lunch on Wednesday. "So, Brew, tell me how to be a Congressman!", I asked.

Brew laughed loudly at that. "Oh, Carl, you're such a babe in the woods! Nobody cares about being a Congressman! They only care about being reelected!"

I rolled my eyes, but smiled. This was pretty much in line with what he had told me all through the campaign. "Humor me, Brewster. Imagine that I actually gave a shit about being a Congressman. I know it's a stretch, but try to imagine it."

"It's easier to find bacon in Tel Aviv than it is to find a working Congressman in Washington. Okay, I'll try." He stood up and went over to my liquor cabinet. "We're going to need a drink or two for this."

I smiled and nodded, and he brought back a couple of glasses and bottles of gin and tonic water. I buzzed Cheryl and asked her to rustle up some ice. After she brought in the fixings for the booze we made our drinks.

Brewster sat down and drank some of his drink, and sighed blissfully. "Now, where were we? Oh, yes, discussing science fiction. Well, the first thing you have to understand is that all of the actual work is done by your staff. Forget about the sound bites and speeches from the elected representatives of this our great democracy. They don't actually know shit about what is going on. It's their staff that runs the place."

"How big is my staff, anyway?", I asked.

"Right now? Zero!"

"None of the existing staff stay on?"

"Nope. They're all Democrats anyway. No, you need to start lining up a staff now. You can have a maximum of twelve or fourteen - not quite sure on that - and they do everything."

"Fourteen? Everybody gets that many? I mean, if there's 535 Congressmen and Senators..." I started doing the math in my head, and then switched to a calculator. "That's almost 7,500 staffers!"

"Wrong. Congressmen get that many. Senators get three dozen! That's almost ten thousand staff people. Plus interns, don't forget them."

"Good Lord!"

"It gets worse.", he added. "That's just the staffers for the individual Representatives and Senators. Congress itself has a staff. Each Congressional committee - you know, like Ways and Means or Armed Services - has its own staff. There are dozens of committees. Then the leadership, like the Speaker and the Whip, has a staff just for that. These are just the people who work on the laws. I'm not including any of the police or maintenance types. I wouldn't be surprised if the total staff of the Congress was in the fifteen to twenty thousand range. I don't think anybody actually knows!"

"Holy crap! That's like an entire city!"

"Bingo! Now you know why they built the Hart Senate Office Building back in the Seventies. You simply can't cram that many people into the Capitol. You won't have an office in the Capitol itself. Only the leaders have those, the guys way up in seniority. You'll be in either Cannon, Longworth, or Rayburn, down on Independence Avenue. That's one of the things you'll do in Orientation, get your office."

"Huh.", I muttered to myself. "So, what in the world do all those people do?"

"Well, it's like I said earlier, get you reelected. If you can actually accomplish anything while you're at it, more power to you." I gave him my driest look, and he shrugged and went on. "Okay, since you plan to be so tiresome as to actually want to do your job, here's more for you to think about."

We both drank some of our G&Ts and then he continued. "One thing you have to remember is that no single human can possibly read all the crap that comes through your office. It's written by lawyers, for lawyers, and it would take up way beyond twenty-four hours a day to actually go through the mountain of shit that is a single bill. Nobody expects you to read this stuff. That's what some of your staff does. They sort through it, figure out if it's what you want, and tell you what you think about it. Even more of this goes on at the committee level."

I raised an eyebrow at that. "So, if I was being cynical and unscrupulous, and I wanted to screw around with a bill, why bother with the Congressman, just go after the staff."

"I knew you'd catch on eventually.", he replied, smiling.

"What else do they do?"

We spent the rest of the afternoon discussing staff members. There was the Chief of Staff who ran it all. Maybe an Assistant Chief of Staff, but that might be more for the Senators. A Press Secretary to tell the world what a great job I was doing. Probably a Legislative Director and several staffers to work on bills. An Executive Assistant to tell me what I was doing. You always had caseworkers who would field complaints from the home office and constituents, to help them get their Social Security check or whatever. Plus assistants and interns and general flunkies to round it all out. The most important person also turned out to be one of the lowest ranking people (isn't that always the case?) – The person who logs in all the phone calls and letters and makes sure that each and every one is responded to. It's is worse to ignore somebody than it is to tell them NO.

The Congressman was probably the least important person involved!

"So where do I find people to do this stuff? Call StaffRUs?", I asked.

"Pretty much. Don't worry too much. There's a huge subculture of staffers and wannabe staffers all around Washington. You'll meet some of them at the Orientation next week. Find one, and they'll start coming out of the woodwork."

I was curious. "What will Stewart's staffers be doing?"

He shrugged. "Same sort of thing. Looking for jobs on other Democratic staffs or going to work for a lobbyist. That's one of the ways the lobbyists buy a Congressman. They don't actually go after him, but they go after his staff, and promise them jobs in the future."

"Good Lord! Does anything actually get accomplished?"

"Only when all else fails.", he replied. "Listen, very important, don't piss off anybody else's staff. Some of the long term senior staffers for the more powerful members will have a shitload more pull than you will. Keep that in mind. If you have a chance to be nice to them, take it."

"Not following you. Be nice, how?", I asked.

"There is a whole subculture in D.C. of caterers, decorators, real estate people, restaurants, travel agencies, and the like that are owned or operated or staffed by people related to Congressmen or Senators or their staff. Pay attention to that. All other things being equal, it would be better to hire a 'Republican' decorator than a 'Democrat'. Follow me?"

"Christ! What a fucking snake pit!"

The rest of the week we spent preparing for the transition. I avoided signing anything important until after Orientation, just in case I did something that was a violation of Federal law. In my experience, investigators from the Department of Justice had notoriously small senses of humor. For instance, was I allowed to enter into a long term lease for the campaign headquarters? Could I use the same space for my local office and the future campaign headquarters? Could the headquarters have a door that opened into the local office or did they have to be inviolably separate? Andrea thought up all of these questions.

Who comes up with this shit? Didn't the fine folks at the Federal Election Commission have better things to do than come up with rules on this stuff? Apparently not. It turns out that I couldn't use my campaign offices as my local office; they had to be separate, not even so much as a door between them. I got Andrea working on splitting the space into two sections and developing two lease agreements, one for me to pay for the campaign space and one for Congress to pay for my local offices.

Andrea didn't handle real estate in the D.C. area, but she knew someone who did. She had gotten enough business off of the Buckman Group and referrals over the years that she knew better than to steer me wrong. (The town house and property for me, the office and two expansions for the Buckman Group, John's new home, the Tusk's building and home, a house for Jake Junior, etc. - get the idea?) I checked with Brewster and found out that the person Andrea recommended was the wife of an assistant to the Chief of Staff for Vice President Quayle, an acceptable choice. I talked to this new person, a Jacqueline Staymann-Huestis, and made an appointment to meet with her during Orientation Week. I got the impression that she was busy, but would be happy to sell me a house. Maybe when Andrea told her I was ludicrously rich she changed her mind.

Something else had been rattling around in my brain, as well. I was really rich now. I could buy lots of stuff, like an island villa - or a plane! How much would that cost me? I was now worth around $1.75 billion. At even a 5% return on my investment, which was ridiculously low, that was an annual income of over $87 million. I had to be able to pay operating expenses on a plane or helo at that level! I could probably fly home most nights. That really redefined commuting!

Marilyn had to be with me for at least a night or two in Washington, but the kids had school, so we had to make plans. We made arrangements for a sitter to stay with the kids at the house for a few days, along with one of the security people. We would drive (well, be driven, anyway; it was so weird to be driven instead of just grabbing the keys and going) down Saturday night, Marilyn would stay through the introductory day on Sunday, and then get driven home on Monday. I could get my security detail to drive me around as necessary during the week, and then get me home at the end of the week.

The orientation schedule took up an entire week. We would start out on Sunday at the L'Enfant Plaza Hotel, and we had booked a large suite for me starting Saturday night. One thing I knew was that in this job, more than any other I had ever had, I would need to schmooze. A suite with a parlor or living room could be useful. This was even more important when we bought a home. In this, my wealth was a major advantage. Washington is one of the most expensive cities in America. A large home in a nice neighborhood in a scenic setting, with a nice yard for the kids to run around in, would probably set me back several million dollars, on a par with what I paid for Hougomont, and way beyond the cost of our home in Hereford. However, did I want to buy a house? What if I figured out I was a disaster as a Congressman? Maybe a lease with an option to buy would be better?

Monday and Tuesday, after I sent Marilyn back to our children and normalcy, we were scheduled for 'How to be a Congressman!' classes in the Capitol building. You know, the fun stuff, like where are the bathrooms, and taking the class photo. It would be like going back to elementary school. Wednesday and Thursday we would meet with various Congressional caucuses. We would be able to vote for leadership positions, and I was guessing, find out what committees we would be on. The fun day would be Friday, when they draw names out of a hat to determine our offices. Thirteen years after graduating from Rensselaer, I would be back in a frat house playing Room Roulette!

Meanwhile, for the entire week, we would be wined and dined by all sorts of people there to 'help' us out. All sorts of lobbyists and senior politicians would be looking to line up the support of the young and naïve Congressmen, who still have visions of making a difference. There would be breakfast meetings, luncheons, and dinners with everybody looking to line up or buy our votes. Imagine Darth Vader, only without the light saber, but with a plateful of chocolate chip cookies. Then, after you've eaten the cookies, you will be lifted off your feet and have the life crushed out of you. Damn good cookies, though!

To what extent I still had visions of making a difference I wasn't sure. Marilyn generally considered me a pessimist, but I consider myself a realist. I knew I could make a difference, but what would be involved and what I would need to do were still questionable. The one thing I had learned, over two lives, was that I had the internal strength to survive no matter what, and that I could lead. I considered Ted Kennedy, who I had met already. As much as we disagreed on things and as much as I disliked him on a personal basis, the man could lead a group of fractious individuals, and get things done. Now I had to learn, from him and others.

I packed both a large suitcase for myself as well as the hanging bag with a number of different suits. Nobody had said anything about a black tie dinner, so I left my tuxedo at home. Marilyn packed a couple of nice dresses for Saturday and Sunday evening, and something a bit more casual for Sunday during the day. She did tell me, which made me laugh, that she was wearing low heels except for dinners; no way was she wearing high heels for three days running! Monday, she swore, she was going to wear jeans and a tee shirt and look like a bag lady when she went home. It was a good thing she had a driver for that; it was a two hour drive home, and on her own Marilyn would get lost and drive home by way of Arkansas and Ohio.

It was an interesting group I was joining. We had 48 incoming Congressmen, two of whom had already been in Congress, lost, and won back their seats. We also had six new Senators, two of whom had never been in Congress even as Representatives. Of the 48, 27 were Democrats and 20 were Republicans; Vermont had elected Bernie Sanders as an Independent. Bernie was an interesting guy. He mostly worked with the Democrats, and ended up as a Senator.

There were a lot of names on the list I had received that I knew would become big deals. John Boehner of Ohio would end up as Speaker of the House. Rick Santorum, of Pennsylvania, would become a Senator and then lose in the 2012 primary for President. I had a fellow Marylander, Wayne Gilchrest from the Maryland 1st (basically Maryland's Eastern Shore area), also a Republican, and I resolved to make sure I met him. The saddest to me was Randy "Duke" Cunningham, a certified hero from the Viet Nam War, the last Navy 'Ace' who shot down five MiGs. He spent 20 years in the Navy and 14 years in Congress, before being caught taking bribes and sent to prison. What an incredible waste!

It was an overwhelmingly Democratic House. There were 270 Democrats (plus Bernie Sanders, who might as well have been a Democrat) and only 164 Republicans. For the time being, at least, the Democrats were calling the shots. I knew that in four years there was going to be a major upheaval, one of those cataclysmic watershed events when the voters would 'throw the rascals out!' Right now, though, the Democrats called the tune.

I looked over the brief bio pages on us wonderful folks. I wasn't the youngest guy in the crowd, but I was close. It looked like most were about 10 years older than me, and a few were quite a bit older than that. The oldest was a guy named Dick Nichols of Kansas, who was 64. The youngest was Jim Nussle of Iowa, who was only 30. I was a year older than Tim Roemer, two years older than Dick Swett, and three years older than Rick Santorum.

I briefly wondered about my fellow classmates. Were they sitting there in their rooms, reviewing their bios and wondering about me? Who was this punk kid? Did any of them know anything about me? Had they read, or even heard about my books? Did they read the business magazines, or only political stuff? Or had they seen the news about the billionaire investor who wanted to play at being a Congressman? To be fair about it, the only reason I knew any of them was because of what they would become. Probably the biggest difference was that these guys probably had at least a semblance of an idea about what they were doing here.

Realistically, I was probably the most famous of the newbies. Following the election, I had made the covers of both Fortune and Business Week. (I missed the trifecta; Forbes not only didn't have me on the cover, they didn't even mention me on the inside!) Fortune had Geoff Colvin write a follow up piece to his original cover article back in the summer of '86, called 'Mister Buckman Goes To Washington' and basically updating the bio piece from before. Thankfully, a large separate piece also wrote about the future of the Buckman Group, with bios of Junior and Missy, and details about the planned joint venture, Marquardt/Buckman Investments. Junior and Missy were really earning their paychecks! (Dave Marquardt got top billing? Trust me, my ego could handle it! This was going to make me a shitload of bucks!) Business Week only had me in a photo about a quarter of the page on the front. Inside I was simply a one page photo and blurb in an article overwhelmingly about the politics of the next Congress. Nowhere was it mentioned that I didn't have a fucking clue what I was doing.

The average Congressman starts out as a local politician, a city councilman or county commissioner, maybe a mayor or state senator or district attorney, with a touch of ambition and a desire to do something right. He learns the tricks of the trade at a lower, less expensive level, builds contacts and gets to know the right people. Then, when an opportunity opens up, he pulls the trigger and goes for broke. The guys, and it is mostly guys, who had showed up here with me were the winners. In theory, some of them would eventually run for a more important office, usually Senator or Governor, and maybe if the gods of politics smiled at them, leverage that up to President. For the life of me I couldn't remember a Congressman who went directly from the House of Representatives to the Oval Office. The best I could come up with was Jerry Ford, who was picked by Tricky Dick to replace Ted Agnew when Agnew went to jail. Ford went from Congress to being Vice President. Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Obama had all been Senators at some point. Carter, Reagan, Clinton, and Bush 43 had been Governors. Bush 41 had been a Congressman, but had then become an Ambassador and Director of the CIA before being tapped as Reagan's VP. After Obama, they all changed too fast to notice or care.

Technically, we didn't have to be at the hotel until Sunday evening, when the festivities officially started. We drove down Saturday evening after Marilyn and the kids went to Mass at Our Lady of Grace. Then she hustled around to move them out, and we drove down for a late supper and just spent the evening blessedly alone. Sunday we slept semi-late and then went down for breakfast, skipping the normal early-breakfast-and-a-full-morning-of-news-shows routine we enjoyed. That was when I realized that things were going to be different. Between the time we got off the elevator and the time we got to the restaurant, we were approached by two different men in suits, dressed quite a bit nicer than we were, with invitations to lunch, one from the American Petroleum Institute and the other from the Heritage Foundation. I pocketed both invitations with a smile but declined to commit myself.

The lobbyists were out in full force, and I hadn't even been sworn in yet, which wouldn't happen until the new Congress convened in January. The API I knew as the major lobbying group for the oil companies. The Heritage Foundation I had heard of; they were a conservative 'think tank', but I didn't know where their funding came from. After we were seated, Marilyn asked, "Who were those guys? Do you know them?"

I smiled and shook my head. "No, not yet, but I'm sure I am going to soon enough. They're lobbyists."

Her eyes opened wide at that. "Already!? You're not even sworn in yet!"

"I think that is way down the list of things they care about. Just wait, we'll probably be hit up by a defense lobbyist on the way out of here."

"Is that legal?"

I shrugged and smiled. "Define legal!"

She gave me her exasperated look. "Carling!"

I had to laugh. "From what I've learned over the years, legal and illegal, or right and wrong, aren't the major concerns of Congress. I think it's more along the lines of getting caught and not getting caught."

She smiled at that. "If they're as cynical as you, you'll fit right in!"

"Scary thought, isn't it? On the plus side, as long as I'm willing to sell my soul to Satan, I won't ever have to pay for a meal again in this town! As many times as I've been in this town, I don't know how anybody can actually afford to live here!" I remembered back on the first go, being sent to a conference in Washington back when I was a humble chemist. My per diem for food wouldn't cover three fast food meals a day, and I got royally chewed out about eating in 'expensive' restaurants - like the one at the hotel where the conference was held!

In many ways, this was what led so many otherwise fine Congressmen into trouble. Unless you are bunking on the floor of a tenement slum, apartment rents are astronomical. If you plan to bring the family and put the kids in local schools, it just gets worse. The D.C. school system is a national disgrace, so everybody puts their kids in private schools, which are also ridiculously expensive. The suburbs, like Bethesda, Chevy Chase, and Alexandria, are some of the most expensive in the nation. If you want to live in the suburbs, you end up living an hour or more away, just to keep the cost down.

Marilyn used to complain about how much we were paying the clowns in Washington, but she never actually ran the numbers. When you added in the necessity of keeping a home back in their district, their paychecks seemed ridiculously low. It shouldn't have been a surprise that so many Congressmen can be bought.

According to my briefing information, we would be getting lectured on Congressional ethics, an oxymoron on the level of 'jumbo shrimp!' I told Marilyn that it wasn't going to be so much a list of what we couldn't do, but more a guideline to how to get away with something. For instance, if the Acme Widget Company wanted a single source monopoly contract to the Federal government for the sale of their widgets, they had two ways of guaranteeing it. The fast and simple method is to go to the chairman of the House Widget Committee and drop a paper bag full of cash on his desk. Quick, efficient, and illegal.

Instead, the Acme Widget Company can find a lobbying company, generally a law firm with the former chairman of the Widget Committee on it, a man who decided he preferred living in Washington rather than going home to Mooseshit, Montana. The law firm sets up a think tank, the American Widget Advisory Board, designed to teach Congressmen about the wonders of the American widget industry, and how Acme Widget stands for truth, justice, and the American way! The lobbying firm then starts making campaign contributions. For instance, maybe the five owners of the Acme Widget Company each give $2,000 to the Chairman's reelection campaign. The Widget Advisory Board coughs up some more. Maybe the Widget Political Action Committee (dedicated to supporting the interests of American widgets, and not those inferior foreign widgets!) makes a contribution, and maybe they also run some campaign ads showing support for the Chairman.

Depending on just how much power the House Widget Committee has, and how much juice the Chairman has, and how big the potential contract is, there is even more that can be done. For instance, maybe the Chairman's worthless son needs a job. The Widget Advisory Board can hire him to investigate widget usage in Bermuda, and send him on vacation. (Andy Stewart's wife used to work for the bank lobby, remember) Maybe the Chairman's chief of staff is looking to retire and make more than a government salary can offer. Make him a deal directly! Best of all, Congressmen are immune from most insider trading statutes. Let the Congressman know that a positive vote will cause the values of stock options in Acme Widget to double, and suggest, offhand and just in the interest of full disclosure, what that might be worth.

I explained most of this to Marilyn over breakfast, and she simply shook her head in disbelief. I wondered what committee assignments I'd end up with. From what I understood, all the real work was actually done by the various Congressional committees, and there were good committees to be on and bad committees to be on. I was guessing, but I suspected the good committees were the ones with the most lobbyists and money washing around. I'd find out later in the week.

After breakfast I was stopped and invited to a luncheon by a defense contractor lobbyist, 'especially appropriate considering your distinguished service in the military!' I just smiled and nodded and promised to give it some thought.

As we rode upstairs in the elevator, I commented, "Well, at least we didn't get hit on by the environmentalists. They're probably off harassing the Democrats right now."

"Unbelievable!"

I unlocked the door to our suite and led her inside. I sat down on a couch in the parlor, and then stood again so I could pull the invites out of my pocket. I set them down on the coffee table and sat back down again. "You need to be careful with this stuff, too.", I told her.

"Me? You're the Congressman, not me!", she protested.

"Yeah, I know, but don't be surprised when they start coming after me through you! Or our friends! What happens when the motorcycle lobby comes after me through Tusker? Or somebody offers you a great sounding job that you never actually applied for? Maybe I'm just being careful, but the money sloshing around this town could sink a battleship!"

"Huh! So, we aren't going to any of those luncheons?"

I smiled and shrugged. "I don't know. Want to go to one and see what it's like? 'Luke, come to the Dark Side! We have cookies!'", I intoned deeply. "I can't be bought, but I might be able to be rented!"

"You're hopeless!", she laughed.

"When I go to jail, will you promise to visit me? Conjugal visits?"

"Yuck!"

We went to the luncheon by the defense lobbyists, met the Cunninghams, and stuffed ourselves. Dinner that night was at the Smithsonian, and we were seated next to the Boehners. Despite our visiting the Bahamas regularly, that guy had a much better tan than we did. Tom Foley, Speaker of the House, was the speaker at the dinner. Then we had more drinks, turned down invitations to a late night 'after party' by two separate groups, and went back to the L'Enfant Plaza. We managed to get busy back in our room, and afterwards I teased my wife about whether she would be able to go an entire week without me. Her response was, to put it mildly, rude!

Chapter 107: Mister Buckman Goes To Washington

"Mos Eisley spaceport: You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. We must be cautious."

Change the name from Mos Eisley spaceport to Washington, D.C., and you've got the idea! Even Obi Wan Kenobi would have despaired of this place! That doesn't mean I was sorry I had run for office. It just made me want to be cautious.

Friday I managed to get lucky, and got a decent draw on office assignments. Basically names get pulled out of a hat, and afterwards you have 15 minutes to pick an office. There are three offices for the House of Representatives, Rayburn, Longworth, and Cannon, all on Independence Avenue south of the Capitol. There is a definite pecking order in where you get to call home. It's like back at Kegs, with Room Roulette, only not quite as organized, although probably more sober. Seniors outrank juniors, etc. The most coveted offices are in the Capitol building itself, but that is too small. Only really senior ranking people, like the Speaker or the leaders are in there. Most want to be in Rayburn, which is the newest building, and actually has an underground subway line over to the Capitol! Next down the list is Longworth, and then you have Cannon. Cannon is the oldest and you don't want to be there. The offices are smaller and were designed before the current staffs got so big. Freshmen Congressmen end up on the top floors of both Longworth and Cannon, and in Cannon, half your staff is in what is known as "The Cages." Quite literally, they sit in an open bullpen arrangement across a hall from your office, and are surrounded by cages which can be locked when unoccupied. It's like Siberia, only not as congenial. There were actually two other Congressional office buildings, Ford and O'Neill, but these were only used by committee staff, and in the case of O'Neill, Congressional pages.

Brewster McRiley had told me about this, and told me to get an office anywhere but Cannon. When my name was called early in the process, I got one on the fourth floor of Longworth. It wasn't the biggest office, but I would be able to keep my staff in one place without them feeling like second class citizens. Staffing would be difficult enough without having to put up with a two-tier system.

I wouldn't be able to move in until sometime in December, during the lame duck session. Losers have to leave by the end of November. I wasn't sure how you got to better offices if you moved up in seniority, but they had to have some sort of rules. My new office was still occupied by somebody who was voted out of office, so I decided to be polite and not check it out until after he had left.

I stayed through Saturday and met with Jacqueline Staymann-Huestis that morning. She seemed capable of meeting my needs, though snobby, which she tried to keep to herself but failed. Instead she tried for obsequious, considering she must have known about my money. Weird.

Marilyn and I had gone over our needs already, at least between ourselves. First and foremost, we wanted to keep our primary residence back in Hereford. It was close enough that I figured I could commute, if not every day, then every other day. We'd give that a shot before moving to Washington. Still we would need a place in D.C., and we wanted a home with a yard for the kids and the dog. The most convenient place, 'for those who can afford it', was in the Georgetown district or out near Rock Creek Park. She promised to line up some prospects. I could do a first cut on things, and then bring Marilyn down to make a final decision. One important feature I told her was the financing; I wanted a two year lease with an option to buy. I would be generous on the lease terms, since it was relatively unusual, but I needed an out if things didn't work out.

My committee assignments weren't all that great. The big committees, the powerful committees, were the ones like Ways and Means (in charge of taxes), Budget (in charge of, you guessed it, the budget), or Armed Services (again, pretty obvious). It was pretty unusual for a freshman to end up on any of these committees. I found myself selected for Science, Space, and Technology and on the Subcommittee on Science. My second committee assignment was Veterans Affairs, and the Subcommittee for Disability Assistance. The first because of my doctorate in applied math; the second because I was a veteran myself.

I wasn't overly impressed, but I kept that to myself. Science, Space, and Technology had about half a dozen name changes over the years (adding and subtracting the words Space and Technology). Most of the time the committee played catch-up to whatever was happening out in the rest of the world. If they did manage to come up with something useful, you could count on them being overruled by one of the more powerful committees. Veterans Affairs was pretty much the same, and was relegated to being the outfit that supervised the Department of Veterans Affairs, which had only been created the year before. Generally, nobody paid any attention unless there was a scandal going on.

To the extent that I was ambitious, I needed to get off of these two committees, and onto something more interesting. With my recent background in political economics, Ways and Means or Budget would be good; with my military experience I wanted either Armed Services or Intelligence; with my knowledge of finance the House Financial Services Committee would be good (Andy Stewart's old hangout). Even Transportation (Eat Your Peas! and infrastructure) might be interesting, although probably toothless.

That Saturday I made it home, and I spent the next couple of days getting to know my children again. Charlie was old enough to know what I was doing, but the twins were still a bit confused by it all. My schedule was full, though.

That week I had an appointment with a prospect for the Chief of Staff position on Monday after my weekend back in Hereford. For staff I had to start with my Chief of Staff. He, or she, runs the operation, and is critical. I was more than a bit clueless with this. Back when we started the Buckman Group, Jake brought his secretary with him, and that was how we started the staffing. In this case, I didn't know anybody. I had talked to Newt Gingrich, the Minority Whip, during one of the orientation sessions, and he gave me the name and number for a guy named Chuck Hanson. Chuck had been a Deputy Chief of Staff for a Congressman who had just lost his job, and seemed like he could step up to being Chief of Staff. I would start there.

I met the man and he seemed qualified, so I put him on my staff. We decided on the most critical jobs - Legislative Director, Executive Assistant, and a Constituent Services Director. The Legislative Director and the Constituent Services Director would propose several people of their own, who I would then meet and hire, to handle legislation and deal with the people back in the Maryland Ninth. Cheryl would be the Field Representative back in the district, and would become a government employee. My Press Secretary I would hire through the campaign office, and he wouldn't be a Federal employee, saving a slot for somebody else. Most everybody was involved in constituent services. What couldn't be handled back at the Field Office would need to be sorted out with the Washington professionals who were used to navigating the impossibly large Washington bureaucracy. At that point Chuck gave me a shopping list for staff and turned me loose. He would be looking as well.

My first stop was to see my fellow Republican Congressmen from the great state of Maryland, Helen Bentley (Maryland 2nd) and Connie Morella (Maryland 8th), preferably before Wayne Gilchrest (Maryland 1st) got to them. Wayne was a freshman like myself. I was only partially successful in this. I met Helen while Wayne was meeting Connie, and we ran into each other rushing off to meet the other. We had a laugh at this and resolved to meet for lunch later in the morning. From what I learned from Chuck, almost every Congressman has some junior staffers who can be convinced to move to a new office, especially if a promotion is involved. The Congressman losing the junior staffer also has some incentives to allow this. First, there's a quid pro quo involved – you get my junior assistant flunkie, I get your vote on a few bills. Secondly, they now have a blank spot on their own staff they can fill, perhaps with the offspring of somebody powerful or wealthy or connected. Finally, maybe they take this as an opportunity to give a glowing recommendation to the local village idiot and pawn him off on the unsuspecting newbie, who is now no longer their headache, but your headache. Hey, I'm just saying, it happens!

All in all, the entire exercise reminded me of pre-Civil War slave trading, only it wasn't as dignified.

At lunch, Wayne and I had a very nice meal, got to know each other, and discussed our new staff members. This was his first elected office, also, although it was his second run for office. Nice fellow, used to teach high school. He offered to pick up the check, and I agreed, making him promise to let me pay when we took our wives to dinner some night. Then we split up, to keep hunting for staff. We both had the makings of a staff by the end of the week.

I also spent a day with Jacqueline Staymann-Huestis and looked at homes. It's a good thing I'm rich! We found a nice place in Massachusetts Avenue Heights on 30th Street, which would 'only' set me back about $2 million. What a bargain! Still, it had a fair sized back yard to let the kids and dog run around in, six bedrooms and baths, and was large enough to have a gigantic formal foyer, formal living room, banquet-size formal dining room, den/library/office, and a designer kitchen with a breakfast nook. It was actually quite a bit larger than our house in Hereford. If I amounted to anything in the House, it would be perfect for entertaining and home office space. I gave Jacqueline a tentative approval on the property, but told her I would need to bring my wife back in a week to look at it. She commented that homes of this quality wouldn't last long. I told her I'd chance it; there were very few people moving to Washington who could afford a home with that price tag. I smiled and wished her luck moving it in the next week or so.

I had booked the suite at the L'Enfant Plaza for the time between the election and the opening of the 102nd Congress. By then I figured I would be able to find a house and get a start on furniture and what not. Marilyn brought the kids down the following weekend and they gave the 30th Street house their blessing, and I gave Jacqueline a significant check. She then asked, "Have you chosen a designer yet?"

"A designer?", I asked. I looked over at Marilyn, and she seemed as clueless as me.

"Yes, to coordinate your décor and space, of course."

"Oh, like an interior decorator?", asked Marilyn.

"Something like that.", she replied.

"Well, my Aunt Peg offered to let me have the furniture in the basement until I could cash my first paycheck and get over to IKEA. Still, I guess we could get a designer. What do you think, honey?", I asked Marilyn.

"Will you behave!? You're as bad as the kids!" She turned to Jacqueline and said, "Never mind him. Do you know a decorator?"

The woman dug a business card out of her briefcase and passed it along. I gave her John's business card, and also one for Andrea. Andrea had agreed to review everything with John, to make sure it was all okay. I wanted a quick closing, which should make everybody happy. We retrieved the kids from the back yard, along with Dum-Dum, and loaded them back up. We drove around the neighborhood a bit, and then we took the kids home. I really needed to look into a better method of commuting. This took two hours each way, and was not realistic.

The solution to this presented itself in mid-December. I made an appointment to talk to Lloyd Jarrett of Executive Charters and drove out to see him at the Westminster Airport. "Carl, what's up? By the way, congrats on winning the election. I would have voted for you, but I actually live down below Reisterstown."

"Thank you. I appreciate the thought. That's sort of why I'm here, actually, in a roundabout fashion.", I replied.

"Oh?"

"Yeah. We're still living here, over in Hereford, and it's crazy to drive back and forth. What I was wondering is, well, what if I buy a helo and commute? Can I do that?"

He blinked in surprise, but shrugged his shoulders. "Yeah, sure, it can be done. When did you get a pilot's license?"

It was my turn to look surprised. "No, no, not me! I mean, I'd buy the helo and base it either here or there, and go back and forth as the passenger, like a limo, sort of."

Lloyd looked at me curiously. "Carl, do you have any idea what that would involve? This would not be cheap!"

"Tell me."

"Well, there's the chopper itself. A new Jet Ranger, which would do the trick nicely, will probably run you close to a mill on its own. Then you'll need a pilot and you'll need a mechanic, because helicopters break down real fucking easy! You've got to park it someplace, which means you'll need to pay pad fees and hangar rental, probably both here and there. Fuel and parts ... Carl, you have to be looking at close to a million or two to set this up, and at least a million a year to keep it going."

I nodded to myself. I could afford that. "What about airplanes? What would a G-3 cost me?"

He stared in disbelief. "A Gulfstream III to commute between here and Washington?! That's crazy!"

I smiled and nodded. "No, that's crazy! I agree! No, I'm just curious, how much would that run?"

"Good Lord! Okay, the plane will be a few million. You can probably pick up one just a few years old for a reasonable figure. A lot of them have come on the market as owners trade up to the new G4 model. You'll need two pilots for that, as well as the same sort of hangar space and fees and parts and fuel. If you want both, you'll be paying two to three mill a year, at least."

"But it could be done?"

"Yeah, sure. With enough cash anything can be done. Hell, we made it to the moon, didn't we? D.C. should be a piece of cake." Then he scratched his head and asked, "Are you serious about this?"

"Yeah, I think so. Can it be done?"

"Okay, but here's another approach. What do you know about planes and helos, really? Why not pay me to handle this. We can put the birds under Executive Charters' name and certificates, use our facilities, our pilots, our mechanics and offices and hangars. We handle everything and you get either exclusive use or preferred use on everything. If you aren't using them, we can use them for rental or charter, to offset the costs."

I opened my mouth to argue but stopped halfway. This might actually make sense. I didn't really want to own airplanes; I just wanted to use them whenever I could. Why in the world did I want to run an airline? Even the airlines lost money doing that, and they were the ones who were supposed to know how to do it! I closed my mouth and thought about it, and gave Lloyd a wry smile. "Listen, do me a favor and look into this. Come up with a proposal. I just want to be able to hop back and forth when I want to, and use the airplane for longer trips and vacations and such."

"You want to go into National, or College Park?"

"College Park?" That was where the University of Maryland was, just outside of D.C.

"There's a small airport there, be good for small stuff, easier to fly into and out of than National. A Gulfstream would be too big for it, but a helo would be fine. Further out, though."

"Work it up both ways. I might have to drive from our home to both to time them."

Lloyd nodded. "Where's the house?"

"Northwest. Near the Naval Observatory and Rock Creek Park."

He nodded again. "Give me a few days. Let me make some calls and work something up."

We shook hands on it. Maybe we could make this work.

The day after my offices in Longworth were emptied out, I moved in. It was bare bones, but habitable. Sherry Longbottom, my new Legislative Director, commented, "Not much to look at, is it?"

"You'd prefer a spot over in the Cages?", I asked.

"Been there, done that! It's really quite lovely here, isn't it?"

"That's the winning attitude!", I answered, smiling. "Okay, seriously, let's make this habitable. Figure out what we're going to need and let's get it ordered. I don't need a matching mahogany and gold suite, but we need something decent, computers for everybody, printers, copiers, all that stuff. If we don't have it, get it. Beg, borrow, or steal, I don't care. If you need me to run interference, fine, but you guys probably know how to get it done better than I do."

Mindy McIlroy, my Executive Assistant, smiled and commented, "I am guessing your watchword will be plausible deniability?"

"You have hit upon my next campaign slogan! Write that down!" I motioned for her and Chuck to follow me into my personal office, which was also fairly bare. I glanced around and said, "The same goes here. I'm not all that picky on décor, but we need to do something. In the meantime, let's go over my schedule." The three of us sorted things out. The lame duck session was finished, and wouldn't reconvene until January 3rd, early for Congress. Then we would be out again for almost two weeks in February, almost three weeks in March/April, and another week in May, two weeks in June/July, six weeks in August/September, and then another six or seven weeks from November until January in '92. I started adding things up, and I counted out about 26 weeks when Congress wasn't in session, half the year! It gets worse - most work weeks are only four days long!

It's not quite as inefficient as that makes it seem. The worker bees on the staff work Monday through Friday, and through recesses. It's the elected officials who spend most of their time doing anything other than the nation's business. I had already heard about the informally named 'Tuesday-Thursday Club'. These were the Congressmen who would fly home on Thursday night and fly back to Washington on Tuesday morning, cramming four days of fundraisers or junkets into the weekend, and then forcing themselves to put in three days in Washington - usually at fundraisers.

It's one hell of a system!

Then I went out to talk to Sherry about anything coming up for votes or committee action. Nothing significant seemed to be on the horizon involving either Science or Veterans Affairs, but that didn't mean there wasn't work that would be involved. After Congress convened, I'd start officially attending committee meetings, but before that I would be learning my assignments and meeting with top committee staffers.

Then I went home for a few days. I would be back on Monday morning, and I expected to find some decent office furnishings and a functional staff by then, by hook or by crook! Meantime, I had to go home and be husband and daddy for a few days. In particular, the Cub Scouts were doing an overnight camping trip this Saturday night, and I needed to attend. Charlie was looking forward to this. He was a Webelo now, and they could go camping. They only did one night at a time, not two or more like the Boy Scouts did. I had missed an earlier trip during the campaign. I couldn't put it off again.

That Thursday night, all that Charlie could talk about was the upcoming camping trip. Needless to say, both of the twins wanted to go camping, too, to which their brother replied, "No way! You're girls!"

I stifled a laugh and shook my head. "I think you two should stay home and help Mom."

Holly whined, "Mom!"

Molly whined, "Dad!"

I just looked my wife in the eye and shook my head, "NO!" That was all I needed to do - a winter camping trip with three women who had never been camping before! I'd rather go camping back in Nicaragua.

Thank God Marilyn had the good sense to tell the girls they'd go shopping and to a movie, which almost made Charlie change his mind. I just reminded him that we would be able to go out and do 'guy things' and he changed his mind back to camping. I just rolled my eyes at Marilyn. "You know how to use a microwave oven in the woods?", I asked her.

"How?"

"Look for a tree that's been hit by lightning."

"Very funny." Charlie giggled at that.

The camping trip was Saturday morning to Sunday morning. I had volunteered to be a 'people mover' and thought I would switch cars with my wife and use her minivan. A couple of the other fathers had pickups and would haul equipment. The rule with the Cub Scouts was that each boy had to be accompanied by an adult, preferably male. (Really, really, really preferably male - it makes life so much simpler that way.) Back on my first go when Parker had gone through the Scouts, I had done it with him, so this was old hat to me. I spent the day sorting through some old gear and running into Towson with Marilyn to pick up a few things.

This actually led to a serious argument with Henry Donaldson, about my security. He wanted a couple of his guys to go camping with us, which I refused. That would make us stick out like sore thumbs. For one thing, half the parents in the Pack would yank their kids out of the Pack. If my children and I were in such danger that we needed permanent security, then we were much too dangerous to be allowed near their precious offspring! It wasn't Charlie's fault his old man was a big shot.

Finally we compromised. "Alright, I'll have a guy drive you all up in one of our vans. We can say that your minivan broke down or something.", he said.

"Fair enough.", I agreed.

"I'm not done yet. After he drops you and the boys off, he's going to hang around somewhere down the road. In the meantime, we'll give you a little radio transmitter with a panic button on it. If there's a problem, hit the button and we'll come running." He pulled what looked like a big key fob out of his pocket. "Here, take this. Your wife is getting one, too."

I stared at it for a moment. It was plain black plastic, with a single red button, and a clear plastic cover over the button. You had to flick off the cover before hitting the button, so it was safe from accidentally setting itself off. "You're kidding me, right? How's it work?"

"You know about GPS? The military uses it. It's a bunch of satellites that can tell where anybody is in the world if they have the right receiver." He pointed at the gizmo in my hands. "That's got a GPS receiver built in and a radio transmitter. Once you hit the button, we can track you down."

I knew what GPS was, and could probably have given a lecture on it, but this was much more advanced than I expected. "What, like in that James Bond movie?"

"Something like that. Don't lose it, either. You don't want to know how much these things cost!", he finished.

There's nothing all that difficult about camping with the Scouts. Back when I was a Cubmaster and Scoutmaster, I had distilled it down to three simple rules, Buckman's Rules for Camping:

1 - Keep 'em warm!

2 - Keep 'em dry!

3 - Keep 'em well fed!

Do those three things and the kids won't care what you make them do! Five mile hikes in the snow? No problem - just follow the three rules. March them off a cliff? No problem - just follow the three rules. Violate those rules and you can turn happy campers into miserable whiny brats in minutes!

It's a lot like being back in the Army!

Of the three rules, Number 3 is the easiest. Boys running around in the woods burn up a lot of calories. Even the boys who are the pickiest eaters will eat not one sandwich, but two. It doesn't have to be fancy, just hot and filling. For breakfast feed them pancakes and scrambled eggs, sausage and bacon. For lunch it's not soup or sandwiches, it's soup and sandwiches. Make sure there's enough for seconds. Keep a bag of apples around for anybody to munch on.

Rules 1 and 2 are trickier, and require discipline. You always have some kids who won't dress properly because it's not 'cool.' So they don't wear jackets or boots or long underwear. You can tell them until you're blue in the face that they won't have any place to go inside and hang around if they get chilly. Hell, half the parents aren't smart enough to figure this stuff out! The only way to make them understand is by having an inspection before you load the gear up and send home the kids who flunk. For that you need a tough and fair leader.

You can usually tell who's been around for awhile - they look like a bunch of ragamuffins. They certainly don't look cool, but they do look warm and dry and comfortable. Marilyn and I went out in the late morning and picked up some new long underwear for Charlie and me, and some heavy socks for the both of us. Otherwise, we'd survive the night. He had a good heavy coat and some gloves, and some hiking boots that he hadn't outgrown yet. Otherwise we'd just throw layers on him. For equipment he had a day pack that would suffice, along with a small gym bag, and a lightweight sleeping bag that we would line with a couple of light blankets to beef it up.

My gear was pretty routine. I didn't give two shits about looking cool. I had a pretty decent sleeping bag I kept in my trunk for emergency use, so I threw a liner inside (one of the girls' Care Bears blankets) and threw everything else into a duffle bag. We weren't doing any hiking, so that was good enough. I had some Carhartt overalls and a matching coat that I wore at times when I was working outside, and an old pair of jump boots. I also threw a pair of insulated barn boots in the back of the van in case it was wet. Lousy for hiking, but great for snow or mud.

Scouting wasn't part of Marilyn's background, but it had been in mine. When we mentioned it to Charlie he had been interested, and we had signed him up with Pack 116 in Monkton, just the other side of Hereford. There was supposed to be a pack in Hampstead, which was closer, but they operated out of the Hampstead Elementary School. Charlie's buddies in Fifth District Elementary were in Pack 116. It made a lot more sense for him to go over to Monkton. Pack 116 ran out of St. James Episcopal. Occasionally I would tease Marilyn that this was a back door method for the Protestants to get their hands on our son. Most of the time she would snort in laughter and say they were welcome to him, he was obviously a lost cause!

We were up early. I helped my son finish packing and then finished myself, and we loaded our gear up in our driver's Caravan. We had to be at the school by no later than 9:00. The camping trip was part of the Boy Scout Camporee held up at Broad Creek Camp in Harford County. The Boy Scouts were there for two nights, starting Friday night. The little guys needed to work up to that. By the time all the late-comers got to school and we actually got on the road, it was closer to 9:30. We got to the camporee mid-morning.

The first order of business was checking in and finding our campsite, then we drove up and unloaded our gear. It was December, and in Maryland that meant the weather was crisp, but not snowy. That was fine with me. I used to go on winter camping trips in upstate New York in February, and that usually meant several feet of snow. If it was deep enough, you'd have some troops building igloos! I wasn't that hard core. We carried several bales of hay with us to spread out on the ground where we were setting up the tents. It softened things up and acted as an insulating barrier. We set up quickly and then sent the boys off with a couple of leaders to start their events.

The Boy Scouts would be tested on various survival skills, like first aid and starting fires, and would win points in a competition. The Cub Scouts were more focused on learning this stuff the first time around, so they would be cycled through various stations to get some instruction, either from an adult or a senior Boy Scout. Those of us back at the camp finished setting things up and started preparing lunch.

After lunch, about a half dozen of the fathers and I were sitting around the campfire on camp chairs and drinking coffee. Well, I was drinking tea, but that's simply because I was more civilized. There was a box of Lipton tea bags in the chuck wagon box, and that was plenty fine for me. That was when I noticed a few Boy Scouts coming towards our camp, accompanied by a couple of adult leaders. This was a bit unusual, since we don't normally mix Boy Scouts and Cub Scouts. Webelos were nine and ten, Scouts were generally older and a lot bigger. It was better to keep them separated except during group events, like campfires or training events.

Something caught my attention and I turned back towards the campfire with the other guys, and then a shout made me turn my head. One of the adults who had joined us with the Scouts was talking to Al Parker, Johnny's father, and Al turned and called out, "Hey, Carl! I've got some of your constituents here!"

I gave him a curious look. "My constituents?"

"Are you Congressman Buckman?", asked one of the Boy Scouts. He looked to be about 13 or 14, but wearing a coat, I couldn't see his uniform and rank badge.

Pack 116 knew of my dirty little secret, but I hadn't pushed any electioneering around the Scouts. That was just way too tacky, and wasn't done. The Boy Scouts didn't allow that sort of thing. "Well, sort of. I don't get sworn in until January. Can I help you fellows? You look a little young to be lobbyists."

The boys looked confused by that, but several of the adults laughed at this. Bill Baker, who was sitting next to me, asked, "You get that a lot?"

"More than you can imagine!" I turned back to the Scouts. "What's up guys?"

They looked at each other nervously, now that they were in the presence of the 'great man', but one of their leaders motioned them on. "Go on."

The boy who had asked if I was a Congressman stepped forward slightly and stammered a bit, "Uh, I'm working ... we're working on our Citizenship in the Nation merit badge."

The boy standing next to him piped up and said, "For our Eagle requirement!"

It was starting to dawn on me what was happening. I smiled and nodded. "And let me guess. One of your requirements is to meet a Congressman?" It didn't sound quite right, but when I was teaching merit badges when Parker was a Scout, I didn't teach any of the Citizenship badges (Community, Nation, and World). Maybe it was a requirement.

They looked at each other and stepped closer, loosening up a bit. A third boy said, "Uh, not quite, but we were wondering..." He dug a pamphlet out of his coat pocket and flipped it to the first page.

"Hold on, fellows. First things first. The first part of citizenship is courtesy to your fellow citizens. Tell me who you are! My name is Congressman-Elect Carl Buckman. Who are you guys?", I said with a smile.

The first boy blinked at that and said, "Jerry Reeves, sir. Troop 420, out of Westminster."

I stuck my hand out and he shook it. "Nice to meet you, Jerry." I went around the small circle, shaking hands and getting their names. "Now, what's this requirement?"

"Uh..." he took the book from his friend and read a few lines. " ... Name your two senators and the member of Congress from your congressional district. Write a letter about a national issue and send it to one of these elected officials, sharing your view with him or her. Show your letter and any response you receive to your counselor." He handed me the booklet and pointed to the line.

"Okay, so name the Senators.", I challenged them.

"Paul Sarbanes and Barbara Mikulski!", answered a little guy at the end of the line.

"Correct. Now, who was your Congressman?"

Jerry answered, "It was Andy Stewart."

"Until you beat him!", tossed in another boy. There were a few snickers among the adults at this.

"Right. So, what do you need to do, write me a letter and get a response? You need my address?"

The boys looked at each other in confusion. I didn't think they had figured it out that far. "I guess.", said one of them.

"Got a notepad and pencil?" They started patting their pockets, and I joked, "Whatever happened to being prepared?"

I climbed up out of my chair and moved over to the picnic table. "Let's make this simple, guys. Have a seat." I positioned them around the picnic table and placed my camp chair at the head of the table. "Let's pick a topic and talk about it, and I'll count that as the letter and we'll sign off on it. Okay?"

"Can we do that?"

"Sure we can! I'm a Congressman, right?" I winked at one of their leaders, who wasn't anywhere near as impressed as the boys were. He was probably a Democrat! He grinned and gave me a thumbs up sign.

I started leading the boys into a discussion about something close to their hearts, which was school. I had been a teacher in the past, and I always preferred the Socratic Method rather than lecturing as a teaching tool. Ask the kids the questions and use their answers to prompt more questions, leading them to the point you were trying to make. They figure the answers out themselves rather than being told the answers. We talked about how to make schools better and what some of the problems might be with their ideas. For instance, do we increase the length of the school year, and does that mean we now have to raise the pay of teachers and raise taxes to pay for that? Things can get complicated quickly, and you normally need some compromises.

After about an hour, one of their Scoutmasters came over and tapped his watch. "Time to get back and make dinner, guys."

I looked around and nodded. "Our guys are getting back, too. Listen, I gave you my address, so feel free to write me. If I can help you out, let me know. The most important thing isn't that there's a right or wrong to this stuff. The important thing is that you care enough to ask the questions and think about the answers. You'll be voting in a few more years, so keep thinking about this stuff."

The boys popped up, and I shook their hands and they shuffled out of camp. Their leaders also shook my hand and thanked me. "You're welcome. Do you need me to sign off on something?", I asked.

"Nah! I'll sign off on it. I'm the merit badge counselor on this for the troop, so this is good enough for me.", said one of the men.

"Well, feel free to let your boys know I'm good for this sort of thing. In fact, let the word out, if any Scouts in the Council need to speak to a Congressman or want me to do something for the Scouts, for any reason, they can dig me up. In most ways, teaching these kids is more important than any other stuff I do."

"And you go camping with these guys?

I laughed at that. "My boy's a Webelo. Why else would I be sleeping in a tent?! There's a reason we started building houses, you know!"

They laughed at that, and then thanked me again and left. I repeated my comment to the Cubmaster, and told him to get the word to the Council. I probably wouldn't have the time to teach merit badges, but I could still help out. Then the Webelos came back, loudly talking about how they had all started fires. Pack 116, building pyromaniacs one boy at a time!

Part of the secret to running a good camping trip is to have too much for the boys to do. Idle hands are the Devil's workshop, and that sort of thing. Keep them busy all day long learning things, then have a few contests and games, followed by dinner. After dinner we made them do the cleanup, and led them off to the giant bonfire, for singing and skits.

The funniest part was at the end of the night, after the bonfire, when we were back at our campsite around our own fire. One of the boys looked out into the darkness and asked, "Are there any bears around here?"

Most of the adults chuckled, but I leaned forward and said, "Absolutely! In fact, when I was a Scout, I was up here at this very campsite, and a bear found me, right here!"

I could see a few of the other adults trying to stifle their grins, but the boys were all wide-eyed and looking at me. The first boy asked breathlessly, "What'd you do?"

"Well, I climbed up a tree, right over there.", I answered, pointing to the forest.

"And the bear left you alone?"

"Well, pretty much. He tried to push the tree over but it wouldn't fall, so he left and came back with a second bear, an even bigger bear! That was really scary, let me tell you!"

"So, what'd you do then?", I was asked.

"Well, I stayed in the tree, and both bears tried to push it over. They couldn't though, so they went away, and then they came back with a third bear, an even bigger bear! I really thought I was in trouble then!"

"But they couldn't push it over, right, Dad?", asked Charlie. He was as rapt as the other boys.

"Nope, they pushed and pushed and pushed some more, but it wouldn't tumble over, so all three bears left. I just stayed up there for awhile, so they could all leave."

"Did they bring back another bear?"

"Worse!" I leaned closer and looked around the campfire at the other boys, all staring at me. "They all came back carrying beavers!"

At that point the adults exploded in laughter. "Oh, jeez, I haven't heard that one in years!", commented Bill Baker.

"Beavers!", laughed Al Parker, "Oh, that's a good one!"

"DAD!", complained Charlie. A few of the other boys complained too, now that they realized they'd been had. We shooed them off to bed and finished off the coffee and tea, swapping other tall tales we'd heard over the years, mostly going back to when we had been boys.

Sunday morning we were out of there as soon as we could rouse the boys and feed them. Since a Scout is Reverent, when we got back to St. James, we hauled their butts inside the church and made them sit through the last half of the service before sending them home. (Marilyn wasn't too pleased with that, since it wasn't a Catholic service, but I told her to lump it.) We cleaned up and took naps, or at least I did. Charlie had a lot more energy than his father did!

It was a big difference camping with the Scouts in the Nineties versus camping with the Scouts in the Sixties. Back when I was that age, nobody gave a shit about being sensitive or politically correct. Leaders would sit around the campfire smoking and passing a flask, while sending the kids off into the wilderness to hunt for left-handed monkey wrenches and snipe. Now we had to be nurturing and supportive. We couldn't allow hazing, booze was forbidden (admittedly, that was probably a good rule), and if you had to smoke, you had to leave the camp area. That led to some silly stuff. I remembered one trip when I still smoked. The Scoutmaster, and all three of us Assistant Scoutmasters left the campfire area one cold winter night to smoke and chat; so half the boys followed us, so they could chat, too. Everybody ended up standing around in the dark snow.

We were lucky on this trip, with no WIAs or KIAs in Pack 116. Nobody got lost, nobody got homesick, nobody cried, nobody got hurt more than scrapes and splinters and bruises. Nobody got eaten by bears. Everybody got filthy. That pretty much made it a good trip for a bunch of nine and ten year old boys! Life is pretty simple at that age.

Chapter 108: Settling In

I was sworn in as a Congressman on January 3rd, 1991, as the 102nd Congress convened.

"I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter: So help me God."

Everybody in Congress, all the Representatives and the new third of the Senate, has to take this oath. It dates back to 1884.

Both Brewster and Chuck, my new Chief of Staff, insisted I had to have Marilyn and the kids there for my swearing in. That meant we had to take them out of school for the day. I argued against it, but was told this was not optional. They had to be there!

In most ways, it really is optional. It is nothing but a gigantic photo op. For one thing, all 435 of us are sworn in at one go, in the House. Since no photos are allowed, nobody can see us. So instead they have a bunch of empty rooms with flags and backdrops set up, and photographers. You get called into one of the rooms, with your family and whoever else you want in the photo, and it all gets faked! You could bring in the cast of Sesame Street and be photoed with your right hand raised and your left hand on Grover's head and it would be totally legit. In fact, donate enough money to the campaign and you can be in the background, smiling as Congressman Needsdough gets sworn in. You don't even have to be sworn in with your hand on a Bible. There are no laws saying you have to. It can be on a Koran or the Book of Mormon or a set of car keys. I settled for the small King James Version bible I had received as a gift from my godmother after my confirmation. That was back in the days when I still lived at home and Hamilton hadn't totally gone crazy yet.

We didn't get silly. We asked Suzie if she wanted to come down with her family for the fun and games. She had a good laugh, but then called us back the next day. John couldn't take the time off, but he had (foolishly to my way of thinking) agreed to take care of the boys for a couple of days and she flew down. She couldn't believe we had sent a plane for her, and then I told her she'd have to come down with just her husband one day, and waggled my eyebrows at her. Both she and Marilyn turned bright red and spluttered, which made it money well spent.

We had also asked Harriet and Big Bob to come down, but they were going on a Caribbean cruise, and couldn't make it. They did, however, accept my offer to have them flown to San Juan, Puerto Rico, so they wouldn't have to fly commercial. They promised to see us after the trip.

I didn't invite my parents. After Suzie and I reconnected I prevailed on her to get in touch with dear old Mom and Dad. She was nervous about it, but made calls. Afterwards she called me, crying. Our mother was damning me to no end, and complained that Suzie wasn't being supportive, and was no better than I was. Dad, on the other hand, would be happy to see her again. She should visit and meet his new girlfriend. He wasn't overly happy with her getting in touch with me, either, since I had caused so much trouble, even if some of it had been forced on me by Hamilton. What a pair of fucking nut jobs! No, I didn't need either one of them anywhere near me or my family or the United States Congress.

We were still figuring out the commuting and living thing, and I was still at the L'Enfant Plaza. We had closed on the house on the 30th but our designer wasn't through with it yet. I wasn't surprised when the designer Stayman-Huestis had recommended turned out to be a 'Republican' designer, the wife of a Senate committee staffer. I had this horrible feeling that by the time she was done with that, the interior decorations would end up costing more that the Hereford house total, including property, pool, and pool house! She had put off the grand unveiling by a week already, and I was sure I was going to need a very strong drink before I went inside.

The commuting-airplane angle was actually working out neatly. I had put Lloyd Jarrett and his partners together with Jake Junior, and they had come up with an interesting plan. Junior had said, we're in the equity business, so let's do this as an equity deal. The Buckman Group would come up with the money, partly through sales of my shares, and buy an appropriate sized chunk of Executive Charters. Executive Charters would use this capital investment to purchase a mint condition slightly used Gulfstream IV and a brand new Bell JetRanger III. I would have primary use of them, the Buckman Group would get secondary use, or a substitution of something equivalent, and they would also be available for charitable or mercy flights. That sort of thing was always good as public relations and had a few tax benefits - and it's simply good citizenship.

Marilyn and the kids came down on Friday night, and we got our first look at the new house, now ready for us to move into. Imagine House Beautiful, only nicer. The designer showed us around, and assured us the price was quite reasonable, that price being somewhere in between "Holy Christ!" and "Oh my God!" The kitchen was the type with the matching $10,000 custom pots-and-pans set hanging from the mahogany rack over the granite island. I used it to make burgers with. I was worried that the gods of décor would shoot lightning down through the roof at us.

Saturday was going to be a big day for Marilyn and me. We had a very important dinner to attend, and we had needed to dig up a sitter for the kids. I didn't know anybody in the neighborhood, so I simply asked around my office. Anybody have a kid interested in babysitting Saturday night, maybe late, good money? It worked out that Sherry Longbottom, my Legislative Director, had a niece going to school at Georgetown and doing some intern work on the side with us, and she could do with a few bucks. She came over Saturday afternoon with a pile of textbooks. That gave her the time to meet Charlie, Holly, Molly, and Dum-Dum, and time enough for us to feed them before we ran out. Our security detachment would stay out of sight in the basement office we had set up for them. Sherry's niece took over feeding the kids, and Marilyn and I went upstairs to clean up and get dressed. It was an important dinner, black tie, so I was in my tuxedo and Marilyn had a new black evening gown.

We were dining at the White House.

President Bush was giving a dinner for all the new Congressmen and Senators, along with the various Congressional and Senate leadership. I had bought a tux back when I began donating to the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and the Meyerhoff Symphony Hall in the early Eighties. With the kind of money I was donating, you get invited to a fair number of black tie affairs. The nice thing is, though, that when you buy your own tux, you can buy what you want. It's really nothing more than a fancy black suit. I went with a full vest instead of a cummerbund, bought several types of black bow ties and such, and formal shirts in several different colors, all with French cuffs. By the time I was finished, I could have worked as a busboy at any number of excellent Washington restaurants!

For the White House, I selected a crisp white shirt and some gold Rensselaer cufflinks Marilyn had gotten me for my 30th birthday. Marilyn wore a new black evening gown with a slit up her right leg to a few inches above the knee, and slender straps up top. It had some interesting, but tasteful, cleavage on display. Our children were predictable in their opinions when we came down the stairs.

Holly oohed and said, "Mommy, you're pretty!" Molly agreed with her.

"Dad, what's with the fancy suit? You look like a waiter in that TV show last night.", asked Charlie.

My wife rolled her eyes and bit her tongue to keep from laughing. I just gave him a deadpan, "I'm auditioning for a new job."

"I thought you just started a new job.", he replied.

"That might not work out.", I told him. Marilyn started giggling at that, so I shuffled her out the door before the kids could say anything else. To her I said, "I sure hope they serve drinks at this thing!"

"Maybe you should stop off somewhere and buy a hip flask.", she laughingly said.

"Sounds like a good gift for Father's Day."

We had our driver take us in a limousine over to the White House. The plus side, if you could call it that, to the new security regime was that nobody was going to photograph me in my 'foreign sports car'. I probably should have sold it, but I just couldn't bring myself to do it.

We pulled up to the White House behind a black limousine, and out of the car stepped John Boehner and his wife. When he saw who we were, he stopped and waved. I waved back, and when Marilyn climbed out, I led her over to them. "John, good to see you again. Marilyn, this is John Boehner, another Republican Congressman like me. We met him and his wife Debbie during Orientation, remember?"

"Pleased to meet you.", came from the others. We shook hands all the way around.

The Boehners went in ahead of us and we followed. Once inside, we took off our coats and handed them to a liveried waiter. Like me John was wearing a trench coat, although I had a fedora on. Debbie was wearing a long camelhair coat with a hood attached. Marilyn, however, was wearing a very nice calf length sable coat and a matching sable cap. I had bought it for her for Christmas, as a thank you for putting up with the election nonsense. Marilyn wasn't big on fur coats, but she had owned a rabbit fur coat in high school and this was much, much nicer! For all of her complaints about what I spent, I would occasionally see her running her hands through the fur and smiling. I would laugh at her and she would blush and tell me I was imagining things.

After we were relieved of our outerwear, we were directed through a set of magnetometers towards a hall. The Secret Service was being vigilant, and they took my cane (dark mahogany, with an oiled bronze head) and examined it. I knew security would get worse in the future.

We ended up in a line outside a reception hall. A young lady greeted us and told us the drill. The President and First Lady would greet us, we would shake hands and pose for a photo, and then we would continue on into a reception for a few drinks. After that we would move on to a dinner, after which the President would say a few words. Then she was further down the line for the newest arrivals.

After we were left in the line, John turned to me and said, "I've seen you with the cane a few other times as well. You need that all the time?"

"Mostly just in the evenings. My knee stiffens up in the evening and starts bothering me.", I answered.

"If you don't mind my asking, what's wrong with your knee?"

I smiled. It was a common enough question, and I gave my usual answer. "I used to be a paratrooper, and I made one jump too many. I had a hard landing and wrecked my knee."

"Well no wonder!", exclaimed Debbie Boehner. "That's so dangerous! Weren't you worried your parachute wouldn't open?!"

I couldn't help it. I grinned at her and said, "I never worried about that. Our parachutes had a 100% guarantee."

"A guarantee? How do you guarantee a parachute?", she asked.

"Well, if your chute fails to open, all you have to do is take it back, and they'll give you a brand new one, free of charge!", I answered.

Debbie's eyes opened wide at that, but her husband chuckled. Marilyn said, "Please, don't get him started! You wouldn't believe how many jokes they have about this stuff."

"Like what?", asked John, laughing.

"Like, 'We've never left anybody up there' and 'It's not the fall that gets you, it's the sudden stop at the end!' I used to hear these guys all the time back in the day." She turned to face me and wagged a finger at me. "It used to get old even then!"

"I would have paid good money to watch you jump out of a plane, good money!", I replied.

"You guys were crazy.", commented John. "I enlisted in the Navy but screwed up my back and they cut me loose while I was still in basic training."

"My dad was Navy, but I get seasick, so I went into the Army instead.", I admitted.

By this time we had worked our way up the line to where we would be going in soon, so we quieted down. Another young lady took our names and reported them. Then John and Debbie were ushered forward, where they shook hands and posed for pictures, and after that it was Marilyn and me. Forget about any impromptu discussions of foreign policy; it was "Thank you for coming.", followed by smiles and the flash of a camera. Then we were off and into the reception.

We circulated around the room, being polite and trying to make small talk, but it was actually a bit surreal to both of us. I mean, this was the White House, the home of the President of the United States! Congressman or not, what in the fuck was I doing being so presumptuous as to think I could be here?! At one point I whispered to Marilyn, "This is just so fucking weird!"

"What, being in the White House?"

"Yeah!"

"No shit!"

We were standing with the Boehners when Mr. and Mrs. Bush came up to us, circulating so as to greet everybody. A pair of large fellows in tuxedos were standing a few feet behind them, eyes constantly moving around the room. They had to be Secret Service. "I'd like to thank you all for coming.", said the President.

"Thank you for inviting us, sir.", replied John. The rest of us parroted him.

"Have you been able to find apartments or houses and settle in?"

Marilyn and I nodded. "We managed to move into a place this weekend. Marilyn will be going back home with the kids on Sunday. I'll be staying in town when I can't get home nights.", I said.

Debbie Boehner also admitted she would be staying at home with the children most of the time. John asked, "So, where is your regular home?"

"About half an hour north of Baltimore.", said Marilyn. "We're still trying to figure out the commuting." She turned to me, and asked, "Did you close on the deal with the plane and helicopter yet?"

The others turned to us and stared. I just shook my head and said, "No, next week, I think."

"You're buying a plane and a helicopter?", asked Barbara Bush.

"Yes, ma'am. The helicopter is what I'll commute in. We're also acquiring a Gulfstream IV for anything long distance. That would be too big for commuting, though."

The others didn't quite know what to say. I broke the ice by admitting, "I've actually been here once before."

Marilyn gave me an odd look. "When?"

"When I was little. My godmother, my Aunt Peg, drove me down here for the tour. I mean, it was probably an hour-and-a-half, maybe two hours. That must have been back during the Kennedy presidency."

"Do you remember it? Did you see the President?", Marilyn asked.

President Bush chuckled at that. "You don't actually meet anybody on the tours. How old were you?"

I shrugged. "I couldn't have been more than five or six. The only thing I remember was waiting forever for the tour to start. I just remember a really long line!" I turned to Marilyn and said, "You know, President Bush here is a paratrooper, too!"

Marilyn turned to the Bushes, who were laughing at this. "You don't look crazy!", she commented.

That really got Mrs. Bush laughing. Mr. Bush chuckled and said, "It wasn't planned. I had to bail out of my bomber over Chichijima. It was the accelerated course, I guess you could say. Was that your service? You were a paratrooper?"

"Yes, sir, airborne artillery."

"Your old outfit is over there now, isn't it?", he asked. We got more serious at that. A big chunk of the Army was currently deployed in Saudi Arabia shielding the Saudis from the Iraqis. It was still Desert Shield, and wouldn't turn into Desert Storm for another month or so.

"Yes, sir, the 82nd Airborne."

"You miss it?", he asked.

I hadn't thought about it all that much, but as he asked it, I knew it was true. I nodded and said, "Yes, sir, I suppose I do. I'd have probably had a battalion, maybe a brigade by now. God forgive me, but I would want to be there." I looked at Marilyn with a guilty smile.

Marilyn smiled back and tightened her hand in mine. "Carl was planning on going career when he messed up his knee.", she told the others. To me she said, "You've already got a medal, you don't need any more. Don't be angry if I say I'm not sorry you're out."

"Never.", I said, smiling back.

We chatted another minute or so, and then they excused themselves and moved on. The Boehners turned to us and John asked, "You are buying a jet and a helicopter? I remember hearing at the time about the billionaire investor who was trying to buy a district. Well, you know what I mean. You really could have, couldn't you?!" He wasn't asking rudely.

I nodded. "I didn't really buy the district. I wish! That would have been so much easier than putting up with Andy Stewart! I was in investments, private equity and capital. I own about three quarters of the stock in the Buckman Group, although that's now in a blind trust. Which means I can afford a few toys.", I said with a grin.

"If you're ever in the Baltimore area, call us and visit.", invited Marilyn. They agreed to, and we split apart and moved around some more.

We ran into Wayne Gilchrest, and I introduced him and his wife Barbara to Marilyn. I had already had a chance to talk with him a few times during the various orientation and caucus sessions, and then we had lunch together after that while shopping for staff. He was the only other new member of the Maryland Caucus from either side of the aisle. Whether planned or not, we found ourselves sharing a table with the Gilchrests, the Boehners, and David and Caroline Hobson. David was an Ohioan like John Boehner, and the only other new Republican from Ohio. Curiously, all four of us had served in the military at some point, with John in the Navy (even if just briefly), Wayne in the Marines, and David in the Ohio Air National Guard. If nothing else, it gave us all something to chat about. The specifics, of course were about the looming Gulf War.

It was a touch strange, thinking about it. By the time I recycled, veterans in Congress were a very small minority. There had been a time when elective public service practically demanded that you had done a hitch, but that was rapidly becoming passé. It felt strange.

The other thing we could chat about was what they had all done before they had been elected. Hobson and Boehner had gone the traditional route, working up from local positions into the big leagues. Gilchrest, on the other hand, had been a high school teacher and had run for the first time in 1988. He had lost by only 460 votes, so he ran again this time and won. Only Dave Hobson had earned a law degree; Wayne was a history major and John was a business major. We joked that this would allow us to keep an eye on the lawyers.

"Well, you guys will have to tell me what in the world to do, because I am clueless. Before this I was in the Army and business. I'd never even run for dogcatcher before I got talked into this.", I admitted. "Wayne, even you ran once before, so you still know more than I do."

"Never!?", asked an incredulous Dave.

I shrugged and shook my head. "Never even thought about it. There I was, just minding my own business, when some people I used to consider my friends said, 'Carl, we've got an idea!' One of these days I will get them back."

"Oh, stop it! You'd jump in front of a train for John Steiner, and you know it.", scoffed my wife.

I chuckled at that. "I can still dream, can't I?"

"So what did you do, then, before you ran for office?", asked Caroline Hobson.

"I ran an investment company. We did a lot of private equity and venture capital deals.", I answered. "The last few years I've done a fair bit of writing and speaking."

Like John Boehner, the others all knew about the billionaire who had just bought a Congressional seat, but the Hobsons didn't realize that I was the guy. "Well, you sure whipped Andy Stewart's butt but good!", Wayne said.

"That was an ugly campaign!", added his wife.

That got all of us to start discussing our opponent's dirty tricks during the campaign, including whatever vices we had been accused of. John smiled and asked, "So, what vices are you guilty of that you weren't accused of?", and got a fair bit of laughter at that.

Debbie protested, "John, you can't ask that!"

He smiled and piously intoned, "Well, I simply need to know about the character of the people I'll be working with."

This made me laugh. "I have no vices. I am as pure as the driven snow, and stand for truth, justice, and the American way!"

There were the predictable groans, and equally predictably, Marilyn shook a finger at me. "That's not true, and you know it. You gamble..."

"But I always win!", I interjected.

" ... and you get in fights..."

"But I always win!"

" ... and you're generally a smartass!"

"Better than being a dumbass!" I leaned over and gave Marilyn a quick kiss.

Carolyn Hobson said, "They're all a bunch of smartasses, if you ask me. I think it's a job requirement."

"What was that about fighting?", asked Debbie.

"I heard about that.", commented Wayne.

His wife, Barbara, nodded. "That's right, you got in that fight, like a month before the election. That made the TV news. It got you the women's vote, that's for sure!"

"What?", came from several people around the table.

"Well, it wasn't much of a fight. I was just sitting there in a late night diner having some pie with a reporter after a campaign speech. It was late, I was tired, the place was empty and quiet. It was just us and a woman in a booth at the end of the place. Anyways, this drunk comes storming in, smacks around the owner of the place and a waitress, and then grabs the woman and tries to drag her out. I got up and knocked him on his kiester and we got the cops there and they hauled him away. It turned out that he was her husband, she's six months pregnant, and he's been using her as his private punching bag, and she finally got sick and tired of it and tried to get away." I turned to Wayne and added, "He's doing three years in Hagerstown."

He nodded and added, for the others. "I remember that. The police released the security tape footage of it all. It was like watching a cop show on television. He really cleaned the guy's clock!" Then he turned to me and asked, "Didn't you do something like that in the Bahamas once? I thought I read that in the Sun."

I admitted as much and gave a brief retelling of that incident. Then I turned back to Wayne and said, "It wasn't that big a deal. Besides, you'd have done the same. I read your bio in the Sun, too. You were in Viet Nam. You earned a Bronze Star, right?"

"So did you, Carl.", interjected Marilyn. That made a few eyes open around the table, but I just waved it off. I didn't want to get into it that night.

Fortunately, I didn't have to. We had been talking all through dinner, and I was saved by the bell, or more specifically, the mike. It was time for President Bush to make a few remarks, and he went to the dais and the lights dimmed and then he gave a fairly average speech, with a lot of rah-rah sentiment and absolutely no content. He thanked us for our service, promised to work with us, promised an open door and an ear to speak into, etc., etc., etc. How much of this was true was questionable. He was a politician, after all.

Like me, now that I thought about it!

We ended the evening on a pleasant note. I told the others to feel free to drop by my office sometime, and we promised to have them over to the house. None of the others had a home anywhere near large enough for a large group. While Marilyn and I weren't by nature 'big party' people, we had always hosted the big summer and fall parties, and were sure we could handle something here.

For one thing, we had already made a big decision concerning how we were going to live. Back in Hereford, we didn't have servants, but made sure the kids did chores and we cleaned the house ourselves. The only thing we subcontracted out was lawn maintenance and having John Caples run his brush hog over the place a few times every year. We thought it was important that the kids be brought up as normally as possible. You put kids in private schools and surround them with chauffeurs and servants, the result is not pretty. You end up with a bunch of drugged out jet set kids. No way, not us!

The house in the Bahamas we treated differently. That was our vacation home. We had a local maintenance company clean and take care of everything before and after every visit; they would restock the pantry and liquor cabinet as needed. We planned to do the same here in Washington. There was no way that Marilyn could take care of our kids and house in Hereford, and then come down and do the same thing in an even larger home here in D.C., nor could I. We would hire a maintenance and staff company. Fortunately, there are plenty of outfits capable of handling it, and we had already hired one. There was also a lively industry in catering parties and even a 'party consultant' business.

Remember the first Van Wilder movie, the good one? In it, a perpetual student, Van Wilder, played by Ryan Reynolds, gets cut loose by his father and has to survive on his own. He earns money by becoming a 'party liaison', and arranging parties and inviting interesting guests. Well, Van Wilder would have done quite well in Washington! These people actually exist, and we had already been given a couple of names by the interior designer we used.

Marilyn and I went home and sent the sitter home. The kids were sleeping and the house was still standing. Sunday we would head back to Hereford. This was a screwy setup.

Chapter 109: Chief of Staff

Wednesday, January 30, 1991

By middle of January I was feeling like I had made a mistake. By the end of January I was quite sure I had made a big fucking mistake! Stuff seemed to be piling up around the office, not much was getting accomplished, and I was hearing rumblings among the staff. I mentioned this all to Chuck Hanson, my Chief of Staff, but he assured me it was just people settling in. Meanwhile, despite my orders not to, he kept shoveling lobbyists at me, and with no particular rhyme or reason. One morning he had somebody pushing 'clean coal' followed immediately by the Sierra Club. They ran into each other in the outer office and immediately got into a shouting match! What a clusterfuck!

The final event, to my way of thinking, occurred on Wednesday, the 30th of January. I was in my office and about two or so, Chuck informed me my afternoon appointment was here. I glanced at my calendar book, and it had been blank. My standing orders were that anybody could write things in my schedule (within reason) but that if it wasn't in my book, it wouldn't get done. Back on my first go, when I was with Lefleur Homes, it was actually a bit of a company joke. Even after everybody started switching to PDAs and computer calendars, Carl Buckman kept his calendar book. On the plus side, I never missed anything I put in the book.

I sighed in exasperation, and bit off the complaint. "What if I had scheduled something else, or wasn't here, because it wasn't in the book?" Chuck would have just given me a blank stare and ignore this. I simply told him to show them in. I stood up and slipped on my suit jacket, since I had been in shirt sleeves, and wanted to look like I knew what I was doing.

Chuck opened my door and went out into the common area, and then ushered in two men, both on the large side. He introduced them. "Congressman, this is John Talbot of the American Petroleum Institute, and Morton Adrianowicz of Dunder Logan Simkins. Gentlemen, Congressman Carl Buckman."

"Gentlemen, it's a pleasure to meet you. Please, come in." I glanced over at Chuck and said, "Thank you, I can take it from here."

"Are you sure, Congressman? I'd be happy to help."

"No, that's all right. I can handle things." I was still irritated over the scheduling issue and wanted him away for a bit. I closed the door behind him as he left my inner office.

I showed the men over to a couch and armchair set over in the corner of my office. They shared the couch, and I sat down in the armchair. Something about the two men seemed familiar, or maybe it was just the one man, the second. The first guy was from the API, which was the lobbying group for the petroleum industry. The second guy had to be a lobbyist from one of the city's multitudinous law firms. Still, what in the world did these guys want with me? I had nothing whatsoever to do with oil.

"So, gentlemen, what brings you here? How can I help you?", I asked.

They looked at each other curiously, and then the first guy, John, said, "Sir? We were told you had asked to see us."

I must have looked dumbfounded to them. "I asked to see you? Are you sure about that?"

They looked at each other again. "Yes, sir. Your chief of staff asked for a meeting."

I ground my teeth for a moment. "Can I assume he intimated a campaign contribution would be involved?"

Adrianowicz nodded and said, "You may assume so. We were surprised at that, since you aren't on any committees or subcommittees involving the oil business. Still, it doesn't hurt to make friends in this town."

Damn, but that guy looked familiar, but I shrugged it off. "I'm having some growing pains with my chief of staff. Last week I had a meeting with the Clean Coal Initiative, which I did have some interest in, through the Subcommittee for Technology and Innovation. Maybe he thought I needed input on other fuels as well." I tried to put a good face on it. Chuck must be going through the D.C. phone book selling me off to everybody.

"So you weren't actually reaching out to touch our wallets?", asked John, smiling.

I returned the smile. "Fellows, I'm as interested in campaign contributions as the next politician, but you'll be wasting your money. I have about zero influence over the oil business."

"That is refreshingly honest, Congressman.", commented Morton.

I just held my hands up in wry agreement. Then I looked at him closer. "Have we ever met before? You look awfully familiar, but I can't say as I've ever met a Morton Adrianowicz before."

"The name is Martin Adrianopolis.", he replied, which made me really scratch my head. That name sounded familiar! "You, too, for that matter. I knew a Carl Buckman back in college, but he was a math major and going into the Army."

I sat bolt upright at that. "I knew a Marty Adrianopolis, back when I was at RPI, as a math major and ROTC cadet." This guy looked familiar, but a different haircut and thirty extra pounds changed the line of his face.

His face broke out into a huge grin. "It is you! I thought it might be, but Carl and Buckman aren't the most unusual names, and your background history was that you were a investment banker before you ran for office. Holy crap! It is you, isn't it!?"

"Well, by God, it's good to see you again! We have to talk!" I looked back over at Talbot, and said, "Well, it wasn't a wasted trip after all! Did you come over with him, or vice versa?"

"Marty came with me."

"Marty, stick around. We are going to have a few drinks and go out to dinner. Okay?", I asked him.

He smiled. "We will discuss the ways in which the Maryland Ninth and the petroleum industry can help each other. Think of all the billable hours!"

"Oh, God, don't tell me you became a lawyer!", I said. He laughed at that.

I stood up and so did John Talbot. "Mister Talbot, I really want to apologize for getting you over here like this. I'll be discussing it with my chief of staff, but I do apologize."

"Please Congressman, these sorts of things happen. Don't worry about it. Maybe we'll both get lucky and you'll end up on Energy and Commerce, or Natural Resources, and you can owe me a meeting then."

"Maybe so." I showed him to the door, and ushered him out

Chuck came up and glanced into my office, where Marty was still lounging on my couch. "Congressman, you have another meeting in ten minutes."

"Nobody put anything on my calendar, Chuck.", I told him. "Therefore I don't have another meeting."

"But Congressman, we have you scheduled!", he insisted.

"Chuck, let me give you a hint. It's my life so I get to make the schedules. Unless it's the President of the United States or my wife, I'm not available. I will consider something from either the Speaker of the House, or Michel or Gingrich, but tell them you'll have to ask me first. Understand?"

"Congressman?!"

I left him standing there in confusion in the lobby, with a couple of secretaries staring at him and another smirking. I went back into my office and closed the door. "What an asshole!", I said quietly, as much to myself as to Marty.

"Problems?", he asked.

"Nothing I can't handle." I went over to a bookcase-hutch against one wall. I tugged on it and it unfolded into a hidden wet bar. "It must be five o'clock somewhere."

Marty stood up and grinned. "Scotch and soda if you have it."

"I have it, but I can't stand Scotch, so I don't know if it's any good." I held up a bottle. "Glenlivet. Any good?"

"It'll do.", he said with a smile.

I made a couple of drinks, Scotch and soda for him and a Seven and Seven for myself. I handed him his drink. "Here's to knowledge and thoroughness."

"Oh, Christ! Was that a long time ago!" 'Knowledge and Thoroughness' is the Rensselaer motto.

We sat back down around the coffee table. "So, what the hell are you doing in Washington?", I demanded.

"I could ask you the same question! The last I remembered, you were a math major working on your doctorate and going through ROTC training. I always figured you'd end up teaching somewhere. How the hell does that translate into billionaire investor and Congressman?", he asked.

"Yeah? The last I remember of you was when you moved to Houston, to work for Exxon at a refinery. You were a chemical engineer, right? Then, a year later, we all lost track of you, and now you're a lobbyist? What gives? You first!"

"Well, that's right, I went to Houston to work for Exxon at one of their refineries. Not quite a year later, though, I had an opportunity to go to Saudi Arabia and work for Aramco, at one of their refineries. Big money, and I had just gotten married to a woman with expensive tastes. That would have been, let me think, late '76 or so. Anyway, I worked over there for about five years, got divorced, came back home, and ended up back in Houston."

"Right back where you started from."

"That's what I said! I didn't just want to spend the rest of my life in a refinery, waiting for something to blow up, or getting cancer from some shit. I went to law school, and ended up here, junior lawyer in a lobbying firm. Money's better, too."

"You ever remarry?", I asked.

"I am a firm believer in the sacred rite of marriage. And divorce, now that I think about it. I married a second time and got divorced from her, too."

"You're just a sorry ass to have to live with."

"You'd be an expert on being a sorry ass. What about you? The last I remember, you were banging that little brunette with the nice tits."

"That would be my beloved wife and the mother of my children you're talking about.", I answered.

"And the tits?", he said, laughing.

"Even nicer!" We laughed loud and long at that.

"Good for you! So, how the hell did you ever end up in this shithole? I used to think you had principles!"

"Really? A Kegger with principles? Hard to even imagine!", I replied.

"Come on, give!"

I gave an elaborate sigh. "Remember the Grateful Dead, and that line about what a long, strange trip it's been? That would be my life!" I got up and made us another round of drinks, and then brought them back over. Marty was still sitting there waiting for an explanation. "Okay, when last you saw me, I was still at the 'Tute, working on my math degrees and dating Marilyn and planning to go into the Army." Marty nodded and agreed with this.

"So, that's pretty much what I did. I graduated on time, two years after you, and was commissioned into the Army, so I belonged to them for four years. I ended up in the 82nd Airborne, in a battery of 105s. You know what I'm talking about?" I had to explain that to Marty. "A year after I graduated, Marilyn graduated and we got married."

"So, you did your four years and got out.", he asked.

I gave him a wry look. "Well, that's the strange thing. Actually, I liked it, and was good at it. I decided to go career, but then I made a bad jump and screwed up my knee."

"You? Career Army? Holy Christ! You couldn't stay in?"

I shrugged. It was too much to explain, unless he had been Army himself at some point. "Maybe, in a staff job somewhere, but I was a combat officer, and a good one. It's like I told Marylyn, it'd be like working in an ice cream store and not being allowed to lick the scoop. So I got out."

Surprisingly, he nodded. "Okay, I can follow that. My old man was in Korea. He once said something like that to me, too. But how do you go from the Army to investment banker? I would have figured you for teaching college or going to work for Microsoft or something."

At that I laughed loud and long! "Oh, buddy, if you only knew!", I told him.

"Knew what?"

"Back at RPI, I was a millionaire. I'm really good at investing, really good! When I got out of the Army, that summer I flew out to Redmond, Washington, and wrote Bill Gates a check for five million dollars. You think I was going to work for Microsoft? I own just under five percent of Microsoft!"

Marty stared at me. After a few more seconds, he said, "Are you shitting me? You own five percent of Microsoft?"

I shrugged and smiled. "Technically, the Buckman Group owns the shares, but I own 75 percent of the Buckman Group."

"How much does that work out to?"

"What, the Microsoft shares? Well, the market capitalization is somewhere around $13 or $14 billion, so figure five percent times 75 percent, that makes what, $500 million or so."

"Holy Christ! You'd better go slow and start from the beginning. You were a millionaire in college? What the hell?"

I smiled and pointed at the wet bar. "You might as well bring the bottles and ice over here. This is going to be a long, long tale!"

While Marty laughed and went over to the bar, I pulled my cell phone out and hit the first memory button. I listened while the phone rang, and then was picked up. "Hello?" It was Charlie's voice, still high pitched and a little thin. In the background I could hear his sisters demanding to know who it was, at which point he yelled back, "SHUT UP! I'M ON THE PHONE!" I slapped my hand over my face in disbelief. Then I heard, "Hello?"

"Charlie, don't be rude to your sisters..."

"Hi, Dad!"

"Is your mother there?"

Needless to say, the next thing I heard was him dropping the phone, probably on the kitchen counter, and yelling at the top of his lungs, "MOM! IT'S FOR YOU!"

I muttered to myself, and a minute later there was the sound of the phone being picked up. "Hello?"

"Mrs. Buckman, this is the National Center for Youth Telephone Discipline. Do you have time for a survey?"

"Very funny! Let me kill your son for you, and I'll tell you all about it. What's up?"

"My schedule's changed. I'll be staying here tonight. I'll come home tomorrow night and make a long weekend. Sorry about this, but it just came up."

"That's okay." Marilyn had learned my schedule needed some flexibility. "What's up?"

"I need to have dinner and drinks with an old friend who I just reconnected with.", I told her.

"Male or female?", she teased.

I glanced over at Marty. "It's either an ugly guy, or a really ugly girl. I'll tell you about it tomorrow."

Marty flipped me the bird, making me laugh. Marilyn just said, "You can take me to an expensive dinner, and not the special at the Westminster Diner, either."

I laughed some more and told her to make reservations for Saturday night, and then told her to tell the kids I loved them. Before I hung up, I asked, "Do me a favor and call Tyrell I won't need a pickup tonight or tomorrow morning, please." Tyrell Washington was the helicopter pilot for the LongRanger. Marilyn agreed, and I flipped my phone shut and stuck it back in my pocket. "Let the drinking begin!"

Mindy stuck her head in a little later. "Anything I can do, Congressman? Chuck asked me to look in on you."

I snorted. "We're fine. Do me a favor. Call around and make reservations for dinner somewhere, something nice. Morton's would be good if you can manage it. Ruth's Chris, too. Tell my driver, too."

Mindy excused herself and closed the door again, and Marty and I got back to swapping lies and talking about the old days, and how we ended up where we were. At six, Mindy knocked and came back in. "I've got your reservations at Morton's at half past, and if you go downstairs now, your car should be waiting for you when you get there."

"Mindy, you are an angel. Don't let Marilyn know how you run my life, because she'll only get jealous! We're going. You should go home, too." The girl blushed and waved good-bye.

The limo waiting for us when we got down to the lobby, the security guy standing there holding the door for us. Marty climbed in and then I climbed in after him. He smiled as he looked around. "Pretty swanky compared to the old days, huh?"

I laughed. "Marty, you have no idea! Listen, you doing anything this weekend? I'd love to take you home and reintroduce you to Marilyn."

"Sorry, not this weekend. Next weekend is open, though."

"Perfect. Bring a bag or a suitcase over here next Friday and prepare to be surprised.", I told him.

He gave me a curious look. "Going to show me your castle?"

"No castle, but trust me, you'll be surprised."

"It's crazy, you know. I knew about the billionaire who bought himself a Congressional seat, but I never figured it was my little brother from the frat house. You're really a billionaire?", he asked.

I held up two fingers in a V. "Somewhere between one-and-a-half and two. And I wish I could have bought it! It would have been so much simpler than putting up with Andy Stewart!"

"Talk to me! He's been a scumbag since before he ever made it to Washington. What happened with you?"

We talked over the campaign for awhile, taking care of the ride over and getting our table and through the appetizers. It was a touch early in the evening, and Wednesday isn't a big 'power dinner' day, so we didn't have to wait. Marty loved the whole election mess; me, I was less than thrilled with it! "I'm glad you're enjoying this. I could have done without it. So, if I have to tell you the sordid truth about my election, you have to tell me the sordid truth about your marriages. What happened?"

He shrugged and sighed. "My first marriage? She didn't handle being overseas very well. She started sleeping around, and I walked in on them one night."

"Okay, that pretty much sucks.", I agreed. "What about Number Two?"

He shrugged. "I guess I was on the rebound. It just didn't work out. Maybe I'm just not the marrying kind. Anyway, screw that! I want to hear how you are conquering Washington!"

I snorted at that. "Conquering Washington? I'm not even sure I'm conquering my office! So far I am not riding to glory."

"What's wrong?", he asked.

By now our steaks had arrived and we started cutting them up. Happy cows! I savored a bite, and then answered. "I think it's my chief of staff. I don't think he has a clue what he's doing. I need somebody who knows what he's doing, since I certainly don't, and he ain't cutting it. He spends all his time trying to line up campaign contributions and no time trying to help anybody get anything done."

"So fire him! Get somebody new. Where'd you get him anyway?"

"Gingrich recommended him, but I don't know if he knew the guy all that well. He had been an assistant chief of staff to somebody who just lost his seat. Either Newt didn't know the guy, or Newt is trying to sink me. Now, he's probably perfectly capable of doing that, but I can't see what motive he would have. He hasn't known me long enough to hate me yet!"

Marty gave a wry smile and nodded. "Well, at least you're not a total babe in the woods. I know some guys who wouldn't consider a knife in the back. Still, you're right. Newt Gingrich would slit your throat if he thought it was a good idea, but his big plan right now is building the numbers of Republicans up and getting control of the House. If he slits your throat, it won't be until after he does that. The guy is probably just a good assistant and a lousy boss. We've all seen that before."

"True, so true. I remember one battalion exec who was brilliant, right until the day the battalion commander had to go to Fort Sill for a week and left him in command. The guy was a miserable clusterfuck when left to his own devices."

"Right.", agreed Marty. "So fire this asshole and get somebody decent."

"You know anybody any good?" That just earned me a shrug. "I don't want to go back to Gingrich, and the only others I really know are newbies like me. Hell, you know this town, you'd be better than what I'll find on my own!"

Marty laughed hard enough to start coughing, which got me to laughing as well. "Then he said, "Carl, even if I wanted to work for you, you can't afford me!"

"Is that the only issue? The money? Do you like being a lobbyist that much?", I asked.

He looked at me seriously. "No, but I like being in this town and I like being near power, and I really like the money. I make more than what your chief of staff makes! I like you, Carl, but I don't like you that much!"

I nodded in agreement, and we kept talking through dinner. After dinner, we eschewed dessert, but we did order coffee (tea for me) and cognacs. Marty ordered a Remy Martin, but I said, "You know, I'm not big on cognac. Can I just get some whiskey instead?"

The waiter answered, "Yes, sir, of course. Anything in particular?"

"Canadian Mist? Or Canadian Club if you don't have it."

"Yes sir, of course.", replied the waiter.

We sipped on our coffee and tea while the waiter went to the bar. A few minutes later he returned with a pair of snifters, setting one down in front of each of us. I just stared at mine in disbelief. "Holy Christ!", I told my friend. "I thought he'd just bring back a shooter! There must be four ounces of whiskey here!"

Marty laughed and swirled his cognac in his snifter. "I wonder if we can set it on fire?"

"Oh, good Christ! Do you remember that night? Remember how I ended up being thrown in the pool over that?" I swallowed some of my whiskey, which I have to admit, was very nice.

Marty held his snifter out to me. "To the Polar Bear Club!"

I tinked my glass against his. "And all the idiot members of it!"

After we were nearing the bottoms of our snifters, I commented, "If it's just a question of money, I could always raise your pay? What the hell? That's how the real world works? Supply and demand! High end people cost more!" I think I was starting to slur things, but wasn't sure.

Marty was coherent enough to be listening. "Forget it! It doesn't work that way! That's a government job! You can't moonlight or get paid under the table. Why do you think these guys all want to work for the lobbying firms? So they can make some money!"

"Marty, let me tell you something. I may not know shit about government, but I know about people and money, and if there's a way to do something, it can be figured out."

"Well, when you figure this out, let me know. I'll be curious!" Now Marty was slurring a bit.

I waved down the waiter and handed him my American Express card, wishing now that I hadn't ordered the whiskey. I also asked him to order the driver up. He came back, I signed away a ludicrously large piece of my net worth, and we left. Marty was staggering slightly as we went outside. I took a breath of air and got enough oxygen flowing to stay awake, and helped my friend into the limo. By the time I went around to the other side and climbed in, Marty was asleep.

The driver and I stared at each other. "Crap! I was hoping he would help me get inside, not the other way around!", I said.

"Yes, sir.", the driver replied, laughing. "Do you know an address for him?"

I shrugged. "Not a clue. Let's take him over to my place. He can sleep on the couch. Maybe you can help me with him."

He nodded. "If not, I have a brother in law with a construction company. We can borrow their crane."

We went over to 30th and up the driveway. I unlocked the front door and propped it open, then the two of us got Marty upright and headed inside. We dumped him on the couch, and then I stumbled upstairs to bed.

I woke up late the next morning, wondering why I was still wearing a suit. I remembered why when I stood up, and discovered I had a major league headache. I stumbled into the bathroom and stripped off my clothing, and then swallowed a half dozen Advils. I stood under the shower for a long, long time, then crawled out and had a few more Advils. I handle ibuprofen very well, much better than aspirin or Tylenol. Then I remembered my guest downstairs. I grabbed a robe and padded barefoot down to the living room.

Marty was absent, but there was a handwritten note on a scrap of paper in the kitchen. "Took cab ... great place ... call me" along with one of his business cards. I made myself some cereal and juice, and ate that, and then headed upstairs again. I was very late when I got into my office.

As soon as I hit the Longworth building Mindy and Chuck followed me into my office. I was all cleaned up and dressed, but my eyes were bloodshot and my pallor was a bit grey. Mindy said, "Long night?"

I looked at her and said, "If I wanted a woman to scold me, I'd get married. Oh, yeah! I did! Too bad you're not my wife."

Chuck was oblivious, and immediately announced I had missed an appointment with somebody from the Renewable Fuels Association that morning. I looked over at Mindy, who gave me a blank look. I grabbed my planner off the desk and flipped it today's page. No meetings were scheduled. "Chuck, there's nothing listed for today."

He waved his left hand dismissively. "This is something that just came up."

"No, Chuck, it didn't. If you had somebody scheduled to meet me this morning, then you scheduled it no later than yesterday, so it could have been put in my calendar. When did you actually schedule this meeting?"

Chuck's eyes widened and he began to sputter. "No, no ... it wasn't like that ... I mean, yes it was the other day, but no..."

"Forget it. What possible reason could I have to meet this guy?"

"Woman. Tracy Shelburne."

"Nobody cares, Chuck. What possible reason could I have to meet this lady? Renewable Fuels? What the hell is that all about?"

"Ethanol, of course.", he replied.

"Ethanol? From corn?" He nodded. "Chuck, let me tell you, the only ethanol from corn we care about in the Maryland Ninth is bourbon. What in the world did I want to speak to her about anyway?"

"There's a potential for a vote in the Technology and Innovation Subcommittee.", he told me.

"So, last week you were selling my soul to the clean coal lobby. Yesterday you tried to sell me to the oil and gas drillers. Today you wanted me to sell out to the ethanol refiners. What happens when these guys figure out that I can't possibly vote for each and every one of them? Think that might be a problem, Chuck?

"Well, you obviously can't make any promises, other than to consider their positions carefully."

I looked over at Mindy. "You know the definition of an honest politician? One who stays bought. Mindy, I need to talk to Chuck. Can you excuse us? Thank you."

Mindy stood up and left my office, closing the door behind her. Chuck watched her leave and then turned back to me. "Chuck, are you happy here? Working for me, I mean."

He looked very confused at this. "Yes, why?"

"Because right now the feeling is not mutual. I want you to listen to me very carefully. From now on, you make no appointments for me without discussing them with me first and getting my permission. Any appointments get written in the calendar. You do not keep running around selling my vote to anybody and everybody. Are you getting the gist of the discussion, or do I need to be more explicit?" I said this in as calm and even a tone of voice as I could muster.

"Congressman, I don't understand what the problem is. These are all individuals with legitimate reasons to meet with you."

"Maybe they are and maybe they aren't, but that's my ruling on this. It ends today, now. Is this clearly understood, or do I need to go find myself a new chief of staff who understands these requirements?"

Chuck's eyes snapped wide at this. "Congressman!"

"Do you understand me or not?", I pressed.

"Congressman Buckman! I don't understand the hostility of the discussion."

"Mister Hanson, for the last time, will you abide by these rules, yes or no? I need a response."

"Yes, sir, of course!"

"Now, who were you selling me to this afternoon, and why do I want to see them?" We talked about another fifteen minutes, and Chuck was fairly flustered the entire time. I could see him flipping through appointment slips that he was now going to have to cancel. Afterwards I brought in Sherry Longbottom to discuss upcoming legislation, and then Babs Brosinski, my Constituent Services Director, to discuss any problems back in the district. Babs, despite a name that suggested a ditzy blonde, was a tough-as-nails battleaxe brunette. I had brought Cheryl down for a day, and she had taken to Babs quickly, and they looked to be a good team for handling problems back in the Ninth.

Mid-afternoon, I got a phone call from Marty, who complained that I was an individual of low moral character, who was prone to lead innocent victims to a life of ruin. He didn't sound all that good, but he had been socking it away even more than I had. I chided him by saying I learned many of my dissolute habits from him, and then reminded him to call me next week and confirm his visit to the house.

That evening I went over to National and Tyrell flew me back to Westminster. I made it in the house before Dum-Dum figured out I was home, but she was so neurotically insistent on playing with me, I sat down in my chair and let her lick my face while I rubbed her belly. Marilyn came over to kiss me hello, and Dum-Dum decided to lick her face as well. "AAAAGGGHHH! Dog kisses!", Marilyn complained, sounding like Lucy Van Pelt.

I glanced around to make sure the kids were out of earshot. "I don't think it's the kisses so much as the tongue that bothers you."

"AAACCCKKK! That's so gross!"

I rubbed Dum-Dum's belly, and scooted her away. "French kissing a dog! That's a new low, even for you!"

"Keep it up, wise guy!" This time I gave her a real kiss, which calmed Marilyn down. Then the girls jumped into my lap, while Charlie smirked and rolled his eyes. He was now at a very old and wise point of life, nine going on ninety. The odds of his survival to ten were low, and dropping by the day.

Dinner was some leftover beef stew from the beginning of the week, and some fresh baked rolls. The stew was sort of blah (Marilyn can't cook) but the rolls were quite nice. After dinner we sent the kids packing and I told Marilyn about the next weekend. "I've got an old buddy coming next weekend. We don't have anything planned, right?"

"You're supposed to ask that first, and then make your plans.", I was told.

"Okay, do you have anything planned for next weekend?"

"Well, no."

"So can I have a friend over for a sleepover, Mom?!"

"You can be eliminated, you know! You sound like Charlie and his buddies. What if the kids invite somebody?", asked my wife.

"Then they can have a slumber party in their room. It's what they do, anyway."

Marilyn had to nod in agreement at that. "That's true enough. Who is it?"

"You'll never believe who I ran into the other day. Remember Marty Adrianopolis from Kegs?", I asked.

Marilyn looked suitably blank. "One of your old frat brothers? The name's not ringing any bells."

"Big guy, a couple of years ahead of me. He was my frat big brother." Marilyn still looked blank. "He was bartending with me the night we met. We used to bartend a lot."

That made her eyes light up. "Oh, yeah! Big guy, always flirting with me. Didn't we invite him to the wedding or something?"

I nodded. "Yeah, but he didn't make it. I don't remember if we even heard from him, but he was out of school two years by then. Have to ask him."

"Okay, I remember him now. What's he up to?" Marilyn stood to clean the table.

I stood as well, and we carried the dishes into the kitchen. I ended up leaning back against the island while she rinsed and washed the dishes before putting them in the dishwasher. Me, I would have just stuck them in the dishwasher, but no that wouldn't have been doing it right. "He's a lobbyist, of all things. He sold his soul to Satan."

"When he comes, I'll tell him you said that."

"Yeah? Maybe I'll tell you what he said about you!"

"What!? He remembered me?"

"Not specifically. He just remembered the little brunette with the big tits I was banging..."

"HE DID NOT!"

I gave my wife a pious and innocent look. "Oh, yeah, he remembered because of all the noise you used to make. He told me they could hear you all the way over in Grogan's..."

"BULLSHIT!", she squawked, loud enough to attract the attention of the kids.

All three came in. "Mom?!" asked Charlie. I knew he couldn't quite believe his ears. Marilyn never swore in front of the kids.

I tried to keep a straight face, but wasn't succeeding very well. She looked daggers at me, and I was biting my lip. "Out!", she told them.

Charlie snickered and headed towards the living room.

Holly looked at her mother and said, "Mommy! You always tell us that if we say bad words, you're going to wash our mouths out with soap!"

Molly chimed in at that. "Do we need to wash your mouth out, Mommy?"

I was barely holding it together at this point. Marilyn glared at all of us, and pointed towards the living room. "OUT! ALL OF YOU! OUT!" The girls giggled and scampered away, followed closely by me. I was followed by a wet dishcloth. "YOU THINK YOU'RE SO FUNNY!"

"What'd you say to Mom, Dad?", asked Charlie, once we were all out of the kitchen.

"None of your business. Feel free to ask her, though. She'll drop you in the pool and pull you out in the summer. It's your life, though."

Just then a loud clatter came from the kitchen. Charlie grinned and said, "I don't think so!"

"Discretion is the better part of valor.", I told him, which didn't really register. I grabbed a magazine from the end table and started reading in my recliner.

After finishing with the dishes, Marilyn came out of the kitchen, and I had to bite my lip all over again. "You think you're so funny!", she said to me, in a more normal tone.

I had to laugh. "You know, all those years ago, I told you that you'd get in trouble screaming like that."

"You are deluded!"

"I warned you that the Carl Buckman Experience was a life changing event."

Marilyn started laughing now, too. "In your dreams!"

I glanced around and saw that none of the kids were paying any attention to us. I smiled and responded, "I bet I can make you scream."

"Forget it!" I just gave her a confident look and a half smile. "Maybe. Later. If you think you're up for it!"

I grinned back. "Just remember, an artist does his best work on a fresh canvas! Maybe you need to clean up - all over! - to make sure you get the best result. That and dig out a gag, since I don't want your begging and screaming for more to scare the children."

That really made her laugh. "Bullshit!", she whispered to me.

I just waggled my eyebrows in return. "Just remember, I taught you everything you know, but not everything I know!"

Marilyn really laughed at that. On the plus side, shortly after the kids went to bed, Marilyn opened a bottle of wine and took a glass into the bedroom, and said she wanted to relax in the whirlpool bathtub. That meant to me that she was planning on a bubble bath and shaving her legs. I'd bring her in a refill after a bit, and then head to bed a little early, after she was done cleaning up.

I was right, too. Marilyn returned later in a black peignoir set that was pretty much transparent. Everything was clean enough to eat off of, so that's exactly what I did! She returned the favor, and while she didn't need a gag (not that we even had one; my kinks don't quite go that far) she did end up moaning into the pillow while I finished by plowing her ass from behind. Saturday night we did a very nice date night, with dinner and a movie, and Marilyn without any underwear. I teased her by telling her I'd let Marty know how wild she still was, and she retaliated by telling me that when Marty was visiting, I was cut off, so there wouldn't be any 'embarrassment.'

Chuck lasted through Wednesday before pissing me off for the last time. It started out as a scheduling issue, but then he tried a workaround through Mindy, scheduling something on my calendar without clearing it ahead of time. I had also asked him to figure out when some of the troops would be getting back from the Gulf, as I was planning to co-sponsor a 'Welcome Home' party in Fayetteville with the USO. He ignored that. I simply couldn't trust the guy. I asked him to stay late Wednesday, and then after sending the rest of the staff home, I cut him loose. He protested his innocence six ways from Sunday, but I simply took his keys from him and showed him the door.

Thursday morning I called the staff in and made a simple announcement that Chuck had left to pursue other opportunities, and that I was in the market for a new chief of staff, but that we were on our own until then. I kept a smile on my face and looked around the room. The response was interesting. The more junior people looked relieved, and the senior people simply nodded to each other. After that, I sent everybody back to work, although I kept Babs, Mindy, and Sherry behind.

"Okay ladies, let's go over today's plans.", I said.

Mindy and Sherry nodded. Babs asked, "Are you planning on hiring a new chief of staff?"

"Probably. Do you think I should? What are your thoughts?" I pointed at all of them. "What do all of you think?"

It was Mindy who answered first. "It might make things easier when you're not here.", she said timidly.

Sherry nodded and Babs added, "I'm not going to miss Chuck, but somebody needs to do it."

"Just don't hire somebody who orders people around like he did. You need something from Legislative, ask me, or Bobby if I'm not around, not one of the kids.", commented Sherry. Bobby was Bobby Hisert, her assistant.

I looked at the others. Mindy wasn't in charge of anybody, and was one of the more junior people, but she was dialed into the grapevine. "He do that a lot? Going around people?" They nodded. "Okay, that's not good. I used to be in the Army, and I'm a big fan of the chain of command. Okay, I need to replace Chuck. I got his name from Gingrich, but I don't want to go back to that well. If any of you know somebody, let me know. Now, what do we have planned?"

That got us off of Chuck and back to something useful. Babs reported on the usual missing Social Security checks and help needed with Health and Human Services by a town in the western end of the district. Babs handed me a sheet of paper with a name and a phone number and a script of sorts, a bunch of talking points, really, for when I called over there. I was to wave my Congressman badge around and get somebody to do something. I was also handed a second sheet with a name of somebody over at Veterans Affairs. Same deal, call over, be a Congressman, get something done.

Next, Sherry mentioned something about a bill called the 'Gore' bill, because Tennessee Senator Al Gore was pushing it. It was going through the Science, Space, and Technology Committee, and she thought I might be interested. I scratched my head at that. Al Gore? What was he up to? "What's that about?", I asked.

She riffed through some notes. "It's something called the 'High Performance Computing and Communication Act'. Something to do with computer networks, I think."

Holy shit! It was Al Gore's Internet bill, the one that tied ARPANet and NSFNet together! I sat upright. "Okay, I want to know all about it. If it's what I think it is, I want in on this.", I told them.

"Al Gore's a Democrat and a Senator.", she replied, curious at my interest.

I nodded. "Ladies, long before I was an investor or a soldier, I was a scientist. In case you didn't know, I'm not a lawyer, I'm a mathematician. I have a doctorate in computer networking. If it's what I think it is, this is an important bill, and I want my name on it somewhere. Does he have any sponsors in the House? I might not know how this works, but I know you need to sponsor this in the House as well as the Senate. Get me involved!"

Sherry nodded with a surprised look on her face. "Yes, sir. Let me look into this. Give me a few days and I'll get back to you."

I tilted my head towards Mindy, but kept talking to Sherry. "Get in touch with Al Gore's staff. Feel free to set me up with a lunch with the Senator, my treat. Schedule it with Mindy for me."

Next I turned to Mindy. "I want you to call somebody at either the Pentagon or Fort Bragg. Find out when the 82nd Airborne is going to be coming back from the Gulf. Then get in touch with the USO. I donate to them every year, and I would bet that they are planning some sort of 'Welcome Home' party. Feel free to use my name, but I want to help. They'll want some money, so remind them I have contributed in the past and will continue to do so. Also, figure out about any troops from the Maryland Ninth. We can have a party back home for that. I'll want to attend both."

Mindy was scribbling furiously. The others eye me curiously. "You were in the 82nd, right?", asked Sherry.

"Yeah."

The others all nodded. "So, we should stop selling you to the lobbyists, and actually try to get something accomplished?", commented Babs.

I smiled. "Chuck didn't quite get it. Let's see if you ladies and whoever I get as my next chief of staff can figure it out." That got some laughs, and I shooed them out of the office.

I spent the rest of the week learning how bills got introduced and passed in the real world, and not how they teach you during Orientation. It was too late to make a name for myself with the Gore Bill. Al had introduced it to the Senate on January 24 as S .272, and George Brown had introduced the related H .656 to the House four days later. George Brown was the head of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, thus the bill was pretty much a done deal. The best I could manage was being a co-sponsor, which I would just have to be happy with.

I talked to Sherwood 'Sherry' Boehlert over lunch that week about the bill. That was pretty interesting, since he had been my Congressman back when I had lived in New York on my first trip round. He was a decidedly moderate Republican, much like myself, and by the Nineties was constantly being hammered by the religious right about being pro-choice. He finally gave it up in 2006, deciding not to put up with the increasingly hard right tone of the party and got out while the getting was good. He was a fellow member of the SST Committee and was already listed as a co-sponsor. I would have a chance to get on as a cosponsor in April.

He also warned me that this was considered a 'Democratic' bill. He was the only Republican sponsor, and warned me that co-sponsoring it would bring me to the attention of the party leadership, and not in a positive fashion! He could get away with it because he had a reputation as a moderate, and had been in Congress for eight years already; I was a newbie with no reputation. I don't think he gave a damn about what Gingrich thought, and was only four years junior to him anyway. Gingrich was only the Minority Whip, but he was very, very ambitious and Boehlert figured he was trying to maneuver into the Minority Leader's seat, and hopefully become Speaker of the House. That was one of the subtexts of everything involving the legislation, this or any other. Newt was pushing to reverse the Democratic domination of the House, and if he managed it, he would oust Michel. I needed to watch my ass. My counter was three simple letters - P -H -D! I could flaunt my interest in computers and my years of experience in the business, and otherwise pass myself off as simply naïve in the workings of Congress. I told him to count me in.

I had a lot of respect for Boehlert. If nothing else, when Parker had made Eagle Scout, our Congressman, Sherry Boehlert, had issued a very impressive Congressional Proclamation for the occasion. I would have to make sure that Babs and Cheryl knew about that sort of stuff. It costs nothing, wins votes, and impresses the hell out of people.

Marty called me the middle of the week to confirm his coming to the house on Friday, and again Friday morning. I hadn't told him our mode of travel yet, deciding to keep that a surprise. He showed up at my office with a two-suiter on a strap around four in the afternoon. "We'll take my car. It'll be easier that way.", I told him.

"Fine by me. Did you have to remind Marilyn who I was?"

I laughed. "Yeah, she remembered the big guy who used to check out her tits!"

"Great! Some help you are!"

I laughed even more at that. I called for my driver and we headed down. I just needed to bring my briefcase. We threw everything into the back of the limo and climbed in the back. Marty commented, "You know, you really live a tough life."

I smiled. "It's a dirty job, but somebody has to do it."

That earned a derisive snort from him. Then he noticed what direction we were heading in. "Hey, I thought you lived in Maryland. That's out of the city, not into it."

I smiled. "Trust me. I know a shortcut."

He gave me a curious look, and looked at the signs along the highway. "Your shortcut goes through National Airport?!"

I grinned as we pulled off the approach road towards the charter base. When the car stopped and we climbed out I pointed towards a white helicopter without any logos or artwork on it. "There's my shortcut.", I said.

"We're flying to your house?", he asked, staring at me incredulously.

"Not quite, but close though. Come on, grab your bag." I waited for Marty to retrieve his bag. The driver, one of my security people, would wait until the LongRanger lifted off before heading out.

Meanwhile, Tyrell Washington, a large black guy in a heavy jacket and slacks came out and waved at us. I waved back and the three of us converged on the helicopter. "Afternoon, Tyrell. All the parts put back together after the last crash?", I asked.

Marty's eyes opened wide at that, which Tyrell noticed. "Yes, sir, pretty much. They found some extra pieces, though. We've got them in a box back at the hanger. We won't need them until the next safety inspection, though.", he replied, deadpan.

"I sure hope you two are joking.", said Marty.

"Only one way to find out!" Tyrell opened the rear door on the right side and tossed in my briefcase and Marty's bag. Marty was told to get in the right hand seat and buckle up. Tyrell handed him a pair of headphones. Then I went around to the front left, and got into the co-pilot's seat, while Tyrell got into the right side pilot's position. I have no idea why they have to do things differently than everybody else. Chopper pilots are a little different, is my explanation.

Once inside, Tyrell settled a pair of headphones on his head, and I did the same. Marty was somewhat bewildered, but when he saw me do this, he did the same, although he got them on backwards. The engine was already starting to wind up, so I yelled for him to turn them around, and demonstrated with mine. That got the mike in the proper spot, and I said, "Can you hear me?"

"You commute to work in a helicopter?!"

Tyrell laughed at that. I answered, "It's a two hour drive otherwise. I can cut it in half, or less this way."

The engine had spooled up loudly now, and Tyrell broke in on our chatter. "Quiet, please, while I talk to the tower." I nodded and Tyrell flipped a switch and started chattering with the control tower. A few minutes later we lifted off and started flying.

The biggest problem with National is that it is right downtown, in a very congested area by flight standards. Washington is chock full of secure airspace that you're not allowed to fly in (no buzzing the White House) and National is a relatively old and small airport without any room for expansion. For general aviation purposes College Park, just northeast of D.C. would be better, but probably twice as far from either the Capitol or the house on 30th Street and couldn't handle the G-IV. Dulles, the newest major airport, is at least a half hour west of the city.

After a bit, we were out of the city and climbing up to about 5,000 feet, and Tyrell's voice came up through the headphones. "Okay, that's out of the way. Welcome to Buckman Air. We'll try not to crash, or double your money back."

"Anybody ever tell you that nobody likes funny pilots?", said Marty.

"Well, we don't have the room for any stewardesses, and Mrs. Buckman probably wouldn't approve of them anyway.", was the reply.

I twisted around in my seat some, so I could look over my shoulder at Marty. "Sure beats driving for two hours, doesn't it?"

"You do this every day? This must cost a fortune!", he protested.

"Marty, I know you're a lawyer now, and have lost your math skills along with your morals, but think back to the days we were at college together. Remember the difference between million and billion. Start doing the numbers. It's scary at times."

I saw Tyrell glance at me out of the corner of his eye, and then he gave me a wry shrug. You don't get to be a chopper pilot by being stupid, and he could do the numbers too. I made more in interest each day than I could spend in a month.

I had Tyrell give a running commentary of the view and sights below. Once we were at altitude and outside of the D.C. flight area we made quick time on the way to Westminster. We landed in a circle near the terminal and Tyrell helped Marty out of his seat. Twenty minutes later we were at the house.

Marty commented as we climbed out of the car, "I'm surprised you didn't have your pilot land you in the driveway, and save all that time."

I had to smile at that. I waved a hand around. "Get real, there's nowhere near enough room in the driveway." Marty snorted and smiled, and followed me into the house. "Watch out for the idiot dog. She's harmless, but gets excited."

True to form, Dum-Dum raced in. When she saw somebody new, she ignored me, but tried to jump up on him. Marty submitted to her for a minute, and then I pulled her away. She immediately began racing around the house at full speed, running off and then running back, only to get stopped by me.

"Don't worry. In fifteen minutes she's back to normal. During the first fifteen minutes, though, she's simply uncontrollable.", I said.

"DUM-DUM! KNOCK IT OFF! DOWN!", yelled Marilyn. I grabbed a newspaper and when she raced back, I smacked her on the nose with it. Dum-Dum was now eight years old, 56 in dog years. She qualified for AARP, the American Association of Retired Pooches.

Marty and I left our bags in the foyer and I led him inside. "Marty, you remember Marilyn Lefleur. Now she's Marilyn Buckman. Honey, remember Marty Adrianopolis from Kegs?", I said, re-introducing each of them.

Both of them smiled as recognition crept back. "Damn, Marilyn but you look good! You're prettier now than before. Much nicer looking than your husband!"

Marilyn laughed at that. "I remember you, too, Marty. The last thing I remember was we invited you to the wedding, but never heard back from you."

Marty shrugged. "When was that '77 or '78?"

"June of '78"

He nodded. "Well, I was in Saudi by then. Supposedly my mail was being forwarded, but it wasn't the most reliable place to get anything done. The invitation is probably arriving there any time now."

"Saudi Arabia! You mean, all the way overseas like that!?", she exclaimed.

"Yep."

"You are going to have to tell us about that!", I told him.

Dum-Dum was still rampaging around, and the kids came out of their rooms and into the living room to see what was going on. Charlie was the first one out, and the tallest, and he said, "Hi."

"That's Charlie." I said, pointing, and then swung my finger over a bit. "And that one is Holly, and that one is Molly. Guys, this is Mr. Adrianopolis. He's a friend of your mother and mine. He's staying for the weekend, so behave."

"Mister Adaroana...", struggled out from my son.

"Just call me Mister Marty. It's a lot easier to say.", commented Marty.

Charlie's face lit up at that. "Cool!"

"Hi!", came out of both girls.

Marty smiled at them, and then looked at us. "How do you tell those two apart?"

"Holly is troublesome and Molly is more troublesome.", I answered.

"Mom!", they both complained.

"Out, all of you!", she said in reply. She scooted them out, and sent Dum-Dum off with them. To Marty she commented quietly, "And Charlie is most troublesome!" That just earned some laughs.

"We've got two choices for you. Down the hall past the kids' rooms is a spare bedroom. Option Two is the pool house. It's more private and has its own bathroom, but you'll have to come over here for meals and such." I took him over to the kitchen and pointed the pool house to him through the window.

"Well, I don't think it will hurt me to share a bathroom with the kids. Let's give that a shot.", he replied. We went back into the foyer and grabbed our stuff, and Marilyn showed Marty down the hall to the spare bedroom. I dropped my briefcase in my office and then went to our bedroom and changed out of my suit.

I walked barefoot in old khakis and a denim shirt down the hall to the kitchen. Marilyn was putting some dishes away while Marty, now also more casual, was sitting on a bar stool at the island. "What's for dinner tonight?", I asked.

"Hamburgers!", yelled Charlie running in.

I glanced at Marilyn, who nodded. "Okay, hamburgers it is. What about tomorrow?"

Marilyn said, "I was thinking I just picked up some chicken breasts, and I can thaw out the ham slices from when you baked the ham last week."

"Coq au vin?" Marilyn nodded, and I shrugged. "Fine by me." I looked over at Marty and said, "It takes a good hour to prepare, so I don't normally cook big when I'm in Washington all day."

"Have I ever had that? Did you make that back at Kegs?"

"I doubt it. I would have blown a Sunday budget for sure. Want a drink?"

"You bet!" He looked over at my son and then turned back to Marilyn and me. "Got any Southern Comfort? We can teach Charlie how to do flaming shots."

I laughed at this and Marilyn groaned and rolled her eyes. It got worse when our ever-attentive son came over and asked, "What's a flaming shot?"

"Never you mind, Mister, and mind your own business!", said Marilyn. She pointed towards the living room and sent him packing. "No flaming shots!"

"Right. Gin and tonics?", I asked. The others nodded. "Okay, gin and tonics. He can learn about flaming shots the hard way, like we did, in a run down and seedy frat house fighting over hot and wild women looking to lead him from the path of good and righteousness."

"God bless them!", agreed Marty.

"You two still haven't grown up!", said Marilyn.

"You need a double.", I replied.

"With that bunch out there? Make it a triple!"

I made drinks (regular strength) for all of us and then started on the burgers. It was much too chilly to cook on the grill outside, and we had that covered for the winter. Tonight I used the broiler in the oven. The twins didn't want cheeseburgers, but the rest of us did. We ate dinner in the breakfast nook rather than the formal dining room. "So, tell us, what was Saudi Arabia like?", I asked Marty.

He gave me a wry look that said volumes. "I guess I'm glad I did it, but I don't think I'd do it again."

"Oh?"

"You are not in Kansas anymore, Dorothy! It is not like the States. You have to agree to a multi-year contract to work there, so you are locked in. I did one for five years."

"Is it real strict or something?", asked Marilyn.

"Well, yes and no. I was in Dhahran, which is in the eastern part of the country, near all the oilfields. You live in a compound, sort of a gated and walled city, with only the foreigners, well, mostly foreigners, living in it. It's sort of like living in a normal American suburb. And the pay is really, really good! Good schools and you can save a lot for retirement or college."

"Okay, so that sounds good."

"Yeah, but it can be weird. You are in this walled compound, almost like a prison camp. Outside those walls it's all Islamic, women can't drive, you don't have any rights, and nobody is a real fan of America. Inside the wall, everybody pretends they're free, but you have to smuggle in booze, and if you get caught, you will probably be deported after being flogged. Everybody inside the compound is secretly running stills and making home brew. It's like a prison, only it's the fanciest prison you've ever heard of. My first wife, she couldn't handle it, and divorced me and flew home."

"Well, that kind of sucks.", I said.

"I thought so at the time, too. Then again, I did find her..." He stopped and glanced at the children in the room, and finished, "... in flagrante delicto, if you know what that means. That didn't help matters."

"I guess it wouldn't." Marilyn was looking at me in confusion. I just said, "Little pitchers, big ears. I'll explain it later."

Charlie caught part of it. "Were you a pitcher on a baseball team?" I rolled my eyes and let Marty deflect that one.

"I'm actually kind of glad I wasn't over there last year. Dhahran would have been Target One for Saddam Hussein if he had pushed south from Kuwait. Everything he was after was along the east coast, all the oil fields and refineries. He would have taken all those westerners and used them as human shields, too.", Marty told us.

I nodded in understanding. "That would pretty much suck. I have a buddy, still in the service. He was artillery like me, but was commanding an MLRS battalion during Desert Storm. The one thing he said was that the whole place was simply hotter than the surface of the Sun!"

"It is that!"

After dinner we went into my study and I showed him some of the pictures on the wall. He knew about the billionaire investor part, but that's different then seeing me and Bill Gates signing papers. I had a few pictures of Bill and Michael Dell, and of course there was the plaque of me getting my Bronze Star. One of my more recent photos included the President, and another one with the Governor of Maryland, William Donald Schaefer. He was a fascinating fellow, coming up through the Baltimore City Democratic machine, serving 16 years as the Baltimore Mayor, and now was in his second term as Governor. A very popular guy, and even the Republicans were polite to the man.

"What are these pictures doing here?", asked Marty. "You should have all this stuff in your office in Washington."

I shrugged. "I never thought about it before."

"Christ, Carl! There are people in that building who can't do half of what you routinely get away with. Do you think Michel or Gingrich have Bill Gates on speed dial? These guys are lucky to get a handshake at a meet and greet. You have awards for heroism here. Get this stuff down to D.C. on Monday!"

"Well, okay, if you think it would be good."

"In Washington, power is perception. If people down there think you have power, then you have power."

"So, why don't you come work for me? You can teach me this stuff. God knows, somebody needs to!", I replied.

Marty smiled. "I can't afford to work for a government paycheck."

"Money! Whatever happened to helping your country out!?", I teased him.

"Yeah, money! Patriotism isn't going to pay my mortgage."

"Do you like buying and selling Congressmen?", I asked. "Is that what you want to do when you grow up?"

Marty gave me a wry smile. "No, but so what. Carl, I hate to tell you this, but you've sunk to a new low here. Remember when we were in that jail in Florida for sleeping on the beach? As a general rule, our fellow inmates had higher standards than most of Congress."

"Well, I know that. They're mostly lawyers, right?"

Marty flipped me the bird at that. "Fuck you, too, buddy."

"Marty, I might not know the rules, but I know people and politics. You can do anything you want if you can pay for it. I can pay for a lot of things. You can't get by on a government salary? Why can't I hire you directly?"

"Because government employees can't moonlight or get paid by somebody else. We'll both go to jail."

"What if I hire you through the re-election campaign or something like that? I pay what people are worth, not government rates."

He nodded at that. "Legal, but then I would be limited to only things related to your re-election. I wouldn't be a government employee. I wouldn't be able to get a decent security clearance, for instance, if I needed one." Then he gave me an odd look. "Although, there is a degree of moonlighting allowed. I am allowed to earn a certain percentage of income working for the campaign."

I smiled at that. The best way of winning an argument with a fellow is to let him argue your side of the argument! "Any way you can squeeze something more out of the government?", I asked.

Marty was in that deep lawyer mode of thought I had seen in John and a few of the others. "Over time, there might be committee staff duty possible..." He was slowly speaking as much to himself as to me.

"There has to be a way.", I told him. He just smiled.

"Jesus! I am going to have to think on this."

"Think fast. Next week I need to start looking for somebody.", I said.

Saturday I put Dum-Dum on her leash and Marty and I walked around the property. It was cold, but it hadn't snowed and you could see the property fairly well. The pool was covered, but we hadn't drained it, and there was a giant beach ball under the cover to break up any ice. We had the pool house, and I showed him that. I pointed out where Charlie had busted his arm trying to ski jump over the highway, and Marty asked me about the trails cut through the property where my son went dirt biking.

"Are the girls going to be riding, too?", he asked.

I shrugged and gave a wry look. "Not that they've told me. Then again, I'll probably be the last person in the know. They like watching Charlie race, but I don't see them as tomboys. They're more girlie-girls."

"Is that a good thing or a bad thing?"

"Ask me when they turn thirteen!"

Marty grinned. "Oh, I'll bet that will be fun!"

"I've still got my service pistol somewhere. I'll just remind any of the boys I'm the crazy billionaire murderer.", I replied, smiling. Maybe a reputation as a killer would be a good thing!

"Tell me about that. I watch the Sunday news shows as much as the next Washington insider, but what really happened back then?"

I nodded. "Let's go inside where it's warm. You should hear it from Marilyn, also. She was involved as much as me." We turned around and went back to the house, Dum-Dum leading the way.

We took off our coats in the laundry room and left our shoes there, too. Unfortunately, we were the only ones around. Marilyn had bundled the fruit of my loins off to karate and ballet. We were on our own for a few hours until they came back, so we talked politics and what George Bush was going to do with the economy and the growing budget deficit. Right now it wasn't great, not a thing an incumbent President wants to experience right before an election season. The Democrats were still horsing around trying to figure out who was going to run. I knew it would be Clinton, but hearing all the names that Marty was tossing around was a real flashback. Wait until he got a load of Pat Buchanan and Ross Perot!

Marilyn returned after taking the kids through Mickey Ds. Seeing my daughters in tights and tutus always brought a smile to my face. Suzie hadn't been one for ballet, and I hadn't been around the house all that much longer anyway. Holly and Molly were closing in on being seven this summer, and I had moved out when Suzie was only ten. I never saw her growing up this time, and I just didn't remember any more from the first go. I asked the girls about any recitals or dances coming up, and then asked Charlie how his workout went. I got some answers, but then they ignored me. I was just Dad, nobody important.

Considering Marilyn and the children had already eaten, I warmed up some leftovers for lunch for Marty and me. Then Marilyn sat down with us at the island and in low voices we told Marty about that terrible time back in '83. Marty knew about my family troubles from back in college, but this put a whole new spin on things!

My old buddy stayed with us another night, and we watched the Sunday morning news shows together. Then around lunchtime, we drove him back to the Westminster airport and I had him flown back to Washington. Again he marveled at this kind of casual display, but by now it seemed second nature to me. He promised to consider working for me, and I told him to consider quickly.

Chapter 110: 1991 In Our Nation's Capital

I got a call from Marty on Monday afternoon, late. "I need to have my head examined, but I'm in. If you still want me, let me know. I haven't given any notice yet."

"What about your law firm, Dewey Cheatem and Howe? Is this going to screw up any partnership bids? How does that work, anyway?"

Marty snorted. "That's part of it. I have been weighed in the balance and found wanting. I nosed around some this morning, and there won't be a partnership offer made to me. At least, not under current circumstances. If I were to make the appropriate investment, they might reconsider."

"Ouch!"

"Right, so I might as well consider my other options."

I shrugged to myself. There are lots of reasons not to make somebody a partner, and job performance wasn't the only factor. Maybe Marty simply pissed off a senior partner. "Come over on Wednesday and we'll talk some more." We hung up on that.

I talked to Marty on Wednesday and we confirmed he would come to work as my Chief of Staff. Thursday morning I called Sherry, Babs, and Mindy into my office and gave them the word. They sat there and nodded in understanding, but I felt an undercurrent of relief. They were getting somebody to sort things out. Marty would start soon, not the next Monday, but the Monday after that. They would pass it along to everyone.

When Marty joined up, you could see everybody settling into a new scheme of things. The entire office tightened up some, in that there was actually a method to the madness, and some needed discipline. Marty would have a meeting every morning, with me, him, and the three top ladies, and we would plan out the day and review what needed to be done. At least once a week he met with Babs and the Constituent Support people, and also with Sherry and the Legislative Support people. He also made a schedule to visit the District Office in Westminster on a regular basis. Even my own schedule began tightening up, as I began to meet with people I needed to see, and not just people who wanted to buy my soul.

After a few weeks, as things began to work together much more smoothly, I made a comment at our morning meeting that, "I think this new arrangement is going to work out."

Marty laughed dryly. "That just means it's all going to fall apart by lunchtime."

He was right, of course. By the beginning of April I found myself called on the carpet by Newt Gingrich. He had discovered, horror of horrors, that I was interested in co-sponsoring Al Gore's Internet bill. I was 'asked' to meet with him in his office. It was a lot like being called into the Principal's office. He sat behind his big desk and I sat in a chair in front of him. "Carl, I understand you are interested in co-sponsoring HR656."

'Yes, that's correct.", I replied. I didn't want to elaborate unless I had to. Newt Gingrich had the moral instincts of a shark looking for a wounded guppy. There was a reason he was the Minority Whip.

"I'm curious why you would do that. That's Al Gore's computer bill, isn't it?"

I nodded. "Basically. It's the House version anyway. He had George Brown propose it. Sherry Boehlert is one of the co-sponsors." Maybe I could deflect any wrath by throwing Sherry under the bus.

Newt looked like he was sucking a lemon as I said that, so maybe that wasn't a great line of thought. "That's really a Democratic bill, Carl. It would be best if you took your name off of it."

"It's a bill that is going to pass, so maybe it would be good to get my name on it.", I countered.

He shook his head. "I don't think so. You know that Minority Leader Michel and I are working to build a Republican majority, right? Neither of us thinks that successful Democratic legislation will be conducive to that. We'd rather wait until we returned to power to do these things."

Well, that was blunt enough. The massive Congressional gridlock that characterized Washington from about 2008 on really got its start twenty years prior, under the Gingrich reign over the Republican Party. Strategy meant nothing, tactics meant everything. It was a beggar thy neighbor, scorched earth approach to legislation. Better that nothing get done than that anything bipartisan might get accomplished. The only way this actually works, though is when one party has an unassailable hold on both houses and the Presidency. Under any other circumstances it just makes for not much action and really bad blood.

I nodded in understanding, but countered, "Newt, this is an important bill, and it will have consequences that will benefit the Republican Party as well. We should be supporting this bill."

"Explain how this will benefit us."

"Are you aware of exactly what this bill does? In a nutshell, it opens up existing government computer networks and allows them to be expanded on. In effect it is privatizing the existing government networks. We're in favor of privatizing. There will be a lot of money made from this."

That made Newt wake up. He sat upright and looked at me hard. "Computer companies are going to buy this?"

"Probably not, but the phone companies will."

"I'm not convinced.", he told me.

"Let me put it another way. Al Gore is taking to calling this thing the 'Information Superhighway', right? Have you ever heard of a highway that didn't need construction? I would think you'd be interested in figuring out how to regulate and control that construction." Regulate and control - in other words, get money from the companies building the highway so that the construction would be regulated and controlled the way they wanted.

Newt gave me a noncommittal grunt at that, and I could see the wheels whirling inside his head. I pushed in a different fashion. "Here's another thing to think about. You don't want Al Gore claiming he built the Information Superhighway, do you?"

"That's why I'm meeting with you.", he said tersely.

"Well, you've heard that when somebody hands you lemons, make lemonade. This bill is going to pass, that's a given. You can't stop it. Make some lemonade. Remember, I'm actually a mathematician. I have a doctorate in applied mathematics and my thesis was on computer networking. If Al Gore starts saying he's building the Information Superhighway, trot me out. I wrote the blueprints!"

Gingrich's eyes popped open at that. He grumbled some more at me, but let me out. I don't know if I was first on his list or last, but I knew he wouldn't let it go. A couple of other Republicans were going to co-sponsor it as well, Steve Schiff of New Mexico, and my fellow Marylander, Wayne Gilchrest.

By the end of April I was officially listed as a co-sponsor of the bill, which was reported out of the Science Committee mid-May. From there it had to go to the Senate to be sorted out with the joint committee, to make the wording match what was reported out of the Senate Commerce Committee. It was just a matter of time after that. The Democrats had a solid majority of both the House and the Senate, and this thing wouldn't even be brought up to a counted vote. A voice vote would be good in both houses. It's like I told Newt Gingrich, this thing was going to pass no matter what.

Also, by the end of April, most of the troops in the Gulf were coming home. I got a call from the USO and Mindy set me up with a room down in Fayetteville. I flew down for a few days and helped host a 'Welcome Back!' party. No, I didn't give any speeches, or at least not too many, but I did talk to the generals and colonels commanding the division and the brigades and attached battalions. I also left my business cards. Little Captain Buckman had left home and grown up. If the 82nd needed help in Washington, they now had their own pet Congressman.

There was actually one speech I gave, which I began using with lots of military groups in the future. I was asked to say some words to a group of senior non-coms who had seen their last war. The Army was still downsizing and the Gulf War had been their last hurrah. I was expected to say fine things and thank them for their dedicated service, and I did that of course. Then I added an extra.

"Now I am going to close this by saying that your nation is not done with you. Some of you came into the Army as draftees. Others enlisted. All of you had chances to get out after doing a hitch, and all of you thought that your service to the nation was important. It still is. Now you are retiring, to start second careers, many of them in the private sector. However, your nation still needs you, now more than ever! I want everyone here to think about the sacrifices you have made, and have been asked to make. I want all of you to consider a new sacrifice, the sacrifice of serving in political office. It's not easy, but it is important. From now on, every time you complain about something dumb in government, I want you to think about what you could do to make it better. I want you to think about becoming part of the solution, and not just complaining about the problem. Republican, Democrat, or Independent – I don't care! Just get involved! Run for alderman or county commissioner or the school board. Hell, run for dogcatcher! The skills that got you here today, the pride and dedication and courage and smarts, those are the skills your hometowns need! You've spent a lifetime serving your country. Now go home and serve there as well!"

At the end, as I was shaking hands, several commented to me that I had given them something to think about, and some of the senior officers told me the same thing. Later, while talking to some of the colonels and generals, I stated that for years, military service had been considered a requirement for holding political office, but that was going out of fashion. Maybe it should come back into fashion, and what better way than this? Maybe one of those non-coms would become a alderman, and then maybe leverage that upwards. It worked for a beat up old battery commander, didn't it? (Not me – Harry Truman!)

In May, the Queen of England visited and gave a speech to Congress. In preparation, I went home the night before and practiced waving to the peasants with Marilyn playing the role of peasant. She returned the favor, using a special wave involving the middle finger being extended. How very peasant-like!

One of the things that Marty forced us into was the role of host and hostess. It was one thing to buy a home large enough to do this, but another to actually do it. Still, Washington floats on a sea of shrimp cocktails and Swedish meatballs. Some of my colleagues had reputations as being very private homebodies, but more than a few had a very different reputation. There were at least a half-dozen A-list parties every night somewhere in this town, some given by politicians, some given by lobbyists and think tanks (which had the advantage of being tax deductible), and some given by high-end reporters and pundits.

Marty gave me my marching orders. I had to pick a date and we would hold our first dinner, something small, for the Maryland contingent of Congress. That was nine Representatives and two Senators. If everybody came and brought a spouse/significant other/insignificant other/somebody-they're-just-trying-to-get-in-the-pants-of that would be 22. Not all would attend and somebody would probably add an extra. Add in a few reporters, pundits, and hangers-on. Toss in an invitation to the Governor of Maryland, since Annapolis is only a half hour away. Figure about three dozen people. Marty checked out the name of the 'party liaison' and made a few calls.

"Don't sweat it, you can afford it.", he told me. He had a particularly evil grin as he said this.

I just rolled my eyes at that. "You're really getting off on ordering me around.", I told him.

"Damn straight! Marilyn told me to keep you on the straight and narrow."

The dinner was on Friday, May 17. For the average Congressman, meeting your fellow Congressman on a Friday night isn't so great, since most of them are back in their district on a Friday night. Maryland was a little different, though, since it is right next door to Washington. Other than the Gilchrests from the Eastern Shore, everybody else could almost commute.

Marilyn brought the kids and Dum-Dum down right after school, and Sherry's niece came over to babysit upstairs with them. That generally went fairly well, but there were a few hitches. Charlie and his sisters were neatly dressed, and all three were at an age where they understood that "Behave or else!" actually involved an 'or else!' Our party coordinator brought in a chef and wait staff, and the chef used our fancy showroom kitchen to make some Maryland dishes, including soft shelled crabs and oyster soup. He also made up some Maryland fried chicken, and did some drumsticks for the kids. We allowed them to troop through, grab some plates, and head back upstairs. At that point Dum-Dum snuck past them and zoomed down the stairs. Fortunately I was able to snag her before she disrupted too much. I picked her up and calmed her down in my arms, and several people came over and got enthusiastically licked before I maneuvered her back up the stairs.

That actually elicited a discussion of child rearing techniques. Everybody commented that our children had been extremely well behaved, and I simply mentioned the 'or else!' method of child education. Since Marilyn and I were the youngest in the group, everybody else in the room thoroughly understood this time tested technique, and passed along how they had raised their children and how they had been raised. None of us believed all that touchy-feely New Age no spanking bullshit.

In general it went well. We didn't really discuss anything important. Everybody thought the kids were adorable (which had Marilyn and me scratching our heads) and Dum-Dum was a real scamp. I made sure I told the others, all of whom, other than Wayne Gilchrest, had more experience in Washington, that whatever I could do to help Maryland, to let me know. Governor Schaefer immediately asked me for a campaign donation, saying how that would be good for Maryland. That got a loud round of laughter, since he was a Democrat, so I countered by saying, "Don, I already married a Democrat.", and pointed to Marilyn. "Just how much more can I do for you guys!?" That got even more laughter and the Governor shook my hand, saying that was plenty sufficient. The photographer Marty had ordered up took several group pictures.

I did earn a number of Brownie points when, over dinner and joking about Schaefer's comment about helping him out, Wayne Gilchrest commented, "Maybe you can donate to some of my volunteer fire departments like you do your own?"

I glanced over at Marilyn and she shrugged at me, so I shrugged back. I looked over at Wayne and said, 'Okay."

Beverly Byron, who represented the Maryland Sixth, the Appalachian counties, joked, "Can the Democrats get in on the action, too?"

I looked across the table and said, "Sure. I hear even Democrats have fires."

She gave me an odd look. "Are you being serious?"

"Yes. Are you?"

There was a level of consternation around the table. Governor Schaefer, who was sitting a few seats down, asked, "Carl, are you serious about donating money to other districts' charities, even the Democrats?"

I glanced over at my wife, who smiled and nodded. "Governor, unless you can guarantee me that all the bad things that happen to people in the state of Maryland will only happen to Republicans, then yes, I am serious.", I looked around the room. "Look, I've heard the stories, I know what's been said. I bought the election by throwing my money around to charities. I'll admit I've given a lot of money to fire departments and emergency squads and police departments in my district, but it's because that's where I live. If you have some charities in your districts you'd like to see helped, then let me know. Or let Marilyn know. She's actually the head of the Buckman Foundation. Just be prepared for the consequences."

"Such as", asked Steny Hoyer.

I shrugged at him and smiled. Steny was a leading Democrat. "Such as my smiling face handing over the check while the cameras are clicking. What's more important, that the charity get the money, or that a Republican not get credit? Hmmm? Something to think about, isn't it."

There was considerable murmuring about that! However, it wasn't all bad. Kweisi Mfume, who represented one of the poorest inner city districts in Baltimore, said, "I don't care if your face is on the check! The people in my district need money for health care and clinics, and they don't care where it comes from. Are you serious?" He had a rebellious look on his face, and I recalled that he and Schaefer had their differences about this.

I looked him in the eye and said, "Yes. How much are we talking about?"

"How about twenty thousand for a clinic in Pimlico?"

"Fifteen.", I countered, "but it is in matching funds. You scrape up fifteen elsewhere, anywhere, and I'll cough up another fifteen. Deal?"

"Make it twenty, and you get to stand there and cut the ribbon.", he pushed.

"Only if the Sun and the television stations cover it.", I replied.

"Deal!"

You could see wheels whirling in people's heads about this. I knew some wouldn't want it, if I was attached, and some either wouldn't care, or would be happy to see me (mostly the other Republicans.) Over the next ten minutes, I got requests for quite a bit more, again, all for various clinics and fire/emergency units.

"Just how much are you planning on donating?", asked the Governor.

I thought about it for a moment. "I've been giving about two hundred grand to various charities around my district for years, simply because it's where I live. If we expand that same amount to the rest of the state ... maybe two million. Seem fair?"

"Every year?", asked an incredulous Steny Hoyer.

"Well, as long as the economy holds up, so maybe you Democrats should vote Republican and help us with the economy.", I said, smiling.

That earned me a number of laughs, and a lot of thoughtful looks from the others. More than a few people asked me about things, and then said, "I'll hold you to that!", which I replied to in kind.

By the end of the dinner, we got invited to several dinner parties by the others, including one at the Governor's Mansion in Annapolis. We politely accepted that one, and promised to check our schedules on all the others. It is entirely possible to spend damn near every lunch and dinner eating somewhere on someone else's' dime, although how much you will accomplish is debatable at best. You'd better be a sparkling conversationalist at the least! As for Governor Schaefer, well, Don Schaefer was the Maryland politician of our generation, and it didn't matter that he was a Democrat; if you wanted to do something political in Maryland you made sure you played nice with Don Schaefer, and at the least didn't piss the man off.

Otherwise, however, 1991 passed along without much excitement. Unfortunately for George Bush, the economy began swirling around the bowl. In the early spring, following the American victory in the Gulf (okay, Coalition victory, but really, who cares!?) the President had approval ratings in the 90% range. Unfortunately this proved the high point of his presidency. By the summer the economy was beginning to tank seriously. A combination of higher oil prices due to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, massive government deficits, and a general decline in the housing market combined to really slow the economy.

To a certain extent my holdings in the Buckman Group weren't affected. When I had been elected, I had to place my financial assets into a 'blind trust', a trust where the trustee had full control of the assets and I had no legal ability to modify the investments. In theory, this prohibited me from changing my investments to benefit from any knowledge of what I was doing in my public life. I was not to communicate with the trustee other than to learn how the cumulative investment was doing.

In practice, the blind trust is one of the weakest methods of insuring fiscal independence. The trustee has to be somebody known and trusted by the owner of the trust. My trustee was hired by John Steiner, my long time friend and lawyer. Since I was such good friends with John it was not unexpected that we would talk frequently. As knowledgeable men of the world, with interests in politics and economics, it would be expected that we would have frequent conversations over market trends. However, since nothing we ever said in these private and unrecorded conversations could be construed to be trading instructions, neither of us was in breach of our fiduciary duties. Likewise, while I never talked to the trustee, it was not out of the realm of possibility that John would talk to him, since they probably did other business together as well.

Realistically, I wouldn't have given him any trading instructions in any case. My assets were predominately in the form of Buckman Group stock. If, however, John was to pass along any of my comments and insights to other friends, such as those involved in the management of the Buckman Group, that was to be expected. It wasn't even a case of insider trading.

The practical effect was that the Buckman Group focused even more closely on computer and networking companies, as the 'Information Superhighway' began to be built. On the rest of the market, we began betting on a recession based economy. I just reminded them of my trading philosophy that there was just as much money to be made on the downside as there was on the upside. Jake Junior and Missy took the bit in their teeth and ran with it.

This was an amazing part of being a Congressman. If I was still with the Buckman Group and pulled this shit, I'd be doing time at Club Fed for insider trading. As a Congressman, the rules simply didn't apply to me. At least I kept up the semblance of innocence; when LBJ had been President, he had a phone in his desk with a direct line to his stockbroker.

On my weekends home I made a deal with Marilyn to spend at least one day with her and the kids as just a regular dad. I would also usually do a pancake supper or chicken-and-biscuit dinner somewhere in the district. It kept my face out there and allowed me to make an appropriate charitable donation to the local firehouse or ambulance squad. I wasn't buying votes, at least not technically. My donations weren't really out of line with what I had been giving before I got into politics, however, they were a lot more high profile. I even had a big fake check made up out of plastic, like a white board, where I could write an amount and a name on it, and pose for pictures. Afterwards, I would stick the fake check back in the car and give them a real check.

On the plus side I liked pancakes and chicken-and-biscuits. Being a zillionaire meant I didn't have to spend my entire life begging for money. Yes, I kept a 'tip jar' with me for campaign donations, but I didn't have to sell myself body and soul to stay in office. I did, however, have to call people and visit around the district. If somebody I knew had a kid who got married, I had to send a card with a check to the happy couple. If somebody died, I had to show up for the viewing or the funeral. Brewster stayed in touch with Marty and me (for a fee, of course) and made sure I got a daily list of calls I had to make, to keep in touch back home. It was a lot like being a salesman.

There's a lot of routine stuff to being a Congressman. Some of this was the relatively mundane business of finding out why the Social Security check was late in the mail. Other times it became more personal. For instance, I learned on my first go-around that you can get a flag that has been flown over the Capitol building. Just write your Congressman or Senator and he can arrange it. The mundane becomes very personal in a hurry – a veteran dies in my district, I pay for the flag out of my own pocket, and if somebody dies in combat, I damn well better call the family and show up at the funeral! Thankfully the Gulf War wasn't all that bloody.

Another very typical item is a Congressional Proclamation. Parker got one when he made Eagle Scout. You get a nicely written framable document that made patriotic noises about the wonders of whatever or whoever was being proclaimed. A big benefit I had in living so close to Washington was that it was entirely possible to actually show up and make a presentation, especially if it was in the evening. Nothing like showing up at an Eagle Scout Court of Honor to present a flag or a Proclamation. Give a little speech, shake a few hands, NEVER mention an election. Trust me, they'll remember – and vote for you!

One routine thing that was pretty serious were the military academy appointments. As a Congressman, I got to nominate an applicant for the Military Academy at West Point, the Naval Academy at Annapolis, the Air Force Academy at Colorado Springs, and the Merchant Marine Academy at Kings Point. Curiously, the Coast Guard Academy doesn't require a Congressional appointment. (Is that a good thing or bad?) The rules could change slightly, but most years you got to nominate one student to each academy, for a total of four students.

Andy Stewart, for all his general uselessness as a human being, had a procedure for handling academy nominations. From what I could see, it was a fairly standard type of setup. Every year he would send out a letter to every high school in the area, inviting students interested in an academy appointment to apply for one, along with a packet of information for the school. That worked out to nine separate high schools, when you added the ones that were located inside the district and the ones where they were located outside the district but had students who lived inside the district. If they had decent enough grades and test scores, they could apply and I got to select one of them for each school.

In many ways I was of two minds about the whole process. On the plus side, I had generally enjoyed my time in the military, and had done well at it. The service academies were generally pretty good schools, academically rigorous and a free ride for the students. On the other hand, while I had known any number of really good officers who were graduates of Hudson High, I had also known more than a few real fucking morons who were ring knockers. As a student, I would have hated it! There is very little academic freedom, an extremely regimented personal life, hazing at a level that made my fraternity life seem like a party, and discipline that led to suicides and hospitalization. You've got to be really hard core to want to go through that.

The only way to handle it was to talk to the kids. If they qualified by the various objective standards, I set up an appointment schedule to talk to them. The worst ones were the kids who were pushed into this by a parent who was a campaign donor and figured this was a quid pro quo. Mom or Dad wanted a West Point or Annapolis graduate in the family, regardless of whether their son or daughter liked the idea. I made sure that I met with the high school students without a parent in the room, and pushed to see what their real feelings were. Sometimes the young man or woman was hard core, and that was fine. Sometimes they didn't really know what was involved, and I would roll up my pants leg and show them the scars on my right knee and wave my cane at them and they woke up to what could be involved. The hardest time was when a young man came through who was academically and physically marginal but whose father was a big contributor to the campaign. He was a big time car dealer in Parkton and ordered me to send his son to Colorado Springs, and make sure he became a pilot once he was there. I sent them both home, with an offer to return his campaign contribution and the request he not come back.

During the summer recess, we spent almost a month at Hougomont. Charlie protested that he was missing race dates and the girls protested they were missing their friends. Marilyn and I ignored them. We cruelly forced them to swim in the ocean and run around on the beach and stay up as late as they wanted to. We even slept late and made them make their own breakfasts some days. We were heartless! We kept the G-4 flying back and forth, though. Tusker, Tessa, and the boys came down for a week, and we managed to get Harlan, Anna Lee, Roscoe, Mary Beth, and Tyrone (the newest and littlest Buckminster) to visit a different week. Big Bob and Harriet brought a few of their kids down, the youngest, the ones who didn't have to spend the summer working at the sales lot. I also would usually cut out for a couple of days every week and fly back to D.C. to get some work done with my staff.

We came home at the end of August. The kids needed to start school again, and I needed to press some flesh (What an awful saying! It sounded like I was packing canned ham!) around the district. Congress reconvened on Wednesday, September 11, and I flew back to Washington that Monday morning. That first morning I was expecting to be buried in phone messages and call back slips, and to a great extent I was, but mid-morning there was a bit of a clamor out in the lobby of my office, and I heard a familiar voice. "Is he back yet?"

I looked over at Marty curiously and then stood up. I went to my open door and looked out. As I thought, it was John Boehner, along with another one of the new Congressmen, who I recognized, but couldn't remember his name. "I'm back. You looking for me, John?"

"Great! You busy? We need to talk!" He came towards me and went to enter my office.

I laughed. "It's good to see you, too, John." I stepped out of the way and let him barge into my office. John was turning out to be a good friend. He was smart and knew how to get things done, and very personable. The other Congressman grinned and followed. I shook my head and smiled, and then followed them in.

"Congressman?", commented Marty Adrianopolis. When we were alone, it was 'Carl', but he made sure to address me as 'Congressman' when anybody else was around – it built me up, he said, and he was right.

"Marty, give us a few minutes, please. Thank you.", I told him. Marty skedaddled and I commented to John, "John, how is it that I go to the Bahamas for a month and come back with only a sunburn, and you stay in Ohio and have a tan George Hamilton would envy. Is Ohio really that sunny?"

"Very funny! Carl, you remember Jim Nussle, don't you?"

I turned to the other man, remembering him now. "Sure. You're one of the newbies like John and me. Where was it, Iowa, Nebraska, somewhere out in the middle of the country, right?"

"Iowa, the Second District.", he responded, reaching out and shaking my hand.

"Well, how can I help the Iowa Second and the Ohio Eighth?", I asked. I extended my hand towards the sitting area to the side of my office, and we all seated ourselves around the coffee table.

John answered. "Have you seen the report out of the GAO about the House bank?" I could tell he was excited, and Jim was nodding furiously as well. "I figured you'd be interested, after kicking the crap out of Andy Stewart."

"Sorry, guys, but you are going to have to bring me up to speed. I've been on vacation with Marilyn and the kids. We only got back in time for them to start school. What are you talking about?" Something about this sounded vaguely familiar, but I needed more information. The GAO, or General Accounting Office, was the official government watchdog, charged with ferreting out waste and mismanagement. With an operation the size of the Federal government, there was always something capable of eliciting outrage.

Nussle answered, "The GAO is about to issue a report that Congressmen are kiting checks through the House bank. I mean, a lot of checks! Thousands of checks! And hundreds of Congressmen are doing it!"

Well, that certainly opened my eyes. "Hundreds of Congressmen?" I glanced over at John, who was excitedly nodding. "Hundreds?"

"Hundreds!"

I whistled softly. It was beginning to come back to me now, as one of the first in a string of major Congressional scandals. There would be more to come. "Just how high does it go? And how big?"

"Pretty high, and it's mostly the Democrats."

"Huh." I had to give that some thought. "Mostly is not the same as all. I am guessing there have to be some Republicans involved." The other two nodded. "One word of warning - before we get involved with this, feel out Gingrich and Michel. They won't be amused if we throw garbage on the Republican half of the House. I'm already in the doghouse with Gingrich as it is."

"So, you want in on this?", asked John.

"Sure! Can you get me a copy of the report? Like I said, I've been out of town for almost a month. Like you said, this is the sort of thing Andy Stewart would have been up to his eyeballs in! It's probably just the tip of the iceberg, too."

Jim smiled and nodded. "I think you are very much right."

"If we get you a copy today, when can we meet and talk?", asked John.

I thought for a second. "If we do it here, somebody is going to start wondering what we're up to. We'll meet at my house tomorrow evening. Sound feasible?"

They nodded and agreed, and then left. I let Marty back in, but didn't answer his questions. Not just yet, anyway.

That afternoon a courier came over with a copy of the report, along with a one line note asking when we should meet tomorrow. I jotted down the address and 7:00 PM, and sent the courier on his way. Then I called the catering service and specified I needed coffee and tea and all the fixings for an evening meeting put into the kitchen by tomorrow evening. I wasn't planning on a dinner party, but we would need something to munch on, I was sure.

That evening, when I flew home, I told Marilyn and the kids that I would need to stay in Washington Tuesday night, but I should be home Wednesday. Then I got the lowdown on what they were up to in school. Charlie was just starting the fifth grade and the twins were starting the second grade! When the hell did they grow up?!

Tuesday I left the office around five. I went to the house on 30th and tidied up a bit, and changed out of my suit into khakis and a sport shirt. Then I went downstairs and cooked a couple of hot dogs and warmed up some Michigan sauce and put that on them, for supper. I had already warned the security people that I would be having guests over, and they didn't need to screen everybody coming in. I had the place cleaned up by the time the bell rang. I went to the front door and opened it up, to find Jim Nussle and Rick Santorum standing there. They both were still in their suits. "Hey, you found us. I won't have to launch flares.", I said. "Come on in. You come together?" As I let them in, I noticed another car pulling into the driveway, so I waved at the newcomers and motioned them to come in.

I turned back to find Jim and Rick staring around at things, taking it all in. Well, it was a pretty nice place, as small mansions go. I smiled to myself and just shook my head, and then went back to the door. Next through were Charles Taylor, Frank Riggs, and Scott Klug. I let them in and the reaction was much the same. I led them into the den, where I planned to host the meeting. "Well, make yourselves at home. I'm a bachelor for tonight, so we won't have my wife or kids around. I have coffee and tea and soda, and whatnot through there, in the kitchen. I picked up some snacks, too. I hope everybody had something to eat already, since I didn't cook anything." Everybody was assuring me they would be fine, and then the doorbell rang again, and I had to answer it.

It was John Boehner, and he had a surprise guest with him - Newt Gingrich. "Newt, good to see you. John, glad you could come."

"Thanks for hosting us. I was trying to get John Doolittle here, but he had something else he had to be at. We can fill him in tomorrow."

"This is a lovely house, Carl.", commented Gingrich, looking around at the place.

"Thank you. We wanted a place where the kids could run around the yard, and large enough to entertain in. It's a school night, though, and Marilyn and the kids are back home."

"Yes, John was commenting that you fly home some nights."

I nodded. "I'm only about forty-five minutes that way, although we're thinking about putting a landing pad in the backyard. That will cut fifteen minutes out." I grinned at them. "I might wait until I get re-elected for that."

I led the way into the den, where I found several of the men had already availed themselves of coffee. I told John and Newt about the stuff in the kitchen, and then headed there myself, to pour some iced tea. I also brought a plate of chocolate chip cookies that Holly and Molly had made. "Okay, gentlemen, official Buckman Brand chocolate chip cookies. My seven year olds made them for me. Hopefully their mom was doing quality control. Otherwise, John you asked for a meeting place. You want to open things up?" Everybody took a cookie and commented approvingly on them. They were actually pretty good, too. I'd have to ask for some more!

John looked around the room and said, "By now, everyone here has read the draft copy of the GAO report on the House Bank. That's going to be published by the end of the month. We need to use this to shake things up. If we just leave this up to the Democrats, it will be buried so deep that dynamite and a bulldozer won't dig it out!"

Nussle piped in at that, "Foley and Gephardt won't even allow this to be discussed! I heard that Gephardt wasn't even going to allow the Ethics Committee to look at it."

"What about Bill Gray?", asked Santorum, referring to William Gray, the House Majority Whip, the same position that Gingrich held.

Newt answered that. "Forget him. He's out of here tomorrow. He's resigning his seat to become President of the United Negro College Fund. Dave Bonior is taking over for him." I hadn't heard that, but I shrugged, as did a few others. It didn't really matter, though, since nobody on the other side wanted to highlight this. There were a lot more Democrats in Congress than Republicans, so it was bound to be the Democrats who would take the heat.

Jim Nussle spoke up and said, "We need to use this to get control of the House! We should be able to use this information to do that."

I made the time-out motion and spoke up. "Hold it, let me ask a question or two. First, the way I read the report, the most obvious thing involved was House members being overdrawn on their paychecks and other checks, correct?" There were some nods and murmurs of agreement. "Okay, what about the Republican members of the House? Before we start throwing mud, how much is going to get splattered on us? I'm not saying we shouldn't do this, but if we don't ask now, somebody will be asking later!"

All of us looked over at Gingrich, who was sitting there like Buddha, wise and benevolent and somewhat chubby. "Yes, people will be asking, but the way I was reading the names in the report, the Democrats involved seriously outnumber the Republicans, and the level of overdrafts involved with the Democrats really outweighs the Republicans. It is going to hurt them much, much more than it is going to hurt us."

I nodded. "Okay, so has anybody here overdrawn their checking account? You know, the pot calling the kettle black and all that."

Everybody around the room said no, but Newt commented, "I don't know. It's hard to say. The system is so screwed up I'm just not sure. What about you, Carl? You know, the pot and the kettle and all."

"Fair enough. I wouldn't think so. I'm not really sure how it works, but my check simply gets mailed direct to the Buckman Foundation, and then we cut a check to the Red Cross. If there was a problem I'm sure they would have let me know.", I answered.

"You don't collect your paycheck?", asked Frank Riggs, incredulously. Around the room several other people stared as well.

I shook my head and shrugged. "All of my income from my books or public service goes to the Red Cross, but we are routing it through the Buckman Foundation. I'll check with my accountants on this. Regardless, I won't be having any problems on that score."

Newt gave a noncommittal grunt on hearing this, and a few of my fellow freshmen just looked at each other in disbelief. John Boehner, on the other hand, had already seen evidence of my wealth, and just grinned back at me.

"Okay, so, if we are going to push this, and the Democrats are going to bury it, what do we do? I agree this will probably be helpful, but how do we make it work? The floor is open!", I finished.

At that pretty much everybody started talking at once, and Gingrich called things to order and went around the room. I had a pad and pen at hand, and started making notes. Some of the items were 'Individual speeches', 'Push House Ethics Committee', 'Talk shows', 'Get Bush involved.' It quickly became apparent that the House leadership would move to bury this thing in the deepest hole they could find. We needed to keep it front and center. That would do two things. First, by focusing on a Democratic House scandal we kept the heat on and would probably pick up some seats in Congress. Secondly, and almost as important, by focusing on Democrats misbehaving, we took the focus off the tanking economy and that would have to help President Bush's re-election!

This technique hadn't worked in the first time I went through, but that was before I recycled. Maybe I could help? Could I help defeat Clinton? Or would I hurt?

For the immediate future, we would need to focus on forcing the House leadership to respond to the report. This would take the form of impassioned speeches on the House floor, timed to catch the evening news, denouncing the 'outrageous' behavior involved. We would coordinate this with appearances on whatever talk shows we could handle, and hope to land on the Sunday morning shows. Try to get some tame reporters to lob a softball to the President about the 'scandal', and get him to comment how the House seems to need to clean up their act. Get reporters, and not just partisan Republican Congressmen, chasing down facts.

One idea I had was, "What about anything else with Congress? There are a lot of perks in this job. Now, I don't want to get on my high horse, but are there other things going on we could slam them with?" I looked around the room. There had to be something to slam the Democrats with; they had controlled Congress for four decades! Unfortunately, I just couldn't remember back to my past in enough detail. I knew that on the first go around, Clinton would hand Bush a defeat, and that in '94 the Republicans would take Congress back. The details weren't clear, though, and what would change with my actions this time? Was Clinton's victory sufficiently large that nothing we did would help Bush and hurt Clinton? Was my involvement going to help or hurt taking back Congress?

The really big question was - was this helpful to the country? Clinton had been a very effective President, although on a personal level he had the morals of an alley cat. Shake his hand, but keep the other hand on your wallet, and then make sure to wash up. Oh, and don't leave him alone with your wife or daughters! Then again, he actually managed to balance the budget, which was a big favorite of mine. Likewise, taking back the House resulted in gridlock, which Newt Gingrich had a major hand in. I wanted the Republicans to take back the house, because I believed it was the only way to force a budget deal, but did I want Gingrich to run riot over everything else? He did not play well with the other children. Could I help that?

You place your bet and take your chances. I was going to have to see how this played out. To a considerable extent, my recycle had not really affected anything important, other than my immediate family, for good or for bad. My business dealings had not changed the course of history very much. If I hadn't invested in those companies, somebody else would certainly have stepped up. Now, though, with national politics, I could definitely affect things, and maybe not for the best. I was going to have to think about this!

Chapter 111: Dog Fighting and Legislation

Rick Santorum's closing comment sounded true. "We are going to start a dog fight over this!" The agenda was that, beginning immediately, we would all get with our staffs and come up with ways to get a full blown investigation going through the House Ethics Committee. We would each start giving speeches in the well of the House, and with eight of us rotating, we should be good to give a speech every other week. We would start the beginning of the following week.

As the meeting broke, I offered the use of the house as a 'War Room' for anything related to this. In case anybody wanted to have a meeting away from one of the Congressional office buildings, just call and I would have security let them in. Then, as I escorted everybody out, I tapped Newt on the shoulder and he held back for a moment. "I need to see you about a piece of legislation I want to sponsor. When can I do that?"

An eyebrow rose. "And you're meeting with me and not your committee chairman?"

"I'm sure I'll meet with him soon enough, but he's a Democrat, and I want to touch bases with you first." One of Gingrich's faults was a personal pride and sense of importance that could cause him to occasionally step on his dick. Better to be nice to him; he had the memory of an elephant!

He nodded in appreciation. "Have somebody call my office tomorrow. I'll tell my assistant that you'll be looking for some time."

"Thank you."

The next morning I started writing a speech to be given sometime next week. What most people didn't understand was that when C-SPAN, the television network that covers Congress, is broadcasting a speech, there probably isn't anybody listening. The cameras are rolling all day long, and Congress is officially in session, but the only time everybody really goes to the main chamber is when there is a vote going on. The rest of the time it's mostly empty - except for the talking heads hoping to get a good sound bite on the news later in the day. Since everybody wants to make it to the news, and most speeches are predictable and boring, everybody is trying to figure out a way to get on the air.

My focus was going to be two-fold. First, "I used to be a businessman. If I ran a bank the way the Democrats run this one, the bank would be out of business, and I'd be in jail!" Second - "The Democrats say that this is very complicated. Well, every day, the voters have to balance their checkbooks. How complicated can it be?!" One way or another, keep hitting them with that message. It's a business, and a business the voters understand. Some of my counterparts were going to focus on outrage and shame, and forcing the leadership to acknowledge the problem. We were also going to look into any other perks of the job, like the Congressional Post Office, and things like the gym and the barbershop.

I got fifteen minutes to see Newt the following Tuesday morning. When I got there, he had a television in the corner of his office, and it was tuned to C-SPAN. He waved me in, and then hit the volume control on the remote. "Come on, Boehner's about to speak!" I turned to see my friend begin fulminating about the just released report, outrage spilling from his lips!

"Think that'll make the evening news?", I asked.

"No, but it's a good start. You guys keep pushing, and it will get there eventually."

"What about you? Are you going to speak? Or is this going to cause you trouble?"

He shrugged. "No, this is up to you guys. Eight freshmen Republicans, outraged by the behavior of the Democratic party - that plays better than bringing me in on it. As for the trouble, I just don't know. I probably have a few overdrafts, but the bank is so screwed up, we might not know."

"That's going to be one of my focuses. It's a lousy way to run a business."

He nodded. "You asked to see me about some legislation."

"Yes. I've been getting some complaints from some constituents. Some of the troops who have been coming back from Kuwait and Saudi Arabia have some medical problems and the VA hospitals are just pooh-poohing them. They can't figure it out, so it must not exist, that sort of thing."

"What kind of problems?"

"Fatigue, pain, rashes, digestive problems ... I mean, stuff that's all across the board, but that only started after the Gulf War. What if we are seeing the first signs of something like the Agent Orange problem from Viet Nam? Remember how the VA kept downplaying that, it wasn't a problem, they're making it up, etc.? What if this is the same type of thing. Agent Orange turned out to be a real problem."

"And you want to do what?"

"Force the VA and the Army medical people to start taking it seriously. Start investigating. I'm not looking for big money, but at least something to make them act like it's real. Let's find out, at least.", I explained.

"How much money?"

"For initial research and testing? No idea, but I would imagine $10 to $20 million would be fine. More if they figure it out. The actual treatment would be under the regular VA and Army budgets." Newt gave a non-committal grunt. He was hard to read at times. "I don't think this is that outrageous, but I wanted your input on doing this."

"You're going to need a Senator to introduce this on that side. Any ideas?"

"I was thinking either Bob Kerrey or John Kerry. They're both Viet Nam vets, and I want to tie this into the Agent Orange analogy. I haven't talked to them yet."

When I mentioned Kerrey and Kerry, Newt grimaced. They were both Democrats. "Why not John McCain? He was over there, too."

I nodded. "I thought about that, and I can see him as a co-sponsor, but I want something bi-partisan. I know you don't like that, but I'm a Republican in a Democratic district. I have to work with the Democrats, or I'm a one term wonder. They are both highly respected. If I can snag one of them, and tie in some of the other Viet Nam veterans in Congress, we can make it happen. I bet I can get Wayne Gilchrest and Randy Cunningham to co-sponsor in the House."

"Have you talked to Sonny yet?"

Gillespie 'Sonny' Montgomery was the Chairman of the House Committee on Veterans Affairs. He was a Democrat from Mississippi, and a veteran from World War II and Korea. "Not yet. I wanted to talk to you first."

Newt grunted. "Well, start writing something. By that I mean get your staff to figure out which of the think tanks would be best on this. Even something simple will be more than what your staff can write. I don't see why you can't get McCain to do this with you."

"Newt, when I was in business, we had to negotiate deals where everybody ended up happy. It had to be win-win for everyone, or it wasn't going to work. I have made a whole bunch of money working with people and not against them. It works for me. This banking mess is not going to slam the Senate. They don't have a bank, just us in the House. This lets me throw them an olive branch. We don't need to piss everybody off."

He grunted again. "Well, start writing. Just don't call anybody on this yet. Let me think about it until next week."

"Fair enough." I stood and shook his hand and let myself out. Gingrich was a brilliant tactical thinker, but he was too partisan and didn't focus on strategy enough. He was the type to burn down the house to kill the rats, and then proclaim loudly and proudly he got rid of the rats, while arguing with everyone who was sifting through the smoldering ashes.

I talked to Sherry and Marty about it the next day and I left it to them to sort out the details. As I told Gingrich, I couldn't imagine how the price tag on this could get all that big, but I was prepared to be unpleasantly surprised. Was Sonny Montgomery going to be in favor or not? Was I wrong in thinking that the Viet Nam vets in Congress would remember Agent Orange and think this was a good idea, or would they think of the current vets as whiny brats? Would Gingrich go along? I was really clueless on this one. Nothing from my future knowledge was helping me.

Newt called me the end of the week. He would let me ask Kerrey or Kerry, but that was it. If neither wanted to be involved, and I wanted to push it, I was talk to John McCain, and good luck getting it through after that. I had Mindy ask for a lunch with Bob Kerrey; I would try him first. I just hoped I didn't trip over my own tongue if I met the man. He earned the Medal of Honor in Viet Nam. My inherent tendency would be to stand at attention and call him 'Sir!'

The medical issue, of course, was what was about to be labeled as 'Gulf War Syndrome.' I knew enough about it from the future to know it was going to be a major problem for a lot of the vets from the Gulf War. The symptoms were similar to those you get from a sub-lethal dose of some nerve gases, which the Iraqis had, and which we ended up bombing the bunkers of. Low levels got loose and wafted all over the place. At the time, though, nobody really knew about the Sarin gas, and there was enough other nastiness around to make everybody scratch their heads. Was it the first use of depleted uranium shells in tank cannons? There was a rumor that when they impacted enemy armor, they compressed enough to cause gamma ray bursts. What about toxic fumes from all the burning oil wells? What about the guys who used their nerve gas pens on themselves? Did that stuff cause problems? Did it interact with all the stuff they got injected with on the shot line?

It reminded me in a lot of what happened with Agent Orange back in the Seventies. Agent Orange was a chemical defoliant that was sprayed from modified C-130s over the jungle. Spray it on the jungle; a few weeks later, the jungle is dead and dying. You're left with nothing but bare trees and the bad guys have nowhere to hide. The official word at the time was that this stuff was harmless to humans, which I always thought was a stretch (it kills everything but us?), and the official instructions were to wear the equivalent of HazMat suits when handling it. Still, it was a steamy, hot, and humid jungle, and the grunts using it and being sprayed with it were running around shirtless and damn near bathing with it.

After the war these guys were coming home with all sorts of dreadful diseases, including cancer, genetic mutations, and neurological problems. The VA and the medical establishment blew all this off as a bunch of shirkers from an unpopular war. It turned out that the manufacturing process made a little understood byproduct called dioxin which, by the way, was astonishingly lethal and dangerous to be anywhere near. Major league ooops moment! There were a lot of similarities to this new Gulf War Syndrome.

I got a meeting the middle of the following week with Senator Kerrey, and he was quite gracious. There is a huge amount of mythology about the treatment of Medal of Honor winners. Most active duty military members come to attention and salute in their presence, and they rank higher for receiving salutes than even four star generals and admirals - in other words, a general would salute a private with the Medal of Honor, not the other way around. I remember talking to a Marine once who said he knew a sergeant with the medal from Viet Nam. During inspections he would just lay the medal on his bunk, and the officers would pass him by. Then again, the average winner is dead, so maybe it's not a bad idea to be really nice to them.

He listened to my explanation and agreed to sponsor a Senate version of the bill, although he wasn't too sure how well it would go over. I had already given my fulminating speech in the well of the House, and the Democrats weren't overly amused. I promised to send over a copy of what we were working on, so that his legislative staff could do something with a version of their own. We were calling it the Gulf War Syndrome Research and Relief Act. We'd have to see how it would go.

I understood what Senator Kerrey meant about the Democratic leadership not being thrilled with my speech. You write these things with lots of one-liners and sound bites, in the hope that the networks pick them up, for a ten or fifteen second filler. Both NBC and CBS picked up on my comments. "Our voters have to balance their checkbooks at home! Why is it that Democratic Congressmen don't need to balance their checkbooks?! And why is it they don't want the voters to know this!?" ABC didn't even pay attention to the uproar today. We all expected they would shortly, since Jim Nussle was planning to give his speech while wearing a paper bag on his head, to signify his 'shame' for being part of this Congress! The rest of us laughed our asses off when he told us this!

Our actions were going to cause the House Democratic leadership to start blathering about how we were upsetting the apple cart. We didn't need Newt Gingrich to tell us that there would be complaints about partisan Republican freshmen, who didn't understand the system, demeaning the dignity of this great institution. That would result in an immediate counteraction, where we would ask what they were trying to hide. If they tried to stifle any legislation as punishment, that would be the next week's speech, denouncing their authoritarian tactics, and fear of what an investigation would find.

I got a call from Tim Russert's office Friday morning, after my speech, and was asked to appear on Sunday's This Week. I, of course, said yes. In this I was lucky, since Jim wasn't going to do his brown bag thing until next week, at which point nobody would give two shits about me! They would all be clamoring for him! I agreed to show up, and was told I was going to be going up against Dave Bonior, the brand new House Democratic Whip. I had to get my shit together! These guys wanted to bury me, preferably after burning me alive with a stake through my heart.

The best defense is a good offense. If Bonior responded too hard to my frontal assault on the House Bank, I was going to flank him by bringing up the House Post Office scandal. The Postal Inspection Service of the U.S. Post Office had just turned over their report to the House Postmaster, Robert Rota, who had promptly given it to the wife of Tom Foley, Speaker of the House, who was burying it. If I could get Russert to start questioning Bonior, we could whipsaw the man!

I spent a lot of time on the road that weekend! Friday night I flew home in time to make a pizza and relax with my family. Saturday morning we had soccer games (boys lost, girls won.) Saturday afternoon I hustled Charlie and his bike to a race in Harford County (he won!) Saturday night I flew back to Washington, so I could appear on This Week, after which I flew home again for the rest of the weekend. I would fly back Monday morning. I was going to have to get a better schedule going, because I was exhausted!

The whipsaw technique worked great on Bonior. He hadn't been expecting my side attack on the Post Office scandal. I kept pushing my theme of 'Ordinary Americans have to play by the rules. Why can't the Democrats in Congress?' In this case, it was, "You say this is more complicated that it looks. So explain it simply, for all of us. Everybody out there in the audience has gone to a Post Office. What makes yours so special that it needs to be investigated?" Russert picked up on this and pushed the idea that where there was smoke there was fire. Why wasn't it a good idea to find out if there was a problem? Silly question! The reason they didn't want any investigations was because there was a problem, and they didn't want it exposed!

In October Senator Kerrey and I put our bills into the system. I was promptly informed by Sonny Montgomery that it would be snowing in hell before any bill I introduced would ever get out of committee, let alone get passed by a Democratic Congress. I just smiled and nodded in understanding, and then counterattacked. I took out full page ads in the November issues of Army Times, Proceedings of the Naval Institute, Air Force Magazine, Coast Guard Magazine, and Leatherneck (the Marine magazine) detailing what the bill would do, and highlighting the importance of the bill. I also specified I was a veteran myself, and how I was paying for the ad out of my own pocket, and not with taxpayer funds or campaign funds. Readers should write their Congressman and Democratic Party leaders demanding the bill be passed. That got me ten minutes on Meet the Press when word hit Washington!

Marilyn and I took the kids up to Utica for a few days over the Christmas holiday, to spend time with their grandparents. After that, we took them down to Hougomont for the rest of the weekend. Monday morning I left Marilyn in the Bahamas, and flew the kids back to Utica for the remainder of the week, and then turned right around and flew back to spend the week with her.

Marilyn met me at the door of the house when I arrived. She was wearing a wrap skirt and a halter top and high heeled sandals when she greeted me. She gave me a very warm kiss when I came inside, and as I wrapped my arms around her, I couldn't feel anything under her clothes. I rubbed her butt and got a nice wiggle in return. "Why do I think you have something planned?", I asked her.

Marilyn simply smiled. "I can't imagine what you mean! I'm simply trying to greet my husband as a good wife should!"

"Hmmm ... well, I must admit I approve of the outfit. How come you never greet me like this when I get home?"

My wife laughed. "Wouldn't that give the kids something to talk about!"

"Remind me again why we wanted children. I keep forgetting."

She laughed some more. "I don't remember either. Holly and Molly are starting to play games with the teachers. They're swapping clothes in the bathroom and switching places in class."

"And you found out how?"

"They've got big mouths. They told their friends, and the whole class started giggling. Somebody blabbed to Mrs. Markell."

"And here I thought Charlie was going to be the problem!" I just shook my head and chuckled. "What'd Mrs. Markell do? Mark them with Magic Markers?"

"Worse! Ignored them. I heard about it at a PTA meeting."

"I like my idea better. Wait until they start dating and pull that on their boyfriends."

Marilyn sat down on the couch and lewdly spread her legs, spreading the wrap skirt apart. "Well, did you want to keep talking about the kids, or do something else?", she asked.

I laughed as I pulled my sport shirt over my head. "Wow! Nothing like a little pressure! What's gotten into you?"

Marilyn lewdly spread her pussy lips apart. "Nothing! That's the problem! I need something to get into me!"

I kicked off my shoes and stripped off my pants and briefs. "I'll see what I can do about the problem." Then I crawled onto the couch and lay down between her legs.

As soon as I was inside her, Marilyn wrapped her arms and legs around me and began moaning as I fucked into her with long slow strokes. I made sure to throw in some hip wriggles and ground against her clit. "Fuck me! Fuck me!", she was whimpering, and she came twice before I unloaded.

I collapsed onto her, breathing heavily. A minute later, Marilyn said, "Is that it? Get back to work, Mister! No resting on the job!"

I snorted in laughter and rolled off of her. "Bitch, bitch, bitch! Nothing but complaints in this job! Give me a chance to catch my breath!"

Marilyn kept prodding me. "None of this goofing off! You have work to do!"

"I'll show you some work!" I rolled back onto her and began tickling her under the ribs and undoing her top. Marilyn squealed and tried to fight me off, in between squeals and screams, but she was weighed down by me, and I kept up until she managed to roll me off. I grabbed her quick and finished undressing her, leaving her in just her heels. Undeterred, I rolled her onto her stomach and started pinching her ass. That caused her to squawk even louder, as well as humping her butt up and trying to make me stop. As soon I got stiff again I drilled her doggy style. That calmed her ass down!

Afterwards I crawled off Marilyn and rolled onto the floor. Marilyn commented, "I need to take a shower. Somebody got me all sweaty."

I sniffed theatrically. "You're right! You need to take a shower!"

"Whose fault is that?"

"Hey, I was just following orders!" I stood up and grabbed for my clothing. "What's the plan for the rest of the day?"

"It doesn't involve your wearing clothing.", she responded.

I looked over at her and smiled. "Very ambitious, but I think you'll find I end up sticking to the furniture if we follow through on that idea."

"Yuck!"

I nodded in agreement. "Yeah, yuck. I think it works better if you stay naked and I put some pants on rather than the other way around."

"Oh? Really? That's your plan?"

"Seems simple enough to me."

"Maybe I'll just buy you a Speedo."

"Lady, you don't have enough money to get me to wear a Speedo!"

"I'll just borrow it from my husband. He understands what I'm looking for in a boy toy!"

"Go take that shower!", I ordered. Ye Gods! A Speedo? Thank God we had built a small 'shack' for the security detail. It was tucked behind some trees, giving us a certain sense of privacy. There was no more al fresco fun and games, but we were alone in the house now.

I cleaned up our clothing while Marilyn showered, and then I cleaned up when she got out. Then, dressed again, though without my briefs on, we went out and got some dinner. Over drinks, while waiting for our dinner, Marilyn asked, "Is international travel while going commando a violation of a Federal law for Congressmen?"

"No, just a violation of any sense of taste and decency for most of them. Can you imagine Newt Gingrich going commando?", I answered.

"Ewwwwww!!! Not when we're about to eat!"

"Hey, I have to work with the guy! You just get to fantasize about him."

"You're about to wear our meals."

Dinner was some conch fritters and shrimp, along with some rum punches. As we dined, Marilyn asked, "So, when do you have to be back in Washington?"

"We reconvene on the 3rd, just like last year, this Friday. We'll probably recess again on Saturday. It's a wonder anything actually gets done in that town."

She looked at me curiously. "Sorry you ran?"

I was on the point of a witty comeback, but stopped. "Are you sorry I ran?"

"What do you mean?"

"Well, remember back when I was asked about going career in the Army? I said yes, but I needed to talk to you. You knew I was going in, but you hadn't signed up to go career with me. Remember that?" Marilyn sipped and nodded, so I continued. "Well, I mean, you really didn't sign up to be the wife of a politician! Are you okay with what's gone on? It's been two years now since I said I would try it. Do you want me to keep going or quit?"

"And like I told you about the Army, this isn't about me. I want you to be happy. Answer me this - Are you happy? Do you think you're doing any good?", she countered.

"You know, I think so. I mean, it's like trying to suck molasses through a straw, but I think so. This Gulf War Syndrome bill for example, sooner or later somebody would have done something, but I made it happen sooner, and it's probably going to pass. Maybe some vets will benefit from that, and not have to wait around for the VA to get around to working on it."

This was true, too. The bill was a low cost and high feeling-good bill. Bob Kerrey had roped almost every veteran in the Senate into co-sponsoring the bill, and I had gotten a lot of the Republican veterans in the House to go along. Bob had added a few more veteran related bells and whistles which I could live with, including an expansion of education benefits for Gulf War vets. The only people who didn't want this to pass were the House Democratic leaders, who wanted me to die slowly and painfully. Gingrich was delighted with this, and was squawking about Democratic retribution. That got him onto the Sunday morning talk shows.

"So, there's your answer. We'll stick with you. Don't worry about me or the kids. It's not like you're commuting between D.C. and California. That I might complain about!"

"Wow! No shit!"

Marilyn asked, "So, were you looking for my blessing before running again? Don't you have to do that this coming year?"

"Every two years, like it or not! I told Brewster McRiley I would let him know this week."

"He going to be your campaign manager again?"

I gave her a wry smile. "Sort of. He'll be managing a couple of Congressmen this year, and he's got an assistant for each of us. I think he's trying to become an election supermarket. Hire his company and he'll get you elected. He'll directly work with somebody new down in Virginia, and then supervise an assistant who will work with me." I shrugged. "I'll call him tomorrow and meet him next week at my office. He likes working for me. I pay his bills on time."

"Who's running against you?", my wife asked.

"Not really sure yet. Nobody is going against me in the primary. I've heard a couple of names on the Democratic side, but I don't know how serious they were, or whether they'll end up with a primary. There's one of the county commissioners in Carroll County, and a county councilman in Baltimore County, District Three, I think. Beyond that, though, I don't know. Somebody's going to run against me, that's for sure. It's still a mostly Democratic district, and nobody is going to let me keep it for free!"

"You'll win. I know you." Marilyn smiled. "Maybe we should get a photo of you in that Speedo, go for the women's vote!"

I almost spewed out my drink at the thought, and started laughing. "Could you imagine what Andy Stewart would have done with that? Or maybe a picture of you in a thong? If I have to wear a Speedo, you have to wear a thong!"

"Oh my God! I don't want to think about it!"

"I know! We'll get you a blonde wig, and you can wear that red club dress I bought you that time. Think of the scandal!"

"Keep dreaming, Congressman!" She was grinning, though.

When we got back to Hougomont, there was a note stuck to our door, an invitation to a New Year's Eve party at Government House. Marilyn nodded an approval, so the next morning I called and accepted, and then arranged for a limo and driver. We had brought some good clothing with us, at least as far as a suit for me and some nice dresses for Marilyn. We would make our manners with the Bahamian government, have a drink or two, and then go over to Paradise Island and round out the night there. With a little luck I could soak them for a nice chunk of change at the blackjack table.

Otherwise we spent the rest of the week goofing off and screwing around. We had a small locked safe built into the master bedroom closet, and inside it we kept a few things we didn't want anybody else who might be staying there to find. Specifically, Marilyn kept her vibrators and dirty movies in there! She wasn't too worried about somebody seeing her lingerie drawer, but the 'Lifelike 8" SuperMax with G Spot Action' and a copy of The Horny Housewife would have embarrassed her to death! New Years Day we unlocked the safe and put in some new batteries into the toys and watched the movies. Marilyn stayed naked the entire day.

Thursday we flew to Utica, retrieved the fruit of our loins, and went back to Hereford. Friday morning I flew back to Washington and went back to my sacred duty representing the Maryland Ninth, holding high my sworn commitment to our nation's highest principles. Well, something like that, anyway. In some ways it was back to the same old grind. The eight of us who were now a real thorn in the side of the Democrats were now being referred to as 'The Gang of Eight' in the media. We didn't really talk like that, but the house on 30th Street was now known as 'The Clubhouse.' This was because we had taken to calling ourselves, just like in the old Our Gang movies, the He-Man Democrat Haters Club! My friend John Boehner was now being referred to in the press as the leader of our little group, but I was surprised to find my name being used as his 'second in command.' I asked Rick Santorum how many commands I had given him, and he just laughed and told me that the press needed something to fill the white space.

We went back to weekly speeches, this time slamming them for borrowing money from their House bank accounts to fund their re-election campaigns. President Bush was actively calling on Congress to investigate this further, offering to help through the Justice Department. We also whipsawed the Democrats with the Post Office problem, which looked to be just as big an issue as the banking scandal. Something had to give.

The dam burst in March of 1992. By the middle of the month, both the House Sergeant at Arms, Jack Russ, and the House Postmaster, Robert Rota, had resigned in disgrace. Both were under criminal investigation. The banking scandal had been referred to the House Ethics Committee, where the leadership caved in, accepting a vote by the House to divulge all the details of who had overdrawn their accounts, by how much, and how often. The House Administration Committee would be doing the same thing with the post office mess.

As I told Marilyn, I didn't have to face a Republican primary challenge. Two Democrats, Bud Hawley of the Baltimore County 3rd District and Tommy Hoffman of the Carroll County 3rd District, decided to square off for the privilege of kicking my ass to the curb, where a good and proper Republican should stay. Speaking as an outsider, all I could say was that it was a messy primary, and the eventual winner, Bud Hawley, did not come out of it looking or smelling any too sweet.

We'd just have to wait until November to see.

Chapter 112: 1992

1992 proved interesting on a number of fronts.

Grace Hopper died in January. I had met her back when I was a lowly Second Lieutenant. Hell of a mathematician, hell of an officer, and a hell of a lady! Marilyn and I went to her memorial service and funeral at Arlington. The world lost somebody special that day.

Charlie was now in his first year of the Boy Scouts and he went camping overnight in January again, this time for two nights. During the summer he did an entire week and had a grand and glorious time. I was much too busy these days to be much of a volunteer leader, but I managed to spend time on each of these trips. He thought this was just great! I would end up coming home with kinks in my back from sleeping on a rock somewhere and thinking to myself that this was the reason we invented houses.

The only real issue with camping occurred that summer, when I helped out one night as a volunteer leader. Scout leaders are almost always volunteers. The only professionals are the guys who man the district offices or actually man the camps. Probably 90+% of us are just parents of the boys. It's too much to ask any father to take an entire week off to stay up at camp, so we usually worked up a rotation. Most of the dads could manage to take a day off at some point, and then spend a night in a tent. While there you were the boss. It was always a couple of men, though, for safety sake.

The issue came about at the end of the day I was there, a Wednesday. We were having a "retreat parade" after dinner, where you line up the boys and lower the flag in the campsite. It's supposed to be a somber and sober ceremony, quiet and polite, and the boys are supposed to be standing silent and at attention in their uniforms, saluting. That was the theory, anyway. That night was different, though.

Instead, the boys were joking around, laughing and talking through the ceremony, Charlie among them. It's a quick ceremony, not even five minutes long, but they were just fucking around. It pissed me off, and I just stepped up into the middle of the ceremony. "KNOCK IT OFF!"

Everybody's eyes were on me. The two boys who were lowering the flag stopped what they were doing. I turned to them and ordered, "Raise that thing back up to the top! Do it now!" They hustled it back up, and I turned back to the assembled boys and gave them a piece of my mind. Pointing back to the flagpole, I said, "THAT IS THE AMERICAN FLAG! THAT IS THE SYMBOL OF THIS COUNTRY! YOU WILL DAMN WELL SHOW IT THE RESPECT IT DESERVES!"

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the other adult leader, Bo Parsons. Bo was a teacher over at Hereford High. He was eyeing me curiously, but otherwise was smiling and nodding. I decided to keep going. "MY FATHER WENT TO WAR UNDER THAT FLAG! MY GRANDFATHER WENT TO WAR UNDER THAT FLAG! A COUSIN OF MINE WAS BURIED UNDER THAT FLAG! YOU WILL DAMN WELL SHOW SOME RESPECT WHEN YOU ARE AT A FLAG CEREMONY AND YOU WILL BEHAVE LIKE SCOUTS AND KEEP YOUR FAT FUCKING MOUTHS SHUT! IS THAT UNDERSTOOD?!"

The boys were staring at me, half terrified, and a few mumbled out a, "Yes, sir."

"IS THAT UNDERSTOOD!", I roared. "I WANT TO HEAR IT LOUD AND PROUD!"

At that the boys looked at each other and gave me a ragged but loud "YES, SIR!"

I turned back to the two boys at the flagpole. "Now, let's do this over again, and do it right!"

After the ceremony, the boys took off, Charlie included, getting away from crazy Mister Buckman as fast as they could. I was left near the chuck wagon with Bo Parsons, who was smiling. He was an official Assistant Scoutmaster, much higher up in the hierarchy than just a parent. I gave him an embarrassed smile, and said, "Sorry if I got out of line there."

"Don't sweat it. I'd have stepped in if I thought you were out of line. They're a bunch of kids. They need their asses kicked every once in awhile. We probably won't have to chew them out on this for another few years."

I gave him a curious glance. "Really?"

He nodded and chuckled. "Every few years the older guys have either dropped out or grown old, and you get a bunch of new guys who need a lesson in... practical civics, let's say. It will be a few years before they forget it, too."

I grunted and shrugged. None of the boys said anything to me, and nobody said anything to Charlie, as far as I could see, but they all were a lot better behaved during ceremonies from then on.

The twins started out the year in the second half of the second grade. I was wondering whether they were identical twins or not. I suppose there's a genetic test. They looked almost identical, maybe 99.9% the same, but there was always something about them that let you tell them apart. Maybe it was just the way they carried themselves and their mannerisms. They could confuse new people, but after you had spent some time with them, even the clothes switching routine wouldn't work. Holly seemed just a touch louder and more extroverted than her younger-by-five-minutes sister Molly.

Marilyn showed an astonishing degree of cognitive dissonance with our daughters. When I once asked her if she thought they would try the swapping routine with their boyfriends when they got older, I was promptly informed that 'her' daughters would be good girls and do nothing of the sort. When I asked Marilyn if she wanted me to tell 'her' daughters what their Mom used to do, Marilyn started squawking for me to behave, and besides, she had been a good girl, too, at least until she met me!

I grinned at that, and asked if she thought our son would be a 'good' boy.

"Hmmmppphhh! Not hardly! He's too much like you!"

Charlie wandered in at that point. "How am I like Dad?", he asked. "We don't look anything alike!" That was true. With his blond hair and stocky build, he looked like Marilyn's brothers Matthew, John, and Michael.

Marilyn looked down at him, her hands on her hips. "Because you're just as much trouble as your father!"

Charlie put his fists in the air, like a victory dance, and yelled, "YES!", and then turned to me and said, "Give me five!" I slapped his hand and he ran out of the room, followed by Dum-Dum.

I looked at my wife and said, "Oh, brother!"

"Just remember, you wanted boys!"

"Wait until Holly and Molly start dating. You'll wish you had boys, too!"

"Never!"

In the spring we put a landing pad out back of the house. This sounds a lot more grandiose than it really was. Lloyd Jarrett and Tyrell Washington figured out what we would need, and passed it on to me and to John Steiner. John took care of arranging the permits, and then we called in a contractor.

However, before we ever got that far, both Lloyd and John told me to go make nice with the neighbors. "Huh?", I commented. I'd never had any problems with them before, and to be fair, didn't have all that many.

"This is going to play out one of two ways. Either nobody gives a crap, and we have it done in a few months, or one of your neighbors gets a hair up their ass and decides to gum up the works. Wait until you are the billionaire throwing his weight around and buzzing their swimming pool and such. This thing will need FAA, state, and county approvals. Somebody starts bitching, and you'll get this sometime in the next century.", replied Lloyd.

"That won't look too good at re-election time, will it?", added John.

I grumbled and rolled my eyes. "So what am I supposed to do?"

"You're a politician now. Go kiss some ass. I'll draw up a sheet where you can have your neighbors sign something saying they won't mind you doing this. It will make it so much simpler. Kiss a few asses in Towson and Annapolis, too.", he said.

I spent the next three weeks visiting my friends and neighbors. To the south of me, on the other side of Mount Carmel Road, the only person there was John Caples, and he was a friend. To the west was a large wooded area that I had bought when we increased security. To the north were some more woods, but on the other side of the hill was a small development that I needed to canvas. To the east was another development, on the other side of a wooded stream. I had to concentrate to the north and east. I also had to promise the State Police and the Baltimore County Police that they could use my pad as an emergency pad, not that I would have ever complained anyway. It took me longer than expected, and cost me a few favors in Annapolis to get everything signed off on, but it promised to be worth it. Fortunately, my upcoming opponent for the election was from Carroll County, and didn't get to toss his two cents in.

The pad was located about halfway between the house and the woods, and wasn't anything more than some crushed gravel with a vapor barrier and a heavy layer of asphalt over it, with a wind sock on a pole nearby. We cut a hole in the fence and put in another driveway to the pad, and then a small walkway down to the house. We put some small lights in the pad in case we needed to drop me off after dark. After they painted the white circle with the 'H' on it, we were pretty much in business. All we needed to do was to drop me off and let me walk to the house. The LongRanger would then lift off and head to the barn in Westminster. It wouldn't even need to shut down. We did put a waist high fence around it, but mostly to keep the deer and turkeys from wandering through. And the kids! They found it fascinating, and this was a way to keep them a safe distance away when they heard us landing.

Everybody in the House of Representatives was massively distracted throughout the year because everyone was up for re-election. I suppose the Senate got some work done, but even there a third had to run again. As for the House, forget it! The Democrats were really up shit creek this year. There was a mounting chorus of 'Throw the rascals out!' and the vast majority of the rascals were Democrats. Of the 22 Congressmen singled out by the House Ethics Committee for massive overdrafts on their House Bank accounts, 18 were Democrats.

The Post Office scandal was just more fuel on the fire. This wasn't as fully developed as the Bank scandal, but looked to be even more serious and long lasting. We already had reports of embezzlement and drug use in the Post Office, and criminal charges were swirling around. Again, it all pointed at the Democrats.

A number of Democrats simply decided it wasn't worth the candle and retired. Quite a few faced primary challenges, and a few even lost, which sent tsunami level shock waves through the House. Most were having to raise huge amounts of money to fight for re-election. Additionally, if you were a Republican incumbent, it worked against your Democratic challenger. That was good for me. Bud Hawley was going to have an uphill battle. He had used most of his money throwing mudpies at Tommy Hoffman. Since Tommy had returned the favor, Brewster McRiley, his designated hitter John Thomas, and I had lots of ammunition to slam him with if necessary.

It might not even be necessary to go negative. Babs and Cheryl had done a sterling job of handling constituent problems ("Yes, Mrs. Joshua, Congressman Buckman really wants to find out why your Social Security check was late, and he told me that he will be talking to the Administrator by the end of the week.") Add in the passage of the Gulf War Syndrome bill - we had a number of vets coming back to the district who were able to talk about better treatment from the VA hospital or getting a better college benefit package. We had also passed an update to the Civil Rights Act, which was popular in liberal and Democratic Maryland. Finally, we had the free publicity from my attacks on the Democrats in the House. I had been on all three Sunday talk shows as well as the MacNeil Lehrer Hour. Hollywood might say that there's no such thing as bad publicity, but they don't say that in Washington! The Democrats were running scared, and it was affecting races across the country.

Marilyn had talked about getting a job now that the kids were in school, but neither of us was all that thrilled about the idea. For one thing, it wasn't like we needed the money! In fact, you could argue that if Marilyn took a job somewhere, then she was taking a job that somebody else who actually needed to work would be able to get. For another thing, Marilyn wanted to be home long enough to send the kids to school and be home early enough to be there when they got home. What did that leave, the lunch shift at McDonald's?

Then there was her function as the wife of a Congressman. We were developing a schedule where every other weekend she and the kids would come down to Washington for the weekend, otherwise I would go home for the weekend. The weekends in D.C. might involve a party or dinner she would attend with me, with the kids having a sitter in the evening. At home, Marilyn might need to run around during the day over to the Westminster office. In fact, I told her, it made more sense to have her work at our Westminster office helping Cheryl and the others as an unpaid intern than it did getting a job somewhere else. Marilyn's a chatty person and was perfect to put on the phone with some whiny person demanding that 'Something Has To Be Done About This!'

I talked it over with Cheryl and Marilyn, and we gave her a fancy title, but no pay and no authority. She could work whatever hours she had available and run errands for the office as needed, answer phones, and simply help out. With our schedules, it was the best we could figure out.

Marilyn helped out in other ways as well. As Trustee of the Buckman Foundation, she had the checkbook. We continued going to the various pancake breakfasts and chicken-and-biscuit dinners (and I actually really like chicken and biscuits!) and we could also write a nice check for the local fire department or ladies auxiliary or whatever in the area. I could also give a little five minute spiel about the wonders of what we were doing in Washington and ask for suggestions. I stole liberally from the Andy Stewart playbook - if there was a grant or interest free loan or benefit I could trumpet, I did so shamelessly. ("This road repaving is possible due to a grant resulting from Congressman Buckman's support for...") When I made a donation to a charity or cause in a Democratic district, I didn't set out the 'tip jar', since that would be more than a little tacky. I didn't do it in a Republican district, either, but they were generally much happier to shake my hand for the cameras.

Your freshman two years as a Congressman is supposed to be the time to see if you can play in the big leagues. Can you get along with the people you need to get along with, form coalitions and groups, and dodge the slings and arrows of outrageous misfortune? Do you trust people or are you possessed of a healthy skepticism? Can you stay in control of your destiny or does it control you. I think that, clueless as I was, I had a healthy grasp on what was going on.

It is very, very easy to lose your way. It is very easy for Darth Vader to suck you over to the Dark Side in Washington. I am sure that Andy Stewart, scumbag that he was, started out wanting to do something positive. Even as cynical as I am, I think he wanted to be a good guy. It's just incredibly easy to allow yourself to be bought and used, and so many don't even realize it's happening.

Want to visit Barcelona with your wife and take a ten day vacation? That's really fucking expensive, but, hey, Megabucks Pharmaceuticals really thinks you're a helpful chap. They are putting together an educational trip to Barcelona this summer, right over the next recess. Why don't you let us fly you over on their G-5 and let you learn about the wonders of Megabucks Pharmaceuticals, while your wife gets a little shopping in? Do you golf? Did I forget to mention the resort we'll be staying at has three courses?

Since Megabucks Pharmaceuticals thinks you're such a swell guy, and you think they were just great to take you on that wonderful fact-finding expedition, it's only natural that you vote to help them out on that little import issue. If you don't, well, it's true that you have to vote your conscience. We understand, Congressman. No, sorry, the winter trip to Cabo San Lucas is already booked.

It's amazing just how many facts are hidden on beaches around the world, and on golf courses and ski slopes. Damn few are actually found in factories and office buildings, though.

Well, two can play that game! I knew that the second ranking Democrat on the Veterans Affairs Committee hadn't been able to get to Bar Harbor that summer, so I offered to take him and his wife along with Marilyn and me. The third ranking Democrat and his spouse also decided to go, too. Why anybody would actually want to swim in water with icebergs in it is beyond me but, by God, the lobsters were wonderful! We flew up in the G-IV and had a nice three day weekend, all as my guests.

The Gulf War Veterans Act made it out of committee two weeks after that little trip. Now, to be fair, Sonny Montgomery was under some intense pressure already, but it couldn't have hurt to have his ranking Democrats pushing as well.

By now Sonny Montgomery really hated my guts, but between Gingrich and his two top lieutenants pushing hard, he allowed the 'Buckman-Kerrey Bill' out of committee, and that allowed it to go to the joint committee with the Senate for reconciliation. We'd be able to vote it into law before the summer recess. President Bush had already promised to sign it into law. Bob Kerrey had told me that there would probably be a very nice ceremony in the Rose Garden when he did it, and since we were the authors of the bill, we'd be there, standing in the background. The entire idea really excited me, which made Bob laugh at me good-naturedly. Who'd have thought little Carl Buckman from Lutherville would end up like that?

We had the summer barbecue at the house as usual. It just kept getting bigger and bigger, and was becoming an actual campaign event. I had a catering company run it this time, so that Marilyn and I could actually get out of the kitchen and from behind the grill to meet our guests. I made sure that Lurlene Parker wore a 'Vote for Buckman' badge before I gave her a juicy and delicious Republican burger. Then we got a picture of her and I threatened to turn it into a campaign poster.

I attended the convention in Houston, but Marilyn stayed at home. I knew it was a disaster in the making. The economy sucked and Bill Clinton's 'It's the economy, stupid!' message was getting through loud and clear. I applauded Reagan's speech, since it was the last one he would ever give. He was already silently going through the first stages of Alzheimer's. Otherwise, the thing was a circle jerk of the far right wing pushing a social agenda that made me rather uncomfortable. The Republican Party was beginning its hard right turn. Pat Buchanan began by declaring a 'Culture War' and Rich Bond, the RNC chair and Rich Miller's boss (Rich was the guy who recruited me for this!), gave a speech declaring that "We are America; they are not America". Nothing like a little unity in government.

I won't say I cruised to an easy win, but I did win. Bud Hawley was able to make a better showing than Andy Stewart, and didn't get too personal or throw too much mud. I behaved, too. The end result was 58-42 for me. Again, unlike Andy Stewart, Bud called me after the television stations called it and made a very nice concession speech. I publicly thanked him and did so again privately. I beat him, that was victory enough, and I didn't need to rub it in or be an asshole. No matter what I did, there were a shitload of Democrats in my district, and I had to be polite. I also resolved to call Jacqueline Stayman-Huestis and exercise the option on the house on 30th.

Be nice to people on the way up, because you'll be sure to meet them again on the way down! It always amazes me how the smartest people can forget this little idea. Maybe it was all my experience at this point, 90 plus years. Courtesy counts. Being nice to people matters. If you want to get something done, throw a handwritten note in with the package of crap you're sending out. It worked in trailer sales, and it works in Congress.

Not everyone believed that, of course. Newt Gingrich made a lot of enemies on his rise to the top and you could really see it up close and personal. All in all the Democrats lost 14 seats in the House and the Republicans picked up 12, making it 258 Democrats to 176 Republicans to 1 Independent. I had no idea how it happened on my first go, and whether I had helped or hurt, but Gingrich seemed pretty pleased with the results. He was already starting to ask questions about increasing the pressure for the next election.

When Freshman Orientation came around, I talked it over with my staff and we decided to stay where we were. We might have been able to move a floor down or something like that, but it just wasn't worth the hassle. That might change in a few years. While I didn't want to be too glib in my predictions, I did know that there was going to be a huge upset in Congress in the 1994 elections. Assuming I survived the election, I was going to find myself in the middle of the pack of a House full of new Republicans. I might just want a new office then.

After the election I did my duty day thanking people, and then Marilyn and I turned the offspring over to her parents for the rest of the week and flew down to Hougomont. The election had been on November 3rd, so I turned 37 on Thursday. We had a very private birthday party, with Marilyn wearing high heeled sandals and not much else, and she had to light my candle all day long. Otherwise we just goofed off until we flew home on Sunday.

Chapter 113: An Old Friend

Thursday, December 17, 1992

There are some things that only the House of Representatives can do and some things only the Senate can do. The House is much more involved in the budget process than the Senate. On the other hand, only the Senate gets to weigh in on a President's appointments to high office. The Senate is supposed to be the more senior of the two bodies, and is supposed to be the older and wiser grownups. It goes to most Senator's heads, and makes a lot of them into pompous asses, but that's probably a different topic.

The one thing I didn't have to pay any attention to was cabinet appointments or nominations to the Supreme Court. No matter what I thought of the person, I had no legal right to get involved. If somebody were to ask, I could toss my two cents in, but even then, it mostly doesn't matter. As far as the Cabinet is concerned, there are four biggies - State, Defense, Justice, and Treasury - and everything else is who-gives-a-shit territory. For instance, nobody cared about Transportation until a bunch of planes crashed on 9-11, otherwise, who gives a shit?!

What most people don't realize is that most of these positions have deputies who are also political appointees, and need Senate approval. These jobs never end up on the evening news, never get any kind of argument, and are basically rubber-stamped. The only time things get mucked up is when a Senator gets his panties in a wad and puts a hold on things to try and make a point. For instance, when George W. Bush came into office in 2001, Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina put holds on a bunch of his appointees to force the President to change a law.

As a plain and simple and relatively junior Congressman, I was beneath the gaze of my more powerful brothers in the Senate. Everybody already knew by December who Bill Clinton was nominating for various positions. The various deputies were simply listed on a paper that got sent to everybody as part of a routine data dump. Huge amounts of this stuff get sent around, almost none of which is ever read. In general, if you even notice it, you glance over it, and send it back to be filed or tossed.

I received a courtesy list of nominations for Cabinet Deputy Secretaries and Under Secretaries towards the end of December. There are huge numbers of these bureaucrats, and the titles are intentionally confusing. Who ranks higher, a Deputy Secretary, an Under Secretary, or an Assistant Secretary? Who's more important, a Deputy Assistant or an Assistant Deputy? Does anybody actually care? Well, actually, it's important to know if you are trying to get anything done. A Deputy is a shitload higher up in the pecking order than an Assistant, so if you need something to get done, you have to know who on the ladder can help.

At this point, though, I just scanned over the list, to see if I remembered any of the names from my first time through. In fact, one of them did. I called Mindy into my office and handed her the list, with one of the names circled on it. "Do me a favor, Mindy, and find out who this guy is?"

She looked at the list, a bit confused. "Who is he?"

"That's what I want you to find out. He must have a bio somewhere in the system. All I have right now is the name. I just want to see if it's the same fellow I think it is, or somebody totally different."

She shrugged and nodded. "An old friend?"

I smiled back. "Maybe. Let's find out."

Mindy took off and I put it out of my mind, and went to the next piece of paper in the In Box, a list of some legislation about to be introduced as soon as Bill Clinton took office. Bill was feeling pretty cocky, with a happy Democratic Congress ready to do his bidding. Well, good for him, but in a couple of years he was going to get a very rude wakeup call.

Mindy came in the next morning with a manila envelope. "Here's the information you asked for." She opened the envelope and handed me what looked like a fairly stock bio and a picture of a handsome and smiling man. "Is this who you thought it was?"

I stared at the picture as my stomach churned. "Yes, yes it is. Thank you." I looked up at her and saw the curiosity in her face. "Now, I want you to call Gingrich's office and get me a meeting with him as soon as possible. Don't take no for an answer. It won't be a long meeting, but I need to meet him soon, and I'll stay as late as I need to."

"What's wrong, Congressman Buckman?"

I shook my head. "Don't worry, just get me that meeting. Thanks."

Mindy nodded and left, still mystified. I looked back down at the bio and photo, pondering how in the world this man had wandered back into my life like this. It was a good photo, too, showing a handsome man, tall, and slim, with a full head of 'executive hair' and bright white teeth.

It was my old friend, Brigadier General Anthony Hawkins!

I never used his full name in 1981, when I met the man, although I knew it. I was a Captain and he was a Brigadier General. His first name was 'General', and I needed to toss a lot of 'Sir's in as well. When last I saw him he was ordering my sorry ass onto a C-47, and then a few days later I heard him demanding I march my dead and injured men back to Honduras. I never saw him after the dustoff picked us up at that 'abandoned' airstrip; he kept his hands relatively clean and had the Provost Marshal and his people kick the shit out of me in that basement jail cell.

Colonel Featherstone had told me that Hawkins was being promoted to Major General at about the time I was ending my career. I looked down the bio and shook my head in amazement. He did two years in Brussels with NATO, and then transferred back to the states, where he managed to pick up a third star, and then moved on to Hawaii as the Army commander reporting to CINCPAC, the Navy four star who ran the Pacific. That was it for him in the Army. He retired a Lieutenant General six years ago. After that he spent some time on the board of a defense contractor, and when that was bought by Grumman and he was out of a job, he went on to join the Center for Military Progress, a Washington think tank.

What really surprised me was that Hawkins was a Democrat. Military people are by and large a conservative bunch, and they tend towards the Republican Party. One of the benefits of conscription, drafting people, is that you get much more of a mix of society than you do with an all volunteer force, which tends to be self-replicating. No, I'm not advocating the return of the draft, but it wasn't all bad, either.

I hadn't really thought much about the dumb bastard since I got out of the service. My knee was fucked up, but that could have happened another time or place, a different jump, or even just falling down the stairs. I had left the Army almost eleven years ago, and it wasn't a part of my life anymore. I never regretted my service, and would have loved to have stayed in, but it just didn't work out that way. I certainly couldn't complain about my life since then!

Now, as I thought back to those days, I realized how foolish and naïve I had been. What would have happened if I had just said "NO!" and refused to get on board that Goony Bird? What if we had all refused what we knew were ridiculous and illegal orders? It's not like we were at war, where you have to do what you have to do. It was a fucking training exercise and that asshole would have cheerfully killed us all as long as it didn't hurt his next promotion. What's the worst that would have happened? He could have court-martialed me for refusing to obey an order, but I could have beaten that one at trial easily. My career would have been shot, but it was over with as soon as Hawkins got involved anyway. More importantly, two good men wouldn't have had to die, and another good man wouldn't have been crippled, and I don't mean me. I had allowed my personal courage and sense of duty to override my duty to my fellow soldiers.

There was no way I was going to let Hawkins back into the service of the U.S. government!

Right after lunch Mindy told me that Newt was giving me five minutes at four to talk to him. I thanked her and had her clear my schedule for the afternoon. At half past three I walked over to his office and waited my turn. I was ushered in about five after four, and smiled as I wound my way through his offices. It was nicer than mine, by a long shot.

Ever since we had picked up some more seats in the House, Newt was a lot happier with me than before, when I was working with the Democrats. I was still planning on working with them, but I saw no need to rub it in his face. In fact, what I wanted to do now would be a sharp stick in the eye for the Democrats, and he was sure to appreciate it.

"Carl, good to see you again. How can I help you?"

"Thank you for seeing me, Newt, I appreciate it."

He smiled expansively. "So, what brings you here?" I reached inside my jacket and pulled out the bio and photo of Hawkins and laid them on his desk. "What's this? Who's this fellow?", he asked.

"That would be the information on Lieutenant General Anthony Hawkins, who has been nominated by Bill Clinton as the Deputy Secretary of State under Warren Christopher."

"So?"

"So, it's not going to happen. I knew this guy back when I was in the Army. He is not qualified for a leadership position anywhere in the government. I don't want to get into it because there are national security implications, but I won't let him serve again. Nobody in the Senate or over at Clinton's offices knows me or would listen to me, but they know you. I am asking that you contact somebody and have this nomination killed off."

Newt had been sitting back in his chair lazily listening to me, but as I talked and got to the phrase 'national security' he straightened up. "Carl, we are in the House of Representatives, not the Senate. The Senate gets to 'advise and consent', not us."

"I understand that, and it's why I'm talking to you. I'm serious, though. If I have to crash his confirmation hearing and do it on live TV, I'll do it, and if it costs me my office, I'll pay the price."

"You pull a stunt like that, and it will cost you your office! It will result in a Congressional censure and contempt of Congress charge, at the least!"

I nodded. "As I said, I will pay the price."

He looked at me carefully. "You need to tell me what's going on, Carl. What the hell is this national security nonsense?"

I shook my head. "I can't tell you. It was classified Top Secret. I will have to pay that price as well, if I speak out in a public hearing."

"Carl, I'm not sure what you expect out of me if you don't tell me what is going on, or what happened, or whatever."

"Newt, on this one you are going to have to trust me."

He just shook his head. "Give me some time to make some phone calls, but don't do anything stupid without talking to me first. If this is bullshit I will hang your balls out to dry in the noonday sun."

"Fair enough." I stood and took my leave of him. I flew home, and then had several drinks too many that night. Too damn much of that nightmare in Central America was being dredged up. Even Marilyn noticed I was being short and snappy with her.

Newt called me two days later. "Carl, the best I could do was set up a meeting with some people in the Senate, and you are going to have to explain this national security stuff to them."

"When?"

"Thursday the 17th."

That was next week. "Just let me know when and where.", I told him.

"You'd better know what you're doing, Carl, or this is going to be a disaster." Newt finished and hung up on me.

The meeting was in Newt's office at two in the afternoon. I was waiting with him, just chatting over plans for 1993, as people began showing up. It was a meeting of the Washington Congressional and Senatorial elite - and me. The Senate Majority Whip, Wendell Ford, was present, as was the head of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Claiborne Pell, which was the committee that would have to hold the hearings on Hawkins. Probably because of the national security implications I was mentioning, the head of the Select Committee on Intelligence, David Boren, was present. The last to appear was a handler from the Clinton transition team named John Baldwin, who was one of Warren Christopher's people, and Hawkins himself. The only Republicans in the room were me and Newt.

Hawkins came in last, pride and defiance in his stride, and almost sneered at me when he saw the junior pipsqueak who dared to threaten him. I gave him my most studied indifferent look, simply looking at him without blinking, dragging my gaze across him from right to left, and then slowly turning my head away.

It was Baldwin who spoke first, simply as a way to start the meeting. "Congressman Gingrich, it's a pleasure to see you again. Allow me to introduce General Hawkins."

Hawkins came forward and brushed past me, to shake Newt's outstretched hand. "Congressman, thank you for seeing me, although I can't understand what the problem might be."

"That's what we're here to figure out, isn't it, General. This is Congressman Buckman, who requested the meeting."

Deigning to acknowledge me for the first time, Hawkins turned to me and stuck his hand out. "Congressman."

"It's good to see you again, Mister Hawkins."

"That's General Hawkins, if you please.", he responded.

John Baldwin interjected, "General Hawkins was a general in the United States Army, and it's customary to refer to a retired officer by his rank."

I put my most innocent face on and looked around the room. "Really? Well, I guess you could all call me Captain Buckman instead of Congressman Buckman, but that seems a little presumptuous of me." I looked around the room innocently.

We all sat down, and the meeting started. "Carl, you asked us to this meeting, and I'm here because of the national security implications that you refused to tell Newt about. So, spit it out, son, what's got your panties in a twist about this fellow?", said Boren, in his folksy Oklahoma twang.

"I find this entire meeting an insult!", interrupted Hawkins. "I have an exemplary record and everybody in this room knows it! I demand an apology!"

Baldwin laid a hand on Hawkins' arm and shook his head silently.

"Calm down, General, we'll figure this out.", commented Pell.

All eyes turned to me. It was show time.

I nodded. "Well, I have to say that I am very disappointed that Mister Hawkins, or General Hawkins if he insists..." Hawkins' eyes flashed angrily at that, but I continued. " ... doesn't recognize me. We met before in the fall of 1981. Back then the General was known as Brigadier General Hawkins, and like I said, I was known as Captain Buckman."

"This is ridiculous! I've never met you before in my life!", he protested.

"Not true, General, not true! It was in November of '81, and we were in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, during Exercise Southern Shield '81." I turned to the others and explained, "I'm not sure if you gentlemen would have ever heard of this, but it was a pretty typical training exercise. At the time I was a captain in the 82nd Airborne, commanding a battery of 105s. The Sandinistas had just taken over in Nicaragua and were being a pain in the butt, so the Army decided to send an airborne battalion task force down to Honduras to show the flag and do some training."

Hawkins looked like he wanted to speak out, but Baldwin silently held him back. Hawkins simply glared at me.

"Brigadier General Hawkins was in charge of this whole thing. It was a pretty typical sort of training exercise, with us training the Honduran paratroopers and doing joint drops and exercises, that sort of thing." I looked at the Senators for any glimmer of understanding. I knew that Gingrich hadn't served, but I hoped that at least one of the Senators might have.

"I know what you're talking about, Congressman. I was in the Coast Guard, but I've seen these sorts of training exercises. They're pretty normal." Pell made the statement and looked at his colleagues, all of whom nodded in understanding.

"Yes, sir, they are. Anyway, there we were down in Honduras, and putting up with Brigadier General Hawkins, who really didn't have a clue what we were doing. The General was what we called a 'five jump chump', somebody who had done the minimum five jumps to qualify for his jump wings and never did it again. Still, that wasn't all that big a problem, since we were pretty used to jackass generals."

Hawkins looked like he was about to come after me, but Baldwin kept a hand on his arm and a smile on his face.

"All that changed during the last jump. Now, before I go any further, I have to say that the rest of the discussion must be considered Top Secret. It was classified afterwards..."

"Then we're done here! I won't sit here while this traitor leaks classified information!", barked Hawkins. He turned to Baldwin and said, "We're out of here!"

It was Wendell Ford who ordered, "Sit down, General. The rest of us all have a security clearance of one sort or another, and I really doubt that Mister Baldwin here would want it known if there actually was a problem. I want to hear this."

Hawkins gave me a hateful look but made an exasperated gesture to continue.

"Thank you. As I was saying, everything was going fine until that last jump. General Hawkins here decided that it would be a great idea to have the Honduran paratroopers jump from the American planes, while the Americans would jump from the Honduran planes. Mind you, this alone violated about a half dozen safety regs all on its own, but that was the order. Then it got better when we learned that the Hondurans were jumping us from surplus C-47s we had given them after World War II. None of us had even seen airplanes that old, let alone trained to jump from them. Despite our complaints we were ordered to jump from them regardless of the fact we had never trained to do this."

A couple of the Senators looked over at Hawkins, but now he was sporting a poker face. I kept going. "It got worse after that. We were ordered to do a night jump. Night paratroop jumps are just about the most dangerous thing a soldier can do. You don't do night drops unless you're at war and only then as a last resort. Hawkins ordered us to drop anyway. We loaded up in the Goony Birds and off we went in the middle of the night."

"It ended up a disaster! The Honduran pilot of the plane I was in got lost and flew south into Nicaragua. After awhile, he just turned on the drop light and dumped us out over Nicaragua. Out of twenty of us, two men died and a third was crippled. That was where I blew my knee out. Then it got better. The commanding officer of the group I jumped with was one of the dead, and I had to assume command. It took us two days of hiking north, hiding from the Sandinistas and drug lords, to get into radio range. Hawkins personally refused to order an evacuation and made us keep hiking. We kept marching until we ran out of food and water, and then I told Hawkins that if he didn't order an evac I was going to surrender to the Sandinistas."

All three Senators were staring at Hawkins by now, and Newt had a fascinated look on his face. Hawkins ignored them all.

"So, the helicopters needed to land at what was called an abandoned airstrip. Abandoned, my ass! It was controlled by whoever the local drug lord was, and we had to do a nighttime combat assault on the place to secure it and call in the Hueys. By then we were more walking wounded than combat troops, but we did it anyway, because we were American paratroopers and the toughest sons of bitches on the planet! I had men who volunteered to be left behind so as not to slow us down, but I told them we were all going home, dead or alive. We got back to base, at which time Hawkins had me arrested for disobeying orders and mutiny. When I refused to cooperate, his pet Provost Marshal had me dragged into a basement and beaten into unconsciousness."

"This is all a lie! A damned lie and I won't stand for it!", Hawkins roared.

I smiled at him, as the others looked at me. I replied, "You want witnesses? It's been eleven years, but I can pretty much guarantee that if I call over to the Pentagon I can get the current addresses of the rest of the guys that dropped. Some of them are probably still in, but I know of at least one guy who got out, and the odds are there were others. If it comes down to it, we can track down the JAG lawyer who got me out of that basement and into Walter Reed."

"And this was all classified Top Secret afterwards?", asked Gingrich.

"Following my thumping in the basement, I woke up in a hospital bed in confinement. I was informed everything was classified Top Secret and that I was to keep my mouth shut, take a Bronze Star for getting my men home, and not to let the door hit me in the ass on my way out of the Army. I was cashiered along with every other officer in the chain of command, those still alive at least, all except for one Brigadier General Anthony Hawkins, who got himself promoted."

I got to my feet and took my cane and limped over to the window. I turned back and said, "I didn't need this before that jump or before I had to hike the better part of a hundred klicks through an enemy army. The only reason I kept my mouth shut was because we didn't need the Nicaraguans to know that an American General had decided to invade their peace loving country with armed American paratroopers, or that an American General could get away with ordering an officer beaten unconscious for defying him! Any of you gentlemen care to contemplate the shitstorm either would have caused?"

"This is preposterous! You can't prove any of this!", barked Hawkins.

I looked over at Pell. "Senator, you'll be the guy running the confirmation hearings on the General. Do you really think I can't find one Republican Senator with an axe to grind who won't invite me to testify?" I turned back to Hawkins. "You know, aside from the running, I can still pass the physical to qualify for jump school. I miss that, the running, I mean. I used to run five miles a day." To the others I explained, "That was actually the minimum, five miles, which all paratroopers had to be able to run. Sometimes we ran longer distances." I turned towards Hawkins and slapped my cane against my right leg. "I'll never run again, General. I was a damn good combat officer, General. I was already scheduled for a research command and a stint at CGS. All gone. Payback's a bitch, ain't it!"

"This is preposterous! I won't stand for this..." Hawkins ran on for a few minutes, but it was obvious that nobody was paying attention to him anymore.

I overrode him. "General, you didn't deserve to wear the uniform then and you sure don't deserve to come back for a second shot."

Hawkins protested loudly at this, but Boren cut him off. "What do you want, Congressman Buckman?"

"Senator, you can't believe any of this..."

Boren waved him off and kept looking at me. "Well?"

I simply shook my head. I turned to face Baldwin. "This asshole is history. Forever. I have no interest in telling this story. Nicaragua is still a powder keg, and nobody needs this brought up. Just dump his sorry ass now and forever." I faced Hawkins. "General, I have no idea where you came from, but it's time to go back there. Get out of Washington. Sell the house, quit the job, and leave. It's time to go home and live off your pension and be forgotten."

I looked back at the others. Boren and Pell silently nodded; Ford grimaced and gave Hawkins a disgusted look. Baldwin simply had a stone face and refused to look at Hawkins. Newt simply stood up and came over to me. "I think I can take it from here, Carl. Why don't I call you later?"

"Fair enough. I need to go home and apologize to Marilyn. I've been a little short with her and the kids since this started."

I shook the others' hands, well, not Hawkins, but I wasn't feeling overly polite with him. I limped out of the office, straightened up a touch, and retrieved my coat and hat.

Screw the son of a bitch! Payback really is a bitch!

Chapter 114: A New Contract

Tuesday, January 12, 1993

Newt popped into my office Monday morning unannounced. I was doing some paperwork, but you're always polite to the Whip. The title is because the Whip is supposed to be the guy who whips his side into order. They have a lot of power over staffing and committee assignments and office administration, and can generally make your life miserable if you defy them.

When Mindy announced him I put my paperwork aside and stood, to greet him and wave him towards a seat. "That was quite the bombshell you lit off last Thursday.", he told me.

"You catch any grief on this? Or do I need to be sacrificed on his behalf?"

Newt shook his head. "I got together with Boren and we made a few phone calls Friday. We didn't do a complete verification, be we got enough to know you weren't bullshitting us. The White House will be withdrawing his name, citing family issues or something like that. Is that going to be good enough for you?"

I shrugged. "I've got no interest in making any of this public. I just won't let this guy back in. If he heads off to East Asshole, Indiana, and never shows his face again, that will be just fine with me." I cocked my head to the side a touch and asked, "So where does this leave me? Shit flows downhill. Is any going to splash on you or me? I'm sorry if you catch any grief on this, Newt. That wasn't my intention."

He waved it off. "This won't be a problem. He's just one more pissant appointee. Nobody needs the grief. Those guys have already forgotten his name and your name." He gave me a curious look. "Leaving aside your personal feelings, you think Hawkins would have really been a problem?"

"Absolutely. It's bad enough that George Bush put us into Somalia, but Clinton is going to make it even worse. He's a complete novice at anything overseas, except for smoking dope at Oxford. Hawkins would really make that bad!"

"You think Somalia is going to be bad? We did all right in Kuwait, and Bush put us in that."

"I think Somalia is going to be a disaster! Bush's problem is that he thinks he has to 'do something' to help. Kuwait was a real country with a real government and a real people. We had a simple problem, run the Iraqis out and turn it over to the real owners. Somalia, well, some places are just too screwed up to be fixed. You watch! We are going to be filling body bags over this and for no good reason. God help us if Clinton sends Hawkins over to supervise!", I replied.

Newt shrugged and stood up. "Well, it's over, so keep your mouth shut and nobody will care. After the recess is over, we need to get together and make some plans to turn the heat up on the Democrats. No reason to let up on them."

"I've got no problems with that. Call me or John or one of the other guys, and we can schedule a meeting at the clubhouse. I think we can still get some more mileage out of the bank and post office problems. People are going to jail over those little issues."

He smiled, like a vulture considering his next meal. "We do this right, we can take control back of the House, at least. Maybe the Senate, too."

"I have an idea or two. Let me get a few things down on paper and plan them out for after the recess."

I showed Newt out through the office lobby. He stopped at the outer door and turned to me. "You know, if we do take back the House, you guys are actually going to be somewhere in the middle of the seniority ranking. Any thoughts on that?"

It was my turn to smile back. "Yeah, let me off Science or Veterans Affairs, or both. I want Armed Services or Foreign Affairs." Those would be good payoffs for moving the Democrats out.

Newt smiled and nodded. He liked a good horse trade as much as the next politician. "For a guy who was never a politician before, you learn quickly. Let's make this happen, and then we can worry about that sort of thing." We shook hands and he left.

I made phone calls to the offices of Pell, Ford, and Boren, to get five minutes with each of them. One thing I had learned, both on the first trip and this one, is the importance of face to face communications and thank you's. With Pell and Ford it was pretty straightforward – thank you for seeing me last week, sorry if I disrupted anything, I appreciate the effort you took. Equally understood was the fact that Washington is a place of give and take, and I now owed them a favor. Fair enough.

With Boren it started out the same way. I got five minutes with the man, which was all I had requested, and when I was shown into his office, I started my little spiel. "Senator, thank you for seeing me. I just wanted to thank you for listening to me last week."

"Congressman, you're welcome. Please have a seat.", he replied.

"Well, I didn't want to take up your time. I just wanted to say thank you and it was appreciated. I'm sure you're a busy man."

He smiled but shook his head, and gestured towards an armchair in a sitting area. Leaving now would be very rude, so I had a seat, and he sat in a matching chair next to me. "I wanted to talk to you for a minute about that. You know that Newt and I looked into your story. He told me he was going to talk to you."

"Yes, sir, he saw me the other day. That's one reason I was making sure to make my manners with you gentlemen.", I said, smiling.

"The courtesy is appreciated. I wanted to talk to you about that mission. I talked to some people over at the Pentagon. That thing was a screw-up from the start, wasn't it?"

"That's as good a description as any I've heard, Senator.", I agreed.

"I also heard what really happened afterwards, including what the charges would have been. All the charges." His face didn't change when he said that, but I knew what it meant. He had heard that the dickless lieutenant had said I shot the prisoners. Boren must have pulled some strings to get that information, because I was sure it wasn't in any sort of routine file.

"The charges that were never actually brought? Or were they brought and then officially expunged?", I asked. "That was the end of my career, so I never paid it any attention."

"The records are there, but buried deep. If you had pushed this to the limit, they wouldn't have stayed buried."

I sighed. "I thought as much. As I said before, if there is a price to pay, I will pay it. I just couldn't allow Hawkins back in. Should I be contacting a lawyer?" Theoretically, if the Army wanted to pursue this, they could 'un-retire' me for the purposes of a court martial.

"No. This is done for now. Unlike some of our esteemed colleagues, I actually believe that some secrets should be kept secrets. I have no interest in digging it up, and neither did the Army. Newt knows, but you play for his team, so that won't be a problem. One of these days, though, it will probably surface. You might want to give that some thought. No good deed goes unpunished, that sort of thing.", Boren said.

I sighed again. "Senator, I just did what I had to do. I got my men home. Nothing else mattered. It was my fault we were there to begin with. If I had refused the jump maybe somebody else would have refused, and we could have gotten the whole mess cancelled." I shrugged and looked at him. "I've thought a lot about it over the years."

"Son, don't overthink it. You weren't the only officer that jumped that day, and they weren't your men to command. Don't go looking for trouble. Just remember that it will all come out some day. Nothing stays secret in this town, at least not forever. I mean, I love these conspiracy nuts who think the CIA had Kennedy killed. There'd have been a dozen eyewitness books out by now if that had happened!" He laughed at the idea.

I had to smile at that and nod, and with that, the meeting was over. He stood, so I did, too, and he ushered me out, shaking my hand at the door. I had dodged another bullet.

At the end of the day I went home. I was taking off for a couple of weeks until after the New Year. We reconvened on January 5 and I needed to be present to be sworn in with the 103rd Congress. Until then, we would take the Christmas break and visit Marilyn's family and then go to Hougomont for a little sand and sunshine.

Meanwhile, however, what Gingrich had spoken about was running through my mind. It got to the point that by the time we were in the Bahamas, I found myself sitting on the beach watching the kids run around, but with a notepad and pen in my lap. Marilyn was at my side, in a one-piece bathing suit, straw hat, and oversized sunglasses, laying on a beach lounger and catching some rays. I was in swim trunks and a Hawaiian shirt, sunglasses, and my own straw hat. Between us in a bucket was a bag of ice with a six pack of Coronas. Charlie was down trying to body surf the miniscule waves, and his seven year old sisters, Holly and Molly, were working on a sandcastle.

Marilyn reached between us to open a beer. "What in the world are you working on?", she asked.

I smiled at her and waved my pad. "This is my plan for global domination."

"Feeling ambitious, are we?"

"Today Hereford, tomorrow the world!", I intoned.

"Give me a break!", she said with a snort.

"When I'm done, the Democratic Party will be in full retreat. Your parents will have to move to Canada or be charged with treason."

"What about me?", my wife asked. "I'm a Democrat, remember!"

I waved my pad at her. "We have a provision in the party platform to allow for sleeping with Republicans."

"Keep it up, wise guy. Sleeping will be all that goes on."

I grabbed my pen. "I think I'm going to modify the platform, require something a little more concrete, maybe involving kneepads and handcuffs."

"I don't want to know!"

I grabbed a beer and yelled, "Hey, you two, Mommy wants to be buried in the sand!"

Marilyn popped up and began to argue, as Holly and Molly scampered over eagerly. They were sent back towards the water. I could see their brother just shaking his head in our direction. Grownups!

In between teasing Marilyn and chasing the kids, I managed to write some notes down. I knew what would work to put the party back into power. My problem was that I wanted it to be done on my terms, and not the terms of the hard right wing of the party. I was personally part of the liberal wing of the Republican Party, which was about the only way I could get elected in Maryland. Unfortunately, while some of my personal feelings were in line with the Democrats, the leadership in the Democratic Party was much more interested in maintaining power and the current status quo. Changes needed to be made, and the only way that would happen was a palace revolt. The Republicans had to regain control of Congress, something that hadn't been done since the Fifties!

I spent the rest of the time in the Bahamas making notes. Marilyn glanced at them from time to time, but in most ways she just didn't care. Yes, she was a Democrat, but she was much more conservative than her parents. Politically, we met very much in the middle, which allowed us to tease each other constantly. The standard joke was that we had to go to the polls together, so that we could cancel each other out.

When we flew home, I called John Boehner and Jim Nussle and told them about my conversation with Newt, and about getting together in the clubhouse for a strategy session. We made a date for the Tuesday after the session started, the 12th, and they promised to corral the rest of the Gang of Eight plus Newt for a meeting at the house. I started fleshing my ideas out in the meantime, typing them up and figuring things out. I also picked up a couple of whiteboards, easels, and easel pads.

Marilyn and the kids came down to D.C. that weekend and I spent part of Saturday setting up some things in the den and prepping one of the easel pads into a flip chart. Charlie came in at one point and asked, "What are you doing, Dad?"

"Homework!"

"You're not in school."

"That just makes it even more important.", I told him.

"That sucks!", he replied.

I rolled my eyes but tried to keep it from my son. Marilyn might say he was too much like me, but he wasn't an academic. It was a little more like Chevy Chase as Clark Griswold proudly talking about his son Rusty in Vegas Vacation - 'He's a C+ student!' It was time to put my foot down. I looked down at him and said, "What about you? Have you done your homework?"

He gave me a look and said, "I don't have any homework."

"You don't have any homework, or you don't have any homework here?"

"Dad!", he protested, with a very guilty look on his face.

I put my hands on my hips and gave him the stare down. "You ever try to pull a stunt like this again, you won't be able to sit for a week. You think I'm tough? I learned from people who would eat you alive! Until you hear otherwise, I will be checking your homework nightly. You want me to start calling your teachers and asking them if you have any homework?"

"Dad!" He had a panicked look in his eyes at the suggestion.

"Out! And don't try this one again!" I pointed towards the door and he scooted out at high speed.

Marilyn came in about a minute later. "What did you say to your son?"

I gave her a wry smile. "Just that he had to do his homework." She gave me a curious look. "He tried to pull a fast one on me by telling me he didn't have any homework, when he meant to say he didn't have any here. He really left it home."

Marilyn replied, "That little shit!", but she was smiling as she said it.

"So I chewed his ass and asked if he wanted me to make daily phone calls to his teachers."

She glanced back towards the door. "I'll chew him some more when we get back home."

"I like that idea. Why do I have the funny feeling my first born is not going to be making his name in the halls of academia?"

"Carl! That's an awful thing to say!" I gave her an are-you-kidding-me! look and she shrugged. "Well, did you know you were going to get a doctorate when you were eleven?"

"I think I knew when I was in the womb, and it still wouldn't have satisfied anyone!", I replied, laughing.

"You're as crazy as everyone else in your family."

"Sshhh! Don't let anybody know!" I laughed and advanced on her. "Besides, only poor people are crazy. Rich people are eccentric!"

Marilyn laughed and backed away from me. "I don't care how rich you are. You're still crazy!" She backed her way out the door.

Since it didn't look like I was going to trap Marilyn in the den, I went back to work.

Tuesday evening the meeting was set for seven at the house on 30th. I had told Marilyn I would be spending the night in Washington, and the catering company had left plenty of coffee and tea and some cookies and snacks. By twenty-after we all had our coffee and were gathered in the den. John looked around the room and said, "Well, Carl, you called the meeting. What's on your mind?"

I was already standing, but at this I went over to one of my easels that I had positioned at the end of the room. "All right, fair enough. A few weeks ago I was talking to Newt about continuing the pressure on the Democrats, about taking control of the House back, and even the Senate. I spent a chunk of the recess thinking about this, and came up with some ideas. I'll go into them in a moment, but I want to lay out the big picture first."

"First, we need to keep up the pressure related to the bank and post office scandals, but we need to do more than that. So far we've only been telling people why they shouldn't vote Democratic. We haven't been telling them why they should vote Republican! We've been negative, not positive. It's not enough to say the Democrats are the bad guys, we have to convince people that the Republicans are the good guys. Has anybody here ever worked in the private sector, a restaurant or a company selling something?"

The others looked around at each other. "I grew up working in my grandfather's bar. It's still in the family.", said John.

Frank Riggs offered, "I used to sell real estate."

"Okay. You guys know that you can't sell stuff negatively." To John I said, "Your grandfather wasn't going to sell any more beer by simply advertising that the bar down the street wasn't as nice as his. Same thing with you, Frank. Nobody is going to buy through you if the only thing you tell them is that the other brokers are crooks. No, you have to show them why they should buy from you, that you have better listings and know more." I turned back to John. "Or that your beer is tastier, or your waitresses are cuter. You have to push the positive." I got a few nods at this.

"We have to show that our Republican Party product is better for our buyer, the voters. So, here's my idea. While we keep pushing the problems with the Democratic Congress, we also come out with a bold plan, something that takes all the ideas we got into this business for, and combine them into something new."

I reached out and flipped the top page off of my easel pad, exposing what I had written beneath. "I propose a Contract With America!" There were some curious murmurs at this. "We can call it something else, but I think this will fly. Here's how it works."

I flipped another page over, where I had ten bullet points listed. "Now, we have ten items on our list." I flashed my hands out, all ten fingers spread. "We can argue about the specifics, but we keep it to ten items. For instance, balancing the budget, we all want that. Entitlement reform, especially welfare. The line item veto on the budget. Infrastructure investment. A Federal level gun law that requires 'may issue' states to become 'shall issue states'." I went over several other items. I had purposely left several lines blank, so the others could come up with their own ideas.

"Why ten items? We can come up with more than that?", asked somebody.

"Ten's a good number. It's easy for people to remember and think about and talk about. Moses did well with it, why can't we?" There were a lot of nods at that, along with a few grins. I always tended to think of Mel Brooks' History of the World, Part One, where Moses comes down off of Mount Sinai with three tablets, telling everybody he has 15 commandments, and then drops and breaks one of the tablets, cutting the number down to 10.

"One important feature - we stay away from Democrat hot buttons.", I warned. "I don't care what you might personally think, but you want to stay away from abortion. Stay away from school prayer. Stay away from gays and marriage. I don't care how wonderful a bill you write, we get into some of these social things, and the Democrats will beat us to death with them!"

"Abortion is wrong. It's murder.", said Rick Santorum.

I shrugged theatrically. "Rick, I understand what you are saying, I truly do, but that doesn't mean I agree with you. There are nine good conservatives in this room, and I can guarantee that I'm not the only guy here who doesn't agree with you. If we start trying to push these things, they will be the only things the Democrats will talk about and we will get killed on this. The average American doesn't like it, but that doesn't mean they want to ban it either. If we start pushing a hard right agenda, this will be still born." There were a few grumpy faces around the room, but a few relieved ones as well.

"So how does this work with the Contract bit?", asked Scott Klug.

"It's how we sell it to the customer, the voters. We tell them that it's a package deal. There is stuff in here that everybody but the most die-hard liberal is going to want. We tell them that within the first 100 days after electing us, we will submit a package of ten bills, one for each item, and we promise that if elected we will ram them through. Lots of hoopla! We do a mass signing of the contract on the steps of the Capitol. We invite all the Republican candidates to Washington to sign with us. We do the talk shows and the news shows and the whole nine yards. If each of us takes one or two of these items as their own, we can bomb them left and right."

"It'll never work. Clinton will veto every last thing we put through.", retorted Santorum.

It was Nussle that answered that one. "So? This is going to be very high profile. You think he is going to bag ten consecutive bills? If we take back the Senate, we could actually do this in the first 100 days."

"Remember, this is partly theater. Every day after we take control, we submit one of these bills like clockwork, just in time to make the evening news. We're not actually going to get everything we want, but we can play this up big with the voters. Don't forget, there are a lot of Democrats in conservative districts that are going to like pieces of this. It won't be a straight party line vote on this stuff. I would bet that on some items we'll be able to pick up enough votes to be able to override a veto.", I added.

There was a positive undertone to the meeting, but every eye was turned to Newt Gingrich, who could kill it with a single word. Instead, he was looking at my easels, one hand along the side of his face and a finger tapping his chin, with a sly smile. "Carl, you told me you had an idea, but this is an entire campaign! It is audacious! How do you see it working?"

Well, he wasn't shooting it down! "This year, 1993, we are doing prep work on this. We finalize the ten points, start getting details down. A year from now, we start increasing in speed. Six months later, after the primaries, we get the new candidates involved. We go full court press on this. We get a few Senators to start writing their own versions of the bills.", I told them. I pointed at Newt. "You're the general on this."

He nodded. "We do this right, we win and I become Speaker. This isn't public knowledge yet, but Michel is leaving after this term. He won't be back in two years."

"Damn!", I heard around the room. That made sense, though. I knew that Gingrich would become Speaker in the next Congress, but that he was only Number Two in the pecking order now. If Michel left, he moved up, and he wanted to be Speaker so bad he could sit on it and taste it.

"There's ten points to the Contract, whatever they end up as. We each take a point and start working on the legislation; we get some help on the other two. It has to be absolutely secret. The Democrats and Bill Clinton get a sniff of this, they'll figure out a way to push back. This year is totally quiet prep.", I added in.

Gingrich shook his head. "No, we can't leave it in your offices. We move it out, to one of the think tanks around town. We work on it through them. I'll talk to a few people, get them over here for an evening or two. It's a good start, though. Carl, I really like this! John, what do you say?"

John looked around the room and at the easels for a moment. "It's brilliant. We're going to have to do a lot of ads on this next year.", he cautioned.

Jim Nussle said, "We get the RNC and some soft money to do that. They can push the program without mentioning us. It's legal." A few others nodded and agreed with that.

"By God, this could work!", exclaimed John Doolittle.

I nodded. "This has to be secret, though, really secret. I mean, cross your heart, hope to die, pinkie shake secret. You can't tell your wives, you can't tell your girlfriends, you can't talk in your sleep! The Democrats learn about this, they'll come up with some bullshit of their own.", I said. There were some grins at this. While some of the group were real straight arrows (Santorum), I knew some weren't (Gingrich), and the comment about wives and girlfriends would hit home for some of the guys. Hey, they were grownups; they could face the heat if they got caught.

We broke apart after some more discussion. Newt promised to get back to me the following week. We were in business.

Was this how the first Contract With America began? That was on my first go around, and I had no idea when it actually got started. I did remember that by the '94 elections it had totally galvanized the Party and thrown the Democrats into complete disarray, and the elections were a watershed event. It was Newt's baby then, and the Gang of Eight were his helpers. I was happy enough to let him lead the charge this time. If we won, I would rack up some serious Brownie points and favors I could call in at a later date.

Plus, a lot of it was stuff that the public thought we needed. Entitlement reform for instance, was desperately needed. In the case of welfare, we had created a perverse incentive to have welfare babies. As originally planned, women on welfare received payments based on the number of children they had. The more children they had, obviously the more assistance they needed. Enter the Law of Unintended Consequences. If by living in some dump and not feeding your kids properly, it costs less to raise a child than the extra payment, then you actually make money with another child! Talk about your bad policy ideas! That was just one example. The entire system needed to be overhauled, to get people off the dole and onto their own feet.

What I wanted to do was to oversee the entire thing. By 'creating' the idea, it put me in the driver's seat, even if I let Newt take the credit. I could soften things, make them more palatable to the Democrats, cut down on the nasty rhetoric. I could push back against the lobbyists who would try to take over everything. It was going to take a lot of work, and I was going to need some help.

The first thing I did was to break my own rule about talking to anybody. I told Marilyn I was staying another night, and had Marty come over to the house Wednesday night. He had spent several years as a lobbyist before coming back from the dark side. I would frequently joke with him about just that thing, telling him that I knew there was good still inside him. He could help me keep things honest!

Marty and I had a quick dinner at a seafood place down on the Potomac before heading over to the house. Once there, I made a couple of drinks and took him into the den, where I gave him pretty much the same spiel as I had given the others. With Marty, however, I was able to focus a little more, and cut out some of the extraneous stuff, and got it done in half the time. At the end I asked, "Well, what do you think?"

"Well, it's audacious as hell, that's for sure. What did Gingrich and the others think? He can kill it if he wanted to, but he's looking for a game changer and this could be it."

I nodded. "The others all liked it. Newt liked it more when I said we'd put it under his name. If it works, he becomes Speaker of the House."

"He probably gets hard just dreaming about that."

I gave a theatrical shudder. "Now that's an image I don't want to think about!" Marty snorted in laughter. "What about his idea of shopping it out to one of the think tanks in town? Why should we do that?"

"Deniability, for one thing. If anything leaks, it's just a proposal from the think tank, not pending legislation from your office. You just sit there and go 'Huh?' as necessary.", he commented.

"Huh?"

"Very good, keep practicing that. Just as important, they have a lot more lawyers and statisticians and thinkers on tap than you do. Some of this stuff will be really, really big and involved."

"That's what I'm worried about.", I told him. "Every conservative lobbyist in the city is going to want to weigh in on this, and some of them are just going to be whack jobs. If I can keep it in house, we can control it."

Marty simply shook his head. "It's too big for any one man to control, which means it's going to be pissed on by others. Forget about control, settle for influence. You can have some major influence in this, but it will never be entirely what you want. The soup tastes better when everyone has a chance to pee in it."

I grimaced. I understood what my old friend was saying, but I didn't have to like it. "Who do you think Newt will give this to?"

Marty shrugged. "Probably the Heritage Foundation, but maybe the Cato Institute. They might be a little too libertarian for Newt's tastes, though. Maybe the American Enterprise Institute. Those three come to mind anyway. My bet, you'll find out when Gingrich decides, and has you do another dog-and-pony show for them. He'll bring over a few people here for you to do your stump speech. Kiss some ass and get in with them, keep your fingers in the pie. Don't get on your high horse and try to order them around. They won't be impressed. They will be here long after Carl Buckman is voted out of office."

"True enough!"

"You said you wanted everyone to pick a specific piece of legislation and ride herd on it. It's your baby. Which one do you want?"

"I've been thinking about that. They're all really critical, but some are going to be so big I doubt I'll be able to get my hands around them enough. I was thinking to handle the gun bill and the Second Amendment." It still galled me what Marilyn and I went through ten years ago with Hamilton and trying for a carry permit.

"The NRA is going to want to weigh in on that."

"Yeah, but the good point to that is they're really the only big lobbying group that will care. The hard left nut jobs will want to ban the manufacture and sale of all guns in the country, and send storm troopers to go through every house and seize all the guns they find. The NRA wants every child to be issued a government supplied automatic grenade launcher at birth, with unlimited ammo for life. There has got to be a middle ground."

"Most of what you are trying to do with your bills, the Democrats are doing now. With Clinton in the White House and the Democrats controlling both houses, they are going to ram through a shitload of favorites. They are already planning a gun control bill of their own."

"Doesn't matter. The pendulum is swinging my friend, and it is swinging in our direction. In two years time we are going to own both houses, and it will be our turn to make some changes. Bill is going to be very surprised."

"We'll have to see on this.", commented Marty, as he got ready to head home.

"It's our time, Marty. You need to help me keep the hard liners from going overboard."

"Fair enough."

Chapter 115: The Bravest Man I Ever Knew

1993

I was in a pretty good mood when I got home. Newt and the Republican Party would have done the Contract with America whether I had recycled or not, but with me involved we had a chance of toning down the harsher aspects to it. I was already pushing to keep most of the 'family values' crap out of it. That was a sideshow that always sidetracked the Party and played into the hands of the Democrats.

My good mood broke when I got home. Bucky was staying with us, and while I really like my namesake, I was curious. "Hey, buddy, what's up? Where's the rest of the family?"

He gave me a strange look. "Mom said I was staying with you guys for a few days, maybe until the weekend."

I shrugged. "That's cool. Carter here, too?" Maybe Tessa and Tusker were taking a few days off for themselves.

I got that odd look again. "No, they were going somewhere with him."

"Okay, I'll talk to your Aunt Marilyn." I dropped my briefcase in my office and went down the hall to my bedroom and changed out of my suit. I was on the verge of heading back out when Marilyn came into the bedroom. She closed the door behind her, but she didn't have a playful look in her eyes. I knew she wasn't planning any fun and games before dinner. "What's up?", I asked.

"Bucky is going to be spending a few nights with us."

I nodded. "Yeah, I saw him out in the living room. What's with that?"

"Tessa and Tusker are taking Carter for testing."

"What's wrong with Carter?" The Tusk's second son was a good boy, and bright. Like his brother, he had his father's bright red hair, but where Bucky was tall and had Tusker's looks, Carter was smaller and looked a lot more like his mother.

Marilyn lowered her voice. "They are taking him to the Mayo Clinic. They think he has cancer."

I just stared at my wife while the blood roared in my ears for a second. She wasn't smiling, and this wasn't something people joke about. After a few seconds, I said, "What?! When did this happen?"

Marilyn gave a helpless shrug and sat down on the bed next to me. "He's been seeing his doctor for a few months now, but they just started putting the pieces together. He gets tired, his knees and elbows are constantly hurting, and he keeps getting bruises that never heal."

"I saw one of the bruises, over Christmas, and later, when we came back from the Bahamas. I thought it was different."

My wife shook her head. "It was the same bruise. It should have healed by then."

"Why aren't they taking him to Johns Hopkins? That's just down the road, and it's one of the best hospitals in the country!"

"They already have. His pediatrician referred him there. That's where they diagnosed it as cancer. This Mayo Clinic trip is a second opinion."

"Huh!" I sat there in disbelief for a second. "What kind of cancer?"

"I don't know. Some type of leukemia or something."

"How are they getting out there? They're not flying him through the airports, are they?! Have they left? I can get the Gulfstream..."

Marilyn took my hand and smiled. "I already did that. As soon as I heard I called Taylor and made the arrangements. They dropped Bucky off on their way out to Westminster. They're probably already there."

"Oh, sure ... okay." I should have known better. "Why us and not his grandparents?"

"Luck of the draw. His folks are in very poor health themselves, and hers are in Europe on vacation."

I nodded at that. Tusker was a year older than Tessa, but he was the baby of his family, and she was the oldest child in hers. His parents were at least ten years older than hers. I smiled back at her. "Well, it's not like he's never been here before. All we have to do is make sure he and Charlie don't try to build a moon rocket in the back yard."

"Launch the pair of them out of here!"

"Maybe they'll find out it's something else."

"Let's hope!", she agreed.

For the next few days we kept our hopes up and our mouths shut. Bucky didn't have any idea what was going on. He was a smart kid, and growing up as fast as a weed. He was fourteen now, and would be fifteen in June (as if I would ever forget his birthday!) He was already well over five foot tall and growing fast, and I wasn't even sure if he had hit his growth spurt yet! Even if he averaged out between his two parents in height, Tusker was taller than I was by several inches, and Tessa was about Marilyn's height. Bucky would probably be taller than me.

The only odd thing was explaining to the kids why their friend was staying with us during a school week. Marilyn would run him down to school in Cockeysville after loading the kids on the school bus. Otherwise, we had the phone ringing off the hook as girls started calling the house for him. Bucky had figured out that girls weren't all that gross and yucky! Charlie thought his older friend was crazy in this regard, and Bucky just laughed at him.

The twins were eight, like Carter, and they were pretty curious why Bucky was staying here when Carter wasn't. They kept picking at us, first me, then their mother, then me again, and finally Marilyn chewed their butts and told them to behave and go to their room. They grumped and whined and I stood up and then they took off with considerable alacrity! It pays to be big! I gave Marilyn a wry smile and we went back to what we had been doing.

The Tusks flew back with Carter Sunday morning, and I could tell by the looks on their faces as they came by to retrieve Bucky that the second opinion was the same as the first. We turned Carter loose upon the other kids, and sat Tessa and Tusker down in the kitchen.

"So, what is it?", I asked.

"Acute lymphocytic leukemia.", answered Tusker. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a pamphlet. "Here, I knew you'd ask, so I picked this up. Thanks for flying us out there. I'll pay you back somehow..."

I waved it off. "The hell you will. Forget it! What's this acute ... whatever? Leukemia? That's a blood cancer of some sort, right?"

Tusker looked at Tessa, who answered, "It's a fairly common childhood cancer, but not normally seen in adults. Your white blood cells go haywire and go into overproduction, but aren't like normal white blood cells. For what it's worth, they say we caught it relatively early, so that's good. It's the same diagnosis we got at Johns Hopkins. They suggested we continue to have him treated here."

"Well, that's good, isn't it? You're only half an hour from one of the best hospitals in the country, maybe even the world! There's a cure, right?", asked Marilyn.

I didn't know shit about cancer and leukemia, but I did know that childhood leukemia was one of the most treatable cancers. By the time I recycled, it was practically guaranteed curable, at least if you could afford to go to the hospital. Most Americans didn't have health insurance after about 2020.

Our friends nodded. And grimaced. "The treatment is chemotherapy. There's nothing to operate on surgically. That and maybe radiation."

"That sucks, but at the end, he'll be cured. They do all sorts of stuff with cancer these days.", I told them. "Listen, let me make a few calls this week. See if I can find any experts in Washington. Don't delay anything, but let me look into it."

At that offer, Tusker and Tessa looked at each other and smiled. Tessa said, "Why do you think we brought you that pamphlet? We knew you'd want it spelled out for you when you started poking around."

"You two are real funny! Am I that predictable?"

The other three all looked at each other and said, damn near in unison, "Yes!" I just rolled my eyes. The Tusks left us with the pamphlet and packed up their kids and went home.

That night I made sure to hug each of my children before they went to bed. The girls didn't think about it, but Charlie thought it was pretty strange. I told him to tough it out, or I'd kiss him, too. He ran shrieking at the thought, which made Marilyn and me laugh.

Monday morning, after my morning staff meeting, I had Babs and Mindy stick around. "A friend of mine has a child with leukemia. Who do I see about finding him the best doctor in the country?"

The two women looked at each other. Mindy looked a little mystified, but Babs immediately answered, "You need to see somebody over at the National Institutes of Health. They'll know somebody."

"Is this one of your children, sir?", asked Mindy.

I shook my head. "No, but he might as well be. It's my best friend's youngest."

"I can make a few calls, set something up.", said Babs.

"Make it happen fast. I need to know this week.", I pressed. They nodded and left. I called Marty in and we started discussing other stuff.

Wednesday morning I drove out to Bethesda, where I had an appointment with somebody about leukemia. The National Institutes of Health are a sprawling campus where they do research and fund medical research for the government. Babs and Mindy had made enough calls to move me up the food chain.

Bethesda wasn't far from the house on 30th, but it took my driver a bit to find a parking spot and make our way to the front door. In those pre-9/11 days you didn't get strip searched on opening the door. The young lady at the main desk took my name and called somebody, and two minutes later an earnest young man came down and retrieved me. "Welcome, Congressman Buckman. You'll be meeting with Doctor Heisman this morning.", he told me.

"Lead the way."

I was escorted inside, where we took an elevator up several floors. I was led to an office with a sign by the door, 'Jonathan Heisman, Executive Director', which my guide simply pushed open and led me into a small waiting area. I was deposited with a secretary and my guide took off. Almost immediately I was shown into an inner office, to find two men waiting for me.

"Congressman Buckman, welcome to the National Institutes of Health. I'm Jonathan Heisman, the Executive Director. Doctor Healey would have been here, but she's at a conference in San Diego this week.", said the first man, a slim and somewhat ascetic looking man with a trim beard and mustache. He reached out and we shook hands.

"That's all right. This just came up, Doctor ... I assume it's Doctor?"

He nodded. "Yes, both MD and PhD. This is Doctor Harry Hollings, my counterpart over at the National Cancer Institute, one of our sub-agencies."

I turned to the other man, a thoroughly nondescript fellow about my height and about twenty pounds heavier. He reached out to shake my hand also. "Pleased to meet you, Congressman, although not under these circumstances."

"Thank you. I agree, it's not the way I would want to meet anybody."

Heisman gestured towards an armchair. "Why don't we sit and talk about that." We made ourselves comfortable, and he opened the talk. "My understanding is that you have a friend, a constituent I believe, with a child with leukemia."

I had to smile at that. "Close, but not exactly. They aren't my constituents, but they are very close friends. Their youngest son was just diagnosed with acute lymphocytic leukemia." I took the pamphlet, now getting worn out, out of my pocket and laid it on the desk. "They were initially diagnosed at Johns Hopkins, and then got the same diagnosis a few days later at the Mayo Clinic."

"And what brings you to us?", asked Hollings.

"I don't know. What can I do to help?, I guess."

Heisman looked at Hollings, who asked me a few questions. When did they notice the first symptoms? When did they take Carter to Johns Hopkins? When did they take him to Rochester? When were they starting treatment? I answered each as best I could.

"Congressman, I have to tell you that your friends are doing everything we tell people to do. They took the symptoms seriously, they sought out medical treatment, they went to specialists, and they got a second opinion. They are not delaying anything, and are at as good a facility as you can find."

"Will he be cured?", I asked.

Hollings made a wry face and shrugged, raising his hands in an expression of helplessness. "Sir, I just don't know. The odds are good, but not perfect. The good news is that when caught early, childhood leukemia is one of the more treatable forms of cancer. The odds are better than even. The bad news is that it's a very serious disease, and nothing is guaranteed."

"I understand that. Tell me, are there any clinical trials, experimental drugs or treatments, other things they could do? Is there a doctor I could send them to, anywhere else, in the world even?"

He shook his head. "No, not really. Treatments are improving every day, but we don't have a magic bullet hidden away somewhere."

"Nothing?! Money isn't an object. I mean, if you've got some million dollar pill available, we can spend the million dollars.", I pushed.

"Sorry, Congressman, we don't even have a ten million dollar pill. Your friends are doing what can be done."

"GODDAMMIT!", I cursed. The other two looked concerned, but I held my hands up. "Sorry, I apologize for that. It's not your fault, and I know you're trying to be helpful. I appreciate that. I really do."

It was Heisman who spoke next. "I take it this family is very close to you."

I sighed and nodded. "I went to school as a kid with the parents. The father was one of the ushers at my wedding, and the mother went into labor with their first child at our reception. My wife and I attended Carter's christening. I don't think we can get any closer."

"Then you're already doing everything you can. They're doing all the right stuff for Carter's treatment. You're supporting them. That's what you can do."

Hollings added, "Something else you can do, Congressman Buckman, is to understand just how debilitating this is going to be on everybody. The primary treatment is going to be chemotherapy. Everything you've ever heard about how hard chemo is on a person is true. Carter is going to be sick as a dog on his good days. This is going to be very hard on his parents and the rest of the family, too. If you want to help, take the load off the family. Let any of the kids stay with you, run an errand or two for them, give them a break and see that they have a date night or two."

I sighed again. "We can do that. I'll let my wife know tonight."

Heisman spoke up again. "The other thing you can do, Congressman, is your job. Get us more funding. There's never enough, and it directly tracks into better treatments and breakthroughs."

I smiled. "And that's your job, isn't it. Funding, right."

He smiled back. "We understand each other."

I stood. "Well, I appreciate the time you took. If I can return the favor someday, well, I owe you, and you know where my office is." I smiled and shook their hands.

"I'll hold you to that some day.", Heisman returned, smiling at me.

I excused myself and left. An escort took me back down to the lobby, at which point I called my office and said I would be back the next morning. From Bethesda I decided to drive home, not to the Washington house but to my real home, with a stop along the way. We drove up to Baltimore and got on the Beltway, and then drove clockwise around the city to York Road, and went up to Tusk Cycles in Cockeysville.

Tusker was talking to a middle-aged couple when I entered the showroom. He nodded to me when he saw me enter, but I waved him off and he never stopped dealing with his customers. We could talk later. I wandered around the showroom, admiring the gleaming machines and marveling at the prices they commanded. I had no desire to ride one, but they were so expensive only rich and retired folks could afford a top end Harley with all the whistles and bells. Unbelievable!

After a few minutes, Tusker came down the aisle and found me. I looked over at him and smiled. "Sell them?"

He smiled back. "Two brand new Softails, plus customization." He made the universal sign for money, by rubbing his thumb against his fingers.

I just shook my head in amusement. "Did you check to make sure their organ donor cards are filled out?"

Tusker laughed. "Just wait until Charlie wants his license. We've already got Bucky clamoring for his."

I gave an exaggerated shudder. "Let's talk."

He nodded and led the way to his office. For all of Tusker's public persona of the wild and crazy biker, his office was that of a serious businessman, with a computer on his desk, and the appropriate furnishings. There was a reason he had two sales lots and was more than a little profitable. "What's up?", he asked as we settled into a couple of chairs.

"Well, you know I was planning on seeing if I could find anything better for Carter in D.C., right?"

"Yeah, you mentioned it. Find out anything?"

"Nothing more than you already know. I met with the head of the National Institutes of Health and the National Cancer Institute. I told them what was happening and they asked me a few questions, but you guys are basically doing what you're supposed to do. Hopkins is as good a place as any to take Carter, and you're doing the right stuff. You aren't dicking around, you're starting treatment, you've been to a good place for a second opinion." I shrugged in helplessness. "There are no magic pills. I asked. Chemo is the answer, and it won't be any fun."

Tusker sighed. "Thanks, man, I... we ... appreciate it. I didn't think you would find anything else, but I'm glad you looked into it."

"The one thing they stressed was that this is going to take a lot of time and care. They said to tell you to get everybody involved. It is going to be very stressful on all of you, not just Carter. Tell your family and friends, get them to help. Have you talked to your parents yet? Tessa's parents?"

He nodded. "We had everybody over for dinner Monday night. Boy, was that fun!"

"Well you know you can count on us, and let your other friends know, too. Carter's going to take up a lot of time. If Bucky needs a break, have him stay with us, you know we'd love to have him. If you and Tessa need a break, let us and other people help. Let the people here at the shop and at the other place know. Somebody else has been through this and can tell you stuff."

"I never thought about that, but you're right. One of my mechanics over at the Honda place lost his mother last year to breast cancer." He grimaced as he thought about it.

"That's supposed to be a whole lot tougher than leukemia. The odds are a lot better for Carter, so don't get too glum.", I told him.

He nodded again. "That it?"

"Yeah, pretty much. I have to head home now and let Marilyn know. When does Carter start his treatment?"

"Friday morning, and then twice a week for six weeks. Come on over to the house on Sunday."

"Sure. Have Tessa call Marilyn and set it up."

I stood up and let myself out and went home, to tell Marilyn the news. She agreed with me that it seemed like everything that could be done was being done.

My own experience with cancer was limited, but not reassuring. The Buckman family simply doesn't get cancer or heart disease or diabetes or any of the other biggies. For us, I think, it's worse. We all get strokes and Alzheimers. I wondered how my 'recycling' had been handled – heart attack or stroke? If it was a heart attack, it was the first!

Marilyn's family was riddled with cancer. Both Harriet and Big Bob would die from it, and her baby brother Michael would get it several times before dying from it. Harriet had been too far gone by the time she was diagnosed to even receive treatment, but I remembered the hell that Big Bob and Michael went through. Chemotherapy had been hell on Earth for the two men, with all the weight loss, nausea, vomiting, and hair loss you learn about.

I hoped like hell that it would be easier on little Carter, but I seriously doubted that would happen.

1993 rolled on the way it had before, with no real differences from what I remembered. Would I have known differently? Back on the first go I never really noticed some of what was happening, because it didn't mean anything to me at the time. The bombing of the World Trade Center in New York took on a whole new meaning when I considered what would happen in 2001. Pentium computers came out, with an amazing increase in power and speed over the old 486 models. We promptly replaced the stuff at the office out of my own pocket, not wanting to wait another five years for the government to get around to it. Around the world it seemed like the planet was going to hell in a handbasket, just like before.

Congress-wise, we spent most of 1993 working on the upcoming Contract with America with the Heritage Foundation. I was spending at least one, if not two, days a week over there reviewing progress on all ten items. Like Marty had foreseen, every lobbyist in town was sticking his nose in on things, 'consulting' about how to 'improve' our legislation. The budget and entitlement reform bills especially promised to be clusterfucks of improvements! It had to be done, but it was like a sausage factory – you really don't want to see what goes in!

Carter's chemo proved to be every bit as awful as could be foreseen. That poor little boy spent his ninth birthday puking his guts out after a session of chemo. By then he couldn't keep hardly any food down, and had lost all his hair. He would puke and cry, puke and cry, but he was a fighter, that's for sure.

Sometimes it would get too much for his older brother, and we would take him for a weekend. Bucky was a good kid, but it could be incredibly stressful. All of a sudden, Carter became the focus of the whole family. If Bucky wanted to go somewhere or do something, it might not happen, or it might be cancelled, depending on Carter's condition. It can make a person resentful. Bucky was a good kid, and helped a lot, but it was trying on him. He wasn't crazy like my brother, but it's only human to get angry about the attention. He tried to keep it from showing, and would stay with us occasionally to let off some steam by riding with Charlie around the property.

At the end of the six weeks he was off chemotherapy, but would be monitored by weekly visits to his oncologist at Johns Hopkins. A week later, when Carter began feeling better, and could start eating again, Marilyn and I packed the bunch of them into the G-IV and sent them off to Hougomont for a week.

The first blood work on Carter after the chemo came back hopeful, but not great. Subsequent tests after they came back from the Bahamas weren't even that positive. The cancer was slowing, but not gone. A second round of chemo was needed, with stronger medicines and a longer period. That started in May.

The strain on the Tusk family only increased that summer. Both of Tusker's parents died in June, his father of a heart attack, and his mother from heart break. She simply lost the will to keep going, and passed away in her sleep. We helped as much as we could, like the rest of their friends. I was one of his father's pallbearers. Tessa and Carter missed that funeral because Carter was taking chemo that day. That was really tough on the family. Tessa and Tusker were arguing a lot after that, but held it together for the sake of Carter. Marilyn and I could only stand on the sidelines and offer moral support.

Our big summer party that year was July 24, a Saturday. The Tusks came to it, like always, but you could see the strain on them. Carter had just started a third round of chemo. Tusker and Tessa were keeping a brave face up when around him, and they never said anything to anybody other than that he was getting better, but it was like they were whistling as they walked past the graveyard. Carter was down to skin and bones by then, and rather than sit outside with the others, he was propped up in one of the recliners in the living room.

One of us would always be with him, spending time with him so he didn't feel like he wasn't being included. We were having the party catered again, so Marilyn and I could circulate, but at one point in the afternoon, I had a chance to sit down with Carter and talk with him. Most of the time, when he was around, one of his parents were hovering, but now, it was just the two of us. I sat down in the chair next to him and asked, "How you doing, Carter?"

"Okay, I guess.", he said, quietly.

Something didn't sound quite right, so I asked, "You want to talk, Carter? Anything I can help you with?"

He looked at me and asked, "Can I ask you a question, Uncle Carl?"

"Sure, whatever you want."

"Will you tell my parents I'm sorry after I die?"

I think a bomb could have gone off at that point and I wouldn't have noticed it. Then I realized he was looking at me very seriously. I couldn't just laugh this off. "Why do you ask, Carter? Do you think you're going to die?"

He nodded. "I'm not getting better. Mom and Dad won't say anything, but the chemo isn't working." He gave me a wry look, and finished, "I mean, they keep taking me to the doctor's office and I'm not getting any better. Aren't you supposed to get better after going to the doctor?"

I smiled and nodded. "That's the general idea."

"Well, I'm not getting better, am I?", he stated.

I was slow in answering, but Carter was serious, and he wasn't joking about this. I shrugged and nodded. "No, you're not."

Amazingly, the little boy's face lit up at this! "Thank you! Everybody around just keeps telling me bullshit!" Then his eyes opened wide and he clamped his mouth shut. "You won't tell Mom or Dad I used a bad word, will you?"

I laughed at that and patted him on the knee. "Your secret is safe with me. So, what do you want to do? Do you want to stop seeing the doctors?" What the hell was I going to do if he said yes?

"No." Carter shook his head. "I tried to talk to Mom about it once, but she just got angry at me and told me I was getting better. Why does she get angry like that?"

"Well, she's not angry with you. You mom really loves you. She's just scared. She's really trying to convince herself, not you, that you'll be okay. I think that if she were to tell herself that you might not be getting better that would be the same to her as giving up, and parents never give up on their kids."

"Yeah, I guess that makes sense. Anyway, I didn't want to make her cry any more. She cries so much anyway." He looked at me and shrugged. "I don't think it will be for all that much longer anyway."

I didn't know what to say to that. I just sat there with him, and he continued, "So will you tell them I'm sorry? They're always crying and arguing now, and Bucky gets it, too. If he makes a joke or says something Mom and Dad yell at him, too."

"I promise."

"Thanks, Uncle Carl."

I stood up. "Can I get you anything?"

"Nah. I'm kind of tired. I think I'll take a nap."

"Okay." Then, before I left him, I said, "You know, you're not dead yet! You might just pull through. Won't you feel silly then about this!"

He smiled at that. "See you later."

I left my little friend in the living room and went into the kitchen, where I sat down at the island and quietly cried. Then I pulled myself together and washed my face and went back outside to the party. Carter was snoozing in the living room. Marilyn saw me come out and glanced towards Carter. "Everything okay?"

"Just fine."

Carter Henry Tusk passed away ten days later, August 3rd. It wasn't anything dramatic. Carter just kept getting weaker and weaker, whether because of the treatment or the fact that he could barely keep any food down, so he wasn't getting any nourishment. I heard from Tessa later that she went in to wake him and he wouldn't wake up, though he was still alive. She called an ambulance to take him to the hospital, but nothing helped. He was in a coma, and later that evening just slipped away without waking.

Marilyn called me at the office in Westminster and I drove home to help her break the news to the kids. I called the Tusks the next morning, but all I could hear on the other end of the line was Tusker crying. Eventually Bucky came on the line and whispered that he would call us later. We heard from friends the funeral service would be Friday morning, at St. Paul's. Visiting hours at the funeral home were Thursday night, and Marilyn and I took the kids. We debated whether the girls were too young, but they were nine like Carter had been, and we thought they would be old enough to handle it.

The funeral home was pretty well packed. Tessa's parents were there, along with both Tessa's and Tusker's siblings. Bucky looked fairly miserable, in that he was both bored to tears standing around like he had to, but also because he had loved his brother and was hurting as much as his parents. He saw us in the line and broke free to come over to us, where Marilyn gave him a hug and Charlie tried to act like a grownup. The girls were a touch bewildered, but soldiered on.

I was surprised by the turnout, but I shouldn't have been. You had quite a few biker types, rough guys who looked like they had been cleaned up special for the occasion, and you would see them standing next to a suburban family with a child Carter's age, who had been in school with him. I nodded and spoke to the people I recognized, but it wasn't the time or place to work the room.

We moved up the line to the casket. The undertaker had done a decent enough job with Carter, who was wearing a suit and a baseball cap to hide his baldness. Marilyn showed the kids how to kneel at the little prie-dieux in front of the casket, while I stood to the side. They all made the sign of the cross, and prayed quickly, before standing and moving aside to say what we could to the family. As I shook Tusker's hand, he asked, "You'll be there tomorrow?" The funeral was the next morning. Tusker and Tessa looked like they had been dragged through a knothole.

"Of course. Uh, do you need somebody to help, you know, with..." I nodded towards the little casket. I had carried a few in my time. He nodded bleakly. I looked beyond him and found one of the funeral home's people. "I'll go let them know."

"Thank you."

I was on the verge of leaving, when I stopped. "Tomorrow, at St. Paul's, at some point I want to say something, a eulogy, sort of. Carter asked me to say something for him."

It felt like every eye in the place turned to me, but of course it was just the immediate family and Marilyn, really. "Carter asked you to speak?!", asked his incredulous father. Tessa and Marilyn just stood there dumbfounded.

"Please, it will be easier to explain tomorrow. It's not going to be hurtful or anything like that. I just ... it will be easier to explain tomorrow. Please?"

"Uh, yeah, okay. Whatever.", he mumbled. Tessa just stood there stock still, her mouth open. We excused ourselves and moved off. I stopped to talk to one of the funeral directors and gave him my name and that I would help as a pall bearer. He jotted something down, and then we left.

"Carter told you to say something?", asked Marilyn after we settled the kids in her minivan.

"It will make more sense tomorrow.", I promised her.

After we got home, the kids were sent to bed. I headed into my den to start making some notes and typing something up. Marilyn stuck her head in after a bit to say she was going to bed, and I just looked up and gave her a quick kiss. I was going to be a bit longer.

I must have stayed up half the night typing and then retyping. I didn't sleep much, either, afterwards. I just hoped I had written something that Carter would have liked.

The next morning we bundled the kids off to church. St. Paul's was packed, all the way back into the annex. We sat in the middle, and I made sure I was sitting on the aisle. We went through the normal liturgy, and when it was time for the eulogy, the pastor stopped and said, "Giving the presentation on Carter is a family friend, Carl Buckman. Mister Buckman?" He stepped back, and I stood and walked up the aisle.

I was kind of nervous as I walked up to the lectern. My mouth was dry as I pulled my notes from my pocket and spread them out. I looked out on the audience, and down to my friends and family, and took a deep breath.

"Thank you. My name is Carl Buckman. I knew Carter probably as long as almost anybody in this church except for his parents. When Tusker and Tessa headed off to the hospital when she went into labor, neither of their parents were around, and my wife Marilyn was out shopping, so I got the call to come and keep an eye on their older son, Bucky. A few weeks later we were invited to the christening, here at St. Paul's. We seem to have come full circle.

In a lot of ways, Carter was just a pretty average kid. He liked to do the things that any other nine year old did. If you took him to the beach, he'd swim and chase seagulls and build sand castles. He liked watching his brother ride his motorcycle, but he wasn't a racer himself. He went to school and did well. His favorite season was the summer, when he could run around with his friends and goof off.

And then Carter came down with leukemia. Cancer is an ugly disease, and in a young child it's at its ugliest. Like everyone here, I watched as Carter went through the rounds of chemotherapy and treatment, and hoped and prayed that each new treatment would be the one that did the trick, the one that brought him back. The doctors tell us that we've never had as much hope as we have now, and that someday soon childhood leukemia will be a thing of the past. We aren't there yet. Carter didn't make it.

At times the treatment seemed worse than the disease. Carter just stoically stuck it out. He never complained to me, although I made sure to give him the chance. The medicines ravaged his little body. Carter kept going. He kept smiling for the others.

Here's the reason I asked to speak today. Carter knew he was dying. I think I'm the only person he told. Two weeks ago he and I were talking and he told me that it wasn't working, that he wasn't getting any better. He asked me what I thought, and I told him the truth, that I thought he was right, he wasn't getting any better. The funny part was that his face lit up and he said, 'Thank you! You're the first person to tell me the truth!' Then he said that everybody was giving him a lot of BS about getting better, only he didn't say BS, and then he worried he was going to get in trouble for using a bad word. I laughed and promised I would keep his secret. With all that was happening to him, he was worried about saying a dirty word. What a sweet guy.

And then he asked me to do a favor for him. After he died, he wanted me to tell his parents he was sorry. I didn't understand, so I asked him, 'Sorry about what?' It didn't make any sense to me. He told me he was sorry he had been such a burden to them; that they had to spend so much time trying to make him feel better when it wasn't working. He was sorry that his brother was taking a back seat to him. He was sorry he made his parents cry. I asked him if he had told his parents what he was telling me, and he said, no, that they were spending all their time trying to cheer him up, and he didn't want them crying because he knew he wasn't going to make it. He would rather go through the chemotherapy then make his mother cry any more. I saw what the chemo was doing to him. It wasn't pretty. I don't know if I could handle it. He went along, though, just to make his mother feel better because they were still trying.

So, Carter, I did as you asked. In the Army we'd say you were off doing reconnaissance for us, finding out where we're going to go. I doubt I'll ever make it to Heaven, but it's nice to know you are checking it out for me ahead of time. You can find the good places to goof off up there.

As for everyone down here, let me finish with this. I've known some really brave men in my time – soldiers, policemen, firefighters - men labeled as heroes, but here's the God's honest truth! The bravest man I ever met was a little boy named Carter Henry Tusk. Thank you"

Chapter 116: 1994

By the time I finished my little speech, there wasn't a dry eye in the room. It was hard for me to tell for sure, though, since I was crying and could barely read the paper I had written it down on. I was working from memory at that point. Over in the front row, Bucky was crying, and Tusker and Tessa had their arms around each other and were weeping.

We all pulled ourselves together, though, and I sent Marilyn and the kids out to the car. I had to help carry the casket out to the hearse with the rest of the pallbearers. Once we were done, I was in the car behind the limo carrying the Tusks, with the other pallbearers following. At the cemetery, we laid Carter to rest, and then went back to the church for a memorial lunch in the parish hall.

At the lunch Tessa wrapped me in a big hug and thanked me. Tusker told me, "You should have said something, man."

I shook my head. "What? Carter asked me not to, and there wasn't anything else you could have done other than what you were already doing. I didn't tell Marilyn, either. Sometimes there just are no good answers."

He sighed and shook my hand. "I know. I just wish it could have been different."

"Did you and Tessa ever think about having any more children?"

He shrugged at that. "We thought about it a few years ago, but decided two were enough. It's too late now in any case."

"Really? Tessa's my age, right? She's what, 38 or 39?"

At that Tusker gave me the first smile I had seen in weeks. "It's not her, it's me! I got snipped a few years ago." He made a scissors motion with his fingers.

My eyes widened at that. "I had no idea! When did you do that?"

"Oh, I guess around five or six years ago. Tessa wanted to get off the Pill and we decided we didn't want any more kids. Now that I think about it, you and Marilyn must have been away on vacation or something."

Back on my first go, I had gotten a vasectomy, too. In an incredibly selfish way, our accident, with Marilyn losing the baby and being unable to have any more children, had spared me having to go through it again. It is nowhere near as enjoyable as they advertise!

First, you aren't unconscious; they do this all under a local. You are laying there with your legs up in stirrups, and the doctor says, 'You'll just feel a pinch, like a bee sting.' Well, it wasn't a pinch, and I've never had a bee sting me there! Next, while you are looking down between your legs, he's slicing and dicing you, and then while the vas deferens is exposed, he is cauterizing that. Wait until you see smoke rising from a place that smoke is never supposed to rise from!

Afterwards he slaps a Band-Aid on everything and you get to wear a modified jockstrap to support everything and go home with. He also gives you some painkillers, and they aren't enough and they are nowhere near as strong as they need to be. You are going to be off your feet for about a week and you are going to be in pain for three to four weeks.

Ahead of time you are told, 'It's no worse than getting kicked in the balls.' That is perfectly true. What is left unsaid is the fact that no man yet born has ever volunteered to get kicked in the balls! Then, the next morning, when you start moving again, it feels like somebody kicked you in the balls all over again! It's like this day after day for almost a month! Forget about sex! Nothing down there is going to work for weeks!

Also, by the way, don't let your dog sit in your lap. The doctor told me this and I asked 'Why not?' He told me how one of his patients when home, sat down in the recliner, and his St. Bernard jumped into his lap. The stitches gave way and everything kind of squirted out through the opening. He ended up in an ambulance going to the hospital!

I grinned back at my friend. "I'll bet that made riding a motorcycle an exciting experience!"

Tusker rolled his eyes. "Like you wouldn't believe! Come over to the house sometime. I'll kick you in the nuts and then we can go dirt biking on a motocross trail!"

"You make it sound so appealing! I can see why you do so well in sales."

Tusker laughed, again probably for the first time in a month or more, and then went off with Tessa to talk to some of their guests.

The good news was that after Carter was laid to rest, the Tusk family settled back down again. Without the stress of his failing treatment, our friends went back to normal. It had seemed at one point like they were on the verge of splitting, but it all just calmed down and they stayed together. A few weeks later, he showed me a small pamphlet from a memorial company, and pointed out the stone they were getting for the grave. It was going to be a large stone, but one with spaces for three names, Carter's and both his parents. They had bought the plots on either side of his.

Later that fall, we were having dinner with the Tusks, and I asked, "Back when Carter first got sick, and you guys started taking him down to Johns Hopkins, do you remember how I did some checking if there were any treatments available that he could get?"

Tusker and Tessa looked at each other and then Tessa said, "Yes, and you said there wasn't anything that could be done that we weren't already doing."

"That's true. What I didn't say, because it had nothing to do with Carter, was that the doctors I spoke to all said that the one thing I could do was help get them the funding for more research. I was thinking, I mean, yes, in Congress I can do that, but what about just as a private citizen? I talked to a guy down at Johns Hopkins. If you would agree to it, I want to create a professorship for research down there. We'll call it the Carter Henry Tusk Chair, or something like that."

They looked at each other again, and it was Tusker that answered. "Uh, yeah, I guess so. How much would that cost?"

"Well, nothing. I would simply endow a chair and send them a check."

"Okay, but how much is it?"

I had been hoping to avoid that, but it was a legitimate question. "Four million." I had discussed this with my wife of course, especially considering she was the trustee for the Buckman Foundation, and would be writing the check.

Tessa's and Tusker's eyes snapped wide open! "Four million?! Dollars!? You can't ... I mean ... Are you kidding me?!", gabbled my friend.

"Tusker, I can't take it with me. Maybe someday something that professor figures out can save me, right? Besides, money isn't something I covet just to be rich. It's a tool, and what better way to use it than something like this.", I responded.

"Holy fucking shit!", he exclaimed, which set all of the kids to giggling.

Marilyn looked at our offspring and scolded them. "Just because Uncle Tusker said a bad word doesn't mean you get to."

"Do we get to wash his mouth out with soap?", asked Charlie. Bucky was grinning and nodding.

"You bet, as soon as you figure out a way to wrestle him to the ground.", replied Marilyn.

Charlie eyed Tusker, who gave him a menacing look in return. "Maybe later."

"If you're getting a professor, why do they call him a chair, Uncle Carl?", asked Bucky.

I had to blink at that. "I'm not really sure, Bucky. I think that they used to give you a really fancy chair to sit on at some old time colleges, but I never asked that before."

"Oh."

Thus was born the Carter Henry Tusk Chair for Pediatric Oncology at Johns Hopkins. There was a fair bit of paperwork involved, and then the university had to hire somebody to fill the chair. That we couldn't decide, on the theory that none of us knew anything about pediatric oncology. That was pretty much true. The professorship would become effective in the fall semester of 1994, and we and the Tusks were invited to attend the grand opening, or whatever they called it. That would be for the future, though, almost a year away.

In the meantime, I needed to get back to my job as one of the leaders of the free world. I won't say that this had been a distraction from that. It was more like being a Congressman had been a distraction from being a friend. Still, I needed to get back to Washington and start fighting for my Defending the Second Amendment Bill, which was planned to be the formal name.

I had some fairly specific thoughts in mind for the bill, which we were abbreviating as D2A. I had a few very specific things I wanted in the bill, and my biggest foes were not going to be the Democrats, but my fellow Republicans! The Democrats wouldn't allow anything I wanted, plain and simple, but after 1994 they would be in the minority. They could vote against it, but the odds were that we would have enough of a majority to ram through even vetoed legislation. Putting any kind of sensible restrictions on guns, however, was the sort of thing that the NRA would never allow. What I had in mind was:

* Require all states to be 'shall issue' states rather than 'may issue' states for concealed carry permits.

* Require all states to recognize each other's permits.

* End the assault weapons ban (which wasn't law yet, but would be next year. It would be one of the last gasps of the Democratic Congress.)

* Limit all civilian weapons magazines to a maximum of 10 rounds, no matter what the actual weapon could fire.

Some of the items would be near and dear to the Republicans, and would pass without any question. For years there had been discussion of changing the rules on concealed carry. After my experiences with Hamilton's stalking of Marilyn and Charlie, I was all in favor of this. I also knew that some of the more liberal states, like Maryland and Massachusetts would be a very tough sell. Still, I figured we could count on Congressional votes from the more rural and conservative districts of those states.

Likewise, ending the upcoming assault weapons ban would be popular with the Republicans. It was one of our stupider laws, basing decisions on whether a gun was an 'assault weapon' on purely cosmetic items. Military people know full well what an assault rifle is. It is a fully automatic rifle firing an intermediate (smaller size than a rifle) cartridge with a detachable magazine. What Congress had tried to do was ban guns based on what they looked like. If it looked like an AK-47, even if it was semi-automatic, it was an assault weapon. An M-1 Garand, which looked like a regular rifle, was also semi-automatic and was actually far more powerful and accurate, but wasn't considered an assault weapon. They made up all sorts of silly rules and exceptions based on whether the stock folded up, or it had a flash suppressor, or a pistol grip, or even a grenade launcher! Never mind that grenade launchers and fully automatic weapons were already illegal, and the mere possession of them would land you in the slammer. No, they now constituted a convoluted assault weapon category.

Most of that stuff was just flash and plastic parts. For another thing, almost no crimes are actually committed with long guns. They are hard to conceal and quite impractical. What criminals use are handguns. What made these weapons dangerous wasn't what they looked like, it was that they were designed to use military sized magazines of ammunition. Some of the magazines were really amazing. You had extended thirty round magazines for some pistols that stuck out the bottom of the regular handgrip, and some assault weapon types could accommodate a hundred rounds or more in military issue circular magazines.

What we needed was something vastly simpler. Eliminate the rules on what was or wasn't an assault weapon. Simply state that civilians couldn't own automatic weapons and couldn't use magazines with more than a ten round capacity.

The NRA would love to end the assault weapons ban. As far as they were concerned any restriction on gun ownership was pure anathema. Any time a state overrode Federal law on guns, they were there to fight it the next day. They would also fight against a restriction on magazine capacity, but I figured I could probably swing that one through. Most of the public couldn't understand why you needed an M-16 style 'hunting rifle' (the AR-15) with a thirty round magazine.

I also knew they would protest that it couldn't be done. They would line up a bunch of gun and ammunition manufacturers who would swear on a stack of Bibles they couldn't make magazines in those capacities, that it would be too expensive and drive them all into bankruptcy. That was the sheerest bullshit. All that needed to be done was to take an existing magazine and position a plug at the bottom to take up space, and then replace the spring with a smaller one. We could even add a provision to the bill preventing conversion of a ten round civilian magazine to a full sized military magazine, much like there were laws against converting semi-automatic weapons to fully automatic versions.

What I didn't see happening was a repeal of the Brady Bill, the Federal law requiring background checks on all handgun purchases. My own feelings on this were mixed. No, it's probably not a good idea to let crazy people and criminals buy guns, but it wouldn't stop them from getting their hands on them. The bill itself was chockfull of loopholes anyway. More importantly, as a tactical decision, the Democrats were going to squawk loudly about D2A, and would trot out Jim Brady shamelessly. D2A would be easier if we didn't mess with the Brady Bill. The NRA was going to have to lump it on this one.

By now we had the outline of the ten bills we were going to make the centerpiece of the Contract with America. The entire concept was still under a fairly tight hold, and the media hadn't twigged to our plans yet. Newt was planning on rolling it out after the primary season was finished, in the spring. In the meantime, most of the Gang of Eight were making regular trips over to the Heritage Foundation, and several nights a week we had meetings at the Clubhouse (my den, in the house on 30th) with lawyers from the Heritage Foundation. We had the following bills in the works, although with some of them the names kept changing, as we tried to find better sounding alternatives:

Bill 1 – Balanced Budget Act, John Boehner to be in charge. This was a big one, mandating a move towards a balanced budget and a line item veto for the President. I expected this one to be massively pawed over by every interest group under the sun!

Bill 2 - D2A, yours truly presiding, see above.

Bill 3 – Personal Responsibility Act, Scott Klug's baby. This was welfare reform in all its myriad forms, including prohibitions against giving welfare to underage mothers, ending extra welfare benefits based on family size, ending open-ended welfare benefits, and requiring people to get a job. There were going to be a lot of little provisions, and the Democrats would hate every one of them!

Bill 4 – Tort Reform Act, Jim Nussle. Personally, I figured this one was the least likely to get passed. Trial lawyers were big fans of the Democrats, since by creating all sorts of new 'rights', the Democrats gave fertile ground for law suits when somebody violated somebody's rights.

Bill 5 – Rebuilding America Act, me again. I had a fair bit of knowledge from when I had written Eat Your Peas!, and I used my contacts shamelessly. I got in touch with Harry Johnson and used his ideas repeatedly. If he couldn't figure out something, he knew somebody who could. More on that later.

Bill 6 – Unfunded Mandate Elimination Act, Chuck Taylor's responsibility. This was pretty straightforward in concept. An unfunded mandate was pretty routine these days, and was created whenever some government agency ordered something done without paying for it. For instance, if the Department of Education requires all schools to hire a counselor for some reason (who knows why, who cares, they did it all the time!) but leaves paying for that counselor up to the local school district, which now has to raise taxes to pay for this person, that was an unfunded mandate. Chuck's bill was supposed to require that this sort of thing be prevented.

Bill 7 – Regulation Reform Act, Rick Santorum. A whole shitload of items related to cost-benefit studies and restrictions on various government entities to write new regulations willy-nilly. I hoped Rick could pull this off. While we were all going to be running for re-election, for Rick it was an even bigger deal – he was planning on running for the Senate in Pennsylvania.

Bill 8 – Social Security Reform Act, Frank Riggs. Another unlikely item, but worthy nevertheless. For instance, I knew that he was working on raising the age Social Security could be collected at. When it was passed in 1935, you couldn't collect until you were 65, but at the time, the average life expectancy was only about 61. Currently, you could start collecting limited benefits as young as 62, but the average life expectancy was over 75. The numbers made absolutely no sense. Simply indexing benefits to age would save us a fortune!

Bill 9 – Business Tax Reform Act, John Doolittle. I figured this one was going to be as big a boondoggle as the balanced budget act would be. Still, I would love to see the end of double taxation on dividends, and while the Buckman Group had never really done much investing overseas, I knew taxes were handled quite differently elsewhere, and not to America's benefit.

Bill 10 – Congressional Reform Act, Newt Gingrich to preside over. This was really a long shot. It had a bunch of little things, like cutting the number of committees, numbers of staff, adding term limits, and all sorts of odds and ends that my fellow Congressmen would fight tooth and nail. They'd vote to let the Republic end before they would let a single staffer go!

I was going to push the Rebuilding America Act as both a repair bill as well as a jobs bill. A lot of those jobs are blue collar jobs, which are a big draw for the Republicans. I was also going to push repairs over new construction. There were more than enough potholes, rusty bridges, and leaky dam locks that needed to be fixed. In order to raise the funds and keep this revenue neutral, we wouldn't raise taxes, but we would increase various fees and tolls and charges. No taxes though, since Republicans hate taxes! In addition, we would index them so they would rise. Four cents a gallon on gasoline when it costs a dollar a gallon is a four percent rate, but if the cost of gas goes up to two dollars a gallon, and the fee remains at four cents, your rate drops in half. Keep the rate the same, so you collect enough to pay for the repairs. Some rates needed to be on gas or diesel, some on tonnage, some on axles, and so forth. Make the drivers and freight companies pay enough to pay for the repairs.

If you have 250 million people in the country, and you need to raise $100 billion for repairs, that works out to $400 for every man, woman, and child in the country. Since kids aren't driving a whole lot, maybe $1,000 for every driver. Sounds like a lot, but work it backwards. First, the $100 billion won't be spent in one year, it might be over five or ten years. Second, it will be buried in things like gas and diesel costs, so they only are paying a few pennies a gallon in fuel, or a few quarters on something shipped to them by UPS or Federal Express. They're much more likely to complain about the road construction than the cost!

What I was also adding to the bill, which tied in with the regulatory reform Rick Santorum was going to push, was cutting down all the regulatory nonsense with infrastructure. I used to run into this all the time when I was with Lefleur Homes on my first shot. For example, the New York Department of Transportation once proposed a plan to widen and repair an important stretch of Route 23 in Oneonta right before the Great Recession started. Mind you, this was a repair to an existing road, not building a new road. A new road would have been an even bigger nightmare!

DOT proposed the rebuild, which took the road from three lanes to five, and changed three stop lights to traffic circles. Then they had to post this all in the paper and wait sixty days for responses. At that point they had to post any changes, wait sixty days, and hold public hearings. After that, make more changes, wait some more, etc. etc. etc. Meanwhile, everybody and their brother was weighing in on this with their lawyers. The local eco-freaks wanted the bridge over the Susquehanna River, the only bridge connecting to a highway for five miles either way, converted into a public park. (Yes, dig up the roadway on a bridge and plant trees in holes in the concrete!) The local shopping mall and Wal-Mart both brought in lawyers and consultants stating that traffic circles in front of their location were a bad idea, and needed to be in front of their competitor. Meanwhile, you had wetlands conservationists suing for an Environmental Impact Study. At the end of the process, the whole thing got shitcanned because the state didn't have any money anyway. If they did get some money, it all had to start over again. What a clusterfuck!

The Chinese are a lot smarter. If they wanted a road built, they told people to get the fuck out of the way, we're building a fucking road! It's not really a stretch to figure out why they were handing us our asses.

Meanwhile, I had to get myself reelected, otherwise all this was for naught. Here's a helpful little idea, when you're told to go jump in a lake, do it! Well, sort of, anyway. If there was a dunking booth at a local fair or school fundraiser, I would volunteer. It shows you're a 'man of the people' and, more importantly, that you have a sense of humor. There is, however, the off chance that the school coach will recognize you and line up the high school baseball pitching rotation to throw at the target. It happened at Hereford High, and I swallowed a lot of water that afternoon! It didn't help that Charlie had scraped up some quarters and was paying them to strike me out! Every time I protested, he'd laugh and cough up another quarter, the little bastard! I chased him down and dunked him in the booth at the end of the day.

It's not like I ignored that stuff in the off years. People remember that, too. I did, however, do a bit more in an election year. There's an old saying that all politics is local, and this is the ultimate expression of it. I think a major reason I whipped Andy Stewart back in 1990 was that he pretty much ignored that personal touch. He relied on the fact that he was a Democrat in Maryland, a Democratic state. It was never out of my mind that I was a Republican in that same state, and I needed to do more.

This year I was running against a woman named Catherine Hartwick, who was on the Board of Education for Carroll County. Bud Hawley and Tommy Hoffman had been the best candidates two years ago, and they had spent all their time destroying each other. The Democrats decided to avoid a primary fight this time, and were betting that a woman could beat me. On the surface she had a fair number of things going for her. The Democrats were big favorites of the education business and the unions, and they figured a woman would play better with the woman's vote, where I had historically done well. She was a MILF, too, which would do well with the men.

Under the surface they had a problem, in that she was a lousy candidate. She had maxed out her capabilities running for the Board of Education, and it must have been a weak slate that year. So far she had managed to piss off the Carroll County Board of Education by telling them they were too weak on the teachers' union, along with the teacher's union when she told them they were greedy. Both statements were true, but not exactly helpful. She had a truly God given talent for sticking her feet, both of them, in her mouth, and usually at the worst possible moment.

My job, as the incumbent, was to let her sink herself, without fucking myself over in the process. I needed to concentrate on constituent services back home, let Ms. Hartwick piss off the voters, and make the Contract with America the centerpiece of the national Republican agenda.

If anything, this time around the Contract with America seemed to be an even bigger deal than before, but that was probably because I was involved with it now and it just seemed bigger. I had prevailed upon Newt to bring the Senate in on things, which before he hadn't. The Senate had weighed in and quite a few Republican Senators were going along with it. Newt had lined up a bunch of Republican Senators who would sponsor the Senate versions of our ten bills. If we took both houses, we could slam all ten through and dare Bill Clinton to veto them all. He would veto some of them, but if we had enough votes, we could override him.

Don Nickles, a conservative Republican from Oklahoma, had volunteered to sponsor the Senate version of the Defending the Second Amendment Act. He was definitely to the right of me on a bunch of issues, and this was one of my more right wing stands. John Danforth of Missouri was writing the Senate version of the Rebuilding America Act; he had been the Chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation prior to the Democrats taking the Senate in the '86 elections. He was actually a fairly moderate Republican, and although he was happy enough to go along with infrastructure improvements, he told me privately that some of what we were trying to do he didn't like. He wouldn't be voting for some of the bills in the Contract. He also warned me that this bill was going to be a major magnet for every Congressman and Senator with a taste for pork in his budget.

Maybe if we passed a line item veto, we could shave some of that pork out. That was up to John Boehner in his bill. We'd have to see.

To a certain extent, the Democrats knew we were up to something, and that Newt and the Gang of Eight were up to their ears in it. On the other hand, there wasn't much they could do about it. For one thing, one really gigantic thing, they were still being hammered by the House Bank scandal and the House Post Office scandal. The Postmaster for the House Post Office, Robert Rota, had pled guilty to three separate felonies. In turn, he had tattled on several Democratic Congressman, including the Chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, Dan Rostenkowski. Ways and Means was probably the single most important committee in the House, and 'Rosty' was probably one of the three most powerful Congressmen in the country. Now, even though he was still around, he was a dead man walking.

As a result, the House Democrats were running scared. They were keeping their heads down and desperately trying to raise funds for re-election. Quite a few had announced their retirements, rather than lose in the general election. Mike Synar, of Oklahoma had already lost his seat in a contested primary, a practically unheard of event for a sitting Congressman! Newt actually had a white board up in the clubhouse with a running count of where he was expecting Congress to be at after November, and was practically gleeful at the prospect. The times, they were a-changing!

The girls turned ten that year, which they seemed to think was a big deal. We had to have a big pool party at the house, to which all boys were explicitly excluded! I rolled my eyes and laughed, and told Marilyn that I would take Charlie somewhere for the day. I told the girls, on the other hand, that I was going to bring over Charlie's old Cub Scout Pack and his new Boy Scout Troop, so that lots of boys would be around. They ran shrieking off to Mom, and she threw a dish towel at me. I told Charlie I'd rather face a House full of Democrats than a house full of little girls, which earned me a second dish towel. He laughed and agreed.

Charlie was growing up, too. He hadn't hit his growth yet, but I knew it would kick in sometime in the next year or so. He wasn't thirteen until October, and girls weren't on his radar yet. When they did come to his attention, though, Heaven help them! Charlie was a good looking kid, and while my tastes don't run towards men, I can tell if a fellow is good looking or not. I wasn't sure where his height would pan out, whether he would be taller or shorter than me (there's a big range in the Lefleurs, from about 5'8" to about 6'2" for the men) but he was blond, blue-eyed, and handsome. His build was fairly square and stocky, not at all like my slim and wiry frame. Now that he was getting older, he had taken to working out with me some mornings, and was doing a lot heavier weights than when I started out at thirteen. Whereas I had been a runner in high school, although not on the team, Charlie looked a lot more like a football player.

In fact, that was a real interest to him. Charlie was going into his first year at Hereford High School, which had football. Hereford Middle School hadn't. They also had basketball and wrestling and lacrosse. Much as I had discussed with my wife earlier, Charlie was showing signs of being a jock, not a nerd. In addition, Charlie was really getting big into the motocross events. When he had turned twelve, he had applied to and gotten his AMA (American Motorcyclist Association, the sport's governing body) card as a junior rider. Any victories he got were now going against an official scorecard, and earned him points in national standings.

It was kind of strange, but our little boy was becoming nationally ranked at this insane sport! Tusk Cycles had signed on as a sponsor and was now supplying his racing leathers and helmet (all festooned with their logo). He was still too young to race pro and earn money, but he could go to big league AMA affiliated tracks and race. He had moved up to an 85 cc bike now, which made an appalling racket and scared both his mother and me, but he loved it. He was really dominating the Maryland tracks he had been competing in, and we were now talking about trips to other areas. How we would schedule that, I had no idea. I assigned that task to him and Tusker.

Part of the reason we went along with this was a conversation I had had with my namesake, Bucky, last summer shortly after Carter died. Bucky was 15 at the time, and he told me he was giving up racing.

"You don't like it anymore?", I asked.

Bucky smiled and shrugged. "I like it, but I'm never going to be a real winner."

"What do you mean? You're just going to give up?" That didn't sound like the Buckman Tusk I knew.

"No, it's just ... Uncle Carl, it takes a lot of time, and I'm never going to be as good as I would have to be. I'm not like Charlie. He's just unreal! I was okay as a little kid, but at my age, I'm not even above average."

"Huh." I gave him an odd look. "Charlie's really good? I mean, I'm not a rider, so what do I know!"

He laughed at that. "Charlie's better at his age than half the racers at my age. He's one of the reasons for me to get out! For the last two years he's been smoking my ass blindfolded!" Bucky knew I wouldn't jump his butt over his language.

"Really?! I mean, I knew Charlie was winning races, but ... really?"

"He's unreal! He has reflexes ... you think you're doing good, and suddenly he blows his way through a crowded pack like he's on an empty highway with jets up his ass, and you're like, where did he come from?!" He shook his head with an amused smile on his face. "I could put him in the pro group now and I bet he'd win. He just needs to grow into a bigger bike."

"Wow! I had no idea. You're serious?", I asked.

He grinned and nodded. "Have you ever wondered what it must have been like playing on Babe Ruth's high school baseball team? That's what it's like racing around here against Charlie."

"Huh." I shrugged. "You're not giving up on bikes, are you?"

It was Bucky's turn to grin and give me the are-you-crazy look. "No way! I love riding! Girls like it, too!"

Oh Christ! Bucky was 15 at the time, and he was definitely past the girls-are-yucky stage. He wasn't street legal yet, but he could still ride at the races. "Oh, boy! Have you mentioned that to your parents?"

"No way!"

I snorted and shook my head with amusement. "Well, if you ever need to talk about that, let me know. You know, in case you want to talk or ask a question you don't want to ask your parents, hmmm? Maybe I'll send Charlie to see your old man some day when it's his turn." Bucky just laughed at this.

That was last year, and Charlie was improving as he grew up. It was too early to be sure, though. He might become a scholar after all, or he might figure out girls were a more interesting ride than a motorcycle. We'd just have to see.

Chapter 117: A Changing Of The Guard

Newt announced the Contract with America at the beginning of September. By then most of Washington knew something was up, but not the extent or breadth of the plan. The Democrats weren't stupid. They had their spies just like we did. They knew we planned something big and bold, and they knew we were writing legislation, even if they didn't have the printed copies in their hands.

Still, it was an election year and they were in survival mode. The mood of the country was changing and the pendulum was swinging from liberal to conservative. Even as the old diehards protested nothing was changing, everybody else was scrambling frantically, often trying to position themselves as conservatives, which made more than a few Republicans laugh.

John Boehner and I were pushing Newt Gingrich hard to make the Contract as showy and public as possible. We wanted this to dominate the airwaves for the next eight weeks, between now and Election Day. Every week was to be a big event. We started with press conferences and announcements, but by the third week of September we had a massive 'signing' of the Contract on the steps of the Capitol building. We flew in all the Republican candidates we could find who were running against Democratic incumbents, and had them sign as well. We swore oaths and made promises and shook pinkie fingers and gave each other the secret passwords and did everything we could to bind ourselves to the Contract. I wasn't sure whether it reminded me more of joining Kegs or of signing the Articles of Piracy on a buccaneer ship.

We were still keeping the specific bills locked up, even though we were now talking about them in general terms. Specifics would have been used against us, since there would always be something somebody wouldn't like. Meanwhile, our high minded opponents would promise a counterplan that would remedy whatever we would do. Without the specifics, they could only guess and screech about Republican promises and how we were high-jacking the ship of state. (I actually heard that phrase a few times!)

We also began to blitz the various Sunday morning talk shows. Newt might be on ABC, while John was on CBS and Rick was on NBC. The following week it might be another three of us. Between the Gang of Eight and Newt, we could alternate networks without wearing out our welcomes. The Democrats were fulminating loudly, but they were playing catch-up ball, and not doing well with it.

As we got closer to November 8, we just kept raising the pressure. I pushed Gingrich to bring the Senate in on things. Originally the Contract with America had been exclusively a House deal. Newt had an ego bigger than his butt, and he really wanted to keep it in the House. I was pushing to bring in the Senate. It wouldn't hurt to bring in all the Senators we had lined up to sponsor the Senate versions of our ten bills. Newt could stay in charge, but when (not if – I was always stressing the positive) we took control and he became Speaker, he would have all sorts of valuable markers to call on in the Senate, especially if he lined up some support with Bob Dole and Alan Simpson, the Minority Leader and Whip. Newt could be cantankerous as hell, and as proud as a peacock, but he was smart. He might not like what I was pushing him to do, but he could see the benefits.

"Carl, you can be a real asshole at times!", he once told me, while I was pushing for him to play nice with the Senate. "You're a goddamned pushy bastard!"

I simply smiled. "Those are just my positive traits, Newt. Go talk to my wife. She'll tell you the bad stuff about me!"

He just shook his head in disgust and made the call I wanted him to make. I only had about a fifty-fifty success rate with him, but there were people around us who told me I was doing better than most.

Back home, in the Maryland Ninth, Catherine Hartwick continued her flaming self-destruction by pissing off the state employee unions, which I had never even talked about. I was running a pretty plain vanilla campaign – I'm wonderful, here's what I've done to help you, let me shake your hand and kiss your baby. I hadn't needed to go negative, and she was spending all of her time trying to explain what she really meant to say.

On election night, we did the usual. Marilyn's parents came down and stayed with the kids, although they did drive them over to the campaign headquarters, where we showed them around. Charlie was now 13 and the girls were 10, and they were well behaved, if a little confused by some of it. I introduced Marilyn's parents to John Steiner and the others, with the proviso, "Don't tell them any campaign secrets; they're actually Democrats!" Since we didn't have any secrets, Marilyn just laughed and Harriet scolded me. Big Bob started arguing politics with John, so we just let him run on while my wife and I snorted in laughter.

After a bit, Big Bob and Harriet took the kids home. None of us were surprised when WBAL called the race at the first commercial break, with me beating Catherine Hartwick like a rented mule. After the applause and screams, things settled down again. Everybody wanted to see the rest of the returns.

I was using John Thomas again as my campaign director, and he and I dragged a white board out into the main room as returns started coming in. We had started the election with a House composed of 177 Republican Congressmen, 256 Democrats, and 1 Independent (One seat was vacant, the previous owner having died two days before the election.) The Senate was 47 Republicans and 53 Democrats. As returns began coming in, John Thomas began calling RNC headquarters and figuring out other races as well. We began erasing the numbers and putting up new numbers for the 104th Congress as the races were called.

By 9:00 it was obvious that we were witnessing something massive and historic. I mean, even I knew we were in for a change, and it seemed phenomenal to me, too. As we put the numbers up on the board, there would be occasional cheers, but as the evening went on, the networks began interrupting with some really big fucking news! John Thomas was on the phone, and he tapped me and looked at me awestruck. "Rosty's gone!", he told me just before it was announced on television. Dan Rostenkowski had failed to win re-election, which didn't surprise me in some ways, considering he was linked to the House Post Office mess. Then it got crazy – Tom Foley out of Washington, the Speaker of the House, failed to win re-election! They were saying nothing like that had happened since Reconstruction!

Tom Brokaw and Dan Rather both seemed thunderstruck by what was happening, using terms such as "historic", "unprecedented", "watershed", and the like. I just sat out there in the big room, taking it all in, with Marilyn sitting sideways on my lap, while John Thomas and the others kept changing the numbers on the board. People were coming up to me and congratulating me, and asking how this was going to change things in Washington. I would mumble something, and talk to a reporter or two, saying some routine phrases. By the end of the evening, the Republicans had control of both houses.

It was after midnight when we went home, and the final numbers weren't clear yet. Some of the races were still too close to call, but even so, we had won big. I made the appropriate phone calls and interviews on Wednesday and then on Thursday morning we kissed the family good-bye and flew down to Hougomont for the rest of the week. Interestingly, Marilyn and I were asked to a small reception at Government House while we were there. We met with the Prime Minister, Hubert Ingraham, who had succeeded Lynden Pindling a couple of years earlier. Marilyn and I went, had dinner and drinks, talked a little shop about the election, and then headed over to Paradise Island for a bit. We flew home on Sunday after working on our tans for a few days and drinking our share of the rum.

The final results were back by the time we got home. We had picked up 60 seats in the House, and were up to 238 Republicans! The Democrats were down to 196 seats (plus Bernie Sanders as an Independent) and it was like a bomb had gone off in the Capitol. People were wandering the halls of the Capitol with shocked looks on their faces. The Senate was almost as bad. We had started out at 47 Republicans and picked up 10 seats, to end at 57. The Democrats were down to 43, and if we got just 3 to go along with us, we could block a filibuster whenever we wanted to.

The staff in my office was positively gleeful! For one thing, Newt had passed the word along to them that if I wanted it, we could find a new home over in the Rayburn building. I had barely walked in my door when my staff started bombarding me with questions. I quickly called a time-out, and looked over at Marty, who was grinning at me. "Is this for real?"

He nodded. "I got the word from Newt's office while you were gone. I also checked with the House Administration Committee. Newt spoke to them, too. We've got a very nice place on the third floor in Rayburn opening up."

I waved him quiet for a moment and then turned back to the others. "Okay, it sounds official. Start making your plans. When we get the word we can move, we want to do it quickly and cleanly and efficiently. Get with Marty on what we need to do, and let me know how I can help you."

Around us the room erupted into a gabble of noise again. The Longworth Building hadn't been bad, but Rayburn was a lot more modern and had a lot more amenities. I motioned for Marty to follow me into my office, and he did so, trailed by Sherry Longbottom. I eyed her curiously, and she said, "I wanted to see you, Congressman. You should probably be here, too, Marty."

I leaned back against my desk and said, "All right. Is there a problem, Sherry?"

"Well, yes and no. I mean, not for me, but I needed to let you know. You see, I've been offered a position over at the Heritage Foundation."

I smiled and nodded. I wasn't terribly surprised. Sherry ran my legislative staff, so she had been involved with the bills we had written with the Heritage Foundation for the Contract. They must have seen in her the same abilities I had seen! "And for probably twice what you're making here?" She gave a shrug and a smile at that. I looked over at Marty. "You know about this?"

He shrugged and smiled too. "I caught a whiff of something, but can't say I knew about it. I'm not surprised, though. Are you?"

"No." I turned back to Sherry. "When do they want you?"

Sherry looked relieved by my obvious acceptance of this. "The beginning of December. They wanted me sooner, but I needed to give you some time to replace me."

I smiled at her. "I can't replace you. I can only find somebody else and hope they'll do as good a job as you did. Who in your staff can move up to your slot, and who do we get to replace them? I'd prefer to move somebody up rather than bring in somebody new." The three of us made some plans, and after a bit, I shooed them out. "Make sure we have a nice going away party and have a cake I can get a piece of." I told them.

Sherry was the first senior staffer I had lost. I had replaced a couple of very junior people prior to this. I wasn't surprised though. Sherry was very good at her job, and most Congressional staffers are trying to move up the ladder into the private sector. The system had an incredible potential for abuse and corruption, but she couldn't be blamed for playing the game by the rules she didn't create. I just smiled and shook my head, and asked Mindy to get me a meeting with Gingrich at his pleasure. We had a lot of details to go over about the new session.

When I did meet with Newt, I got another thank you from him for helping with the Contract. I was out of both Science and Veterans Affairs, and was in Armed Services. He would let me pick which subcommittee I wanted, and I promised to let him know in a few days. Armed Services was one of the important committees, and a regular Congressman could make a lot of money by knowing about pending appropriations bills. That wasn't an issue for me, but maybe I could make the services more efficient. I had some potential in the committee, too, because since the election I was about a third of the way up the seniority ladder. After only four years, I was one of the seasoned veterans!

I also stroked his ego some, by referring to him as 'Mister Speaker.' He liked the way that sounded! You could almost see his dick getting hard. Terrible mental image. In some ways, the biggest problem we had going forward was to keep Newt from self-destructing. He had immense talents and brainpower, but an ego and self-image to match. Right now he was damn near at the peak of his political power. He had just managed to thoroughly hose the Democrats, was about to be named Speaker of the House, and had a raft of legislation to be brought to the floor.

Unfortunately, Newt was matched up against probably the wiliest politician of the age, Bill Clinton. I don't think the nation had seen a politician of his caliber since FDR. Now it was the two of them going head to head. In my previous life, where I had just been a spectator of all of this, Newt had really thrown his weight around for the next few years, and ultimately shut down the government in a spending showdown with Clinton. Clinton came out of it smelling like a rose, and Gingrich ended up in big trouble. He wore out his welcome in only four years and found himself voted out as Speaker, and then left the House in disgrace. Could I change that? Should I change that? Did my presence in Congress now mean things would be different?

Back in my office, I was talking to Marty about the legislation we would be bringing out. The plan was that once we were all sworn in again, and the House was back in session, we would keep the pressure up by introducing a new bill every day. I had the two bills that I was going to introduce. In both cases I was going to make sure I had a little speech prepared. While it would be too much to hope that the TV news would pick up even one for a soundbite, the odds were that they would focus on what we were doing with the Contract.

"What do you think Clinton's going to do about them?", asked Marty.

I shrugged. "Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee ... He's going to bob and weave for a bit, and then try to bury them or whatever. Some he'll sign, after trying to highjack them. Others he is just going to veto, and hope he can get away with it. Hell, some of them are going to end up at the Supreme Court!"

"You think?"

"For sure. The line item veto, for instance, that's a clear break in the rules for the legislative branch versus the executive branch. Likewise, at least one or two of the states will sue over D2A. That will be a states' rights issue."

"Too bad we don't have a lobbyist we could hire for these things.", he said with a laugh. "We could lobby for our own legislation."

Marty just tossed that off in passing, but as he did, it felt like lightning had just struck. I was quiet, and he was quiet, and we looked at each other in awe. "Are you thinking what I'm thinking?", he asked me.

"You'd better tell me what you're thinking,", I said eagerly.

"I'm thinking why don't we set up our own lobbying outfit!"

"That's what I'm thinking, too!"

"Look, it's your money, but you don't seem to mind spending it. What if you funded a lobbying group?", he asked.

"Could I do that? Is it legal?"

"I don't know. Maybe. I can tell you this much, it would have to be buried deeper than a coal mine! Nobody, and I mean nobody, can know about this, or it destroys whatever chance you have of making it work! You can't be seen to be buying your own legislation. You'd become a laughingstock overnight!"

"Holy shit! Are you serious? We could do this?", I asked him. "How much would it cost?"

Marty gave me an incredulous look and raised his hands palm up. "No fucking idea. Could you raise the money without anybody catching on?"

"I think so."

"Un-fucking-real! Let me look into this..."

"Quietly!", I interjected.

Marty nodded. " ... and I'll talk to you about it."

That night I called John Steiner and asked to meet him quietly at the office in Hereford the next day. That morning I drove in to the office and said hello to everybody, and then John and I went into his office and lowered the Cone of Silence. "What's up?", he asked.

"I need to set up some untraceable cash, probably a few million. Nothing about it can point at me. How do we do that?"

My friend gave me a strange look. "Excuse me? What are you up to now?"

"I was talking to Marty about something, and we want to try something, and to do it we are going to need some laundered money. Can we do it?"

"What are you up to now!? I will not be a party to anything illegal!"

I had to laugh at John. "Well, we don't think it's illegal, but it's probably smelly as all hell. Basically, we came up with the idea of forming our own lobbying group. I mean, I write a piece of legislation and the first thing that happens is all the lobbyists in town try to water it down and get a piece of the action. So, let's become our own lobbyists and fight for it! Fight fire with fire! The only way to do it, though, is by making our lobbying group a secret, so that nobody can claim I'm buying legislation."

"Which is what you're actually doing."

"Exactly!"

"I should report you to the RNC!", he protested.

"Lawyer-client privilege.", I chided.

John made a very rude gesture at me and snorted. I wasn't too worried. He would be much more likely to squawk if the problem was illegal rather than simply going against the national committee. "Okay, let me work on this. I'll let you know. Don't tell anybody other than your friend, though, because it really would smell."

I thanked him and left, and drove over to Westminster and flew down to D.C. to get some work done. A week later he summoned me and Marty to a meeting at his office. I had Marty go over to Washington National in the morning, where Tyrell was waiting for him. He flew to the house and dropped him off, and then we drove into Hereford. I showed Marty around the offices and then we went into John's office, where John was sitting with another man.

"Carl, Marty, This is Bob Seaver. Explain to him what you two have in mind.", started John.

I nodded and shook Seaver's outstretched hand. He was a sort of nondescript fellow, a few years older than me, more advanced baldness, a touch heavy around the middle, kind of bland looking. "It's good to meet you, Mr. Seaver."

"Congressman, nice to see you, too." He looked over at Marty, and said, "Same to you, Mr. Adrianopolis." They shook hands as well. We all sat down and Seaver continued at that point. "I understand you want to set up a lobbying effort in Washington, but that it needs to be totally laundered and unknown. Is that correct?"

"Pretty much.", I admitted. I glanced over at Marty, who nodded back.

"All right, so once the funds are in the lobbying group and you need them to be dispersed, you then want the funds from the lobbying group to be secretly funneled to various politicians or bureaucrats?"

At that point, I looked at Marty in confusion. "Is that what we wanted?"

He shook his head. "No, that would be illegal."

Seaver looked over at John and then back to us. "So you don't want the activities of the lobbying group to be hidden, only the source of their funding?"

"Right. I mean, at that point it's just one more lobbying or policy outfit. We just don't want to trace the money back to me."

He breathed a sigh of relief at that. "Oh, well, that's different! You're right, that's fine. Hiding what they do with the money, that would be illegal. That wouldn't be protected, either, since it would be a violation of the canons. Hiding the funding to start with, that's no problem. Do you have any of this started yet? Do you have a name?"

I blinked at that. "No. We just thought this up. We wanted to find out if we could get away with it first. So, we can do this?"

Seaver simply waved a hand dismissively. "Just say when."

"Huh." I turned to Marty. "Got a name?"

Marty shrugged, too. "Something innocuous and patriotic or whatever. They're all named American Something-or-other, Institute or Foundation or whatever. They all sound alike."

"The American Renaissance Initiative, building America's tomorrow, today!", I intoned solemnly. I remembered Stephen Colbert's Super-Pac, 'Building a better tomorrow, tomorrow!'

John chuckled and shook his head. Marty gave a wry grin, and commented, "Perfect. They all say that!"

Seaver began taking notes. "You don't have a name or address of the head of the group yet?"

"We just thought it up. That's next.", said Marty.

Seaver handed us both a business card. "The easiest way to handle this is for me to be the Treasurer of the organization. That way nobody knows where the money is coming from. I can handle any requests."

That got me to thinking. I cocked my head a touch, and asked, "So you get a piece of the action for moving the money around, and then you get paid by the American Renaissance Initiative as the Treasurer? Isn't that double dipping?"

For the first time, Seaver smiled. "I love politics, don't you?!"

I groaned and shook my head at that. What had I gotten myself into, now!?

Marty rolled his eyes at me and shrugged. He glanced at the card and tucked it into his pocket. "I'm going to sound out a few people about running it, but we'll probably run some of the initial paperwork through you."

"Once you figure out the person to run it, we'll get together and do some more paperwork. We'll need an office, some staff, etc. I'll stay in New York, but that won't be an issue for this." He and Marty talked a little about staffing and how to proceed.

Eventually, though, John called it to an end. "Okay, we don't need to tie up Carl and me on this. You two can sort out the details on your own.", he said, pointing to Marty and Seaver. "Now, I need to talk to Carl for awhile."

I led Marty out to the lobby and arranged for one of the security staff to drive him over to the airport, and to call ahead and let Tyrell know he was coming. Meanwhile, Bob Seaver came through and shook our hands, and he left as well. I headed back inside to see John.

"So, just who is that guy?", I asked. "Is he any good?"

"He used to work for the FBI, tracing hidden money. Then he got married and had a couple of kids, and decided he needed to actually make a few bucks. He set up shop in New York, using what he learned with the Feds."

"You have to love free enterprise.", I quipped.

He nodded, and then stood up. "Listen, stay here. I asked the others to come in for a bit." I stayed in my seat as John moved out of the office. He returned a couple of minutes later, with the two Jakes and Missy in tow.

"So, what's up?", I asked when the others sat down. Jake Junior, who sat down next to me, looked as confused as I was. The others were no better.

"I've asked you all here for a reason." He took a deep breath, and began coughing, which he had done in the earlier meeting as well. When he was able to continue, he said, "That's the problem right there, in a nutshell. I've been coughing like that for a few months now. At first we thought it was just a cold, but when it got worse, I went to the doctor's. I'm not going to beat around the bush. I've got lung cancer, and I'm dying."

To say it was like a bomb going off in the room would be an understatement. All of us began squawking and protesting and speaking at the same time. John let us run on for a few minutes before waving us to silence. "Let me speak. I got the second opinions, I've seen the specialists, I've done all that stuff. It's too late for me. They don't have a cure for this. I've got maybe eight months to live, a year at the most if I really, really fight hard, and that would be very ugly. I talked it over with Helen. We're going to do something we've always talked about but always put off until later. There is no more later. I'm retiring and we're taking a cruise around the world. I'll be out of here at the end of the month."

He coughed a little more. I sat there stunned by the news. John had never smoked, and yet here he was with lung cancer! Now that I knew what to look for I could see he had lost some weight, and was looking a touch pale. Melissa was arguing with him to fight it, even as she cried, but wasn't getting anywhere. Jake Junior looked at me and he looked as stunned as I did. Only his father looked a little more used to the idea; maybe he had a suspicion ahead of time.

John quieted Missy down. "Listen, it's lousy, but it happens. I am closer to seventy than to sixty. Did you guys think I was going to last forever? I could have retired anytime in the last five years. Instead I kept going. No more. All that stuff Helen and I said we would do, well, we're going to do it now. I've seen what the chemo and treatments do to you. Not interested! Thanks to you guys and this company, though, now we can actually afford to do some stuff, and then some. We're going to spend the next few weeks unraveling me from here, and then I'll see you all at the end, at the funeral." He grinned at that.

"God damn!", I said, half to myself. I looked up at him and replied, "You don't leave until after we've had a chance to talk!"

"Fine by me." He stood up and shooed us out. "Now, I need to go home and talk to Helen some more, let her know I let you guys know. We told the kids over the weekend."

I was pretty shocked by it all, so I collected my thoughts and drove home for the rest of the day. When Marilyn came in from the office in Westminster, she found me sitting there in my den, just thinking. "You're home early!", she said in surprise.

I smiled over at her. "Afraid I might find you getting into trouble?"

Marilyn snorted and laughed at that. "I think it'd be more like I'd find you in trouble than the other way around. What's up? They let Congress out early today?"

"Yeah, that's it. The government wanted to get something done, so they sent us away." That earned a smile from my wife. "Actually, I had a meeting with John at the office today. Then he called the two Jakes and Missy in and announced he was retiring for good."

"Good for him. He should take it easy. He's earned it."

"Not good for him. He's got terminal lung cancer. He and Helen are planning to start working on his bucket list."

Marilyn's jaw dropped and her eyes snapped open. "Oh my God! Are you kidding me?!"

I shook my head. "I wish. They're going to take a world cruise starting next month. He's going to wrap up some paperwork and it's so long, Charlie! He told us he'd see us again at the funeral."

"Oh my God!"

"That's pretty much what we all said."

"What can we do?", she asked.

I just held my hands up and shrugged. "What can we do? He said they've already told their kids. I got him to promise to talk to me before they leave."

She nodded and then asked, "What's a bucket list?"

Huh? It was a common enough phrase when I recycled, but when did it become popular? Had I just invented a phrase? "It's the list of things you want to get done before you kick the bucket. You've never heard of it before?"

"No. Do you have a bucket list?"

"Sure thing!"

"Like what?"

I grinned and said, "It involves a blonde with a really big pair of..."

"YOU PIG!"

At that point we heard a school bus pull up out at the road and a minute later Charlie came storming in. "Hey, Dad! What are you doing home?"

"I got a call from your school saying you were skimping on your homework again.", I told him.

Marilyn's was behind Charlie as I said this, and she gave me a look that mixed laughter and exasperation. Charlie couldn't see her starting to silently laugh, and his eyes opened wide! "Dad! No, I mean, I'm not ... it's not like that ... NO!"

Marilyn said, mid-giggle. "You're fine. Your father is just pulling your leg."

Charlie looked back at me. "Dad, that's not funny! You could have given me a heart attack!" He grabbed his backpack and headed to his room with Dum-Dum.

I looked over at Marilyn. "A singularly inappropriate remark, wouldn't you say?", I commented.

Marilyn rolled her eyes, and then another school bus rolled up and deposited the girls. I got a nice set of hugs from them. Afterwards my wife commented, "How are you feeling about this?"

"Well, it sucks. John is one of my oldest friends. I told you how we met, right, getting me out of jail? That was over twenty years ago! I'm closer to John than I am to my own family."

"He's your father.", she replied. "Or at least who your father should have been. Or something like that."

"I understand you.", I said, nodding. "I think I will miss John more than my real father. What the hell does that say about me?"

Marilyn shrugged and went off in search of our offspring. I just sat there in the great room until it was time to start cooking something for dinner. I was moving on autopilot, though, and pretty quiet the rest of the night.

Marilyn snapped me out of it at bedtime. She came out into the living room wearing a very nice peignoir set and settled into my recliner with me. "Do you think John would want you moping around, or would he want you to get back to living?"

"Probably the second.", I answered, smiling a bit.

"I can help with that."

"Oh? Just what did you have in mind?", I asked.

Marilyn lowered her lips to my ears. "That all depends on just how athletic you're feeling. There's a videotape cued op on the VCR, a tube of cherry flavored lube on the night stand, and a couple of toys next to it. Anything coming to mind?"

I had my hands around Marilyn's waist, and she shifted to stand up and lead me into her den of iniquity. On the other hand, she didn't talk like this often, and I liked it. I tightened my grip and kept her on my lap. "Tell me more. What did you have in mind?"

She moved to climb to her feet again. "Come on and you can show me what you have in mind."

I stayed put. I shook my head. "No, I want you to tell me what you're going to do. I want you to tell me."

"Carl, no. You know I can't do that. Please, come to bed."

I released my grip slightly, but before she could move, I slid a hand down her side and across her hip, and then went down her legs. I tugged the hem of the peignoir and slid my hand under it, and then moved it slowly back up her legs. Marilyn began squirming, and looked towards the hallway. She frantically, whispered, "Stop, the kids might come out!"

"They can't see anything." By that point I had moved my hand far enough up her legs to start fingering her greasy hot slit. She whimpered at the touch. "Now, what do you want to do tonight?"

As I began to flick my fingers across her clit, Marilyn squirmed and moaned softly. "Oh, you're so mean! All right! I'd want to get undressed, the both of us, and I think you'd want me to suck your cock. Would you like that?" I made some agreeable murmurs, and Marilyn continued. "Maybe we could do some sixty-nine? I love it when you lick my pussy. Please, Carl, lick my pussy tonight?" I made a few more murmurs. "I'll swallow your come, and then get you hard again. Then you can fuck me until we come again."

"How do you want me to fuck you?"

"Hard, really hard and deep."

"How? What position do you want me to fuck you in?", I pushed.

I revved up my finger action and my wife was shivering under my touch. "From behind, it goes in so deep that way..." I made a few more murmurs, and she blurted into my ear, "In my ass! I bet you'd like to fuck my ass tonight! Please Carl, let's just go to bed and you can fuck my ass!"

I pulled my hand out from under Marilyn's nightgown, and straightened up some, and she hopped off my lap. My cock wanted to say thank you, since she had been sitting on it a touch earlier. She eagerly grabbed my hand and pulled me along behind her. "Just keep in mind the sacrifice I am making for you tonight.", I told her. "It's not my fault you have these uncontrollable urges."

Marilyn snorted at that. "You're such a helpful guy."

"I am, I am indeed!"

Chapter 118: Armed Services

Winter 1994-1995

Now that we were the majority, everybody got to play musical chairs with the various committee assignments. Science, Space, and Technology was interesting, and I thought I did well there with the Internet bill. Likewise, Veterans Affairs gave me the place to do the Gulf War Veterans Bill, and that was both timely and useful. Still, both were backwaters as far as anything useful was concerned. Science would do all sorts of wonderful things, like hold hearings on the NASA budget or the Superconducting Super Collider, but these budgets would be the first place raided when 'important' stuff needed doing. For the price of a few fairly useless B-2 stealth bombers, the world's top heavy particle collider could have been built in Dallas, and not in Europe. Veterans Affairs was equally a dead end; why the Veterans Administration needed to be upgraded to a cabinet department was way beyond me.

Floyd Spence was the ranking Republican on the committee and would become chairman when we reconvened. I managed a quick meeting with him and got myself assigned to the Subcommittee on Tactical Air and Land Forces. This was one of the bigger subcommittees, bigger in the sense of importance. We oversaw the Army and Air Force, the National Guard, the Reserves, and several logistic and modernization areas. There were other subcommittees related to the Navy and Marines, Intelligence, Oversight, and such. I probably knew as much about the Army as any of the other members, for good or for bad. Floyd made a call and got me a meeting with the Chief of Staff for the committee, which was also quite helpful, since those guys actually do most of the work.

As I had told Newt and the others, Bill Clinton wasn't going to roll over and let the Republican Party have their way with things. He was already scrambling to recover, like a quarterback moving as his pocket collapsed around him. He was promising to work with the Congress to pass this, that, and the other thing, and simultaneously trying to rally the Democrats into a coherent response. We were still planning on keeping up the pressure, with a plan to spend the first two weeks of the new Congress introducing our Contract with America bills and giving speeches on them.

Unfortunately, it wasn't enough for Newt. He wanted to destroy Bill Clinton. I simply think he just didn't like the man. We spoke about this mid-January when he came over to the house on 30th for a working dinner. There were just a few of us, not the entire Gang, John Boehner, Jim Nussle, Newt, and myself. I had promised them my signature coq au vin meal.

John was the first to arrive, and I let him into the house and brought him back to the kitchen. He sat down on a tall bar stool on the side of the kitchen island facing the stove. "So, you actually know how to cook? Every other time I've eaten over here it's been catered or you've had a chef in doing something."

"Yes I know how to cook! I've been cooking for myself ever since I left home as a kid."

"You mean when your parents threw you out?", he asked.

I nodded. "It was a little more complicated than that, but essentially yes. Wine?" I held up a bottle of Riesling I had pulled out of the wine cooler, and John nodded. I began to open the bottle and continued talking. "For most of the last two years of high school I was on my own, so it was either learn to cook or eat at McDonald's three times a day. That stuff will kill you. Besides, my girlfriend liked that I could cook."

He grinned at that. "What did her parents think about you having your own place?"

"Funny, but somehow that never came up in our conversations." That earned a barking laugh from him. I finished opening the bottle and poured some in glasses I pulled from an overhead rack. We sipped some, and John and I talked for a few more minutes about my bachelor days. I began pulling out the pots and pans and setting things up.

The doorbell rang and I glanced at my friend. "I'll get that. You keep cooking." He hopped up and came back a minute later leading both Newt and Jim.

"Gentlemen, welcome again. Toss your coats somewhere and have a seat. John can pour the wine." I was cutting some boned chicken breasts in half and placing them to the side; next to be cut up was a large and thick slice of boned ham and some fresh button mushrooms.

Both Jim and Newt made the same comment: "So you really can cook! It's not something you made up?"

"Some friends you guys are! Yes, I can cook! It's an excellent method of separating young ladies from their virtue! If you pull it off you look suave and sophisticated, but if you fail, you look helpless and she gets to be maternal and helpful. Keep that in mind for when you are shopping for a mistress." They all laughed at that.

"What does Marilyn think about that idea?", asked Newt.

"What, the cooking or the mistress?", I riposted.

We continued joking about cooking while I finished preparing the ingredients, and then I pulled out my electric skillet and set it on the island in front of us all. If I cooked at the stove, my back would be to everybody. I set the skillet to 300 and tossed in a stick of butter, and then began dredging the chicken breasts through flour. As the butter melted, the chicken went in, to begin sautéing. I grabbed a set of measuring spoons and began measuring out my spices.

I noticed my glass was empty and the others were getting low. "How was the wine? I need to open another bottle. The same or something different?"

Newt answered, "It was very nice." The others nodded as well, so I pulled out a second bottle and passed it and the corkscrew over to John. Newt looked at the label on the empty. "Where is this from, the Finger Lakes?"

"Yes. Marilyn and I did a nice tour of some of the wineries up there the last time we visited her folks. We like wine, so we picked up several cases. It's really quite reasonable."

Jim asked, "What is reasonable to your budget and what is reasonable to mine might be different."

I simply shook my head. "Just because I have enough money to get silly doesn't mean I do get silly. This runs about ten or twelve bucks a bottle and is very nice. Just because I can afford something ten or twenty times that, it doesn't mean I can taste the difference." I flipped the breasts and let them cook on the other side, while measuring out the wine and brandy. "We actually live fairly simply. You should come out and visit us sometime. You'll have to share a bathroom with the kids, but that's not my problem, that's yours!" That got a few laughs.

We continued talking about our homes. When the chicken breasts were lightly browned, I dropped the temperature on the skillet down to about 200 or so and dumped in the other ingredients. They would basically stew and steam in the wine, cooking the chicken and swapping flavors. "All I need to do now with the chicken is to keep an eye on things and add water to keep it from drying out."

"Has that ever happened?", asked John.

I nodded and ruefully admitted, "Yes, once back in Fayetteville, Marilyn and I ... well, when I went back into the kitchen, it was burned black in the bottom of the pan. I had to throw the pan away, it was so bad!" That earned me a fair number of snickers!

I got the Minute Rice ready to cook. That would only take about ten minutes total, so we had plenty of time to chat, maybe another half hour or so, before I had to worry and do more than just watch and stir. Inevitably the conversation turned to business, our business - politics. The big discussion was with people tossing out names for who would run against Clinton in 1996. Bob Dole was named, and I knew he would win the nomination (at least he did my first time) but whether he would win this time around I wasn't sure. Had I changed things this time? Several other names got tossed around as well, some of whom were definite and some of whom were maybes. The selection was from all over the map – politicians like Dick Lugar and Phil Gramm, businessmen like Steve Forbes and Ross Perot were wild cards, and even newspaper columnist and pundit Pat Buchanan was interested.

I wondered through all of this what effect my actions would have. Would Bob Dole win the nomination again? Would Ross Perot still be a spoiler and third party candidate? Would somebody else do better? I had a lot of respect for Senator Dole, both then and now, and said I was going to support him. It would be interesting to see how this worked out from a front row seat. I remember it being a wild and wooly primary season, and I suspected it was still going to be.

We kept talking through the rest of the preparation time, opening a third bottle of the Riesling in the process, and then I called quits to shop talk while we ate. That didn't work out all that well, since we were all a bunch of political junkies. What I found disturbing, though, was when Newt was telling us how much he wanted to hurt Clinton, to grind him into dust. It was almost personal with the man. I simply shook my head in disagreement.

"You disagree with me, Carl?"

"Yes and no, Newt. It's not so much your intention as it is your degree. It's one thing to beat the man, but leave him some wiggle room. There is nothing more dangerous than a wild animal that has been wounded and then trapped. You learn the same thing in the Army. It's better to let an enemy on the run keep running. It demoralizes the other troops facing you. If you corner them, well, desperate men do desperate things, and they have no reason not to take you down with them."

"I think you overestimate him, Carl. Bill Clinton is spent. He's a has been. We can wipe him out and replace him in two years.", Newt bragged.

"Newt, I am going to keep backing you, you know that, but this may not turn out as neat and easy as you think it will. There's a reason they named him 'Slick Willie' back in Arkansas. You may not like him, but you sure better respect him.", I replied.

"You think he's going to be that tough in '96?", asked John, in between bites of chicken. "Oh, this is so good!"

I laughed at that. "The secret isn't in the chicken, it's in the spices and the stew they make with the flour you dredge the chicken in." Then I gave it some thought. "Yeah, I think it would be very easy to underestimate Slick Willie. We have the tiger by the tail right now, but it would be very easy to end up inside the tiger!"

I went home the next night and told Marilyn I had cooked dinner for the boys, after which she pointed me towards the kitchen and made me cook for the kids. I made shrimp scampi for them, although I insisted that Marilyn had to help me with peeling the shrimp. We were able to eat by about seven or so. Now that the kids were older, we didn't have to worry about them going to bed early. The girls were still only ten. They still listen to you at that age. That would change too damn soon for my taste. Charlie was now thirteen, and had recently discovered that he was smarter than I was, or at least so he thought.

He was a pushy little bastard, too! On his birthday back in October he had asked about getting a tattoo or an earring, and he brought it up again. He didn't have anything particular in mind, just asking, but I decided to shut that idea down real fucking quick! "You get no tattoos that don't say U.S. Army, and no extra holes in your body that the Good Lord didn't issue as original equipment! YOU GOT THAT STRAIGHT?!", I thundered at him. He just laughed at me and scooted out of the room.

"You think that was clear enough?", I asked his mother.

"Probably not.", she said with a smile.

"I think I'll show him a rerun of Heartbreak Ridge, where Clint Eastwood rips an earring out of a recruit's ear. Maybe that will get through." My wife rolled her eyes at that. "Wait until your daughters get in on the act, and want their belly buttons pierced?"

"My daughters are good girls and would never do that.", she replied, rather primly.

I snorted. "Yeah, well my daughters would do it and then lie to us!" On my first go, Maggie had not only gotten her belly button pierced, she also got a 'tramp stamp' at the base of her back. I don't have a problem with the piercings so much as the tattoos. They don't enhance the scenery, as far as I am concerned, and just wait until you're a grandmother and weigh fifty pounds more, and your grandkids want to know why you have a tattoo on your ass.

On the plus side, Charlie was fundamentally a good kid. He was still in the Boy Scouts, although I had my doubts whether he would make Eagle. I could see him doing the Explorer routine like I had done, or just staying in the Scouts and goofing off and going camping with them. Then again, Marilyn had caught him looking through my latest issue of Playboy, so I figured he might also develop a totally different interest to take up his time. Well, you can't get into trouble just chasing girls; you only get into trouble when you catch one!

I remember when he asked me what 'overly developed' meant. He had been looking at a copy of The National Enquirer, which struck me as rather odd. Certainly neither Marilyn nor I ever read it, so I asked him, and he said he got it from the Parkers. I could imagine Lurlene reading it, and rolled my eyes. "So, what's it mean?"

"What does what mean?"

"It says that Mom is overly developed. What's that mean?"

"WHAT?" I went over to him and grabbed the 'newspaper' from him and looked at the page he was reading. It was reportedly an article on Congressmen with good-looking wives or girlfriends. There was a picture of Marilyn and me at the Kennedy Center, me in my tux and Marilyn in a black evening gown. That had been a few weeks ago, and the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, which I supported generously, was having a Tchaikovsky night. The photo made me pay attention, since Marilyn's dress had been somewhat low cut, though not untasteful. This shot, maybe because of the angle, or maybe because they doctored it, showed an awful lot of very healthy cleavage.

Charlie was pointing at the words. "See, it says that Mom is pretty but overly developed."

Marilyn came out at that moment to find us looking at the picture. I was trying to keep from laughing, working my jaw to keep steady. Marilyn took a look at the Enquirer as Charlie asked again. I glanced at her and stifled a grin, and replied, "Let's just say that it means your mother still looks good in a swimsuit." Marilyn looked daggers at me. I guess that's not something a father is supposed to tell his son.

Suddenly a light went off in Charlie's head. His eyes opened wide and he gave a loud, "Ohhhh!" Then he looked at Marilyn, and his eyes glanced at her chest for just a split second, and then darted away, and he repeated, "Ohhhh!"

"CHARLIE!", she protested.

"Get out of here.", I said, swatting him with the paper. He grabbed it and laughed, and ran out of the kitchen.

I was silently laughing at my wife, while she stewed at me. "What do you have to say?", she demanded.

"Who? Me? Nothing, nothing at all! Would you rather I explained to him that it meant his Mom has big tits!?"

"Behave!" I was sent packing from the kitchen, but she had a smile on her face, too. I figured I'd talk to her about this later that evening, much later, in our bedroom.

Back in Washington we had all sorts of fun on the Armed Service Committee. For one thing, the latest round of the BRAC system was happening in 1995. BRAC stood for Base Realignment And Closure. During World War II and the Cold War the various armed services had built bases all over the place, and as a result we had huge numbers of very expensive bases. Since nobody would allow a base in their district to be closed ("It's strategically important to defend [fill in the blank]") but everybody thought that somebody else's base should be closed ("It's an outrageous duplication and wasteful spending to defend [fill in the blank]"), they came up with a system. An independent commission would come up with a list of bases to be shrunk or closed. The list could be voted yes or no, but could not be modified. It gave everybody political cover when things started closing.

I had seen this up close and personal on my first go. When Griffiss Air Force Base in Rome was put on the list in 1993, the uproar had been deafening, and the locals all screamed that their base was a critical part of the nation's defense. Instead, they argued, shutter that wasteful and duplicative base north of us, Plattsburgh Air Force Base! Well, the Commission promised they would look at Plattsburgh and the people in Utica and Rome went away happy. Nobody was happy when a few months later the Commission recommended both bases be closed!

Closing bases is a very painful thing. In addition to whatever soldiers or airmen or sailors or Marines are stationed there, you usually have lots of locals working at a base, as well as businesses who sell stuff to the base. It is a major source of income. On the other hand, military spending by its very nature is inherently wasteful. If you want to do well spending government money, a better investment is infrastructure or research or something. You'll waste less and hire more. I remember that when Griffiss shut down it was very painful for a few years. Lefleur Homes wasn't selling very many homes in the Rome area when you could buy an existing structure for fifty cents on the dollar. Still, the area came back even stronger.

Anyway, the latest round of BRAC was ongoing, and looked to be as contentious as the earlier ones. We still had too much military for the budget and the threat. The Soviet Union was no more. They hadn't been able to control Afghanistan, which was a major reason they had collapsed in 1989, and now the U.S. was the undisputed and sole superpower left. Furthermore, the military we had was the finest in the world. Just a fraction of our force had been enough to whip Saddam Hussein in a matter of days.

It was too big and too expensive to maintain an army and a navy at the levels we had built up to during the Cold War. The process had started under George Bush and accelerated under Bill Clinton. Congress and the Pentagon hated it, but it needed to be done. By the time the Republicans took back control of Congress in 1994, the Army had shrunk from 18 divisions down to 12, and the National Guard had from 10 down to 8. The Navy was equally shrunk, from almost 600 ships at the time of the collapse of the Berlin Wall down to about 400 at the time the Republicans took control. The Air Force and Marines were equally slimmed down.

Now, with the Republicans firmly in control of Congress, the call was out to stop this 'erosion' of American strength and rebuild our forces to their former glory. Of course we would do this in a prudent and reasoned fashion, avoiding the 'bloat' and 'excess' found in previous Democratic Congresses and administrations. It was assumed by one and all that as a former soldier I would see the wisdom of rebuilding the Army again. I suppose if I had gone into the Navy I would be expected to shortchange the Army and build some extra ships.

I kept my mouth shut and my thoughts to myself. Even at half our size, the national security of the country was assured. Our Navy had more ships than at least the next dozen nations on the list, and they were almost all our allies. The same could be said of our Air Force. As for the Army, well, unless the bad guys started human wave attacks we could eat anybody else on the planet alive. The only problem that I could see was the overwhelming need to make the services even smaller! Nobody who I met who wanted to build up our forces could come up with a single plausible opponent who could possibly harm us.

Russia? They lost half their empire in the breakup and were gone as a military force. Their Navy was rusting at the piers and their Army was rusting in the fields. They would be hard pressed to protect their borders from the Islamic nut jobs. The Chinese? They didn't want to attack us! They wanted to buy us! The same went for any number of other former Communist dictatorships around the planet. The same could be said for the former client states who had professed their hatred of us and caused trouble. Now that the Soviet Union wasn't paying the bills, they were jumping all over each other proclaiming how much they loved us and wanted our assistance.

Only the Islamics were dangerous, and they only had two ways to cause trouble. First was through terrorism, both here in the U.S. and abroad. That was a job for police and Special Forces types. You can't fight terrorists with armored divisions and aircraft carriers.

The second, more difficult, way they could create trouble was by weapons of mass destruction. Pakistan was already a nuclear power and had spread that joy to all sorts of wonderful people, like the North Koreans and Iran. It would only get worse, along with other cut rate weapons like gas and biologicals. By the time I recycled all three types of weapon had been used. Biologicals never really worked too well, despite all the hype and fear. Gas was easier and cheaper and was handed out by several countries, including Syria, who managed to let it get into the hands of some rebels who promptly turned around and gassed Damascus. After that, nerve gas was kept under a little better control. Nukes did get loose, and the mullahs in Iran gave one to Hezbollah, who detonated it in Haifa. Israel wasn't amused, and promptly proceeded to kill 8 million Iranians when they retaliated by nuking the ten largest cities in Iran into rubble and glass. That made a lot of the Arab world sit up and take notice, and a lot of terrorists got caught and killed in the resulting uproar.

My problem in the here and now was to allow the process of downsizing the Army and Navy and Air Force to continue, while not appearing to be soft on defense. The easiest way I could do this, it seemed to me, was to be very tough on new program ideas. The services were always on the lookout for the latest whiz-bang gadgetry, and were constantly being bombarded by the defense contractors with proposals for new equipment.

For instance, the M109 Paladin self propelled howitzer has been in service with the Army since 1963. It works, it's relatively cheap, and it is very accurate. It has been upgraded at least a half dozen times over the last 30 years. Still, we can always do better, so United Defense and General Dynamics came up with the M2001 Crusader, a replacement that was both heavier and less accurate. That was going to be coming before Congress for approval at some point in the next few years. Ultimately it would be found to be a disaster and get cancelled. Not to worry, a replacement for the replacement was in the works, the M1203 Non Line Of Sight Cannon, which was also cancelled. Meanwhile the Paladins soldiered on, and were still in front line service when I recycled.

The paramount military threat of the 21st century, of course, turned out to be terrorism. Terrorists don't own howitzers.

Some of what I saw I knew wouldn't work out so well. There had been a vote in Congress in 1992 to show approval to President Bush to 'do something' to help in Somalia. I had voted against it, which didn't make me any friends. Everybody wanted to 'do something' but as soon as anything bad happened (think Black Hawk Down) they conveniently forget. Some places are so fucked up you just can't fix them. This year I knew Bill Clinton was going to want to get involved in the Balkans, so we could 'do something' to help. That was because he didn't get involved in Rwanda last year (another place you can't fix) and now needed to show he 'cared.' If Otto von Bismarck thought "the Balkans aren't worth the life of a single Pomeranian grenadier" what made Bill Clinton think he was smarter? It was just one more damn place that can't be fixed. If I got a reputation as an isolationist, I wouldn't be unhappy. (I had already voted against NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Act. I remembered that 'sucking sound' of jobs leaving the country. This was just the start.)

Some things should get money, but they were the plain vanilla boring things. I was in favor of stuff for 'readiness' This is the gas for the planes and ships and tanks, and the bullets for the guns, and the replacement parts for what we already owned. It was money to send people for training and to the various schools. It was for intelligence programs so you knew who the bad guys were and what they were up to. It was for various research and development programs to see what might be around the next bend. None of this is as sexy as a brand new invisible plane or boat. Most of them don't work as advertised anyway, but boy are they cute and beautiful!

Perhaps the strangest aspect of my getting onto the Armed Services Committee was that I gained a new 'assistant' The Pentagon assigns an officer to 'help' most members of the committee, so we can better do our jobs of exercising guidance over Congress' relations with the services. Pretty much everybody on the committee except for the most junior members gets a liaison officer. By objective standards, since this was my first time on the committee, I was a junior member, but since I was in my third term as a Representative and was now surprisingly high in seniority, I got a liaison. This was announced in December of 1994, after the announcement I was moving to Armed Services. Shortly thereafter, on a day when I was in my old office in Longworth prior to moving to Rayburn, Mindy announced I had an appointment with some Army officers.

I wasn't quite sure what to expect. I knew that Floyd had a liaison, as did the minority leader of the committee. I figured I'd probably get a dog-and-pony-show orientation and a list of phone numbers or something. What I wasn't expecting was a Major General in a Class A uniform, and a Lieutenant Colonel in a dark blue pinstripe suit. I knew he was a light bird because he happened to be one Harlan Buckminster. My eyes lit up when Mindy, who couldn't have known of our friendship, brought them into my office. "Congressman Buckman, this is General Thompson...", she said, beginning the introductions.

I reached out and shook his outstretched hand. "General."

"Congressman."

" ... and Lieutenant Colonel Buckmeyer.", she finished.

"Colonel Buckmeyer! So nice to meet you! Run out of clean uniforms, did we?", I said as introduction.

Harlan rolled his eyes and reached for my hand. "Keep it up smartass. I know stuff about you I am sure Marilyn doesn't know about yet."

"And if you don't, I'm sure you can make something up?", I replied with a laugh, and shook his hand. I turned to Mindy and said, "Lieutenant Colonel Buckminster is an old friend from way, way back."

Mindy blushed deeply. "I am so sorry, Colonel..."

Harlan laughed and waved it off. "Forget it, Miss. Ask me sometime and I'll tell you those same stories about the Congressman I am going to tell his wife."

"An empty threat. I know just as many about you. Come on in, gentlemen. How can I help the U.S. Army today?" I let Mindy out of my office and showed the two men over to the couch it my sitting area. I sat in an armchair facing them. "What brings you here?"

It was the general who responded. "Congressman, I'm with the Congressional Liaison Office at the Pentagon, and I wanted to introduce you to the officer we have selected to be your liaison. Colonel Buckminster will be able to help you with any requests for information or assistance you might have, as well as to answer any questions you might have in regards to your duties on the Armed Services Committee. We think it's important to provide all the help we can, especially since this is your first time on the committee."

I arched an eyebrow at this gigantic load of horseshit, and glanced over at Harlan. "And this is the officer you've selected? I am sure the colonel told you we have known each other for years."

"Yes, sir, he did. The rest of the office and I think that will help to make a good working relationship. Is that going to be a problem?", he responded innocently.

"Oh, no, no problem. Exactly what do you see Colonel Buckminster doing?"

At that the general and Harlan alternated explaining Harlan's duties, which consisted of working half the time with me and the other half the time with the Armed Services Committee, helping out however he could. It smelled to the high heavens, but I couldn't fault the Pentagon for trying to influence me. After a few minutes, I nodded and said that Harlan would certainly be acceptable, and asked General Thompson if Harlan could stay so we could catch up on old times.

Thompson beamed and said, "Of course, Congressman. Lieutenant Colonel Buckminster can find his way home, I'm sure."

"We'll make sure of it.", I asserted. I stood and ushered the General out. Harlan stayed in his seat.

I came back over and sat across from Harlan again. "The last I heard, you were out at Sill doing something staff-like. When did you come to Washington? How's Anna Lee and the kids?"

"Anna Lee and the kids are fine. I only arrived yesterday. You're my new duty assignment."

"That figures. And you just happened to be available, right?"

"You're not buying that? Are you possibly implying that a general officer of the United States Army might be less than truthful to a Representative of the People in this great democracy?", asked my friend. "Carl, you've become so cynical as you've aged!"

I snorted and laughed at that. "How many hundreds of officers did they have to sift through to find you?"

He gave me a wry smile and shrugged. "Probably several hundred. I think they took every officer's name from all the way back to our ROTC training camp classes and added in anybody you might have served with in the 82nd, and then stripped out everybody who had either left the service or had a command. I got called into my boss' office at Sill and put on the phone and asked if I had ever heard of you. When I said sure, that you and I were old buddies in fact, I got stuck on a plane so fast my ass is still catching up. I had just enough time to go home and pack a few uniforms and a civilian suit. Anna Lee told me to make sure to send her love and to give Marilyn a hug when I see her."

I nodded. "That will be tonight. I'll take you to the house. Listen, you don't mind this? They yank you from whatever you're doing to be my babysitter? You're okay with that?"

"Carl, I am just trying to finish out my twenty before they heave my ass to the wolves. You know what's happening to the Army. Half the Army is gone, and those of us left are just trying to survive. If you aren't the reincarnation of George Patton, you get a 'reduction in force' notice and don't let the door hit you on the way out. The only reason I'm still around is my combat experience in the 'Sandpile' a few years ago. They've been unloading some really good guys in job lot quantities!"

I grimaced and nodded in understanding. "And this is your choice? What the hell were you doing out at Sill, anyway?"

"Strategic planning and readiness. I write memos and doctrines that nobody will read and then file them in places nobody will remember. If I don't find a new home here, I am probably gone in six months."

"Jesus!" This was the ugly downside to cutting the military down in size. A huge number of really good, dedicated, brave, and smart guys were being cut loose left and right. I leaned forward and rubbed my face. "Well, we can't be having that, now, can we? So, you're going to be the Pentagon's spy in my office. I might as well introduce you to my Chief of Staff."

I stood up and opened my office door. I didn't have far to look. Marty was standing at Mindy's desk talking to both her and Babs. He saw the door open and looked up, and I motioned him in. "Marty, got a few minutes?"

"Of course, Congressman."

Marty came through the door and saw I was with someone. I closed the door behind us and invited him over. "Harlan, I'd like to introduce my Chief of Staff, Marty Adrianopolis. Marty, this is Lieutenant Colonel Harlan Buckminster, my new liaison officer from the Pentagon."

Harlan stood and the two men shook hands. I waved them both to seats and looked over at Marty. "Marty, feel free to call me by my first name when we're with Harlan. He's almost as old a friend as you. He and I go back to summer training when I was still at RPI with you." To Harlan I explained, "Marty likes to use my title when I'm with the staff or people outside of the office, but he's an old buddy like you are."

"You were at college with Carl?", asked Harlan.

"I was two years ahead of him. Did the two of you really capture an entire enemy army all by yourselves, or is he just full of crap?", asked Marty.

"I'll tell you his army stories if you tell me his college stories."

"Keep it up, guys. I'll send you both back where I found you.", I laughed. "Hey, Marty, Harlan is supposed to be our new liaison..."

"Yeah, I heard something about us getting a liaison officer. How's that going to work?", Marty replied, as much to Harlan as to me.

"The way it's been explained to me, if you need something from the Pentagon, you tell me and I go and get it.", answered Harlan.

I smiled at Marty. "And then he runs and tells his boss what Congressman Buckman is up to."

Marty nodded and said, "Bingo!"

Harlan smiled at me but looked confused. "You want to explain that?"

I shrugged. "Harlan, correct me if I'm wrong, you've been staff before but this is your first duty at the Pentagon, right?" He nodded agreement, so I continued. "Trust me on this. The first thing that your General Thompson is going to ask the next time he sees you is for a total debrief on our visit, right down to the size of the meal we served you at the house and whether we offered you seconds. I am one of the most dangerous legislators they will ever meet, because I'm a legislator who actually knows something about the military. They won't be able to buffalo me like they would really prefer."

Marty nodded and agreed. "As far as the Pentagon is concerned, or really, any government agency, the perfect Congressman is somebody who doesn't know anything about what they are supposed to be regulating. That way the agency can guide them appropriately, which basically means raising their budget no matter what."

Harlan's eyes widened some, but he nodded. "There is supposed to be a course on this somewhere, but this happened so fast they haven't had time to run me through it."

"Well, you tell them that I'm giving my blessing, but that if you need to take a few weeks to figure it out, I'll understand.", I told him. "Is this considered a joint billet for Goldwater-Nichols?"

Congressional liaison is a big deal at the Pentagon. The military budget is one of the largest items in the total, and they have huge numbers of officers dedicated to keeping it large and growing it larger. If I had been in the Navy, or was on the Naval and Marines subcommittee, an Admiral would have brought around somebody. There are also officers assigned to the Senate and the various staff committees as well. These are all field grade officers (O-4 through O-6, majors through full colonels, officers who should be running battalions and brigades instead of this nonsense) all of whom were reporting to a flag officer of some sort (generals and admirals) some of who were assigned to specific commands and some of who were assigned to various procurement programs. It's an impossible muddle.

The Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986 decided to 'streamline' the system, and instead added a gargantuan number of 'joint' slots to the system, where Army officers served on staffs combining other services as well, so they could 'jointly' work on problems. At some point an officer has to serve in a 'joint' position to be considered promotable to a senior rank.

Harlan nodded. "It's joint, but it doesn't matter. These days, unless you're better than Audie Murphy you'll be lucky to get your twenty in. I am just hanging in until then."

Marty commented, "Well, they have you stashed somewhere until you find your way around?" Harlan nodded. "Make some friends over there and buy a place down in the Virginia suburbs. There's a lot of defense contractors out along the corridor to Dulles. Do it right and you won't even need to move at the end of your time. You can get in with a contractor and hawk their wares for even more money."

I grinned and nodded. Harlan simply rolled his eyes and said, "I think I have fallen down the rabbit hole!"

"Oh, my friend, if you only knew!", I told him.

Chapter 119: Counterattack

1995

Before John and Helen left for their trip, we had a big party for them at a banquet hall in Timonium. It was a big group of us, people from the company, political types from all over the district and from elsewhere in Maryland, other friends and neighbors, and Allen and Rachel both flew in with their families. Prior to this John had met with me and introduced me to his handpicked replacement, an attorney just a few years older than me, Tucker Potsdam, who had been a tax lawyer with the Buckman Group and didn't take to the corporate life and the killer hours it occasionally involved. Now he was hanging out his own shingle as tax lawyer and private equity manager. We were going to continue with the fig leaf of independence from active management of my investments. I would talk to the new guy, who would talk to my trustee. Perfectly legal, at least by Congressional standards.

The party turned out to be ... strange. Nobody wanted to say the obvious, that we were having a party and talking about a dead man walking. At one point I was sitting at a table with Allen Steiner, John's son and an old buddy from Boy Scout days, having a drink. He asked, "Does this feel more than a little weird to you?"

"I've never been to a funeral where the guest of honor was walking around the room.", I answered.

Allen snorted out a laugh and coughed out a bit of his drink. "It's bizarre, all right!" He coughed a little and then drank some more.

"I don't know what I'm going to do without him.", I told my boyhood friend. "I mean, a guy develops feelings for the first man who bails him out of jail."

That caused Allen to start laughing and coughing again. "Will you stop it? If I keep laughing and inhaling my drink, I'm going to end up in the box before my dad!"

"Hey, I'm just saying, I have history with him."

He nodded. "Yeah, there were times I was even a little jealous, you know? I was three thousand miles away, and you were still back here with Dad. It sounds stupid now."

"Allen, you have to know, you and Rachel ... Listen, my picture was out in the lobby. Yours and Rachel's were on his desk!", I protested.

He waved it off. "Hey, don't sweat it, I know that. I'm just saying, Dad feels the same way about you. I mean, he sat me and Rach down the other night and reviewed the wills and stuff. Good Lord! He's worth $60 million dollars! He told us he wouldn't have had a fraction of that if he hadn't gotten in with you and your company."

"He earned every cent! I wouldn't be where I am without what he did for us." I replied. "It wasn't just me, not by a long shot!"

"All I'm saying is that when the time comes, you know..." He glanced over at where his parents were sitting, with a somewhat guilty look on his face. "Well, you know ... he'd appreciate it if you said a few words. Mom and Rachel would, too."

I nodded. "I'd be honored. Hell, there'll be so many people wanting to say nice things about your father, I'll need to beat them back with my cane!" I drained my glass. "Christ, he'll probably end up on some tropical island in the South Pacific and outlive us all."

Allen drained his own glass. "I'll drink to that!"

In Washington Newt and the Gang of Eight (now Seven, since Rick had moved up in the world) began to get a lesson in practical politics from one William Jefferson Clinton. I was expecting it, even if the others weren't, and it was still a shock. Some of the others were reeling, and Newt was truly pissed that Slick Willie wasn't rolling over and playing dead like a good Democrat should. Clinton laid low for the first couple of weeks of the new session, allowing us to introduce one of our Contract bills every day. When asked, as he invariably was, he simply promised to work with the new Congress and the new Congressional leadership to forge legislation that was both bipartisan and able to move the country forward. Very innocuous stuff.

To what extent he was trying to lure us into a sense of false security I'm not sure. While he wasn't screaming, some of his key lieutenants were. The ones I heard the most from were Dick Gephardt and Dave Bonior, both of whom were highly experienced, thoroughly tied into the moneymen, and as crooked as the day was long. The Republican takeover of Congress was an unnatural event, ranking right up there with having sex with dead donkeys, and needed to be reversed. They immediately began taking our legislation and picking it to pieces in the hopes of destroying it entirely. Even better, if they could destroy it, they could then trumpet how the Republicans had failed in our Contract with America, and should be sent packing at the next election.

Some of the bills were easy pickings for them. The two most obvious items were John Boehner's Balanced Budget Act and my Rebuilding America Act. These were the two bills most likely to be compromised by the Dems – and everybody else, for that matter! Both were major spending bills, and allowed an infinite number of ways for a Congressman to loot the Treasury on behalf of his constituents, or contributors. Sometimes it is something relatively innocuous and cheap (by government standards) such as the Federal funding of yet another corn museum in Iowa. Other times it can be ridiculously extravagant projects like the 'bridge to nowhere' in Alaska, which ran almost a third of a billion dollars, and connected the mainland to a town with only 50 residents. This is pork barrel politics at its most nitty and gritty. Remember the mighty word 'earmark.'

I warned John and the others what was going to happen, and that if we tried to stop the process we would get nothing but heartache. The best we could accomplish was to control and influence things, and keep the lid on the more ridiculous stuff, by throwing spotlights on them as necessary. We also had to control our own side, who now that they were in positions of power wanted to get their own blessing of pork.

Some of the bills were going to be shitcanned. After a few weeks of review, the word came down that Clinton was going to flat out veto my Defending the 2nd Amendment bill. He had just signed the Brady bill into law in the last session and here we were trashing it. While I hadn't touched the section on requiring background checks on handgun purchase, we had totally wiped out the ban on assault weapons and replaced it with a piece on limiting magazine sizes, and were violating states rights on the permit issue. Worse, I was both a murderous bastard (no, Bill didn't actually call me that, but he came close, citing my 'proclivity to shoot first and ask questions later') and calling me a shill for the NRA, the National Rifle Association, which I wasn't even a member of. I simply shrugged and began working on finding enough votes to override the veto. I could probably do that in the House; the Senate was much more questionable. I would need to line up 67 votes there, and might have to accept a watered down bill to manage that.

All the other stuff, tort reform and welfare fixes and social security and such, they would do the rope-a-dope technique. Every little bit would be fucked with and delayed, and modified so much as to be totally unrecognizable, in the hopes that we would drop the hot potato before they could get Clinton to veto it. Some of it they figured would die of its own weight. We would never get enough Congressmen to sign off on any meaningful Congressional reform, so Bill could stand back and look statesmanlike and sorrowful when we couldn't even get our own house in order.

Newt and the Majority Leader and Whip, Dick Armey and Tom DeLay, were taking a more laid back approach to some of this. Newt's big plan wasn't so much the legislation as the spectacle and effect. He had used the Contract with America to take back both houses of Congress. If we got the legislation to pass, so much the better. We had a big meeting with the Gang of Eight and the Republican leadership of both the House and the Senate in February, and got our marching orders. Newt and Bob Dole were working on driving a stake through Clinton's heart for the next election. Generalship on the various bills he was leaving up to DeLay and those of us with our names on the bills.

The biggest change between now and the first time through on this for me was that this time we already had the Senate lined up. On my first trip through, Newt had only handled things in the House, and didn't have any decent support in the other house. Since nothing can go to the President until both houses pass it and cobble something together, this added months to the process. This time we had started much earlier. We had brought some Senators in on things. We had Senate versions of all our bills ready to go the same day we dropped the House bills into the hopper. By April we had most of the bills passed, sometimes over Democratic screaming, but passed. (Well, not Congressional Reform or Tort Reform, they would probably never pass!) Now it was up to Bill Clinton to either sign them into law or veto them.

Clinton had ten days to sign them into law or veto them. If the Congress went out of session before he could sign them, they were effectively vetoed. (This is known as a pocket veto and is a useful tool to get a law passed that nobody really wanted and then get the President to dump it. You simply wait until the end of the session, pass it, and the President just ignores it until the clock runs out. Congress has managed to do something about whatever without really doing anything.) We didn't give him that luxury. He waited nine days before giving the chop to most of them. Surprisingly, the Rebuilding America Act he let pass, probably because there was sufficient Democratic pork in it. I tried to control it, even going so far as to pull an all-nighter in the committee conference room with the Chairman of the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee, Larry Pressler, during final markup. Still, we had plenty of pork for everybody.

I did not envy John Boehner and his Balanced Budget Act, or John Doolittle and his Business Tax Reform Act. Doolittle had promised that his focus was on eliminating loopholes and tax shelters. He was promising to lower rates if we eliminated loopholes and shelters. Everybody liked the first part of that, but not so much the second. Then again, if Boehner could close the budget gap, which had been over $200 billion last year, we could afford lower rates. It had been done the first time through, why not do it again?

Meanwhile I tried to get home and be father and husband. One of the benefits of having a driver and security detail was that it made it easier to haul Charlie and his bike to various races. When I started with increased security and drivers I had bought a Ford F-150 with a hitch package, and a small enclosed trailer to carry his bike. Then, with one of the drivers hauling the gear, the family could follow in a second people-mover minivan. In neither life had I ever learned to drive while towing something, but I could usually find a driver who had learned somewhere. Charlie was now competing outside of Maryland as well, into Pennsylvania and West Virginia and Virginia.

Charlie was making a real name for himself now, and was actually interviewed at a race in Hedgesville, out near Hagerstown but just across the border into West Virginia. He was named along with several other junior riders in a piece on 'Pros of the Future!' I commented to Marilyn later that what he really liked about the magazine was the pictures of the pretty girls standing next to the motorcycles. My wife rolled her eyes but didn't argue. Our little boy was growing up, and showing decidedly heterosexual tendencies.

I sat down with him one evening after a Boy Scout troop meeting, one where he seemed a bit listless and disinterested. "What's with you and the Scouts?", I asked.

"Huh? What do you mean?"

"You, tonight. You didn't seem all that thrilled to be there."

Charlie grimaced. "It's not the Scouts. Next month we're doing a camping trip down to someplace in Virginia. Some place called Winchester or something."

I nodded. "That's in the Shenandoah Valley. Very nice area. Should be fun."

"Yeah, but that's the same weekend as a race in Pittsburgh. I mean, I mentioned that to you, right? You said I could go and all." Charlie was sounding a touch whiney.

"Okay, settle down. Sure, you probably said it, and that's fine with me. You need to make a decision. You can't do everything. School's the most important thing, and if you don't bring your grades up and keep them there, there's no racing anyway." Charlie looked horrorstricken at the thought, but nodded mutely. "After that, you need to decide what you're going to do. If you can't do both the racing and the Scouting, you need to make a decision. You can't do them both half-assed. You need to figure out what's important to you."

He nodded again, seemingly lost in thought, so I kept on. "What about school? You were on the JV football team last fall, right? Do you plan to keep playing sports? Can you do that, too? Do you expect your mother to take you to all of these places and still manage to come down to Washington? She's also taking your sisters to do their stuff, too."

"Uhhhh..."

"Well, we don't need an answer now, but you need to start planning. You need to think about what is important to you. Nobody, not even me, can do everything.", I told my son.

He didn't say much, so I sent him off to think. Marilyn came through from the kitchen at that point and saw his somber face. She asked, "What's with him? He looks like his dog just died." Dum-Dum took that opportunity to jump up and try to lick her face. "No, Dum-Dum, not you!"

I had to laugh at that. I rubbed Dum-Dum's head and she jumped into my lap and lay down for a nap, well deserved after a long day of sleeping. Then she farted and both Marilyn and I had to rub our watery eyes! "It wasn't me!", I protested.

"No, even you don't smell that bad. Oh, Dum-Dum, what have you been eating!?" Marilyn sat down in her chair and Dum-Dum jumped across to her lap, eliciting an "Ooof!" from Marilyn.

"I told Charlie he has to set some priorities. He can't keep racing and doing Scouting and doing afterschool sports. He has to make some choices." I explained our conversation.

She sighed and agreed. "I know! I mean, there's his sports and the girls in Brownies and ballet and his Boy Scouts and the church and..." She finished with a line I had heard before. "I need a wife of my own!"

I let her run down for a bit before interrupting. "Marilyn, you're as bad as the kids. You need to make some priorities. You can't do all this stuff either. You have to tell the kids what you can do and then stick to it! Unless you want to hire a nanny..."

"NO!"

" ... then you need to get serious about your schedule. You can't keep up like this. You'll kill yourself!"

As I expected, Marilyn protested that it really wasn't that bad, that she could do everything she needed to. It was an argument we had had before, both in this life and in my last. She refused to believe she couldn't do everything. At home this usually meant a long list of projects she would start and then never finish. Time management was not Marilyn's strong suit. I sighed and half nodded to her. The only way this would end was when the kids all moved out and we were on our own. "We just need to sell the kids off.", I said, which elicited a laugh from Marilyn.

Just then Holly came wandering through. I looked over at her and asked, "When's your birthday?"

My daughter gave me an odd look. "July 23."

I nodded solemnly. "Just like last year. And you'll be how old?"

"I'll be eleven."

"Excellent. Only seven years to go.", I announced.

"Seven years to go to what?"

"Seven years to go until you're eighteen and I can kick you out the door!" I jumped out of my chair and chased her around the living room. Holly started squealing and ran away, to be joined a moment later when Molly came out. Then Dum-Dum jumped up and hopped around on Marilyn's lap. After a couple of minutes the twins ran squealing down the hallway and their bedroom door slammed shut.

Marilyn rubbed the dog's belly which made her settle down. "Do we have to wait until they're eighteen?", she asked.

"Why wait! We've got 25 acres here. If we dig a deep enough hole, nobody will find them!" I went into the kitchen to make dinner.

By August I got a phone call from Helen Steiner that I had been dreading. I had been checking with Tucker Potsdam and a few of the people around the Buckman Group all spring and summer. John Steiner had told us that after the going-away party none of us would see him until the funeral, and he had been true to his word. After their round the world trip, they had returned home, puttered around a few days, and then had flown to Europe for an extended tour and vacation. They stayed in Europe until the beginning of July, when John's health began completely falling apart, and the cancer and pain had spread too much. They came home, and he had hospice begin treating him at his home. He passed away the second week of August.

As I promised him, I acted as one of his pallbearers, and spoke at his memorial service. I don't remember what I spoke; I had written words down, but never bothered taking them out of my coat pocket, and simply spoke from the heart. Nobody seemed to notice, and everybody had a good cry. In the audience, I saw my father sitting, but I had been closer to John than I had been to my Dad. We didn't talk. That made it doubly worse for me. I realized that not only one of my oldest friends was dead, but to me, my father was dead also. I drank more than I should that night, sitting in my office at the house.

Then it was back to work. Back in D.C. the American Renaissance Institute came into being. Marty found a guy named Porter Boardman over at the Cato Institute who wanted to move up in the world, and passed his name along to Bob Seaver. We had Bob sound him out on a few things, and began funding things. The only people who knew what I was doing were Seaver and Marty, and we wanted it kept that way. The ARI was set up ostensibly as a think tank devoted to 'common sense' ideas, somewhat libertarian, which was how Porter was found. The ARI would have a board of directors and a fundraising staff, they could hire lawyers and lobbyists, and start trying to influence things.

I wasn't sure how this would play out, but Seaver promptly got Boardman to hire a law firm registered as lobbyists to start pushing to pass D2A. His line was that a major funding outfit wanted it passed. Initially this was just a junior lawyer and a staffer sitting in on some of our meetings at the Heritage Foundation. Still, you had to start somewhere. Ultimately, I'd be able to go to my think tank, just like a regular Congressman, propose some ideas, have them actually write the legislation, and then hire the various lobbyists as needed. As long as the money flowed, nobody would care. We budgeted five million that first year.

A big part of getting things passed is 'counting noses', determining who will vote which way and why. We had enough House votes to override, but not in the Senate. As much as I detested working with them, we needed the NRA to bend over and get butt-fucked. The only way I was going to get this passed was to repeal my repeal of the assault weapons ban. This was simply foaming-mouth anathema to them, and the restraint on magazine capacities of over 10 rounds wasn't much better. The only thing they really liked was the demand for reciprocal permitting and the 'shall issue' requirement (and they really liked those parts, which made some of the other stuff acceptable.) Again, I had the House lined up, but digging up ten Democratic Senators was going to be tough – as in, expensive. There would be a lot of campaign contributions for this one.

You have to love Congress. It's the best that money can buy.

One thing I continued doing was to overtly use my 'toys' to swing a vote here and there. You or a constituent needed to fly somewhere? Hey, I've got a G-IV that I'm not using this weekend. Why not take that? Didn't get to Barbados this year? Maybe you'd like a weekend in the Bahamas, a little place called Hougomont? Sure thing, not a problem. Just remember, we have this little vote coming up...

At one point in late summer I had a meeting with Wayne LaPierre of the NRA about the bill. He'd only been on the job for a few years, but he was a hard core gun rights advocate. He was pushing hard for me to remove the magazine capacity restrictions from the bill. I let him fulminate for more time that I really wanted to waste on this, and then shut him down. He was never, ever, going to get what he really wanted, which was a constitutional amendment outlawing any and all restrictions on who could own guns and how many and where they could carry them. If you left it up to him, it would be perfectly legal to strap an automatic machine pistol into your holster and march down the middle of the street, daring anybody to stop you. He wanted the good old days down at the OK Corral, never realizing that what really occurred there was that Wyatt Earp and his brothers and Doc Holliday were actually enforcing various gun control ordinances.

"Wayne, you are never going to get what you want."

"Carl, we have to fight..."

I held up my hand to stop him. "You've had your turn, now it's mine!", I told him sharply. He settled down, none too graciously, and gave me a mean look. I ignored him. "As I was saying, as long as Bill Clinton or any other Democrat is in office, you are never going to get more than a piece of the pie. You are going to have to fight the long fight, years, in fact, and probably never get everything. There is no way we can get rid of the stuff in the Brady Bill. We just don't have the votes. I can get the override with the reciprocal permitting and the shall-issue ruling, but the only way is to keep the magazine capacity limit in place. End of story. You ain't going to get any more than that, and if you don't like it, get over it!"

He looked like he had a head of steam about to explode, and he cut loose on me. I just sat there and sucked it in, and then shrugged theatrically. "So what!? It don't matter! Sure, you can buy all the Congressmen you want, but you ain't going to be buying all the Senators that you need. Hell, I've got more money than you, and I couldn't buy that many! You need to work on the edges. Maryland? Massachusetts? They'll never vote for this, even if I lined their pockets in gold. Start working on the ones on the fence, and keep your mouth shut and settle for what you can. We get this now, and then in two years we run Clinton out and try again."

The thought of Clinton losing re-election mollified him slightly, and after a bit, I got him out of there. My biggest worry was that he would demand more than anybody was going to give him, and then throw sand into the gears in response. That was a problem with true believers; it was either their way or no way.

I wondered, if this passed, could I get to meet Charlton Heston? He was the head of the NRA, a figurehead position, but really ... he was Charlton Heston! How often do you get to meet Moses? I hoped Wayne could calm down enough to bring out the big guns. A photo op with Heston might convert a few recalcitrant Senators. This was a good ten years before the Alzheimer's took him, and he was still quite clear and cogent at this point, and extremely popular.

There were some other conservatives who began thinking they had more pull than they really did. Grover Norquist was really pushing hard on his reducing taxation kick, and was going to every Congressman and Senator to get them to sign his 'pledge.' He already knew my feelings on the subject, but made an appointment (demanded it, really) and slapped it down on my desk. I wadded it up and tossed it in the circular file while he sat there and stewed. "Carl, don't think we don't have influence. How would you like a vicious primary fight in two years!", he warned.

"Grover, how would you like a nice liberal in the Maryland Ninth in two years?", I responded.

"Don't try that threat with me."

"Threat? That's no threat, that's a promise! Let's play Suppose for a bit. Suppose you do find somebody to run against me next time around Now, I know damn near every Republican in the district but I suppose you can find a hard core conservative in the western part, or you can bring in a ringer from somewhere else. Now, suppose you give him a few million to attack me. Do you think I can't afford to counterattack? Grover, I have more money in my wallet than your whole group has in their bank accounts! Now suppose that your guy is good, really good. He might win in a nasty primary bout, or he might lose, but weaken me in the process. What happens in either case is that we then lose to the Democrats, who will listen to you even less than I do. Grover, you can defeat me, but you can't win the district."

He argued on, about the moral imperative of what he was doing and about how Democrats really wanted fiscal discipline, too. I let him ramble on and then hit a hidden button under my desk. That buzzed my secretary, who would enter and inform me that I had an urgent call, allowing me to rid myself of nuisances.

One amusing incident occurred around this time. I was over at Tusk Cycle talking to Tusker late one afternoon, and Bucky was working in the shop. He was a high school senior now, and planning on college. He was tall and lanky, a lot like his father, with the same flaming red hair, although it was just an unruly mop, and not down his back. (Tusker's was turning gray, which I needled him about on occasion.) He came through, and I asked him, "So, where are you planning on going to college?" Tessa had informed her son that he was going to college, and not hanging around the shop for the rest of his life.

He glanced at his father, and then looked back at me. Then he looked back at Tusker, who said, "Well, go on, ask him!"

I gave the pair a curious look, and Bucky stuttered a bit and asked, "Uh, Uncle Carl, I was wondering, uh, would you write me a recommendation letter?"

"Yeah, sure. Where to?" I glanced at his father, who was amused by his son's nervousness. Bucky was a good kid, with good grades. He had two hobbies that I could detect, motorcycles and girls. If he was into anything more serious, I couldn't see it.

My namesake breathed a sigh of relief, which I found amusing. Was he actually worried I would say no? I snorted in derision and glanced at his dad, who looked amused. "Well, tell him where you want to go!", urged Tusker.

"I applied to the University of Pennsylvania. Maryland, too, but the University of Pennsylvania is my first choice. I want to study business, and they're supposed to be really good.", came out in a rush.

I looked over at Tusker, who was obviously proud of his son. "The University of Pennsylvania, hmmm? The Ivy League! Pretty good for the son of an itinerant bicycle repairman."

"Fuck you, Carl.", laughed Tusker, who flipped me the bird. "I'll tell Tessa you said that, and let you put up with her."

"Heaven forbid!" I turned back to Bucky. "Well, why not. My old man went to Pennsylvania. Wharton's a good school for business, too. I bet the Buckman Group has hired a few MBAs from there over the years. You figuring a letter from me on Congressional stationery might help?" Before he could answer, I looked back at my old friend. I raised my right hand and rubbed my thumb across my fingers. "The Ivy League? You are going to have to repair an awful lot of bicycles!"

He laughed some more. "Now I really am telling Tessa!"

"Give me a couple of days, and I'll get something for you." I jotted a note to myself and stuck it in my pocket.

The next morning I was in the front office with Mindy and a few of the others, and I mentioned it to her. She simply nodded and pulled one of the stock recommendations we had around the place. We red-lined a few sentences and added a few replacements, so that it was obvious I actually knew the kid, and she promised to get it typed up on some Congressional letterhead for my signature.

Marty came through as she was reading the final version, and he commented, "If he really is a friend of yours, whatever you do, don't tell them the truth! Any namesake of yours must have majored in beer and cheerleaders in high school!"

I had to laugh at that, as did a few others there, and Mindy said, "We should write up a real recommendation for him!"

"I should. We can give it to his parents and tell them we've already mailed it. Maybe something about how he is expected to be released in time for classes to start in September." That earned some more laughter.

Mindy grabbed a notepad and jotted that one down. Other phrases that made the cut included, 'A pre-law curriculum is highly recommended, so that in his future endeavors he will be able to assist his attorneys in his defense', as well as 'Buckman is possessed of a spirited and lively sense of humor. A review of property, accident, and general liability insurance requirements should be considered.' Half the office was weighing in on this, and we wrote a very nice recommendation for a young man applying for incarceration at the maximum security prison in Jessup.

The following weekend we had the Tusks over for dinner, and I gave them the phony recommendation first. Tusker snorted his beer out through his nose halfway through the letter, and was laughing as he passed it over to Tessa. She started squawking as she read it, with Marilyn over her shoulder, especially after I told them I had already sent it off. Marilyn simply said, "You didn't!"

"Hmmm? I didn't? Maybe it was this one I sent." I handed over a copy of the real letter.

Tusker handed Bucky the phony letter. "Keep this. It's an example of truth in advertising." The real letter was much nicer, and combined with the Congressional stationery, looked pretty impressive. If he failed to get in, it wouldn't be because of the letter.

Slick Willie fought us tooth and nail through the summer and the fall. In November I managed to get just enough Senators to generate an override of the veto on D2A. We essentially rewrote the bill as a new bill, which technically meant that the President could legitimately veto it again. However, he could count noses, too, and when he saw the numbers I had cobbled together, accepted it with a certain degree of ill grace. There wasn't a nice Rose Garden ceremony, that's for sure!

I was advising some of the other Gang of Eight members, too. A few of them got some funding from ARI to help generate sufficient votes. Slick Willie came up with a tactic that Newt absolutely detested – he surrendered. Specifically, he would veto a bill, but then have a Democrat submit a similar bill, one that generated about 80-90% of what the first bill did, which he would go along with. This new 'Democratic' bill, showing wonderful 'bipartisan leadership' that 'addressed the needs of the nation, and not just the desires of a single interest group' would pass. As far as Newt was concerned, Bill Clinton wasn't being beaten into the dust. As far as I was concerned, we were getting an awful lot of what we were pushing for in the Contract, without getting the specific bills passed. We got a big chunk of the welfare reform bill enacted, along with most of the regulatory reform and social security reform bills passed. Clinton punted the tax reform and budget reform bills, promising to roll them into the next budget bill.

This was not at all the way Gingrich wanted to win the fight. He wanted more than just the substance, he wanted the flash and sizzle of 'winning.' He wanted to beat Clinton, and to have it publicly acknowledged that he had beaten him. He wanted Clinton to stand and fight, get beat up in the process, look ineffective, and then die from poor leadership abilities during the 1996 elections. As I told Newt months before, Slick Willie was more than capable of teaching Newt a thing or two. Clinton knew when and where and how to fight, and what battles to fight and what battles to cede. He was actually making Newt look more than a little childish and intransigent at times.

Bill Clinton, I think, knew how this was pissing Gingrich off. For reasons of his own, namely winning re-election, he couldn't allow a Republican 'victory' on anything. Still, I had to wonder if he knew just how much it was pissing Newt off at a personal level. This became a full blown crisis in the late fall.

Clinton had managed to push John Boehner's budget bill and John Doolittle's tax reform bills into the hodgepodge of the general budget. When the fiscal year ended at the end of September, we still didn't have a budget. The Republicans in the House, most definitely including me and the rest of the Gang of Eight, wanted to cut spending and balance the budget. Just as much, however, Clinton wanted to increase spending on any number of social programs. These were items like Social Security, education, and health care. Yes, we had already hit on a few of these in the Contract, but this was an end run on those. These were all popular programs designed to appeal to the Democratic base, and it wasn't a surprise considering that we were about to enter an election year.

Everybody stood their ground, and no budget bill was forthcoming. Normally, when this happens, and it happens a fair number of times, they pass what's called a 'continuing resolution', which simply means we get to keep going at last year's budget numbers until we could get things sorted out. Gingrich got totally pissed off and decided to throw sand in the gears. He demanded a limit to increasing the national debt. I tried to talk him out of it, in a private meeting with Newt, John Boehner, John Doolittle, Dick Armey, Tom DeLay, and a few others. Newt saw this as simply a tactic to force Clinton to his will.

"Newt, I am warning you, this will have consequences beyond what you can imagine. You are messing with the promise of the United States government to pay its debt. I guarantee that this will not look good on Wall Street!", I warned him.

"Exactly! That's why he'll cave in! He has to! He'll never stand the heat if Wall Street starts complaining.", was the riposte.

I noticed the others were just watching as I argued with Newt. "Why in the world would that matter to him? The Republican bankers and investors on Wall Street don't like it? What a surprise! He's already convinced half the country that we're out to drive a stake through his and Hillary's hearts. What are you going to do? Link the continuing resolution and the debt ceiling together? What will he do?"

"If he wants the resolution, he'll have to take the ceiling." Gingrich was too focused for his own good.

I shook my head. "And what if he doesn't? What if he says that the obligation to pay our debts is greater than the obligation to balance the budget? What then?"

Around me there was a look of confusion on a few faces. The actual effects weren't really very clear to them. I knew what would happen, since I had seen it on the first try. "He'll have to!"

"Nuts! He will shut the damn thing down and point a finger at you. He won't be the bad guy, you will! When Great Aunt Martha doesn't get her Social Security check, he'll point at you. When Uncle Cletus doesn't get his pension check from the VA, he'll point at you. When Little Suzie's hospital cuts off her dialysis treatments because they didn't get paid, he'll point at you. How long do you want to put up with that? You think that's going to play so well back home?"

Gingrich was practically sneering at this. "Carl, it will never come to that. He will break. He's the President. Even if what you say will happen happens, it will be all his fault, and people will know it. He will look weak, and it will kill him next November."

"People in this country love an underdog. Hell, it's how some of us got here, by portraying ourselves as the underdog. He can play that sob story for quite a while. He'll offer to meet and compromise and work with you and be bipartisan, but if you don't meet him at least part way, the blame will be on the people in this room. The voters might not like Clinton for what's happening, but they sure won't like us for it either! Hell, you might even be playing into Slick Willie's hands! He can do the political calculus as well as anybody in this room. You don't think this is going to mess up Dole's bid for office? How many of us will be weaker next year because of this. We don't need this, Newt."

The consensus in the room was to let Newt keep pushing, although I knew it was going to prove an unmitigated disaster for the party. The existing resolution ran until November 13, at which point we needed either a budget that would pass, or another continuing resolution. Gingrich was demanding that the next resolution include a debt limit ceiling, which Clinton wasn't going to approve. Newt figured that would require Clinton to pass a budget.

I met with Newt once more on this, privately, the day before the vote on the second resolution. "Newt, you know I have been a support to you, ever since I got into Congress. You know that! But I have to say, this is not good. This is going to backfire on us, and on you more than anybody. Don't do this! Sever the link and make nice. The voters sent us here to fix things, not break them."

"Carl, you've told me this before, and it is getting old. I put up with a lot from you, and yes, you've been a loyal supporter. Now, I am telling you this is going to go through, and I am telling you that you are supporting it. Is that understood?"

"Just don't expect me to smile when the wheels come off this thing." I left his office shaking my head silently.

On the 13th Newt and the rest of the congressional leadership met with the President to try to figure out a compromise. Newt refused to compromise. On the 14th, big chunks of the government shut down. In most ways it was the pinnacle of Newt Gingrich's political career.

I wondered what was to become of mine.

Chapter 120: Mister Perfect

I couldn't remember for the life of me exactly what had happened on my first go-around, but I knew it had been bad, with Newt and Bill shutting down the government for a chunk of the winter. It was the same now. From November 14 through December 22, for 39 days, they wrangled and snarled at each other. It unfolded pretty much along the lines I had predicted, with both sides losing respect from the public, but the Republican House losing more than the President. Then it got ugly.

It came out by the end of November that Gingrich and Clinton had gotten into a pissing match when they both flew to Israel for Yitzhak Rabin's funeral at the beginning of the month. Gingrich complained, to a reporter no less, about how he had been forced to exit Air Force One from the back of the plane.

When the President flies somewhere in Air Force One, the cameras focus on him coming out the front door, waving to everybody, and meeting the dignitaries. Everybody else – and I do mean everybody! – wife, kids, friends, reporters, staffers – they all go out the back door, and nobody sees them on television. Newt decided that he deserved to go out the front door with the President! He was shut down and sent packing to the rear. New York's Daily News ran a cartoon on the front page showing a crying Newt in a diaper, which made national headlines. It only made Newt more difficult to work with.

I avoided the man as much as possible. He had been heard to mention my 'disloyalty' for disagreeing with him, even though I had voted with him. I heard about that from John Boehner and Jim Nussle. I shrugged, and they pretty much did, too. They were smart men and could see the damage being done even if Newt couldn't. There was even some grumbling from a few people about whether making Gingrich the Speaker of the House had been such a wise thing after all.

Three days before Christmas, Gingrich caved and severed the link between the continuing resolution and the debt ceiling. Clinton promptly proposed a smattering of budget cuts and tax increases so we could pass a budget in January. It wouldn't balance the budget, but it would cut the deficit.

In some ways, I didn't care. I had bigger fish to fry than Newton Leroy Gingrich. The Democrats were feeling frisky, and with the populace starting to reconsider their decision two years ago to throw out the Democratic rascals, a new crop of Democrats were pushing to throw out the Republican rascals. My last two re-elections had been relatively easy. In '92 I faced the stunned and half-beaten survivor of a nasty primary fight. In '94 I had been gifted with an opponent who spent more time insulting the Democrats than coming after me. The Democratic Party was hoping that the third time was the charm, and I was very much afraid it might well be!

My opponent was to be Steve Rymark, an Assistant State's Attorney for Baltimore County. He was 36, four years younger than me. He was tall, lean, and trim. He ran marathons. He had a full head of thick blond hair. His wife Donna was a runner-up Miss Maryland, tall, blonde, and leggy. Between the two of them they had about a million perfectly capped and blindingly white teeth, which they both showed in their incessant smiles. They had two adorable children, both blonde and with dimples. Donna was two months pregnant when Steve announced he was running against me. They lived in Cockeysville, just inside the district line. They were the most beautiful and adorable family on the planet!

It just kept getting better. He had made a name for himself in a case putting away a couple of Republican county commissioners last year for bribery, and then followed it up with the successful prosecution of a cop killer in the fall. (There went the law and order vote!) She had just written and illustrated a children's book about a family of happy dragons, which had been reviewed by the New York Times. (And goodbye to the family values vote, too!)

If I wasn't running for office I would have voted for him!

Marilyn took a look at their picture in the paper and pronounced, "He's cute!"

"Nothing like a little support there, honey!", I told her, earning a raspberry in response.

Charlie took a look at the picture of Steve and his wife standing next to him, and pronounced, "Wow! She's hot!" I might have to put up with Marilyn, but not Charlie. I smacked him with the newspaper and he took off, laughing.

I was using John Thomas as my campaign manager, and we ran a preliminary poll two weeks after Rymark announced he was running. The results were dispiriting, to say the least. So far I had won three elections by margins of 15 to 25 points. Right now I was down in the single digits. John and I looked at each other and called a meeting of everybody we could think of for the following Friday. I got on the phone and called Brewster McRiley and told him to shag his ass to Westminster; we were going to need all the big guns this time around. We brought Marty up and called in the various heads of the Republican Committees in the three counties I represented. For some extra flavor, we had Marilyn and Cheryl Dedrick, my Field Representative present. If anybody had a feel for the pulse of the Maryland Ninth, it was the person who spent her time sorting out the problems of the locals. Theoretically she was to keep her time separate from the campaign, as was Marty, as government employees. On the other hand, if I lost and Steve Rymark took over, they wouldn't be government employees for long. They had a stake in this, too.

We agreed that we had to do the usual things, opposition research and extensive polling, as well as research into what the voters were thinking about me. In this regard Cheryl had a few comments, though, which were unpleasant but not unexpected. "The letters we are getting here at the office are relatively content with how we handle the routine stuff, but they aren't too happy with some of your policy stands. You are being linked closely to Newt Gingrich and that is not playing well here. We got a lot of letters and calls about the monuments down on the Mall being shut down. We've had some calls from veterans complaining that they can't get any response out of the VA, Johns Hopkins oncology department is complaining about the shutdown at the National Institutes of Health ... the list is endless." She laid out a spreadsheet with a summary of complaints and shutdown departments on it. "For all that people complain about hating big government and wanting to shut it down, when it actually happens they don't really like it."

Marty nodded and tossed a stack of phone logs on the table. "We're seeing the same thing in Washington. Everybody wants to shut down government, just not the pieces they like, which turns out to be the whole damn thing anyway. You and the rest of the Gang of Eight and Gingrich are considered by many to be the reason for the mess."

I sighed and nodded. "The Gang of Eight is no more. We were just a group of guys who liked each other and could work with Newt to topple the Democrats and ram through the Contract with America. We're not even eight now; Rick Santorum is a Senator and above this pettiness. Besides, Newt isn't talking to me at the moment."

There were a few snorts and chuckles around the room. Jack Nerstein summed it up nicely. "Even worse than being wrong is being right, when being right means you disagree with the other guy." I gave him a wry smile, pointed a finger at him, and nodded.

"So we can't expect any help from him?", Millie Destrier commented.

"You don't want any help from Gingrich.", interjected Brewster, who had been listening up until now. It had been a bit over six years now since I had met McRiley, and he was no longer the brash kid. He had managed or overseen seven Congressional and Senatorial elections by now, and won a total of six of them. The one loser was caught in bed with a hooker and his wife divorced him, actually serving him with the papers at a campaign rally designed to put his problems behind him. That one gave the late night comedians a lot of fun!

"Yeah.", I agreed sourly.

He continued, "He doesn't forgive or forget, and if you aren't an ally, you're an enemy." I opened my mouth to protest, but he waved me quiet. "I know, I know, you're not an enemy, I know that. Newt is incredibly shortsighted at times, and he doesn't look past the immediate tactical victory to the long term strategic loss. Right now all he sees is that he just lost to a man he despises. Newt's natural instinct is going to be to double down and attack again. That is not going to be in your interest."

"I am going to have to distance myself from him, which I am sure he will be happy to help with." I could just see running ads saying I wasn't really a key ally in the Contract with America. Unbelievable!

There wasn't much we could come up with. This was going to come down to plain old fashioned campaigning. We came up with two major thrusts.

First, just like an old time smash-mouth football game, we were going to have to keep running the ball, going for two or three yards at a time, and not give up too many yards to the other team. There would be no Hail Mary passes or glorious 99 yard kick returns. The legendary Vince Lombardi, longtime coach of the Green Bay Packers, would start each season by holding up a football and saying, "This is a football!" We were going to go back to the basics.

In campaign terms, this meant doing the basics. I needed to contact everybody who had ever donated or helped or worked on a campaign and ask them to do it all over again. Nobody could come up with any dirt on either of the Rymarks. (When discussing Donna Rymark, John Thomas had shaken his head in disgust and commented, 'What are we going to say? Her tits are too big and her legs are too long?' Millie and Cheryl countered by pointing to a picture of Steve Rymark in running shorts, with what looked like a roll of socks stuffed down his pants, and said, 'Some of us like other things, too.'; Marilyn simply giggled. Great! American democracy was being determined by penis length and bra size! How the hell did I ever get in this mess?) We were going to have to buy a lot of ads and push all the wonderful stuff we were doing for everybody, and not dwell on any of the big policy debates in Washington. It was going to be expensive.

There was a very strange response to Donna Rymark, one that I hadn't expected. I came home one evening to find my wife chatting on the telephone in the kitchen. She tilted her cheek towards me, so I leaned down and kissed her. I glanced at her and noticed that something seemed different, but she was yapping away, so I dumped my briefcase in my office and went to the bedroom and changed out of my suit. When I got back to the kitchen Marilyn was hanging up the phone. "How was work?", she asked.

"Every day it is a privilege and honor to represent the Maryland Ninth and protect the citizens thereof from the godless hordes bent on their utter destruction."

"You're a selfless hero."

"And in need of a drink." I pulled a bottle of Louis Jadot Burgundy from the wine rack. I looked at Marilyn again. "Is that a new outfit?"

She lit up. "You noticed!"

"I always notice what you're wearing."

"No you don't!"

I had to smile at that. "Guys always notice what women are wearing, so they can figure out how to get it off of them."

That earned me a squawk of protest. "You are an awful person! If I told the citizens of the Maryland Ninth what you said, you'd lose the women's vote, for sure!"

"But I'd gain the men's vote.", I said, shrugging. "So, that's new?" Marilyn had on a tight black skirt that ended about an inch above her knees, but had an interesting slit up the back a few inches higher. Up top she was wearing a tight fitted red tunic-shirt that overlaid the skirt, unbuttoned down to a point you could see a touch of cleavage, with a gold sash tied asymmetrically at the waist. She also had on some nice sheer hosiery, and some pointy-toed high heels.

"You like it?"

"Yeah. Very nice." She looked both cute and sexy. "Are those pantyhose or stockings?"

"None of your business.", she replied primly.

"I think it is precisely my business!" I moved closer and managed to back my wife against the kitchen island. Even as she laughed and protested, I managed to reach down and begin tugging the hem of her skirt northward. Marilyn's propriety was saved, however, when the back door slammed and the twins roared in.

"You can behave!", she told me, grinning.

"Huh! So this is how you spend your day, while I am off serving the populace? You go shopping?"

"Precisely. Some of our friends decided to do an intervention."

"What?!"

"That's what I said.", she admitted. "It was decided that we needed to fight fire with fire, so to speak. I needed to dress better to match Donna Rymark, so Taylor, Cheryl, and Missy decided we needed to update my wardrobe."

I rolled my eyes. "Just how much did all this cost me? And by the way, Missy Talmadge is a Democrat. Isn't she rooting for Steve Rymark?"

"Yeah, but she wanted to go shopping, so she went with us anyway."

"Good Lord!", I muttered. "So you bought some new outfits?"

She smiled and nodded. Then I took an even close look at her. "There's something else." Marilyn had a mysterious smile on her face, and it took me a few seconds. "Did you do something with your hair?"

She put a hand up to her head and said, "Do you like it? I got it trimmed a bit."

"Very cute." Still something seemed a touch different. I looked at her from different angles, and then it hit me. I grinned and said, "You colored your hair!" Marilyn had been starting to get a few gray strands, and they were now gone.

Marilyn's eyes opened wide! "No, no, I didn't!"

She looked way too guilty! "You did! I can tell! You did!" I started laughing, and it only got worse when she slugged me in the shoulder. That made me keep going. "Does the rug match the drapes?! Do the collars match the cuffs?!"

Marilyn shrieked at me loud enough to get the girls to come into the kitchen, and she tried to punch me a second time, so I wrapped her up in my arms as I kept laughing. Holly looked at her sister and said, "They're crazy!"

"They're weird!", replied Molly.

That made Marilyn start laughing, too. At that time I was informed that I wouldn't be seeing any collars, cuffs, rugs, or drapes for the rest of my life, which just kept me laughing. I just had to keep going, though. "Did you guys go shopping for new glasses?" Marilyn is nearsighted. It hit me when I was 18, but before I ever met her. She had never known me when I didn't wear glasses. For my wife, however, it had started in her early 30s, and was now to the point where she needed glasses to be able to watch television or see a movie. Since she refused to admit to her vision problems, and refused to wear her glasses, she was constantly squinting or trying to fake it.

"NO!" She smacked me again, and started me laughing some more.

I retaliated by wrapping her up again in my arms, and this time I managed to pull her skirt high enough that I could feel the tops of her stockings. "Want me to find out if you're going commando?"

She laughed. "Later, and if you don't start behaving yourself, never!"

"Since when did you want me to behave myself?" I pinched her ass and then let her go and poured the wine. Marilyn blushed at that. "Any chance you guys did some shopping at Victoria's Secret or Frederick's of Hollywood?" That got an even bigger blush as a response.

With Marilyn trying to match Donna Rymark in the style department (although she would never be able to match her in height) our other big thrust was going to be somehow publicly distancing myself from Newt Gingrich. We had to paint him as an out of touch demagogue who had lured me astray, but now I was back on the path of goodness and righteousness. This left a sour taste in my mouth. I had known full well what I was doing when I helped to oust the Democrats, and I firmly believed that the elements of the Contract with America were for the good of all of us.

The one thing I agreed with, though, was that Newt was nowhere near done with his feud with Bill Clinton. I knew he was going after Slick Willie on every front he could, and in the most over the top fashion possible. For one thing, Monica Lewinsky was already working at the White House as an intern. I had seen her in passing once, and almost did a double take when I realized who she was. Pretty girl, I suppose, though more than a bit chunky for my taste. On the other hand, I like curvy brunettes, and if she had lost about twenty or thirty pounds around the midsection even I might have been tempted. Maybe she just gave great head! Clinton couldn't keep his dick in his pants if you sewed the zipper shut, and no matter what I did in the here and now, Newt was going to hammer him on it.

In other areas, Clinton was equally vulnerable. On the personal side, Ken Starr was already investigating the Clintons about their Whitewater Development investment, and this was just going to dive deeper and deeper into their messy and complicated financial affairs. On the public side, there was the controversy about the White House Travel Office, improper access to various FBI files, and already some glimmerings of various espionage scandals involving Chinese businessmen with ties to Beijing. I told Marilyn that he was a great politician but I wouldn't let him in the front door of the house, and I wouldn't leave her or the kids alone with him. I'd make him come in through the utility room, and then wash my hands after shaking his.

All this meant that Gingrich had plenty of fuel to build a fire under the man, and he had no intention of not lighting the match.

What did it mean for me? No matter what my personal thoughts, I couldn't be seen being petty. If Newt started pushing on Clinton's marital infidelities or his pot smoking or draft dodging, I couldn't allow myself to be drawn into it. I had to stand back and maintain a statesmanlike attitude. Some of it I didn't care about (smoking marijuana) and some didn't apply to me (my zipper was firmly closed, thank you very much, but Newt was a well known womanizer; the pot was calling the kettle black) and some I just didn't want to touch (I served, but nothing good would come of me going after Clinton; better to just behave myself when asked about it.)

There was one way to differentiate myself from Rymark, though, and that was to push myself as a leader. Every politician worth his salt tells the voters he is going to be a leader, but damn few ever really are. In my case, I could point to legislation I had sponsored or co-sponsored, and the Contract with America, and say, 'Like it or not, you have elected a leader of Congress. Do you want a leader, or not?' I was going to have to run on my record, such as it was.

More than a few moments for this occurred during the election season. The President had signed the new version of the Defending the Second Amendment Act into law in November. Almost all laws have some form of waiting period, typically 90 days or more, before the law kicks in. This period allows the states to take measures to put the law into effect. For instance, if we passed a law requiring the states to inspect school cafeterias (just for example; they do it already anyhow) the delay allows the states to write the rules, hire a few inspectors, print up inspection forms, and so forth. In the case of D2A, the law went into effect on February 20, 1996, the day after President's Day.

The new law was, to put it mildly, controversial in Maryland. It proved popular with large portions of the public, but not with the higher ups in the State Attorneys' offices or the Maryland Attorney General, or with upper ranks of the State Police. It was surprisingly popular in Baltimore itself, which is very black and very Democratic, but when you thought about it, you realized most violence in the black community is from other blacks. Regardless, Rymark was publicly against the law, and the Attorney General for Maryland had vowed to sue, all the way up to the Supreme Court, to have it overturned.

That gave us an opportunity for some showmanship. The current Attorney General was Joe Curren, a long time political powerhouse with a history of supporting gun control laws. He was so anti-D2A that he had ignored the 90 day requirement to prepare for 'shall issue' concealed weapon carry permits. He simply said that Maryland was going to ignore the law, and deny all permits and refuse to accept out of state permits, just like before. I got together with John Thomas and Brewster McRiley, and we decided to fight fire with fire. We announced publicly that I would be traveling to Baltimore on February 20 and would apply in person for my Federally approved gun permit. Curren took the bait, and responded on the evening news that he would be on hand to personally deny the permit, and if I were to actually have a concealed weapon on my person, he would order me arrested on the spot!

We got a permit application and filled it out. Then we did something that I didn't think Curren was expecting – we hired a lawyer. Not just any lawyer, either, but David Boies, a partner at Cravath, Swain, and Moore, one of the most preeminent attorneys in the country. He had fought a bunch of high profile cases, sometimes defending and sometimes attacking, but almost always winning. He was going to cost us a fortune, so we had the American Renaissance Initiative foot the bill. At that point Wayne LaPierre and the NRA weighed in, wanting to contribute and get their name attached. I called Wayne and told him in no uncertain terms that the NRA was about as popular in Maryland as a ham and cheese sandwich in Jerusalem, and that if he wanted this to go through, to back off and shut up. He blustered at that and threatened to pull any funding from my campaign, but it was a hollow threat, since he had never donated dollar one.

February 20 dawned cold and clear, and we drove from my office in the Rayburn building up I-95 to Baltimore. John Thomas was earning his pay, since when we arrived at 10 AM at the corner of St. Paul and East Lexington, there were already cameras and microphones set up. There were also a number of State Police officers standing around, and when my party and I got out of the limo, several of them came over to us. The highest ranking officer present, a major, got in my face and asked, "Are you Carl Buckman?"

"Yes, I am."

"Are you carrying a handgun, sir?"

The cameras were rolling, I could tell, and I simply smiled and told the truth. "No, I am not."

"Sir, it has been reported than you are carrying a firearm. Are you denying that report?"

It was like the guy was reading from a script. "I deny I am carrying a firearm, officer.", I replied.

"Sir, since I have received a credible report that you are carrying a firearm, I must insist that you be searched. If you are carrying a firearm and have no permit to do so, I will have no choice but to place you under arrest. If you wish to leave, however, I will not do so at this time."

Ah! Arrest me before we could get to the permit process. Behind me several others began protesting loudly and longly, but I simply smiled and raised my hands over my head, and stepped forward. A couple of beefy sergeants stepped forward, and while one eyed me while resting his hand on the butt of his gun, the other gave me a very thorough frisk, even to the point of having me remove everything from my pockets. I wasn't carrying a gun, or anything else for that matter, not even a nail file. I only had my driver's license in my pocket for identification. I smiled all the while this was going on, and after they stepped back and shook their heads, I simply smiled and turned back to the major. "Satisfied?", I asked.

He grumbled something but stepped out of the way. I led the way through the doors into the lobby. Joe Curren was standing there looking unhappy that I wasn't being arrested for packing heat. Behind us the rest of the group came in, including the camera crews. I waited until everybody was set, and then stepped forward. "Attorney General Curren, my name is Carl Buckman. I am here to apply for a concealed carry weapon permit pursuant to the Federal Defending the Second Amendment Act of 1995. Here is my application." I flourished it for the cameras. "As per the provisions of the law, you have five business days to issue an approval or denial. Can I expect a response by the end of business the 27th?"

Curren smirked, and turned to face the cameras. "The State of Maryland denies the constitutionality of this so-called act. Maryland law states that applications must be made to the Secretary of the State Police and require 90 days for review. Therefore this application is denied as improperly filed." With his own flourish, he tore it in half and then dropped the pieces, to let them flutter to the floor.

That was all it took for me. I stepped back and David Boies popped forward. Before Curren could react, Boies had a blue document in his hand, which he slapped into Curren's hand. "My name is David Boies and I am the attorney for Mr. Buckman. This is a Federal court order demanding..." He was off and running. How he managed to do it was beyond me, but he basically had a Federal judge slap a show-cause order on the state demanding to know why Maryland wasn't obeying the new Federal law. He had other Federal paperwork with him, too, and one of them was a writ that allowed me to carry a concealed weapon while waiting for the Federal court case to be resolved. Joe Curren had not been ready for that one, and he turned an interesting shade of purple.

Boies was a real showman, that much I had to give him. He led the way out of the building, with the reporters in tow, and we went to the rear of the limo. There, in the trunk, was my old .45. I ostentatiously removed my suit coat and pulled on a shoulder holster, and then loaded a magazine into the pistol, and placed that in the holster. Then I took back my jacket and put it on. I was now officially 'carrying a concealed weapon.'

From the doorway the State Police major looked livid, and looked like he was going to barge out and have me arrested on the spot, but then I saw Curren place a hand on his arm and hold him back. Boies had told us that while I could be arrested, the odds were that this would really piss off the tame Federal judge he had in his pocket. If he got pissed off enough, he could send Federal Marshals out to cut me loose and issue bench warrants demanding the presence of Curren and any State Police personnel involved.

I had a few people who thought my arrest would make for great television, and were hoping I would get the cuffs slapped on me. My own thinking was rather more divided. Yes, it would be great television, but, getting arrested? I told Marilyn before this started that while I had seen more than my share of jails over the years, the only time I had ever actually been charged with anything was the time I got caught sleeping on the beach with Marty and Ricky when we were on that road trip, and that wasn't even a misdemeanor, but just a violation. Up until now, if I had to fill out a job application, for instance, when it asked if I had ever been arrested or convicted, I could honestly say, 'No!' Marilyn wasn't amused by my thinking. She didn't want me being arrested by anybody for anything.

As soon as I had my suit coat back on again, I slapped a smile on my face and turned to face the cameras. It was cold, but I would just have to suck it up. Doing this all in a trench coat wasn't going to cut it. The questions were immediately forthcoming.

"Congressman Buckman!? Do you plan to wear a gun from now on?"

"Well, that's kind of the point of the concealed weapon permit, isn't it? You won't know if I am or if I'm not!"

"Why won't you answer the question?"

"I did answer the question. If a criminal decides to attack or rob somebody now, he won't know if his victim will be able to fight back, will he? Maybe that will keep him from trying."

"Won't that mean he'll just get a gun of his own?"

"The criminals already have all the guns they could ask for. This just evens the playing field for all the regular citizens out there."

And then I got the question I knew was coming, the big one, the one that had to be asked:

"Congressman, the State's Attorney has been quoted as saying that the only reason you are doing this is to justify your killing your brother. What do you say about that?"

I straightened up and faced the cameras as best I could. I was starting to freeze, but this needed to be done right. My political future was depending on it.

"Yes, this is about my brother, but not to justify it. No this is to prevent what happened to me from happening to somebody else.

When a madman decided to attack my family, I did the proper and legal things. I went to the police. They told me they couldn't protect us. My wife was being followed, her car was vandalized and set on fire, our home was firebombed. We had a psychotic killer trying to butcher my wife and infant son, and I was told I couldn't protect them either. I asked if I could get a permit to carry a weapon, a weapon I had worn honorably while serving my country, and was told not to even bother asking.

I was told by the police that the state of Maryland would prefer that my family be hacked to death by a madman than that I carry a gun to protect them. I was told that if I carried a gun I would be the one arrested, not whoever was chasing us. And I was told that if I was smart, I should do it anyway, since I was rich enough to be able to hire lawyers to get out of jail.

So, is this about my brother? Yes, because I don't want any of my fellow citizens to have to go through what I did 13 years ago. I want them to know that if they are confronted with a criminal, it won't be them that has to face the music, but the criminal. And I want them to know that I stand with them and will fight this battle for them! There is a reason for the Second Amendment, and it is time the politicians in Annapolis understand that!"

And there we had it. I had worked on that 'impromptu' response for several days with Marty and Boies and a fellow from ARI, and it was full of buzzwords that were guaranteed to play well in the media. 'Madman' – 'Psychotic' – 'Butcher' – 'Hack' – all these words were to evoke a horrific image of what could happen to the viewer. 'Honorable service' – 'Protect' – 'Battle' – all of these words were chosen to showcase me in the best light, and highlight my service to the country, and to the voters. We agonized over our choice of words as much as any speechwriter working on the State of the Union address.

We called it quits at that. They kept shouting the same questions over and over again, but I just smiled and waved and got back into the limo. Once we were rolling down the road, David Boies looked at me and asked, "Do you really plan to wear that thing everywhere?"

I snorted a laugh. "God forbid! I have a security detail to handle that sort of thing now. If the bad guys get close enough to me that I need a gun, I should be able to pick one up from one of these guys." On hearing that, the driver snorted, and the security guy in the passenger seat turned around and rolled his eyes at me. "No, I think I am going to take this home and stuff it in my desk, where I normally keep it."

Boies shrugged and we talked over the probable events for the near future. By filing suit in Federal court and serving papers already, we had kept the matter out of the Maryland courts, and probably cut at least a year off the time this would languish. We could expect a resolution by the end of 1997 or sometime in 1998. We drove back to my office in Washington. I made an early day of it and flew home mid-afternoon. I wanted to watch this on the news tonight.

What I hadn't expected was Charlie to brace me when I got home. WBAL hadn't waited to run the episode on the 6:00 News, but ran it earlier, at 5:00. "Dad! I saw you on the news when I got home! Are you really carrying a gun?! Cool! Can I see it?!" He was really excited.

I wasn't. Whatever this was, it sure wasn't cool! "Settle down, son. Let me say hello to your mother first."

Marilyn came in from the kitchen. "How was your day? I saw you on television, too." She had a look on her face that seemed to combine pleasure that I was home, and displeasure about my being on television.

"Okay, I guess."

Marilyn gave me a nice and simple kiss, and then leaned in and whispered in my ear. "You need to have a talk with your son."

I just nodded back at her. I hung up my outer coat, and then crooked a finger at Charlie. "Follow me."

Charlie had a look of concern on his face at that, as in 'What did I do?' I led the way into my office and after he came in, I pointed him to the couch, and closed the door behind us.

"Charlie, I think we need to have a little talk. You think this is cool?"

"Yeah! Carrying a gun around..."

"Charlie, this is many things, but cool is not one of them." I took off my jacket and tossed it on an armchair, leaving me wearing the shoulder holster with my Colt in it. I pulled the gun from the holster, removed the magazine, worked the action to make sure there wasn't a round chambered, and handed him the weapon. "Here, take this."

For somebody so interested in it, when faced with the reality, he reached out and took it rather gingerly. He gripped it so lightly he almost dropped it on the floor, and had to fumble around for a good grip. He looked at me nervously. I reached out and took it back from him. "Didn't think it would be so heavy, did you?" I sat down at my desk.

"Uh, no."

"It's heavy in more than one way. Charlie, this is a gun. It's not a toy. Its sole purpose is to kill people. I hope I never have to carry this thing again. I sure don't plan to wear it around every day. It's one thing to take it down to the range in Parkton and shoot off a few magazines to stay in practice, but I never, ever want to have to use it again for real." I turned in my seat and unlocked my desk. The Colt and the holster went in the bottom drawer. I relocked the desk and put the keys in my pocket again.

He looked at me for a moment and then said, "Dad, what was it..."

" ... like? What was it like?" Charlie nodded. "What was it like killing my brother?" He nodded a second time. I sighed at that. "Jesus, Charlie, it's not something you talk about, you know? I mean, killing your uncle? That's who he was, you know?" He just sat there and looked at me, not saying anything, but waiting for me to continue.

I couldn't look at him. I looked over at the far wall, not really seeing the bookshelves, but seeing the kitchen that day back in 1983, and even further back, to a night in 1981. I turned back to my son. "Killing a man changes things, Charlie. It's not like on TV or the movies. There's a cost to it. Every day I think about it. Every day that I go into the kitchen I am reminded of where I had to shoot a man and leave his body on the floor for the police to remove." Charlie's eyes opened at that. I don't think he ever linked the facts of my killing my crazy brother with the reality that it occurred in the same room he ate his breakfast cereal in.

"There's more to it than that, Charlie. I had to do it, make no mistake. He really was crazy and he really was trying to kill you and your mother, but when I killed him, I also killed the rest of my family. My sister, your godmother, your Aunt Suzie – she basically ran away from home. She changed her name and moved half way across the country to get away from our parents and me. I had aunts and uncles and cousins, Charlie. I haven't talked to any of them since then, not even my own godmother. My parents, the grandparents you've never met, call me a monster. My family is gone, Charlie. There's a cost you pay when you kill someone." I tapped the desk where I had put my pistol. "It's not a toy, and it's never cool."

My son sat there for a minute, and then said, "Sorry, Dad."

I simply smiled and waved it off. "Don't worry. No harm, no foul." I nodded towards the door.

Charlie stood up and went to the door. I sat there for a moment longer, and then I heard him say, "You all right, Dad?"

I snorted a touch and turned to face him. "It's okay. Anytime I wonder about that day, I just look at you and your mother and your sisters, and I get better." I stood up and motioned for him to leave, and then followed him into the kitchen.

Marilyn was in the kitchen taking a loaf of bread out of the oven. It smelled wonderful. She and the twins had made a Crock-Pot full of spaghetti sauce, and a pot of water was boiling on the stove. I grabbed a bottle of Chianti out of the rack. "Is everything all right?", she asked.

"Just fine."

Behind me, our son was standing stock still in the kitchen, realizing this was where a dead guy had laid. He looked at me guiltily, asking me silently, 'Here?' I didn't say a word, but subtly pointed towards the end of the island, where Hamilton had landed on the floor. Charlie's eyes opened wide, and he backed out of the room.

Marilyn looked at me and asked, "What in the world was that all about?"

I smiled and poured some wine for both of us. "I'll tell you later."

Steve Rymark proved himself a formidable opponent. In some ways, not only did he run on his own record, he ran on mine, in a negative fashion. He was a big believer in gun control, so D2A showed I was an out of control gun nut, playing into the hands of the National Rifle Association. Additionally, of course, I was part of the Newt Gingrich Gang of Eight that shut down the government and raised taxes. Whatever was going wrong in government, you could be sure that it was my personal fault.

There wasn't much I could protest about with this. It was true. We had fundamentally different views of the Second Amendment. I was one of Gingrich's protégés, even if he wasn't speaking to me at the moment. I was a charter member of the Gang of Eight. We had shut down the government and we had ended up raising taxes. I had voted for the linkage between the continuing resolution and limiting the debt ceiling.

When you get handed lemons, make lemonade. We worked up some quotes and sound bites that would make me sound leader-like. When I got hit by questions or complaints, I was to adopt a tough love attitude – these were things that had to be done, or the country was going to hell in a hand basket.

"Yes, I was part of the government shutdown. Am I happy it got to that point? No, of course not! Did we need to institute the discipline to fix our problems? Yes we did!"

and

"This stuff is important! Budgets and deficits and taxes are important! It's not fun and it's not sexy and it's not exciting, but it's important. Somebody has to lead on these issues, and if it isn't going to be Bill Clinton, then it will have to be us. I am one of those leaders!"

and

"Budget deficits matter! We have borrowed money from around the world to pay for things that we should be paying for ourselves. One of these days they are going to come calling! Why are we borrowing money from China to pay for [fill in the blank]? If it's that important, we have to either pay for it ourselves, or find the money elsewhere. We have to stop spending money we don't have!"

and the ever popular

"I pay my bills! You pay your bills! Your kids are paying their bills! So why can't the government pay its bills?! This stuff matters!"

All this was part of the stump speech. The overall approach was one of sorrow. Yes, I know it was a terrible thing, but if Clinton wasn't going to behave responsibly, and take action, then we would have to force him to take action. That was when we got to the second half of the speech, the results we had to date.

"Was it pretty? No! Was it fun? No! Was it necessary? Yes! Did it work? Yes! The budget deficit for this year is half what it was last year! Next year it will be even lower! We need to clean up our act and get our financial house in order! We are going to eliminate the deficit, but only with the continued support of the voters – you folks out there. We have to fix this mess, and to do that, we need to stay with the program and send me back to Washington to lead this fight!"

We were just going to have to see how it all played out.

Chapter 121: Children, All Sorts

1996 - 1997

Well, I survived the '96 election. As close fought elections went, this was cleaner than most, simply because neither of us gave the other any dirt to throw. I'm not talking about our records as public servants, but about the personal stuff. By now my life was an open book. What was Steve Rymark going to accuse me of, killing my brother? Please! Old news! As for him, believe me we looked! His zipper seemed tighter than mine. Donna Rymark simply glowed as she grew bigger during the campaign. When she gave birth to another son in August, the only thing we could think to do was to visit them in the hospital, all of us, kids included, each carrying a large box of infant disposable diapers and smiling for the cameras.

It was an expensive election. We had to match Rymark ad for ad, and he had a lot of money to spend. There was a feeling at the Democratic National Headquarters that a bunch of us who were tied to Gingrich were vulnerable, and they funneled some money to local candidates. Additionally, the Maryland Ninth is not a poor district, especially in the Baltimore county area, and Rymark had more than a few donors able to give the maximum. He had a war chest ample to fight me.

Rymark spent a lot of time beating on me about being a member of the Gang of Eight and shutting down the government and being a buddy of Gingrich. The best I could come up with was that he was a liberal Democrat who hated the Second Amendment. I just kept up my regular ground game, donating to worthy causes, speaking to every group available, and pushing the incumbency card hard. November 5, my 41st birthday, I managed to get reelected. It was a 55-45 win, which was roughly half the margin I had been averaging. By most standards it was a landslide, but to say it was unnerving was an understatement. Steve Rymark called at half past eleven that night and conceded quite graciously. By the time I made my speech, it was too late for anybody to give a shit.

Maybe I'd get lucky and in 1998 he'd run for something else, anything else! On the downside, most of the upcoming races would have Democratic incumbents, like Parris Glendenning for Governor or Barbara Mikulski for Senator. Then again, the good news for me was that we were no longer in an era when the loser could try again in a few years. Nowadays, if you lost, you were generally through. I probably wouldn't have to face Steve Rymark and his unbelievably adorable family ever again. On the downside, if Donna Rymark ever decided to run for office, I was up shit creek! If they went to picture ballots, all she had to do was wear a low cut blouse and I was totally screwed.

Ultimately, about a month after the election, Steve was approached by the re-elected Clinton White House and offered a position as the United States Attorney for Maryland, replacing Lynne Battaglia, who took a job as a Federal Judge. It was a no-brainer move. At the start of the year he had been an assistant county prosecutor, and at the end of the year he was the Federal prosecutor responsible for the entire state. If he did well there, he could run for Senate or Governor someday.

If the Democrats were hoping to tar and feather the Gang of Eight and ride us out of town on a rail, they uniformly failed. All of us survived the election, as did Newt. The same could not be said for all of our colleagues, however. The Republicans still controlled the House, but we lost 10 seats to the Dems, making it 228-206-1. Newt held onto his position as Speaker, but there was some loud grumbling. More than a few of our colleagues were looking at the results, and at the much tighter races they had fought to stay where they were, and were pointing fingers at Gingrich for making life a lot more difficult for them. On the plus side, nobody was pointing fingers at me or anybody else in the Gang of Eight (Seven now, since Rick Santorum was a Senator and beyond us mere Congressmen). For one thing, they had all voted as Newt had demanded we vote, so the blame for their seriously depleted campaign chests was on him.

I'm not sure if Newt noticed the finger pointing. I am sure that if he did notice, he didn't care. He was on a mission, a mission to destroy Bill Clinton. He began talking about impeachment, at least quietly, and seemed to be looking for an excuse to make it happen. He took the stunned looks on the faces of those he talked to as approval.

Impeachment is a big deal, a damn big deal! It had only been used twice so far, once on Andrew Johnson after the Civil War, and once on Dick Nixon after Watergate. Johnson's real crime was that he was a moderate in a time of radicalism; the Republican Congress wanted the South to suffer and Johnson wanted things to settle down. They trumped up some charges and put him on trial; Johnson won by a single vote. Nixon's offenses were much more serious and legitimate, and it never actually got so far as an actual impeachment. Nixon was told that he would be impeached if he didn't resign first, so he resigned. They never actually got around to drafting the paperwork.

Now Gingrich was hunting around for anything he could lay his hands on to fry Clinton's ass. The Constitution is delightfully vague in some areas, and this was one of them. A President can be impeached for 'treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors'. Treason and bribery were pretty self-explanatory, but what was meant by high crimes and misdemeanors was left blank. Johnson's crime was ignoring the real powers in Congress and the Cabinet, not precisely what the Founders had in mind. Nixon's crimes actually involved real crimes, like ordering break-ins and running a slush fund out of the Oval Office. Clinton's crimes, such as they were, seemed to fall quite a bit lower down the scale, but Newt was pushing hard.

So far, all that was known for sure was that there had been allegations of bribe taking in the Whitewater real estate mess in Arkansas; although Clinton never got the money, a friend did. To what extent any of this was credible was questionable. There was a single person making the complaint and it was a legal quagmire. Considering that the Clintons actually lost money on the project made a lot of us figure it wasn't worthy of the investigation – if you make money, okay, it's bribery; if you lose money, you're stupid and deserve whatever happens to you. As far as Clinton's numerous marital affairs, so far there was just a whole lot of smoke but no sign of any fire; how that would end up in an impeachment nobody could figure out. You don't get impeached for screwing around, you get divorced! The same applied to all the other little nonsense around the joint, the FBI files and the Travel Office issues. It's embarrassing, but not something to be impeached over.

One of the most common jokes at the time was:

'Q: What do you get when you cross a crooked lawyer and a crooked politician?

A: Chelsea!'

On the plus side, since I wasn't a Senator, I didn't have to vote on the impeachment. I resolved to not vote for the impeachment in any matters crossing my desk in the House. If Hillary cut his schlong off with a rusty machete that would be sufficient for me.

My enemies weren't only on the Democratic side. Newt Gingrich was of the opinion that if you weren't for him, you were against him. Shortly after the election, I discovered I was no longer on the Armed Services Committee. I was now back in Science, Space, and Technology. I was about in the middle of the pack. I think that if the House had a committee on extinct animals, I would have been assigned there. On the plus side, my old buddy Harlan now had enough time in the Army that with accrued leave and a variety of other credits he could retire in February of 1997. He managed to get an assignment for a few months directly with the Armed Services Committee, and found himself a future position with United Defense, the manufacturers of the M109 Paladin howitzers that he had worked with earlier in his career.

I lost a couple of junior staffers when it became known that Gingrich had me in his sights. My senior people could see what was happening, but they could also see that Gingrich was getting more than a little nutty. I told them that Gingrich was going to wear out his welcome sooner rather than later, and that sticking with me might just work out better in the long term. At least we didn't lose our offices. The House rules wouldn't let Gingrich send me packing off to Cannon and the Cages, which was certainly something he had to be contemplating.

Meanwhile a massive crisis was brewing in the Buckman household. It had been simmering for a dozen years now, and was now finally erupting into a full blown disaster. The twins were twelve-and-a-half years old, rapidly approaching thirteen, and were in the seventh grade. My wonderful little angels were no more. They had died, killed by zombies, and their brains had been sucked out and replaced by the spawn of Satan.

Almost on a daily basis came anguished cries of 'MOM!' and hateful stares at me as they screamed 'YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND!' followed by a SLAM as a bedroom door closed suddenly and forcefully. These outbursts were generally caused by my simple existence and perpetual survival on the planet. From what I could determine Lucifer's daughters simply objected to my possession of life.

I was at a loss to explain the cause of this sudden hatred for me. Marilyn was no help whatsoever, rolling her eyes at these outbursts and telling me to leave them alone, it was 'growing pains'. Both girls hit puberty within a day of each other. They were changing, too. Up until now they had been short and a bit scrawny, with their mother's round face and upturned nose, but my family's straight hair. Now, while they were still short, they were filling out, and weren't all that scrawny anymore. In fact, they were growing breasts and their hips were getting broader. Worst of all, I was not the only male noticing. Their brother Charlie tended to tease them mercilessly, occasioning head slaps from the parental unit nearest him when we caught him. That wasn't the bad part. The bad part was that other males were noticing, males who were not interested in teasing them. It seems that even the daughters of billionaire Congressman can get bra straps snapped and requests for 'dates.'

Neither their mother nor their father went along with any of this nonsense, but only I had to suffer their wrath. Marilyn escaped most of it. It just wasn't fair.

I had gone through this once before, with Maggie. (Alison, with her Williams Syndrome, had been nowhere near as nutty.) I had thought Maggie was impossible, but I had never contemplated going through adolescent hormones with twins! I started telling Marilyn I was going to permanently move to Washington. "Only if I can go with you!", was the response. The screams of outrage from Holly and Molly got especially loud when I asked Marilyn what she thought of sending the girls to boarding school in Switzerland, and only bringing them back when they turned eighteen. Both Marilyn and I knew the girls were listening to us and watching, so when she said we should look into it, they ran screaming to their room, and slammed the door behind them. She watched them run, and then looked at me and smiled. "You're mean!"

Music began blaring from down the hall. "You think so?"

My wife snorted and went back to making a pie.

Another time they announced they were going to leave, "And there's nothing you can do about it!" This was told us right after an argument before dinner, so we were all in the dining room together.

I nodded thoughtfully, and then commented, "Well, you might just want to know, you've heard about GPS, right? The global tracking stuff? Well, when you two were babies, we were worried about kidnappers, so we had tags surgically implanted inside you. We can find you anywhere in the world." I was keeping a straight face through this. Marilyn simply rolled her eyes, and Charlie grinned and nodded.

The girls were thunderstruck, of course. They didn't realize GPS wasn't around when they were born. "You didn't!", cried Molly.

"Where is it?!", yelled her sister.

"Small of your back, near the spine."

"Yeah, I have one, too.", added Charlie. He spun around, lifting his shirt up from behind and running a finger along his lower back. "Right about here. I can feel it under the skin..."

Both girls screamed and ran from the dining room. Moments later we heard the door to their bedroom slam shut. Marilyn said, "Will you stop teasing them?", to me, and to Charlie she added, "And your father doesn't need any help from you!"

Charlie looked over at me, and I said, "Nice touch there – 'you can feel it under the skin.' They're down there right now looking for the scars and trying to trace it out."

Marilyn swatted me. "You're not helping!" She sighed and stood up. "I'd better go tell them."

"Can we do it after dinner? It's actually nice and quiet right now."

"NO!" She left the dining room and headed down the hall. Charlie and I finished setting the table and we served ourselves. Ten minutes later Marilyn led the twins back into the dining room; she looked amused, the twins looked murderous. Charlie started laughing and then grabbed his plate and ran out of the room before they could kill him.

At least they weren't actually dating yet. We had decided that wasn't happening until high school. Marilyn had told me in no uncertain terms (stern face and finger wagging, etc.) that no junior high school boys were going to have the same level of fun with her daughters that I had enjoyed at that age. I laughed pretty good at that – and agreed!

The summer of 1997 I went from being extravagantly wealthy to oil sheikh wealthy, although it wouldn't show up for a few years more. At the summer barbecue, held the first weekend in June this year, I managed to have a quiet break with Missy Talmadge, my lawyer Tucker Potsdam, and Dave Marquardt. We had been working with Dave since we made our first investment in Microsoft fifteen years ago, and now he was a partner in the Buckman Group's Silicon Valley investments. Even though I was no longer active in the Buckman Group, I had spent a lot of time there, and still knew the business.

(Normally Jake Junior would have been there as well, but he had taken the G-IV to Ireland with his family. His wife had family still over there, and they were taking a vacation. I simply told him to bring me back a bottle of whiskey from as many Irish distilleries as he could find, and I'd run a taste test afterwards.)

Dave Marquardt asked me, "So, what do you think is going to happen in Cupertino this year? When do you think they are going to file Chapter 11?"

Cupertino meant Apple Computer, of course. I smiled at Dave. "Now is the time to buy Apple cheap.", I answered.

Dave and Missy stared at me. "Buy? Are you kidding me? The stock is dropping through the floor!", exclaimed Missy.

I nodded. "Steve Jobs is going to slit Gil Amelio's throat sometime soon and take over again."

"So what? They threw him out once before for screwing up. Why would he do any better now?"

On the face of it, that was true. He had been forced out back in '85 in a boardroom coup, and had spent the next decade puttering around Silicon Valley and Hollywood. NeXT Computer proved a bust; Pixar and the Disney connection were wonders. When Apple bought NeXT last year, they were letting a wolf back into the fold. "Look, on the face of it, what you said is correct. My take on it is that Moses has been wandering around in the desert long enough, and it's time for him to lead his people again."

"He doesn't have enough money to do what needs to be done over there.", commented Dave.

"Have you followed the technology he developed with NeXT? He'll suck that into Apple and prune away the deadwood. Don't forget, the man might be an asshole, but he's a supremely talented asshole, and he has a vision for what he wants to do, which is something neither Sculley nor Spindler nor Amelio did."

"That still doesn't get him the money to keep the doors open."

"He will after you and Bill Gates put in a couple of hundred million.", I told him.

That made everyone blink. "Are you serious?", asked Missy.

I shrugged, but nodded. "Hey, I'm just a dedicated public servant who has no control over his investments, since they are all managed by a blind trust, so what do I know." That earned me some sly grins and smiles, since everyone there knew about how easily the rules for blind trusts could be manipulated. "What's the downside, though? If we split it with Microsoft, a mix of voting and non-voting stock, a hundred million each, the most we lose is the hundred million. Let's face it, it's serious money, but it won't bankrupt either Microsoft or us. What's the upside? Again, let's face it, you ain't going to be buying Apple stock much cheaper. It is all upside potential. We could make a fortune on this when he turns it around, and I know the guy is going to do that!"

"What's in it for Bill?", asked Dave.

"Microsoft Office for Apple, and no grief from Jobs about it. Bill makes his investment back just on the basis of additional software sales."

Dave Marquardt looked thoughtful at that. He was on Microsoft's board just like Jake Junior was. The kind of deal I was describing was definitely possible, if the two men pushed Gates on it. He looked over at Missy. "You know, he almost makes sense!"

"That's a very frightening thought, isn't it? Jake gets back next week. When he does, how about we sit down and talk about it?"

One of the nice things about private enterprise is that speed is so much faster for everything. If I had proposed something like this with Congress, it might come up for review in about ten years or so. Instead, Missy (and Dave on a conference call) sold it to Jake Junior when he came back from Ireland, and then they called Bill and told him they wanted to see him. He wasn't about to turn down two board members, so they flew out the next day, and ironed out the details inside of a week. Gates met with Jobs about a day after Jobs ousted Amelio. The ultimate deal announced in Boston at the summer MacWorld Expo was that the two companies would invest $185 million between them in a 50-50 split, with a mix of 70% nonvoting and 30% voting stock. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates made nice on stage, and swore undying love and devotion for each other, and announced a bunch of Microsoft software would be made available on Apple computers.

In a few years we would be as wealthy as Croesus!

That summer I faced a crisis totally uninvolved in politics. It was in July, a hot day, and I had worked in Washington that morning. Rather than fly back home, I had Tyrell fly me to Westminster in the early afternoon, where I drove over to my offices and I had a meeting with Cheryl and my staff, and then walked next door to have a meeting in my campaign office. Then I went home. I went into the house, curious about the little red Nissan I saw parked in the driveway. Charlie didn't own a car, although he did own a motorcycle that he couldn't drive on the road yet (he was still 15.) I went into the house and found Marilyn knitting something in the living room. She looked up at me and said, "Hi, honey. Home early?"

I leaned down and kissed her, and then flopped down in my recliner. "Somehow I just couldn't bear another minute of solving our nation's problems. Whatcha' making?"

"You said you wanted a new pair of slippers."

I smiled and nodded. Marilyn makes some really great slippers from rug yarn, warm and floppy, and surprisingly durable. They were sort of like really oversized socks that were stiff enough to stay up above my ankles. My last set was blue and a bit ragged. These were two-tone red. "Sounds good. Now, if I can get you to start knitting a flag, I'll take some photos, and we can use them in the next campaign."

"Yeah, right! Me and Betsy Ross!"

We both had a laugh at that. Dum-Dum was sleeping on the couch and snoring. "Where's the kids?"

"The girls went shopping in Towson with some friends. Charlie's in the pool."

"Whose car is that outside?", I asked.

Marilyn grinned. "That belongs to his new girlfriend, Missy Something-or-other."

I rolled my eyes. "Oh, boy! Let me guess. She brought her bikini?"

Marilyn simply smiled and kept knitting. Charlie was a 'chick magnet' at Hereford High. He was a big kid, good looking, handsome, muscular, and a jock. He had played both basketball and football on the varsity team last year, unusual since he had only been a sophomore. He might not have been able to drive, but it seemed like there was a steady stream of young ladies available to give him a lift. I would occasionally get an amused comment from one of the security guys who tailed him around, that they couldn't keep up with the changing cast of young ladies.

"I'm going to change.", I announced. "What's for dinner?"

"Hamburgers? We can grill them?"

I glanced out the window. It was a beautiful and sunny day. "Sounds good." I stood up and grabbed my briefcase. I went into my office and dropped off my briefcase, and then I went to our bedroom and changed into a Hawaiian shirt and cargo shorts. When I came out of the bedroom, I went into the kitchen to grab a cold beer, and as I did so, I looked out through the window to the pool. Nobody was in the pool. Curious, I went out through the patio door.

No, my eyes weren't deceiving me. The pool was empty. There were a couple of beach towels on the grass at the side, and a pair of pink flip-flops, but no kids. Grimacing to myself, I set my beer down on a patio table and went over to the pool house. The shades were partially drawn, and I couldn't really see inside, but the noises I heard made me very suspicious. Half dreading what I was about to encounter, I grabbed the doorknob and twisted. The door popped open, and there was Charlie, naked as the day he was born, laying on his back on the carpet, with an equally undressed Missy on top of him, straddling him and grinding down on him. I think they looked even more shocked than I felt when they looked up at me.

"Oh, Christ!", I muttered.

Missy squealed and rolled off my son, trying to cover herself and scrambling for her clothing, and leaving Charlie laying there, his tallywacker pointing at the ceiling. "DAD!", he protested.

I stepped back. "Playtime's over! I want you two dressed in two minutes!" I closed the door behind me as I left the pool house.

Inside I could hear the two of them scrambling around and getting dressed, and arguing about me. At one point I heard her say, "You said you could hear his helicopter coming a mile away!" I didn't catch the response. I smiled to myself. I'd have to keep that in mind for when the girls started dating.

It was over two minutes, but not by much, when the door to the pool house opened, and Charlie and his girlfriend scooted out. Their faces were a mix of fear, shame, and worry, especially since I was standing there with my arms crossed and my 'Father' look on my face. 'Father' doesn't smile; my 'Dad' look is a lot more pleasant. I was blocking the path back to the house.

Charlie tried to lead Missy around me, but I stepped in their way. "Hold on, you two. We need to have a talk!", I informed them.

"What?!", they both blurted out.

I pointed back to the pool house. "Let's return to the scene of the crime. We're going to have a discussion."

They looked horrorstricken at that, but I simply moved forward and chivied them back inside. Once there, I closed the door and said, "Open the blinds and get some light in here. I sniffed theatrically, and added, "And open the windows while you're at it." There was a distinct aroma of passion in the room. Both of the teens had the decency to blush in embarrassment. After the windows were opened and a breeze began blowing, I pointed at the couch. "Sit!" They sat down, painfully upright. I sat in an armchair in a much more relaxed pose.

"Okay, let's have a little conversation. Let me ask you a few questions. What kind of birth control are you two using?", I started with.

I don't think they were expecting that question, or maybe they just weren't expecting any questions, just a lecture. They looked at each other. Charlie started gabbling out an answer and she squeaked out, "I'm on the Pill."

I nodded. "Uh, huh. Were you also using a condom?"

"What?", they both uttered.

"A condom. You do know what they are, correct? Or were the both of you virgins before today?"

They started squawking about my questions, and Missy stood up. "You can't ask me that! I'm leaving!"

I shrugged. "There's the door. You leave and I'll be on the phone with your parents before you ever make it home." It was true, too. The security guys had her license number. I could make a call to the State Police and get a name and phone number before she cleared the driveway. Missy stopped dead in her tracks with a look of sheer horror on her face. I pointed back at the couch. "Or you can sit down and act like a grown up. You two think you're old enough for adult fun and games, then you're old enough for an adult conversation. Sit!"

Missy sat back down next to Charlie, looking defeated. "Now, were either of you virgins today?" Both turned beet red, and shook their heads in the negative. "Uh, huh. Next question – have you had other sexual partners before today?"

They both looked at each other. Charlie answered very slowly, "Yes."

Missy nodded, and also said, "Yes."

"Did both of you get tested for a sexually transmitted disease before you two became sexually active with each other?"

"Dad! It's not like ... No!"

"Jesus! What kind of girl..."

I held my hands up and told them to be quiet. It took a second. "Listen, I don't care who you are screwing or how many. What I care about is that nobody gets AIDS! You've heard about it, right? You've taken Health class, right? Were you paying attention!? There's no cure! You'll die from it! Use condoms! Jesus Christ, why the hell do you think they sell them!?" I chewed their asses a few minutes more, and then sent them on their merry way. Charlie I told to stick around.

Charlie gave Missy a very self-conscious kiss at her car, and then she took off. I wasn't sure how serious this romance was, but this couldn't have helped. So be it. As she left, I called him back, and pointed to the pool house. Time for another conversation. He came back over and I ushered him back inside, and closed the door again. "Sit down, Romeo. We need to finish this."

"Dad..."

"Shut up, Charlie. I didn't get into this in front of the young lady, but we need to talk." He shut his mouth. I settled back into the armchair. "Do you own any rubbers? Have you ever used a rubber?"

"No."

"No, you don't own any, or no, you've never used one?"

Charlie sheepishly admitted, "Neither."

"So, all of your girlfriends have been on the Pill?", I pushed.

"Dad!" I waited there and motioned for him to continue. "Uh, most have been on the Pill." My eyes opened wide at his idiocy, and I sat upright. Alarmed, he continued, "She said it was the wrong time, we'd be safe!" It tumbled out in a rush.

"Listen up! You know what they call morons like you? Fathers! Your grandparents use the rhythm technique. They've got 13 kids. It ain't real reliable!" Charlie's eyes opened wide at that. He knew about his mother's family.

"So that brings us to another topic. Are you in love with Missy? Are you planning to marry her?", I asked.

That earned me a confused look. "What? No! We're just having fun."

"Okay. There's two parts to that. First, girls get a lot more serious about who they fool around with than guys do. You might be surprised if I asked her that question. Second, if you don't plan to marry her, what happens if she gets pregnant?"

"Huh?"

I shook my head. "Did you see her taking a birth control pill? Or did you simply believe her when she told you?"

Charlie protested, "Missy's not like that!"

I shrugged. "No, she's probably not." Charlie smiled at that. I snapped my fingers at him. "Pay attention. I said probably. Listen very carefully to me." He nodded. "There are at least a couple of reasons I could see somebody lie about that. First, well, let's face it; I am a very rich man. Are there some young ladies who would be willing to get pregnant as a way to blackmail you, and through you, to blackmail me? What do you think?"

Charlie stared at me. "You're kidding me! That happens?"

"It could happen. I'm not saying it will happen, just that some people would think of it. Or somebody's father could think of it. Or somebody's real boyfriend could think of it.", I answered.

"Shit!" He looked at me after that, and said, "Sorry."

"Here's another possibility. This one is actually more probable, I suppose. You might think this is all just fun and games, but suppose she doesn't. Suppose she thinks she's in love. Suppose she thinks the only way to keep you from leaving her is to get pregnant. Suppose she thinks the only way to escape her parents is to get married. Suppose, suppose, suppose..." I shrugged again. "Charlie, I'm not saying this is happening with Missy, or any of the other girls you've met, but it has happened to other guys before. The only way to be absolutely sure is to keep Charlie Junior wrapped up, or simply keep your pants zipped."

"This is crazy!", he protested.

"Maybe I'm just paranoid. Or maybe I've seen too many guys get into trouble by sticking their dicks in every hole available. So here's something else I want you to do. How is it that you are screwing these girls and your mother and I find out when we walk in on you? If you like a girl enough to stick your dick in her, maybe you should have her come to dinner and meet us?"

"DAD!"

I stood up and motioned for my son to rise. "From now on, no more of this foolishness! The pool house is off limits for fun and games. What if your sisters had looked in the windows or come in the door?! You want to tell me how you explain that one?"

"Dad, what ... I mean, where..."

"Do I look like I care? Figure it out! As for the rubbers, I'll take you down to a pharmacy and show you where they are, but you have to buy them."

Charlie had a terrified look on his face. "No, Dad, I can't..."

"Wake up, Charlie! You think you're man enough to need them? Then you're man enough to buy them! And don't think you can get one of the security guys to buy them for you, either. I am going to give them specific orders not to help. Man up, Charlie!" He looked dejected at that, but didn't argue with me. "Now let's go inside. Your mother is sure to be curious about where we are.", I told him.

Suddenly Charlie got a nervous look on his face. Me catching him wasn't anywhere near as scary as his mother finding out. "Uh, Dad, you don't have to say anything to Mom, right?"

I clapped him on the shoulder, man to man. "No, I won't tell her." Then I gave him my biggest and most evil grin. "You will!"

I led the way into the house; my now warm beer I grabbed as we passed it. Marilyn was in the kitchen, heading towards the laundry room. "Where have you guys been? You left your beer outside, you know.", she told me. I held it up to show I had grabbed it. Charlie promptly tried to slip past me and head out of the room. I grabbed his arm and pushed him towards his mother. She saw this and said, "Okay, what's going on?!"

I kept my mouth shut. Charlie looked like he'd prefer facing a firing squad. He had a wild look in his eyes, and he was babbling a bit. I set my beer in the kitchen sink, and got another cold one, all the while staying between him and escape.

"Um ... uhhhh ... Mom ... uhh ... me and Missy...", he started, with the rest coming out in a rush.

By this point I felt safe stepping back, to open my new beer and take a sip. The results were fairly predictable. "CHARLIE!" followed by Marilyn clocking our offspring on the back of the head.

"Mom!?"

She smacked him on the head again and then started chewing his ass. I stood there, leaning against the refrigerator as she chewed on him, mostly about the same things I had said, like his sisters walking in on him, and his general irresponsibility. Then she turned to me and crossly said, "Well, don't just stand there! Don't you have something to say?!"

I shrugged. "I already said my piece to him. You're doing fine all on your own."

"Hmmmphhh!" She turned back to Charlie and sent him to his room to contemplate his sins. Charlie scooted out of the kitchen like a cat whose tail got stepped on. Marilyn looked at me, to find me with a sly smile on my face. "He's your son!"

I smiled broadly at that. "Do you want me to summon him back here, so we can discuss your virginal attributes on your wedding day?"

"You wouldn't dare!" I opened my mouth to say something, and she got in my face. "You just behave!" I started laughing at her, and she joined in a moment later. "It's not funny!", she protested. That just made us laugh harder. After a bit, we caught our breaths. "Did this ever happen to you?"

"What, my parents walking in on me and a girlfriend?" Marilyn nodded at that. I simply snorted. "You saw my parents' house. Where in the world would I have any privacy there? I committed my sinning elsewhere. It did get me in trouble, though, sort of."

"How so?"

"Well, my parents never walked in on me, but Hamilton broke into one of my foot lockers and dumped a box of condoms on the table at dinner that night." My wife gasped, and I described the incident. "It was one of the deciding factors in my moving out. He was totally out of control at that point."

"That must have been fun!"

"Yeah. Mom demanded that Dad do something about me. It was all my fault that Hamilton had caused the nonsense." Being reminded of my asshole brother made me grimace. "I should have drowned the little asshole at birth."

We were interrupted at any further traipsing down memory lane when the twins came in the door, yelling and arguing with each other. Marilyn and I gave each other the Look and the she went off to settle the latest problem. The two girls spent about an equal time screaming at each other and whining for their mother to take their side in the dispute. The gist of the dispute was that while at the mall they had run into one Bobby Snyderman, who was absolutely dreamy and cool and cute and hot and in, and that he had been flirting with both of them, and now they were convinced it was true love, and each of them wanted their twin sister to jump off a tall building and leave her alone! I decided to do like my son had done, and scram! I headed to my office and closed the door, leaving Marilyn to deal with the screaming.

Marilyn came into my office about ten minutes later, looking exhausted, and flopped down on my couch. "This is all your fault!", I was informed.

I laughed and replied, "How is this my fault?"

"You're a man. It has to be your fault."

I laughed again. "Hey, remember the rules. I deal with boy stuff, you deal with girl stuff. I told you even before they were born that they were going to be impossible once they got to this age. I think I'm going to start staying in Washington."

"And leave me with the kids!? Forget it! I'm going with you! They can starve!" We shook our heads at that surprisingly pleasant thought. "So, earlier, you spoke to Charlie and Missy?"

I told her the gist of my conversation with the two teens. She nodded. "You walked in on them?", she asked, amused.

"I had a pretty good idea what was going on."

"He's your son!"

I waggled my eyebrows at my wife. "Later on, after the kids are asleep, why don't you put on a swimsuit and we can go outside and I can give you a more detailed description."

Marilyn coughed at that. "In your dreams, mister!"

"You know, that little red number I bought for you."

Marilyn's eyes widened at that. I was referring to a very risqué suit I had bought her on Paradise Island. It was extremely small, with the emphasis on the word extremely, with a thong bottom and side ties, and a minimal bra top. It was very sheer and red, and had the added virtue that when wet it became almost transparent. "No way!", she protested.

"I am almost positive I saw it here after our last trip. You put it on and we can go swimming, and I can show you exactly what I caught them up to."

"Forget it!" She was smiling at me.

"I think I am going to ply you with booze tonight, to see if I can convince you otherwise." I stood and led her back to the kitchen, to make drinks. It was relatively quiet at that point. Either the girls were all screamed out, or they were in their room plotting something nefarious for the other one, or me, or Bobby Snyderman. I kept my wife's gin and tonic filled, and strong, through dinner and afterwards.

By the second drink, Marilyn suspiciously commented, "I think you are making my drinks stronger than normal."

I gave her my most innocent look. "Who, me?"

"You are up to something!"

Holly chimed in at that point, "What's Dad up to?" Molly piped in a second later asking the same thing.

Their mother looked at them and said, "Never you mind! Your father knows what I am talking about."

"Dad?!", asked the twins, together.

I just laughed. "I have no idea what your mother is talking about." Then I looked at Marilyn and clinked the ice cubes in my glass. "Refill?"

Marilyn's eyes twinkled. "Yes, please."

I smiled. I had a funny feeling I was going swimming later that night!

One thing I worked on in my spare time was another book. I couldn't really work on it last year, since I was tied up in a lot of speechifying and running for re-election. Now I had some time, and I wanted to touch on a topic that was going to radically affect the Republican Party. I had seen some of this during the latest campaign, and it needed to be addressed. Maybe with the name of a Congressman on it, it might get more attention paid to it.

Why do Congressmen write books? The answer is that very few of them actually do. Most don't have the time or the intellectual capacity. Most books by politicians are written as either memoirs or biographies by a ghost writer, or as a manifesto for their future agenda in a higher office. They might be involved in the final editing, but they just spout their ideas to the ghost writer, who tries to make it coherent.

At that point things get very amusing! Most books by politicians don't get read. Most politicians are boring people with the ethics of used car salesmen. (I should know, since I had become one.) Who wants to read about how Congressman Crankypants worked his way up through the Boise political machine and climbed to the peak of Idaho political power? And after learning those fascinating details, who wants to learn his plans once he is elected to Supreme Pontifex and Grand Imperator? The answer is - NOBODY!

So, what to do? Since all politicians are chronically short of money, the Congressman can sell his book, and since book royalties are exempt from the limits on outside income, he pockets all the royalties. However, since normal humans don't actually want to read the book, sales will probably be limited (i.e. nonexistent!) Maybe the campaign can help, by buying a few books and then giving them away to campaign volunteers and donors, so they can learn more about the wonders of Congressman Crankypants. Down this slippery slope more than a few politicians have fallen. Raise the price a little too much, raise the royalty rate a little too high, have the campaign buy a few too many copies, and all of the sudden you have the perfect recipe for laundering campaign funds into the Congressman's pockets. Excuse us, Congressman, but the Justice Department has a few questions for you!

None of this actually applied to me. Leaving aside the fact that my royalties were donated to charity, I allowed Simon and Schuster to set the pricing and made sure my co-authors were prominently listed, and for my name I used Carl Buckman, PhD, not Carl Buckman, Congressman. Furthermore, I wasn't writing a memoir or a biography, and all my books had been fact based - infrastructure, political economics, and now, demographics.

The demographics of the country were changing, and it wasn't to the benefit of the Republican Party. Minorities were increasing in size, and where people lived was changing as well. Back in the Fifties, the magical and mystical days that Reagan pointed to during his Presidency, white Protestants had the numbers, the money, and the political power. That was no longer the case. Blacks were numbering about ten percent of the electorate, and they could vote now, and their incomes were rising as well. Ironically, after the blacks fought the fight for voting and civil rights, the Latinos were now an even larger population group. Other major groups were single women and the young and the gays, and none of these groups were being addressed by the Republicans in any meaningful way. Where they lived was changing, too. Urbanization was increasing, and by 2010 the majority of Americans lived in metropolitan regions, and not out in the country.

Putting it bluntly, the Nineties and Oughts were the last hurrah of the white man. By 2010 or so, we were simply the largest minority in a nation chock full of minorities. By 2020 the Republican Party was jokingly referred to as the party of angry white men, irrelevant when it came to the Presidency and the Senate, but more than capable of generating enough angry white male votes to totally fuck up the House.

The only way to combat this was by bringing these groups within the confines of the Republican Party. There was no earthly reason to let the Democrats brand themselves as the party of inclusion. Make the Republican Party the big tent party, bring the Latinos and Asians in, court the blacks with middle- and upper-class incomes, and stop branding cities as evil, compared to the 'heartland.' There's a reason nobody wants to work on the farm – it's incredibly hard, pays peanuts, and is dangerous (farming and ranching has some of the highest rates of accident and death of all occupations.)

Right now, the storm clouds were on the horizon, and visible to everybody, but nobody actually believed them. Maybe it was simply my degrees in mathematics, and the realization that this stuff actually had consequences. As I had stated in my previous books, two plus two equals four, not three and not five. Maybe you don't like the answers, but they are going to smack you in the face soon enough.

I called Simon and Schuster and discussed it with them. We would get a couple of hard core quantitative types, demographers and actuaries, and they would be the ones running the numbers. I would write most of the text and try to give the numbers a human face. Birth rate statistics and immigration rates can be incredibly dry and boring stuff, but they have real long term consequences.

I made sure to devote an hour or two a day to the project. Like my earlier books, I broke it down into a number of chapters, each devoted to a specific subject. One might be a history of minority voting patterns, which then led into a chapter on minority birth rates, which led to a chapter on the white majority status, and then into illegal immigration, which led to birthrates and assimilation among immigrants, and so forth. It was almost a survey course of modern demographics and population studies. Fortunately, by now I had written enough books that I had a handle on time management and could figure out how to do the writing.

To what extent any of this would have an effect, I just wasn't sure. Ignorance is bliss, especially when it is willful ignorance. There were an awful lot of Republicans who didn't want to know that the easy ride was over. Starting in the Sixties, when the Democrats became the party of desegregation and civil rights, and whites fled to both the suburbs and the Republican Party, there was a built-in constituency, and it was big. Reagan had played to this base superbly, and I knew that left to his own devices Bush 43 would do so also. Still, demographics don't lie. Minorities had higher birth rates and immigration was overwhelmingly minority. As for movement away from the rural areas to the cities, that had been going on for generations. Still, if you can learn what is going to happen, you can adapt.

The Future Republican Party: Demographics and the Changing Electorate was scheduled to come out in the fall. It was an off year, so no major elections were in the works. If anybody read it, maybe it would change their behavior next year, which was an election year for Congress. We'd have to wait and see.

Chapter 122: Impeachment

1997-1998

The Future Republican Party came out in November, just in time for the New York Times Christmas list. As far as Newt Gingrich and some of the Republican powers were concerned, it was about as welcome as a loud and juicy fart in church. These guys were busy riding the white male vote, and the word that the fast and fun ride was going to stop was not welcome. I found myself doing the Sunday morning talk show circuit and having to face fellow Republicans who disagreed.

This took one of two forms. First were the academics, who argued that the trends I was quoting weren't actually happening (No, the Latinos aren't really growing that fast; no, people really weren't moving to cities; no, etc. etc. etc.) Then you had the politicians, who tried to argue with a straight face that the Republican Party was inherently attractive to all Americans, including the minority groups. The real amusement came when the talk shows then brought out several minority leaders (a vice president of the NAACP and a director of the Southern Baptist Leadership Conference were particularly amusing) to argue about just how welcoming the Republicans were.

I think my best moment in the debate came one morning on Meet the Press. Russert asked me, "Congressman, some of your fellow Republicans are calling you too intellectual. Others say you are being pragmatic, and others are saying you're too idealistic. How do you respond to these criticisms?"

I smiled and said, "Why can't I be all three? Take immigration, for instance. The intellectual in me says that immigrants have a higher birth rate than native born Americans. The pragmatist in me tells me to appeal to this large and growing group of Americans. Most importantly, the idealist in me says that these people are crossing burning deserts and cramming into rusty cargo ships and riding leaky rafts and sailboats to get to this country. They look at America as a shining beacon to the rest of the world. I say to them, 'Join us! Be part of us! Help us hold up this beacon!' I say, from all three viewpoints, I can either be regressive, and hide in the past, or be progressive, and I choose to be progressive and face the future!"

Newt was not amused. I was violating the Eleventh Commandment, 'Thou shalt not tell the truth if the truth goes against our talking points!'

He was still in charge of the House, and still had enough Republican Congressmen to give Clinton a boatload of grief. I couldn't remember when it all came out on my first trip through, but the dam broke on the Lewinsky scandal by the end of 1997. In retrospect, I wondered on occasion if Newt was pushing this so hard to deflect from what I was saying about the party he was in charge of. Kenneth Starr, who had started by investigating the Whitewater real estate mess the Clintons were involved in, just kept digging and digging. In this he was aided and abetted by Gingrich, who was convinced there had to be a smoking gun somewhere, and that he could use it to shoot Slick Willie. When the Office of the Independent Counsel was created, there was no limit on what he could look into, or how much he could spend doing it.

As much as I despised James Carville, the man was right when he commented, 'Drag enough hundred dollar bills through the trailer park, and you're bound to find something or other.' Ken Starr was tossing hundred dollar bills around left and right, and then leaking all the results directly to the right wing media like the Drudge Report and Fox News. 'Fair and balanced' – my ass! Starr probably had these guys on speed dial.

So, for Bill Clinton's 1997 Christmas present to his family, he gave them Monica Lewinsky and a semen coated blue dress. To say it was a national scandal was to put it mildly. Hillary's response was equally scandalous. Half the country wanted to see her divorce him, preferably on television, and the other half wanted it over, but couldn't understand why she forgave him. I asked Marilyn if she would 'stand by her man' if I got caught cheating on her. She looked at me quizzically and responded, "Have you lost your mind?"

I smiled. "I take that as a negative."

"Extremely negative!"

"As in, I'd be divorced before the dust settled?"

She smiled and pointed a finger at me. "Faster!"

I smiled back. "Then I guess I better not let you catch me."

"What was that?!"

"Nothing, dear." I smirked at her.

"You behave!", she finished, and threw in some finger waggings for extra emphasis.

Newt was milking this for all he was worth. He was demanding that Clinton be called before Congress to answer for his crimes. Exactly how cheating on your wife was a national crime was convoluted, to say the least. It involved the fact that he had said he wasn't cheating on her, and had therefore perjured himself in testimony before the Justice Department, through the Office of the Independent Counsel. Considering that the Counsel's office was leaking like a sieve, if he had admitted to it, it would have been on the news before he had managed to get home.

Meanwhile Ken Starr kept digging. He wasn't just investigating Bill, he was also investigating Hillary. The odds were that he was also investigating Chelsea. Considering she was only 17 at the time, that seemed rather a pointless gesture, but I heard a whisper regardless. This was dragging on interminably. John Boehner told me that Newt was timing the whole thing so that it was going to come to a conclusion about the time of the mid-term elections.

John was still a friend and still talking to me, though he knew that Newt didn't approve of that. John made up for it by going along with Gingrich on almost everything else. We were sitting in my home office in December of 1997, having a few drinks and talking shop one night. He was giving me Newt's plans, since I was no longer in the inner circle.

I listened and nodded, and then asked him, "John, let me ask you something. Ever cheated on Debbie?"

"Carl! That's a hell of a thing to ask!", he protested.

"Ain't it though.", I responded. "You know, I don't care. It's not my business. It's yours and your wife's. Don't you think this is the same thing?"

John had the decency to look uncomfortable at the question. Was it because he knew I was right, or because he had cheated on his wife? I didn't know and really didn't care. "That's true, but it's not about the cheating, it's about the lying. That's the crime."

"That's a subtle distinction, don't you think? We aren't destroying a man because he cheated on his wife, but because he lied about it? You don't think that's more than a little hypocritical coming out of the mouth of Newt Gingrich? He cheated on his first wife with his second, and from what I hear he's doing the same with her. Gingrich keeps pushing this, it is going to come back and bite him in the ass, and probably not just him. There are going to be some heads rolling over this!"

"Carl, even if I agree with you, it doesn't matter. Newt thinks this is a winner for him and for us. You have to admit, he's been right so far.", argued my friend.

I shook my head. "No, he hasn't been. We lost ten seats in the last election. We do it again and we have a one seat margin. Newt screwed up when he decided to shut the government down. This is a mistake also. We have almost a year before the election. Newt thinks he can keep up the outrage for the next ten months. Here's what's going to really happen. For the next few months, until sometime this summer, people are going to be outraged. After that, people are going to get sick and tired of it. The Clintons are going to get sympathy, you know, 'It's a private matter, leave them alone!', that sort of thing. By the time Slick Willie turns Carville and the other attack dogs loose, people will be blaming Newt and the rest of us for this mess."

"So what would you have us do? We can't let it drop. Newt won't let it drop."

"Hey, I didn't say we shouldn't use it to pressure the man. I'm just saying that this is going to go too far. You impeach the President for ordering break-ins and rigging elections. You don't run an impeachment because he got a blowjob from an intern! That's why they invented divorce, John!"

He shrugged and gave me a helpless gesture. "You know the man. What do you expect me to do?"

"Talk to people. I went to lunch with George Will last week, and Marilyn and I went to dinner with Tim Russert and his wife two nights ago. I talked to both of them about these sorts of situations. There is a definite life cycle to these things. At the start there is a lot of outrage. It builds and builds, but then after awhile, everybody is sick and tired of it. After that, if you keep pushing, you start building sympathy for the person you are tormenting. 'Can't they leave that poor man alone?!', that sort of thing. Newt is going to keep pushing this long past the expiration date!", I told him.

"I'll see what I can do."

"Here's something else to tell people. You know and I know, Newt ain't the only fellow in Congress to have fooled around on his beloved spouse. If the press really is as liberal as you think it is, don't you think somebody is going to start investigating Republican marital infidelities? Newt wants to push this into the November elections? It's a poor sword that won't cut both ways!"

John simply grunted at that.

Not much happened through the first half of 1998. As far as the Republican powers that be were concerned, I was assigned to the Committee on Purgatory and Limbo, although I kept on talking to people. There was a backlash building slowly against Gingrich and what he was trying to do. It was like a snowball; it just needed a little bit of help for it to start to roll down the hill and grow.

I remembered enough about politics from my first go to know that the actual impeachment proceedings of Clinton occurred during the lame duck session of Congress, following the mid-term elections, November thru December of 1998. Clinton would be charged in the House and be acquitted in the Senate. This time around, Gingrich rushed things. Sensing that the public was tiring of his endless carping, he decided to go for broke, and impeach Clinton before the election. I heard from several people that Newt had commissioned several very private polls that were telling him what he wanted to hear – we would pick up two dozen or more seats in the House, and half that many in the Senate, more than making up the losses we suffered in 1996. The drama of televised impeachment hearings would make up for the disgust with the political process the general electorate was feeling.

The response from my fellow Congressmen, on both sides of the aisle, was muted at best. The overall consensus was that nobody needed the grief during an election year. The Democrats were worried that if Clinton could be impeached, it would hurt them November 3rd, and if he wasn't impeached, it still wouldn't help. Curiously, more than a few Republicans considered the whole thing one of the tawdriest spectacles they had ever seen, and wanted no part of it. Only the most rabid or tactically minded of my party welcomed this. Most of us thought this was the most incredible distraction to our real job of getting elected again.

As for re-election, I was running against the mayor of Westminster, a fellow named Jerry Herzinski. I had known Jerry for a number of years, and he decided to throw his hat in the ring. While I wasn't taking the election for granted, I had to admit that Jerry was nowhere near as tough an opponent as Steve Rymark had been two years ago. Jerry had the Democratic machine going for him, and a decent enough record as a small town mayor. Unfortunately, when God was handing out charisma, Jerry was standing behind the door and got passed by. Watching and listening to paint dry was more exciting than listening to Jerry give a speech. He had a decent enough war chest for ads, but the man was simply boring! I couldn't ignore him, but every independent poll had me beating him by double digits.

Newt went for broke, calling Congress back into session over the summer recess, and ordering his top lieutenants to prepare the paperwork to start the official impeachment process. The House Judiciary Committee voted to impeach Clinton on an even half-dozen charges, with perjury and obstruction of justice being the two most important, and a mix of obstruction and contempt of Congress charges rounding out the others. From there it would go to the full House for a vote. If we voted for impeachment, it would then go to the full Senate for a trial, with Bill Rehnquist, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court hearing the trial. It would be the biggest spectacle since Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette had their day in court a few years before.

It was too much for me to stomach. Shortly after the formal charges were made, the Capitol Hill reporters began swarming, searching for soundbites. As one of the better known Congressmen, and one of the more moderate, they began to beat down my door looking for my thoughts. I called Marty, Mindy, and my other senior people together to formulate my response. Cheryl drove down from Westminster. We met over at the house in Massachusetts Avenue Heights. Marilyn and I made dinner for everybody, and then after dinner we all retreated to my office. "I want everybody here to give me your unvarnished opinions. Most of you know my thoughts already, but I want yours. Do you think this is going to be a winner for us? Not if you think it's right, but if you think Clinton can be impeached. Junior person goes first." I pointed at Mindy. As my Executive Assistant – my secretary – she was technically the most junior among us. "Mindy, what do you think?"

Mindy shook her head. "From everything I am seeing from the letters and emails from people in the district, people are sick to death of this! Not to be rude, but the guy got a hummer. That might be tacky, but it's not something to be tried for."

I turned to Cheryl, my senior person back at the Field Office in Westminster. "Is that right? Do the people back home want this over, or do they want an impeachment?"

Cheryl sighed. "This is not helping you, Congressman. From everything I am seeing, and the rest of the office is reporting, as disgusting as most people think Clinton is, they really would prefer that Gingrich be impeached rather than Clinton. Your stance so far is helping in this regard, but only with the people who know about it."

"Explain that.", asked Bill Ferguson, my Press Assistant. He was actually part of my 'permanent' re-election committee, paid for by the campaign, and thus not counting against the limits on my Congressional staff.

"A lot of people figure that Congressman Buckman is a Republican, and is therefore part of the anti-Clinton conspiracy. The ones who have paid some attention, however, know that the Congressman is not in favor of the impeachment, and aren't holding it against him. I would put the anti-impeachment letters and emails at two to one, or three to one, versus those in favor of it."

"Bill, what are you hearing? More important, what do you think?", I asked.

Ferguson shrugged. "I think Cheryl and Mindy are right. The Maryland Ninth is not planning on burning Bill Clinton in effigy. Newt Gingrich is another matter, however. He is widely considered to be a huge blocking force in Congress. He was at the heart of the shutdown and now is at the heart of the impeachment."

"What do you think, though? What are your personal feelings?"

He shrugged again. "I don't have any personal feelings. For me it's more tactics, and the tactics here are not helping us. You have a fairly clean reputation. You are both pro-women's rights and pro-family, which is a tough act to cobble together. As long as you and Mrs. Buckman don't get divorced before the Clintons, you're safe."

I glanced over at Marilyn, who had a dry look on her face. "You don't tell about my girlfriends and I won't tell about your boyfriends."

"Very funny!"

I continued around the room. Nothing about this was going to affect anything we were working on legislative wise. The big effect was going to be whether this would backfire during the elections. If Gingrich won and Clinton was impeached, it would probably hurt the Democrats badly – maybe! It might also unleash a sympathy vote in their favor. If the Republicans lost, it hurt us, no matter what. In many ways, the best possible thing to happen would be for the House to fail to vote for impeachment. The only way this was going to happen was for somebody to take a stand against Gingrich.

Everybody in the room was looking at me. "You guys want me to go publicly on the record against Newt Gingrich and the impeachment?", I asked.

Marty looked around the room and answered for everybody. "Yes. For one thing, this is good for you, the politician. It will let everybody back in the district know you are against it, which matches their feelings. More importantly, it tells everybody here in Washington that this is a bad idea for the nation as a whole. This is not why we have impeachments. This is not a high crime or misdemeanor. If you can shut this down, you are taking the high road."

"If I shut this down, Newt Gingrich is going to come after me with an axe. We are going to find ourselves on the fifth floor of Cannon and you guys are all going to be in the Cages."

"So what!?", he countered. "You're rich! You can build us a sixth floor, with an atrium and a garden and a spa!"

"Oh, Christ!", I muttered. I glanced over at my wife, who simply smiled and took my hand.

I looked around the room at the others. Like me, most of them had come to Washington in the hope of doing something good, and like me, they realized that an impeachment over lying about getting a blowjob was not something good. I could see it in their faces. Lead, follow, or get the hell out of the way! So went the old saying. After about thirty seconds, I nodded at Marty. "Okay, I will come out publicly against it. How do we manage this for the greatest effect?" There was a sense of relief around the room, and some smiles as well. I rolled my eyes at them. "And when this fails, you are all invited to my political funeral. Now, what do we do?"

Marilyn kissed me on the cheek, and then stood up and began refreshing everybody's coffee. She wasn't much of a political strategist. She did know right from wrong, though, so my stand was fine with her. "I'm going to make some fresh coffee. I'll be back in a few minutes. You don't need me to write a speech.", she announced.

Mindy popped up to help her, and the rest of us got down to the tactics of doing this and making it happen quickly. It was already out of the Judiciary Committee. In two weeks we would be having the vote in front of the entire House. We had two weeks for a four term Congressman to wage war on the Speaker of the House. Win or lose, this was going to radically change things.

Two days later, I had a press conference scheduled on the Capitol steps. Since the preparations for this couldn't be hidden, I had a visit from Bob Livingston, the head of the powerful House Appropriations Committee and one of Newt's main henchmen. He was politer than Newt, in that the day before the press conference, he appeared at my office and asked to see me. Newt would have simply barged in.

After admitting him to my office, I ushered him over to an armchair. I sat down across from him. "How can I help you, Bob?", I asked.

"Carl, I'll come to the point. Newt knows you are having a press conference tomorrow, over on the steps to the Capitol. He'd like to know what you plan to say."

"The Speaker couldn't ask himself? I know he's a busy man, but he couldn't even pick up a phone and call?", I countered.

Bob didn't have much of a response to that. What was he going to say, that Newt only called his friends and allies, and I was now neither? "Well, Newt was busy, so he asked me to look into it. What do you plan to say during the press conference."

No way was I answering that. The one thing we had all agreed on the other night was that this was going to be closely held, very closely held. We had written the speech that night, and Mindy had typed it up. There weren't going to be copies handed out ahead of time, no digital versions would go to a teleprompter, nothing leaked to sympathetic reporters. If Newt caught wind of this, the press conference would be cancelled for some reason. If nothing else, Gingrich would personally phone in a bomb scare to the Capitol Police! I waved it all off. "Oh, nothing big. Just some personal thoughts about my future in the Maryland Ninth. I've been wondering about whether it's worth it. I'll let you know tomorrow."

Livingston eyed me curiously, but then took his leave. Let him go back to Newt and tell him that I was leaving Congress. Newt would enjoy that immensely.

The next day, I found a large number of reporters down on the Capitol steps, facing a podium. Newt and a few others had let it be known that I was going to announce my retirement from the Congress, and the turnout was greater than I would have gotten otherwise. Fine and dandy. I was declaring war on Newt Gingrich, and a surprise attack would be useful. I left the Capitol and marched down the steps, flanked by Marty and Jerry Ferguson. At the podium I waited while the last minute sound checks were run. There was a nod to me from one of the sound men, and then I began.

"Thank you all for coming. As everyone here knows, in two weeks time, the House of Representatives will be voting as a grand jury on articles of impeachment on President Clinton. If the House passes these articles, the case against the President will then be tried before the Senate, with Chief Justice Rehnquist presiding. The impeachment of a sitting President is the most serious judgment a Congressman can make, and requires him to make a fundamental evaluation of his purpose in Congress.

Like my fellow colleagues, I have agonized over my response to this. How will I vote if it comes to that? After much thought, my actions are clear to me. I will not vote for impeachment.

The Constitution is clear on this. The President can only be impeached for treason, bribery, and high crimes and misdemeanors. There have been no charges of either treason or bribery. The charges are those falling into the category of high crimes or misdemeanors. But what are those crimes? President Clinton cheated on his wife and then lied about it. This is not what our Founding Fathers meant by high crimes and misdemeanors! You do not get impeached over a matter of marital infidelity! You get divorced!

Does this mean I approve of President Clinton's behavior? Hardly! As both a man and as a husband, I find Mister Clinton's behavior disgusting and reprehensible. I would be ashamed to introduce him to my wife and children. If he were to shake my hand today, I would count my fingers and then wipe my hands off. He has grossly abused the trust of his wife and family - but he has not abused the trust of the nation! His misbehavior does not rise to the level that the framers of the Constitution had in mind for reasons to remove the Chief Executive. I remind everyone that our Founding Fathers were men themselves, with all the failings of men.

So I announce today that I will not vote for impeachment, and I will work against impeachment. Instead, I will introduce an Article of Censure to Congress. While I feel the President's misbehavior does not warrant his removal from office, I feel just as strongly that the entire Congress is as disgusted as I am by that misbehavior. This would be the proper method for us to express that displeasure. Let us end this impeachment and pass a censure, and then let us wash our hands of this sordid affair. Thank you."

Chapter 123: The Soapbox Rebellion

To say my announcement was a shocker was a gross understatement. I think I would have gotten less of a reaction by lighting a large bomb in the basement of the Capitol! After I finished reading my statement, there was a roar from the reporters as each one of them began yelling out questions. I declined and began moving away. Meanwhile, around the fringes of the group, and out of camera range, several Republican Congressmen and senior staffers were standing there in stunned silence. Rather than watching me announce my impending retirement from Congress (to be responded to by pious thanks for my long years of service) they had just watched me declare war on Newt Gingrich. To a man, they turned and hustled away, staffers running interference, as reporters hounded after them demanding to know how they would vote.

For me, it was oddly liberating. For over a year now, I had been dancing around with Gingrich, starting when I argued with him about the government shutdown. Now the dance was over. It was war.

That night, after dinner, Marilyn found me in my home office, simply sitting in an armchair, staring out a window and thinking. She came in and sat down on my lap. "Care for some company?", she asked.

I smiled at her. "Sure." I wrapped my arms around her.

Marilyn made herself comfortable, and then said, "I just want you to know, I'm very proud of you. I know this has been hard for you, but you are right and Newt Gingrich is wrong and I am proud of what you said today."

I hugged her, and then said, "Thank you. I wonder if this is how Caesar felt when he crossed the Rubicon."

"Huh?"

I smiled at her. "You've heard of Caesar crossing the Rubicon, right?"

Marilyn smiled and shrugged. "Yes, but I never really knew what it meant."

I nodded in understanding. "Ahhh ... well, this was all a few years ago, of course, but when Julius Caesar decided to take over Rome, the rule was that no Roman general could march an army into Italy. The line was a little river in northern Italy, the Rubicon. Actually, it's more a stream than a river. So, anyway, old Julius got summoned to Rome to answer for his crimes, and had to leave the army behind, on the far side of the river. If he went without them, he would get thrown in jail. If he took them with him, though, he was declaring civil war."

"And he took them with him?"

"That's what the saying refers to. He took them with him. It means you've made a decision you can't back away from. You've placed your bets and rolled the dice, for good or bad."

Marilyn smiled. "Well, Caesar won. So will you."

I snorted and gave my wife a wry smile. "I'm not sure that's a great example. Caesar was opposed by Pompey the Great, another famous general, and after a few battles, Caesar ended up chasing Pompey to Egypt, where Pompey's head ended up in a basket."

"Yuck!"

"Yeah! On the other hand, that's where Julius Caesar met Cleopatra. Maybe I need to keep an eye out for beautiful foreign queens."

That earned me an elbow to the ribs. "Forget it!", she told me.

I chuckled. "Well, it didn't end so good for Caesar, either. Eventually he ended up back in Rome, where his friends killed him on the floor of the Senate. Let's just hope I don't get invited over to the Senate any time soon!"

Marilyn climbed up off my lap and headed towards the kitchen. "So much for politics!"

As she left, I called out, "Hey, got anything in the way of a Cleopatra costume?"

"Forget it!"

I laughed at that.

The next couple of days I began calling and talking to pretty much any Republican Representative I could. There weren't many. The vast majority refused to talk to me, although none actually said as much. They simply weren't available, or were on another call, or had another appointment. I did speak to Wayne Gilchrest, who agreed with me and promised to vote with me against the impeachment. I also spoke to John Boehner, who also said he agreed with me, but refused to make a commitment either way.

By strict party line vote, which was what Newt was counting on, the Republicans would have 228 votes to impeach versus the Democrats' 207 votes not to impeach. To beat the impeachment, I needed to switch 11 votes, to come to a 217-218 score. Well, 10 votes anyway, since I was one of the 11.

It was actually more complicated than that. Since the actual articles of impeachment had six specific charges, it was possible that some of my counterparts could try to have it both ways, by voting against some of the charges, but for the others. The two big charges were the perjury and obstruction of justice charges. The other four were the contempt of Congress and obstruction charges relating to that. I could easily see a number of Congressmen ignoring those four, but still voting for the first two. Worse, there were a few conservative Democrats who were as disgusted by Clinton as anybody else, who might cross the line in the opposite direction! Realistically, I needed more than ten votes.

My political career was swirling the bowl. On the plus side, I was still filthy rich, so I wouldn't have to go to work as a lobbyist. I had actually had that thought for the briefest of moments, and then snorted in laughter, and called ARI. The American Renaissance Initiative began pushing Republican Congressmen to vote against the impeachment. Nothing like spending a little money to help.

The one thing I had never figured on, though, started Thursday morning. The House vote as a grand jury would be on Tuesday September 15. Two Thursdays before that, the morning of the 3rd, I was in the Westminster Field Office, meeting with Cheryl and the rest of the staff. Mid-morning, who walked in but Fletcher Donaldson. Fletcher was still with the Baltimore Sun, and was now their senior political correspondent, with both bylined articles and an opinion column that was on the verge of being syndicated. He ignored the protesting intern who tried to bar my open door, and stuck his head around the corner. "Carl, you want to call off your attack dog here?"

I snorted and waved him in. "Fletcher, you are rude, crude, and socially unacceptable!"

"My mother would agree with you. Let's talk."

I rolled my eyes at that, and said, "I'm sure I have an appointment. Let me call in and make one!" I brandished my cell phone and mimed making a phone call.

Fletcher ignored this as well, and sat down across from me. He leaned back in his chair and threw his feet up on my desk. "So, Carl, you want to tell me about your pissing match with Newt, and how you expect to win?"

I leaned back and threw my own feet up on the desk. To the extent that any politician can have friends in the media, Fletcher was a friend. Certainly, we were on a first name basis. "Fletcher, I have no idea what you are talking about! Newt Gingrich is a personal friend and a mentor, and has earned my respect and the respect of all of his colleagues, both Republican and Democrat."

"Carl, I'll bet you've been practicing that line for a week now. I'll also bet you practiced the line to your kids about those quarters under their pillows coming from the Tooth Fairy."

We batted it back and forth for about ten minutes, with Fletcher trying to get something from me about me going up against Newt, and my protesting my innocence. Then Carrie, the young intern who had tried to keep Fletcher out of my office, appeared in my doorway, a worried look on her face. "Uh, Congressman, uh, you should see this."

I raised an eyebrow. "I'll be out in a few minutes, Carrie."

"Uh, sir? You really should take a look at this."

I glanced over at Fletcher, and shrugged. I stood up and got to the door before he did. "Carrie, keep him here and don't let him out."

The poor girl dutifully tried to stay between Fletcher and the doorway, so he feinted right and slipped around her to the left. Carrie scampered behind us, looking more than a little flustered. I found most of the staff staring at the mail bin, a plastic box the Post Office brought around every day with the office's mail. "Well?", I asked.

Cheryl pointed at a large and misshapen envelope, and then at two others that were similar. One was already open. "Look.", she said, pointing at the desk it was laying on. Sitting there on the desk was a small bar of soap, of the size and type typically found in hotel bathrooms, still in the wrapper. "It was in the envelope, along with this note." She passed it onto me.

I turned it over in my hands. It was a simple enough note, written on plain white paper. "Wash your hands well, and vote no on the impeachment." It was signed "Ellie Hines." There was a return address on the envelope, for "E. Hines" in Arcadia.

While I read this strange missive, Cheryl opened the second envelope, and shook out a second bar of soap, with a similar message. I took it and set down the first note, which was grabbed by Fletcher before I could stop him. The third bulky envelope contained a full size bar of soap, partially mashed in the envelope, and a message saying to vote no on the impeachment.

We all stared at the mail, with Fletcher reading them as well, and the silence was broken by my cell phone ringing. I flipped it open and lifted it to my ear. "Hello?"

"Carl, it's Wayne Gilchrest here. You'll never guess what I got in the mail today!"

"A bar of soap!"

"How'd you know?!"

"Same here! I got three. Was there a note?", I asked.

I heard a paper rustle. "It basically told me to vote no on the impeachment. Did you have something to do with this?"

"I had no idea."

Wayne said, "I'm making some calls. You should do the same."

I grunted agreement, and looked around the room. Fletcher Donaldson asked, "Congressman, could I get a statement?"

I didn't know what to say, but Cheryl saved me. "This is the voters saying they want the impeachment voted down, and they want Congress to censure the President instead."

"Yes, exactly.", I said in agreement.

"Right." Fletcher pulled his car keys out. "It's always interesting talking to you, Carl. I'll see you around!" He was gone before I could say good-bye.

I had Cheryl call the office down in D.C. to see if any soap had shown up there, but the answer was no. That changed the next day. Friday I flew down to Washington and read the Sun. Fletcher had a piece on the Opinion page about the soap I had received, along with most of the Congressional delegation from Maryland. He had spent part of yesterday afternoon calling around to the various Field Offices to see what was going on. In Washington, when the mail came around, I received four bars of soap, and I called back to Westminster and was told another three had come in. I also got a bunch of phone calls from my fellow Congressmen, asking me, "What the hell is going on, Carl?!"

That Thursday and Friday it was just a trickle of soap. By the following Tuesday, the 8th, the day after Labor Day, it was a torrent! Hundreds of bars of soap were pouring into the Capitol, all with an admonition to wash our hands and forget about the impeachment, or get to work solving problems, or stop the bickering. The point they were making was obvious. The impeachment was nowhere near as popular as Newt thought it was. By the end of the week, one bright young Democratic staffer down on the first floor had placed a garbage can out in the hallway with a sign on it saying "Soap Only", and the name of a Washington D.C. homeless shelter on it. All those bars of soap would be donated to charity! I don't know how many homeless people there were, but they must have been the cleanest in the nation! We got sent a lot of soap!

Jerry Ferguson managed to book me to speak on This Week with David Brinkley on Sunday. It was the last chance I would have to publicly speak against the impeachment before the vote the following Tuesday. The topic of the day would be the 'Soapbox Rebellion', so named by Fletcher Donaldson in an opinion piece that went national. Brinkley didn't bother pitting me against a Democrat; his second guest was Majority Leader Dick Armey, one of my putative bosses that I was 'rebelling' against.

The basic arguments came down as follows:

Armey: "This is very simple. This isn't about whether or not President Clinton cheated on his wife. This is about whether he lied to Federal investigators. The president lied to the Department of Justice, and through them, to the United States Congress! This is a nation of laws, and no man is above the law, not even the President!"

Me: "Yes, the President lied. He lied to Ken Starr, he lied to the Department of Justice, and he lied to Congress. More importantly, though, he lied to his wife and his daughter. However, what he lied about had nothing whatsoever to do with the performance of his office, and everything to do with his personal life. I make no apologies for the man. I am simply saying that this is not what impeachment was designed for. This trivializes the Constitution. The man does not belong in Federal court, he belongs in divorce court!"

There were several questions about whether the Soapbox Rebellion was some form of power grab by me. I smiled and waved it away, repeating my litany that Newt Gingrich was a friend and a mentor, and I was proud to work with him. We wanted the same things, and simply differed on tactics. This made Armey noticeably squirm as he agreed that Gingrich held me in the highest possible regard, especially when he was pressed about some statements Newt had been heard to utter about destroying me. I just kept my mouth shut.

Finally, there were some questions about whether a censure would mean anything, which I sidestepped somewhat. It wouldn't, and I knew it. On the other hand, it was a peace offering to all my fellow Republicans who wanted to do something, just not impeach the President. For several days junior staffers at the White House had been intimating that the President would be willing to go along with some form of censure, as long as he got to help write it. I was ignoring that. He would take what he got and like it!

That week I made the cover of Time. There was a split picture, with Newt on the left side, looking left, and me on the right side, looking right, and down below a bar of soap, and the title, 'Rebellion!' I didn't make the cover of Newsweek, but a bar of soap did, along with the title, 'The Soapbox Rebellion!'

Two days later, the Articles of Impeachment were voted on in the full House of Representatives. The four minor articles were all voted down by a margin of 257-178. The obstruction of justice article, related to lying to the investigators, failed by a much slimmer 220-215. The big one, perjury, the charge that Clinton was most guilty of, failed by a single vote 218-217.

There was an uproar in the House. A second uproar occurred moments later, when John Boehner stood up and moved to have the Article of Censure voted upon. It was already in the hopper and everybody had read it by now, but technically it needed to be voted out of the Judiciary Committee first. Never mind that, and never mind the Democratic leadership that half-heartedly tried to derail this rebuke. The Article of Censure passed 411-24. Afterwards, John met me and we shook hands. He had voted with me on all six counts of the impeachment, and had managed to sneak in the censure. It was a good day for both of us.

Newt tried to avoid the cameras afterwards, but wasn't successful. He tried to make lemonade from the lemons, by praising his colleagues in their generosity and forbearance, in choosing the lesser of the punishments they had available to them. Bill Clinton didn't say anything, however, and his Press Secretary, Joe Lockhart, simply stated that Clinton and his advisers were examining their possible responses.

This became really and unpleasantly obvious a couple of weeks later. I received a phone call from Dick Armey's office, requesting my presence at a meeting on Wednesday, September 30. Armey was the House Majority Leader, second in importance in the Republican Party to Gingrich himself. Dick wasn't much more of a fan of mine than Newt was, but he told me that the White House Counsel's office had requested a meeting with the House leadership, and me, to discuss the wording of the censure. I was requested because I was the guy who had pushed for and written the Article of Censure.

I was curious what Clinton expected to do with the censure. All it really said was that he had disgraced his office and the Congress. He didn't have to do anything. It seemed as if he didn't even want to do that. Also to be present was the rest of the senior House leadership, Armey and DeLay on the Republican side, Dick Gephardt and Dave Bonior on the Democratic side, and Newt as Speaker of the House. The meeting was held in a conference room in the Capitol itself.

The meeting started one man short. Newt cancelled at the last minute, claiming a sudden illness. I suspect he was sickened by his inability to impeach the President, and even more sickened by having to participate in a meeting with me. None of the others wanted to deal with me either, the Republicans because Newt didn't like me, and the Democrats because I was a Republican. When the small party from the White House came in, the dissension in our ranks was obvious, and pleasing to them. Clinton had sent over a party of three, two flunkies from the Chief of Staff's office and Chuck Ruff, the White House Counsel.

Ruff was the only one who counted, and he opened the meeting with fifteen minutes of legal gobbledygook. Basically, the Articles of Censure had never been properly voted out of the Judiciary Committee, had never properly been sent to the floor of the House, wasn't in the proper format, etc. etc. etc. The White House wanted to cooperate, of course, but thought it best that this be done properly. Perhaps we could do this more carefully, take our time with the process and the wording, and make sure it was done right.

There were any number of looks on the faces of the rest of the room. The two flunkies seemed very pleased with themselves. It was obvious that the tactic was to delay, delay, delay. The White House wanted this pushed back beyond the mid-term elections, and then to quietly die. They had dodged a bullet with the impeachment, thanks to a foolish junior Republican Congressman, and now they were going to do it again. Most of the Congressmen had looks of disgust and disbelief on their faces.

I decided to shut down the entire meeting. I was sitting towards the end of the table, allowing the powers that be to face each other. The murmurs of discussion ended as I stood up slowly, and heads turned to face me. I slowly made my way down to a position across from Ruff, standing between Armey and Gephardt. "Let's make this simple. I'm the guy who started this, and I'll be the guy to finish it." Before anybody could argue, I continued in my best Strother Martin impersonation, "Whut we've got he-ah is a fail-yuh ta communicate."

One of the flunkies, the one on Ruff's right, bridled and protested, "Look here! You can't..."

I turned to look at him, with no emotion on my face. "Shut up, sonny. You had your say, now it's my turn."

He turned red and looked like he was going to say something, but Ruff laid a hand on his forearm and shook his head. Ruff looked at me and said, "It's your turn, Congressman."

"Alright then. I'm not a lawyer. I used to be a businessman. I know about making deals. This was the deal. We don't impeach your boss, and he takes a censure. Now your boss doesn't like the deal. He got the impeachment quashed, but doesn't want to take the censure. Do I have that right? Don't bother answering. It was a rhetorical question."

"Now that we've sorted out the important issues at hand, let's look at the alternatives. First, you can fight the censure. You can bitch and moan about the process, but you're going to look silly. Everybody on the planet knows what Clinton did, and what Congress thinks about it. You can try and fight it, but you'll just drag out the process. While you are dragging it out, though, the big loser is going to be me. I'm the guy who orchestrated the failure of the impeachment, and I'll be the guy who looks like an asshole. I don't like looking like an asshole, so I'll probably fight back. Sound right, so far? How will I fight back? Maybe by writing a check to the Independent Counsel's Office, to cover the cost of reopening every investigation they ever thought about. They'll investigate Slick Willie, they'll investigate Hillary, they'll investigate Chelsea, they'll even investigate Socks the Fucking Cat! Then they'll keep investigating everybody who ever worked for Slick Willie, like everybody on his staff who was stupid enough to recommend this." I kept looking at Ruff, but out of the corner of my eye I could see the two flunkies glancing at each other. "I'm a pretty rich guy, so I can write a pretty big check. Trust me, this time they'll dig deeper and get the proof they need. You know and I know that there was a lot of stuff that was left off the table for national security reasons. The gloves will come off! Six months from now your boss will lose the impeachment, and he'll be on trial for treason and bribery and begging Al Gore for a pardon before the next election."

"Now, you don't want what's behind Door Number One, so let's see what's behind Door Number Two." I bent forward and leaned over the table, supporting myself on my two outstretched arms, and looked Ruff straight in the eye. "What's behind Door Number Two is a big, steaming pile of shit that your boss dropped there, and a spoon. And just what will your boss do when he opens Door Number Two on national television? I'll tell you what he's going to do! He's going to slap his biggest smile on his face, take that spoon, dig in deep, pick up a healthy heaping spoonful, and suck it down! And then after that, he's going to slap on an even bigger smile, lick his lips, and go, 'YUM! TASTY!' That's what he's going to do! Is that understood? He is going to suck it up, take his punishment, and get on with his life and being the President, because the only other choice is to have me turn his remaining two years in office into a living hell. Are we clear on that? He has until the end of business Friday to announce his gracious acceptance of the censure and his hope the nation forgives his mistakes. And then this all goes away, and we can all get on with our lives."

I stood upright. "Now that we have settled the negotiations, you can go back down to the other end of the street and report in. Do that now. This is the Capitol, the People's House. You are here as our guests." I pointed towards the door. "There's the door. Close it after you leave."

The room was silent. Ruff looked at me hard, and then packed his briefcase without another word. His two flunkies noted this, and packed their own briefcases. They stood when Ruff stood, and followed him out the door.

I went back down to my seat. I could feel the eyes of the others on me, Armey with a certain degree of loathing, and DeLay, Gephardt, and Bonior with an equal degree of curiosity. Armey said, "You want to explain what the hell that was all about?!"

I turned to face him straight on. "Back when I was a battery commander, I had this sergeant, an old country boy, who used to say that when you wanted to get an ornery mule to do something, the first thing you had to do was to get the mule's attention, and the best way to do that was to take a two-by-four and smack him as hard as you could right between the eyes! Then, once you've got his attention, you can get the mule to do what you want." I pointed over at the door. "I just got their attention." I hadn't brought a briefcase, so I simply headed for the door myself. "See you fellows later." One way or the other, we'd know what would happen by Friday evening.

Chapter 124: A New Job

The rest of 1998 was almost as big a watershed event for the Republicans as 1994 had been. For me, it went fairly well, though parts were expected, and parts weren't.

On the Friday after I told Chuck Ruff where to head in, Clinton capitulated. The White House press corps was informed at the morning press briefing that the President would make a brief statement, and there would be no questions afterwards. At ten o'clock that morning, the camera began rolling and Bill Clinton appeared behind his desk in the Oval Office. He only spoke about ten minutes, and apologized to his family and to the American people, and thanked Congress for the understanding they had shown. He never specifically stated the words impeachment or censure, but it was sufficient for my colleagues and me.

The next thing that happened was that Buckman v. Curren came to an end. This was the Federal court case that had been ongoing since I had attempted to get a gun permit in Maryland under the Defending the Second Amendment Act. Maryland Attorney General Curren had denied the permit, and my attorney, David Boies, had promptly filed suit in Federal court, and gotten me a stay on the denial. That was over two years ago! Since then it had been to Federal court, where we won, and Maryland had appealed. The Fourth Circuit, which covered Maryland, the Virginias, and the Carolinas, made a technical ruling that did not invalidate the law, but sent the case back to trial, where we won the case again. Back to the appeals process we went, and we won that before the standard three judge panel appeals court, and then when they lost, Maryland appealed it to the full court, en banc. They also lost that, and even worse, they lost the request to stay the order until they could appeal it to the Supreme Court.

Now, at the start of October, the Supreme Court announced the cases they would hear, and they refused to hear Buckman v. Curren, which meant that the lower court's ruling held, and the state of Maryland was shit out of luck! I did a number of talk shows about the meaning of the ruling, and how it was a victory for law abiding citizens everywhere in the country.

I did not start wearing a gun. I was perfectly content to let my security people handle that problem for me. If I was just an average asshole, however, I would have definitely worn it. From everything I was hearing from local law enforcement, while there had been an initial rush for permits, most of them were people who had already applied and been turned down, because they didn't 'need' a gun (like I didn't need one with Hamilton!) It didn't seem like there was any kind of a rush for half the state to be getting permits. I was hearing the same from my colleagues from other states.

On another front, Jerry Herzinski did not prove to be the world beating candidate the Democratic Party had hoped for. Yes, he was a good small town mayor, but he could put a tweaking meth addict to sleep. You want to have your supporters more excited at the end of your speech than at the beginning, but it's supposed to be because you have them worked up, not happy to see you finish! I was not taking him lightly, but everything was pointing towards a major win on November 3 for the Republican candidate for the Maryland Ninth.

For one thing, by now, my constituent services team really had their shit together. If they couldn't fix a problem themselves, they made no bones about putting me to work. I would be provided with the names of the people to call and lists of bullet points to argue, and sent out 'either with your shield or on it', as Spartan hoplites were told by their mothers. In other words, get it fixed, or don't come back to the office! Some of my constituent services people were pretty tough cookies, and I didn't want to chance that they meant it!

For another thing, never underestimate the power of incumbency. There are the obvious advantages, such as taking credit for using government money to do something your constituents want. "This bridge repair was brought to you by the efforts of Congressman Buckman!" Combined with my penchant for strategic donations by the Buckman Foundation, this was a very winning combination.

Incumbency has another advantage, the advantage of inertia. For years now it had been known and proven that incumbents - regardless of party, regardless of record, regardless of the amount of money spent, regardless of almost anything – have a 90% chance of re-election. Eventually the odds would catch up to you and somebody else would push you out (like me with Andy Stewart) or the voters would send a message to the White House by a mass purge in Congress, like in 1994. I was not facing that this year.

I won re-election by 22%, one of my highest margins ever. It was ... intoxicating!

The effect in the House was interesting, to say the least. Newt had been running several polls all year long, and they were telling him that because of the Clinton sex scandal the Republicans could be expected to pick up between two and three dozen seats in the House. This would more than make up our losses in '96 and cement him as a great leader of the House, like Sam Rayburn and Tip O'Neill. He then proceeded to share these polls with all his top buddies.

The actual net result? Zero! We lost four Republican seats to Democratic newcomers, and stripped four Democratic seats in return. To what extent the polls were accurate and to what extent Newt was simply finding things he wanted to find wasn't clear. I can say with 100% certainty that Newt blamed me for the discrepancy, because he reported this in the Washington Post. We had been on track to use the scandal to pick up all those seats in the House, when a rogue Congressman had to muck things up for everybody, derail the impeachment, and make friends with President Clinton.

This sounded great in theory, but a significant number of my fellow Republican representatives were not in agreement. I wasn't as much of a rogue as Newt was making me out to be, and I had a large number of friends who weren't buying Newt's explanation. Among them was John Boehner, the Republican Conference Committee Leader, not quite as critical as the Majority Leader or Whip, but a nice step up the ladder. A revolt was brewing, he told me. Newt Gingrich had worn out his welcome. During the votes for leadership positions after the election, he would be voted out of his Speakership.

Somebody, maybe John, had a big mouth, and it got back to Newt. Newt called a meeting of the House Republican leadership (not including me, go figure!) and forced a response. I heard about it afterwards. Bill Paxon of New York announced he would challenge Newt for the Speakership. Since nobody really wanted Paxon, he was told to sit down and shut up. Newt told the rest of them that he didn't want to 'rule over a pack of cannibalistic wolves' and said he was quitting as Speaker. Was it a bluff? I can't say, but if it was, it failed. The wolves began arguing about who would take over. Newt's four years at the helm were not considered successful, and the top people were tainted with him. Bob Livingston was going to be the next Speaker, as Newt's chosen successor.

Well, maybe not.

There were new scandals brewing in Congress itself. Egged on by Hustler publisher Larry Flynt, everybody and their brother in the House, especially the Republicans, was being investigated for extramarital affairs. Flynt had promised a reward of a million bucks for documented proof, although it was never clear to me what you needed to get the million. Charlie even got in on the act, asking his mother to put on a blonde wig and sit on my lap, so that he could get a photo and send it in for his piece of the million. Smartass! I chased him around the kitchen as his mother and sisters laughed, and then gave him a swift kick in the pants!

The results were predictable. You can't pick 535 random people and find zero who haven't cheated on their spouse. The likelihood is so vanishingly small as to be meaningless. The first victim was Bob Livingston, one of Newt's closest henchmen, who was fucking around on Mrs. Livingston. With Livingston out of the running, Dick Armey stepped up. Too bad for Dick that he was too tightly tied to Newt. Nobody wanted him as Speaker either. At that point, Newt simply told us all to fuck off, and resigned his seat representing the Georgia 6th.

And that was my opportunity. Things had gotten too crazy, too much had been said, too many bad feelings were floating around. There was a significant chance that the Democrats could find a few Republicans disgusted by the entire affair and join with them to vote in a Democratic Speaker in a Republican dominated House. That needed to be shut down, and shut down hard! I talked to as many of the more moderate Republicans I could speak to. Interestingly, I also spoke to Tom DeLay, who was equally disgusted by what was going on. So he and I made a deal.

When the vote for House leadership positions came, Denny Hastert decided to go up against Armey for Speaker. On the third round of voting, Hastert won. That was when DeLay slipped a knife into the back of Armey. Tom got himself nominated for House Leader, which was Dick's current position, and won the vote. Armey was stunned. The second half of the deal was the quid pro quo. My buddy John Boehner nominated me for Majority Whip, and DeLay seconded the nomination.

I was asked my philosophy of governing by one of the newbies, a fellow from out in the Midwest. I stood up and scratched my head, and then grabbed the microphone. "My philosophy? How about getting something done around here?! How about accomplishing something?! I'm not from some district that doesn't have Democrats in it. I'm from the Maryland Ninth, where I am damn near the only Republican in the district. If I can't work with the people on the other side of the aisle, I don't come back here. If I don't try and get something done here, I don't come back here. If I don't at least show some level of courtesy to the Democrats, I don't come back here. So here's my philosophy – Do your damn job! Every one of us told the people back home that they could trust us to fix the problems around this joint. So do it! I am going to ask every person in this room to figure out ways to lower the volume of nonsense we have been spouting, and work together to get some things done. So that's my philosophy. Do your damn job! And you tell me what I have to do to help you. And that's my job, to help you!"

I set the mike back in the mount and looked out at the others. Some of the people there had stunned looks on their faces, but others were nodding and whispering to each other. Then we took a vote.

I was the new Majority Whip.

I suspect that when the news got to the White House that for the next two years when they asked to see the Congressional leadership they would be seeing my smiling face went over like a lead balloon. In fact, a few people asked if I would shake his hand, and suggested I take some hand sanitizer for when I did. I smiled and laughed with them, but that would be ballsy, even for me. I would behave myself, or Marilyn would smack me, I'm sure.

At Christmas, we did the usual and flew up to Marilyn's family for a few days. Everybody had heard about my promotion, and I spent a fair bit explaining to my brothers- and sisters-in-law what the job was, or at least what I thought it was. Everything went pretty well, but there was a somewhat uncomfortable conversation on Christmas day. It wasn't about the truly dreadful meal, which Marilyn's mother cooked – Marilyn got her abysmal kitchen skills honestly – but the question asked over dinner. Harriet looked across the table at Charlie and asked, "So, Charlie, where do you plan to go to school next year?"

I kept any expression off my face as I turned to face my son. I had been pushing him on this same question for almost a year now, and not gotten much in the way of an answer. Marilyn had argued through his junior year that I didn't need to push him, but even she was starting to worry. He only had one more semester until graduation. So far he had only told us that he just didn't seem to like the idea of going to college. I told him that he could enroll at one of the community colleges, go there for a couple of years and figure out what he wanted to do, and then transfer to a four year school. Essex or Hagerstown were certainly close enough if he wanted to live at home, or he could live on campus anywhere in the state.

There had been a time when Charlie was younger, just hitting his teens, when his growth spurt seemed like it wasn't going to end. He had been talking about football a lot, and when he hit Hereford High and got picked for JV football, he was still growing. Then his spurt came to an end, as they all do, and Charlie peaked at 5'10" and 195, all solid muscle. Charlie was a linebacker. When I asked him once what his qualifications for the job were, he laughed and said, "Coach says I'm fast enough to catch them and big enough to eat them!" For a normal guy, he was on the large side, and certainly in excellent shape. For a football player, he wouldn't even make it to Division III ball. College and professional football was now nothing but the Land of the Giants. He wasn't going to college on a football scholarship, or with his grades, any other type of scholarship. Not that we needed one, but it would be nice to see him get an education.

He had hemmed and hawed at all of these ideas, so I put it to him differently. "So where do you plan to work?"

"Huh?"

"Charlie, you need to figure out what you are doing with your life. If you think you can just live here, think again. Once you are out of high school, the free ride is over. We'll put you through college, but you need to get a job and start paying room and board. If all you have is a high school degree, the only jobs you are going to get will involve your saying the words 'Would you like fries with that?' Or do you plan on going pro with the motocross racing?" Charlie had decided to drop from Scouting several years ago and had concentrated on football and motocross. For the last year, since he had turned sixteen, he had gotten his pro ticket from the AMA. Going pro, however, would necessitate a lot of travel and expense.

Charlie got a little more animated at that. "I've been thinking about that. I talked to Bucky and Uncle Tusker, and they are interested in sponsoring me, but Bucky is still in college. He won't be much help."

"Well, then, you'd better decide on the Army or the Navy, because you ain't hanging around here for the rest of your life."

At that our son nodded and stood up, and headed towards his room.

Marilyn was sitting in the living room at the house when we had this conversation, and had remained silent throughout. After Charlie took off, she told me, "We are not charging our son room and board."

I smiled at her. "I know that and you know that, but he doesn't know that. He needs a swift kick in the ass at times."

She glanced towards the hall where the bedrooms are, and then looked back at me and smiled. "Very true."

That conversation had been during the fall, and I just couldn't get him to commit to anything. Now, with his grandmother asking, he shrugged and said, "I think I'm going into the service."

I sighed and nodded at the answer, since it seemed to me that Charlie was doing this just because he couldn't come up with any better idea. Marilyn pursed her lips and looked unhappy, but didn't argue with him. That task was immediately taken up by the entire remainder of Marilyn's family. They were still as big a bunch of draft dodgers as they had been when I started dating Marilyn. The difference now was that when they met me, I was already committed to serve. Charlie was still talking about it, and wasn't signed up yet.

Harriet had the general gist of the family's argument. "Have you lost your mind? Why in the world would you want to do something that stupid?!" I kept my mouth shut but gave her a rather dry look at that. They even offered him a job after he graduated, working for Lefleur Homes.

Charlie jumbled out a bunch of reasons before Marilyn had the decency to shut her family down. Afterwards, I tapped him on the shoulder and led him into the den. "So, what's going on? Why are you doing this? I know it's not the money. Your mom will never actually let me throw you out into the snow, you know."

He laughed at that. "Mom told me that. I didn't think you actually would. I just don't want to keep going to school. I think I'll go crazy if I have to keep doing that!"

"Yeah, well let me tell you, you join up, you'll still be going to school. Don't you dare think otherwise! This isn't the days when they handed you a musket and lined you up and told you to bang away at each other! The training is constant, and some of the fields are more technical than anything you will find at a community college.", I told him. (You want technical training? Join the Navy!)

He nodded, but replied, "Even so, it'd still be different."

"Then let me tell you something else. This is still something more than just avoiding school. I don't care whether you join the Army or the Navy, or even the Coast Guard, but you damn well better have a reason more than not having anything better to do."

"So why did you join up?", he returned. "I've read your bios. You had other scholarships, and you had a lot of money, even then. You didn't need to join the Army to go to school, did you?"

"We're not talking about me. We're talking about you!"

"Are we? I've talked to Aunt Suzie, too."

That stopped me. "What does my sister have to do with this?"

"She told me about the family history. She told me that she got the photos from your father that were in their house before they sold it. The photos of you and your father and grandfather in uniform. And I've seen that picture of you getting your medal. Mom's real proud of that one. She says you're her own personal hero."

I gaped at that and sat down heavily in an armchair. "Oh, Charlie, those are the worst possible reasons! If you think you need to join because of some family destiny, you are so very, very wrong. And believe me, I'm no hero."

"But the medal..."

I looked at him sadly. "Charlie, that medal and two bucks buys you a cup of coffee. Men died that day. I'd rather just have the cup of coffee, and I don't drink coffee." I looked out the window, not really seeing the view. "You want a medal, Charlie? Hell, I'll give you the damn thing!"

"Dad, you told Mom once that it was your turn to do your duty. That's what she told me once, anyway. Maybe it's my turn now."

"Shit!", I muttered to myself. Then I looked at him. "Do me a favor and get an office job. If anything happens to you, your mother will never forgive me. The Army is always looking for truck drivers and clerks."

My son laughed at that and left the room. Moments later Marilyn came in, to find me still sitting there and staring out the window. She came over and sat down on my lap. "I heard what you told him. He's simply too much like you."

"I had been hoping for something better.", I told her.

She put her arms around my neck, and I put mine around her waist. "You're always too hard on yourself. He's a good boy, and some day he'll be a good man, like his father."

"Just remember, I tried to talk him out of it."

She hugged me and answered, "I know. I heard it all. You're still my hero, no matter what you say."

"You could have done so much better than me."

"Nonsense!" Marilyn kissed me. "Enough of this." She stood up and led me back to the rest of the family.

Later that day I told Charlie that he needed our approval to do this. None of the services would even touch him until he graduated from high school, and until he turned 18, he needed our signatures. He was to bring the recruiting sergeant to the house some night after we got home.

That occurred two weeks later, on a Wednesday night. I was under orders to make sure I was home in time for dinner. We were to meet Sergeant Rodriguez at 7:30. The girls were more curious than anything else, Marilyn and I were rather resigned, and Charlie was very nervous. He was pacing back and forth and looking out the windows, and Marilyn and I were looking at each other and simply shaking our heads and rolling our eyes.

A few minutes before the appointed time, I went down the hall to my bathroom. Needless to say, that was when the doorbell rang. Well, there were plenty of other people to handle the matter. Then I heard Dum-Dum bark, and smiled to myself. Definitely, somebody else could handle the problem!

I took a piss and then washed up. As I started heading back out of the room, I heard Marilyn comment, "Oh, dear!" That made me wonder what the problem was.

I quickly found out. Marilyn was standing there in the living room, holding Dum-Dum in her arms. Dum-Dum was now at least 15 years old, and she was an old dog. She had a bit of a limp these days (well, so did I), and her face had a lot of white hair, and she wasn't moving too fast anymore, but she was still excited to see people. She was squirming in Marilyn's arms and was licking the sergeant who had bent down to allow this. Charlie was standing there holding the sergeant's coat. I came closer and then the sergeant stood upright and turned to face me. That was when I realized why Marilyn had said, "Oh, dear!"

Sergeant Rodriguez was a member of the United States Marine Corps!

I couldn't help myself! I swear to Christ, I couldn't help myself! I turned to Charlie and said, "The Marines!? Are you kidding me? The Marines!?"

Marilyn laughed and set down the dog, who scampered around a bit before heading off to jump up on the couch. "You behave!", she told me. To Sergeant Rodriguez, she said, "Don't mind him. He used to be an Army paratrooper."

The sergeant smiled and nodded in understanding. "Yes, ma'am. Army paratroopers are just guys who wanted to be Marines and didn't make the cut."

Marilyn laughed heartily at that. "Carl, I think we have found your match!"

I gave a wry smile and shook the sergeant's hand. "Nothing personal, Sergeant, but my understanding was that the Marines were the guys who found jump school too hard. Welcome." I turned my head to my grinning son., "If this is a joke, you will spend the rest of your very short life digging your grave out back!"

He laughed and said, "It would almost be worth it."

I snorted and turned back to the sergeant. "Well, I can always kill him later. Come on in. I'm sure my wife has coffee on."

Sergeant Rodriguez was perfectly charming, and made a fine case for Charlie to join the Marines. Despite my many jokes over the years about recruiting sergeants, the days are long past when they could lie about everything and not give a damn about the consequences. At Lefleur Homes I had hired several recruiting sergeants, since they made excellent salespeople. Ever since the advent of the all volunteer force, military recruitment has taken on an almost professional air, with recruits signing contracts, and the military having to honor the contract in most cases (assuming nobody is shooting at you at the moment.) It was also obvious that the sergeant had done his homework. He knew who I was, as in I wasn't some routine schlub sending his kid out. I had a fair amount of juice.

I listened to the sergeant, and also watched Charlie's face. It was obvious to me that my son wasn't doing this just because he couldn't think of anything else. He had obviously swallowed the Kool Aid.

They don't just let any old asshole in the Marine Corps. It's not like the old days where you could just sign up, or be sentenced in some cases, and be sent off as cannon fodder. Charlie would have to take both the ASVAB, a military SAT type test to see if he was smart enough, as well as a pre-ASVAB to even get that far. There would be a couple of physicals, including drug testing. I wasn't too worried about that, since I hadn't seen any indications of it, but the parents are always the last to know.

At the end of the spiel, I looked over at Marilyn, who gave a resigned shrug of her shoulders. That was probably about as much of a positive sendoff as a Lefleur was going to give. I nodded back to her, and then turned to face the sergeant.

"Okay, I think it's my turn to speak, for both me and Charlie's mother. First and foremost, Charlie is not leaving here until after he graduates from high school, and he is going to graduate, and he is going to graduation. There will be no exceptions on that. Is that understood, Mister?", I asked our son.

"Uh, yeah, sure." I gave him a hard look, and he swallowed and said, "Yes, sir!"

"Good. Remember that phrase."

Sergeant Rodriguez snorted at that. "Fine by us, Congressman. We don't want him if he doesn't graduate."

I nodded. "Where are you out of, Sergeant? Towson or Reisterstown?"

"Towson, sir."

"Do you have some form of physical conditioning program? Something to toughen these kids up before they report in?"

I received a smile in return. "Yes, sir, we do. We will be expecting Recruit Buckman to attend, too."

"I'm in shape!", protested Charlie.

I gave him a disgusted look. "You think you're in shape. You are soft and weak. You couldn't pass the Marine standards right now, let alone Army standards. You will cooperate with the sergeant or find another job. Got it?"

"Yes, sir!"

I nodded. In reality, Charlie was in perfectly fine shape to join up, but he could use the discipline and structure involved.

I looked back at Rodriguez. "Okay, a question for you. You can't have him until graduation, which is in June. He turns 18 in October and you don't need our permission then. That makes me think you will be sending him to boot camp in between." I made the last sentence into a question.

"In August, sir."

"Parris Island?"

"Yes, sir."

I shrugged. South Carolina in the summer. It should be delightful! From what the Sergeant had told us, boot camp would run 13 weeks, so he would be tied up with them until sometime in November. He would get a week's leave at that point, and then off to the School of Infantry for another couple of months of combat training at some place near Camp Lejeune. That would probably keep him busy through Thanksgiving and Christmas. He'd probably get another leave after that, and then find his ass shipped off to his duty station. At that point he'd be assigned to a battalion and follow them wherever they were sent. He would have a four year commitment, followed by another four years in the inactive reserves.

"Okay. We'll go along with this, but we won't sign the papers until after graduation. Then you can take him and be welcome to him! I do want to ask a favor, though."

"Yes, sir?"

I sighed. "Sergeant, you know who I am. I'm a U.S. Congressman, and I am relatively well known. I can't require you to do this, but I can ask, as the father of a young man. I know how the services work. When you put through his paperwork, I want to see a mistake. Don't enlist him as Charles R. Buckman. I want you to enlist him as Robert C. Buckman. And I don't want you to use his address here. We can use the address in Washington."

Sergeant Rodriguez' eyes widened at that, and both Marilyn and Charlie started protesting and asking what I was up to. Even Dum-Dum looked up from where she was sleeping. I kept my eyes on the sergeant, however. "Sir, that would be very unusual. Why would I do that? Charlie will have to provide his birth certificate.", he replied.

"I am aware of that, Sergeant, and I am also aware that clerical errors get made." I then looked at my son, and gave the rest of the answer. "Charlie, I am a rich and powerful man. Most of the kids you have grown up with, most of the girls you have dated, you first met them when I wasn't anywhere near as rich or powerful. But out there, out in the rest of the world, the people you meet will only know you as the son of a rich and powerful man. Bobby Buckman, of Washington, however, nobody has ever heard of. The friends you make, you'll know they're your friends because of you, not because somebody wants something from me. The same goes for your duty assignments. There will be people who will want you to do things in the Marines because they think they will be able to get stuff from me."

"Huh?"

"It happens, Charlie. Maybe you get assigned somewhere nearby, or maybe you want to have one type of duty and somebody in the Pentagon sees your name and decides you should do something different. Hey, it happens.", I told him.

Then I looked back at the sergeant. "So, there it is. I can't expect it of you, and I can't even really ask it of you, but for his sake, not for mine, change his name. If he wants to do this, let him, but let him just be a regular guy."

Sergeant Rodriguez wouldn't commit himself, but simply promised to think about it. I couldn't ask more than that. After a bit more, we let him leave, and told both him and Charlie we wouldn't stand in his way. After he left, though, I tapped Charlie on the shoulder and pointed back to the living room. "Why the Marines?"

"Because it's not the Army.", he said. I was quite hurt at that, and it must have shown. Charlie, said, "Dad, I need to do something different. I know you were in the Army, and I can't go through life being compared to you. I have to do something different."

"Is it that bad?", I asked softly.

"No, it's not like that. It's just ... I need to do something different. The girls, they're more like you. Holly and Molly ... I can see them going to college and becoming scientists or something, like you did, but that would drive me crazy! I'm never going to be an office type of guy, so let me try something else."

I looked over at Marilyn and we gave each other a resigned look. Marilyn sent our son to bed and then looked over at me. She didn't say anything.

I simply said, "The Marines?!"

She just started laughing at me.

There proved to be limits to my power as the Majority Whip. I could delay legislation and influence legislation, but I couldn't stop legislation. Case in point – the Gramm-Leach-Bliley bill, otherwise known as the Financial Services Modernization Act. Wall Street was pushing this hard, very hard! In the sake of modernization, they wanted us to dismantle the Glass-Steagall Act from the Depression. There were also other minor issues, but this was the big one to me.

Glass-Steagall mandated the separation of commercial banks from investment banks. Commercial banks were what normal people thought of as banks, where they got car loans and mortgages and cashed their paychecks. Investment banks, on the other hand, were the basis of what is known as 'Wall Street'. You might have stocks and bonds with them, or a retirement account. To a considerable extent, the Buckman Group would be considered part of Wall Street, since we did so much investing and had clients and investors. There was a big difference in how the two groups were regulated, and what they could do. The biggest difference was that if a commercial bank went under, the depositors were safe. The Feds would come in, examine the books, shut it down, and sell the bank, in most cases overnight. If an investment bank made the wrong bets on Wall Street, tough luck! You lost your money! You want to play with the big boys, wear your big boy pants.

I knew how this story would end, and it wasn't pretty. In fact, it was a major factor in the financial sector collapse in 2008. After Glass-Steagall was repealed, investment banks and commercial banks bought each other up and became indistinguishable. Then, when something bad happened, like an investment bank failed, it took down any commercial bank part of it, and the Fed ended up investing almost a trillion dollars cleaning up the mess.

I fought it, and I fought it hard, but too many people wanted it. I tried to delay it and modify it, but everybody thought they were smarter that the market and the economy. Depressions? They were a thing of the past! We had out-regulated and outsmarted the bad things that could happen. What a clusterfuck of thinking. The best part was that everybody seemed to think that since I made my fortune on Wall Street I should be in love with this. I made a few speeches and went on the talk shows and said that I was a big boy, and if I fucked up, I would lose my money but nobody else's. If I was brave enough to bet my money, why did they want to gamble with the public's? I might as well have talked to the wind. I was well in the minority when it came time to vote on this abortion.

I didn't have to worry about behaving properly around the President and the First Lady. Bill and Hillary weren't about to invite me over to dinner unless it was a scheduled and formal event. That occurred in January when the freshmen Congressmen and Senators were invited for the regular welcome dinner, along with the House and Senate leadership. As the lowly Whip, I didn't make a speech. I was involved in various group photos, some with the President and some without, and some with our spouses and some without. Likewise, at the start of any new legislative session, you get the wonderful group photos of the President meeting with the leadership of the House and Senate in a big conference room, along with various Cabinet members. Everybody smiles for the cameras and promises to work together for the benefit of all. Then we pull out our knives and sharpen the points, the better to stick in each other's backs.

The overall impression I got from most of Bill's staff was that if they could drown me in a barrel of used motor oil, it still wouldn't be sufficient.

I didn't much care. I left a lot of the care of the district in the hands of my regular staff, and did like a good Representative should – I obeyed my staff! Marty and the Constituent Services people would decide what I had to do, Mindy would write it up for me, and I would do their bidding. It was a lot like an upside down pyramid, with a dozen or more chiefs ordering around a lone Indian. It made you wonder who worked for whom.

The Whip's office worked a little differently. I actually had two separate offices and two separate staffs. The Whip's staff was totally separate from my district office and only worked on leadership items. I spent a fair bit of time working with DeLay and Hastert figuring out how to get legislation passed, and then I would go back to the staff with instructions. There is still an immense amount of really piddly fiddlework involved in getting things done, and it's the Whip's job to do it. You have to meet prospective Congressmen, the guys who want to challenge somebody for a seat. Then there's the mundane aspects of running a big bureaucracy. Who gets on what committees, when do votes get scheduled, where people are at any given moment – it all has to be kept track of! If a vote on some legislation is scheduled, are the good votes present and the bad votes out of town? Make it happen! There was one memorable case where a senior legislator who happened to be in Washington State needed to make it to D.C. in time for a critical vote, and the Whip arranged for him to go to the local Air Force base to get an 'orientation flight' in an F-15 to fly to Andrews Air Force Base outside of Washington in time for him to vote.

It wasn't all bad. True to my word, I worked across party lines to deal with the Democrats. In fact, if somebody, especially a Republican leader, couldn't be seen to be consorting with those evildoers on the other side, they might have a word with me to get me to do it. Since I was going to burn in the fires of Republican eternal damnation anyway, why not? The same was true for the Democrats. If something needed to be whispered in a Republican ear, they could easily whisper it in mine.

I remember talking to Dave Bonior, my counterpart in the Democrats, and we proposed coming up with a special committee, where we could put each party's crazies, and let them drive each other nuts. I would propose one of our homophobe Creationists, and he would propose one of his Communist eco-freaks. It became a running joke for us.

My biggest task was to keep the pressure on the Clinton Administration. To the extent that I had any form of national reputation as anything other than the billionaire murderer who had bought a House seat, it was as a serious deficit hawk. (I also had a reputation as a neo-isolationist, but that was a whole different story!) Now, in 1998, by all forecasts we would actually turn a surplus! The default Democratic response to this unnatural occurrence would be to spend more money, to bring us back into the much more natural deficit state. As a deficit hawk in a position of leadership, I had to keep the Republican Congress riled up, keep the pressure on, and not allow any backtracking.

This wasn't hard to do. It simply involved unrelenting public pressure on the Administration. All the 'business' Republicans, as opposed to the ideological and social conservatives, took every conceivable opportunity with the press and the various talk shows to push the benefits of deficit reduction, and now, the surplus. In particular, we were pushing the need to maintain a surplus for the foreseeable future, in order to pay down the debt. In this we were aided, ironically enough, by Alan Greenspan, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve.

Greenspan was, in my modest opinion as one of the richest men in America (and not just because I knew a lot of future history), incredibly overrated as a financial genius. He had recently started claiming that budget surpluses were bad, that paying off our national debt would lower the value and trading status of our national debt instruments like Treasury bills and Treasury bonds, and would otherwise lead to the end of Western Civilization and life on this planet as we knew it. By now I had enough reputation on the subject to be able to go on the Sunday morning talk shows and argue the opposite.

I used the same technique I had used in the House bank scandal and the House Post Office scandal. While others had argued about various outrages, I reduced it to a level that the most average viewer could understand. Now I pushed, "How hard can it be? Average Americans dream of the day they can pay off the mortgage. Average Americans hold mortgage burning parties, and half of them invite the bankers they got the mortgage from! Being debt free is every person's dream; why shouldn't it be this nation's?"

Inasmuch as the only responses to this extremely plain spoken and practical question were highly technical high finance explanations that required doctorates in economics to understand, public opinion was on our side. I knew that in the future, at least in my original timeline, the problem would be solved in a totally different way. The Republican Party, in thrall to the no-tax coalition of Grover Norquist and the billionaire elite donors to the party, drastically reduced taxes, especially on the rich, and put us back into deficit. This was totally separate from the fact that we managed to blunder our way into two separate wars, without any coherent plans to pay for either. The Presidency of Bush 43 put us trillions in debt!

Grover wasn't a major factor in my calculations at the moment. He couldn't threaten me with having donors withdraw campaign contributions from me. He was still in the process of forming his unholy alliance with the Tea Party, which really didn't exist yet. He could threaten me with trying to find candidates to run against me in a primary, which was a distinct possibility. Primary battles generally play to the hard core party base and not the much larger electorate found in the general election. In addition, primaries have lower turnouts than general elections. Combine the two and the hard core conservative base can overthrow an incumbent, but then lose in the general election to a more moderate candidate from the opposing party.

While it wasn't having a credible effect on me, at least at the moment, I could see that it easily could affect some of my colleagues. I told Marty to give it some thought and then to pass along to the American Renaissance Institute the benefits of supporting other deficit hawk candidates and incumbents.

One big problem for me that spring turned out to be the disaster at Columbine. In April a pair of Goth crazies decided to shoot up their high school in Colorado. As the author of the Defending the Second Amendment Act I found myself at the center of the firestorm over gun control. It was a no-win position to be in. It faded after a few weeks, as all of these things do, usually because something else dreadful takes everybody's attention. What a God-awful situation!

By mid-spring it was obvious that Charlie really wanted to join the Marines. He was participating eagerly in Sergeant Rodriguez' prep workouts, and his grades seemed sufficient to escape Hereford High. We relented by mid-semester when the sergeant showed us the paperwork that he was going to run through as Robert NMI Buckman, and we signed. I then told Charlie that if he tried to weasel out of graduation, he was going to be sent to Parris Island in pieces. Even Marilyn got into the act with, "I didn't go through ten hours of labor all on my own not to see you graduate!", combined with vigorous finger wagging.

"She gets scary at times.", he whispered to me later.

"Tell me about it!", I whispered back.

Charlie graduated, and then he and a bunch of his buddies drove down to Ocean City for a week. He had asked if he could fly them to Hougomont, and I laughed that one away! No way did I need to start an international incident and war when those twits decided to moon somebody I might actually know, like the Prime Minister! We simply managed to rent a house for the week, and made them all cough up some cash, and then sent a couple of drivers to keep them out of trouble. I reminded Charlie that a prison record would keep him out of the Marines.

On the plus side, nobody ended up needing bail money, and no angry fathers of young women chased down Hereford High's football team. On the down side, I don't think the rental agent was overly amused by the number of empty beer bottles left in the place. It was with a sigh of relief that we turned Charlie over to Sergeant Rodriguez in August.

Later that fall, we were faced with a tragedy. Dum-Dum had been moping around ever since Charlie had left for the Marines. She was his dog. He had picked her from the litter, he had named her (after a fashion), and he had taken good care of her. She had mostly slept in his room, usually on his bed. Once he left for Parris Island Dum-Dum had been disconsolate, going back and forth between his empty bedroom and ours. The first week of October, she started having accidents in the kitchen and family room.

I had a bad feeling about this. We had gotten her in late 1982, when Charlie was a little over one. Now he was seventeen, and Dum-Dum was sixteen. In dog years that was just way beyond old. Marilyn took her to the vet, who kept her overnight to run a few tests. We got a call the next day; Dum-Dum wouldn't be coming home. She was suffering from kidney failure, and probably cancer. Marilyn called me about it, but neither of us wanted to drag out the old girl's pain. We had her put to sleep.

Holly and Molly wanted to know why we couldn't get a transplant or something, and Marilyn had to explain that it would be cruel to drag out Dum-Dum's pain and suffering. Marilyn and the girls cried their eyes out that night, and I can't say I was in any better shape. The twins wanted to get a new dog right away, but we decided to wait a bit. I told them we could do something next year.

Charlie graduated from boot camp in November and Marilyn and I took a few days off and flew down to South Carolina. Once there, we managed to leave the security team at the gate and act like the other parents down to see their offspring march around. Nobody seemed to know who Charlie was related to, and when we offered to take him home with us for his leave, he told us that some of the guys were heading to Miami for a few days, and would it be all right if he went with them. He promised to come home when he got leave at Christmas. Our little boy was growing up.

Meanwhile, the Republican campaign for the 2000 elections was well underway! Everybody and their brother had been making pilgrimages to Iowa and New Hampshire, well, everybody who was running, anyway. How these two miniscule states ended up being the arbiters of national politics completely escaped me. The political future of an incredibly complex and multiculturally diverse nation would be decided by a bunch of fundamentalist farmers and hardheaded Yankees. This couldn't be what the Founders had in mind when they thought this mess up!

This was the third presidential election since I had gotten to Washington in 1990 and I had learned one thing from them. The single solitary lesson I had learned was that never, under any circumstances, did I want to run for President! It was one thing to run around a couple of small Maryland counties nights and weekends, keeping my name and face fresh in front of the voters. It is something completely different to try and do the same thing across fifty states and face down a dozen guys who would happily sell their mothers to a Mexican whorehouse and rape nuns to get the job.

As 1999 ended it seemed like everyone and their brother was running for the Republican nomination. We had Senators, a Governor, a former Vice President, some Cabinet Secretaries, and a bunch of businessmen who were all vying for the privilege of whomping on Al Gore's ass. While a bunch of Democrats were talking about running for the Democratic nomination, other than the Vice President, to my knowledge none of them had even formed the obligatory 'exploratory committee' prior to declaring. This was one of those legal fictions allowing candidates to run all over the country giving speeches and 'learning about the concerns of the people' while collecting campaign funds without legally campaigning.

As far as I was concerned, there were only two serious candidates for the Republican nomination. George W. Bush was the Governor of Texas, and the son of George H. W. Bush, the former President. John McCain was the senior Senator from Arizona, and was the only member of the Senate with the political chops and skill to run for the office. The others, like Steve Forbes or Pat Buchanan or Dan Quayle were either has-beens or wannabes without either a clue or a chance.

In '92 I had of course supported President Bush, who had been the only guy running. I ignored Ross Perot as nothing but a troublemaker. Four years later I had supported Bob Dole. I had known he would take the nomination, but seriously, none of the others interested me anyway. I slept soundly supporting him. Bob had been thankful, of course, but it wasn't like I was any sort of power in the House, and the Maryland Ninth wasn't going to vote for him in any case.

My, oh my, how things had changed! The Maryland Ninth still wasn't going to vote Republican, but I was now the Majority Whip, and had a certain degree of influence. I began to be courted by the candidates, being asked to be seen with them, to go to fundraising dinners, to become known as an adviser. Sometimes the candidate themselves might come calling and sometimes it might be one of their campaign staff. Some were serious players with good ideas (I liked Orrin Hatch, Liddy Dole, and Lamar Alexander, but I knew they would never generate the money it would take to make even a serious run) and some were jokes (Herman Cain!) The worst to me were the ones doing it because they had a cause that they were pushing, at the expense of everything else, like Pat Buchanan and his hard right agenda. Pat had already lost in 1992 and 1996, and had gotten shriller and more unelectable with every election. Another pathetic excuse for a candidate was Steve Forbes, who made a big push for me to support him, simply because we were both ludicrously wealthy. Big difference? I made my money (with a fair bit of foreknowledge, to be sure) and he inherited his, a lot of which he spent with a campaign and message which failed to resonate with anybody.

For most of 1998 and 1999 I was able to tap-dance around the issue, simply promising to support whoever was nominated. It was obvious early on that the only two serious players were going to be Bush and McCain. The party establishment, the RNC and the state parties, were all lined up behind George Bush, and I was certainly hearing this from both groups. On the other hand I knew, without any shadow of a doubt, that George Bush was going to be one of the most disastrous Presidents this nation had ever seen. On practically every choice he made, whether foreign or domestic, he managed to come down squarely on the side of the wrong choice! McCain could be a hothead and a loose cannon, but he was simply smarter.

I had a meeting in my Westminster office with Millie Destrier (Bob had died last year, a real loss, because Bob was just a hell of a nice guy!), now the head of the Maryland Republican Committee, Jack Nerstein from Carroll County, and John Steiner's replacement for Baltimore County, Macy Adams. All three of them were pushing me to publicly come out in favor of George Bush. It was late in the day, after hours, and the four of us were having drinks. Nobody was around to overhear us and we all knew each other long enough to be candid.

I had listened to their arguments, and had simply replied, "I can only promise to support the candidate who eventually wins. Why should I commit myself now, and maybe end up backing the losing horse?"

"With George, you know you'll be backing the winner.", countered Millie.

"That is circular logic, Millie, and won't stand on its own.", I said with a smile.

"It's not circular if you look at who is going to win. When you look at the donors and the campaign contributions and the rest of the supporters, none of the others have a chance! This is going to come down to either Bush or McCain.", said Macy, and I nodded in agreement. She continued, "Between the two of them, McCain just doesn't have the backing. It's going to be George Bush."

I gave a wry shrug at that. It might be true, but I didn't have to like it.

Jack asked, "Carl, what's your real problem with Bush? There's more to this then just hedging your bets."

"And say there was? Say that you are right and I am wrong, and George Bush becomes the next President of these United States. I do not need it getting out that the House Majority Whip doesn't think much of the President! Tell me how that plays out well for anybody?", I replied.

"So tell us! Listen, I swear I won't tell anybody what you said here tonight.", he said. The others promptly made the same promise, which I was free to value for whatever I felt it was worth.

I sighed. Here was another dilemma – do I tell them their candidate was a moron or do I tell them I don't trust them not to tell tales out of school? "Okay, just hear me out on this, and if anybody ever flaps their mouth, I'll hear about it!"

I freshened my drink and Millie's, the others were all right. "Listen, George Bush has a lot of stuff going for him. On paper, everything is perfect! Republican establishment, money, education, military service, a background in business, owner of a sports team, governor of a big state – everything you would ask for if you sent down to Central Casting for a Republican Presidential candidate. But if you start digging at anything, it becomes real obvious real fast that there is nothing underneath the surface."

"How so?", asked Macy.

"Look at his business dealings. He's a Texas oilman, right? So, somebody want to tell me how he managed to run three separate oil companies into the ground? I mean, it's oil. You go somewhere in Texas, you stick a pipe in the ground, and you make a fortune. Everybody wants to buy the stuff, and he can't figure it out on three separate tries. Whatever money he has actually made on his own came from his time with the Texas Rangers, when he was the General Manager. Again, somebody want to tell me how that is important? Nobody cares about the front office. The coach is the important guy! He wasn't even that important in the front office. He was a minority owner who looked good schmoozing."

The others all looked at each other, not quite sure how to respond. I kept going. "Take a look at his record in Texas. Texas is one of the weakest governorships in the nation. The governor there is practically a figurehead for the bureaucracy and the various department heads. Again, not an impressive record. Overall, the man strikes me as being a mile wide and an inch deep."

"And you think John McCain would be better?", asked Millie.

At that, I simply threw my hands up and shrugged. "That one I can't answer. Is this a case of the devil you know versus the devil you don't? McCain has a reputation for being hotheaded and a maverick. Is that somebody we want as President? I just don't know. I do know, however, that this ain't as cut and dry as everybody tells me."

We ended the meeting about where we started, with my refusing to support George Bush, or anybody else for that matter. They weren't happy with me, but I think they understood me. I just tried to keep my sanity and do my job and be a father. The twins were now sophomores at Hereford High and wanted to date. Their mother and I, however, were less than sympathetic, and the screams of outrage from the fruits of our loins were deafening! They wouldn't turn 16 until the summer, which meant that they would miss all the dances and parties and etcetera, etcetera, etcetera! We weren't so worried about the dances and parties, but were terrified of the etcetera! What if they met guys like... me!? Suddenly my misspent youth was coming back to haunt me, in spades!

We relented in May, and allowed the girls to go to the Junior-Senior Prom. Both girls had been asked by juniors, who were just two of the numerous young men sniffing around the house all year. This wasn't an unexpected turn of events. The twins had turned out as beautiful as their mother, and despite my considerable genetic height advantage, neither one of them seemed to be any taller. In fact, they were probably the shortest cheerleaders in school. Marilyn spent two weeks fretting and warning the girls about the perils of older boys. I decided on an approach that was more... practical.

The twins were too young for prom dresses, so Marilyn and Tessa went out with them and found some very nice cocktail length dresses. If there had been any thought that the two dresses would be somewhat demure, it totally failed. Thirty years ago I would have been after the two of them for a threesome! Marilyn insisted that the girls could only go as a double date. I made my plans accordingly.

The schedule was that the two young men, one Joseph Mangione and one Robert Smithson, would be at the house at 6:30, take the girls to dinner, and then from dinner go to the Prom. Unbeknownst to my daughters, I had my security team do a quick investigation on the boys and their families, which simply proved I was as paranoid as my brother. They were all amazingly normal and boring – and had never been in any trouble. Somehow I wasn't reassured.

The girls were driving the pair of us crazy that evening, dressing too early, then changing into sweats, then changing back, and meanwhile running back and forth between their bedroom and ours. I was decidedly not a welcome guest, and was sent off to my office, which was fine with me. Marilyn was hard at work toning down their makeup and perfume plans. By 6:15, the back and forth now included the front door and windows, in a triangular pattern. I wondered if my impending arrival at a girl's door had ever occasioned this much anxiety. I certainly hoped so, if simply so I could share the misery.

An excited squeal announced the impending arrival. I hurried to my preplanned position, in the kitchen, sitting at the kitchen table. I had let Marilyn in on my plans enough to know she was to bring the boys into the kitchen, so I could meet them.

"Don't you think that's a little too much?", she asked.

"Don't worry. It's almost certainly going to be harmless. Well, relatively harmless. I mean, probably. There's really going to be very little danger. Not much, anyway. Actually, you'll probably need to have the first aid kit ready.", I replied.

"I don't want to know!"

I heard Marilyn call Holly away from the front door and into the living room. When the doorbell rang, Marilyn went to the door to answer it, and I went to the kitchen island and pulled my preparations out. From the living room, I heard Marilyn inviting the young men in, a mumbled reply, and a couple of high pitched squeals. Then I heard Marilyn say, "Well, before you all go, we're going to take a few pictures, but I think your father wanted to talk to Joseph and Robert first."

"Mom!", sounded from both the girls.

"Your father's bark is much worse than his bite. He's in the kitchen. I'll be back when I find the camera." Marilyn moved away, and the twins came around the corner with two tall and gangly young men wearing bad tuxedos in tow.

"Dad, this is..." Molly started, but stopped in midsentence, stopping dead in her tracks and causing a pileup in the entrance.

"What's wrong ... Dad, what are you doing?!", squealed Holly. She and the two boys were all staring at me, sitting at the kitchen table.

What really had their attention, however, was what was on the table. I had spread out a few old newspapers and had my Colt 1911A1 on it, partially disassembled, along with a box of ammunition, a spare magazine, and the appropriate cleaning supplies. As they stared, I finished disassembling the pistol, and then stood up. "Hi, fellows, nice to meet you. Why don't you have a seat, and we can talk." The two boys had an appropriately terrified look in their eyes as I shook their hands and directed them to seats.

"Daddy! What are you doing!?", gasped out Holly.

"I was at the range earlier. I always clean my gun afterwards, you know that."

"MOM!", yelled Molly, scurrying off towards our bedroom. Holly squealed in outrage and followed her.

That left the two boys staring at me as I ran a cleaning cloth over my pistol. "It's very important to take care of a pistol. I've had this one since I was just a little bit older than you fellows. I had to kill a man with this gun once. I had to clean it after that, too." The two looked at each other nervously. I picked up the box of ammunition. "You boys ever see what happens when Federal Hydra-Shoks hit a target? I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen it myself! I mean, when it goes in, it makes a hole about so big..." I made a small circle with my fingers. "But then the head flattens out, like a mushroom, and when it comes out the other side, it's about this big!" I held my hands about a foot apart or more.

I ran out of time then, as Marilyn came into the kitchen, followed by the twins, both of whom were gesticulating, complaining, and glowering at me. Marilyn said, "See, nothing is happening. Your father is simply cleaning his pistol. You've seen him do that dozens of times. Now, let's get some photos."

"Sounds good! I'm sure that tonight is going to be a night that all four of you will remember." Marilyn gave me the evil eye when I said that, but I just smiled innocently.

After the photos, we sent them on their way, with instructions to be home by 11:00. The girls protested, pro forma; the boys eagerly agreed. Afterwards I reassembled my Colt and cleaned up the kitchen. Marilyn pulled out the makings for our own hamburgers and beans. "You don't think that was a little over the top, honey? Those boys will never want to ever come back here!"

"You say that like it's a bad thing."

"Carl!"

"So what? Let me tell you something. I just put the fear of God into those two, and they will be telling their buddies about the crazy killer father of the two hottest cheerleaders in school. You don't think that might be beneficial?"

"Not if your daughters never speak to you again!", she said, laughing.

"Think of the quiet." I made us a couple of Seven and Sevens. "Think I ought to be sitting in the living room at eleven, wearing my shoulder holster?"

That got another laugh. "That, I think, really would be overkill."

"A singularly appropriate remark, wouldn't you say?"

Marilyn snorted at that. I didn't wear the holster. We simply ate our dinner and then watched television in the living room until the kids came home. They arrived around ten minutes early, in perfectly fine condition. The girls brought their dates into the foyer, and I heard one of them state, "Don't worry! Daddy's not like that!"

If they had been hoping for a goodnight kiss, they were disappointed. The two young men saw Marilyn and me sitting there, smiling and waving at them, and they took off like they had jets up their butts! Holly and Molly shrieked in anger and stomped off to their room. "I HATE YOU!" and "YOU RUINED EVERYTHING!" came wafting down the hall.

Their mother sighed and stood up. "I'd better go talk to them."

"They'll get over it.", I told her.

"You're a real meanie."

"You should see me pulling the wings off of flies."

Chapter 125: Vetting

The campaign unfolded just about like I thought it would. About half or more of the candidates dropped out even before the primaries started, when their exploratory committees went exploring, and discovered that the far horizon had no money on it. About half a dozen stayed in, but the only two who counted were Bush and McCain. Neither of the two choices thrilled me. I knew Bush would be a disaster, but after seeing the hash McCain made of his campaign in 2008, I wasn't overly sanguine about him either.

Bush smacked McCain around in the Iowa Caucus, but then McCain won in the New Hampshire primary. After that pretty much everybody else dropped out of the race, although there were a few primaries they ran in because their names were already on the ballots. After South Carolina, though, things really went against McCain. Bush began running a very dirty and negative campaign, with intimations that McCain had fathered a child with a black prostitute. Karl Rove, Bush's campaign director, swore up and down that he had nothing to do with it; nobody believed a word he said.

By Super Tuesday it was all over. On March 7, 2000 there were 13 Republican primaries, and except for a few small states in the Northeast, George Bush won big. It was the final nail in the McCain coffin. The convention was to be held in Philly at the end of July, but by the end of March the pundits and politicians were already chattering about who would be Bush's nominee for Vice President.

Dick Cheney, a longtime Republican power player, was placed in charge of George Bush's search for a Vice Presidential candidate by the end of April. Cheney had been in Washington forever, going back to being an intern for Dick Nixon. He had been a Wyoming Congressman for years, and had once had my job, as Republican Whip. Then he served under George's dad (the smart Bush) as Secretary of Defense. Since then, he had been out of the public spotlight, and in Dallas running Halliburton. He was also the most disingenuous choice possible for the job of picking a Vice President. After much deliberation and soul searching he found the perfect candidate – himself! I couldn't wait to be 'surprised' again at this.

Well, I actually was surprised, when at a dinner with George Will, his wife Mari, and Marilyn, George commented, "I heard the other day that you were on the list for Vice Presidential choices."

I stared at him for a second, before replying, "I think you better check your sources on that one. If I'm on the list, it's only because the Tooth Fairy had a conflict of interest."

Marilyn looked at us curiously. "You're being considered for Vice President? When did you plan to tell me?"

I arched an eyebrow and answered, "As soon as somebody considers me. I think our friend here is just trying to get a rise out of me, and see if I snap at the bait."

"Congressman Buckman, how can you think such a thing!?", said a pious George Will. Mari simply rolled her eyes.

I pointed towards him and looked at Marilyn. "Uh, huh! See!" I turned back to him and said, "Nice try."

"So who is on the list?", asked Marilyn.

I shrugged. "The long list or the short list? The long list is just about anybody who's a Republican with a pulse. The short list is the serious one."

Mari added, "By that standard, Carl actually is on the long list."

"So, Congressman, for the record, what is your response?", asked George.

I put my most serious face on and grasped my lapels, trying to look pompous, and replied, "I fully intend to support whichever candidate is chosen, and assist them in their run for the White House."

"So you are saying nothing."

"You have grasped the overall concept. Who's on your short list?", I countered.

He shrugged. "Eh, the usual suspects. The safe bet is McCain, simply because he was number two, and it shows party unity, but that won't happen."

"Why not?", asked Marilyn.

"Because he doesn't need him, and they generally don't like each other.", I said. Turning back to George, I asked, "Who else? What about Liddy Dole? It would be good for the women's vote."

"That's an interesting idea." We tossed around a few more names, and Cheney never popped up once. George finished with, "So you're not interested?"

"In what? In playing this game? Sure, I love the game. In running for Vice President? I think the Tooth Fairy has a better chance. Hell, throw your name in the hat! You're smarter than most of them anyway."

"I couldn't afford the pay cut.", he laughed.

That evening, as we drove back to the house on 30th, Marilyn asked me, "Was he serious about that?"

I laughed. "NO! He was just trying to push my buttons and get me to say something that he could then use to go after some other poor schmuck. He's just trying to stir the pot and see what bubbles to the top."

"Oh. Would you want to run for Vice President?"

I opened my mouth for a snappy rejoinder, but then closed it again. It was actually a fair question. I glanced over at her and said, "I don't know. Leaving aside that the odds of this ever happening are somewhere lower than the odds of me ever seeing Heaven, I don't know. As Majority Whip, or some other House leader, I would probably have a lot more power than the Vice President. The only reason it actually makes sense is if I wanted to run for President some day."

"Would you?"

I was saved from answering by our arrival in our driveway. "Saved by the bell, the doorbell in this case!" We went inside without finishing our conversation. I opened a bottle of wine and we shared that while snuggling together on the couch, but all the while, I was thinking about those two questions.

Would I want to run for President? God forbid! To spend two years shaking hands in Iowa and New Hampshire, crisscrossing the country, begging for money, never seeing my wife and children for weeks upon end, while reporters and investigators climbed so far up my ass that I would see their smiling faces when I brushed my teeth? I shuddered at the very thought! If you have to have 'fire in the belly' to run for President, I could honestly state that I didn't.

Vice President was a different topic, though. For one thing, you really don't campaign for the job so much as you campaign for the Presidential candidate. You only have to be in campaign mode for the summer and fall, maybe four months. After that, you either lose and go home, or you win and go to sleep until the President dies. In my case, as a Congressman, I would need to run two campaigns, one for Vice President and the other as Representative of the Maryland Ninth. It looked as if the Democratic candidate for my House seat was as ham-handed as some of his predecessors, so I was reasonably confident I would win again. If I lost as VP, I would still have my day job. If I won, they'd have a special election to replace me. That's one of the reasons Presidential nominees often ask Senators to be a VP; if they pick one who isn't up for re-election, a loss doesn't mean he's out of a job.

One of the best reasons to be Vice President is if you want to become the President! If the President is good and successful (Reagan) his Vice President (Bush) is a shoo-in. However, if the President is unsuccessful or unpopular (Johnson) it's a much tougher row to hoe. Hubert Humphrey did not beat Dick Nixon. Still, it's good for name recognition. More than a few failed VP nominees have then gone on to run for President.

Vice Presidential selection is as much of an art as it is a science. At one point in our history, you selected a nominee who would complement the Presidential nominee. If the top guy was a northerner, the other guy was a southerner. Mike Dukakis from Massachusetts selected Lloyd Bentsen from Texas, for example. (The same thing applied with JFK and LBJ, curiously enough.) Maybe you select a moderate (George Bush) to tone down a conservative (Reagan) or maybe you select somebody who can carry an important state for you (Ike picking Californian Nixon, or JFK and LBJ again.)

That's the theory, anyway. In practice, you get some very strange results. Kennedy and Johnson had just come off a brutal primary season, and they hated each other's guts. Supposedly, Kennedy used Johnson to get him the critical Texas votes in the election, but I also heard that the election was rigged by Mayor Daley and the Chicago machine and a wonderful graveyard vote count.

It is actually much truer that the VP nominee rarely helps and almost always hurts. Dan Quayle looked like an eager little kid next to Bush 41 and Sarah Palin was a whack job with the IQ of a mouse. One of the worst examples was in 1972, when George McGovern selected Thomas Eagleton as his choice, only to have it discovered that Eagleton had received psychiatric treatment for depression. He had to be replaced, which did wonders for McGovern's campaign after he announced he would back Eagleton "100 percent!" Certainly, with my 'billionaire murderer' stigma, there was no way anybody would ever want me running.

We were finishing our wine when the girls came downstairs and found us still snuggling on the couch. They were in sweatpants and t-shirts, and Holly asked, "What are you doing?"

Marilyn giggled and answered, "I'm snuggling with my sweetie!"

"Mom! Oh, that is so disgusting!"

I bit my tongue to keep from laughing. Marilyn said, "Give me a break! Where do you think you two came from?"

"GROSS!"

Molly chimed in, "I think I'm going to vomit!"

The pair of them made gagging noises and headed towards the kitchen. Marilyn giggled again, and groped me through my pants. "Gross!", she said. "Want to go upstairs and see if we can be disgusting?"

I snorted in laughter, and led her up the stairs. "As long as we don't vomit!", I whispered.

It became doubly curious a few weeks later, when on one of the Sunday morning talk shows, my name was mentioned as a 'long shot' candidate. I was considered a leader in the House (as Whip that was true enough, I suppose, though after less than a full two year term you really couldn't call me 'tried and tested') and a leading intellectual in the young conservative movement. That one had me scratching my head, since I wasn't all that conservative. Monday morning Marty was asking me about it, and the only thing we could come up with was that somebody was using my name to drive their own agenda. It was certain that nobody had approached me from the Bush campaign.

A week later Fletcher Donaldson tracked me down and called me to ask me my thoughts on being on the short list. "Fletcher, if I was on the short list, don't you think somebody would have told me? Where are you getting this stuff?" He refused to tell me, and I let Marty and Marilyn in on this latest rumor. In most cases, being known as being on the short list was considered a good thing. It showed you to be a 'serious' leader worthy of consideration for higher office, and who wouldn't want that? I'd even heard of Congressmen and Senators lobbying Presidential nominees to leak that they were in the short list, so that it would help them in their regular re-election bid.

The second week of May Marty announced that I had an appointment with a couple of staffers from Governor Bush's election campaign, but it was to be in the Whip's office. In some ways this didn't surprise me; in fact if they hadn't wanted to meet with the Whip it would have surprised me more. I took the subway train from my office in Rayburn over to the Whip's office in the Capitol. What did surprise me, once they had been shown in and we seated ourselves, was when they announced that they weren't from the campaign, per se, but were from Dick Cheney's office. "Congressman,", one of them started, "we wanted to talk to you about whether or not you'd be interested in becoming the Vice Presidential nominee."

I tried to keep the surprise off my face. This definitely wasn't what I had suspected the conversation was to be about. "Is that a job offer?", I asked, smiling.

"That might be a little premature.", commented the other man. "We're just curious about your thoughts on the rumors floating around the Capitol these days."

"I've heard those rumors. I've been curious about them, too. I know I didn't start them, so who did? Any ideas gentlemen?"

Staffer Number One simply smiled and shook his head. "Not really, Congressman." Yes really, we leaked it.

My mind was racing at this point. Was this part of the selection process? Leak a name and see what happens? Does the candidate start some kind of response? Does he begin pushing his name in the press, or stating he doesn't want the job, or complaining about the other candidates? So far I hadn't done any of those things. My responses had all been a variation of two themes, and I gave them both again. "Well, of course I want to do anything I can to help Governor Bush in his bid for the White House. I'm just surprised that my name ever came up when there are so many much higher profile candidates."

"Congressman, you never actually came out in support of Governor Bush during the primaries. Why is that?", asked Number Two.

I gave a noncommittal shrug. "It was always my position that I would support the eventual winner. My concern was for the future. If I supported the Governor, I've just made Senator McCain unhappy, and I have to work with him. If I support Senator McCain, I have the same issue with President Bush if the Governor wins, and even if he loses, I didn't want to insult his father, the first President Bush, who I hold in the highest respect." That seemed a decent enough argument. "Besides, I'm damn near the only Republican in the Maryland Ninth, and I don't think I am going to sway anybody else in the state to vote Republican. I suspect Maryland will vote for Al Gore." I gave a wry smile as I said this.

I received a smile in return. Two asked, "You were a supporter of the Governor's father, correct?"

"Very much so. He was in office when I first came to Capitol Hill, and I consider him a fine gentleman and a good President. I definitely supported him in his re-election run.", I answered firmly.

One nodded and asked, "Back to the reason we are here. What would your thoughts be as to being on the ticket?"

I stared at the man for a moment, and then looked back and forth between them. They weren't smiling or joking. "This is serious? I'm being considered for the short list?"

"Yes, sir. This is serious. Your name has been brought up in conjunction with the short list."

I sagged back into my chair at that. My brain was running in about a million directions. After about thirty seconds, I repeated it. "Seriously?"

"Yes, sir."

I blinked at that. "Well, it's certainly not something I had considered. I figured somebody was just trying to stir the pot and see what rose to the top. All I can tell you is that I would have to give this some serious thought."

Two said, "I would think, Congressman Buckman, that in the last few weeks, since these rumors started, that you've had a chance to think about this already."

I gave him a hard look. "There's thinking about it and then there's thinking about it. I would certainly have to discuss this with my wife and family."

They glanced at each other and nodded imperceptibly. One opened his briefcase and brought out a thick manila envelope. "Congressman, as you can imagine, there are certain time constraints we are operating under. We are just starting the process of vetting all the candidates. If you are interested in being on the short list, we'll need to know within two weeks, and we'll need this paperwork filled out by then."

I raised an eyebrow at that. "Oh? What is this, a job application?"

One gave a small shrug and an even smaller smile, and Two simply nodded. "It's simply some background material Mister Cheney and Governor Bush will need to help make the decision."

I eyed the envelope. "Let me look this over. I'll be in touch."

"We'll need this filled out in two weeks, sir."

"I'll be in touch." I stood up, ending the meeting.

One then said, "This needs to be kept in the strictest confidence, of course."

I eyed him and cocked my head to the side. "Well, that ends my plans to tell the New York Times, doesn't it? I need to talk this over with my wife."

"Of course, sir."

"Good day, Congressman."

"Good day."

I showed the staffers out the door and then closed it behind them. I went back to the couch and sat down. Grabbing the envelope, I opened it up and leafed through the paperwork. It was a lengthy form with over 80 questions. If I thought the vetting process had been bad when I ran for Congress, this was ten times worse! Vast sections were about my finances, they wanted details of all my living relatives (and Marilyn's) out as far as we could find them, and details about my education and military experience I wasn't sure I could ever remember. I needed to provide copies of my voting record since I entered Congress along with copies of all speeches ever given. There were releases which needed to be signed so they could obtain transcripts, public records, and even my medical records. There was stuff in there I had never heard of. No way would I ever be able to fill it out; this would require my lawyers and accountants. The response would probably involve enough paperwork to fill a van.

Still, none of it meant anything unless Marilyn gave me her approval. Did I even want to do it? Maybe, if I could have any kind of influence on George Bush, if I was selected, if we made it into office. There were a lot of ifs in that statement. First things first. I pulled out my phone and hit the speed dial for Marilyn.

"Hello?"

"Hi. You busy?"

"Not particularly. I was just about to switch the laundry from the washer to the dryer. What's up?"

"Are you alone?"

"No, I have the pool boy, the lawn boy, and a couple of maintenance guys waiting for me in the bedroom. Why?"

"Marilyn!"

"Of course I'm alone! The girls are in school. What's up?"

"Listen, you can't tell them, or anybody else. You know, like you wouldn't tell your mother all the things you like having me do late at night..."

"CARL!"

"Okay, you know those rumors about me being on the short list for the VP slot? They aren't just rumors. I'm really under consideration.", I told her.

"What? Really?"

"That's about what I said.", I admitted. "I just had a couple of staff guys from Dick Cheney's office in here sounding me out. They left me with some paperwork I need to sort through, and I have to give them an answer in two weeks."

There was silence for a moment, then she asked, "What do you want to do?"

"I don't know. What do you want me to do?"

"I don't know. Do you want to be the Vice President?", Marilyn asked.

"Yes. No. Maybe. If I could actually do anything, then maybe, but no way do I want to do this if you don't want me to."

"They didn't ask me."

"Marilyn, I'm serious. I know you've said I should do something if I thought I could, but this is a whole different level of weird! If I say yes, and if I get selected, and if we win in November ... well, it really affects all of us!"

"Huh." There was some more silence, then she said, "I'm not saying no, but I want to talk about it tonight."

"Fair enough. See you later."

I couldn't think enough to get anything else accomplished that afternoon, so I called for my driver and packed the envelope into my briefcase. I was home about an hour later, arriving just after the girls came home from cheerleading practice. Tonight was spaghetti night. I really wasn't in the mood for small talk, but no way did I want to discuss this over the dinner table with my daughters.

They noticed as well, and Holly said, "What's going on? You two are up to something!"

Molly piped up, "Yeah, you two are doing something!"

I gave them my innocent face. "No idea what you are talking about." Marilyn smiled and rolled her eyes.

"No! See! Look at Mom's face! She can't keep a secret! You two are trying to hide something!", pushed Holly.

Marilyn grimaced at that, though I was tempted to laugh. She really can't keep a secret and has no ability to hide something. I shrugged, and responded. "It's really nothing. Well, the Swiss boarding school called this afternoon and told us the check cleared, but other than that..."

"Not funny, Dad! Not funny!", squealed our youngest. Her sister just glowered at us.

I shrugged and Marilyn buried her face in her napkin, hiding her smile. We finished our dinner and the twins headed into the living room to watch television. I helped Marilyn in the kitchen, and then we headed off to my office. I made sure to close the door, and then positioned my chair so that I could see if the girls tried to sneak up and listen. I had caught them doing that once or twice, but the door was a French door with glass panes, and I could see them approaching if they tried.

I turned to where she was sitting and commented, "You know, that Swiss boarding school idea keeps sounding better and better!"

"Don't tempt me. They have already announced we are having a big party this July when they turn sixteen.", she replied.

"Sweet sixteen and never been kissed?"

That earned a groan. "I think I'll be satisfied if they are simply single and without child!"

I gave a worried look out the door and down the hallway. "Do I need to clean my gun again any time soon?"

She waved it off. "No, it hasn't gotten that bad yet. Give them time, though. I'm glad they're on the Pill."

"WHAT!?

She rolled her eyes. "It helps them keep regular periods and eases their cramps. I thought you knew."

"Oh, good Christ!", I muttered. I looked back towards the living room. "I am really liking the idea of a boarding school. Someplace high in the Alps, girls only, run by nuns, and with a drawbridge and a moat. A really deep moat!"

Marilyn snorted at that. "If you become the Vice President, maybe we can get the Secret Service to start shooting their dates."

"We'll have to ask, for sure!" I turned back towards her. "All joking aside, do you want to do that?"

"Maybe. Would we have to move to Washington full time? The girls have two more years of school here, and they would freak out. Where would we live? The Naval Observatory?" The Vice President's residence is on the grounds of the Naval Observatory, in northwestern D.C.

I nodded. "Yeah, it's probably only a mile away from the place we have now, if that. I wouldn't think we would have to live there full time. Nobody cares about the Veep. We could keep our current schedule. Summers you could all stay down there with me. I am guessing I might have more travel than I do now. The biggest job is advising the President. I might not make it home every night, or even every other night. Once the girls have graduated, we can live there full time."

"Is this definite?", she asked.

"Hardly! They gave me a job application around ten feet long. If I get through that, I'm simply on the short list, and George Bush picks from there. The usual procedure from that point is that there is a public announcement a few weeks before the convention, and that is at the end of July. After that, I would be on the go until the election, non-stop, in November. Figure a solid four months."

"So this just might get you on the list. You wouldn't have to accept or decline until later."

"If I make it to the list, right."

"Do you think you might make it onto the list?", she asked.

"I have no fucking clue! There are times I can't figure out how I ended up a Congressman! Wait until I have to explain to some shitkicker in Alabama why my parents disowned me, and he agrees with them that I shouldn't have married a Yankee, a Catholic, or a Democrat!", I replied.

That made my wife laugh. I wasn't so sure how funny it would be. You develop a thick skin in politics, but switching from a couple of counties in Maryland to the entire nation would be a challenge. At home I didn't have but a few television stations and one newspaper to contend with. When Bumfuck TV 6, "The News That Bumfuck Needs!", decided to go after Marilyn and the kids, I could easily see myself punching out a reporter!

There was one thing I could do in the meantime, and I handled that immediately. Pulling out my cell phone, I hit the speed dial for Tucker and asked for a meeting the next day. Since I was really Tucker's only client, he agreed to meet me at his office early. I would dump the packet with him and let him and the accountants worry about it.

For the next few days, Washington D.C. played the ever popular game of "Who's the nominee?" There were all sorts of names being tossed around other than mine. Colin Powell could have had it if he wanted it, but did George Bush want a guy who had worked for his father? Otherwise it was the standard mix of Senators and Governors, with names like Bill Frist, Tom Ridge, and George Pataki being tossed around. The fun part of the guessing game wasn't to point out anybody's particular strengths, but to point out their weaknesses, as to why they wouldn't be picked. This one was too liberal (me, for instance), that one was too conservative, maybe somebody wasn't known to a national audience, maybe someone was too well known by everyone. My name was just one more thrown around, and Marilyn delighted in reporting to me my various character flaws, as revealed on television.

We got the packet back to Cheney's office by mid-May, and I was told I would be contacted at some point. It was a waiting game at that point, and my best guess was that somebody would make a decision in June. At the minimum, they would need at least a few weeks to print up the bumper stickers and signs before the convention in Philadelphia starting July 31.

By the end of May, I hadn't heard anything, and after talking to a few Senators I knew had been approached, I realized they hadn't either. I was smelling a rat, and its name was Dick Cheney. I gave it some thought, and then called George Will.

"George, you doing anything this evening?", I asked.

"I was going to watch a ball game. Why? What's up?"

"Come on over to the house. Let's talk. I can make dinner for us or you can come over after you've eaten."

"What's this about, Carl?"

I didn't answer. "You want anything fancy? I was just going to make hot dogs and Michigan Sauce."

"Okay, be that way. I'll see you at six."

George showed up on my doorstep a few minutes after six, still in his suit from the office. I was already in shorts and a sport shirt, and barefoot. He had been to the house before, as a guest at various dinner parties, but it was unusual to have him there alone. He glanced at my attire and said, "You were serious about the hot dogs?"

"Sure! Take off your tie and jacket. Get comfortable." He shrugged and took off his suit coat and tie, and then followed me into the kitchen.

I already had the hot dogs and fixings out, and a can of baked beans was on the counter. "You want two?", I asked.

"What's that?", he said, pointing to a small pot on the stove.

"Michigan Sauce."

"Which is?"

"It's sort of like chili. It's a family recipe from my wife's side of the family. If I actually told you what's in it, she'd have to kill you." He held up two fingers and I opened the package of hot dogs. I pulled out four and fired up the broiler. "Beer?" When he said yes, I pulled a couple of bottles of National Bohemian out of the refrigerator. "National Bohs. It's the last of them, though. Pabst is shutting down the brewery and going to tear it down. They'll still make it, but it won't be in Baltimore."

"Trying to prove you're a man of the people, Carl?"

I shrugged. "Trying to stay in office, if nothing else. It's pretty popular stuff back in Maryland."

"So, why'd you want to see me? It's not like there's a ball game on, so I can't sit back and pretend I'm at a stadium somewhere and have hot dogs and beer." George's biggest interest outside of politics was baseball.

"George, we're just a couple of fellows talking politics, you know, on background. What could be more innocent.", I answered. "You know, off the record."

His ears perked up at that. "Off the record?" On background and off the record were key phrases meaning that he couldn't use me as a source. "Okay, I'll play along."

"Well, let's just chat a bit first while we eat, and then we can go into my office. I have something for you." He gave a cautious nod, and I continued, "Hearing anything from the other people on the short list?"

"Is there a short list? I thought you were auditioning for the short list."

I smiled. "That would be the question, wouldn't it?" I had the beans on a burner, low, along with the Michigan Sauce. I rolled the franks on the broiler tray, and set some condiments on the kitchen island along with rolls. I grinned at him and commented, "It's a little less formal when we don't have a room full of politicians."

"I wouldn't have thought you to be a beans and franks kind of guy.", he replied.

"Marilyn and I are really very low key. We are simply middle class kids who got very, very lucky."

"And I can believe as much or as little of that as I want. So, what about the short list? Is there one?"

I shrugged elaborately. "Not that I can tell. Now, I don't know what you've been hearing, but you probably know more of the candidates then I do. The way it was put to me was that if my answers to the questionnaire were okay, I would go on the short list, and then George Bush would interview us and make a choice."

"That's what I've heard, too."

"Only nobody's being interviewed or being called back. What would that suggest to you? Bush's got between now and mid-July to make a pick."

"More like Cheney's got to make the pick. He's the head of the nomination committee."

"So again, what would that suggest to you?" The hot dogs were ready, so I pulled them out of the broiler and put them on buns. I set the pans of sauce and beans on hot mats and placed them on the island along with serving spoons. "Dig in."

We loaded up our plates, and George took a couple bites of his hot dog. He smiled and said, "This is pretty good. What's in it?"

I smiled back. "That's Top Secret, burn-before-reading and all that. If I told you, Marilyn would kill both you and me." I took another bite myself, and then said, "It's sort of like chili, only without the beans and peppers.

"It doesn't have the heat of chili."

I shook my head. "No, it doesn't. Different mix of spices."

"You were saying about Cheney?"

"Let me ask you a question. Who's smarter, George Bush or Dick Cheney?"

That got me a snort of laughter. "George got a Gentleman's C and thinks that's the same thing as a real C."

I nodded in wry agreement. "The smart one in that bunch is his brother Jeb."

"So, Dick Cheney is smarter than George Bush. So what?"

"So, he's a lot smarter. George has him running the selection process for his Vice President and also for his Cabinet. Who do you think is going to end up in these jobs? People owing their position to Bush or people owing Cheney?"

"Again, so what?"

"Okay, so what?" I paused a second and washed down some dinner with my beer. "So Dick is vetting all of us. What happens when he goes to George Bush and says that every one of us is fatally flawed and would be a complete disaster as a nominee. Every one of us would hurt the ticket. That nobody on the list can be used."

"That's pretty unlikely, Carl. There are some pretty qualified people on that list, and I'm not talking about you!", he replied.

"George, I'm still not sure why I'm there. The only thing I can think is that he wanted one Congressman to show he was being even handed or something, and he figured neither Hastert or DeLay would want the job. The question still stands, though. If none of us is qualified to be Vice President, who does that leave George Bush to choose?"

That caused Will's eyebrows to raise. "Are you suggesting Dick Cheney is going to recommend Dick Cheney as the Vice Presidential nominee?"

I smiled. "George! I suggest nothing! We're just two fellows having a light dinner and talking shop. If you were to ask around and find out I'm wrong, please, let me know."

We finished our meal and I set the plates in the kitchen sink. "You said you had something for me?"

"It's in my office." I led him out through the dining room into the foyer, and then down to my office.

He stepped inside and said, "So this is the infamous clubhouse? I don't think I've ever been in here before."

"You heard about the name?", I said with a laugh.

"What, the He-Man Democrat Haters' Club? I think we're both dating ourselves, Carl, when we say we know where that came from."

"Marilyn was never amused by that.", I admitted. I pointed him to an armchair and sat in a swivel chair near my desk. I reached into the desk and pulled out a manila envelope. "Here, take this. It's a blank copy for you."

"What is it?"

"Open it and find out."

George shrugged and opened the flap, and pulled out a copy of the questionnaire I had been given. It took him several minutes to work his way through the various pages, and then he looked up at me. "All of you had to provide this information?" I nodded. He looked through it a second time. "About the only thing he didn't ask was if you drank or used drugs."

"Considering George Bush's past history, that might not be a discussion they want to have." George Will pursed his lips at that, but didn't deny it. The Governor had already admitted to 'youthful indiscretions', including a drinking problem, and there were unanswered allegations of a heavy coke habit when he was younger.

"On the face of it, there is nothing here that a campaign wouldn't want to know about a prospect.", he commented.

"That is very true.", I agreed. "Still, at the level they are asking? And here's another couple of questions for you. First, has Dick Cheney had to fill this out? And who would do the vetting on him? And second, let's say that somebody is being considered for a Cabinet office and Dick doesn't want them there. What's to keep him from leaking something from the files he has collected to the New York Times and killing it off? Would you trust him?"

"Like who?"

I shrugged. "Keating is on the short list, right?" George nodded. Frank Keating was the Governor of Oklahoma. "Former FBI agent, former assistant U.S. Attorney, former Associate Attorney General, good conservative credentials ... sounds like a shoo-in for the Attorney General's slot, right. I can tell you right now that Cheney doesn't like him or want him. Wait until Cheney turns over his file on Keating to the press."

"What about your file?"

I threw my hands up at that. "What in the world is less secret than my life? What could they possibly find on me that hasn't already been used against me. Besides, no way do I have any kind of chance. I am much too moderate for the hard core Evangelicals that George and Karl Rove are courting. It's more likely I'll be burned in effigy than be elected to a national office."

"So why tell me?"

Again I shrugged. "I just thought you'd be curious to see how the process was really working. You're a curious guy, right?"

That didn't get an answer, and after a few more minutes, he left with the envelope.

Things got interesting that Friday. George Will had apparently been following up on my information and his column detailed the influence Dick Cheney was having over George Bush. It detailed how Bush had turned over the entire Vice Presidential and Cabinet selection process to Cheney. It also stated that Cheney hadn't been through his own vetting process, which he must have gotten from somebody else. It ended with an interesting conclusion.

An administration is more than simply who the President is; an administration is the people he chooses to implement his policies. To that extent then the forthcoming election would seem to be a contest between the winner of the Democratic primary, Al Gore, and the unelected winner of the Republican primary, Dick Cheney.

George Will might be a conservative and a Republican, but first and foremost he was a journalist and pundit. He must have known what a bomb he was igniting in the campaign. The Sunday morning talk shows were loaded with senior campaign operatives and consultants arguing that Governor Bush was in complete charge of the selection of the Vice Presidential nominee and the other cabinet members, and that there was actually a process in place to begin interviews. Notably absent from any discussions were either Bush or Cheney.

The following Monday morning, I got a call from Cheney's office and was asked to meet with a few staffers for a more personal vetting that afternoon. Joe Allbaugh, the campaign manager, had gone through my responses and now had more questions. There were some questions that had arisen with my responses. I met with them in the Whip's office. It became very obvious to me, very quickly, that I was not going to be a serious candidate. Among the exchanges, we had the following topics:

Military Service:

Q: Explain, in detail, how you earned your Bronze Star.

A: I'm sorry. That drop was classified Top Secret.

Q: It will be critical to know so that we can properly use this in the campaign!

A: That was classified Top Secret. I am not allowed to speak about it.

Q: Congressman, that happened 19 years ago. We need to know the details.

A: Good for you! Now, all you need to do is trot over to the Pentagon and get the Chief of Staff to sign off on my breaking security, and have him put it in writing, and I will be happy to tell you!

Q: This isn't very helpful, Congressman.

A: Top Secret! I still hold a reserve commission and a security clearance. What branch did you serve in and what was your clearance? (No answer to that one!)

Charity:

Q: Why do you donate to Planned Parenthood?

A: Because I want to. They do good work.

Q: That isn't going to be popular, Congressman. You shouldn't be donating to a charity for abortions.

A: Fine, then don't donate your money to it. It's my money; I'll give it to who I want to. (This also applied to a number of my other donations. I was either giving to the wrong people, or not giving to the right people.)

Church:

Q: Where do you go to church?

A: I don't.

Q: Never?

A: When I do go to church, I accompany my wife to her church. She's a member of Our Lady of Grace in Parkton. They're Catholic.

Q: It's important to show that you are a Christian and a regular member of a church, Congressman.

A: Then ask my wife to run.

Business:

Q: Congressman Buckman, why did you invest in [insert name here – they named several firms]?

A: So I could make money. Why do you think I invested in them? (At that point these financial wizards would want to know why we structured a deal this way or that, and I told them that when they were multibillionaires, they could feel free to give me advice.)

Q: Why does your blind trust invest primarily in the Buckman Group and related companies?

A: Maybe because I built a great investment company and I taught them how to make a lot of money. You should give it a try someday.

and finally, my favorite, Personal:

Q: Why did you parents disown you?

A: Because they didn't like me. (I think by this point they were agreeing with my parents!)

Q: Why did you think it was necessary to shoot your brother?

A: Because he broke into my house and was trying to kill me.

Q: You have a black belt in karate. Why didn't you use karate to disarm him and capture him?

A: Because he had a big knife.

Q: Why didn't you simply shoot it out of his hand?

A: Were you always this dumb, or did you take a special class?

At that point the interview was over. We never did get to my voting positions or public statements. I am sure that they went back to Dick Cheney with the conclusion that I was both unsuitable and uncooperative. I told Marilyn about it that night, and she was more than a little amused. She told me, "Carling, your biggest problem is that you don't tolerate fools very well, and to you, most people are fools."

"So? You married me. Does that make you a fool? Then how come I tolerate you?"

At that she giggled and said, "Would you like me to demonstrate?"

I smiled and nodded. "Maybe you're not so foolish after all!"

Chapter 126: Selection

Marty Adrianopolis was leaving me.

It wasn't as tragic as it sounded. He was a great Chief of Staff, and I trusted him implicitly, but he had a fatal flaw. Marty was a firm believer in married bliss. He had proved this twice before. Now he was seeing a good looking blonde about ten years younger who worked in Steny Hoyer's office (it was our own little version of James Carville and Mary Matalin, only reversed.) Marty needed to make more money than he could make on a government paycheck.

"So, what are you thinking?", I asked him.

"Well, I've been talking to the guys over at ARI, and I figure I can slip over there and become an executive director, something at that level. That way I can still work with you on your projects, but I can actually make some money without jumping through so many hoops.", he replied, smiling.

It was certainly something I would have proposed, so I simply nodded. Since I was the major funding source of the American Renaissance Initiative, I had a lot of say in the matter. "I've got no problems with that. The only question is going to be timing. I want you to stick with me through the election. After that, during the lame duck session, we find a replacement, and then you head over to K Street. Have you negotiated your new salary yet?", I asked with a smile.

He grinned back. "It won't be cheap! Jenny has expensive tastes!"

"Maybe we need to head to Vegas first, and get the over-under on how long this one lasts."

Marty flipped me the finger at that. "Third time's the charm! Hey, what do we do if you actually get selected as the nominee for Vice President? What happens then?"

"You mean, right after the heavens open and Christ comes down for the Second Coming?"

"Exactly!"

"I am guessing that things get complicated. I can still run for Congress at the same time. If Bush wins, they'll have a special election, probably in January. We'll run a candidate in the Maryland Ninth. If we win, you'll need to stick around to help them settle in. Figure a few months to find a new Chief of Staff. It shouldn't delay things more than a few months.", I told him.

"Any ideas on who you'd run? You're going to have a lot of influence on this.", he commented.

'Think Cheryl would go for it? She knows the district and the players." Cheryl Dedrick headed up my Westminster staff.

"She'd be a good choice, and it wouldn't hurt with the women's vote. Wait until you get selected, then talk to her about it." I nodded agreement with this. A lot of Congressmen got started by working on somebody's staff.

I left it with Marty starting to consider his replacement at the end of the year. Two weeks after my confrontation with the two doofuses who vetted me, I got a call from Joe Allbaugh. Would I be willing to meet with Governor Bush in a few days? I actually stared at the phone in my hand for a second before responding affirmatively. Even if I wasn't going to be selected, you don't piss off a guy who might well become the next President. You take the meeting! I was to meet the Governor in a suite at the Hay-Adams.

Unsurprisingly, when I got to the meeting, Dick Cheney was present as well, and he didn't look overly happy to be there. As far as he was concerned, he didn't want anybody getting in his way of selecting the next Cabinet, and certainly not either George Bush or the prospective Cabinet members. He was only here because the campaign was reacting to the pressure from the media. Al Gore, on the other hand, was trumpeting the transparency of his selections. This was total hogwash, as well. Al was selecting a Vice Presidential pick for the same reasons of expediency as anyone else did, and his Cabinet choices would be mostly recycled Clintonistas.

Still, our meeting was cordial. While Cheney was unhappy, it didn't seem directed at me. Rather, he was pissed that his elaborate scheme had been exposed for what it was, but he didn't know by whom. He did ask me at one point. "Carl, you know you aren't the only person being considered for Vice Presidential nominee. Any thoughts on where George Will's wild accusations came from?"

I kept a neutral face on and simply held my hands palm up, in an unknowing position. "Dick, there's about a dozen of us on the short list, and with all the documentation you required, each of us had about half a dozen lawyers and staffers pulling things together. And that's just on our end! What about the other end, whoever was pulling together the information and reviewing things and vetting us? I would daresay that the better part of a hundred people knew about the process, and could have leaked it."

"Maybe so, but that certainly wasn't the process we were using! The Governor and I are looking at everything together, and I am certainly not making the choice myself!", he declared. George Bush didn't say anything through this.

"I'm sure of that, but that doesn't make as good a story on the news, does it?" There, throw George Will under the bus on this one. "All it takes is a selective bit of disinformation and you can start trouble. Maybe one of the candidates is trying to torpedo somebody else?" I shrugged in confusion.

After that we got to some more substantive issues. Cheney would raise a few questionable points about my past and Bush would ask me to explain what had happened. My wealth was an amusing topic, and it was pointed out that I was richer than all the other Congressmen and Senators combined. I smiled and agreed with that. There was some discussion of my military record, which was considerably more exemplary than either of theirs. Cheney had been a major league draft dodger, getting about a half dozen deferments; Bush had served in the Texas Air National Guard, and his service there was suspect at best. Both wanted to learn about the Bronze Star, and that surprised me. I would have thought they could have gotten somebody at the Pentagon to unearth it (Cheney had been Secretary of Defense and Bush's father had once run the CIA) but it must have been buried deep. I pleaded national security, but then smiled and said, "Of course, as President Bush, you will be able to look it up. I would be happy to explain it to you then, sir." That got a large laugh from George Bush; not such a big laugh from Dick Cheney.

A big chunk of the meeting was about my family. My current family was everything a good Republican could ask for. We just had to keep quiet about them being Catholic. My parents and brother, though, were the very definition of a clusterfuck. We could count on that coming up, and they were surprised it hadn't derailed me already.

"Governor, believe me, people have tried. My first campaign that was a major theme. It was simply huge! After that, though, I was able to develop a track record, and was able to run on that. Still, I can't hide it. My parents and my brother will be ripe pickings for reporters."

"So, they'll talk to the press?", pushed Cheney.

I arched an eyebrow at that. "I think it will take a small miracle to get my brother to make a comment, I mean, considering I shot him in my kitchen." Then I shrugged. "My father won't be saying much, either. He's in a home with Alzheimers'. My sister and her family live in Minnesota and they'll be fine. We are in touch with them and my sister and I are close. My mother will be more than happy to go on national television and damn me as the Anti-Christ, but she's been under psychiatric care off and on for twenty years."

"I really think that kills off any chance of going further. Wouldn't you agree, Governor?", prompted Cheney.

"Congressman, I haven't made any decisions yet, but I suspect you may be more use to a Bush Administration as the Majority Whip, and perhaps, someday, Majority Leader or Speaker of the House.", said Bush.

"Of course, sir. Believe me, I understand. Please let me know if there is anything more I can do for you or the campaign." We all shook hands and I took my leave.

So much for any hopes for higher office. I smiled to myself as I left and shook my head in amusement. I still wasn't sure how I ended up on the short list, other than by being the top Congressional leader who might be interested. Hastert would have almost as much power as the Speaker, and DeLay was hoping to succeed Hastert. It would take another ten years for me to get to that point, or at some point try to run for Governor or Senator, both of which seemed far-fetched, to get that level of power.

Maybe I should push for Ambassador to the Bahamas? Wait until the kids are off in college in a couple of years and then Marilyn and I could work on our tans year round. I would have to ask her about that! We could work on the rum consumption problem facing America, as well as the beach sand deficit. I really needed to give this idea some strategic thought!

For the next ten days or so, there was a steady stream of the high and the mighty traipsing through the Hay-Adams, all of whom were noted by Fox News as being considered for various positions, and this was all indicative of how the Governor was taking a hands on approach to these critical selections. How dare anybody dispute this!? In some ways, this wasn't helping Governor Bush. After anybody was reported meeting with Cheney and Bush, Rush Limbaugh's next show would discuss why they weren't appropriate. I was highlighted as an 'extreme liberal, a closet Democrat, who has bought his elections and shares the left wing Democratic agenda with his New York Democrat wife!'

Marilyn found this extremely funny, though she seemed less amused when he commented that she had obviously used my billions on extensive plastic surgery and a boob job! It was my turn to look at her curiously and ask to see the 'evidence.' The twins also wanted to know if their mother had implants, and wanted to know if they could have them, too. I snorted and bit my tongue and let their mother chew on them for a bit. Our daughters did not suffer from the curse of flat-chestedness. They were D-cups like their mother, without the enjoyment of three pregnancies to help the process along.

I was not the only choice to be singled out as inappropriate. Colin Powell, one of the most respected men in the country, was also labeled as a Democrat, Fred Thompson of Tennessee was a 'Johnny-come-lately' to the political party, George Pataki was from a Democratic state (New York), and so on. There was nobody who was conservative enough for Rush Limbaugh! The man was more of a raving lunatic than usual on the subject.

On the Fourth of July I attended the obligatory parades back in Hereford and Westminster and spent the rest of the day drinking around the pool with my 'enhanced' wife. Our daughters were elsewhere (they wanted to be anywhere other than where their hopelessly ancient and clueless forebears were) and Charlie was out at sea, so I managed to talk Marilyn into wearing a very extreme swimsuit and then chased her around the pool. I caught her and examined her enhancements up close and personal. My wife's comment was that perhaps I needed to spend my billions for some enhancements of my own, which earned her a good smack on the rear when we got out of the pool. Then I chased her into the house and we spent some more time examining our original equipment.

On July 5, the world got exceedingly strange. George Bush called me direct, and asked me to meet him at his suite at the Hay-Adams the next day, and I wasn't to speak to anybody about this, not my wife, not my staff, nobody. I simply thought this was weird. Up until now I had always heard from Cheney's staff. It seemed like he wouldn't be involved in this discussion. Could this be some final private vetting? That didn't make sense. There were already some unofficial reports saying that I was no longer under consideration, though nothing so crass was coming out officially from the campaign.

At ten the next morning, Thursday, I went over to the Hay-Adams and went up to the Governor's suite. After going through the discreet magnetometer and being eyed by the Secret Service agent standing post at his door, I was allowed in and found myself with George Bush. It was just the two of us, and he led me to a small parlor and we seated ourselves in armchairs. "Thank you for coming, Congressman Buckman."

"It's my pleasure, Governor. Perhaps someday I can say, it's my pleasure, Mister President."

He smiled at that and nodded graciously. He might be a moron, but he knew the game when it came to being pleasant and making his guests feel welcome. "That's very kind of you. I wanted to talk to you some more, and get a feel for how you think the campaign is going."

"Really? I was under the impression that I would be playing no further part in the campaign. According to Fox News and some of the other outlets in favor of you, there is no question but that I would be a hindrance, not a help. I'm not sure I could be elected dog catcher according to them."

He made a wry smile at that. "Perhaps you've heard the old prayer, 'Lord, protect me from my friends. I can take care of my enemies myself!' While I will grant you that a significant portion of my support comes from a more conservative element in the party, I do have to appeal to other groups as well. Not everybody agrees with that, but it is true."

I made an accommodating gesture and nodded. Where was he going with this? "Well, of course, Governor, as the leader of the Party, you would have to reconcile different philosophies." I smiled. "Consider it good practice for after the election, when you have to get the Democrats to go along with you!"

"Let's hope so. Oh, by the way, is your wife really a Democrat?"

I laughed. "Very much so. Her parents are torn between their love of their daughter and their despair that she married out of the faith, so to speak. Then again, several of her brothers are Republicans also, so it gets spread around somewhat evenly."

He laughed at this. He really was a consummate schmoozer. "You have a history of working across party lines as needed. You've been a leader in bipartisan legislation, and it's my understanding that you are a major conduit between the parties when something quiet needs to be whispered back and forth."

Was that what he wanted? He wanted me to whisper something to the Democrats? "It's always been my experience that the best results, in either business or in politics, are those where both groups can smile at the end and feel they've come away a winner.", I explained. What did he want me to tell them, and to whom?

"Newt Gingrich told me that you warned him against the government shutdown. You told him it would be a mistake, and so would the impeachment."

What in the world!? What was he asking me about Newt for?! "I consider Newt to be a friend and a mentor. I worked closely with him for many years. We simply disagreed on tactics, not strategy. We both wanted the same things."

"Such as?", he asked.

"First and foremost was our desire to bring the budget under control. I know you agree with me that for forty years the Democrats have been treating the Treasury as a piggy bank to be raided at will. We have been buying things on the national credit card with no thought to how we would pay it back. Thanks to the Speaker's leadership on this, we took back control of the House and the Senate, and were able to impose some serious financial constraints. The budget has been balanced for two years now, and should continue that way into the future."

"Very true. I would think, though, that we've turned a corner now. A tax cut is in order, wouldn't you agree?", he asked.

"Perhaps, but only if we can keep spending down. We must maintain at least a moderate surplus in order to pay down past debt." Where was he going with this? Treasury? Budget Director? You needed a PhD in economics and finance experience for that sort of stuff.

"You also were the chief architect of the Contract with America."

"Governor, I was just one of many people involved in that.", I protested.

"No false modesty. You came up with the idea, and then let Newt take control. Why was that?"

"Practicality. Nobody is going to pay attention to a junior Congressman. Everybody pays attention to Newt Gingrich!" We both laughed at that, but I still didn't understand what was going on. There's an old joke that if you're in a poker game, and you can't figure out who the chump is, it's you. I was feeling very much the chump at the moment.

"Congressman, these are some of the compelling reasons you are being considered for the Vice Presidential nomination. Properly handled, these positions can play to the base of our party, while your bipartisan nature plays to the other voting blocs."

I practically coughed up breakfast when he said the words 'Vice Presidential.' Still, I managed to keep my game face on, and simply looked at him curiously. "I'll be happy to help in any way I can, Governor."

He smiled and said, "Do you know the difference between being involved in something, and being committed to it?" Of course I knew the answer, but I simply allowed him to continue. "Well, this morning, I had bacon and eggs for breakfast. Now, the chicken, she was involved in my breakfast, but the pig, he was committed!"

I dutifully laughed. "Well, Governor, you can count on my commitment, that's for sure." Commitment to what?

"I was hoping you would say that. You see, Congressman, it's been very expensive getting to this point in my career. I mean, surely you can understand this, from your own experience." What the hell?! Did he want a campaign contribution? I simply nodded in understanding and agreement. "Well, I would think a sign of that commitment might be a suitable contribution, no, an investment, in the future."

The cheap bastard was hitting me up for money! I kept my emotions off my face. "I would think you've already picked up a substantial sum for the campaign, and it's only going to increase."

"I was thinking more along the lines of the difference between being involved and being committed. I was thinking more along the lines of a personal commitment, man to man, as it were."

Suddenly it hit me! Stripped of all the subtlety and innuendo, George W. Bush was proposing to sell me the Vice Presidency of the United States of America! I choked down my outrage, and leaned back in my seat. He kept his silence and simply watched me. There were no witnesses, no recorders. Who would credit such an outrageous charge?

It made sense, actually. The Bush family was wealthy, but it was all family money, which meant it was actually his father's money. George had a few million on his own, but it was nowhere near the level of dear old Dad. He had probably netted about $15 to $20 million when he sold his chunk of the Texas Rangers, but his oil investments had been a bust.

What the hell did I say to this? My mind was zinging back and forth at the speed of light, or even faster! Was he so confident of winning the election he could skip the pretence of having a Vice Presidential pick who could help? As Vice President, I would be in an intimate position with one of the dumbest guys to ever make it to the Oval Office. At least, that was how I remembered him from my first run through. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe he was smart like a fox! It actually made sense, in a way. Cheney had been out of the government for eight years. How the hell did he really end up as Vice President? Did he know the difference between being involved and being committed? After years of running Halliburton he probably had the funds necessary. I couldn't see any of the others with the funds sufficient to do this. Who else had he approached? McCain? He didn't have the money, but his wife did. He would never go along with something like this! Was that the reason he despised George Bush so deeply? Or did George figure McCain would flap his yap and blow the deal?

"Governor, have there been other indications of commitment? What level of commitment has been offered?", I asked. Let the bidding begin.

"There have been offers. Signs of the trust and commitment needed.", he admitted.

"Governor, I can't begin to determine the commitment necessary without knowing what else has been suggested."

"Congressman, I think we've both been in business long enough to know I can't simply give you a level and accept that you'll do that plus a dollar."

Don't you dare compare yourself to me as a businessman, you idiot. I was eating guys like you for lunch long before I got into politics! "No, but I can make a few guesses, can't I? I would expect the likeliest individuals, those with the assets to make such a commitment, would be able to invest perhaps $4 or $5 million. Am I at least in the proper area? I need to at least know something, Governor.", I responded.

He smiled at that. "And if you were correct in that, what would your response be?"

It was in the single digits, then. Probably all the info I would get. "I won't get in a bidding war. I'll give you a number. You can take it or leave it."

"Of course."

I rubbed my finger along the side of my jaw for a moment. This man was everything I despised in a politician, stupid and venal at the same time. Could I pay him enough to let me protect America from him? "Twenty."

The twit's eyes bugged out. "Twenty million dollars?" I was probably doubling his net worth.

"Of course, with that level of investment, of commitment on my part, I would be expecting an equal commitment from you. I would want to be included in all the major decisions, a chance to give you my thoughts on everything.", I cautioned.

"Absolutely, that goes without saying!"

"It won't be a lump sum, either."

"Oh?!", he answered warily.

"Unh, unh. Five now, five after being nominated at the convention, five after the election, and five after the inauguration." I didn't trust the man as far as I could throw him.

"That seems reasonable. When do you see this happening?"

"Do you have the account number?"

"What?"

I pulled out my cell phone. "Give me the account number and I can have the first five million wired to it. You'll have confirmation by tomorrow."

"Oh." He thought about it for a moment. "I'll have to get that for you."

What an idiot! The man was not a mastermind of finance. "Tomorrow morning, then. I'll make my preparations. You'll get confirmation within 24 hours."

"Excellent. I'll call you later today." He smiled and stood up. "Now, I think I need to make a few preparations."

"Of course." I stood up as well, and went to shake his hand. However, when he took my hand, I didn't let go. "One thing, Governor, my word and my deals mean a lot to me. I've made a lot of deals over the years. I'm sure you heard what I told the Clinton team a couple of years ago, when they tried to break a deal. I think we can all assume I would be equally unhappy with any other deal being broken. I mean, it would show a lack of commitment, wouldn't it?"

"I quite understand, Congressman Buckman, I quite understand.", he said, still smiling.

Don't smile, asshole. You've just been had.

Chapter 127: A New Campaign

That night I had Marilyn come into my office with me and I told her what was happening. Not entirely, though – I didn't tell her about the commitment, just that I was being selected. I didn't do this until after the girls went to bed, but I didn't want them to have any chance to overhear us. This was too insane to let them know. They would never be able to keep their mouths shut! Marilyn was simply astonished, since we had both come to the conclusion prior to this that I had no chance in the world of being named for anything whatsoever.

"You're kidding me? When will this become official?"

"Not sure, exactly. I'm expecting a call from him tomorrow, and then we'll be announcing it a few days later."

Bush messengered me the account number the next day. I had then called Bob Seaver, who had already been warned about laundering the first five mill and who had run it into the account, although I didn't tell him who was getting it. It wouldn't show up until the next day (it never goes as fast as they show on the TV crime shows!) and we would make an announcement Tuesday the 11th. Bush's people would handle that, and the details weren't exact yet. That would give us almost three weeks until the convention.

"Well, won't you be important then!", she teased.

"You know, us important guys have certain expectations.", I replied.

"Really? Just what kind of expectations?"

"Well, I mean, the kind of expectations that require some really serious effort to fulfill. I mean, really serious effort!"

"Oh? Just how serious?"

"Let's just say that it might be a good idea to see if you can earn your way on to the Vice President's staff. Remember Monica Lewinsky? I am figuring I will need to audition an intern or two!"

"Yuck! You are such a pig!", she protested.

We were in my office as I told her all of this, so once she began protesting, I grabbed her and we wrestled on the couch until I got her undressed, and then I showed her just how serious she needed to be. Afterwards, we repeated the demonstration in our bedroom.

I got a call from the Governor by lunchtime Friday that the transfer had gone through, and I had until Tuesday before the announcement. That was still being sorted out, but I would get the details Monday morning. In the meantime, I needed to make certain preparations. I called Marty and told him to shag ass to the house for dinner that evening, and then repeated the call to Brewster McRiley. He complained that he was in Chicago, and I told him I didn't care. He needed to be in Westminster that night, and then I asked him if he wanted me to send the G-IV. That got his attention and he agreed to come, so I sent the plane. I called Cheryl and told her to bring her husband as well, and I called Millie Destrier, Jack Nerstein, and Macy Adams. Finally, we told the girls they had to stay home that evening; they couldn't go out with any friends. They wanted to argue, but we told them it was for a serious meeting and they needed to be there as adults, which both intrigued and flattered them. They were still fifteen but not for long. They would turn sixteen before the convention.

I couldn't see spending a lot of time cooking and playing host tonight. I called Nick Papandreas and asked him to make up a buffet platter, a big one, and I'd come over and pick it up. I left Holly and Molly with their mother to help make some iced tea and lemonade, and clean the house. They must have sensed it was important, since for once they didn't argue with us. We expected people to start arriving any time after six, although Brewster might be the last to show.

He was. Most of the others had arrived by 6:30, when a call came in from the Westminster airport that the Gulfstream was on final approach. I had a driver waiting for him, so we should expect him a few minutes before 7:00. Otherwise, Macy Adams was the only one late, and she showed up right after the call. "What's going on, Carl?", she asked, like every other guest.

I gave the same answer the others had gotten. "I'll explain when we're all here. In the meantime, grab some food."

At 6:50 Brewster arrived. I shook his hand and invited him inside. He asked, "Okay, Carl, what's up? What was so important that you sent a plane to pick me up in Chicago? I was damn near expecting the chopper on the pad to fly me to the door! What happened? Bush pick you or something?"

I nodded and simply answered, "Yes."

Brewster stopped in his tracks and said quietly, "You're not kidding me, are you? Bush picked you?" Around us the room was suddenly quiet.

I nodded to him. "We came to an agreement on my commitment to the campaign. Now we need to have a talk, all of us."

Suddenly the room exploded in questions. I smiled at the uproar and loaded some seconds on my plate. I sat down at the head of the table, and then I held my hands up in a quieting gesture. "Okay, here's the long and the short of it. I met with the Governor yesterday morning. We talked and he promised to call me with the news today. He called me this morning, and I told him I would need a couple of days to make arrangements. The official announcement is on Monday. We have this weekend to make some plans."

Molly was the first one to speak. "Dad, you're going to be the Vice President?"

I smiled at my youngest. "Well, we have to win an election first, but that's the general idea, anyway."

Molly looked at her older sister, and they were silently talking to each other. You could almost see the brain waves traveling back and forth between them.

"One election or two?", asked Millie Destrier.

"Now, isn't that an interesting question." I replied. "That's the real reason I invited everybody here tonight."

"I don't understand.", commented Holly.

I nodded to the girls. "Okay, let me explain how this works. I'm up for re-election this fall. You already know that I'm running against Rob Hollister. Now I have to run two elections at the same time."

"You mean you're still going to run for re-election at the same time you're running for Vice President? Can you do that?"

It was Millie Destrier who answered that. "Yes, it's legal, just unusual. It only gets complicated if your father wins both elections. I mean, if he only wins one and loses the other, he only has the one job to worry about, and if he loses both, he's out of a job anyway."

"So what happens if he wins both? Can you be a Congressman and a Vice President at the same time?"

Everybody smiled and shook their head. "Nope, it doesn't work that way.", said Macy.

"No, your dad becomes the Vice President, and then we have a special election to elect a new Congressman.", said Jack.

"So, who becomes the new candidate for Congressman?", asked my wife.

"That would be one of the topics for tonight. The people in this room are basically going to be the ones who decide that. Not you and the girls, so much, but you know what I mean."

"Maybe I should change to become a Republican? Do I get a vote then?"

I grinned and waved off the idea. "No! Forget it! Do you know how many votes it's worth with you as a Democrat?! It's a great human interest item!"

Brewster smiled and agreed with me. Around the table the other political types nodded as well.

Cheryl Dedrick cleared her throat, and I turned to face her. She looked over at her husband, Jim, who I recalled was a paving contractor in Reisterstown. Then she said, "I don't know how you pick the candidates, but can I put my name in the hat?"

I glanced over at Marty, who I had discussed this with already, who shrugged and nodded. Then I looked over at the others before answering. "The only person I've talked to about this is Marty, but you were the name we talked about. I wanted you here tonight, you and Jim, to raise the question. You'd be interested?"

She looked over at Jim again, and then nodded. "We actually talked about it when you were being mentioned for the Vice Presidential slot. Then, when you said they told you no, we kind of wrote it off. But, yes, I think I could do it."

I looked around the table to the other professionals. "Any thoughts on this? Have any of you been thinking on this?"

Macy commented, "Don't take this the wrong way, Carl, but I figured you never had a chance for the VP slot. I couldn't even figure out how you got on the short list. No offense meant."

"None taken. I was as surprised as you were."

Millie asked, "Carl, are you planning on running for both offices? It's too late to run somebody else. They would have had to register months ago."

"I don't have a choice, not if we want a chance to keep the Maryland Ninth in the Party. I have to run as hard here as we had already planned, as well as spend my every waking moment campaigning for Bush. What else can I do? I am going to have to rely on you guys to help me win an absentee campaign."

"And that's why you needed me here.", added McRiley.

"And that's why I needed you.", I agreed. "I don't know what you would be able to do with the Bush campaign, but I am going to need the help here. I have to win this election here. If I win as VP and lose in the Maryland Ninth, I become a national joke. We are going to have to do this full bore."

"And afterwards?"

"I work just as hard for my hand-picked successor, whoever that ends up as. Likewise, we'll be able to crank up all the resources we can from the RNC. So the question really arises, who am I hand-picking as my successor? Marty and I vote for Cheryl. Any other candidates you guys have been thinking of?"

Nobody else had any names, but nobody had any issues with Cheryl. This wasn't going to be decided tonight, but we'd come up with a name by the convention. Marty and I explained how he would be leaving after the inauguration, though he agreed to hang around long enough to help the next Republican victor find a replacement. It was late when we finally broke up and everybody went home. We gave Brewster and Marty guest rooms for the night. Marty took Charlie's room. Charlie was at sea in the Indian Ocean and had just deployed; he wouldn't be back until around Christmas. He would get to miss the circus this was about to become. I almost envied him. Then I called my sister in Rochester, swore her to secrecy, and let her know what was happening.

By Saturday lunchtime somebody talked. I began getting phone calls on the unlisted number from reporters asking for comments. I just referred everybody to the Bush-Cheney team. I did accept the call from Joe Allbaugh with the itinerary for the announcement. We were to fly to Houston on Sunday afternoon. There would be a suite for us at the Four Seasons. The announcement would be made right after lunch from the deck of the USS Texas, docked as a museum ship in Houston. Would we be able to make the travel arrangements? I assured him it wouldn't be a problem, and then called and made sure the G-IV was ready. We began packing our bags. By Saturday afternoon reporters and camera crews began camping out by the driveway and parking on the side of Mount Carmel Road. I called the head of our security detail in and gave him the good word. He would need reinforcements!

Sunday morning, the political talk shows were all over the rumor. My bet was that somebody from the Cheney-Rove camp had leaked it, for good or for bad, perhaps in a desire to get me to say something stupid and premature, and thus derail the whole thing. The most amusing segment came on ABC's This Week, with Sam Donaldson interviewing my old buddy Fletcher Donaldson (no relation.) Fletcher had discovered that, almost by default, he was now the go-to guy on all matters Buckman. He had been covering me for the Sun for ten years now, and was probably the only reporter who had ever been inside the house. I had talked to him the other day, but only to tell him to call the Bush campaign, and that he knew me well enough to know I wasn't going to say anything else to him.

"So, Fletcher, you've known Carl Buckman the longest of any reporter I know of. What's he really like?", asked Donaldson.

Fletcher looked like he had bought a new suit for the occasion, and gotten a haircut, to boot. He said, "He's a very plain person, for one thing. He truly and honestly thinks he's a really boring guy and lives a really boring life. He's been married to his college sweetheart for over twenty years. Both he and his wife Marilyn were middle class kids. They live in the same house they built when he left the Army, a rancher out in the outer Baltimore suburbs. His kids go to the local public school. His son went into the Marines. Marilyn spends her time either being a stay-at-home mom or helping out as an intern at the Congressman's Westminster office. On fall weekends, they make jam..."

"They make jam?", asked an incredulous Donaldson. "As in jam and jelly?"

Fletcher nodded. "I've had some. It's pretty good stuff, too. They always make extras and he takes it down to this office and lets his staff and visitors have some. They also make pies together. Marilyn's a pretty good baker, but Carl says he's the better cook. It gives them something to argue about, their son once told me."

Cokie Roberts butted in at that point and said, "How does he reconcile the difference between being what he thinks is normal and boring with all the other things he is involved in?"

"That one is tougher to explain. I mean, I'll grant you, his resume is beyond belief. He's one of the richest men in America. In eight years he rose to the third most powerful position in the Republican Congress. He's written three books, earned a doctorate in mathematics, and been a decorated soldier. And he's also one of the most down-to-earth and grounded individuals I've ever met. He still thinks of himself as a kid from the suburbs who just got lucky. Really, really lucky!"

"He also killed his own brother.", commented Roberts.

"Ah, yes, and that's actually Carl's weak spot. Not his brother, no. That was actually totally legitimate. His brother was insane and broke into their house and tried to kill him. No, Carl's weak spot is his family."

"How so?", pressed Sam Donaldson.

"Carl Buckman's personal family when he was growing up was an absolute disaster. His brother and mother were simply nuts, and his father refused to handle the problem. When Carl was 16 he moved out, into an apartment near where he was going to school and which he had to pay for personally, and he's been taking care of himself ever since. His parents actually disowned him after he married Marilyn. Maybe it's overcompensating, but Carl is just incredibly protective of his wife and kids. You want to see some fireworks on this campaign, just wait until somebody starts heckling and insulting Marilyn Buckman or his daughters!"

Fletcher was right in that, and I would have to behave myself, because somebody was going to try it, just to start some fireworks. They continued batting it around until the commercial break, at which point they segued into whatever message the Bush campaign was trying to send with this nomination – which still hadn't been confirmed. After that, we turned off the television. The LongRanger landed and flew us to Westminster, which wasn't something the reporters had been expecting. They had been planning on chasing us down the road in their cars, the idiots! From Westminster we flew to a small airport outside of Houston, where a limo was waiting for us. We went direct to the Four Seasons, and then were whisked straight to the suite, without ever checking in.

Karl Rove was waiting for us. He was polite enough, but I could tell he was unhappy. He was a favorite of the Bush family, both father and son, and close to Dick Cheney. He had been in the political game since college, and he liked it, and he liked it dirty. I was a major upset to the apple cart. Still, he was professional enough to go with the flow. He laid out the following program:

Monday, July 10, at noon we would be making the announcement on the Texas. George Bush would speak first, and then I would come onstage, and after that, Marilyn and the girls would be invited out. I think this was the first time they realized that they would be involved. The twins looked excited, Marilyn looked nervous. Tuesday, July 11, through Thursday, July 13, I would be working with the campaign team on a stump speech and a schedule of appearances. Marilyn would get her own staff and schedule, which really made her nervous. Rove either didn't notice or didn't care. I suspect it was the latter. Friday, July 14, through Saturday, July 29, I would be touring the country campaigning for the Governor. The details were still being firmed up, but I could expect a variety of appearances through the 'heartland' to introduce me, and appearances every Sunday on the talk shows. Sunday, July 30, we would all fly to Philadelphia for the convention, which would start on Monday, July 31. This would run four nights. I would speak the third night and Bush would speak the fourth night. Marilyn would get her own schedule of appearances. In addition, on Wednesday, August 2, she would be one of the first speakers at the convention, and would introduce me. At that point Marilyn turned ghost white and began protesting. She was terrified of speaking publicly! She basically refused to do it! Karl didn't care. If she wanted me to become the Vice President, she would do what she was told. The kids were the same. They would learn their lines and behave. He wasn't quite that rude, which would have earned him a punch in the nose, but he came close.

The girls were actually sort of excited by the idea but their mother was on the verge of tears. I took her hand and said, "Don't worry. Let me handle this."

"I can't give a speech! I've never given a speech!"

"I know, I know. Calm down. Let me handle this."

Karl started saying something, "Congressman..."

I turned to him and cut him off. "Zip it, Karl. It's my turn now. You want to order me around, fine, knock yourself out. You ever talk to my wife or children that way again, and I'll bounce you out the door and tell the reporters why. You got that?" He babbled something but I just overrode him. "Now, let me explain something very clearly. My wife has never given a speech in her life. I'm the politician in the family, not her. I didn't marry her because she gave a great speech!" The twins giggled at that, but their mother was clinging to my hand. "Now, I will talk to Marilyn and we'll get some speechwriters in, and I can probably convince her to give it a shot, but that's all. If it doesn't work out, Marilyn won't be campaigning."

I turned back to Marilyn and said, "Don't worry so much. If I can do it, anybody can do it. Hell, look at some of the other idiots you've seen speaking! You're smarter than they are."

Marilyn had relaxed when I stood up for her (like I wouldn't?) and some color was returning to her face. "But what if I mess up?! What if I can't do it or miss my lines or freeze or something? What if..."

I laughed and hugged her. "Well, I'll just have to divorce you then, won't I? Now calm down. We'll figure this out."

I turned back to Rove, who seemed rather put out by all of this family drama. "What's next on your list?"

"Well, tomorrow morning we'll be contacting the Marines and see if we can't get your son transferred, or at least put on leave, so he can help."

"Stop it right there. My son is a Marine. He's an adult now. What he's doing is more important than whatever you have planned. He stays out of it. If I hear that you've even thought about calling the Pentagon or the Marines about him, I will go on national television and denounce you personally and publicly. Is that understood?", I told him.

It was with a considerable degree of ill grace that Rove accepted these restrictions. It was important to remember that when dealing with Karl Rove, he had the moral sense of a hungry wolf eyeing a wounded fawn. He could have given lessons in dirty tricks to Richard Nixon. One time when he was in college, he used a fake name to infiltrate the Democratic headquarters of the fellow who was running for Illinois Treasurer, stole a few reams of letterhead stationery, and then used it to send out invites to drunken orgies. He had done other stunts over the years, like planting bugs in his own office and then claiming the Democrats were doing it, and leaking information on other campaign operatives that would then make him look better. During the recent primary, Rove had managed a whisper campaign against McCain insinuating that John McCain had a love child with a black New York City prostitute, none of which was true.

At that point we took a brief break and Rove brought in some of the aides and assistants who would be working with us. Things actually began to improve, because some of these people were actual humans. Karl might have been born with the number '666' burned into his flesh somewhere, but he did have some normal people working for the campaign. This could also be simply that as the Vice Presidential nominee, I didn't rate the real spawn of Satan that worked with George Bush. I got the wannabes who had to practice being evil.

We dined on room service that evening, not wanting to be seen publicly yet. I split my time until late, alternating working with a speechwriting team on my speech on the Texas on Monday, and working with the team who were coaching Marilyn. This consisted of fifty percent holding her hands and fifty percent toning down the nonsense that they had planned. It came down to a compromise. They would write a few short test speeches, and then have Marilyn and the girls practice them on a mock stage. Then they could make a judgment before we broke apart at the end of the week. My wife and children agreed to this, though the girls were much more excited about the idea. They'd learn soon enough – ha, ha, ha!

The next few days went about like I thought they would. The official announcement was made on the deck of the USS Texas, an ancient battleship tied up to the dock in Houston. It was a fine choice for the event; the Bushes were popular in Texas and a World War II battleship made a great patriotic backdrop. George Bush made a wonderful speech extolling me to the heavens, and then I came trotting out through a hatch, smiling and waving to everybody. After that I invited Marilyn and the girls to come out, and they made the same trek, smiling and waving to everybody. Then I made a speech extolling the wonders of George Bush and 'compassionate conservatism.'

Nobody actually understood what compassionate conservatism was, but it didn't really matter. It was sort of like Humpty Dumpty in Alice in Wonderland, who said, "When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less." (As Robert Heinlein once commented about what sovereignty meant, it was somewhere between sober and sozzled in the dictionary.) The curious part to me in the whole exercise was that I was giving a stump speech for somebody other than me. Up until now, I gave a speech about how wonderful I was, not somebody else.

Tuesday it was Marilyn's turn. While she is very good talking to people one on one, and frequently talked to people after campaign appearances with me, or to reporters, she had never once given a speech or talked in public with a microphone and cameras. They rigged up an empty hall in the hotel with a podium and some lights and a camera, and Marilyn came out and gave a stump speech.

Like I told Karl Rove, I didn't marry Marilyn because she gave a good speech. Marilyn's career as a public speaker looked to be abysmally short. She never got the hang of memorizing a speech, and would simply read the words off the notes in front of her. Forget about the teleprompter, since she refused to wear her glasses or contacts. Her timing was terrible, and her speech pattern was either too fast or too slow. It was painful to watch, and got worse as the day went on. On her last run through she was crying.

On the plus side, Holly and Molly were naturals! They were gorgeous and outgoing, bubbly and cute, and could handle a five minute speech without batting an eye. They were judged to be a real advantage.

The best we could do was simply to keep Marilyn off of the podium. What they couldn't understand was how warm and personable she was in person, just talking to people, and yet be so horrendous in front of an audience. How could she introduce me at the convention, in what was now a tradition? I settled it by suggesting that we combine her introduction with another tradition, the biographical film on me. She could do the voice-overs and talk about me in a personal sense, without having to memorize lines or stand in front of a crowd. They scribbled out some trial notes and sat Marilyn in an armchair and tried it, and that went well. Her speechwriters began some serious scribbling. We had found a job for Marilyn!

Wednesday they had her try this some more, and Marilyn worked out much better. She was fine as long as nobody slapped a mike and a camera in her face. By the end of the day, we had settled on how she would handle things. When we split apart to do our campaigning, I would take the girls to the Heartland and Marilyn would go with her bunch to Baltimore, where a bunch of writers would comb through our family photos and develop my biography.

As for me, I had to do some campaigning! Thursday night we would fly to Lexington Kentucky, where I would give a speech at a fundraiser. Friday we would board a bus and drive south into Tennessee, stopping every few hours to give a speech. I would have my daughters with me, and we could give them a shot at speaking. They thought this was incredibly exciting. I knew better, but I was just their father, so they didn't have to listen to me. I simply smiled at that. They'd learn.

Chapter 128: Stormy Weather

Thursday, July 20, 2000

They learned, all right! By Thursday they were heartily bored and sick and tired of the whole thing. The first day or two had been interesting. Marilyn and I had never taken the kids to Kentucky or Tennessee, not even on vacations, so everything was new and interesting to them. We would roll into some little town, and the local Republican committee would have a stage set up somewhere, maybe the local school or the courthouse or veteran's hall. The local organizer would introduce Holly and Molly, who would then do four or five minutes and introduce me. I would come out and hug my daughters, and then deliver a stump speech. Afterwards we would meet the local reporters, have a meal, and climb back on the bus. Two hours later we were someplace else.

During all of this I would be surrounded by 'consultants', who would basically plan everything I did, from the time I woke up, until the time I went to bed. There was a wardrobe consultant, so that I would be appropriately dressed. If I had to wear a suit, they would decide what color suit and shirt and tie; if I was in shirtsleeves, they would decide how far up the arm they would be unrolled. If they didn't stay at the appropriate height up my arm, they would be more than happy to staple them into position. There was a speech consultant, to edit the stump speech as needed. There would be somebody to liaison with everybody locally. There were food consultants to tell me what I was eating and when. There was probably a bathroom consultant, to make sure I took Vice Presidential dumps at appropriate times.

You have to be real damn careful with consultants. Consultants are professional worriers. You can't make a joke, since it might just offend somebody. You can't say you are for something, or against something. You can't give details lest they be turned against you. The best politicians know when to ignore the consultants and let the chips fall where they will. The worst campaigners ended up like Mitt Romney, afraid to say anything to anybody without it being run through a consultant, and ending up looking phony and plastic.

Do all this for twelve hours a day or more, and it gets real old, real fast. The twins learned not to eat very much at these things. By the end of the day I wasn't sure where I even was, and I needed help to not fuck up by not knowing where I actually was and who I was speaking to. By Thursday the girls were making up mock versions of their speeches, and our chief handler caught them practicing them in front of some laughing reporters on the bus. As a VP candidate, I had national correspondents along with me, not so much to cover what I was saying, but in the hope I would manage to fuck up massively on camera. I was sent back to stifle my daughters, and it really burned his britches when I sat down with the reporters and laughed along with them. Afterwards I told him that as long as my daughters were poking fun at their dad, the reporters would laugh along. If they poked fun at the Governor, I'd clamp down on them. What a nitwit.

I figured I'd call Marilyn and get them sent home over the weekend. It would give them a break and she could use some feminine companionship for a bit. I probably wouldn't see her again until the convention. At 2:00 we rolled into Springboro, Oklahoma, which was somewhere east of Shawnee, which was somewhere east of Oklahoma City. We had already been through Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi, and Arkansas. Friday and Saturday would see us into Nebraska and Kansas. By Sunday I would be doing mock speeches in the back of the bus myself!

Still, everything looked fairly average. It was warm, but not ridiculously so. The weather forecast was for a heavy thunderstorm in the afternoon, which is pretty normal. My speech was in the high school gymnasium, and even though it was the summer, they had the "Pride of Springboro" - the Springboro Okies basketball team and the Okie Cheerleading team - there to liven things up. Well, that was the plan, anyway. As we got off the bus and headed into the school, I commented to the girls that it looked like we were going to get a real thunderboomer, it was dark and getting darker, with clouds on the horizon, and that in these flat plains, they'd probably be able to see it coming from miles away.

We went inside and used a couple of empty first grade classrooms as makeshift dressing rooms before heading towards the school gym. Outside the sky kept getting darker, and the wind seemed to be picking up as well. Still, I've been in thunderstorms before, and as long as the power stayed up, nobody cared. We were directed to the gym, where a stage and backdrop were set up, and were moved to hide behind the backdrop. The local dignitaries were there, the mayor, the school principal, the town council, and the local Republican honchos. I would meet the various Congressmen and Senators at dinner that night in Oklahoma City.

After a few minutes, Holly and Molly made their way to the stage, amid a lot of cheering and applause. They did their speech and then called me out. I came out and gave them both a hug, and sent them off the stage. "Thank you! Thank you! I am so glad to be here! Now, let me ask you, are those girls great, or what!" There was some more cheering and applause, and the twins dutifully came back out with smiles on their faces, waved again, and departed. "It's good to see the cheerleading squad here, since my girls are cheerleaders back at Hereford High. As for you fellows on the basketball team..."More raucous cheers – basketball is a big deal in Oklahoma! " ... Sorry guys, they're still a little young for you! I might let them start dating when they hit their thirties!" More laughter at that.

Suddenly the world's loudest siren went off, seemingly right over my head! Everybody in the room started talking, and I looked over at the guy next to me, who happened to be the mayor. "Fire alarm?", I asked.

"Like hell! That's a tornado siren, mister!" He grabbed the microphone from me and started giving orders. "Everybody, down to the crawlspace! We've got the time, but drop your stuff and get down to the crawlspace!" He kept exhorting people to move their butts, while the school principal and a few members of the basketball team started directing people.

One of the campaign guys yelled in my ear, "We should be leaving now!"

Just that moment I heard a big crash outside, probably from the wind picking something up and throwing it around. I grabbed my girls and yelled back, "Like hell! We're going to the crawlspace!" Maybe the twit could go outside and check, and he could beat us to Nebraska, air express, so to speak. I pushed the girls in front of me towards the crowd heading down a flight of stairs. Suddenly the lights went out, but emergency lighting kicked in, and we found ourselves in a large and filthy concrete basement. The noise from outside the building reminded me of a freight train, and the ceiling above us was shaking and dust was raining down. I pushed the girls to the floor in a corner and lay on top of them. Then I felt somebody land on top of me, and I looked around to find the terrified face of Jerry McGuire, one of my traveling security guys. I was protecting the girls, but he was protecting me.

The freight train kept getting louder and louder, and there was a sound of screeching torn metal, and dirt was falling around us, probably decades' old dust off the ceiling of the crawlspace. I should have been terrified, but I was too scared for that. I had my eyes closed to keep the dust from blinding me, and around me I could hear people crying and screaming. I don't think I was one of them, but I know my daughters were. Eventually the freight train left, just vanished suddenly, and all we could hear were some sirens, regular sirens. The tornado siren was quiet, mercifully.

People started climbing to their feet, and helping others up. Somebody opened the door to the school, and light came in, and people began moving out of the crawlspace. Everybody was gawping at the sight. The roof was missing over part of the school, and that's where the light was coming from. We kept moving out. All of us who had been in the crawlspace were filthy, and the twins had runnels of tears going down their faces. They had their arms around me. "It's okay, it's over.", I told them. "Let's keep moving."

The surprising part to me was that after the storm blew through, the weather outside was bright and sunny. The general direction of traffic was towards the outside, so we moved in that direction. For once the reporters were ignoring me. They had a real life calamity to play with! Outside it became really obvious that Springboro had been well and truly trashed! The tornado siren over the school had been toppled over and had crashed through the front end of the campaign bus. We were stuck in Springboro for the foreseeable future. Around us, the remains of several houses were laid flat. Off to one side a sudden fireball lit the sky, and a bunch of people began running that way, including the reporters.

Organization began to grow, however. The school gym and lunchroom were still viable and safe, and they would be a makeshift shelter. A volunteer fireman and the mayor were on a walkie-talkie sorting things out. Another local big shot called for volunteers to search some of the nearby homes. I turned the twins to face me. "You two need to stay here. I want you to go down to the gym and volunteer. People need help."

Molly started crying. "NO! You have to stay here!"

"Molly! Molly! I have to go help! You two are safe here. You help out here, so I can help out there."

"Daddy!"

"You have to help!"

I pushed them into the arms of their security guard, a young woman in her late twenties named Amanda Baines. She and Jerry were listed in the entourage as campaign staffers, not security. She hugged the girls and herded them towards the building. "Come on, let's get cleaned up and help out."

As soon as they were out of my hair, I turned to Jerry and said, "Come on, let's go." I ran up to the fireman, and asked, "Where do you need us?"

I don't think he recognized me, and he just pointed at the next street over, which didn't look as badly hit. "Check those places and see if anybody is trapped inside." He turned away from me when somebody yelled that nobody was under one pile of rubble and they moved on to the next. I shrugged at Jerry and we went in the opposite direction. We went over a block and looked around. Looking down the street, it seemed that these houses ranged from just some loose siding and shutters to imminent collapse.

"Maybe we'll get lucky and everybody was at the campaign rally.", I told Jerry. That had been the reason that the destroyed house had been abandoned a moment ago; people knew everybody in the small town of Springboro and the family was at the rally.

"Let's hope so.", he replied.

People were coming out of their homes around us, and staring in amazement. At the house we were in front of, however, nobody was coming out. We wandered around to the back yard and yelled out, "ANYBODY HOME!", as loud as we could.

We were on the verge of leaving when Jerry said, "Did you hear that?"

"What?"

"From over there!" He led the way around the corner and there was some crying from what looked like a basement door, one of those things on a slant with some doors on top. Now I could hear the sounds, but no way were we going down to the basement. Part of the garage had collapsed onto it, and we weren't going in that way without a chainsaw and a crane. "ANYBODY DOWN THERE?"

"SAVE MY CHILDREN!", came out weakly.

I looked at the house and then at Jerry. "Oh, shit!"

"Mister Buckman, this place is going to come down any moment!"

"Then we'd better move quick." The place looked like a fairly traditional center hall colonial two story. I ran back around to the back and scrambled up onto the remains of the back porch. It didn't collapse under my weight, so Jerry joined me and we managed to pry the back door open. Inside it was dark, and everything looked like it had been knocked off every shelf and out of every closet. I ducked my head and slowly went inside, stepping softly.

"Oh, this is a bad idea!", I heard behind me. Then there was a loud creak as Jerry put his weight on the floor.

I turned and said, "Hold it!" I heard some voices ahead of me and to one side. "Wait for me. Give me a moment." I kept moving forward through the kitchen, as the building creaked around me, and got closer to the voices. They were from a door to the cellar, just off the hallway, which looked sprung. I got down on my belly and stuck my head through the opening. "Anybody down there!"

"HELP! WE'RE TRAPPED! YOU HAVE TO GET MY BABIES!"

"Oh, shit!", I muttered to myself. "WE'RE COMING!", I yelled down the stairs. I began tugging on the door, and opened it enough to be able to slide through. I turned back to Jerry. "I'm going down into the basement. You can probably make it over to here."

"I'm coming with you!"

"No way! I'll send the family up. You have to get them outside!" I wriggled my way through the cellar door, and wedged my back against it, pushing it even further open. The door shrieked at the abuse, but I got it to the point somebody could come back up. "I'm going down now!"

There were a couple of windows in the basement, so I had some light. It looked to be about eight foot deep. I was halfway down the stairs when there was a loud crash and I went tumbling into the basement. When I climbed to my feet, the stairs had detached from the wall and collapsed under me. Jerry's head was at the top, at the door. "You all right!?"

"Just peachy! You stay there. I'll send people up."

"How many?", he asked.

Good question! "I don't know yet!"I went towards where I heard some voices crying and found the problem. A rack of canned goods had fallen across a doorway into their little emergency shelter. I pushed the rack out of the way and was able to easily open the door. "I'm coming in!", I called out.

I was greeted with a scene from a bad movie. Two little children were there, along with their very pregnant mother. She was bleeding badly from a cut on her right calf. Over in the corner a dog was nursing some puppies. All I needed to make this a disaster-of-the-week film was the requisite escaped convict and a nun.

Mom was crying for me to get her kids out, but she was in bad shape. I tried applying pressure to her cut, but it wasn't helping. Meanwhile Jerry kept yelling for me to tell him what was happening, and I couldn't answer. I looked around wildly and found a roll of cotton clothesline. I had no choice. I fashioned a tourniquet just below her knee, using a piece of scrap lumber to twist it. Thankfully she had passed out by that point, so I managed to get her up into my arms and carry her towards the steps. The little kids were trailing along with a flashlight.

"Where the hell have you been!?", he demanded.

"Sightseeing! Listen, she's hurt bad. You need to drag her outside and get her some help!"

"Oh, crap! Lift her up here!"

I managed to pull over a couple of crates I could step on, and then lifted the young mother up as high as I could. It wasn't enough. I just didn't have the strength to lift her over my head and to where Jerry could grab her. I set her back down and ran back for the clothesline. I tossed it up to him, and he let down enough for me to tie it under her arms. Then, with him pulling and me lifting, we got her out. "I'll be back!", he yelled. Above us the floor creaked ominously, and I grabbed the kids and ran back the other way.

They were little kids. The boy looked about five or six, his sister about three or four. "Who are you?", he asked.

"My name is Carl. What's yours?"

"I'm Billy. That's Molly. She doesn't talk to strangers.", he answered.

"That's cool. I have a little girl named Molly, too. When we get out of here, I'll introduce you to her."

"Is Mommy going to be all right?", he asked. Molly just looked at me with the widest blue eyes I had ever seen. They were both blond and blue-eyed.

"Oh, sure! You bet! She's going to be fine! We'll see her as soon as we're out of here."

Just then the dogs moved around some, and one of the puppies came over and sniffed at me. "You have to save the puppies!", cried Molly. It was the first thing she had said. "We have to save the puppies!", she insisted.

"I promise! How many are there?"

"Four. There's three boys and a girl.", said Billy. "Maggie's the mom."

I looked over at Maggie, who was nursing the pups. She was a big shaggy dog with strains of golden retriever in her. This was going from bad to worse. "We'll save everybody!", I said. I just hoped somebody would save me!

"Do you like puppies? Dad says we can't keep them all. Would you like a puppy?", he asked.

This kid was going to be a salesman someday! I bit off the idiot reply I wanted to make. I just had to say something to keep these kids calm and under control. "I love puppies! I'd like the girl puppy."

Just then, I heard a voice at the top of the stairs and I went back, followed by the kids. Jerry was back at the top, and had thrown down the rope again. "Come on! Let's get going before this whole place collapses!"

I tied a bowline around Molly and we got her out fast, and then Billy went up. Outside I could hear Molly crying for the puppies. Jerry yelled down, "Come on, get up here!"

"In a minute!" I ran back and found a couple of big plastic trash bags. I scooped up a couple of pups and tossed them inside and then ran back down to the stairs. "Here! Take this!" I tied the clothesline to the bag and he pulled it up.

The bag was squirming and he yelled down, "HAVE YOU LOST YOUR FUCKING MIND!?"

"Yes! There's more coming!" I ran back and corralled the last two pups into the other bag, and went back. This time I was followed by their mother, Maggie, who did not look overly amused. The last two pups went up. A minute later, Jerry was back, and I tied the rope to Maggie's harness. Thank God she didn't have a collar! She went up. "That's it! Get the dog out and come and get me out of here!", I told him.

I heard the floor creaking as Maggie was dragged barking from her house. Jerry was cursing the mutt, but managed to get her outside. By now I could hear sirens around the house, so somebody must have figured out where the fun action in town was. Then I didn't care anymore. The creaking became a crashing, I dove for the floor, and everything went dark. I screamed from something ripping into my chest and left arm. It got quiet at that point.

I saw what happened on the news later. One of the reporters, with a cameraman lugging around his equipment, missed the mad rush to the explosion on the other side of town, and caught the tail end of Jerry and me heading to the other street. They caught Jerry crawling into the house after me, and started filming, and then others started gathering. By the time Jerry got the mother out, somebody had called an ambulance. When word hit that Congressman Buckman was involved, all the reporters left the scene of the fire. They were there by the time the kids started coming out. It was decided that the place was too dangerous for more than one person, so Jerry would go back in and hand off the kids and dogs to one of the people outside. After Jerry got the dogs out and was on the verge of coming back for me, the house shifted and partially collapsed a second time. That was when something fell on me and knocked me out. After a couple of minutes, things settled down and a bunch of guys were able to pull me out of the rubble. I came to as I was being pulled out.

The sunlight outside looked pretty good to me. I hurt all over, so that was probably a good sign as well. A paramedic type was trying to work on me, so I grabbed him with my right hand. My left arm didn't seem to be working so well. "The woman, is she alright?", I asked. I hadn't wanted to use a tourniquet, but I didn't have a choice. You can do more harm than good if you fuck it up!

"Settle down, Congressman."

"The woman, did she make it!?", I demanded, a little more strongly.

"Yeah, she's fine. She's on her way to Shawnee. You're going next.", he told me. "Now, calm down."

I sagged back a little at that. Maybe I hadn't cost her a leg. "The kids."

"The kids are just fine. And the dogs, too. That was stupid, Congressman!', he told me.

I couldn't argue with him. Just then I heard a screaming rampage and the words, "DADDY! DADDY!" Holly and Molly came busting into the circle around me.

I grinned at them and gave them a thumbs-up sign with my right hand, and that got a lot of applause and cheering around me. A cop was keeping them back, but they outflanked him and ran to the gurney I was being lifted on. "I'll be fine. Don't worry about me."

The final part of the entire mess was when a little blond haired boy managed to sneak through the entire group and made his way past the cop to the gurney. "Hey, Mister! You want your puppy?"

I twisted my head enough to see that Billy had a squirming brown fuzzball in his arms. "Oh, my sweet suffering Jesus!", I muttered to myself.

Holly and Molly stared at me and then at little Billy and the puppy. "Daddy?!"

I laughed, and that hurt. "Holly, take care of those two kids. Molly, take care of my puppy!"

Holly wanted to argue, and Molly just stared in confusion. "We're going with you."

"No room!", replied the ambulance guys.

"Take care of the kids!", I ordered her. Then something went into my arm and things began getting fuzzy. "Take care of the kids..." Things got dark and quiet again.

When I woke up I had that hospital room feeling. It was bright and white and out of the corner of my eye I could see a window. I tried to twist my head around a bit, but that hurt and I groaned a touch. Then I heard something rustling and I kept twisting around, and saw a pretty nice sight. Marilyn was in a cheap armchair near my bed and was stirring alive, sitting up slowly and rubbing her eyes. She saw me and smiled. "We have to stop meeting like this!"

I smiled and laughed, but that hurt, and I said, "Oh, don't get funny. Where am I?"

"You're in Shawnee, Oklahoma, in the hospital. How are you feeling?" Marilyn stood up and came over to me. "Oh, God, why do you have to keep scaring me like this!?" She bent down and kissed me quickly.

I groaned a touch. "Even that hurt!", I said, smiling. "How are the girls?"

"They're fine. They're back in Springboro, taking care of the kids you rescued."

"Huh?" What was she talking about? "What's going on? How'd you get here, anyway?"

"What, do you have amnesia or something?"

I gave her a perplexed look. "No. The last thing I remember was being dragged out of the basement of that house and talking to the ambulance guy and the girls. Then he stuck a needle in me and here I am. What happened? What day is it?"

"It's Friday. It's only been a day. You're national news, Carl!"

"Huh?"

"Some of the reporters managed to get a satellite feed going while you were in that basement. They reported live on your rescuing the Torquists. They even cut into the afternoon soaps and Oprah. I watched them drag you out of that house!", she told me.

"Who are the Torquists? Was that their name? We weren't really introduced."

"No kidding. That's the family's name. Andrea called me when they pulled you out all covered in blood, and she told me the Gulfstream was being fueled up and to get my butt out here. I landed last night, while you were in surgery."

"Huh! Are they all right? The Torquists, I mean. And why are the girls there? And can I get some water?"

Marilyn smiled down at me. "You bet, hero." She poured some water in a glass and held the flex-straw to my lips. I sucked it dry. "Yes, everybody is fine, everybody except you. And Mrs. Torquist. She's in intensive care right now, and she had her baby last night."

"Oh, Christ!" That would have been all I needed! "So, what's with Holly and Molly?"

"Don't you remember? The last thing you said to them before being loaded into the ambulance? You ordered them to take care of the kids. They said you kept repeating it, that and something about a puppy. Did you get a new puppy, Carl?", she asked, grinning.

It started coming back to me, the idiot promise to the little kids in the basement and the scene around the ambulance. I groaned and mumbled, "Oh, Christ!", again. I looked over at her. "Did I?" She grinned and nodded. "Oh, Christ! So the girls are still there? Why?"

"They were saying something about you giving them your final orders, your dying orders. Molly was being very melodramatic about it all. They're fine. Mrs. Torquist's sister lives nearby and she took the kids and the dogs and the twins in. I went over there last night after they started working on you and calmed them down, but they insisted on staying there."

"Where's their father?"

"He's a long haul trucker. They tracked him down in California. I sent the plane to bring him home. He'll be here this afternoon."

"You'd better call them and tell them I made it after all. Good Lord! My dying orders!? You're kidding me, right?" I rolled my eyes. "So, you flew here from home, saw me here, drove to Springboro, saw the girls, and then came back? Did you get any sleep? What are you, Superwoman?"

"Able to leap tall husbands in a single bound!"

Marilyn opened her purse to pull out a cell phone, and a nurse came into the room. "Congressman! You're awake!"

I nodded, which hurt, and asked, "What happened to me?" From what I could see, most of my left arm was bandaged, and I could feel some pain in my chest and some constriction there, and what felt like a bandage on the left side of my head.

"I'll get the doctor!" She scurried out of the room.

I glanced over at my wife, who was talking into her phone. " ... he's fine. He's wide awake and chasing a nurse out of the room. Here, you can talk to him." She handed me the phone. "They're your daughters!"

That's never a good sign. I took the phone and held it to my ear, all of which hurt. "Who's there?"

"DADDY!", screamed Holly. Then I heard her yelling to somebody in the background. "IT'S DAD!"

"Hi, I'm just fine. Now, you two are relieved of duty! Let those poor people have some rest and I'll see you later today." I felt suddenly tired, and Marilyn took the phone from me.

She smiled at me and said into the phone, "Now, will you two calm down!? I'll be there sometime around lunch and rescue the people you are staying with." I heard the 'That's not funny!' from where I lay in the bed. My wife hung up on the girls and turned back to me. "How old were you when your family kicked you out?"

"We still have a few weeks to go before they're that old."

"Feeling better?"

"Water, please."

Marilyn got me some more water and then the nurse returned with another woman, about the same age, but with a more serious look about her. She smiled as she saw that I was awake and alert. "Congressman Buckman, I'm Doctor Elizabeth Shooster. How are you feeling?"

I gave her a wry smile. "I think you're supposed to be telling me that, Doc. What happened to me?"

She looked at Marilyn. "Is he always like this?", she asked, smiling.

"No, usually he's much, much worse."

I shrugged, but that hurt. "How about, I hurt all over?"

"That's to be expected, but it will pass. All right, here's what happened to you. When the building collapsed, something jagged – probably a wooden floor joist – clipped you on the side of your head, and then kept moving down, and buried itself in your left pectoral muscle and..." She stopped when she saw I had no idea what she was talking about. "It dug in here and here...", she explained, tracing a few areas on her own chest, " ... and also dug into your upper left arm." She tapped her own arm in emphasis. "While that was happening you also cracked a couple of ribs on the left side. They're not broken, though. You also lost a lot of blood. So, when you came in we pumped some blood into you and removed the wood and splinters, and sewed you back together and taped your ribs."

"Now what?"

She shrugged and smiled. "Now you get better. We have you on lots of antibiotics and some painkillers. You'll be here a few days and then we can send you home. You'll be wrapped up for a few weeks, but you're in excellent shape. Three months from now and you'll just have a few more scars to talk about." She sounded like she was finished, but she didn't leave, and she looked like she wanted to ask a question.

That was interrupted when Marilyn's cell phone rang. Her eyes opened wide when she saw the name pop up on the little screen. She flipped it open and said, "Governor?" After a few minutes chatting, she gave the phone to me. "It's Governor Bush."

I wasn't surprised. "Carl, how are you feeling? I hear you're out of surgery and awake."

"I'm just fine, Governor. It was nice of you to call. Thank you."

"Listen, I'll be flying in later. I'm at a fundraiser in Denver right now. We can talk and make a few plans, do a press conference, that sort of thing."

"Of course, sir. I look forward to it."

"Well, you get better! That was a hell of a thing you just did, I want you to know that! A hell of a thing!"

"Thank you." The phone clicked and I flipped it shut. Marilyn took it back. I looked at the others. "George Bush is coming in. We're going to do a press conference."

"That's what I wanted to talk to you about, Congressman. There are reporters camped out all over the hospital trying to get in here. The Governor, of Oklahoma I mean, he ordered up the State Police to keep order! Everybody wants to see you and to talk to the doctors and everybody! It's crazy out there!", said Doctor Shooster.

"And now George Bush is coming?", added Marilyn. "What's he trying to do?"

I smiled at my wife. She could be a bit naïve at times. "He is going to bask in the sunlight of my reflected glory, or something like that. Politics 101, hun. Everything that is good happens because George Bush is wise and good; everything that is bad happens because Al Gore is wicked and evil. You ought to know that. By the time George gets through with this, Springboro will rename itself Bushville, since he was wise enough to send me to save the town from the tornado that Al Gore caused."

"You weren't this cynical when I married you.", she told me.

"I was just hiding it well." I turned to the doctor. "Okay, how about you and me and your hospital's communications director write up a press release. We can do a press conference tomorrow."

"I'll ask him about that. I'll come back around lunchtime."

"I need to find your daughters. What do I say when the reporters ask me in the lobby?", asked Marilyn.

"Just say that I am awake and feeling much better and we'll be issuing a release later on."

"Oh, by the way, I talked to both Tusker and Tessa and Marty and your sister while you were out but you need to call them as well." Marilyn gave me a quick kiss, and then I closed my eyes and went back to sleep.

I woke up again around noon, when Marilyn returned with our daughters, who were carrying a large cardboard box. They both came in, shrieking happily, and set the box down on the end of the bed, where it began moving. I looked over at their mother. "Don't tell me, that's not..."

"Oh, yes it is!" She peeled back the lid and a gigantic fuzzy brown head popped up.

The girls picked the pup out of the box and set her down on my chest. "We named her Stormy!", announced Holly.

"Yeah, after the storm.", added her sister.

I bit off a smartass reply, and simply warned, "If this thing pees on me..."

Stormy didn't pee on me, but she did crawl forward and begin licking my face. How do you say no to a puppy licking your face? I reached up with my good hand and began to rub her fur, and she began licking my hand. This thing had an inexhaustible supply of saliva. She moved back to licking my face and I wiped my hand on the bedsheets.

Doctor Shooster came in at that point, followed by a corporate type and a nurse with some food, and gave a pro forma protest at seeing a dog in the hospital. This sort of abated when she put her hand on the critter and was licked. We sent them out of the room, with orders to find a leash and a collar. I wolfed down my Jell-O and juice while we crafted a press release. It didn't say much, other than that I was alive and awake, in good health. It was expected that I would survive and be released in a few days, and that we hoped to have a press conference tomorrow. The communications director added a section where I was thanking the hospital for the excellent treatment I was receiving. I thanked him, somewhat dryly, for rectifying my oversight. Then we sent him off, Doctor Shooster was sent home to get some rest, and I went back to napping.

I woke up again a few hours later, when Marilyn came back in with the girls, sans puppy. "Hey, where'd you get the clean clothes?", I asked them.

"The bus was trashed, but we could get into the luggage compartment. We got all of our suitcases and yours.", explained Molly.

"We left Stormy in the motel. She'll be okay until we get her home.", added her sister.

"Carl, feeling up for some visitors?", asked Marilyn. She nodded her head towards the door.

"Company coming to call?", I asked. She nodded without saying anything. "Do I look okay?"

"No, you look like a house fell on you." She went to the door and opened it.

Governor Bush came bouncing in, followed by a few members of his entourage. He had with him a photographer, who took several pictures of the Governor shaking my hand and looking solicitously at me, like the Governor was there and getting prepped to perform surgery on me. We talked briefly and he was curious about why we couldn't do the press conference today instead of tomorrow.

A black nurse came in as he was asking that question and told everybody to get out, and she answered the Governor by stating, "He can't have a press conference today because all his stitches will come out and he'll bleed to death. Now, everybody out! I have to change some bandages!" She was an intimidating woman, and everybody skedaddled, except for Marilyn.

I smiled at the nurse. "Thank you."

"My pleasure. Besides, I'm a Democrat. Maybe I can make it hurt."

I laughed at that, and that hurt enough. The bandages didn't take long, but then she and Marilyn gave me a sponge bath. I was going to need something a lot more serious before I could do a press conference. The nurse said she would remove my catheter tonight, and give me a chance to move around some, and if I was reacting well, they'd cover my bandages tomorrow and give me a chance in a sit-down shower and see if I could get a shave. By the time they were done, the Governor and his crew were gone.

By that evening Marilyn was sleeping in the armchair, and she snoozed through my dinner of broth, green salad with no dressing, Jell-O, and decaf green tea. At this rate I was going to ask to be put back into the basement. When my wife woke up, I kissed her good-bye and sent her to the motel to spend the night with the girls. After that, a nurse pulled my catheter and helped me to my feet, to let me walk around a bit and work my muscles. An Oklahoma State Trooper was stationed outside my door, so it would be an enterprising snoop who could disturb my sleep.

I woke up the next morning feeling better, much better! The general achiness was gone, although I had a general throbbing in my left arm and chest, and some sharp pains in my ribs when I moved around. Marilyn and the twins came over while I was eating my Corn Flakes with skim milk and drinking my OJ. I wasn't sure when I was getting out of here, but the first stop was going to be a McDonalds! After breakfast I returned some calls to my friends and family, assuring them I was still alive, and then Doctor Shooster came in, checked me over, and gave me a clean bill of health. She cleared me for a bath and a shave prior to the press conference. A nurse, Pat Richards, was promised to assist me.

Pat Richards turned out to be a guy. He saw the surprise on my face and grinned. "Not what you had in mind for a shower with a nurse?"

"Not hardly! Do me a favor and don't tell my wife."

He gave me an evil grin. "I'll do worse! I'll tell a reporter!" That elicited a groan from me and I surrendered. He laughed and scrounged up some plastic wrap and covered my bandages, and then wheeled me to a handicap accessible shower. I sat on a special seat and he helped me as I cleaned up one handed, and afterwards slapped some shaving gel on my face and gave me a disposable razor. I was almost feeling human by the time we got back to the room.

Back in the room I discovered that Charlie had called while I was in the shower. The news and footage of the rescue had been shown on his ship, and it had taken him almost two days to manage a phone call. He promised to try and call again over the weekend, and then told his mother to tell me that I was too old for this kind of behavior and I needed to start behaving myself. I told her he was right! She was laughing pretty good at that.

Richards changed all my bandages when we got back to the room, which fascinated my daughters and grossed out my wife. A fair bit of the swelling had been reduced and the seepage around the stitches was almost ended. They were able to reduce the bandages on the side of my head to a few butterflies. My daughters were sent out to play in traffic while I got dressed. My briefs and slacks were easy enough, but a shirt was very tricky. My left arm was strapped against my chest, keeping movement down, but preventing me from putting on a shirt. It was decided to get the shirt on and then put my arm in a sling tied around me, but we had a hard time getting a shirt on over the bandages. Marilyn came up with the idea of just cutting the left sleeve off, since the sling would hide the missing sleeve. That worked out pretty well.

The press conference was scheduled for noon, and if I behaved myself, I could escape sometime after that. It was an impressive offer, so I decided to behave myself. Unsurprisingly, Governor Bush showed up, but I was surprised when Frank Keating, the Governor of Oklahoma also appeared, along with Don Nickles, one of the two Republican Senators, and half the Oklahoma Congressional Caucus, Steve Largent, J.C. Watts, and Frank Lucas. "Hey, guys, thanks for coming. I really appreciate it. It means a lot.", I told them. I shook hands with all of them. They formed an honor guard of sorts as Marilyn and the girls walked me down to the press conference. I asked Don, who I had worked with on D2A, "If you guys are here, who the hell is running things back in Washington?"

"Nobody. You ought to know that by now, Carl!"

George Bush managed to 'help' me into the room where the press conference was being held. The others led the applause as I appeared. Thankfully he allowed my family to sit down next to me. Instead, he and the other dignitaries formed a phalanx behind me. Everybody wanted a piece of the Carl Buckman phenomenon. Of course, if I screwed this up, they would be the first to throw me to the wolves!

I was seated on the right hand side of a dais, really a long conference table covered with a table cloth and a skirt with the hospital's logo hiding the front, with several microphones on it. One was in front of me. Marilyn was on my left and the girls on my right. Next to Marilyn was Dr. Shooster. Beyond her was another woman in her late 30s or early 40s, and she smiled and waved at the twins as we came in, and they waved back. Most ominously, on the floor next to our chairs was a big cardboard box that was moving on its own. I whispered to my wife, "Is that what I think it is?"

She gave me a big grin. "Oh, you know it!"

"Yeah, well I sure hope somebody has a copy of a newspaper around here!"

Marilyn's eyes popped open at that, and I noticed one of George Bush's aides off to the side. I motioned to him and caught his eye, and made the 'Who? Me?' face. I nodded and beckoned him over. When he came over and leaned down, I whispered, "We're going to need a newspaper!"

"What? Why?"

"Because there's a puppy in that box and it isn't house broken yet. You better find a newspaper. A copy of the New York Times would be perfect!"

Sudden understanding came to him, along with a big grin, and he took off out a side door. George Bush gave me a curious look which I silently smiled at and gave him a hidden 'OK' sign with my good hand.

Once we were all in place, Dr. Shooster looked out into the crowd and asked, "Are we all ready?"

Most everyone was, but one of the TV guys yelled something about a bad feed. We waited a few more minutes for him to fiddle with something, and then he yelled out, "Try it again!"

"Try what again? I've never done this before.", commented the doctor.

"Got it!"

She looked at me in confusion and I covered the mike with my hand and said, "We're fine. You're doing fine. You can start now."

She nodded and I sat back as she started. Around us some flashes started up, and the camera lights were blinding. "Hello. Thank you all for coming. My name is Doctor Elizabeth Shooster and I am the attending surgeon for Congressman Carl Buckman. I was also consulted on the treatment for Mrs. Sylvie Torquist. Congressman Buckman and Mrs. Torquist were the only victims of the tornado that hit Springboro two days ago who were treated here, and as far as I understand it, the only two victims who received more than cuts and scratches. I think we can all be thankful that the level of injuries was so light."

That seemed pretty good for the destruction I saw in Springboro. Doctor Shooster kept going. "With me up here is Congressman Buckman and his wife Marilyn and his daughters..." She looked down at an index card before continuing, " ... Holly and Molly. On my other side is Mrs. Anna Simpson, the sister of Mrs. Torquist, who will be able to speak for the Torquist family." Mrs. Simpson flashed a big smile and waved at everyone. She was a blonde like her sister, though older and more heavy set.

"I asked if the Springboro police or fire department wanted to contribute to this press conference, but they indicated that they were too involved with operations in Springboro to send somebody to attend. However, they did wish to thank the Congressman, and said that he had as good a view of what happened as anybody, and that he could speak for them."

Thanks for the vote of confidence, guys. Now watch me step on my crank! The doctor wasn't finished however. "As a doctor, I will be speaking to the medical condition of the two patients." She bent over and picked up a medical dummy, upper half only, and set it on the conference table. "Congressman Buckman was injured when the Torquist home collapsed on him after he rescued the Torquist family. At that time he received a mild concussion and some abrasions to the left side of his head. There was also penetrating trauma from wood splinters to the left side of his chest and upper arm, along with two cracked ribs." As she mentioned each injury, she pointed it out on the dummy. "While Congressman Buckman's injuries were significant, they were not life threatening, and the Congressman has responded very well to surgery and treatment. I anticipate releasing the Congressman from our care either later today or early tomorrow."

I smiled at Marilyn. It couldn't be any too soon for me.

"Mrs. Torquist's injuries were considerably more severe, and were complicated by the fact that she was pregnant. I have received permission from the Torquists to provide relevant information. Before the Congressman was able to reach Mrs. Torquist, she had been injured by some falling shelves in her storm cellar, which gave her an extremely deep cut on the back of her right calf, penetrating and partially severing her posterior tibial artery." She now pulled out a dummy leg. "Congressman Buckman was able to fashion a tourniquet and remove Mrs. Torquist from the basement, where she was transported here. Further medical treatment required that we perform an emergency Caesarian section here, and then we transported Mrs. Torquist to Oklahoma University Hospital in Oklahoma City for vascular surgery to repair the arterial damage to her leg. While I am not a vascular surgeon, the doctors I spoke to at O.U. expected that Mrs. Torquist would fully recover and come home again in a relatively short time. In addition, while the delivery of their baby wasn't planned, the birth was only about a week early and the baby is in good health. For more on the Torquist family, you will need to speak to Mrs. Simpson here, as the family spokesperson. Now, I'm going to sit down and let the others here speak."

And pandemonium ensued!

Everybody began speaking at once, and both the doctor and Mrs. Simpson seemed stunned by it. Finally I stood up and motioned people to silence with my good hand, and then said into the mike, "Okay, one question at a time, just like when we were all back in the first grade!" That got me a few laughs, so I sat down and pointed at somebody in the first row. "You first."

"Congressman, why did you go into the basement? Why didn't you wait for trained rescue people?"

"There wasn't enough time.", I answered. "When we were yelling to see if anybody was in there, we were told to save her children. That put a whole different light on things. We had to go in, right then. By the way, my job was the easy one. All I did was hang around in the storm cellar. The guy we really ought to be thanking is one of my staff, Jerry McGuire. He's the guy who kept going in and out of the house to bring out the Torquists." I looked around but didn't see Jerry. The rat must have ducked out when he heard me mention him.

Another reporter popped up. "Why didn't you rescue the children first?"

"Because Mrs. Torquist's injuries were pretty bad. I'm no doctor, but she was losing blood pretty fast. The children were uninjured. I simply did the best that I could at the time."

Doctor Shooster broke in at this point. "The Congressman is correct in this. Mrs. Torquist lost an awful lot of blood before he got the tourniquet on her. If he had waited even a few minutes while rescuing the children, both Mrs. Torquist and her unborn baby would have died. As it was, she needed massive transfusions both during the ambulance ride and here."

Huh! I had no idea!

Another question came in, this one really dumb! "Congressman Buckman, weren't you frightened to go into a house on the verge of collapsing?"

"Of course I was, but you can't let that stop you. All I knew was that there were people trapped, at least a woman and some children. Once I was inside, I was much more scared of messing up the tourniquet than anything else. Like I said, I'm no doctor, but I do know you can screw that sort of thing up and really hurt somebody!" I looked over at both the doctor and Mrs. Simpson. "She's going to be all right?"

"She'll be fine.", assured Doctor Shooster.

Mrs. Simpson got into the act, which was fine for me. "I talked to Tom this morning. Sylvie is doing fine. The surgeons think the damage is fully repaired, and that she can come home in another week to ten days. She's a tough girl. She and Tom said to make sure I thanked you for saving her life. Oh, and I wanted to say that your daughters are simply darling girls. The kids loved them."

Holly and Molly lit up at that, and the conversation turned on them. Another reporter asked, "How did you meet the Congressman's daughters?"

"They stayed with us last night. Mrs. Buckman came over last night and checked on them, but it seems they had orders from their father to take care of the children." She turned to us and asked, "What was that about, anyway?"

I rolled my eyes at that and Molly answered, "Oh, Dad told us to take care of them right before he went to the hospital. We figured it was his last request, you know?"

I must have slapped my head and looked to the heavens at that, but there was some laughter around the room. I looked over at that and said, "Sorry about that. I heard about my 'dying orders' the other day. I appreciate your taking care of them."

She waved it off. "Everything was fine. Ever since my boys moved out we had the room, and they were good with the kids and the dogs."

A reporter asked, "Did you really think your father was dying?"

Holly looked over at her sister, who nudged her and whispered something, and then Holly turned and said, 'Well, maybe, I don't know ... it's just..." She looked at the rest of us for a second and continued. "All my life – all our lives – we've heard how Dad is so brave and a hero and all, and to us he's always been just ... Dad, you know? And then during the tornado, when we were down in that basement, we were down on the floor and he was on top of us, like nothing could get to us without it going through him first. Then, afterwards, all I wanted to do was run away and hide, and he said no, that we had to help people. And now this ... it's just ... I – we – suddenly realized that Dad is always about helping other people, not himself. Nothing is ever about Dad. And he told us to help Billy and Molly, so that's what we were going to do, no matter what." She gave a wry shrug at that.

I didn't know what to say. I looked over at Marilyn and she was smiling but her eyes were glistening. Great!

"Mrs. Buckman, when did you learn about your husband rescuing this family?", was yelled out.

Mariyn's eyes opened when she realized a question for her. I passed her the microphone and she answered, "Probably like everybody else did. I had a day off from the campaign and I was watching television when they interrupted the show, and I could watch him being pulled out of that basement."

"How did you feel?"

"Scared, mostly, but then when the story came out, I felt proud. It was like what Holly just said. I've known Carl since we were in college. He's not about himself, he's always about helping others. I married a hero." The politicians behind me began applauding at that.

Meanwhile, this was all going out live. Needless to say, the next question was about the dogs. I glanced over and saw the aide on the side, who was smiling. I motioned him over and he ducked down and ran over. I took the newspaper, a day old copy of the New York Times, and I whispered, "Stick around." He nodded.

The inevitable question came up. "Congressman, did you really adopt a puppy during the rescue?"

I laughed at that. "I had to! I promised the kids I would save them and I'd hate to break a campaign promise!" I turned to look at Governor Bush. "Governor, we keep our promises, don't we?!"

He smiled back and yelled out, "Absolutely!"

At that point I turned back to his assistant and said quietly, "Let's have that box." He lifted the box up to the conference table, where it moved a bit. "Let me introduce the newest member of the Buckman family. My daughters named her Stormy!" I popped the lid off the box and the pup dutifully stuck her head out and looked around. I awkwardly reached in with my good hand and lifted her up, and she licked my face. The room erupted in applause and cheering.

I had a funny feeling something was about to happen, so I told the assistant, "Leave me the cover section, but spread out that paper back here." His eyes widened a bit, but he smiled and tossed the cover section on the table. I turned back to the group and said, "Excuse us, but this little girl is still a puppy. I think we need to set her down." The fellow picked up Stormy and set her down on the newspaper, and she dutifully squatted and peed about ten gallons out. I made a wry look at the audience, and nodded to them. More than a few of the politicians looked horrified, but nobody could see from the audience. When she was finished, she looked around and tried to wander off, but the assistant grabbed her and put her up on the table. She came over and licked my face again.

Only one thing to do! I picked up the front page of the New York Times, probably the most liberal newspaper in the country. I held it so that everyone could see the cover. I leaned into the microphone and said, "Stormy prefers the New York Times because it's extra fluffy and absorbent. The New York Times – Stormy tested, Stormy approved!"

The laughter was pretty deafening at that, and we needed to bring this to an end. I pushed the pup down the table to the girls and stood up, picking up a microphone. "I think it's time to let some people go home. I'd like to apologize to the people of Springboro that I wasn't able to meet more of them the other day before we were so rudely interrupted. Here's two more campaign promises. First, the people behind me, your Governor and Senators and Congressmen, are going to bust their butts to help get Springboro back on its feet, and your next President, President George W. Bush, will be helping make that happen." I looked back and saw the people behind me were all loudly agreeing to this. I turned back and continued, "Secondly, I am going to be recuperating for a few more days, and then I'll be at the convention in Philadelphia. However, my first stop after that will be in Springboro, and I'll see what I can do to help them myself!"

Chapter 129: Home Again, Home Again

With that we shut off the mikes and despite the reporters still calling out questions, we all started moving out. Behind me at my feet was the soiled newspaper. Great! I dropped to one knee, to try and roll it up one handed, when the young assistant dropped down next to me and said, "I'll get that, Congressman." He already had a small trash can ready. I steadied the trash can for him and he rolled it up and stuffed it inside. "We're out this way, Congressman."

I looked around and saw that the twins had already bundled up the mutt, and were following their mother out the door we were heading towards. "What's your name?", I asked him. He was about 24 or 25.

"Frank Stouffer, Congressman."

"And what do you do in this traveling circus?"

"Mr. Rove has me assigned to the Governor."

I nodded and was about to speak further when Doctor Shooster tapped me on the right shoulder. "Congressman, you can't leave yet. I need to check you out first."

I grumbled at that, but was much more polite when Anna Simpson came up and shook my hand and kissed my cheek. "Thank you so much, Congressman! I know Tom and Sylvie want to thank you. Maybe when you come back you can meet them. You are coming back, aren't you?"

I smiled. "I just said it on national television. I don't think I can back out now. If she's not out of the hospital by then, I'll look her up, for sure."

"Thank you." She kissed my cheek again and then looked over at the twins. "You did real good with those girls." Then she was gone.

I said good-bye to the other politicians. They were planning on an inspection tour of Springboro, to 'assist.' God help Springboro! Before they left, I asked George Bush, "What's that kid of yours, Frank, do for you?"

He gave a shrug. "He's one of Karl's boys. Why?"

"Can I have him? He seems smart."

"Why? What do you need him for?"

"I need a dog-robber.", I told him.

He glanced at Frank and pointed at me. "Stick with the Congressman. You belong to him now."

Stouffer looked surprised with that but rolled with the flow. "Uh, okay." He turned to me and said, "What's a dog-robber?"

"Old time Army term. It means an aide-de-camp, somebody who helps out a general, who will rob a dog of his bone if ordered. Go get your stuff from wherever you've got it stashed and get back here before we leave. Pick up a dog crate big enough to handle Stormy and a few dog bowls.", I told him.

"Where?"

"Figure it out, dog-robber!"

He looked alarmed, but took off.

Marilyn looked over at him as he left, and then smiled at me. "Behave, Carl, he's not a second lieutenant."

"Honey, that is exactly what he is!" At that I followed the good doctor back to my room for a final checkup.

Unfortunately for the billing department, I proved healthy enough to be released and deny them the pleasure of another day's charges. We were on our way towards the door by five or so. As we reached the lobby, Frank Stouffer came racing in, out of breath, and yelling, "Wait!" He had a suitcase in one hand, a hanging bag over his neck, a large plastic animal crate in the other hand, and stuffed under that was a bulging plastic bag with the name of a pet store on it. He was being followed by a protesting cab driver, demanding payment. "I caught you!"

"A good thing you did, too. It'd be right embarrassing to miss the flight." I reached into my back pocket and pulled out my wallet, but couldn't handle opening it and paying the cabbie. I handed it to Marilyn and said, "Can you pay this guy?"

Marilyn snorted and smiled, and pulled a fifty out. "This cover it?"

The cab driver was suddenly all smiles, and he took the fifty and took off. The rest of us distributed the loot and Jerry McGuire, who had miraculously reappeared after the press conference, led us outside to a limo. From there we headed towards the airport, where the G-IV was waiting for us. We got on the plane and it was wheels up for Westminster.

My daughters had been wearing nice knee length dresses, which combined with some high heeled sandals, made them look older and more mature. I noticed that Frank had eyed them curiously. When he sat down in front of me, facing backwards, I told him, "Frank, you do realize that they aren't even 16 yet, don't you?" That wouldn't happen until tomorrow. "Do I need to take you down to the range and show you what happens to a hollow point when it hits something?"

He laughed at that. "No sir, I'm good on that. They are pretty cute, though, you have to admit that. They'll turn 18 sooner than you think."

I waved that off. "So? Six months from now I'll be the Vice President and have access to military weaponry. You have any idea what happens when a beehive round goes off? It's awesome!"

"I'll take your word for it, Congressman."

"So, Frank, you work for Karl Rove? What's your background?", I asked.

Frank explained that he was a graduate of Princeton with a degree in Political Science and had attended Yale Law. He was one of the young political class flocking to Washington, with no experience outside of Washington or the Ivy League. His job with Karl Rove was his first job. He was 25.

I nodded as he told me this. "Okay, first things first, you no longer work for Karl Rove. You work for me now. Is that understood?"

"How ... am I on your Congressional staff?"

I shook my head. "When we land, get Brewster McRiley on the phone and I'll handle it from there. You'll technically be on the staff of McRiley Associates. You have a problem with that?"

"Uh, no sir, why would I?"

I eyed him curiously. Was he naïve or dumb? "Let me be very explicit. You do not talk to Karl Rove from here on in without clearing it with me first. I am guessing you got orders from him to give him a daily report on what I was up to?" Frank turned beet red at that. He'd be a lousy poker player. "I'll take your silence as a yes. No more. You work for me, not Karl. Is that understood, or do we need to part ways?"

"Yes, sir."

"Yes, sir, which?", I pushed.

"Yes, sir, I understand. What's the problem with Mister Rove?"

"No problem, but Karl Rove doesn't work for me and doesn't have my best interests at heart. I pay Brewster, and as long as my checks clear, he stays loyal to me. Karl Rove ain't loyal to me. You following this?"

"I follow you sir. Uh, how do I contact Mister McRiley?"

"Figure it out, Frank!"

Marilyn had been listening to us, and she reached across the aisle and swatted at me. "Will you behave!?" She turned to Frank and said, "Get a pen and pad and I'll give you a few numbers." He scrambled and pulled a pen and notepad out, and Marilyn read off some numbers from her cell phone. She gave him Brewster's, but also Marty's and mine, and the numbers for my offices in D.C., and the ones for the campaign and the local Westminster office for the Maryland Ninth, and several others.

I chuckled at all this, and then said, "Now, when we land, I want you to get yourself a room over in Parkton, and rent a car. We'll get somebody to give you a lift over. Make sure you keep receipts for everything. Always have at least a grand in cash in your wallet, mostly twenties and fifties. You'd be amazed how much easier things work when you deal in cash. You can take tomorrow off, since it's Sunday, but be at our house early Monday morning. I might be on sick leave, but I still need to work."

Frank kept jotting down notes. The next few months would either break him or make him. We'd have to see which.

Marilyn asked me, "You really have to work this week? You need to rest. Doctor Shooster said you needed to rest."

"It will be a working vacation. You need to finish whatever they have you doing with the convention speech, and I have to write one of my own. I started one, but just don't like it.", I told her.

Frank popped up at that. He shuffled through a briefcase and handed me a manila envelope. "Here's your speech, Congressman. Mister Rove gave this to me to give to you."

I eyed the envelope curiously. Up until now, all of my speeches I had written myself, although I had frequently gotten some input and editing assistance from my staff. Now I was going to give a speech written by somebody else. "Who wrote it?"

"Mister Scully." I gave him a blank look. I knew Mike Gerson was the chief writer for Bush, but wasn't aware of the second tier yet. "Matthew Scully, he works for Mister Gerson."

"Well, give it here, let me read it."

I took the envelope and opened it to read it. The best speechwriters would write for the speaker's voice, using his tone and his style and his substance. The worst would simply slap some shit together. This was about in the middle. It wasn't just slapped together, but it was obviously written for somebody else. It was also rather generic. I was going to have to write my own speech and incorporate what I could of this one. I needed to give the speech of a lifetime; this one wasn't that. It was okay, but I wanted more.

I started reading, but drifted off and slept most of the trip back to Westminster. We had some limos and vans waiting for us when we landed. As we walked off the plane, Marilyn said, "You need to rest. You look pale."

"If you are going to play nurse, shouldn't you get one of those little nurse's costumes?"

"OH, THAT'S SO GROSS!", yelled Molly.

"THAT'S ... I DON'T WANT TO HEAR IT!", screamed her sister. "LA ... LA ... LA...", she sang out loudly.

Marilyn and I looked at each other and grinned. Neither of us had known they were within earshot.

My entire traveling circus went over to the house, and then I sent most of them off to either find some motel rooms nearby or simply to go home and rest. I was still tired, and needed to rest for a bit. I told Marilyn I wanted to sit in my chair for a bit, but she pushed me down the hall into the bedroom. I did give the girls a few orders, but simply to get the puppy situated and sorted out, and to unpack and relax. They needed some down time as much as I did.

I sat down on the bed and kicked off my shoes. I looked at my wife and smiled. "You never did answer me about the nurse's costume."

"GROSS!", she said mimicking her daughters, making me laugh.

I stretched out on the bed and eyed her invitingly. I had been away from home for too long.

Marilyn grinned and closed our bedroom door, flipping the lock. "Would you prefer me to wait until I went out and got the outfit?"

"It's not all that critical to the healing process."

She came closer and spoke seductively in my ear. "How about I simply take off my clothes and suck your cock? Think that will help you heal up some?"

My temperature must have risen at that, among other things. "It's an excellent start! I'll probably need some additional treatments like that later on, too."

"We'll see. You're not as young as you used to be. You might not be able to handle the treatment!" I snorted derisively at the comment. Marilyn did a quick little striptease in front of me and then undid my pants and pulled them down to my knees. Then she knelt by my good side and went down on me. I ran my good hand over her naked back, and then, as I got closer, ran my fingers through her hair and kept her head in place. I sighed happily as she got me off, and swallowed me down.

She sat up on the bed and wiped her lips on the back of her hand. I smiled and said, "Nurse, I'm feeling better now, but I think I need another treatment."

Marilyn giggled and said, "Sorry, but that will have to wait. Your insurance won't cover multiple treatments." I swatted her bare behind and she scampered into the bathroom and cleaned up and brushed her teeth, and then slipped into a simple halter top sundress. I had my own pants pulled back up by the time she came back and she helped me with the belt and zipper.

Before she left, I slipped a hand under her dress and ran my fingers up to her pussy, to find that she was going commando. "I like the way you nurses dress when you're off duty." She just laughed and told me to get some sleep.

It was late when I woke up, after dinner, in fact, and I went to the bathroom and cleaned up some before limping out to the living room. Marilyn was watching Wheel of Fortune while the girls were teasing Stormy with an old sock. She came over and sniffed at me, and then headed over towards a corner. "Grab her! She needs to go outside!", I yelled at them, and they picked her up and ran her out the patio door.

"Feeling better?", asked Marilyn.

I glanced and saw the girls were outside still, and replied, "Still looking forward to a few more treatments."

My wife blushed and grinned. The twins came in and she said lowly, "Later." The she raised her voice some, and asked, "Want some dinner? We heated up some canned beef stew."

"That's fine. I'm not ready for anything big. Anything's got to be better than broth and Jell-O!" Marilyn laughed at that and headed for the kitchen. "How about some booze, too!"

"Are you taking those pain pills?"

"Advils only." I reacted well to ibuprofen. Most people can take one pill an hour, or up to 24 a day, before their liver explodes. I had popped half a dozen when I woke up. I was good at the moment.

When the girls returned with the pup, I played with her for a bit, and taught the twins how to housebreak her. It was going to be their responsibility. If they saw her heading behind the furniture or looking for a place to squat, grab her and get her outside. If you catch her too late, rub her nose in it and swat her with a newspaper. Praise her when she goes outside. All the standard stuff that people having been doing for millennia to housebreak dogs. Most importantly, don't listen to your mother about what to do; she thinks Stormy can speak English and will understand without rubbing her nose in it or smacking her.

"I heard that!", came from the kitchen. That just made us speak a little more quietly.

It's not hard to housebreak a dog. It just requires some patience and vigilance. I remember hearing somewhere that the bigger the dog the easier it is to housebreak them. I have no idea if that was true or just an old wives' tale, but if so, I expected Stormy to be incredibly easy to train. She had all the earmarks of being a really big dog, much bigger than I was used to. All of my dogs, this life and last, had been some form of hound mix, in the 30-40 pound range. At barely three months, this thing was already about 10 pounds, and seemed to be growing just in the few days we already had her! She was sure devouring Puppy Chow, that was clear!

By now Stormy was snoring in my lap, so when Marilyn brought me some stew and a gin and tonic, we traded. After dinner, I read Scully's speech while Marilyn watched television. I hadn't known what I was going to say, but while listening to the late news, everything sort of crystallized. I would spend the next couple of days working on it.

We put some newspapers down in the laundry room and I let Stormy out on a leash before we put her in the room and went to bed. I was ready for another treatment, so Marilyn stripped me naked, and then pulled off her dress, and we made love – carefully! I had to stay on my back, and I only had one hand to work on her with, but we figured it out, and finished with her riding me while playing with her clit, and with my fiddling with her nipples. My ribs were aching afterwards, but I could live with that.

Frank Stouffer showed up the next morning while we were eating breakfast, so I invited him in and made him some eggs and bacon. He had managed to get some hotel rooms for himself and some of the other staff in Parkton, and had rented a car. I hadn't expected him that morning, which was a Sunday, but I shouldn't have been surprised. Until Election Day, there were no days off. I gave him orders to get in touch with Matt Scully and have him come on out here. At the minimum, if he couldn't make it out here today, I needed the speech in a digital format, Word or a text file, something I could begin changing. He would complain, like any good author would, but he would feel better about it if he was involved.

After that, we all headed into the living room to watch the Sunday morning talk shows. The primary topic was the upcoming Republican convention in Philadelphia, along with reports and summaries of what the Governor and I were up to. The Democratic convention was two weeks after ours, and Al Gore still hadn't named a running mate. Would he stick with Joe Lieberman, or pick somebody different? Had I changed things so that a different calculus was needed?

By lunchtime, I sent Frank off and checked my email. The speech file had arrived, along with a note that Matt would be here Monday morning, and requested we get him a room. I forwarded it to Frank and followed up with a phone call. Then I went to work.

The Vice Presidential candidate has a specific job in that he is often called on to be the Presidential candidate's attack dog. He was supposed to be rude and mean and go after the other side, while the Presidential candidate stayed away from it all, looking, well, Presidential. The speech was very much in this line, with me going tooth and nail against Bill Clinton. We were painting Al Gore as Clinton 2.0, which was a pretty accurate description. If anything, he was even more liberal than Slick Willie, who had an instinctive feel for how hard he could push and get away with things. Al was more dogmatic and hard core.

I could do the attack dog role if I needed, but I was more comfortable doing a positive message than a negative one. In this regard, I planned to milk my current 'hero' status. The planned format was for my nomination would take place late Tuesday night, so that when I spoke on Wednesday, I would already be the official nominee. Then, Wednesday evening, John Boehner would give my official introduction, and then we would segue into the biographical video that Marilyn was working on. (She still had more work to do, and Monday morning would leave me with the girls, while she flew to Hollywood to finalize her stuff.) Then, after the video ended, somewhere between nine and ten, and still in prime time, I would come out, along with the family. We would wave and smile, and then they would leave and I would do the speech. Afterwards, the family would come back out, to thunderous applause and balloons and confetti, and for all I knew, doves flying and angels singing.

Thursday night, the last night of the convention, we would repeat the process, with Governor Bush. At the end of that speech, my family and I would join the Bush family on stage. Then we would begin three months of hell until the night of the election.

This week the priorities were to write the speech, and do so early enough to get it to the technical people who would put it on the teleprompter and get the necessary placards and signs printed up. I was going to work from home, though I planned to take one day to travel to the Westminster and Washington offices, to show the flag, thank everybody for caring and helping, and prove I was recuperating. Otherwise, I really did need to recuperate. The convention was going to be a tough physical grind, and the last thing I could afford – that any of us could afford! – was to have me collapse on stage during my speech.

I was delayed working on the speech for a good reason. I had a chance to talk to Charlie that afternoon. A call came in around half past twelve, and I was in the kitchen when the phone rang. I grabbed it and said, "Hello?" I just hoped security was screening our calls properly. I didn't need to talk to any reporters today.

"Dad? You're home!"

"Charlie! How are you?"

"Dad! How are you?! You made the news on the ship!"

Huh! I suppose that made sense. They probably got some sort of canned national news from the Armed Forces Network. "Does anybody know who you are yet?", I asked.

"Nah! Not that I can tell anyway. The rest of the guys don't know, and if any of the officers know, they haven't said anything.", he replied.

"So where are you calling from? You on the ship? Where are you?"

"Bahrain."

"Bahrain?!"

He laughed at that. "We docked and have leave. There's a whole bunch of payphones here. My cell phone doesn't work here. This place is seriously depraved!"

"What time is it?", I asked him. What time zone was Bahrain in? That was on the other side of the world! "And what is this about depraved?"

"It's 2040 here. We're plus eight compared to the East Coast. And you don't need to know about depravity. You're married! To my mother, no less!", he answered with a laugh.

"Just remember, sonny, an old beat up paratrooper can kick a young Marine's ass any day of the week!" Smart ass kid!

After that we talked about the tornado in Springboro, and then I got Marilyn and the girls on the line with him.

I felt good enough to be able to cook that night, so we invited Tusker and Tessa over for dinner. The girls introduced them to Stormy and then told them about our adventures in the Midwest. Then Tusker suggested that as soon as we were done with the convention, we should head up to Sturgis, South Dakota, and campaign at the annual bike rally. I almost snorted my drink out through my nose, and then almost died of laughter when Tusker and Tessa had to explain to Marilyn some of the antics that routinely occurred at Sturgis. Then I had to ask Tessa if there were going to be any pictures surfacing of her in a wet t-shirt contest, or lounging naked on the back of Tusker's hog. Tusker didn't help any by denying her denials. The twins wanted to know how I knew about Sturgis; they had heard about it through their biker brother. That was going to make for an interesting conversation the next time I talked to Charlie!

We also gave the girls their birthday presents, which were some scarves and accessories their mother had picked up in Hollywood, at some fancy boutique. They oohed and aahhed appropriately, but I'll be damned if I could understand how such small amounts of fabric could command such ludicrous prices. Is it a woman thing? Or was I just being an old fart?

Monday I sent the twins and Stormy off to the vet for a checkup and shots and all the other things you need to do with puppies. They were also assigned to get the mutt a dog license! I'd hate to be hit with an unlicensed dog violation while running for Vice President!

Matt Scully showed up mid-morning on Monday, shortly after Marilyn left for the airport, and by late Tuesday we had a new speech written. I practiced giving it a couple of times, speaking at a makeshift lectern, and then Scully gave me a withering critique and we did a rewrite. I did another practice speech, and he wasn't as withering. We kept after it through Wednesday lunchtime, at which point he took a copy of the speech to run past Rove, Cheney, and Allbaugh. I didn't care by then. I was just exhausted by the whole process.

Thursday it was time for me to wave the flag in my various offices. I had the girls tend to my doctoring, and after my shower we were able to remove most of the bandages on my chest and arm. I still needed to keep the ribs taped up. Then I shooed them out and dressed in a good suit, and Frank helped me tie a tie one-handed, and I put the sling on and secured it properly to my chest. I wanted to heal up well enough that when it was time for my speech, I could do it without the sling.

Frank and I headed over to Westminster first, early enough to head into the Westminster Diner and greet people and have breakfast. Nick Papandreas was present, as I hoped he would be, and I invited him to join us. He greeted us warmly, and though he refused breakfast, he did have some coffee. He quizzed me all about the tornado, and then reminded everybody in the diner how I had saved the diner ten years ago. I shook a lot of hands before I could escape and then Frank and I drove over to the District Office and the campaign headquarters, located side by side in the strip mall up the road. I thanked everybody for all that they were doing, and got a lot of applause and congratulations.

By lunchtime we had flown to Washington, and I made a slow tour through the Rayburn Building, visiting friends and stopping at my offices for the Maryland Ninth. I made a nice little side deal with John Boehner that if I made it to Vice President, I would support him for the Whip position I was vacating. He was the head of the Republican Caucus currently, so this would be another step up the ladder. After that, we headed over to the Capitol, where I got to meet with my staff in the Whip's office as well as Hastert and DeLay. Again, more applause and congratulations. Then Marty joined us for a late supper before we headed back to Hereford.

Friday and Saturday I basically did some work in the Westminster office and did some campaigning throughout the Maryland Ninth. It looked as if I was going to beat Rob Hollister. The polls were definitely in my favor. I also had to field a few questions about what would happen if Bush won over Gore, and what would happen then. I explained the procedure, and then told them that while I couldn't tell them who would be running in the special election, it would be somebody they would approve of. The Republican Committee had agreed with Marty and me that Cheryl Dedrick would be the choice to replace me. She had sailed through their vetting process a lot easier than I had.

Marilyn came home from Hollywood Friday afternoon. She gave me a DVD with her introduction of me at the convention, and we played it on a television set in my office in Westminster. Marilyn might have been scared to death to speak in front of an audience, but one on one, she was just fine. I had to admit, it looked pretty slick! It ran about twenty minutes or so, going back to when I was a kid growing up in the suburbs, moving on to being a teenaged investor, on through high school and college. The narrator was none other than Magnum P.I. himself, Tom Selleck! As soon as he started talking and I knew who it was, I had to ask my wife if she met him!

"He's gorgeous!", she gushed. "If he wasn't already married, I wouldn't have come back!"

"That would really blow the family values vote, wouldn't it?", I remarked.

"He's got money, too.", she teased.

I just threw my hands up in despair at that point.

While Selleck was doing the narration, and various home photos were being run across the screen, Marilyn began talking about midway through the bio. They had her sitting in an armchair, partially in shadow, with shots of her from slightly off to the side. The format was one where she was getting asked questions from off camera, and they were taping and splicing in her replies. She started talking about from when we met in college, through my Army and Buckman Group years, and then about what I was doing as a Congressman. Eventually it came to an end. When this really played at the convention, the screen would go black, and then John Boehner would speak from offstage and announce my entry, and I would come out from behind the curtains.

It was very professional and slick. I told Marilyn, "Hell, this guy is great! Let me know when he starts walking on water, because I want to watch!"

"You're no help! I think I'm going back to Hollywood and look for Tom Selleck again!"

"I can always grow a new mustache."

"Yeah, but he still has hair!", she replied.

I made a menacing move towards her and she skedaddled out of my office. "It's a good thing for you I'm still an invalid!", I yelled after her.

Sunday afternoon we all flew up to Philly in the LongRanger. We even took Stormy with us. If they were going to play me up as the hero, I might as well do it big time. Even Democrats like puppy dogs! We flew into New Castle. Frank was waiting for us there with a limo and the security staff I was traveling with these days. Presidential nominees, like Bush and Gore, get Secret Service protection while they are campaigning. Vice Presidential nominees don't. If we won the election, that would all change, but right now I was providing my own protection detail.

The convention was being held at the First Union Center, and we had a large suite at the Ritz-Carlton a few miles away. We traveled with Stormy in her cage, since the last thing we needed was for her to find some damn place under a seat to take a leak, take a dump, or take a nap and get forgotten. She was taking well to the housebreaking training, but she was still a little, er ... big puppy.

My big appearance was on Wednesday, but Sunday through Tuesday I was to meet major donors and supporters, and otherwise ingratiate myself with the group surrounding George Bush. Neither Rove nor Cheney were any more friendly towards me, but as long as I didn't get into a flaming argument with them, I would be okay. Cheney in particular was plotting out his position in the Bush White House, and was planning on taking State. On my first go that had been held by Colin Powell, and I hoped he wasn't out in the cold. I just would listen to the plots and nod and mumble something neutral.

As far as the press was concerned, I was unavailable, resting prior to my speech. I wasn't on lockdown, but it came close. We ate in a private dining room, and didn't do any sightseeing. The girls did manage to take Stormy out several times for some fresh air and to let her pee and poop. In the suite, we kept some newspapers on the floor of the bathroom in Marilyn's and my room.

We had flown in Sunday afternoon. That night we planned to let Stormy sleep in the bathroom. Marilyn and I got into bed, and she was beginning to examine my new scars and compare them to my old ones, in a most intriguing manner, when the mutt began whining from the bathroom. "Go to sleep, Stormy!", I called out.

Stormy quieted down for a couple of minutes, and then started up again. I repeated the order, and after just a couple of minutes, she was whining. Marilyn looked at me and asked, "Maybe if we turn the lights off?" We had been getting frisky with the lights lit.

"Worth a try." I rolled over and turned off the light on the nightstand and yelled, "Go to sleep!" Then I rolled back towards my wife. Stormy began whining and barking, and there was a scratching on the door. I rolled over and turned the light on again. "This is nuts!"

I got out of bed and opened the bathroom door, wondering if she needed to pee or something, but she immediately tried to jump up and play with me. Marilyn looked over at me and tried to stifle some laughter. I tossed the dog on the bed with her and said, "I know how to handle this!" I pulled my pants back on and then grabbed the dog. "Your daughters are getting a present!"

I picked Stormy up and carried her out of our bedroom and across the lounge to the large bedroom they were sharing. I knocked and barged in. They were both up, but in bed and watching television, wearing t-shirts. They started scrambling for cover. "Daddy!", they both protested.

"Forget it. I've seen it before. Here, have a dog. Your mother and I are trying to get some sleep!" I dropped her on Molly's bed and left.

I heard them squawking through the door but didn't care. When I got back to my bedroom, I dropped my trousers and crawled back into bed. Marilyn wasn't interested in checking out my scars anymore, so we simply made love and fell asleep.

Around one in the morning or so, I heard the bedroom door open, and one of the twins came in. "Here, take her, she's yours! She can't figure out which of us she wants to sleep with!"

Marilyn woke up with a muffled, "Huh?", just as the bedroom door closed.

In the dim light of the room, I looked down and saw a very happy puppy crawling towards me on the covers. She licked my face, and then Marilyn's, and then turned around in between us about a dozen times before laying down and going to sleep.

Marilyn looked at me and said, "You're kidding me, right?"

"This will only be until we get her home, and then it's back into the utility room at night.", I assured her. "This is not what I had in mind when I said I wanted a threesome!"

"Yuck!"

Chapter 130: Conventional Wisdom

August 2, 2000

We were sitting in the green room behind the stage at the Union Center. It was the four of us, five if you included Stormy, and she seemed to be getting a kick out of jumping from lap to lap. I was looking forward to spending a night at home with her locked in the laundry room. It wasn't like I had never had a dog sleep in bed with me, but this idiot critter seemed to prefer sleeping in between Marilyn and me, and under the covers no less! It wasn't exactly the crazy nights away in a strange hotel I had been looking forward to.

John Boehner had been with us until a few minutes ago, when he had been summoned forth. He was about to do his introduction of the bio. We had ABC on the television and were watching as he appeared on the screen, smiling and tan. How the hell any human could be that shade always amazed me, and gave me endless opportunity to tease him. Marilyn was seated next to me and holding my hand. I wasn't sure who was more nervous, me about the speech or her about the bio movie.

"I first met Carl Buckman in December of 1990 during Freshman Orientation Week. We had both just been elected to Congress, and we happened to be seated at the same table. Everyone at that table knew about the cocky young billionaire who had just bought himself a Congressional district, and there he was at the table with us. Guess what? He wasn't all that cocky, or at least no more than the rest of us at the table were. In fact he was a pretty nice guy."

John had started to speak, and I looked over at Marilyn and said, "You wouldn't believe how much he charged me to say this stuff. His original speech started out, 'Carl Buckman is a real asshole!'"

She gave me a nudge in the side and said, "Behave! I am going to tell him you said that!"

"Go right ahead!"

"It turned out that Carl Buckman hadn't bought his seat. He simply had managed to make a whole lot of money, and was now giving it back to the community he loved and lived in. He had been donating for years to every fire house, police station, ambulance squad, and emergency room in northern Maryland. He never thought twice about it. It was where he had grown up and where he had moved back to after getting out of the Army. I once talked to a fellow Maryland Congressman, Wayne Gilchrest, who said that at a dinner party he asked Carl if he would donate to charities outside of his district. Carl simply said, 'Sure, how much?' Since then the Buckman Foundation has given out well over $50 million to first responder and emergency groups in his home state and across the nation"

John went on for another ten minutes, telling about my rise from suburban kid to mathematical prodigy to combat soldier to billionaire investor, and then finally, Congressional leader. He piled horseshit upon horseshit, as all the while I made snarky comments to Marilyn quietly. She laughed at me as I did this.

When John finished, we went to the video, where Tom Selleck and Marilyn said the same damn thing all over again, this time with pictures. I had already seen it a few times, using it to set up some of what I wanted to say. The girls, however, hadn't seen it and they were properly impressed with their mother's speaking. I even got a few 'You really did that, Dad?' remarks out of them, after which I simply rolled my eyes at my wife.

About halfway through the video, a staffer knocked on the door and came in. "It's time to go, Congressman."

I nodded. I looked at the girls and said, "Take her outside and let her do her business in the parking lot quick. We do not need her peeing and pooping on national television!"

"She just went half an hour ago!", protested Holly.

"Go!"

The girls scrambled out with Stormy on a leash. Marilyn and I followed the staffer to a place behind the curtains. Two minutes later the twins showed up with Stormy on her leash. I looked at Molly and asked, "Well?"

"She peed."

Marilyn and I gave each other superior and knowing looks and nods. Then the moment was over. The video ended with thunderous applause from the crowd, and John Boehner's voice came over the loudspeakers. "Now, please welcome the next Vice President of the United States, Carl Buckman!"

I looked at the others and said, "Showtime!", and headed to where the staffer was pointing.

The lights and flashes were blinding, and the roar of the crowd was deafening. I walked confidently over to the podium, showing a lot more confidence than I felt. The roar kept up as I stood there, so I simply smiled and waved with my right arm. My left was moving okay, but if I stretched, my ribs protested big time.

Finally there was a slight break in the pandemonium and I was able to start talking. "Thank you! Thank you for that warm welcome! I want to take a moment to introduce somebody to you, somebody who just was part of that amazing video, somebody who I owe everything to. Please welcome the greatest woman in the world, Marilyn Buckman!"

I turned and motioned her to come out as the audience went nuts. She gave me a look of terror, but then put a smile on her face and marched out. She kept her eyes on me, and moved a little too fast, but nobody else seemed to care. She waved at everybody as well, and then after a moment, I spoke up again. "I have to confess something here. I saw that video just a few days ago myself, and the first thing that I could think of to say to Marilyn was, 'Wow! You got to meet Tom Selleck!'" Laughter rocked the place as I grinned at the audience. "Then it got worse, because Marilyn promptly told me that she was heading back to Hollywood, because he was a heck of a lot cuter than me and had a full head of hair." More laughter.

When the laughter died down, I kept going. "I'd love to introduce you to the next member of my family, but Charlie isn't available. He is currently on duty, deployed overseas and defending our great nation, with the United States Marines." We were back to cheering again.

"Finally, allow me to introduce the rest of the family, our daughters Holly and Molly, and the newest member of the family, Stormy!" I motioned them out, and they came out. The girls were pretty good at this, nowhere near as stiff as their mother, waving and smiling to everybody. Stormy was loving it. She scampered on her leash ahead of the others, and when I knelt down, she jumped into my arms. I held her up and showed her to the audience as she licked my face, and the room went fucking nuts! By now everybody in America knew about the puppy I had rescued in Springboro and adopted.

Finally I put Stormy in Marilyn's arms, and kept the dog's face out of the way while I gave Marilyn a quick kiss. Then I kissed the girls on their foreheads, and they all left, waving at the cheering crowd. It was showtime, so I stepped back up to the podium. A printout of my speech was already on the podium, and the teleprompter was cued up. "My family and I thank you all for that wonderful welcome. You really have no idea how much it means to us." Then it was time to get into the speech.

"As I watched and listened to the video a few minutes ago, the overwhelming thought to cross my mind was 'Who was this man?' Many times I heard how brave I was, how fearless I was, how nothing scared me, and through it all, I kept asking myself, 'Who was this man?'

I asked this because I have the same fears as every other man, every other woman, every other parent, every other person in this room. When I was standing in the doorway of an airplane, preparing to jump out into the cold and dark, I was afraid. When I had to defend my wife and children from killers and thieves, I was afraid. When I had to stand between a drunken man and the pregnant wife he was beating, I was afraid. And two weeks ago, when I went into the basement of a collapsed house to help an injured mother, her children, and their pets, believe me, I was afraid!

Fear is an emotion. It is basic to all of us, like love, hate, jealousy, trust, joy. Everyone has fears. I am no different than any other man. I have fears as well. However, you can overcome fear, by deciding to be brave. When I was still a boy, I simply decided to have courage, to not let my fears rule me, but to rule my fears. Courage is not an emotion, it is an active decision we can all take. Courage is a choice!

When I went to jump school, and they strapped a parachute on me, and told me to stand in the doorway, I was offered a choice. You can step back and land in the airplane, or you can choose courage, and make the jump. I chose courage! Courage is a choice!

When my wife was robbed in the Bahamas, and the gang decided to go through me on the way out the door, I was offered a choice. I could jump out of the way and let murderers and thieves run loose, or I could choose courage and stop them. I chose courage! Courage is a choice!

When a madman began stalking my wife, when he vandalized her car, when he firebombed our house, when he broke into our home and threatened my life, I was offered a choice. I could run away and hide from a psychotic killer, or I could choose courage and keep my family safe. I chose courage! Courage is a choice!

When a drunk twice my size began busting up a restaurant back home, beating up the owner and a waitress, and then began hitting his pregnant wife, I was offered a choice. I could ignore it and eat my pie, or I could choose courage and save a woman's life and the life of her unborn child. I chose courage! Courage is a choice!

When a tornado ripped through the peaceful town of Springboro, tearing up people's homes and their lives, I was offered a choice. I could stand back and let somebody else handle the problem, or I could choose courage, and save a dying mother and her young children, and yes, even the family dog. I chose courage! Courage is a choice!

Moral courage is the most important courage of all. It is the courage to make the right choices, choices that help not yourself, but others. When friends came to me ten years ago and said they had read my books and heard my speeches, they told me to put up or shut up, put my money where my mouth was, and step up to the plate. However you want to put it, the challenge was to stop complaining and start fixing, and run for Congress. This was a scarier proposition than anything else I had ever done! I chose courage! Courage is a choice!

Courage is about the choices we make in everyday life. It is the choice of a pilot staying with his dying plane just a little bit longer, to miss the elementary school even if he won't be able to punch out. It is the choice of a fireman going into a burning house to search for a child. It is the choice of a Coast Guardsman who says he has to go out, but he doesn't have to come back. It is the choice of a father who is dying of cancer, but stays on the job just one day longer, so his children can stay in school just one day longer. It is the choice of a mother who works three jobs so that her children will be able to go to college.

And courage is the choice of a leader, a leader who makes choices to benefit an entire nation, choices to benefit not just a voter, but that voter's children and grandchildren, choices to benefit everyone, and not just those who voted for him. George Bush has that courage! George Bush chooses courage! Courage is a choice, and George Bush has made that choice!"

At that point I pivoted into the speech that Matt Scully had originally written, but now modified and edited to fit the new slant to the speech I had given. I spent about half of this section praising George Bush and the other half damning Bill Clinton. At times I was really stretching George's compassionate conservatism to be some form of courage. It was easier to label Clinton's choices as 'cowardly'; all I had to do was point out that by spending more than we were taking in on taxes was a cowardly pandering to special interests. Never mind that for the last couple of years we had been running a surplus, that was only because 'courageous' Republicans had forced it on him. The bullshit was getting pretty deep by the time I ended.

The big thing was to keep a rhythm and syncopation going. It was like running through a list of bullet points, but at the end of each item, I would thunder out, "George Bush has that courage! George Bush chooses courage!" By the end of this section they were stomping their feet and waving "Courage" banners around, and yelling along with me when I hit the bit about George Bush. We just wanted them rocking the house down!

It was finally time to bring things to a close. I needed to go out on a positive note, but with something dramatic. I paused and let everybody settle down.

"When I was a boy and decided to live my life with courage, I discovered something amazing! Courage is fun! Courage is exhilarating! Courage is intoxicating! Courage is liberating! Courage gives you the freedom to live your life on your terms and not somebody else's! When our very nation was founded, and we rose up as one people to demand our freedom, we demanded courage from ourselves! Courage gave us the great nation we now have, and only courage will allow us to keep this nation free!

Choose courage! Choose freedom! Choose George Bush! Courage is a choice! Courage is a choice! Courage is a choice!..."

By that point they were all on their feet stomping and yelling and chanting "Courage is a choice!" I led them for a moment, but then stepped back and looked offstage. Marilyn and the girls were all standing there, even the mutt, and I motioned for them to join me on the stage. They trooped out and I picked up Stormy as the place went berserk. You could practically feel the waves of energy and emotion rolling through Union Center. We all waved at the crowd for a couple of minutes, and then moved off the stage.

"Dad, that was amazing!", exclaimed Holly.

Molly put it a little more succinctly. "Holy crap, Dad!"

I looked at them for a moment, as the nervous energy flushed out of me, and I suddenly felt drained. I staggered for a moment, and found a stool to rest on. As others came up to me and shook my hand and told me what a wonderful speech it was, Marilyn looked at me worriedly and asked, "Are you all right?"

I nodded. "Tired is all. I'm still a bit weak, I guess." We leaned against each other and Stormy licked us both until we gave her to the girls.

At that point, a staffer came up to us and said, "Congressman, Governor Bush would like to have you and Mrs. Buckman see him in his suite, if you could."

I looked over at Marilyn. "Command performance, hun. Ready?"

"Of course."

I looked around and found Frank and waved him over. "Frank, let's get the car and get back to the hotel."

"Can do, Congressman!"

Marilyn told the girls to walk Stormy and they headed towards the parking lot. Marilyn looked at me and said, "I think even they were impressed by your speech. Choose courage, huh?"

"Just so long as they don't think they can have the courage to get their driver's licenses any time soon. Then I'd have to show them the courage of my boot to their butts!" The way those two yammered on their cell phones constantly, they were an invitation to a car wreck!

She turned to the staffer and said, "Give us a moment to freshen up." He assented and we went in search of a rest room. I was still a bit weak, and my ribs were really killing me from the exertion, but I wasn't about to collapse now. I used a restroom and straightened myself up, and then went out to wait for my wife. Afterwards we were driven over to the Ritz-Carlton. We went inside and took the kids and dog upstairs, and then continued up to the Bush suite, which was a couple of floors above us.

Marilyn noticed the Secret Service agents standing post in the hallway and outside the door to the suite. "Do we get Secret Service protection, too?"

I shook my head. "Highly doubtful. The candidates get it, but that's about it. If we win, that's a different matter. Still, we've been living with some form of security for years now, so this shouldn't be that big a deal."

We made it inside without setting off any alarms, and were greeted by Governor Bush. He enthusiastically shook my hand, saying, "That was a hell of a speech, Carl! It made me wonder if you were running for President and I was the Vice President! Great speech, great!"

"Thank you, George, you're too kind."

"Are your daughters with you?", he asked.

I shook my head. "They're a couple of floors down. It's getting late for them and they are probably walking the dog."

"She's adorable!", gushed Laura. "She was in that basement, too? Oh my heavens!"

"Your girls here?", I asked. The Bushes had twin daughters also, Charlie's age, but fraternal, not identical.

Laura shook her head. "They have their own rooms. They'll join us on stage tomorrow, but otherwise they won't be campaigning. Your daughters seem to be taking to it well."

I made a wry smile at my wife. "Is that a good thing or a bad thing?"

"Never mind him. They think it's all quite exciting. I am sure that by the time school starts they will be more than happy to stay home!", she replied.

"Can we get you something?", asked Bush.

I noticed several other very senior staffers in the room, Karl Rove and his wife Darby, Dick Cheney and his wife Lynne, and a few others. I saw Joe Allbaugh but he was standing by himself, as was Jim Nicholson, head of the RNC. Several of them had what looked like drinks in their hands, but I noticed the Bushes didn't. George had taken the pledge a number of years ago, after Laura cleaned him up and dried him out. I nodded, saying, "George, I would just about kill for a drink, but if that's a problem for you..."

"Don't be silly. I've had my problems, but that is behind me now. No reason to force you to go dry." He led us over to a bar, where a bartender made Marilyn a whiskey sour and me a gin and tonic.

I sipped it appreciatively. I smiled at the bartender. "Ahhhh ... nectar of the gods! I'll be back!" He chuckled and nodded.

I looked over at George and Laura. "It's too bad you had to quit. This cures two dread diseases at once. The lime is for scurvy and the tonic cures your malaria."

"Well, it's good to know we can send you into deepest and darkest Africa now." He led us both over to the others, and said, "The man of the hour! When Matt Scully said you were changing the speech, I got worried, but that really nailed it! Tremendous speech, tremendous!"

Around us several more people gave accolades as well as some general applause. I also received several more handshakes. I held up my hand and simply said, "I like to think it was more of an edit. Matt Scully wrote a wonderful speech, but I simply needed him to work with me on it. I figured I needed to bring my A game tonight."

"More like you're A-Plus game, if you ask me! You've put a real burden on me now! I'll have to do even better tomorrow night.", he mock complained.

"I have no doubt you will manage it.", I replied, smiling.

At that point Laura pulled Marilyn off to the side, and the political types began a discussion of the speech and the reaction to it. They had all been watching it on a bank of televisions, and listening to the network commentators speaking about it afterwards. Adjectives such as 'Stunning!' and 'Electrifying!' were being tossed around, along with discussions of the bio. After a bit, I went back to the bar for a refill, and afterwards grimaced a touch. "I need to sit down.", I told the Governor. I made my way to a couch and sat down on it.

"Are you all right, Carl?", he asked. Behind him I could see Cheney and Rove hoping it was something incurable; a perfect scenario for them would be to milk my death and use it to put Bush into the White House with them running it for him.

"I'll be fine. It's my ribs. I cracked them, so they aren't broken, but today was really the first day I haven't had the sling in place. I'm pretty sore, right now.", I admitted.

"Where's your cane?", asked Rove. "I didn't see you with it."

I shook my head. "I left it back in the room. I didn't want to draw attention to it on national television, and I figured if I did limp a bit, people would chalk it up to the accident."

I stayed seated for a bit, resting and letting my ribs protest, and discussing the plans for the last day of the convention and my follow-up trip to Springboro at the end of the week. After that, kiss Marilyn good-bye. I was going campaigning!

Chapter 131: Campaigning

Friday we all flew out to Shawnee, including Stormy, where we were met by Frank Keating, who traveled with us to Springboro. It was a mutual love fest, with Frank thanking me for saving his citizens and me thanking Frank for his inspired leadership and help during the crisis. We started at the school, now being rebuilt, and toured the town, and then met with the Torquists. Along the way I said wonderful things about Springboro and Oklahoma, and whatever it was they did there. I gathered it was either farming or ranching, neither of which I knew crap about. I made a few jokes about chocolate milk coming from brown cows, and everybody seemed to think that was amusing. I also had Marilyn write out several donations to the fire department, the ambulance squad, the school, and so forth. Doctor Shooster showed up, so we wrote out a check to the hospital as well. Leaving aside the wear and tear on me, being in a catastrophe was expensive!

The most amusing part was when we got to sit down with the Torquists for a bit. They were staying with her sister, Anna Simpson, while their house was demolished and then rebuilt. Mrs. Torquist seemed to be in good spirits, though she was wearing enough bandages to cover the state and wasn't walking yet. Her husband, a truck driver for J.B. Hunt, was effusive in his praise, and kept shaking my hand. Little Molly didn't really remember me, but Billy asked all sorts of questions and then told me that after I went to the hospital, in the ensuing publicity, he was able to find homes for all three of the other puppies!

I looked over at Frank and said, "Either he's going to end up taking our jobs, or he's going to be a used car salesman!"

"Some days there's not much difference!", he replied. I nodded agreement.

I asked Sylvie Torquist about Stormy's parentage. This critter was growing by leaps and bounds, and I was wondering where it would stop! Marilyn and I listened in horrified fascination. Mama, who I had hoisted out of the basement, was mostly Golden Retriever, but an Irish Wolfhound had snuck in somewhere down the line. Papa was the St. Bernard next door, who had managed to jump the fence and find true love. I looked at my wife and remarked, "This thing is going to grow up bigger than you and me! Combined!"

"She's going to end up in the bed and we're going to be in the dog house!", Marilyn replied. Our daughters thought this was a great idea!

After our trip to the heartland, Marilyn and the girls flew home with Stormy, and I headed to Florida in a leased 737, which we had to travel to Oklahoma City to catch. The plane was packed, with a staff that seemed to grow by the day, and with many more reporters than before the tornado. The staff now included Frank Stouffer and Matt Scully, assigned to me as speechwriter and 'liaison' to George Bush; the reporters were all hoping to see me get killed doing something newsworthy.

They were also hoping for me to mouth off about something. Ever since the tornado, for about the last two weeks, the Gore campaign had been laying off me. It's real hard to campaign against a guy fighting for his life in the hospital after rescuing puppies. They had been laying low, reduced to de rigueur prayers for my recovery and praise for the rescue. Now that I was well enough to campaign again, I was fair game!

Before the plane had even lifted off, I was being slammed for my hard line debt reduction push. I was a heartless billionaire who was throwing widows and orphans off of welfare and shutting down Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. I had also managed to do all these horrible deeds while raising taxes on hard working middle class Americans. Why I was running as George Bush's Vice Presidential choice was a mystery, unless it was symbolic of the fact that George Bush himself deserved to be burned on the same bonfire that I had so richly earned.

None of this was unexpected. It was pretty much standard operating procedure for a modern political campaign. We managed to return the favor. Even comments like the ones I had made about chocolate milk and cows were 'milked', to show how out of touch I was to the voters in the heartland. They would compare me to Al Gore, who grew up on a farm in Tennessee. The truth was that Al Gore was the son of an extremely wealthy father, Al Gore, Sr., a Tennessee Congressman and Senator. He had been born in Washington, D.C., and grew up in the Fairfax Hotel on Embassy Row. He knew even less about farming than I did!

The convention gave a serious boost to George Bush's poll numbers. I had made the cover of both Time and Newsweek after I was announced as his running mate, with major bio pieces on the inside. They also ran small pictures of me along with the Springboro devastation, and pictures of both George and I on the cover during the convention. I knew it wouldn't last, though. As soon as Al Gore made his selection, they would be all over the news.

Meanwhile, I was living proof of the old adage 'protect me from my friends; I could take care of my enemies.' Rush Limbaugh was slamming me with complaints that I wasn't conservative enough. I was much too liberal; I was pro-abortion, pro-gay, anti-gun rights, anti-church. In short, I wasn't a real Republican. I wondered where he was getting some of this stuff. My pro choice stance was well known, and I had never hidden it. The anti-gun rights was a convoluted take on my passage of the Defending the Second Amendment Act, where I had agreed to restrictions on magazine sizes, even though I had managed to increase concealed carry privileges across the country. I wasn't sure about the anti-church claim; no, I didn't go to a Protestant church, but my wife and children were active members of the Catholic church, and I occasionally went with them to Mass. Being Catholic was not a big seller in the heartland, but it was a long time since Kennedy had to address it, and Marilyn wasn't running for office.

The pro-gay bit wasn't a real surprise to me. That had been dogging me for a few years now, since I had voted against the Defense of Marriage Act back in 1996. The homophobes had decided we needed to do something about the wave of gay marriages inundating the God fearing Christians of our great nation, so they passed a law stating that only straights could marry. It would ultimately be found unconstitutional. I had been the only straight Republican in the entire Congress to vote against it, which had not endeared me to Newt. My argument was on a purely constitutional basis. States have the power to regulate marriage, not the Feds. Some states would end up allowing it, and some would ban it. I simply reiterated my position that marriage is up to the states, not the Federal government.

This didn't sit well with the true believers on our side. Worse to come was when I got a call from Marty Adrianopolis in the office in Rayburn. I was in a motel room in Santa Fe when he called. "Hey Marty, what's up?"

"I've got reporters around here sniffing around the place. It would seem that Carter Braxton isn't as far in the closet as he thinks he is."

"Tell me something I didn't already know." Carter Braxton was my Assistant Legislative Director, and was quite good at it. He was also gay, and hiding it. He hid it pretty well, too, but both Marty and I had been dinged by our gay-dar. I talked it over with Marty and we basically shrugged. It wasn't our business and Carter was a good staffer. Our biggest question to each other was how come Carter was a Republican, when the party basically wanted to have him tarred and feathered.

"Yeah, well, he's freaking out. He has reporters following him around. Limbaugh outed him today and the phones have been ringing off the hook. He had never told his parents."

"Great! This is 2000, not 1950. It's not illegal.", I replied.

"So, what do you want to do about this?", he asked.

"Nothing. Why?"

"Rove's office called and they want us to cut him loose. Come up with some bogus reason, but cut him loose and get rid of 'the little faggot.' Their words, not mine."

I rolled my eyes at that. "Screw that. Carter has enough problems now. I do that and I play straight into the hands of Al Gore. Tell Carter he's safe. I'll tell him he's safe."

"He's not here. I sent him home."

"Have him call me tomorrow morning. I'll tell him."

I was hit with this in the morning, before I even had a chance to talk to Carter. "Congressman, is it true you are planning on firing one of your key Congressional staff members because he is gay?"

Good question! If I say yes, I look hypocritical and the Democrats rake me over the coals. If I say no, the hard core Evangelicals in the Republican Party have 'proof' I'm not really one of them. It was time to play that most trusted of cards – always answer a hostile question with another question. I gave him my most confused look. "Excuse me? Has one of my staff members been accused of a crime?"

"Are you claiming that being gay is a crime?"

"Do you think it's a crime?"

"So, what about the demands from Rush Limbaugh that you fire Carter Braxton?", asked somebody else.

"Is that who this is about? Carter Braxton? He's on my legislative staff. What's he done?", I asked innocently.

"Are you claiming that you weren't aware Carter Braxton was a homosexual?", asked a third voice.

I shrugged. "Is that something I should be finding out about my staff?"

"So you aren't going to do something about this?"

"What do you want me to do?"

I just kept up the dumb question routine and let them blather on. Later that morning I talked to Carter and told him he wasn't being fired. Fox News wasn't amused, but I just didn't care. George couldn't repudiate my actions either, without painting himself into the same corner.

That made me wonder about the whole event. I wouldn't put it past Rove to throw me under a bus, but in doing so he put Bush at risk. Cheney wasn't going to make a stink, not when one of his daughters was a lesbian. This was shaping up to be a close election. Screwing me over prior to the election didn't make any sense whatsoever. Likewise, it was too easy for a campaign stunt like outing a staffer to backfire if it had been done by the Gore campaign. It was more likely that this was the random investigation of the millions of reporters currently investigating me.

I was now being publicly vetted at a level beyond anything I had ever contemplated during my public life up to this point. Huge sums were being spent to find any conceivable snippet of information about the candidates. My classmates at every school I had ever attended were being tracked down and interviewed, to see if they remembered me. Every speech and vote was being examined by partisan reporters from both sides. Everybody I had ever done business with, from coast to coast, was being interviewed, and every deal was being put under a microscope.

Some of the problems we had were self inflicted. One of the Bush campaign's bullet points was that George Bush was a businessman, and knew how to run the country like a business. Never mind that countries and companies are two different things. Now they had me as another successful businessman. One of my handlers opened his fat yap and said that as a businessman I had invested in companies to increase jobs in America. I remembered how that had bit Mitt Romney in the ass. All it would take was a single company to report that they had laid off a single worker to put some serious hurt on the campaign.

I grabbed Matt Scully and pulled him aside. "Shut that asshole up! He is going to bury us!"

"What is the problem, Congressman? We are pushing your success as a businessman. This plays to that perfectly!"

"This is a disaster. Just follow my lead on this and tell him to knock it off!"

At the next question and answer period, I was asked, "Congressman, is it true that you only invested in companies that were hiring American workers?"

I gave a wry smile, but shook my head negatively. "I think that statement is a bit of a misrepresentation of what actually happened. I invested in companies to make money for my shareholders and investors. While I certainly hoped that I was creating new jobs, that wasn't my only concern. I had a legal duty to maximize returns on investment, not jobs. I was pretty successful at that."

I could see the others staring at each other. There were all sorts of wonderful ways to use this to try and sink me. How dare I say that creating jobs wasn't a politician's primary purpose! The fact that I wasn't a politician at the time meant nothing! A worse case, however, would be trying to have it both ways, which had really fucked over Romney. In this case I had to stick to a single and solitary message, that I was in the money business back in the Eighties, not the political business. I left it to Matt to come up with better ways to tell that message.

The Democratic Convention was held two weeks after the Republican Convention, and was held in Los Angeles. Al Gore kept his selection secret until the second night of the convention, when Joe Lieberman nominated John Kerry as Vice Presidential nominee, and put it to a voice vote. I was watching the entire event on television and was simply stunned into silence. The others in the room noticed my staring at the television, and I waved them into silence. I needed to think!

On my first trip through, Gore had selected Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut as his VP pick. Lieberman was noticeable for three separate facts. He was considerably more conservative than Gore, he was the first Jewish candidate for national office, and he was quite possibly the only potential choice even less exciting than Gore. Now, everything had changed.

This was a major break with my past history! Why John Kerry and not Joe Lieberman? What had my ascension to national prominence changed? My mind was going a million miles an hour as I tried to process this. John Kerry had first made a national name for himself when in 1971, as a decorated hero of the Viet Nam War, he appeared before Congress to tell them that the war was really fucked up. He rode that into Massachusetts politics, rising through various state positions until he ran for the Senate seat being vacated by Paul Tsongas. He ultimately ran against George Bush in 2004 and lost.

He had been elected to the Senate in '84, and then been re-elected in '90 and '96. This was a win-win for him. If Al won, John became VP; if Al lost, he still had his day job in the Senate. I had known John for years. He had been one of the co-sponsors that Bob Kerrey had lined up for the Gulf War Syndrome Act I had drafted back when I first got into Congress.

This was a selection aimed directly at me. Fight a hero with a hero, or some such nonsense. In Viet Nam John had earned a bunch of medals commanding Swift Boats, high speed river combat boats of the type seen in the movie Apocalypse Now. He was a certified hero. To a certain extent some of my plans, especially related to the upcoming Vice Presidential debate, were predicated on my going up against Joe Lieberman. That was all out the window now.

In the room around me there was a loud buzz as people were discussing the choice. Matt Scully asked, "Carl! What's going on?"

I shook myself awake, and looked at the others. "Just thinking. I wasn't figuring on Kerry. I thought for sure it would be Joe Lieberman." Scully and a few others nodded or shrugged. "Okay, here's our take on it. We go positive, sort of. John Kerry is a good guy, honest and honorable. How Bill Clinton got his claws into him we don't know. Sound okay?"

"It's as good as anything else I've heard.", he agreed. This was all part of our ongoing theme in the campaign, that Al Gore was Bill Clinton 2.0. Slick Willie was pulling Al's strings and running things, whether it was true or not. This played into one of Al Gore's biggest weaknesses, a phenomenon known as 'Clinton Fatigue.' Put simply, the American people were sick and tired of Bill and Hillary and all the drama they brought to everything.

Meanwhile, everybody I had ever met at any time in my life was being hunted down with a ruthlessness reminiscent of the Nazis searching for Jews. The results were mixed. More than a few people answered, 'Carl Who?', when asked about me. A few of my old girlfriends were tracked down and either gave glowing reviews or slapped the reporter who asked, one time on camera. I found both responses more than a little amusing. Marilyn came to light in this regard, when some reporters tracked down some of the guys from Kappa Gamma Sigma, a couple of whom commented on the 'smoking hot' girl I had been dating all through college! I teased Marilyn about it, and she teased the twins about it.

One interesting bunch of interviews turned out to be the people I had gotten in fights with over the years, if they could be tracked down. Of the three assholes who had tried to get my lunch money back in junior high, one couldn't be found, one couldn't remember the fight (he had been in a lot, I gathered) and one was in jail. That proved to be a general trend, in fact. Some of them either didn't remember (it was over thirty years by that point) or admitted to being a jerk at the time. Some couldn't be found. And a select few were doing time as career criminals. It didn't seem to be hurting the campaign.

The Rottingen household was besieged to the point where John called his buddies on the Rochester police force to come out. They showed up with three cruisers and a wagon, and after issuing orders over a loudspeaker to get off the grass, half a dozen reporters and cameramen were arrested and thrown on the bus, all of them charged with trespass and two charged with assault on a police officer when they tried to resist. After that the others started behaving. John and Suzie then invited just a few inside and held an interview in their family room. When I was asked about it the next day I simply commented that there seemed to be some limits to freedom of the press after all, and that maybe it wasn't such a good idea to hassle the wife of a cop. Karl Rove was not amused.

Tusker, needless to say, ate it up. When cameras appeared in his parking lot, he took off his dress clothes and put on some old jeans and a sleeveless t-shirt and a vest, brushed out his hair some, and then went out the back and rode a Harley around to the front, like he was just coming in. He looked like an over-aged member of the Hells Angel's with all his tattoos showing. I watched it on television later and damn near died laughing. My ever growing staff was less amused. I couldn't wait for some biker magazine to try and get a reporter on the tour bus!

Meanwhile, I spent the entire month of August crisscrossing the country, sometimes on a bus and sometimes in the 737. I was also eating way too much food. Everywhere I went I had to dine on the local dish. Po' boys in New Orleans, cheese steaks in Philly, knishes in New York, chili in Tucson, sour dough bread in San Francisco. In Minnesota I was served lutefisk, which is whitefish that has been soaked in caustic lye until it turns to gelatin, and after all sorts of other awful steps, is served hot. I had about two bites for the camera and smiled, and then managed to spill my plate. Even Stormy wouldn't have eaten that stuff! When I saw Suzie next I asked her if she ate it, and she shook her head and said she had told John it would be considered grounds for divorce.

I had some fun with Suzie and her family when we hit Minnesota. I stayed the night with them, and John, Suzie, Alex, and Harry appeared with me at a campaign rally in Rochester. Their oldest boy, Jack, was in the Marine Corps like Charlie. Suzie had married a fellow with the same genetic disposition for military service that ran in our family; he had been a Marine, too. The fun came because Alex and Harry had a neighborhood business. They mowed lawns during the summer and shoveled sidewalks and driveways in the winter. Mom and Dad kept them on a short leash money-wise, which Marilyn and I had also done with our kids. Alex had just gotten his own cell phone for 'business', and John and Suzie had bought them matching baseball caps with 'H&A Yard Work' on them, mostly as a joke.

As we were leaving the house that morning, I noticed the ball caps and said, "Hey, you two want some extra business?"

"Yeah, sure, Uncle Carl!", replied Harry.

"Okay, you make a campaign contribution and I'll get you some more business.", I told them.

"A what?"

Alex was a little more understanding of what was going on. "How much?"

"Five bucks from each of you."

"Ten bucks?"

"Trust me on this, it will be worth it.", I told them.

"What are you up to, Carl?", asked my suspicious sister.

"Trust me!"

"The last time a man said that to me I ended up with three kids!"

I grabbed one of the ball caps and stuffed it in my back pocket, and collected a couple of fives from the boys. Then we all went off to the rally. Once there, I had the Rottingens standing on the side of the stage. The two boys were really excited by it all. Then I went up to the podium when I was introduced.

"Thank you! Thank you! It's good to be back in Rochester, really good! In case some of you weren't aware of it, my sister and her family live here, and Marilyn and the kids and I have been here several times visiting them." I turned towards them and said, "Wave to everybody, guys!" Alex and Harry waved madly, their mother a bit more sedately and self-consciously, and John with a forced smile.

"Now, before we get going here, I just wanted to address something. I heard somebody say that politicians should wear NASCAR driving suits, so that people would be able to see who has bought and paid for them. Well, far be it for me to deny that, so here goes." I stopped and pulled out of my pocket the H&A ball cap and stuck it on my head. "Harry and Alex's Yard Work, the best yard work in the Rochester area. They do lawns in the summer and shovel snow in the winter, and do cleanup work the rest of the time. For quality work, call H&A Yard Work!" Off to the side the two boys were giving each other high fives and jumping up and down in excitement. As the audience laughed, I tossed them back the ball cap and said, "After we win the election, I'll take you two over to the White House and you can give us an estimate on a bigger project!"

Harry was nodding frantically in agreement. Alex thrust a fist in the air and yelled, "YES!" Beside them their mother's jaw dropped, while John clapped a hand to his head in disbelief.

"Best ten bucks you two ever invested!", I told them. I waited a few moments for the laughter to die down, and then went into my standard stump speech.

Afterwards Suzie laughed and said, "You just made their day!"

"Just doing my civic duty!"

"I can't believe you did that!", laughed their father. "I am never going to hear the end of this!"

Needless to say, my mugging for the camera made the evening news shows, as well as the late night comedies. Gore tried to portray it as my making light of the way George Bush was selling his candidacy to the highest bidder. That simply backfired when practically everybody in the country told him to get a sense of humor. KAAL TV 6 News in nearby Austin even managed to interview the principals in H&A Yard Work, and asked them about their Uncle Carl.

My personal flaws were endlessly categorized and exposed. The fact that Marilyn and I drank wine was elitist. The fact that I preferred Canadian and Irish whiskey over good old fashioned American bourbon was a sign I was 'weak.' If I had a beer I was pandering to the cameras. Even my drug use was explored. Despite the fact that the head of the ticket, George Bush, had admitted to an alcohol problem, and refused to answer questions about cocaine use, John Kerry came after me. So figuring the best defense was a good offense, I admitted it.

Sam Donaldson was doing an interview with me on a Sunday morning and said, "Congressman, President Clinton has said that he tried marijuana but never inhaled, and didn't like it. There have been reports that you smoked marijuana also. Care to comment?"

I put on my most innocent face. "What do you want me to say, Sam?"

"Is it true you smoked pot in college?"

"Yes."

"Did you inhale?", he asked.

"Yes."

He looked stunned at the answer. "So you are admitting you smoked marijuana?"

"Sure. I didn't do it often, but when I did, I inhaled. I daresay the vast majority of my generation did so at some point at that age." I gave a wry shrug at that.

"When did you stop taking drugs?", he pressed.

"Well, let's be specific. The only drug I ever used was marijuana. I have never used anything else. The last time I smoked pot was sometime my senior year, shortly after Christmas.", I answered.

"Why did you stop?"

"I was finishing up my doctoral work and getting ready to go into the Army. I just didn't have the time for the distraction. It wasn't part of who I was. I quit. Never thought about it again.", I told him.

"Why didn't you use other drugs? They must have been available.", Sam asked.

"Oh, sure, there was all sorts of stuff available. It just scared the pants off of me. I was never even tempted."

"Did Mrs. Buckman take drugs?"

At that I just laughed. "You can ask her that yourself. Go ahead! I want to watch!"

What surprised most everyone was that this turned out to be a non-event. Nobody gave a shit. Even the hard right didn't scream. This was partly because I was a Republican, and they didn't want to take me down like they wanted to take down Clinton eight years ago. It was mostly, though, that the times they were a'changin'. Marijuana use was no longer considered a big deal, not when various state legislatures were talking about medical marijuana and decriminalization. It was simply not the issue it had been less than a decade ago.

Things were moving along fairly smoothly through August and into the first week of September. We had gotten a much bigger boost from our convention than the Democrats. We were in the hard core muddling through section of the campaign. Both sides were wondering about, and trying to prepare an 'October Surprise', a news event designed to negatively influence the election.

October Surprises were mythical, since if you managed to pull one off, you could never admit to it. Previous candidates included announcements that peace was impending in the Viet Nam War (Humphrey vs. Nixon), a supposed secret deal between the Republicans and the Iranians to keep the hostages until after the election (Reagan vs. Carter), and various Iran-Contra allegations (Bush vs. Clinton.) Now what would happen, and to whom? You wanted the surprise to happen in October, when you had enough time to manipulate the resulting furor, but not enough time to allow the opposing team to fight back.

It occurred the weekend after Labor Day, on Sunday, September 10. The New York Times Sunday edition's headline was 'VP Candidate War Criminal?', with a smaller headline on the main article 'Buckman Accused Of Mass Murder!'

Moments after this was announced on Sunday Morning on CBS the phone rang. Frank Stouffer was staring horrified at the screen as he screened the call. Then he turned to me and said, "We've been ordered back to Washington."

Chapter 132: October Surprise

Sunday, September 10, 2000

The first thing we had to do was get out of the hotel. All of our cell phones were going nuts, and a few minutes later there was a knock on the door. Frank opened it to find the hotel manager. The lobby and front entrance were swamped, and he was having a hard time keeping reporters from slipping past the lobby. I nodded.

Turning to the others I said, "Everybody! Five minute drill! Get to your rooms and get packed, now!" I turned back to the manager. "I need two trucks or vans, to carry us and our luggage out the back. Can you make that happen?"

He stared for a second and said, "I guess so. They might not be very fancy, and I'll need them back."

I pulled out my wallet and slapped five one-hundred dollar bills in his hand. "We don't need fancy. We need quiet. Can you make that happen?"

The hand went into his pocket. "I'll get right on it." He headed towards the door.

I grabbed his arm. "Hold it!" I turned to Frank. "Order the limos brought to the front door, right out where everybody is. Tell them we will be leaving in fifteen minutes." To the manager I said, "Get those vans to the back door in ten minutes. Go!"

Ten minutes later the manager was escorting us out the back door into a pair of courtesy limos, oversized vans of the type you rode into to get to long term parking at the airport. I gave him another wad of cash and we headed out a side entrance and through a parking lot to a side road. Nobody followed.

We took off and headed towards Washington. Along the way we all read and reread the only information we had available, an Associated Press reprint of what was being published by the New York Times. It was a heavily slanted partial version of the U.S. Army's armed incursion into Nicaragua, led by the crazed Captain Buckman. By the end of the story I was wondering if Martin Sheen was now heading upstream to kill Colonel Kurtz, or in this case, me.

I spent the rest of the trip back wondering about just how much the Times had gotten, and who had given it to them. This story had been buried for almost 19 years. I had rarely pushed the Bronze Star, and never, ever, told how I had earned it. I simply fell back on the Top Secret aspect and told people that I had sworn an oath and simply never budged from that point. From everything I had learned over the years, the Army had sunk this in the deepest vault they could find; it had not been the U.S. Army's finest hour. Aside from the brass, though, who knew about it?

There were probably about a thousand soldiers and officers from the battalion task force who knew something about the mission, but while they would certainly talk about it to each other, they probably wouldn't have said anything to a reporter, and wouldn't have known anything damaging. The ones who knew the really dirty details probably numbered only a few dozen, and they would have been ordered to keep their mouths shut. The MPs and Provost Marshall's staff had no reason to talk; they had moved on with their lives now and didn't need their hometown newspapers writing stories about how they had arrested and beaten an injured officer. The various officers who had been cashiered didn't need it either.

Politically, there had been about a half dozen of us in 1992 who knew about it, when this came up during the days leading up to the confirmation hearings for Hawkins. Nothing had been said at the time, and Hawkins had left Washington and announced that health concerns were keeping him from further public service. I had never heard about this from anybody in the days afterwards, but I figured it had to originate there. It hadn't been forgotten or kept quiet. Somebody had told Bill Clinton. Now it was payback time!

I couldn't do anything more until we landed, and we just didn't have enough information from the one report. We would get into D.C. early afternoon, and be able to get a copy of the Times, and probably be able to watch the news. After that I would be able to meet with Governor Bush and figure out what was going to happen. This was a perfect example of a VP being more trouble than he's worth. In some countries the job is an appointed position. It certainly made me wonder about our political system.

We landed at National in the late afternoon and managed to grab a copy of the New York Times as we headed on through the terminal. So far they were the only ones on this, but that would change by tomorrow. This was bound to be the big topic on tonight's evening news, along with the very predictable response. "Governor Bush has full confidence in Congressman Buckman and eagerly anticipates being able to discuss this with him." He just as eagerly was sharpening a machete, the better to hack me into small pieces with. The standard response in this would be to have me 'voluntarily' drop from the ticket, so that I could 'concentrate my energies on fighting the lies and falsehoods.' Don't let the door hit you on the way out, by the way.

I read the article twice on the way to the hotel. The article in the Times gave more information than the AP piece. They were reporting that during an international exercise in Honduras, my unit was dropped incorrectly into neighboring Nicaragua. Despite orders to turn ourselves in to the Nicaraguan authorities, I had disobeyed those orders and captured a Nicaraguan airstrip. Then, as the helicopters were arriving to rescue my men and to arrest me, I summarily executed my prisoners and threatened to do the same to my soldiers if they said anything about what I had just done. Afterwards, back in Honduras, I was arrested and charged with mutiny, disobedience to orders, and murder, but was released rather than have the truth come out at trial, for national security reasons.

There was just enough truth to what was being reported that somebody must have leaked some sort of official documentation to them. They had all sorts of dates and places down accurately. The only other specifics were from the account given by 'an unnamed source intimately involved in the cover-up.' That was the damning part. So far it was almost all smoke and almost no fire, but that was going to change rapidly. Now that it was out in the open, other people would talk. Everybody who had been anywhere near Tegucigalpa that fall was going to find a microphone stuck in his face, and somebody was bound to talk.

Once we got to the hotel, a Secret Service agent was waiting for me and escorted me directly to the Governor's suite. Unsurprisingly, Dick Cheney and Karl Rove were waiting for me as well. Nobody was smiling. "Well, I guess I know why we're all here.", I told them, waving the newspaper.

"I sure hope that's not an attempt to be funny, Carl.", replied George. He motioned us to some armchairs and we all sat down.

"Not hardly."

"Is it true?", he asked, cutting to the chase.

"Not particularly, but there is just enough truth there to make it a problem.", I answered.

"Don't get cute, Buckman!", snapped Cheney. "We asked you about this during the vetting process and you lied to us!"

"The hell I did, Dick! I told you that it was classified and I couldn't talk about it. Not talking about it is a long way from lying, and don't forget it!"

"Screw you, Buckman. I knew you would be a problem."

George decided to calm things down, and said, "Forget the Top Secret stuff. That's all behind us now. It's all going to come out. You need to tell us what happened. All of it."

I nodded. "Fair enough. Somebody decided to leak classified files, so that pretty much let's me off the hook anyway." I spent the next fifteen minutes telling the others what had happened and another ten pointing out the differences between what happened and what the Times was reporting. I did not admit to killing any prisoners, but simply reiterated my old line about releasing them.

"It doesn't matter. They got their hands on something. By the end of the week they will have people swearing that you butchered these people with your bare hands.", said Rove.

"Karl, you haven't got a clue what you're talking about. Out of all of us who made that drop, only one person made a complaint and he made it all up. He never witnessed a damn thing. He lied then, and if he's behind it now, he's still lying.", I told him.

"So what? Pack your bags and go home. You're off the ticket immediately.", he told me.

Dick Cheney looked over at the Governor. "Well, we'll have to do now what we should have done two months ago. Tomorrow you'll announce that this asshole is dropping out and you're naming me to take his place. Let's hope we can rebuild things after this disaster!"

"You know, Dick, for a guy with six deferments, you're pretty damn mouthy when talking to somebody who, quote, solves his problems with ruthless violence, unquote." That last part I read out of the article. "If I am guilty of any of this, then I've already killed five men, so what's one more?"

His eyes opened wide at that, as did Rove's. I ignored them and said, "Now, you two can go. I need to talk to the Governor about this."

"Carl, I don't see the point in protracting this.", commented George Bush.

I turned my gaze on him. "Oh, I disagree. I'd like to discuss commitment with you, George. You know, the difference between commitment and involvement. Man to man." I turned back to the other two. "You two are excused."

They stared at me, and then stared at Bush when he said, "Why don't you two go out for a bit and have a drink? We'll be done in a few minutes."

The Governor and I waited until all the doors clicked shut, and then he turned back to me, a hard look on his face. "I don't care what you are thinking. There is no way you are staying in the campaign after this mess!"

I smiled at him. "George, do you remember when you offered me this position, how we talked about the difference between the chicken and the pig, and how you were looking for somebody committed, like the pig? Remember how we discussed that commitment, man to man? Do you remember that conversation?"

"This totally changes things, Carl! I can't be held to something said then, when I didn't know all the facts."

"So, you do remember the conversation. Good! Well, I've committed ten million facts so far. I told you then that my word and my deals are very, very important to me. Didn't you believe me?", I asked.

He blustered, "That has nothing to do with this!"

"George, do you think for one single second that I am going to let you weasel away with ten million dollars of my money?"

"There is nothing you can do about it!"

I laughed at him. "George, right now you are thinking that if I tell somebody I bribed you, nobody will believe me. It will be the crazed ramblings of a desperate man, right?" I could see in his eyes he had this all figured out. "One small problem, George. I have the account numbers where I wired the money to, and I have slips of paper with your fingerprints and your DNA on them from giving me those account numbers. They are locked in the deepest vault imaginable. If I leave this room as anything other than your continued Vice Presidential nominee, I will head directly to the Justice Department and see if they understand commitment."

"You wouldn't dare!", he hissed.

"How long do you think those guys will take to trace that money, especially when I give them the account that I paid it out of?"

"They'll arrest you for this!"

I wagged my finger at him. "They'll arrest us, George. They'll arrest us! You think anybody's going to care about Nicaragua after you get photographed doing a perp walk in handcuffs? I don't think your Daddy can write a pardon retroactively."

"You'll be in handcuffs, too."

I shrugged. "Yes, I will. I will be ruined. I'll have to resign my seat in the House. My name will be mud. I will be charged with all sorts of things. I will have to hire the finest lawyers in the country to get me out of jail, and I will probably have to pay a fine in the millions of dollars, maybe a billion dollars. And most important of all, I will have to turn State's Evidence against you! The one thing I won't be doing is spending any time in prison. You, on the other hand, will bankrupt yourself and your father fighting this, and you will spend time in jail. I don't think you'd do very well in prison, George. As for me, well..." I waved the newspaper loosely. " ... I'm a ruthless killer. I can handle it easily in case I end up there."

George Bush looked like he was about to vomit. After a couple of quiet minutes he said, "You son of a bitch!"

"I told you, George, I was committed. That cuts both ways, doesn't it?"

"Yes, damn you!" He had surrendered.

"Why don't you wash your face and let's invite Dick and Karl back in, and give them the good news?"

"Don't push it, you bastard!" I kept quiet and he composed himself, and then went to the door. A few minutes later Cheney and Rove came in. They found us sitting on the couch, side by side, and chatting amicably. Bush motioned for them to have a seat, and then said, "Carl has convinced me that this is a situation that can be dealt with, and dealt with positively."

"You have got to be kidding!", exclaimed Rove. Cheney simply stared like we had both grown second heads.

"No, not at all. Let's face it; Thomas Eagleton proved the danger of swapping nominees. The Governor will be slammed for pushing me out and abandoning me. No, he'll be hurt badly doing that. The only thing we can do is fight this.", I answered.

Rove turned to me and said, "And just how do we do that?! This is a fucking disaster!"

"Two parts. One is that the Governor supports me fully and knows my innocence. He is standing by his principles. This is all politics and Bill Clinton releasing classified information for political purposes. Blah, blah, blah. Part two is me. I'll handle this mess.", I told them, holding up the newspaper.

"How?", asked Rove, incredulously.

"First steps first. Call CBS and get me on 60 Minutes with Mike Wallace doing the interview. Make that call as soon as I leave. I want that interview as soon as possible.", I told them.

Cheney said, "You've lost your mind!"

I slammed down the newspaper on the coffee table. "I used to be a soldier, and a damn good one. I think it's time some people in this town learn just what that means! Get the hell out of my way, gentlemen, and watch! I am going to war!"

I left them in stunned silence and went down to a car waiting for me. I went over to the house on 30th, where several reporters had set up camp, though none were daring to push past my security people. I went inside, ignoring their yelled questions, and went into my office. I was beat, but needed to get some work done. The first call was to Marilyn, who had been getting hounded by reporters. I told her everything would be fine, and that I was still the VP nod. I told her I was staying in Washington until this was over, and to reassure the girls and not to worry. Then I made myself a stiff drink and started making notes on a pad of paper.

The one thing I didn't quite understand was the relative crudity of the attack. Slick Willie was a master of manipulation. He could have slit my throat much more easily. Start out with a whisper campaign in the Senate, in the Intelligence and Armed Services committees. Start simple, with an investigation into possible false claims of military medals among Congressmen and Senators, something that would require a very quiet review of classified records. Then, leak the investigation to the Times, but don't give any names out. Let the media start figuring out which politicians have medals. Then convene some very quiet and discreet hearings, and clear most of the people, but not everyone. At some point leak that Congressman Buckman didn't pass muster, but that nobody could do something about it. It leaves me swinging at ghosts and rumors.

You're going to have to throw a Democrat to the wolves. You have to be bipartisan. Who do we sacrifice? It will have to be somebody in a district that will stay Democratic. How about John Kerry of Massachussets? It will be easy to find somebody to damn him, since he turned anti-war afterwards. He won't be up for re-election until 2002, so he can be 'rehabilitated' by then, evidence can be found to prove he earned the medals after all.

A campaign like that can work very well, but it takes time to make it happen. It could easily take a month of whispers to get George Bush to drop me. Didn't they figure they had enough time? Did Al Gore's pick of Kerry throw off the idea of killing a hero off? I knew that Al and Bill had differences, but weren't they even talking, or had Al killed off the idea and Bill was running it anyway? Too many questions...

I ended up having a drink or two too many and woke up sitting in my armchair about four in the morning, my notepad still in my lap. I shook myself awake and headed upstairs. I might as well get some work done. I told the security guys to get the ball rolling on a car, and took a shower and shaved, then dressed. I skipped breakfast other than some juice and Advils, and glanced out the front window. A few reporters were stirring, seeing the lights on in my house. I smirked at that. I told Jerry, "Let's go." We left the lights on and headed out the back door, through the back yard, and out a small gate in the fence. Then it was a ten foot hike through some brush to the street and into a car. As we drove down the street I glanced back and saw the reporters still standing there in the early morning chill.

We snuck into the Rayburn building through the garage. The only people in at that time of the morning were some very early staffers and some more reporters assigned to hang around my office. We brushed through them, ignoring their yelling, and closed them out.

"Jerry, you want to make a phone call and hustle up something to eat for us? McDonald's would do. Just something.", I asked him.

He grabbed his phone and asked, "Anything particular in mind?"

I shrugged. "Something from the four major food groups, you know - salt, cholesterol, caffeine, and sugar."

He laughed at that. "I'll order some bagels and cream cheese up, too."

"Fair enough. Thank you."

While Jerry did his thing, I pulled the pages I had torn off my notepad and laid them on my desk. I was going to be making a lot of phone calls, and probably waking people up, but if I was going to get anything accomplished, I needed to start right now. At a minimum I needed to find out just what Clinton had leaked to the Times. The Army floats on a sea of paperwork, even if it is a classified sea. There must have been after action reports, JAG inquiries and investigations, documentation ordering us to do what we were doing. Only some of this seemed to be leaked. The only way to fight this was for me to do a full disclosure and technically violate my security oath. I found this mildly distasteful, but only mildly. Somebody else had really blown the doors open on this, so my keeping silent was useless now.

Anybody else keeping silent was also going to be useless. I still had contacts at the Pentagon from when I had been on the Armed Services Committee and Veterans Affairs Committee. What I needed now was names of people who could testify to what had happened. It had been 19 years. By now most would have left the military, even the lifers, with 20+ years in. A few might still be in. Simply because of time, some would have died and some would have moved and been lost track of. Still, the odds were that several of the guys who were in C Company would be available, and I trusted them more than I trusted Bill Clinton. Clinton would know he would need more than a 19 year old report to jam me up, too. He must have somebody on tap as the unnamed source in the cover-up. Who? It would have to be one of the bad guys. Hawkins getting me back for '92? That shithead Provost Marshall or the numbnuts second john, whatever their names were? I was going to have to get copies of the records myself for review.

When my staff arrived, I greeted them and gave them all a basic rundown. No, I wasn't a serial killer. Yes, I was being set up by the President. Yes, I needed their help, as much as possible. No, don't say jack to the press. I was passed copies of the Times and the Washington Post, and found more information was being leaked. The basement of the Pentagon was being turned into a sieve. Sunday's stuff was just the appetizer. Now there were intimations that I had managed, with collusion from high places, to block the JAG investigation back in 1981. How a fucking captain could do that was left unanswered. There were also two unnamed sources now, with more expected to come forth. Until now they were reportedly too afraid of my retribution to come out. Joy!

I also cut a cartoon out of the Post. It wasn't the first cartoon of me. Those had started right after I was picked as George Bush's VP pick. They generally portrayed me as tall and slender, sort of a trimmed down Karl Malden, balding, and with a noticeably busted up nose. Ever since I had rescued Stormy, Stormy had been appearing in some of the cartoons as a St. Bernard with a barrel under her neck labeled 'Votes'. Today's had me with a sweatband tied around my forehead, carrying a machine gun with ammo belts criss-crossing my bare chest. The caption? 'Rambuckman!'

I made my immediate response team out of Marty, Frank, Carter, and Mindy, my long time secretary. Carter Braxton was nervous when he came in, but he thanked me for standing by him and said he would do the same for me. I thanked him and put him to work. I put everybody to work calling the Pentagon and the VA, to track down people. I needed a roster of names from C Company and Bravo Battery. Even if the Pentagon didn't have current addresses, pension checks still needed to be mailed out.

While everybody was combing the bureaucracy for information, I took a slightly different tack. I called Newt Gingrich at his home in McLean, Virginia, one of the nicer Washington suburbs. I managed to catch him before he left for his think tank office. I wasn't sure he would take my call, but if need be, I would head over there hat in hand. I had to talk to him.

"Newt, it's Carl Buckman. Do you have a few minutes?"

He hesitated for a second. "Carl? I'll be damned. What's it been, two years?"

Thanks for the reminder, Newt. Yes, two years ago I helped maneuver you out of the Speakership and the House. Now, will you help me or shiv me? Who do you hate more, me or Bill Clinton? "Not quite. Year and a half, maybe. Got a few minutes?"

"Sorry you stopped the impeachment, are you?", he asked.

Yes, gloat, you fat bastard! If Newt Gingrich wanted me to eat some shit, I was going to have to smile and dig in. "I'm starting to wonder, I have to admit that. Yes, I am starting to wonder."

"Well, I'm sure you didn't call me so you could hear me tell you I told you so. What's on your mind, Carl?"

"Newt, I need some help, and if listening to you chew on me is the price, I'll pay it. Feel free to throw some dirt on my grave, because God knows there are other people ahead of you in line.", I admitted.

"What do you need, Carl?"

"Well, you know my problem. Now, back in '92, when Clinton tried to run that asshole general into State, you were one of the people who got the Pentagon to verify my story. It was you and Boren. I need to know who you talked to and how you verified it.", I told him.

"You're trying to figure out what was leaked, aren't you?"

"It's a starting point, anyway."

"You'll need the whole file. I'm not sure who's running that section now, but you'll need to talk to..." He gave me a couple of names and offices; I'd have to find the phone numbers myself. Convincing them to release the file to me was my problem.

"Newt, I appreciate it. When this is all over you'll have to come out for dinner. Marilyn can hold me down while you kick me in the ass."

"Count on it! Nice talking to you, Rambuckman." Great! If it wasn't such a mess, I'd laugh, too. He hung up and I started tracking down the file on this disaster.

All sorts of stuff gets classified, and not all classifications are the same. At the top of the list is code worded material. You might have a Top Secret security clearance, but a file might be 'Top Secret – Pembrook', which meant that even if you had a Top Secret clearance, unless you had Pembrook clearance you weren't allowed to know about whatever Pembrook was. Likewise, Pembrook people might not be able to see Top Secret – Brookfield stuff without the Brookfield clearance. This was for the really important stuff, like the nuclear launch codes and the names of spies.

Next down the list is the stuff that is secret but is going to be known sooner or later, like where the aircraft carrier was heading or how fast a bomber could fly. You really don't want the bad guys to know this stuff, but sooner or later they will learn, usually when the carrier shows up or the bomber flies by. There are various gradations of this stuff, and it is pretty serious, but it really isn't code worded. For instance, while the location of an aircraft carrier might be Top Secret today, 19 years from now nobody will care.

At the lowest level is a vast sea of crap that people basically don't want to see in the newspaper. The State Department didn't want front page headlines made of what they were saying to the Iranians through Swiss intermediaries, not until a deal was finalized, that sort of thing. A lot of it is simply embarrassing to somebody, which is where the Nicaraguan jaunt came in. There were international ramifications, plus it was embarrassing to the Army that they had managed to lose one of their platoons for almost a week, and kill a few soldiers while they were doing it. Well, it was time for some embarrassment.

Karl Rove called mid afternoon. I was to be in New York the next morning at the CBS studios at 9 AM sharp. Then he told me that he didn't know what kind of hold I had on the Governor, but he would see me dead and buried before this was over. I thanked him for the support and hung up.

Somebody over in the Pentagon must have been sympathetic to my cause, because I got a lot of information. If they don't want you to learn stuff, they can make it next to impossible, at least in the short term. My bet was that what Clinton was trying to do was pissing somebody off. He had never had any sort of decent respect from or for the military, and it was showing this way. His predecessor, Bush 41, had been widely respected by the rank and file as a certified hero from World War II. Clinton's reputation was as a draft dodging and pot smoking hippie hiding out in England while the Viet Nam War was going on. By late afternoon several large envelopes were messengered over. I looked through them and found a lot of useful information. Not all and not enough, but it was a start at least. I made copies of everything and went home.

I called Marilyn that night and talked to her and the twins. I tried to keep it light but I don't think it was working. Marilyn pretty much knew the entire story from back then, but to the girls it was new. They knew their old man had a medal, but I never talked about it, and now the newspapers were calling me a bloodthirsty butcher. They were scared, not of me but of what might happen to me. The New York Post was calling for my arrest. I just told them to not worry, and that their old man was going to be just fine. I would be home for the weekend.

Tuesday morning I got up very early, and Frank and I flew to New York. For once I wasn't taking a huge retinue with me. We took the LongRanger, and landed at the West 30th Street Heliport in New York, the closest heliport to the CBS studios on West 57th. A car was waiting to take us to the studio, and the helo would fly to JFK to refuel and wait for us. We made it to the studio by 8:30.

It was interesting, in that I had never been on 60 Minutes before. I had been on the Sunday morning talk shows before, but not 60 Minutes. There was definitely something of entering the lion's den about it all. I met Mike Wallace and his producer and said hello, and then was ushered off to makeup. After that I was shown into a studio with just a couple of armchairs and several cameras. The cameras were aimed so that there was one pointing at each of us individually, and a third to catch us facing each other. What I didn't tell anyone was that I had a very expensive tape recorder in my jacket pocket, voice activated and with a long battery life and long tape. Not that I didn't trust them, but better to make sure the editing wasn't a hack job.

One way or the other, this was all going to be over in a few weeks anyway. The show would be on this Sunday night, and my counterattack would begin then. I'd know within a week's time if it worked or not. If not, I would pack up and head home and get out of the politics game. If it worked, I would bury Bill Clinton with a stake through his heart. More and more I realized that this was all Bill Clinton getting back at me for a variety of troubles, the most recent being the censure. Al Gore had been close to the Clintons, but the Lewinsky affair had devastated their relationship. Bill had told Al in a personal meeting, face-to-face, that he hadn't cheated on his wife, and Al was a straight arrow. He felt betrayed, and didn't take much campaign advice from the best politician of our age. Not only was Clinton getting back at me, he was proving his worth to Gore and hedging his bets for a future role. On the other hand, if I beat this, not only did I screw over Bill Clinton, Al Gore was going to look like a fucking moron.

By quarter after, Wallace came out and sat down in his chair, and after a few minutes of sound checks and other technical crap, we were able to start the interview.

Wallace: "Congressman Buckman, thank you for coming on our show."

Me: "Thank you for having me. It's like the old joke about having good news and bad news. The good news is that 60 Minutes wants to interview you. The bad news is they sent Mike Wallace."

Wallace: "Congressman, my understanding is that you asked for me, not the other way around. Why is that?"

Me: "That's true. I did ask for you, so that the American people will know that what I am telling them is the truth."

Wallace: "How so?"

Me: "At one time Walter Cronkite was known as the most trusted reporter in America. Your reputation is the most feared reporter in America. You are the toughest interviewer around."

Wallace: "So you think that if you can get something past me, you'll be safe."

Me: "No, because I don't think I can get something past you. When you show this interview, the American people are going to think you did a fair presentation. If I survive, then maybe I'm not a bloodthirsty maniac after all."

At that point Wallace gave a brief summary of what I had been accused of in the papers. As of this morning, one of my accusers was named, and it was indeed General Hawkins, coming back for his pound of flesh. I kept my mouth shut during the summary.

Wallace: "That is a summarized version of the story that the New York Times is reporting. Is that accurate?"

Me: "It is a summary of what the Times is reporting, but it is not an accurate summary of what actually happened."

Wallace: "So your memory of events is different."

Me: "It's not just my memory that should be checked."

With that, I pulled my briefcase from beside the chair I was sitting in, and opened it on my lap, and pulled out several large manila envelopes. They had tried to keep it off camera, but I had insisted it be there.

Me: "Up until now I haven't spoken of this publicly, due to the Top Secret classification that was placed on the events. Inasmuch as the White House has seemingly declassified this, I can now speak. I only had about a day to pull together the information I am handing you now, but I am sure that it will give you a place to start in your own investigation. In those envelopes is at least a partial file on what happened in Honduras and Nicaragua. Also, I was able to find at least some names of personnel who were on that mission, as well as some names of others in attached units."

Wallace: (Staring briefly at the envelopes) "You say that these are only some of the files and names."

Me: "Correct. This only came to light on Sunday, and I only had yesterday to begin to piece this together. Some of the files, specifically the Judge Advocate General's final investigation report, simply were not available to me. They were not stored in the Pentagon, but at the JAG headquarters. As for the names of the personnel, it's been almost twenty years. Most of them have left the military and are all across the country. I did the best I could, but I am sure that some have died and some never left forwarding addresses, that sort of thing."

At that point the producer yelled, "CUT!". He and Wallace conferred and the envelopes were examined and then passed off to some assistants, probably to be reviewed and either used to contradict what I was saying, or to be followed up on. What I was hoping for was that one of the guys on the drop might be able to be reached and be able to say the story was rank bullshit. Then again, with my luck, the only guy they would reach would be the asshole lieutenant who had landed me in hot water.

After a few minutes asking me about the files and sending them off the set, we went back to the interview.

Wallace: "So, you are saying that what is being reported is not what really happened. Could you tell us what really happened?"

Me: "Of course."

At that, I spent about half an hour going over the actual mission to Honduras and what we were supposed to be doing there, that fateful and fucked up drop, and the slog back home. Then I told about the arrest back at base, my treatment by the Provost Marshall's office, and my waking up in a hospital in confinement. I knew at least 90 percent would be cut, but that would be their job. I had my secret tape recorder going if they tried to hatchet me.

Wallace: "According to you, General Hawkins refused to have you airlifted to rescue until you blackmailed him into it. Why did he do that? It would seem to me that getting you home faster made it less likely that you would be captured."

Me: "That is something I have given a lot of thought to over the years. The best I can figure is that Hawkins was a very political general. From what I have seen of his record, he has never actually been in combat or even been close to it. His Viet Nam experience was limited to headquarters duty in Saigon. Regardless, I don't think he cared what happened to us, as long as it didn't mess up his career. All he cared about was not making his own record look bad. If we were captured by my blundering around, well, that was the fault of my poor training and judgment, and the fault of the 82nd Airborne for letting me lead troops. If he sent helicopters in to rescue us, however, he would be taking direct responsibility, and if something happened, then it would be on his head."

Wallace: "That's an astonishing thing to say! And afterwards, you claim that he ordered your arrest and subsequent torture to extract a confession?"

Me: "I think torture is a bit overblown. I got a good thumping, though, and the guy who gave it got a bit carried away. I really wouldn't call it torture."

Wallace: "But you claim that he ordered an American officer to be beaten into unconsciousness."

Me: "My understanding is that he ordered the Provost Marshall to offer me generous terms if I confessed, and urged that I be convinced of the error of my ways, and the Provost Marshall claims that an overzealous MP was actually responsible. You can believe as much of that as you want to."

Wallace: "And after you came to in the hospital, what happened?"

Me: "I woke up in a hospital in Guantanamo, at the Navy base where I had been flown while I was unconscious. I was in a confinement ward. While there I was interviewed by a JAG lawyer, who then told me of the final disposition of his investigation. First and foremost, everything about the drop was classified Top Secret. Pretty much every officer involved was being relieved of command and sent packing, including me. I would get the Bronze Star for getting the guys home, but my career was over. If I wanted to ever see my wife and family, I was to keep my mouth shut and go with the flow."

Wallace: "What happened to General Hawkins?"

Me: "Shortly afterwards, he was promoted to Major General and received a posting at NATO headquarters. He eventually was promoted to Lieutenant General before he retired."

Wallace: "He was promoted?"

Me: "Yes."

At that point Wallace began trying to pick apart the details of my story. Why was I there? Why did I take command? Why did we have so many casualties? The biggest thing was, of course, the prisoners we had taken at the airfield.

Wallace: "Why did you capture the prisoners? What purpose did they serve?"

Me: "No purpose whatsoever. However, this was the place we were ordered to be at for the evacuation, and we had to secure the site. These were armed guards and leaving them alone would mean that I would be asking unarmed helicopters to come into a hot LZ. No way was that going to happen! We took control of the airfield and captured the guards, and then tied them up. We would release them prior to our evacuation."

Wallace: "But you didn't release them. You killed them. At least that is the claim being made against you."

Me: "That claim was made by Second Lieutenant Fairfax, who is also the only person who made that claim. Second Lieutenant Fairfax did not witness me release the prisoners. In fact he was at least fifty yards away, on the other side of the airfield, when I released them. If you ask any of the other soldiers who were there, they would report that he could not possibly have seen what he reported. It was pitch black. All anybody could say was that I fired my pistol to hurry them off the airfield."

Wallace: "Then why did he claim that you had killed them?"

Me: "You'll have to ask him that, and then ask the others who were there if they witnessed me killing the prisoners. I think he was simply getting back at me for relieving him of command and making him look bad. He also charged me with leading a mutiny, destruction of Army property, failure to obey orders, and pretty much anything else he could come up with, all of which were dismissed."

Wallace: "And the claim that you were released for political reasons?"

Me: "For one thing, as far as anybody knew at the time, I was just one more captain without any pull. Besides, even if you assume they let me off the hook for national security reasons or some such, why give me the medal? That doesn't make any sense."

Wallace: "None of the prisoners ever came forth to complain. Is this another example of dead men telling no tales?"

Me: "The fact that four drug runners never came forth to file a complaint isn't an argument! When we left, we blew up over half a ton of cocaine that would have come here to America. Millions of dollars worth of cocaine were destroyed by my command. Which is more likely, that I killed four drug runners in cold blood with witnesses, or that their own bosses buried them in a shallow grave in the jungle?"

Wallace: "Why did you destroy the drugs? Were you actually there on a drug raid?"

Me: "We were not there on a drug raid. We were there because we were dumped there by a lost pilot. Would you have preferred those drugs to come to America? No, we dumped kerosene all over them and blew them up."

He asked about my return to the States after it was all over.

Wallace: "You state that all the officers were separated from the Army afterwards. Including you?"

Me: "Yes. In some cases they were allowed to retire early. In others they were simply told that when their current time was up, not to bother asking to stay in. In my case I was told I was going to get a medical discharge. After I was released from Walter Reed Hospital, I went home and found that somebody had already packed up my personal possessions from my office and brought them over. I was not even offered the chance to pack up my own belongings. The only time I spent on base after that was either physical therapy at the hospital or when I received the medal and left the Army."

Eventually he ran out of things to question me on. I wasn't sure what was going to happen in editing, or if he was even going to check with any of the other guys in the drop. If he wanted to, he could edit this thing enough to make me look like a concentration camp commandant. Then we got to the summary.

Wallace: "Have you ever thought back to that day?"

Me: "I think about it every day. Every time I use my cane, I am reminded of the price I paid that day, and the price others paid, so that a General could look good. I sometimes wonder what would have happened if I had just said NO when we were ordered to get on the planes."

Wallace: "Do you think that would have changed things?"

Me: "I don't know. Maybe. I would have been arrested and court-martialed, but I could have beaten that. Maybe somebody else would have said no, too. If enough of us had done that, maybe he would have cancelled it. I just don't know. Instead I went along, and we had a disaster. If you want to charge me with something, then charge me with letting my personal sense of courage and duty override the duty I had to those around me. That's what I was really guilty of."

After that I left and flew home. It was out of my hands now.

Chapter 133: 'The Buckman Crisis'

Sunday, September 17, 2000

We flew home and I felt exhausted and drained. My very future was on the line and it seemed like the Fates were conspiring against me. By the time I got around to watching the news that night, we had gone international. Both Honduras and Nicaragua were demanding my head, although the U.S. could keep the other pieces. Honduras was screaming that I had defamed them somehow, even though I hadn't made any public pronouncements at all. Nicaragua, now being run by the 'Contras' and not the Sandinistas, was still pretty volatile, and they were demanding I return and stand trial for invading their country and killing their citizens.

George Bush was still campaigning. The official message was that he had full faith and confidence in me and that the charges were a baseless political attack by the Clinton White House. I was working to prove these false claims were lies and wouldn't be available for a few days while I did this. I had talked to George late Monday and told him my plans for today, and called him that Tuesday evening to let him know what had happened with 60 Minutes. We were expecting it to be broadcast on Sunday evening.

We were still trying to piece together who was doing this. It was much harsher and blunter than Clinton's normal antics. I wondered if it was Carville. James Carville and Dick Morris had always been his go-to guys for dirty tricks, with Carville being the hammer and Morris being the velvet glove. Morris was gone, though, brought down by a prostitution scandal during the last election. This felt more like James Carville playing hard and fast with the truth, and consequences be damned. I was pretty sure it wasn't Cheney or Rove, though. They didn't want me around either, but the time to slit my throat was before the convention, not after.

Once I was back home, Marilyn and I had a long talk with the girls about what had happened back in 1981, and what was happening now. I warned them that it was going to get crazier before it got better, and told them not to talk to reporters. If anybody asked them questions they were to simply tell them to find me or their mother. It didn't matter if it was a reporter, a teacher, or another student, but they weren't supposed to talk about it. It was more than I could ask of them, but I needed their help. They were suitably impressed and made solemn oaths not to talk. I smiled over at their mother when they said that, and we sent them on their way. Charlie was back at sea now, heading towards Australia and amphibious training with the Aussies, and probably wouldn't have a chance to call any time soon. We did get a few emails from him after the story broke, telling me he believed me and not the newspapers.

Wednesday proved to be a mixed bag. I stayed at home, but was on the phone all day. On the bad news side, Honduras recalled their ambassador for 'discussions' and Nicaragua decided to sever diplomatic relations with the United States. The evening news shows were now referring to this as 'The Buckman Crisis' and forecasting gloom and doom over our international relations with everybody south of the Rio Grande. Likewise, I was contacted by somebody from the Justice Department, asking me to come in for 'discussions', and I referred them to my lawyer, Tucker Potsdam, who I had instructed to sit on everything and stall them until I had this under control. The moment I showed up at any U.S. Attorney's office, there would be flashbulbs and cameras, and the very real possibility of a perp walk. I needed to stay away from the Justice Department as long as possible.

On the plus side, however, I began to get some phone calls from retired soldiers all across the country, guys from both Bravo Battery and C Company. Initially they called my office in Congress, but after Marty heard about them, he called me. We had a rule that nobody got my home number, but this was the exception to the rule. They were to be called back and given my personal phone number. By early evening, as guys began drifting home from work and began getting messages to call a newspaper or television station, I began getting phone calls at home. By Wednesday various news organizations were using their own sources to dig up names and addresses of people who might know something.

I have to admit, there was a tremendous feeling of relief as I answered some of these calls. No matter how much of a cloud I had gone out with, almost all of the calls were offering support, even from the guys I had never had contact with. When they asked what they should do, I told them to tell the truth, especially if 60 Minutes came calling. The only way I could survive was if some of the guys who had been there that day said so and said it was all bullshit.

Thursday and Friday simpler got louder and stranger. My prepared statement that Governor Bush had full faith and confidence in me was wearing thin. By Thursday evening CBS was running promotional ads with video of Mike Wallace questioning me in a menacing manner, and promising that Sunday night was going to be a special broadcast. I took that as a good thing. If it had been the standard 15 minute segment, then it meant they weren't getting any rebuttal witnesses. Meanwhile, the Justice Department announced they were considering charges related to both war crimes and civil rights violations. It seemed that drug dealers in foreign countries had American constitutional rights; whether I still had any was under discussion.

It was becoming clear that 60 Minutes was talking to some of the guys who had made the jump and wanted them to do a taped interview. I got a couple of calls from guys asking what they should do and I told them to do the interview and simply be honest. If they were asked what they saw, and they didn't see anything, then say it. The most interesting guy who called was Alex Briscoe, the senior sergeant on the plane. He had retired after the Gulf War as an E-8 Master Sergeant. We talked about what was going on, and he told me what he had been hearing as well. He was tied in with some old timer non-coms and they passed around news and such. Several of the non-coms had been contacted by the Justice Department and warned against speaking on camera, as it might be considered interference with an ongoing investigation. I found that quite interesting. I asked him to call some of those guys back and get me some names and phone numbers, and not to worry about the Justice Department. I would handle that.

Sunday night we ate dinner early enough so that at 7:00 we could watch television. Needless to say, 60 Minutes was delayed almost half an hour by a football game. I tried to pay attention, but I just couldn't care; Minnesota was at New England and I didn't particularly like either team.

Stormy was in seventh heaven, however. She had four laps to choose from and eight hands to rub her belly and scratch her head. She began jumping from lap to lap testing us to see which of us was better at spoiling her. You had to brace yourself when she jumped into your lap. She seemed to take more after her St. Bernard father than her Golden Retriever mix mother. She looked like an all brown St. Bernard, only a bit shaggier. And she was big! She was now somewhere around four months old, and weighed between forty and fifty pounds, and was growing at about four pounds a week! She was monstrous! This was, without a doubt, the largest dog I had ever owned, and I could easily foresee her to be growing bigger than Marilyn or the girls.

Eventually the show started, and it looked to be a doozie! Mike Wallace was sitting on the stool in front of a picture of me, with the caption 'The Buckman Crisis' overwritten on the photo. He announced that tonight's entire show was going to be on the Buckman Crisis and my response to it, and further, that the regular show was being expanded to 90 minutes instead of the regular 60. That was news to me. I wasn't sure what he could scrape up for that much time. A typical 60 Minutes show contains three 13 minute segments and about 3 minutes of Andy Rooney at the end. The numbers only add up to about 42 minutes, with the rest being commercials between the segments.

With that he went directly into the first segment, a discussion of the charges against me followed by excerpts from the interview with me. I was pleasantly surprised in that it wasn't a hack job, although an awful lot of stuff was left on the cutting room floor. Most of the background material, on why we were there and why we were sent, was reduced to 'a routine training deployment.' Still, there are different ways to edit a story, and it wasn't done anti-Buckman.

After the commercial break, the next segment was introduced by Wallace with the statement "So far all that has been heard on the events in Honduras and Nicaragua has been either the allegations of misconduct by General Anthony Hawkins, his accuser, or by Congressman Carl Buckman. Still, others served with Captain Buckman, and they have their own stories." The segment opened with Wallace and another man seated in armchairs, much like we had been on Tuesday. Wallace did a voiceover at that, and explained he was talking to Maxwell Fletcher, a project manager for a commercial contractor in Boston, and 'Executive Officer of Bravo Battery under the command of Captain Carl Buckman.' He had left the Army after fourteen years, as a major.

I blinked and stared at the image. "Holy shit! It's Max!", I exclaimed. Marilyn and the girls turned to face me. I looked at my wife and pointed at the screen. "It's Max!" Marilyn just gave me a blank look, so I waved her off and looked back at the screen. Max was older and heavier, and now had a mustache, but I remembered him. He had been a 2nd Lieutenant when he was first assigned to Bravo Battery, did well, and was promoted to 1st Lieutenant when I made Captain and was given command of the battery.

Wallace: "Major Fletcher, your first assignment in the Army was to Bravo Battery, Captain Buckman's outfit, isn't that correct?"

Max: "Pretty much. I was a Second Lieutenant just out of jump school and artillery school and was assigned to the 1st of the 319th. When I got there I was introduced to Carl Buckman, who was a First Lieutenant."

Wallace: "What was he like?"

Max: "It was actually kind of strange when I first met Carl. I had been told that I was being assigned to the best battery in the battalion, and then was told I was meeting the commanding officer. The next guy I met was this young guy, only about a year older than I was, but he was already the exec of the battery and pretty much its commanding officer."

Wallace: "Pretty much? What do you mean?"

Max: "We had a captain but he was leaving, and we were on our own for awhile. For the next year or so we would get a new captain every few months, but they wouldn't work out and leave. Meanwhile Carl Buckman was actually running the best battery in the division. I found out later on that eventually the colonel just left Carl in command and stopped trying to find captains for us."

Wallace: "Was that unusual?"

Max: "Very unusual. Captains run batteries, not lieutenants, and definitely not lieutenants who have only been out of artillery school for a year or so. Carl Buckman was just one hell of a lieutenant!"

Wallace: "What was he like?"

Max: "He was one of the finest officers I ever served under. After we met, the first thing he told me was that there were no bad troops, only bad officers. He held himself to a very high standard, and he held his officers to that same standard. We were expected to hold our non-coms, the sergeants and corporals, to a high standard and we were expected to make sure they held the rest of the troops to a high standard. He expected us to be the best battery in the unit."

Wallace: "So he was a martinet?"

Max: "Hardly! Carl had a surprisingly dry sense of humor, and most importantly, the troops respected him. Troops know when an officer knows what he's doing, and Carl Buckman knew what he was doing. He was tough but fair, kept the [bleeped] to a minimum, and kept battalion and division off their necks."

Wallace: "Did the men like him?"

Max: "That wasn't important to him. Doc didn't care if they liked him or not. What was important was that they respected him and obeyed orders. That was one of the first things he would teach his officers, that they weren't in the like or dislike business. If they couldn't hack that, he would give them the address to the dog pound and a transfer out. They could pick up a puppy if they wanted to be liked."

Wallace: "He was known as Doc?"

Max: "Yeah, well, he was a doctor, right? Everybody knew about the boy genius with the doctorate in math. He hated the nickname, though. You never said it to his face, not unless you outranked him. The majors and colonels all called him Doc."

Wallace: "You were in Honduras with him, correct?"

At that point Mike Wallace began quizzing Max about the deployment and why we were there. Max verified what I had said, and then Wallace asked why I had made the drop.

Max: "Carl told me that it was going to be his last drop with the battery. We already knew he was transferring out as soon as we got home. He had this plum assignment lined up at Fort Sill, and a stint at command school after that. He figured he'd do one last drop, have a little fun, and go home. Boy, did he get that wrong!"

That pretty much ended Max's participation in this, and the next scene had Wallace facing three men who were sitting on bar stools and facing him. They were introduced as 'Alex Briscoe, Raul Gonzalez, and John Thompson.' As I looked at them, memories came flooding back. I had talked to Briscoe the other day, but not Gonzalez or Thompson. Thompson had been the RTO with us, and Gonzalez had been one of my Spanish speaking scouts on the hike home. Wallace gave a quick bio on each man, specifying that they had all seen action in the Eighties and had all left the Army after twenty or more years of service. He even told what they had done after they left the service. Briscoe worked security for a casino, Gonzalez owned a small used car sales lot, and Thompson was in the telecomm field.

Wallace: "Sergeant Briscoe, what was so special about this mission? What made it different than normal?"

Briscoe: "It was all messed up. That idiot general wanted to make Brownie points with the Hondos, so he had them drop us out of World War II C-47s. None of us had ever even seen a plane that old, let alone trained in one. And he didn't want to hear it when he was told it wasn't safe. We were going or he'd have us all up on charges."

Wallace: "Couldn't you refuse?"

Gonzalez: "Hey, the guy was a general and I was a private. You obey orders or go to Leavenworth. It's pretty straight forward. We got on the plane and made the jump."

Wallace: "What were your ranks and what did you do during the jump?"

Briscoe: "At the time I was a Sergeant First Class, and I was the senior non-com on the plane."

Gonzalez: "I was a PFC, Private First Class. I spoke Spanish, so after we landed, the Captain assigned me as one of the scouts."

Thompson: "I was a Spec 4, the radio operator. I just followed the Captain around and ran the radio."

Wallace: "So you were there when General Hawkins ordered Captain Buckman to turn himself in to the Nicaraguan authorities?"

Thompson: "We never received any such orders. We were ordered to march north to the border, and not get caught doing so."

Wallace: "General Hawkins says he ordered you to surrender yourselves and Captain Buckman refused those orders and then threatened you if you disobeyed him."

Thompson: [Snorting and shaking his head] "General Hawkins is lying, then. That radio never left my possession and I was always with the Captain when he was talking to anybody. What he is saying is simply not possible. It didn't happen."

Briscoe: "Captain Buckman never threatened anybody, unless maybe he told that worthless lieutenant to get his act together."

Gonzalez: "The Captain couldn't threaten us. If we didn't like what he wanted to do, we could have just walked away!" [Laughing from all three of them]

Wallace: "What do you mean?"

Gonzalez: "He really busted up his leg on the landing. He should have been on a stretcher, too, but he didn't want to slow us down. He refused any morphine, too, said to give it to the guys who needed it more. He just had us wrap his leg as best we could and we rigged him up a crutch."

Wallace: "What do you mean about Lieutenant Fairfax? Why do you say he was worthless?"

Briscoe: [Glanced at others and then shrugged] "It's just ... listen ... not everybody is cut out for a combat outfit. Lieutenant Fairfax was simply clueless. He was just a lousy officer. Now, I don't know what he did after he left the Army. Maybe he became an insurance adjuster, and maybe he became the world's best insurance adjuster, but as a combat officer he was a disaster."

Gonzalez: "He'd have gotten us all killed or captured, that's for sure. Captain Buckman, the one thing he kept telling us over and over was that we were all going home, together, no matter what. Then he made it happen."

Briscoe: "I remember one funny moment when we were going through this one valley and he led us all in the Paratrooper's Psalm."

Wallace: "The Paratrooper's Psalm? What... ?"

Gonzalez: [Laughing] "Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil..."

Briscoe and Thompson: [Together with Gonzalez, laughing] " ... because I am the meanest son of a bitch in the valley!" [Laughing]

Thompson: "It's just too bad he wasn't infantry." [Laughing and 'HOO-AH's from the others]

Wallace: "Meaning?"

Briscoe: "We were all Infantry. Captain Buckman was Artillery. He wasn't one of our regular officers. He was actually along as an observer."

Wallace: "So when he took command he actually did mutiny."

Briscoe: "Not at all. Artillery is a line command, just like Infantry, and captains outrank second lieutenants. No way would we have gone along with a mutiny. He simply outranked Lieutenant Fairfax. It was as simple as that."

Wallace led the group through some of the details of our getting home. The group session ended when Wallace brought up what happened when the Hueys brought us back to base.

Wallace: "You were present when Captain Buckman was arrested?"

Briscoe: "Thompson and I were. Gonzalez had a broken ankle and some bad cuts at that point and was off to the infirmary. I have to say, I've never seen the like of it, either before or after. They handcuffed him right there on the flight line."

Thompson: "It was just plain wrong. You don't treat soldiers that way. He got us out of that [bleeped] hole and they arrest him in front of his men? That's wrong!"

Briscoe: "Captain Buckman, he was a class act, though, I have to tell you. Some of the guys were really pissed at this, and they wanted to cut him loose, you know. Captain Buckman, handcuffs and all, he marches over to us and orders us to stand at attention and then he reads us the riot act, telling us we were soldiers and to act like it. Then they grab him and drag him away."

Thompson: "That must have been the resisting arrest charge. [Snorted disgust]"

After the break, there was a final segment, on the political ramifications of the Buckman Crisis. At this point, Wallace pulled out some of edited excerpts from my interview.

Wallace: "Congressman, according to you, this is all an orchestrated leak of classified material by the White House. That seems a pretty extraordinary claim. What proof do you have?"

Me: "Proof? None at all. I just find it incredibly suspicious. Bill Clinton has known this about me since 1992, and yet it only comes out when I am the Vice Presidential pick for George Bush? It's not like he can claim that this is new information just brought to light. He's personally known about this for almost eight years."

Wallace: "What do you mean that he's known about it? Known about it how?"

Me: "In 1992 Bill Clinton nominated General Hawkins as his choice for Deputy Secretary of State under Warren Christopher. Once I learned about this I decided that Hawkins had done enough damage to the country, and wasn't going to get another shot. At that time, and that would have been in December of '92, I went to Newt Gingrich and told him I was going to fight the nomination. Rather than go public, Newt brought in a number of Democratic Senators who would be involved in the confirmation process. I laid out what I just told you, and then they checked it out. Afterwards I talked to both Newt and David Boren, who was the Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence at the time, and they both told me they had confirmed my story. General Hawkins' name was removed from consideration."

Wallace: "So why wait until now to leak the information, if that is what really happened? Why not sooner?"

Me: "I've thought about that more than a little. The only thing I can think is that until now he didn't need to. In 1992 I was just one more minor Republican Congressman in a Congress dominated by the Democrats. Since then, however, I have become a sharp thorn in his side. I was part of the Gang of Eight that put the Republicans back in power, I helped write the Contract with America, I have held his feet to the fire about the deficit and spending, and I'm the guy who rammed the censure down his throat. I do not get invited to the White House for milk and cookies. Bill Clinton plays high stakes poker. The timing is perfect to release it now. He sinks me, and destroys George Bush's run for the Presidency, leaving it to be won by his handpicked successor. He gets to run the government for another four years."

At that point Wallace cut away, and a voiceover stated that he talked with Newt Gingrich about the events in 1992. There were excerpts from an interview he did with Newt in Washington and Mike Wallace in New York. After that he mentioned that while he was not able to do an interview with Senator Boren, who had left office in 1994 and was now the President of the University of Oklahoma, Boren had verified by telephone the events of 1992.

Then he reviewed the latest information as of earlier that day, that Bill Clinton was claiming innocence in the release of the classified documents, that the only two men who were claiming I had killed the prisoners and otherwise disobeyed orders were Hawkins and the just named Provost Marshall, Richard Reinhart, and that Nicaragua was now demanding my extradition and had issued a warrant on me through Interpol. Second Lieutenant Fairfax had left the Army and moved home to Mendocino, California, where he had gotten a job at a video game company, gotten married, had two children, gotten divorced, and then been killed by a drunk driver four years ago. His widow, now remarried, had no knowledge of any of the events under question. Meanwhile, several of the soldiers had reported that they had been warned by the Justice Department to not talk to 60 Minutes. Then he closed with:

Wallace: "By almost all accounts, the claim that Congressman Buckman, while still an Army captain, murdered captured prisoners and committed other war crimes seems false. CBS News and 60 Minutes have been unable to find a single source to back the claims by the two individuals making them. In fact, it would appear that the Bronze Star Congressman Buckman received in 1982 was well deserved. Still, there are many troubling aspects to this story.

Why, after so many years, has the story come to light? The Congressman has always claimed that his orders and national security prevented him from speaking. The national security issue actually seems true, at least in earlier years, when the Sandinistas still ruled Nicaragua. The timing, in the end run of a close election, seems very suspicious. The Congressman says he will refuse to cooperate with any further investigation, since the incident was fully investigated back in 1981, when it occurred. However, CBS News and 60 Minutes have been unable to obtain a copy of the Judge Advocate General's report on the incident or its conclusion. Until that becomes available, a new investigation may well be required to finally lay this to rest."

The phone rang about thirty seconds later, before Marilyn and the girls could even begin to ask me questions. "Carl!"

It was George Bush's voice. "Governor?"

"Well, that seemed to go well. Better than I thought it would, in fact. I have to ask, Carl, it's been a week now. You'd better have a good plan now."

"George, are you in D.C.?"

"For the night. Tomorrow I fly to Chicago."

"Well, I'll be at your office at 8:00 AM. We'll need Karl and Dick and Gerson and Scully and everybody else."

"What's on your mind, Carl? You've got a plan?"

I smiled as I answered. "In military terms, we just ate the attack. Now we counterattack! Now we destroy them!"

By the time I made it to the campaign office the next morning, the newspapers were out and the morning news shows were on. The big topic was the latest on the Buckman Crisis, and the tone was generally positive. Fox News was heaping praises on my head, but that was kind of expected. What wasn't quite as expected was a generally positive tone from both the Washington Post and the Chicago Tribune, with them saying that this was undoubtedly a political attack disguised as an international incident. The New York Times was still damning me, but you almost expected that of them; it was their story after all, and they had to stand by it. (Plus, they were also still pissed by my using their newspaper to paper train my dog!)

We had a packed conference room when I got there; all the first and second tier people were there. The critical people were Bush, Rove, Cheney, and me. George was actually smiling for once, and Rove was looking thoughtful. Only Cheney had any overt hostility towards me, and that was muted. The Governor started the discussion saying, "So, Carl, you think the show last night rescued you? You told me we were going to counterattack when we talked last night. What are you thinking?"

I nodded. "This is a two part defense. The first part was last week, when you kept me on, and for that, I truly thank you." I was really saying this for the others. Bush might hate my guts, but I had no reason to sow dissension in the ranks. "By keeping me on, you show strength and faith in me, etcetera, etcetera. You were letting me respond to the outrageous lies being spread. That's what you did last week. Now we go into the second part. We push back and go full bore back at them. We do it hard enough, we crush them."

"What do you have in mind, Carl?", asked Rove. You could almost see the wheels turning in his mind. The right wing conservative who didn't want me was battling with the devious political operative who liked to play the game, and the operative was winning.

"Two parts to this. The Governor here goes after Al Gore for his part in this, and he goes after him hard.", I said.

"And you go after Kerry?", asked an incredulous Cheney. "That leaves us where we started!"

"Screw Kerry! Ignore Kerry. Nobody cares about the VP, you know that. No, I ignore John Kerry. I'm the attack dog from now on! I am going after Bill Clinton!"

We had some back and forth on this, but nobody had a problem with the general concept. We basically hit on the following areas of attack:

* The election of Al Gore was actually the Clintons trying to stay in power. He was their puppet.

* George Bush had faith and trust in me; I would make a worthy Vice President. I was thankful that the Governor was able to see beyond mere politics and was able to trust that I was innocent of everything. It was a mutual love fest from here on out.

* John Kerry was a nice guy but irrelevant. We would ignore him. We weren't even agreeing to a debate between the VP candidates at the moment, not until the 'crisis' was over. We would demand that he repudiate these charges against me.

* Clinton had intentionally leaked the files on me.

* We would begin demanding release of the JAG investigation report.

* We would not accept any other investigations, including by the Justice Department, while the JAG investigation was not available. In fact, in a case of reverse jujitsu, we actually wanted the Clinton Administration to try and get the Justice Department after me, since then we could keep screaming about how they were 'suppressing the truth' and 'double jeopardy.'

* Likewise, any international repercussions with Honduras or Nicaragua showed how the Clinton White House was playing politics with international relations. Clinton didn't have a great reputation in the area anyway, so this just played into our hands.

* I would keep finding character witnesses from my old unit and C Company. Some of these guys would know other guys, and sooner or later we would be hearing from them.

* We would publicize the millions of dollars that I had donated to the USO and the 82nd Airborne's scholarship funds. It showed how I didn't hold any grudges against the Army, just against the assholes who had screwed up.

Dick Cheney got the job (from Rove and Bush, not me) of playing Devil's Advocate and trying to poke holes in the plan. It was a job he took to with relish. To be fair, he tightened up some of the talking points and toned down others. The man knew what he was doing. We just didn't like each other.

We had enough accomplished by lunchtime that Gerson and Scully were able to issue a few press releases, basically that I was now in a position to respond to the insane allegations that the Clinton-Gore campaign were hurling against me, and that I would be making a speech in front of the Justice Department Tuesday morning. We were practically daring them to come after us. By the end of the day, we had new talking points and speeches written. Increasingly, as the day wore on, the news coverage was turning our way. Several more of the guys who had dropped into Nicaragua had either been found or come forth, and all of them were backing up the story told on 60 Minutes. The MP guard who had strung me up had even been tracked down, along with his prison record and proof of employment in the late 1990s as a mercenary overseas. The story was practically writing itself!

I stayed in town that night, huddling with Scully, Frank, Marty, and Brewster McRiley into the wee hours. We figured the Justice Department was not going to be amused by my giving a speech on their doorstep. Would they shut us down? What would we do then? What if they let us go, but then tried to stop us? What if they decided to serve me with a subpoena or a warrant or take me in for questioning on the spot? I called Tucker and asked him to be there in the background just in case.

We did the speech on the side of the building on Constitution Avenue, across from the National Museum of Natural History. The sidewalk was wide and we had enough room for cameras and reporters. We provided a podium and stand for me to set up a little higher than normal, and for once, I was using my cane at a public event. Most of the time I would leave it behind and try and conceal the limp. Not today – today it was 'proof' of my heroism. All the networks and news channels were present, along with a number of print reporters. Off to the side and out of camera range, I could see several glowering people from the Justice Department.

I gave my speech, and then opened up for a few questions. Most were pretty much expected, and were ones that we had hammered out during the prep session the other day with Dick Cheney. I might not like the guy, but that didn't mean I couldn't learn from him. We got the obvious ones: Why did I think the Gore campaign was behind this? (The Clinton-Gore campaign is behind it; Bill Clinton hates me.) What proof did I have? (Doesn't the timing seem suspicious? Who had access to classified information?) How do we know you haven't paid the soldiers off somehow? (All of them? For almost 20 years? Without getting caught?) Why aren't you cooperating with the investigation? (What investigation? There is no investigation?! The Judge Advocate General investigated this in 1981. Where are the results of that investigation?) Would I turn myself in to the Nicaraguans for a fair trial? (No!) At that point I shut down the idiot question session and we put an end to things.

I had a lousy taste in my mouth from all of this. I was the only guy who actually knew what I had done back then, who knew that Fairfax, the lying schmuck, had been absolutely correct. I couldn't lie to myself. I had killed those four drug runners in cold blood. I had known what I was doing, and I had known the consequences if I failed to do it, and I had known the consequences if I got caught. At the time it seemed like I had gotten away with it. I got the men home and we didn't get into a border incident with the Sandinistas, but now the Sandinistas were screaming for my head and we were in an international incident with them anyway. I had been able to duck it so far, but the consequences were coming back to haunt me.

Worse, what was happening to me? What was worse, that I had killed those men then, or that I was using their deaths now to gain political office? What kind of psychopath had I become?

Chapter 134: Attack Dog

The plan at that point was for me to resume a normal touring and speaking schedule, but for the time being, limit myself to strongly Republican areas where I wouldn't be challenged on this. Matt Scully was redoing the standard stump speech and would be traveling with me to edit it as new information came in. We would work up a healthy portion of outrage into the speech based on this, with me attacking Bill Clinton at every conceivable moment. Ignore John Kerry; damn Bill Clinton; Al Gore is Clinton Light. Pound on those three items. We were flying out in the morning for stops in Boise and Helena.

I went over to my office in the Capitol and called Marilyn at the end shortly before dinner to fill her in on the latest. I told her I would spend the night in D.C. and then fly out west in the morning. After that, I worked several hours making phone calls to various committee chairmen to let them know I wasn't dead yet, and was in fact showing surprising levels of life. Then I went home. I ordered in a pizza and decided to have a few beers for dinner. It had been a long day. Then it got a little strange. My cell phone rang and when I answered it, it was an Army colonel. "Congressman Buckman?"

"Yes."

"I am Colonel Andrew McFaggin from the Chief of Staff's office."

I could feel my brow wrinkling at that. "Who?"

"Colonel Andrew..."

"I got that part, Colonel. Which Chief of Staff?"

"General Shinseki, sir. The Army Chief of Staff.", he explained.

"Not Shelton?" Hugh Shelton was a four star general and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the most senior leaders of the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines. Eric Shinseki was currently the Army Chief of Staff, one of those senior leaders.

"No, sir, not General Shelton."

"How can I help you, Colonel?"

"Sir, can I come over to see you?"

What was going on? "You know where I live? Come on over. I'm having some pizza and beer. Hustle and it might still be warm. The pizza, I mean, not the beer."

"Thank you, sir. I'll be there in a few minutes." The colonel hung up on me and I was left to ponder what the Chief of Staff could want with me. For the life of me I couldn't remember much about Shinseki. I must have met him at a cocktail party or something, but if we had ever actually had a conversation, I couldn't remember it. Shelton I remembered as being a bit more politician than general, but I suppose at that level you have to be. The same was probably true of Shinseki.

About ten minutes later there was a knock on the door and an officer in a dress uniform was shown into the kitchen. "Congressman Buckman?"

I stood and shook his hand. "Colonel. Welcome." Before he got started, I turned to a cabinet and pulled a plate out, and slid it across to him. Then I pulled another beer from the fridge. "Here, have something to eat. I'll never finish this, and I'm flying out in the morning. You can help."

"Uh, thank you, sir." I don't think the colonel had been actually expecting pizza and beer, but he put a slice on his plate and opened the beer.

I pointed at a bar stool. "Sit. What can I do for you, Colonel?"

He swallowed the bite he was working on and said, "Congressman, I am here on behalf of General Shinseki. He asked me to give you some information, and he asked me to ask you to come to the Pentagon in the morning."

"Well, I'm all ears, Colonel, but I'm on an early morning flight to Boise in the morning. I'm scheduled for a campaign tour.", I told him.

"Sir, the General was hoping that you would change your schedule."

"You'd better explain that, Colonel.", I replied.

He took a deep breath. "Sir, at approximately 2030 today General Shelton told General Shinseki that tomorrow he is to issue orders recalling you to active service. At that time, you are to be taken into custody pending a formal investigation into charges of murder relating to your duty in Honduras and Nicaragua. Pending the outcome of that investigation, you will either face court martial or be extradited to Nicaragua to face charges there. Perhaps both."

I stared briefly. "You must be joking!" What the hell was going on! We were hoping to force Clinton to overreach, but this was ridiculous!

"No sir. I am not."

"And you expect me to turn myself in tomorrow morning? Is that what this is about? You can kiss that idea good-bye, buster." I stood up and pointed towards the hallway. "Get lost." Time to call my lawyers!

"Congressman, allow me to finish. General Shinseki told me that General Shelton received these orders earlier in the evening directly from President Clinton. General Shinseki would like you to be present tomorrow morning at a press conference he plans to hold. At that time he will announce that he is refusing the order, and then he will resign his position as Chief of Staff."

I stared and my jaw dropped. After a few seconds I said, "Excuse me? You want to run that by me again."

"Sir, tomorrow morning, at a live press conference at the Pentagon, when General Shelton and President Clinton expect that your imminent recall and arrest will be announced, General Shinseki will instead state that the orders given to him are illegal and he will refuse them. He would like to invite you to be present. The General is disgusted by the treatment you are receiving.", said McFaggin.

I sat down again, and sat there pondering what the colonel was telling me. I reached out and sipped my beer, but I could barely taste it. "Colonel, while I really appreciate what General Shinseki is offering, what would really help is the release of the investigation report from 1981. Is there any word on that?"

McFaggin sat back down and drank some more beer. He reached inside his uniform jacket and pulled out a folded up sheaf of papers. He tossed it on the bar top. "You might find this interesting reading." I reached for it and he continued, "The General plans on handing out copies of this at the press conference tomorrow."

I looked at the pages and flipped them right side up. It was the Article 32 Investigation Report prepared by Colonel Bruce Featherstone. So there had been an official Article 32 investigation after all. "I'll be damned.", I muttered.

"This might not be my place to say it, but after General Shinseki got his hands on this last week, he lost any remaining respect for the President."

I gave the colonel a hard look. "Mister, he might not respect him, but he damn well better obey him."

"Congressman, I think we settled conclusively at Nuremburg that not all orders are created equal."

I grunted noncommittally at that. Then I looked at the man. "What's your deal? Why are you flushing your career down the toilet? Shelton is going to find out about you telling me, and even if you say that Shinseki told you to, you're finished."

McFaggin sighed. "I don't know if you know this, Congressman. The General stepped on a land mine in Viet Nam, blew off a chunk of his foot. My old man was a corporal in the same unit. He told me that if Shinseki hadn't stepped on the mine, he would have. He always felt like he owed the General. When he learned I was assigned to General Shinseki's staff, he told me to watch over the man."

I shrugged and nodded. "Good a reason as any." I looked briefly through the report. Looking back at the colonel, I said, "It's best that I don't go to the press conference. I show up, there are going to be questions about my setting something up with Shinseki. It will be better if I go about my regular business." I waved the report in the air, though, and added, "Still, tell him this is useful and appreciated, and that a beat up old battery commander still knows the value of good intelligence. I plan to read this and put it to good use."

"Understood, sir." He stood up and headed towards the door. I walked him out. "Congressman, good luck."

"Same to you, Colonel. Same to you."

I went back to the kitchen and grabbed another beer, and took it and the report into my office. I sat down and read the report. It was strange reading the military legalese, but it was all there, a complete investigative report – names, ranks, timelines, accusations (many), evidence (nothing), conclusions, and recommendations. I went through it a second time, and then a third, remembering back to that clusterfuck, and never going to bed. Eventually I got up and made several copies and stashed one, and then went upstairs and showered and shaved and dressed. Maybe I could sleep on the plane, but I doubted it.

The flight out of Reagan National was to lift off at 5:50 AM and landing in Boise seven hours later, around 10:50 AM Boise time. It was a charter flight in a 737, so maybe they could shave some time off it. The plane looked to be packed. Up in the front end, the first class section was reserved for me and my staff, with a curtain giving us some privacy, and a bouncer type to smile and keep the reporters in the back. The back was jammed with reporters, all waiting on me to A) go after Bill Clinton, and B) step on my crank doing so. I planned to do the first and to try and avoid the second.

I waved to everybody as we boarded the plane, but I simply smiled and waved while they yelled questions at me. I waited until everybody was on board and the plane was lifting off to speak to my staff. I swapped to an aisle seat with Frank and motioned Matt and Brewster into seats across the aisle, and then handed them copies of the investigative report. "This thing is going to break wide open today. I got this out of the Pentagon last night. It's the missing investigation report that we've been screaming for." I outlined what Shinseki's messenger boy had told me was going to happen. They were stunned, but then everybody tried to speak at once, whispering at each other.

Brewster managed to out-whisper the others. "Okay, Carl, what do you plan to do?"

"Brewster, I plan to bend Bill Clinton over a barrel and ram this report straight up his ass! You got any better ideas?"

He grinned at me. "This ought to be fun!"

We spent the rest of the flight figuring out talking points and rewriting (by hand – no electricity for a laptop) the stump speech. We had to modify it to take into account the latest attacks from the White House. Meanwhile in the back of the plane a certain level of buzz was building. We had left too early for anybody to have heard anything about a press conference, but somebody back there must have heard something. After it got loud enough, I went back and schmoozed them some, simply walking up and down the aisle, smiling, shaking hands with the new people, joking, and saying absolutely nothing. Nobody knew anything, but the team from ABC must have heard late last night that there was a Pentagon press conference that would be about me. I just looked blank and asked what they had heard.

It was my dumb and stupid act. Whenever Marilyn gets pissed at me, she tells me it comes naturally. (The rest of the time she tells me I'm too smart for my own good. I wish she would make up her mind!)

As we approached Boise, however, the buzz in the back got louder! We were getting in range of cell towers, and even though the stewardesses were yelling at everybody to turn off their electronic devices, nobody obeyed. By the time we landed most everybody on the plane knew something was going on. After the landing we hustled our asses off the plane before anybody could ask and headed over to the campaign rally. On the way, I called Marty for the latest.

"Carl, you won't believe, it, but we have a full blown constitutional crisis going on back here!"

I smiled to myself. "Tell me more!"

"The Army Chief of Staff announced at the morning briefing in the press room at the Pentagon that he had received orders to arrest you, and then declared those orders to be illegal and resigned as Chief of Staff."

"I knew that was going to happen.", I told him.

"What?! Yeah, well what you don't know is that immediately after that, the Vice Chief of Staff marched up to the podium and announced that he also believed those orders to be illegal, but he wasn't resigning. If the President, Secretary of Defense, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs didn't like it, they could fire him, but he would not approve any orders to recall you and arrest you. Then they issued copies of the investigation from back in 1981 we've been screaming about.", he told me.

"Oh, shit! I almost wish I had been there."

Marty continued. "You knew about this, didn't you?! What the hell, Carl! Do you have a copy of the report, too!?"

"This all broke late last night, Marty. No need to get you involved. Anything else happen?"

"There were a shitload of questions, but the best one was when somebody asked Shinseki, he's the Chief of Staff, why he did this, and he told them that the White House could clean up its own mess and leave the Army out of it."

"He said that?! Oh, holy shit!" Shinseki was going to be lucky to avoid a court martial of his own at this rate! "Anything happen since then?

"That was just an hour ago. Nothing out of the White House since then. What's happening there?"

"The reporters just twigged to the fact that something happened and they weren't there. Scully and I have been rewriting the stump speech. Watch the evening news. The game just went into overtime!"

"Screw that. You're winning!"

I hung up my phone and noticed everybody else in the party was on theirs, undoubtedly getting the same message I just got. When they hung up, we chatted, but didn't really bother to rewrite anything else. We simply went to the campaign rally and proceeded to bend Bill Clinton over a barrel.

We started by giving a fairly standard stump speech, praising George Bush for his leadership and insight, and of course, the courage and integrity he was showing by standing by me. Then we added a number of comments based on the latest we had of the situation as of yesterday afternoon, before I got the copy of the report and before I was informed of what Shinseki had planned. Then I grabbed the microphone and came around the podium, and sat down on a bar stool in an 'impromptu' informal move. I commented that it seemed that something was going on back in Washington, but that my cell phone wasn't working, and I hadn't been able to get any details. Would somebody care to fill me in?

There was an immediate hubbub, and a voice yelled out, "Congressman! Do you mean to say that you aren't aware that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff refused to have you arrested this morning and resigned?"

Trust a reporter to get it wrong. It was easy to look confused and say, "General Shelton resigned?"

"No, General Shinkowski!"

Now I could really look confused. "Do you mean General Shinseki? He's the Army Chief of Staff, not the Chairman. I don't know a General Shinkowski. Do you mean General Shinseki resigned? Why?"

"The President ordered him to have you arrested!"

I put a look of surprise on my face. "The President wants the Army to arrest me? He's got an entire Justice Department to do that! Arrest me for what? Getting my men home?"

"Congressman! The President ordered the Chairman to order the Army Chief of Staff to arrest you!", yelled another voice. "And the Army Chief of Staff said the President could clean up his own mess and resigned." Finally somebody got it right!

"Huh! Well, it's true, the President surely has made a mess of this! Now he's forcing out other good officers? This is what you get when you make a draft dodger the President!"

There was a huge uproar over that, but then a third reporter yelled out, while holding up a phone, "Congressman, I just heard that General Shelton relieved the Vice Chief of Staff for also refusing to order your arrest."

Holy Christ! This was spinning out of control back home! "Well, I'm sure that the President will fire enough people so that sooner or later he'll find an ambitious second lieutenant he can bully around. I guess that means he hasn't released the investigation from 1981."

From the far side yelled out several voices. The clearest and loudest yelled, "General Shinseki released copies of it this morning!"

"You're kidding me, right!? The report must have exonerated me! Are you telling me that the President of the United States is ordering me to face double jeopardy on a closed case, simply to force me out of politics!? What happens next? If a new Army investigation clears me, does the Justice Department get a shot at me?! This is outrageous, even for a man as low as Bill Clinton.", I cried out. It was time to go on the offensive. I climbed up off the stool and faced them all.

"Let me tell you something! The President of the United States knows exactly where I am! If he wants me arrested, he can send the Justice Department after me! He can send the Army! He can send the Marines if he doesn't trust the Army anymore! He can send the Boy Scouts if he wants! I'm a peaceful man just trying to do my job! It's just too bad for Bill Clinton that my job is to run his ass out of Washington in disgrace! Now, I am going to continue this campaign swing. If he doesn't like it, he can issue the arrest warrant himself. His personal conduct in this is despicable!"

Part of our strategy was to get Clinton pissed off enough to do something stupid. Make him overreact; be the voice of reason but then goad him into doing something. Make him react to us, and not the other way around. Meanwhile George Bush could take the high road and concentrate on Al Gore, and push the idea that Al was Bill 2.0. At some point maybe Al would manage to do something stupid, like repudiate Clinton. If we could get them fighting, the job was half done.

I was somewhat surprised by Clinton's orders to have me recalled to active duty, but not flabbergasted. He was simply counting on the military to obey him automatically. He wasn't the one ordering my arrest! No, it was the conclusion of the Army that I had betrayed them. They were the ones working to fix the Buckman problem. He simply was clueless about the military and had no respect for them, and it generally showed in his actions and in those of his cabinet. The military didn't respect him either. One of the first things you learn as an officer is to never give an order that won't be obeyed. Where Bill screwed up was by not making sure the Army would obey his orders. Now he had gone to war with his own Army.

To be fair, the American military firmly believed in the idea of civilian control. We weren't some third world shithole with the Army routinely leading a coup d'état. A general might refuse the order and resign, but he would never do anything more than that, and sooner or later a general would be found who wanted an early promotion and would stomach what it would require, and orders would be given. In due time somebody would be coming around for me. In the meantime, however, Bill Clinton was going to be fighting this battle in the news and not looking good in the process. It would be a Pyrrhic victory, destroying his Presidency and sinking Al Gore in the process.

Slick Willie didn't find a general by lunchtime, so after lunch we flew to Helena and repeated the process. In Helena we were scheduled to stay overnight. In the meantime, after dinner, I agreed to a little bargain – the local television station played that morning's Pentagon press briefing for me and I gave them an exclusive interview. There was more on the national news. They had managed to track down Colonel Featherstone, but he was a dead end, literally. He had died of lung cancer in 1993 (well, he did smoke like a chimney, as I recalled.) In addition, some of the high points of the report and the conclusions were read out and displayed as graphics on the screen, including:

"No evidence has been found to back the accusations made against CPT Buckman. However, there is considerable evidence to prove the claims are false."

"2LT Fairfax acted with gross negligence and incompetence and conduct unbecoming an officer."

"CPT Buckman's conduct and leadership abilities were exemplary, and it is recommended that he be retained in the service of the U.S. Army."

Afterwards I met with the Governor and the various Republican powers in Montana. During that meeting I was called away, when George Bush called me. "Carl, that was a fantastic speech you gave earlier today!", he told me.

I was a bit surprised at that. "You caught that? I'm surprised!"

"The entire country caught it! You basically called the President of the United States out into the street for a gunfight!" Trust George Bush to turn this into a movie.

"Huh! I figured I was just dealing with the locals and the people following me around. You got a problem with me hogging the spotlight?", I asked.

"Not as long as you focus on Clinton. I'm holding my own with Al. You are pushing a wedge between him and Clinton, and that weakens the both of them.", he replied.

"Okay, fair enough. I've got an idea or two. Can you get Karl to call me? I want to bounce an idea or two off of him."

"Give me a few minutes, and he'll call you.", he told me. "I'll talk to you sometime tomorrow. I'm going to Florida again, Tampa this time."

"Good luck."

Ten minutes later Karl Rove called me. "Carl, what's up?" Rove might not like me, but he loved the game.

I gave him the latest. "Karl, I want you to do two things, please. First, get me on one of the Sunday talk shows."

"Okay, that's probably doable."

"Second, get in touch with Newt Gingrich. Ask him - politely – to..." I laid out my plans to him, and he told me he would talk to Gingrich first, and then get back to me. He didn't, but Newt did, and we talked it over for a bit. He agreed to go along with me, and laughed at what was about to happen.

Rove sent me a message through Scully that I was booked onto This Week on ABC Sunday morning. Ostensibly we were going to discuss the 'Buckman Crisis' and how it had spilled over into a fight between the President and the Pentagon. By Thursday that was growing deeper. With both the Army Chief of Staff and the Vice Chief of Staff forced out, the Pentagon was scrambling to find names to recommend to the President as replacements. Clinton decided to cut his losses. Denying that he had ordered Shelton to have me recalled and arrested, he cut Shelton loose and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff resigned. That made the third four star general to lose his job over this, and it was being called 'The Revolt of the Generals!'

At that point Newt Gingrich stepped up to the plate. I was hoping for a solid base hit, but he managed a standup double. He went to Capitol Hill, 'simply to meet with some old friends for lunch', and managed to get himself interviewed on camera by some of the reporters hanging around the place. When he was asked his opinion about what was happening he made a laughing comment that, "I bet Carl Buckman is sorry now that he didn't let Bill Clinton be impeached. If what President Clinton is doing now isn't a high crime and misdemeanor, I can't imagine what is!"

There it was, on national television on the evening news, the 'I' word, impeachment! Overnight the entire country was transported back in time two years to all the drama and nonsense of Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky and the resulting nonsense. The timing was impeccable, too. The first chance the White House had to respond to this was Friday, which is considered a slow news day in Washington, and the day the Administration dumps unpleasant news into the hopper, in the hope it will be go away. This usually works, to the point that a lot of the crap at the Friday White House press briefing gets tossed out, and in this case, the White House pronouncement that impeachment was ridiculous was simply ignored.

I should say that the White House denial was basically ignored. I was interviewed at a campaign rally and fundraiser in Ohio, and when asked about Gingrich's comments I answered, "Well, I have to admit, it kind of makes me wonder, you know!", and, "The next time I see Newt Gingrich, I am going to bend over and let him kick my butt!"

Sunday morning I went on This Week and was interviewed by Sam Donaldson. I had met Donaldson any number of times before, and been interviewed by him once or twice. He was a smart man, but unapologetically liberal. Still, I could live with that. This was simply too juicy a story for him not to focus on Bill Clinton.

After the initial greetings and introductions, he got right into it. "Congressman, so far three generals have lost their jobs and the Pentagon is in a state of open war with the President of the United States. Whatever happened to the principle of civilian control of the military in this country?"

"Sam, that principle is obviously alive and well! It's been the generals who have left, not the President.", I replied.

"But they refused to obey the orders given to them.", he responded.

I nodded. "I asked an officer about that recently. He told me that Nuremberg proved that there are some orders you simply don't obey. 'I was just following orders' doesn't mean much when you shouldn't have been following those orders in the first place."

"Are you comparing the order to arrest you to the war crimes of the Nazis?", he asked incredulously.

"Hardly. Bill Clinton isn't a mass murderer and war criminal. He is simply a petty and venal man with too much power, and is trying desperately to cling to that power." That was a nice phrase and ought to be good for a repeat on the evening news. Nothing like bitch-slapping the President of the United States to get headlines.

Sam moved on to the next topic. "Congressman, several days ago your old adversary Newt Gingrich commented that you shouldn't have interfered with his impeachment efforts in 1998, and that you wouldn't be in this mess if you had allowed the impeachment proceedings to go forward. Care to comment?

I smiled. "Actually I do, on several levels. First and foremost, Newt Gingrich and I were never adversaries. Newt is a friend and has been for years. Back when I was first getting into politics, in 1989 and 1990, I met with Newt Gingrich and was impressed with his smarts and his desire to help the country. For years we worked together to do that. On occasion we had our differences, but only about tactics, never about our desire to do the right thing by this country, a country that we both love."

"As for the impeachment effort two years ago, I have to think that we both turned out to be correct. Newt thought that the nation would be better off without Bill Clinton as President, and I think that has been proven time after time. However, I still think that impeachment is not something to be done for political reasons. You get impeached for treason, bribery, and high crimes and misdemeanors, and a tacky affair with an intern doesn't rise to that standard. On the other hand, what President Clinton is doing now certainly does! In an effort to ruin my reputation and that of Governor Bush, and extend his de facto rule over the country for another four years, he has committed many high crimes and misdemeanors. He has divulged classified information, suppressed evidence of my innocence, ordered a sitting Congressman to be sent to prison without a trial, and plans to strip me of my American citizenship and deport me to a banana republic to stand trial in a kangaroo court! If those aren't high crimes and misdemeanors, what are?!"

Maybe some of that was a bit overblown, but it didn't matter. I knew Nicaragua would be up in arms about being called a 'banana republic' but nobody would care. They had broken off diplomatic relations with us, and they couldn't vote in the election anyway. The critical thing was to get the magic word impeachment back out there. This allowed me to make nice with the right wing of the party, show that I had learned the error of my ways, and still look dignified and principled to the moderates. Kiss Newt's ass, tie my name to that of George Bush, and ratchet up the 'Clinton Fatigue.'

After I left, Cokie Roberts chewed on a Gore campaign staffer who didn't quite distance his boss from Bill Clinton. He tried the 'where there is smoke there must be fire' defense, which really didn't sit all that well, since most of the smoke was circling the President and not me. Afterwards, in their Roundtable segment, which I watched on the monitor from the green room, the general consensus was that Bill Clinton had badly mishandled the entire situation.

Of special interest to me was a remark by George Will, given in his trademark lecturing cadence. "What I find curious is why anybody who knows Carl Buckman would ever think he would back down from this fight. Everybody knows about the Marines. There is an entire mythos about how they consider themselves elite assault troops able to take on any odds and triumph. What most people don't understand is that in the United States Army, paratroopers are their Marines. They consider themselves elite infantry. In combat they expect to be surrounded, outnumbered, outgunned, and to take heavy casualties - and they expect to win! Carl Buckman, by all accounts, was an excellent officer and emblematic of this belief. He doesn't know the meaning of quit and he doesn't know the meaning of surrender."

Mythos? Trust George to use a five dollar word!

Anyway, there it was, out in the open again, impeachment. I wouldn't have to say it again, unless asked. Bill Clinton began circling the wagons again, and the House Judiciary Committee began spouting off about hearings and the mechanism for a fresh trial. Realistically, there would be no impeachment. Slick Willie was the lamest of lame ducks. He had maybe six weeks until the election, after which he would be out of office ten weeks later. Nobody was going to the trouble of impeaching him. It would be like sentencing a man with terminal cancer to the electric chair. It would never happen.

What would happen, however, was that the Democratic Party would begin devouring itself from the inside out. Al Gore was going to have to distance himself from his boss, a tricky thing to manage under the best of circumstances. John Kerry kept trying to salvage a sinking ship. He began demanding dates and times for a debate with me, and George Bush's staff responded with a categorical refusal unless he publicly repudiated the Clinton-Gore strategy of sending me to prison on false charges. (George did have a debate with Al, in which he demolished Gore.) We were showing solidarity and teamwork while the Democrats were falling apart.

By the middle of October the polls were well ahead for the Governor. Even the mess with the USS Cole in Aden helped. In an awful way it pointed out Clinton's, and by extension Gore's, poor performance in foreign policy and defense. It was disgusting to watch Rove use the deaths to put Bush into office.

I was informed by my children that Stormy was housebroken, and I verified that with their mother. The last few weeks of the campaign became a family affair. The girls were old enough to take care of themselves, so Marilyn and Stormy joined me on the campaign trail, with the twins flying in on weekends. Marilyn was now comfortable enough to be able to do a quick introduction for me. She would go out on stage to applause and cheers, and introduce me as, "A man who has proven he is a hero to the nation, and a man who is my hero, Carl Buckman!" I would then come out, leading Stormy on a leash, and give my wife a hug and a kiss. She would step back and I would lift Stormy up onto a table or bench, if she couldn't make it herself. She was getting huge, and was a real publicity hound (no pun intended!) It was easy to break the ice with comments along the line of, 'It's a good thing I'm rich, because you wouldn't believe how much kibble we go through!' and 'If this politics thing doesn't work out, I'm going to buy a saddle and start working the carnie circuit!', while if she was acting up a little, I could simply say, 'I should have left you in the basement!' She was an extremely well behaved and calm dog, and could go through several minutes of intro remarks, at which point Marilyn or the girls would take her backstage. (One favorite remark: "If you're a Republican, she's just licking you, but if you're a Democrat, she's tasting you!")

By Tuesday, November 7, it seemed a foregone conclusion. The Governor was up by at least five points across the country. John Kerry would be heading back to his day job in the Senate, and Al Gore and Bill Clinton were about to get permanent vacations. It even looked like I was going to be re-elected in the Maryland Ninth. Fletcher Donaldson and a few other reporters had begun asking what I planned to do after being elected to the Vice-Presidency, as if it was already decided. I simply told them that nothing was assured until the election, but that if the Governor was elected, we would both make sure that the best possible candidate ran in the special election. I declined to name any names, but promised them that whoever was nominated would be an excellent candidate to carry on the work I had done for the citizens of the district.

That Tuesday night we had our usual bash at the Best Western. We stayed in an impromptu lounge we had created out of a conference room, with a bank of televisions and some tote boards to count electoral votes. Tonight was definitely a family affair, with the girls and the mutt in attendance, and Cheryl Dedrick and her husband were with us. If I was elected to both offices, we planned to announce her candidacy on Wednesday, but we wanted them there tonight.

By nine the Maryland Ninth was called, with a certain Carl Buckman winning by 15 points. You could hear the screaming from down the hall. I took the call from my opponent, who tried to get me to let him know who would replace me if George Bush won. He had already announced that he would run again in the special election in January. I thanked him but didn't tell him.

It was shortly after eleven when the networks began announcing that George had won. I didn't even catch it at first, since I was outside walking Stormy, while she sniffed everywhere trying to find the perfect spot to squat in the grass. I could hear some screaming from inside, but we had been getting that all night. Then some kid came racing out of the building and ran up to us, breathless. "Congressman! Congressman! You won, you won!"

I smiled at him and said, "I know I won, son. Calm down."

"No, you don't understand! Governor Bush won! Both NBC and CBS just called it! You won!"

"Huh!" I just stood there for a moment, as Stormy pooped in the shrubs. "I'll be damned. We won?"

"You won!" Another staffer ran up at that point and told us both the same thing.

"I'll be damned!" I looked down at the dog, now back by my side. "Well, Stormy, let's go see what kind of trouble I've gotten into now!"

Book Seven: The White House

Chapter 135: Inauguration

First things first. "Are you sure about this?", I asked.

"Yes, sir! All the networks have called it!" The two staffers started hustling me inside, with Stormy happily leading us on her leash.

A minute later I was in our campaign suite, with people alternately congratulating me and asking where I had been. Stormy jumped up on a couch with the girls and allowed herself to be fussed over. On the television Tom Brokaw was making a report that there were unconfirmed reports that Vice President Gore was calling George Bush to concede.

Which meant absolutely nothing. I had been through this once before, on my first go. Florida was so close a race that before the night was over, all the networks reversed their calls and ruled it too close to predict. Gore retracted his concession. For roughly a month we had dueling lawyers fighting over recounts and 'hanging chads' on the ballots, until George's brother Jeb, the governor of Florida, had his handpicked election boss declare George the winner, and the Republican Supreme Court confirmed the victory. George also lost the popular vote count, and managed to create a constitutional crisis along the way. It did not bode well for his future.

The Vice President doesn't talk during these events, although I did go out into the main room to thank everybody and say other wonderful bullshit. It's the night for the Presidential nominees to speak. Governor Bush did call me to tell me that Vice President Gore had called him to concede. The tipping point wasn't Florida but Pennsylvania, so Jeb Bush managed to keep his good name through this. We lost Maryland, which we had expected, but the race was tighter than I had expected, 52-48. I went to bed that night not at all certain that history wouldn't come back to haunt me, and that in the morning I would find that Al Gore had recanted.

I was wrong. When I woke up I was still the Vice President-Elect. It took a bit for it to sink in. I was going to be the Vice President! After all the nonsense with the election, we had won, and handily at that. I had been right with my strategy of going full bore after Clinton. Bush might not agree, since it was all about him, but I had seen what the other side of the coin could be, and it wouldn't have been pretty.

I think the thing that really stuck out as proof that we had won was that from about the time we climbed out of the sack the phone began ringing. Along with the usual congratulations, I was now getting all sorts of orders from various staffers about what I had to do. It really struck me that I was no longer my own man. I was going to spend most of the week making phone calls and preparing for the transition. Important supporters had to be called. We had to make the announcement about Cheryl. Most important, I had to get to George Bush to keep him from doing anything stupid.

Into all of this, while I was still working on my breakfast while wearing pants and a bathrobe, the Secret Service barged into my life. The Secret Service is mandated to provide security to the Presidential candidates, but it is only voluntary for Vice Presidential candidates. I was comfortable with my own arrangements, and refused the offer. Now that I was officially the future Vice President, they were in charge of our security. They were there bright and early, looking dreadfully serious and impossibly arrogant. The pros from Dover had arrived, and the farm team was to be sent packing. I knew it was going to happen, and prior to the election had called in my security people and made plans. Most would be sent off, but I figured that one or two would be kept around for a few days to transition the Secret Service in. I assured the managers that I would be happy to provide recommendations for either individuals or the firm as a whole; it was the least I could do.

I met my new lead agent that morning. Special Agent Jonathan Reading was disdainful at best, even though several of my people had been former Secret Service themselves. I wasn't using Wackenhut rent-a-cops to protect my family! They had all been high end Federal operatives at some point – FBI, Secret Service, U.S. Marshalls, Diplomatic Security, etc. He didn't care.

The Secret Service announced that my existing alarm system was to be ripped out and a new one put in. The fences and gates would be replaced. The security shack across the street would be replaced. The pool house would be converted to a security monitoring and response unit. This was all academic, anyway, since they would be moving me and my family to the Naval Observatory as soon as the Gores vacated it in January. I should probably sell the place, since it was totally unsuitable from a security standpoint and it wouldn't be possible to stay there after we took office. Mind you, he didn't ask; he ordered. I listened to this for a bit, and then nodded in understanding. I sat down at the bar in my kitchen and pointed at the seat next to mine, and then told Reading, "Please, have a seat."

"Congressman, I have a lot to do. The situation here is much too exposed and dangerous."

"Humor me, just have a seat."

Reading looked unhappy at my interruption of his plans, but took a seat next to me. "Yes, sir?"

"I just wanted to welcome you to my home. My home, is that understood? This isn't the White House. This isn't the Naval Observatory. This is my home. You do not come into my home and give me orders. You ask, and you ask a hell of a lot more politely than now. You do not order me around, and you sure as hell do not order my wife and children around. You don't even order my dog around. Is that clearly understood?" I kept a smile on my face, but my voice was icy cold.

By the look on his face, Special Agent Reading was not impressed. "Congressman Buckman, you don't understand the magnitude of what needs to be done. You'll need to cooperate, sir."

"Uh, huh." I shrugged. "Okay, have it your way. Get your supervisor on the phone, please."

"Excuse me?"

"Special Agent Reading, there is an unfortunate counterfeiting problem at this moment in Minot, North Dakota. You are going to solve that problem. If you force me to make that phone call, the counterfeiting problem will be in Nome, Alaska. Make a choice, Special Agent Reading."

"You can't do that, sir! You have no authority..."

I shrugged. "Back in a few minutes." I went into the bedroom, where Marilyn was in the shower. I grabbed my cell phone and called George Bush. I managed to get through, and asked, "George, I need you to do me a favor. Can you put your lead agent on the line?"

"What's up, Carl?"

"Nothing much, just a minor issue here on my security."

"Okay, whatever. Hold on a second."

About thirty seconds later a new voice came on the line. "Special Agent Wittimer speaking. How can I help you?"

"Special Agent, this is Carl Buckman. I don't know if we've met before, but I am sure that President-Elect Bush will vouch that I am who I say I am."

"Yes, sir, we've met, and the Governor told me it was you. How can I help you, sir?", he asked.

"It's a matter of the lead agent assigned to me and my family. Can you have your supervisor call me on this number, so I can discuss it personally?", I asked.

"Of course, sir. Can I ask what the problem is?"

"Just have your supervisor contact me. I'm sure you will find out."

I hung up and waited for a phone call. About two minutes later my cell phone rang. It was a supervisor type at the D.C. headquarters of the Secret Service. I explained my problem, and that Special Agent Reading was not going to be suitable, and in fact a posting elsewhere might be an excellent choice for him. I didn't make a demand, because I didn't need a reputation as an asshole with the people sworn to protect me, but the Secret Service didn't need to piss me off either. I was assured the problem would be settled shortly.

I didn't let Marilyn know what had happened, and after she got out of the shower, I went in and cleaned up, and then shaved. When I was out and dressed properly, I went back out to the kitchen. Special Agent Reading was no longer in sight. Instead, a much less arrogant Special Agent Ralph Jaworski introduced himself, and promised to work with me to make sure there wasn't any future unpleasantness in our relationship.

"Special Agent Jaworski, I would appreciate that. Would you care to see my home and give me your thoughts on the security situation?"

"Thank you, Congressman, that would be very nice."

Sometimes you need to smack the mule with a two-by-four to get him to pay attention.

Something was still nagging at me, and then I realized that I couldn't go to the Bahamas. Nicaragua still was screaming about demanding my extradition and still had an outstanding warrant issued on me through Interpol. Nobody really took it seriously, since political crimes were expressly excluded from Interpol's mandate, but they had it couched in terms of murder. We were in the unique position of swearing in a wanted felon as the Vice President! While I doubted anybody would do anything, could I chance it? I called Assistant Commissioner Javier and explained my problem. He almost dropped the phone while laughing, but he promised to take care of the problem, and the next day I received a phone call and a messengered note from the Bahamian Ambassador stating that the Bahamas would ignore the request from Nicaragua for my arrest. I got the impression that they did not need to have the 82nd Airborne drop in on their little island to free me if I was thrown in jail.

Not that that was about to happen. Before I called Javier, I had called Secretary of State Madeline Albright to see if she could do something about the idiotic warrant. She was sympathetic, but told me that President Clinton had tied her hands. As it was, he was leaving office under a massive cloud, because he had issued pardons to both Hawkins and Reinhart, who would probably be investigated for their part in leaking the Nicaraguan disaster to the press. There was nothing she could do. If I did get arrested outside of the country she wouldn't be able to help. She suggested I have Dick Cheney request it from the Nicaraugans when he took office.

I could just see that happening.

By the end of the week Marilyn and I were able to take a long weekend and head down to Hougomont. Special Agent Jaworski had taken his predecessor's fate to heart, and was a lot politer. I knew that there were going to be some changes, but I didn't have to put up with orders from an asshole. I stressed to Jaworski that once in the Bahamas, I would almost certainly be meeting with the Prime Minister, and that he needed to sort out security arrangements with the locals. I also gave him the name of Assistant Commissioner Javier, and suggested a call ahead of time would be a wise investment of his time. He was already aware of the issues with the Nicaraguan warrant.

My worries about George Bush doing something stupid were overblown. Dick Cheney wasn't about to let George do anything he hadn't already told him he was doing. I was a mistake that was not going to be repeated. Dick and Karl had a chokehold on the transition team, and on the cabinet and staff appointments that would be made. First and foremost, Dick was going to be Secretary of State. On my first run, Dick had been Veep, while Colin Powell had State. Now, since Powell was needed as both a sop to the moderate wing (like me) and because he was too prestigious for anything less, he was getting Defense. John Ashcroft, the former governor of Missouri and a staunch conservative, was getting Justice. Paul O'Neill, a Republican powerhouse and the head of Alcoa, was going to have Treasury, which I approved of; he was a moderate and a deficit hawk like me. As for the rest of the Cabinet, nobody cared.

For non-Cabinet positions, Paul Wolfowitz, a leading neo-conservative academic and former Deputy Secretary of State under George H.W. Bush, was going to get the CIA. Louis Freeh was still the Director of the FBI, but he wouldn't last; he had a lot of baggage from the Clinton years and Cheney was already looking for a hard core conservative. Condi Rice was slated to be the National Security Adviser, which wasn't a bad idea, actually. She was a black Republican woman, an unusual combination, and smart. Meanwhile Karl Rove would take a position in the White House as a senior counselor or some such.

Some of what was happening wasn't amusing to me. I was also wondering to what extent George would be listening to me once he was sworn in. I may have shot my bolt simply by staying in the running when the others wanted me to drop out. We'd have to see.

In the meantime, we had about two months before the January special election for my Congressional seat. I threw my support and campaign chest into Cheryl's corner, and she came out fighting. Rob Hollister had sworn he was going to run against whoever we nominated, but he didn't have much money and we had whipped him soundly. The Democrats tried bringing in some fresh money, including from the national committee, but the RNC matched it. Every poll we ran showed Cheryl beating him. I even had George come up and we did a joint campaign tour for her, including a stop at the Westminster Diner, where we smiled for the camera with Nick Papandreas and his family. For a small town Greek immigrant running a diner, having the President-Elect and the Vice President-Elect show up was very big news. We ended up on the local and national news that night.

During Orientation Week I pulled out all the stops in a quid pro quo with John Boehner, and we managed to get him voted in as the new Whip. The Republican Party had pulled in another half dozen seats in the House, although the Senate was tied 50-50, so Bush would have a solid House to back him up. I suspected one of my jobs was to be the quiet liaison to Congress and the tie-breaker in the Senate.

Charlie was still out to sea through Christmas and New Year, but we expected him home any day now. He had been in about a year and a half now and had been promoted to PFC, Private First Class. I was looking forward to seeing him again, and asking him how he liked it. What I was really hoping was that he had done some growing up and was figuring out what he wanted to do with his life. If what he wanted was to stay in the Marines, fine, I would shut up and let him do so. He was an adult. If he had decided to do something else, maybe involving going back to school after his hitch was up, that would be fine, too. I had always believed that, patriotism and family history aside, he had joined up because he simply didn't have anything better to do.

In the back of my mind, however, I was terrified by what was coming down the pike. Before the year would be out, a practically unknown Islamic terrorist group was going to declare bloody war on America. George Bush would promptly use that as an excuse to get us into two disastrous wars, causing tens of thousands of American deaths and casualties. Charlie would be smack in the middle of it, unless I could change history.

Could I change history? I just didn't know. Some things had changed, but the overall course of human history seemed to be moving in the same general path. Reading science fiction gave you the 'butterfly effect', where the wafting of a butterfly's wings, simply by moving a few air currents, could affect something bigger, which could spiral out of control until everything was different. That hadn't happened, however. I had wafted an awful lot of air currents since 1968, but the world was for all practical purposes the same. It was as if I hadn't done something, somebody else would have anyway. Did that mean I would have no chance to change future history?

Up until now I really hadn't tried. How would I? I knew the space shuttle would blow up, but how could I stop it? Call it in? To whom? What proof would I have? And after it happened, everybody would want to know how I knew. What would I tell them? It was simply impossible!

I just didn't know what I could do to prevent the coming catastrophe.

I did have a nice chance to sit down with my son about a week before the Inauguration, and I asked him about his plans. His ship had come in and he was taking two weeks leave with us. Charlie had done some growing up, at least to the extent he didn't give me an automatic smartass answer. Instead he simply smiled and shook his head. "I don't know yet, Dad." I just nodded. I did notice that the Corps had knocked some of the smart ass out of him. He was more mature than when he went in. Maturity didn't extend all that far, though. On his right arm he was now sporting a large globe-and-anchor Marine Corps tattoo. When I told him I hoped it hurt, he just grinned and said, "It's not too bad when you've been drinking!"

The Inauguration was being held, by law, on January 20th, a Saturday. I had been to the 1996 Inauguration, but I had a bout of the flu the day of the '92 festivities. The day is supposed to be a joyous celebration of the wonders of democracy, but from what I could tell, what it really was was a major pain in the ass! From the crack of dawn onward there are breakfasts and prayer ceremonies and associated horseshit. Then, in the late morning, would be the Inauguration itself. We would have various speakers and music, Billy Graham would give the invocation, and then I would get sworn in first, maybe about 11:30 in the morning. After that there would be some more fooling around, and then at noon George would be sworn in. He would give a speech, we'd have some more fun and games, and then there would be a parade.

The biggest problem would be that it was outside in January! We had an excellent chance of freezing our asses off. Presidents have died doing this shit! Why they couldn't do this in the Rotunda of the Capitol was beyond me.

All day long, until the Inaugural Balls in the evening, you had all sorts of pomp and ceremony around the city to attend. Then you had to go to the Balls – plural. There were eight of them, all black-tie, spread around Washington, and you had to make an appearance at each and every one of them. It wasn't so much a celebration of the Inauguration as a celebration of exhaustion! The balls started at 7:00 PM, and ran until well after midnight. It was expected that we would show up at one of them, say something nice, have a dance, and try to eat something and have a drink. We had to be done and to the next one inside a half hour.

We had a fair number of complimentary tickets given to us. Upwards of 50,000 guests would be at the various balls, the cost of which was fronted by various millionaires and lobbying groups. The Maryland Ball was being held in the D.C. Armory, a cavernous building with seating for 9,000. Cheryl and her husband would be there, along with my (her) entire Congressional staff. Ohio, John Boehner's home state, was having its ball in the Washington Convention Center, and he would have the Whip's staff there.

We also invited Suzie and her husband, and Marilyn's parents. They would stay at the Armory, and not travel around with us. The twins opted to stay with our families and not travel everywhere with us. The idea of Big Bob and Harriet at a black tie affair was so ludicrous that I spent weeks teasing Marilyn about it. Marilyn would be wearing a designer gown by Oscar de la Renta. She wasn't really a designer gown sort of lady, but off the rack at some boutique wouldn't cut it. I had no idea what Harriet would be wearing, but I suspected it would be large and ugly. Suzie and the twins opted for some very expensive boutiques – I packed them and Marilyn off to 5th Avenue in New York for an appointment with a professional that Marty dug up. I didn't want to know what it would cost me. Other guests included Tusker and Tessa, Jake Senior and Jake Junior and their wives, Missy Talmadge, Dave Marquardt and his wife, and a few other people, like the Gates and the Dells. Any of my other tickets I gave out to campaign donors and supporters on the orders of Karl Rove. I made sure to invite the Republican Committee honchos from Maryland – always remember to dance with the one that brought you!

On the plus side, Charlie was going to attend. His mother and I assigned him as the escort to his sisters, and I was able to rush order some dress blues for him. I had to admit, the Marines really knew how to do a uniform! Of all the services, theirs was the best, with blue, red, and gold. Then I reminded Charlie that when he met the new President he was a serving Marine, and he would be well advised to stand tall and salute! All that stuff he was taught in basic about military protocol and courtesy? Now would be a real good time to review it!

The inauguration was as miserable as I could imagine it to be. It was freezing cold and rainy. Yes, the stage we were on was covered and had hidden heaters, but it was just miserable. I pitied the poor bastards who had to march in this mess. Afterwards it was just a matter of hurry up and wait. Marilyn and I did get to see our families, even if just briefly, and we worked it so that we finished our tour of the balls at the D.C. Armory, and rushed through on the way to get there. I was exhausted, and Marilyn actually fell asleep leaning against me. A picture of her snoring on my shoulder, mouth wide open, made it into the newspapers the next day.

I was sorry that we were both so tired by the end of the day. Marilyn's evening gown sort of wafted over her curves and had a very pleasing cut to the neckline that really highlighted her bust. It was a shade of red, her favorite color, that did well with her coloring and brown hair (with highlights covering the gray – I had teased her on that earlier.) Marilyn still had a nice hourglass figure, although she was complaining it was getting a lot harder to keep. With me being away so much during the campaign, it became very easy for her to 'forget' to exercise in the morning. Still, when she came out of the bedroom in her gown I made the appropriate wolf whistle. It was too bad that she'd never wear it again. It would probably end up being donated to the Smithsonian.

Marilyn smiled and asked, "So you like it?"

"You bet!" I ran a hand across her back and down to her rump. I could tell she had a bra on, but I suspected pantyhose were covering her panties.

"What are you up to?", she asked suspiciously.

"Well, you know, as the Vice President, I need to be able to perform the duties of the President in an instant. As the wife of the Vice President, you should be able to perform your wifely duties in an instant!" I waggled my eyebrows at her and patted her rump. "Nothing should get in the way, if you know what I mean."

Marilyn snorted and rolled her eyes. "Oh, give me a break!" Then she looked at me and gave me a sly grin. "Does the Vice President's wife have to step in when the First Lady can't perform her duties? Maybe I should talk to Laura about that."

"Hmmm ... I never thought about that. Maybe I should check with Bill Clinton. Maybe there's an intern program available."

"Yuck!"

"I think the Vice President gets interns, too."

That earned me a finger wagging and several "You can behave!" comments.

The day after the Inauguration Bush ordered Cheney to take care of the warrant on me. This was handled in Dick's signature subtle style – he had the Treasury Department put a hold on all Nicaraguan funds in American banks. They squawked loudly and he had a spokesman publicly tell them at a press conference that they were acting too big for their britches and that if they wanted their money back to cancel the warrant. Nowhere did he require that I be exonerated. It was pure power, might makes right, behave or get spanked. They behaved, but sure didn't like it. I decided I wouldn't be making any formal state visits to either Honduras or Nicaragua, no matter what Cheney or Bush wanted.

After the Inauguration Marilyn and I took several days down at Hougomont. Now that I was officially the Vice President we couldn't take our G-IV down, we had to fly in a government plane. What kind of government plane, you ask? We took Air Force Two, an almost brand new Boeing 757. This is a plane that normally can carry about 200 passengers and was now decked out in sybaritic luxury for less than 50. I told Marilyn that we'd need to upgrade when I left the government. Air Force Two is actually just a designation that the Veep is on board. It could be anything from a puddle jumper up to the Presidential 747, if he isn't on board. If the runway in Nassau wasn't long enough they would have sent us in a government C-20, another G-IV.

Waiting for us at the airport was a delegation from the embassy and another from Government House. We were invited to several events, including a formal dinner with the Prime Minister. Meanwhile the press was there to take photos of the billionaire politician who had bought a Vice Presidency (in the words of the New York Times, if they only knew how true that was!) and was now beginning a four year vacation paid for by American taxpayers (Fox News). Some days you just can't win! I needed to get a handle on this quickly, and let everybody know that my future vacations were not state functions!

Another surprise was awaiting us when we got to Hougomont. Aside from how the Secret Service had taken over the security building on the grounds, now we had a Coast Guard cutter sailing around a mile or two off the beach! I could almost feel the eyes scanning us from binoculars. It was probably a good thing they were around, though, since if I looked down the beach in either direction I could see photographers at the edge of our property line. I was really at the center of a media frenzy now, and Marilyn and I needed to get used to it.

This Vice President thing was going to take some getting used to.

Chapter 136: Waiting

February to September, 2001

George Bush had a serious agenda to remodel the country and the government, and it became very obvious at an early stage. He planned to make some wholesale changes in the way things were done.

Well, that is probably an overstatement. What was much more accurate was that George's backers had very serious plans, and George was along for the ride. To what extent he knew that he was overmatched was questionable. From what I could see working with the man, he was quite possibly the dumbest President we had suffered under since Warren Harding! I might even have to go back to some of the idiots who were in charge of the country before the Civil War to find a match. Certainly he had no native talent for management.

It was much more accurate to say that he paid the greatest heed to the last fellow who talked to him. It became a gigantic wrestling match to become that person. His instincts were conservative, and that was fine, but he let his deputies and department heads craft his agenda, not the other way around. They would make plans and then talk him into them. Cheney and Rove were the leaders of this group, and it was all the moderates could do to try and hold their own.

Taxes? They needed to be lowered, drastically! He envisioned tax cuts for all eight years of his Presidency, or at least the Wall Street types envisioned them for him. We had a bunch of them around. And loopholes! We needed more loopholes!

The military? That needed to be strengthened, really grown! So said the defense contractors who wanted to sell their latest goodies, and the Pentagon generals and admirals who wanted to buy them.

Medicare? For a guy who had pushed against entitlements, he was very much in favor of increasing benefits that mostly benefited the insurance companies and the drug companies.

Compassionate conservatism? Nobody really understood it, but it seemed that it involved bringing in the hard right fundamentalist branch of the Christian churches. They set up a faith-based initiatives group in the West Wing to do something to liaison with church-run charities, and Ashcroft began loading up the Justice Department with lawyers who graduated from Liberty University and other Bible colleges.

Foreign policy? Cheney and Wolfowitz and a shitload of chickenhawks were champing at the bit to start a new war in the Middle East. They believed that the first President Bush had screwed up by not conquering Iraq when he had the chance. Now they envisioned doing it right, in a new war, one which would bring freedom and democracy to the country, and from there spread to the surrounding nations. It would be quick and easy and profitable to boot! In this they were happily aided by George himself, who considered his father's quite reasoned ending of the Gulf War as a defeat. George would solve the problem his father had let fester.

The Cabinet was not a happy place. It wasn't quite open war, but it came close. On the right you had an axis based on Cheney, Wolfowitz, and Ashcroft, all of them full of grand plans to reform America and the world. We were a Christian nation with Christian values and we should be damn well giving those values to the rest of the planet, whether the rest of the planet wanted them or not! Wall Street was to be allowed the proper level of freedom to bring the benefits of American style capitalism first to Main Street, and then to the rest of the world. On the other side of the equation were the moderates, those with ties to the liberal or moderate wing of the party. The main axis on this side was O'Neill, Powell, and myself, and I wondered how long that would last.

The mood of the Republican Party was still swinging rightward, and moderates were the new liberals, something to be branded as un-American. As Whip I had been able to keep many of the Congressional idiots muzzled and out of power, but that was changing. Since the Republicans retained control of the House in the last elections, some of the crazies had more seniority and had moved up in their committees and subcommittees. With longevity grew power, and John Boehner was not being as successful at keeping them from getting out of hand. In Congress the bottom line was that if the President wanted to do something crazy, he had a ready audience and an eager band of helpers.

Dick Cheney seemed to spend almost as much time at the White House as he did at Foggy Bottom, the neighborhood that was home to the State Department. In this he was aided by his right hand man, Lewis 'Scooter' Libby, who he had gotten confirmed as his Deputy Secretary of State. Scooter was Dick's chief henchman, and his job was to run the rest of the world while Dick ran George Bush. I had my own network of staffers and assistants to help me in this. I had brought Frank Stouffer and Carter Braxton in as part of my team, as Chief of Staff and Communications Director, with Mindy McIlroy Geisinger as my Personal Assistant, and had commandeered Matt Scully as well. Meanwhile, Marty Adrianopolis was now over at the American Renaissance Initiative, and he had funneled some staffers from there to me. These were all people with ties to the moderate side and to me, and not so much to George or Dick or Karl.

The one thing Dick couldn't do was to bar me from meeting with the President. If Cheney met with Bush, I would manage to meet with him next. I might not be able to get George to see reason on things (he really was stupid, with a very simplistic view of the world) but sometimes I could tone down his actions or delay them. For instance, almost immediately after taking office George Bush began talking about a 10% cut in all taxes across the board, and this was just to be the start of a multi-year effort to drastically cut taxes. Almost immediately this was told to Grover Norquist, who began promoting it heavily in Congress. Treasury, the Office of Management and Budget, and I were aghast at what this would do to revenues and the deficit! The best we could come up with was a reduction in the first year to a 5% cut.

It became very clear the dangers we were facing at our first meeting of the National Security Council in early February. By law this is supposed to be the most senior cabinet members and other critical people, a 'mini-cabinet' to contemplate war and peace. Besides the President and the Vice President, you had the Secretaries of State, Defense, and Treasury, the National Security Adviser, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the head of the CIA. Along with these mandatory members, you also had 'invited' members who almost always showed up, like the President's Chief of Staff and the Attorney General.

One of the biggest changes in American politics became obvious at the Cabinet level, and that was the utter decline of the value of being a military veteran. A generation before the majority of the male members of the Cabinet and virtually all of the National Security Council would have seen some form of military service, even if it had only been running the motor pool at Fort Dix. Now it was almost unheard of. In the entire cabinet, at least from what I could determine, the only veterans were Colin Powell, Tony Principi at Veterans Affairs, and me. Tommy Thompson and George Bush had both been in either the Reserves or the National Guard, and they had worked their asses off in order to avoid actually having to serve. The National Security Council was just as bad.

That is not to say that these were bad people. Just because you wore a uniform at some point in the past, that didn't make you some kind of saint or an expert on all matters military. I was a pretty good company level commander and could have probably handled a battalion without too many problems. That did not make me the next Patton! However, it does give you a feeling for what will be required and what should be considered in any discussion of the use of military force.

The meetings of the National Security Council are supposed to be run by the President, with questions being asked of and instructions being given to the other participants. I raised an eyebrow at Colin Powell when as soon as George Bush called the meeting to order he turned it over to the Secretary of State. Dick Cheney opined on the problems we were having with Saddam Hussein and the Iraqis (basically, they weren't doing what we wanted them to do, which was to turn over Saddam Hussein to us for a nice, clean hanging), and then he turned it over to the head of the Central Intelligence Agency, Paul Wolfowitz.

Wolfowitz then began to recite the issues that we were discovering through our intelligence and surveillance of Iraq. I began taking a few notes. They were routinely thumbing their noses at us and testing the limits of the no-fly zones we had created after the Gulf War. There was an active program to develop a nuclear bomb. They already had chemical weapons. They were hiring Russian scientists to develop biological weapons. They were developing missiles capable of carrying these warheads, not just to Israel, but farther, to Europe. They were in discussions with terrorist groups in Lebanon and North Africa. The bottom line was that we needed to strongly consider some form of stronger response to their aggression.

There was no discussion because Cheney immediately turned the meeting over to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, an Air Force General named Meyers, who had replaced Shelton when he had quit during the nonsense with me in the election. General Meyers promptly reported that he agreed with everything Director Wolfowitz had said, and that it was imperative that we begin preparing a variety of responses to Iraqi aggression. George Bush, on cue, ordered General Meyers to begin developing possible plans.

I cleared my throat, drawing attention to myself. "Excuse me, but I have a few questions."

Before the President could respond, Cheney said, "Carl, this is only a preliminary investigation into these matters for the sake of the President."

"Regardless, I still have some questions, and the President might be interested in hearing those answers." I looked over at George Bush. "Mister President?"

"Go ahead, Carl. Let's hear some questions and answers.", he replied, amused at my trumping Cheney.

"Thank you, Mister President." I turned my head to Wolfowitz. "Mister Director, You claim the Iraqis are developing chemical weapons. They already have them. Gulf War Syndrome was a consequence of low level exposure to them. What has changed to warrant any changes on our part?"

That was the start. I also pushed on details about his other claims. What proof did he have for the nuclear bomb program? Where were the biologicals being developed? Why would an avowed secularist dictator like Hussein want to have anything to do with the terrorist groups Hizbollah or Hamas, which were primarily supported by the Iraqi's mortal enemy, the Iranians? Wolfowitz blustered ferociously about all the classified information the CIA was developing, none of which, of course, could be given in detail to us. I simply nodded.

Then I turned to General Meyers. "General, you must have provided the Director with the information about the attempted violations of the no-fly zone and the other provocations. We've been living with that for the last ten years. Is there anything different now than before? We've been containing these idiots just fine. Why stop?"

To his credit, General Meyers didn't bluster and fulminate. Still, his responses were that Hussein seemed to be increasing the tempo of his provocations and that we were using a lot of resources to contain him. Worst of all, ever since the Gulf War, some of these guys thought combat was a video game.

I looked over at George Bush and shook my head. "Mister President, I have to tell you that this is very disturbing. I can see no good reason why we should go to war, which is what the Secretary and the Director and the Chairman want. Pardon my French, but Saddam Hussein is an asshole, not a threat, and we simply can't go around killing assholes just because they are assholes. We will run out of bullets before we run out of assholes!" Cheney looked furious at this, but Condoleeza Rice looked amused. Powell simply looked thoughtful.

Bush nodded and held up a hand to forestall any responses. "Fair enough, Carl." To Wolfowitz he ordered, "Paul, you need to get a lot more information before we can continue in this direction."

After that we went on to other topics and areas of the globe. Later, I invited myself into the Oval Office and sat down with President Bush. "George, I won't deny that I have my differences with some of these guys, but this is more than that. We're not just talking about money. This isn't about taxes or deficits or Wall Street. This is about sending young men and women to their deaths. Some of these guys think it's going to be just like ten years ago, cheap and easy. That was a onetime thing, a once in a thousand years event. Real war is a lot messier, and it is never quick and easy. I am begging you, go slow on this."

"Carl, I appreciate your thoughts. It is still too soon to know what we need to do. If I do have to send our troops in, I won't do it lightly."

I thanked him and left. I was not reassured. The idea of avenging his father's 'defeat' rankled the man. Realistically, the Saudis would never have allowed us to go to Baghdad and depose Hussein. On the plus side, almost immediately afterwards, I was asked to a meeting with Colin Powell, who basically promised to keep me completely up to date on whatever Cheney and Wolfowitz and Meyers were up to. He was as concerned as I was.

A couple of months later we had a similar meeting, but to this one I made an invitation and brought in Richard Clarke, the Counter-Terrorism Adviser to the National Security Adviser. He put together a dog and pony show on what both he and I felt was a much more serious threat, Islamic fundamentalist terrorism. He mentioned Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda specifically, along with several other groups. The only thing that Bush and Cheney wanted to know was the kind of contacts they had with the Iraqis. Clarke gave them a funny look and glanced over at me, then said, "I'm sure the Iraqis are keeping track of them, simply because Al Qaeda wants to kill Saddam Hussein. Other than that, they have no involvement with them."

"What about the Iranians? Are they working for the Iranians?", asked Wolfowitz.

"Uh, bin Laden is Sunni and the Iranians are Shiites. They wouldn't be working together. More like they'd be targeting each other."

Nobody paid him any attention after that. I was astonished that these geniuses didn't even know the religions of the people they were planning to invade. It didn't matter to them. We would invade in another lightning campaign, destroying the Iraqi Army in a matter of days, roll into Baghdad, occupy the palace, and capture Hussein. It might take two weeks, tops. The locals, elated after years of oppression under the boot heel of the dictator (I heard that phrase used) would rise up and welcome us with open arms. Within a matter of months there would be free elections and our hand-picked candidates would take over, and in their gratitude, would allow American oil companies first crack at all that Iraqi oil. It might cost us a few hundred billion, but the oil would pay for it. Even better, once all their neighbors saw democracy taking hold, they would all rise up and overthrow their governments, too (Syria, Iran, etc.) It would be the beginning of democracy in the Arab world!

In hindsight this was as big a blunder as Viet Nam had been. The 'boot heel of the dictator' was the only thing keeping everybody from killing each other! They rose up and promptly wanted us to get lost while they went about a delightful little civil war. There were no oil revenues, since Hussein hadn't invested penny one in the infrastructure, so it was falling down around his ears, and everybody thought blowing up their enemy's wells and refineries was a good idea. Meanwhile we were stuck there about ten years and spent at least $2 trillion on this disaster, while getting tens of thousands of troops killed and maimed. Meanwhile, none of the neighbors rose up, and what revolts did occur during the 'Arab Spring' had nothing to do with Iraq. At the same time, we wasted our best shot at stabilizing Afghanistan, and wasted another $2 trillion over there.

The usual response to my bringing up these unpleasant questions was that Cheney would maneuver me out of the country. Not to important places, but there are a lot of rinky-dink shitholes where the Vice Prime Minister dies and the American Vice President needs to make a formal visit for a state funeral. There are also many facts that need finding in deepest and darkest Africa. As far as I could determine, the most important fact I needed to find was the location of the 'This way out of Africa' sign! This usually would tie me up for a week or so, while Cheney and Wolfowitz would undo whatever damage I had done in their campaign to go to war in the Middle East.

It only got worse. We had another meeting in July, where I brought Clarke in again, to discuss the latest intelligence on Al Qaeda. Everything I had been hearing that spring and summer indicated that something was in the works. There was talk of 'chatter', emails and cell phone calls from strange people to even stranger people. Something was going to happen. I asked Clarke what he thought it was, and then asked him about various scenarios straight out of Tom Clancy novels. Two days after the July meeting, the counter-terrorism office for the National Security Adviser was eliminated as being duplicative of efforts at CIA. Richard Clarke had been fired.

On the plus side, George Bush was still talking to me and listening, to the extent that he listened to anybody not telling him things he didn't want to hear. He had been cool after Clinton tried to land me in the jackpot with the release of my classified records. After the election, however, I called George and asked for the account number for the third $5 million payoff, and he brightened right up again. I made the last installment the afternoon of the Inauguration. As I told him, my word and my deals meant a lot to me.

Surprisingly, the one area I ended up supporting George was in education. He was pushing his No Child Left Behind Act, a major overhaul of the way schools were funded and graded. This was a massive bill, and it encompassed some major changes. I knew that the bill was not perfect, and that it had any number of flaws in it, but the way America did public education was deeply broken. If the definition of madness was to do the same thing over and over, and to expect a different result, then the way the U.S. did education was madness.

Personally, I thought one of the biggest improvements would be to cut the unions down to size. As it stood, the teachers' unions had no interest in improving education and only an interest in getting more money for teachers and the unions. They coated it all with a fine layer of sweetness and light. This was actually one of the big areas where Marilyn and I argued. She had gone through the process, getting a bachelor's and a master's in education, and she had bought their bullshit hook, line, and sinker. It was one of those areas we agreed to disagree.

Surprisingly, George used one of our discussions in the major speech he gave to introduce the bill. I had talked to him about breaking the unions and the stranglehold they had on the system.

"We have a system where math teachers can't do algebra, where English teachers can't parse a sentence, and where chemistry teachers aren't qualified to work in a laboratory, but they are teachers because they have a degree in education. Meanwhile, Vice President Buckman, who has a doctorate in applied mathematics, and is qualified to teach half a dozen subjects at the college level, is unqualified to teach in our high schools, because he doesn't have a degree in education! This is a deeply flawed system."

To a certain extent this threw me into the fire, which undoubtedly pleased Dick Cheney, but I didn't care. It was a subject I could speak to, and did so on several occasions.

It wasn't just foreign affairs that had me in hot water with some of the others in the White House. To be fair, a chunk of it was my own fault; I should have known better than to pick a fight. It was my general disdain with the hard core right wingers running loose. They weren't all in the government, either. Rush Limbaugh had been running and gunning for me ever since I had begun to make a national name for myself. All through the short list period prior to my selection as Bush's running mate he had been complaining I wasn't Republican enough, meaning conservative enough.

Two events occurred which got me in hot water with the White House. First, the tech bubble had burst, costing millions of people billions of dollars. Well, not all of us. Most of my dough was tied up with the Buckman Group, which had done all right, and not because I was issuing warnings to them sub rosa. In late April Fortune ran a cover article titled 'RED TEAM: How The Tech Titan Profited From The Tech Collapse.' The picture was a group of four men and women, all employees of the Buckman Group.

Jake Eisenstein Jr. was still running the Buckman Group. His father had retired and was living a life of luxury in Florida. Missy Talmadge had remarried and was semi-retired. Junior was really the only one left of the old gang, but he was a real force to be reckoned with on Wall Street. He had learned a lot from the collapse of the market back in '87, and had formally created a group of contrarians that called themselves the Red Team. They were a bit flashy and flamboyant, like young guns out to make it big. They studied markets and analyzed all sorts of things and developed trading strategies for when things fell apart. This was all a takeoff on my Red Light and Green Light plans from 1987, which I had created to help gloss over the fact that I knew what was going to happen. As a result, they had been able to keep the firm from losing very much when things headed south, and were able to make it all up and more so with subsequent hedges and short sales. Most of the article was on the members of the Red Team, but there was a sizable side story on Jake and he talked about me and politics. Jake was a bit more conservative than me, but he basically lauded me and ran down the Administration's economic policies. Thank you, Jake!

I got a fair bit of grief over this, but it wasn't as bad as what happened next. The second problem was even closer to home. It started when WBAL, one of the Baltimore television stations, was out at Hereford High filming a lacrosse game with Perry Hall, in May. The twins were there, of course, along with the rest of the varsity cheerleading team. At some point they decided to shoot some footage of the cheerleaders (pretty girls in short skirts, sounds like a winner to me!) and all the girls eagerly crowded around. They were teenage girls and being on television was exciting! For whatever reason, the interviewer asked them if they had summer jobs lined up. A few of the girls said they were working in local stores or for their family businesses or babysitting. Holly and Molly decided to goof off. Holly replied, "Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays I sell drugs and my sister turns tricks."

Molly chimed in and added, "Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturdays we switch off."

Holly finished with, "Sunday is a day of rest!"

Then, with all of their buddies laughing hysterically, they all ran back over to the sidelines. At that point, one of the editors back at the station figured out that it wasn't just a bunch of ditzy cheerleaders fooling around. No, it was the twin daughters of the Vice President of the United States who were goofing off! They made the top of the local news that night. The Baltimore Sun picked it up and put it below the fold on page 3 in the morning. At that point it was loose in the world!

I learned about it when Frank Stouffer ran into my office that next day around noon. "Boss! You have to see this! Turn on your television!"

"Frank, what's going on?"

"Turn on the television!" He grabbed the remote and flipped it to CNN, which was finishing a segment on my daughters joking about selling drugs and becoming prostitutes.

"What in the hell?", I asked him.

"Were Holly and Molly on television yesterday?", he asked.

I shrugged in ignorance. "No idea. If they were, I don't know how. I was here last night. Marilyn was at home with the twins."

"You'd better make a call!"

I shrugged again and called Marilyn. "Where are the girls?", I asked.

"At school. Where else would they be now?", she replied.

"Were they on television yesterday?"

"Television? Why? What's going on?"

"That's what I'm trying to find out. Did you watch the local news last night?", I asked.

"No, I missed it getting dinner ready. By the way, are you coming home tonight?"

I glanced over at Frank, and an equally agitated Carter, who had just come in. "I think so. I think I am coming home tonight. Make sure the girls are there."

What's going on?", she asked.

"I'll tell you later."

"Okay. I love you."

"I love you, too." I hung up. I looked over at the other two. "So, want to tell me what is going on?"

They looked at each other nervously, and then Frank said, "You're going to need to see it for yourself, Mister Vice President."

About twenty minutes later CNN's Headline News rolled around with a repeat of the report. They had the clip from WBAL, cut down to just the last few questions, and there were the twins proclaiming how they were going to work as drug dealers and prostitutes over the summer. It would have been hilarious if it weren't for the fact that upon entering the White House it was required that you check your sense of humor at the front door. I just rolled my eyes and tried to keep from smiling.

On cue, the phone rang. It was Ari Fleischer, the White House Press Secretary. He was on his way over. I was to be ready to explain this.

I looked at the other two. "Okay, back to work. Ari is coming over. You don't need to be involved. Just let the Secret Service know I'll be traveling to my home tonight, and not the Naval Observatory. Thanks."

Ari Fleischer barged in as they were leaving. "Mister Vice President, what have your daughters done!?"

"Ari, you know as much as I do. I thought kids were off limits to the press?"

"Nothing is off limits, you should know that! Your daughters are going to sell drugs and turn tricks? This is a disaster!", he cried.

"Ari, how is this any more of a disaster then when Bush's daughters got picked up for underage drinking a few days ago? I don't recall the end of the republic occurring when that happened?", I asked him.

'They didn't do it on national television!"

Just then Karl Rove stormed in, with a full head of steam. "What the hell are your fucking daughters up to now!?", he demanded.

I fixed him with a glare. "Watch your mouth, Karl. Those are my daughters you're talking about."

"Screw you, Buckman! We just buried the problems with Jenna and Barbara and you do this? Have you lost your mind?!" He never bothered to give me a chance to talk, but turned to Fleischer and said, "You'll need to put out a statement, something about how the Vice President regrets the statement his daughters made and how he understands the significance of the drug problem in this country..."

"Don't forget the prostitution.", I chimed in.

"This isn't funny, Buckman! Why don't you just shut the hell up?!" I contemplated tossing his fat ass out the door for a second. Rove just turned back to Ari and said, "Yeah, and the prostitution problem. Add in something about how the Vice President apologizes for his daughters' behavior and youthful indiscretion and is counseling them."

Ari looked over at me and I simply shook my head. "Forget it, Ari. Don't bother. I am not throwing my daughters under a bus so that George Bush's daughters look good in comparison. Forget it."

Karl said, "Screw you, Buckman! Ari, write the damn release!"

I stood up and pointed towards the door. "Karl, you can leave under your own power or get thrown out head first, your choice. Ari, I'll see you at the press briefing in the morning. I think I'm going home to talk to the dope dealers and flesh peddlers in the house. You put out a release like what he wants and I will publicly repudiate it tomorrow morning. See how well that goes over."

I pushed past the pair of them into the outer office and picked up the Secret Service agent assigned to me. Rove kept following me and ordering me to return and do as I was told. It was quite the spectacle going through the West Wing. Finally I had enough and I turned to him. "Karl, if you don't settle down I will deck you here and now. I'd love to read Ari's press release for that!"

The Special Agent stepped in front of Rove and said, "Sir, I have to ask you to step back."

"Get out of my way!", Karl blustered.

"Sir, if you do not step back I will be forced to detain you."

He turned to face me and said, "Buckman, this isn't over!", and then stormed off.

"Thank you.", I said to the agent, and then we continued on. We took a limo over to the Naval Observatory, and then took Marine Two home to Hereford.

I came in to find Marilyn knitting in the living room. Holly and Molly were sitting on the couch looking nervously at me. Marilyn seemed quite a bit calmer. "You're home early.", she commented.

"I figured democracy had taken enough of my soul for the day, and it was time to go home to find out about what I had been missing. It seems as if we've had all sorts of fun in the last day or so." I dropped my briefcase on the floor and loosened my tie, and sat down. Stormy promptly jumped into my lap and began slobbering all over my face. After a minute of this I pushed her away and looked over at my daughters. "Well, who wants to start?"

"Start?", asked Molly weakly.

"Yes, start. You know, start telling me about your drug dealing and prostitution. It's Wednesday, so which is it for you?"

At that both of them started protesting their innocence and how they didn't realize the cameras were going and how they weren't into drugs or prostitution and how it wasn't their fault but somebody else's. Yadda, yadda, yadda! I looked over at their mother and rolled my eyes throughout all this; she covered her mouth with her hands and stifled the laughter.

After five minutes, by which time they were on their third rendition, I made the time-out sign and said, "Enough already! Quiet!"

"Dad, I mean, it just...", continued Holly.

"QUIET! That means you! I watched it on television today at the White House. You were the one who started this..." I turned to Molly. " ... and you were the one who went along with her. You are both guilty! Now, I have to clean this up. The White House would like to see me offer you two up on an altar for human sacrifice. I almost agree with them!"

"Daddy!", they both squealed.

"QUIET! Now, for once in your lives I want you to listen to me! Reporters are not your friends! The cameras and the microphones are always on! From now on I want you two to stay away from reporters, like FOREVER! Start practicing the fine art of keeping your mouths SHUT! Are we clear on that?!", I said.

"Daddy!"

"ARE WE CLEAR ON THAT?!", I thundered.

"Yes, sir.", they replied, much more meekly.

"I let you two get away with a lot, but that is going to change. You have no idea how much trouble I am in over this idiocy. You two are staying home tonight to watch the news with me, all night if we have to. That is not open for discussion, by the way. Now, off to your room. I need to talk to your mother." I made a shooing motion and they scampered out, followed by Stormy.

"Think you were a little rough with them?", asked Marilyn, smiling a touch.

I snorted. "Karl Rove wants Ari Fleischer to put out a press release stating I have disinherited the two of them and roasted them on a spit. Then we got into a shouting match in the middle of the West Wing. No, I don't think I was all that rough on them. As it is, I am going to have to attend the press briefing tomorrow to sort this out."

"I kind of liked the idea of them taking Sunday off as a day of rest.", she said, giggling.

"Yeah, so they can spend the other six days breaking the other nine commandments. Good idea, hun!" I glanced down the hallway. "What a clusterfuck. You need to make dinner tonight so I can watch the news."

The news that night was just about as bad as I expected, maybe worse. We were the second segment on WBAL that night, right after a piece on a series of bank robberies in Highlandtown. Tonight was basically a repeat of the story from the other night, along with a summary of the national coverage the story had received, as well as some of the comments made by national commentators. After that we watched Tom Brokaw on the NBC Nightly News. It was also their second story, but almost as long as the first, and included the 'controversial' remarks made by Rush Limbaugh. Rush's radio show ran from noon to 3 PM and today he had focused on my family. Earlier today, shortly after I had left the White House to fly home, Rush had called my daughters 'miserable sluts' and my wife a 'stupid bimbo' and an 'unfit mother.' Brokaw didn't call my family names, but simply reported the insults as part of the story on Rush Limbaugh's reaction. He also reported the official White House response, which was basically what Rove had told Fleischer to write.

At the end of the story they had shocked looks on their faces. Marilyn and I simply sent them off to their room. "How bad is this?", Marilyn asked me after they had left.

"Don't worry. Tomorrow morning I plan to ram a few pine cones up some asses. I'll take care of it." I glanced back towards the girls' bedroom. "Just tell them to watch what they say around reporters and cameras. Even with their friends if they have video cameras. You'll never know what they are going to do."

"I will, tomorrow."

The morning press briefing was going to be at 11:30, and Ari Fleischer spent the morning with me. According to Ari, Rove had made him write the release after I left, and Rove was 'super pissed' at me. The press corps was waiting for us, and Ari thought that Rove had primed some of them to go after me. Ari Fleischer wasn't all that much of a fan of me, but it was more because he didn't need the extra aggravation this involved.

At 11:30 we marched into the press room, which was a surprisingly small and drab place, despite what it looked like on television. The lights and cameras were already on, and Ari simply stated that I had a statement to make. He stepped back and I took his place. It was time for my 'apology'.

"Thank you. I'd like to apologize to the American people today. I am apologizing for the fact that for the last two days so much of your time has been taken up with this nonsense." You could have heard a pin drop at that moment, and out of the corner of my eye I could see Ari Fleischer turning white. "Let me explain. My daughters don't live in Washington. They live out in the real world..." I pointed towards the wall, and ultimately anywhere out there, and continued, " ... and they have what is known in the real world as a sense of humor. A couple of days ago they made what normal people call a joke while hanging out with their friends. The rest of America understands what humor and jokes are, but here in Washington they don't. So, I apologize to you. I promise to explain this to them and tell them that in the future, they are no longer allowed to have fun or friends, and they are no longer allowed to tell jokes. Any questions?"

Pandemonium broke out, with everybody and their brother jumping up and shouting out questions. I waited a few seconds and then put a finger to my lips and made "Ssshhhh!" sounds while using my other hand to direct them to sit down again. When they were sitting I said, "There, just like in the first grade. Raise your hands and wait your turn." Everybody raised a hand, and I pointed to somebody on the left. I recognized the face but not the name, and knew he worked for CBS. I glanced down at the seating chart and saw it was John Roberts. I pointed to him and said, "John."

Roberts stood up and asked, "So, your daughters aren't really going to be selling drugs and becoming prostitutes?"

I stared at him for a second. "Are you for real? You're kidding me, right? Sit down. No more silly questions. Next?" There was a stunned silence for a second when I told one of the 'elite' White House correspondents to sit down and shut up, but then another flurry of hands rose up. I decided to go with a woman this time, and found Campbell Brown from NBC. I pointed at her and said, "Campbell."

"Vice President Buckman, you don't think you should be subjected to the same scrutiny as other political figures?"

"Me? Sure, I'm fair game. My daughters? No, not at all. Now, it's your network, not mine, but if you want to report on my ditzy daughters while they are goofing around with their pals, well, it's your time and money, not mine." I looked around and found a print reporter, Jim VandeHei of the Washington Post. "Jim."

"What is your response to the comments of Rush Limbaugh about this?", he asked.

I grimaced at that. "What I'd like to know is how Rush Limbaugh managed to become the voice of family values in this country. He's on his third wife and I'm still working on my first. He has no children and I have three. My daughters are straight A students. My son is off defending the nation so this blithering idiot can spew his vileness. Yet somehow he is the one who gets to pronounce that my wife and daughters are sluts and bimbos?"

"The worst part is that all of you go along with him on this! Last night I had to sit with them and watch Tom Brokaw announce it on national television, but I could have turned to any other channel or read it in any of your papers. Many of you in this room have met my girls and my wife, and you know that these are lies and slanders, and yet you report them anyway. Here's another thing they know about out in the real world – shame!"

Somebody yelled out, "So what are you going to do about it?"

I glanced around the room but couldn't figure out who had spoken. It didn't matter at that point. "Well, I had to teach my daughters about reporters, didn't I? They've lost a piece of their innocence. From now on they'll always have to wonder if the people they meet and the boys they date think the awful things that the people in this room have said about them."

I looked over at an ashen faced Ari Fleischer and stepped back. "I think we're done here." I turned and walked down the hallway back to my office.

That night selected excerpts of my press conference made the news, and in full on The Daily Show, with Jon Stewart throwing in pithy comments along the way. He also threw in Rush's latest invective and commentary from Fox News, which couldn't figure out whether to back a Republican politician, me, or a Republican icon, Rush. They tried for both and got neither. It would have been hilarious if it didn't involve my family.

Marilyn and the girls flew down to Washington and stayed the weekend with me. They were pretty upset with some of the things they were hearing around school. I knew it would pass, but it still wasn't nice. It's one thing to hear that Rush Limbaugh or some political types were attacking me, but quite another to find it was slopping onto them. Marilyn's comment to me was simply, "I'm your first wife? Think again! I'm your only wife!"

I had to grin at that and reply, "I don't know, honey. Maybe I'm behind on the count. Maybe you need to keep me from testing the waters."

Holly and Molly both yelled, "GROSS!", and ran off to their rooms.

Marilyn tried to punch me and I wrapped her in my arms. "Gross!", she laughed.

"Gross!", I agreed.

Things were tense in the West Wing for a few days. It all blew over, as I knew it would. Rush amped up his bile for a few days until even he went over the line and he began taking heat for it, especially from his sponsors. Ari Fleischer settled down as the ruckus ended. Karl Rove hated my guts before, and hated them now.

Ahhh! The joy of politics! Oh, if I could only go back to being a simple multibillionaire.

Chapter 137: Treason

Tuesday, September 11, 2001

It was surprisingly easy to commit high treason.

By the end of July it was becoming obvious that if I had been hoping to have any effect on the future of the country it had been a delusion. They were beating a drum loudly about going to war with Iraq. Anybody moderate or who tried to point towards terrorism was fired, demoted, or ignored. I was asking all sorts of questions about sleeper cells and whether information was passing between the FBI and CIA, and was told to sit down and shut up. I heard from one of the mid-level people over at the CIA that Wolfowitz and Scooter Libby were ordering intelligence estimates to be slanted heavily in the direction that Cheney and Bush wanted. He wasn't sure, but he thought some of it was being falsified.

This was something that happened in a lot of cases. Intelligence is a tricky business, and you can never really say for sure what the bad guys are up to. The analysts normally give you a spectrum of choices, such as a happy choice, the realistic choice, and the if-things-go-to-shit choice. They were busy over at Langley blowing smoke up everybody's asses, and if you weren't with the program, shut up and pack your bags. Saddam Hussein was gearing up to bring nuclear war to America, and we needed to stop him!

I tried to stop it. I stayed in contact with Richard Clarke and tried to figure out ways to highlight the possible damage coming. We even went over all the various scenarios that I knew were coming, even if they were only the ones in Tom Clancy's novels. Nothing we did was even admitted to be discussed at National Security Council meetings. I could have marched through with a brass band and a bullhorn and not been noticed.

On the domestic side, it wasn't much better. We already knew taxes were going to be lowered. While I had managed to get the original 10% decrease for the year cut to 5%, they would make up for it next year. In addition, dozens of domestic programs were going to go under the axe in the name of efficiency and deregulation. Be careful eating that burger, because while the FDA and the Surgeon General and the Centers for Disease Control were still around, their budgets were cut in half and they no longer had any inspectors or technicians to test anything or doctors to treat you if you got sick.

Elsewhere, my disloyalty was goading Bush into an action practically unheard of in modern politics. He was planning to dump me. The Vice President is an elected official, not an appointee, so he can't be fired, only impeached. Rove was leaking to Washington that the President was unhappy with my performance and that I wasn't a team player and he wouldn't be bringing me back for the second term. There was even a quiet intimation that my family's mental health issues were surfacing in me as well. So far this was just a whisper campaign, with nobody saying anything for the record, and nobody saying where they had heard these silly rumors, but it was starting to get out. I spoke to Fletcher Donaldson the last weekend of July at the house in Hereford, and he told me he had heard some things, but without any confirmation he couldn't print it yet. I simply replied that it was three years away from the election, and he shouldn't believe everything he heard.

So, I fought back. What better way to fight a whisper campaign than with one of my own. I made a few phone calls to some financial types in New York and let them know I wanted to explore some options for the future, and would they be interested in putting together a breakfast meeting and then maybe some one-on-one time with a few people in New York. We could discuss options for the future and some financial issues, maybe do a little preliminary fundraising for the RNC for the future. No, of course I wasn't going to run! No, we were just going to talk and raise a little cash for the future. I'd give a nice little speech or two somewhere and come home the next day.

The breakfast meeting was set for 8:30 AM Tuesday morning, September 11, 2001. We would have breakfast at Windows on the World, the restaurant near the top of the World Trade Center North Tower. After breakfast I would join some of the executives of Cantor Fitzgerald in their conference room, along with a few other financial types.

Of all the things I had ever done since I recycled, this would be the worst by orders of magnitude. After I hung up the phone I went into my private bathroom and threw up my lunch. I knew I was condemning thousands of people to death, but they were going to die anyway. There was nothing I could do to stop the attacks of 9/11. Nobody in the White House, the CIA, or the State Department was listening. I could stand up on the table in the Cabinet Room during a meeting and scream it from a megaphone and it wouldn't be heard.

Was I simply an opportunist? Or was I a psychopath? Had I always been one?

I remember reading Isaac Asimov's Foundation, where in an early chapter one of the heroes, Hari Seldon, is arrested. He explains to a protégé that he wasn't worried about being put to death. The judge in the case was too smart. The judge knew that while he couldn't reverse the decline of civilization, he also knew that he could speed it up by acting stupidly. In this I considered George Bush, who thought that acting stupidly was a high calling. The global dominance of the United States was not a guaranteed thing, and there were a number of indicators that it was ending. I could guide it into a soft landing as the first among equals, or I could allow George to crash it into the ground at high speed. The changes he made over the next eight years took us from global power to international laughingstock in twenty years.

And yet I knew my plan would work. It was too simple. We had roughly six weeks until then, and I knew somebody would talk. Sure enough, the following Monday I got a call from George Bush asking me to step into the Oval Office, where he and Karl Rove were sitting and chatting amicably. Did I have something planned as a fundraiser in New York in a few weeks? No, George, of course not! I'd never go around you like that! This is just something for the future. So you wouldn't mind if I joined you? No, of course not! Love to have you along!

While we all sat there smiling at each other, I pulled my phone out and called the VP at Cantor Fitzgerald I had been talking to, and gave him the good news. Not only would I be there, but the President of the United States would be making a visit!

From there it became even simpler. By mid-August I was off the trip, assigned to a grade school library visit that morning in Sarasota, Florida, followed by a visit to a high school in Tampa in the afternoon. This was all part of Bush's big initiative to revitalize education. All I had to do was to wait for the inevitable.

I lost ten pounds that late summer, horrified and sickened, half by what I was doing and what I knew would happen anyway, and half because I wasn't sure it would work! What if things had changed because I had recycled? What if they attacked on Monday or Wednesday or Tuesday afternoon? What if they attacked but hit something else?

What kind of a monster was I? How could I just allow this to happen, and send people I knew to their deaths? George Bush wasn't a criminal; he was just criminally stupid! Did he deserve to die for that? The only thing I could see was that no matter what I did, the assholes in the caves and training camps in Afghanistan weren't going to stop because of what was happening here. All the people that died that day would end up dying anyway. There was nothing more I could do to stop it.

And so on September 10th I flew to Tampa and stayed the night, and then on Tuesday morning we drove down to Sarasota. At 8:45 I was sitting on a very short chair in a circle with a group of first-graders, debating the merits of The Cat In The Hat versus Green Eggs and Ham (Please, Green Eggs and Ham wins going away!) At 8:46, the Secret Service agents standing in the corner and by the door suddenly looked serious and pulled Uzis from under their jackets, while several more busted through the door to the classroom. Without even saying 'Excuse us!', I was grabbed by each arm and lifted off my feet and run down the hallway and out a door. When I say lifted off my feet, I mean every word. My feet didn't touch the ground until I was at the open door of a black GMC Yukon. Behind me I could hear the screaming of little children as we ran through them, knocking them to the floor. I was tossed into the back seat of the Yukon, hitting my head on the door frame of the vehicle, and before I could even get a seat, I was slammed backwards into a seat as we tore out of the parking lot. A siren was blaring before we ever hit the street. Behind us a small convoy was racing behind us, also with sirens blaring and lights flashing.

"WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON!?", I demanded. Up in the front the agent in the passenger seat was speaking into a microphone in his sleeve but otherwise ignoring me. I repeated the question to the one sitting next to me.

His head swiveled to me for a second, and then he yelled back over the sound of the siren, "WE'RE UNDER ATTACK! THE PRESIDENT IN NEW YORK HAS BEEN ATTACKED!" Then his head turned back to the window.

I tried to ask what he meant, but I was ignored. About thirty seconds later we bounced over a curb and drove across the grass into a small park. Just settling down in front of us was a helicopter with the markings of the Florida State Police. We drove close to it and I was dragged out of the Yukon and over to the helo, where I was thrown into the back and three agents climbed on after me. The bird had never stopped its engines and seconds later we were airborne.

I grabbed the arm of one of the agents and asked the question again. "What's going on!?"

He took a deep breath and said, "We're under attack! We're flying to Tampa and getting on Air Force Two! That's all I know for sure."

"Who's attacking us?", I asked. I grabbed his arm again, and repeated it louder, "WHO'S ATTACKING US!?"

He shrugged me off and said, "We don't know yet. We'll know more on the plane!" That was all I could get from him.

By the time we landed at the Tampa airport the entire airport had been shut down to all traffic. We landed on the tarmac directly in the taxi area next to the 757 and everybody hopped out. Guns drawn, the agents surrounded me and ran me to the plane and up the stairs. The engines were already running, and as soon as the stairs were pulled away and the hatch was shut, the plane began moving. We were airborne within seconds.

For the first time since this began, the Secret Service agents around me began to relax. They put away their weapons and sighed and sagged into their seats. "WOULD SOMEBODY PLEASE TELL ME WHAT IS GOING ON!?", I demanded.

An agent came out from a compartment in the front and stepped in front of me. "Sir, a short while ago, at 8:44, a plane crashed into the World Trade Center, the North Tower, where President Bush is. A short while later another one hit the South Tower."

Memories from my first life came rushing back to me. I think every American who was alive that day remembers where they were and what they were doing when they learned the horror of what was happening. When the news began hitting the airwaves at about 8:50 I was just pulling into the parking lot at Lefleur Homes, and thinking that it was a small plane, a Cessna or Piper. I sat there listening to it for a minute, and I remembered that back during World War II a B-25 had flown into the Empire State Building. That couldn't happen anymore, though. Modern planes had radar and all sorts of navigational aids. Then, a few minutes later the news of the second hit, and that they were airliners, not little planes, meant it was terrorism, not accidents.

I remember afterwards sitting in my office listening to the radio all day in shock and disbelief. I got nothing at all accomplished. I was so shocked by it all that a day later I apologized to my brother-in-law Gabriel, my boss in sales at the time, for not getting anything done the day before, even though he had already told me he hadn't gotten anything done either. None of us did that day. Around lunchtime, one of my fellow adjunct teachers over at MVCC drove over and told me classes were shut down for the day, and I didn't have to teach that night. We were both stunned, and we both mentioned that it must have been like when our parents heard on the radio that Pearl Harbor had been bombed. It was the closest thing anybody could come up with.

I stared at the guy for a second, both in shock and trying to hide my lack of shock. "What?!"

"Sir, two airliners, jets as big as this one, have slammed into the Twin Towers in New York. The President is trapped in them." Then he held his hand to the earbud in his ear. "What ... say again ... Oh, sweet Jesus!" He looked up in horror at us. "Another one just took out the Pentagon!"

The other guys just stared at each other, white faced. "Where are we going?", I asked.

The guy who was listening to his earbud seemed to be in charge. "Sir, that is classified information."

"Excuse me?", I asked incredulously.

"Sir, where you are at a time like this is classified."

"Who the hell am I going to tell?", I demanded. "I'm on the plane with you! Now, where are we going?" I looked out the window but simply saw white clouds below us, and occasional glimpses of blue.

"Sir, that is classified. We will stay here and then land at an undisclosed location."

Unbelievable! The mind set of these people! "Well, mister, you can damn well disclose it to me! I'm the Vice President. I need to know!"

"No, sir, that is not in the ops plan."

"Jesus Christ!", I muttered to myself. This was ridiculous! I stood up and brushed past him and headed towards the cockpit.

"Sir, sir! You can't ... STOP!", he demanded.

I was grabbed from behind by the Secret Service agent, who dragged me back. "I DEMAND TO SEE THE PILOT!", I roared.

An Air Force type noticed me being dragged back towards my seat, and grabbed a phone and began speaking into it. Moments after I was pushed down into my seat, an Air Force colonel showed up in shirt sleeves. He stared at us for a second and said, "Mister Vice President, I'm Colonel North. I'm the pilot. You asked to see me?"

The lead agent said, "Colonel, this does not concern you. You need to return to the cockpit and proceed with the mission as authorized."

"Colonel! I demand to know those orders!", I told him.

"Colonel North, you are to continue the mission.", said the agent.

The colonel took one look at them and then at me, and said, "Like hell. Let that man up now, or so help me God I'll ... I'll ... just let him up! Unless you've suddenly learned how to fly an airplane, I'm in charge here!"

Hands left me, and I shrugged loose. "Colonel, are you aware of what is occurring in New York and Washington?"

"Yes sir, I am."

"Do you recognize me as the Vice President of the United States of America?"

"Of course, Mister Buckman. What can I do for you?", he replied.

"Where are we currently and what is our course? We need to get back to Washington immediately!"

"Colonel, this is a classified mission and you cannot reveal our destination!", ordered the lead Secret Service agent.

"Good Lord!", muttered the pilot. "I can't tell other people, you twit! I can certainly tell the people on the plane!" To me he said, "Sir, we are currently over the Atlantic Ocean, about 75 miles east of Jacksonville, and circling to hold position. We will maintain position here for another two hours and then we will be heading towards Omaha. We will be landing at Offut Air Force Base."

"Colonel, you may consider yourself under arrest at this time.", said the lead agent.

Colonel North simply rolled his eyes and muttered in disbelief. I shook my head in disgust and said, "Thank you. Now, Colonel, I am countermanding those orders. We need to get back to Washington immediately. Put us into Andrews as soon as possible, please."

Everybody's eyes popped open at that. North replied, "Sir, despite what this fool thinks, there is a very good reason to keep you away from Washington in case of an attack."

I nodded in agreement. "Colonel, that would be very true in the case of either a conventional or special weapons attack. However, nobody capable of such an attack would be using airliners as a weapon. This is terrorism of some sort, and you know it. Now, are you aware that the President is currently in the Twin Towers?" Colonel North was part of the 89th Airlift Wing, the wing assigned to do flight duties for bigwigs in D.C., including the President; he would know where the President was. He nodded. "Then he is either already dead or is about to die."

There was a collective gasp at that from everyone around me. "Sir, you don't know what you're saying!", said North.

"Colonel, what is your degree in? Engineering? How much fuel does an airliner carry? How many tons of avgas have been splashed into those buildings? What temperature will those buildings be burning at? It is simple physics. Those buildings will not survive."

The pilot had a horrified look of comprehension on his face and slowly nodded. "And when the temperature gets high enough, the structural steel..."

I finished for him. "The structural steel will soften and lose strength and the building will collapse."

"Colonel, I am ordering you to continue the mission! President Bush will be rescued and will be able to alter these orders at that time.", ordered the lead agent.

Just at that moment somebody yelled out, "It's gone! One of the towers collapsed!"

Colonel North looked at the two of us, and then stepped towards an intercom. He grabbed it and spoke into it. "Bo, change of plans. Head it towards the barn and put the pedal down."

"Andrews?", came the tinny response.

"Affirmative. Log it as my order."

"Roger!" Almost immediately the plane began a steep bank to the right. The pitch of the engines began spooling up, too.

North braced himself against the wall. To nobody in particular he said, "Oh, shit!"

"Yeah! Now, I need to get into the commo section. Who are we in contact with?" I stood up and this time wasn't grabbed by the Secret Service.

"Who do you want, sir? We can talk to everybody from here, even SAC if you want to start a war."

I was about to make a reply, when I looked around. "Where's the football?", I asked.

Everybody looked at each other. The 'nuclear football' was a briefcase carried around by an officer, a major or lieutenant commander or higher, with a Yankee White clearance, just about the highest security clearance possible. The briefcase, occasionally handcuffed to his arm, contained the nuclear launch codes. By law they were always supposed to be only a few feet from me. There was a football with the President, one with me, and a spare in the White House.

One of the Secret Service agents said, "We must have left him back in Sarasota!"

I looked at the pilot. "Great! Get this bird moving!"

"Yeah!", he turned and trotted back to the front office. I went to the communications section.

I wasn't interested so much in giving any orders, but in hearing the latest news. It was fragmented and chaotic but coming in fast. The National Communications System had been activated, the Capitol and the White House had been evacuated, fighter planes, some armed and some unarmed, had been launched to search for airliners not responding to orders, and the FAA had shut down all air traffic in the nation, ordering all flights to land at the nearest airports or risk being shot down.

It was the South Tower which had collapsed. There were helicopters buzzing around the North Tower trying to figure out a way to winch George Bush to safety, one New York City Police chopper had already crashed after getting caught in the smoke and turbulence surrounding the fires. Half an hour after the South Tower collapsed the North Tower went down. The President was still inside.

I only gave one order. All cabinet members possible were to gather at the 'bunker', the bombproof Presidential Emergency Operations Center located under the lawn at the White House. When we landed, Marine Two was to transport me immediately to the White House grounds. Marilyn and the twins had already been grabbed and flown by helicopter to Fort Meade, where they had been stashed at the bottom of one of the secure intelligence and command bunkers.

It was almost noon by the time I made it to the White House. By then everything was pretty much over. The fourth plane, United Airlines Flight 93, had been discovered to have gone down in a field in Pennsylvania. I had been following all the latest news from the commo section of Air Force Two. When we landed, the pushy Secret Service agent tried to order me around some more, so I fired him on the spot. The other two agents took one look at me and turned their backs on him and we left him standing on the tarmac at Andrews. Ten minutes later we landed on the lawn at the White House. I was to later learn that this was the first and only time that Marine Two had landed at the White House. Another agent was there and directed me to the bunker.

The bunker is buried fairly deep, but I don't know if it is really nuclear bomb proof or just nuclear bomb resistant. Either way, I'd much rather be at my home in the Bahamas if somebody wants to find out for sure. I had been there once before, on an orientation tour in January. The conference room is a bit cramped, but nobody minded. There was a loud buzz that silenced when I came through the door. I glanced around and found most of the Cabinet already present, with two seats conspicuously empty, mine and the President's.

Dick Cheney was sitting in a spot next to George Bush's empty seat. "Mister Vice President?", he said, with a trace of hostility.

I looked around the room and saw a few faces missing. "Who's not here?"

Colin Powell replied, "Ann Veneman is in Iowa and Tommy Thompson is in Minnesota."

"Can we talk to them? Are they on the phone?"

A pair of voices came from speakers on the table. "I'm here, sir.", came from both a male and female voice, overlapping each other.

Ann was Agriculture and Tommy was Health and Human Services. "Can you hear us clearly?", I asked.

"Yes, very clear!", answered Ann.

"Same here, Carl ... Mister Vice President! Sorry about that."

"Don't sweat it, Tommy.", I told him.

"Okay, let's get started." I looked at the others, most of whom had a look of disbelief and shock on their faces. "I just flew in from Andrews, so I've been out of touch for a few minutes." I looked around and found Norm Mineta, the Secretary of Transportation. "Norm, you ordered the planes landed?"

He nodded. "Yes, sir, right after the second one hit the Towers. They should all be down by now, even if they have to land at divert fields. International flights have been diverted as well, some to strips in Canada."

"You did this on your own authority?", I asked.

"Yes, Mister Vice President, I did.", he answered, sitting up straight.

I smiled. "Very good, Secretary Mineta. Thank you." I looked around the others and said, "This is a most extraordinary occasion, and we will be taking extraordinary measures. Every one of us will need to do more than what we originally signed up for." I looked back at Norm. "Thank you, sir."

I looked over at Colin Powell. "Colin, what readiness state are we at?"

"When this started we were at DEFCON 5. After the second tower was hit, I got a call from Secretary Cheney and we took it to DEFCON 3."

I nodded. The DEFCONs were Defense Conditions, with 5 being the lowest level – peace and quiet – and 1 being thermonuclear war. To the best of my knowledge, DEFCON 2 was the highest we had ever actually been, and that was during the Cuban Missile Crisis. "Now that the planes are grounded, shouldn't we be lowering that?", I asked.

"We don't know if this is the start of something else, maybe some other form of attack.", he answered, holding his ground.

I nodded again. "Okay, that makes sense. I would think we'll know for sure by noon tomorrow. If nothing happens by then, let's drop it to DEFCON 4."

"Agreed."

"Wouldn't that be a call for President Bush to make, Mister Vice President?", asked Dick Cheney. He had a belligerent look on his face.

There it was, out in the open. Heads swiveled to face us both. I ignored Cheney for a moment and looked around until I found a Secret Service agent. I motioned him over. "Special Agent, your name please?"

He looked startled at this, since normally they just stand out of sight. "Special Agent Patrick Duvall, sir."

"Thank you, Special Agent Duvall. Are we in contact with either President Bush or any of the agents assigned to him this morning?"

"No, sir. They all went off the air when the North Tower went down, about 10:28", he answered.

"And they had not managed to get the President out yet?"

He shook his head. "No, sir. They were trying to figure a way to rig a sling, but the New York City helicopter wasn't rigged with a winch. They were trying to get something from the Coast Guard when ... when..." His face was ashen and he couldn't finish the statement.

"Thank you, Special Agent Duvall. I am sure your colleagues tried everything.", I told him. I looked around the table. "I think we need to consider the provisions of the 25th Amendment.", I announced.

There was an immediate ruckus at this, and Cheney looked furious. "You can't do this! He's not dead!", he roared, effectively silencing the others.

I stayed calm. "I certainly hope he isn't, but we need to be prepared. Attorney General Ashcroft, could you lend us your expertise?"

"We need to consider Section 4. It was written in case the President suffered a stroke or became incapacitated and couldn't pass along his powers normally.", he replied. He already had a folded pocket copy of the Constitution before him, and it seemed as if it was open to one of the last pages. "It states that when the Vice President and a majority of the principal officers of the executive departments consider the President to be incapable of his duties, there is a procedure for which the Vice President can be named Acting President." He read off some of the relevant amendment. "This was passed following the Kennedy assassination, to clarify the succession. We've never used Section 4 before, but it would have certainly been used when Wilson had his stroke.", he commented.

"Thank you. John, please clarify the procedure.", I asked.

"Like hell! You will never be President!", declared Cheney. "George was going to get rid of you and name me the Vice President!"

There was a small uproar at that, but I just held my hand up. "Please, let the Attorney General continue."

John Ashcroft nodded his thanks to me. "When this was written it was envisioned that the principal officers meant the Cabinet. If we vote for this, you only need to win by one vote. Then we inform the President Pro Tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House, in writing, and you become the Acting President. You don't need to be sworn in."

"Hastert is the Speaker, but who's the President Pro Tempore of the Senate?", asked Ann Veneman over the phone.

"Robert Byrd.", answered somebody.

Somebody else commented, "He's still alive?"

Colin Powell took it one step further. "Why are we screwing around? We need to swear you in as President, sir!"

"Damn you! President Bush will be rescued!", exclaimed Cheney.

"Dick, face facts! There is nothing left of the World Trade Center but a pile of rubble. It will take weeks or months to dig it out. Nobody got out of there!", answered Powell.

"You go to hell!", Cheney retorted.

I ignored Cheney for the moment. "Secretary Powell, I considered that, but let me say that this would be premature. I have no idea how many people were lost today, but if I tell the American people that we think the President is dead, we are telling them that everybody is dead. It is too soon for that; they won't accept it. I can't do that. I think we need to invoke the provisions of Section 4 now, however.", I told him and the others.

I saw a number of nods and affirmative glances at that, although Cheney looked mulish. I turned back to Ashcroft. "Mister Attorney General, I don't know how we should do this. I can't vote, clearly. How do you want to do this?"

He sighed. "Nobody's ever done this before. We have 14 Cabinet level departments. I will go down the list and ask everybody to vote yes or no. Yes means that Carl Buckman becomes the Acting President. No means he does not." He took a sheet of paper and began to make a list. "Secretary of the Treasury O'Neill?"

"Yes." He looked at the others. "If we do find that President Bush survived, this all becomes moot, anyway."

"Quite true.", added Ashcroft. "Secretary of State Cheney?"

"NO!"

"Secretary of Defense Powell?"

"Yes. Of course."

"The Attorney General – I vote yes." Ashcroft continued down the list, only pausing to comment that while the two missing people might not technically be eligible to vote, since they weren't present, he wanted their opinions as well. Both spoke up in my favor. The vote ended at 13 to 1.

Paul O'Neill spoke up at that. "Dick, I am asking you to change your vote. This is not a permanent thing. If the President is found, Carl goes back to being Vice President. Do it for the nation. We need to be united now, not divided!"

Several other people went along with this, and Cheney reluctantly agreed. Ashcroft happily changed his sheet. He looked up at me and said, "Mister Acting President, your orders?"

I nodded. "Mister Attorney General, you are excused. Please see that this is typed up and put into some sort of proper form and bring it back for all of us to sign. While you are doing that, please see about how we submit this properly. Thank you, sir."

He stood and made a formal little bow of sorts and left.

I turned to Paul O'Neill. "The stock exchanges are shut down?"

"As much for safety as anything else. Nobody knew if any planes were going to crash into them.", he replied.

"I imagine we'll need to keep them shut down for a few days. What's this going to do to the economy?"

"Nothing good!"

After about ten minutes John Ashcroft bustled back in. He had a wry smile on his face. "Even in a nuclear bunker we have secretaries." He waved a few typed pages and brought them around to me. "It's simple enough. Everybody sign. I will witness for the people not here. Is that alright?", he asked towards the speakers.

Both absentees said it would be.

I looked it over. It was on White House stationery and simply stated, 'Pursuant to Section 4 of the 25th Amendment to the United States Constitution, and with the full agreement of the Cabinet, I hereby assume the duties of the Acting President of the United States of America.' Below that there were the typed names of everybody in the meeting, with a space for all of us to sign.

There it was, in black and white. I took a deep breath and exhaled. I looked at the Attorney General. "Just sign there above your name, sir."

I scribbled my scrawl, and then passed it to my left. It went around the table. When Ann and Tommy needed to sign, Ashcroft read the page and then formally asked them if they wished him to sign in their places. They agreed. Cheney looked mulish, but he signed as well. I looked at Ashcroft and asked, "What now?"

"I've already taken the liberty of sending the Secret Service to bring Denny Hastert and Robert Byrd here. They were both in town, so we'll just ask them in and I will present this to them. They can confirm it with us all, and then we can go about our business."

"Which will be what, Mister President?", asked Colin Powell.

I looked him straight in the eye. "Which will be cleaning up this mess and then killing everybody who thought it up. Are you up for it, General?"

"Yes, sir, I am!"

Chapter 138: Aftermath

Tuesday, September 11, 2001

It took a bit longer for Hastert to arrive than Byrd because he was third in line for the Presidency and the Secret Service had stashed him outside town. In the meantime, I made a little speech before dismissing most of the Cabinet. "I will be speaking to everyone here on an individual basis over the next few days, but I expect the scheduling to be haphazard. There are two things that everybody here has to know and understand. First, we are about to go through some extraordinary times. We have just been handed a world-class disaster. If your department is asked to do something, do not wait around – get it done! Don't wait for the paperwork to be finished. I will cover you as best I can, but get it done, whatever it is. I can just about guarantee in writing that this is going to end up in front of a half dozen Congressional and Senate committees, and you will not want to be explaining why you delayed something that could have helped."

There were a few nods and murmurs at this. "Secondly, our economy is going to take a major hit from this." I glanced over at Paul O'Neill and asked, "Paul, am I wrong in saying this could cause a recession through the end of the year and into next year?"

"I think it is highly likely.", he responded.

"Where is that crap coming from!?", demanded Cheney.

I quietly sighed to myself. I was going to have to get him under control, and soon. "We just shut down the stock markets, the airline industry is grounded for God only knows how long, a big chunk of Wall Street just collapsed into the streets, and we have a multi-billion dollar hole in the middle of New York City. Oh, and when we do find out who did this, we're going to be spending billions more on fighting them that we didn't plan for. I used to make money playing these games, trust me on this.", I told him and the others. To the room as a whole I added, "So, go back to your offices and get your deep thinkers figuring out what we will need to do going forward. Agreed?"

There was a healthy chorus of agreement down the table. "Ann? Tommy? We need to get you home. I'll get the 89th to send a plane. Just get packed. Somebody will be in touch, okay?"

"Yes, sir.", they both said.

"Thank you. Now, I want State, Defense, Treasury, and Justice to stay. Everybody else, please get to your offices. I'll be talking to you."

Most of the Cabinet stood and took their leave. After a few minutes it was just the five of us – Cheney, Powel, O'Neill, Ashcroft, and myself. I looked around at them and said, "Gentlemen, you represent the most powerful and important posts in the Cabinet, departments that were created by the very Constitution itself. Whether you like me or not, I need your help, and I need it badly. Can I count on that help?"

"Of, course, Mister President.", said Colin Powell. O'Neill and Ashcroft said the same thing.

"That's Mister Acting President!", answered Dick Cheney. "You'll only have that until we rescue President Bush, the real President."

I sighed and nodded. "Secretary Cheney, I wish you were correct, but the ugly truth is that there are thousands of people in those buildings who will never even be found, let alone make it out alive. Not much is left when you drop a billion tons of concrete and steel on somebody."

"That's pretty convenient for you, wouldn't you say?"

"Dick, I am going to give you two choices. You can resign your position and go to New York to help digging out or you can shut up and act like the Secretary of State. There is no third choice, and I expect an answer right now.", I told him.

The others just stared at him as his jaw worked, but eventually he said, "I am the Secretary of State."

"Excellent. I am sure that there is plenty for you to do over at Foggy Bottom. Please go and see to it. Thank you."

He stood with considerable ill grace and left. I turned to John Ashcroft. "John, the FBI works for you. After you leave here I am going to need to see the Director this afternoon, as soon as possible. You'll also need to brief Denny Hastert and Senator Byrd, please."

"Of course. If I may be excused?"

"Please." I turned to Paul O'Neill. "The same goes with you and the Secret Service. I'll need to see their boss as soon as possible as well. Also, could you get in touch with Wolfowitz for me? I'll need to talk to him, also."

"Yes, sir."

That left me with Colin Powell, the Secretary of Defense. "Were you in your office when it was hit?"

"I thought a bomb had gone off! The whole place was shaking. We evacuated and I was able to get around to the side to see what happened. Unbelievable, I mean, just unbelievable!", he told me.

"General, just like I am going to be asking the CIA and the FBI, I am going to need any intelligence the military can come up with on who did this. Then it is going to be up to your department to destroy them."

"You'll have our full cooperation, sir." He stood up and left.

I sat there in the conference room by myself for a moment, just staring at the wall, trying to think what I needed to do next. The list was endless. Then I realized there was one simple thing I could do. I stood and left the small conference room, and found a secretary sitting at a desk in a hallway. "Any idea where my family is?", I asked.

"They were taken to Fort Meade, sir.", answered a Secret Service agent who had begun to follow me.

I turned to face him. "Can you get them on the phone?"

He blinked and nodded. "Yes, sir." The secretary wordlessly turned her desk phone to face him and he dialed a number, probably to his headquarters. I didn't think cell phones would work underneath all the steel and concrete we were buried under.

A few minutes later, Marilyn was on the other end of the phone. "CARL! What's going on!? Nobody is telling us anything!"

I breathed deeply, and felt a tremendous weight lift my chest. "Marilyn, it is so good to hear from you! You know about the World Trade Center?"

"Yes, what happened, why are we..."

"Marilyn, hold on for a second. George Bush was in there when it was hit. I've been named Acting President. Now, are the girls with you?"

"Acting ... oh my God!", she said.

"I want you and the girls to get over to the Naval Observatory. I'll see you later on. I'm fine. We'll be fine. I'll talk to you soon."

"I love you, Carl."

"I love you, too. Tell the girls I love them. Bye." I hung up and smiled to myself, probably the first time since that morning. I turned to the agent and said, "Now, call who you have to, but get them to the Naval Observatory."

"Sir, I don't think we're supposed to do that."

"Son, I've already fired one Secret Service agent today. Want to go for two?" Realistically I couldn't actually fire an agent. These guys were protected by civil service regulations. However, being dismissed from the presidential detail was the kiss of death career-wise, and that I could easily arrange.

His eyes widened and he grabbed for the phone again. To the secretary, I asked, "Is the White House still evacuated?"

"Yes, sir."

"Well, let's un-evacuate it. We can't work out of a hole in the ground." To the rest of my detail, I said, "Well, let's go, fellows. Show me the way out."

The White House is normally bustling with people, so it was eerily silent as we went in. I headed directly to my office. I wanted to start making calls, but I realized I didn't even know how to get an outside line. Everything went through my secretary. I reached into my pocket and pulled out my cell phone and called Matt Scully. I quickly told him to get over to the office and I'd tell him what was happening; I was going to need a speech.

At that point Josh Bolten and Ari Fleischer came into my office, both with shocked looks on their faces. Josh was Deputy Chief of Staff for President Bush, and Ari was the White House Press Secretary. "Are you ... did you...", came stumbling from Ari. Josh just was silent and stunned.

"I'm the Acting President. I wasn't sworn in. President Bush might be found.", I told them. "Who was with him?"

"Huh?"

"Ari! Josh! Come on, snap to! I need some help here!" I had to get them back to reality.

They both focused in on that. "Uh, yes sir.", said Josh.

"Who was with President Bush?", I asked again, as gently as possible.

"Andy and Karl.", he replied.

"Scotty, too, and Blake.", added Ari.

I nodded. I knew all four men. Andrew Card was George Bush's Chief of Staff and Josh's boss, Karl Rove was ranked as a White House Senior Adviser, and Scott McClellan was Deputy Press Secretary and Ari's number two man. Blake was Blake Gottesman, Bush's 'body man', his personal aide like Frank had been for me during the campaign. We had a hole in the heart of the White House that these men would need to fill. It was one thing to eliminate the President, but in doing so I had also killed a number of other good men whose only crime had been to work for George Bush. I was truly a psychopath.

"Ari, I am going to need to go on television tonight and tell the country what is happening. I don't know how to make that happen. Can you set that up?", I asked.

That was the sort of routine task he could focus on. "You mean, like from the Oval Office?"

I shook my head. "It's too soon for that. Can we do it from my office instead? I don't want to seem like I'm jumping the gun. When can we set it up for? Seven? Eight?"

Ari began to act professionally again. "Seven would be best. I'll need to make some calls..."

I gave him a positive smile and pointed him towards the door. "See me when it's set up." I turned to Josh. "The Cabinet named me Acting President until we figure out what is happening to President Bush. I won't be using the Oval Office unless I get sworn in. Can you handle this? Step up to it?"

Tears were streaming down his face, but he wiped them with a hand and nodded. "Yes, sir, it's just ... yes, sir."

"Thank you, Josh. I need you to find out where the First Lady and the girls are, and also where former President Bush and his wife are. I need to talk to them. Go wash your face and settle down some, but then figure out where everybody is and get back to me."

Josh took off and Matt Scully wandered in, along with Mike Gerson. They were the principal speechwriters in the White House. I gave them a quick breakdown on what had happened in the Cabinet meeting, and we went over an outline for the speech I needed to make that night. After they left Ari returned and told me it would be at 7:30 that night, and I sent him off to help Mike and Matt.

And so it went for the next two hours, with people streaming in and out of my office figuring out what was going on and what to do about it. Laura Bush and the girls had been taken to Camp David, and I spoke to Laura on the phone. There wasn't much I could tell her other than rescue operations were underway. I spoke to the first President Bush and offered to send the spare Air Force One to pick him and Barbara up and bring them to Washington, an offer he accepted. I was on the phone with Rudy Giuliani in New York. He had been scheduled to attend the breakfast meeting and had been delayed. He got there just in time to watch the North Tower get hit. I told him that if he needed anything, to let me know and it was his. Scooter Libby showed up from the State Department with a list of foreign dignitaries I was ordered to call, basically every Prime Minister and President on the planet. I sent him back to State with the list and the order to have Cheney pick the ten most important and get that list to me tomorrow. Cheney could speak to the others.

One contentious meeting was with the heads of the FBI and the Secret Service. Louis Freeh was there for the FBI, and a guy named Brian Stafford was there as Director of the Secret Service. I had never met Stafford before, but he was a perfect fit for them. He had the same level of arrogance as the rest of the department! Almost immediately after they got into my office it descended into a turf war.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation, I was told, was by law required to investigate all cases of terrorism on American soil. The Secret Service responded that, by law, they were required to investigate all threats and attacks on the President. I listened to them wrangle for a couple of minutes and then reached into my desk and pulled out a steel whistle I kept there. Charlie had given it to me as a gag gift to sort out the twins' wrangling. When I became the Whip I took it to the office, and told him my fellow Congressmen were worse behaved than his sisters. I took a deep breath and then let out a piercing shriek of a whistle, and shocked them into silence. I also attracted some attention to my closed door, and I waved that off.

"Gentlemen, I am extremely disappointed in the both of you.", I started.

Louis Freeh said, "Mister Vice President, if you..."

I blasted the whistle a second time. "Mister Freeh, Mister Stafford, if either one of you says another word I am going to fire you on the spot. Now shut up and let me speak!" They glanced at each other but then they both nodded.

"This is the most disgusting thing I have seen since I first came to Washington. Thousands of your fellow citizens are dead, and you two are playing power politics over their corpses! Now, since you decided to bring this to me, I get to play Solomon." I turned to Stafford and said, "There are only two ways this happened. One, there was a terrorist act and the President just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. It has nothing to do with him. The FBI investigates that. The second is that this is an elaborate plan to assassinate the President. If that is the case, however, the FBI is ten times the size of the Secret Service! No way, no how, do you have the manpower or resources to solve this! You would have to go to the FBI to figure it out. Are we agreed? Good! Thank you!"

Stafford looked angry and started to respond. I simply held up my whistle and moved to put it between my lips again. He shut up. "I am going to make this very simple." I pointed at Freeh and said, "The FBI is going to be the lead agency.", and then I pointed at Stafford. "You get to name whichever of his deputies you want to run the investigation, and you get to name whichever of your deputies you want as the number two. I am going to make that announcement tonight on national television. If either of you don't like it you can clean out your desk and then you can tell it to the Washington Post in the morning. I don't have the time for this and neither does the country. Clear?"

Stafford looked like he wanted to argue some more, so I put the whistle to my lips and pointed them both to the door.

Assholes!

Paul Wolfowitz of the Central Intelligence Agency came through right after Matt and Mike ran through the first cut on the speech. I gave them a quick read-through and edit, and sent them out, along with a request to have somebody bring me a sandwich. I had missed lunch earlier. Wolfowitz came to the conclusion that it was Al Qaeda which had attacked us, something that Richard Clarke and I had been saying all summer long. He also thought this was an excellent opportunity to link terrorism to Saddam Hussein. I told him flat out to not say anything to anybody until tomorrow, no leaks, no nothing.

I sat at my desk and ate my late lunch while a camera crew tried to arrange my office for a camera. It was just too small. Reluctantly I agreed to give the speech from the Oval Office. Then I called in my secretary. She popped in and I said, "Mrs. Lowenstein, I need you to tell the following people to be in here tomorrow for a meeting. We can use either the Cabinet Room or the Roosevelt Room, whichever works better. I want to call the meeting at 9:00 AM and we'll run however long. We should consider it a meeting of the National Security Council."

"Yes, sir.", she replied. "Who will be attending?"

I looked at some notes I had made. "I want the head person, director or Cabinet secretary, for the following departments: State, Defense, Justice, Treasury, the FBI, the CIA, National Security Adviser, and the FAA. I also want their deputy, whoever their number two is, or if that person isn't in town, somebody else. Oh, and we'd probably better bring in the Secret Service, too. FEMA, we'll need them."

She was scribbling faster than I could without even looking. When I was done she said, "Sir, those planes, how could ... how could somebody do that?!"

I simply shook my head. "I don't know, Mrs. Lowenstein. There are some things I just can't understand. Explain Auschwitz to me some day. That will be your answer."

She nodded and left.

At 7:00 I was reviewing the latest edit on the speech when I got a call I had to take. It was from George H.W. Bush, Bush 41, George's father. "Good evening, Mister President.", I said when we were connected.

"Good evening, Mister President.", he responded, although it sounded like his voice was cracking at that.

"I am only the Acting President, sir. Search and rescue operations are underway as we speak. We are all hoping and praying for George's safe return."

"That's very kind of you to say, Carl. Can I call you Carl?", he asked.

"Of course, Mister President."

He continued, "I wanted to thank you for sending the plane. With everything shut down, I wasn't sure how Barbara and I would get to Laura and the girls."

"I am placing it at your command until this is resolved, sir. Could I ask a favor of you, sir?"

"How can I help, Carl?"

"Sir, would you come here tomorrow, when you get a chance? I need to speak to you about a few things. I understand your family obligations could get in the way, but it would help me a great deal.", I asked.

"Of course, Mr. President. Whatever I can do to help." He paused for a second, and then asked in a heart wrenching tone, "Is there any hope? Have you heard anything?"

What was I to say to that? "Sir, there is always hope."

I'm sure he heard the pause in my response. He sighed and thanked me, and then hung up.

I hung up as well. What could I say to the man? That I was the cause of his son's death, because his son was a disaster in the making?

Ari grabbed me and pulled me into a small room next to the Oval Office and they slapped some makeup on me. As they did so, I saw Josh Bolten out of the corner of my eye. "Josh, I am going to need to see the leadership of the House and the Senate tonight, after this. We can do it here or at the Capitol, their choice, but I don't want them to think I am snubbing them. Can you make it happen?"

"Yes, sir!"

"Good man! I know this is tough, but we take it one step at a time. Pass that along. I have faith in you guys. We are going to make it through all this, and the payback is really going to be a bitch!"

"Yes, sir!", he said feelingly.

At that, Ari tapped his watch and said, "Show time." I followed him into the Oval Office and made my way around the camera and lights and sat down at the President's desk. I didn't have enough time to contemplate the enormity of my actions. I had to straighten up, find the teleprompter, jot a couple of sentences into my speech, and look into the camera. I couldn't be fumbling when this began. The director gave everybody a two minute warning, then a one minute warning, and then another at thirty seconds. I looked into the camera, where a light would come on when we were broadcasting. At ten seconds, he began a countdown. " ... three ... two ... one!" He pointed at me silently.

"Good evening. I am Acting President Carl Buckman.

Earlier today our citizens, our freedoms, our nation, and our very way of life were assaulted by terrorists in a series of deadly attacks. In acts of unimaginable mass murder, an attempt was made to drag our country into chaos. That attempt failed. Our country remains strong.

By now everyone in America, and probably the rest of the world as well, knows what happened. This morning two planes hit and destroyed the World Trade Center in New York, destroying the Twin Towers. A short time later a third airliner was crashed into the Pentagon, which while suffering some damage was not destroyed. Finally, a fourth airplane crashed into a rural area in Pennsylvania, apparently when the heroic passengers tried to take back control of the plane from the terrorists who had captured it.

Immediately following the start of these attacks, Secretary of Transportation Mineta ordered the grounding of all airplanes throughout the nation, an unprecedented action. He is to be commended for his quick thinking and action. Likewise, Secretary of Defense Powell and Secretary of State Cheney immediately realized what was happening and raised the defense readiness state of our nation to deal with any possibilities. Because of their quick action, a second set of attacks will not occur, and they are also to be thanked.

The full extent of the destruction is not yet clear, but it is evident that the death toll will be great, far greater than any of us can imagine. The bulk of the destruction is in one of our greatest cities, New York. I have spoken to Mayor Giuliani and assured him that whatever is needed in the rescue operation will be made available. I have also spoken to Secretary Powell and said the same thing about the crash at the Pentagon. There is hope that survivors will be found at both locations. Unfortunately, there were no survivors of the crash in Pennsylvania.

By now, you have all heard that President George Bush was visiting New York, and was in the North Tower of the World Trade Center when it was hit by the first airplane. He was trapped with many other people, and we lost contact with him when the building collapsed. There is, however, hope that he and others may have survived the attack and will be rescued. I have spoken to his family and to former President Bush, and I have assured them that all available resources will be used in the rescue.

The Founding Fathers of our nation provided us with a Constitution, a document laying out a system of government that all these years later still provides us with wise guidance and robust protection. Over the years we have refined that Constitution with amendments designed to adapt to changing times, but to still safeguard our liberties and way of life. Earlier today, at an emergency Cabinet meeting, provisions of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment were put into place when it became apparent that President Bush was no longer in contact with us. This amendment clarifies various policies and procedures to be taken when the President is not capable of discharging his duties. Attorney General Ashcroft, our nation's leading attorney, explained to the Cabinet what was involved, and then led a unanimous vote to name me as Acting President. His services were greatly appreciated by all of us. Once the President is rescued and is capable of discharging his duties, I will revert to Vice President. Later this evening I will be meeting with Congressional leaders to further discuss this.

As Acting President, I have full executive authority to defend our nation against any and all foes. Let no nation or group think that this would be an opportune time to attempt to take advantage of us. I can assure them that any such attempts will be met with the full force of our military.

My first order to the Cabinet was that all our strength and effort should be put towards the rescue of anybody still trapped in New York and Washington. The American people expect that of them, and they all promised to do their utmost. Likewise, while many buildings in Washington were closed today because of the emergency, they are already reopening and will be fully staffed tomorrow.

Because of the temporary grounding of all airplanes, we currently have thousands of passengers stranded far from home. I promise you that as soon as practical we will begin flying again so that you can return safely to your loved ones. I have been told that overseas, many stranded passengers have been temporarily adopted by host families. I thank you, and our nation thanks you, for this extraordinary generosity in our hour of need. It will not be forgotten.

Around the world, nations and peoples have sent messages of support and assistance, condemning those who would attack innocent people going about their business in such a horrific manner. The civilized world is united in its horror at what has occurred today. That support will also not be forgotten. Further, all civilized peoples were shocked by the actions of some who consider the death and suffering of our citizens a cause for celebration. That behavior will also not be forgotten.

Finally, I say to those who perpetrated these unspeakable crimes, we will find you. Our law enforcement and intelligence agencies will track you down, you and those who harbor and assist you. Our retribution will be swift ... and final.

I close now with the following thought. America is more than its buildings and America is more than its people. America is an idea, a symbol, a belief. We are a beacon of freedom and opportunity to the world, and the evil of madmen will not shutter that beacon. The price of freedom is never cheap, but it is a price that we must bear, and a price that we will gladly pay. Our nation will emerge from this dark day even stronger and more committed to the ideals we believe in.

Thank you, good night, and God bless America."

I kept looking into the camera and waited until the director said we were done and the lights went out. Even then I kept my mouth shut until after they had the microphones turned off and out of the way. The last thing we needed was an 'Ooops!' moment where I said something stupid while something was still live. The technology wasn't quite at the point where anybody with a cell phone could catch you being an idiot, but it was fast approaching that point. As soon as possible I headed out of the room and went into a bathroom to clean off the makeup. I really needed a shower for that, but just didn't have the time. I think the worst part is the stuff they put on top of my head to keep the glare off my bald spot! I mean, like, thanks a lot, I really needed to be reminded of that!

I came out feeling a little more human, and found Ari and Josh waiting for me, along with some of my own people from my Vice Presidential staff. Frank, Carter, and Mindy were waiting for me. It was obvious Mindy had been crying heavily, and Carter whispered in my ear that her mother had been on Flight 93, which had gone down in Shanksville. I sat her down and told her to take some time off. She nodded and I motioned for an agent to take her home. Then I looked at Frank and Carter. "Guys, this is a bit weird, but we are going to somehow merge our staffs together. If President Bush is rescued, I go back to being the VP, and you come back with me. Otherwise, we are going to have to figure this out."

"Yes, sir.", they both agreed.

I looked at Josh. "Are we lined up to meet Congress? Were you able to set something up?"

He nodded. "Yes, sir. I was able to corral some of them and they promised to get hold of other people. It's at the Capitol, though. Should I have them brought over?"

"That will be fine. Let's get a car and go. You, me..." I looked around and eyed Ari. "Ari, you want to go? Carter's been my press guy, but that's not a big job for the VP. Do you want to take him on as your deputy?"

"We can see how it works out, Mister President.", he answered, noncommittally.

"Carter, if Deputy Press Secretary doesn't work out, we'll fit you in somewhere." I looked over at the nearest Secret Service agent. "Five minutes. We're going to need a car. We'll be just going over to the Capitol, so set it up, please." He immediately began speaking into a microphone on his sleeve.

I stood and stretched a bit. It had been a long day and I was feeling tired and creaky. I grabbed my cane. "After I meet with the people over on the Hill, I am going home. I'll keep living at the Naval Observatory until this plays out. Everybody, you all need to go home and get some sleep at some point. Tomorrow might be even crazier. We've got a major meeting in the morning, and if President Bush, the former President Bush, calls, I want to meet him tomorrow as well. Regardless, go home and get some rest." To my traveling party, I said, "Let's get this on the road." With a Secret Service agent leading us, we headed down to a car. A few minutes later we were at the Capitol.

There were a bunch of people in the Speaker's office, some sitting, but they all stood and faced me when I came in the door. From the Senate we had Trent Lott, Tom Daschle, Harry Reid, Robert Byrd, and Don Nickles; the House was represented by Tom DeLay, Denny Hastert, John Boehner, and Dave Bonior. The only major leader missing was Dick Gephardt, and I knew he was out of town. "Gentlemen, thank you for meeting with me.", I said.

Denny Hastert said, "We all watched your speech from in here, Carl. We all thought it went well. Not too long, but it got the point across."

"How are you doing, Carl?", asked my old friend John Boehner. "You look tired."

I smiled and shook his hand. "I'm beat, but I'll make it. I started out early this morning in Tampa. Good to see you again."

At that, I went around the room, shaking hands with everybody. These were the men I was going to have to work with for the foreseeable future, the Majority and Minority Leaders and Whips, the Speaker, and the Senate President Pro Tempore. Some of them were friends and some were enemies, but all of them had a personal agenda that did not necessarily involve cooperating with one Carling Parker Buckman II.

First steps first. "Denny, Senator Byrd, I apologize for not meeting with you this afternoon, but it just got crazy. Did the Attorney General talk to you? Are you satisfied that everything was done in a proper form?" I didn't need somebody getting a bug up his ass about my 'usurping' power.

Both men nodded. Denny Hastert said, "It was fine, Carl. How long do you think it will last? Or do you think it will be permanent?"

I was feeling a bit tired, so I hoisted myself up and sat on his desk, and faced everyone else. "Right now, Denny, I just don't know, but I have a really bad feeling about this. Those buildings were a thousand feet tall. How many millions of tons of concrete and steel was that? I can't imagine how anybody could get out of that." There, it was out in the open. We needed to consider that the President was dead.

"If that is the case, why didn't you get sworn in as President?", asked Harry Reid in an accusing tone.

"Harry ... Senator Reid, if I was to go out there and declare myself President, then I am saying that George Bush is dead, and that means everybody else in those buildings is dead. I don't think people are ready for that. We'll all know better in a few days time. How long do you think I should wait, sir?", I responded. There, dump it in their laps for a bit, see how they liked it! They couldn't complain about not being informed if I asked them in a group session.

I wasn't given a break on that. These guys were too savvy for a rookie stunt. Dave Bonior immediately asked, "Carl, what did you have in mind?"

I held my hands up in a questioning gesture. "Today's too soon. On the other hand, we are going to need a permanent President sooner or later, and probably sooner. We can't have me be the Acting President until 2004." I looked around the room daring anybody to counter that. A couple of faces looked thoughtful, but nobody argued with me. "Now, let's be blunt. I need to be cleaner than Caesar's wife on this. I cannot be seen to be delaying or denying any form of assistance to the rescue efforts. I ordered all the Cabinet departments to assist. Here are my thoughts. We wait three days. By Friday morning it should be pretty obvious if anybody is going to make it out of there. By lunchtime Friday, I call another Cabinet meeting, and this time I bring in the leaders of Congress – you guys – and we take another vote. In the meantime, why don't you send two people to New York to provide some oversight?"

Tom Daschle commented, "You've given this some thought."

I shook my head in the negative. "Senator, I am making this up as I go along. John Ashcroft was telling us earlier that the idea behind Section Four of the amendment was to handle what would happen if the President had a stroke, like Wilson did. It was never designed to handle the President... disappearing!"

I wanted to tell them to send one Senator and one Representative, and make one a Republican and the other a Democrat, but resisted the temptation to meddle and influence them. After ten minutes of wrangling they decided to send Harry Reid, a Democratic Senator, and John Boehner, a Republican Congressman. I turned to Josh and told him to get the 89th warmed up for a morning flight, and also to track down Dick Gephardt and get him here, as well, and he stepped out of the room to make a call.

Denny Hastert then asked the question on everybody's mind. "Carl, who did this!? Who was behind it?"

I sighed. "All we know for sure is Islamic terrorists. We have some pretty strong theories, but we won't know for absolutely sure for a few days."

"You're going to need to do better than that, son.", commented Senator Byrd.

"No, sir, I don't. Even if I knew the names and addresses of the people involved – which I don't – I wouldn't divulge the information until we had disposed of them. When the time is right, I will inform you and the American public, but not until then."

Several of them recoiled at that, with angry looks on their faces. How dare I imply they couldn't keep a secret?! The reality was that they couldn't keep anything secret. In Washington information is currency to be traded for power. Any number of Congressmen and Senators could be guaranteed to tell somebody, probably a reporter, in order to demonstrate how much they were trusted by the President and to show how much power they had! Afterwards, if it came out, they would have plenty of well intentioned reasons to say why they had to divulge the information. There were several murmurs and whispers around the circle facing me.

"What happens, then, Mister President?", asked Tom DeLay. He was the first not to call me by my name, and a couple of eyebrows went up at that. "What do you plan to do when you have that information?"

I smiled and got off the desk. "Well, that part is simple. We're going to kill them."

"What about taking them prisoner and bringing them back here to trial?", asked Daschle.

I gave him a big grin. "Tom, you remember what Bill Clinton claimed I do to prisoners, don't you? Nah, I don't think we'll have too much of a problem with prisoners." Nobody knew what to say to that. I decided to wrap it up. "Fellows, it has been a long day. I am going home and getting some sleep. John, Harry, you should go home and pack for your trip. I'll talk to you tomorrow. Good night."

We drove over to the Naval Observatory, and then I sent the car with Josh and Ari back to the White House. Technically speaking, the Vice Presidential Residence is not part of the Naval Observatory, which is still functioning, but on the grounds of the Observatory, at Number One Observatory Circle. It's a fairly large Queen Anne style place, and while it has dining rooms and parlors large enough to entertain a large group, it almost never makes the news. Marilyn and I were still living semi-apart, with my going home every other night or so, to Hereford. Still, we had managed to have a few dinner parties earlier in the year, but as word of my impending doom became obvious, a lot of people managed to have something else to do when we had a party. Wouldn't they be surprised now!

Marilyn was in a sitting room on the first floor, wrapped in an Afghan in front of the television. The boob tube was on, but Marilyn wasn't; she was laying on the couch but asleep, while the images of the towers collapsing played over and over, and the talking heads tried to come up with new shit to tell people. Her face was a mess, with the marks of tears and a runny nose. She stirred as she heard me walk across the floor. "Come on, honey, let's get you upstairs.", I told her.

"What time is it?"

"About ten.", I said, glancing at my watch. "Come on, you should go to bed. How are the girls?"

"Okay. Scared.", she admitted. "Me, too, I guess."

"We'll be fine." I held out my hand and she took it, leaving the Afghan on the couch. I led the way upstairs to our bedroom, but did a double-take when I went into our bedroom. Ever since we got Stormy, who was now at a monstrously large 130-plus pounds, we had taken to sleeping in a king size bed. Stormy liked sleeping with us, and she was now bigger than my wife! Now, I stared. My twin girls were both in my bed, along with my dog, all asleep as the television flickered.

"Uh, oh.", commented Marilyn.

"Now what? Do we sleep in their room?" I shook my head in amusement. I pushed her towards the bed. "Here, you lie down and get some sleep. I want to sit up and think for awhile."

Marilyn was a little groggy and crawled under the covers, still dressed, next to Molly, who was separated from her sister by the mutt. I just shook my head in disbelief and headed into my den, and cranked back the La-Z-Boy. I was tempted to get a bottle of whiskey out, but I figured if I started drinking, I wouldn't stop. All that was on television was a rehash of what had happened that morning, and the latest news, which was the same as they had reported half an hour earlier. I flipped through some channels, and then fell asleep in my lounger.

Chapter 139: Picking Up The Pieces

Wednesday, September 12, 2001

I woke Wednesday morning when Stormy whined to go outside. It was cool, but I wandered out in my bare feet with her, with a Secret Service agent hovering nearby. After she did her thing, I took her back inside and unhooked her leash, and she thundered back up the stairs. I followed. The girls were back in their room and Marilyn was stirring awake. I went on into the bathroom and stripped yesterday's clothes off, and took a quick shower.

"Good morning.", I heard from the bathroom. It was Marilyn sitting on the toilet. Just as I reached to turn off the water there was a loud WHOOSH followed by, "Sorry!"

I climbed out and attempted to look superior to her. It didn't last, since she looked worried. "Good morning. Get a decent night's rest?"

"I'm sorry about last night. Where did you sleep?"

I did a head nod towards the bedroom and beyond. "In the den. I'm fine. I need to get to the office."

"You're the President now, aren't you?"

I nodded again, as I toweled dry. "Pretty much. The title is Acting President, but I'll probably be sworn in by the end of the week. Are you okay with this?"

That got me a wry look. "Well, it's not like we never knew it couldn't happen. Still, it's different than if you actually ran for it, you know?" She pulled on a bathrobe and asked, "How is this going to change things? Do we move into the White House?"

I shrugged. "Not until after Laura and the girls move out. I think that would be more than a little tacky, don't you?"

Her eyes opened wide. "Oh my God! I never even thought of that! Laura ... Oh, God! I need to call her..."

"Please, do that today. Don't say anything about them moving out or us moving in. Just call and offer some support." Marilyn got along well with Laura Bush, much better than George and I had been getting along. Marilyn had teaching degrees, even if she hadn't been a teacher, and Laura was a librarian. They had done several joint projects together, usually something related to education and reading, mostly in the general D.C. area.

"Of course."

I finished dressing and headed out, with Marilyn behind me in a bathrobe and fuzzy slippers. The girls were still upstairs, so I didn't even have a chance to say goodbye to them. Breakfast was a quick bagel and cream cheese and juice, and then I was off to the White House. I got there by 8:00, by which time the place was already a beehive of activity. It never really goes to sleep, of course. A lot of the office staff starts coming in before 6:00, just to prepare for the President to arrive.

As usual, the first person in my office was a National Intelligence Officer with the President's Daily Brief, a daily summary of the latest intelligence. It was compiled by the CIA overnight and the first person to get it is the President. Other people to get it typically included the Vice President, the Secretaries of State and Defense, and the National Security Adviser. I knew for a fact that there had been arguments made by Cheney and Wolfowitz to cut me out of the loop, but Bush hadn't gotten to that point yet. I read it over quickly, and wasn't surprised by any of it. Most of the world's militaries had increased their levels of readiness, the smart ones because they were worried about Islamic nut jobs, the dumb ones because their neighbors had increased their readiness. The rest of the brief was mostly information about various terrorist groups. Nothing like locking the barn door after the horse had bolted.

I raised an eyebrow at one piece, which was tying Al Qaeda to Saddam Hussein. "What is the basis for stating that Osama bin Laden is sharing information with Saddam Hussein?", I asked.

"I'm not at liberty to say, sir.", he replied.

I set the Brief down on my desk. "You want to think about that for a second and come up with another answer, buster?"

"Sir? That information is classified and cannot be divulged."

This fellow was in his late twenties, a junior version of the regular NIOs who met with the President. "Sonny, I'm the Acting President of the United States. When I tell you I want some information, you can trust that I really want it."

He looked very confused at this. "Sir, my understanding is that this is just something temporary."

"Uh, huh. Who told you that?", I asked pleasantly.

"Mister Wolfowitz, sir, and Mister Libby."

"Scooter said I'm just temporary, too?"

"Yes, sir. You're going to be Vice President again as soon as the President is rescued, so we shouldn't break security.", he told me.

"And besides, I'm not going to be here much longer anyway, right?" He didn't know what to say to that, but it was obvious he had heard this. "Okay, thank you.", I told him.

He looked relieved. He collected the report and left. Yet one more damn thing to sort out.

One important moment came when Frank Stouffer came through and said, "Air Force One, the spare anyway, is in Houston. The first President Bush and Mrs. Bush are going to leave within the next hour. They'll be here sometime early this afternoon."

"Okay, Frank. I want you to keep track of that and head over to Andrews when it lands. For as long as the Bushes are here, you belong to them. Get them where they need to be. Grease the ways. If the Bushes want you to take off your skin and dance in your bones, do it. Got me?", I told him.

"Understood, sir."

"Good man. President Bush was President when I first got to Congress. I have a lot of respect for the man, and I expect you to show it."

"I won't fail you, Mister President."

I stood up and smiled. "I know you won't, Frank, that's why I'm giving you the job. One thing ... I am sure the first thing the Bushes will want to do will be to see Laura and the girls. Make sure to mention to Mister Bush that I would appreciate some of his time. This afternoon would be good, if possible."

"Yes, sir." He left to go about his duties, and I thought about him for a second. He was now my Deputy Chief of Staff, a big step up from the Vice President's Chief of Staff. He'd been with me just over a year now, since when he came on board with me after Springboro. I'd been using him as a combination Chief of Staff and body man. Deputy Chief of Staff meant I'd need to find a new body man. One more damn thing to do.

I headed to the meeting I had ordered for the morning. It was time to sort this mess out. I grabbed a covered leather clipboard sporting the Presidential Seal, and tossed a few items in it.

We were meeting in the Cabinet Room, and I took the central seat at the long table. There had been a quiet buzz as I came in, but it silenced as I sat down. I glanced around. As far as I could tell, the key people I wanted to speak with were present, and there looked to be an equal number of other people, their deputies, most of whom I didn't know, sitting in chairs behind their bosses, along the wall. Everybody's eyes were on me as I sat down.

"Thank you all for coming.", I started. "Now, before we get into anything, I want to tell you something. Last night, when I got back to the house, I found my wife sleeping in her bathrobe on the couch, with the television on showing the news from yesterday. She had been crying. Upstairs, my daughters were upstairs in my bed, also asleep with the news on, and they had been crying as well, and they were huddled up with my dog to protect them. All across this country the people who rely on us to protect them are crying in their beds because they are scared! We have failed to protect them. We have to fix this, and this meeting is the start. If you do not understand this, there's the door. Is that clear enough?"

A chorus of "Yes, sir!" came from around the table, some clear and some mumbled.

I looked around and nodded to everybody. "Thank you. Okay, first things first." I looked around again. "Where's Joe Allbaugh?" Joe was a long time political fixer and was now the head of FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Administration. He was a long time pal with the President.

A voice came up from the end of the table. "He's at a conference in Montana, sir. I'm Michael Brown, Deputy Director of FEMA."

It took me a second to recall Brown's round face, and then it hit me. This was the guy who, on my first run, had been running FEMA at the time of Hurricane Katrina. Yeah, Michael 'Heck of a job, Brownie!' Brown. Great! For years both political parties had been using FEMA and a few other agencies as dumping grounds for politicians who managed to raise enough money for them and needed an easy job. Both Allbaugh and Brown fit the bill perfectly.

"Okay, Mister Brown, what's the current status with the crash sites?"

To be fair, his answers were clear and concise and accurate as to what we knew. The Pentagon was severely damaged on one side, but not destroyed and was still functioning, and the structural design of the building (five separate rings, one inside the other, with connecting corridors at the vertices) broke the building into separate sections. We probably had a few hundred dead, but the fires were out and cleanup was proceeding.

The real problem was New York, where we now had two gigantic piles of smoking rubble. Giuliani was running the show, and doing it competently, and had all the men and equipment he could ask for. The biggest problem was the choking smoke and dust surrounding the area. Otherwise, everything that could be done was being accomplished, but it would be slow. There were some survivors, but not many.

"Thank you. A few questions. Do they have enough respirators and gas masks, that sort of thing? Does FEMA have a stockpile of that? Can we get them more?"

"They are using what they have, and more are being rushed in.", he replied.

I nodded and made a note to talk to Tommy Thompson. He would need to alert the Centers for Disease Control about possible health hazards from all that shit.

"When do they expect President Bush to be rescued?", asked Cheney.

I eyed him for speaking out of turn, but then looked at Brown. "It's the next question. Any ideas, Mr. Brown?"

He simply shook his head. "I'm sorry, but that seems like it is going to be a real long shot. So far none of the people who have gotten out or been found were from above the plane strikes. They are still looking, of course, but ... sir, there's just nothing left!"

"Thank you, Mister Brown. I appreciate how difficult that is to say." To the group I stated, "Last night I met with the leadership of the House and the Senate. John Boehner and Harry Reid volunteered to go to New York to report back to Congress on the rescue and recovery operations." To Brown I said, "Make sure that you do what you can to help them. Do we have any idea what the count is yet? How many people were in there?"

He shook his head. "No. A lot of people managed to escape, at least from the lower levels, but nobody was running a head count. We probably won't know for days, maybe weeks." He thought for a second, and then added, "It will be in the thousands."

There were a few gasps at that. There had been wild speculation on the television stations yesterday, but this sounded ominously official.

I muttered something rude under my breath and then nodded. "I'm going to need to see this for myself. This afternoon, I should be able to get over to the Pentagon. Tomorrow, I can fly to New York." I looked around and caught the eye of one of the Secret Service agents on the periphery. "Did you catch that? I'll take Air Force Two. Please set that up, along with a drive over to the Pentagon later today."

"Yes, sir." He departed the room.

To the others I added. "The original Air Force One is still in New York, and I loaned the second to the President's father." I turned to Colin Powell. "Are we still at DEFCON Three?"

"Yes, sir, but nothing seems to be happening. I think we should downgrade to Four.", he replied.

"That is much too preliminary!", argued Cheney. "We need to maintain this readiness state. We'll be making a response to this as soon as President Bush is returned to office."

"When we make a response, then we can worry about the readiness state at that time. Until then, maintaining a Level Three readiness state puts excessive wear and tear on both the troops and the equipment, and costs us an excessive amount of money for a level of protection not currently warranted.", responded Powell.

I looked at Powell. "Are we locked down overseas, too?"

"Yes, sir." He gave us a quick outline of what DEFCON Three involved, including increased patrolling with planes, readying vessels for sea and increasing naval patrols, and locking down on overseas bases.

I listened for a bit, and when he was finished, I said, "Okay, after we are done here, take us down to Four, but keep the overseas bases tight, and keep some planes flying. We're going to need to begin taking security a bit more seriously."

"Sir, that's a call for President Bush to make.", interjected Cheney.

Time to handle this; the man just would not take a hint! I kept focused on Cheney, but raised my voice a bit, and said, "Mister Attorney General, is there anything in Article Four of the 25th Amendment specifying that the powers of the Acting President are not those of the President?"

I could feel all the eyes in the room on me. Ashcroft answered, quickly, "No sir, there is no restriction as compared to the President. As Acting President you have the full powers of the President."

I kept looking at Dick. "Very, good, sir. So, Secretary Cheney, do you have anything to add to that?"

Cheney was working his jaw, but simply said, "No, sir."

"Thank you." I looked back at Powell. "You have my orders. Any questions?"

"None. I will probably modify a few items based on intelligence, but I understand your intent."

"Good enough." I turned back to the table and looked up and down. "Okay, now for the fun part. Yesterday was the biggest intelligence failure this country has seen since the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor! Would somebody please tell me what the hell happened yesterday morning?" I pointed at Paul Wolfowitz, head of the CIA. "You first."

Wolfowitz looked confident as he responded, and I was surprised by the level of information he had available. How much he had known before the attacks and simply ignored, that I wasn't sure of. Basically, he had several dozen members of a terrorist group called Al Qaeda who had managed to travel to the U.S., in some cases months ago, and Al Qaeda was now making public statements that they were the ones responsible. He then pronounced that Al Qaeda was taking orders from Iraq.

I made a few noncommittal grunts and then pointed at Louis Freeh, head of the FBI. He was on his way out, so to speak, a holdover from the Clinton days, and unpopular in the Administration. Originally he was supposed to have left right after the Inauguration, but for some reason Bush held on to him as a sop to the Democrats. Nobody expected him to last through the year."Louis, anything you guys have figured out?"

His report was similar, though he had less information. He didn't know how many people were involved, or what weapons they had, or where they had been living, or where they had managed to learn to fly airliners. However, he promised that all that would be figured out, since every agent was being pulled off every other case to look into this. It was a remarkably unsatisfying response. Even though it had only been a day, I had expected more.

I turned to Brian Stafford of the Secret Service. "Who do you have working on this?"

He turned and pointed at a man behind him, who stood up. "Deputy Director William Basham, sir.", he said.

"Pleased to meet you. I'm sure we'll be talking. Who's the guy running this on the FBI side?"

"That would be Executive Assistant Director Collins Barnwell.", answered Basham.

"Is he here?", I asked, looking around. Nobody was jumping up, so I turned to Freeh and gave him a raised eyebrow.

"You only specified my deputy, sir.", he said lamely.

I muttered under my breath something else rude, and then finalized the decision I had been considering since last night. I simply nodded to myself for a moment, and then looked down the table to the Director of the FBI. "Well, that settles something for me." I looked around the table. "It's time for a frank discussion, folks. I met with Congress last night. One of the things that was mentioned was that the American people will be looking for some answers, and Congress will be holding hearings. They are going to want to know what happened, and they are going to be looking for a few heads to roll. People will be held accountable. We might as well get started."

I opened my clipboard cover and pulled out a sheet of White House stationery. I slid it down the table to Freeh. "Mister Freeh, I am sorry to hear that you have decided to resign your position as Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Your many years of service will always be remembered. Just write 'I quit' on there and sign it and date it. That should be good enough."

You could have heard a pin drop, and everybody stared. I was firing somebody? That just wasn't done! The usual Washington response would be that the President would admit to various unspecified lapses in judgment and take the blame for everybody. Nobody would be hurt and life would go on, business as usual. Screw that! Time for some people to get a wakeup call!

Louis Freeh just stared at me. I snapped my fingers at him and pointed at the paper. "Mr. Director, your performance a few minutes ago was totally unsatisfying. I have no doubt that when this finally gets figured out, the files of the FBI will have the names, ranks, and serial numbers of everybody involved. Do like I said. Write 'I quit' and sign and date it." Stunned, he did as he was told. He passed it back, and I said, "Thank you. When you leave this room, turn over any identification, keys, etc. to somebody outside. Then, go home. You are no longer in the employ of the United States of America."

"Jesus!", I heard somebody murmur. Freeh stood up from the table and slowly left, the look of a broken man on his face.

I looked over and saw his shocked Deputy Director. I crooked a finger at him and then pointed at the chair Freeh had just left. "Congratulations, you are the interim Director. From now on, when we have a meeting about what happened yesterday, I will expect your Executive whatever to be on hand, and I expect him to have a lot more answers than what I just heard. Are we agreed on that?"

"Uh, yes, sir."

I turned back to the Deputy Director of the Secret Service. "Mister Basham, from now on, you and this fellow Barnhart..."

"Barnwell, sir."

I gave him a dour look at the interruption. "Do I look like I care? Barnwell! You and he are joined at the hip. I want you two working so closely on this that you can finish each other's sentences! If you get an itch, I want him to scratch it! This afternoon I am going over to the Pentagon to see what happened there. Afterwards I want the two of you to see me here, and I am expecting a heck of a lot more info than I just got. Understood?"

"Yes, sir!"

"Thank you. You are excused. I want you to go find him and get this sucker cranking!" Basham left with a lively step and a look of determination. After he left I pulled a second blank sheet from my pad. "Our next contestant is the Administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration."

"ME?!", came from a few feet down the table to my right. "What did I do!?"

"Ah, there you are, Ms. Garvey." I slid a blank piece of stationery down the table. "Ms. Garvey, it's not what you did, but what you didn't do. Your agency is supposed to regulate the airlines, and instead they regulate your agency. Now, while I will admit that you didn't create this situation, you did nothing to change it, either. We might not know what happened, but airplane security falls under the regulations of your agency. I can guarantee that in your files will be a list of proposals that could have stopped this but were never implemented. So, sign away."

Jane Garvey was furious, but she signed a resignation and stormed out. Her replacement sat down in her place and I looked at him. "Your job will be to find that list of fixes and get them going. If you need political cover, I'll give it to you. If you need an Executive Order ordering things to be done, I'll give it to you. I will support you on this, but no plane lifts off until we are sure that this won't happen again, and we need those planes flying as soon as possible. Understood?"

"Yes, sir!"

"Good! Now, get out of here and get to work. I'll talk to you sometime tomorrow night, by which time I expect a list of concrete proposals and a timetable to implement them."

"Yes, sir!", He took off. I hadn't even caught his name.

"Next!" I pulled out another blank sheet, and slid it across the table to Paul Wolfowitz, who was sitting across from me. He simply stared at me. "Paul, for the last six months, other experts and I have been warning about the dangers of terrorism and you have been telling me how we weren't in any danger, and how the real problem was Iraq! You fired the experts you didn't like, but you couldn't fire me. Even today you are still trying to sell the idea that this was caused by Iraq. Sorry! No sale! You know the drill by now. Sign it and date it!"

"Damn you! You can't do this! President Bush will have you impeached!", yelled Cheney.

I turned to my left, where Dick was sitting. "Dick, we went through this earlier, remember? I can do it, and I just did. If we find the President, he can hire any of these people back that he wants. In the meantime, they are gone."

Wolfowitz looked at his patron, but he either didn't pick up on Cheney backing down, or didn't care. "You go to hell, Buckman! You're not the President! I don't have to take this shit!"

Around the table you could hear people gasping. I hadn't quite expected that response, but I certainly knew how to handle it. I caught the eye of a Secret Service agent and said, "We're going to need a team in here, right now, if you please."

"Yes, sir!" He began speaking into his sleeve mike and moved to stand behind Wolfowitz.

"What the hell do you think you are doing, Buckman!?", Wolfowitz demanded.

I reached over and took back the piece of stationery. I wrote, 'Paul Wolfowitz has been terminated from the employment of the United States of America, effective immediately. Carl Buckman, Acting President, United States of America, September 12, 2001.'

By the time I was finished, four additional agents were standing behind the ex-CIA director. I looked up at them and said, "Mr. Wolfowitz is no longer in the employ of the Central Intelligence Agency, or any other agency of this government. After you escort him from the room you are to search him and remove any identification or other items not of a personal nature. Then he is to be taken directly to his home. I want two of you to head over to Langley and inform the guards at the gate that Mr. Wolfowitz is no longer an employee and is no longer to be permitted on the premises. If there are any questions, they can call the White House. Is that understood?"

"Damn you!", yelled Wolfowitz, who tried to stand up.

On doing so, two agents grabbed him by the shoulders, one on each side, and held him in place. I pointed towards the door, and he was led outside. Some of the faces in the room looked shocked, but I noticed Colin Powell had a slight smile, and Paul O'Neill didn't look unhappy, either.

One of the shocked faces was Wolfowitz' deputy. I pointed at him and motioned to fill the now vacant seat. He moved into position and I gave the newcomer a hard look. "Tomorrow morning I am flying to New York City. I will expect to be able to tell people with a straight face that we are working hard to figure out who exactly did this to us, so that we can return the favor. I am expecting you to have information for me that is truthful and unbiased. If you are smart, you will have somebody very senior and very serious to help those other two figure things out. They are to become the Three Amigos. If you need to open the vaults, do it. Do you understand me, or do I need to repeat the process we just witnessed?"

"I understand, sir."

I pulled out a fourth piece of blank paper, and stared at it for a second, and then put it back in my folder. I felt a sense of relief in the room; there had been enough drama. I made a half turn in my chair towards Cheney, but then kept turning my head towards Scooter Libby, sitting behind him. "Scooter, I really thought hard about this, but I am going to give you the benefit of the doubt. However, if you ever again tell anybody that I'm not the real President and that I am not to be kept in the loop and can't be told classified information I will hang you out to dry in the noonday sun! In the meantime, you are to start doing your damn job and not running around trying to game the system and cooking the books on the data with the CIA!"

Cheney looked like he was about to explode, but kept quiet. If he had said anything, I planned to pull out a sheet of paper and hand it to him, but he behaved himself. The rest of the meeting was about what we would need to do in the future for security. I also gave people a plan for my coming schedule, including a joint meeting with the Congressional leaders Friday morning with the entire Cabinet.

When we broke around noon, I called Norm Mineta and semi-apologized for firing the FAA Administrator out from under him, and asked him to call over there and give whatever assistance he could to get the planes up and flying again. Then I called in Ari Fleischer and filled him in on the changes in personnel, and my schedule. He was going to have to start earning his pay! I would let him handle the press briefing.

I grabbed a quick lunch in the White House Mess, the West Wing cafeteria run by the Navy, and then got a call from Frank Stouffer saying that the first President Bush had flown in, along with his wife. From Andrews they would be taking Marine One to Camp David to see Laura and the girls, but they would land at the White House first, and the President would sit down with me for a bit while Barbara flew on. I told Frank to bring him in as soon as possible.

It was a little before 2:00 that I got the word that Marine One was about to land, so I cleaned my desk off and made myself presentable. I watched it land and then lift off again as soon as the former President was clear. He looked much the same as when I had met him a few times back during his Administration, but he was clearly older, at least in his mid-70s, and moved slower. Today, he had a very somber look on his face. Frank escorted Mr. Bush to my office, and I greeted him at the door. "Thank you for seeing me, Mr. President. Allow me to say that Marilyn and I and the rest of my family are all praying that George will be rescued shortly." I ushered him over to an armchair.

"That is very kind of you, Carl. Is that alright?", he asked.

"Of course, sir." I waited until he had sat down, and then I sat down in a chair opposite him. "I appreciate the time you are allowing me, sir. As soon as we are done, I will have Frank get you up to Camp David. I hope Frank has been helpful. I told him he belongs to you and Mrs. Bush as long as needed."

That earned me a small smile. "Good heavens, but he seems so young, but I suppose we all were that age once."

"Yes, sir, I think that is very true. He's good, though. He's been on my staff since the campaign, and I've found him very useful. Whatever you need, just let him know."

He nodded. "Once we get to Camp David, we'll be fine, I'm sure. Please, is there any more news?", he asked with a pleading tone.

It was heart-wrenching to tell this to a man I had so much respect for, and to know I was the cause of this heartbreak. I shook my head and said, "Rescue operations are still moving along, but the latest report, right after lunch, was no different than what you might have heard this morning. There are some people being pulled out of the rubble, and some who we know are trapped, but nobody from above the plane strikes. Still, it's early. We still have hope."

He seemed to deflate for a second, and then drew upon a hidden well of strength inside himself and sat up straighter. "Thank you, Mister President, for being so ... compassionate. There really isn't any hope, is there?"

"That was one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you, sir. Could I have a few minutes of your time before I answer that remark?", I asked.

He nodded. "Of course, Mr. President. How can I help?"

"It is related to my current status. As I am sure you understand, I am currently only the Acting President. When the authors of the 25th Amendment wrote the bill, they were contemplating the President being ill or otherwise indisposed. They certainly never thought that he might not be available. Now, while the Cabinet has confirmed me as the Acting President, I am facing considerable opposition from one particular individual, and I was hoping that while you were here you might be willing to speak to him."

He eyed me curiously. "Who?"

"Secretary of State Cheney.", I admitted. "I hate to admit that I can't control the situation as well as I would like to, but that is the truth. He refuses to accept the situation, is telling people I am not the 'real' President, and is fighting me at every turn. Worst of all, he is telling the people he works with not to cooperate with me. I am afraid that George led him to believe that I was going to be removed as Vice President, and that he would be named as the new Vice President. I am on the verge of firing him, but I simply do not need the headache it will cause me. You worked with him in your Administration, and I was hoping you could speak to him. Our nation needs to be unified now, not split apart like this."

President Bush grimaced at this and looked away slightly, but then turned back to face me and nodded. "I've talked to George and he indicated to me he was trying to get Dick into your office, but I counseled him that if he really wanted to do that, he would need to wait until the re-election. George does have his own mind on things, though." I could tell the admission left a sour taste in his mouth. It was my understanding that the Bush family couldn't quite figure out how George W. had ended up in the Presidency. His younger brother Jeb was considered the smart one in the family!

"I think that if you were to talk to Dick, perhaps you would be able to reason with him. He doesn't have to like me, but he cannot continue to publicly fight and belittle me in front of the Cabinet and other agency heads. The next time he does it I will have no choice but to remove him from office, regardless of the price I have to pay. Earlier today I asked the Director of the FBI and the Administrator of the FAA to resign, and they complied. When I asked the head of the CIA to resign, he refused, with Cheney's backing, and I fired him and had the Secret Service remove him from the building. I will not tolerate Dick Cheney's attitude, and I would dearly love for you to explain that to him in no uncertain terms."

"You fired Wolfowitz! Oh my God!"

I nodded. Paul Wolfowitz had held the position that President Bush had once held, Director of the CIA. "Yes, sir. He and Scooter Libby have been slanting the intelligence under the direction of Dick Cheney. They want to go to war with Iraq, so they are saying the Iraqis were involved in this." I wasn't sure how much of this he was aware of. By tradition, ex-Presidents can receive the President's Daily Brief also.

"And they weren't?", he asked.

"No, sir. It was done by a group called Al Qaeda, a bunch of renegade Saudis hiding out in Afghanistan. I do have to ask that you not divulge that."

He simply shook his head and sighed. "I'll speak to Dick. He and I go way back. Was there anything else?"

I slowly nodded. "Yes, sir. It relates to what we were discussing before. As you are probably aware, Senator Reid and Congressman Boehner traveled to New York last night, to get a personal take on the rescue efforts and to make a report to the rest of the Congressional leadership. When I met with them last night, I told them that if it was necessary for me to be sworn in, I wanted there to be no question on it. It was too soon to even contemplate it. We discussed another meeting Friday morning, with the leadership and the full Cabinet, and taking a vote at that time."

A look of pain came over the President's face as I discussed, even in an oblique manner, the probable death of his eldest son. "How does this relate to what you would like to ask, Carl?"

I took a deep breath. "Sir, I have the utmost respect for you, and would never wish to cause you any harm or pain. However, if the Cabinet decides to vote to have me sworn in as the President, there will always be a lingering doubt as to the legitimacy of my Presidency. If you were to be standing at my side and holding the Bible I would be sworn in on, those doubts would be eliminated. This is something I ask, not for myself, but for the nation. Still, if you refuse, I'll understand."

The President didn't say anything, but pain flashed across his features and tears welled up in his eyes. I kept my mouth shut. There was nothing I could add. After a minute he said, "Carl, I need to think about this. I should be getting up to see Laura and the girls."

"Of course, sir. Please give them my regards. If there is anything that I can do or get done let me know." I stood and waited while President Bush climbed to his feet. As we walked towards the door I said, "I am flying to New York tomorrow to see the damage. You are welcome to come with me."

"No, I think that would be too soon."

"Yes, sir." At the door I turned the President over to Frank and found myself facing Scooter Libby. "Mr. Libby, what brings you here?"

Scooter was a bit more deferential this afternoon. "Mr. President, you said you wanted to begin calling back some of the various heads of state this afternoon."

"Yes, I did. Thank you for the reminder. Come in. Do you have a list? What's the procedure?" This was a first for me! How the hell do you dial up the Queen of England?! What, do you dial the Operator, and then when you get the switchboard, ask for her extension?! I took the list from Scooter and glanced down it, and then looked back at him. "You'd better have an interpreter on hand. Marilyn says I can't even speak English, only Southern. I sure can't speak some of these languages!"

I had told him the other day I would speak to the top ten countries, and the State Department could handle the rest. On the list – Russia, Israel, England, France, Germany, Canada, Mexico, Japan, China, and Saudi Arabia. I went over to my desk and sat down, and gestured for him to sit as well. I grabbed a pen and crossed off Saudi Arabia. "Screw the Saudis. They're half the problem." I thought for a second and jotted down, "India. I assume they called? What the hell time is it in some of these places?" India and Russia were somewhere on the other side of the world!

Scooter glanced at his watch and then said, "It's 2:30 now. India is ten hours ahead of us, so that makes it after midnight..."

"That would be crazy!"

He continued with a nod, " ... Moscow is plus nine, Israel is plus seven, and then we work down from there."

"Okay, let's start with Israel and work our way west. We'll budget ten minutes each and hope for the best. Now, what do we want me to say?"

He blinked at that, and then we figured out a standard response. So far, everybody had been saying how sorry they were, they were offering assistance, they hoped for the President's quick rescue, and looked forward to meeting me at my earliest convenience. The response: thank you, we appreciate the offers and the State Department will coordinate any international assistance, we are also hoping for President Bush's rescue, and I look forward to meeting you. He had already told the White House bull pen to start warming up the interpreters.

In general, the calls went about as expected. The only thing out of the ordinary was in the first call, with Ariel Sharon. He offered some very valuable intelligence assistance and I promised to make sure the CIA cooperated and worked with them. Then I informed him that Wolfowitz was gone.

"So I have already heard. He is still pushing that ridiculous theory that Iraq is involved? Good! He's more trouble than he's worth!", said Sharon

This had all been on speakerphone, and I glanced over at Libby for his reaction. He was visibly shocked. "That was the gist of our disagreement. Mister Sharon, I don't have the time to talk to you right now, but I look forward to meeting with you soon to discuss this and other security issues."

"And I with you, Mister President."

After I hung up, I looked at Scooter. "Scooter, when this is settled down some, we'd better plan on a summit meeting between me and Sharon. These guys have been fighting these crazies since before you and I were born, so maybe we should listen to them every once in awhile." Then I grabbed the list. "Who's next?"

Most of the leaders I spoke to spoke better English than I did, but if it wasn't their native language, we had translators on the line anyway. We took a break after Europe and North America, and then hit China and Japan after dinner. Meanwhile, I had various aides coming in and out and phone calls from various people about everything else. When did I want to discuss the flight ban? When could I discuss the latest intelligence? When could I discuss military responses? What were my travel plans for tomorrow? What was the latest information from Ground Zero?

Somehow in the midst of all of this, I managed to make a limo drive over to Arlington to see the destruction. Colin Powell was present and he showed me around while the television cameras rolled. The stench was overpowering, a mix of jet fuel, burned tires, melted asphalt, construction fire – and burned flesh. There wasn't anything to do or say, but I had to say something to the workers. They had already rigged up a gigantic flag and I said something patriotic and martial, about how we wouldn't let this stand and how justice would be done. I was just winging it, but they were cheering like crazy. Then I told Colin that when this was over, that flag was to be in a museum somewhere.

There must be something in the American psyche about raising the flag in a disaster. After a disaster, natural or man-made, one of the first things we do is raise a flag. I remembered that was one of the first things I saw when we climbed out of the school in Springboro. Somebody had dragged out a spare flag and was running it up the now bare flagpole.

It was late when I got back to the Naval Observatory, well after the dinner bell had rung. Marilyn and the girls were still up, and I gave them the rundown, and then my wife handed me a phone and a slip of paper. Charlie had called from Camp Lejeune, where he was on alert. I called him back and it was good to hear from him. He wanted to know when they were going to deploy to kill the crazies, so I told him to settle down. When I needed the Marines, I would let them know.

No way was I invading half the Islamic world! We lost thousands of American soldiers, sailors, and marines doing that on my first go, and I did not need to include my boy with the list!

Chapter 140: Oath of Office

Friday, September 14, 2001

Thursday morning, we got up early. The girls needed to get back into a regular schedule with school, so Marine Two flew them all home to Hereford at the crack of dawn, with Stormy in her travel cage. Actually, it flew all of us to Andrews and dropped me off first, and then flew to Hereford. This was some crazy fucked up schedule. I knew that sooner or later it would calm down, but right now we were just winging it and making it up as we went. I kissed my family good-bye and waved as they flew away, and then climbed up the stairs to Air Force Two.

It was a fast flight to New York. The President normally gets priority routing, but with no planes flying, there were zero delays. It was spooky. We really needed to get air traffic flying again! With me on the trip were the Three Amigos, the guys from CIA, FBI, and the Secret Service, who spent the trip up briefing me on what they were finding. It had been two days now, and the results were impressive. The flight manifests for the four flights had been examined, and every single passenger and aircrew member was being investigated, with most of them already cleared of any involvement. On every flight there were four or five individuals, all men, with very sketchy backgrounds and personal histories, and everybody was zeroing in on them. Likewise, links were being found between these names and the names the CIA had in their files.

What I was seeing was the first-hand results of what I knew would be found. The FBI is a huge organization. At the lowest levels, where the agents and the first line supervisors are massed, they have extremely smart and dedicated people and amazing technology, and the ability to flood a problem and pick apart every last little piece. Unfortunately, once it climbs up the ladder, very quickly the organization turns into a bureaucracy much more interested in covering its ass. I knew what they would find, that the hijackers had taken flying lessons in the U.S. and had raised a number of red flags in doing so, but when the reports had gone into the system, they had swirled around the bowl and been filed and ignored.

The CIA was similar, with several additional problems. By law they weren't allowed to operate in the U.S. By practice, they shared nothing with anybody else, especially the FBI. They would be discovered to have followed these guys into the States, filed a classified report, and not told anybody. Furthermore, half the work product these guys were generating was aimed at slanting or corrupting the information heading towards the White House. Not only didn't the right hand know what the left hand was doing, but half the time they were working at cross purposes.

As for the Secret Service, nobody told them shit.

When we landed in New York, I was greeted by Rudy Giuliani and the Police Commissioner, Bernard Kerik. Rudy I had met a few times at Republican fundraisers and election meetings. Kerik I had never met before. Both men had been near the Twin Towers when they collapsed, Giuliani had actually been invited to the breakfast meeting at Windows on the World but had been delayed, and he had gotten there just as the North Tower was hit. Kerik had arrived afterwards, just in time for the South Tower to be hit. Both men had lost their vehicles to falling debris, and had run away to set up a nearby command post.

The two men looked tired and somber. We rode over in the Mayor's car, since the armored limousine the President rides around in was buried in the rubble. "How bad is it, guys?", I asked.

"Mister President, you will have to see it to believe it.", answered Rudy. "I simply don't have words to describe it."

"Mister President, I don't know if you believe in Heaven and Hell, but now I have seen Hell.", responded Kerik.

"Is there any hope? Not just for President Bush, but for anybody who was in there?"

Kerik bowed his head and shook it but didn't answer. Giuliani, sighed and said, "Very little, sir. If you didn't make it out before the buildings collapsed, you didn't make it out. We are still trying to figure out who was in there at the time, but so many of the companies that were there ... the records and computers are gone. It might take us weeks to find out who was there and who wasn't."

"What do you need? What can I do to get you what you need?", I asked.

Again, they shook their heads, but this time it was a more positive response. "Everybody is being extremely helpful. We are getting everything that is available.", said Rudy. He shrugged. "Money? This is going to cost a fortune."

I gave him a wry smile. "Spend the money. I work for the Federal government. We print the money, remember. We'll just have to print a little more."

Kerik added, "The only thing I can think of is more rescue dogs, you know, dogs specifically trained to search for people buried in avalanches and structure collapses. We simply don't have very many. We've had offers of help but with the airports shut down..." He shrugged in helplessness.

"I intend to get them up as soon as possible. This is not something that can last. I will be talking to the FAA about that on my way back to Washington.", I told them.

"You really fired the heads of the FAA, the FBI, and the CIA?", asked an incredulous Giuliani.

It had been all over the news yesterday. All three organizations, as well as the White House, had issued press releases that were brief – 'So-and-so resigned today at the request of Acting President Buckman. A-different-so-and-so was named temporary director.' All three were immediately run down and had microphones and cameras stuck in their faces. Louis Freeh had nothing to say; Jane Garvey was loudly irate and had protested her innocence; Paul Wolfowitz informed the world that I was the worst thing that had happened to American democracy since the British burned Washington in the War of 1812.

I nodded at Giuliani. "Yes I did. They may not have been personally to blame, but their organizations dropped the ball, and heads need to roll. Congress has already told me that they intend major hearings on this disaster, and I told them I intend to cooperate. Here's something else I want you two to think about, the both of you. What do we need to do to improve our response, not just here, but everywhere else, other cities? What can we learn from this? When this is at a point where you can sit down and think, put your smartest people on that. I can just about guarantee that is going to make national news, too."

First stop was Ground Zero, towering piles of rubble where the tallest buildings in New York had been. I was basically speechless. It's one thing to see it on television, but the reality was a smack in the face, and the smell, that I was never going to lose. There were television cameras around, and I know I said something appropriate, but I can't remember for the life of me what it was. I needed to watch it on the news later to find out.

After that we went to the command center, which was a beehive of people, many of whom were filthy and tired, all of whom were talking into phones and trying to get something done. That was where I found John Boehner and Harry Reid, and they looked as drained as the others. I shook their hands and they followed me as I trailed after the Mayor and the Police Commissioner into a conference room. A few other people followed me in, including the Fire Commissioner and the head of the New York City Office of Emergency Management, their version of FEMA. Giuliani had things under control, but the problem was massive, and most of the people there had friends who were inside the buildings when they went down. Loss of life, especially among the Fire Department, was enormous.

I don't know if it was worse than my first time or better. The total death toll was being estimated simply in the thousands. Impromptu memorials were sprouting up all over, as were walls with people hanging pictures of relatives and requests for information on them. It was incredibly chaotic. In some cases people were being reported as missing who never made it to work that day, or nobody had taken down the picture after they got home. They were beginning to get a handle on it, by setting up a clearinghouse for names, but it was slow going. Some of the financial firms which had been destroyed would need to consult emergency backup records in other locations.

I knew it would happen and that there had been nothing I could have done that would stop it, but it was just incredibly depressing regardless. John and Harry didn't say anything during the meeting, but several others commented that they had been quite helpful in reassuring people that resources would be made available, and occasionally suggesting ideas for that. I thanked them both.

Eventually things ran down, and I asked everybody to leave the room but Harry and John. They both nodded, and after everybody else filed out, John closed the door behind them, and then sat down heavily. There were bags under his eyes and under Harry Reid's eyes as well. "Gentlemen, you look like crap! Have you been able to get any sleep?", I asked.

"Not much, Carl. I dozed for a few hours last night in a chair in here.", admitted John.

"Same here, Mister President.", added Senator Reid.

"Harry, I think we can dispense with the titles. It's just the three of us, and you've been calling me Carl for a while now, usually with some other stuff added on.", I said with a wry smile. He snorted and smiled at that, but nodded. "Listen, I have to ask the question. The President, is there any chance?"

Both men sighed and looked at each other wearily. Harry answered first. "Not really. Almost nobody got out of there after the buildings collapsed. There's a few people trapped in the rubble in the subbasements, but they were down there to begin with. Up top? Nobody!"

"John?"

"Carl, I would like to argue, but I can't. We are going to have to swear you in. We can delay it, but it's a lost cause. We'll be lucky to find anything in this mess. I heard one of the emergency managers talking about putting everything through table sifters to try and find anything but dust." He lowered his voice and added, "We're talking about bits of bone and wedding rings and pieces of wallets, that sort of thing!"

"Jesus!" They'd be sifting dust for years! "So, what do we do now? What do you two plan to do?"

Harry looked over at John and then turned back to me. "Carl, later today, John and I are going to call down and talk to Denny Hastert and Tom Daschle. You can't be in on the phone call, I mean, you just can't be. You can't be seen to be influencing anything. They'll probably talk to you later today."

"And then what?", I pushed.

"They'll talk to you later today. That's all I will say for now."

I nodded in tired acquiescence. I could see one of two things happening. Either they would decide to swear me in as President, or they could decide to wait until they had proof that George Bush was dead, something that might take years, if it was even possible. If they chose Option Two, I was the lamest of lame duck Presidents, doomed before I even started. There was even the possibility they could make me live in the Vice President's mansion until I was sworn in, making me an international laughingstock. "Fair enough." I stood up. "Guys, I am going to get out of your hair. I'll go talk to Rudy for a bit and then I'm heading back to D.C. You do your thing, and then get a room and get some sleep. You're not going to help if you collapse from exhaustion."

They both nodded mutely and we shook hands, and I left the room. An hour later I was flying back to Washington, accompanied by the Three Amigos. On the way, we talked to the Deputy Director of the FAA and outlined plans to get things up and running by the weekend. The plan was to start slowly and concentrate on getting people back home first, and then ramp up. We would start flying again Saturday morning.

By the time we got back to Andrews and were preparing to take Marine Two back to the White House I had gotten a call that Denny Hastert and Tom Daschle wanted to see me. I told them they would be first on my list. We got to the White House about 4:00 and I sent the Three Amigos on their way, while I headed to my office. Denny and Tom were already there. I invited them into my office and closed the door. "How we doing?", I asked.

"What's it like up there, Mister President?", asked Tom Daschle, the Senate Majority Leader.

"I don't know what Harry and John told you guys, but words just can't describe it. Bernie Kerik said that now he's seen Hell. There's nothing left but rubble and dust.", I told him.

Tom looked over at Denny Hastert, the Speaker of the House and a Republican, and Denny nodded back at him. Tom took a deep breath and said, "We need to have you sworn in, sir. We both talked to Harry and John, and we had a few others in the room with us. They were pretty convincing. There's nothing left, and no chance."

I nodded and looked at them. "I forget whether it was John or Harry who said that there were plans to start putting all the rubble and the dust through sifters and sieves to look for bones and anything to identify people by. I've never seen anything like that! I don't think I could do it myself."

Denny muttered something in disbelief and then shook himself of the thought. He looked at me and asked, "Carl, when do you want to do this? How do we do this?"

I gave him a brief smile. "I'm making this up as I go! Hell, how do we have a state funeral without the guest of honor? Answer me that one?" Both men's eyes popped a little at that. "Anyway, today is Thursday. I'm not sure, but I think we'll need the approval of the Cabinet, just like when they named me the Acting President. If we had absolute proof the President was dead, it wouldn't be necessary, but that might take years."

"That would be good. We can call them together and Denny and I can attend the meeting with Chief Justice Rehnquist handy.", replied Daschle. "As soon as the vote passes, he can swear you in."

"I'll call for a full Cabinet meeting in the morning."

"Very good, Mister President.", agreed Denny.

They were on the verge of leaving when I had a thought. "Hold up a second, gentlemen. Let me bounce an idea off of you." They looked at each other and settled back into their chairs. "I have a worry. There are going to be people, some in Congress and some out there in the real world, who will not think I am the legitimate President of the United States. I wasn't elected, I'm jumping the gun, the real President is in the rubble and I'm stopping the rescue – I mean, you guys can fill in the rest. Will you grant that this has the potential to be a real problem, and not just for me, but for the nation? When we figure out who did this, we are going to war, and we do not need any questions raised."

"I understand you, sir.", answered the Speaker. Senator Daschle was slower to respond, but he nodded and agreed also.

"Well, it's not like I am going to get an Inaugural Ball out of this disaster, but we can't be seen to be hiding this in a conference room in the White House. We need, all of us need, this to be public, as public as possible."

"Perhaps at the Capitol and on television.", suggested Hastert.

"How do we do the vote? What if somebody gets a bug up his tail and votes no? You don't need that on television!", countered Daschle.

"Yikes! No, that would be lousy!", I agreed. "How about this? You guys come to the Cabinet meeting in the morning. You tell them what you've agreed to, and they take a vote. If everybody is unanimous, we do a public version tomorrow night in the Capitol on live television and Rehnquist swears me in."

"You planning to speak afterwards?"

"I can. It won't be big, but I probably should. Something about how democracy continues to march on or something like that. I am not figuring on a major speech or State of the Union Address.", I told them.

"Speaking for myself, I think we could go along with that.", he agreed. "Denny?"

"Same here."

I stood up and thanked them and ushered them out, and then ordered up a Cabinet meeting for the morning. Then it was back to work.

I got home at a relatively decent hour that night. I was still living at the Naval Observatory, and Marilyn and the girls (and Stormy) were home in Hereford. They had gone back to school today, and if everything went as planned, they would be at school tomorrow. Afterwards, they could come back down for the swearing in ceremony. I ate a late supper and watched CNN for a bit.

The news was a mixed bag. It was all about the 9-11 attacks, of course, but it was about a bunch of different things. You had reports from Ground Zero (and virtually nothing from the Pentagon) with footage of rescue teams and guys in hard hats trying to sort through the mess. They were constantly rerunning any footage of anybody being pulled out, but there were damn few of those. On top of that was vast speculation about the status of the President, which segued into my status as Acting President and my visit to the site earlier in the day. Also discussed was my visit with the first President Bush, as well as some footage of Harry Reid and John Boehner talking to reporters in New York. There was intense speculation about what they were doing there, and who they were discussing their findings with.

There was also discussion of my actions the other day in cleaning house at the FAA, FBI, and CIA. Rush Limbaugh had declared my actions (on the basis of his extensive legal background, no doubt) unconstitutional and justified my impeachment. That prompted all the mainstream networks to call out their guest lawyers to report on the constitutional implications. They needed something to fill in 24 hours of air time.

I was getting out of my chair to head towards bed when they called a late breaking story. "We are now getting a report – this is unconfirmed but from a reliable source – a report that tomorrow the Congressional leadership will report to the Cabinet that President Bush is to be considered missing in action and presumed dead, and that they are recommending that Acting President Buckman be sworn in as President!" I stopped at that and listened. The report was about 90% accurate, and it was obvious that one of the Congressional leaders was leaking the story. After that I headed to bed.

Friday morning found me back in the Cabinet Room at 9:00. This time we had Tommy Thompson and Ann Veneman with us in person, and I made sure to thank them for getting back to town. Dick Cheney was present and looking mulish as ever, but I had talked to Frank Stouffer and he had confirmed that President Bush had talked to Cheney before heading to Camp David. Hopefully he wouldn't be an asshole today. Also seated in the room were Denny Hastert and Tom Daschle. By now all the networks were reporting that there was going to be a major decision in the Cabinet today related to the 25th Amendment.

We started with my greeting our guests from Congress. "Speaker Hastert, Senate Majority Leader Daschle, thank you for coming. When we talked yesterday you were getting in touch with the rest of the Congressional leadership. Have you done so?", I asked.

I wasn't sure if they had rehearsed this or not, but Denny Hastert replied, "Yes, Mister President, we have. We talked to both John Boehner and Harry Reid yesterday and have concluded that President Bush is missing and should be presumed dead. We are here to recommend to the Cabinet that they vote to make you the President."

There were some murmurs at that, and Cheney turned red and looked like he would explode, but he kept his mouth shut. With his heart problems he was about one outburst away from a heart attack!

The Attorney General spoke up. "Mister President, I have been in contact with Chief Justice Rehnquist about this, and I would like to bring him in at this time."

"He's here?"

"Yes, sir, along with some of the other Congressional leaders. I think we should have everyone in."

I blinked for a second, but nodded. "They're here too? Fine by me."

Ashcroft turned to a Secret Service agent and motioned him over, and then spoke quietly to him. He left and a couple of minutes later the rest of the Congressional leadership trooped in, less Harry and John, along with Bill Rehnquist. I stood and greeted them. I had known the Congressmen and Senators for years, but I don't think I had met the Chief Justice more than a handful of times. "Mister Chief Justice, I am glad you could make it. I gather the Attorney General has been keeping you abreast of what has been going on."

"Mister President, thank you. Yes, I have talked to the Attorney General several times over the last few days. He was concerned over any possible misinterpretation of the 25th Amendment. We really don't have a precedent for this, as I am sure he told you.", answered Rehnquist.

He took a seat near me, in effect my old seat as the Vice President. I sighed and nodded. "Yes, sir, he did. I told him that we were making it up as we go. Hopefully you can sit here and tell us what we are doing is legal. I'd really prefer not going to jail."

There were several chuckles at this, but not many, until the Chief Justice smiled and answered, "You can always write yourself a pardon, sir." I smiled at that, too, and he continued, "Seriously, though, what you are doing is going above and beyond my reading of the Amendment. On the other hand, the political reality is such that going above and beyond may be what is best for our nation right now. With that being said, I would suggest we turn the meeting over to Attorney General Ashcroft, much as I understand you did Tuesday afternoon."

"Of course, sir." I turned towards the Attorney General and said, "You're on!"

John Ashcroft stood up and said, "Well, it is my intention to repeat the process we had on Tuesday. I am going to go down the list of all the Cabinet members and ask 'Yes' or 'No.' A Yes vote means that Carl Buckman is the President and a No means he stays as Acting President." He grabbed his pen and a note pad and asked, "Secretary of State, yes or no?"

Dick Cheney turned beet red again, and he growled as he answered, but he said 'Yes.' I could see the looks and sighs of relief around the room. Ashcroft ignored the histrionics and continued down the list. It was unanimous. At that he turned to the Speaker of the House and said, "I've been talking to the Chief Justice as well. It's not in the 25th Amendment, and it is not required, but we both think it would help immensely if I asked you gentlemen the same thing. Mister Speaker, yes or no?"

We had the Speaker of the House, along with the Majority and Minority Leaders and Whips of both the House and Senate in the room, all except John and Harry, who were flying home. He went down the list and it was unanimous. Denny added at the end that both John Boehner and Harry Reid had told him they were voting Yes as well.

"How do you want to do this, Mister President?", asked the Chief Justice.

Denny Hastert interrupted and said, "Excuse me, Mister President, but is it still your desire to do this on television tonight, like we talked about yesterday?"

I nodded. "Like I said, I know it's not an inauguration but I think the country is going to want to see this. It's up to you fellows, though. The Capitol is your building."

"Well, we'll do it like a State of the Union Address. We'll have everyone there, let John here run the thing, swear you in, and you make a quick speech. Who is going to be the missing man?"

"That will be me!", growled Cheney forcefully. At all State of the Union speeches there is always a 'missing man', a member of the Cabinet who can become the President if somebody manages to nuke the Capitol. "I'll be damned if I want to watch this crap!"

Denny Hastert wasn't going to be put off by Cheney. "Fine by me, but if you're not going to be there, you'll write out your acceptance right here and now. John, give him a sheet of paper!"

Cheney's nostrils flared at that, but he was under the stare of everybody. Ashcroft silently pushed a sheet of stationery across to him. Cheney scrawled something on it and then stood up and stormed out of the room. It was rude as hell, but I wasn't going to make an issue of it and I was glad to see his back. One of my first jobs would be to replace Cheney.

Denny took the paper and folded it up and stuck it in a jacket pocket. "Okay, I will see you all this evening at eight o'clock. Mister President, get Ari Fleischer to get the wheels in motion. Otherwise, we are going to get out of here and let you get to work."

"I agree." I stood up. "Everybody, I will see you all this evening. Thank you."

Getting back to work involved getting Ari Fleisher to crank up the system for this evening, calling Marilyn and informing her of what was going to happen, and calling Camp David and talking to the first President Bush.

That was an instructive call. He told me that Harry Reid and John Boehner had called him last night after talking to the Congressional leadership, so that he wasn't blindsided when the inevitable reports came out. The President offered to come to Washington for the ceremony, but that for Barbara, Laura, and the girls, it would be too much, too soon. I promised that I wouldn't move into the Executive Mansion until they were ready and had moved out. Dignity of the office or not, that would be more than a little tacky! He promised to sit down with me and talk, commenting that he had done the same with Bill Clinton and George W. Then he asked an interesting question. "Have you talked to your son yet? Where is he stationed?"

"He's at Camp Lejeune. Why?", I answered.

"Get him to the Capitol tonight. This is all about theater. Get him there in a uniform, sitting with his mother and sisters."

"Huh. I had planned on letting him alone. I didn't want to prejudice things..."

"Carl, that is ridiculously naïve! You aren't a Congressman anymore. You are the President of the United States! The guys over in the Pentagon are not going to let him just slide by. If you want him to have any sort of normal life, you are going to have to take that bull by the horns and have it out with them. Now, after we hang up, you need to get your Naval Adviser to get the boy on a plane!"

I chuckled. "Yes, sir. Pardon me for saying it, sir, but you still sound like a President."

"You bet, Carl! You bet!"

"Very good, sir. I will obey that order. Please tell your family that they are in Marilyn's and my prayers, and that we hope to see them again in the future."

"Thank you, Carl, and good luck to you and your family, as well."

After I hung up, I called Josh Bolten and told him what President Bush had told me. "So, how do we get Charlie up here?", I asked.

"We get Mike Miller in here, that's how."

I felt like an idiot, but I had been cut out of so much the last few months, and there were so many people working at the place. "Okay, so who's Mike Miller?"

"He runs the White House Military Office. If he can't do it, he'll know who can."

"Well, stop talking to me and call him. Bring him on in when you find him. Thank you." I hung up and started making some notes about what I wanted to say tonight. I didn't want to talk for a long time, and it wasn't the place for anything legislative, like a State of the Union Address. I needed something uplifting and patriotic, something that would let people know we still had a functioning government and one that would keep them alive. I put out a call for Matt Scully and Mike Gerson to stop by.

Before they could come in, Josh returned with a Navy Captain, an O-6, which was much higher up the food chain than the O-3 Army Captain I had been. "Mister President, this is Captain Miller. He should be able to help you.", said Josh.

I stood and went around my desk to greet Captain Miller. I had probably seen him in passing, but couldn't swear that we had actually spoken. "Captain, I have a small problem, and maybe you can help, or at least point me in the right direction."

"Yes, sir. Whatever I can do."

"This is in the nature of a personal emergency. My son is a Marine Lance Corporal at Camp Lejeune. I haven't had a chance to even call him about this, and I don't even know what he is doing, but I need him here in Washington tonight."

Captain Miller didn't bat an eye. "Yes, sir. I'll take care of it. Where should he report to, and what is his uniform to be?"

I opened my mouth, but didn't reply for a moment. "Captain, you seem to be smarter than I am. I like that! He needs to be at the Capitol by eight this evening, for when I get sworn in. You should probably get him to the residence at the Naval Observatory. We made sure he has all the uniforms he could need there. I would think that the Blue Dress Uniform is too much?"

"That's more like a tuxedo, sir. He should wear his Service A uniform. We'll let him know."

"Okay."

"With your permission, sir?", he asked.

"Thank you, Captain. I am sure we will be talking some more. I hope you get him here on time."

"The difficult we do immediately. The impossible just takes a little longer." He turned and left.

Josh smiled. "This situation sucks, Mister President, but we are going to make it work."

I motioned him towards an armchair and moved to one opposite him. He sat down and I asked, "Are we going to be able to mesh the staffs?"

"Pretty much. Some of them really are Vice Presidential only, and will be on hold until you name somebody. Frank Stouffer will work out. He's just awfully green at this..."

"Frank's a quick study and has been with me since the campaign. Let's see how he shapes up."

Josh nodded. " ... Agreed, sir. I'm not sure about your other fellow, Carter. The VP's press guy doesn't do much, and I don't think it's in his blood." I was about to say something, but Josh held up a hand to forestall me. "That being said, he isn't dumb. If he doesn't work out in the press office, we can move him somewhere else. He's the gay guy, right?"

"Is that a problem for you, Josh?", I asked. "Carter has been a smart and loyal staffer for me, going back to when I was in Congress."

"Hey, it's not a problem to me. I'm just saying, why's he a Republican? Half the party wants to burn him on a cross!"

I snorted. "You know, I asked him that once, back when Rove wanted me to fire him. He told me that his sexuality is not what defines him, that even homosexuals can want a strong and safe government and a decent tax policy and a balanced budget."

It was Bolten's turn to snort and shrug. "I can't argue with that. It just might be better to keep him out of the public eye."

"Josh, if he can't do the job or doesn't like the job, that is one thing. I am not going to bury him in the basement to satisfy the religious right. Hell, they don't like me anyway! If we are ever going to make this party relevant to young people again, we have to be more accepting to women, gays, Hispanics, blacks, you name it! We can't remain a party of old white people. You know what happens to old white people?"

"What?"

"They become dead white people. We need some fresh blood in the Party, or I am going to be the last Republican President for a long time."

Josh gave me a wry smile. "Good luck selling that one. Maybe you're right, but we both know people who won't want to hear it."

"I ain't blaming you, Josh. I'm just saying, numbers don't lie. I know what they say about me, but you know I'm not about to start wearing a robe and praying to Lenin and Marx."

"Mister President, I understand what you are saying. On the other hand, you must have heard the old saying about the problems with remembering that you are there to drain the swamp when you are up to your butt in alligators. We have a bunch of alligators, some of which you made."

"By firing people."

"Not to be blunt about it, but yes."

"Fair enough.", I answered. "We are going to need to replace some people. Right now the important ones are going to be the FBI and the CIA. Cheney, too." Josh looked distressed at that. "Josh, the man can barely be civil with me, let alone work with me. Whatever you feel about whatever direction you think I should be going in, you know we can't work like that."

He gave me a pained look, but nodded. "I understand, sir. It won't be pretty, though."

We spent the next half hour talking about possible personnel changes. Some of the best people might be qualified in more than one spot, others I didn't know very well and he needed to get some background worked up for me. Anybody I selected would need to go through a Senate confirmation hearing, and it was a guarantee they would be scrutinized closely.

Before he left, he asked, "What about a new Vice President?"

"Add that to the list of alligators, Josh."

He left and I ordered no more appointments or meetings for a few hours. I needed to think and to make a few phone calls. I had already learned I had a bunch of personal calls backing up, and it was time to clear some of them away. Marilyn was first, and I simply gave her the latest details on the schedule for the day, and that Charlie was going to be here for the swearing in. We'd be able to see him that evening and talk before sending him back to the Marines.

After I hung up I called Suzie at her house. She was at work, but her husband, John, was at home, having finished his shift. "Carl, is this for real!?", he asked.

"As real as it gets. How are you guys doing?"

"So far so good. We've had some reporters trying to bug us but I got the barracks to station a patrol car outside, and Suzie is going to get a ride home with a buddy."

"That figures.", I told him. "I'm sorry about that, but I figure it will calm down in a day or two."

He agreed. "Probably. Maybe I'll get lucky and have to shoot somebody."

"Sounds like fun. I can write you a pardon, you know.", I replied, laughing.

"I'll pass that along." Then he got serious. "What are we going to do about this? I talked to Jack last night. He managed to make a call from the Tarawa. Those guys are ready to bust! They want to go kill some people."

"John, I can't go into that, but if you are talking to him, tell him I agree. When it comes time, we'll be going full bore on this, and if I need the Marines, he and Charlie will be remembered."

He asked, "Have you talked to Charlie?"

"Not yet, but I am getting him brought here. I'm sure it will be a topic of conversation. He'll be there tonight when I get sworn in. Watch it on television."

'Yeah!"

"I have to go. Tell Suzie we'll call over the weekend."

"Take care."

We hung up and I called Tusk Cycle next and talked to Tusker. I promised that we would get together as soon as possible. He told me that Marilyn had been talking to Tessa already about that. After a bit we hung up and I called the American Renaissance Initiative.

Actually, I don't really make the call. Even the Presidential cell phones go through the White House switchboard in the Old Executive Office Building. All calls in or out go through there and are recorded. I've often wondered how many calls get there by an infant playing with Mom's cell phone and just hitting buttons at random. You just knew it had to have happened! In my case, I simply lift the phone and tell them who I want to speak to and hang up. They call the other party, tell them to stay on the line, and then call me and make a connection.

So in this case I asked to talk to Marty Adrianopolis at ARI and then hung up. A few minutes later the phone rang and I picked it up and said, "Hello."

"Carl, is that you? Is this for real?", I heard my old friend say.

"Hey, Marty, good to hear from you."

"You're the President?! Jesus!"

"That's kind of what I've been saying. How are you doing? I'm sorry I didn't call before this, but it's been crazy.", I admitted.

"I'll bet! How are Marilyn and the kids handling this?"

"Okay, so far. They're back home today, but they'll be there at the Capitol tonight for my swearing in. Charlie is coming up from Camp Lejeune, too."

"Carl, what can I do to help?"

I snorted out a laugh. "Know anybody honest who wants to come to work for me?"

"That's pretty much a contradiction in terms, isn't it?", he replied.

"Like you wouldn't believe! There are times I think Diogenes was an optimist!" Marty laughed at that, so I asked, "Want to come to work over here?"

"Doing what?"

"No idea. I can put you on the staff. I don't think you've got the experience to run the CIA or FBI."

"Yeah, I read about that. I heard a rumor that you had to have Wolfowitz dragged out of the building. What a fucking putz!"

"I can neither confirm nor deny any such tale.", I told him.

"Yeah, well you can't afford me. My wife has expensive tastes."

I had to laugh at that, because it was true. I gave him a Presidential Order to come over sometime soon and visit.

Late that afternoon the intercom buzzed and a secretary said, "Visitors, sir." They knew I wasn't on the phone, since it would have gone through them.

"Send them in."

There was a knock on the door and it opened. Captain Miller came through the door with somebody behind him. "Captain Miller reporting for duty with a detail of one, sir." He stepped to the side, and there was Charlie, dressed in a Marine Battle Dress Uniform (a camo version of the fatigues I would have worn in those days.) and looking a touch bewildered. However, Marine habits are strong, and when Captain Miller came to attention, though with a smile on his face, Charlie automatically snapped to attention.

I smiled at Miller and said, "As you were." Miller automatically relaxed, though Charlie took a few seconds.

"Dad? What's going on? Is this real?", came jumbling out.

"Charlie, it's good to see you again. I'm glad they found you. Where were you, by the way?"

"I was out on the firing range! All of a sudden they shut the whole thing down and a chopper lands and the Captain, he orders me and the Gunny to get back to the barracks and pack my stuff. I didn't even get a chance to hit the head and clean up! Then I got thrown back on the chopper and taken to New River, where I was thrown on an airplane and flown to Andrews. And now I'm here! What is going on!?"

I had to laugh at this. To Captain Miller I said, "Congratulations, you got him here." I turned to Charlie and asked, "Did you ever get to the head?"

"Yes, sir, in New River."

I nodded. "Good. The long and the short of it, Charlie, is that tonight I am being sworn in as the President of the United States. Your mother and sisters will be coming down from Hereford this afternoon, in fact they should be down any time now. We need you to be in a good uniform to be with them. I'll get you back to your base tomorrow."

"You told me that I wouldn't be taken from my battalion for this sort of stuff.", he responded.

"And I meant it. It's just that, tonight, for this, I need you here. I'll get you back to where you need to be tomorrow. Alright?"

"Yes, sir."

"Okay. The Captain here will see that you get to the house. We're still in the Naval Observatory. I'll come home for dinner before we head over to the Capitol. We still have your uniforms in your room. You get over there and let Stormy out and get cleaned up."

He smiled at that. "The Monster? Is she going to be there tonight, too?"By the time Charlie had gotten home from the deployment he'd been on when we got Stormy, she was gigantic, and he had taken to calling her The Monster.

"That would be all we'd need!", I laughed. "No, I think she'll stay home. Listen, I promise, I will talk with you about any changes when I get home." I moved towards my office door and the other two moved with me.

Charlie stopped in the door and turned to face me. "Dad, who did this? When do we hit back?"

"We're working on that."

"I want in on it! All the guys do! We have to do something!"

"Like I said, we're working on it. If I need the Marines, I know the address." Not if I can help it!

"Yes, sir." He headed out the door, and then stopped again. "Who could do something like that?"

"Monsters, Charlie. Monsters." I said to Captain Miller, "See he gets to the house. Thank you."

Monsters – like I had become.

I was the last of the family to make it to the Naval Observatory. Marilyn and the girls had flown down as soon as they got home from school. I walked in to find Charlie cleaned up and in an old BDU, sitting on the floor and brushing out Stormy's coat. Stormy was writhing on the floor in delight. Meanwhile the girls informed me that one of the major topics of conversation around Hereford High was their status as daughters of the President. I told them that this gave the Secret Service authority to shoot boyfriends. "Not funny, Dad!", I was informed.

Marilyn asked me, "Are you ready for this?"

"As ready as I will ever be. I can't back out now."

"Then we'll be ready, too."

I laughed and said, "I know you said you'd stick around for better or worse. Is this the better or the worse?"

"Ask me this time next year!", she replied, and then gave me a hug. "You'll be America's greatest President. A hundred years from now, historians will be telling people that Washington and Lincoln would have wanted to be as good as you. Your birthday will be a national - no, an international! - holiday! Children will be named after you! Churches will..."

"All right, enough out of you. I just hope I don't blow up the country! Now, what's for dinner?"

"The cook has a glazed ham going. Whenever you want to eat, say the word."

I smiled. "Sounds good. Let's do this now. I can change after dinner."

We left about a quarter after seven, with me in a dark suit, Charlie in a Marine Corps Class A Service Uniform, and the ladies in knee length dresses and heels. Security was tight, with a convoy of vehicles. We rode in an armored limo, but not the official Presidential limousine. That was buried in the parking lot under the World Trade Center. I knew the Secret Service wouldn't be happy until we were actually living in the Residence portion of the White House, but that couldn't happen until Laura and the girls moved out. I couldn't push them out. That would be pretty tacky for a guy who killed Laura's husband and the twins' father.

At the Capitol we separated. Marilyn and the kids would be watching from the gallery, like they did last January during the State of the Union speech. I was directed towards the Speaker's office, where Denny Hastert was sorting out the ceremony. We really didn't have any precedent for this. It wasn't an inauguration, which is just an excuse for a big party. Likewise, while everybody was present in the House chamber, it wouldn't be all smiles and congratulations, like in a State of the Union Address. Denny told me that they were passing the word that everybody was supposed to be quiet and somber.

"I've got John and Dave telling everybody to behave. There is to be nobody reaching out to shake hands in the aisle or whatever when you come in.", he told me.

"Let's do it one better. When the doors open, how about we have the House and Senate leadership, the Majority and Minority Leaders and Whips, the eight of them, march me down the aisle in a phalanx. You can already be at your seat. They need to be down front for the vote anyway. Is Ashcroft still planning on asking them to vote?", I asked.

"Yes. I talked to him about ten minutes ago. After you enter we are going to turn it over to him to run the vote." He slid over a proposed ceremony. "Let's just hope we never have to dust this off again in the future."

"Agreed!"

"Did you prepare something to say?", he asked.

I tapped my coat. "I had Matt and Mike whip something up quick. I won't be long, but I do need to say a few things."

"Do you have any idea how we are going to run a funeral without a body?", he asked.

I shrugged. "I had the guys simply jot something in that next week we will begin a month of national mourning. We can come up with something over the weekend. Hell, Denny, I was eight years old when Kennedy died! I just remembered it screwed up my cartoon watching schedule! Somebody is going to have to dig through the archives."

We talked a bit more as I glanced over the ceremonial plan, and then there was a knock on the door. An aide stuck his head in and said, "We need to get ready."

I glanced at Denny and nodded. He responded to the aide, "Are the Leaders and Whips out there?"

"Yes, sir."

"Let's go." He led the way out of his office and into the corridor beyond, where the others were waiting. A flash went off and I realized there was a photographer there. Not one of the reporters, but an archival photographer for the President. For the rest of my Presidency I would be under constant scrutiny.

John Boehner and Harry Reid were there, and I thanked them for getting back. "Any changes?", I asked.

John shook his head sadly, and Harry simply answered, "None, Mister President."

"Thank you."

Denny glanced at his watch and got us in order, and then said, "At the signal, just escort the President down the aisle and take your seats. Wait here until somebody comes for you." We murmured something and he left.

A few minutes later the same aide as before hustled up. "They're ready now, gentlemen."

John Boehner looked over at me and said, "Are you ready for this, Carl?"

"Is anybody?", I answered with a sad smile. "It's the job I signed up for, John. Let's do it." I started forward and the others stepped out and caught up to me. I had two Republicans on my right and two on the left, the same with the Democrats, and two Congressman on each side and two Senators on each side. I didn't want anybody claiming I wasn't being 'bipartisan' or some such shit.

We halted before the large double door, which then was opened, and the stentorian voice of the House Sergeant at Arms called out, "Mister Speaker, the Acting President of the United States of America!"

Several eyes glanced at me, and I just nodded resolutely and stepped out. The others were in lockstep as I marched down the aisle. There was a low murmur, but it was the quietest I had ever heard the place. We marched down to the well at the bottom, and I continued on and up to the podium. I waited there silently as the others took their places. In their appointed places were the Cabinet members present, the Justices of the Supreme Court, and the Chiefs of Staff of the military services. I glanced over at the Cabinet and saw John Ashcroft holding a leather covered clipboard. He nodded at me discreetly and it was show time. "Mister Speaker, I call on the Attorney General to come forth and preside." Then I stepped away from the podium. I saw John stand and come forward and I moved around to my regular seat next to the Speaker. That was when I saw the first President Bush sitting next to Denny on the other side. His face was blank and he simply stared forward.

John Ashcroft stepped up to the podium and opened his covered clipboard. He looked out at the audience and began speaking. "Mister Speaker, Mister President Pro Tempore, Congressmen, Senators, distinguished guests ... Pursuant to Section 4 of the 25th Amendment, on Tuesday, September 11, 2001, the Cabinet voted unanimously to confirm Vice President Buckman as Acting President of the nation. Tonight we meet to vote again, to confirm Acting President Buckman as the President and to swear him in as such. I have consulted with Chief Justice Rehnquist as to how we should commence."

His voice took a slightly more formal tone. "Congressman Boehner, Senator Reid, you have returned from the site of the World Trade Center in New York, where you witnessed the recovery efforts. Is it your opinion that there is any chance that President Bush will be found alive?"

Both John and Harry stood up and said in a loud voice, "No!"

I glanced over at the former President, and tears were streaking down his face, yet he sat there stock still. I remembered hearing that this was his second child to die. Their second child, a daughter, had died as a toddler from leukemia.

My contemplation was short lived. Ashcroft was speaking again. "I will now poll the Cabinet, in order of seniority. A vote of Yes will be to confirm the Acting President as President, a vote of No will be to maintain him as Acting President. Secretary O'Neill?"

Paul stood and said clearly, "Yes!"

"Secretary Powell?"

"Yes."

When it came to his own name, John voted Yes. Then he continued down the list. Everybody voted Yes. At the end, he reached into his clipboard and pulled forth the Yes vote from Dick Cheney, read it aloud, and asked that it be placed into the record. Then he continued on, going down the list of the House and Senate leadership. All eight voted Yes, as did Denny and President Pro Tempore Byrd.

"The vote is unanimous. Chief Justice Rehnquist, would you please administer the oath of office?" John moved away from the podium and went back to his seat.

I stood up and moved towards the podium, as did Chief Justice Rehnquist. There was a muted gasp from the room as President Bush also stood. He moved woodenly and slowly, and his face was a blank mask of pain, but he came down to the podium with us. I pulled my Bible from my jacket pocket. It was the same King James Version copy I had been sworn in with after all my previous elections, an inexpensive small travel edition Bible, with lightweight paper and a zipper cover. It had been given to me by my parents at my confirmation, back in the days before Hamilton went crazy and I still had a family. When President Bush stood next to me, I handed him the Bible. He stared at it for a second, and then nodded to himself and stood up straighter. His right hand was rock steady as he held it in his palm.

I placed my left hand on the Bible and raised my right hand. Rehnquist discreetly read off a crib note in his hand. "I, Carling Parker Buckman the Second, do solemnly swear ... that I will faithfully execute ... the Office of President of the United States ... and will to the best of my ability ... preserve, protect and defend ... the Constitution of the United States ... so help me God."

That was it. I was President of the United States. When I had recycled, I had spent years working to meet Marilyn and win her again. This ... this was different. I had never gone into politics in a desire to become President, simply a desire to make things better. I had never considered becoming President. Now what?

When I finished, President Bush seemed to stumble a touch and slump, and Justice Rehnquist took his elbow. At the touch, he straightened and looked me in the eye. "Good luck, Mister President."

"Thank you, Mister President."

President Bush turned and went back to his seat, and the Chief Justice went to his seat. I moved to the podium and pulled my speech from my coat pocket and flattened it out. It was typed in large print, double spaced. There hadn't been time to get it to a teleprompter. I took a deep breath and began.

"We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union ... That is how our Constitution starts. Over two hundred years ago our Founding Fathers created one of the most amazing documents in human history, a robust yet flexible system of governing that has become one of the strongest in the entire history of mankind. Over the last few days we have seen that wisdom in action.

During that time the strength and flexibility of our system has been on display for the world to see. At the first meeting of the Cabinet after the attack we discussed the 25th Amendment, and we all came to realize that while the intent of the Amendment was clear, nobody could have foreseen the events which occurred. More than one of us commented that we were in uncharted territory. Yet the meaning and spirit of the Amendment was always understood. I would like to particularly thank Attorney General Ashcroft and Chief Justice Rehnquist for their assistance in determining the procedures we would follow. I would also like to thank Congressman Boehner and Senator Reid for their part in this, both earlier in New York and here today. Most of all I would like to thank former President Bush for offering his services this evening, despite the immense personal cost to himself and his family.

I can begin to tell you what is happening and what will happen in the future. Beginning tomorrow, airports will reopen and flights will begin flying again. The FAA is implementing new security measures, and flight operations will be ramped up slowly, to allow the airlines and passengers to get used to the changes. Initial operations will focus on getting stranded travelers home as quickly as possible. I would expect full scale operations to commence by early next week. Also, we will begin a month of national mourning next week, in remembrance of all who died on Tuesday. While we do not yet have any schedule, memorial ceremonies will be held.

Earlier today my son asked me a very simple question. 'Who could do such a thing?' I answered him the only way I knew how. 'Monsters!' Even as we speak, a team of FBI, CIA, and Secret Service agents are working to determine exactly who committed this atrocity. I have met with this team several times already and expect to continue to do so in the coming weeks. We will determine who was involved and who aided and abetted them. At that time we will make the appropriate response. Congress has already promised an investigation of this tragedy. It is my intention to cooperate fully with them. Following our response, all information we develop will be reported to them.

Two days ago, while I was touring the destruction at the Pentagon, I talked to a Special Forces sergeant. He told me that 'They can run as far as they want and dig a hole as deep as they want, but they will just die tired and dirty.' When the time comes, and we know who was involved, I promise the nation that our response will do that sergeant proud.

I issue a word of warning, however, to anybody who misguidedly decides to take up vengeance in their own hands. I have learned that there have been incidents of religious and racial bigotry and intolerance. Our nation was built on principles of religious tolerance. It was the first and most important amendment to the Constitution. We are not a vengeful people, but a just people, and tolerance is our strength, not our weakness. These actions will not be allowed.

So let me close by repeating what I said three nights ago, when I first spoke to you to tell you what had happened. America is more than its buildings and America is more than its people. America is an idea, a symbol, a belief. We are a beacon of freedom and opportunity to the world, and the evil of madmen will not shutter that beacon. The price of freedom is never cheap, but it is a price that we must bear, and a price that we will gladly pay. Our nation will emerge from this dark day even stronger and more committed to the ideals we believe in. I believed those words when I spoke them, and I believe them even more firmly now.

Thank you, good night, and God bless America."

Chapter 141: Funerals

After that, I left the podium and exited out a side door. There wasn't going to be any schmoozing in the aisles tonight. Once outside the chamber, I sent somebody in to find the Commandant of the Marine Corps and ask him to see me for a minute or two. I smiled as I considered that. Once upon a time if a senior officer 'asked' me to do something, it was really an order. Now I was the one doing the asking. My, how Second Lieutenant Buckman had grown up.

Marilyn and the kids showed up about a minute before the Commandant did. I knew when that happened because suddenly Charlie's eyes got wide and he came to attention, making his sisters stare at him briefly. I twisted to look to my right and found the Commandant also coming to attention. I chuckled and said, "As you were, the both of you."

"You asked to see me, sir?"

"Yes, thank you for coming over, General. I appreciate it. This really concerns my son, Charlie."

Charlie's eyes bugged out again and he coughed out a squeaky, "Me!"

The Commandant chuckled and said, "Settle down, Lance Corporal." He turned to me and asked, "What can I do for you, sir?"

"Two things, really. First, we need to get the Lance Corporal back to Camp Lejeune tomorrow."

He nodded and turned to his aide, a full colonel. "Set that up, please."

There was a mumbled, "Sir"', in response.

"Secondly,", I continued, "I simply want to make sure that you, and through you the Marine Corps, understands that Lance Corporal Buckman is to continue being treated as Lance Corporal Buckman. I mean no disrespect, but I know it would be tempting for some officers to change his assignments or how he is treated because of who his father is."

I received a smile at that from the General. "Understood, sir, I will take care of this."

I then turned to Charlie and said, "Charlie, I can't promise that people won't know who you are or who I am. This is the best I can do. As for anything else, you're a Marine, and I expect you to suck it up."

My son came to attention and barked out, "Aye, aye, sir!" which made me roll my eyes and the Commandant chuckle.

"General, thank you for your time. I'm sure I'll be talking to you soon.", I ended things.

"Of course, sir. Thank you." He shook my hand, and then reached out and shook Charlie's hand before heading out.

I turned back to my family, and saw that Marilyn was standing away slightly, her cell phone to her ear, and one hand over her other ear, so she could hear the conversation. She had a look of horror on her face, and tears were forming. She looked to be in shock, and she hung up the phone and stared at me. "What's wrong?", I asked.

"It's Harlan! He's dead!"

"WHAT!?"

"That was Anna Lee. She's been trying to reach us, but couldn't get through the switchboard. She finally found a number for Tusker and Tessa and got a number from them. It's Harlan! He was at the Pentagon Tuesday. He's dead!" She began crying.

The blood drained from me. Oh God, but my sins were piling up fast! "Sweet Jesus!", I exclaimed lowly.

I led the family over to a bench on the side of the hallway and sat down with them. Marilyn and the girls were crying and Charlie was muttering curses under his breath. Several people were staring or trying to get my attention but I ignored them. I pulled out my phone and turned it on, and called the switchboard. A minute later I was talking to Anna Lee.

"Anna Lee, it's Carl. What happened?"

"Carl, it's Harlan. He was at the Pentagon when ... when ... they just notified us. They couldn't ... couldn't ... Oh God, Carl! How could this happen!? He was just going over there to meet somebody!", she wailed.

"Where are you at? Are you at the house? When can we come over?" Marilyn reached out and took my free hand and nodded at me.

"We're at the funeral home. We're just about to leave and go home.", she told me.

"We'll meet you at the house."

"Thank you!"

I hung up and slipped my phone back in my pocket. I stood up and helped Marilyn to her feet. She was no longer crying, but her eyes were puffy and wet. The kids looked confused and hurt. They might not have been as close as Harlan and I, but they had played with their children and been on vacations with them. I turned to the nearest Secret Service Agent and said, "Change of plans. We are heading over to the Buckminster residence in Alexandria, not the Naval Observatory."

He looked shocked and said, "Mister President, we can't..." Then he stopped as he saw the look in my eyes. "Yes sir, understood." He began speaking into his mike. "Jumper is on the move, diverting to..."

Jumper was my Secret Service codename, taken from my time in the 82nd. I recalled when it had been assigned to me that it was a name taken from one of Clancy's books. Marilyn's codename was Jelly Jar, after the jams and jellies we made together, and it irked her to no end. I had damn near died laughing when I first heard it. The kids were Biker, Trouble One, and Trouble Two at my suggestion. They actually liked their codenames.

There had been some plans to go over to the White House at some point and meet some people, but it wasn't anything that couldn't be put off. The Buckminsters had bought a split level in a fairly typical upscale suburban development in Alexandria. Anna Lee had commented to me at the time that it was the first place they had lived that she didn't have to plan for their next move. We had a convoy of lead and chase cars and my limo and a dummy limo to act as a decoy. When we got there, a lead car had already arrived and 'secured' the area. With my luck they had probably shot the neighbors. The Secret Service had a level of institutional arrogance and chutzpah beyond anything I had ever run across.

After we got out, I ignored my protectors and simply walked to the front door and knocked. An agent was already inside, and he opened the door, and looked around, then allowed us in. Anna Lee and Mary Beth were sitting on the couch together, and Tyrone was off to the side. Marilyn immediately sat down next to Anna Lee and they hugged. The twins sandwiched Mary Beth between them. They were just a year or so younger than Mary Beth, who was a college freshman at Virginia Tech. Tyrone was still in high school, a freshman or sophomore, I thought.

Tyrone was the only one by himself, so I went over to him and reached out and shook his hand. Charlie followed along behind me. Tyrone was like a robot, moving on remote control. I went into the dining room and grabbed a chair and brought it back and sat down next to him. "Tyrone." He didn't say anything or even look at me. I put my hand on his knee and nudged him. "Tyrone, Earth to Tyrone."

Tyrone smiled and turned his head, and then got serious again. "Sorry about that, Uncle ... Mister ... what do I call you now, Mister President?"

I chuckled at that. "Whatever you want, Tyrone. If you want to call me Uncle Carl, go ahead. If you think you're too old for that, just call me Carl. I won't mind. Tell your brother and sister the same thing." He nodded at that. I looked over to the sofa, where all the women were crowded together hugging and crying. "I'm not ready for that. Where can we talk?"

"Yeah. Let's go in the family room." Charlie and I followed him down a half flight of stairs into their finished basement. He plopped down on the couch and I sat down in an old armchair next to him. I sent Charlie off to find a few cold cans of Coke. "I don't know which is worse, the not knowing for the last few days, or the knowing, now.", said Tyrone.

"Tell me what happened, Tyrone."

"I mean, it was just a normal day. Dad said he was going over to the Pentagon to meet some people, and then after lunch he was going back to his office, but after the plane hit, we never heard nothing. Mom tried to call him but had to leave him a voicemail and he never called. He never came home and we couldn't get anybody to answer our calls when she called over there. A cop showed up today and told us!"

"Oh, shit!", I muttered lowly. "What'd he say?"

"Oh, man, it was awful. He said they had a body, with Dad's wallet and identification, at the morgue. He wasn't a soldier anymore, so they had the police tell us.", he answered.

"Oh, shit!"

"I mean, he wasn't rude about it or nothing, but ... I mean, how do you tell somebody something like that? Do you have to take lessons or something?"

I shrugged. "Yeah, in the Army you do have to take lessons in it. They have special teams to do that."

"Man, that must suck."

"I don't think I could do it, Tyrone.", I told him. "Have you guys gotten in touch with Roscoe?"

"Mom called, but they're on lockdown. She left a message with somebody."

I sighed. "Maybe I can do something about that. Let's go talk to your Mom."

Roscoe Buckminster was a first class cadet at West Point, what everybody else would call a senior. Roscoe had wanted to follow in his father's footsteps in the Army, but decided to apply to West Point. Since their official address of record was still in Mississippi, when Harlan had asked me for a little help, I spoke with one of their Senators and did a little horse-trading for his appointment. It was actually really routine Congressional back scratching, but the Buckminsters were suitably impressed. It wasn't a college lifestyle I would have enjoyed, but Roscoe seemed to like it.

We went back upstairs and I found the girls were off in Mary Beth's room and Charlie went in search of them. I sat down next to Anna Lee and said, "Tyrone told me you tried to reach Roscoe, but they were locked down. Did you ever reach him?"

"No. Can you call him?"

"You bet." I wasn't terribly surprised. When we went to DEFCON Three, they locked up the military bases, and by definition West Point was a military base. They had probably issued bazookas to the cadets and told them to man the wire. I looked around the room and found my Personal Assistant, Mindy, and waved her towards me. Mindy had been my assistant since my Congressional days, had followed me to the West Wing when I became the VP, and was still with me. How she had managed to do all that and get married and have two kids at the same time was a most impressive feat of time management!

"Grab a pad and pen and start taking some notes." I pulled out my cell phone and called the switchboard. "Get me the Superintendant of West Point, or if he's not there, whoever is in charge. Call me back as soon as you can." I flipped the phone shut and said, "As soon as they call, we'll get you on the line with Roscoe. Mindy, we'll probably need to make some arrangements to get him back here."

"Thank you, Carl.", Anna Lee said.

"Did you and Harlan ever talk about where he wanted to be buried?" Marilyn and I had decided on a small public cemetery in Dulaney Valley. Since I wasn't Catholic, we couldn't both be buried in a Catholic cemetery. "I can make arrangements for Arlington, I'm sure."

She shook her head. "No, Harlan wanted to go home. He wanted to be buried at the family plot in Buckminster."

"Fair enough." Just at that, the phone I was holding buzzed. I flipped it open. "Hello?"

"Lieutenant General William Lennox, sir. How can I help you?"

"General, thank you for calling. Are you still on lockdown there?", I asked.

"No sir, but we have been conducting drills and inspections. Is there a problem, sir?", he asked.

"Yes, I'm afraid so. You have a cadet there, a first class cadet, Roscoe Buckminster. We just discovered his father was at the Pentagon when the planes hit. I need to speak to him, please."

"Yes, sir. Give me five minutes and I'll get him."

"Don't say anything to him, General. Let me do that. Afterwards, I'll need to speak to you again." I could hear the phone being set down, so I handed it to Mindy. "Keep an ear on that. When you get somebody, I'll take it. Thanks." She took the phone and nodded and moved away, to sit at a dining room table.

It took a little over five minutes, but not by much. I had no doubt that I had just initiated a world class goat rope at the Military Academy, which would have been funny any time but now. Who was this Buckminster kid? Where was he? What was he doing there? Get his ass in here! NOW!

I simply sat there quietly, with Tyrone to one side, while Marilyn and Anna Lee commiserated with each other. I gathered one of the problems was a snafu with the switchboard. They had recognized Harlan on my list of Anytime Anywhere callers, like the Tusks, Marty, Brewster, Suzie, and most of Marilyn's family, but somehow had missed Anna Lee. I would have Mindy look into that. I was jolted out of that reverie when I heard Mindy say, "Please hold for the President of the United States." She came back to us and handed me the telephone.

I wasn't sure if I was going to be speaking to the General or Roscoe. "Hello?", I said.

"One second, Mister President. I have Cadet Buckminster here.", answered Lennox.

There was a bit of phone shuffle, and then Roscoe's clear tenor came through. "Cadet Lieutenant Buckminster!"

I glanced at his mother and decided it would be better for me to break the news. "Roscoe, it's Carl Buckman."

"Yes, sir, Unc ... Mister President."

"Roscoe, I have some bad news for you. Your father was at the Pentagon when the plane hit. I'm sorry, son, but your dad didn't make it."

I caught a hitch in his voice. "Dad ... he's..."

"Roscoe, I have your Mom here. Hold on." I handed Anna Lee my phone and then sagged back into the cushion. There is no good way to do this. Some people simply can't do it. They can't say the words. I remembered back when Mark and Lauren had their accident on my first go, and lost their oldest girl, Nicki. Gabriel was my boss at the time when I was running Cooperstown and got the job of calling me, and through me, telling Marilyn. He literally couldn't say the words, but kept spouting things like,

Gabriel: 'Nicki had a bad accident.'

Me: 'How bad?'

Gabriel: 'Bad!'

Me: 'How bad?'

Gabriel: 'Real bad.'

Me: 'Gabe, how bad?'

Gabriel: 'Bad.'

It took me about a half dozen or more tries to get him to say the words, that Nicki was dead. He simply couldn't do it. It would have almost been funny, if it wasn't so horrid.

I sat there with my thoughts as Anna Lee cried and talked to her son, and then she handed the phone back to me. I picked it up and held it to my ear. "Hello?"

"It's General Lennox, sir. You asked to speak to me."

"How is Roscoe, General?

"He's a bit in shock. As soon as we hang up I am going to speak to his tactical officer and get some of his friends to be with him.", I was told.

I wasn't sure what a tactical officer did, but it wasn't important. "General, I don't want to upset your applecart, but I assume you have some procedure for compassionate leave in a case like this."

"Yes, sir. We'll figure something out and try to get him home tomorrow. If he can't fly, we'll get him on a train to New York, and then he can get a train from there."

"The airports will be opening again tomorrow, but I'm not sure when he'll be able to fly. Just get him to the nearest airport tomorrow and I'll get a plane there. I'll let you talk to my assistant about that. Hold a second." I held out my hand and gave the phone to Mindy. "We can send my G-IV to pick him up. Fly him back here and then we'll fly the family to Mississippi as needed. Figure it out with the General."

"Got it." She took the phone.

I turned to Anna Lee. "We'll get Roscoe back here. After that, we'll get you and the family and Harlan back home. Call me when he gets here. If you can't reach me, call Marilyn. We'll give you Mindy's card, too."

"Thank you." She gave me a funny look. "You're really the President, aren't you? If Harlan was here he would be laughing his ass off at you right now."

I snorted out a laugh of my own. "He'd have died from laughing too hard, and we'd be back here anyway! He never did have a good thing to say about politicians after he spent time with me on Armed Services!" I shook my head and smiled in remembrance of him.

"I know you're going to be really busy, but if you could come to the funeral ... I mean, I know that you can't do that stuff now, but maybe call us that day.", she asked.

"Call us when you have the details. Give me a day's notice and I'll see what I can do." I told her. The Secret Service was going to hate it, but if I could swing it, I would.

We all went over to the Naval Observatory and went to bed. I didn't bother listening to the late night television. I was heartily sick of the 24 hour news stations trying to come up with one more piece to yap about. By now the conspiracy theorists were claiming that I had managed to do all this, because I was actually a secret member of a terrorist group, so that the Muslims could take over the world. If they only knew how right they were (although not in the details!) If it was important, somebody could wake me up. I went to bed thinking about my actions this last week. Was I right or wrong? I had tried every way I could to avoid this, yet here I was.

Saturday I went into the office, and found that things had been moved into the Oval Office. The Bushes were still up at Camp David. I had a visit from the Commanding General of the Military District of Washington, the guy who owns all the ceremonial troops around the city. The Army runs state funerals, which is what the memorial service for George was going to be. They had dusted off the funeral service for JFK, and then started editing it, since it's real hard to bury somebody who ain't around to bury! Kennedy had lain in his casket in the White House for 24 hours, and then a horse drawn artillery caisson took the casket to the Rotunda of the Capitol. After 24 hours of laying in state in the Capitol, in an even bigger march back to the White House, then on to St. Matthews Cathedral, and then on to Arlington.

Thankfully, I didn't have to make any decisions on this. The General had been in touch with President Bush at Camp David, and gone over a plan with him. We would basically use the Kennedy funeral plans, only with an empty casket. It would lie in state, first at the White House for a day, then another day at the Rotunda in the Capitol, and finally be transported to Arlington for interment on Thursday. Eventually it would get a perpetual flame like Kennedy's. I called the Bushes at Camp David to go over some of this with them. I had talked to the first President Bush several times, and I had called Laura at one point Tuesday afternoon during the mad scramble. Now I was able to speak to Barbara as well, though the twins were still too broken up to speak.

It was rather maudlin and grotesque, I thought, but I really wasn't in a position to criticize. We did have to make a change, though. By late Saturday morning, Roscoe was linked up with his family, and by that evening they were all, including Harlan in his casket, in Buckminster, with plans for a Sunday viewing and a Monday funeral. Anna Lee had asked us to attend the funeral and speak for Harlan. At that point I called Josh and informed him of my plans. Now I had to write a eulogy for Harlan on my own, and let the Secret Service and the 89th Airlift know what was going to happen. They would hate me for this!

The President of the United States doesn't just go somewhere. Security is simply crazy! The assholes who want to kill him are numbered in the thousands or more. When he flies off to someplace, it's not just him but an entourage of hundreds of people. For instance, my flight to Jackson for Harlan's funeral (the closest big city to Buckminster) would involve the following. An advance team of Secret Service agents would head down a couple of days before to scout out Jackson and Buckminster. The local cops would be called in and informed about what was happening and what would be required. The Secret Service got first call on all resources. If the locals were chasing a crazed serial killer and the Secret Service wanted the manpower, the serial killer would be left on the loose.

I wasn't planning on staying overnight, but if I was, they would find a room and set up security. That would probably involve agents investigating every employee and guest of the hotel and checking his or her name against various watch lists of local wackos. Rooms would be cleared out, reservations would be cancelled for other guests, and service deliveries would be investigated. Dozens of agents might be involved.

Prior to Air Force One showing up, one or two C-5 Galaxies would arrive, carrying the armored limo and a bunch of armored Chevrolet Suburban security SUVs, known as 'War Wagons'. Fuel would be bought for the planes, tested for safety, and then stored in tanker trucks with armed guards around it. Helicopters for local flights might be ferried in or packed into the C-5s for reassembly on site. Doctors would be present. In some places food and water are brought in. This was all choreographed to look seamless – the Big Man flies in and things are ready to go. Mind you, this was for friendly visits. If I was going someplace unfriendly, it was worse! Then, it would all be packed up and leave for the next trip to someplace else.

It could be worse sometimes. George Will once reported that when George Bush came to his house for a dinner party, advance teams of agents descended on his neighborhood and ordered his neighbors, under pain of arrest, to leave their yards and go inside their houses and stay there. It was insane. As a result, the President is practically a prisoner in the White House. There is a reason they have a movie theater in the White House – it is incredibly difficult for the President to actually get in a car and take his wife to the movies otherwise! It's actually cheaper to build him a theater than it is to go out on the town.

It isn't this crazy for the Vice President. He's just another spare part, nice to have around until the machine breaks. Otherwise, one is as good as another. There had been plans to get rid of me and bring in somebody more docile, or smarter, or more bloodthirsty. Now I had to get my own spare part lined up.

On Sunday Marilyn and I took Marine One up to Camp David. I had never been there before. The Presidential Retreat is actually a rustic cabin complex up near Thurmont in the Catoctins. That I wasn't invited before was due to two factors. First, Presidents are pretty picky about who goes there; they tend to think of it as their personal playground. Second, I was not on the favorites list with Bush and his closest people. He might have to put up with me in Washington, but not up there. Once there it was the first chance we had to see the Bush family since the tragedy. Everybody was present, George H.W. and Barbara, Laura and the girls, and most of the other kids and grandkids. George told me that they would stay up there until the Thursday ceremonies, and then go back to Texas. Laura and the girls wouldn't be coming back to the White House. I replied that we wouldn't move in until after the ceremonies. There was no point in being rude about it. I did have a chance to talk to Jeb and a few of the older grandsons, some of whom seemed interested in getting into politics on their own. This family was the Republican version of the Kennedys, though without all the drama.

The schedule that week was, for want of a better word, horrid. I would be officially mourning the entire week, from Sunday on, speechifying, shaking hands, looking somber, meeting every dignitary and VIP under the Sun, at least 25 or 26 hours every day. The current plan was to do Harlan's funeral on Monday and fly back that afternoon. The official Bush funeral ceremonies would start on Tuesday and conclude Thursday. The only one I really wanted to be at was Harlan's, which was the one I got the most grief over from everybody else on the planet. How dare I visit a private funeral this week? How could I pick this funeral and not any of the others? What makes this guy more deserving than anybody else? I dumped it into Ari Fleischer's lap. He could tell people that while I knew there were going to be thousands of individual ceremonies and sendoffs, my duties would allow me only two, one for a 'common man' – Harlan – and one for a 'great man' – the President. He needed to polish that turd up and get a few people to start spinning the story.

Monday morning Marilyn and I flew out at the crack of dawn. The girls were back in school in Hereford and Charlie was back at Camp Lejeune, and everybody probably had lots of stories to tell. Tessa was staying at the house keeping an eye on the girls. We were met in Jackson by the Governor of Mississippi, a fellow I had never met before named Ronnie Musgrove, and all the Mississippi Senators and Congressmen. None of them had ever met or heard of Harlan until I came to bury him, and all of them had wonderful things to say about him. I almost lost my lunch. I whispered to Marilyn, "Do you hear that high pitched whirring sound?"

She gave me a confused look. "No."

"It's the sound of Harlan spinning in his grave, and he's not even there yet!"

That simply earned me a subtle nudge in the side.

From Jackson we rode in a convoy to Buckminster. I allowed Musgrove and an aide to travel with me. The rest of them could find rides of their own! They actually had a couple of deluxe motor coaches, giant luxury buses, to haul their important butts around. I knew there would be cameras and video crews and press around for this, and I had warned Anna Lee that by my showing up, things could get crazy. She still wanted us there, and said that she'd throw people out if they got out of control. I was traveling with Carter, on his first foray into press control. We came up with a few rules. A single video camera inside the church, along with no more than a half dozen reporters. Anybody who acted up would be escorted to the local jail, where they could call their lawyer. The same applied to the politicians. I mentioned this in passing to the Governor, in a joking manner, but I wasn't really smiling and I suggested he pass it along to some of the other dignitaries.

I wasn't really surprised to find that there was a real zoo outside of the Buckminster African Baptist Church. As I looked out the window as we pulled up in front, I could see a line of State Troopers and local cops keeping a solid wall of reporters back. Hovering around everything was a cloud of Secret Service agents, all looking important, wearing dark sunglasses and talking into their sleeves. One of the agents in the limo began talking back, and after a bit, we were allowed out. Needless to say, everyone started yelling questions at me, and needless to say, I just ignored them. I did, however, notice a face I needed to speak to, in a small group near the door to the church.

I turned to the Governor and said, "Gentlemen, I am sure you can find a seat inside. Meanwhile, I need to talk to a few people first." Then I turned away, dismissing them. It might have been a little rude, but I couldn't deal with any more bullshit today. I took Marilyn by the hand and went towards the little group at the door.

There were three men in the group, an older black man in the uniform of a police officer of some sort, wearing a Smokey Bear campaign hat, a white Army officer about my age, and a young black man wearing the gray cadet uniform of the Corps of Cadets of the Military Academy. Him I knew. He was Roscoe Buckminster. As I approached Roscoe and the officer came to attention and saluted, and the police officer at least stood a little straighter. I approached a little closer and then stopped and came to attention and returned the salutes.

As soon as we broke I reached out and took Roscoe's hand. "Oh, Roscoe, I am so sorry for this. How's your mom doing?"

"Thanks, Uncle C ... Mr. President. She's fine. They're inside already. I just needed to get out in the air for a bit."

"You can still call me Uncle Carl, I won't mind. If it's official, though, it's Mister President or you get drummed out of the Army.", I said with a grin.

Marilyn came up and gave him a hug. Roscoe was now quite a bit bigger than she was. She began talking to him. I looked at the other two men. "Gentlemen, Carl Buckman."

The black man spoke first, saying, "John Brown, Sheriff of Buckminster County. I've known Harlan's family for years." He looked over at the mob of reporters with disgust. "They're like a pack of hyenas."

I shook the Sheriff's hand. "Sheriff, hyenas have morals. If any of them get out of line, you have my blessing to lock them up and throw away the key. Hell, shoot them and I'll write you a pardon! It's nice meeting you." I turned to the officer, an artillery colonel. "Colonel?" I shook his hand as well.

"Avery, sir. William Avery. I served with Harlan quite a few times over the years. We stayed in touch after he got out. Anna Lee called and invited me and my wife. I was just chatting to Roscoe here about my days in Beast Barracks."

I smiled and nodded. "Harlan and I managed to avoid that personal torture. We served together several times, also. I'm glad you're here. They need familiar faces."

Roscoe looked over and said, "Sir, Mom said that she'd like you to be one of the pallbearers, if you could. I mean, if you can do that sort of thing now. If not, don't worry, we've got plenty of cousins."

"I'd be honored. Let's just hope we bought your father a cheap and lightweight casket."

He smiled. "I heard him say the same thing once."

"They're heavy suckers, that's for sure."

"You two are awful, and I am telling your mother, Roscoe.", commented my wife. "We should be going in."

I smiled and took Marilyn's hand, and Roscoe ushered us inside. We were in a reserved pew a few back from the family, and Roscoe whispered, "Mom says you need to be on the aisle, so you can get up and speak." I nodded, but then broke free and went forward with Marilyn to hug Anna Lee and Mary Beth. It was obvious they had been crying, but were calm now. After that we sat down in our pew and Roscoe sat with his family.

The liturgy was fairly simple to follow along with. It was somewhat longer and a bit more rambunctious than I was used to, but that was the style, so go with the flow. The church was fairly large and was packed, though how much that was because of Harlan's attendance and how much was because of my attendance was debatable. Eventually it was my turn to speak, and the minister called me to the lectern.

"Thank you, Pastor Carmichael. It was with a great deal of sadness that I learned that Harlan Buckminster had passed from us. We only learned Friday evening, and our entire family felt the loss deeply. We rushed to Anna Lee's side as soon as we heard, because that is what family and friends do, and what you here have done.

I knew Harlan Buckminster for well over twenty years, since I was a teenager in fact, and we were friends since just about that first day. We met our first day in basic training in the Army. Buckman – Buckminster – the Army is nothing if not efficient, and we were assigned to the same barracks and to the same bunk. I was on the top bunk and Harlan was beneath me. For the rest of our time that summer, when one of us was assigned to do something, the other one would be right next to him.

We had not a single thing in common. Harlan was a black kid from Mississippi, the son of a mill worker and the descendant of slaves. I was a privileged white kid from one of the richest suburbs in the country. The only thing we shared was our color, not white or black, but green, Army green. We were soldiers, and that was plenty good enough for the both of us. We became fast friends.

Two years later we attended artillery school together at Fort Sill, and we bunked together again. We went our separate ways afterwards, as you tend to do in the Army, but we would often link up again, as you also tend to do in the Army. One time, when Harlan finished jump school and was assigned to Fort Bragg for a few weeks, Marilyn and I had him stay with us rather than let him live in the barracks. Many years later we worked together again when I was on the Armed Services Committee in Congress, and Harlan was assigned to be my assistant. Over the years we vacationed together; sometimes we stayed with the Buckminsters, and sometimes they would vacation with us. Our children called the Buckminsters Uncle Harlan and Aunt Anna Lee, and we were Uncle Carl and Aunt Marilyn to their children.

In every way, Harlan Buckminster was a good man, a brave man, a proud man, and a fun man. He was a good man, in that he always took care of his family and friends, and could always be counted on in a time of need. The people here in this church knew him from when he was a little boy, and I have met several of you over the years, and have heard some of the stories about him. Most of the time I ended up laughing over the stories, and then we would sit there and swap lies for a while.

Harlan was a brave man. He spent twenty years defending our country. He was a lieutenant colonel in the United States Army, and in that time saw combat and smelled gun smoke. He paid a price, as all soldiers do, in frequent absences from home, frequent moves, and not enough pay for the responsibilities which were his. His love for his country was as great as his love for his family.

Harlan was proud, too. He was the first member of his family to ever go to college, and he ended up a professional officer. His wife was a nurse, and his children would all go to college. He knew the great leap he had taken but he was always proud of his family and background, and he always cherished the burden of making his family proud of him.

Harlan was funny. He was a guy you could sit down with and have a drink with, and we routinely did. When I went into politics he had more than a few pithy comments to make, and the longer I stayed in, the more fun he made of me. As I was telling Anna Lee the other night, if he'd lived long enough to see me become the President, he'd have died laughing and we'd all be back here anyway!

Harlan and I were friends, and we often talked, not just about what the kids were up to and what our favorite teams were doing, but about history and politics. I won't lie to you and say we agreed on everything. Harlan was a Democrat and I'm a Republican. Sometimes we'd get to chewing on each other pretty good. It didn't matter. In the end we would always come back to the fact that Army green wasn't red or blue, it was red, white, and blue. No matter what we would argue about, in the end we were both Americans.

And now we do what has to be done with all good men, we have to give him back to God, with thanks for letting us borrow him for too short a time. Harlan, your family will miss you, and your friends will miss you, and I will miss you. So, it's time to send you now to your final reward. I strongly suspect you're going to Heaven, but I might be wrong. I suppose there's a chance you might be heading somewhere south of there. Don't worry, though, because if that happens, when I get there we can bunk together again."

After the ceremony, I hung back with the other pallbearers (and a Secret Service detail, which everybody else stared at) and then helped carry the casket out of the church and to the hearse. I commented to Colonel Avery that Harlan didn't get the lightweight casket, which earned me a few laughs. From the church we went to the cemetery, and again I found myself carrying a casket. Thankfully I didn't stumble or drop him, since this was going out live and nationwide on television. Then it was back to Washington. We didn't even have time to do much more than hug Anna Lee and the kids, though I did have a chance to speak to Tyrone.

"Uncle Carl, can I ask you a question?"

"Sure, what's on your mind?"

He glanced over at his brother in his gray uniform. "When I get old enough, will you help me get into West Point, like you helped Roscoe?"

I crossed my arms and eyed the young man, and also glanced at his mother. She didn't look either pro or con, but she had been a camp follower for most of her life. "I'll give you a maybe on that. You need to qualify to get in, which means really good grades and a few other things. You've got a few years to go, but if you can qualify and you are still interested, look me up, and we'll talk. Fair enough?"

"Yes, sir!"

Anna Lee shooed him off and said, "Thank you." She glanced over at Roscoe, talking to some of his cousins. "Who'd have thought it? The first in his family to go to college, and he ends up with two at West Point? Harlan wouldn't never believe that!"

"Kick his butt on his grades.", I told her, then we all hugged and we took our leave.

We flew back to Washington quietly, both Marilyn and I wrapped in our own thoughts. I had known Harlan for over a quarter of a century. Had it really been that long? It seemed like just a summer or two ago that we had routed the Orange Army and fired 105s and done training jumps together. It was like I had said; we hadn't been black or white, but green. He was just too damn young to be gone!

The rest of the week was a combination of morbid fakery and diplomacy. Every day there was some form of ceremony, some short and some long, usually with the Bush family in attendance. I had a lieutenant colonel from the Military District of Washington following me around giving me instructions and timetables for what I had to do. My overwhelming thought every time I saw him was, 'We're paying an O-5 to do this shit?!' Every day it seemed like I had to give a different speech or memorial presentation, and Matt and Mike were working overtime writing them for me.

It got worse that day. Somebody decided to have some fun mailing anthrax to various government offices. Fortunately, I had remembered about this happening, though not the time frame, and I had given orders on 9-11 to start screening mail more carefully. Nothing actually got to any Congressional offices, though the Capitol mailroom ended up contaminated and four workers there eventually died. For some reason it seemed like it wasn't as bad this time as on my first trip through. Once again the press went into overload.

Meanwhile, foreign dignitaries were trickling in daily. Pretty much every nation around the world that the United States had cordial relations with sent either royalty or their highest ranking elected official or their head of foreign affairs. Many sent all of the above. From England we got Prince Charles and the Prime Minister. The Israelis sent their President, Prime Minister, and Foreign Minister. Unlike with JFK, we now got delegations from a variety of former or still Communist states, including the People's Republic of China. We also got delegations from a number of Arab and Islamic states, but not all of them. Meanwhile, back home, in a number of those countries people were still dancing in the streets.

I assigned Dick Cheney to handle most of these delegations. We were barely on speaking terms at that point, and we were now communicating through aides and assistants. I ordered him to divvy the delegates into groups. The people we liked and were important got to meet with me. The people we liked and weren't important got to meet him. The people we didn't like got junior flunkies, regardless of how important they were. That group included most of the Arab world. There was no way in hell I was going to sit down and break bread with the Saudis, not when almost all of the hijackers had been Arabs working for an Arab terrorist group. If they felt insulted, I really didn't care.

I ended up speaking to the powers-that-be of about a dozen nations. In most cases I was able to meet with them between ceremonies. Everybody wanted the new American President to visit their country. It was actually rather refreshing in a way, in that some of these places were actually places you would want to visit. George Bush had never sent me to Paris while he was alive, but now it seemed quite probable he would do so in his death.

Wednesday, after seeing the casket in the Rotunda, I was able to meet with Colin Powell in the Oval Office. I knew that some of the neoconservatives in the West Wing would report the meeting to the 'real' Republicans elsewhere, but I no longer cared. It was time to do some housecleaning.

"Colin, thank you for coming.", I said after he was ushered into the Oval Office. I dismissed the Secret Service escort and directed him over to a sideboard. "Coffee?"

"Allow me, sir. You?"

"I'll have tea. I never have been able to really stomach coffee. Now I don't have to.", I said, smiling.

I joined him at the sideboard and poured myself some Earl Grey from a silver tea service. Colin poured himself some Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee. The blend was supposed to be the most expensive in the world, and restricted to the Oval Office. It was ironic that I would never taste it. It was simply coffee to me, and made my stomach churn. We took our cups back to our seats in armchairs in the center of the room.

"You asked to see me, sir?"

I smiled. "Colin, I think when we're alone, you can call me Carl. Twenty years ago I would have been calling you sir, not the other way around, and I would have been doing it at attention."

He chuckled at that. "Carl, I would hate to be that presumptuous. I wouldn't want to take the chance somebody might consider me disrespectful."

"Do you consider it likely that somebody will consider you disrespectful of the President, whoever he is?", I said, smiling.

"No, sir, I don't."

"Okay, let's get down to business. You want to be the Vice President?", I asked.

Secretary Powell was quick to answer, with a shake of his head. "No, sir, I would not."

I shrugged. "Didn't think so, but I had to ask. You'd do it well. If something were to happen to me, I'd die knowing the country was in good hands."

"I've talked to Alma about it and I just can't do it to my family.", he replied.

"I'm not surprised. Okay, want to be the Secretary of State?" Colin Powell looked at me sharply at that but didn't say anything. "Oh, don't give me that look! You know I can't keep working with the man. He thinks he should have had this job, not me. I don't trust him and neither do you. It's not a question of whether he leaves, but when and how. I need a Secretary of State I can work with and that I can trust not to get me into a war I don't want."

Powell sighed. "Are you sure about this?"

"Colin, last Tuesday changed our nation, our world, in ways that will take years to figure out. For the last twenty years old enemies have been dying out and new enemies have been arising. Now we have to figure out ways of dealing with a wholly new world. I cannot do this by myself. I need help! Help me!", I asked.

"Who do we put in as Secretary of Defense?"

I shrugged but smiled. "I don't know yet, but we can figure it out. Does that mean you'll switch to State?"

"When do you want to do this?", he asked.

"I'll take that as a yes.", I replied, smiling. Powell didn't gainsay me. "Soon. We'll be responding to this in the next few weeks. As it stands, I can't trust what I am being told. If I leave it up to Cheney and the other neocons, we'll end up invading some damn place that has nothing to do with this. They have an agenda that has nothing to do with what really happened."

"The question still stands. When do you plan to do this?"

"I can see a response by the end of the month, or maybe the first week of October. Once that is done, he's gone. If I fire him first, I have no idea what he will do in response. He might just spout off and say something, all with the best of motives, of course, that will screw something up. In the meantime, you need to get your bomber crews dialed up and the other assets in place. I want to have some options to discuss early next week."

"Al Qaeda?", he asked.

"And the Taliban. And I don't need to attack the other billion Muslims around the world while we're doing this."

"Who do we put in Defense? And CIA, for that matter? And the Vice Presidency?"

I gave a minor shrug at that. "I've got an idea or two for the CIA, but I'm not sure yet on Defense, and I will be more than happy to listen to suggestions. I'm thinking about the VP slot, too. If you can come up with a name or two for Defense, I'll sort out the Vice President slot and CIA. We need to completely rebuild our intelligence capabilities. Go back to the Pentagon and see what your sources are up to."

"Yes, sir. Understood."

I stood up, and Powell stood with me. I reached out to shake his hand. "General, I appreciate the assistance. Thank you, sir."

I was also able to meet with several foreign leaders on an individual basis. For these we had to have interpreters and the Secretary of State was present. Some leaders were happy to see me, others quite wary. The neocons had been getting more and more bellicose as the year had worn on, and Vladimir Putin was not amused, among others. Most of all, everyone wanted to meet the new boy President. I was 45 years, 10 months, and 6 days old when I was named Acting President, the third youngest President in American history. I told Cheney we would need to make a foreign trip before the end of the year. I received a sneer in response.

Fine by me. I'd hang him out to dry before then.

Chapter 142: Intelligence

Monday, September 24, 2001

The funeral was finished by Thursday afternoon. Laura and the girls officially moved out on Friday. I needed to take a few days off myself. Marilyn and I flew back to Hereford on Thursday for a long weekend. In the meantime, the White House Chief Usher, the head of the residence staff, would coordinate getting the Bush's belongings out of the place and out of Camp David, and getting our stuff moved over from the Naval Observatory. We would officially move in Monday morning.

When I was elected as Vice President, we had moved our clothing and my office from the house on 30th over to the Naval Observatory, though we left the furniture. I had debated putting the home on the market, but quickly realized that it might be useful to keep it around as a backup residence. If I had somebody visiting that I either couldn't put up in an official residence, or didn't want to, or didn't have the room for, I could let them stay there. It wasn't like I had to sell it to pay the new mortgage.

We were both exhausted by the time we got back to the house, but there was no rest for the weary. Almost immediately I was asked where I wanted the commo bunker installed. "Excuse me?", I asked the Secret Service agent.

"The communications trailers. There are actually two of them, plus antennas. We didn't think you wanted them out on the front lawn, so to speak."

I looked at my wife and muttered, "Good grief!" She looked distressed so I dragged the fellow outside and pointed to a place out in the field on the other side of the landing pad. Then I looked in the other direction, and saw a clearing in the woods I owned on the other side of the street, a clearing that hadn't been there before. "What's going over there?"

"A security trailer."

"Just how permanent are you making these things?", I asked.

He shook his head and said, "Not too crazy. No basements or anything. They'll be self contained units on slab foundations. The day you leave the White House, we can just unbolt everything and haul it away."

Leaving me with new concrete lawn ornaments. I sighed in acceptance. "I assume you'll be doing this at Hougomont, too?"

"Where's that? I know we have to do it in the Bahamas."

"Hougomont is the name of our place in the Bahamas.", I told him.

"Oh. Yes, sir, there too. That's a different team, though."

"God help the Bahamas! They'll probably declare me an undesirable by the time this is done!" I wandered back inside and told Marilyn what was going on.

To be fair, they kept the disruption to a minimum. Ever since that first day after the election, when I managed to get a really obnoxious and arrogant agent packed off to Nome, Alaska, or somewhere north of there, the Secret Service was generally a lot politer to me. Okay, there had been the asshole on Air Force Two, but that was a pretty odd day to begin with. Some of the changes we were getting were simply upgrades of various things that had been put in when I became the Vice President. They had replaced our phone system and Internet/cable connections then, and increased security also. Now, as the President, I just got more.

I couldn't wait until they brought in the anti-aircraft missiles! That was no joke, either. I heard somebody mentioning an I-HAWK battery, but they couldn't figure out how to camouflage it, and were debating using Stingers instead. Joy!

I had 25 acres around the house and about 10 across the road. I wondered if it would be sufficient!

One thing I had to deal with over the weekend was a ridiculous case of racism. It had been simmering all week, but what with the memorial services, I was prevented from dealing with it appropriately. It all dated from Monday, at the funeral for Harlan, when during the eulogy I had said that in basic, 'I was on the top bunk and Harlan was beneath me.' Reverend Al Sharpton had been taking me to task ever since then about my obvious racism and how black people were beneath me!

When Ari Fleischer told me this, I simply stared at him in disbelief. Finally, I got my brain to working and asked, "Are you kidding me?!"

"I am dead serious, Mister President!"

"Ari, we were assigned our bunks. I never chose, or I'd have chosen the bottom bunk! Are you shitting me?!"

"He is also claiming that your position carrying the coffin meant something demeaning. That one I don't understand myself."

I gave him another odd look. "There were six of us, and I was in the center on the left. I've got a bad knee, and if I bobbled the thing, the guys in front and behind could catch it. This is nuts."

"Al Sharpton doesn't have to make sense. All he wants to do is keep his name out there. He thinks he's the next Jesse Jackson and Martin Luther King, Jr., all rolled into one."

"Shit! Okay, if you have to put out something, simply say that the bunks were assigned and that is all that means. Jesus Christ! I have to bury a President and this asshole thinks it's a good time to grandstand!", I told him.

Ari put out an appropriate statement, but that didn't shut Sharpton up. He loved the sound of his own voice, and facts never swayed him. It came to a head that Sunday morning on Meet the Press. Tim Russert, who I had known for years, had Sharpton on in an early segment, and as a counterpoint, had a retired Major General Jonathan Buller. It took me a second to recognize him, but then it dawned on me that General Buller had been my battalion commander when I had Bravo Battery. The interesting thing, though, was that Buller, who had been a fine battalion commander and who had continued rising through the ranks, was as black as the ace of spades. That had never been important to me when he had been Lieutenant Colonel Buller and I had been First Lieutenant Buckman. He said 'Jump!' and I said, 'How high?' How they ever dug him up I will never fathom.

Sharpton was being broadcast from a studio in New York City, and Buller was in the studio with Russert. Sharpton started off with a litany of woes about the racism of the Buckman administration, which had only been in office about 12 days at that point. As proof, he cited my long personal history of racism, starting with my statement about Harlan being beneath me. When Tim stated that I had explicitly stated that I was in the top bunk and Harlan was in the bottom bunk, Sharpton replied, "That's what Mister Buckman says, of course, but that doesn't mean it's true!"

Tim looked over at General Buller. "General? You used to command the President. Is he a racist?"

"Absolutely not! This is the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard of! Lieutenant Buckman was one of the finest officers I ever had the privilege of commanding, and I never saw a trace of racism in his words or his actions. I recommended him for early promotion twice, and if he had stayed in the army he would have had an outstanding career. He was an excellent officer."

"Then what about the significance of which bunk he was in? Or is there a significance?"

Buller snorted. "This happened when he was in cadet training, which for an officer is the same thing as boot camp. They start at one end of the barracks and a sergeant assigns each boy a bunk alphabetically. It's a bunch of 18 and 19 year old kids, and the sergeant just goes you ... you ... you ... right down the line. Buckman ... Buckminster ... next! They sleep where they are told, they march where they are told, they do what they are told, and they do it with whoever they are told to do it with! That's all it is. Every soldier and every officer goes through it. It's basic training and that's how it works. If Al Sharpton had ever served the country like he serves his mouth, he'd know better!"

It only got better from there! I watched with vast amusement as my old friend had to put up with Sharpton and Buller trading insults. Sharpton called my former commander a 'Tom' and a 'house boy around the plantation' and Buller called Sharpton a 'damn fool' and a lying sack of [bleeped]!' I was laughing my ass off at that point, and Russert pulled the plug on the pair of them. I told Marilyn we would have to invite General Buller to dinner some night, maybe to speak to the NAACP, at which point she told me to 'Behave!' and gave me a finger wagging. Somehow I suspected the problem was going to go away at that point. I dreaded to think of what Harlan's family thought of it all.

Monday morning, I took Marine One back to Washington while Marilyn stayed home with the girls. This was their senior year in high school. We needed to somehow make a two-home family work, just until they graduated. This was going to be tricky, since Marilyn was now the First Lady, and needed to be in Washington with me. It wouldn't be easy.

I left the house early and got to my office about 8:00, and went directly to the Oval Office. First things first – I received a Presidential Daily Briefing without any attitude now. The official intelligence was still that everything pointed towards Iraq. The intel I was getting from the Three Amigos was pointing towards Al Qaeda and Afghanistan.

Priority Number One – Sort this shit out! My first call was to Collins Barnwell, and tell him I wanted the three of them to be here at 11:00 with the latest info. Barnwell was the titular head of the investigation, and an Executive Assistant Director of the FBI. The other two, Secret Service Assistant Director William Basham and CIA Deputy Director of Analysis Winston Creedmore, were to come along with him.

Until then I puttered around doing odds and ends. That's not saying I was goofing off, but at the Presidential level, even the odds and ends are important. The secretaries try to keep things straight, but there are never enough hours in a day. Even going to the bathroom seems to be on a schedule. Forget about goofing off and reading a magazine or playing Solitaire on the computer. You are already booked for that time. Meanwhile, something is bound to come up that throws everything out of whack. By the way, everything that lands on your desk can literally involve life and death decisions.

Nobody has yet come up with a way to determine if somebody will be up to the job of being President. Some business executives ran on the basis of their ability to run big operations and multi-task. These are useful skills, and are also found in a number of governors who had held the job. Then again, over the years we've had some governors who didn't do as well as others (Carter and Bush 43, not great; Clinton, better than average) and Senators without executive experience that had done okay (Kennedy) and others who hadn't (Obama). All the scholars could do was make wild ass guesses about what it took. From what I could see you needed to be a world class juggler and as flexible as a contortionist. Maybe they needed to start recruiting at the circus.

Barnwell gave the presentation on what they had discovered so far, and it was impressive. The FBI technique is to throw a zillion agents at a problem, with each one assigned to a specific task, and that agent becomes an expert on that task. So, the simple answer was to take the passenger and crew lists from each airplane and assign an agent to each passenger or family of passengers, and to each crew member and investigate them thoroughly. Could they have been involved? Where were they sitting? Who were they sitting next to? What was that person doing? What was their background and history? If they were clean, that agent got assigned to something else.

In short order they were able to write off ninety-plus percent of the crew and passengers. Joe Schmoe, a stock broker from Milwaukee, flying home from Boston, on the way to see his blonde wife and 2.3 children, was not the guy who did this. Instead, let's look closer at this swarthy fellow, Mohammed Mohammed, who paid for his trip in cash, one way, is on an expired visa from Saudi Arabia, and who got a pilot license in the States. Yeah, let's look at him, especially after an interview with his flight instructor reports that Mohammed Mohammed wasn't paying any attention to the 'landing' portion of the lessons. At that point, they start tearing this guy's life apart. Where was he living? What was his itinerary like? Where did he get his money from? Where were his bank accounts? Can we tie him to anything overseas, with the CIA? Did he show up on Secret Service lists?

Nineteen foreign born men, most of them from Saudi Arabia, were tagged and investigated. They all had ties to the terrorist group Al Qaeda, and had some history in Afghanistan. None of them had anything to do with Iraq.

"Okay, gentlemen, you've told me the good news, such as it is. We know who did it and we know how they did it. How did they slip through? Or did we catch them and ignore them?", I asked. At that point I started getting some hemming and hawing, and guilty looks from both Barnwell and Creedmore, with Basham having the good taste to try and look sympathetic. I eyed them and said, "Let me put it another way. Just how bad did your departments fuck up?"

Barnwell answered first. "Bad enough, sir. We are still digging through our own files on this, but it is obvious that we had some early reports on at least some of these men, something that twigged various local agents, and that got buried by higher ranking agents."

"Great! You?", I asked Creedmore.

"Not like that. We don't investigate inside the U.S. That being said, if something was sent to us, it would have been buried. As a general rule, we don't share with anybody else unless we have to." He saw the look on my face and held his hands up. "Hey, I am just telling it like it is. It's the way we've operated for years. I am not saying it's right or wrong."

"Wonderful." I turned my head to Basham and raised my eyebrows at him.

He shook his head. "We had nothing on these guys. They simply didn't pop up. Then again, we never got a heads up from anybody else, either."

"Okay. It's obvious that we need to really overhaul the intelligence system in this country. Keep working on this. I don't care how crazy it gets, but we need to be comprehensive. You three are my point men on this. When Congress decides to hold hearings on this, I am going to personally haul you down there and nail you to the seats. They are going to have a field day with this, and we have no choice but to be clear and comprehensive. We can't hide it any longer. We will need names of anybody at any rank who withheld information or buried reports. Heads are going to roll."

Creedmore looked at the other two for a second and then turned back to me. "Mister President, the FBI and the CIA aren't the only intelligence agencies in town. Have you looked at any other sources?"

"Specifically?"

"Well, there's the Defense Intelligence Agency, which is run by Defense, and the State Department has some sources. Most of the military branches have their own intelligence system.", he explained. "Even Treasury has intelligence related to moving money around. These mutts had to get their money somewhere."

Good luck getting anything out of State! That was locked down tight by Cheney and Libby. Defense was another matter, however, with Colin Powell running it. I knew enough about moving money around that Paul O'Neill and his troops would need names before they could track things. I gave them orders to get a list of names to O'Neill and Treasury. Basham could handle that, since the Secret Service worked for Treasury. I would call Colin Powell.

I called Colin Powell right after lunch. I told him what I had been told, that maybe Defense had some assets in the DIA who might know something. Colin's response was unusual. He paused for a second, and then said, "Are you reading my mind or something?"

"Not that I was aware of. Why?"

"Something came up this morning. I need to see you about it."

I looked down the schedule on my desk. I was already booked solid, but decided to delay some things until after dinner. I had already planned to stay the night in the White House. "Can you be here by four?"

"Yes, sir."

I hung up and called in Josh and Mindy to go over the schedule and changes. At 4:00 Secretary Powell was announced and was ushered in, along with an officer in an Army uniform, with a lieutenant colonel's silver oak leaves on his epaulets. I hadn't been expecting anybody else, but I didn't envision a problem. I stood and shook hands with the Secretary and the newcomer, a Lieutenant Colonel Anthony Shaffer, and invited them both to sit down.

"Mister President, when you called me earlier today, I had just spoken to Colonel Shaffer here, and I think it is important that you hear what he has to say. I have to say, I had never heard any of this before."

I turned to Shaffer and said, "I'm all ears, Colonel."

"Sir, have you ever heard of Project Able Danger?", he asked.

"Project Able Danger? Can't say as I have." I turned to Powell and asked, "Where do you guys come up with these names? You keep them in a barrel in the basement or something?"

"This isn't all that funny, Mister President."

"Okay, fair enough. Continue, Colonel."

Shaffer nodded and said, "Project Able Danger was started two years ago in the Defense Intelligence Agency. I was in charge of the project, though not the only person assigned to it. General Shelton authorized the program, which was to use database mining techniques to determine if open source and non-classified information could be used to target potential terrorists operating inside the United States."

Despite my technical background, I wasn't quite sure what he was talking about. "This started in 1999? What is database mining? My technical background is in information theory and topology."

He blinked at that, expecting me to say law or something. "Yes, sir, 1999. Data mining involves looking for relationships in massive databases. It needs really massive computer power. It starts getting into artificial intelligence and statistical analysis..."

I held my hands up. "Okay, while part of me would love to go into this, a bigger part of me doesn't have the time. You are obviously here for a reason. What is it?" Before he could answer, I looked at Colin. "How did you get involved in this? You're the Secretary of Defense. I don't mean to belittle the Colonel here, but whatever this is is way below your horizon."

"Colonel, you want to explain that, please?", answered Colin Powell.

"Yes, sir." He turned to face me. "Earlier today I was ordered to shut down Able Danger and destroy all the records involved. I felt this was very unusual, so instead I made a computer copy of what I could, and delayed implementation of the orders."

"Who gave you these orders, and why do I care?"

"The orders were given to me in the office of the Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Vice Admiral Wilson. I was called into his office this morning, and received them verbally from somebody in the State Department.", he said.

"State? Why?" That made no sense at all. What would State have to do with whatever this was?

"Yes, sir. I was called into the Director's office and he was talking to a man. Then he ordered me to obey any orders I was given and he left. The fellow who was there never introduced himself, but he had a nametag on, an ID badge, saying he was Jonathan Radziwill, State Department. He ordered me to shut it down. Afterwards, he left, the Director came back in, and I was sent on my merry way."

I glanced over at Powell, who simply said, "Deniability."

I nodded and asked, "He ordered it shut down? Why?"

"That was not explained, sir. I was simply told to shut it down and destroy all records of it. As I said, I found that very unusual, so I went outside of channels and got in touch with the Secretary."

"I like proper channels, Colonel. Who did you speak to?"

He took a deep breath and admitted, "I called General Shinseki. I had met him once or twice before. He's retired now, but he told me he could reach the Secretary. I simply stated I needed to speak to the Secretary. I did not speak of Able Danger."

I looked at Powell. "Shinseki called you?"

"And I called Shaffer here."

"What the hell is this all about, Colonel? What did this Able Danger do?"

"Sir, we found the names of some of the 9-11 hijackers. We reported them to the CIA."

I stared at him for a moment. "You knew who was going to attack those airplanes?"

"No, sir, not really. We figured that out afterwards.", he replied.

I looked over at Powell. He looked back at me in dead seriousness. Colin Powell had bought into whatever this was. I turned back to Shaffer. "Okay, you're going to need to explain that, like you're teaching a really stupid politician."

"What we determined was that there were groups of individuals who fit the profiles of possible terrorists, organized into groups, a cell organization it's called. We passed this information along to the CIA, since these were foreign nationals, so they could track down anything about them."

"I'm with you so far. So how do you know these men were the 9-11 guys? Those names haven't been released yet. The information is still being developed, in fact."

He nodded. "Yes, sir. Well, we had these names and we were tracking them, sort of, just to see if our algorithms were working. Then we noticed that none of the names had any changes or movement after 9-11. They had completely dropped from sight. That was when we started querying the CIA again."

"And that was when the State Department ordered it shut down and disbanded? How did they get involved? What does the State Department have to do with the Defense Intelligence Agency? None of this makes sense." I looked at Shaffer. "This program of yours, is it – was it – operational?"

"No, sir, it was just a pilot program, to see if we could develop information. We were still figuring it out."

"Colonel, I'm going to ask you to step outside for a few minutes." I escorted him to the door and showed him out, with instructions to stick around, but feel free to get coffee for himself. Then I went back and sat down with the Secretary of Defense. "Colin, why the hell do I feel like we're playing a game and I not only don't know the rules, I don't know the game."

"Carl, I am getting a very bad feeling about this."

"Some unknown light bird at the DIA finds some names and crossdecks them to the CIA, but it's the State Department which shuts him down. How did they get involved?"

"How would they even have heard?", commented Powell.

I was getting a really bad feeling about this. "Who is this Radziker or whatever his name is?"

"Radziwill, Jonathan Radziwill. I asked about that. He's a personal assistant to Scooter Libby.", he replied. "He also knew Wolfowitz, at least that's what I've heard."

That made me raise my eyebrows. Wolfowitz had previous history at State, and knew Scooter and Cheney. Scooter was the Deputy Secretary of State, the number two man over there, and Cheney's longtime assistant. "Scooter doesn't go to the bathroom without permission from Cheney. So, why does Cheney want it shut down?" I thought for a second longer and said, "Okay, so Cheney orders the evidence that we knew about 9-11 ahead of time buried, but we didn't know about 9-11 ahead of time. They just had some names of possible bad guys. Cheney might be the Antichrist, but even he wouldn't allow these guys to kill George Bush.", I argued.

"It's not about 9-11.", Powell rebutted. "It's about Iraq. All year long State and the CIA have been arguing that Saddam Hussein is the threat to the country, and after the attack, they've been saying he sent the terrorists. Now Lieutenant Colonel Shaffer pops up to throw sand into the gears. Here's a question for you. What happens if these names get sent to the CIA or the FBI? The CIA buries it in the vaults, because they don't talk to anybody. The FBI, however, puts some agents on these guys, maybe hauls them in for questioning, maybe figures it out and we don't get 9-11."

A chill ran up my spine! I had condemned thousands of Americans to die, when we already knew the bad guys were in the country and up to something. What if we had grabbed them? What if 9-11 hadn't happened? I didn't know whether to cry or throw up.

"I get the impression that Cheney is trying to cover this all up, but what's he covering up? That it was Al Qaeda, not Hussein? Is this even a cover-up? Is this even illegal? Or are they trying to cover up the fact that they wanted a war with Iraq, no matter what the facts are? Or are they trying to cover up the fact that they failed to act on the info, even though the CIA isn't allowed to act inside the U.S.", I replied.

"Have your Three Amigos heard about any of this?"

"Nobody has said anything to me, and I think they would have said something. By all accounts this is looking like George was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Nothing they are finding says that he was being targeted." I shrugged for a second, and said, "I'm not even sure this is illegal, just sneaky and underhanded. Well, we need to figure this out, and neither you nor I are going to be able to do that. We need to get a lawyer involved. Will you ask the colonel to come back in? By the way, when all this is over with, we need to come up with a way to say thank you to Eric Shinseki. This is the second time he has helped me out."

Colin stood and went to the door, and summoned Shaffer back in. I stood and said, "Colonel, I'm not really sure where this is going to be headed, but I think we need to find out. I hereby order you to make backup copies of the project, and ignore any orders to destroy it. I also am ordering you to cooperate with any investigation from the Justice Department. Colin, I want you to get in touch with John Ashcroft, and take the colonel over there."

Both men replied, "Yes, sir.", and I sent them away. The whole thing was disgusting. Did Cheney and Wolfowitz and Libby and the rest of the neocons they surrounded themselves with want war with Iraq so badly they would bury evidence that it wasn't Iraq who did this? But I wasn't buying that and wasn't claiming it anyway, so who were they trying to bury the evidence from? Bush? He was the least of their worries! The moderates? Was that even illegal? Or is this simply hiding the incredibly embarrassing, but not necessarily illegal, way they ignored something that led to the deaths of over three thousand people?

One thing I was sure of was that it was going to come out. The biggest problem with cover-ups is that they don't work. Every scandal I had ever heard of, going all the way back to Watergate and before, it wasn't the crime that landed people in jail, it was the cover-up. The only way this was going to be at all something we could work through was if we could control the release of the information.

I could foresee two possible outcomes. First, we could try to bury it. We tell Shaffer to dismantle the program and send him to Nome for the rest of his life. Sooner or later, though, somebody would talk, it would hit the papers, and some Congressman would demand hearings. It would take months of time, and somebody would end up fired or in jail.

The other option wasn't vastly more palatable, but was better. We announce we discovered a problem. No, we didn't know what was going to happen, but we did discover some of the names involved. We discovered a cover-up and called in the Justice Department and have been cooperating. It still ends up in the papers and in front of Congress, but we can control the exposure and look like we are doing something about the problem. It takes less time, and you can control who goes to jail.

Another thing to add to the to-do list, completely revamping intelligence gathering and reporting!

Meanwhile, I had a war to plan. I had told Powell I wanted to meet this week to discuss our military response, so I called a meeting of the National Security Council for Wednesday morning with this in mind. Present were Cheney, Powell, Condi Rice as the National Security Adviser, the new temporary head of the CIA, and the Chairman of the JCS, Myers, and Josh Bolten. Once we were all present in the conference room, I turned it over to Colin Powell, who promptly turned it over to Myers for a dog and pony show.

I was presented three options for Operation Enduring Freedom, a name picked more for symbolism than anything else. If it was up to me I'd have called it Operation You Asked For It. Option Able was restricted to Al Qaeda targets and was the minimum recommendation; it consisted mainly of bombing training camps. Option Baker ratcheted things up a notch, by adding in some Afghan military assets like Army bases, and Option Charlie added a ground component. Special Forces teams would be dropped in to link up with anti-Taliban forces in the northern part of the country, and do joint combat and training missions with them. From what I remembered of history on my first go, we had gone with Option Charlie, which had worked fine, but then decided we could actually run the country better than the locals, so we sent in 100,000 troops later on.

I listened to Myers' spiel and looked at the computerized map he had on the giant wall screen. At the end, I had a few questions. "General, in which of these options are we attacking the Taliban itself. I don't mean their military assets. I mean their government."

He looked at me in confusion. "Sir, I'm not sure I understand. Both in Baker and Charlie options we will be destroying their Army and Air Force."

"General, correct me if I'm wrong, but their Air Force is limited to a few barely workable helicopters and their Army uses captured Soviet tanks and artillery pieces from the Eighties. No, I mean the government itself. Why aren't you attacking their Congress or Parliament or White House or whatever they call it over there?"

"Sir, attacking a foreign government ... it just isn't done, sir."

"Why not? They attacked ours? As much as the Afghanis want to sit there and say they weren't involved, we all know they were up to their necks in it, and I see no reason not to cut them off at those necks. I can pretty much guarantee they don't have any qualms about attacking our government. I expect to see an option with attacks on the Taliban presented to me. Now, just what sort of assets do you have planned? Bombers? Afghanistan doesn't have a coastline, so who are we going to have to fly over to get there? What's the plan for that?"

For that he actually had an answer. Bombers would be staged out of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, with tanker support. Meanwhile the Navy would be in the northern Arabian Sea with carriers, which would fly missions and launch Tomahawks.

"So we will overfly Pakistan while we do this? What makes you think they will appreciate us violating their territorial integrity to wage war on their buddies? Al Qaeda might be Arab, but the Taliban is a subsidiary of the Pakistanis.", I said.

By now Rice and Powell were looking thoughtfully at me, but Myers and Cheney looked angry, and Harold Tillison, the temporary CIA director looked like he was wondering how I knew so much about the assholes on the other side of the planet. Obviously I wasn't following the script.

Cheney answered, "Well, obviously we will need to inform the Pakistani government ahead of time and secure permission."

"Well, while you are doing that, why not send a telegram to Kabul at the same time? The ISI in Pakistan has them on speed dial.", I replied. The ISI was the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence Agency, a combination CIA and FBI, and was filled with hardliners and Muslim radicals. They were directly responsible for financing and supporting Muslim terrorist groups in Afghanistan and India.

I turned back to Myers. "General, I appreciate this, but it is inadequate. I want you to understand the overall concept I have of our response. We are going to bomb their country into rubble, then we are going to bomb their rubble into gravel, and then we are going to bomb their gravel into dust. Figure a way to start it without the Pakistanis knowing about it. The minute we launch, I will invite the Pakistani ambassador in here and tell him where the bear shits in the woods, and he can like it or lump it. I expect you back here in two days with an Option Delta, with some very specific target lists and details. Is that clear?"

"Yes, sir!"

"Thank you. Oh, and come up with something other than that cockamamie name! Enduring Freedom? How about something a lot closer to the truth, like Operation Justifiable Homicide!" Colin Powell smirked at that and rolled his eyes. "I want to begin operations in two weeks or less. Make it happen."

For the rest of the week I went about rebuilding the Cabinet. Wednesday morning John Ashcroft told me that the DIA Director, Wilson, and Radziwill, the guy from State, had been picked up at their homes by FBI agents. Wilson had promptly lawyered up and was on ice at the moment, but Radziwill was frightened to death and they had granted him immunity from prosecution for giving them people higher up the food chain. Radziwill promptly named Scooter Libby as giving him the orders. By Thursday afternoon Dick Cheney learned that Scooter Libby was being investigated by the Justice Department and demanded an audience with me. I let him in to see me and he told me in no uncertain terms that Scooter was being railroaded and that I needed to shut down this witch hunt. He couldn't possibly run the State Department without such a critical man as his deputy.

I let him go on like this for a few minutes and stopped him. "Dick, you've had your say, so here is mine. I know about the investigation. I'm the guy who ordered it. I sent the individuals involved directly to the Attorney General. I know Scooter's your friend, but the best thing you can do is to tell him is to cooperate and to hire a good lawyer. I will not be issuing pardons over anything related to 9-11. Is that understood?"

"You can't do this! He's done nothing wrong!"

I shrugged. "Then he'll be fine, won't he. On the other hand, from what I've seen of Scooter, he doesn't blow his nose without asking you which tissue to use. If you told him to destroy information, maybe you should be getting a lawyer, too."

"HOW DARE YOU!"

"Dick, I think the time has come for the parting of the ways. Would you prefer to resign or do you want me to ask you to leave? Which statement should I have Ari issue?" I had gone through enough with the man. I didn't need Dick Cheney to look tough. Enduring Freedom (Colin told me to behave and accept the name) was going to do that just fine.

"You go to hell, Buckman!"

"Okay, so be it. Ari Fleischer will be issuing a statement this afternoon that in light of our disagreements over foreign policy I have asked you to stand down as Secretary of State effective immediately. I hereby warn you that you have sworn various oaths regarding secrecy and classified information, and that violation of those oaths will be prosecuted, and I do not issue pardons."

Cheney's face was beet red and I wondered if he would have a heart attack right there in my office. I wouldn't really mind, but as the saying goes, the paperwork is a nightmare! He stormed out of my office, slamming the door as he went, and my next call was to Ari Fleischer. Ari was going to end up hating me. My second call was to Colin Powell, to let him know that his new job was available.

Dick did not go gentle into that good night. The news reports that evening uniformly began with the story of Dick Cheney's dismissal as Secretary of State, and how I was cleaning house in the Cabinet. Most of the networks had two or three stories, perhaps one on Cheney's dismissal and a second reviewing all the names I had fired so far. Only NBC had picked up on the Justice Department's investigation of 'improprieties by senior employees of the State Department', though they didn't have any details, and Brokaw speculated that this was part of the reason for Cheney's dismissal. For his part, Cheney denounced me as weak and deluded. A firm hand was needed to guide our country and I was out of my depth.

A much easier conversation was with Richard Clarke. I had asked for him to come over and speak to me for a few minutes Thursday afternoon. I had worked with him earlier in the year trying to wake people up about terrorism. I suspect he knew I was going to offer him a job, but not which job. I made it easy. I offered him the Central Intelligence Agency and told him I wanted the mess cleaned up, the sooner the better. He didn't bat an eye, but signed right up.

I had a different conversation with John McCain. He arrived Friday morning and was ushered straight in. It wasn't that I was being overly deferential, but the man was a very senior Senator, and I had no good reason to piss off the Senate. I had already decided I wanted much more of a collegial atmosphere than some Presidents had with Congress. I wanted to make some changes, and if kissing some Congressional ass was required, so be it.

John was brought into the Oval Office and I moved around my desk to greet him. "Thank you for coming, John."

"You're welcome, Mr. President. How can I help you?"

We shook hands and I showed him to the armchairs in the center of the room. He moved with a slight limp like I did, courtesy of his service in Viet Nam. We both had injuries in common. "Can I offer you some coffee?"

"Please."

I looked over at Frank Stouffer, who had brought the Senator into my office and nodded. I chatted with McCain for a moment while Frank prepared coffee and tea, but we didn't say anything substantive. After he served us, I thanked Frank and sent him out of the room.

John sipped his coffee and commented, "This really is very good coffee. You don't drink it though, I've been told."

"No, I'm a tea drinker, have been since I was a teenager. Made things difficult in the Army, I'll tell you. The Army runs on coffee!"

"The Navy was pretty much the same way. They might not issue rum anymore, but they sure better have coffee around." I smiled and nodded at that. "Those were simpler days, Mister President. It's more complicated now. You've been busy the last few days."

"That's very true, John. Call me Carl, by the way."

"Thank you, Carl. As I was saying, you've been busy. The CIA, the FBI, now State – I have to wonder what you are up to."

I nodded in understanding. "I'd be surprised if you weren't wondering what was happening. Let me put this as plainly as possible. Our nation just suffered through the worst intelligence disaster since Pearl Harbor, and I do not use that term lightly. We lost more people at the Twin Towers than we did at Pearl, and we ended up then with a World War. You were Navy. You must have been to Pearl and seen the Arizona and the Punchbowl. This will be for our generation and our children's generation as momentous an event as that day was. Would you agree with that?"

"Yes, sir, I would agree with that, which makes me wonder why you are dismantling our capabilities like this.", he replied.

"John, the last thing I want to do is to dismantle our capabilities. We are going to need them more than at any time in the past. No, what we need is accurate information that is not tied up with politics, and I am sorry to say that is not what we have been getting. I am not one to fire people without a darn good reason, and I am sorry to say I had reasons."

"Carl, I want to believe you, but four high level firings is a lot."

"John, I agree. However, this is going to break down into two separate issues. First, the quality of the intelligence and how it was handled was a disaster, in no uncertain terms. We had plenty of warning and nobody did jack about this. When this comes out you will be amazed. Those were the people I let go initially. Cheney is a different matter. You have probably heard that the Justice Department is investigating senior people at State. Ashcroft thinks there will be indictments. Basically Cheney, Wolfowitz, and the entire crew around them have been gaming the intelligence for the last year or so, and you have seen the results. I told Dick the other day that he needed to hire a lawyer, and that I would not be handing out pardons."

McCain looked stunned as I told him the information. After a moment he replied, "These are unbelievable charges!"

"I agree, but I have been dealing with this for most of the last year. Now I have to rebuild a government. That's why I asked you to come over today. I want your help."

McCain set down his coffee cup and saucer. "In what way, Mr. President?"

"I am bringing Colin Powell over from Defense to State, and I am bringing Richard Clarke in to run the CIA. I don't know if you know him, but he's been working counterterrorism for Condi Rice, at least until he was fired."

"And you want me for Defense?", he asked with a touch of incredulity.

I gave a wry smile at that. "I considered that, or State, but no, that's not my thought. I was thinking a little higher up the ladder."

"Vice President!?"

"Would you consider it?", I rejoined.

He looked closely at me. "Are you planning on running in 2004?"

I smiled at that. "John, the honest answer is that I just don't know. I might. I would never run if I had to go through what you guys have to do, but this would be different, wouldn't it. Or were you planning a primary challenge?" Normally, a primary challenge to a sitting President is both unheard of and a disaster to everybody involved. Now, it was possible, but could still be a disaster.

"It's something to consider. You've never done a national campaign, not like that. If I become VP, that is out, isn't it?"

I nodded. "On the other hand, you get a leg up on everybody else, regardless. Who else is there?" I shrugged and tossed my hands up. "John, I just don't know if I am going to run. If I do run, I'm term limited to just one more term. You'll be able to run in 2004 if I get out, or 2008 if I stay in. Either way, you get a lot of benefits from being the Veep."

"I won't put up with the crap you took."

I smiled at that. "You noticed! I'm touched! Seriously, every once in a while this country gets a lesson in politics when the Vice President gets an unexpected promotion. Most of the time nobody gives a rat's ass, but when it happens, they care. I might not have run for the job, but I have it, and I will damn well make sure that whoever is next in line is qualified. I won't say it will be perfect and easy, but I believe you have the nation's best interests at heart, and if necessary, you could do the job."

He didn't respond directly to that, but he didn't shoot me down. "What is my role in this?"

"My door will be a lot more open than George's was, that's for sure. Actually, one of my biggest plans is simply to work with Congress on things. Back when I was in the House I used to work across party lines all the time. You were there; you know that's how I worked. I need to do that some more, and a second person couldn't hurt. This country is going to be going through some changes and I will need the help with Congress. That will be a focus for you." I sat back in the armchair and smiled. "Besides which, you will have more than a few advantages if you run for President when I step down. I can help with that."

"Can I have a day or two to think about this?", he asked.

I chuckled at that. "Yes, you can, and I promise I won't say anything to anybody. However, you know how the cameras watch this place. Don't blame me if somebody starts asking questions!"

"That's true enough."

"Are you considering it yes or considering it no?", I pressed.

"I'm considering it yes, but I want to talk to my wife. As long as we are talking about who is considering what, what are you considering for 2004?", he asked.

"I really don't know yet. Right now I feel like I'm playing catch-up ball. I will be able to say by early next year. Give me until the spring before I decide. I hate to say it, but you'd be buying a pig in a poke in that regard."

"Can I call you Monday morning with my answer?"

"Or before, if you want to. If it isn't you, I am going to have to find another name, but you are my preference. If yes, we will need to have a skull session here." We would need to sit with my people and his before the announcement.

We left it at that and I did some more of what my staff told me I was doing. In that way it was a lot like my days in the House. My time was booked and my boss was the clock and the staff. After lunch, however, I had a major meeting. General Myers was giving me the detailed presentation on the Afghanistan plans after lunch, at the Pentagon.

Josh and I drove over to the Pentagon and were taken directly to the Situation Room, a secure facility in the basement where we could see all sorts of stuff. There was a conference table, computerized maps on the walls, various generals and admirals, and Colin Powell. I have to admit that I walked around looking at things. "I've never been in here before.", I commented.

"The big thing is that it is secure. We can't be spied on here. Your cell phone won't work, for instance.", commented General Myers. "Here, sir, why don't you have a seat?" He pointed me towards a chair in the center of the table, opposite a large computer screen or flat panel system on the wall.

"Thank you." I took my seat, and General Myers went around the table introducing me to people. At the end, I nodded to Myers and said, "Well, let's see what you have for me. By the way, General, Secretary Powell has told me I have to behave. We are keeping the name Enduring Freedom." That earned a laugh out of Colin Powell.

I might have been rough on the General a few days ago, but the man was a professional and took my words to heart. He had developed a multi-prong approach.

* On the date selected, which was simply being called 'X-Day' for now, a dozen B-2 stealth bombers would fly directly from the United States, from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri. They would be loaded with precision guided bombs and would be tasked with destroying anything air defense related, as well as any targets near cities that needed precision targeting. These targets would include army and air force bases, military headquarters, and government buildings. They would fly direct, and because they were radar-invisible (mostly) would overfly a number of countries on the way.

* Simultaneously, a flight of B-1 bombers would fly in, loaded with as many dumb iron bombs as they could carry. While they weren't technically stealthy, they had a lot lower radar signature than B-52s. They would stage out of Diego Garcia and would fly in over the relatively uninhabited southwestern portion of Pakistan. Once inside Afghanistan, they would proceed to various training camps and army bases, and then do high speed, low level bomb runs, carpet bombing whatever they were assigned to. They actually showed me a video of a Bone (B-One, get it?) on a training run, popping up over a mountain range and dropping down so low it looked like the exhaust was hitting the ground, and then whipping over a target and dropping a massive load of bombs out. It was quite impressive.

* B-52s would make a second wave attack on the various training bases about an hour after the Bones plastered them. It was commented that by giving the terrorists time to dig out and start looking for their buddies, the second attack would catch them flatfooted and demoralized. Colin commented that it would be like Arc-Light strikes back during his Viet Nam days, and that they were surprisingly accurate.

* Special operations teams, (Special Forces, SEALs, Marine Force Recon, Delta, etc.) would be parachuted into northern Afghanistan to link up with the Northern Alliance, a loose alliance of resistance groups. They would have special radios able to talk to bombers and target bad guys quickly. After the initial attacks, B-2 and B-1 bombers with precision munitions would be on call 24-7 to blow up bad guys as needed.

* Meanwhile, the Navy was going to have several aircraft carriers stationed off the coast of Pakistan. If the Pakistanis decided to butt in, the Navy was going to be responsible. They were already positioning assets, which meant that they had two carriers in the area, with a third on the way, and most of their cruisers and destroyers had long range Tomahawks as well. If they didn't need the Tomahawks for the Pakistanis, they could fire some at the Afghans.

* Diego Garcia was getting a buttload of tanker and intelligence support planes being flown in even as we spoke. Tankers I understood, but the intelligence stuff was a variety of 'elint' electronic intelligence planes and even some U-2 spy planes!

After the show was over, I looked around the table and nodded. "General, I have to say, this was definitely a better plan than what I saw the other day. I think you have in mind what we are looking for. I am going to tentatively approve this. I do have some questions first, though."

"Understood, sir. Anything we can answer now?"

"Probably." I looked over to find an admiral with some insignia I didn't know how to read. I glanced at his name card, Vern Clark. "Admiral Clark, are you in charge of the naval portion of this?"

"Yes, sir, I'm Chief of Naval Operations.", he replied

"What kind of assets will you have available?"

"On what day do you plan on this, sir?"

I looked at a calendar. "Monday, October 8 sound all right? I don't think they celebrate Columbus Day over there."

He gave a slight smile at that. "No, sir, I don't think they do." He thought for a second and said, "By then I can have three carriers on the line. Right now we have one in the Bay of Bengal and the other in the Arabian Sea. We'll move the one from the Bay of Bengal over, and I'll have a third as backup by then. We'll also have Tomahawk loaded ships with them."

"And if the Pakistanis get feisty?"

"Sir, I am not trying to make light of this, but three carriers can handle anything the Pakistanis can throw at them. I would appreciate it, however, if you could try to keep them from getting feisty." The last was said with a smile and shrug.

"My thought is that when we start the bombing runs, I call the Pakistani ambassador to the White House and lay down the law."

"Yes, sir."

Next I turned back to the Air Force and reviewed their list of targets. I got several nervous looks at this, because several of the targets were located uncomfortably close to mosques. I gave them my best stone-face look and signed off on them. I really wasn't in the mood to worry about mosques or civilian casualties. As far as I was concerned, they had earned whatever happened to them.

I looked over at an Army general and asked, "How do we get your guys home, General? I don't think we want to leave them there."

"Are we bringing them back, sir? Or are they going to be the first wave of an assault?"

I shook my head. "I am not about to invade a landlocked country. We are going to kill their Army and then go home. The locals can do with the place whatever they want. It's not like we want it."

"We are still working on some of the details. Two possibilities are being considered. First, we can stage them out of Uzbekistan, on the northern border. The other choice is simply to figure on picking them up with C-130s from rough airstrips and roads."

"You have until October 8 to figure it out, General."

"Yes, sir! HOO-AH!"

I had to laugh at that. Across the table, though, I had some serious looking faces. Colin Powell said, "You are not planning on an invasion."

"Definitely not. Let me make that very clear. I am quite aware that there were plans afoot to invade Iraq and other Arab countries. I can envision few things which would be more dangerous for us to do. These are people who do not like us. We can kill them and destroy their armies, but if we invade them we are nothing but modern day Crusaders and colonialists. We are not their religion or culture, and no matter how hard we try, they will never love us or want us there. We need to get in, do our thing, and get out."

I looked around the table. "So far, so good. We can destroy training camps and trash Afghanistan. What about Al Qaeda? I mean, the big guys, not the recruits. Are they being targeted?" Several heads turned towards the end of the table, where two middle-aged men in civilian suits were sitting. I am sure we had been introduced, but their names passed by me. I did remember they were CIA liaisons of some sort. I looked at them and asked, "Gentlemen, where is this bin Laden character? Is one of these Xs his house?"

They looked at each other, and then one began to speak. "Sir, confirmed intelligence is, of course, difficult in Afghanistan under any circumstances. We have more than a bit of signal and electronic intelligence which is pointing to possible locations for senior members of various terrorist linked groups..." He went on for another minute or two.

I held my hand up and stopped him. "Let's try this a different way. Yes or no – Do you know where Osama bin Laden is?" He was off and running again, without actually saying anything. I cleared my throat. "Last chance. Yes or no? If I have to ask a third time I will ask your partner there, because you will be unemployed."

His eyes snapped open, and he stammered out, "No."

"Thank you. Wasn't that easy? Now, do you have any locations of places he might be hiding, him or anybody else? Safe houses or something? Do they have an office somewhere? Maybe in the downtown Kabul business district? The headquarters of Al Qaeda, Inc. Where do they get their mail and their cell phone bills, that sort of thing?", I asked, sarcasm dripping from my lips.

They glanced at each other again, and the second guy answered, "We have some information on possible locations, but nothing completely confirmed."

"Has that information been given to the generals and admirals here, for inclusion in their targeting lists?"

"We were waiting to confirm our options."

I leaned back and counted to ten slowly. "Let me make this abundantly clear. Those locations go on the target list now, no matter how fuzzy they might be. I don't care if it's in the basement of the Afghan version of the Washington Monument. We are going to drop a really, really big bomb on it. Is this understood or not?"

I received a chorus of "Yes, sir!" from around the table.

"Thank you." I looked around the room. "Let me be perfectly frank. Regardless of any irritation I might feel at times, this is probably the most important thing I will ever do. In a matter of days I will be sending our men and women into combat. I have a son and a nephew serving, and I know that some of you have children in the services also. We have to get this right. What do I have to do to get it right? If you need me to do something, you have to ask. I do not intend to be calling mothers to tell them their baby isn't coming home because we at this table didn't do everything we could to get it right!" I looked back down at the CIA. "Would the Israelis know where these assholes are?"

They looked at each other again. "I don't know, sir. Maybe. Nobody gets in these groups. You practically have to be born into them. On the other hand, maybe."

I looked at the wall, where around the room were spaced clocks with different time zones marked. Israel was plus-seven, so it was approaching midnight there. "If I call Sharon tomorrow morning, I'll ask for help. Perhaps you two could prime the pump and let him know I will be calling?"

"Of course, sir. When do you want to call?"

"Will he be at his office at 0800 local time?", I asked.

Eyes snapped open at that. That meant I would have to call him at 0100 Washington time, after midnight! "Yes, sir. He should be."

"Get the message to him. Now, if we are done here, I need to get back to the White House. Marilyn and the girls are coming down. It will be the first time they have been to the White House. Thank you all. I am sure we will be talking again." I stood, and Josh and I headed out.

"You know, it's not that late. Sharon is probably still awake.", said Josh.

I glanced at my watch. It was a bit after 3:00 PM, so it was a bit after 10:00 PM in Tel Aviv. I shrugged. "Maybe so, but if I am calling on somebody for a favor, it pays to do it on his schedule, not yours. Maybe you're right. Follow up with those two from the CIA. If he's still up and wants to call me, I'll take the call. Otherwise, I'll stay up late."

He asked, "What do you plan to ask Sharon to do?"

"Not sure, yet. You don't need to be there, Josh. You need some sleep. I'll see you in the morning. It's Friday. I'm calling it an early day."

We drove back over to the White House (No, you don't just drive! It's a caravan of War Wagons, the armored limo, a disguised ambulance with doctor and nurse, motorcycles, flashing lights – basically a heavily armed and armored zoo on wheels!) We got there just in time to see Marine One coming in for a landing on the South Lawn. I sent Josh on his way and waited for my family to come out. After the helo settled down, I began walking across the lawn towards them. First off was Marilyn, followed by the twins. Last off was a Secret Service agent struggling with a gigantic hairy monster, otherwise known as the First Puppy. Stormy was happy to get out of her travel cage and wanted to jump down and run around for a bit, and looked like she could easily drag the burly agent with her.

I jogged a little closer and she pulled loose and ran down the stairs and came close enough for me to grab her leash. Some luggage came off the chopper and then it took off again. It felt good to see everyone again. I had been holed up in the White House all week, not the every other night routine I had been often able to do as a Congressman or Vice President. I missed my family. I even missed my dog, who romped madly around for a few minutes before squatting and dropping a load of Presidential Puppy Poop on the lawn. Afterwards she looked up at me and I said, "Stormy, you are not really what I would call Presidential caliber! You barely qualified for Congress!"

I got a loud 'Woof!' in return, and then she pulled me along. I tugged her back and then went over to Marilyn and the girls. The twins didn't look terribly enthused to see me, and Marilyn had a half smile on her face.

I looked at them, and then sat down on a bench. "Okay, what'd I do now?"

My wife looked at me and said, "What are you talking about?"

"What's with you two?", I asked of Holly and Molly. "I'm the Dad, so it has to be my fault."

They both gave me mopey looks and refused to answer. Marilyn sighed and said, "You have interfered with their social schedule. They were invited to a party tonight and I had to say they were coming here."

Neither of the girls argued with this. I just looked them over and said, "Okay, fair enough. I am sorry to screw up your busy schedules, but I need to run the country from here. Let's make a deal. Every other weekend you come down here. This is only for the rest of the school year."

"What about when you go away? What do we do then?", complained Molly.

"What are you talking about?"

"We saw on the news you were going overseas?", added Holly.

"Ahh, don't worry about that." The news was running reports that I had been invited to visit several countries. "Nothing is definite, but you two are old enough that you can stay on your own, with the Secret Service around, if your mother and I have to travel. Again, come summer time, you two might want to travel with us. We might be going to some pretty neat places."

They looked at each other for a moment and were considering it. "What about dates?"

"They have to pay for their own flights.", I replied, deadpan. Marilyn rolled her eyes at that.

Holly protested, "No, Daddy! How do we date like this!?"

"Give me a break! You date the same way you did when I was the Vice President! There's no going out on school nights anyway, you know that. Just tell your boyfriend that the leader of the free world needs to see you every other weekend. If he wants to drive down and take you out, fine by me."

"Really?"

"Sure. Just warn the boys that they will be strip searched before they are allowed on the premises, and that any drugs, alcohol, or just about anything else I don't like will get them thrown in Federal prison! Maybe I can get the Secret Service agents to demonstrate marksmanship for them."

"DADDY!", they protested in unison.

Marilyn giggled at this, and I could see a couple of agents snorting in silent laughter. "Enough of this. Would you like to go inside and see where we'll be living? It's pretty cool. It's like living inside a museum." I stood and took my wife's hand, and Stormy led the way towards a door. The girls trailed behind us.

Behind me I clearly heard an agent saying, "Jumper, Jelly Jar, Trouble One, and Trouble Two on the move..."

I looked at my wife. "Let's go inside, Jelly Jar!"

That earned me a vigorous finger wagging. "You are having too much fun with that name!"

We were greeted by the Chief Usher, Mr. Walters. An usher makes it sound like somebody trying to keep the groom sober at a wedding, or a bell boy, but at the White House he basically runs what is effectively a small hotel and museum. The Buckmans were simply the guests. I had met him when I moved in the beginning of the week, after the Bushes had left, and had gotten enough of a tour so that I could find my bedroom and the bathroom. Otherwise, I just followed people around who seemed to know where they were going. Mr. Walters gave us an excellent tour, enough so that by the time we got upstairs the twins were over their initial snit and were going 'Oooh' and 'Ahhh' over everything. At one point he was taking us through the Blue Room and I commented it was named after President Blue. I could see him working to keep from laughing, as Marilyn and the twins looked at each other and then asked when he had been President. I just moved them along at that point.

We ended up on the Second Floor, which was where the Presidential apartment is. Marilyn and I had a very nice bedroom suite down at the west side, with a sitting room, dressing room, bathroom, and so forth. The Oval Room (not to be confused with the Oval Office) was set up as our living room, and allowed entry outside, to the Truman Balcony over the Portico. On the backside, across a central hallway, were the dining room, a small kitchen, and bedrooms for the kids and guests. If I wanted to rent out the White House to paying guests, which is effectively what the Clintons had done, the Lincoln and Queen's Bedrooms were down the hall.

Mr. Waters told the girls they were free to wander around, and to ask anybody they saw for help if they needed help, and they took off with Stormy like they had jets up their butts. He took that opportunity to introduce some of the more senior staff, like the Butler and the Chef, to Marilyn and me. We were also presented with our recommended menu for the week. The Chef would suggest healthy choices and we could pick and choose. For me this was pretty simple. Breakfast would be cereal if I had it, lunch would be either something from the Mess or a business lunch with others, and dinner would be whatever Marilyn told me I was eating. When I was home, I could do the cooking. Otherwise I was asked if I had any favorite recipes, and I promised to bring the family cookbook in.

I was also told that my personal billing would be done on a monthly basis. While anything we ate at official dinners and such was compliments of a grateful nation, our personal meals we paid for. It helps to be rich when you are the President. I was probably also going to be billed for Marilyn and the girls flying around or being taken somewhere. I simply told them to send the bills to my accountants.

The twins and the dog returned about a half hour later, the bunch of them looking like drowned rats! "What in the world happened to you two?!", I asked.

Holly answered unhappily. "We found the swimming pool out back and Stormy decided to go swimming!"

"And you two couldn't wait to change into swimsuits?"

"No! We had to get down and help Stormy out of the pool and she managed to pull us in with her!", explained Holly.

Marilyn just started laughing, and I buried my head in my hands. "What a pack of idiots!", I muttered. Stormy loved swimming in a pool, but at home we had some steps built into the pool, so little kids could climb out. Our dogs had all been happy to climb out that way. I was going to have to get something built for Stormy. A Wet-Vac would also be useful, since she could carry gallons in her coat. I glanced over at the girls, who were arguing with their mother that it wasn't funny. "I remember hearing about that pool. I think Jerry Ford had it built. The old pool used to be inside, in the West Wing, and when Johnson was the President he used to go skinny-dipping in it."

The looks on their faces were priceless.

"OH MY GOD!", exclaimed Holly.

"I am never going swimming again!", added her sister.

"I need to take a shower now!", finished Holly. They stormed down to their rooms to change, followed by the dog, who they loudly blamed for their predicament.

I simply shook my head at my wife, and took her hand and led her downstairs. We went outside and walked around the place. It's gorgeous. I told Marilyn we would have to bring down H&A Yard Work for a professional critique. She also suggested her family. I told her that her parents could sleep in President Blue's Room, and got an elbow to the ribs.

After dinner the girls went exploring some more, and Marilyn joined me in the Oval Room. I was just staring out over the Truman Balcony, with Stormy snoring on a couch nearby. "You look like you're a million miles away.", she said.

I turned to her and smiled. "I'm fine."

"Sorry you took the job?"

I snorted at that. "The thing that gets me is why anybody ever wants it in the first place! Grown men, guys who should know better, spend years running for the job and would do anything to get it. They would happily sacrifice their daughters on an altar if it could get them a vote. And for what? It is totally thankless." She laughed at that. "Yeah, you laugh now. You're going to be sleeping alone tonight. I need to make a call at one in the morning."

"What? Why?"

I sighed and shook my head. "I can't tell you."

"Why not?", Marilyn asked, not angrily, but out of curiosity.

"Because I can't. There are things that I do now, things that are secret, and that I can't tell people who shouldn't be told. You're one of those people."

"Don't you trust me?"

I took a second to answer that. "Marilyn, I would trust you with my life. However, I am now responsible for the lives of 300 million other people, and I can't put that trust on anybody else. Let me ask you something. Could you order somebody killed?"

She recoiled at that. "Oh my God, NO! How can you ask that!?"

"Because I have to be able to do that. In a matter of days or weeks I am going to send our country into war. Hundreds, no, thousands of people will die as a result of that.", I told her.

"Oh my God! Charlie?"

I shook my head. "No, he should be okay, him and Jack. Still the time might come when I have to order him into battle. You could never do that."

Marilyn shook her head. "No, of course not. I hate that you have to do this. Why do you have to kill all those people? Why can't they just leave us alone?"

I smiled sadly. Marilyn was a good person, but she saw the world as she wanted it to be, and I saw the world as it was. "Two sides of the same question, hun. I have to start this war and kill them so I can try and convince them to leave us alone. If I could figure a way to do it differently, I would be happy to." I snorted and laughed derisively. "Hell, I used to kill retail, and now I get to do it wholesale! Hell of a world, ain't it?!"

"And tonight?"

"Tonight I have to talk to people in faraway places. That's all you can know."

We just sat there on the couch looking out at the world while the sun sank and night came. Eventually Marilyn went to bed, and I made my way down to the Oval Office. I worked on some budget numbers that the Office of Management and Budget had put together for me until it was time to make a phone call. I made the request for the night operator to put the call through. Sitting across the desk from me was one of the two CIA representatives from the afternoon. After a few minutes the phone rang and the voice said, "We have the Prime Minister of Israel, sir."

"Hello?", came an accented voice.

"Prime Minister Sharon, thank you for taking my call. I hope this isn't too early for you."", I said.

"No, Mister President, of course not. This is quite late in Washington. If you had called earlier I would have been happy to take the call.", he replied. The signal quality was crystal clear.

"No need for both of us to lose sleep. I was hoping that you might be able to do me a favor."

"If it's within my power, of course."

"Mister Prime Minister, it occurred to me that you might have some intelligence on certain terrorist groups that we might not have. I assume you have heard of Al Qaeda.", I asked.

'Yes, we know of this group. What kind of intelligence would you be looking for?"

"Nothing much, really. Just names and addresses, I suppose. I plan to mail them some packages."

Ariel Sharon gave me a barking laugh at that. "If we had those addresses, there would be no need for you to send them any packages, Mister President."

"Perhaps not, Prime Minister. I will concede that point. Regardless, it still occurs to me that you might have more information than we have. The reason I ask is that you probably have people capable of passing along intelligence in the other direction, so to speak. Without getting into details, we think it might be helpful if any individuals in Al Qaeda who happened to be outside of Afghanistan currently were to head back home. Maybe if they thought that we knew where they were currently, but not where they might go in Afghanistan. Do you follow my drift?"

Sharon responded slowly. "You would like these individuals to head back to Afghanistan I gather. When do you foresee a need to get them home?"

No way was I going to tell, but I had to make a reply. "Well, not today, but soon, very soon. A matter of days, maybe a week or two. Certainly no longer than that."

"And then?"

"Well, I don't want to seem to be making unwanted suggestions, Mister Prime Minister, but if I had friends or employees in Afghanistan, I might want them to be out of the country by then."

"Really?"

"Yes. I don't really think there will be a place called Afghanistan in a few weeks. It sounds kind of unhealthy to me.", I told him.

"That's very interesting, Mister President. Perhaps I can call on some people I know after breakfast and see what we can do to help."

"Thank you, Prime Minister."

"The name is Ariel, sir.", he commented.

"My friends call me Carl. My close friends call me much worse.", I answered with a laugh.

"Perhaps I can become one of those close friends. I know I invited you to Israel when I saw you last week. Let me again invite you to visit. I think we would have much to discuss.", he said.

"I think you are right. Let me get a few things taken care of here, and I will be sure to visit. Perhaps sometime in November?"

"That would be very nice. Would it be imprudent to ask if your delay will be due to the need to rebuild your Cabinet?", he commented.

"You know how difficult it can be to get good help. Let me let you get back to work. I appreciate you taking the call. Thank you."

"Goodbye, Carl. Shalom."

"Shalom, Ariel." I hung up the phone. I looked over at the fellow from the CIA. "Well, let's see how that goes. Dial up whatever assets you have anywhere over there. If we get lucky, some of the bad guys are going to get word that they are going to be attacked somewhere other than Afghanistan. Maybe they decide to go home for a little vacation. Get addresses to the Pentagon. A stern word goes a long way in diplomacy, but a stern word and a thousand pound bomb goes even farther."

"Yes, sir, I'll get on that." He stood and left, and I headed up to bed.

Chapter 143: War

Monday, October 1, 2001

My most important Cabinet post left was Defense, what with Powell moving over to State. I thought about this some over the weekend, but didn't really do anything. Most of the time I simply played with the dog, and let the twins drag me and Marilyn all over the place showing me what they were finding. A lot of stuff is actually down in the basement. Also, there are several elevators and hidden stairwells and hallways. As amusing as it might be, you really don't need the First Lady wandering through the Main Reception Hall on the ground floor looking for the swimming pool while a tour group comes through. Marilyn was pretty cute, but some of the First Ladies in swimsuits could be downright scary!

Saturday afternoon Marilyn and I spent some time getting to know each other again. After breakfast I had done some paperwork down in the Oval Office and had then returned to the Residence. In our bedroom I found Marilyn lounging on the bed wearing a short silk robe. "Is this some sort of secret White House ritual I missed during Orientation?", I asked.

My wife smiled at me. "If you don't like the idea..."

I waved my arms at her. "Now, don't be hasty. I didn't say anything like that. I'm just a little surprised, is all." I began to unbutton my shirt.

Marilyn smiled. "I have to tell you, I had a visit from a very discreet Secret Service Agent, a woman, and we had a little discussion. Were you aware that we get every station broadcast anywhere in the world here. Or something like that. Stations like the Playboy channel? And a few others?" Marilyn blushed at that. "She showed me how to dial them up."

I had the same conversation with somebody equally discreet but male. Not only did we have all sorts of stations, but if I wanted any sort of 'marital aids' or lingerie, I could place various orders using some fake addresses and account names. By the time he was done I was damn near rolling on the floor laughing. We had both had the same conversations when we had moved into the Naval Observatory, but somehow, in the White House, it seemed even sillier.

I kicked off my shoes and sat down on the bed, to start pulling off my socks. "I would have paid a pretty penny to have listened to that conversation. Did you have a question and answer period, or a test?" I stretched out on the bed next to Marilyn. She could do some of the work. "Just what kind of stations did she tell you about?" I decided to leave my glasses on.

Marilyn reached out and found a remote control on the nightstand and placed it on my chest. She snuggled up against me and told me to hit the ON button. She must have been playing earlier, because it immediately went to a movie that was already on, and in the beginning scenes of a very graphic blowjob on a very large television. I knew it wasn't the Playboy channel, because as I remembered it, that was more of a hard R sort of station. I put an arm around her shoulders and she snuggled up against me, and began running a finger through my chest hair.

"Is this really Presidential, do you think?", I asked.

Marilyn giggled. "From what I've seen of the President, this would be an improvement!"

"Oh, really? Maybe you need to get closer to double check!" I pushed on her shoulders and Marilyn giggled some more, and she began kissing her way down my chest slowly, while one hand began to undo my pants. A minute later Marilyn began imitating the movie, by sucking my cock and jacking on the shaft. Unfortunately, the scene changed, and the blonde on the screen moved to sit on the bald stud's face. Marilyn decided that life needed to imitate art, so she peeled off her robe and sat on my face.

I couldn't hear shit from the movie in this position, and certainly my vision was extremely limited. On the other hand, Marilyn wasn't complaining, and after a few minutes was becoming rather vocal in her appreciation. Even before the movie went to the vaginal sex, Marilyn had moved down and decided to sit on me and bounce on my cock. "Couldn't wait for the movie?", I teased.

"Just shut up and fuck me!", she hissed, lowering her tits down to my lips.

I licked at her nipples teasingly, and added, "What's with you today? Not that I'm complaining. Just curious."

"I only get to see you a few days a week now. I really need you. Now shut up and fuck me!"

I glanced over at the screen, and found they had changed positions, to doggy style, so I rolled Marilyn off of me and moved into position behind her, and that was how we finished. Afterwards, I lay on my back, with Marilyn cuddled up against me, as the movie finished. "Now, let's do that again.", she sighed.

I snorted a laugh at that. "Give me a few minutes, okay? By the way, were you aware that the President is always under surveillance?"

"Huh?"

"Well, you've seen the cameras around the West Wing and downstairs, right?"

"Yes.", she answered.

"Well, they are monitored in real time downstairs. You don't think that's the only part of the White House being monitored, do you?", I asked innocently.

Marilyn's eyes snapped open and she grabbed at the bedcovers we were unfortunately lying on. "No way! You don't ... no!"

"Marilyn, ask any cop, ask Suzie's husband, John, they'll all tell you that most murders are by the spouse." This was probably bullshit, but it sounded like something off of Law and Order. "They have to protect me. Look, there's a camera over there." I pointed at the molding up by the ceiling at the foot of the bed. "And another over there." I pointed across the room. I was just pointing at the molding; there were no cameras inside the Residence.

"You bastard! You are full of shit!", she said poking me in the side. "There's no cameras here. Besides, we'll just do it at night, then."

"They have infrared cameras, too. See in the dark. And they probably are keeping a record of what channels we are watching.", I added.

"You are so full of shit!"

I shrugged, and pushed on her shoulders again. "We just might as well give them a show." She was right. It had been a week or so. Longer really, since last week back in Hereford, it had been that time of the month. We both needed to relieve some stress.

Marilyn and the girls and Stormy went back to Hereford Sunday evening. I promised to come home Friday afternoon.

Sunday afternoon I received a call from McCain, telling me he was onboard with the choice. He told me he had discussed it with Cindy and gotten her agreement. I thanked him and asked him not to tell his colleagues yet, but that we would do something this week.

Monday morning I talked to Josh Bolten about some of the Cabinet choices. Tom Ridge was the governor of Pennsylvania, and like me and a few others, had been on the short list for Vice President. He had prior Congressional experience, and I knew that in a different life he would be picked to head Homeland Security after 9-11. I thought about Frank Keating for a moment, but set him aside. I liked Frank and had met him several times during the Springboro tornado pleasantries, but his background was law enforcement. I like the idea of having him on tap as a possible replacement for Ashcroft. The current Attorney General was considerably more conservative than I was, and his overt religious tendencies tended to grate on my nerves, but his performance in the aftermath of 9-11 was superb. He had showed considerable strength and integrity, and I had no good reason to get rid of him.

I discussed all this with Josh, and asked him to invite Ridge down for a chat. By lunchtime he reported that the Governor would be in my office Tuesday morning.

I didn't have a replacement for Freeh at the FBI yet, or for Garvey at the FAA. In the case of the FAA, I was tending towards naming the Deputy Director to the spot. He seemed to be capable and was tightening things up over there. As for the FBI, I was at a loss. We needed somebody with law enforcement experience, and I just didn't know that sort of thing. I hadn't been impressed with Freeh, and while both his Deputy and Barnwell seemed capable, I didn't see either of them as being the Director. I was going to have to talk this over with a few people.

My meeting with Tom Ridge went well, and he accepted the offer of Defense on the spot. At that point I called in Josh. "We need to make some announcements about this.", I told him.

"Then we need to get Ari in right now."

"Good point!" I picked up the telephone and asked Ari to step in, and he joined us a couple of minutes later.

"What's up?", he asked.

"Ari, this is Governor Tom Ridge of Pennsylvania. I asked him to become Secretary of Defense, and he has agreed, so we will need to make an announcement. Several, in fact. I think you know what's been happening, but let me make it clear. Colin Powell will move from Defense to State. Richard Clarke will be nominated for CIA, and John McCain will be coming onboard as the Vice President. What would be the best way to handle this?", I asked.

He was nodding to himself as I told him what was happening. Ari wasn't dumb, so he must have been considering some of the latest comings and goings as possible appointments. "Have you discussed this with Congress yet? Not the whole Congress, but the leadership?"

"No, but I should. The Senate is going to have to sign off on Colin, Tom, and Richard Clarke, and both houses have to vote on John, as I recall."

"Let's kill two birds with one stone.", commented Josh. "Get the Group of Eight over here for lunch and tell them. I don't care how much you stress this has to be kept quiet. One of them is bound to talk to somebody. That primes the pump, so to speak. You make the formal announcement by the end of the week. You aren't expecting any grief on this are you?"

I shook my head. "Colin's already been through a Senate confirmation hearing, and I don't see them refusing John McCain. Tom used to be in Congress himself, so again, I don't expect problems. The only one I wonder about is Clarke, and I think we can push the fact that we need to shake up the agency." I looked over at Josh. "Can you make a few phone calls and set up a nice lunch over here, tomorrow or Thursday, so we can let them know?"

"Even better, have the nominees here as well. Give them a chance to meet and greet.", added Ari. "Do you plan to do a broadcast on this?"

"Do you think I should? I'll be doing another broadcast next week, and I don't need to wear out my welcome with the networks."

"Afghanistan?", he asked.

"We'll talk later, Ari. One problem at a time.", I answered.

"Okay. Then Friday morning you read a prepared statement in the Press Room naming your choices, with them in the background. They each read something short and sweet. No questions." I raised an eyebrow at that, and he explained, "The first question everybody is going to ask is when are we invading Iraq, and the second will be why did you fire Dick Cheney. We don't need either."

I looked at the other two and nodded. "He makes a certain amount of sense."

Tom chuckled and said, "Yes, sir."

Josh added, "Scary, isn't it?"

I turned back to Ari and nodded. "Let Mike and Matt know what's going on and tell them I need a short statement. If we do this Friday morning, somebody will have blabbed by then. We'll need to have some talking heads for the Sunday news shows."

Ari nodded in return. "Josh and Frank. Frank's young but surprisingly good. By the way, I wanted to speak to you about Carter. Don't get me wrong. Carter's nice, but he's really not a spokesman type. We are going to need somebody else."

I shrugged. That had been a long shot. "Okay. I will let you figure that one out. I really don't know what that entails and how you find a guy. Have you talked it over with Carter?"

"Yes. We both knew this was coming. He can move into more of a legislative role of some sort. That's more his interest, anyway.", Ari replied.

"I'll confirm this with Carter, but if you need somebody different, so be it. If Carter doesn't like the change, I know he can find a home over on K Street anyway. I'll talk to him this afternoon.", I answered.

"Thank you, Mister President." At that the meeting broke up and everybody left.

We had the official luncheon on Thursday in a room on the ground floor of the Residence across from the Map Room. By then, two days after the decision to do this, there was already some leaking from the White House. I was a little surprised by that, but not much. Nobody was really saying anything yet, but Ari commented that there had been a few questions in the hallways by the Press Corps. He seemed to think this would be good. One of the Congressmen would yap, that was guaranteed, and 'speculation' would be on the nightly news. This would prime things for our announcement Friday morning.

Lunch was to be relatively simple, soup and salads and sandwiches, but all eaten on White House china. Over the years, some Presidents discounted the need to schmooze Congress, and they tended to be less successful. As I had told John McCain, I wanted to work them like a salesman working a customer. The fellows who were going to be at the luncheon wouldn't be all that impressed, because they were senior people, and had all been there multiple times before. However, you get some first or second term Congressman from Butte, Montana, or Pigs Knuckle, Arkansas, and invite him to the White House? Wow! That's impressive! Work him, make him feel important, ask him about something from back home – I don't care what party he's from, it makes it easier to sell the fellow. Throw in some of the swag available, and the vote is half in the bag.

What was swag? All sorts of things, simple stuff with the Presidential Seal, like cuff links, tie clips, business card holders, cigarette lighters, match books, pens and pencils, fake coins. Some is for men and some is for women. Give it to somebody personally, along with a handshake. If you go to a John Deere dealer to buy a tractor and he throws in a ball cap, that's swag. You just bought a half million dollar combine and got a free ball cap, and now you think the dealer is your best friend. Guess what? We had White House ball caps, too. It was similar to what I had for the constituents back in Congress, only I had more stuff and a bigger budget.

Some of that wouldn't work on the leadership, but it still paid to be polite and break bread. Most of them knew the lunch was more than just a meeting, and nobody was surprised to find Clarke, McCain, Ridge, and Powell in the room. Josh, Frank, and Ari were with us, also. Before we had lunch, I went to a small podium and made the official announcement. "Thank you all for coming. One of the things I promised all of you was that I intended to work closely with Congress. I apologize if I wasn't able to meet with you all last week, but you all know how busy that schedule was. One of the things I want to talk with you about today is coming up with a more formal schedule for lunches, both with the leadership and with other members of Congress. In any case, I asked you here to meet some of the candidates we have to fill some of the current vacancies in the Executive branch." At that I gave a quick rundown of who was doing what, and a request that the leadership work with me to see that everybody was confirmed quickly.

Nobody gave me any grief over McCain or Powell. There was a bit more comment about Ridge, but only because he wasn't as well known. The same applied to Richard Clarke, with the added difficulty that several people knew that the Bush White House had fired him, and here I was bringing him back. It was a very obvious sign the Buckman Administration was going to be different, and not everybody in Congress was going to be thrilled with that. I simply asked that the confirmation hearings be expedited, and that the various Committee Chairs in the Senate contact us to set up meetings.

I actually got a bit more grief about the upcoming response to the 9-11 attacks. Pretty much everybody wanted to know what I was going to do about it and when, and why hadn't we already done it, and why they hadn't been told weeks ago, like on the 12th. I just kept pushing the answer that it would be soon, and that security restrained me from letting anybody know until it started. There was some grumbling at that, but I kept a stoic look on my face.

It was also obvious that people knew something was up, just not what. I was told they were hearing from constituents that family members had been updating wills and going into lockdowns on bases, and that planes had been flying out to parts unknown. I was being asked about every country from Libya to Pakistan. I just shook my head and refused to answer. I simply promised that it would be sometime in the near future.

If I actually said what was going to happen, the Afghanis would be filing a complaint in the United Nations before I made it back to the Oval Office.

As predicted, all four names were leaked by somebody in time for the Thursday night news, along with a comment that the White House would make a response Friday morning.

Friday morning, Ari had us all troop into the Press Room, read our statements, and then we all trooped out again. There were no questions and answers, but we weren't worried. The four men were all known quantities. The news would be full of them, and on Sunday Frank and Josh would make the rounds of the talk shows, extolling their virtues.

I couldn't fly home that weekend.

Monday was X-Day, and I needed to be in place. I was ordering our troops into combat. The bombs might not start falling until Monday, but the planes had to take off hours ago, in some cases, early Sunday. Everything was compounded by the fact that Afghanistan was 8-1/2 hours ahead of us. We had decided to bomb them at 9:00 AM local time. That made it 12:30 AM Washington time. The most complicated factor was the need to tell the Pakistani Ambassador we were committing hostile acts in his nation's sovereign airspace. They would be well within their rights to disagree with that. Violently.

We asked the Pakistani Ambassador to arrive at the White House at about 11:00 PM. Both Colin Powell and I would greet him. Condi Rice was supposed to be there, but she had been looking a little green around the gills earlier in the day, and had ended up at Bethesda with a bad bout of the flu.

By the time we told the ambassador what was happening and he got back to the embassy, even if he managed to make an immediate phone call home, it would be too late. Our birds would be across the border and over their targets before they could do anything. "Anything you can tell me about the ambassador?", I asked Colin. "What's his name?"

"Her name is Doctor Maliha Lodhi. She's been here a couple of years or so. According to her file, she's a big wig in their Foreign Office.", he answered.

"So she probably speaks better English than I do?"

"No probably about it. She used to be their ambassador to the Court of St. James before this."

I snorted at that. Colin finished with the Cliff Notes version of her background right up until 10:45, when the Ambassador's arrival was announced. Both Secretary Powell and I were standing when she was ushered into the Oval Office. I moved forward and said, "Thank you, Madame Ambassador, for coming at such a late hour. I know this is unusual, but a situation is developing that requires this of all of us."

She had a pronounced British accent. "Of course, Mister President. Allow me to say how sorry the Pakistani nation is at the events of September 11, and that the entire nation despises what occurred that day."

"Your words are most kind, Madame Ambassador." And not quite true, I thought to myself. More than a few of the dancing and chanting crowds had been in Islamabad and Karachi.

She turned to Colin and said, "It is a pleasure to see you again, Secretary Powell. Might I ask if you are here in your role as Secretary of Defense, or your future role as Secretary of State?" Technically, in the event the Secretary of State was unavailable, his Deputy would be present. Unfortunately, that was Scooter Libby, now on a paid leave of absence while dealing with the Department of Justice.

"For tonight, I must report that would be both roles.", replied Colin.

She smiled. "That sounds ominous."

I waved a hand towards an armchair. "Why don't you have a seat, Doctor, so we can discuss that.", I said. We waited for her to seat herself, and then we both took our own seats.

"You have my attention, Mister President. How can I and Pakistan assist you?"

"By allowing our planes to fly over your country."

"Your planes? What planes are you talking about? From where and to where? When do you wish to do this?"

"The when is right now.", I answered. "Even as we speak, American warplanes are overflying the southwest corner of Pakistan in order to take up positions to begin bombing targets in Afghanistan. By the time you leave here and make it back to your embassy, they will already be in-country and on their final approaches to their targets. Our intelligence agencies have determined that the attacks you mentioned earlier were carried out by a terrorist group in Afghanistan known as Al Qaeda, with the active assistance of the Afghan government, the Taliban. We intend to destroy both."

"And you are doing this now!? Without giving my government the opportunity to discuss this?! This is a gross violation of the sovereign airspace of the Pakistani people! This is intolerable!", she replied. She was no longer the smooth diplomat, but now rather an affronted representative of her people. Too bad.

"Madame Ambassador, the location of the overflight is far from any population centers, or even government control. It is in Baluchistan, which you will have to admit is only nominally part of Pakistan. Regardless, it was necessary for operational reasons to do this.", added Secretary Powell.

"Mister Secretary, as you are well aware, Baluchistan is not simply a location on a map. Your warplanes are overflying the nation of Pakistan, and you well know it. No, I am going to have to insist that those bombers or whatever they are must turn around and depart our airspace immediately.", she replied.

"Madame Ambassador, that will not be happening. Our armed forces have been given a mission to perform. I authorized that mission and I approved that mission. It will go forward. I am simply informing you so that you can contact President Musharraf and assure him that Pakistan is not the target of our attacks, and that we have no intention of initiating hostile action against Pakistani forces. We intend to overfly isolated and deserted sections of your country on the way to somewhere else. Those planes will then reverse course and fly back out the way they came.", I told her.

"No, Mister President, this is not acceptable. No nation can invade another nation's airspace, regardless of their intention or destination, without it being a flagrant violation of international law and an act of war. You are risking a great deal with this illegal saber rattling. I must insist that you stand down your forces and send them home.", she answered.

"Madame Ambassador, I have considerable respect for you, and I appreciate the position I have put you and your nation in. It is not your fault that Pakistan is caught in the middle like this. However, it is now the time for plain speaking and blunt truths.", I replied. She opened her mouth to argue, but I held up a hand. "Please, hear me out." She settled down a touch and I continued. "The only way to reach Afghanistan is through the airspace of neighboring countries. We will be destroying Afghanistan over the next few days or weeks. That is a given. It is non-negotiable. Overflying Baluchistan is the simplest and cleanest way of doing this. I am sorry if Pakistan doesn't like it, but it is what we will be doing."

"Now, it's your country, and your airspace. By every consideration of international law, Pakistan would be well within its rights to attempt to prevent us from violating Pakistani airspace. The only way to do that, however, would be with military force, and I have ordered our military to protect our planes with every means available. Let me be even plainer in speaking. If you wish to try and stop us, it is your right to do so, but you are going to lose a lot of airplanes and ships and men, and you won't stop us. You are not a soldier, but your President is. I would suggest you discuss it with him."

I stood up at that moment, as did Colin Powell, signifying the meeting was over. We shook hands, coldly, but I wasn't finished yet. I held onto her hand, and added, "Doctor Lodhi, the CIA and the NSA have reported rumors that foreign fighters, not Al Qaeda, but others, are in northern Afghanistan. Now, I could not order the Pentagon to target such rumors without confirmation, however that can always change in the future. Certainly if there were such rumored forces, it would be much healthier for them if they were to go home." The Pakistanis had an infantry brigade of about 10,000 troops facing the Northern Alliance. Doctor Lodhi didn't make a reply, and she was shown out. Afterwards, I sat back down with Colin. "I imagine that went about as well as could be expected. What's the fallout going to be?"

"Lousy, but that's the hand we have to play. At the bare minimum, they do nothing back home, but file a bunch of protests in the United Nations. Worst case scenario, they decide to try and stop us from this violation, and we sink a lot of their ships and shoot down a lot of their airplanes. Absolute worst case, they try to do that with nukes, in which case Pakistan ceases to exist.", he answered.

"I don't see that happening, but I could be wrong. I think you are correct about the U.N. though. Just make clear to everybody that we don't want those bombers anywhere near anything the Pakistanis might care about.", I told him. We chatted a little more, and then I glanced at my watch. "Let's go down to the Situation Room and see what's happening."

It was my first real look at the famous Situation Room, where we were supposed to have the means to wage war around the world in a secure facility buried beneath the West Wing. I had been here once before, on an orientation tour, but I hadn't had a chance to do more than look around before I was whisked off somewhere else. Now that I was actually there and supposed to accomplish something, I was less than impressed. The room isn't all that large, considering the number of people who work there (it is staffed 24-7). The walls were lined with wood paneling, like your basement family room, and behind the paneling were television and computer screens. Since they were all ancient CRT monitors, the false walls were correspondingly thick, which made the room narrower. The computers I saw were ancient 1980s technology. There were a couple of fax machines and a teletype machine in the corner. The carpets were crappy and the tile was cracked.

"What is this, the dungeon?", I asked.

The senior watch officer had the decency to look embarrassed. "We've been meaning to upgrade things..."

"It's authorized. Start tomorrow.", I told him. I found a seat at the big table. "Okay, so, where are we at?"

"Sir, in approximately five minutes, it will be 9:00 AM local time, X-Hour." He hit a remote control and one of the screens lit up, with a map of Afghanistan, with several cities shown, and a number of colored arrows and dots moving slowly. "The B-2s are on their final approaches. They are at 45,000 feet, so even though it is daylight, nobody can actually see them from the ground, and they are radar invisible to anything the Afghans might have available. In a few minutes they will be dropping 1,000 pound JDAM munitions on the initial target list. That would be all the Taliban and military hard targets and headquarter targets we had. In some cases multiple bombs are targeted to the same site."

"JDAMs?"

"It's a new type of bomb, sir. We basically bolt an extremely accurate guidance system onto cheap old dumb bombs. They are guided by GPS signals.", he explained.

"And if somebody jams the GPS signals?"

He shook his head. "They are multiply redundant, with backup inertial guidance units. They are extremely accurate. This is the first time we are actually using them. On the tests we have been running, you can practically pick the window out that you want the bomb to fly through."

"Huh." This all sounded like more of the video game warfare we had seen during Desert Storm. I wondered if any of these guys had ever gotten their hands dirty and feet muddy in the real Army.

"We should be seeing something on the satellite screens shortly." He pointed to a different screen, with a black and white image of an urban zone, but without labels I didn't know what I was looking at. A timer in the corner was ticking down, and then went to 0:00, and began climbing again. Nothing had happened. I glanced over at him and he smiled, saying, "It takes a bit for the bombs to fall from nine miles up and ten miles away."

Okay, that made sense. I turned back to the screen and wondered when and what I would see. If I tried, I could sit down and figure it out, but by then, it would probably be over. Suddenly there was a bright flash on the screen, which washed out everything, and the room erupted in a massive, "WHOA!" Fifteen seconds later the video was back, and in the center of the screen, one of the buildings was a mass of rubble and dust.

I looked over at Colin and said, "I guess these things work after all."

"Mister President, if you thought Desert Storm was high tech, you ain't seen nothing yet. In a few years we'll be able to do live reconnaissance before, during, and after one of these things. You and me? We're dinosaurs with this stuff."

"Colin, not to be rude about it, but I would guess that you were saying the same thing right before you went to Viet Nam, and we lost that one. Let's hope these guys don't get the same rude awakening."

"Touché!"

I turned back to the Watch Officer, a colonel. "Colonel, what was it we just saw happen there?"

"That was the headquarters of their Army, such as it is, in Kabul. The Taliban is relatively low tech and doesn't have a lot of formal headquarters and such, but this was the closest we could come to it." He pointed at another screen. "The B-2s also took out what radar they had, mostly at what they had for airports and airstrips. The Bones are on final approach. They have a heavy load of Mk 83 Snake Eyes with a mix of fusing options." On another screen was another black and white image of something, I guess a valley of some sort, with various black dots on it. Suddenly, from right to left, something streaked across the screen, and then behind it massive clouds of dust rose up. There was more yelling and congratulating from the watchers.

I watched a little longer, and some reports were coming over from the Pentagon. It was well after one in the morning when I stretched and said, "I am going to bed. Colin, I suggest you do the same. Tonight I need to make a speech." I made a final look around the room. "These guys are playing video games and it feels like we are playing Pong on a black and white television in my aunt's basement. Get this place updated before somebody sees it and laughs themselves to death."

He laughed at that. "I'll pass that along. Good night, sir."

"Good night, Colin. Thank you for being here tonight."

I slept late, and Josh had the writers do up a speech for me. Ari was going to put me on television tonight at 7:30. Ari wasn't in the need-to-know loop, but he would understand, and I didn't expect the speech to take long. It would be half rah-rah patriotism and half real information. Actually, that wouldn't be fair, to anyone. Americans were angry and scared, and up until now it didn't look like their government was doing jack shit about a disaster that had killed about 3,200 of their fellow citizens. They wanted something done, and they wanted it done sooner rather than later. A decent speech and solid action would help bring my fellow citizens back to an even keel.

Mindy and the staff knew I was reserving today for something critical, and not to schedule me for much. We had maintained fairly tight security on the operation so far. Josh had known what was going on, but all Ari had been told was that he had to get me time on the air. I was in my office, in khakis and a sports shirt, by 10:00. I asked Josh, Ari, and Matt Scully into my office at that time. Mike Gerson was out of town on a long weekend, which he had earned.

After they came in, I asked, "Josh, anything new on the operation?"

Ari interrupted and asked, "What operation, Mister President?" I glanced at him in surprise, and he continued. "I was asked a question by the Washington Post a little while ago, something about some unusual explosions or something going on in Afghanistan. It wasn't very clear, but something happened over there."

I had a half smile on my face as I asked, "What did you tell them?"

"That I didn't know what he was talking about. What is going on, Mister President?"

I looked over at Josh. "Well, security seems to work sometimes around here." He snorted at that. To the others I said, "This is why you are here and why I need to speak to the nation tonight. Last night, around midnight our time, we launched quite a few bombers and blew up quite a few targets in Afghanistan. A terrorist group there, called Al Qaeda, and the Afghan government, the Taliban, were the ones behind the 9-11 attacks. Tonight I need to tell the nation."

Ari looked very distressed. "Mr. President, how can I craft the appropriate response if I am kept in the dark like this? I have a top secret clearance!"

"Ari, you do have the clearance, and I do trust you. This is a matter of military security. If anybody had said something to anybody, and it had gotten out, lives could have been lost. I will never compromise that for the sake of not looking bad. For weeks now people have been asking you when we are going to do something. You've told me that. What would you have done differently if you had known this?"

"I could at least have said we were working on a response. Instead everybody thinks we're a bunch of idiots who don't know what we're doing.", he replied.

I nodded. "Ari, we have known who did this since the first night I spoke to the nation, that night, 9-11. We had to wait to get everything ready and get men and ships and planes into position. If I had given you more of the details, you might have inadvertently said something and, they would have disappeared. I can afford to look foolish. I can't afford to let them get away."

He stared at me in shock. "You've known all along?!"

"Now you know why I got rid of a bunch of people. All those times they told you that it was Iraq doing evil things?" I shook my head and finished. "Iraq had nothing to do with this, and Cheney and the entire crew around him knew it. They are finished. We need to talk more on this, and it isn't quite as secret, and you can't release it yet, but there is so much more going on. I promise you, talk to me alone some time later this week. Book some serious sit down time, and I promise to fill you in on everything. Today was all about security. I won't keep you in the dark unless I have a damn good reason."

"Yes, sir."

I looked over at Matt. "Ari is going to get me some time on television tonight. I need to tell the public what we have learned and what we have done about it. I am going to get somebody down in the Situation Room up here to give you two some details. My overall thrust is that we knew what happened, but needed to delay our response until it could be massive and overwhelming and a surprise. I want a positive tone to everything, and a warning to anybody else who might get too big for their britches. Getting my drift?"

"Yes, sir."

I picked up the phone and asked for the Watch Officer in the Situation Room to come up. He was there a couple of minutes later, an Air Force colonel this time, as opposed to the Army colonel I met earlier. When he came into the Oval Office he was surprised at the presence of others. Regardless, he came to attention and said, "Colonel Oliver, sir. You asked to see me?"

"At ease, Colonel. Yes, thank you. This is Ari Fleischer, my Press Secretary, and Matt Sculley, one of my speechwriters. Tonight I have to address the nation and let them know what we have done. Before they can do that, they need to know what's been going on. You are going to have to help them with some information."

"Yes, sir. We can figure something out. Uh, sir, you need to know..."

"Yes, Colonel?"

He had a pained look on his face. "We lost a plane, sir."

I sat upright at that. "Where? How?"

"It's not definite yet, but highly probable. One of the second wave B-52s. From everything we can tell, the mission went as planned. They radioed feet dry when they hit the Pakistani coast, sent the signal when they made their bomb run, and sent another signal for feet wet when they hit the Pakistani coastline on the way out. We verified they hit their target from satellite imagery. From the coastline they were to link up with a tanker for a refuel before flying to Diego Garcia. They never made the linkup with the tanker."

"Any idea what happened?", I asked.

"No, sir. They never gave any of the code words for being under attack, either over Afghanistan or Pakistan. In addition, the Navy reports the Pakistanis have stayed at home. They have sent out a number of reconnaissance flights, but nothing was in the area, and the planes involved are not capable of attacking anybody. It just went down."

"Shit!", I swore to myself.

"Sir, I don't mean to make light of this, but this can happen. Those planes are my age or older. Sometimes they just break and stop flying."

"Colonel, please tell me that we are searching for the plane. Actually, I don't care about the plane, but I do care about survivors."

He nodded. "Of course, sir. Both the Navy and the Air Force are flying recon flights and search and rescue."

"That will be a top priority, but we need to make sure the mission is accomplished. What is the status on Afghanistan?", I asked.

The colonel looked at the others and then answered. "The targets were hit repeatedly and early BDA suggests a very high accuracy. We haven't got all the reports in, but reaction out of Kabul is disjointed and confused. Whatever they had for a functioning government is seriously disrupted."

I looked over at the two civilians. "BDA is Bomb Damage Assessment. It tells if we actually hit what we were aiming at. We went for a really massive assault, and it sounds like it worked."

"Did we kill the leader of Al Qaeda?", asked Matt. "He's the one who ordered the 9-11 attack, right?" I looked at him curiously, since we really hadn't been pushing his name. "Hey, I've been listening to people around here."

I shrugged and looked at the colonel. He answered slowly. "Sir, we just don't know at this point. We hammered their training camps and bombed anything the CIA indicated might be a safe house or stopover. Still, trying to kill a single man in a foreign country who is hiding and on the run ... I just don't know."

I sighed at that and nodded. I remembered on the first time through, it took us about ten years to kill Osama bin Laden. We tried numerous times earlier, but never really had his address. We would bomb or Tomahawk some place, and then might not know if he was dead or alive until he made another video and released it from somewhere else. "I understand the difficulty, Colonel. Really, I do. Try to work up some information on that for me, please." I looked at Matt and Ari. "I know it will be difficult, but we can't focus on a single individual. We need to focus on the organization and the radical philosophy they espouse. This is just the start of a new and long war. It's not going to be like World War II, where we can kill Hitler or Tojo and declare victory and go home."

I picked up the phone and asked for one of the Three Amigos to be tracked down and to call me as soon as possible. We were going to have to get into that tonight as well, and Ari and Matt would need that briefing, too. When Basham, the Secret Service guy, called, I asked him to come over. I looked over at Matt and Ari and smiled at them. "I haven't just been fumbling around for the last month guys. Stick with me and maybe we can get some stuff accomplished around this joint!"

Chapter 144: President Buckman

"Good evening.

Almost four weeks ago our nation was attacked by terrorists. Four airplanes were hijacked in a coordinated attack and flown to targets in New York and Washington. Two were crashed into the World Trade Center in New York, one was targeted at the Pentagon here in Washington, and a fourth crashed in Pennsylvania when the passengers managed to overpower their attackers, but lost their lives in the process. President Bush and over 3,200 other people died that day, and our nation changed forever.

At that time I promised you that we would determine who had committed these atrocities and that we would respond. Tonight I am able to speak for the first time about what happened that day and what we have done since.

Following the attacks I ordered a joint investigation by members of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the United States Secret Service. I ordered them to find out who attacked us and how it was done, and whether we could have prevented it. The investigation is still continuing, but I can provide some information now. First, there is no indication that this was a planned assassination attempt on President Bush. The evidence all points to a conclusion that the attacks were planned before President Bush even scheduled his trip to New York.

I can now state that our intelligence services were able to determine who the attackers were within a matter of hours. That first night, when I spoke to you to tell you what had happened, we already knew who had attacked us. We could have attacked at that time, but our response would have been premature and ineffective. We needed confirming intelligence and information, so we waited until our armed forces were prepared to respond effectively. That response was made today!

A terrorist group named Al Qaeda, consisting of radical Islamic fundamentalists, was behind the attacks of September 11th. They are based in Afghanistan, and have the support of the Afghan government, the Taliban. At 12:30 AM our time, and 9:00 AM local time, Operation Enduring Freedom commenced. American warplanes began a massive and coordinated attack on Al Qaeda and Taliban targets throughout Afghanistan. We targeted training bases, military assets, a wide variety of government targets, and terrorist safe houses and support facilities. Tomorrow, the Pentagon will release more specific information, but it will be limited. Military operations continue even as we speak, and I will not endanger the lives of our soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen by releasing information prematurely.

I can say with a considerable degree of certainty that our assault was highly successful, although the exact degree is not yet certain. Unfortunately, a price was paid by our armed forces. Thomas Jefferson once wrote that the Tree of Liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. I am not yet free to divulge all the details of Operation Enduring Freedom, but I can say that while our losses were extremely light, there were losses. Patriots shed their blood, to protect us from tyrants. I cannot promise there will not be losses in the future.

September 11th changed our lives forever, and in ways that will probably take years to determine the extent of. Many of us believed that what happened then could never happen, or that if it happened, it would be somewhere else, in another country, with people we never heard of. We slumbered peacefully, and have received a rude awakening. We must now come to terms with a very different future than what we had planned. As I said earlier, we must change the way we handle our intelligence and determine new ways to deal with new threats. Our nation faces new enemies, enemies who wish to destroy the peaceful and free society we possess.

However, America is strong, not in spite of our freedom, but because of that freedom. The greatest amendment to our Constitution is the very first amendment. It states that we are open and free, in our religion, our speech, and our right to assemble. It is, in effect, the right to freedom of thought. We will not give up those rights. When I was sworn in as President, I swore to preserve, protect, and defend the very Constitution that says we will be a free and open people. Those who would try and change us will fail. We as a people are strong because of our beliefs, and working together we will remain strong, as individuals, and as a nation. Our nation has been challenged, and will grow stronger through this challenge.

Thank you, good night, and God bless America."

I kept staring at the camera with my mouth shut until the director turned off the bright lights and began talking. I looked over at Ari Fleischer, who was standing in the corner with a copy of the speech in his hand. "Did I blow my lines?", I asked.

"No, sir, I think you got them.", he answered.

"Good." I waited for some of the technical people to leave and said, "Remember how I said I wanted a sit down with you to go over some of the information on the intelligence problems we had?" He nodded, so I continued, "I had a call from Ashcroft earlier this afternoon. He and one of his investigators are coming over the end of the week for an update. I would like you to join us. The only reason I didn't bring you in earlier was because I couldn't take the slightest chance of a leak affecting the military operation. That doesn't apply any more, and you need to know what is happening. I am not being sneaky for the sake of being sneaky."

"Yes, sir. Thank you. What is going on? The Attorney General is involved in this?!"

I nodded. "Remember how during the summer all you heard out of some of the people surrounding the President was Iraq, Iraq, Iraq?" He nodded again, so I shrugged and shook my head. "Guess what, it wasn't Iraq, and some people knew it. It isn't completely clear yet, but it's going to be a mess, and there are probably going to be some indictments. I would bet that there are going to be hearings on the Hill about this, just like with everything else about 9-11. We can't be seen to be playing politics with this, so any announcements need to be out of Justice, but you are going to need to know what is happening. As for the timing, I have no idea. Maybe we'll find out when John and his people come here."

"Thank you, Mister President."

"Ari, I just want you to know that if I have to be an asshole at times, it's not for the sake of being an asshole. I'll have a reason. I need talented people here, and you are one of those people."

"Yes, sir. Thank you." He paused for a second and said, "Indictments?!"

"Ari, I could see it happening right in front of me and even I was surprised. For your information, if there are indictments, I won't be issuing pardons on anything related to 9-11. People didn't do their jobs, and now we have 3,200 dead Americans and a dead President and I ended up in the jackpot. No, I won't be handing out any pardons." I stood up from the corner of the desk I had been half sitting on. "Come on, it's late. Go home and let me get out of here, too."

"Yes, sir. Thank you."

The next step was scheduled to occur the next morning. Secretary Powell arrived at my office at 9:45, and the first thing he said was, "Are you really sure you want to do this?"

"Colin, people need to learn the consequences of their actions. When you were growing up, if you acted up, your mom or your dad would smack you on the butt and tell you not to do it again. Why should countries be any different?"

He crossed his arms and argued, "That's all well and good, but don't think there won't be consequences for your actions, too."

"Every day I think about those consequences, Colin, every single day."

We were still discussing consequences when the intercom on my desk announced our guest was arriving. Colin went to the lobby. The Saudi Arabian Ambassador, Prince Bandar bin Sultan of the House of Saud, one of the innumerable Saudi princes and arguably one of their smarter ones, had been invited, and you don't just let ambassadors wander around the place looking for the proper door to knock on.

Then again, while he wasn't on my current list of favorite people, I didn't need to be overly hostile. My actions in the next fifteen minutes would be hostile enough.

One of the agents at the door knocked and opened it, ushering in Ambassador Sultan and Secretary of Defense Powell. He approached and stretched out his hand and I shook it. "Thank you for coming to see me, Mister Ambassador."

"It is my pleasure, Mister President. I hope you and your family are well." We chatted about everything under the sun for about ten minutes, since it is considered rude to actually get anything accomplished. Eventually he came around to business. "I am sorry that I was not able to meet you a few weeks ago following President Bush's passing. I can understand how busy you must have been, and still are, it would seem."

I nodded. "Yes, yesterday was quite busy. Unfortunately, while I hope that our response to the attack on my country will deter future attacks, I seriously doubt that it will dissuade anybody. That sort of fanaticism does not truly believe in the power of consequences for one's actions."

"Actions such as we all witnessed on September 11th are hateful to Allah, and an affront to Islam, a religion of peace.", he commented.

"It is good to hear you say such things, Mister Ambassador, but it seems to be at variance to the actions of your country. This is truly disturbing to me, and to my fellow citizens.", I replied.

"I do not understand. What do you mean, sir?"

"Well, in a very short time, the details of September 11th will be publicly known, in full. Details such as the fact that of the 19 hijackers, 15 of them were Saudi citizens. Details such as the fact that the leader of Al Qaeda is a Saudi citizen. Details such as the fact that Saudi charities and financial institutions provide the funding for terrorist groups such as Al Qaeda and others. Details like the fact that the extremist religious doctrines that promote this sort of behavior are routine parts of Saudi culture and thought and government support. To the average American citizen there is little difference between the individuals that did this and the nation that, to all intents and purposes, sent them."

"Mister President, you paint my nation in much too harsh a light. Groups such as Al Qaeda are banned in Saudi Arabia, and these terrorists have fled us, to other places where they can hide in rocks and caves from civilized people. My country categorically denies any participation in such hateful actions, and I am surprised you would consider this of us."

Colin Powell was simply sitting there watching us, and wondering whether I was giving myself enough rope to properly hang myself. In for a penny, in for a pound. I kept going. "Unfortunately, Mister Ambassador, my country has a saying. Perhaps you have heard of it – actions speak louder than words. The actions of your nation are not the actions of a friend or an ally. What am I to think, and what is the average American to think, of these actions?"

"Mister President, for many years now our nations have been allied, and we have not allowed minor differences to detract from our joint mission of bringing peace to the entire region. Surely you cannot doubt the resolve of Saudi Arabia in this noble endeavor.", he countered.

"Mister Ambassador, I sincerely hope that you are not categorizing the deaths of 3,200 Americans and an American president as a minor difference! I am going to give you the benefit of the doubt and trust that was simply a poor choice of words!", interjected Secretary Powell.

Bin Sultan turned to face the Secretary and replied, "I do not mean to take this lightly, Secretary Powell, but the fact is that we have had differences in the past, and will probably continue to do so. Certainly your nation's continued and uncritical support of Israel over the overwhelming and legitimate rights of the Palestinian people is at least as serious a concern to us as any concerns you might have as to my nation's religious beliefs. Regardless, we have stood together in the past, and will continue standing together in the future."

"Regardless, sir, we now come to the crux of the matter. As you are aware, the United States has not had an ambassador to the Kingdom since Ambassador Fowler left in May. Absent any change in the policies and behavior of your Kingdom, our replacement for Ambassador Fowler is being held in a state of abeyance for the foreseeable future. Inasmuch as this seems an inequitable state of affairs, we are requesting that you return to Saudi Arabia, to discuss with your government ways in which America's trust in your nation can be rebuilt.", I told him.

The Ambassador was possessed of an excellent poker face, but this took him by surprise. "You are declaring me persona non grata!", he exclaimed. Being declared persona non grata, also known as being PNGed, was a diplomatic version of being told to get out of town, usually within 48 hours. Afterwards, they theoretically lose their diplomatic status and can be arrested.

"No, of course not. I have no wish for this to get any more ugly than it has to. However, I do think, and my advisers agree with me, that it would be best if you were to go home and discuss measures to reassure us in the future, so that your successor can someday return and we can put this painful period behind us." Your successor, because you won't be found acceptable. "Perhaps a convenient diplomatic illness?", I suggested.

"I am most disappointed, Mister President. I have watched you for many years, and throughout your history you have always been a voice of reason when others around you beat the drum for war. Yet here you are waging war on Islam, bombing countries that had nothing to do with what happened to your nation, and acting the madman. Certainly that is the impression my countrymen will take from such actions. They will not want to do business with people who cannot be trusted to behave according to international standards.", he said. Business, code word for raising oil prices.

I barked out a laugh. "Mister Ambassador, you obviously have drawn some very poor conclusions about me. I would suggest that once you land back in the Kingdom, you open your eyes and see what your nation has wrought on the world, and consider what the consequences of your actions are. We will be happy to reconsider things at some future date, but only if there is reason to believe that the Kingdom has changed its practices."

I stood up, followed by Colin, and then finally, slowly, by the Ambassador. He looked at me, and said, "I cannot ask you to swerve from this course you seem determined to follow?"

"It is a course forced upon us by others, sir, not one I would have chosen on my own." I reached out and he reluctantly shook my hand. "Farewell, Mister Ambassador. I wish you a safe trip home."

"Farewell, Mister President." He followed Colin Powell out the door.

Colin was back a few minutes later. "Well, I have to say, when you decide to piss somebody off, you do it in a big way. Like I said earlier, there are going to be consequences, and they are going to land in your lap."

I shrugged. "So be it. I think they are survivable. They are pissed, but they don't have all that many weapons to use against us. They will undoubtedly reduce the amount of oil they pump, so that is going to raise prices. That won't be good for the economy, but that is taking a major hit anyway. It is going to take years for the airlines to recover, and some of them won't. If oil prices rise, it will make it much more palatable to raise fuel efficiency standards on cars and trucks. In addition, it will spur oil and gas drilling here at home. Are you aware of just how much natural gas they are discovering right beneath our feet here in America? Once they figure out how to drill it and get it out safely, we'll be able to convert every coal fired plant in this country to natural gas. Who needs the EPA to regulate emissions when the power companies will do it for them! The Saudis will cut back on purchases of our weapons? Fine! Who ever thought giving camel jockies billions of dollars worth of hardware was a good idea anyway? They won't be able to get what they really want anywhere else. They want the most modern stuff available, to protect themselves from Iran and Israel. Neither country is overly impressed anyway."

"So what?", he argued. "Everything you just mentioned slams our economy, and doesn't change their behavior. They are going to continue funding these mutts no matter what. It's cheap and it's good local politics for them."

"Very true. Colin, the problem with the Saudis dates back almost a century. King Faisal sold his soul to Satan. He made a deal with the only branch of Islam who would put up with him, the nut job Wahhabis. They supported him for king, putting him in front of all the other Bedouin princes. In turn, he gave them free rein over the mosques and the schools. They have been turning out more nut jobs ever since. The Devil is coming to collect, though. Most of the nut jobs hate the House of Saud as much as they hate the rest of us. Just watch. Wait until they start blowing up things in Saudi Arabia, and not just everywhere else. The Saudis need to clean up their own house.", I explained.

"Either way, you need to speak to Paul O'Neill about this as soon as possible. He is not going to appreciate you raising the price of gas."

"Very true. Thank you for being here, Mister Secretary." Colin took his leave and I went back to work.

Much of what we discussed unfolded slowly around us over the next few weeks. Prince bin Sultan was gone by the end of the week, concerned over his ailing health. The CIA contacts we had there indicated that he had promptly resurfaced high in their foreign intelligence office. Also, amid public pronouncements over the concern that America was overreaching in its foreign policy attacks on Islam, oil production was cut in the Kingdom by two million barrels a day, and prices rose by $4 a barrel, rising to just under $26 a barrel.

To a considerable extent, some of this was overshadowed by the other events going on. Combat actions in Afghanistan continued through the rest of October and into the first week of November. The Pakistanis had an entire infantry brigade in northern Afghanistan supporting the Taliban against the Northern Alliance. We had known about it, and hadn't targeted them, but once we destroyed the airports and supply depots, they lost all their logistical support, and began driving south and east. We let them go. It was one of the dicier aspects to our operational plan. If I had given enough warning to Musharaf to allow him to yank his troops, I would have given the same warning to the Afghanis and Al Qaeda. In the end we decided that we could chalk any Pakistani losses up to accidents and if they pushed it, ask why they were there in the first place. Their disappearance considerably demoralized the Taliban forces left behind.

No more planes were lost. The BUFF which had gone down had left nothing more than an oil slick and a small debris field in the northern Arabian Sea. We did have more losses though. The Special Forces A-teams we dropped into northern Afghanistan were able to link up with groups in the Northern Alliance on training and support missions. The remaining Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters, now joined together, had a time honored technique for handling an infantry assault. They would retreat up the nearest hill or mountain and allow their enemies to try an assault. Since their attackers were irregulars and partisans they couldn't afford any sort of serious casualties, so the attack would eventually peter out. Enter the high tech world of the American Green Beret. The fighters they were embedded with would make an assault, the Taliban would retreat up a hill, the irregulars would pen them in and make lots of noise down at the bottom, and then the Green Berets would call in an airstrike on the mountaintop. The new JDAM munitions were incredibly precise, and could be targeted right in the Taliban's laps. Two or three would clear off a hilltop handily.

On the other hand – shit happens. There were two cases of friendly fire, where incorrect coordinates were sent to the orbiting bombers, and A-teams were caught in both cases. I remembered this had happened the first time, too, and the response was similar. Northern Alliance fighters had died, but since the Americans had died along with them, the locals simply considered it the price of doing business and it showed our solidarity and support for them.

Most of the bombing was confined to the first day, but as intelligence began to determine who was still around after the bombing, new targets were added. On the third day we dropped a pair of 1,000 pounders into a mosque being used as an Army headquarters. By then, foreign journalists had begun arriving and reporting from Kabul and Kandahar, and video was making its way out. Ari was questioned on this the next day at the morning press conference, and became combative with the press, much to my amusement. "You don't want us to bomb a church? Great! Don't put your soldiers in the basement of the church! And maybe you should stay away from schools and hospitals, too!" Later, after being asked what the civilian casualties were, he gave my response, which was, "The President told me he didn't ask. Sort of like how Al Qaeda didn't ask about the civilian casualties on 9-11."

There was a huge furor about that! How could we be so inhuman as to bomb churches and schools and hospitals?! How could I not care about collateral damage? There were lengthy discussions by the talking heads of whether we were committing war crimes. I got the general impression that I wasn't getting a Nobel Peace Prize out of this.

Some, but not all, of the complaints shut down two days after that. The Taliban in some shithole named Bamian had decided to use the local clinic/hospital as their headquarters when the doctors and nurses there decided to complain. They were all German and Swiss doctors and nurses working with Doctors Without Borders. The Taliban handled this by simply taking the doctors and nurses outside and putting them against a wall and shooting them, and then broadcast this as part of their jihad. This did not endear them with the Germans, who had been complaining about American imperialism up to that point.

Ari and Josh were watching my approval ratings all during this time, as well. I peaked at 91% the Friday I was sworn in as President, and then began dropping slowly. I rebounded to 90% when we began bombing Afghanistan. Ari and Josh loved it, as did the rest of my staff, but I just smiled and shook my head. It would never last. If I didn't handle the economy and everything else, a war scare wouldn't keep me where I needed to be to get things done. I would be lucky to stay above 50% by the time of the 2004 election.

I spoke to John Ashcroft and he came up with names for two lawyers. He was appointing one of them, Patrick Fitzgerald, an Assistant U.S. Attorney in Manhattan who was familiar with everything related to 9-11, to be lead prosecutor and investigator on anything and everything 9-11 related. For some reason the name was familiar to me, but I couldn't put my finger on it. That meant he was going to be involved in the Scooter Libby and Able Danger mess. A second name was somebody I had heard of but never met, Robert Mueller, who had been an assistant U.S. Attorney under Reagan and Bush 41, and then had a variety of jobs with either the Justice Department or in the private sector. I knew he had been considered to replace Freeh, but had gone through prostate cancer surgery over the summer, which had delayed the replacement. Now he was healthy and Freeh was gone. Barnwell, the Executive Assistant Director who was one of the Three Amigos, was a good man, and when the 9-11 investigation was over was going to find himself either a U.S. Attorney or Federal Judge down the road, but he was too junior to take over the FBI. Freeh's Deputy Director hadn't impressed me, and wasn't going to be named as Director. I asked John to have Mueller visit to meet me. If I got a decent feeling for the man, we'd send his name to the Senate for confirmation.

The Senate confirmations were moving apace, which meant slowly. In a typical confirmation hearing, the candidate reads some sort of statement to start out with, and then gets questioned by the committee members. On some committees there might be a dozen and a half members, and each and every one of them gets to ask questions of the candidate. After that they vote on the candidate, and if he passes, then the full Senate gets to vote. In happy times this can go quickly. Right now we were benefiting from the need to 'support' the President by approving his choices. Colin Powell was a case in point. After his opening statement, each of his questioners started their little session with five minutes of singing Colin's praises and then a few puffball questions. His confirmation hearing lasted a total of one day.

In unhappy times, or with a controversial appointee, things aren't as pleasant. The praises are criticisms, and the questioning can go on for days, and the final votes go along strict party lines. If I got lucky I could keep the partisan bickering under control. On the other hand I was dealing with Congress, so intelligent action was not guaranteed. The one thing I had going for me was that the general sense in the Senate was that a President should be allowed employees of his choosing, so even the most controversial people usually got approved eventually. Right now the nation had a feeling of unity, and I needed to exploit it to get the people we needed in place.

It wouldn't last, that feeling of unity. We were going to get hit with a recession, and once people started losing their jobs, it was all going to be my fault. The airlines were flying again, but were hemorrhaging cash, especially since the price of fuel went up. Meanwhile lawsuits were starting to pile up, and I knew we would need to somehow indemnify the airlines before survivors' lawsuits broke them. I sat down with the replacement FAA boss and came up with the beginnings of a plan. As I suspected, there was a list of simple solutions that the airlines had all resisted on a cost basis. The easiest, replacing cockpit doors with something bullet proof that latched securely, would cost about $5,000 to install. As ugly as it sounded, even if the hijackers killed every single passenger and flight attendant, if they couldn't get to the cockpit, they couldn't crash the airplane. Regardless, the cheap bastards wouldn't spend the money, and we saw how that worked out.

Some of the other solutions available were pricier, such as military grade anti-missile technology in case somebody decided to launch a Stinger or something similar at a plane. That was more in the million dollar range. My plan, at least until Congress got into it, was to offer some form of indemnification and monetary assistance with the conversions needed, provided the airlines accepted the security requirements demanded by the FAA. In other words, if you installed what the Feds told you to install, and somebody still managed to break into the cockpit or shoot down a plane with a Stinger, the airline was off the hook. Congress was going to water it down, or decide to give them money, or pay too much, but if I could get the FAA in control of security it would be a major step forward.

I wasn't in the mood to give them too much money. Most airlines were run by money grubbing twits, along with equally rapacious unions. They could damn well raise their prices if the price of gas went up, just like everybody else in America. If they lost money, tough luck. Maybe they needed to change how they did business. Again, I knew the lobbyists would be out in force, but if I rammed some of this down their throats while they were still in shock and needy, I might get lucky.

I knew we were going to get involved in insurance to the surviving family members, which we had done on my first go. It was a shitty and horrendous job, and necessary. We would appoint a Special Master to handle it. Likewise there would be some loan guarantees for reconstruction, etc. Just add a few more billion to the deficit.

The one thing I absolutely did not want to do was start up any more major government bureaucracies! Homeland Security proved to be a disaster. The Transportation Safety Administration was even more disastrous. There were already calls for the government to do something, in this case make a single agency devoted to protecting the Homeland. It sounded to me an awful lot like the Russian Motherland or the German Fatherland, both of which sounded fascist. We got sloppy and the bad guys got lucky, but there was no reason to get stupid. We just needed to not be sloppy!

On the other hand, I was definitely in favor of a major overhaul of national intelligence. I was looking for a national counter-terrorism agency which could coordinate anti-terrorist stuff. That way if the DIA Able Danger team finds out about a sleeper cell, they send it to the new agency, which can get anything the CIA has on it, and then tell the FBI to track the assholes down. This could work, whereas Homeland Security very quickly became a bloated monstrosity overly impressed with its own importance.

By the end of October I began putting together a wish list of things to do. I talked these over with the Cabinet heads and Vice President Select McCain. He was also going through a confirmation process, and I told everyone we needed a new VP by November 1. I needed to do a foreign trip, and couldn't leave without a backup. Otherwise my wish list would hold until January, when I dumped it on America in a State of the Union Address. I wanted something consistent and coherent by then, with a limited number of major points, addressing security, national defense, the budget, and a few very select projects. If I was all over the board on this stuff, nothing would get done. If I could focus on a limited menu, I might accomplish something. We'd just have to see.

Cheney had been thundering against me from the sidelines since the day I had fired him. Exactly what he expected to accomplish wasn't clear, since he couldn't get me thrown out of office. From some of what he was saying, he wanted all of my Cabinet selections thrown out, and hard core conservatives and chickenhawks put in place. I really think he was positioning himself for a run in the Republican primary in 2004. If so, it backfired on him. By November the appointment of a Special Prosecutor to look into intelligence failures was announced, as was the fact that the investigation was focusing on malfeasance by some of those involved. Fitzgerald was planning on taking depositions, and the White House Counsel's office was figuring out the official position on 'executive privilege' as it applied to individuals no longer in the employ of the government. One of my problems was that the White House Counsel was Alberto Gonzalez, a former Federal judge who was a very close friend to George Bush. There was no doubt in my mind that anything I told the Counsel's office would be reported directly to Dick Cheney. Gonzalez had zero loyalty to me, and I wanted to get rid of him as soon as practical. Our public position was that we looked forward to cooperating with the Special Prosecutor, and simply needed to determine the best way to do that. I figured this was an excellent way to get Cheney out of my hair. Even if he didn't go to jail, he would probably go back to Wyoming, which was almost the same thing as far as I was concerned.

The only question we had inside the White House was how long it would take for Cheney's political career to begin swirling around the bowl. The odds were running 3-1 it wouldn't last past mid-November. By then I wouldn't care. Mid-November would see Marilyn and me overseas, on our first official visit anywhere.

Chapter 145: Foreign Relations

Foreign trips are a mix of smoke and mirrors and public relations. What they usually aren't is anything substantive. Nobody flies halfway around the planet to meet with the high and mighty without everybody knowing what is going to happen ahead of time. So why do them at all? For one reason, just like in any other form of business, it's usually helpful to actually meet the guy you're doing business with and look him in the eye. At the minimum you can start to get a sense of the other person.

We were scheduled for eight days in mid-November, visiting London, Paris, Moscow, and Tel-Aviv. Figure two days in each spot, and travel at night. I was not expecting miracles, but this could be interesting. I was the new kid, untested and untried, the billionaire playboy who had somehow managed to be in the right place at the right time when the real President died. Expectations were low. I think the State Department would be happy if I simply managed to use the right spoon and fork at the various state dinners we would be attending.

I was traveling with the Secretary of State, and he was a fairly well known commodity on the world stage. He had become very high profile back during the Gulf War, and had managed to avoid stepping on his dick in the ten years since then. In most foreign capitals he was much better known than I was. Marilyn and I were both going, and the kids were staying home. Colin's wife, Alma, was also traveling with us.

I was fairly current on what our history was with each country, including what had been planned under President Bush. That didn't mean I agreed with his plans. In particular, I was less than thrilled with his antagonistic view and tone concerning Russia. There were a bunch of people who longed for the good old days of the Cold War, when we only had one enemy, the dirty Commies. They were evil people you could point to and say were bad. Since a lot of the more hard core neo-conservatives dated back to the Reagan and Bush 41 years, when the 'Evil Empire' was given its nickname, they still thought that way. It was easy to point at Russia; it wasn't so easy to point at radical Islamic terrorists.

I had argued this out with both Bush and Cheney. We had spent fifty years in a European-centric world view. Certainly the army I had served in was all about fighting the Soviets. The Russians were going to flood the Fulda Gap with T-72s and BMPs, and the 82nd was going to be dropped in to stop them. That was the theory, in any case. In reality, for fifty years the Russians never attacked in Europe, and the 82nd went everywhere but Europe! However, World War II had ended in 1945, and 56 years later, we still had armored units facing Eastern Europe, even though the Soviet Union had collapsed 12 years earlier. Worse, nobody seemed to think this was a strange idea! The Russians couldn't successfully invade their refrigerator right now, let alone a foreign country. Their tanks were rusting to pieces in the fields, they didn't have the money to pay for gas to fly their planes, and their ships and subs were being slowly sold to other countries, at least the ones that hadn't rusted out to the point they sank at the docks.

It wasn't helping that Vladimir Putin was taking a more international stand than his predecessor. Boris Yeltsin had been almost exclusively focused on internal Kremlin politics and policies. Putin had a much firmer hold on power in Russia, and was able to focus on foreign affairs. He had a very good grasp on the fact that Russia was in the crosshairs of more than a few Islamic radicals, and it was a lot easier to get to Russia than it was to get to America. They had been fighting in Chechnya and Dagestan for most of the last decade. Meanwhile the neocons were yapping about the need to strengthen NATO by admitting former Soviet Bloc client states, and moving anti-ballistic missiles and armed forces closer to the Russian borders. If nothing else, I needed to ratchet down the nonsense. We could start by at least being a lot politer to each other.

Powell didn't agree with me completely. He still had a European focus, though that had changed somewhat. Like me, however, he was not possessed of an overwhelming desire to get pushy with the Russians. I had a much more realpolitik view of the world. I had to live with the world as it really was, and didn't have a burning desire to replace it with something else, especially something that wouldn't work. I remembered how on my first trip through, the Bush crew had allied themselves with the Republic of Georgia, and then looked like they were pulling their puds when the Russians invaded in 2008 and gave them a quick spanking. The entire world knew we weren't going to have a nuclear confrontation over Georgia, but we certainly managed to look stupid during the process. The harsh truth was that most of Eastern Europe and the Caucasus were in the Russian sphere of influence, just like the Western Hemisphere was in ours. There was no need to get pissy about it.

So the plan was to visit England and France and meet and greet the powers that be, go on to Moscow and tone down the rhetoric with Putin, and then head to Israel. Sharon had invited me twice so far. He was on the front lines, so to speak, and dealt with the crazies on a daily basis. I wanted to ramp up our intelligence capabilities, and he wanted some money for weapons and for us to shut up about settlements and other shit. We basically just needed to do business, and I had spent a number of years doing business. We could get along.

Great Britain and France were the first two stops. In some ways they were the easiest and most ornamental. Tony Blair was the British Prime Minister, and I was now his third American President to deal with. He was Labour Party, which was closer in sympathies to the Democrats than the Republicans, but they ran a Parliamentary system in any case. Most importantly, unless the Americans got really stupid and crazy (and sometimes even if they did), the British would back us up.

The French were a different matter. There was a real love-hate relationship there, and they tended to do things their own way and be rude about it in the process. Jacques Chirac was the President, and I was his third American President as well. In some ways I didn't really need to go to Paris, but Marilyn made some comments about visiting there when she was in high school, and we had never gone before. Maybe I could get a few minutes and take her to see the Eiffel Tower.

This was really our first trip to anyplace exotic for political reasons. Marilyn and I had flown together around the country during the election and before, when I was in business. As the Vice President I was mostly sent to the drearier parts of the planet as punishment for being outspoken, and Marilyn stayed home for those trips. I offered to let her stay home rather than meet the Queen at Buckingham Palace, and was promptly asked, "If I sue you for divorce, do I get to keep the White House?" Frank and Ari both heard her ask that and both just about rolled on the floor laughing.

It's a seven hour flight from D.C. to London, but you are also traveling east five time zones, so it actually takes twelve hours to get there. Before we left, I saw John McCain, now officially sworn in as Vice President, and asked him not to start any nuclear wars without me. He gave me an evil laugh and sent me off. We left Andrews on Wednesday, November 7, at 8:30 PM, and landed at Heathrow the next morning at 8:30 AM on Thursday the 8th. One nice feature was that the President and First Lady have their own suite in the nose of the plane. Colin and Alma would catch a few winks in some really nice first class seats that leaned way back, but it still wasn't the same as a bed. I teased Marilyn about that. We hadn't fooled around on an airplane since I began using security details back when I got into Congress. I don't think we slept more than five or six hours, but it beat an airliner seat all to hell. We were even able to take showers and clean up before changing for landing.

It was more than a little weird leaving Air Force One at Heathrow. The only other time I had flown in the plane was as the Acting President when I flew to New York right after 9-11. There had been zero pomp and circumstance involved, and I had traveled with just a few people. We had an emergency and decorum be damned. We flew in, went down the stairs, and moved out.

Now it was nothing but pomp and circumstance! According to the briefing paper I was given, Prince Charles was standing in for his mother the Queen, and would greet us at the airport. I would review some ceremonial troops, and then we would be taken to the Hyatt Regency London, where we were staying. We would freshen up and settle in, and then Marilyn and I would split up. I would meet with Prime Minister Blair while Marilyn was taken on a tour of London and a visit to an elementary school. Somebody had figured out that my wife had a degree in teaching, even if she had never taught a day in her life.

The one thing I really wished we had kept when we threw the Brits out all those years ago was a separate Head of State. In Britain the Queen was the Head of State, while the Prime Minister was the Head of Government. This is very common in parliamentary systems. The Queen gets a nice paycheck and has to deal with all the ceremony. The Prime Minister doesn't have to do that stuff. I was constantly switching back and forth between running a country and shaking hands. It was not uncommon to leave a budget meeting and have to congratulate the top selling Girl Scout cookie salesperson who had won a trip to Washington, go back to a different budget meeting, get yanked out to meet and greet the Wisconsin Dairy Princess, and then head off to meet the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

It's a major pain in the tail. I know it's important, but it really makes you lose focus, and takes an immense amount of time. In Britain, it lets them do something with all those otherwise unemployed princes and princesses.

Marilyn had looked over at me while our trip was being reviewed prior to our leaving Washington, and asked, "Just what am I going to do on this trip?"

I shrugged and replied, "Something First Lady-ish, I guess. Whatever you do, try not to get me in trouble."

"You're no help!"

I wasn't overly sympathetic. "So you really didn't want to visit Buckingham Palace and meet the Queen? I mean, we can always send you home..."

"Will you behave!? I never said that!"

I shrugged some more. "I wonder what Charlie and the girls would do over here. Think they might get into any trouble?"

"We'd probably end up with another War of 1812! Maybe that wouldn't be so good.", she laughed.

"So, don't piss anybody off. Just smile and say how everything is wonderful. Sort of like I had to do when campaigning.", I told her.

"Just as long as nobody serves us lutefisk. Your sister told me about that. Even Stormy wouldn't eat that!"

I had to laugh. "Could you imagine Stormy rampaging through Buckingham Palace? God help those poor little Corgis the Queen likes!" Marilyn had to laugh at that vision, too.

So, while Marilyn and everybody else went out the back door, I went out the front, smiling and waving at everybody and went down the stairs. At the bottom I met up with Prince Charles, who shook my hand and led me over to a small podium. Beyond that was a double line of fairly smart looking troops, with a red carpet between them, heading over to the limousine. Off to the side, out of sight of the cameras, were a pair of C-5 Galaxys that had brought in the support. First the Prince made a short speech welcoming me to the United Kingdom, and then I returned the favor, saying thank you and how I looked forward to getting to know the British people better. I simply read something the State Department trotted out every time we did this. I would do the same thing at every stop, and simply change the name of the country I was visiting.

It really was a lot like campaigning for office.

Afterwards I marched down the line of troops, the Prince at my side, and being trailed by a colonel. Nothing was out of place, not that I expected it to be, and I commented positively to the colonel. Then it was time to head out. The Prince got in his Rolls Royce limo and headed back to the Palace, and Colin, Alma, Marilyn, and I got into the Presidential Cadillac and went to the Hyatt Regency. The Ambassador and his wife would meet us there, and accompany Colin and me to meet the Prime Minister.

Marilyn teased me and asked, "So, were the troops up to snuff enough for you?"

I chuckled at that. "You'd probably better ask Colin that one. I never made it past captain, and he was a four star general." Colin smiled and chuckled too, and nodded in response. "Still, they seemed okay. They're ceremonial troops. They are supposed to look clean and shiny. You never know how good they actually are until the bullets start flying."

Colin commented, "That's true enough, but the British are better at that than most. I'm no expert on British medals, but a few of those men have seen action. I'd say they were good troops."

I nodded in agreement. Turning to my wife, I said, "The real test is when they are out in the field. If the troops are dirty but their guns are clean it's usually a much better sign than the reverse."

"Worst of all is when the troops are dirty and the guns are dirty! You see that, just get out of there before somebody does something stupid!", added the Secretary of State. I nodded in agreement.

Marilyn looked over at Colin's wife and said, "He's been out of the Army almost twenty years and he still thinks he's a paratrooper!"

Alma sympathized. "Colin's the exact same way." Both Colin and I snorted at this, and she added, "You two boys are retired now. You can stop acting like little boys playing soldier now."

The Hyatt Regency is a very nice hotel, and I think we were renting damn near every room in the place. For certain we were renting several entire floors. For security reasons, the Secret Service had rooms above and below our suite. Add in the Powells, the guy with the football, Josh Bolten, Ari Fleischer, and the traveling staff, security and communications – we probably had an entourage of a hundred people or more. We would repeat the process three more times before heading home again.

Ambassador Farish and his wife greeted us and ushered us into our suite. He was a Republican businessman and contributor with no previous State Department experience, but he seemed adequate to the task. I assumed he actually had employees at the embassy who did the real work involved. I couldn't recall ever meeting the man, but we moved in different business circles and he was a Texas friend of George's.

I was still piecing together a coherent strategy on foreign relations, and my advisers were shooting holes in it left and right. Vice President McCain didn't completely agree with me on what I was working towards. That was fine with me, because they might just be smarter than me. I certainly hoped so! Maybe I could learn something from them. What I was working towards was some form of containment towards radical Islamics.

The predominant form of foreign policy that America had was formulated shortly after the end of the Second World War, when the true nature of communism and Soviet expansionism became obvious, was containment. Originally articulated by George Kennan, it envisioned that western governments, led by the United States, would enter into alliances that would keep Soviet influence limited to where it was, and prevent it from going further. This was the Cold War, and lasted for roughly fifty years until the Soviet Union collapsed. It wasn't pretty. It was actually fairly messy, and the Cold War had a disturbing tendency to heat up at times, like in Korea and Viet Nam. Regardless, we managed to stabilize the world and keep from going to nuclear war, and to ultimately win.

The biggest threat to civilization now wasn't communism, but radical Islamic fundamentalism. Al Qaeda wasn't so much a specific group of nut jobs as much as it was a philosophy. Why couldn't we in the West figure out a way to contain the nut jobs? For years we had been backing one local strongman after another, to keep the peace. They would take our money and weapons and either use them to start a war, use them on their own population, or use them against us. It might be cold blooded but why bother with trying to keep the peace? As long as they didn't bother us, why should we care how many of each other they killed? In effect, cut them off from the rest of the world. Buy their oil, don't sell them weapons, don't support them with charity and donations, and don't let their fundamentalists loose.

There were problems with actually doing this, of course, and every country had different answers and problems, both in the West and in the Muslim world. The country with the largest Muslim population in the world, Indonesia, considered itself an Asian country, not an Arab country, and their entire outlook was considerably different than the countries in the Middle East. The fundamentalists varied from country to country, and some countries had them locked down better than others.

The Western European countries had their own issues. Muslims were a much higher percentage of the population in many European countries than in America, running 5-10% in some countries. They generally hadn't done well assimilating into the local culture, and were generally not appreciated. France had Algerians, Italy had Libyans and Tunisians, Germany had Turkish nationals, some were there illegally, some were on work visas, some had overstayed their visas. It was very messy. Furthermore, it was very easy to say that we shouldn't sell Muslim countries weapons, but weapons manufacturing was a very high profit business and very competitive. France was going to sell the Arabs planes and ships and such, no matter what they might promise publicly.

On the other hand, some form of containment had some real benefits, both in terms of lives lost and dollars spent. The locals might not like us occasionally bombing them when they started getting too big for their britches, but they really didn't like us when we landed on their doorstep. Forget about picking sides in the local version of a civil war! The Sunnis hated the Shiites, the moderates hated the radicals, the Muslims hated the Christians and the Jews, but everybody hated foreign invaders! Unless you embraced Genghis Khan's solution to the problem when the Tartars rebelled against him, in which he lined the entire Tartar nation up in a line and slit the throats of everybody over the height of a cart handle, you would never get anybody to go along with you.

This was the total antithesis of the neocons battle cry. We needed to go into these countries forcibly, throw out the dictators, hand them the Constitution (suitably translated, of course), and install free elections and a two party democratic system. Never mind that nobody in most of these places understood the idea of an election. Never mind that 40% of the population in some countries was illiterate and couldn't even read a ballot, let alone understand it. Never mind that women were still considered property and that in some of these shitholes they still had slavery in place. America was a burning flame of freedom, and if some of these places got singed, so be it! Once one of them fell in a quick and glorious and cheap campaign, the neighbors would immediately understand the wonders that we had brought, and overthrow their leaders to get in on the freedom.

We spent ten years, tens of thousands of casualties, and trillions of dollars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and all we did was piss off a huge part of the world. We certainly didn't bring democracy to these places; both ended up in civil war. My thought? They hate us already! We don't need to invade them to piss them off. They're already pissed at us. Let the bastards rot. It's cheaper.

I knew it was more complicated than that. We couldn't embargo dozens of countries. We would still get drawn into fights, much like we had to just do in Afghanistan, and what we were still doing with Saddam Hussein in Iraq. We were going to need to keep armed forces around the world. However, the mix and locations needed to change. Our military was one that was designed to face off against the Soviet Union. It was very high tech and very expensive – much too expensive to use against raghead assholes. We didn't need invisible fighters and bombers, but we did need tankers and cargo planes. We didn't need multi-billion dollar destroyers, but we did need some corvettes and frigates to do convoy duty and antipiracy patrols. We didn't need self-propelled push button one man howitzers, but we did need commandos and high quality infantry.

Force locations were in the same fix. Why were we defending the German border when the Iron Curtain had rusted to pieces? Why were we involved in Bosnia, when it was right next door to NATO? We needed to pivot our forces from Europe to Asia, from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific and Indian Oceans. We needed new alliances, and to reformulate old ones.

It was complicated and sophisticated, not an approach suitable for sound bites and political grandstanding. Worse, while I understood the costs of a failed approach, having seen it originally, I knew that others wouldn't believe me. Besides, what if I was wrong? No matter how smart I was, if terrorists managed to make another spectacular strike, the nation would put boots on the ground somewhere, and I wouldn't be able to stop it. We were going to have to play smarter than ever before.

I discussed these ideas with both Tony Blair and, a few days later in Paris, Jacques Chirac. The results were fairly predictable. Britain thought I had a good idea. France would give it some thought, but they were smarter than us (and everybody else, too.) Neither wanted to invade anybody, though both had capabilities to do so, at least nearby in Africa and in Europe. Both lied through their teeth about limiting arms sales.

Otherwise, the trips to Britain and France were fairly successful. Neither Marilyn nor I insulted anybody or spilled soup on the Queen. We said nice things about the British and the French, and didn't stick our noses in any sort of local politics. We took boat rides on the Thames and the Seine, and got to see the Eiffel Tower. There was a huge amount of residual sympathy from the devastation of 9-11, and since we had stopped our campaign in Afghanistan before we left home, that wasn't an issue. France was surprisingly sophisticated regarding that, since they had done similar things with the French Foreign Legion over the years. Yes, there really is a French Foreign Legion, and they are as tough a bunch of bastards as you are likely to find. I had seen a few of their officers once while I was in the 82nd, when they were doing some cross training and familiarization. The Frogs used them as expendable mercenaries in all sorts of shitholes.

So, anyway, London and Paris went okay. In a lot of ways it was simply a chance for the old pros to get to meet the new kid on the block. He was different than the last kid who lived in that house across the street, but he looked like he would be there awhile. Even if we didn't solve the problems of the world, I thought we had accomplished something, and Colin Powell indicated that I hadn't stepped on my crank. And besides, if I ever started thinking that living in the White House was like living in a museum, all I needed to remember was that little side trip through Buckingham Palace. There are some fascinating things that never make it into the usual tour itinerary! Amazing place!

Russia was a more interesting trip. Vladimir Putin was Russia's latest strong man, and even though they had nominally embraced democracy, it was a thin embrace. All of the pre-trip briefings had stressed that it was a nation of contradictions. They rejected communism but preferred a strong ruler. The Russian Mafia vied with billionaire oligarchs to control the economy, so you had a kleptocracy challenging a plutocracy. Parts of the country were modern, parts were Third World, and the only reason anybody feared them was that they had nukes. I remember how my parents visited there on my first time through, and my dad came back and told me about the trip. His comment? "Why in the world were we afraid of them for fifty years?! They're broke!"

Part of Putin's political calculus was to use foreign affairs to deflect the public's attention from domestic problems, a surprisingly common tactic around the world. In this he was aided by the fact that the Russian economy was just starting to rebuild after the economic collapse of the '90s. Both he and Russia were feeling stronger.

So far, Bush had simply been tossing around ideas and talking about the need to 'rein in' Russia, but we hadn't really done anything yet. We had brought Poland, Hungary, and the Czechs into NATO during the Clinton years, but so far we had just been talking about bringing in the rest of Eastern Europe. I knew once we did that, the Russians would begin treating us as hostile again, which would only be exacerbated when we started moving Patriot anti-missile batteries towards the Russian border. I could see no possible reason to piss them off just for the sake of pissing them off.

Colin did have some good ideas. We had a meeting in early October, after we had decided on the trip. "Okay, so you are planning on caving in on NATO and the anti-missile issue." I opened my mouth to protest, but he held up a hand to stop me. "That's what it's going to look like. What do you want in return? We need some specific points to ask about, and at least get a discussion going. What do you want from the Russians?"

When he put it that away, it made sense. We were going to do some negotiating, so what was going to be the bid and offer prices. "Cooperation on anti-terrorism, for one thing, and not just some speeches. We are going to be setting up some form of counter-terrorism intelligence center, and I am going to want active cooperation with them. We send a request, they respond, and vice versa. If they want to send people to help, we will return the favor. I want real cooperation. This is what is going to be the problem for most of the next century."

Colin nodded. "What else?"

Pushy bastard! "They need to play nicer with their neighbors, at least their European ones. I don't care what they do on the backside of nowhere, but they can't be as pushy with the Baltic States and the Ukraine. I know it's complicated, but if they ratchet their shit down, so will we. They also really need to cut any ties with Hugo Chavez. They stay out of our back yard and we can stay out of theirs."

"They are going to claim that is interference in their internal politics." Again, he held up his hand to slow me down. "I know it's not, but that will be their response. Okay, so we need to firm up some of these ideas and get specific. I've never heard that you were a big poker player..." I shook my head at that, and he continued, " ... but I know you are used to making deals. We need to make a deal with them." We worked on that prior to the trip.

The schedule in Russia was that we left Paris late and landed in Moscow very early. It's only a three-and-a-half hour flight, and Moscow is only two hours ahead of Paris. We left at 10:00 PM and arrived 3:30 AM, and headed directly to the Moscow Ritz Carlton. International travel was beginning to wear on us, and we all got some sleep before heading to the Kremlin mid-morning. The formal state dinner was actually for the next evening. We would be in discussions with Putin and Kasyanov all day, and then take in the ballet at the Bolshoi that night, more meetings tomorrow, and then the fancy dinner.

According to my State Department briefing, Putin spoke Russian and fluent German, which was probably why a big chunk of his KGB career had been spent in Germany. Supposedly he was taking English lessons, although to what extent he was fluent was questionable. We would definitely be using translators. So be it. My Russian was limited to da, nyet, sookin sin, and yob tvou mat! That worked out to yes, no, son of a bitch, and go fuck your mother. (It's amazing the junk you pick up and store in your memory.) I didn't figure to use the last two phrases anywhere in public, and Marilyn would probably smack me if I used them around her, especially since I would have to translate them for her.

We met at 11:00 AM for a small photo session, to be followed by lunch, after which we would have a working session. During the photo session you sit there side by side and smile and don't say anything more important than "Do you get a lot of snow here?" The answer is "A whole shitload!" or something to that effect. Whatever you do, don't actually say anything meaningful while the cameras and recorders are running. More than one American President has stepped on his dick by saying something private and having it run on the air that evening. I kept asking about the weather until everybody had left, and we were able to get down to business.

Putin started off by having his Prime Minister, Mikhail Kasyanov, review a litany of complaints about George Bush's speeches and actions related to NATO. He argued with the NATO expansion with Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic (even though that had been done by the Democrats under Clinton) and argued strenuously against any continued expansion into the Baltics or further east. Secretary of State Powell and I kept our mouths shut and listened. The complaints were nothing new.

Colin responded with complaints about Russian heavy-handedness in regards to interference in the politics of the Baltic States - Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. The Soviets had ruled them during the post World War II era, and they had a sizable minority of Russian citizens stranded there when the Soviet Union collapsed. Economically the nations were marginal but improving. Culturally, they considered themselves distinct from Russia and more European, and generally didn't like Russians.

Putin and Kasyanov sat there stone faced while Colin went through our complaints. They were on the verge of a rejoinder, none of which was overly helpful, when I decided to intervene. The Secretary and I had worked this out ahead of time; it would give me the appearance of breaking through a road block. "Mister President, Mister Prime Minister, allow me to make a few comments, if I might.", I asked before they could begin responding to our response.

The translator said this to them quietly, and Putin and Kasyanov looked at each other for a moment, and the Putin said, in heavily accented English, "Please."

"Thank you." I nodded towards Colin and said, "Secretary Powell and I have considered your interests, as previously stated, and we would like you to consider a possibly different future. We cannot change the past..." Well, you can, as I discovered, but better to not bring that up. " ... but we can change the future. Perhaps if the United States were to step back from urging additional eastern expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, perhaps then your nation might ease on your legitimate concerns over your citizens in the Baltic region." And there we were; let's dicker.

Putin and Kasyanov looked at each other, and now there was a glimmer of interest on their faces. We could have sat there for two days arguing past history and who was right and wrong. None of that mattered. Fix the damn problem. If we backed down and they backed down, and gave each other a little bit of face saving, we could get to something much more important. We spent the rest of the afternoon discussing various complaints related to our positions, but it was meaningless. Likewise, Putin and Kasyanov wanted us to shut up about any human rights violations regarding Chechnya and Dagestan. I snorted out a laugh and told him bluntly that after 9-11 they could do whatever they wanted to the bastards, and that we had some suggestions for the next day's meeting regarding our mutual problems with radicals and terrorists.

There would be no agreements to sign on this. The proof was in the pudding, and would take effect after we got home. At the next NATO meeting, we would announce that we considered further expansion 'premature at this time' and add a few other weaselly comments. Likewise, we could pay attention to how bellicose the Russians remained over the Baltics, and know if they were backing down. A few quiet words to our ambassadors in those nations might ratchet down the tensions. We would never get them to love each other, but maybe we could get them to stop yelling as loud.

The afternoon ended with considerable surprise, however. The plan for the evening was to attend the Bolshoi ballet after dinner with the Putins, and that had been known since the trip was planned. However, he gave me a curious look and asked, "I understand you are a patron of the symphony back in your home. Is that correct?"

My eyes widened at that, and I nodded. "Yes, that is true. I have helped to support the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra for many years. Baltimore is a city near Washington, and I grew up and live very close to it.", I explained to the others at the table.

"Well, I am sure you will enjoy the ballet then, but I also understand you enjoy the martial arts.", he said.

My eyes popped open at that. "That's quite true. I have black belts in both aikido and tae kwan do. I understand you are quite adept in judo." That was also in the briefing, as were several photos of him tossing people in hip throws while bare-chested. I gathered he thought it played well with the public. Where was he going with this? I flicked my eyes towards Secretary of State Powell and he looked confused as well.

"I simply was thinking about this evening. I know we are scheduled to go to the ballet, but I am a member of a dojo here in Moscow. I understand this is very much at the last minute, but I was wondering if you were interested in changing your schedule. I will understand if you can't, of course."

I sat back in my armchair and studied President Putin. There was a ghost of a smile on his face. It was a challenge, plain and simple, and a chance to see what kind of opponent he had in me. According to the CIA dossier, he was quite highly ranked. On the other hand, I probably hadn't been in a tournament of any sort since I got out of the Army, although I had continued training and practicing. Even now, as the President, I usually managed an early morning workout with a few Secret Service agents every other day. They had even begun teaching me Israeli Krav Maga combat, which I thought went well with my nature. It's a violent take-no-prisoners training, and the real fights I had been in, especially that one in the Bahamas, had been that style to me. Regardless, this was definitely a personal challenge, and my response was important.

Next to me Secretary Powell was stirring, and commenting, "It seems rather doubtful we would have time for both, and I am sure the ladies would like to see the ballet."

Putin, however, kept his eyes focused on me, and I looked back, not blinking. I nodded. "Da!" Then I pointed a finger back and forth between us, and then wagged it side to side. "You, me, no fight. Nyet!"

He barked out a laugh and smiled broadly. "Da!", and then rattled off some more Russki. "No, practice and some sparring, and we won't fight each other. Let us see what we are made of."

I grinned and nodded. "We fight and somebody loses, we end up in World War III! Not a good idea!"

He laughed some more. I glanced over at Colin, who looked horrified, and then turned to face one of the Secret Service agents in the background, who looked even worse. I gave them both a thumbs-up, which simply caused Putin to laugh harder.

We broke apart at that, adjourning our meetings until the morning, and we left to tell our wives the ballet was off. That was fine with me, since I'm not real big on ballet. It's better than opera, though. Regardless, once we were out of the building and back in the limo, Colin said, "Have you lost your mind?"

I smiled. "I think you meant to ask, 'Have you lost your fucking mind!?' Colin, he's testing me. It's a personal thing. He wants to know if he can back me down. I lose face if I don't."

"You'll lose face if you lose! What then?"

"I'd better not lose, then." I looked over at the agent riding with us. "Think I'm going to lose?"

Most of the time these guys are just in the background, but here I was putting him on the spot. He thought for a second, and said, "I don't know. Do you have to stick with straight judo? Or can you use other martial arts?"

"Good question. I don't know. We'll have to find out tonight."

He shrugged and smiled. "You're pretty good, sir. Not as good as us, but you'd give somebody in a tournament a run for their money."

"Oooh, money! Tonight, get the best odds you can, and put me down for $500. More if you can find a sucker." I looked at Colin. "Some bets you just can't lose!"

"Good Lord!", he muttered to himself.

Marilyn's comment when we got back to the hotel was a little more succinct. "You're an idiot!" Most everybody else seemed to agree.

I simply smiled and reiterated that there was a lot of face involved in this. On the other hand, I knew Marilyn wasn't going to enjoy watching a tournament. Not only did she find them generally unpleasant, but she didn't like seeing me at my most brutal. She looked rather unhappy. I looked over at one of the embassy staffers and said, "Call over to the Kremlin and tell them there has been a slight change of plans. Secretary Powell will escort both his wife and mine to the ballet. I will visit the dojo on my own. Make up some excuse if you have to. Tell them I don't want to lose in front of my friends." I turned to the others and grinned. "Maybe we'll get better odds."

Marilyn gave a quiet shriek and glared at me. Colin simply said, "You need to win, or you are going to look like a horse's patoot."

I nodded. He was right.

Marilyn calmed down quickly enough, and after a pleasant dinner in a private dining room with the Powells and the other staff, we broke apart to go our separate ways. Much of the conversation was about my planned idiocy, although nobody was quite ballsy enough (aside from the Secretary of State and my wife) to call it that. I did get a bit more info from a CIA type on Putin, who was the president of his judo club back in St. Petersburg, his home. He was considered quite good, but it was questionable if he had ever actually been in a real fight of any sort. In that regard I had much more experience.

We left about the same time. Alma gave me an amused look but didn't say anything. Her husband told me to not screw up. Marilyn told me not to hurt anybody. I just laughed and headed out with my detail and Ari Fleischer, who wanted to see how bad this was going to be and how he was going to have to spin it. "Nervous, Ari?", I asked him.

"Rule of thumb Mister President. Never do something unless you already know how it's going to work out. It's like what they teach you in law school. Never ask a question you don't already know the answer to."

"You'll never accomplish anything if you don't try something different. Either way, I can spin this to win the cooperation of Putin.", I countered.

"He doesn't vote."

I shrugged at that, but he was right. We both knew that this was going to get out. We had a big chunk of reporters with us on this trip, and while some of them would be decoyed over to the Bolshoi, some busy little beaver was going to figure out they were being snookered and find out about my little side trip. If they didn't get into the tournament, they would find somebody with a video camera.

I hadn't been in a real martial arts club in almost twenty years, but the smells brought me back. You could smell the perspiration from years of men working out and the industrial cleansers trying to combat it, scents that permeated everything, like a really clean locker room. You knew it was clean, but you knew that smell. I was directed to a locker room in the rear, where several other people were already changing out of their clothes and putting on their gis. Several looked at me curiously, but was it because I was the American President, or simply somebody new that they didn't recognize? I was shown to a locker, empty except for a gi that seemed to be in my size, and began changing. I was belting the black belt around my waist when President Putin, with an interpreter, came up to me.

"I am glad you could make it. I understand Secretary Powell and your wives couldn't make it. I am sorry to hear that.", he told me.

"Marilyn is not a big fan. I need to keep some peace in the family.", I admitted.

"Da! Very important!", he told me directly.

I smiled and agreed. He led me out of the locker room, side by side, and there was considerable applause from a packed bleacher section and from other members of the club when we appeared. This was a real club, and there were a number of different colored belts around the floor mats. Camera flashes began blinking, so I knew somebody had leaked the evening's festivities to the press. Too late to back down now.

It was actually a very enjoyable evening. I joined in with some warm-up katas, even though my rhythm was off due to my unfamiliarity with their routines. Then there was a general training session, and that was very interesting. In addition to judo, Putin was an expert in a discipline called sambo, which was a Russian variation on judo and wrestling. I watched as he showed me several moves and then I attempted them on a couple of the club members, with Putin giving some expert instruction in his accented and broken English.

Then we got into the sparring, with the club members and Putin and myself sitting on the floor mats surrounding the circle. I had told him that we couldn't fight, but that simply meant several others wanted to try me out. It wasn't really obvious to me how they selected opponents, whether it was by a scoring system from previous matches, and where I would fit into the system. Vladimir was quite good, and handily mastered his first opponent. Then I found myself facing a rather large fellow with mixed Mongol features who was about twenty pounds heavier and twenty years younger. I could see in his face a slight sneer. Several others had been egging him on to teach the brash American how things were done in Moscow. Great! This guy was fighting for Holy Mother Russia!

I glanced over at one of my protective agents and saw him holding up his hands, three fingers on one, and a single finger on the other. I guessed that he meant we had three to one odds against me. I flashed all five at him, meaning the full five hundred, and he nodded, and went back to the one of the Russians.

I could see that Putin had a bit of a set to his jaw. It was obvious that he wasn't amused by how things turned out. If I got hurt, it was going to be on his ass. I just smiled at him and shook my head slightly. In for a penny, in for a pound. I climbed to my feet and went to the center of the ring, exaggerating my limp. My opponent's sneer became more pronounced, and he said something in Russian to a friend, and I am sure it was rude. I glanced at the clock, wondering how long this was going to take before I got hurt. We bowed to the referee, and then bowed to each other, and the ref clapped his hands and it was on.

And it was over, almost as fast. We circled to the left for about five seconds, and then he came in on me. He threw three quick punches and I blocked them, and then he stepped back and we circled slowly a bit more. I feinted with my bad right leg, and that suckered him in. He came in throwing another couple of punches and I had him. I blocked two punches and then slipped to his right side and behind him. I backhanded him, medium hard, to the back of his neck, stunning him, and then used my 'bad' right leg to kick his feet out from under him. I grabbed the front of his gi and rode him to the mat, hard, where he landed with a thud. I pulled my right fist back but held it, because he was out cold. I glanced at the clock again. It had lasted 27 seconds.

I let him lay there and climbed to my feet. Over us the ref was simply staring down in disbelief. I cleared my throat, drawing his attention, and I bowed to him. Then I moved back to my seat next to Vladimir, as a couple of fellows came out of the circle and slapped his face and roused him. He was helped out of the room to the lockers.

The room was quite silent, and then suddenly a cheer went round. Putin slapped me on the back and smiled, saying, "Good! Good! He nekulturny!" I blinked at that and nodded. I understood that to mean uncultured, rude, or boorish, and that seemed to be true.

That was the climactic moment of the evening. Both Vladimir and I had two more matches, and we won them both. Neither of mine was as brutal or as quick as that first one, but both of my opponents behaved better, and didn't allow themselves to get suckered in. I took a couple of thumps from my last opponent, but beat him on points anyway. At the end, I groaned loudly and shook his hand; I groaned again when we all went back to the locker room to shower and dress. I definitely had a few bumps and bruises.

Vladimir came over in the locker room with a big smile on his face, and carrying an icy bottle of vodka and two small glasses. I smiled back. I'm not a big vodka drinker, but a drink would be good. He poured the glasses to the brink and handed one to me. "Nostrovia!"

"Mud in your eye!" I downed mine, and then watched as the translator tried to translate that.

Putin looked confused, but shrugged and refilled the glasses. "Mud in your eyes!", he toasted.

I chuckled and replied, "Nostrovia!" This time we did the linked arms toast I remembered from seeing Patton a million times, as a cameraman took some shots. Afterwards I told him that if he were to visit the U.S. in the future, I would make sure to take him to see the orchestra I supported and that way our wives would remain happy. That earned me a laugh.

On the way back to the hotel, Ari looked incredibly relieved. "Happy now, Ari?", I teased.

"You have no idea, Mister President!"

I smirked at him. "Oh ye of little faith ... Ari, I've been doing martial arts since I was 13. I had my first black belt before I even went into the Army. I'd have never have done this if I didn't think I could hold my own. By the way, who told the press? We're going to have to put up with their foolishness on this, aren't we?"

The agent riding with me handed over a folded wad of bills. I grinned at him and said, "Ooh, goodie! I can pay for Christmas presents now!" That got me a laugh. I unfolded the bills and saw they weren't American greenbacks. "Please don't tell me we were betting in rubles."

"Euros, sir."

I handed them back to him. "Good enough. That's hard currency, too. When you get a chance, find a bank, either here or in Tel Aviv, and swap it for dollars. Did you guys get in on the action, too?"

"Yes, sir."

"Excellent!"

Ari looked horrified at all of this. "Please don't tell me you were gambling!"

"I guess I won't tell you, then."

He groaned. "You are going to be the death of me, Mister President."

"Think of the great book you're going to be able to write when you leave the White House! 'I Survived Carl Buckman', by Ari Fleischer. You'll make a fortune!" I replied. Ari simply groaned again.

It wasn't all sweetness and light that night. By the time we got back to the hotel, I had a problem back home. United Airlines had decided that the new FAA requirements were too onerous, and they had a lawyer who told them to fight. They were 'FAA guidelines' and not 'legislation'. In other words, they wanted to delay things and get them watered down or eliminated in Congress. A few campaign contributions would be cheaper than actually preventing another crisis. The new guy at the FAA had bucked it up to Transportation.

I ended up on the phone with the Secretary of Transportation Norm Mineta. "What are these guys up to, Norm? They figure with me halfway around the world they can stop this and present me with a fait accompli when I get back?"

"That's really it in a nutshell, Mister President. Their theory is that the FAA has no authority to order these changes, and they won't accept them without Congress passing a law requiring them to do so. They can delay that to their heart's content.", he answered.

"This is something they already agreed to, right?"

"They would have agreed to butchering babies in Times Square if it could have gotten them flying again after 9-11, Mister President. Now that they see what the bills are, they're balking.", he replied.

"What bills? The anti-missile systems will require Congressional funding. The only thing they have to pay for now is strengthening the cockpit doors.", I said.

"They don't even want to pay for that, sir."

I said something that probably wouldn't go down well in a Presidential memoir. "United is just the front on this. If they can do it, the others will do it, too. We're only talking a few million dollars! Cheap bunch of bastards. All right. Let's see how they like playing in the big leagues. Call Greg Paulson over at the FAA back, and yank their airworthiness certificates, each and every one of them, for every bird in their fleet. Shut the bastards down cold. Now! Tonight! Tell them Greg is doing it on his own authority, and when they go up the ladder to you, back him up. They can complain to me when I get home. Let's see how expensive a complete shutdown is to the dumb bastards. When I get back, I'll play dumb, and then back you up."

I heard his voice catch. "Sir, they might not survive that. Let's be honest. There isn't an airline right now that isn't losing money. Between 9-11, the rising cost of fuel, and the new changes, some of them are hemorrhaging cash!"

"Norm, either you regulate them or they regulate you. That's how we got into this mess in the first place. Shut the sons of bitches down. As soon as we get back we will rush through an airline rescue package. I should have enough votes to ram it through. You and I both know it will be watered down, but we need to set the precedent that safety is more important than what they want.", I told him. "Meanwhile, get your staff together and write a quickie bill to help them. Go talk to the head of the House Transportation Committee, too. We can punch it through when I get back."

"Yes, sir. Understood. Just come back home before I get lynched."

"Thank you, Mister Secretary. I promise I won't pardon anybody if you get lynched. Feel better now?"

"Not particularly, Mister President. Good night.", he answered.

I hung up, smiling. Some industries around the country needed a wakeup call.

Our next day's itinerary went quite well. I don't know whether it was because Putin had taken a fancy to me or not, but he seemed to agree with my thoughts that we didn't need to antagonize each other, and that the radical Muslims needed to be monitored closely. I discussed my plans to create a counterterrorism agency to coordinate this, and suggested that when this happened, I would be interested in inviting Russian participation and help. I stressed that this was an international problem, not just a Russian or American problem. He countered by suggesting that when we created this agency, we could cross-assign agents.

After that we held a joint press conference, with Putin and me standing at twin podiums a few feet apart. We had prepared a very standard press release simply stating we had discussed a number of issues relating to both our mutual relations and concerns over international radical terrorism, and that our talks had been friendly and fruitful. Ari commented rather drily to both of us that none of this really mattered, since the only thing anybody was going to ask about was the judo competition last night. When this was translated into Russian, Vladimir laughed and nodded in agreement.

We started off with my reading a statement and then Vladimir reading a statement similar to the press release. The talks had been friendly and fruitful, and we planned to follow up our discussions over the next few months. Standard blah, blah, blah. Then we went to a question and answer period. As expected, ninety percent of the questions were about our visit to the judo club the other night. Some of them were downright silly. Who was tougher, me or Putin? Why didn't we fight each other? Why didn't my wife attend? Did that mean we were getting a divorce? Was this some sort of 'karate summit'?

I wasn't sure whether it was more hilarious or exasperating. I noticed Putin was getting a little peeved by it all, and not just by the American reporters. He had cultivated a certain persona as a 'fighting man of Russia', fighting and riding and hunting, all shirtless. Now it was biting him in the ass to an extent. Whenever we tried to bring the subject matter back to the actual things we had talked about, they would sidetrack us back. Eventually we ended the press conference and I commiserated with Vladimir back stage. He normally didn't get this much grief. His press was tamer, and Russia was tough on reporters. They printed what you told them to print or they ended up in a ditch somewhere. Investigative journalism was distinctly frowned upon in Mother Russia!

Israel was happily anticlimactic. It was somewhat less formal, and Ariel Sharon made sure to introduce Colin and me to senior people in the Israeli Defense Forces and Mossad, their intelligence organization. For Colin it was probably old hat, but it was new to me. I tried not to sound too stupid and kept my mouth shut. On the plus side, the Israelis had a very positive view about the way we handled Afghanistan and Al Qaeda. They preferred a very direct approach to such things.

I did find out that they were looking for any intelligence they could on Al Qaeda. We had killed a lot of bystanders when we took out their safe houses and city locations, but it seemed that we took out a lot of their senior cadre. Nobody knew yet if we had killed Osama bin Laden, but I vaguely remembered that had happened the first time, too. We never really knew until he eventually began releasing videotapes showing him inciting the faithful to violence. Even then we weren't sure until CIA analysis of the tapes showed they were new, and not just recycled stuff from the past. So far no tapes had surfaced, but it was still early.

On the plus side, there was definite evidence we had given the Taliban a death blow, at least in their current incarnation. The barbaric bastards had lost damn near everybody at senior ministry level and above, and most of the second and third tier players as well. Mullah Omar, the titular head of the Taliban, was confirmed dead in Kabul, along with the rest of the Kabul City Council. The Taliban were attempting to regroup, but they were basically a part of the Pashtun tribe, and were simply the largest minority in a nation of minorities. Otherwise they were a creature of Pakistan's ISI, which used Islamic fundamentalists and extremists to act against India in Kashmir and elsewhere. There were already reports that Pakistan was trying to rebuild them. Joy!

Sharon commented to me at one point that these were the people who invented the saying, 'The enemy of my enemy is my friend.' Also he reminded me that when dealing with Muslims to always remember that they had invented the concept of taqiyya, where it was perfectly legal and moral for them to lie to an infidel if they felt it would advance the cause of Islam. It wasn't hard for them to justify a lie to us for any reason whatsoever.

Regardless, we needed any intelligence assistance we could get, always bearing in mind that the Israelis played a very deep game, juggling their interests against everybody else's, and there were always two or three levels at whatever they were up to.

One thing I mentioned to Colin and a few of the others on the way home was that we also had to take the Israelis with a grain of salt. They were wizards at using the hugely influential American pro-Israel lobby, and loved the current hard right fundamentalist Christian theory called Christian Zionism. Many fundamentalist Christians believed that before Jesus would come back for the Second Coming (and all the various Rapture variations) it was necessary for the Jews to triumph in the Middle East. Only then would Jesus return, the Anti-Christ would be thrown down, and all the unbelievers would be thrown into the Pit. Of course, if things got to that point, the Jews would go into the Pit as well, since they were also unbelievers. The Israelis took a rather tongue-in-cheek approach to all of this. They loved anything that would keep the American crazies firmly on their side, and since they didn't believe in Christianity, the Rapture wasn't real anyway. Ari gave a wry smile and agreed with my commentary.

We landed in Washington late that night and were thoroughly exhausted. I promptly announced I was taking a day off, and Marilyn and I took Marine One back to Hereford. The Veep could call me at the house tomorrow to find out when I planned to come back.

Chapter 146: A Special Broadcast

Monday, December 10, 2001

We had flown back on a Thursday, so I took a long weekend back home to get to know my daughters again. Charlie was at sea again, deployed on the U.S.S. Fort McHenry, which I thought was nicely poetic, since Fort McHenry was in Baltimore. She was a Whidbey Island class gator, just out of dry dock and a lengthy refit, and was going to be at sea for a good six months. He had left right before we flew to England and we wouldn't see him again until late spring.

We had talked before he went to the ship. He had been in now for about two years, and he still didn't know if he wanted to make it a career. It was interesting, and he did like the sense of purpose it gave him, but floating around on a boat with nothing but a bunch of guys was getting old. Also, he was smart enough to know that as my son, he would be limited in his assignments. He still thought himself more an action and outdoors guy than a college kid, and if he left the Corps, he would probably go full time pro in bike racing. He wasn't a little kid anymore, but was talking like a young adult. I asked how it was going with people knowing who his dad was, and I got a grin and a shrug. "It is what it is, Dad. I mean, people know, but nobody makes it a big deal. Nobody is trying to suck up to me, in any case. I'm kind of glad you got me to go in under my middle name, though. At least then I really wasn't known."

"Well, we'll see you again when you get back. Try and call or write your mother! She worries about you..."

"And you don't?", he teased.

I ignored him and went on. " ... and she misses you. When you get back, if you wanted to bring some friends, that would be fine. If you don't want to stay here, you can stay at the place on 30th Street."

The day before we flew home from Tel Aviv, I called Norm Mineta and Greg Paulson and relented on United Airlines. Hopefully they had learned their lesson. Shutting them down had been like a thunderbolt from Mount Olympus, and I had pointedly refused to take any calls on their behalf from any Congressmen or Senators. Once home, however, I gave everyone the go ahead on the Airline Safety and Security Act of 2001, which would provide some loan guarantees and indemnifications. Everyone expected two things, that it would get watered down, and that it would pass quickly. I could deal with that as long as it left the FAA able to demand safety related changes. If that was left intact, I could live with a lot of other Congressional horseshit thrown in.

At Thanksgiving I took a small break and spent a long weekend at home. We still had the girls with us, for at least this year, so we did the big turkey and stuffing routine with all the fixings. I commented to Marilyn that this might be the last time we did this. Next year the twins would be in college, and might not even want to come home. At the same time, once they were out of the house, Marilyn would be moving full time to the White House with me, which I much preferred. We were on the verge of becoming empty nesters in the biggest house in the world! (Okay, that's an exaggeration, but it would still be a big change.)

We were finishing up 2001 and it seemed the nation was still in turmoil about the events of three months ago. Congress had finally gotten around to announcing that hearings would be held after they reconvened in 2002, probably sometime in February. It would be a joint Congressional and Senate hearing, conducted by the Select Committees on Intelligence. I told the leaders that the Administration would cooperate, and that their first witnesses were going to be the Three Amigos. I also told the Three Amigos to make sure they had their report done by then, and I expected some suggestions for the future. I also told John Ashcroft to see if he could get his Special Prosecutor in line with what was going on. If Congress started questioning people at the same time Fitzpatrick was questioning them, was there double jeopardy involved? If one team gave somebody immunity, did it apply across the board? I'm glad I never became a lawyer!

I also told them that if they expected a statement from me, to let the White House Counsel's office know. While I was perfectly willing to make a sworn statement and answer questions, under no circumstances was I going to let them swear me in and go on a witch hunt through my past. Before I ever gave any form of testimony, there were going to be some ground rules.

Meanwhile, while all this was going on, Enron collapsed. I had known it was going to happen, but I couldn't remember the specific date. I also knew that it was just the first of several big name business collapses that could be traced to inadequate regulation and supervision. I gave a speech to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in which I laid the blame for the collapse at the feet of the unfettered laissez faire attitude prevalent among far too many businessmen and political leaders.

"Americans believe, just like you, that capitalism is the best economic system for them and their families. They know that the best chance they have to improve their lives, and the lives of their children and grandchildren, is through capitalism. Even more important to them, however, is a sense of fairness! People think of business as a great game, and they want to play the game! They also know that games have rules! If you throw away the rules, if you throw away the referees, it's no longer a game that people will want to play, but a racket that people will avoid! If you want the respect of your fellow citizens, there must be changes. If you want to keep making money, there must be changes!"

That was just part of it, and the applause was underwhelming. If they didn't like my speech, they were just going to hate the idea that I planned to increase funding for the SEC and the Justice Department. I wasn't at all sure I was going to win this battle, but I was very sure that it was going to cost me and the American Renaissance Initiative a whole lot of money to fight!

Then again, this was going to be just the first of many salvoes across the deck. I had already told Alan Greenspan that I wanted the banking system tightened up. The Federal Reserve is fairly independent, but that didn't mean I didn't have some influence. I told him that I felt that we needed to increase capital requirements on bank reserves, and also to begin running some 'stress tests' on some of the bigger banks. That earned me a few raised eyebrows from the Fed Chairman, but I just reminded him that the 'irrational exuberance' remark that he had used to describe the dot-com bubble, now applied to the housing markets and financial sectors. I would let him face the markets on that one. They liked and respected him; I was just a fucking zillionaire, so what did I know.

On Monday, December 10, we had a rather interesting day. Marilyn and the girls had been down to Washington for the weekend, and we kept the twins out of school for the day, and they stayed in town. We were approaching the mystical hundred day mark in my Presidency, and there were lots of requests for a lengthy interview in the White House with me and the family. I don't know how Ari made his selection, but he settled on an interview with Bob Schieffer of CBS. We would be interviewed in the White House on Monday the 10th, and it would air in a two hour special Sunday night the 16th.

A lot of this was due to the manner in which I became the President. The American system of selecting leaders is screwy, in that the character traits which are best suited to winning elections are not the character traits best suited for being the President. There is no chance in hell I would have ever actually run for President. George Bush pulled me and my $20 million out of total national obscurity and dropped me in the VP slot. If he had his way, after four years he would have put me back into obscurity. Now I was the President, and most of the country didn't know that much about me.

There had been a flurry of reporting back after 9-11, but to most of the nation, they didn't have a real sense of me. I had only hit the national stage four months prior to the election, and aside from the fact that I liked dogs and killed prisoners, they didn't know me. A regular candidate would have been running for at least two years by now, and doing interviews morning, noon, and night in order to keep their name out there. The same could be said of the rest of my family. One of Ari Fleischer's jobs was to let the world know who I was.

The CBS interview would take place in the Map Room, which was on the ground floor of the Residence just off the main reception area. From what I understood, it was named that because FDR used it to track the progress of World War II on maps. It hadn't been used for maps since then and was now just one more of the innumerable cul-de-sacs around the joint. I wandered by on Sunday afternoon and found a few CBS technicians and White House technical types hanging some lights and mirrors on scaffolding. I just hoped they wouldn't fall on us, which actually happened to Bill and Hillary Clinton once. They had already moved out the Chippendale furniture normally in there and brought in a few armchairs and a matching love seat.

We were to be 'on the set' promptly at nine the next morning, and would be there most of the day. There would be times with just me, times with me and Marilyn, and other times with all four of us. Every thirty minutes or so we would break, so I could go back to my regular day job of solving the planet's crises. If it was a big crisis, they would just do Marilyn and the girls. Needless to say, Ari was going to be hovering around nervously in the background the entire time.

I was wearing a light charcoal suit, and Marylyn had on a nice pair of designer jeans with a belted tunic over it. I gave her a little whistle before we got on camera, and she smiled at that. Holly and Molly were in jeans also, along with tank tops. They looked tight to me, but I was told that was the style. Thankfully none of their bra straps were showing. How that became stylish was completely beyond me.

When we showed up the twins decided that Stormy was part of the family and could watch. I wasn't sure how that would work out; she was well behaved and used to being around strange people, but she never met a camera she didn't like. She promptly lay down in a corner and curled up for a nap. We made it through makeup just fine, and we met and talked to Bob Schieffer (I had known him for years and Marilyn had met him at various dinners and parties, but it was the first time for the girls) and they wired us up with our microphones. Then we sat down in the chairs, with Marilyn and me on the love seat, and the twins in the armchairs on my left. Then the lights went on, and Bob began by thanking us for the interview. As soon as that happened, Stormy's ears popped up and she looked around for the cameras. It was show time! She liked this game! It made the opening segment of the show.

Bob: "Mister President, I'd like to thank you and your family for allowing us this glimpse inside the Buckman White House."

Me: "You're quite welcome. It seemed a good time to..." (Stormy trotted over to us and jumped up on the love seat between Marilyn and me.) "Wait ... WHAT! Stormy, what are you ... Oh, Good Lord! Will you get out of here!?"

Holly and Molly started laughing, while Marilyn and I tried to push the gigantic beast off our laps. We were noticeably unsuccessful, and Stormy ended up sitting between us facing the camera.

Me: "Idiotic mutt! Will somebody go get us a soup bone?!" (I looked back to Bob.) "This thing really is a publicity hound, in every meaning of the phrase!"

We had to wait a couple of minutes while somebody scurried off to the kitchens and returned with a big bone, which the kitchen staff made sure we had plenty of. Stormy had made a lot of friends around the place, and they kept a stockpile for her. He handed the bone to Holly, and suddenly Stormy perked up and turned to look at her.

Holly: "Come on Stormy, go get the bone."

Molly: "Go get your bone, girl!"

Me: "It's a nice fresh bone, Stormy, from a nice juicy Democrat!" (Marilyn snorted at that, and Stormy hopped down and took the bone into the corner of the room, off camera.)

Bob: "You feed your dog nice juicy Democrats?" (He was laughing at that.)

Me: "Only when we run out of nice juicy reporters." (Marilyn and the girls giggled at that.)

Bob: "I walked into that one, didn't I?"

Me: "With your eyes wide open!" (More laughter.)

One of the cameras panned out a touch to show Stormy now gnawing her bone quietly in the corner. Then it was back to the interview.

Bob: "Just what kind of dog is Stormy?"

Me: "She's just an American dog, a big hairy mutt. You know how we got her, right, down in that basement in Springboro? She's as mixed a mixed-breed as you can ask for. She's an All-American dog."

Bob: "How do you mean?"

Me: "Well, it seems like every country has its own breed of dog. You have the English bulldog, the French poodle, the German shepherd, so what's the American dog? I would argue that the American dog is a mutt, a mixed breed, because that is what Americans really are."

Bob: "The melting pot as applied to puppies?"

Me: "Exactly! I mean, all I have to do is look at my own family. We're as mixed as you can ask for. My father's side of the family was English and Lutheran. My mother's mother was of German descent and Lutheran, but her father was English, and half Anglican and half Jewish. Marilyn's family is French Canadian and Roman Catholic, but somehow a Scotsman snuck in on her father's side. At our generation it gets worse. My sister married a fellow with a Norwegian and Swedish background, and half of Marilyn's brothers and sisters married Polish-Americans and Italian-Americans."

Molly: "Don't forget Aunt Kelly. She's Irish-American!"

Me: (Nodding towards my daughter and smiling.) "See? Heaven only knows what our kids will end up dragging home someday! Let's face it, all across the country there are families just like ours, with all sorts of heritages. We make it work, we really do, but you sure can't call us pure blooded. We are a mixed breed sort of nation."

Marilyn: "Carl, nobody wants to be called a mutt!"

Me: (I waved her off with a smile.) "I've had mutts my whole life. Good dogs, hardy, healthy, live a long life, loyal ... Lots of positive attributes. I like the melting pot. It's a good thing."

Holly and Molly looked at each other and barked out a couple of 'Woofs!' and we all laughed.

I wasn't quite sure how this was going to end up being edited. Was it all going to be puff pieces, and then get serious, or was it going to be mixed together somehow? We'd have to wait around until Sunday night to find out. I was told by somebody that they would be running ad spots on the special starting this evening.

While Marilyn and the girls were still there, Schieffer decided to ask them a few questions.

Bob: "So, how have you two been adapting to life in the White House?"

Holly: "Okay, so far. I mean, Dad's been in Washington since we were like in the first grade or something, so we've been going back and forth between home and Washington for years."

Molly: "It's a pretty cool place. There are all sorts of different rooms and places. It's like living in a museum. It's kind of weird that way, too, I mean, who lives in a museum?"

Bob: "How much time do you spend here? You actually live in Maryland, correct?"

Molly: "Yes. During the school year we live in Upperco, that's near Hereford, which is where we go to school. We really only come down here every other weekend or so. When Dad was in Congress, he came home most nights. Now it's like every couple of weeks he comes home."

Holly: "Yeah, Upperco is really our home. Once school is out, I know Mom plans to move down here full time. We'll both be in college next year, anyway."

Bob: (Looking at Marilyn.) "Is that the plan? You are going to move to Washington full time once your daughters have left home?"

Marilyn: "Yes. When Carl was in Congress we lived close enough that he could commute, sort of. Carl was able to come home at least every other night and almost every weekend."

Bob: "By helicopter."

Marilyn: "It was a little unusual, but we were able to make it work. We like where we live and like having the kids in school there, and we didn't want to change things too much for them. Things got more complicated when he became the Vice President, but he was still able to get home every few nights. We always had the idea that when the girls left home I would be able to move down here full time."

Bob: (To the twins.) "Where do you plan to go to college?"

Holly: "The University of Maryland, in College Park."

Bob: "Why there? I would think you could go to any college in the country. Why not Harvard?"

Molly: "College Park is just outside of Washington, and has a much better reputation for engineering and science than Harvard. I want to study engineering."

Holly: "Physics."

Bob: "Engineering and physics! Why those fields?"

Molly: (A bit of a perplexed look on her face.) "I don't know why, exactly. Dad was a mathematician and could program a computer, and Charlie was always taking apart his motorcycles and we got to watch him do that. I don't know, but I always wanted to see how things worked. That's what engineers do."

Holly: "Same here, but with a slightly different focus, I guess. I like the science part of it."

Bob: "Somehow I never pictured you two as, I guess you would be called nerds. Somehow it didn't fit the cheerleader image, I suppose. How do you see yourselves?"

Holly: "You can call us nerds, I suppose. Why is that such a bad thing? Mister Gates is a nerd and he invented Microsoft and is the world's richest man, right? Dad's a nerd, and he ended up as the President!"

Molly: "If you think you can live without nerds, just turn off your television and your computer and your lights and your furnace, because without us nerds you are going to be sitting in the dark and being cold! Who do you think invented that stuff?"

Bob: (To me and Marilyn.) "Your daughters are real true believers, aren't they? Did you push them towards the sciences because of your backgrounds?"

Marilyn: "Oh no, absolutely not. That's really not my interest at all."

Me: "No, not really. I'm happy they are interested in science and engineering. I think they are important fields, and I did well with them, but it's really their lives, not mine. I just want them to pick something and do well at it, whatever it is. Charlie, for instance, didn't want anything to do with going to college. We just wanted him to pick something and settle down and do the best he could at it. Marilyn and I can't live their lives for them."

Some of the questions were just for me, and Marilyn and the twins took off for a bit, with Stormy following.

Bob: "We are coming up on your first hundred days in office. For most Presidents that is when you start getting graded on how well you are doing. Is that going to be a good way to gauge the Buckman Presidency?"

Me: "I don't think I've ever thought about it in that regard. I would have to say that most Presidents, when they get sworn in, they have an agenda and legislation already planned, and have been planning the transition for over two months. They can hit the ground running. When I got sworn in, I had none of that. I had a missing President, a nation under attack, a burning Pentagon, and a gigantic hole in lower Manhattan. My agenda has simply been to get things back up and running properly, and to prevent what happened from ever happening again. Do I have an agenda of my own? Yes, I would say that I do, and I've been working on it. I plan on laying out some of it next month during the State of the Union Address. Maybe you should count the hundred days from there."

Bob: "What is that agenda?"

Me: (Smiling.) "Ask me in January."

Bob: "Do you plan to run for reelection in 2004?"

Me: "Ask me next summer."

At that point we took a break while I returned some phone calls. When I returned, Schieffer asked if I would lead him around with a camera on what would be a typical day. That was nothing but puff, so Ari happily agreed to it.

Bob: "So how does your day typically start?"

Me: "Well, I'm normally up sometime around 6:00 or 6:30. I don't think you want to show pictures of me in my bathrobe brushing my teeth. It's not a pretty sight."

Bob: (Laughing.) "I think we can skip that."

Me: "Good idea. Anyway, at that point I usually put on some workout clothes and head down to the basement." (We headed over to an elevator and rode it down to the basement, where I showed the gym.) "I usually do a workout here every other day, and on the days in between I do some martial arts training with some of the Secret Service agents."

Bob: "Do you ever beat them?"

Me: (Laughing.) "Only when they let me. Seriously, I'm good, but these guys are really hard core. I would not want to meet them in a dark alley." (Off to the side I saw a couple of agents smiling at that.) "Some days I head outside and use the pool and swim some laps. That's good exercise for my leg."

Bob: "So you work out every day? What about the First Lady?"

Me: "I certainly try. If I'm on the road, it can be difficult. Marilyn often joins me but she's not quite as serious as I am. She'll play hooky if she can get away with it." (We left and I took him up to the Oval Office.) "After the workout I'll go back upstairs and shower and shave and get dressed. Sorry, no filming that, either. Afterwards, I am down here in the office, and my schedule is pretty much whatever the secretaries and staff tell me I'm doing that day. Plus whatever comes up I need to work on. It never seems to work out quite the way the schedule says it will."

Bob: (Pointing to my desk, where a large metal box with a big red button on it was sitting in the center.) "Is that the button to launch the missiles?" (Laughing!)

Me: (Looking innocent.) "Push it and find out."

Bob: "Seriously?"

I just looked innocent and waved him forward. He pushed the button and suddenly it lit up, flashing bright red, while the sound of a klaxon horn came from the bottom. Bob jumped backwards! I laughed and reached over and hit the button a second time, and the ruckus stopped.

Me: "Right after I got here, a buddy of mine, Marty Adrianopolis, sent me that to lighten things up a bit. The first time I showed it to Frank Stouffer I told him it was a direct line to NORAD and he almost had a heart attack!"

Bob: "You're a cruel man, Mister President." (We both laughed for a moment.) "So, you spend most of your time working in here?"

Me: "A lot of time. If I don't have a lunch meeting, I'll grab a quick sandwich from the kitchen or the Mess. I try to meet with Congressional leaders and members at least once a week, but that's a tough thing to do at times. It's very easy to get caught up in things. I might also be meeting with Cabinet members or my staff. After lunch I'll keep going until dinner. If Marilyn and the girls are here, I'll knock off around six or so, but if I'm a bachelor, which is often, I usually come back here after dinner for an hour or two. After that, I go back up to the Residence."

Bob: "You make it sound rather mundane."

Me: "It is anything but mundane. Things can change, quickly. There's always a problem somewhere. By the time you land in this job, you had better have learned how to prioritize and manage your time."

Bob: "What's the one thing you find most difficult getting used to about the Presidency?"

Me: "Hmmm ... interesting question. I think it's the entire public fishbowl aspect to my life now. Everything I do now, no matter how mundane, has some sort of political aspect to it, and everybody has an opinion on it, and whatever I am doing is always wrong. It's very strange at times"

Bob: "How so? Give me an example."

Me: "Well, take Stormy, for instance. Earlier we were playing with the dog and gave her a bone and whatnot. You filmed it, and while I'm not a reporter, I know a human interest piece when I see one. You're going to run parts of that on Sunday night, right? Well, I can guarantee you that by lunchtime on Monday, the phones are going to be ringing off the hook and the emails and telegrams are going to be pouring in about how I am raising my dog the wrong way. By Monday night the news shows are going to be doing interviews on the subject. Tuesday is going to get worse! The purebred dog lovers are going to complain that the Presidential dog is a mutt, the cat lovers are going to want equal time, the hamster and guinea pig coalition will complain, and PETA is going to demand an end to interspecies slavery or some such nonsense!"

Bob: (Laughing.) "It won't be that bad."

Me: "You just watch! By Wednesday morning the New York Times will have weighed in, called it a scandal, and given it a cute name like Puppygate. By the end of the day, some Congressman is going to demand hearings, on Thursday there will be a call for a Special Prosecutor, and on Friday we'll have the impeachment vote!" (I looked at the camera.) "Guys, give me a break! I'm just playing with my dog!"

Bob: (Still laughing.) "I think you are exaggerating a touch, Mister President."

Me: (Smiling.) "Not by much. You've been in this town for a few years. Ask Ari sometime. One of these days he's going to take some of the letters that get sent here and write a book and make a fortune!"

We broke for lunch, and I took Bob down to the Mess. It's not glamorous but the cafeteria is available to staffers, though they have to pay. Marilyn joined us, since the next segment, after lunch, we were supposed to be together. After lunch, it was back to the Map Room. Thankfully Stormy was with the twins.

Bob: "Before you got into politics you were a very successful investment banker. Would that investment banker approve of the current state of the economy?"

Me: "I was never an investment banker. I was a venture capitalist."

Bob: "What is the difference?"

Me: "Bankers loan money, by definition. We never loaned money. We used our money to buy stocks and options."

Bob: "Would that venture capitalist approve of the current state of the economy?"

Me: (I smiled.) "He would certainly approve of the plans being developed by the current administration."

Bob: "Which we will learn about at the State of the Union Address."

Me: "You got it."

Bob: "What kind of credit rating did you have to have to be a venture capitalist?"

Me: (Giving Schieffer a curious look) "You mean, what was my credit rating?"

Bob: (Wryly smiling) "One of our producers is getting a mortgage and was curious."

Me: (I laughed at that.) "Ha!" (I looked at Marilyn and shrugged.) "You know, I have no idea, really. It's probably lousy."

Bob: (Astonished!) "You have a bad credit rating? How can that be?! You are a billionaire!"

Me: "But that's only part of a credit rating. A big part is your past history at repaying loans. I've never had a loan, so I have no past history to judge if I would pay it back."

Bob: "You've never borrowed money? What about credit cards or car loans?"

Me: "Nope. You have to remember, I got my start investing in the market when I was only 13. Minors can't sign contracts, so it was all done with an account that had my father's name on it along with mine. Everything I did had to be paid for by cash. By the time I was old enough to legally be able to borrow money, I didn't need to. I have an American Express card, but that has to be paid back every month. That's it."

Bob: "I'd like to ask the First Lady a few questions now. Mrs. Buckman, what was going through your head the morning of 9-11? Where were you?"

Marilyn: "I was at home, our home in Hereford. It was a Tuesday morning, and it was a school day, so I had seen the girls off on the school bus..."

Bob: "Excuse me, the school bus!?"

Marilyn: (Smiling.) "We live out in the country, and the girls go to public school. They've been riding the bus to school since they started going to school. I probably shouldn't say this, but they get tailed by the Secret Service. Their friends are on the bus and we didn't want to make the change too big."

Bob: "So you were at home? Did you know what was happening?"

Marilyn: "Not really. I had the news on, the Today Show, while I was putting some clothes in the washer, but I can't say that I was paying any attention. Suddenly the door blows open and all these agents come in and drag me out. I was thrown into a car and we went flying down the road to Hereford High, and we got there just as this gigantic helicopter landed on the soccer field. We drove out to it, and I just had enough time to see the girls being run out of the school. Then we were flown to Fort Meade, and taken somewhere there."

Bob: "Did anybody tell you what was happening?"

Marilyn: "Sort of. I got some of it when we were driving to the high school, and more when we were on the helicopter. Nobody would tell me what had happened to Carl, though, and that was what really frightened me. We didn't hear from him until after he was made the Acting President, maybe early afternoon sometime."

Bob: "So you were at home doing the wash?"

Marilyn: "It won't get done on its own, and Carl sure doesn't help! Neither do the girls, for that matter."

Me: "Hey, I was in Florida. It wasn't like I could rush home to empty the dryer, you know."

Bob: "I'm just surprised you don't have somebody to do that sort of thing."

Me: (Marilyn and I looked at each other and I shrugged.) "You want to answer that?"

Marilyn: "You can."

Me: "Very early on, we decided we wanted our children to have as normal a life as we could manage. Yes, I am extremely wealthy, and I could have servants follow them around to do whatever they wanted, but that's just a lousy way to raise kids. At our home in Hereford we simply try to raise them like the normal middle class kids we started out as. We don't have servants. We cook our own meals. The kids all have chores. They go to school like their friends. Someday they are going to have to do these things on their own, so they better get used to it now. We know it's not perfect. The kids are smart, and they know that Dad doesn't have your everyday job, but we try."

Marilyn: "I am a stay-at-home mom. I want to be there when they go to school and I want to be there when they get off the bus in the afternoon. The last year has been a bit strange. When Carl was in Congress, I often went over to his office in Westminster and worked as an intern, but Cheryl is the Congresswoman now, and I don't want to stick my nose in. I also spend some time helping out with the PTA and Our Lady of Grace, that sort of thing. We try to stay grounded."

Bob: "I don't see you running off to the grocery store."

Marilyn: (Sighs.) "No, not anymore. It wasn't too bad when Carl was the Vice President. Nobody really pays attention to you then, but it's very difficult now. I am almost trapped at the house. I'm going to be glad when the girls go to college and I can move to Washington with Carl."

Bob: "Are you going to have the girls do chores here?"

Me: "No, I think that would be a bit much."

We talked a bit more about what happened on 9-11, and Marilyn's role. She was a much lower key First Lady than some of her predecessors. On the other hand, after eight years of the 'Bill and Hillary Show', I think the nation would be happy with a low key First Lady!

Bob: "You are far and away the richest man who has ever been President. You used to commute to work in your own helicopter, and you own a jet and a beach front estate in the Bahamas. That's not really a middle class household."

Me: (Shrugging.) "I was certainly born middle class, maybe upper middle class, just like Marilyn. I never really set out to become rich. I knew when I was young that I was going to have to support myself, that I wouldn't be getting any help from my family. So you start out thinking, I just need to make enough to go to college. Then you figure, I just need to make sure my kids can go to college, and I can afford to pay for my daughters' weddings. Then it just got bigger."

Bob: "How so?"

Me: "Well, I remember how, right after I got out of the Army, and I was worth about forty or fifty million, and I took Marilyn on a second honeymoon, a nice private resort in the Bahamas. Anyway, we both really liked it, and I just told her casually, not really thinking about it, that if she liked it, some day I could buy a place like that for her."

Marilyn: "I remember that! I asked if you were serious and you were like, I guess so, but I would really need to be worth about $100 million or so."

Me: "That's right. So, that became my next goal. After that, it was to be able to buy a plane. That was my reason to become a billionaire. It's not just about how much you have. It's not just a scorecard. It's what you can do with the money. It's just a tool. I have a few toys, that's true, but I give away to charity every year more than I could ever spend on planes and helicopters and such."

Bob: "You are in the Forbes Top 10 for American wealth. You are certainly the richest American to become President."

Me: "You know, I'm not quite sure of that. Oh, I agree that in absolute dollar figures that is undeniably true. Still, we have had some awfully rich Presidents. Washington was extremely wealthy, and what was his share of the American economy of the period, compared to my share of the economy now? What effect has inflation had? If you look at Mount Rushmore, you are looking at some pretty wealthy guys. Washington, Jefferson, and Roosevelt were all quite wealthy, and while Lincoln was born in a log cabin, he became a very successful trial lawyer and married the daughter of a wealthy man. He really wasn't hurting either. This is one of those questions we'll have to wait for some economics grad student to figure out."

Bob: "You said you weren't expecting any help from your family. Why is that? When did you realize that?"

I glanced over and saw that Holly and Molly had snuck into the back, so they were going to hear this stuff. I sighed. They would see it on television Sunday night regardless.

Me: (Sighing.) "I learned as a very young teenager that I was a considerable disappointment to my family. To them I was a failure, and they would not support a failure. If I was going to make my way in the world, it would not be with their assistance."

Bob: (With considerable surprise.) "How can you say you were a failure!? By all accounts you were a prodigy in science and mathematics. By the age of 14 you were being published in scientific journals. At 16 you were attending college. You were a millionaire by the time you were 18. That sounds like anything but a failure!"

Me: "To most normal families, that would be very true. My parents ... my mother had a vision of me emulating my father. I was to do exactly what he did, go to his college, become an engineer like him, work for a big company like him, settle down, live in the suburbs, marry a nice girl and have 2.3 children, everything just like my father. Unfortunately, I learned very early on that I had no interest in that sort of life. In my mother's eyes, and thus my father's eyes too, that made me a failure."

Bob: "They were that controlling?"

Me: "Quite. I remember when I was 14 telling them I planned to become a mathematician, and my mother was so distressed that she ordered my father to punish me, as if she thought she could have him beat some sense into me or something."

Bob: "Can you give me an example?"

Me: "One of my earliest memories, from when I was five or six, was when we made Valentine's Day cards in school. That must have been kindergarten or first grade, I suppose. Anyway, I had a word misspelled on the card. When I gave it to my mother, she gave me a lesson in spelling and then sent me to my room to write the words twenty times. I became a very good speller."

Bob: "That sounds crazy. You were punished for giving your mother a Valentine's Day card?"

Me: "No, I was punished for poor spelling. The card was not important to her. It was expected that I would give her a card, so when I gave her a card I had fulfilled that expectation. It was similar when I was in junior high and high school. If I came home with straight As, it was expected, and you don't praise when somebody does what you expect of them. Praise would have required something better than straight As; I have no idea what. Instead I was ordered to do better on the next report card, and then scolded for not having straight As when I was younger."

Bob: "Your sister has been quoted as saying that you suffered abuse from your parents. Is that true?"

Me: (Grimacing.) "I think that's a little overstated. It wasn't like they were whipping me with chains in the basement. It was simply that they had a very regimented view of how our lives were supposed to be. There was only one proper path to becoming a proper adult Buckman. My brother and I were to follow that path, and there were to be no exceptions. They took a carrot and stick approach, only without the carrot. It was sort of logical, in a bizarre way. You were praised if you behaved better than expected, and got spanked with an oak paddle if you behaved worse. However, since the expected behavior was perfection, and you could never be better than perfect, you were never praised, but only got spanked."

Bob: "And you got spanked. How big was the paddle?"

Me: (Holding my hands about a foot apart or so.) "About like this. I got hit probably every other day. When I hit 13 I told them to stop, or I'd leave home. Dad stopped, but Mom never really agreed to that. By the time I was 14, though, I was too big for her to hit."

Bob: (To Marilyn.) "Did you know about this?"

Marilyn: "Not directly, but by the time I met Carl we were halfway through our freshman year at college, or my freshman year - Carl was already a junior by then. Still, I knew that he had moved out of his home and had been supporting himself since he was 16. I did meet his family once on a visit to his home, and it was pretty horrid. I never went back. I've talked to his sister, Suzie, and she pretty much backed up everything he ever told me, or you just now."

Bob: (To me, again.) "Your brother was a paranoid schizophrenic, and your mother has been diagnosed with severe episodic depression." (I nodded at this.) "Have you ever been treated for, or suffered from mental illness?"

Me: (Sitting bolt upright in surprise.) "Now, that's a very interesting question, isn't it? I don't think anybody has really asked me that before. The answer is no. I have never sought treatment or been recommended for any treatment, nor have I ever had any signs or symptoms of mental illness. Yes, my brother and mother have had problems, but my father and sister never did, nor have any other members of my family, as far as I know. I can't say for sure, since I haven't seen any of them since I was 22."

Bob: "So, no depression."

Me: "Nothing clinical. Have I ever been depressed? If you take that to mean sad, then I have certainly been sad in my life, as we all have. There have been many sad times in my life. That doesn't mean I ever needed medication or counseling."

Bob: "What have been the most depressing times of your life?"

Me: (Glancing at Marilyn.) "Hmmm. Being forced out of the Army was depressing. I had already decided to go career at that point, and instead I was thrown out and a cripple to boot. It seemed that way, anyway. A few years later, when we had a madman stalking Marilyn, and it turned out to be my brother, and I had to shoot him – that was a very bad time, almost half a year." (Marilyn reached over and took my hand in support, and gave it a good squeeze.) "I think the worst time we had was when we were in a terrible car wreck a few years later. Marilyn was pregnant and almost died, and we lost the baby, and she couldn't have any more children. That was very bad, for both of us. I had been driving and I blamed myself for a long time, but it wasn't really my fault, it was just bad weather and icy roads, an accident." (Looking at Marilyn.) "Were those the worst times? For you?"

Marilyn: "Mostly. I wasn't too worried when you left the Army. I knew you'd bounce back. When your brother was stalking me, I wasn't so much depressed as I was scared. The worst was definitely when we lost the baby."

Bob: "How did you get through that? That sounds pretty much like depression to me."

Me: (Shaking my head.) "We get through our problems like most everybody else does. We had each other, and we had friends. Just because you're sad, it doesn't mean you need to take a pill. We had each other. No matter what happens, we have each other." (I brought my wife's hand up to my lips and kissed the back of it.)

Holly and Molly were brought back and took their places. I think hearing about some of this was a little sobering to them. Then things got a little screwy. He decided to have some fun with the girls.

Bob: (To the twins.) "Who's the better cook, Mom or Dad?"

Holly: "Oh, Dad, for sure!"

Molly: "Yeah, he's great!" (Marilyn was looking rather peeved at this.)

Me: "Might I remind the pair of you that Christmas is only a few weeks away, and that your mother is in charge of presents."

Holly: (Looking at Molly suddenly.) "Uh, actually, Mom is much better as a cook!"

Molly: "Yeah, Dad is awful!"

Marilyn: (She snorted at this and rolled her eyes.) "Give me a break!"

Me: (Crossing my arms.) "Might I also remind you two that while your mother is in charge of selecting presents, I am in charge of paying for them!"

Molly: "They're about equal." (Holly simply nodded.)

Me: "See? Who says you can't get a bipartisan outcome in Washington!"

Bob: (Laughing.) "So which is tougher, dealing with twin teenage daughters or dealing with Congress?"

Me: "Two teenage daughters or 535 Congressmen and Senators ... hmmmm ... Let me get back to you on that." (More laughter.)

Marilyn snorted some more and wagged her finger at me and the twins. Then Schieffer switched subjects.

Bob: (To the twins.) "Have your parents ever told you how they met? I've heard a lot of different stories."

Holly: (Her face lighting up and grinning.) "No! What'd you hear!?"

Molly: "This ought to be good." (Marilyn and I were looking at each other, perplexed.)

Bob: "I've heard several different things. They met at a bar. They met at a party. There was a duel, a bar fight. Your father won your mother in a drinking game. What's the real story?"

Molly: "A duel!?"

Holly: "This we have to hear!"

I started laughing and buried my face in my hands while Marilyn protested her innocence. After a moment, I looked up and just shook my head.

Me: "Dare we tell them the truth? Do you think they are old enough to hear what really happened, all the sordid details?"

Marilyn: "You can behave!"

Me: "Okay, here's what really happened, the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God!" (My wife groaned at that point.) "We met in January or February at a party at my frat house at Rensselaer."

Bob: "What kind of a fraternity was it?"

Me: (Grinning.) "Have you ever seen Animal House?"

Bob: "Yes."

Me: "We could have given them lessons."

Marilyn: "That's not something to be proud of!" (Wagging a finger at me.)

Me: (Shrugging) "So, anyway, I was one of the bartenders..."

Holly: "You were a bartender?! Cool!"

Me: (Looking at Bob.) "I'm the President of the United States, and they think the cool thing is that I used to sling beer in a frat house! Good grief!" (Back to the girls.) "Anyway, it was the first party of the spring semester, I remember that much, and your mother came to the party and came up to me and I served her some punch. Then I asked her to dance."

Molly: "What was in the punch?"

Marilyn: "Never you two mind!"

Me: (Snorting in laughter.) "Punch. Leave it at that. Anyway, later on, one of the other guys at the party started hitting on your mom, and she wanted to stick with me. He was getting pretty nutty, and I didn't want a fight, so I got him to challenge me to a duel."

Bob: "So there really was a duel?"

Me: "Sort of. I wasn't going to fight the guy, so after he challenged me, I got to choose the weapons, and I chose flaming shots."

Marilyn: (Groaning.) "That was one of the stupidest things I have ever seen you do!"

Bob: (Laughing.) "What is a flaming shot?"

Me: (Looking at the camera.) "Kids, do not do this at home. This is for professionals only." (Back to Bob.) "I am going to get in so much trouble over this. Okay. I set up a pair of shot glasses, filled them to the brink with Southern Comfort, and set them on fire. First guy to down his wins. He chickened out, I drank both, and I won the girl. End of story. We've been together ever since."

Holly : "This is so cool!"

Bob: (Laughing, to Marilyn.) "Is that true? Is that how it happened?"

Marilyn: "Yes, I am ashamed to say, that is precisely how it happened. I am simply going to say that I was young and naïve at the time."

Me: "You were impressed, admit it!"

Marilyn: (Smiling.) "Never!"

On the other side of the cameras I could see Ari and Frank laughing. Great! This was going to be all over the White House long before Sunday. Then it got worse!

Bob: "What was it about the First Lady that attracted you to her?"

Me: "Well, the obvious thing to start out with, she was pretty hot..." (I held my hands up to protect myself from her.) "You still are, so don't hit me!" (Back to Bob.) "That only goes so far, though. After I got to talking to her, I found that inside is simply a good person, with a good heart, and that's what I found truly attractive. It didn't take me long, not long at all, to realize there was a piece missing inside of me, a hole in my soul, that I didn't even know about, and that Marilyn had that piece of me."

Holly: (To Molly.) "I think I'm going to be sick."

Marilyn: "You two can shush!"

Bob: "What about you, Mrs. Buckman? What was it that attracted you to the President?"

Marilyn: "Well he wasn't the President then! Carl was ... it's hard to put into words. He was a big guy, much bigger than me, and almost sort of cute..."

Me: "Almost sort of cute?!"

Marilyn: "Behave. You've said yourself you have a face made for radio! Anyway, Carl had more a sense of power and presence, a sense of confidence. Probably the thing I remember most about him was how he made me feel safe, how nothing could ever get to me without having to go through him. Long before he ever told me that he loved me, he told me he would protect me. It doesn't sound romantic, but it was."

Bob: "Did the President have a pickup line he used on you?"

Marilyn: (Laughing.) "Yes!"

Me: "No! I didn't have a pickup line! Did I?"

Marilyn: "It was so bad! I asked who you were, and you answered, 'Oh, darling, I am your Daddy's worst nightmare!' Oh, that was so bad!" (Laughing!)

Holly: "Daddy! That's awful!"

Molly: "Pretty cheesy, Dad!"

Me: (Laughing.) "Did I really say that?" (Marilyn nodded.) "Hey, it was almost thirty years ago. It worked, right? That's what counts!"

Bob: "I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt on this one, Mister President. I don't think it's anything worse than I used when I was that age."

Me: "Thanks."

Bob: "Back during the election, quite a few women reported that they had dated Carl Buckman before he met you. How did you feel about that?"

Marilyn: (Smiling.) "Oh, I know about them. I've met quite a few, in fact."

Bob: (Shocked.) "You have?"

Marilyn: "Oh, yes! That was back in high school and before. We only live about thirty minutes from his high school. We've been to several reunions. We get together and compare notes." (It was my turn to groan!)

Bob: "Really? What did they have to say?"

Before I ever had a chance to shut my wife up, out it came!

Marilyn: "He was a popular date. They used to call it the Carl Buckman Experience!"

Me: (Blood draining from my face.) "I can't believe you said that!"

Holly: "That is so disgusting!"

Molly: "I think I am going to barf!"

Me: "Somebody please shoot me!"

Marilyn: "Oh, behave, the bunch of you."

I was facing a lifetime of Saturday Night Live jokes! They actually had to shut down for a few minutes while everybody stopped laughing. Ari and Frank were laughing so hard the tears were coming. The girls kept repeating how it was so disgusting, and Marilyn wasn't helping when she asked them how they thought they got here.

I knew it was going to get worse!

Chapter 147: State of the Union

Tuesday, January 29, 2002

I was right, of course. It was going to get worse, a lot worse! By Sunday night everybody in the White House, and seemingly half of Congress, knew about 'The Carl Buckman Experience.' All week long CBS was running blips and teasers from the interview, and I knew that little segment was going to be a big piece of it.

Ari was a little more even on it, surprisingly. Yes, it was going to be a bit embarrassing (A bit? You think!?) but was it really that bad a thing to be known as a great lover? I just groaned at that. I began getting grief about it well before the broadcast, because somebody from CBS got in touch with Marty Adrianopolis and asked him about the party where Marilyn and I met. Then he was asked if he had ever heard about the Carl Buckman Experience. I gather they didn't get a great interview because he was laughing too hard to answer the questions. Afterwards he called me and gave me a major ration of shit on the whole thing.

I went home that weekend to watch it. Sunday night the special ran from 8:00 to 10:00, and even before the show was over the phone was ringing off the hook. At one point I had Tusker on my cell phone, Suzie on the house phone, and Tessa on Marilyn's cell phone. Meanwhile the girls were on both their phones. Marilyn was laughing and the girls were making gagging noises. Tusker told me I deserved whatever happened to me. What a friend!

The Monday morning press briefing was a lengthy and hilarious exercise in futility. Ari ordered me, under pain of arrest by the Secret Service, not to be anywhere near the Press Room, and the agent nearest me damn neared died laughing. Ari got hit with all sorts of questions and could barely keep a straight face throughout it. He was hit with the expected questions about what the 'Experience' involved ("You'll need to ask the First Lady that one.") along with questions about whether the White House was getting complaints about how I played with Stormy ("Yes.") Some fellow out in LA named Cesar Millan was calling himself the Dog Whisperer and was telling people how bad I was at raising a dog. PETA tried to organize a protest out in front of the White House.

The list of complaints was endless. Native Americans, anti-immigration groups, and pro-immigration groups began arguing about the melting pot and whether I was a racist – somebody took the comment about 'Heaven only knows what our kids will end up dragging home someday!' as somehow insensitive and racist. Mothers Against Drunk Driving complained about underage drinking ("It wasn't underage in 1974." – that went nowhere!) Donald Wildmon, a preacher who ran a 'family values' group complained about my lewd and lascivious behavior and ran down fraternities as houses full of drunken hooligans! (Ari's response? "I asked the President about that, and he told me that was why he joined!") Drug companies were complaining that since I wasn't an expert in psychology I obviously didn't know how wonderful their pills were. It seemed as if I had spent the entire two hours offending the entire nation.

Meanwhile, the late night comics had been granted a gift from the gods! On the Daily Show, Jon Stewart ran an experiment setting booze on fire (He actually did two flaming shots, like I had done. His judgment? "Holy [bleeped.] He's one tough son of a [bleeped!]") One night he put Stephen Colbert in a dog suit and labeled him their 'Senior Canine Correspondent'. Leno brought out Santa Claus and a couple of good looking actresses in sexy elf costumes; Santa put me on the Naughty list, while the elves put me on the Nice list. Letterman made the Experience a Top 10 List, straight from the home office in Omaha, Nebraska.

It culminated on Saturday, December 22. Saturday Night Live started the show off with the Carl Buckman Experience. Forget Santa Clause! They had a Christmas present from the President of the United States! Darrell Hammond was the designated Carl Buckman impersonator. He had already done Bill Clinton, and Will Farrell had been doing George Bush. Darrell was the closest to looking like me, I guess, as long as he put some sort of skull cap on with thinning hair. He had done a few bits on me, but hadn't been too tough, since 9-11 was only a few months ago, and it was too raw to make fun of me bombing the Afghans in response. There had been one segment of me firing everybody I met one day, done shortly after I got rid of Dick Cheney.

The show opened in a replica of the Oval Office. It was late and 'I' was meeting with Tina Fey. I was behind my desk and she was sitting in front of it, playing the part of a Congresswoman. I was arguing for her to support my position, while she was refusing to support me.

Darrell: "What can I do get you to support the bill, Congresswoman?"

Tina: "I am sorry, Mr. President, but I just can't do it."

Darrell: "Nothing at all? Are you sure?"

Tina: "My mind is made up, sir."

Darrell: "This is critical, Congresswoman!"

Tina: "No, Mister President, I won't change my mind!"

Darrell: "Then I have no other choice. You'll just have to receive the Carl Buckman Experience!"

With that a large red button rose magically up through the desk. He pushed it, and suddenly the lights began to dim. Overhead speakers dropped down and "Love Is In The Air" began to play. A disco ball dropped down and colored lights began sparkling. A Murphy bed dropped down from the wall. Darrell stood up from behind the desk, and it was apparent he had been sitting there in boxer shorts with hearts on them.

The camera began to pull back, moving backwards through an open door flanked by two 'Secret Service agents' who closed the door and stood there stone-faced. From behind the door could be heard loud sounds of passion. After about thirty seconds the door opened and Tina Fey came through, her hair messed up and her lipstick smudged, her blouse half buttoned, and carrying her high heels in her hands. She was panting, and gasping out, "You have my vote, President Buckman, but first ... LIVE FROM NEW YORK, IT'S SATURDAY NIGHT!"

Marilyn was dying of laughter while this was going on. We didn't normally watch the show, but I knew something was bound to happen. The next morning the Sunday morning talk shows made hay out of this. John Boehner, who was on ostensibly to talk about the Airline Safety and Security Act and was known to be a friend of mine, was asked if he knew about the Experience and if it had ever been necessary for me to use it. He just started laughing and said, "Not with me! Maybe you should ask one of the lady Congressmen or Senators." Barney Frank, the openly gay Massachusetts Congressman who was talking on another show about financial reform, reported that I wasn't his type in any case, and they needed to ask some of the ladies on Capitol Hill. Finally, Frank Stouffer, who was appearing on behalf of the airline bill, upon being questioned about it by Tim Russert, admitted that when Marilyn and I went on our next vacation the Oval Office was to be remodeled to include a disco ball and a Murphy bed.

Wonderful!

On the plus side, and it was the only plus side I could find, Marilyn's reputation soared! She had come across as funny and loving and a good wife and mother. Most First Ladies have higher approval ratings than their husbands (with the exception of Hillary) and Marilyn was going to be no different. By the time we left on our Christmas vacation, the networks were clamoring for interviews just with her.

The Christmas vacation was a disaster. One year ago I had been a simple Congressman, the Vice President Elect. We had a Secret Service detachment, but it wasn't too big, and we had used my Gulfstream, first to go to Utica and see Marilyn's family and drop off the girls, and then to fly to Nassau. Nobody gave a shit. Now, one year later, I was the President of the United States of America, and they don't just take vacations!

On Sunday, December 23, we flew in Air Force One to Griffiss Airport in Rome, New York. This was an old SAC base which had been shut down, and was being considered to replace the Oneida County Airport in Oriskany. They actually sent a crew up there to reactivate the tower and runway ahead of time. No little visit this, I was greeted by the Governor of New York and the Mayor of Rome, despite my request that I didn't need any formality. Then it was off in the limo to the Radisson in Utica, where I was greeted by the Mayor of Utica. WKTV covered both locations. We probably were renting out half the Radisson. We debated visiting Marilyn's family at their home on the Parkway, but that would just be crazy. We dined on room service that night.

The next morning, Christmas Eve, we went over to the house. Security was over the top! It had snowed overnight, and some of our nephews decided to toss some snowballs at Aunt Marilyn and Uncle Carl; one agent actually began to reach for his gun and stopped in time to keep from shooting our relatives. That was just a sign of things to come. An advance team had come through and ordered everybody off the street, and somebody had complained to Harriet, who complained to Marilyn, who complained to me. Shit flows downhill, I guess. I ordered the Secret Service to lighten up. They simply were not set up to handle the giant family coming and going. We had agents patrolling around the yard, an agent at each door, checklists of who was invited ... one of our nieces decided to bring over her boyfriend and they almost didn't let him in.

The only thing remotely amusing was that the Lieutenant Commander with the football parked himself in the downstairs family room, where he was found by some of the littlest kids. They found it fascinating that he had a briefcase handcuffed to his wrist, and the little girls promptly decided to have a tea party with him. I wandered through at one point to find him sitting in his shirtsleeves drinking fake tea with a pair of four-year-olds. I told him he was having more fun than I was.

It became too much. Nobody was enjoying themselves, and by mid-afternoon we had apologized and gone back to the Radisson. We managed to have dinner in the restaurant, which got us a lot of stares. By that time the Observer Dispatch had a reporter tailing us, too. After dinner we called Marilyn's parents and apologized for the foolishness. We couldn't put them through this! We passed the word to the 89th and cut short our visit by a day. We dropped our daughters off with their grandparents, along with their detachment (a shitload smaller than ours!), and flew to the Bahamas on Christmas Day.

It was the first time we had been there as President and First Lady. I knew they had upgraded the security when I became the Vice President, and that must have been adequate. I didn't see anything obvious about the changes, although we had more of a permanent staff. Also, the Coast Guard cutter off the beach had been replaced with an Arleigh Burke class destroyer. The Prime Minister greeted us at the airport, but we told him to go back to his family and then call us in a couple of days. He refused, and insisted that we come by Government House in the morning and join him in watching the Junkanoo, the Boxing Day parade. We didn't have a reason not to, so we agreed to visit and participate. We had seen the parade a few times over the years, but it was the first time we would see it with such an important guide. We also agreed to a small dinner, and invited him and his wife to Hougomont in return.

I told Marilyn that next year we would stay home. This was simply too much.

Marilyn was still teasing me about the Carl Buckman Experience, so as soon as we got to Hougomont and were alone, I undressed her and tossed her clothing in the closet. All she was allowed to wear was a long silk robe. She protested some, but not too hard. The next morning she did protest when I made her attend the Junkanoo commando style, in a long halter topped sundress.

This turned out to be a remarkably short-lived idea. It turns out that even on vacation I am surrounded by advisers and people who have to see me right away. I had the National Intelligence Officer every morning with the Daily Brief, Deputy Chief of Staff Frank Stouffer, Deputy Communications Director (Ari had picked a guy from the Cato Institute to back him up) Will Brucis, Secret Service agents, and so forth. Marilyn tried hiding in the bedroom the first time somebody barged in, but after that she just laughed and got dressed while I grumbled. So much for romance, or any facsimile thereof.

We flew back to Washington New Year's Day and spent the night on our own, and the next day the twins flew down on an Air Force C-20, a Gulfstream much like mine. It's a damn good thing I'm rich. The rules are such that since it isn't fair for the taxpayers to have to pay for the President's vacations and travel, he has to pay for his trips – on Air Force One! However, if he can come up with any sort of excuse – giving a speech or 'foreign relations' or 'fact finding' – he doesn't. That's why, no matter where they go, Presidents always give a speech. As a result, every time I flew home to Hereford, or Marilyn and the girls flew around, I footed the bill. At least I didn't have to pay for all the support personnel and Secret Service agents. Since they were all required by Federal law to accompany us, the taxpayers paid for them. As it was, I suspected that being the President was going to cost me a damn sight more than they paid me, and since my paycheck was going to the American Red Cross, the experience was going to cost me dearly.

And then it was back to work. My next big project was going to be the State of the Union Address. This was scheduled for Tuesday, January 29, which had already been selected by George Bush before his untimely demise. I could change it, since there is no specific Constitutional date for the Address. Theoretically I could have simply mailed it to them. The Constitution simply states that 'He shall from time to time give to Congress information of the State of the Union and recommend to their Consideration such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient.' From Jefferson through Taft the Presidents simply sent a report to Congress and had a clerk read it into the record. Wilson revived the practice of making a speech, and I suspect if I tried to mail it in I would probably be impeached.

In practice, the State of the Union is supposed to lay out for Congress and the public the President's themes for legislative action through the coming year. In between the soaring rhetoric and grandiose pomposity, you need to highlight the various things you want to accomplish in the next twelve months. Some Addresses have worked out better over the years. Some Presidents used it as a grab bag, throwing all their plans into the hopper, stunning everybody with their overblown interests, most of which would be ignored or go down in flames. In the hyper partisan Clinton and Obama eras you occasionally had half the Congress standing and cheering while the other half sat there in stony silence or even heckled. By all accounts, the best Addresses were those in which you chose only three or four themes and hammered those alone.

The first theme was the easy one, at least in picking it out. It was only four months since the 9-11 attacks. People wanted to hear how I was going to personally hold their hands and protect them from evil. I needed to outline my plans to increase security and improve intelligence. In this I was outlining my plans for a new counterterrorism center (already under operation via an Executive Order) as well as mentioning the about-to-be completed report by the Three Amigos. We would also need to raise spending on preparedness and security, and at least change some priorities. Of course none of this would affect civil liberties, or at least so I told people. In reality, probably somewhat. On the other hand, I didn't want to say out loud what I was really thinking, that some fancy new weapons programs would need to be cut to pay for some of this. Congress might not like approving new weapons programs, but it hated cutting them, since the manufacturers would spread the subcontracting across as many Congressional districts as they could, and nobody wanted to be seen cutting jobs. Tom Ridge and I were going to have to sit down for this.

So, what was left? Defense was number one on the list, but what would be number two, or three, or four? Anything beyond that would be simply wishful thinking, and probably counterproductive. The only thing I could figure was along the lines that a strong defense required a strong economy. We were already heading into recession, much as I had pointed out with Paul O'Neill months ago. Unfortunately, the last thing you really want to do during a recession is get Congress involved. Recessions are part of the regular business cycle, boom and bust. It had been a number of years since the last major correction, and we were due. Economists know it, businessmen don't like it, politicians don't understand it. What politicians understand is campaign contributions and votes. They understand that when campaign donors and voters complain, they have to do something to show they are concerned and are fixing the problem.

As a general rule, they almost always end up doing the wrong thing. Recessions are nature's way of saying the economy was overheated, and now we are taking a breather. For instance, everything is going great guns, but wages are rising too fast and interest rates are getting too high. At some point the economy collapses, some people lose their jobs and some companies go out of business, things calm down, interest rates and wages drop to a point where they make economic sense, and people get new jobs and new companies are formed. It's painful, but it happens, and in general things will be better after than before. Every time a bubble collapses, there is a fundamental reason it failed. Meanwhile, there are certain things that can be done to alleviate the problem. The Federal Reserve can fiddle with interest rates and bank requirements and the money supply, and the Fed is fairly quick to respond to problems. Congress, on the other hand, is anything but quick and is usually pretty ham-handed when it does get involved. A typical response to a recession is that everybody hoots and hollers for six months before passing some sort of stimulus bill. Nine times out of ten, the stimulus is for the wrong part of the economy, and by the time it passes, the recession has peaked, and we are now stimulating a growing economy. The other typical choice Congress makes is to decide to cut spending just as the economy starts tanking normally, thereby aggravating the recession.

Now we were going into a recession. As such, there was no reason it would be a killer, but it would be uncomfortable, and there would be loud cries that we needed to do something. That was a given, and if I didn't handle that, somebody in Congress would, and not necessarily to the betterment of the nation. Still, there are good ways to goose the economy with government spending and bad ways. One of the bad ways is to simply cut taxes or give people checks; the money is used to either pay off credit cards (debt reduction) or is spent buying things (consumption.) Debt reduction is a good thing, but generally is only temporary. Most of the consumption goes overseas, as payments on oil or finished products – does Wal-Mart actually sell anything made in America? Good ways to spend on the economy require a longer term view. The best ways to spend would be infrastructure and research. Fill some potholes and fund some R&D projects. The money tends to stay in America and you get a much better bang for your buck. So, to fight the recession, let's invest in America, and send Congress a spending bill to do so, and make that a point in the speech.

What else do I talk about? I don't know who said it first, but it really applied here. Never let a perfectly good crisis go to waste! We had a crisis, and I needed to milk that sucker for all it was worth. I had a golden opportunity to do it, too. What I could do was dust off some of George Bush's ideas, fix them so they weren't as fucked up, and ram them through. In so doing I would be appealing to the newest Republican icon, St. George of Bush. Dust off his ideas, tweak them, wrap them in a mantle of compassionate conservatism, hoist an American flag over them, and away we would go! All I had to do was hold my nose.

It wasn't that outlandish an idea. I had high popularity right now and a lot of credibility from destroying the Taliban and Al Qaeda. That translated into political capital, which I could spend on various votes and projects. The same had occurred with George on my first trip. Unfortunately he wasted his on various horrendous efforts, setting up Homeland Security and the Transportation Safety Administration, neither of which was all that popular, and dragging the nation into a couple of losing wars. He drove a stake through his heart during Hurricane Katrina. By the end of his administration, he couldn't get Congress to agree that the sky was blue, let alone give him what he wanted.

Case in point – immigration reform. George had proposed his DREAM Act in 2001, but had then allowed it to dither around while he focused on other things. It was a great idea, but he lost focus and it died slowly and painfully. It never did get passed under any subsequent President, either. Dust it off, push it hard, and keep repeating, "We need to do it for President Bush!" Then throw in the idea that by controlling our borders, we were fighting terrorism, and the whole thing would make us safer. It needed to be done.

What I needed to do in this speech was to canonize my predecessor, and wrap what needed to be done in his mantle. If I could only figure a way to have his image smiling down at me from above, I would be all set. So, there we were – counterterrorism and security, infrastructure, research, immigration. At that point start feeding it to Matt and Mike, and get them to start writing. We weren't just going to polish that turd, we were going to fucking gold plate the son of a bitch!

A big question at these speeches is who I will invite as my guests. Marilyn and the girls would be there, of course, and I knew Charlie was thankful he was out at sea, because otherwise he would be with them also. I had to give my staff some names and suggestions very early on, weeks before the speech in fact, so they could be properly vetted. For instance, I was planning on having some of the family members of the victims of 9-11 in the gallery, but if we brought somebody in, the press would immediately crawl up their butts and take residence. What if somebody was a criminal or sex offender, somebody who blamed me for 9-11, or a secret Democrat planning to unveil an anti-Buckman banner? The guests are screened by Ari Fleischer and his staff. I had several dozen guests, and at various appropriate places, I would mention them and the cameras would show their faces.

I don't know how many drafts we went through preparing for the speech. I promised the fellows that when it was done they would each get a week at Hougomont, my treat. Regardless, they were both kind of bleary eyed by the 29th, and when Frank decided to joke with them and told them we needed another revision, they started throwing things at him. I took pity on them and put a stop to any changes that morning. "Guys, unless somebody attacks us in the next twelve hours, this is just going to have to do. Now, go home, get some sleep, and watch me tonight on television fucking up my lines."

Matt groaned and Mike shrieked, and they sent everything off to the printers and to Ari for the teleprompter in the Capitol. A courtesy copy was also sent to the Democrats in Congress, so they could prepare their official response. Why the hell they were allowed to rebut the State of the Union Address was a complete mystery to me. It's not a Constitutional requirement, and I have always thought it was rude as hell.

Regardless, Tuesday the 29th rolled around, and Marilyn brought the twins down as soon as they got home from school. The speech would start at 9:00, but that was simply the time when I was scheduled to start down the aisle to the podium. I wouldn't begin pontificating for another five or ten minutes. We actually got to the Capitol a little after 8:00, and relaxed in John Boehner's Whip's office. I had a copy of the speech and was reviewing it, although I already knew it by heart, and it was also going to be on the teleprompter. Knowing my luck, the damn thing would break, I'd forget to say something, and the Democrats would rise up in revolt. Or worse.

The twins were totally bored at the waiting. They had been in the office before, when it had been mine, so it wasn't like they could get a grand tour. We ignored them. Marilyn looked at me and said, "You are too tense. You need to relax. It will be just fine."

"It's only the most important speech of my political life, that's all!", I replied theatrically.

"You have said that about every speech you have ever given. They can't all be that important."

I snorted and laughed. Lowering my voice, I said, "I know a way I can relax."

My wife blushed and her eyes lit up. "And ruin my makeup?! Forget it!"

"Hmmmppph! Maybe I need to hire an intern after all."

Marilyn smiled and said, "I can always ask Carter to step in."

That got me to coughing as Marilyn laughed at me. When I had my breathing under control, I answered, "I like Carter, but I don't like him that much!"

"Good."

Thankfully it was Frank and not Carter who stepped in tapping his watch and saying, "It's time, Mister President." If it had been Carter we would have probably died laughing. We got to our feet, and Marilyn gave me a quick kiss for luck, and I hugged my daughters. Then Frank escorted them out of the room.

There is a lot of ceremony involved in this that is never actually seen by the public. The Congress has to be seated first, and then in some sort of formal order, the Deputy Sergeant At Arms requests permission for the Veep, the Senate, the Justices, the Cabinet, and the other VIPs, like the Chiefs of Staff, to all be allowed entry. They all file in and take their seats. Finally, when everybody is in place, they get around to the President. He is the only one who actually does this on television. The Sergeant At Arms gets to call my name out and I get escorted down the aisle by one Congressman and one Senator, named by the Speaker and the Vice President (in his role as head of the Senate). Today I had John Boehner and Don Nickles, which was fine by me. I knew and liked both men and had worked with them extensively.

We were standing around the corner from the main doorway and I glanced at Don and John. "How the hell did I get myself into this mess?", I asked them.

John simply laughed. Don answered, "Clean living?"

"We know that's a lie!", commented John.

I didn't have a chance to respond, when suddenly the door opened, and I heard "Mister Speaker, the President of the United States!" I squared my shoulders and marched forward, flanked by my friends.

The roar of the applause was deafening. Almost immediately Congressmen and Senators from both sides of the aisle began to reach out to shake my hand. The cynical part of me knew that they were simply looking to get their pictures taken with me, and that they would happily turn on me like wolves on a wounded fawn if they thought it would help them. The not so cynical part of me enjoyed it. I knew that it wouldn't last. This was my good time. I was still popular from punishing terrorists, and the recession hadn't really settled in yet. This time next year my approval ratings would be a lot lower!

It took me almost ten minutes to snake my way down the aisle and get to the podium. My hands were sore, both of them, from reaching out and clasping others. Denny and John reached down from where they sat behind me and both shook my hand as well. Then I turned back to the Congress, and the room quieted down.

"Mister Speaker, Mister Vice President, members of Congress, distinguished guests, and fellow citizens. There are few greater responsibilities than that which I am about to undertake. It is the responsibility to fulfill the Constitutional requirement to report on the state of the union, and to recommend to your consideration measures I judge necessary and expedient. I report to you now that the state of our union is STRONG!"

I said this forcefully and proudly, and the room erupted in applause, with a standing ovation. I waited about thirty seconds and held my hands up for calm, and when the room calmed, I continued.

"More importantly, I report to you now that the state of our union will REMAIN strong!"

This time the standing ovation went on for over two minutes, and resisted my efforts to calm things down. I simply stood there and smiled and accepted it. Eventually it stopped.

"President Bush was to have had this privilege. He fell, doing his duty, along with 3,213 others on September 11th. I last spoke to you here in this forum four and a half months ago, when I took up the mantel of responsibility he carried so well. In that time we as a people have come together to help the survivors, heal the wounds, defend our nation, and claim a justifiable vengeance on those who attacked us.

When I spoke to the nation on October 8th, we were beginning our response to the attacks of 9-11. At that time we began a coordinated effort of our ground, naval, and air forces to destroy the terrorist elements that had waged war on us, and the Afghan government which had sponsored them. As I told you that night, and as we have reported since, that effort was extremely successful. The warlords in Kabul and the terrorists they supported have faced the severest retribution and punishment, and a more moderate government is now beginning to form and coalesce in that stricken nation."

This was true, sort of, I thought as I waited out the inevitable applause. Most of the Taliban and Al Qaeda were dead. Nobody knew if bin Laden had died. Some videos had surfaced, but the CIA had determined that they were old, pre-October 8, just now being broadcast. As for the new moderate government, that was a bit of a stretch. Afghanistan simply had new warlords in place, and hopefully these ones would focus on killing their own people and not ours.

"The price of freedom is never cheap, and is paid for with a currency which is in ever short supply. It requires the sacrifice of our best and bravest, and the combined sacrifices of their loved ones. Tonight, here in the gallery, are some of those who have made such sacrifices. Mrs. Pauline Deveraux and her children Pamela and Charles are here tonight, representing her husband, Co-Pilot Justin Deveraux, and the families of the B-52 bomber Rusty Bucket, lost during the initial attacks. Also present are Robert and Maureen Wilson, the parents of Staff Sergeant Patrick Wilson of the U.S. Army Special Forces, who fell outside of Kabul, and Mrs. Janice Cornwith, the wife of Chief Bosun's Mate Carl Cornwith, a Navy SEAL, who fell near Mahmud-e Raqi. These men were among those who made the ultimate sacrifice for the nation they loved, and we honor their families and the families of all those other heroes."

More applause and another standing ovation.

"Seated with those families, are others, men who served in Operation Enduring Freedom. There are more people involved than could fit in this room, so we can only honor a small sample, but I commend them to you along with their brethren."

At that point I read a half-dozen names, Army, Navy, and Air Force, as the cameras panned across some uniformed and bemedaled faces in the gallery. Again, we had more applause and another standing ovation. I had met all of the guests earlier in the day, at a lunch. It was a humbling experience.

"Part of the price paid was paid here at home. Whether it be a firefighter who rushed into the North Tower to rescue lives but never made it out himself, a corpsman in the Pentagon who suffered third degree burns while saving others, or a passenger on Flight 93, whose final thoughts were to prevent the carnage he had already heard of and decided that 'Let's roll!' was a good idea, the list of heroes here was also too long to mention. We have some representatives of this group as well."

More applause and a standing ovation. The servicemen had been very embarrassed by the support given them by the survivors of those who had died on 9-11.

"Now it is up to us to prevent this from happening again. We in this room, each and every one of us, have sworn a solemn oath, a vow to defend our nation and our people. What occurred on that awful day must not be allowed to reoccur. We must be vigilant, more so than at any time in the past.

I wish at this time to introduce three guests, Executive Assistant Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation Collins Barnwell, Assistant Director of the Secret Service Ralph Basham, and Deputy Director of Analysis of the Central Intelligence Agency Winston Creedmore. Within hours of the attacks, I ordered the three of them to determine what had happened and to report to me everything they could. Since that day I have met with them twenty-three times, and they will be finalizing their report to me this week. I urge you to consider their conclusions carefully. Their report to me was a sobering one, and showed that we, as leaders of our nation, can do better.

On September 11th we entered a new era. For much of the last century our focus - militarily, diplomatically, and intelligence wise – was on the totalitarian regimes we faced around the world. America faced those challenges with courage, and we rose to lead the world to new freedoms. That was the world we focused on right through September 10th. Now we face a new challenge, and we must change our focus and methods to meet it. I say to you now that this is a challenge we shall also rise up and meet!"

There was another roar of approval and another standing ovation. I waited for it to die down before continuing.

"We suffered a failure of our intelligence system on 9-11. It was a system that focused on the threats of the past, and not those of the future. Foremost among the recommendations for the future will be a national clearinghouse for terrorism related intelligence. Within a matter of weeks we will be putting forth legislation to create a National Counterterrorism Center, to be on a par with our other intelligence departments. This will be a joint system, so that if one department learns something action can be taken throughout the system. Sadly, this has been lacking in the past, and we have seen the price to be paid for this. No more! We can do better and we must do better!

My advisers and I will be preparing a budget to reflect these new realities. In so doing, we must consider that one of the costs of the attack on us was an economic cost. Our national economy is slowing, and some pain will be felt by all of us. This is also a cost that must be borne to build a stronger future. We cannot hope to have a strong defense without a strong economy to base it upon. Therefore we must make investments in our future, investments that will build upon the strengths that make America great, and that will make us greater still."

I got some more applause, but no ovation at this. Nobody likes to hear about costs that might actually involve some dollars. More than ever it was time to trot out George Bush and tell them that these were his ideas. For the next ten minutes I spoke about how infrastructure and innovation would make lasting contributions, about the jobs they would create, and the dollars they would funnel to hard working Americans. I spoke about how previous challenges had prompted us to build railroads and highways that crossed the country, and how the investments in aerospace and technology had changed every American's life for the better. Needless to say, these were all ideas George Bush had discussed with me frequently, and I was simply passing along one of our greatest President's dying requests. There wasn't a dry eye in the room when I was done.

Then I got to immigration reform. This actually was one of George's better ideas, and I was going to demand his DREAM Act be passed. On my first trip through, he had taken his eye off the ball, and by the time he got around to it, his brand was so damaged that he couldn't sell water in the desert. Meanwhile, over the next few years, under his less than inspirational leadership, the Republican Party and Congress ossified so much that the only strategy they could come up with was an unrelenting denial of anything the Democrats wanted to do – like immigration reform. Right now, though, I had a golden opportunity to ram something through, and almost anything would be an improvement on the convoluted mess we had now. Even better, I could tie border security in with the fight on foreign terrorists. We would increase border security, but the price would be a demand to fix the rest of the system and do something about the zillion illegals we already had here.

Above all else, it was necessary to create some good sound bites and a syncopation, a rhythm that would get the crowd rocking. It might be dry and boring, but if we could gloss over the details and focus on the wonderful things that would come from all of this, it would go a long way in moving the plan forward. Most importantly, I had to be able to flood Congress with some bills within the next thirty days. By the end of February, I had to dump some of this stuff in their laps. If I expected Congress to do the job for me, it wouldn't work. Congress is like a pack of sled dogs, aimlessly barking and running around, playing in the snow. The only way to get them moving was to harness them and crack a whip. Back at the White House I had assigned each major task to a specific staff member, with Carter overseeing them, and was going to push them to work the problem. I would beat Carter like a rented mule as he oversaw things.

Finally it was time to finish, to wrap myself in an American flag and go out on soaring rhetoric and a good old fashioned American dream.

"These are more than proposals; these are the legacies of a great American President! We here all knew his plans and dreams! We know that he wanted to make this nation a greater and stronger nation! We know he wanted our people safer. We know those things because those are the same plans and dreams we have. We must build and protect President Bush's legacy, not for his sake, but for ours! It is not I alone who calls on Congress to act. It is the American people who call on Congress to act!"

Everybody was back on their feet now, roaring and applauding. There is nothing like appealing to the better natures of people who generally don't have them. I should know. I was one of those people.

"Great opportunity comes from great challenge. America is a nation that thrives on great challenges. Our history is that of one challenge after another, and in each case we have risen stronger than before! Now is no different! This is our challenge! This is our opportunity! This is our time! We will not falter! We will not fail! We will succeed!"

I was roaring it out to them now, and they were on their feet applauding and cheering. It was more like a campaign speech than a policy speech, but it was my opinion that a campaign speech was what the country needed now. Eventually they wound down, and settled back into their seats.

"Earlier, I said that the state of our union was strong, and that it would remain strong. I was wrong when I said that. What I should have said is that the state of our union will become stronger. Our nation possesses a strength unknown by our enemies, and envied by our friends. We will pay the price of freedom, and enjoy the strength of freedom, and harness the power of freedom. Now, with the grace of God, we move forward. Thank you and God bless you all."

And that was it. They were back on their feet and cheering, and both Denny and John leaned over from behind to pound me on the back and shake my hand. I was curious what the Democrats would do in their response, and I knew a tape recorder was catching it back at the White House. Tomorrow we would go over it with a fine tooth comb. In the meantime, I could make a quick judgment by looking up to the gallery. Marilyn was still a Democrat, and from what I could gather, was training her daughters up in that evil creed. I caught her eye, and could see her smiling, sandwiched between and hugging the girls, and all three had tears in their eyes. Maybe it had worked after all.

Chapter 148: A Summit at Camp David

The speech had timed out at about forty minutes, which was considered short. Bill Clinton averaged well over an hour! I think that was because A) I limited myself to the most critical items I wanted to work on, and B) I'm not as good a speaker as Bill Clinton. I figured the longer I yapped, the more likely I would be to fuck up somehow. I finished the speech a bit before 10:00 PM, but between the congratulations and shaking hands, we didn't get out of the Capitol until after 11:00. The twins were heartily exhausted by then, especially with the knowledge that they would have to fly home at the crack of dawn to get to school on time.

I would like to state that in my glorious power, I took my carnal pleasure with my wife, using her for hours in triumph. That wasn't quite true. She was as tired as the girls. They all headed up to the Residence, while I took a last minute call. By the time I got to our room, Marilyn was snoring on the bed, with Stormy spooned up next to her. I chuckled and stripped off my suit, and crawled in next to Stormy.

We were all up early, with the girls grumbling and grabbing for some Danish as Marilyn chivvied them out the door. I kissed them all good-bye, and went about my bachelor lifestyle. By 8:00 I was in my office, with Ari and Josh giving me a critique on the night's performance. Generally the reviews were positive. The Democratic response had gone about fifteen minutes, and the only complaints they had were with some of the spending bills I had proposed. They wanted more government spending, predictably. Otherwise they stressed the need to draw together as a nation, and pledged to work with me in a bipartisan fashion, if I would do the same. Likewise, the network anchors and pontificators thought I had done a good job, especially at rallying a country still in shock.

We didn't have the final polling numbers in yet, but in general, I was still in the high 80s for popularity. My money, suitably washed and run through the RNC, could afford us a level of polling few White Houses could previously afford. We would get hard numbers by the end of the day, and the various networks would have theirs by their evening broadcasts.

On the other hand, some of the chickenhawks were complaining I wasn't going far enough in protecting the nation. Cheney was leading a chorus of neoconservatives who wanted a much tougher response to the threat of Islamic terrorism. We needed a Cabinet level department responsible for defending the Homeland, with a stated mission of letting nobody in who could harm us. In addition to a vastly upgraded intelligence network, they would throw in everything we already had doing these jobs, such as the Coast Guard, Immigration and Naturalization, airport and port security, and so forth. In addition, we should be aggressively using our armed forces to drag the rest of the world into the 21st Century, starting with everybody who was a Muslim.

In effect, they wanted a complete second CIA, FBI, Army, Navy, and Air Force to create a wall around us, while the first team would go out and conquer the world and make it safe for America. If somebody asked who would pay for it, the answer was simple, oil revenues from gratefully liberated nations would pay. It would be cheap and easy!

Meanwhile, the economic choices I was making were clearly both inadequate and wrong-headed. The only thing that could get the nation running properly was a massive and immediate tax cut, like what George Bush had proposed. I had touched on this the other night, but only to report that the Bush tax cuts would need to be postponed, so that we could pay for the investments we needed to make, both the internal infrastructure and research projects, as well as to overhaul our military. In the coming year we would probably be in a deficit situation, after three years of budget surpluses. I had spun this by stating that George Bush would have never have gone along with a deficit unless we had to; he had been a staunch supporter of the balanced budget, and his first year in office had proved that! I kept quiet my personal belief, that tax rates would probably stay where they were for the foreseeable future; we were going to get back to a surplus situation and go back to paying down the national debt if I had anything to say about it.

Cheney and crew thought differently. Massive tax cuts would be so wonderful that the economy would explode with activity! Deficits would melt away. If something needed to be cut, start slashing all the stuff not defense related, like education and health and social subsidies. If we really needed to cut spending, I should cut entitlements. Oh, and I should also defund any regulatory agencies, since only unfettered capitalism really worked.

I had already commented to Josh, when he brought this up. "They're right, you know. The only way to really cut the budget is by scaling back entitlements. Social Security and health spending are going to break us someday."

"Mister President, we are nowhere near that.", he protested.

"Not now, Josh, but that day will come. It will come a lot faster if we don't have the revenues to pay for it."

"So, do you plan to cut entitlements?"

I shook my head. "I think I'd rather slit my throat on national television. The Democrats are never going to go along with it, and neither will our party. The real problem is that everybody loves these programs; they just don't want to pay for them. There's a reason we put these things in place. No, as long as we stay out of a deficit situation, I'm not brave enough to tackle that stuff."

The complaints from the neocons were getting louder, and Dick Cheney was positioning himself at the center of it all. He and several others were providing the counterargument the Sunday talk shows and 24 hour news shows were clamoring for. Cheney and Wolfowitz were only two of the prominent critics. William Kristol, Donald Kagan, and David Horowitz were showing up. They had previously had George Bush's ear, but I had tuned them out. Most of them were academics, with either think tank experience or time spent in the Reagan or Bush 41 administrations.

For the next two weeks Cheney and crew tried to roast me alive. It was very clear that Cheney was positioning himself to my right, and was planning a primary challenge in 2004. I could smile and tell Ari and the others not to worry about him, but John McCain wasn't going to be put off. He asked to see me about this. If I wasn't going to run, he was, and he needed to plan his options. Well, I had promised the man I would discuss it with him, and give an answer by the summer, and I guess February is the summer in Washington. (You really don't want to actually be in Washington in the summer, it's miserable!)

On Monday, February 11, I had John meet me in my office in the morning. Other than the usual non-stop crises, it was a quiet morning. "John, I won't beat around the bush. You want to know what I am doing in 2004, and what I am going to do about Dick Cheney."

John nodded and replied, "Yes, Carl, I do. I need to know how to plan things. I think it is obvious that Dick Cheney is not planning on slipping away quietly."

"That is very true. Well, I wasn't planning on making any announcements this early, but I suspect it will have to come out. I will be running for election in 2004. I talked it over with Marilyn over the weekend, and she supports me. I am going to need your help, because I have never done a national campaign like this before. You will need to help with the planning."

He looked at me and nodded. I am sure he was figuring that this was a real possibility all along, but he had also been hoping that I would decide not to do it. "Well, it's not like you didn't say you might. If Cheney stays in, it's going to get ugly."

At that I smiled. "I don't want to sound too confident, but Dick Cheney is going to be the least of our worries. You're right, he wants it so bad he can taste it when he drives past us on the street. It won't matter. I plan to drive a stake through his heart."

"You have said that, but I'm not sure I am going to buy it. I think I want to know what you are planning."

"Okay, but you have to swear you are not going to say anything to anybody. Not your wife, not your girlfriend, not your priest – nobody! If you talk in your sleep, start sleeping alone.", I answered.

He smiled at that. "Okay. So, what can't I speak about?"

"Have you had a chance to read the report from the Three Amigos? They issued it to me last Friday, and I plan to send it to Congress this Friday.", I asked.

"No, I can't say as I have. I spent a long weekend with Cindy. I know it's in my In Box. You'll need to bring me up to speed.", he said, half apologetically.

"Here goes. You are aware that before 9-11 Cheney and Wolfowitz and Scooter Libby were all making Iraq war sounds. Everything, and I do mean everything, pointed to the fact that Al Qaeda was a subsidiary of Saddam Hussein and we needed to go in and finish the job. Richard Clarke and I disagreed. Clarke was fired, and they were trying to figure out a way to dump me."

"Yes, I remember that. After the attack, the CIA showed it had been Al Qaeda, in Afghanistan, but with Iraqi assistance. We talked about this when you asked me on board. That was when you started cleaning house.", he said, accusingly.

"That's true. Since then, the truth has come out. You've seen the latest intelligence, Iraq had nothing to do with this. Now these guys are beating a different drum, that Iraq has nukes and chemical weapons and bioweapons. Same story. They want a war with Iraq. What you don't completely know yet is just how much they were gaming the intelligence. You've seen some of it, but not all. What you don't know yet is that the CIA knew the names of some of the 9-11 hijackers ahead of time."

John's jaw dropped when I said this, and his eyes popped wide. He stammered for a moment, and then gasped out, "We knew!?"

"Not exactly, but close. The DIA figured out some names and sent them to the CIA. The CIA buried them, and then after the attacks, tried to bury the DIA program. Nothing could get in the way of the Iraq message. It's all very embarrassing, but not necessarily illegal."

"They killed the President and it's not illegal? Are you insane?", he sputtered.

"Calm down, John! Save that for the press conferences we are going to have!" I smiled at him. "No, there is actually a distinct possibility that no laws were broken. The DIA simply found some names of suspicious characters and sent them to the CIA for follow-up. The CIA decided, for whatever reason, not to do so. They might have had a valid reason, or it might be a bullshit reason, but the guidelines were formal and specific, that the DIA report the names to the CIA, and the CIA could do with them what they deemed appropriate. It's a subtle distinction, but enough to keep them out of jail."

"Nobody wants to hear about subtle distinctions, Carl, not on this!"

"John, this is why I say we are going to drive a stake through their hearts! My hands on this are really clean. Richard Clarke and I can stand up and swear on a stack of Bibles that we warned them, and we'll have plenty of witnesses and notes and minutes from the NSC meetings to back us up. You were in the Senate at the time, so they were in effect lying to you, too. What's really going to hang them, though, is that they tried to cover it all up. Cheney ordered Libby to shut down the DIA program. Colin caught wind of it and shut down the shut down. Then he took it to Ashcroft. Ashcroft might be a Bible thumper, but the man has got his share of integrity. He's got a Special Prosecutor chasing it down."

John eyed me curiously. "So, if what they did was legal, what's the prosecutor doing?"

"Technically, Libby had no legal right to order a Pentagon program to be shut down. Legally, State would come to me and I would go to Defense. The real problem is, at least according to Ashcroft, that Libby lied to an investigator about it. That's perjury and obstruction of justice. That's what they are going to nail him with, not the shut down.", I replied.

I could see the wheels whirling in McCain's head. "Scooter wouldn't do this on his own."

"So, what happens when the Special Prosecutor issues a subpoena to Dick Cheney? What happens when the Special Joint Intelligence Committee issues a Congressional subpoena to Dick Cheney? Dick is too smart to lie, so he either takes the Fifth or refuses to respond and gets hit with a contempt citation. Either way, his political career is over. John Ashcroft has told me that his man has enough evidence to send Scooter to Club Fed. If you and I can't bury Dick Cheney with this, we don't deserve to be here another four years!", I told him.

"Huh!" John sat there in awe for a bit. "When is this all going to come out, anyway?"

"By the end of February. After that, Dick Cheney won't be able to get a job as a school crossing guard! We are going to have to have a meeting with John Ashcroft, as well as the White House Counsel's office, and a few other people. You will definitely have to be in the loop on this. John ordered me to keep my fat yap shut, so that's why I haven't said too much."

"So we simply have to survive another few weeks."

"Maybe less. My understanding is that the Special Prosecutor is preparing subpoenas for Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz. If they refuse the subpoenas, he plans to haul them in on material witness warrants and do perp walks for the nightly news. They are probably going to claim executive privilege, and the Counsel's office is figuring out that one. That works a whole lot better if I go along with it, and I'm not feeling all that generous."

"Dick Cheney in handcuffs? That would make for a wonderful campaign poster, Carl!"

"Wouldn't it? I gather the Special Prosecutor is an ambitious young fellow and likes to see his name in the paper. I want you to call John Ashcroft and ask to meet with him - I'll back you - and let's see if you can't be brought up to speed on this. Just remember, you can't even tell your dog about this, not until it comes out. Justice is going to handle this, not you and me. We are innocence personified."

"I'll be damned. I'd like to see that arrogant prick in handcuffs, too." John smiled at that and headed back to his office, to start going through The Tripartite Investigation Report on the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001. We were labeling it The Tripartite Report. The Three Amigos name was to be buried as 'inappropriate'; they were now The Tripartite Commission. It would make fascinating reading, if you didn't end up throwing up first. It was not America's finest hour.

The Special Joint Intelligence Committee officially met for the first time two days later, on Wednesday, February 13. The Chairman was Bob Graham, a Florida Democrat who was the Chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Vice Chairman was his Republican counterpart from the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, also from Florida. They spent the entire day swearing themselves in and speechifying for the cameras and fiddling with procedure, and then adjourned in time to get on camera for the evening news. There were promises of bipartisan cooperation and transparency and then they all held hands and sang Kumbaya! It was wonderful.

That was perhaps too cynical a view. The reality was that while Congress as a whole was venal and self-absorbed, more than a few Congressmen and Senators were fairly honest and dedicated, and simply trapped in the system. Every once in a while they could draw together in mutual outrage and get something accomplished, and this was probably one of those times. If we played it smart, we could manipulate them appropriately.

That began Thursday morning. As soon as they opened their proceedings, Graham and Goss called for a vote requesting the White House to provide any and all information it possessed on the 9-11 attacks. The vote passed unanimously. On cue, there was a knock on the door, and the Three Amigos marched in, each of them carrying a copy of the Tripartite Report, with a flunky behind them pushing a cart with additional copies. The report was actually two parts, with a summary section that was all anybody was actually going to read, and a much larger addendum, the size of the Manhattan telephone book. The Three Amigos were sworn in, they each read a statement that had been prepared jointly, and the session was adjourned so everyone could review the materials provided.

The result was predictable. We had written the summary report with an eye towards television, with a fair bit of hyperbole and some phrases that would be great as sound bites. Congress, no matter what they swore to keep secret, could be counted on to leak like a sieve. Every network had received copies in plenty of time for the nightly broadcast, and it made for a compelling lead segment. Phrases such as 'false and misleading' and 'negligence, malfeasance, and intimidation' made their way into the bullet points. Ari made a few pro forma remarks about how we couldn't comment on the ongoing investigation, and then referred a few questions to the Justice Department for their response.

By Friday it had gone ballistic! The Addendum had been examined, and even though some names and dates were redacted, there was plenty of damning evidence. Justice had issued a statement that they couldn't issue a statement about an ongoing investigation, and then issued a statement that the Attorney General had appointed a Special Prosecutor, who had been working with the Tripartite Commission to determine if actionable offenses had occurred. By Sunday morning, the press was baying at the moon, and anybody named in the report, good or bad, had a microphone and a camera in their face.

The really amazing part? It was all true! Our intelligence agencies really had fucked up by the numbers, all across the board. Cheney and his bunch really had been gaming the system. We could sit there and look outraged and angry, and point fingers, and otherwise raise a righteous hoo-raw. As long as nobody overreached – on our side! – we were winners.

And yet there was a bittersweet aspect to all of this. John Boehner asked me if I was enjoying the destruction of these people. Was it really necessary to rip them to shreds on national television? Did I realize there was going to be a pushback, a righteous comeuppance somewhere down the road? No good deed goes unpunished, and what I was doing to the neocons was going to have consequences.

"John, believe me, I take no pleasure from this, but what would have been the consequences if we lied to the American public and killed off their children in a war we didn't need to fight? That's what they want, you know. John, there are an awful lot of people out there who think that war is some sort of high tech video game, and that if we don't like what is happening, we can push the reset button and start over again. It's not! That was the thinking that got us into Viet Nam, and we spent ten years there and lost fifty thousand lives, and our entire generation is still dealing with the aftermath. If I have to stomp the neocons into the ground to prevent that, then I will pay the price they demand.", I told him.

"Just you remember, there will be a price, and you will be paying it. You and I might be moderates, but that is a dying breed in Washington these days, and you would be well advised to remember that. If there is another 9-11, you will be history, and they are going to bring in somebody who breathes fire and eats babies for breakfast, and consequences be damned!", he warned.

The uncomfortable truth was that he was right. I knew what had happened on my first go, and the bitter truth was that Bush and company had kept the homeland safe. They had spent trillions of dollars and thousands of lives, trashed our civil liberties, and destroyed the economy of the nation, but we didn't have another 9-11. Could I do any better? I just didn't know.

Cheney and Wolfowitz ran the gauntlet of the news shows, and were hammered in the process. Libby was keeping his mouth shut. I heard that he was trying to broker a plea bargain, but that Justice had him dead to rights on perjury and obstruction. He wanted it both ways – no conviction and no squealing on his patron – but that was looking unlikely. Fitzgerald knew some of the people who had died in the Twin Towers and was not looking to make deals. The Joint Special Committee began calling people to testify, and both Wolfowitz and Cheney refused, citing executive privilege. The White House Counsel refused to allow me to completely hang them out to dry, but instead sidestepped it and told the Committee that this was best left up to the courts to decide. This was our weakest spot in the whole thing, in that Gonzalez was feeding everything he was learning straight to Cheney. It was a price I had to pay for a while longer. After the fuss died down, and the legal wrangling ended, I was getting rid of Gonzalez come hell or high water!

By April, Cheney was looking increasingly defensive. He hadn't been given a perp walk yet, but Congress had issued subpoenas and contempt of Congress charges, and the Justice Department had done the same. Wolfowitz had caved, somewhat, and had testified to the Committee along the lines that A) no, he hadn't lied but, B) it was very possible to interpret what had been discovered in different ways. Meanwhile, Richard Clarke had done an internal review at the CIA and had determined that almost all of the evidence for Saddam Hussein being behind 9-11 and owning weapons of mass destruction was, at the minimum, suspect. For instance, a report that yellowcake uranium had been bought by Iraq was reported to President Bush. In reality, the report was made up by a low level Iraqi looking for a payday, and every intelligence service around the globe had looked at it and laughed it off. We saw that everywhere. Often an Iraqi expatriate would concoct a story and sell it to multiple spy agencies, and then when they checked with each other, they had multiple 'confirming' reports. Only when you looked closely did you figure it out.

Meanwhile, 2002 moved along. In March I convened a 'National Security Summit' at Camp David. In effect, the National Security Council camped out in the wilderness for a few days and talked about keeping the country safe while we roasted marshmallows around the camp fire. Well, maybe not that rustic. For all that they call it a 'camp', Camp David is really an office and cabin complex set in the woods. Every amenity of civilization is there, along with office space and conference rooms, and multiple 'lodges' for residence. If you want to go for walks in the woods, fine. You have about 200 acres to wander around in, surrounded by razor wire, electrified fences, and at least a company of combat equipped Marines.

It's only a little further to travel than from the White House to our house, but we had never been up there before. Marilyn and I stayed in the Presidential cabin, Aspen Lodge, and everybody else used the smaller lodges. We used Laurel Lodge for the meetings. A few people stayed overnight, a few went back and forth to Washington. Marilyn and I spent most of the week up there, without the kids, while some of the people came and went as needed. Evenings we had some nice dinners in Aspen with whoever was staying the evening.

I would go to meetings and Marilyn would kiss me goodbye. "I am going to catch a nap and catch up on my knitting.", she happily told me.

"Knit me up a solution for world peace.", I replied.

"How about some new slippers?"

I had to chuckle at that. "I'll take what I can get."

The subject for the week? Developing some sort of strategy for keeping the country safe, keeping the costs down, and keeping the bad guys somewhere far away. That all sounds wonderful, but how to do it? At one extreme you have the Festung America concept, Fortress America, a neo-isolationist viewpoint. Bring the troops home, shut down overseas bases, stop playing policeman to the world, fence the borders and electrify them, and shut down immigration. At a very simplistic level this sounds wonderfully compelling, but in reality it is impossible.

Take immigration, for example. Americans do not have a high enough birthrate to keep the population from declining. If the replacement birthrate is 2.1 children per family, Americans typically ran 1.9. We need immigrants, at least a million a year, legal or illegal, to keep the population and the economy growing. This gets very complicated by the fact that most of those new immigrants are coming from places the existing residents aren't pleased about. The European immigrants who founded the country and provided most of the population are now being outnumbered by immigrants from Africa, South and Central America, and Asia. The country was going to be a lot tanner in a couple of generations. Furthermore, for all the people who screamed about illegal aliens in the country, the only way to get rid of them would be to adopt the same tactics the Nazis needed to rid Germany of the Jews – house to house searches by jackbooted thugs, and concentration camps – none of which would ever be accepted by Americans.

On the other hand, quite a few people had a viewpoint that might be seen as an American Leadership approach. We needed to stay out front, across the world, leading the way! The world needed a policeman and who better than us? Don't react to the world, but be pro-active. Better to control the environment than be controlled by it. At the most extreme end of this spectrum you had those who thought that if the world didn't embrace our values voluntarily, it would be best if we coerced them to do so. America, and the rest of the world, would be better served if we sent in the troops, replaced the government, and brought peace and goodness to the locals. This had been one of the arguments of Cheney and his crew. Strangely, the locals often had differing views on the wonderfulness of this approach.

I'll be honest. I tended towards the neo-isolationist myself. Why in the world did we need to have troops still based in Germany, for instance? Couldn't we be more sensible? Why did we care when the locals decided to kill each other off? Why try and police these shitholes? I was quickly and convincingly cured of my delusions. Isolationism was not even remotely possible anymore.

There had to be some sort of middle ground, where we didn't bankrupt ourselves, didn't view war as a legitimate foreign policy, and still kept the bad guys away. The summit proved unsettling at best. Certain aspects were accepted, in some cases grudgingly, but I learned a few things, as well. China was becoming increasingly bellicose and assertive, and they were rapidly increasing the size and quality of their armed forces. We would continue to need high end naval forces, and not be able to swap out Aegis destroyers with smaller and less expensive frigates. We would be able to manage a swing from Europe to Asia, but there would be costs. We would need to reactivate some of the Asian military bases we had shuttered, and costs would generally increase.

The generals and admirals were going to have to face some of the facts of life, too. They grumbled, but a lot of what they wanted was simply unsustainable. Invisible airplanes at $100 million a pop? Wait ten years and do what they could do with a drone at pennies on the dollar! I knew what the coming revolution in artificial intelligence and computing power was going to bring to military aircraft. I informed the lot of them that every branch was going to face some cuts in future hardware programs, but that I intended to move those funds into readiness and training and support programs. On the other hand, the Commandant of the Coast Guard was ecstatic that his budget would be increased. Of all the services, they got the most work and the least respect and the tightest budget. Since 9-11, Congress and the public were finally waking up to the fact that they were on the front lines.

One thing I stressed was that I was going to expect accountability! Weapons programs were going to be watched closely, and if they thought I was brutal with the civilian heads of the Cabinet, wait until they saw me working over the admirals and generals running procurement! The best way to stay in my good graces would be to bring programs in on time and under budget. If they needed to change the way they did business, so be it.

I sat down with each of the service chiefs and went over their Christmas wish lists of new weapons. It was not a happy experience for the generals and admirals. I was a veteran myself, with just enough experience to be dangerous, from their point of view. Compared to GWB, I did not hold these guys in awe and believe everything they said. The Army came out of it the best of the services. What they had now was really good stuff, and they weren't going to lose a whole lot when the NLOS cannon got shut down, for instance. Some of their funding got switched from heavy armor, like M-1s and Bradleys, to Strykers and variants. Some of their brigades and divisions would get moved from Europe to Asia.

The Marines used a lot of equipment that the Army used, but the one thing that they had exclusively was amphibious vehicles. They were going to lose their Advanced Amphibious Assault Vehicle, an amazingly wonderful gizmo that fought like a tank and surfed on the ocean fast enough you could ski behind. It never really worked that well, and at this point, I could kill it off fairly simply. The last time the Marines had actually done a beach assault had been at Inchon – 52 years ago! Now they used helicopters and air cushion landing craft. I did let them keep the V-22 Osprey, though. Sooner or later they would get that to work, and it was too far along to kill it.

The Air Force and Navy took a pounding! Their Joint Strike Fighter, the F-35, was supposed to be an all-in-one wonder-weapon. It was a lot closer to an elephant, which is a mouse designed by a government weapons board. The last time we had a fighter that both the Navy and the Air Force liked was the F-4 Phantom II, which was originally a Navy plane but so good that the Air Force wanted them, too. Carrier aircraft are so specialized because landing them involves a controlled crash, and that is not generally something airplanes can do. All the variants of the F-35 were overdue and overpriced, and designed for fighting the Soviet Union, which didn't even exist anymore. I promised a big budget increase on drones, but they squawked. Nobody gets medals for flying drones. Meanwhile, buy some more F-18s.

The Navy lost their Littoral Combat Ship. This was still in a proposal stage, unlike the F-35, which was now in a development stage. This was supposed to be a small and lightly manned ship designed to operate close to shore, so that if the bad guys took one out, it wouldn't hurt. It would carry modules of mission packages, so that it could be easily turned from an anti-aircraft ship to an anti-sub ship to a mine countermeasures ship. In the future it would grow into a half billion dollar monstrosity, with two different hull forms since nobody could figure out the best way to build it and nobody had the balls to fire enough admirals to get them to make a decision. None of the mission modules were ever built on time, or could be made to work, and operating the ships took more manpower than they were designed to carry. Total clusterfuck of a ship. I also killed off the DD(X)/CG(X) class of stealth destroyers and cruisers, which were designed to fight the Cold War. They were projected to cost about three to four times what a quite suitable Arleigh Burke would cost.

In place, I told them to keep building Arleigh Burkes, and to figure out a conventional frigate or corvette design. The Perry class hadn't been built in years, but why couldn't they come up with a plan to build new and updated ones? For that matter, what was wrong with an updated and Americanized version of the Sa'ar V class that Ingalls built for the Israelis in Mississippi, or maybe build a version of some of the smaller ships some of the European nations built? I also approved plans for a guided missile submarine version of the Ohio class boomers, which replaced their ballistic missile tubes with seven-packs of Tomahawks. That sounded fairly sensible and budget minded. I would also be happy to purchase more gators and transport ships, and more transport and spy planes for both services. We needed to do things differently, and buy smarter.

The admirals and generals were not amused. Colin Powell and Tom Ridge told me privately that they were simply nodding agreement for now. As soon as they got back to Washington, they were going to meet with their favorite Congressmen and Senators and lobbyists to roll back my roll backs. I could expect a fight on my hands. This was not unprecedented. Carter had killed off the B-1 bomber, which the Air Force and Rockwell had kept secretly on the back burner until Reagan took office, when it resurfaced as the B-1B. I replied that I understood, but that I wasn't afraid to fire people, and if the Congress got too uppity, I would be happy to unpack the Veto pen.

As for foreign relations, both Colin and Condi told me to behave and grow up about dealing with the ragheads. I didn't have to like them, but I did have to deal with them, and politely, too. I was rather rudely informed that I was smart enough to learn that each country had its own issues and problems and cultures, and that Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey, for instance, all had their own beliefs and interests, and just because they were Muslim, it didn't mean they were all the same. I was also told by State that I needed to make nice with the Saudis. Lowering the price of oil would be helpful, too. I grumbled some, and replied I would behave, but that the Saudis would have to show some progress on taming their nut cases. We would end up waiting for some auspicious moment we could claim an agreement to, and then exchange ambassadors.

By the end of the summit we had the start of a coherent plan on national security and immigration. Meanwhile, all through the month of March we were preparing some new legislation based on the ideas I had pushed during the State of the Union speech. Carter and Marty Adrianopolis got together to hammer out some quick bills that would be pushed through Congress while people still liked me. Carter was heading my legislative drive. He would stay out of the spotlight, which was a good idea. The right wing didn't overly like that I had a faggot (their words, not mine) working in the White House. They would have preferred Carter be the guest of honor at a bonfire. Instead, Carter was the eminence grise overseeing the legislation.

I had seen what had buried other Presidents over the years, and one big item was trying to pass gigantic all-in-one all-encompassing total omnibus wonder-bills. When you write that sort of thing it takes forever and nobody likes it. No matter which side you were on, there was always something to bitch about and vote against. No, we needed a bunch of little bills, which we could write quickly and pass quickly, and keep the individual costs down. Better to pass ten $50 billion dollar spending bills than a single $500 billion dollar bill. Marty fed Carter a series of bills related to infrastructure and research. We could fill some potholes, fix a few bridges, update water and sewer systems, and so forth. Most of the money would be funneled through the states, which all had an existing structure to do so. One of the more subtle bills had some wording hidden in it to cut down on the time spent in approvals, to move things along faster.

Then we had some bills for research and development. Quite a bit was funneled through the Pentagon and DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, on dual use technologies. Drones, for instance, might have a terrible name for dropping bombs on people, but were amazingly useful for things like border surveillance and monitoring pollution and wildlife in national parks. A lot of what the military uses can have some form of civilian application, and vice versa. What Wal-Mart brought to retailing through computers, networking, and warehousing made supporting the troops during Desert Shield and Desert Storm possible.

Other items to be funded included increased funding through the National Institutes of Health (basic research masquerading as bioweapon defense), some more money for NASA (more and better satellites for weather prediction and climate science, not that we ever said the word climate, all covered as border surveillance), and so forth. We also let the Department of Energy have some funding for alternative energy projects, couched in the phrase 'energy security'. Some of these projects would fail, and many would take years to develop into new technologies, but they would all be worth it in the long run.

The PATRIOT Act (Protecting America, Tools to Restrict, Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism) had been rushed through back in November, just after the bombing campaign in Afghanistan finished. Congress had been terrified and rushed through a measure that basically loosed the handcuffs on any intelligence gathering in the U.S. I was of two minds on this. It was really obvious by that time that the general stove-piped nature of our numerous intelligence agencies had contributed to the disaster. On the other hand, it trashed parts of the Bill of Rights, and as I recalled, a number of succeeding administrations had gone way beyond what the Act allowed. I was able to redline a few things before it hit the floor of the Congress for a vote (We did not need to scan people's reading lists at the library! For one thing, you could find the info you needed to be a terrorist easier on the Internet.) Otherwise, the thing sailed through with almost no objections and I signed it into law two days later. It had been the first piece of legislation I ever signed.

The first big bill was passed almost by acclamation. At the end of September I had issued an Executive Order (my very first) that created a National Counterterrorism Center, to be funded by the CIA initially, and run out of Langley. It was a temporary measure, and I had told Clarke I would move it out of there as soon as I had some legislation. In April we rammed it through, and he put Winston Creedmore, he of the Three Amigos, in charge. By now, Winston knew as much as anybody did about counterterrorism and the problems with interagency cooperation. I had a long talk with Winston, threatened massive and dire consequences if something like 9-11 ever managed to slip through again, and then we went on camera in the Press Room, where I praised him glowingly and introduced him to the nation. They would be clearing land for a secure complex in McLean by mid-summer.

In June I thanked Alberto Gonzalez for his distinguished service as White House Counsel, and sent him packing. He had been a direct pipeline from the White House to Dick Cheney for the last year, and the sooner he was gone the better. I instead appointed John Weisenholtz, a constitutional law professor at Georgetown that both John Ashcroft and David Boies thought well of. If those two men, so dissimilar and with different views, thought Wesienholtz was okay, that was good enough for me!

The recession we were in was uncomfortable, but not crushing. What was of more importance in the long term was the effect the tax cut we had, and the deficit we would be facing. In 2001 we still had the Clinton era tax rates in effect for the fiscal year, and we had run about a $150 billion surplus. This year, with lower rates and a slower economy, we were facing about a $150 billion deficit! Once the economy improved, that would bounce back, but we had to keep an eye on spending. On the plus side, we hadn't invaded Afghanistan, with the huge expenditure that involved; that would help immensely.

This year, 2002, was also a mid-term election year, so everything we were doing was also being done with an eye towards what would be happening in November. If passing legislation normally was like tap-dancing through a minefield, in a mid-term year you have to do it blindfolded. (During a regular Presidential election year you don't even try. Nothing gets accomplished every fourth year. What a system!) With all that being said, there was still a sense of national unity and a desire to get something accomplished. It looked like I would be able to get passed most of what I wanted.

There was a price to be paid, though. I had enough popularity at the moment that a lot of Republican candidates wanted to ride my coat tails. Beginning at the end of March I found myself scheduled for campaign trips around the country every few weeks. On a typical trip I might find myself flying to Topeka or Butte or Lexington, to be met by the local Congressman or Senator at the airport. We would visit some local factory or public works project or college, view with pride whatever it was they were doing there, and we'd both give a speech. No matter what we were viewing, my speech would have two distinct themes, that Congressman Wonderful is just the kind of fellow who needs to be sent back to Washington to continue his valuable leadership role, and that whatever we were pushing that week on the legislative front had something to do with what we were watching. We'd wave the flag and dry hump each other in a mutual love fest. Half the time Stormy would travel with me, because the idiotic mutt was even more popular than I was!

Afterwards, we would have a fundraiser of some sort, and I would do a meet and greet with whoever they could sell my soul to. Then we would have a delicious rubber chicken dinner. Chicken Topeka tastes pretty much like Chicken Butte and Chicken Lexington. I think Stormy had better dining some nights. The next day we would fly somewhere else and repeat the process. Do that for two or three days and then back to Washington. Wait three weeks and repeat.

On a personal level, if you are an unpopular President, nobody wants to be seen with you. The requests for personal appearances are dramatically reduced, as is any chance of getting any legislation passed. Like I said, there is a price to be paid.

Chapter 149: Springtime

Most of the spring was spent, by me at least, with the legislation I was pushing and with trying to tone down the idiots on both sides who were running around like chickens with their heads cut off. I was still being damned by Dick Cheney, but he was looking increasingly nervous. The Indians were circling the wagon train and getting closer and closer. It made his vitriol even more excessive, but it was taking on a very bitter and self defensive tone. Regardless, I had my hands filled with this through the spring, that and campaigning for my fellow Republicans.

Marilyn and the girls, on the other hand, were driving me nuts with their antics. The twins weren't all that bad, in that you kind of expected a pair of seventeen year old girls to be nutty. They were graduating high school this semester, and between that, getting ready for the prom, planning to move to Washington for the summer, and then off to college in the fall, they were driving Marilyn and me crazy. Still, one particular morning at the beginning of April got extra nutty. It was spring break and Marilyn and the twins were staying at the White House. Monday morning, I was in a 10:00 AM meeting with Paul O'Neill from Treasury and Mitch Daniels of the OMB, along with a few aides, when we were interrupted by the intercom. "Mister President, your daughters are here and would like to see you."

I glanced at the phone, and then at the others. I shrugged my shoulders and hit the speaker button. "We're kind of busy right now."

Molly squawked over the phone. "Daddy! It's important!"

"What?"

"Daddy!"

I rolled my eyes and muttered, "All right.", and then stood to go to the door. Instead, the guard at the door must have heard that as an assent, because the door opened before I could get to it, and Stormy barreled into the room. "What in the... ?"

The twins followed her in, their eyes popping to see it wasn't just me. Molly nervously waved, and Holly said, "Daddy, you have to take care of Stormy. We're going out."

"Excuse me?" I couldn't quite believe this!

"Daddy, we have to go out with Mom! We have to shop for dresses, for the prom! We told you that.", she pressed on.

I looked over at Stormy, now sitting on the couch next to Paul, who was scratching her neck. "So? What does that have to do with the dog? Leave her upstairs!"

"She didn't want to stay. She gets lonely.", answered Molly.

I stared at the pair for a second. "This is the Oval Office! This is the White House! I AM THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES! THIS IS NOT BRING YOUR DOG TO WORK DAY!", I roared.

Behind me I heard a snicker. And a 'Woof!'

Holly simply whined, "Daddy you have to do it!"

Molly settled it by going, "Bye, Stormy. You behave for Daddy!" Then she kissed my cheek and zoomed out, followed by her sister. They closed the door behind them, leaving me stranded with the dog.

I turned to find Paul and Mitch trying to hold in the laughter. Some of the assistants had their mouths hidden by their hands. "The first guy who laughs gets a direct ticket to the unemployment line! I haven't fired anybody lately, and I'm due!", I warned them. The room simply exploded at that.

I sat down on the couch, next to my dog, and suddenly I heard a click and saw a flash. I glanced over and saw Eric Draper, the Chief White House Photographer, taking a picture. Most of the time you forget these guys are around. They keep their mouths shut and are constantly taking pictures, and they flit in and out of surprisingly sensitive meetings. He must have snuck in behind the girls, and now he got several shots of Stormy sitting on the couch between me and the Secretary of the Treasury. I gave him a droll look and he smiled and took off.

I never really thought about it. After a couple of minutes I pointed to the corner, and Stormy jumped down and curled up to take a nap. At lunch I walked her and then took her upstairs and put her in the Residence. What I hadn't expected was that Ari Fleischer, in his role of humanizing The Most Powerful Man in the Free World, gave that photo the green light in the weekly dump of White House photos to the press corps. It was a cute shot; he released it.

That Saturday night, on Saturday Night Live, Drew Carey was on as the host. In the first third of the show, Darrell Hammond did a skit as the President – me! – with Drew Carey in a dog suit. They were both in the Oval Office, and Hammond would be giving orders to people, and then the office would empty out. At that time, 'I' would ask 'Stormy' what to do next! Carey would tell me what I was doing, and I would ask some really moronic questions, and be told off by my dog, and then I would follow my orders. It lasted about seven or eight minutes.

I didn't watch it, but the next morning I found it cued up on the VCR by Will Brucis, and Marilyn and I watched it together. Clips from the show also were featured during breaks on the Sunday morning news shows. Marilyn found it funny, me not so much. I had already told her about the girls dumping the dog on me, and she promised to keep them under control a bit more. To what extent either of us could do that was questionable. Regardless, Stormy giving me instructions became a recurring gag on Saturday Night Live.

Ari's humanizing efforts could only go so far, however. I refused to do talk shows or meet with pundits and commentators. Since when did the Presidency become daytime talk TV? I told Ari and Frank and Mindy that it was about time somebody reminded people that this was an august institution and not reality television. It was bad enough when Bill Clinton had played saxophone on Arsenio Hall and had been asked boxers versus briefs. That was just the start! Over the years you had Presidents going on Oprah and Ellen and Leno and Letterman, and candidates announcing their plans on Stewart and Colbert. I'm sorry, but I was the President, not a game show host!

A younger generation in the White House disagreed with me, and gave me an argument. Mindy said, "If you are trying to reach out to younger voters and sway them, you need to be on the channels they are watching. You can ask Ari and Bruce about this, but a certain percentage of viewers get their news now not from regular news channels but from the comedy news and late night talk shows, and that number is growing."

I glanced at Ari, who shrugged and nodded. "It's a small number, but it's growing. The media is fragmenting, and this is just part of it."

"Let me know when you plan to give Jon Stewart a White House press pass.", I replied.

"We're not there yet, Mister President."

Frank stepped in at that point. "Nobody is saying to go on the Late Show, boss. What about Bill O'Reilly or Oprah? They are fairly mainstream."

I shook my head. "It's one thing to do a press conference, even a small one, with real reporters, for real newspapers and networks. There is a certain level of integrity expected there. O'Reilly and Oprah are not journalists, they are commentators. They aren't asking for information, they are hoping for fireworks! I don't care what the topic is, at this level they are all grey areas. They don't want subtle and sophisticated and thoughtful, they want sound bites. Sorry, not doing it." The subject was dropped, but I knew it would arise again.

The twins settled in enough at the White House that they held a sleepover there with some of the cheerleading squad at Hereford. Thankfully they did it on a weekend. If I thought two squealing and giggling teenage girls was bad, I was assaulted by eleven of them! They bunked all over the Residence, and Saturday morning was bad. I came out of the bedroom in khakis and a polo shirt, intent on grabbing some breakfast and heading down to the Oval Office for some paperwork, and barged into a flock of nubile teenagers barely in their unmentionables! It sounds like a real delight, and it's not! I don't swing that way, and I scampered out of there and ran downstairs, where I grabbed a bagel and cream cheese in the Mess.

Marilyn was a very popular figure, and at the end of April she did a one-on-one show with Oprah Winfrey. Oprah ran things out of Chicago, but Marilyn didn't want to travel, so the mountain came to Mohammed. To snag an hour or two with the First Lady, Oprah and her team flew to Westminster, and shot in our living room in Hereford. Her crew flew out one day and set things up, and then Oprah flew in the next day for taping. Unlike some First Ladies, Marilyn was much more of a homebody, and she didn't have her own staff scurrying around to do her bidding. If she needed something done, or somebody wanted her to do something, she might get some part time help from my staff. In this case, somebody from the Communications Office was there to answer questions. Marilyn was quite excited, amusingly so. This was Oprah!

They taped the last week of April, and ran two shows the first week of May. I wasn't there with her in Hereford during the taping, but Marilyn seemed happy with it. I did make time the next week to watch it. Some of it was quite amusing, and some quite emotional. Fortunately Stormy listened to Marilyn better than me, and slept in her corner throughout the show.

Oprah: "Thank you for having me here to your lovely home."

Marilyn: "Oh, you're quite welcome. It's actually rather exciting."

Oprah: "Really?"

Marilyn: "Yes. You're Oprah!"

They both had a good laugh over that. Since the focus was on Marilyn, Oprah asked her about her background and upbringing, and Marilyn pulled out some scrapbooks and photo albums. She had some baby pictures and a few as a little girl at St. Mary's Catholic School in Utica, dressed in her blue plaid jumper. Eventually they worked their way up through her teen years, and got to college. I was surprised by some of the photos Marilyn had in the albums, and that she showed them. There was one of her in a slinky blue dress with a long slit up one leg that I had bought her for a fancy evening in Vegas, and also some of the shots of her when she sent me some morale boosters when I was at boot camp. That was going to get Marilyn some very positive publicity among any straight male watchers of the show, if there were any.

Oprah: "Oooh! Hot stuff! When did you take these shots?"

Marilyn: "Oh, these are some old photos! Carl bought me a Polaroid camera as a present when we were in college, and asked me to send him some shots as 'morale boosters' when he went off to basic training. One of my girlfriends and I took photos and we both sent them to our boyfriends."

Oprah: "They look like they would definitely raise a soldier's morale, and probably his blood pressure as well!"

They both laughed at that. Then Marilyn opened a different photo album and a different conversation started.

Marilyn: "Oops, this one isn't mine. This is an album of Carl's."

Oprah: "Well, let's see what's in it."

Marilyn: "Well, I can tell you there won't be any photos from when he was a child. His sister told me that their mother destroyed all his photos from when he lived at home. Hmmm, let's see ... these are from a road trip he and a few buddies took when they were in college. They drove across the country, to California and back."

Several photos showed up in order from the trip that Ricky, Marty, and I took that first summer at Rensselaer. That was my last free summer, before I ended up in the Army.

Marilyn: "I always liked this one. My idiot boyfriend, who's now my idiot husband, decided to try riding a mechanical bull! This shot is of him flying upside down after being tossed off! And he wonders why our son is an adrenaline junkie."

Oprah: "Who are these other guys?"

Marilyn: "Well, this one has to be Marty Adrianopolis. He's a really good friend of ours. He became Carl's Chief of Staff in Congress and now he's a lobbyist in Washington. The other guy ... I'm not sure ... Dicky, Ricky, something like that. Haven't seen him in years." (Flip to a different photo.) "This one is of him playing blackjack. I didn't know it at the time, but he was already a multimillionaire, and yet here he is playing high stakes blackjack and making a profit! I hated it when he gambled!" (New photo) "Oh, Carl is going to hate this one! This is when he and the guys were arrested in Florida."

Oprah: "The President was arrested!"

Marilyn: "They fell asleep on the beach, and that seemed to be a deadly crime wherever they were. They spent the night in jail, paid the fine, and got their picture taken by the cops. Not exactly hard core criminals. More like a bunch of nitwits if you ask me!"

Thank you, Marilyn Buckman!

Marilyn showed Oprah, trailed by a cameraman, around the house. She stayed out of the bedrooms, and it isn't all that large, at least compared to the White House. They went out onto the back deck and shot some footage of the back yard and the pool and pool house. Stormy joined them so she could take care of her own business. No, that wasn't recorded for posterity. The Secret Service wouldn't allow any other exterior shots, like the landing pad or any of the bunkers on their slabs.

Oprah: "So this is the workout room." (The camera panned over a Nautilus machine of mine, and a treadmill of Marilyn's, and the large pad to the side where I occasionally did some katas. The room isn't big enough to do any real aikido or tae kwan do.) "You look to be in excellent shape. What kind of workout do you do?"

Marilyn: "Thank you. I mostly walk on the treadmill. If Carl's home, he sometimes gets me on the Nautilus, but that's more his thing than mine. Mostly I watch what I eat. It helps that I have enough time to stay in shape. Otherwise, it would be tough. Stormy likes long walks, too."

Oprah: "Does the President walk with you?"

Marilyn: (Shaking head) "He can't, not really. His knee won't take it. If he walks more than about a mile it really bothers him. I know he tried to play golf one time with John Boehner and some of the other Congressmen, and he barely made it through the first few holes."

That was true. I had often worked out with some of the other 'gym rats' in the House gym, but golf was completely out for me. The best I could offer was to drive the golf cart and pay at the 19th Hole. They went back to the living room and resumed taping.

Oprah: "Well, whatever you are doing, it's working. You look to be in great shape."

Marilyn: "Thank you. I appreciate that. Carl and I try to stay healthy, and we've tried to make sure the kids do the same."

Oprah: "There have been some commentators who have reported that you maintain your figure through plastic surgery. Any comment on that?"

Marilyn: "It's a lie, plain and simple. We watch our diets and work out. It's just that it's a whole lot easier to keep the weight off initially than it is to try and lose it afterwards. That's all there is to it."

Oprah: "So you've never had any work done."

Marilyn: "Not really. Not like what you're talking about, anyway. I did have some reconstructive work done after the accident in '89. I had lost the baby and needed a bunch of other work, and had a lot of scarring." (She waved her hands over her abdomen.) "At that time Carl sent me to a surgeon for reconstruction, but that was all."

Oprah: "So, nothing else."

Marilyn: (Laughing.) "No! Carl laughed and offered to pay for some work up top..." (She brought her hands up to her chest.) " ... but I told him no and slugged him."

Oprah: "You punched the President?! What did he say to that!?"

Marilyn: (Laughing.) "Well, he wasn't the President then. He told me two things, that I punched like a girl – I slugged him again for that! – and that he had been a bottle baby and had issues! I told him tough luck, and to get over it!"

They both laughed at that, while I groaned. The First Lady of the United States was talking about her boobs on national television! Ari was going to be fielding questions in the morning! I was also going to end up being challenged by a bunch of female ass kicking karate champions!

Oprah: "So, nothing else. The girls are all your own."

Marilyn: "All original equipment!"

Oprah: "Speaking of plastic surgery, how come President Buckman never had his nose fixed?"

Marilyn: "His nose?"

Oprah: "From when he broke it?"

Marilyn: "Carl's never broken his nose, at least not since I've known him."

Oprah: "We looked at his high school picture and his nose was straight then."

Marilyn: "It's news to me. I'll have to ask him."

They took a break and Marilyn found my high school yearbook, and they showed the picture on the air. It was definitely a different shape than now. Marilyn simply looked mystified.

Oprah: "Interesting. So he didn't break it in the Army?"

Marilyn: "No, I'd have known. Not in college, either. Maybe it was in aikido or tae kwan do when he was younger. I'll have to ask him sometime."

Oprah: "Or in a fight when he was in school?"

Marilyn: "Maybe. I know he was in several."

Oprah: "Why did he fight so much?"

Marilyn: "I don't think it's what he wanted to do. He told me once that up until about the ninth grade he was one of the smallest kids in his entire school, and got picked on constantly. He told me he either had to fight or get stuffed in a locker."

Oprah: "I've heard he was in a lot of fights. Is Carl a violent man?"

Marilyn: "What?! Like abusive or something?! Never! Oh my God, no! Carl would never raise a hand to me or the kids! No, I've talked to him about the fights he was in. I mean, what kind of man did I marry, that sort of thing. If you mean is Carl an angry man, then the answer is no, not at all. Carl is not a violent man, but he is a man who has been around violence, and who is not afraid of violence. I have also talked to some of his friends from school, who saw some of the fights. Carl once told me, and I believe him, that he never started a fight in his life, but he also told me that he always finishes a fight, and he's never left an enemy standing."

Oprah: "You've actually witnessed this, haven't you?"

Marilyn: "Yes, in the Bahamas once, when I had my purse snatched and Carl was in the way. He was outnumbered three to one, and they had knives, and were killers. It was terrifying! I was so scared, and he put all three of them down in a matter of seconds. I once had somebody ask me if having a man fight for me was romantic, and all I can say is that it was absolutely terrifying!"

Terrific! Ari was going to work overtime on this one!

Oprah: "I understand that you and the President are nothing alike, that it was a matter of opposites attracting. Is that true?"

Marilyn: (Laughing.) "Oh, that's very true! We have absolutely nothing in common!"

Oprah: "How so?"

Marilyn: (Still laughing.) "Oh, everything! He's Lutheran and I'm Catholic. He's a Republican and I'm a Democrat. He's a Southerner and I'm a Yankee. He's a city boy and I'm a country girl. Oh, the list goes on and on!"

Oprah: "But you've made it work for you."

Marilyn: "Very much so! We met in 1974, so that means we've known each other for, what, 28 years now."

Oprah: "Did you ever have a breakup when you were dating?"

Marilyn: "Oh, Carl is going to hate me for this!" (Laughing.) "Yes, back when we were in college he said something stupid and I dumped him. He's not very good at groveling, but I made him!"

Oprah: "What did he say? You have to tell us!"

Marilyn: (Still laughing.) "No, I don't think so, but it required a lot of groveling, and an engagement ring, to boot!" (She held up her left hand and showed her engagement ring.)

Oprah: (Now laughing, also.) "Groveling is good, but groveling and diamonds are even better!"

Marilyn: "That's so true!"

Oprah: "Is President Buckman a romantic man?"

Marilyn: "Hmmm, it's really not his style. He can be very sweet and incredibly supportive, but he's not really big on the whole grand romance thing. Still ... there was this one letter ... he didn't write it to be romantic, but it was just about the most romantic thing I'd ever read." (She held up her hand and stood to go off camera. She returned with her purse, and opened it and rummaged through until she found a plastic wrapped letter in the bottom.) "I always have it with me. This was Carl's good-bye letter."

Oprah: "What do you mean?"

Marilyn: "Carl was in the Army, in a combat outfit, and a lot of guys write farewell letters, you know, in case they don't come home. Carl had one buried in the dresser, and when he was dropped into Nicaragua nobody knew what happened. The Army didn't tell us for almost a week! There were all sorts of rumors, like the plane had crashed and they were all dead, and I opened his letter. Here, you read it. I always cry when I read it."

With that she handed it to Oprah, who read it aloud, as Marilyn grabbed a tissue. Great! That letter was as maudlin as you could get!

Oprah: "Yes, it is romantic, and sweet, and more than a bit maudlin. It sounds a bit depressing, too."

Marilyn: "Carl can get a little melancholy at times. I think he was thinking about his own family when he wrote it. Aside from his sister, I don't think any of them would have really minded him dying. It's a horrible thing to say, but I don't think they would have cried if he had died. Carl's family was truly horrible, except for his sister Suzie. She's wonderful, but she managed to escape, too."

Oprah: "They actually disowned him and didn't even tell him? How was that even possible?"

Marilyn: "I think they filed a legal notice in the Baltimore Sun, but Carl was in the Army at Fort Bragg at the time, in North Carolina. That's all we can figure. Still, what kind of parents could throw away a child? That's what they did! Who could do that?"

Oprah: "According to the timeline, they disowned him right after you two married. Do you take any blame for that?"

Marilyn: "Not really. I think it would have happened anyway, sooner or later. I was just a convenient excuse. His mother never liked me. At our wedding she told Carl, with me standing next to him, and my parents in the background, that he could have done better. What kind of a mother does that?"

Oprah: "She didn't!"

Marilyn: (Nodding.) "She did. It's true."

There was a bit more on this line, none of which I found either new or amusing, but I was sure it was wonderful human interest crap. I wasn't surprised it made it to the air. Oprah finished with a sore subject.

Oprah: "So, you have to tell us. You've been married almost 24 years. What exactly is the Carl Buckman Experience!?"

Marilyn: (Laughing.) "Oh, please! Who says that's so special! Maybe Carl was interested in the Marilyn Lefleur Experience! Ever thought of that one? Oh! Damn! My mother is probably watching this! Mom, there is no Marilyn Lefleur Experience!" (Laughter all around!)

The next day, at my early morning staff meeting, the idiocy commenced. As expected, Ari said, "You know it's bound to come up, so I have to ask you. How did you break your nose?"

"Ari, it doesn't matter. You'll never be able to tell anyone anyway."

"Mister President, we're going to get the question. We need an answer."

"Ari, there is no way in the world you're going to be able to spin this. Trust me!"

He pushed some more. "They won't accept no comment."

I looked around the Oval Office. Besides Ari, I was meeting with Josh, Mindy, and Mrs. Hawthorne, the senior secretary. They were all looking at me expectantly. "Don't say I didn't warn you. You want to know how I broke my nose? Okay, here goes! The summer after I graduated from high school, one night I was over at my girlfriend's house and her parents came home early. Like, hours and hours early! Getting the picture? Got an idea how you're going to spin that one, Ari?"

Ari groaned. "Don't do this to me, Mister President!"

Mindy and Mrs. Hawthorne were laughing, and Josh kept pushing. "I thought you were a black belt by then?"

"I wasn't exactly in a position to defend myself, Josh.", I answered.

"Exactly what position were you in, Boss?", teased Mindy.

"Never you mind, young lady!"

Ari was simply shaking his head in amused dejection. "Just how bad did it get?"

"Mom and Dad were not amused when they came home early. Dad was kicking my ass while Mom was throwing the crockery at me."

Josh asked, "So what did you do? Please don't tell me you punched out her father!"

"Jesus, no! No, I simply grabbed my pants and ran out of the house and drove myself to the hospital. It's the only fight I've ever lost. He kicked the crap out of me!", I said, laughing.

"Great! How old were you at the time?", asked Ari.

"Underage. I was 17 and she was 16."

"Great! Statutory rape! You could be charged as a sexual offender.", he continued.

"Ari, trust me. The only ones offended were her parents!", I told him.

Mindy and Mrs. Hawthorne were laughing loudly by now, as was Josh. Ari smiled and shook his head. "You're not helping, Mister President! You could be called a sexual predator!"

"Considering the position I was in, I would have to argue I wasn't the predator!", I replied.

Ari groaned and smiled. "Definitely not being helpful!"

"And that's why I won't be answering that question, Ari. You will!"

Mrs. Hawthorne had to ask, "Is this part of the Carl Buckman Experience?"

"Why don't you ask Mrs. Buckman sometime? I can't wait to hear the answer."

"Final question.", added Ari. "Want to tell the world about the Marilyn Lefleur Experience?"

"OUT! All of you!" I pointed towards the door, and the laugh track for the morning took off to their own offices.

For utter nuttiness, though, nothing could beat the White House Correspondents Dinner, which was held May 4. This was the first Dinner I had ever attended. Last year, as a punishment for disagreeing with Dick Cheney and Karl Rove, I had been sent to Burundi, Rwanda, and the Congo for a week, to make nice and find some facts. The only fact that I found was that I didn't want to be in the middle of Africa. Prior to that, I was simply a mere Congressman, and was not invited to dine with my betters. There is a certain protocol and format to the Dinner. It is very formal, black tie, and some of the correspondents (especially the print media) end up renting their tuxes. By tradition, the President and the Vice President, and their spouses, are invited. There is usually some form of entertainment, originally a popular musician or singer, but now that had morphed into a popular comedian, who did a stand-up routine that chewed on the President. Sometimes this was pretty good. Sometimes, like when Stephen Colbert skewered George Bush on my first go, it got pretty rocky. Colbert did almost twenty minutes that painted Bush as a moron and the press as kiss-asses, which became monumentally popular overnight with everyone except the White House and the press corps.

This year we were getting Jay Leno, who was funny and very much middle of the road. It was doubtful he was going to chew me a new one live and in person, but I was sure that I was going to be the butt of some jokes. I had Matt and Mike and everybody else writing some material, but how well that was going to work was questionable. I might have to wing it, and that was bound to be a disaster.

I should have known that there was going to be a problem when, as Leno came out to do his routine, a giant screen unfurled behind us. I was sitting next to the podium on the dais (the better to spill your soup down your shirt and have everybody see you do it) with Marilyn next to me. On the other side were John and Cindy, and beyond us were a few other important invitees. The lights dimmed, and Leno stood at the podium, and thanked everybody, and then lit into me.

He started off fairly simply. "I've always wanted to come to the White House Correspondent's Dinner. I wanted to meet the people I watch on television to tell me what is happening in the world. I wanted to meet the people I see the faces of everyday, telling me what the most powerful man in the free world is doing. I wanted to meet the most powerful man in the free world. I mean, really, what an incredible privilege it is to live in a country where the most common of citizens can meet the person who leads his great nation! Let's have a round of applause for this great country!"

There was a dutiful round of applause, and then it got crazy. "I came here to meet the President, and I now stand here at the podium, and I tell you all now, that this person seated here ... he is not the President! This man is an imposter! He appears here under false pretenses, and the real President is elsewhere! Let me show you the proof!"

With that he hit the remote control, and a picture flashed on the screen, the picture of me, Stormy, and Paul O'Neill that Ari had flagged as harmless. "There, there is the real leader of the free world! There is the real President! You can see him sitting there, studying the documents, sitting in between the Secretary of the Treasury, Paul O'Neill, and his handler, one Carl Buckmouse, Buckhouser, Buckmaster, something like that, anyway. That is the real President!"

At this the place began going nuts! Leno did about eight or nine minutes with a string of Photoshopped pictures of Stormy doing various important things - Stormy greeting the Queen of England, Stormy addressing Congress, Stormy parachuting from a C-130. Each shot was more outlandish then the last. Over all of this, Leno was describing what a wonderful and brilliant President Stormy had become. Marilyn was laughing her ass off at all of this, and I just had to join in. I certainly hadn't expected this.

Then it got worse. Leno finished with, "And now I would like to introduce you to the real President! Here tonight, joining us, is the real President of the United States of America!"

A spotlight came on and shifted to the back of the room. Through an open door, in stepped Drew Carey in the dog costume from Saturday Night Live, only now he was smoking a cigar and drinking from a cocktail glass. The room erupted. He slowly made his way through the place, and he must have been wearing a wire, because he was talking to people and making jokes as he worked his way through the tables and up to the podium. He continued his shtick right up to the podium, and then started telling the audience how I had messed up various things by not following his directions properly. "Good help is hard to find!", he complained.

Oh Christ! I had to follow this? Some days it's just not worth getting out of bed.

Chapter 150: Graduations

June, 2002

Charlie came home about a week later, his latest deployment finished. The Tarawa Amphibious Ready Group, which consisted of the Tarawa, the Duluth, and the Fort McHenry, Charlie's ship, had arrived back in Norfolk. I had Captain Miller keep us apprised of the dates. Charlie had a fair bit of accumulated leave, and we told him that we expected him to spend at least some of it with his ancient and creaky parents, before old age and senility took us from him.

So it was that on May 8, a Wednesday, I got a call transferred to my office. "Hello?", I said, answering the call. I hadn't been told who it was, just that I needed to answer it.

"Is this the President of the United States? Really? Wow! You must be important!", sounded a familiar baritone.

"Smart ass! It's good to hear from you. You back on solid ground, where real soldiers work?"

"Only the candy ass ones. Yeah, we just docked this morning. I'll be out of here in an hour. We should be there by late afternoon.", he told me.

"We? Who else is coming?", I asked.

"You'll know when you see him."

"Don't try and be sneaky. I could give you lessons. Your cousin Jack was on the Tarawa, right? You bringing him?"

"That's the plan."

"Sounds fine. I'll see you then." For my next call I called Marilyn, at home with the girls. She promised to bring them down for the night.

Proving that not all pigs are equal, once Charlie and Jack made it off the ship, Charlie called a phone number he carried in his wallet, and contacted the Secret Service. Within an hour a nondescript car picked them up and ferried the boys to the White House. It was probably a heck of a lot simpler that way. Charlie had a motorcycle up on blocks in storage outside of Camp Lejeune, and Jack had a car there as well. Without the car ride, they would have to travel with their compatriots back to Jacksonville, dig their vehicles out and get them running again, and then travel. We could cut out at least a day or two of that.

At about three in the afternoon, Captain Miller was admitted to the Oval Office. "Captain Miller, reporting with party of two.", he announced with a smile. Behind him marched in a pair of Marines in jeans and tee shirts.

I stood up from my desk and moved around it. "And a more disreputable party of two has yet to be found. Thank you, Captain Miller. I appreciate it."

"Sir." Miller took off and left me with my son and nephew. Jack Rottingen, Jr. was a little bigger and heavier than Charlie, and definitely took after his father. Both boys were tan and muscular, with that high-and-tight semi-shaved head look the Marines liked.

I shook both their hands. "Damn, you two look good. How was the cruise?"

"I'm glad to be home!", announced my son.

"Same here.", agreed Jack.

"Have you had a chance to call your folks yet?", I asked my nephew. I looked over at Charlie. "Your mother and sisters will be coming down as soon as school is out. We'll grill something, if that's okay."

"Yeah sure.", he answered.

Jack said, "I called and left a message on the machine, but Dad must not have been home yet, and Mom must be at the hospital. We left a message to call you, if that's okay."

"Sure, no problem." I led the boys towards the door. Opening it, I saw Mindy with my schedule in her hands. "Mindy, you've met Charlie before. This is my nephew, Corporal Jack Rottingen. I need you to do two things. Let housekeeping know Jack will be staying with us tonight, and cancel everything else for the day."

"Welcome home, Charlie. It's good to see you again. Nice to meet you, Corporal." She turned to me and said, "Yes on one and no on two. OMB and the Council of Economic Advisers just got here for a meeting with you."

I looked back at the two young men. "I sometimes wonder who is working for whom. Listen, I'll join you as soon as I can. Charlie, show Jack around and get settled. We can figure things out when I get there."

"OO-RAH!", was the reply, and they looked around and caught the eye of somebody who led them from the West Wing. I grabbed a few things and went to my meeting.

I can't say as I remembered much about the meeting. I basically rubberstamped some plans to end the deficit and the recession. Military expenditures were much more in control on this go. We had ramped up certain items, cut back on some others, and the Coast Guard had gotten a major refinancing. On the other hand, while Saddam Hussein was still being a mouthy asshole, I wasn't spending a fortune keeping him under control, and had no plans to invade. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars had cost us $200 to $300 billion a year all on their own, and none of that had been funded. In fact, Bush would have lowered taxes, and by some projections that would have created deficits of half a trillion dollars a year for as far as the eye could see.

Actually, most of my thoughts were on the two young men by now drinking beer on the Truman Balcony. Jack had already re-enlisted, getting a promotion from Lance Corporal (E-3) to Corporal (E-4) out of the deal. He was making the sounds of a lifer. Charlie was a Lance Corporal and was probably going to get the same offer in the near future. He still hadn't decided if he wanted to go career or not. I was going to have to talk to him about that. Despite what I had told him about not interfering, that simply wasn't realistic. It was much too dangerous to put him into a combat situation, not for his sake, but for the sake of those around him! In Afghanistan, for instance, if the Taliban and Al Qaeda knew that the son of the U.S. President was around, they would be making human wave attacks for the chance to capture or kill him, putting his entire unit into massive peril. Would he want to stay in knowing that for the rest of my term he would never be actually allowed to serve with his unit if they were sent into combat?

I was interrupted halfway through my meeting by a call from my sister, so I put her on hold and had the call transferred up to the Residence ("And if those two nitwits don't pick up, call me back and I'll go kick some Marine ass!") Eventually I was able to break free from the meeting and head up to the Residence.

As I suspected, the two were lounging on recliners out on the Balcony, working on a cooler of beers. Jack was legal, Charlie not so much. He wouldn't turn 21 until October, not that I intended to chew his ass over it. I grabbed a beer and headed into the bedroom to change, and then re-joined them. I was about to say something when we all heard the turbine whine and rotor flutter of an approaching helicopter. Marine One was bringing Marilyn, the twins, and Stormy in for landing on the South Lawn, right out in front of us. Technically, it isn't Marine One unless I am personally aboard, but I have no idea what the call sign would be then. There are actually two type of helos flying for HMX-1, the Marine helicopter squadron assigned to carry me around. They flew either H-3 Sea Kings or, as was the case today, H-60 "White Hawks", a fancy variant on the standard Black Hawks the Army used.

The women all disembarked and I could see my wife's semi-amused look when the three of us stood up and waved at them with beer bottles obviously in evidence. She pointed at us to the girls and said something none of us could hear, but I was sure was snarky. They all came in, and a minute later pandemonium reigned for a few minutes. Stormy rampaged in and almost knocked over the cooler as she greeted us.

"Good Lord! This thing really is a monster!", commented Jack as Stormy tried to jump into his lap.

"I told you.", replied Charlie. "You just didn't believe me."

Marilyn said, "Starting without me?", as she picked up an empty bottle of beer.

"It was a long day. I earned this.", I told her.

"A likely story!" She turned to Charlie and gave him a hug. "Oh! I have missed you!"

"It's good to be back, Mom."

"You, too, Jack!" She hugged him next. "Have you talked to your folks yet?"

"Mom called a little while ago. She knows I'm here.", he responded.

"Well, tell me your plans and I'll call her back. I haven't talked to her in a week or two anyway."

The boys looked at each other, and Jack said, "We've both got a couple of weeks of leave. We were thinking of hanging out here, or somewhere in town, and then going up to Rochester for a week. After that I need to get back to Jacksonville. As soon as my leave is up I transfer to Twentynine Palms, 1st of the 7th."

"Huh. Twentynine Palms, that's the middle of the Mojave Desert. Better take your suntan lotion.", I commented.

"OO-RAH! They also tell us it's a dry heat, but I don't know whether I believe that or not. Mom and Dad said they'd come out and visit after I get settled."

I snorted at that. "Tell them to do it over the winter." I looked over at Marilyn. "You might as well call Suzie and tell her the boys are safe but trying to drink Washington dry. We'll fly them up on the G-IV when they want to go."

She nodded. "If they fly up on Friday, I might want to take the girls up for the weekend. I haven't seen your sister in months."

"Fine by me. You two sort it out and get it set up. If it's just you and the girls it will probably be okay. If I go it will turn into a zoo. Invite them down for a vacation sometime, too. We can put them in President Blue's Room."

Marilyn gave me a dry look. "Very funny." Then she picked up the phone and got the switchboard to connect her to my sister.

The visit to Marilyn's family had been a disaster at Christmas. The entourage surrounding me, and the security required, was simply beyond belief. You had to be present to understand it. It was far beyond what I had traveled with as the Veep, and light years beyond the private security I had used as a Congressman and businessman. Marilyn and the kids needed protection, but not like what went with me. It would actually be a fraction of the cost to fly Marilyn's entire family to Christmas at the White House, compared to flying us to them. It affected everything, too. I couldn't just drive over to Tusk Cycle to see my friends any longer, either. Leaving aside the apoplexy that the Secret Service would have if I wanted to visit a biker hangout, it practically shuts down a business when I make a visit.

I didn't have a chance to speak to Charlie about his time in the Marines until after he got back from Rochester. I kept my mouth shut, but I was heartily thankful when he said he was getting out at the end of his hitch. "I like it okay, and I'm not sorry I joined, but floating around on a steel tub for months at a time isn't quite as enjoyable as you might think."

I smiled. "I never thought it would be. Leaving aside the seasickness part, that would have driven me crazy. At least your grandfather only had to go out for a few days at a time."

"What do you mean? Your father?"

I nodded again. "Yeah, my dad was an ensign, and then a lieutenant jay-gee during the war. That would be World War II by the way, smartass. Anyway, he served on PT boats in the Caribbean. They weren't much more than cabin cruisers with giant engines and some guns and torpedoes. They didn't have enough fuel for more than a day or two."

"You never talk about your father, not much anyway."

I shrugged at that. "What do you want me to tell you about him, Charlie? The man disowned me, for Christ's sake!"

"I don't know. What was he like?", he asked.

I sighed. We had never really talked about my family. He knew my history, like practically every other American who could read, but that was it. His mother's family was a part of his life, and so was his godmother's. My mother and father, not at all. "Listen to the rest of the world, he was a great guy. He was the kind of guy you wanted living next door. He mowed his lawn, kept his house up, went to church, sent his kids to school, never cheated on his wife – you know, all the routine boring stuff. To me he was a royal prick. Mom was crazy and Hamilton was crazier, and as far as my old man was concerned, I was just collateral damage. I moved out when I was sixteen and I wished I had done it sooner."

"Huh."

"Hell, Charlie, go read a book. There must be a half a dozen biographies already written about me by now. None of the authors have ever spoken to me, but they are all experts." I shrugged again. "Moving on to more interesting topics, what do you think you are going to do when you get out of the Corps?"

"I'm going to go back to motocross, but I might also try grand prix, you know, road racing. I had a chance right before I went into the Corps to try that and it was really wild. I've been in contact with Bucky, and he and his father are still interested in sponsoring me. At least long enough to see if I can still keep up with the younger guys."

"You'll be twenty-one, and you're worried about younger guys?", I asked, incredulous.

"When I went pro I was sixteen, Dad."

I shrugged at that. Twenty-one and over the hill? Ridiculous! "Okay. That should be a lot more interesting than the Marines, anyway."

"Huh?"

"Charlie, if you wanted to stay in, the Corps is going to restrict your duty."

He gave me a dirty look at that. "You promised you wouldn't do that!"

"I lied." I held up my hands to ward off any attacks. "Listen, I don't worry about you, but think about what would happen if it became known to the bad guys that the son of the American President was around. Suppose you had been in Afghanistan? There ain't a one of those bastards I would trust with a busted nickel. Both sides would have been gunning for you, and even if you stayed safe, how many of your buddies and squadmates would die keeping you alive. I am responsible to them, just like I am responsible to you."

"Huh."

"What kind of casualties would we take keeping you safe? I won't take that chance. As long as I am the President, you can't get anywhere near combat.", I told him.

He looked out the window and muttered a quiet, "Shit!" After a few more minutes he looked back at me and nodded. "I want to finish my tour with the 3rd of the 2nd. Can I at least do that?"

"Sure. I'll try to keep from invading anybody through next fall."

"Thank you."

I wasn't overly sorry if he didn't get a chance to be a hero. In my experience, the only people excited by action were those who hadn't seen any. Once you had been up shit creek, you never really wanted to paddle back up there. You went, because you had signed up and said you would go, but you did it with clear eyes and a clear head. Kids wanted excitement. Grownups could live without it.

As far as being Presidential was concerned, I had known that I was going to face opposition to the weapons program cuts, and I had known it was going to be serious. Even so, knowing intellectually was not the same thing as seeing it in action. For the last few months things had been building, ever since the National Security Summit I had convened in March at Camp David. The cuts had become official on April 4, when the individual Deputy Undersecretaries in charge of the Army, Navy, and Air Force announced the specific program cuts and changes. That made the evening news, for sure, as well as the Sunday news programs. It wasn't just the military that was pissed, so were the chickenhawks and neocons, and every Congressman or Senator from a state or district where the stuff was being built.

It was by pure happenstance that the Army came out the best, simply because they didn't have any gigantic spending programs planned. They had invested the money in the Eighties and Nineties, and their newest major acquisition program was the Stryker, which I was leaving alone. Still, since I had been in the Army, this was used as 'proof' that I was biased in the Army's favor.

In some ways, the Navy hadn't been as badly hurt as it could have been. Even the admirals knew that the DD(X)/CG(X) simply wasn't needed and was just way too expensive to actually build. It was already projected to cost almost half of what a nuclear powered aircraft carrier cost, and would probably go higher. Likewise, the Littoral Combat Ship was still on the drawing boards, and was nowhere near any kind of production point. On the other hand, I was happy to keep funding the stuff that worked, like the Arleigh Burkes, and new transports and auxiliaries, and the Navy kept the Spruances and Kidds in commission.

The admirals and generals weren't stupid, because dummies don't make it to the top in any system. They knew they couldn't fight me on every single weapons program. This was one of those useful rules of war, he who attacks everywhere, attacks nowhere, and he who defends everywhere, defends nowhere. You have to be picky. Some battles you can't win, so be choosy and fight the battles you want to fight. They decided to fight for the F-35 Lightning II, the Joint Strike Fighter.

The F-35 was the latest and greatest aerial wonder-weapon, a state of the art airplane that could almost think for the pilot, and would protect him from anything while dealing out death and destruction to everybody. Well, that was the advertising spiel, anyway. On paper it looked great. We would take everything we learned from making the F-22 stealth fighter, and make it into an all-in-one fighter-bomber, capable of both attacking other planes and carrying bombs and missiles to attack ground targets. It would be somewhat slower than the F-22, so that would make it less expensive. Even better, it would come in three versions. One version would be owned by the Air Force, and would be a conventional fighter to fly from regular landing strips. Another version would be the same plane for the Navy but converted to operate from carriers, with a tail hook and the modifications to be catapult launched. Finally you had a version just for the Marines, which took all this whiz-bang wonderfulness and turned it into a vertical lift off and landing platform. You would get marvelous economies of scale from selling the three planes to the military.

That was the theory, anyway, and Lockheed-Martin was pushing it hard. The plane had been on the drawing boards since 1996, and the Pentagon had run tests on it and a competitor from Boeing. They had actually built prototypes, and in early October of 2001, shortly after I became President, the Pentagon had picked the F-35 over the Boeing F-32 and moved it into the next step of the system, which was a more detailed design and engineering program that would lead to a contract to build the planes. Now it was in my lap to kill it off.

I knew, from my knowledge from before, that this gizmo was going to be a monumental boondoggle. While I had never really followed the technical stuff then, the program had been such a disaster as to make all sorts of national headlines. The Navy version never really worked; the stealth features and the overall shape of the plane didn't allow a tail hook to be installed, and by the time they fixed that it was a totally different bird from the Air Force version. The Marine vertical takeoff version was even more dangerous than the AV-8 Harrier it was replacing, and the Marines issued orders to not use that feature, which made it an incredibly expensive land based fighter. Only the Air Force version actually performed as expected, and at $100-plus million a plane was several times more expensive than the perfectly fine aircraft it replaced. Already foreign buyers were starting to ask some pointed questions about affordability, and the price was still less than half what it would ultimately become.

Lockheed-Martin fought back on several fronts. This was going to be a major moneymaker for them, and might well be the last manned combat jet ever made, before the robots took over. They were pushing on two fronts, one public and one political. The public front was the most obvious. The costs really weren't that high, each plane was three to four times as effective as older planes, America had to stay Number One and this was the way to do it – if Jesus was going to fly a fighter, he would fly the F-35! There were a lot of numbers that could be spun to show that the F-35 was the plane to buy.

The political attack was much more dangerous. For decades now the weapons manufacturers had realized that the real buyer of their gear wasn't the Pentagon, but Congress. As a result, they spread out subcontracting and parts supplies across as many states and districts as possible. The F-35 might be assembled in Fort Worth, Texas, but the parts were coming from everywhere, from Maine to California, and from Florida to North Dakota. In some cases they went to the extreme of buying parts from a supplier barely capable of making them, in a state farther away and for more money, simply to get the production into another Congressional district, and get that Congressman on board. Even the Maryland Ninth had seen this sort of thing. We didn't actually build weapons in suburban Maryland, but we did build some electronics, some of which went into weapons.

When we announced plans to cancel the F-35, the pushback was immediate. Lockheed-Martin sent a representative, usually retired military, to each and every Congressman and Senator with any kind of production for it in their state or district, even if it was simply a ball bearing. They were informed that the F-35 was vital to America and that without it the angry hordes would be swamping our borders and eradicating our way of life. Worst of all, it would end up closing down a factory, and throwing thousands of people out of work! 'By the way, Congressman, this other fellow I am with is representing a lobbying group for our nation's defense, and he would like to discuss campaign contributions with you.' The various military suppliers had this down to a fine art by now, and often used each other as subcontractors and component suppliers, so that we ended up facing a unified wall. More than a few politicians have caved in over the years.

I was willing to take a lot of heat over this, and our counterattack focused on things we could do cheaper, like continuing to buy newer, updated versions of the existing proven airplanes. The F-15, F-16, and F-18 all worked, so let's keep improving them. Also, for times when you absolutely need stealth, or simply can't risk pilots, let's use drones, which cost a fraction of the price, and were getting more powerful and useful by the day. Above all, Congressman, which programs in your district should we cut to pay for this? Have you talked to the old folks there about closing that hospital they like, so the funds can be given to the Pentagon? No, well, I am sure you'd like to see taxes rise, because President Buckman is not going to pay for this stuff by borrowing the money from the Chinese!

Some of these conversations took place privately, and some took place on the Sunday news shows. A valuable ally proved to be the defense industry itself, since one of the things I was promising was that we weren't necessarily cutting the budget, but we were certainly rearranging it. Lockheed-Martin was fighting for the F-35, but Boeing wanted all that money so it could build F-15s and F-18s, and there were a number of drone manufacturers who were promising things for their chunk of the change. A certain portion of my plan involved getting them to fight each other. Their plan was to increase the military budget, so that they could have their cake and eat it, too. They wanted the Pentagon to buy all those other planes and F-35s!

There were a number of political initiatives that spring aimed at forcing me to back down and reinstate the F-35 development program. First, by mid-May, came a non-binding resolution out of Congress urging a reconsideration of the program, which got overwhelming support. Even the most liberal of Democrats could vote for a resolution to keep studying something, especially if it came wrapped in a campaign contribution. I ignored it and didn't budge.

The next step was a series of amendments to other spending bills. This is a marvelous and time honored tactic to get something passed, sometimes for good and sometimes not. You take an ordinary bill that everybody wants, say a highway spending bill, and then you tack on a rider or amendment, for something else. That other thing can be on anything under the sun, such as a subsidy for cotton candy manufacturing (sponsored by sugar manufacturers). Sometimes they are harmless. Often times they are controversial, like an amendment to ban Federal funding of birth control or a requirement to only teach abstinence. They could even affect overseas policy, by attaching a rider to a bill that would ban exporting condoms (right wing) or require the recipients of foreign aid to not be military dictatorships (left wing).

The big thing is to attach the amendment to something that has to be passed, or else! If you want the budget bill to pass, you have to sign it into law with all the riders still attached. I could sign something with a harmless rider (cotton candy support) but if I balked at an F-35 rider, then would I be willing to veto the budget bill? You were playing chicken with the national economy. This could really backfire! This is in effect what Newt had done when he shut down the government. He went head to head with Clinton, and Newt ended up blinking. In addition, you can have your side add a competing rider which is anathema to the other side, so that nobody wants the damn thing passed!

Nine times out of ten, this sort of crap never makes it out of committee to the floor where it can get voted on, or if it does get voted on, it gets yanked in the conference committee when the Senate and House reconcile their different bills. It has to be something that is really special to make it to the President's desk, for instance, when the committee chairmen get enough of a payoff. In June, the F-35 development program was added back to the budget as a rider on a bill to increase spending on port security and infrastructure, and made its way through the committees and onto the House floor. It passed the House, and failed in reconciliation, so they tried it again on a bigger bill related to the overall budget, and this time it passed.

The gauntlet had been thrown down. I had Matt write me up a statement saying that the basis for a strong defense was a strong economy, and that there was only so much money to go around. I had no intention of going into a deficit in order to fund a program that promised to break every conceivable military budget down the line, especially when we already had perfectly fine weapons and defense systems available. Then I said that I planned to veto the bill. I took a limited number of questions, and then went back to my office and vetoed it before I could be talked out of it. Congress caved and stripped the rider.

Lockheed-Martin's stock price tanked. Congress was actually happy, since they had tried, and gotten lots of campaign contributions, so it wasn't their fault. They didn't have enough votes to override my veto. I had won, but I knew I would face a nasty response somewhere down the line.

Meanwhile, while all this was going on, there were all sorts of other things going on. May and June were the months of graduations, and I had a couple of them to speak at. Friday, May 24, was graduation for the senior class at Hereford High, and the twins would be graduating with honors. Once I got my promotion to President, the school Principal had begun bombarding me with requests to speak at graduation. Normally I wouldn't have done this. For one thing, I wanted to be in the audience, watching the girls. This guy was smarter than that. He didn't ask me, he asked Marilyn! She told him she would ask me, and then told me I had to do it.

Unsurprisingly, the zoo descended on Towson University, which was where the graduation ceremony was to be. Nobody normally cares who speaks at a high school graduation. Some local county politician gets to say something that nobody listens to, especially the kids. They are so excited to be escaping they are half out of control to begin with! Not a one of them, my own daughters included, would give two shits about what I said. Again, normally the only cameras are the ones the parents carry. For this one, C-SPAN would cover it live. It would be a fucking zoo!

Matt Scully and Mike Gerson took one look at my old valedictory speech and both dropped it into the toilet. It wasn't Presidential enough. Instead they came up with something incredibly boring and standard, something like what the assistant county commissioner would normally tell the graduates. I dropped that into the toilet. Then I sat up one night drinking Canadian Mist and wrote out something completely different.

"Congratulations, graduates! You have all managed to make it through 12 years of schooling and become high school graduates. Some of you did it in more than twelve years, and some did it in less, but in any case, you made it. Congratulations! Let's get a round of applause!"

I knew there would be a dutiful round of applause, and then I would have a chance to speak some more. They would not be expecting what I was about to tell them.

"Well, that's out of the way, anyways. Now, it is time for me to tell you how wonderful the future will be, and how you are all prepared to march bravely into that future. That has to be true, right? All your lives people have been telling you how exceptional you are, so you must all be ready to go and conquer the world, right?

Guess what? You're not all that special! Here's another thing to think about. Nobody cares about you, either. I'll bet that sounds incredibly harsh and brutal. I'll also bet that nobody has once told you anything like this. Let me explain what I mean.

The world is a harsh and brutal place. Up until this point, you have been treated as children. You have been coddled and fed and hopefully taught something that will be useful to you. That time is over! You are now eighteen, or will be soon. You are now adults, and you had better start acting like it. I am not trying to be mean or nasty or rude, but that is simply the truth.

What do I mean by this? Let me give you a few examples. A bunch of you are going to be going on to college this fall. If you think it will be Grade 13, you are vastly mistaken! If you don't go to class, nobody is going to call home to Mommy and Daddy to let them know. If you don't turn in your homework assignments, or you flunk your tests, nobody is going to send you to the Principal's office or to the Guidance Counselor. Guess what, they don't care! They have already been paid! They are going to flunk you out and send you packing!

Some of you will be going into the service. Let me tell you, sergeants and petty officers will have even less patience than the teachers in college! You want to goof off and act up and screw around; they will bounce you out so fast your head will spin. The same is true if you plan to go to work for a company out in the civilian world. It's easy to get fired if you don't act sharp.

If you think the world owes you something, guess again. The world does not owe you anything. The world does not give a tinker's damn about you!

Just because somebody has told you that you are exceptional doesn't make it so. However, that doesn't mean you can't be exceptional. You simply have to always remember that if you want to be exceptional, you have to become exceptional! Guess what?! You have an incredible opportunity to become exceptional. You simply have to rise to it. It won't be handed to you. You have to go out and get it on your own.

I went to high school right here in this town."

At this I knew I would get some groans or catcalls. Towson High and Hereford High were longtime rivals.

"Yes, that's right. If you didn't know, I went to Towson High. If you think I was exceptional or special, think again. I was a mouthy and troublesome kid who was too smart for his own good and who had a tendency to get into fights. My parents threw me out when I was 16 and told me I was on my own. It would have been very easy to blow my money and then spend the rest of my life washing cars or mopping floors or asking people 'You want fries with that?' Instead, I demanded that I become exceptional. I finished high school and put myself through college. I went into the Army, and then business, and then politics. I wasn't exceptional, but I became exceptional!

Nothing was handed to me, and nothing will be handed to you! You have incredible opportunities right now. It is all up to you now! If you think you can coast, forget it! The world has no patience for people who coast along. The world can pass you by, or you can pass the world by, and drag it with you! It is all in your hands now! We can't do it for you! Do not accept anything less than becoming exceptional! Thank you"

Did it have any effect on the kids? No idea. I was the President of the United States, which was pretty damn unusual, so maybe some of them listened. Their parents didn't look amused, but I really didn't care. If I had once thought that the baby boomers like me had been coddled, we looked like hardy explorers of the frontier next to this bunch! I also knew the commentators would have a field day with this, but I didn't care about that, either. My remarks would end up on the national news, and probably the Sunday news shows as well. Maybe somebody might wake up who wouldn't otherwise.

As a graduation present, we sent the twins and a bunch of their friends (all female) on the G-IV to Hougomont for a week. Charlie made a wry complaint that he hadn't been able to do that when he graduated, and I replied that the press hadn't been staking out the house he and the football team had been stacking beer cans in. At least at Hougomont the girls could have some privacy. He laughed at that.

Saturday, June 1, was the date when West Point would be graduating the newest bunch of Second Lieutenants, including one Roscoe Buckminster. George was originally scheduled to speak, but now I had the job, and John McCain got to speak in my place at the Naval Academy in Annapolis. Somehow that seemed right. John had graduated from Annapolis, and I was a soldier, so I knew about West Point, even if I didn't attend. We would be switching off next year. Usually the President, Vice President, Secretary of State, and Secretary of Defense, and the National Security Adviser would rotate through Annapolis, West Point, Colorado Springs, Kings Point, and New London. Last year I was supposed to speak at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, and then was sent to Uruguay at the last minute. The Secretary of the Air Force spoke instead.

Service academy speeches fall into the category of 'policy' speeches. Serious people were attending, and serious things had to be said. This was different than a campaign speech, for instance, where you made a million grandiose promises and said nothing of actual import. Since you are dealing with the nation's military, it is generally considered the time to say something about foreign policy and military policy. As this was the first graduating class since 9-11, there was no doubt about what people were expecting. I had to say something about fighting terrorism.

On the other hand, it is generally a good idea to be careful with foreign policy speeches. A major temptation is to overreach. One thing which almost always backfired on you was to explicitly name an enemy. 'Evil empire' and 'axis of evil' gets you nothing but grief in the long run. Sooner or later you are going to have to deal with these assholes. They generally have long memories and will remember your comments. Almost always they will use your words to ramp up public sentiment and popularity back home by labeling you as even more evil ('The Great Satan' comes to mind.) Just as bad, when you do have to make nice and start dealing with them, your own supporters, on whichever side they might be, will take issue with you, using your own words to damn you.

Even worse is the temptation to start drawing lines in the sand. If they do X, we will do Y. Something or other 'won't be allowed'. It's like you are back in the third grade and you are double-dog-daring the kid on the bus next to you to do something. Of course they are going to do it! If you say you won't allow somebody to cross 'The Line of Death' they are going to stick a toe across it, just to test you. Are you going to start a full blown war? Or maybe draw another line, a few feet back? You either look like a warmonger or an idiot. On my first go we had told North Korea they couldn't build nukes, said the same thing to Iran, told Syria they couldn't use chemical weapons – the list was endless. In every case, the bad guys did what they were going to do anyway, we backed down, and we looked like idiots. Many times we stated a policy that we knew was bad simply because people back home in the cheap seats would demand you do something and you didn't have the gumption to tell them to sit down and shut up.

I had already seen this in action in the days right after 9-11. Everybody and their brother wanted me to attack somebody, anybody, immediately if not sooner, in retaliation. I had simply refused, even going so far as to lie to everybody and look like an idiot until we had all our assets and plans in place.

So the plan for the speech was to simply reiterate the strategy we had been working on in the National Security Council. Ramp up counterterrorism and intelligence, stress diplomacy over war (as Churchill once said, 'Jaw-jaw is better than war-war'), make some smart choices on weapons, and start pivoting away from Europe and towards Asia. I just hoped I was making the right bet. Dick Cheney was correct when he said the terrorists only had to get it right once; we had to get it right every time!

Mike Gerson had given us all a simple enough template for our speeches, so we were all working off the same page. Say hello and thank you, say how wonderful it was to be wherever we were, get to the guts of the policy, say something cute and amusing about the particular academy we were at, say thank you and goodbye. There was enough flexibility that we wouldn't end up sounding like clones of each other.

It was curious in a way, because neither on this trip nor the last, had I ever been to West Point. I had been to Annapolis several times, if simply because it was only an hour's drive on the highway from where I grew up, and it's quaint enough and near the bay that it makes for a good date night. The afternoon before the graduation Marilyn and I took Air Force One to Stewart International in Newburgh. It used to be an Air Force base, and it was the closest airport to West Point, maybe twenty-some minutes away. We managed to avoid any local dignitaries, and were instead greeted officially at West Point itself. West Point is just like any other college, in that the entire weekend is taken up with graduation festivities. We would attend a reception and banquet that evening, and then we would stay the night, and I would speak and participate in the graduation ceremonies in the morning.

The boys (and girls, too – there were a lot more women in the Army now than when I had been in) were so starched and formal it was rather amusing. They all had that ramrod-straight I-can't-smile I-am-an-officer seriousness that must have been drilled into them for the last four years. Even Roscoe Buckminster was like that, as he formally introduced his mother and brother to us at the reception. Marilyn stifled a snicker and Anna Lee rolled her eyes. "Roscoe, I have known you since you were in diapers, so don't try to be so serious. If you don't crack a smile, I am going to find your roommates and tell them things you don't want them to know!", I told him. "This is graduation! You are supposed to be happy, not running around like you have a stick up your butt!"

His eyes popped wide at that, and his serious demeanor broke. "What!? No! I mean, you can't!"

Anna Lee and Marilyn both started laughing at him, and one of the generals we were with snorted out a laugh, too.

"You just watch me, buster."

"Uncle Carl! That's not fair.", he told me.

"They still give out demerits here for misbehaving?", I asked.

"Yes, sir."

"Just remember, your old man and I, if we had gone here, we would have set a new record, and we both turned out okay. Have some fun, Roscoe." Tyrone was standing there next to Anna Lee. I reached over and shook his hand, too. "You still want to come here, Tyrone?"

He smiled and stood a little taller. "Yes, sir!"

"Even after what your brother has told you about this place?"

That got me a laugh. "Yes, sir."

"Well, if you can qualify, you come talk to me and I'll see what I can do. Just promise me you'll earn a few more demerits than Cadet Starchy here."

"He will do no such thing!", countered Anna Lee.

"We'll talk some more, later.", I said, laughing. They moved along and the mood of those remaining in line lightened up a fair bit.

Perforce, Marilyn and I stayed sober throughout the proceedings. We didn't need pictures of the President and First Lady getting sloshed. We weren't able to actually get a drink until after the banquet. I was actually able to sit down with Lieutenant General Lennox, who I had spoken to over by phone the night we learned about Harlan's death. He was an artilleryman like me. We both had a laugh about how the kids seemed to take themselves so seriously. He had been a graduate of West Point also. A few weeks with a rough older sergeant or two would take the starch out of them.

The next morning it was out to Michie Stadium, for the graduation. The one thing that surprised me was that they graduated in those silly gray uniforms. I thought they would have graduated in their Army dress uniforms, like I had. Apparently not. Eventually it was my time at the podium.

"Thank you very much, General Lennox, Mr. Secretary, Governor Pataki, members of the United States Congress, Academy staff and faculty, distinguished guests, proud family members, and graduates. I want to thank you for your welcome. Marilyn and I are especially honored to visit this great institution in your bicentennial year.

A few of you have followed in the path of the perfect West Point graduate, Robert E. Lee, who never received a single demerit in four years. Some of you followed in the path of the considerably less than perfect graduate, Ulysses S. Grant, who had many demerits, and said the happiest day of his life was the day he left West Point. If you were to ask the First Lady, she would be happy to tell you which graduate I would have taken after.

That being said, let's take care of a little business first. West Point is guided by tradition and I will observe one of the traditions you cherish most. As the Commander-in-Chief, I hereby grant amnesty to all cadets who are on restriction for minor conduct offenses. As somebody with a little higher rank than mine once said, 'Go and sin no more!'"

At that point it was time to move into the meat of the speech. There had been the requisite laughing and cheering as I pardoned the miscreants and joked about demerits, as well as appropriate applause in various places. Now it was time to get serious.

"When you first arrived here four years ago, your nation was at peace. When your final year started we were at peace. Now, however, we are not. This has happened before to graduates, where the world they started out knowing changed during their time here. A year ago some of you had no idea where Afghanistan was. I can guarantee that is no longer the case now. On September 11th the world changed, and you will need to change as well. From here you will report to various training bases around the country for advanced training, combat training. Pay heed to what you are taught. You will be on the front lines soon. If the need arises, I will be calling on you."

At this point I segued into the policy section, how counterterrorism was the new game they had to learn, how we would need to be vigilant, always 'striving for peace yet preparing for war.' They would need to learn about and face new challenges, yadda, yadda, yadda. After that, it was back to something to emphasize why they were there, and finish things off.

"Part of the challenge we face is in juggling priorities and determining where best to invest our money and our manpower. One frequent target is military education and the service academy system. I have no doubt that many of you have heard the argument that for the money spent educating cadets, we could have gone out and hired graduates of the Harvard Business School and then simply run them through Officer's Candidate School. That would be an excellent idea if what we wanted was managers.

I have no intention of allowing this to happen. What you and your counterparts at the other service academies are learning is not management, but leadership. We don't need managers. The last thing in the world we need right now is more managers. What the Army, and the nation, desperately needs is leaders! That is what we have trained you to be, and that is what we expect you to be. Some day you will be faced with the difference between being a manager and being a leader, and it won't be pretty. This can be a damn ugly business we are in. At some point you are going to have to pocket somebody's dog tags, zip up the body bag, and stand up and say 'Follow me!' That will be when you learn if you are a leader."

'Follow me' is the motto of the Infantry. There were a lot of somber faces in the audience. I let that sink in for a moment, and then continued.

"Well, I bet that was a sobering thought. Right now your mothers are crying, and your fathers are starting to get sick. Now, let me tell you the other side of the equation. It's the best job in the world! You will never again be challenged like you are about to be challenged. When the brass gets together and starts talking about the 'good old days', they aren't talking about the grand times they had as a major on a staff someplace, in charge of paperwork and PowerPoint presentations! The good old days for them were when they had platoons and companies. The good old days were when they were lieutenants, like you are about to be.

You will be facing the most awesome of responsibilities. By the time I turned 25, I was commanding 125 men, had six tubes under my control, millions of dollars worth of equipment, and enough firepower to devastate a small town. I can guarantee you that none of my classmates at Rensselaer had those kinds of responsibilities! By then they were grad students or junior account managers or management trainees somewhere. I can also guarantee that you'll have a lot more to talk about at your high school reunions than your classmates will!"

Time to send them out with a laugh. Most of these I had cribbed from a list of Murphy's Laws of War I had found somewhere, and I made sure to stop after each 'Law' to give people time to laugh.

"So before I let you go, here's some final advice from a broken down old battery commander. Do your captains a favor and try to follow me on this. We sort of know you won't, but if you do, maybe you won't get chewed out so often.

Okay, here goes. Always remember, there are three ways to do things. There's the right way, the wrong way, and the Army way. Do us all a favor. Try the Army way every once in a while. If nothing else, you can confuse your captain.

Here's another important thing to remember – Never share a foxhole with anybody braver than you are.

If everything is going perfectly, it's probably an ambush.

If at first you don't succeed, call in air support.

Here's a good one – never forget that your weapon was produced by the lowest bidder!

And finally, never forget the Law of War – Murphy's Law. If it can go wrong, it will go wrong, and always remember that Murphy was an optimist.

So, congratulations, and welcome to the finest fraternity you can join, the fraternity of honorable officers. Thank you, and God bless you."

Chapter 151: The Rose Garden of Hell

Tuesday, July 16, 2002

Unsurprisingly, several of the networks ran excerpts of my speech during their graduation speech highlight reels. They seemed to run about evenly between some of the last few laugh lines, and the section about zipping up a body bag. Comedy or drama, you pick. For his part, John McCain returned to Annapolis like a conquering hero. A decorated combat aviator who spent seven years in the Hanoi Hilton, he gave a nicely rousing speech, and then ordered that Navy had to beat Army in December. We had won last year, so I was going to have to bust John's chops when we beat his team again.

Marilyn got into the act, too. Some early birds began requesting the First Lady speak in 2003. Plattsburgh State, her alma mater, got to her first, requesting that she speak at their next graduation, the 25th anniversary of her graduation. When she asked me what to do, I told her to go for it. She could tell all of the other graduates how high they could climb if they married well. That cost me an elbow to the ribs and a lot of squawking and a very nice diamond bracelet. I should have learned by now to keep my mouth shut. It's like she said with Oprah, groveling is good, but groveling with diamonds is even better.

After the graduations, it was back to Washington. Marilyn and the girls moved down to the White House. We had their 18th birthday party there, and brought a number of the Lefleurs down, as well as the Rottingens. We kept it private and I don't think the media even twigged to the fact that they had a birthday.

I also had to sign some bills into law. It was an election year, so the summer recess was extra long, so that everybody could go home and get about their regular job of running for reelection. I had about three weeks at the end of June, and about three weeks at the end of July to sign stuff, otherwise kiss it off. I spent a lot of time kissing Congressional ass getting stuff out of committee and through the voting process, so that I could sign it. Fortunately, if you schedule the signing ceremony in the morning, you can do it in the Rose Garden and it won't be too warm. Summer in Washington can be damn hot and muggy, and heavy perspiration on camera is not photogenic.

Tuesday morning the 16th I was signing the Safeguarding the Sea Frontiers Act into law. This was a massive recapitalization of the Coast Guard. For years they had gotten fuck all for respect from the other services, and fuck all for funding from Congress, and an ever increasing number of jobs from the Commander in Chief. Their ships were so old their bottoms were rust held together by paint, their aircraft were ancient and held together by baling wire and chewing gum, and their sailors and officers were overburdened and as tired as their equipment. Yet despite all that, they still managed to perform magnificently at an endless and varied string of jobs.

Never let a good crisis go to waste. In the name of protecting our maritime borders from crazy Islamic fanatics (which actually needed to be done, not being cynical about it) we were going to massively recapitalize the Coast Guard. New cutters, new helos, additional authorized personnel, upgraded facilities and electronics, even a brand new half billion dollar heavy ice breaker – billions were being authorized.

It was supposed to be warm, mid to high 70s and dry, so we wanted to do it before lunch. Later in the week was even hotter, up into the 80s or higher. It was a typical Rose Garden Ceremony, with a podium to speak from, a table to sign the bill at (a simple wooden table with the Presidential Seal on the front), and a semi-circle of VIPs behind me, while another semi-circle of cameras and reporters faced me.

The VIPs included the usual suspects, like the Commandant of the Coast Guard, Admiral Tom Collins, and the Secretary of Transportation, Norm Mineta. They had an obvious interest in increasing funding, and had been happy to cooperate. The real powerhouse behind the bill, however, had been the Vice President. Senator McCain had been the Chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation before the Dems took back the Senate, and he knew everybody involved, their strengths, their weaknesses, and where all the bodies were buried. If it was legal to let John sign the bill, I would have let him do it. Since it wasn't, he was going to be standing right behind me, and would be getting the first ceremonial pen.

That was part of the weirdest of the Presidential ceremonies, the signing ceremony. I had to sign the bill, but nowhere was it specified whether I did it with a pen or pencil or even a goose feather quill. For almost a century and a half, Presidents were content to simply sign the bill and be done with it. FDR decided to spice things up, by using more than one pen and giving them to supporters. The worst was LBJ, who when signing the Civil Rights Act used 75 different pens to sign the bill. It is beyond me how he managed a stunt like that, since even at a pen per letter he was way, way short of 75 pens. As for me, I was quite incapable of writing my signature in a fashion even remotely legible, so I had developed a different trick. I would use the first pen to sign my name and set it aside for my own collection, and then initial at appropriate places throughout the bill (my initials – CB with a circle drawn around them). Those would be the pens I would give away.

At 11:00 I was waiting in my office when Will Brucis stuck his head in the door and said, "Mister President, everyone is ready."

I stood up. "Thank you, Will. Now, watch me go out the door and trip over the door jamb on national television."

"Just try to do it gracefully, Mister President."

I went out the door and around the corner to exit the West Wing towards the Rose Garden. Thankfully, I didn't trip going through the door. I walked over to the podium, where everybody was arrayed properly. There was a microphone at the podium, but I could see several more, long range and parabolic, over the heads of the audience and reporters... "Can everybody hear me?", I asked. A couple of technical types gave me a thumbs-up, and I nodded to them. Showtime!

"The United States Coast Guard dates back to our first President, George Washington, and our first Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton. It was then known as the Revenue Cutter Service. Since then, it has grown, and is now rightfully considered the finest life saving and maritime law enforcement service in the world. In that time they have developed two mottos. The official one is Semper Paratus, Always Ready. The unofficial one is 'You have to go out, but nobody said anything about coming back!' Both mottos are equally true.

Today it is my great privilege and pleasure to sign into law the Safeguarding the Sea Frontiers Act. For too long the sailors and airmen of the Coast Guard have been laboring under the burden of overworked ships and aircraft, and a need for improved facilities in port. Now we can give them the support they deserve, and that they earn every day they protect us. Now we can ... What in the world?"

That was the end of the carefully crafted presentation. Normally I would give a few more minutes of wonderful speechifying, and then move to the table. I would sit down, and with everybody hovering over me, would sign my life away. I had 20 pens today, each of which were Parkers which bore the Presidential Seal and were engraved with a serial number to prove they were not just some knock-off from the gift shop. After each signature or initial, I would set a pen into its case, and move on to the next. Afterwards, I would personally present each of the recipients with their pen, and shake their hand and smile for the cameras, all while saying something wonderful, warm, and personal to them. Politics 101.

Except for the fact that my eyes were drawn to a commotion at the far end of the Rose Garden, on the lawn behind all the cameras and reporters. I stopped and stared in disbelief at the interruption. Stormy had somehow gotten loose and made her way into the ass end of the Rose Garden, and was now playing a spirited game of keep-away with a pair of Secret Service agents trying to corral her. After a few seconds, nobody was watching me, and everybody was watching her! It got worse when one of the agents tried a flying tackle and Stormy jumped out of the way, leaving the agent sprawling on the grass. I decided to get my dog under control, so I stepped away from the podium and said,

"Stormy! Knock it off! Get over here, you dumb mutt!"

I gave a low whistle, too, and that got her attention. Her head whipped around, and she saw somebody else to play with, somebody who liked to roughhouse with her, and rub her belly, and play fetch and take her for walks. She jumped over the Secret Service agent and made a beeline for me.

That was when I got worried! Stormy doesn't have a mean bone in her body – or a smart one. She is a very big and very powerful dog. When we are playing tug-of-war with a rope, or otherwise horsing around, she can easily knock a grown man on his ass. She had one trick with the girls, where they would sit on the floor, one behind the other and with her arms around the sister in front, and they would play tug-of-war; she could pull the pair of them across the room that way. Now, from almost fifty yards away, she began running towards me, and very quickly reached a full gallop.

"Stormy! No, Stormy ... Stop! No ... Stop! Wait ... STORMY! AAAAGHHHH!"

All of this was carried to the video cameras recording our little ceremony, and picked up by the parabolic mikes. Stormy came running through a small gap in the reporters and vaulted onto the signing table. The bill went flying and pens scattered every which way. She didn't stop there, but then leaped at her best buddy. I had been backing up as she came closer, but it was useless. The final 'AAAAGHHHH' cut off when she slammed into me and knocked me flat on my back. I wasn't knocked out, or even dazed, but I had a sudden pain in my left side, and the wind was knocked out of me. Everybody was staring at the incredible scene, with me lying on my back while a monstrous brown dog sat on my chest and licked my face!

"STORMY! YOU IDIOT! GET OFF OF ME!"

I awkwardly pushed her off my chest and a Secret Service agent on one side and the Vice President on the other helped me to my feet. I was still being recorded when the world heard me ask of the agent, "I thought you guys were supposed to take a bullet for me!"

He laughed and answered, "Nobody ever said anything about taking a Stormy!"

"Great!" I reached down and took the mutt's collar. Then it got really stupid. From around a far corner of the Garden I could hear a pair of teenage girl's voices yelling 'Stormy! Stormy! Come here, Stormy!'

The twins came running around the corner, with one of them carrying a leash, and found themselves blundering smack into the middle of the signing ceremony from Hell. In front of me, a couple of aides were trying to set the table upright and gather up all the pens and papers. I gave my daughters a dry look and crooked a finger at them. They came closer and were quite self-conscious and nervous as they did so.

They had excellent reason to be self-conscious! Both were wearing running shoes, very tight running shorts, and very tight tank tops. Holly's was light grey, with a very large seven leafed marijuana leaf on the front, with 'NORML' on the back. Molly's was even worse, being black with a big silver star on the front, along with 'Porn Star In Training!' on the back. Tremendous! However, that was the least of their sins! Up on top they were wearing New York Yankees baseball caps!

"The Yankees!? Are you kidding me? Since when do we root for the Yankees! We are fans of the Orioles!", I asked, perhaps too loudly.

Holly smiled and answered, "Uncle Mark sent them!"

"They're cute!", added her sister.

"Cute, huh? You can tell your Uncle Mark he's about to get audited by the IRS!" I took the leash from them and hooked up the dog, and handed it back. Bending over I had another sharp pain in the left side. At the minimum, I had a cracked rib or two. Wonderful! "Here! Go! Don't come back for a few years!", I said.

"Bye, Daddy!" came from the pair of them, and I got a kiss on the cheek from both of them, and they ran out of the place with Stormy romping out in front.

I looked at the others and said, "I think the rest of the speech is shot." The entire place was on the verge of a total breakdown into raucous laughter. I knew what was going to be on the news tonight. If aliens landed on the South Lawn, peeing free gasoline that tasted like chocolate and cured cancer, it would still have been only the second spot on the news. I went over to the table and sat down, feeling a sharp twinge as I did so. I picked up a pen, and it fell apart in my hands, leaking ink on my fingers. What else could possibly go wrong?! I stared at the pen for a second, and then looked back at the audience and cameras. "Have you ever had one of those days?" That was it. The place exploded in laughter.

I managed to clean my fingers with my handkerchief, in the process ruining the handkerchief and my suit, and signed the bill. Okay, it wasn't pristine and beautiful, but it was the law. I gave John the signing pen and told him the broken pen was going into the Presidential collection, and he laughed so hard he started crying. Meanwhile my side was starting to hurt more.

The end wasn't much more glorious than the rest of the day. I moved to stand up and my ribs protested loudly. By now I was in some real pain. I whispered over my shoulder to John and the Admiral that I needed some help. Once erect, they helped me inside to the clinic. I had always thought that the Physician to the President was a Navy doctor, but this guy was an Air Force colonel. My last physical was under the previous administration, when the Physician was a lady Naval captain. The White House Medical Unit is practically a small scale hospital, with almost a dozen doctors, nurses, and technicians. Ninety percent of what they do is actually care for the routine miseries of everybody who works there, plus the tourists who pass out while waiting in line for the tour.

In this case, I found myself stripped half naked and under an X-ray machine inside of about two minutes. The diagnosis? Two cracked ribs and one broken rib on my left side! Cannonball Stormy did a wonderful job on me. I would have to thank my daughters somehow. They taped me up and sent me up to the Residence, where I took a pain pill and had a drink. That pretty much blew the rest of my day.

That night, the evening news had me as the first few minutes, both with Stormy's antics and then with Will Brucis informing the press corps about what happens when a 135 pound irresistible force meets a 195 pound immoveable object. Later that evening, on The Daily Show, Jon Stewart announced, "He signed the bill with broken ribs! I've said it before, and I'll say it again, whether you like him or not, this guy is one tough son-of-a-[bleeped]!" There was also plenty of grief from Yankees fans, although Mets fans seemed to appreciate me, as did pretty much every Marylander (fans of the Orioles.) Ari informed me that I was going to have to attend a Yankees baseball game as soon as possible. Fine, maybe they could lose, the bastards! Then I got grief from some right wing preachers about my daughter's immoral behavior – the pot and porn tank tops – and how I was a bad role model for the nation's youth. For that one we simply said that the twins were both 18 years old and that I was their father, not their owner. Then I had Marilyn chew on them for a while. I couldn't wait to see what trouble they got into in the fall when they went to college.

The worst part was poor Stormy. I think she knew she was in the doghouse, in more ways than one. She tried to climb up onto my recliner that evening and I had to push her away. She would have really busted me up if I had let her crawl onto me. She whined until I went to bed and let her lie down on my right side. For such a gigantic dog she could be so pathetic!

Chapter 152: Changes

2002-2003

I spent the rest of the summer letting my ribs heal, which definitely put a crimp in my krav maga training and workouts. Doc Tubb heard, probably from the Residence staff, that I had a beer with my pain pill, and promptly chewed me out and put me on ibuprofen instead of anything more amusing. Marilyn gave me an insufferably superior look when she heard that. The twins were actually concerned that after jumping on me and then landing on the ground, Stormy might have been hurt. They were less concerned about their beloved father. I simply looked at Marilyn and asked, "When do they go to college?"

She sighed and smiled. "Not soon enough!"

"Think it will seem lonely? Just you, me, and hundreds of staffers and servants?"

She simply rolled her eyes at that.

Dick Cheney managed to self-destruct over the summer. He could have been a major pain in the keister if he had decided to mount a primary challenge in 2004, and for quite awhile it sounded like he was going to do just that. By August, however, he was finished. The Special Joint Committee had issued subpoenas to damn near everybody with any link to the intelligence system prior to 9-11, and some people cooperated and some didn't. Radziwill, the State Department flunky who had tried to shut down the DIA's Able Danger program turned State's Evidence in order to keep out of jail, and he fingered Scooter Libby. Scooter was caught perjuring himself, and ended up on trial by the end of the summer.

Also on trial was Dick Cheney, who refused to cooperate. He was too smart to lie, so he clammed up and claimed executive privilege. The administration said 'No' on this, which did not sit well with him, so he sued me. The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ruled that he had no standing to claim executive privilege, and a surprisingly fast appeal was turned down. At that point he went in front of Congress and after being sworn in, made a statement. "On the advice of counsel, I hereby refuse to testify and I invoke my Fifth Amendment right against self incrimination." Then he stood up and walked out of the hearing room, while the rest of the room erupted in shouting and recriminations, with the gavel banging and demands to return under penalty of a Contempt of Congress charge.

The contempt charge passed the committee unanimously, though Cheney had enough friends in Congress so the House vote wasn't unanimous. It made no difference. There was a lot of rigamarole surrounding it, and the Counsel's office kept me apprised, but the end result was that Cheney pled guilty to the contempt charge but didn't have to testify or admit to anything. Cheney treated it as an acquittal, but not so the rest of the country. Brewster McRiley, my long-time campaign consultant, told me that Cheney was sniffing around the Republican Party moneymen, and was getting nowhere.

The coup de grace came in August, when Scooter pled guilty to one count of perjury and one count of obstructing justice, and was sentenced to 8 months in Club Fed and a $100,000 fine. There was the de rigueur request for a pardon, which I refused. Cheney was invited on This Week to give his opinion. He stated that, "President Buckman's cold-hearted and cynical refusal to pardon an honorable public servant was akin to leaving a man on the battlefield!"

At that point, Fletcher Donaldson, a guest journalist on their 'Powerhouse Roundtable' who was now Washington bureau chief for the Baltimore Sun and an accredited White House Correspondent, replied, "Mister Secretary, you received five military deferments during the Viet Nam War, and President Buckman earned a Bronze Star for not leaving men on the battlefield. Are you sure you want to be making a statement like that?"

Dick pretty much lost it at that point, and told Fletcher, Sam Donaldson, and Cokie Roberts that I wasn't supposed to be the President, that George Bush had wanted me gone and wanted me to resign, and he should have been the President because Bush had promised it to him. Then he ran me down as a traitor to the office and to the Party. The looks of disbelief were astonishing. Ari brought me out to the morning Press Briefing the next day to refute everything Cheney had said, and I told the truth, that there had never been any such conversations, that no promises had been made, that I had never been asked to resign, etc. No, I couldn't explain Mister Cheney's bizarre behavior. All I had to do was look mystified, and refuse to speculate when somebody asked me if I thought Dick Cheney was suffering from something stress related.

So much for the current crop of neocons.

That didn't mean any of us could relax. All it would take was a single incident to go bad for the conservatives to call for my replacement, with somebody who would 'fix the problem, once and for all!' We had almost had such an incident with the 'Shoe Bomber', Richard Reid, last December, when an Islamic nutcase tried to ignite a shoe filled with explosives on a plane from overseas, and he couldn't manage to ignite the fuse. Dick Clarke was doing a decent job with the CIA, and Winston Creedmore with coordinating intelligence, and Congress had put the fear of God into a few bureaucrats with their investigation. We had managed to stop or capture at least a dozen bombers since 9-11, some foreign born and some home grown. One major help was that people had figured out all on their own that if somebody was fucking around, it was perfectly permissible to gang tackle them and let the authorities sort it out later. Thank you, Flight 93, for that valuable lesson.

One major discussion was about how much we let the public know. If we told people we had foiled a plot, the bad guys would invariably get information on how we foiled it, and then be able to change their tactics. If we didn't tell people then they had no idea of the level of danger and would think the problem was over and we didn't need to be careful. Whatever we did, we all pretty much came to the conclusion that we couldn't tell Congress jack shit, since it would be on television before we ever made it home. The Congressmen who heard about that were not amused, and called on the Administration to be more forthcoming, not less, and how they were trustworthy. That made it to the press as well, and how anybody was able to read that and listen to it with a straight face was miraculous.

Nobody had heard from bin Laden, though plenty of old videos were still circulating. Had he been killed? Was he buried in the rubble or a collapsed cave? Was he in hiding? Nobody knew, or if they knew, they weren't telling. Without a body, none of us dared claim he was dead; you just knew that five minutes after that were to occur, he would resurface on live television.

One thing popped up very quickly, and that was that the name Al Qaeda had lost its copyright status. Just like all copiers got called Xeroxes, now all Islamic terrorists were calling themselves Al Qaeda. Groups of assholes who had never heard of Osama Bin Laden before 9-11 were now calling themselves a branch of Al Qaeda. They figured it was good advertising, and a way to gain recruits and funds. CIA was reporting Al Qaeda groups popping up all over the world, most of whom had never met anybody in the original group.

Afghanistan had settled down into a low level civil war. Al Qaeda and the Taliban had taken a massive pounding, and the few survivors had fled across the mountains into Pakistan, leaving the country in the hands of the new warlords from the Northern Alliance. The Alliance was an alliance of convenience. The individual warlords had their own tribes and their own interests, and promptly settled down to low level fighting among themselves, usually over poppy territories and heroin distribution. Meanwhile, the Taliban was reconstituting itself in Pakistan, with help from the ISI, and was beginning to come back into Afghanistan, killing along the way. I would get reports from Clarke and Creedmore every few weeks, and it sounded like another low level civil war, much like what had evolved over more than a decade after the Russians left the country in 1989. All of our personnel had been yanked months ago, though Clarke still had a handful of agents present with the various Northern Alliance warlords. We funneled some arms to them to help them fight the Taliban, but otherwise kept our noses clean.

If Afghanistan didn't exist, somebody on acid would have had to invent it. Why anybody in their right mind wanted us to be there was beyond me!

Iraq simmered along much as it had during the Clinton and Bush presidencies. Every few months they would make bellicose noises and violate the no-fly zones, or light up an American warplane with their fire control radar. Our response was predictable. We would shoot down the wandering intruder or destroy an anti-aircraft missile battery, and then toss a few cruise missiles at them. It was a low level of combat, enough to keep the Air Force and Navy pilots on their toes, and keep people well trained, and cost us a few billion dollars a year, but no lives. Compared to the cost of either invading the country, or letting Saddam Hussein run loose, that was cheap insurance.

As part of our surveillance on Iraq, Richard Clarke had what assets he had available, admittedly not many, on the ground in Iraq. One group of Arabic speakers was stationed in the Southern No-Fly Zone, where they spied on the Shiites and the Sunnis. They weren't noticeably successful at this. The Sunnis were the people supporting Hussein, and the Shiites were friendly with the nutcases over in Iran.

Much more successful were the agents we had on the ground in the Northern No-Fly Zone, which was centered over Kurdistan. The Kurds were mostly Sunnis, like Hussein, but of a slightly different flavor. Much more important was the fact that the Kurds were not of Arabic descent, and did not consider themselves Iraqi. This was one of those wonderful examples of the Western colonial powers sorting things out by just drawing lines on a map. Kurdistan, the ancestral homeland of the Kurdish people, was centered on northern Iraq, eastern Turkey, western Iran, and the northern tip of Syria. They had been carrying on a low level guerilla war in most of these places, and really hated the Iraqis, who had gassed them on at least one occasion. Colin Powell and the State Department strongly recommended making nice with these people and trying to get them to make nice with Turkey, a NATO ally. I shrugged and went along with him. I still didn't trust the ragheads, but that was what we were paying Colin for, to jaw-jaw and not war-war.

In late August we took another family vacation, probably our last as a family, at Hougomont. Charlie took a few days of leave and joined us the weekend before the girls were supposed to go to college. It was hot, but nice. We didn't get there very often anymore. It was one thing when I was a Congressman. The Maryland Ninth was a fairly small district, and most of the residents knew I had a place in the Bahamas when I first ran for Congress. It was fairly simple for me to defuse the problem if anybody commented.

Not so as the President. It was an example that I was too rich and not one of the common people (like there were actually poor Congressmen and Senators who didn't vacation well.) Worse, I was vacationing somewhere in a foreign country, and not in the good old U.S. of A! My God, I was damn near a commie! At least half a dozen state governors, on both sides of the aisle, made public comments that there were many wonderful places in their states that would have been even nicer. (North Dakota? Really? I must have missed the sandy beaches in the travel brochure.)

We managed to cover it as a 'business trip' by calling it a Caribbean Summit and inviting about a half dozen ambassadors to a nice dinner at Government House. We all smiled and shook hands and did some speechifying and posed for pictures. Meanwhile, while all the cameras were on me and Marilyn, Charlie took the girls over to Paradise Island. He dressed in civvies and a straw hat and sunglasses, and not too many people knew what he looked like. His sisters had been much more in the limelight since I had started campaigning for Bush in 2000. They had a great time figuring out disguises.

We warned them all about not doing anything stupid while reporters or cameras were around, and then sent them off with a small team of Secret Service people, right after Marilyn and I left the house in a limo and entourage. They went out in a very nondescript pair of cars. Charlie took them shopping in a few stores and then over to the casino, where he gave them a few bucks for the slots, and bought them too many drinks. They came back after Marilyn and I had gone home and gone to bed.

We woke up to hear a racket in the living room, and I grabbed a robe and wandered out down the hall to see what it was. I wasn't expecting trouble, since the place is guarded 24-7 even when we aren't around. Charlie and one of the agents were half carrying the twins into the house. I could smell the booze from across the room. "Didn't I ask you not to drink too much?", I said.

He dumped Molly on the couch and held his hands up in surrender. "Hey, I'm the sober one. I tried to keep them under control, but they're legal now, at least around here."

I glanced over at the agent who had decided to simply put Holly over his shoulder and head for her bedroom. "It's true.", he said, "Charlie was being the responsible party."

"For once?", added my son.

"You said it, not me."

Marilyn came down the hallway, looking bleary eyed. "What's going on?"

"Your daughters tried to drink the island dry.", I commented.

"Don't blame me, Mom! I bought them the first round, but they had their own money. If it had rum in it, they sampled it.", said Charlie. He picked Molly up and began leading her down the hall to her bedroom.

"Oh, dear. Well, they'll learn, I suppose.", said my wife.

"Did anybody see you guys? Is this going to be on the front page of the New York Times tomorrow?" Ari was enjoying a few days in the sun with us; would I have to let him know about this?

The Secret Service agent shook his head and said, "Not that I could tell. None of us noticed anybody paying attention to them." The security team had all been wearing casual clothing, and while I knew they were all armed, I had no idea how they were hiding their guns. "To be honest, they looked like a couple of girls who managed to get away from their parents for the night. It's not like that's never been seen on this island before."

I just grunted at that. It wasn't worth worrying about now. It wouldn't be the worst scandal ever seen in the White House. I touched Marilyn's elbow and said, "Let's go to bed."

"Will they be all right?"

"I sure hope not. I hope they have major league hangovers, so they know enough not to get stupid like this again."

"You're not a very loving father.", she commented, as we headed back to bed.

"Just a very practical one."

Marilyn and I slept soundly and woke up our usual time, and dined out in the sunshine the next morning. Charlie was up then, too. We didn't see the twins until almost noon, and they looked like death warmed over. They moaned and groaned and wanted to see a doctor. We just snorted and let Doctor Tubb examine them. He pronounced them fine, suffering from dehydration and excessive alcohol consumption, and prescribed orange juice and aspirin. In other words, major league hangovers. The girls denounced him as a quack, and we laughed and thanked him, and invited him and his team to dinner that night. Holly and Molly didn't make it to dinner, but spent the rest of the day moaning and groaning in their rooms.

Charlie skipped out, too, but not because he was sick. He said that he had seen a few clubs he wanted to visit and see if he could get lucky. Marilyn gave him some motherly and disapproving comments, and I simply reminded him to take some protection. Charlie laughed and left, and Marilyn decided to chew on me for awhile instead. I just nodded and agreed with everything she told me, and then laughed. "Do you want me to tell them about that first trip to Ocean City we took?"

That earned me a finger wagging and her trademark, "You can behave!"

I just hoped the girls would settle down some when they went to college. I doubted it, but I hoped. That occurred a week later, when they had to report to the University of Maryland for Freshman Orientation. So, just like every other college parent, we helped the kids pack their gear and go to school. Marilyn took them up to Hereford for a few days to sort through things and pack whatever they were missing in Washington, and then they drove down and stayed a night at the White House. The next morning, bright and early, we tossed their crap into the back of a War Wagon and rode in a discreet convoy over to College Park. It was an informal day, so I was in khakis and a Hawaiian shirt, and deck shoes with no socks, and Marilyn was in jeans and a checkered blouse and flats. After checking in, the girls got their dorm keys, and off we went to dispose of our children.

The word of the day to the agents was, "Lighten up!" I didn't need a phalanx of bodyguards in black suits, earbugs, and sunglasses shadowing us. They could dress a little more casually and blend in, and hide the War Wagons around the corner. The University knew the girls were attending, and there were some special security arrangements needed. For the first time in their lives they weren't rooming with each other, but had regular college roommates. Across the hall from each room was a dorm room containing a young female agent assigned to each girl and commo gear, and they were already in place. Security would be light, but there would be security.

Thankfully my ribs were healed up by then, at least so that I could carry some boxes around. I didn't have to carry many, though. Shortly after taking the first load up, several helpful young men magically appeared, offering their services, free of charge, to any of the pretty girls moving in. What wonderful examples of American youth! Marilyn and I quickly found ourselves abandoned. I don't think they realized who they were helping until they went out to the War Wagon and saw what else was inside.

Marilyn and I just walked around the dorm area for a bit. She had been the one to take the girls on their college visits, and get them through the registration process. This was helped immensely by the fact that they were straight A students and we were paying cash. Still, I thought she had done a fine job getting them ready and told her so.

Our reverie was interrupted by a young woman bustling up to us with a notepad in one hand and a microphone in the other. I saw one of the agents move to intercept her but I waved him off. She was oblivious to this, and simply came up to us and stuck the microphone in my face. "President Buckman, how do you feel the Secret Service presence on campus will affect campus life for the rest of the students here? What about the chilling effect on academic freedom it will cause?"

I looked at my wife, who seemed perplexed, and I gave her an amused look in response. I held my hands up in a time-out signal. "Who are you?"

"Why do you need to know that?"

"Because I like to know who I am talking to. Don't you?"

The girl's brows furrowed at that. She looked a bit stumped. "Oh." She thought for a second, wondering, I am sure, if by giving me her name she would be somehow violating the freedom of the press. I just stood there and waited for a response. After a moment, she capitulated and said, "Marcy Brennan.", and then thrust the mike back at me.

I smiled at Marilyn and shook my head. To Marcy I said, "Is this the first interview you've ever been part of? Who are you interviewing me for?"

"I'm with the Diamondback. Why won't you answer my questions? What are you hiding!?"

"Oh, dear.", I said with a sigh. "What is the Diamondback?"

"It's the student newspaper. We're an independent student newspaper, protecting the freedom of the press!", answered Marcy, a touch fiercely.

"Good for you. I try to protect it, too, in my own way." I turned to Marilyn. "She just has to be a Democrat!"

"You just behave yourself.", answered my wife.

"Yes, dear." I turned back to the microphone, still in front of me. "Marcy, let's make this simple. You want an interview and I want to sit down for a bit. My ribs are still bugging me. Let's go sit down over there." I pointed to a bench in a grassy area. Before she could protest, I led the way over to the bench and sat down.

Marcy was starting to figure out that she wasn't the one in charge of the interview. She scurried along after us and stood there in front of me. I just pointed at the bench and she sat down at the other end. In so doing, she lost her grip on her notepad and I picked it up. Before she could grab it back, I looked over the questions she had for me. I showed them to Marilyn and said, "I don't get this many questions from the Washington Post!"

I handed Marcy back her notepad. She was starting to look flustered. "Now, let's do this the right way. You ask me a question, politely, and I will give you an answer, politely. You were asking me something about my daughters attending school here?"

"What do you feel about the dangers your daughters are bringing to the campus here?", she asked, reading from her notepad.

"What dangers? I have no idea what you are talking about."

"The armed security guards who are surrounding your daughters.", she pressed.

"Have you actually met my daughters? We left the storm troopers at home. While there will be security around them, it will be barely noticeable. There should be absolutely no effect on the campus at all."

By now a number of others had noticed who was being interviewed, and about a dozen students and parents were gathered around us in a circle. I smiled and waved at them, and did the politician thing. Marcy kept asking me questions, some of them ridiculous. I was guessing that the school paper had sent her out with a list, in the hope that she might find me. In between I would shake hands and say hello to those around us.

"Is anybody here a Republican, by the way?"

One of the mothers pointed at her husband and smiled. "He is." Her husband blinked in surprise at being put on the spot.

"Oh, good! I was wondering if I had ventured into enemy territory. What about you?"

"I'm an Independent.", she answered.

"Well, there's still hope for you." Marilyn elbowed me at that, on my left side, and I winced. "Watch it! I'm still healing there."

"Ooh! Sorry! I forgot!", she said.

"If you don't behave, Marcy will get to report on how the Secret Service took you down!" I turned to the reporter and said, "I bet that would make the front page, wouldn't it? If you have a camera you'd probably get a Pulitzer!"

Her eyes opened wide at that. I reached into a pocket and pulled out a business card holder, and handed her my card. "Listen, we need to go find out what our girls are up to and leave. If you want another interview, you call my office and ask for Ari Fleischer. Heard of him? Good. Ask for him and tell him I said you were the new White House Correspondent for the Diamondback. You can come over and get a nice formal interview, okay?" There is actually a protocol for this sort of thing, and it wasn't unheard of.

Marcy's eyes widened at the idea, and Marilyn and I stood up. We shook a few hands and headed back to the dorm, surrounded by our storm troopers. The girls were wondering where we were, so I told them I was out hustling votes. We kissed them good-bye and headed back to the White House.

The hustling votes remark wasn't far from the truth. By now it was an open secret that I was going to be running for reelection. While I had been ducking the question and officially stating that I would make a formal decision in 2003, the word had gone out. John McCain was not running, and he had announced that, and while Dick Cheney wanted to, a convict was about as welcome as toxic waste. Nobody else was making any kind of noises about running, and if I announced early in 2003, I would block them from the moneymen in the party. Running for President was a whole lot bigger than running for the Maryland Ninth. In the ten years I had been in Congress, I had spent about $10 million in campaigning, and surprisingly little of that, under $1 million, was actually my money. Running for President in the 21st century was going to start at $1 billion, and go up from there. I was not about to spend that kind of money out of my own pocket.

The actual announcement was somewhat anticlimactic. Unlike a regular election, where I would be vying with another dozen candidates, as the incumbent I was the presumed nominee. I didn't have to do much more than actually say, 'Yes, I'm running.' After that it was just a matter of signing the paperwork to get me on the ballots. It was going to be a big job, and would involve a huge organization and a lot of help. For my main general, however, I called Brewster to the Residence one evening (not the Oval Office, since that would be electioneering on work time, a big no-no) and asked him if he wanted a shot at the title. If you are a political operative, running the Presidential campaign is playing for all of the marbles. The only bigger thing than my reelection would be a first time election of somebody else. If Brewster was campaign manager for me and I was reelected, he was automatically in the big leagues as far as politics went. He could name his price after that.

We decided to delay any announcements until 2003. None of us needed to screw up the 2002 elections, and in some ways the presumption I was running was a help. I had enough popularity that I had any number of opportunities to campaign for my fellow Republicans. In addition, throughout the summer of 2002, as the local elections moved into the down-and-dirty slog, I was able to give various speeches supporting legislation. We were still pushing any number of things related to 9-11 and the economy. We had gotten almost all of the national security related stuff handled, but the big infrastructure bill I was pushing was going slower. Everybody liked the idea, sort of, but nobody wanted to actually pay for it, and the Republican Party was pushing for the tax cuts that George Bush and his owners had promised them. It had made it out of committee, but the vote was going to be close, and we were pushing it for October, although I would happily accept a lame duck vote.

Running even closer was going to be the vote on the DREAM Act. The immigration bill we were pushing was essentially the same bill that George had proposed in 2001. We didn't vary it much at all. This basically allowed children who had been brought to this country by their parents, often as babies, but were now here illegally, to gain residency status and apply for citizenship. Likewise, we added some provisions so that if they served a term in the services, they could get citizenship. It was not a blanket amnesty, and did not apply to the parents who brought them in, although it prevented deportation of parents who came forward to register their kids. It also didn't clean up the rest of the immigration mess, but we tinkered with some of that around the edges. It was at least a start.

There was a lot of squawking about the whole thing. The Republicans simply did not like the idea of a lot of illegal wetbacks being rewarded for successfully sneaking into the country, especially when the economy was in a bind, but it wasn't just the conservative Republicans. There were a few Democrats who wanted a payoff for making it happen as well, or wanted more than I was offering. I spent a lot of time wining and dining Congressmen and waving the flag and invoking George's dream. I also spent half the fucking budget on earmarks for assholes who wanted something in order to go along with this. If the leadership in the House and Senate hadn't been on my side, it never would have made it out of committee, let alone made it to the floor. Even then, some cantankerous individuals wouldn't go along with it for any money. It eventually passed by only a single vote, but it passed. Meanwhile, I used up an awful lot of the good will I had accumulated.

In the meantime, however, we were preparing the way for the 2004 election. Over on the Democratic side, a slew of potential candidates were running around, visiting Iowa and New Hampshire, giving speeches and shaking hands, and most importantly of all, lining up local political bosses and moneymen. In effect it was what I had done for ten years in Baltimore and Carroll Counties, only nationwide. I had to do the same, though I had some advantages and disadvantages with doing this. The biggest advantage was incumbency. I was already the President and nobody else was running against me that we could see. I had co-opted my biggest rival, McCain, and destroyed the only other big rival, Cheney. There was nobody else for the locals and donors to choose.

The biggest disadvantage I had was that I had a full time day job already, running the country. You still need to shake hands and schmooze, and not do it in a way that discredits the office. If I had a trip to take or a speech to give, we needed to schedule meetings with important people along the way. The other disadvantage that I had was a more fundamental one. I was simply more moderate than the Republican Party was becoming. When I bought my position as Vice President, Bush let it be known to the conservatives that I was a sop to the moderate wing of the party, and that I wasn't really one of them and he wouldn't pay any attention to me. Well, guess what, here I was, in all my glory as the President of the United States, and they were stuck with me. While I had dismantled some of the neocons, the financial interests were not amused with me. They wanted the lower taxes and lesser regulation that Bush and Cheney and Rove had promised them and that they had paid for! When it was pointed out that the Democrats were even less likely to listen to them, they were not impressed. Some donors were cutting back their contributions, and some simply pocketed their wallets. A few of them had been donating to both sides in any case, and the Democratic National Committee was getting some surprising donations. I wasn't sure how this was going to play out.

In between the girls going to college and the final run of the 2002 campaign, we had the anniversary of 9-11. Leaving aside the inevitable speeches and tributes, what really preoccupied us was the worry that the nutjobs would try something. Across the country police departments were on high alert, and even though we had never instituted that silly color scheme for danger levels, everybody knew there was a lot of potential for Al Qaeda or their buddies to do something either in support of the original bombings or in revenge for our response. I was in constant contact with Winston Creedmore and the new FBI Director, Robert Mueller. If anything happened, it would end everything I was trying to build. Nothing happened, but I was nervous for 24 hours.

The 2002 elections didn't change much in the Congress. The Republicans lost a couple of seats, but we still had a handy majority. The Senate was more interesting. We picked up a seat, breaking the tie, and giving us a thin but real majority. Trent Lott was back to being the Majority Leader and Tom Daschle was out and now the Minority Leader. Harry Reid went back to being the Minority Whip. Curiously, Don Nickles was not reelected as the Republican Whip, but they voted in Mitch McConnell. That was after the election, though. Election night I was busy with lists of names to call, on both sides of the aisle, congratulating them on victories. It had come full circle. A dozen years ago, George H. W. Bush had been the one congratulating me.

In December Charlie shipped out again. He had decided this would be his last deployment, that at the end of his hitch he was getting out. There would be too many restrictions on him as an active duty Marine as the son of the President. This pleased his mother, and me, truth be told, but what didn't please us was his plan to go back to motocross. Get killed by the bad guys or get killed in a motorcycle accident. What a choice! In the meantime, he could float around on the Fort McHenry and do whatever it was that Marines did when they floated around. We would see him again in June or July when they came home again.

In February the Space Shuttle Columbia fell apart during reentry over Texas. I knew it would happen, but not when, and there wasn't much I could do to stop it. The Space Shuttle program was simply a lousy, over-complicated, and fragile way to get people to and from low Earth orbit. One of these days we would come up with a better way to do it. I knew that after the final investigation was concluded that I would be cancelling the program, just like George Bush did on my first go.

The girls managed to make it through their freshman year at college without a scandal. I'm sure they tried, but the Secret Service is nothing if not secret. They wouldn't even tell me what my daughters were up to! I was informed of the theory that if they started telling somebody what their principal was up to, then the principal would be tempted to try to sneak around on their detail, and increase the risk. I grumped at that and told my wife. She sort of shrugged and asked me if I really wanted to know what they were doing, or who. It was better to keep my illusions. On a number of occasions the girls brought their roommates or other coeds over to spend a weekend at the White House. They didn't bring any boys with them, so I didn't really know just what they were up to on that score. I didn't even know if they were still virgins! Some things I simply didn't want to learn.

Marilyn and I celebrated our 25th wedding anniversary that summer. Our daughters were packed off to Utica for the week. I would like to report that Marilyn and I went down to our Caribbean hideaway and played hide the salami for a week, al fresco. Didn't happen. We took a week and went home to Hereford, where we received any number of visitors from D.C. It rained. I was able to cook us a few nice meals, but there ain't much romance in the White House. Forget about taking your wife out to dinner and a movie. Reporters and photographers would be standing six deep around your table, and a dark movie theater is much too dangerous.

By Wednesday we went back to Washington. Friday was the 4th of July, so I had to participate in any number of patriotic events, all with heavy security. It was chilling to hear from the CIA and the FBI about who they were stopping and catching. If they caught somebody inside the country, it was pretty straightforward; they would be arrested and tried in Federal court, and get put in a Federal jail. Overseas, things got trickier. One thing for sure, I was not allowing anybody to be held in an American prison overseas. No more Gitmo! Squeeze them for info, and then dispose of them. In some cases this meant handing them over to the authorities in their home countries. Some of them would be perfectly content to stick them in their own jails. Otherwise, maybe give them to a country who didn't like them anyway. If that wasn't possible, I would happily turn my head and not notice if some terrorist was taken out into a desert somewhere and didn't come back. What I didn't know wouldn't hurt me, or if it did, it wouldn't hurt me too much. I was not giving American civil rights to enemies in other countries.

On the plus side, foreign relations were relatively quiet. We made nice with the Saudis after they had a bombing in Riyadh by their version of Al Qaeda; we exchanged ambassadors and the price of oil dropped $2 a barrel. Otherwise, the assholes generally decided to stay home and kill their own people, rather than kill ours.

The economy rebounded, as I knew it would. People were hiring again and the market was up, the deficit dropped from $150 billion down to $8 billion, and was looking to become a surplus by the end of the year. It was looking like we would be able to announce I was officially running on schedule, with a July 20 appearance in Springboro, Oklahoma, the place I made famous three years before.

Yes, things were looking good. That meant everything was going to turn to shit.

Chapter 153: From the Halls of Montezuma

Wednesday, July 9, 2003

On Saturday, July 5, I was doing my normal Saturday morning routine in the Oval Office, which was basically catching up on some paperwork and reading some briefing papers. It was a Saturday, so I didn't have anything official planned and was, in fact, working in khakis and a rugby shirt. I was contemplating lunch with Marilyn when I got a call from the Situation Room. I picked up the phone and said, "Hello?"

"Mister President, this is Colonel Withers. I am the duty officer in the Situation Room. We are monitoring a situation in Liberia that you should be aware of."

So much for lunch. "Can you brief me here, or should I come down there?"

"It will be easier to discuss it here, sir."

I nodded to myself. "Down in five." I stood and slipped on my loafers, and then used my bathroom. When I left the Oval Office, I stopped at my secretary's desk and told the Saturday fill-in. "I'm heading down to the Situation Room. Let the First Lady know I might not be around for lunch, please. Thank you." She acknowledged the request, and I moved out, followed by an agent. I don't think they are so worried about any danger inside the building, but they always want somebody who knows exactly where I am every second of the day.

I went down to the Situation Room and looked around it approvingly. Through most of 2002 and into 2003 the room had undergone a massive overhaul, and now actually looked like something from the 21st century. Josh Bolten, on the other hand, had not been happy at all, since the room is directly under his, and the vibrations had been so bad that coffee cups would move around on his desk. I let him cut the ribbon when they reopened it, and made sure he got a picture, which only slightly mollified him.

I stepped inside and saw the usual staffers peering into computer monitors. One came towards me and straightened up. He had eagles on his Air Force uniform. "Colonel Withers?"

"Thank you for coming, Mister President."

I reached out to shake his hand. "It's a pleasure to meet you, Colonel. I don't think I've had the chance until now."

"Just in passing, sir."

"You said something about Liberia?"

He led me over to a chair at the head of a conference table facing a wall screen with a map of West Africa on it. "Yes, sir. Uh, Mister President, I am not sure just how much you know about Liberia, but they've had a civil war going on for a few years, and it has been heating up lately. Over the last few days things have been getting ugly."

"You'll have to give me a bit of a briefing, Colonel. I've never been there, but I know the grade school version. Small country, west coast of Africa, we set it up by sending back some freed slaves, the idea never really panned out, and now the place is pretty much a basket case like the rest of the continent.", I told him.

"That's pretty much accurate. Ever since the Eighties the place has been in a constant state of war, as one rebel group after the other tries to overthrow the government and get their hands on the goodies. There is not much on the way of goodies, but if you control the government you can rifle the piggy bank of any foreign aid money that comes in as well as control exports of illegal commodities like blood diamonds and timber.", he explained.

"Sounds about right. Don't get me wrong, Colonel, but you just described about three quarters of the shitholes south of the Sahara. What makes Liberia important to me today?", I asked.

He nodded. "Sir, like I said, there has been a constant string of rebellions aimed at overthrowing the government. As a general rule, that means taking control of Monrovia, the capital, which is where our embassy is, and everybody else's embassy. Right now the rebels are about to take over Monrovia and it is getting ugly. Furthermore, Liberia is considered as being part of the American sphere of influence."

"Which means we need to send in the Marines.", I finished for him.

"It has happened in the past, sir. We've been monitoring the situation there for some time now, but the most recent cables from the embassy are indicating a higher than usual sense of alarm. You need to be briefed on the latest developments. We can do this here and now, or provide a more formal response later.", replied Colonel Withers.

I glanced at the wall clock. Lunch was shot, and probably my afternoon as well. "You're doing fine so far, Colonel. Who do you have here? State? CIA? Can you give me a briefing?"

"Yes, sir." He turned to somebody else. "Jerry, let's go with the map of Liberia and move to the map of Monrovia and the surrounding area." The map on the screen changed and I put my glasses on to see it better. A few other analysts came over to participate and I was introduced to them.

The long and the short of it was that the current government was under the control of President-For-Life Charles Taylor, a homicidal maniac if ever there was one. There were two separate rebel movements, one in the north and one in the south, both of which wanted to replace Taylor and take all the marbles for themselves. From what I was hearing, they were as equally murderous as he was. America had avoided taking any sides because, aside from the human rights aspects of letting murderous cutthroats run loose, we simply didn't care. The general rule was to let them kill each other off just so long as they left the embassy people alone. When they started getting rambunctious towards the foreigners, we would send in the Marines and rescue the foreigners, and let the locals simply kill each other. Eventually things would settle down, and we would let the foreigners go back or go home.

I listened to this, and when it started getting too detailed I closed it out. "What have we been hearing out of State on this? Are they in the loop? They must be."

"Yes, sir. We simply get their feed as far as it involves possible military action."

I nodded at that. Just then, somebody else in the room said, "Hold for a moment, he's right here." He looked over at the colonel and me and said, "Secretary Powell is on the line and looking for you, Mister President."

I nodded at Colonel Withers. "Speak of the devil." I motioned to the other officer and he hit a button on the phone and it rang to the one in front of me. "Colin?"

"Carl, I am hearing some very disturbing things out of Monrovia.", stated the Secretary of State.

"You caught me in a briefing on that. If you hadn't called me, I was going to call you."

"I think we need to discuss some possible emergency measures.", he told me.

I nodded to myself. "I was just getting to that. Let's get the NSC to meet first thing Monday morning. I will pass the word. In the meantime, you stay on top of it, and I'll do the same."

"Agreed. I thought you would be aware of this, but it never hurts to check."

"Also agreed. Talk soon." We hung up, and I turned back to Colonel Withers. "Okay, so what do you want me to do about this? Is it time to send in the Marines? Who do we have available, anyway?"

He turned to somebody else. "Jerry, give me the big map." A large map of Africa and the Southern Atlantic went up on the screen. "We have a few options, Mister President." Several icons for ships went onto the map. "The nearest is the Tarawa Amphibious Ready Group, here, off the coast of Angola. They were doing some readiness training with the Angolans, but we can pull them out and send them towards Liberia by this evening. They will be in place by tomorrow night."

"Okay, let's make that happen. I want a formal presentation for Monday morning, for the entire National Security Council. I want an update and options.", I ordered. "Let the appropriate people know. Also, pass the word to the NSC about the meeting."

He smiled and nodded. "Yes, sir, we'll make that happen." Around him the others nodded as well.

"Thank you, gentlemen, ladies. With any luck, this will all blow over. Is that it or can I go?"

"That was it, Mister President. Thank you for coming down."

I left and headed up to the Residence. I didn't need to let Marilyn know how the world was falling apart, so I watched some television and played with the dog, while she worked on some knitting. I didn't even think all that much of it on Sunday. Nine times out of ten, these things fade away and blow over, and even though Charlie was with the Tarawa group, the odds that he would get involved were extremely low.

Monday morning at 9:00 the National Security Council met in the Situation Room. Josh was with me, and we grabbed Ari and dragged him along for good measure. Unlike the informal shirtsleeve atmosphere of Saturday morning, today everybody was in their Class As. This time the briefer was a Brigadier General Smith, from the Army, although I saw Colonel Withers hanging around in the background. I started by saying, "I assume everybody knows why we're here. Has everybody had a chance to get some background on this?"

Most of the people just nodded and said yes. Colin Powell, the Secretary of State, said, "Yes. Nothing much has changed since we talked Saturday morning, but the overall tone I am getting out of Monrovia is that things are deteriorating."

Vice President McCain said, "Cindy and I were in Phoenix over the weekend. I only learned yesterday about this in the PDB, but I had my NIO give me a followup."

"Good." You don't play the game at this level without being prepared. I looked at the general. "Well, is it good news or bad?"

General Smith answered, "If it was good, sir, we would have let you know so that you wouldn't need to be here. No, it's bad and getting worse." He launched into a slicker and smoother briefing than what I got from Withers the other day, but he covered much of the same ground. Eventually he got to the specifics, which were worrisome. "So, we have two rebel factions, each of which is supported by a neighboring country looking to grab some land or influence. In the southeast you have the Movement for Democracy in Liberia, which is funded by Cote D'Ivoire. In the northwest you have the Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy, which is backed by Guinea. Mind you, none of these guys actually are interested in democracy or reconciliation. It's more like a pack of hyenas fighting over an old bone."

I grimaced and nodded.

Smith continued. "The real nasties are the ones in the northwest, the LURD. They've been at this longer, and they've been committing atrocities just as much as Taylor and his bunch have. Again, nothing unusual there. The problem is that Taylor and what passes for the government is collapsing. Both rebel groups are surrounding Monrovia and beginning to press inward. Nobody is paying much attention to civilian status or noncombatants, but they are just killing everybody they see. LURD is the worst. LURD is beginning to mortar and shell the city, indiscriminately at first, but then they began targeting white owned and foreign sections of the city, including the embassy area."

"Are we getting any evidence of formal anti-foreigner or genocidal rhetoric out of these groups?", asked Condi Rice.

"Yes, ma'am." Smith pointed to somebody and a slide went up on the screen, and some red dots appeared on the map of Monrovia. "We are catching some radio traffic directing rebel units towards foreign residential districts, mortar and artillery attacks have been reported by French journalists – here and here – and a Belgian convent hospital was attacked this morning and the foreign-born nuns were brutalized and killed. I would also point out that only the white nuns and nurses were harmed. African – black African – individuals were simply beaten and sent down the road. Many of the whites killed were also African, but they were labeled as colonialists and foreigners."

Neither Condi Rice nor Colin Powell made any kind of comment on this. They were the most senior African-Americans in the Cabinet, but the emphasis was on American with both of them.

I looked at Colin and asked, "What are you hearing from the Ambassador?"

"The ambassador is a man named Bismarck Myrick. I've checked his background and talked to him a couple of times. He's been a Foreign Service Officer for years. Before that he was in the Army and saw a lot of action in Viet Nam. He's got a Purple Heart, four Bronze Stars, and a Silver Star. I simply point that out to show that he knows combat and he doesn't get nervous easily. He told me the place is as bad as he's ever seen a situation, and he's carrying a pistol under his jacket. There is recurring mortar fire in the embassy areas, from which side nobody really knows or cares, and the city is descending into anarchy."

Tom Ridge whistled and said, "He went through all of that, and he ends up back in a hellhole like this? Oh, brother!"

I muttered, "Shit!", to myself and shook my head in disgust. Then I looked at Smith. "All right, let's get these guys out of there. Did that amphibious group get into position?"

"Elements are in position now, sir."

"What does that mean?", I asked.

The map of West Africa went back up to the screen. "The Tarawa group consists of the Tarawa, a helicopter carrier carrying Harriers, helicopters, and about 2,000 Marines, the Duluth, an amphibious transport carrying more helicopters and another 900 or so Marines, and the Fort McHenry, a smaller amphibious transport, which carries about 400 Marines. These transports are accompanied by a protective screen of cruisers and destroyers, and always have a dedicated surveillance element of P-3 Orions and, in this case, a Los Angeles class attack sub." Several bright blue lights showed up on the map. One was off the coast of Liberia, but the other two were still near Angola. "When you gave the order, the Duluth was in port in Luanda, and had to recall her sailors and Marines from training. The Tarawa and the Fort McHenry were ordered to sail ahead of the Duluth, but the Tarawa suffered an engineering casualty and was delayed. The Fort McHenry, accompanied by the Burke class destroyer Cole, went on ahead. The Tarawa managed to transfer a significant helicopter element to the Fort McHenry before she left. She and the Duluth are expected to be on station by this evening."

"Uh, pardon me for sounding stupid, but what's an engineering casualty? Was somebody hurt?", I asked.

General Myers, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, answered, "No, sir, it means the Navy broke their boat. It happens, probably in the turbine or drive train assembly. My understanding is that repairs are being made and they are already underway, but at a reduced rate of speed. They will be in place by tonight."

"And if we need to do something before then?"

"Then the Marines on the Fort McHenry go in. They have air cushion landing craft and helicopters for transport, and some of the helicopters will be rigged for fire support. The Cole also has guns and helicopters. We will also be pursuing very limited results. Unless you say otherwise, our goal will be to protect the embassy and rescue the staff. We have the resources ready to do that, sir."

I looked around the room. "Is that the goal? Rescue the embassy staff and let the locals kill each other? Or does anybody want us to do more?", I asked.

"What about the other embassies in the city? The French? The Belgians? Anybody else?", asked Condi.

"We need to consider it, Mister President.", added Colin. "If nothing else, it racks up some serious Brownie points with our allies. None of them have any ability to get in there until the middle of the week."

I saw Myers and Smith nodding at that. John and the others chimed in also, in agreement.

I was on the verge of saying something when there was a sudden stir at the other end of the room. An Army major wearing a headset began saying, "Repeat that! ... Is that confirmed? ... Hold for one..." He looked over at us and said, "We are getting reports from the embassy that mortar fire is now hitting the compound ... Wait, what..." The last was said into the headset as his eyes scanned a monitor. "The fire has stopped for the moment, but casualties are reported ... no dead ... repeat ... two light wounds ... hold, please..."

"Who are you talking to, son?", I asked.

"I have Ambassador Myrick on the line, sir!"

Colin Powell sat upright at that. Normally the Ambassador would report to him, so things must really be turning to shit. "Let me talk to him, Major."

"Please hold for the President.", the major said. He hit a button and a phone in front of me rang.

I picked it up. "Mister Ambassador?"

"Mister President, this is Bismarck Myrick, the Ambassador."

"Ambassador Myrick, I gather you have your hands full. How bad is it?", I asked.

"Yes, sir. We just got hit with some mortar fire, 82 millimeter, I think. We took half a dozen rounds. Nobody was killed, but a couple of people caught some shrapnel.", he reported. He sounded a lot calmer than I would probably have been.

"Mister Ambassador. You are authorized to take any and all precautions. Break open the armory and make sure everybody is prepared. This has gone on long enough. I will be sending in some Marines shortly. Get everybody ready to go. Is that understood?"

"Yes, sir. We haven't seen any hostile troops yet, but we're keeping a watch out. We're picking up some foreign nationals, Europeans mostly. I authorized the guards at the gate to let them in.", he reported.

Well, that made up my mind about rescuing other people. I couldn't leave them behind, like the pictures of the last helicopter out of Saigon. "Take care of them, Ambassador Myrick. Help is on the way."

"Thank you, sir." The line clicked off at that.

I set the phone down. "Well, you heard that. I don't think we need to discuss the response." I looked over at Myers. "Get them moving, General. Oh, and while we're here, General, General...", I said to the two generals. " ... I just want to let you know that Colonel Withers here gave me an excellent briefing on Saturday. Really, the entire staff did a fine job. I just wanted to make sure I said thank you, and pass that along." I stood up. There was nothing else to do now on my part, and micromanaging things from thousands of miles away was a terrible idea. "I think we are done here for now. Colin, keep me informed on the Ambassador and his staff, and anything else from our allies. General, a moment of your time privately, please?"

The others began filing out, and I buttonholed General Myers in a corner. I lowered my voice so that it was private, and then said, "General, I don't want to delay your handling of this. I'm not sure if you know, but my son is on the Fort McHenry as a Marine. I'm not exactly worried about him, but it has been pointed out that if an enemy were to know the son of the U.S. President was around, they would make very strenuous efforts to kill or capture him, probably endangering the lives of those around him."

"Yes, sir, that is very much true, I am sorry to say."

"Now, Charlie is getting out at the end of his hitch, and I have explained this to him. He is not happy, but he understands. I am not sure about whether anybody else would understand. If word came out that he was being held back by his father, it would be devastating to him. It wouldn't be good for me either, but I'm a big boy. I can take the heat if I have to. An accusation of cowardice or favoritism would haunt Charlie the rest of his life.", I continued.

"I understand, sir. Mister President, it isn't going to be that much of a problem. By this time tomorrow we'll have another 3,000 Marines off the coast. For today, we'll simply have a few platoons secure the embassy. If the rebels can delay until tomorrow, we won't even need the Fort McHenry and her Marines.", he replied.

"We can't let anybody know about this. It would destroy him.", I repeated.

"Understood, sir. I will handle it."

"Thank you, General." With that I headed to my office to deal with everything else that had piled up over the weekend.

I didn't give Liberia much thought for the rest of the day, as I was tied up in budget meetings and plans for the next fiscal year. At lunch I was quietly informed that the embassy had been secured. I just nodded and went about my business. Charlie was safe on his boat, the Marines had landed, the embassy was secure. By tonight the evening news would be reporting that Monrovia was safe for Americans or some such bullshit. Ari told me that none of the networks had any offices in Liberia, but that they had access to freelance stringers with camera equipment. We were sure that the Marines would be on the news tonight, either as heroic liberators or jackbooted thugs, depending on the leanings of the network. The Europeans, especially the French, tended to take a very distasteful view of 'American interventionism'.

Through the afternoon the situation deteriorated. The Liberians were waging a three sided war on each other, and God help anyone caught in the middle. We began to get reports, not from Ambassador Myrick, but from other sources that foreigners were being targeted, and killed. Myrick was getting as many of them to the embassy grounds as he could, and then sending them out on Marine helicopters to the Fort McHenry. The embassy itself was secure, though under intermittent attack, and he had directed the Marine commander to send out patrols to other embassies and bring back any personnel who wanted to evacuate.

I talked to Colin Powell mid-afternoon. I commented to him that I thought Myrick was doing the right thing, but I wondered if he had the legal authority to give the Marines orders. I got an answer back that surprised me. As 'Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary' Bismarck Myrick was the President's personal representative and spoke with the President's voice. There was actually considerable precedent to taking command of local armed forces, sometimes for good and sometimes not. At least our guy knew which end of the gun the bullets came out.

By the time of the evening news, Liberia had managed to make top billing on most of the networks, and a local stringer for ITN, an English independent network, was reporting about widespread violence, and that American Marines were landing and taking control of most foreign embassies, evacuating noncombatants and family members, as well as any other white faces they could rescue.

By the next morning it was being reported, both in the PDB and on the news, that the Marines had secured most of the foreign embassies and had evacuated hundreds of people to the ships at sea. The video footage was disturbing, especially over breakfast, with a number of shots of dead bodies lying in the street, a few craters, and smoking burned-out vehicles and storefronts. In addition to embassy personnel, there were reports of a convent rescued, as well as several Red Cross groups, and also some French journalists. I commented to Marilyn that the Frogs would undoubtedly find a way to blame this whole mess on us. She stuck her tongue out at me, since I frequently tease her on her family's heritage.

I made a similar comment to Ari Fleischer at the morning staff meeting. He was undoubtedly going to be getting questions at the morning press conference, and I knew the Pentagon would be having a big press conference as well. That was why I had dragged him into the Monday morning NSC meeting. This was the first heavy use of troops I had ordered since the Afghan/Al Qaeda attacks in 2001.

Ari disagreed with me. "I've had Will and a few of the other staff members monitoring some of the European feeds, the BBC, the French networks, German, and so forth. We aren't coming off badly. Ambassador Myrick's decision to send rescue parties after everyone paid off. There are several reports that American Marines ended up in firefights with rebel groups while evacuating locations with various noncombatants in tow. A Belgian broadcast team, in fact, was with a clinic operated by some French doctors and nurses, and actually has footage of some Marines rescuing them and getting them to safety. It won't play badly, Mister President."

"Really? Good! I am going to want to decorate those men when they get home. Anybody who did well over there should be decorated. It's important to recognize them, and not just for the sake of good publicity.", I replied. "Get in touch with the State Department, too. That Ambassador of theirs, Myrick, he seems to know what he's doing. He and his people need to be recognized as well, whether by State or by me."

"Good publicity doesn't hurt. I'll talk to the Pentagon later, State, too, and follow up."

Things remained relatively quiet for the rest of the day. Mid-afternoon I received a heads-up from Colin Powell, and then took a call from President Chirac of France, thanking me for saving his citizens. I also took calls from a couple of other ambassadors, and was assured that their bosses would be calling in the next day or so.

That evening Monrovia made the top of the news again, and by now there was more video available. Tom Brokaw introduced the show, and then promptly turned it over to a report by a correspondent from ITN. It wasn't anything I hadn't already heard, but I suppose it sounded more official in a British accent. Watching with me were Marilyn and the girls, home from college for the summer. They had survived their freshman year, and the University of Maryland had survived them.

The next segment was introduced as 'disturbing and graphic, and might not be suitable for all viewers, which simply guaranteed that everybody would want to watch it. It was introduced as footage of the American Marines rescuing a team of French nurses from a clinic being overrun by rebels. It had been gathered by a Belgian video team which had been with the French clinic when it was rescued. The video was very jerky, and quickly edited for television, and the voiceover started out in French, before being muted with an English accent translation overlaid on it.

"Holy crap!", exclaimed Holly.

"No shit!", added Molly.

"Language!", chided their mother.

It was riveting footage. There were a few jerky seconds of the camera running along down a street accompanied by women and children of several races and heavily armored Marines, who would occasionally turn and fire backwards behind them. It was explained that they were escaping from a clinic being overrun, and heading towards a central collection point with more Marines. The camera rounded a corner to where a couple of Marines were setting up what I recognized was a temporary local strong point. They were laying down covering fire from behind a small concrete wall and directing people behind the wall. As more of the Marines herded their charges behind the wall, they were adding their fire to the mix. Once the cameraman got behind the wall, the video footage settled down and was able to focus on the scene.

The problem came with the last group of Marines and refugees. Two large Marines were bringing up the rear, laying down fire behind them wildly while herding their charges, a blonde woman and two children. Both Marines, filthy and sweaty, were limping and obviously wounded but they continued performing their duty. Suddenly an explosion in the middle of the street forced this little group to the opposite side of the street from the others, ducking down behind a broken down car. One of the Marines hiding by the car fired downrange, and then handed his rifle to the other Marine, grabbed the two children, and picked them up. He ran wildly across the street towards the strongpoint, and it was obvious that he was hurt and bleeding. He staggered once but kept going, and got to the wall and tossed the kids over. Then he turned back and ran back towards the car.

At this point, one of the other Marines jumped over the wall to join him. He only made it halfway across the street before collapsing, at which point the first Marine turned and grabbed him by the back of his protective vest and dragged him back over to the others. The announcer said that he told everybody to stay where they were, and that nobody else needed to die but him. He ran back to the car, picked the woman up and began running back towards the strongpoint as the last Marine was laying down covering fire. The running Marine was immediately fired on again, and an explosion like an RPG round hitting the ground just missed him.

This crazy bastard dumped the blonde off and then ran back into the hail of bullets a third time and ran back to the other Marine. They both fired some more, and then stood to run back. The second Marine was hit, and the first Marine grabbed him and threw him over his shoulder. He wasn't moving fast, but he was moving, and he got about halfway when another explosion behind him knocked them both to the ground. Still, the Marine managed to get back up and finish carrying his partner to safety before collapsing. The scene ended at that point, with the voiceover explaining they were rescued by more Marines. I had a very bad feeling that I was going to be calling a mother very soon to thank her for her son's ultimate sacrifice.

At the end of the broadcast, I went into my study and called the Commandant of the Marine Corps, General Jim Jones. "General, I just wanted to tell you that I was watching the evening news and saw some footage of some of your boys. I don't know if you've seen it, but it was quite amazing."

"Thank you, Mister President. Yes, I have seen some of the footage, sir. These kids are really great kids."

"How bad are the casualties, General? From what I saw, I can't believe that there aren't some serious casualties."

"Actually they are very light. We have no KIAs, at least not yet, and only a few wounded."

"I find that very hard to believe after what I just saw."

"Understood, Mister President. I will speak to you about this soon."

"Thank you, General. I will let you go. I appreciate what they did, so let them know.", I told him.

Afterwards I went back to the living room, and told Marilyn that I had thanked the Commandant of the Marine Corps, and told him that the Marines were almost as tough as paratroopers. She laughed loudly at me and told me she'd tell Charlie about that when he got home.

Wednesday morning, the 8:00 staff meeting was interrupted. There was a knock on the door and a secretary tuck her head in. "Mister President, the Commandant of the Marine Corps is here and would like a few minutes with you."

He must have brought over the butcher's bill for Monrovia. "Let's fit him in right after the meeting."

The door closed, but less than a minute later there was another knock and it opened again. "Mister President, the Commandant really needs to see you."

I shrugged to the others and stood up. Out in the hallway was General Jones, accompanied by a naval officer, a captain, who looked Asian-American. "General, I really didn't expect you to get me those casualty figures this morning. It could have waited, or you could have sent a message."

"Uh, sir, that's really why I'm here ... Jesus, I don't know how to do this..."

"General, what's the matter?"

"Mister President, Monday evening, your son, Lance Corporal Charles Robert Buckman, was wounded in action in Monrovia."

Chapter 154: A Summer Cruise

Things swirled around for a second and I slumped against the wall. The general and the captain grabbed my shoulders, but I didn't faint or collapse. This was my worst nightmare, that Charlie would get killed in the service. Marilyn might have tolerated me in the service, and even allowed Charlie to go in, but this was going to just kill her. She would never forgive me.

"How ... how did it happen?"

The captain answered, "Mister President! Mister President! He's not dead, he was wounded. He's not dead!"

I focused on him. "Who are you?"

"I'm Captain Hmong. I'm a doctor over at Bethesda. I talked to the doctors on the Fort McHenry. Your son was wounded, but he'll be all right. He's not dead! He was wounded. He'll be all right!"

I looked around and found that the hallway was filled with people staring at me. John McCain and Condoleezza Rice were scurrying around the corner. I was maneuvered back into the Oval Office and towards an armchair, with my morning staff shuffling out of the way. John and Condi came in also.

I looked at the Commandant and the doctor again. "He's not dead? He's wounded?"

"Yes, sir. He'll be fine. I've talked to the ship.", repeated Doctor Hmong.

"What happened? He wasn't even supposed to get off the ship!"

General Jones sighed. "There was a breakdown in communications, sir. The Marines knew, but not the embassy."

"What?" That made no sense to me.

"They needed everybody, sir. Every time a helo came back on board carrying refugees, it would load up with Marines and take them back into Monrovia. Sir, there are a million people in Monrovia, and we only had 400 Marines. Your son was in one of the last units sent in, and he was only supposed to be security at the American embassy. Instead, the Ambassador decided they needed to set up a collection point elsewhere and diverted the helo at the last minute.", he explained.

"Jesus Christ!", I exclaimed. "So, what happened to him?"

"Sir, did you see the film of the rescue of the nurses? It was playing on television last night."

"I watched the NBC news. There was a segment with footage of some guys running across a street and getting shot at. One of them kept running back and forth before he died. He was covered with blood. I couldn't believe they showed that.", I said.

"He didn't die! That was your son! He was the one who kept running back and forth pulling people out!"

"No, I watched that, he couldn't ... no way that kid made it!", I protested.

The doctor answered, "He was all shot up, but it's mostly shrapnel and flesh wounds. He lost a lot of blood but he's back on the ship. He'll make it. He'll be fine."

The Commandant added, "His CO put him up for the Navy Cross."

"The Navy Cross?" In the Marines, the only medal higher than the Navy Cross is the Medal of Honor.

"Yes, sir." He shrugged. "Realistically, he doesn't quite rate the Navy Cross, so it will be downgraded to a Silver Star, which is what he actually deserves. You were in the service, sir, so you know how the game gets played."

I did, too. In order to get your people the recognition they deserve, you generally have to overrate them, so they look good compared to some desk warrior whose only combat injury involved a loose staple and some paper cuts. The same occurred at promotion time, when a scruffy but great combat leader had to go up against some picture perfect PowerPoint commando.

As it was, the Silver Star was rated higher than my own Bronze Star, and could only be earned in combat. The worst thing was that I realized that the higher up the medal rates, the more likely you earn it posthumously. To get the Navy Cross he would have probably had to die...

Suddenly my stomach lurched. I stumbled into my adjoining bathroom and just made it to the toilet before breakfast came up. I heaved until I was empty, and only then noticed that I had been followed by the doctor. He helped me to my feet, and I washed my face at the sink. I felt every day of my 100 years at that moment. A hollow man stared back from sunken eyes in the mirror. "It's just nerves, Mister President. You'll be fine. Your son will be fine. We can probably get him on the phone."

He led me back into the Oval Office, which was getting crowded by now. The White House Physician, Doctor Tubb and a nurse had joined us when they got the word I was throwing up. Also, in addition to the regular morning briefing team of Ari, Josh, and Mindy, we also had Frank, Carter, and Will crammed in, along with a couple of Secret Service agents. The room was packed. Meanwhile, John was ordering Josh and Ari, politely, to keep a lid on this until I wanted it released.

I pulled myself together. I knew what had to be done first. "Where is the First Lady?", I asked.

Will answered, "She's here, upstairs, I guess, getting ready. She has a lunch with the Daughters of the American Revolution."

I snorted in laughter at that. "The DAR? Good Lord! My family sat out the war, and Marilyn's was in Canada at the time!" I shook my head. "I'll need to see her right now. Where are the girls?"

One of the agents responded. "They are running with Stormy down on the Mall. Hold one..." He muttered into a hidden microphone, waited a moment, and then added, "Stormy just jumped in the Reflecting Pool!"

"Good Christ! Well, get them back here. This is my doing. I need to be the one to tell them." He began muttering into his mike again. The agents on the twins' detail would drive up with a War Wagon and hustle them inside. They would be back here in less than five minutes. To the others I said, "Whatever my schedule is today, it just got cancelled. We don't say anything about this until I say we do. I will let you know as soon as I know something. Right now I have to tell Charlie's mother her son has been shot. I think I'd prefer it have been me." The room erupted in discussion, but I ignored it. To the general and captain, I said, "Gentlemen, on me.", and led them out of the room.

We went to the elevator and rode up to the Residence, but I didn't go beyond the vestibule. The girls weren't back yet, but I expected them momentarily. I lowered my voice and said, "We are going to wait until they are back. I can't do this twice." They just nodded in understanding.

About two minutes later, the girls and the dog, all of them looking thoroughly soaked, came up the elevator. Molly saw me standing there and said, "Daddy, what's going on?! Stormy was in the Reflecting Pool, and when we dragged her out she got us all wet!" In emphasis, Stormy shook herself all over the twins again.

Holly was more succinct, especially when she saw a pair of officers with me. "What's wrong?"

"We need to go inside and talk with your mother.", I told them.

"What's wrong?", added Molly.

"Is it Charlie? What happened!?"

"Charlie is fine. Let's go see Mom." I ushered them into the living room, where I found Marilyn reading a short speech she was supposed to give about motherhood and apple pie, or some such nonsense.

She looked up and said, "What are you doing here so early? And why do our daughters look like drowned rats? What did they do now?".

"Mom!", squawked both the girls. If that fazed Marilyn, it didn't show.

Marilyn stood up when she saw the visitors. "Hello."

"Marilyn, please sit down. Girls, you too." I said. I went to my wife and moved her towards the couch.

She must have noticed the Marine uniform. "What's wrong, Carl? Is it Charlie? I thought you said he would be safe!"

"Let's sit down, honey." I pushed her down onto the cushion of the couch and sat next to her. Both our daughters had terrified looks on their faces. As soon as she was seated, and with me still holding her hands, I said, "Charlie's been wounded, but he's alive and is going to be okay." The girls went into an uproar at this, but Marilyn turned white as a ghost. I just pressed on. "This is General Jones and Captain Hmong. The captain is a doctor and has talked to the doctors on Charlie's ship. Charlie will be okay."

Marilyn turned an icy glare on the two men. "What happened!?"

The general repeated his review of what happened, and Captain Hmong reported that he had talked to the surgeons who had treated Charlie, and that our boy would be fine. When he mentioned calling the ship, Marilyn jumped at it. I directed General Jones to a phone in my study and told him to set up the call. Monrovia was 5 hours ahead of us, so it was early afternoon local time. He came back in after a few minutes and said that it would be a few minutes and they would call when they had the connection.

Marilyn fixed him with a glare and said, "I'm not going anywhere. Are you?" I actually got to see a Marine general blanch and turn white.

Ten minutes later the phone rang, and we all crowded into the study. I put the phone on speaker and said, "This is the President. Who is this?"

"Hey, Dad, how's it going?"

The voice was weak, and the reception was scratchy, but that was probably the best sound I had ever heard. The girls started shrieking and Marilyn started talking to Charlie, and I just collapsed into my swivel chair. After a bit, I tossed in my two cents, but Charlie just kept repeating he was fine and don't worry about him. After five minutes, Doctor Hmong got on the phone and asked to talk to one of the doctors, and they spouted medical jargon at each other for five minutes. After that, Charlie talked to us again until a doctor on the ship said he needed some rest. The connection broke down after that.

"Mrs. Buckman, Lance Corporal Buckman will be fine but he needs some rest and healing. He lost a lot of blood, but that has been replaced, and he has a lot of stitches and scars in unusual places, and he's in some pain so they have him on meds and antibiotics, but his prognosis is excellent. In a week or two he will feel like a new man, and in a couple of months he'll be as good as new.", said Doctor Hmong.

"What do you mean, unusual places?", asked Holly, beating me to the punch.

The doctor made a wry face and said, "There was a penetrating trauma to the left gluteus maximus muscle."

The girls looked perplexed, and Marilyn wasn't much better, so I translated for them. "Your brother got shot in the ass."

"Carl!", protested Marilyn, as the girls giggled.

The doctor shrugged and nodded. "More likely shrapnel from an RPG or a ricochet fragment, but that's about right."

"When can I see Charlie?", asked Marilyn.

"Well, he's confined to the hospital on the Tarawa right now. He'll be there for a few days, and then will be able to come home. The Tarawa group is actually scheduled to return to Norfolk as soon as they clean up in Monrovia, maybe another week. It might be easier to simply bring the lightly wounded home that way.", said Captain Hmong.

It was my turn to receive the death stare from Marilyn. "I want to see Charlie now!"

"Marilyn, he can't be moved yet!", I argued. "He's in the hospital! On a ship!"

"TODAY!"

"Marilyn!"

"Do you still own a plane? Do you want to bet I can't call and have that warmed up!?"

"Uh, yeah, sure." I took the coward's way out and turned to the Commandant. "General?"

"Give me a few minutes, and we will make it happen. I can probably arrange it from the Situation Room.", he replied.

I popped to my feet. "Here, let me go with you. Maybe I can help." The three of us beat feet out of there.

Once we got out of the room, I asked, "When did this happen? I thought that rescue was on Monday? How come I didn't hear about it until today?"

General Jones actually looked embarrassed at that. "It's sort of your fault, sir. I mean, everybody here knows your son is a Marine, and everybody on the Fort McHenry knew he was a Marine, but the computers still had him down as Robert NMI Buckman of Washington, D.C. When they sent the signal through to the Pentagon, they pulled up his official address and sent a notification team there last night. That's when they were told by the Secret Service where to actually go, and they turned around and went back to the Pentagon to figure out what to do."

I grunted at that. We went down to the Situation Room, where the general did his thing, and I just sat there and contemplated my navel. It's one thing to whistle up the G-IV and tell them to fly somewhere, but how do you get to a ship in the middle of the ocean? It was going to take some doing, but the Abraham Lincoln carrier group was in the process of rushing to the area, to relieve the Tarawa group and show the flag. If we got Marilyn to Naval Air Station Oceana, just outside of Virginia Beach, she could catch a COD flight to the Lincoln. From the Lincoln they could fly her on a helicopter to the Tarawa. She could be there in 24 hours.

The captain we left hanging around the lobby while General Jones and I headed back to the dragon's lair. Marilyn simply nodded and said, "When do I leave?"

I needed to get in control of this clusterfuck at some point. "Marilyn, we can probably do this today, but you need to do something for me."

"What?"

"I am going to get a lot of heat over this, about using the power of my position to send my wife halfway around the world on the taxpayers' dime. How come she can do it when all the other mothers can't? - that sort of thing. Now, I will pay the bill, and take the heat, but if we are doing this, you need to do some schmoozing while you are out there. You get on a ship, you do the tour and shake hands and wave and smile and take pictures, okay."

"Oh, I can do that, I suppose.", she said, quite amicably. Suddenly I thought I might come out of this with my marriage still intact. (If the President and the First Lady get divorced, who gets to keep the White House? Maybe I should ask Bill and Hillary.)

I grabbed a phone. "Please send Ari and that doctor up to the Residence. Thank you."

"What about us? Do we get to go?", asked Molly.

"No, and neither does Stormy. That would be all the Navy needs, the three of you loose on a warship! We'd probably end up at war with somebody!"

"Daddy!", protested her sister.

"No!"

When Ari showed up with the doctor from Bethesda, we gave him the rundown on what was happening. I simply figured he would want to issue a press release and say something at the press conference. No, that was not at all what Ari had in mind. "Mister President, let's be honest here. Your son is a wounded in action certified hero as seen on national television! The First Lady is going to fly around the world on Navy planes to see him, when no other mother can do that. This is news! We need to handle this properly." He turned to General Jones. "General, can we send a reporter or two on this junket?" He looked at me and held up a hand. "That's what the media is going to call this, true or not."

"Yes, probably several people. We're going to send a Marine escort with the First Lady to show her around.", he replied. That was news to me, but I suppose it made sense.

Ari nodded. "Send both a man and a woman, and I'll line up a couple of reporters. Nothing big, though."

"Who are you planning on sending, Ari?", I asked.

"Depends on who I like and dislike when I get downstairs. General, this is going to break tomorrow morning. Have your press people call us here to coordinate our response. Doctor, you will need to brief me on Charlie's wounds. Mrs. Buckman, give him our best!" He stood up and said, "I need to work on this, Mister President."

"Go, Ari. I'll talk to you in a bit."

My day was totally shot by now, and Marilyn cancelled her lunch. I stayed with Marilyn and the girls as they all stewed and tried to figure out packing. After about an hour, I was rescued by the Marines, in the form of a pair of Marine Gunnery Sergeants, one of whom was a woman! That was probably the most surprising thing of all to me, and only went to show I was a hopeless dinosaur.

Ari called me down to his office before this was all done. In with him was Jennifer Loven, a reporter for the Associated Press, and Greg Kelly, from Fox News. Everybody stood up when I came in the office, and once inside, Ari moved around and closed the door. "Mister President, I found a couple of volunteers for you."

Jennifer looked at Ari and said, "Is that what we are? Volunteers? What have I been volunteered for?"

"I used to be a Marine, Ari. I can remember being volunteered before. What's going on?", added Greg.

Ari Fleischer deferred to me. "Mister President?"

"Mister Kelly, do you have a cameraman who can handle remote broadcasting by himself.", I asked.

Ari nodded and Greg said, "Yes. Why?"

"I am asking the both of you to buy a pig in a poke. I will explain what is happening but only if you both agree, right now, not to tell anybody, not even your bosses, the details, at least not until tomorrow. This will be a very exclusive story, but it needs to remain secret for one more day. If you say no, we will swap you out before we tell you. There will be travel involved."

Greg said, "What the hell!? Excuse me, Mister President, sorry about that." He looked over at Jennifer.

She just nodded and shrugged. "Okay, I'll bite. I'm in. What's up?"

I looked back at Greg. He threw his hands up and said, "Sure, why not?"

I nodded to myself and glanced at Ari, who shrugged his shoulders and nodded as well. "Okay, here's the short version. My son got all shot up in Monrovia the other day. The First Lady is going to be flying out to see him. We don't want to announce this until tomorrow, but she is leaving this evening. You two, plus your cameraman, Greg, will be traveling with her. This is going to be an exclusive for you. This won't be your average trip, either. We are arranging to send her out to the ships, and you'll report from the middle of the ocean."

"Oh my G ... Yes sir, I'm in!", he said.

"How is your son, Mister President?", asked Jennifer.

"He's pretty banged up, but he'll make it. Did either of you see the video footage of the Marine who was running through enemy fire to rescue people?" They both nodded at that. "That was him."

"I thought that kid died!", she said.

"No, but he did get wounded. I pretty much thought the same thing. Now, are you two both going to keep quiet and go along with this? I am betting you'll get some nice reporting out of it. You'll probably be gone a week or more.", I asked.

"Can we tell our bosses?", he asked.

I glanced at Ari, who said, "Tell them you will be away on an assignment, and that they cannot release that information, and that I will confirm it if they call me. Then at the press conference tomorrow, when this comes out, it will be explained that two reporters are traveling with Mrs. Buckman."

They both agreed to that, and I said, "Okay, then. Let's get this show on the road. Both of you follow me." We headed up to the Residence, and found the most astonishing sight. Marilyn was standing there in a Marine Corps BDU and combat boots, with one of those hats they call a cover perched on her curls, and wearing web gear and a backpack. She was grinning wildly as I came in. "Holy Christ!", I exclaimed. "They're drafting midgets!"

"Who says paratroopers are so tough!?", she replied. She shifted around with her backpack.

"Well, now I can die happy, because I have surely seen everything.", I said.

Jennifer Loven began fumbling through her purse and came out with a small digital camera. "I have to get a shot of this!"

"What's going on?", asked Marilyn.

"These are your ghost writers. They are going to help you write your book, What I Did On My Summer Vacation." Greg snorted at that, and Jennifer laughed and kept taking photos. "They are a couple of reporters. If I am sending you to see the troops, they are going to go with you."

"Good idea, Mister President." That was spoken by a naval lieutenant off to the side.

"Who are you?"

"Lieutenant Patrick Swanson, Public Information Officer. I will be accompanying the First Lady and her team."

I eyed him curiously. He was in his late twenties, and a naval lieutenant is the same as an army captain, an O-3. "Oh, okay. What's the plan? What's next? These two need to collect a cameraman and get some clothing and gear, I guess."

"Let me handle that, sir. We'll fly out of here at 1900. Let me talk to these folks for a moment, and then we'll get out of your hair."

I let him do his job, and went over to my wife. "Of all the ridiculous getups I've ever seen you wear, this has to take the cake!"

"Here, take this, it's heavy.", she said, trying to shrug out of the backpack.

I grabbed it and she managed to wriggle free. "I'm not impressed. Paratroopers wear chutes heavier than this, and top that off with an even heavier combat load."

"When will we leave and get there?"

I tossed the pack onto a chair and sat down with her on the sofa. I threw an arm around her shoulders. "You'll leave at 1900 or so. They'll fly you down to Oceana and load you on a transport and take off. No idea how long that flight takes, but I guess you'll land on the Lincoln in the early morning. After that, no idea. I don't know if you'll be close enough to fly from there, or if you have to sail closer. Probably tomorrow evening."

"I thought you knew this kind of stuff."

"The Navy and the Marines aren't as precise as the Army, dear."

"I am going to tell your son you said that!"

"So what? He's in the hospital. I can probably beat him up.", I replied. She laughed at that, and I added, "Now, seriously, I know the first thing you are going to want to do will be to see Charlie, but you're not just a mother, you're the First Lady. I want you to visit the ships, talk to the sailors and Marines, pose for pictures, all that sort of thing. Can you do that for me? It's important."

"Of course! It should be fun!"

I smiled to myself as I considered that. I had seen pictures of a C-2 COD landing on a carrier deck; it looked like a controlled crash. It definitely didn't look like fun! Still, I let her prattle on, half out of nervousness. We had a light lunch, after the PIO guy took the reporters out, and the two Gunnies joined us and told us some more of the planning. They had both seen sea duty several times and seemed to know what they were doing. After lunch I went back downstairs and did some more paperwork and reading.

They actually didn't get off the ground until about 2000. I received a call later, when the C-2 lifted off, and then I went to bed. I got another call in the morning that they had landed on the Lincoln, and would be transferring to the Tarawa that afternoon. In between, I would be having my own version of fun, a joint press conference with the Pentagon.

We went with the zoo to the Pentagon, and Ari and I met with their PIO. He would handle the initial press briefing, and then make the announcement that Charlie was wounded and the First Lady was flying out to meet with the wounded and the refugees. The good news came from a phone call right before the briefing, from Colin Powell. Charles Taylor, the President-for-Life had bugged out and surfaced in Nigeria. In the meantime, Ambassador Myrick was negotiating a ceasefire with the various rebel groups and trying to bring some order into the chaos that was Monrovia. Colin seemed to think he would pull it off, too, and I told Colin that when this was done, I wanted to see the man and congratulate him; we needed smart thinkers and he seemed to fit the bill. I was too cynical to believe it would last, but maybe the next time the place blew up it would be on somebody else's watch. Depending on how well the talks worked out, Colin could do his own press conference in a day or so.

The Pentagon press room was packed, since the word had gone out that I would be attending. The initial briefing was presented by a Marine Corps colonel, with the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Commandant of the Marine Corps, and the Secretary of Defense and me standing off to the side. The briefing started out with a timeline on Operation Green Delta, which was named for the operational plan that ended up being used (Green plan, Delta variant.) We had thrown it together so hastily we didn't have time for a fancy name. For this briefing, however, they were able to put together a slick PowerPoint and video presentation.

"Thank you for attending. My name is Colonel Ross Duvalier and I will be presenting this briefing. Following the briefing, there will be a question and answer period. I would request that you not ask questions until that time, and that you also turn off your cell phones or pagers. There will be handouts at the end of the briefing." Colonel Duvalier waited a moment for the inevitable stir and buzzing as some people turned off their phones. "Now, let me begin with a timeline."

With that the colonel threw up on the screen a brief timeline of when the embassy began signaling their concern and about when Secretary of State Powell and I were informed, along with when I decided to send in the Marines and the Navy, and right through to the present time. I figured Colin and a few people were watching this live, so they would know what they were going to have to respond to on the diplomatic side. This was going to be a big story again today, though by next week it would be ancient history. Duvalier finished with, " ... the latest reports, still unconfirmed, indicate that Liberian President Charles Taylor has managed to escape from Monrovia to Nigeria. You'll need to confirm that with the State Department."

He continued, "As of this moment, a ceasefire is in place between the various factions in Monrovia, though there do seem to be isolated incidents of violence. That is probably to be expected. In any case the shelling of our embassy and the embassies of foreign governments has ceased, and the operations of nongovernmental organizations such as the Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders are no longer being targeted. I am pleased to report that Marine casualties have been generally light, with no, I repeat, no American forces killed in action. There have been several Marines wounded, some seriously, though they are all now being treated for their wounds and are all expected to survive. The most serious of these wounds came during a firefight during the relief and rescue of a French and Swiss medical clinic on the outskirts of Monrovia. In this instance a Marine patrol was sent to evacuate the clinic and did so, but in the process their vehicle was destroyed by enemy fire. They then evacuated the area on foot, while taking heavy enemy fire and sustaining several casualties."

"When this Marine patrol rescued the clinic, a Belgian team of journalists was taking refuge there, and they recorded a lot of the rescue and escape, much of which has been played on network television. I have been asked to show this and comment on the situation." With that he hit a button and the video of Charlie's squad began playing, with Duvalier commenting occasionally over the recorded chaos. I was struck, much like I had been the night we watched this on NBC, by how chaotic it was, and by my disbelief that these kids remained alive.

When it got towards the end of the video, Colonel Duvalier stopped the movie and reported that the Marine who had jumped out to help Charlie, and was hit running across the street was Private First Class Tyrell Bird of Detroit, Michigan, and his condition was serious but stable, and he was expected to make a full recovery. He threw a picture up on a separate screen of Private Bird in his dress blues. Then he started it up again, and this time commented on the Marine that Charlie had helped across the street at the end, who Charlie had ended up carrying. That was Sergeant Harold Blackhawk of Cucamonga, California, and he was suffering from multiple shrapnel wounds but was also expected to make a full recovery. Duvalier then threw up a picture of Sergeant Blackhawk in dress blues. Finally he got to Charlie.

"The Marine who carried both Private Bird and Sergeant Blackhawk to safety, along with the last of the refugees, was also seriously wounded." Duvalier hit a button and a shot of Charlie's blood and smoke covered face came up from where he was getting up in the road to pick up his buddy, and then he hit a button and Charlie's dress picture came up. "This is Lance Corporal Charles Robert Buckman of Hereford, Maryland. Lance Corporal Buckman suffered multiple penetrating trauma, including shrapnel, ricochet fragments, and two bullets."

Nobody heard shit after the word 'Buckman' came out of Duvalier's lips. Just enough people knew that was the name of my son, and everybody began calling out questions, not to the colonel, but to me. We all knew this was going to happen, and when it did, Colonel Duvalier looked over at me and I simply nodded to him. He stepped back and away from the podium and I stepped forward. I held my hands up and signaled for everybody to settle down. It was my turn.

"Thank you, thank you, now, I'll make a brief statement and then answer some questions." The room quieted down, and I was able to continue. "Yes, to the question whether Lance Corporal Buckman is my son, yes he is. Like most of you, I watched the video we just saw, an edited version, on the news Monday night, and like you, I couldn't believe the courage of these fine young men. Marilyn and I only learned that Charlie was involved and was wounded yesterday morning, when the Commandant came to see me to inform us. Charlie's wounds are serious, but he is expected to fully recover. We were able to speak to him yesterday. Now, one at a time, please."

Instantly a sea of hands shot into the air. I picked one out at random.

"Mister President, when you saw the footage did you realize that was your son?"

I shook my head. "No, we had no idea. All we saw was a bunch of incredibly brave guys in body armor who looked really dirty and beat up. When I saw that footage, I thought for sure I was going to have to make a phone call to a mother somewhere to give her my condolences!"

Another voice spouted up, "Mister President, when were you informed?"

"The Commandant and a Navy doctor made the notification yesterday morning. We are Charlie's next of kin."

There were several more questions along this line, and then I was asked, "Will you be giving your son a medal?"

I sighed. I knew that was coming! "At the time the Commandant informed us that Charlie was wounded, he also informed us that Charlie's commanding officer had recommended him for a decoration. I am sure that Charlie will not be the only Marine who is decorated. I have nothing to do with the criteria for the awarding of decorations and medals, and will not be involved in that. As both the President and Charlie's father, I have to admit that if my son is to be decorated, I will be extremely proud to do so."

At that point Colonel Duvalier came over and took my place at the podium. He gave a brief description of the method the Marines used to determine whether a decoration had been earned and the process involved. The fact of the matter was that nothing he said mattered. There would be people who simply would refuse to believe that Charlie being given a medal wasn't a political move on my part. If Charlie were to die, they would claim I had sent him to his death to gain sympathy and win re-election.

I got back to the podium and took the bull by the horns. "I am perfectly aware that if my son were to be given a medal, there are plenty of people out there who will think he has gotten it because of who I am, and not what he did. Let me put it a different way, however. If Lance Corporal Buckman did act heroically, should he not be decorated because of who I am? I have to tell you, when Marilyn and the girls and I first saw that footage on Monday night, I thought for sure I was going to be giving somebody an award posthumously. We couldn't believe that Marine, whoever he was, wasn't killed saving those people."

"What was the First Lady's reaction?"

I had to smile at that. "I think you could say she was rather upset, as I was. That was her first reaction. Her second reaction, after we learned that Charlie would recover, was that she demanded to see him, like yesterday." I looked over at the Commandant and smiled at him. "I don't think I've ever seen a Marine general as nervous as when we told Marilyn the other day. I think he would have preferred charging into cannon fire, and I would have been right behind him!" General Jones laughed at that and nodded. "We compromised. I sent the First Lady on a tour of the Tarawa Amphibious Group. She and a few of your fellow reporters should be there later today. Now, while I am sure she is going to go see Charlie first, she is also planning on meeting with the sailors and Marines of the entire amphibious group, and to thank them and congratulate them all on a job well done."

There was another hooraw over that! How could I send my wife, when none of the other mothers could go? (We didn't have time to arrange it. We would be scheduling time to make sure everybody wounded would be able to call home, if they hadn't already done so.) Why didn't she take anybody else with her? (We didn't have time to arrange it. We already answered this. They kept asking anyway.)

Why should the American public pay for this personal use of taxpayer funds? The last question was the easiest to deal with. Jim Miklaszewski of NBC News asked it, so I put him right on the hot seat. "Mik, that's a fair question. The answer is that the American public won't be paying for it. I expect to be getting a bill from the Navy, and I'll have to pay that."

"You'll be paying it? It will cost millions to send Mrs. Buckman and a team of reporters to the middle of the ocean!", he exclaimed.

"Probably so. So now I have an assignment for you! At the end of this press conference you will be escorted somewhere here in the Pentagon, and somebody will figure out what this is going to cost. You are then going to report that number, and bring a camera crew over to the White House, where you can film me writing a check. That ought to be good for a few minutes on prime time, right?" I left him standing there open-mouthed and flummoxed. In fact, the Navy was going to have to scramble to figure this out, but it would get him out of my remaining hair.

The 'Monrovian Rescue' occupied a lot of news time, right through the weekend. By the next day Greg Kelly began reporting from the Lincoln and the Tarawa about the First Lady's tour, as well as a variety of stock shots of F-18s flying combat patrols over Monrovia. The patrols began flying as soon as the Lincoln got close enough to launch them with adequate tanker support, and proved highly useful in settling down the locals. By Thursday all the networks had managed to get broadcast teams to Monrovia, and Bismarck Myrick proved an interesting sight, showing up in khakis, a short sleeve shirt, and combat boots, wearing a Viet Nam era flak jacket open in the front (rendering it useless, but it made for good video) and a pistol at his side in a web belt. At one sticky point during the negotiations, he ordered a flight of F-18s to do a low flyover with the afterburners roaring, which busted a bunch of windows and calmed things down again. I always liked Teddy Roosevelt's comment about speaking softly and carrying a big stick, but it was a good idea to show the stick every once in awhile!

The Monrovia airport reopened the day before the gators were to leave. When it did, a lot of the refugees were shuttled to the airport, and rescue flights were sent down from Paris and Geneva to take people who wanted to leave to Europe. Not everybody did. Many people headed back to their embassies or wherever they started out. Either way, they left the ships, because they had several days of sailing to do.

Marilyn proved very popular with the Navy and the Marines! She has a sunny disposition at the worst of times, and is very good with individuals and small groups. As soon as the Navy saw her wearing that ridiculous Marine BDU, they scrounged up a set of enlisted coveralls and she rolled up the sleeves and legs on those. Marilyn's a good looking woman, and what she did to the front of those coveralls was quite interesting! As expected, as soon as she could get to the Tarawa, she went down to see Charlie, and they both called me from his hospital berth (or whatever they call it on a ship – squids have to do everything differently!) After that, however, she managed to tour each and every ship in the little fleet as they sailed back towards Norfolk. Gators, destroyers, cruisers – she even got loaded onto a helicopter and put in a sling, to be winched down onto the Alexandria, an Improved Los Angeles class attack sub, which then dived and took her down to show her submarine operations. If somebody didn't meet her, it was their own fault, because she seemed to be everywhere. She looked to be having a grand time cruising with the Navy!

The Sunday morning news shows focused on the Monrovian Rescue. Tom Ridge, Condi Rice, and Colin Powell made the rounds. This was the first 'foreign relations crisis of the Buckman Administration' (never mind that little thing we did destroying the Taliban and Al Qaeda) and we were on the hot seat. Despite the fact that approval for our response was in the high 80s, there were plenty of critics convinced that if they had been in charge we could have done it better, or without the Marines, or faster. A few other voices demanded to know why we had done anything; let the damn place go to hell, clear out our people only, and let the Europeans rescue their own people. Oh, and no matter what we did, we didn't show enough 'leadership' in the crisis. It's easy to criticize from the cheap seats.

One of the more interesting segments of it all was when Miklaszewski found himself escorted to the bowels of the Pentagon with a couple of Navy O-4s, who figured out the cost of flying Marilyn and the others out to the Lincoln, and then to the Tarawa, and feeding them for a week. He was presented a copy of the bill, and a separate copy was sent through different channels and I got it. Later, after Ari was questioned at a press briefing, he had to explain the rules about what the government paid for and what I had to pay for, and then reminded everybody that all of my paycheck went to the Red Cross, so I was a net loser on this.

One of the more pathetic episodes was when a commentator on CNN announced that Charlie wasn't actually the Marine who had been wounded, and that the Pentagon was faking the whole thing to make me look good and get a bigger budget. He had this on the basis of secret and classified reports that couldn't be actually shared, and eyewitness testimony from sailors, who couldn't give their names out of fear of reprisals. ABC and the Washington Post then commissioned a study using facial recognition software that analyzed video captures from the combat footage and compared it to pictures of Charlie, and proved it was him after all. CNN stopped pushing the theory, but refused to disavow their pundit.

It was the following Friday when the Tarawa was scheduled to dock in Norfolk. Marilyn had stayed with the fleet the entire way home, and I promised her that the girls and I would travel down to greet them. They were scheduled to dock at about 0900, and disembark not too long after that. Ari let the networks know and that was my schedule for the day.

Tom Ridge flew down with us. I was eagerly looking out the windows of Marine One as we flew over the gigantic naval base. It was the girls who saw the ship first, out their side of the helo, and I twisted to look at what they were pointing at. The Tarawa looked huge, but I knew that compared to the Lincoln and the other attack carriers she was a lot smaller. As we closed in and slowly dropped in for a landing, I realized that they had some sort of platform and podium set up down at one end of the deck, and that the deck was crowded with what looked like hundreds of sailors and Marines. I was dressed in relatively casual clothes, of slacks, sport shirt, and a sport coat, without a tie. The twins wanted to wear skirts, but I told them that they would be on a deck fifty feet up in the air, in a stiff breeze, and in front of a thousand guys. Maybe they wanted to reconsider? Molly said 'Yes!' and Holly said 'No!' and I ruled in favor of jeans and conservative tops.

We landed on the Tarawa in a small circle near the stern, and after the Sikorsky's engines started winding down, somebody with big earmuffs on and some kind of jumpsuit ran out and the door to Marine One opened. I unbuckled and stepped out and down, to be saluted by a petty officer of some sort. I returned the salute, and he yelled over the noise, "Welcome to the Tarawa, sir!"

"Thank you very much!", I yelled back. I waited a few seconds for the girls to un-ass the bird, and then we followed the petty officer away from the helo and towards the bow. There was a pathway cleared through the crowd, and I waved to the crowd, which was cheering wildly.

I had requested that most of the formal honors I could expect were to be dispensed with. If we were to be picky, I needed a band playing 'Hail to the Chief', a bunch of 'Ruffles and Flourishes', sideboys, a boatswain's mate piping me aboard, and God only knows what else. It was pretty ridiculous most of the time, especially for an informal visit to see some wounded Marines. During most of my troop and ship visits, I requested this stuff to be cut back. We worked our way forward, and as we got to where the platform was, I saw that there was a rope line set up to keep everybody back a few feet. On the platform were several Navy and Marine officers, and probably the shortest and bustiest Marine in the Corps. Marilyn was there in that silly outfit. Off to one side were several wheelchairs, and seats, and Charlie was there, but he was standing, a bit awkwardly, along with the others, several of whom were supporting each other.

For some reason that made me angry, that these wounded men were required to come to attention. I went over to them, and hugged Charlie and shook hands, but I said, "You should be sitting down!"

I must have said it sharper than I should, because Charlie answered, "Dad, if it was you, would you sit before the President?"

That took the wind out of me. My eyes popped open, and I responded, "No, of course not. Gentlemen, I meant no disrespect. Please, for my sake, have a seat. I'll talk to you all again in a few minutes." I nodded to my son, and then climbed to the platform, where the twins were already hugging their mother.

Marilyn I hugged tightly, lifting her off the platform, much to the cheers and laughter of the crowd. "I missed you!"

"Me too!"

I set her back down. I shook hands with everybody up there, and was quickly introduced, but thankfully I had been given a list of important names before we took off, and they all had name tags on. Then I was directed to the podium.

"Sailors and Marines of the Tarawa Expeditionary Strike Group, I wish to welcome you home, and to say to each and every one of you, Bravo Zulu!" Bravo Zulu was a two letter code group used by naval forces to mean 'Well Done!' "Your nation thanks you, and I thank you!"

The place erupted in wild cheering. I smiled and waited it out a bit, and when it quieted down some, I held out my hands for some calm. "All right, then, I have no intention to keep you long. I know a lot of you have family waiting for you, and I don't want to keep you away from them." With that, I praised them some more, commenting on the thousands of miles they had sailed, all that had been accomplished on their deployment, and thanked them for the lives they had saved in Liberia. I finished with, "You have made your nation proud, and you have made me proud! Thank you!"

There was more cheering. I was figuring to turn it over at that, but none of the officers were moving, and there were a lot of very suspicious grins. In fact, several of the Marines and sailors spoke up and seemed to be egging my wife on! "Go on, Mrs. B, you can do it!", was heard, and several of them were pointing to the podium. I stood there curious, especially when one very young looking Marine hopped up to the podium, knelt and did something with some wires, and then stood and handed something to my wife. He pointed towards the podium, and nodded, saying, "Go on, say it, just like we practiced!" He handed her something that looked like...

... a remote detonator! She took it from him gingerly, and then stepped up to me at the podium. She had to stand on tip-toes, but she sang out, "FIRE IN THE HOLE!", and then looked at the kid. He nodded and pointed, and she hit the button.

Suddenly, behind me, I heard a series of loud bangs! I whipped my head around and saw puffs of smoke on the side of the bridge, where a big steel panel was. I thought it was part of the ship, but it slowly tipped forward and it was hinged on the bottom. It fell open, banging into the ship loudly, and a string of fireworks went off inside. There, painted in bright white on the side of the bridge, was:
HEY DAD! THE MARINES ARE TOUGHER THAN PARATROOPERS!
I just stood there in disbelief, my jaw dropped to the deck, completely flabbergasted! Around me the entire ship was rocking in laughter, and Marilyn was leading them. Behind me I heard my son crowing, "YES!"

Vaguely floating through my mind was that this was still a whole lot better than George Bush and his Mission Accomplished banner, but really! I just shook my head in defeat. This was going to be all over the news, and Marilyn came up and hugged me, even as she laughed at me. "Charlie's told me he's been wanting to do that for four years!", she said.

"You and Charlie are about to be kicked out of the house!", I replied.

I stepped back up to the podium, and grinned as they quieted back down. I glanced back at the grinning captain, and asked, "Do they still have flogging in this man's Navy?" Everybody began laughing again, and the captain replied in the negative, though nobody heard him. "No? That's all right, Ensign Bowling. I am sure we will find something to reward your service."

There was a lot more laughter at that, especially from Captain Bowling, the commanding officer. I waited a moment and continued. "Well, there is only one way to settle this! We'll do this the old fashioned American way, this fall, at the Army-Navy game! Sound good?" More cheering, and then I finished, "But we are going to make this a little more sporting! The winners will be invited to a delicious five course meal at the White House, my treat. The losers, however, will be eating cold MREs at our newest base, Fort Frostbite, located somewhere north of the North Pole! How about that?" More cheering! "And may the best Army win!" More laughter and a few boos.

Well, I had nothing to say after that. What could I say? My wife and children had kicked me to the curb! I turned it over to the captain, and he said a few things, and then the crew and Marines were released and given leave. Sick berth attendants wheeled the wounded back below, and Marilyn, the girls, and the dignitaries followed them. I needed to thank each of them. Marilyn introduced me to all of them, including Private Bird, who commented that 'a sucking chest wound is nature's way of saying to take it easy.' Very true! He was the worst hit of the men, and would take a bit longer to recover. The others were all going to be given a final checkup and then released to their families. Charlie would fly back with us. While that was going on, Tom and I spoke to Captain Bowling about the deployment. He was going to be visiting the Pentagon, I was sure, and we needed to make sure he and the Marine commander were properly recognized, along with their men and ships.

After Charlie was released, we went back to Marine One and flew back to the White House. It looked to me like half the staff was waiting for us, and when Charlie exited the bird, he got a big round of applause. Also waiting for us was Stormy and the medical staff. Stormy rushed up and tried to lick Charlie to death, but didn't manage to knock him on his ass. Doctor Tubb and one of the nurses grabbed Charlie and dragged him off to the infirmary for a quick review. Charlie needed rest and recuperation, and a daily visit to the infirmary until he was completely healed up.

Chapter 155: Muddling Through

Charlie was supposed to stay with us for about three weeks before he headed back to Camp Lejeune. I took a look at him one day when he was swimming in the pool and had on just a pair of swim trunks, and there were a lot of scars and wounds all over. I still didn't understand how he hadn't died. He commented that it was the clean living, and I told him that must have been somebody else, since he didn't know the meaning of the words.

Charlie mostly seemed the same old Charlie I had always known, but Monrovia had left some other scars on him as well. Every few nights he would get moody, and Marilyn commented to me that our son was going through a lot of beer. A couple of weekends after he got to the White House, I was directed to talk to him, and not by my wife, but by the Chief Usher. A few of the staff people were worried about him. I found him just sitting in one of the gardens on a lawn chair, and sipping from a bottle of Jim Beam, and just staring off into nowhere. I grabbed a matching chair and set it down to his left, and took the bottle from him. Charlie gave me a dirty look, but I took a sip from it myself, and then capped it and handed it back to him.

"How's it going, Charlie? Still in any pain?"

He snorted and uncapped the bottle and took a swig. "This helps."

"No, not really. What's up, Charlie? I've seen you busted up before. You never took too many pills or drank then.", I said.

"I was still living at home. I was a kid then."

I shrugged. "Maybe so." I took the bottle back and drank a bit more, but this time kept holding it. It was the same old sour bourbon taste that wasn't my preference, but I was not about to send for a different bottle. "I worry seeing you like this."

"Afraid somebody will see me?"

"That's not fair, Charlie. I might be the President, but I am still your father. Don't try and tell me that I shouldn't worry about my children."

"Yeah." He looked at the bottle I was holding, but didn't demand it back. "I know."

"It's not just the pain, is it? That should be pretty much gone by now. What's going on?", I asked.

"I don't know. I mean, I don't know what to do anymore. I have to get out in a few months, but I didn't want to get out, but now I don't want to stay in, either. I don't know what I want to do." Now he reached over and took the bottle back, and had another sip. This time he closed the bottle and just stared off into space.

"Why don't you want to stay in?", I asked.

"I don't know. I liked it and everything, but when we got ashore..." He sat there for a few minutes, and then quietly, almost whisperingly, said, "I killed people."

I took the bottle from him and had another drink. "I know, Charlie, I know." He looked over at me bleakly. "I read some of the reports. I know it probably won't make it any easier, but you had to do it."

This time he didn't grab the bottle back, but just turned and stared into space some more. After another couple of minutes, he said, "We train and we train and we train, but it's just words. Then I had to actually service my target, and it was just a kid, and he was shooting at us, and I serviced my target. And then the target next to him, and then another target. And they weren't targets. They were people, guys my age."

"I know, Charlie. That's the way it always is. I never liked it either."

"I've heard some of the guys laughing it off, talking about blowing away guys, and I used to laugh, but they're not just targets!" He kept staring, and then added, "I don't want to service the target, and now they are giving me a medal for servicing the target."

"No, Charlie, they are giving you a medal for saving lives, not taking them. Nobody would care if it was just you killing a bunch of gomers. They care because you brought your team home. That's what you should always remember. You brought your guys home."

He looked at me. "That's what you did, isn't it. You brought your guys home, from Nicaragua, I mean." I nodded, and he said, "No, I mean, all of it. You actually killed those guys, didn't you?"

It was my turn to crack the bottle and take a hefty swig. The nice thing about drinking booze you don't particularly like? After you've had enough, you don't care that you don't like it all that much! It was good that I didn't have to drive anywhere tonight. Or be very presidential, either, come to think of it. "Yeah, Charlie, all of it."

"How do you live with it? How do you deal with it?" He wasn't accusing me, but wanted to know.

"Just like I told you. I got my men home. That was my job, my mission. I couldn't let anybody interfere with that. I still see those men, sometimes when I am alone, but I also see the faces of the other guys, the guys who I got onto the choppers and who flew home."

"Does Mom know?"

I nodded. "She knows. She doesn't know all the details, but she knows. She's known since you were a baby. Your mother is how I survive my own madness, Charlie."

He reached out and took the bottle from me. "I don't have anybody like that.", he said quietly.

"You have us. You have me and your mother. You have your sisters, though they probably won't understand. They love you, though." I thought for a second. "Charlie, tomorrow I want you to come with me and see Doctor Tubb. I know you've been seeing him, but you need to talk to him. I don't know if this is post traumatic stress or something else, but we can get some help. You are not alone. I have been where you have been. Others, too.", I told him.

"I'm not crazy!"

"I never thought you were. You want crazy, I'll give you my mother's address. Take this for what's it's worth, but on the scale of crazy, this barely breaks a sweat. I've seen crazy and you're not in the big leagues. In fact, you barely make it into Little League!" He smiled at that, the first time I had seen him smile in weeks.

I talked to Tubb that evening, separately from Charlie, and explained what was going on. He told me the symptoms weren't really PTSD, but more likely some form of guilt and depression, all mixed up with a realization of what had happened. Since Charlie was getting out of the Marines in a few months anyway, none of us cared if seeking treatment would be reflected in his records. He got Charlie transferred to the Military District of Washington, and enrolled him in an outpatient counseling program at Bethesda. That seemed to help, a lot.

At the end of August, we had a very nice ceremony on the South Lawn, and decorated the heroes from Green Delta. The Marine Corps band was present, and we brought in everybody who was to be decorated, along with their families and guests. Charlie was over the worst of his depression by then, and he was the final recipient. The Marines got another ribbon for their battle flag, and the Tarawa group did so, also. There were a number of Purple Hearts, a few Bronze Stars, a couple of Distinguished Flying Crosses, and a single Silver Star. I personally pinned that to his chest, as Marilyn cried and beamed at him. Equally impressive was the French Ambassador, who showed up and pinned the Croix de Guerre on him, including kissing him on both cheeks. Charlie simply had that stoic Marine look plastered on his face, standing there in his Dress Blues through the whole thing.

After the ceremony, I asked him about the rescue incident. "What was that bit about you were the only one who needed to die? Since when did you get so self-sacrificing?"

Charlie looked at me funny. "What are you talking about?"

"When you were in Monrovia, and your buddy got hit, you told people nobody else needed to die but you."

"Huh?!"

It was my turn to look exasperated. "Charlie, I'm not making this up. We saw it on the video. Right after you rescued those two kids and were heading back, that other Marine tried to run back with you and got shot. Then you pulled him back and told the others to stay where they were. You were the only one who needed to die. I heard about that from a bunch of people! It was in the video!"

He stared at me for almost a minute, and then rolled his eyes. "Oh, you have to be kidding me!"

"Huh?"

"I never meant it that way! Sweet Jesus! I'm not that crazy! I was talking about Birdie, Tyrell Bird! I figured he had bought the farm! I didn't want anybody else dying like him!"

I stared for a second and then began laughing. "Well, I won't tell if you won't. I wouldn't want to ruin your reputation."

Lance Corporal Buckman flipped President Buckman the bird. That was captured by the White House Photography Office, but was not released to the press, but only to Charlie and me. A month later he was out of the Corps, older and wiser, I guess.

While our son was getting his act back together again, he went home to Hereford with us for a few weekends. That seemed to help, too. He met with some old buddies from Hereford High, along with Bucky Tusk. Bucky was just out of Wharton, and was working for Tusker and Tessa, who were now planning on a third and fourth sales office. Charlie went down to Tusk Cycle and spent some time working on bikes with Bucky, and then rode around for a bit. Bucky came home with him, and we greeted him warmly. It had been several years since we had seen my namesake.

When they roared up the driveway, we came out and greeted them. For the twins, it had probably been several years since they had seen Bucky. "Hey girls, how you two doing?" He revved his engine for a second, and added, "Want to go for a ride?"

Holly laughed, and said, "No! How you doing, Bucky? Long time, no see!"

"Yeah, I know. How about you, Molly?"

Molly surprised me by saying, "Sure!" Charlie handed her his helmet and our youngest climbed up behind Bucky, and they peeled off down the driveway, with a War Wagon following. We went to the pool, and around ten minutes later, the thunder of a Harley announced their return. "Thanks, Bucky!", I heard, followed by some more thunder, and Bucky was gone.

"Too bad he left. I'm firing up the grill and doing some burgers.", I told Marilyn.

"He might be back. Tusker and Tessa are coming over. I got out enough for all of us.", she replied.

Bucky returned with his parents, and he spent a fair bit of time talking to Charlie. After dinner, they both came up to us and announced that Charlie was going to try racing again, with Bucky handling the details and acting as a crew, sort of. They were going to become an actual racing team, like in the big leagues. Tusker and I looked at each other. "Why does this sound familiar?", he asked me.

"Remember what I always used to tell you?"

"Yeah, and you still do, too." He looked at the boys and said, "We aren't saying yes and we aren't saying no, but we want to see a business plan. I didn't pay for you to go to Wharton and not be able to write a business plan. You want our blessing and support? We want to see a business plan!"

They looked over at me, and I just pointed back at Tusker. "What he said."

Charlie looked at Bucky, who simply said, "Okay."

"And you keep working while you figure it out!", ordered Tusker. "It does not mean you come out here and hang out at the pool all day!" Tessa and Marilyn giggled at this.

I smiled at my old buddy. "Wow, where have I heard those words before?"

"I would throw a beer bottle at you, but the Secret Service would probably shoot me if I did."

"An empty bottle, I would hope.", I replied.

"I'm sure not throwing a full one!"

"You're smarter than you look."

By the time Charlie was out of the Marines, the two of them had cobbled together a plan that looked like it might succeed. They were giving themselves two years to make it happen. The plan was to get back into racing in smaller regional races and get back into the swing of things, begin winning again, and find a major sponsor. From that point, they could leverage up into the big leagues, so to speak, racing in the AMA Pro Championship series. If Charlie wasn't in the top tier in two years, he probably wouldn't ever be. The only way Charlie could actually make a living at this was to get a top tier sponsor who would pay him, and then land some endorsements. The initial sponsor was going to be Tusk Cycle, like when Charlie was still a teen. Bucky, the Wharton MBA graduate with a lifetime of experience in the motorcycle business, was working even longer hours at Tusk Cycle, as he opened a third sales center in Laurel and ran advertising and marketing for the entire company. What did Tusk Cycle get out of the deal? Lots of cheap ads with local hero Charlie Buckman!

They worked up cost projections for the two years, as well as a budget, and figured out an investment structure. Tusker and I reviewed it, sent it back to the drawing board a couple of times, ran it through our lawyers, and then pulled out our checkbooks. He and I split the investment 50-50. (Technically it was done through my blind trust. I had nothing to say about it. By the way, I have this bridge in Brooklyn, if you're interested.)

It felt good, just like the old days. Now, all we needed to do was wait and see if we had backed a winning horse, or motorcycle in this case. Charlie just wasn't a 'college' kind of guy. If he wasn't trying to break his neck in the Marines, he was going to try to break it somewhere else. In the meantime, Charlie would live at the house in Hereford, so he didn't have to get his own place.

In October I had my first assassination attempt. I suppose that's a landmark of sorts. Most Presidents get them, and almost every President since Hoover. As far as I had heard, only Eisenhower and Johnson hadn't been targeted. Most of them are incredibly amateurish and put together by a whack job, but they often get lucky and hit somebody, though maybe not the President. The Secret Service gets really paranoid about politicians, and politicians aren't easy to protect. We can't be hidden away 24/7, and the basic instinct is to meet and greet and shake hands.

Actually, the absolute first attempt on me occurred shortly after I took office, in January of 2002, when some of the hate mail I got was analyzed and a pattern was found. It's illegal to even make threats against the President. A loony tune in Texas was investigated and taken into custody after a search warrant was obtained and his house was searched. The search found a lot of Semtex plastic explosive, some unregistered machine guns, and a bunch of maps of places in Washington. I guess I wasn't his only target, but he never actually got to where he could hurt somebody.

This time, there was some actual violence. Martin L. Smusky, of Elmira, New York, decided to stop taking his meds, and then bought a gun and took the bus down to Washington. From the bus station he got a cab and took that over to the White House. He had on a baseball cap that was lined with aluminum foil. Rather than wait in line for the regular tour, he decided that the voices in his head wanted me to die right away so he simply walked up to the wrought iron fence around the White House, pulled a .38 snub nose Smith and Wesson through, and fired all five shots at the White House. This was totally nuts, since I wasn't sure that a .38 snub nose could even hit the building from the distance he was firing from!

This all happened in the middle of the morning. He pulled the gun back and began fumbling out the empties, to begin reloading from a pocket full of loose ammunition, when he was captured by the Durands, a family of tourists from Bangor, Maine. Dad made a flying tackle on the guy, and then he and Mom sat on him until the cops and the Secret Service showed up a few seconds later. Meanwhile, their kids, three teenage boys who were completely bored with Washington, were taking photos and movies of everything. Washington suddenly was exciting!

It was over almost as soon as it happened. The Secret Service rushed into my morning meeting in readiness for the hordes breaking down the gates, but it never got quite that far. That's not to make light of them, because all they knew was that somebody was firing on the place. After a few minutes they realized the fun was over and went back to their regular routine. Both Mr. Smusky and the Durand family were brought inside the gates for questioning, but the Durands were quickly released. The Secret Service told me about them, and I had them brought up to the Oval Office, where I thanked them and took some photos with them. They were pleasantly awestruck.

Mr. Smusky was not so quickly released. He was bundled off to St. Elizabeth's, the Washington psycho hospital, pending whatever legal action was going to be taken. I was forecasting a lengthy stay, and not one of his own choosing. The whole thing was on the nightly news that evening, but then died out. The Durands were minor celebrities for a few days, especially after a German tourist was discovered to have made a video of the whole thing and then sold it to a German network. The Durands even made it onto the Today Show!

As we went through the fall and into the winter, Congress moved along at its usual glacial pace. Various legislation crossed my desk, generally of a conservative nature in its fiscal and military implications. I was avoiding the hot button Democratic social issues. I didn't ban stem cell research or screw with abortion, for instance, and I stayed away from 'Don't ask, don't tell.' I thought it was wrong, but I could count noses, and it would be years before Congress would go for me screwing with the policy. I also pushed for Justice and DEA to stop pushing on marijuana. We had better ways to fight this losing war than by chasing pot smokers. That did not earn me any favors from Ashcroft, who pretty much ignored me and didn't change their policy. I didn't feel strong enough to challenge him. Maybe when I replaced him, eventually.

I didn't get exactly what I wanted, since Congress has to fuck with everything. As the saying goes, it's not soup until the cook has a chance to pee in it. With Congress, you have 535 cooks, so there is an awful lot of pee in the soup.

I also got the budget passed, this one the first that could be labeled as a Buckman budget; again, I got mostly what I wanted. I had to throw a screaming tantrum once or twice, but it got through the system and passed in both houses. It was pretty much a standard Buckman budget. Don't screw with tax levels, no new programs, fund the programs we did have. One of the areas I made sure was funded was SEC and Justice Department prosecution of financial crooks. Congress might have been bought off by the securities and finance industries, but I hadn't been. I let it be known, loudly and publicly, that financial crooks would be prosecuted by the Buckman Administration.

Holly and Molly found that fame was not all that wonderful at times. Playboy had a picture of them walking across campus in their 'Girls of the ACC' article. Thankfully, they were fully clothed, and they told Marilyn they hadn't even known they were photographed, or been asked to do anything, not that they would have. Marilyn would have killed them! Meanwhile, Penthouse had a standing offer of $500,000 to each of them if they did a centerfold. The twins asked if I would match the offer not to do it; their mother moved to smack them both, but the girls laughed and scampered away.

That fall Ari Fleischer brought me a new crisis to deal with. Saturday Night Live had invited the twins to guest host in November! Worst of all, the girls knew about the invitation, so we couldn't just sweep it under the rug and forget to tell them. "I don't suppose that they are going to make our lives easier, and decide they don't want to do it?", I asked him.

"I got the overall impression that they wanted to know how soon they could go.", he replied.

"Great! By the time those two are through with New York, we'll end up with another Civil War!"

"Don't be so negative, Mister President. I'm sure we'll be able to limit the damage to your resignation or impeachment."

"You are not making any Brownie points with me, Ari!"

I tried a number of things when we called the girls that night at college. First I suggested that Marilyn travel with them, but that went over like a lead balloon. They were 19 years old and didn't need their mother to hold their hands everywhere! I played the 'you've got classes' card, but they trumped that by replying they would do it when school was out for Thanksgiving. Then we tried to guilt them into not going (Thanksgiving!), but they weren't buying that one, either. We hung up in defeat.

Marilyn looked at me and I just threw my hands up in surrender. "What's the worst that could happen?", she asked.

"I don't know. They could be arrested? I could lose the election? New York could secede from the Union? Either one of them is bad enough, but together they are dangerous!"

Marilyn laughed at me. "Just tell them their Secret Service detail has been authorized to shoot to kill, and that you've promised them all executive pardons. Face it, Carl, your little girls are grown up."

"Bah humbug! If they are grown up, what does that make us?!" That would make us old, was the answer.

"Wait until the press finds out they registered as Democrats, just like their mother.", she teased.

My eyes popped open at that! "No! They didn't! Traitors!" Marilyn laughed even harder. I wasn't sure if this was true; it would be just like her to lie about this in order to tease me. It would end up a running family joke!

Saturday, November 29, Marilyn and I watched Saturday Night Live to see what our daughters would get into. I should have gone to bed. Ari Fleischer was going to kill all of us on Monday morning, if he didn't die of laughter before then. The opening sketch involved a variant of the 'bring your dog to work day' they had pulled on me, only 'Stormy' got loose, rampaged through the Oval Office, peed on the Chinese ambassador, and pushed the big red button on my desk, launching the nuclear missiles – "LIVE FROM NEW YORK, IT'S SATURDAY NIGHT!" The twins did an opening monologue about living in the White House, and then later were in a sketch where they were going out on a double date, and were being shadowed by their Secret Service details, only their bodyguards were literally so close they were rubbing shoulders, and stayed between the girls and their dates the entire time, even when dancing.

We called them after the show, and spoke to them briefly. They were very excited, and heading out to a party with some of the cast members. Their mother and I just rolled our eyes, and prayed they didn't end up on the front page of the New York Post. It's not like I was going to win New York in any case, but I didn't need the grief.

A week after the girls went on SNL, I was back in the news. Saturday, December 6, was the Army Navy Game. Marilyn begged off, but Charlie and I took Marine One up to Philly for the game. I had a standing invite to the game, and had attended in 2002. This year it wasn't an option; I had named the bet and I had to go! Charlie and I were escorted to the center of the field and flipped the coin at the start of the game. To reflect my 'non-partisan' position as Commander in Chief, I spent the first half on the Navy side, and then moved to the Army side at halftime. Charlie stayed on the Navy side the entire time, the rat! Worst of all, Navy handed Army their ass, winning 34-6! Oh, the shame of it!

Two weeks later I made good on the bet. Friday night, the Buckman family hosted the Navy team, players, coaches, and all, at the White House. We served coq au vin, which had been added to the White House repertoire of official recipes. I had Charlie wear his miniature Silver Star ribbon on his suit coat. He no longer looked like a hard core Marine, since he had grown a Fu Manchu mustache and his hair was now long and curly. Those boys were Charlie's age, but they saw that Silver Star, and tended to stand a little straighter around him. The girls liked it too, since pretty young girls liked being around a bunch of big hunky guys in uniforms.

The next day I took Marine One up to West Point, where the staff had set up a mess tent in Michie Stadium. It wasn't 'Fort Frostbite', but it was cold enough. I ordered that all honors be dispensed with, so the football team had no idea I was coming. The boys took it with a lot of humor when I showed up in a BDU and jump boots, complete to the black-on-camo rank badge of a captain, an 82nd Airborne patch, and the appropriate qualification and award patches. They might have been dining on MREs, but the Commander in Chief was dining with them, and we had secretly set up a very nice dessert (cherries jubilee, complete with flaming Kirschwasser over ice cream) in Washington Hall. I sat with the cadets and they showed me how to eat an MRE. I told them, truthfully, that no matter how bad they were, they were still a whole lot better than the Lurps I had dined on in my time in the Army.

I had one interesting conversation with a few of the cadets over dessert. Cadet Lieutenant Miller asked me, "What is the insignia for a Commander in Chief, sir?", after looking at my captain's railroad tracks.

I smiled. "No idea, Mister Miller. Five stars makes you a General of the Army, but I think Bradley was the last one of those. I don't think we ever had more than that."

Another cadet piped up and said, "Technically there is a higher rank, a General of the Armies, which has been granted to Pershing, Washington, and MacArthur, which is theoretically six stars, though nobody ever issued the rank badges."

"Huh! Well, I suppose the Commander in Chief outranks them, so what does that make me? Seven stars? Eight? Sounds silly to me."

Miller asked me, "You were a captain, right?"

I nodded. "Yep. Let me tell you fellows something. I've had people tell me that my money has bought me a lot of things. I bought my seat in Congress, the VP slot, the presidency," I grinned and added, " ... a good looking wife ... you name it." I reached up and tapped the rank badge. "Say what you want. I earned this. One of the proudest days of my life was when I pinned on these bars. My money had nothing to do with them." I then tapped my qualification badges. "Same with these. Bullets can't tell how much money you have. No matter how much money I will ever have, or how much crap I have to take from people, I can stand in front of a mirror and honestly say, 'I earned this.' That's something I will always be able to say." Then I grinned and added, "The good looking wife I also earned, but that's a whole different subject!" That got a lot of laughs, but I could tell the boys were thinking about what I said. Then I told them about the time a New York financier tried to take over the Buckman Group back in the early days, and when we politely rebuffed him, he made a threat to bankrupt us. I had dryly told him that I used to jump out of airplanes in the middle of the night and kill people, so it was going to take a whole lot more than a jackass in wingtips to make me nervous.

Over the winter school break, we made the official announcement I was running for reelection. We all flew out together, Marilyn and me, the twins, Charlie, and even Stormy, and flew into Oklahoma City. Frank Keating was out of office now, and I met with the Democratic Governor, Brad Henry. After that, however, he was sent packing, since there was no way he was going to want to travel with me to Springboro. I was doing my official announcement at the place that had put me on the national political map, so we took the motorcade to Springboro, and did the announcement in the school gym, which is where I was speaking when the tornado alarm went off that day.

That had been three years ago, and Springboro took me to their heart. It didn't hurt that Marilyn and the girls were looking pretty, or that Charlie was a certified hero, or that Stormy was the big idiotic mutt from Springboro. I gave a nicely rousing speech about the can-do spirit of 'Oklahoma Strong!' and how I was going to take that spirit with me as I toured the country and spoke to great Americans just like them. Big on emotion, soft on details. Politics 101. The Torquist family was there, front row center, and we greeted them and I introduced them to Charlie. Tom Torquist had been a Marine, too, so he pretty much got the local American Legion to swear out oaths of loyalty to me. Afterwards we drove over to their new house and looked around. Maggie the dog had another litter of puppies; this time I refused!

Afterwards I went to Shawnee and did another campaign stop at the hospital and spoke about the wonderful things they were doing, and then we went to Oklahoma City, did a fundraiser and speech, and stayed the night. Once we were back on the plane flying home to Washington, Charlie immediately begged off the campaign trail. "How do you put up with it?", he asked.

"It helps if you drink a lot.", I told him, at which point Marilyn punched my arm. Then I added some fuel to the fire, by saying, "It helps even more if you can fly around with a cute White House intern." My daughters started to squawk at that, and Charlie just laughed.

"Your father thinks he's funny.", said my wife.

"Hey, it worked for Bill Clinton."

"Keep it up! Your arms will be black and blue by the time we land!"

"I'm not worried. You all hit like girls, anyway." At that, all three started punching me, so I escaped down the aisle and went back to the press section on the plane. Most of the questions were about the coming election, and who was going to be running against me.

There were at least a dozen candidates on the Democratic side. The front runner seemed to be John Kerry, who had run against me as Vice President with Al Gore, but had not been a factor in the race. The race last time had been George against Al, and me against Bill Clinton. Everybody had ignored John. Also in the running was Joe Lieberman, one of the senators from Connecticut, Senator John Edwards of North Carolina, former Governor of Vermont Howard Dean, and even Dick Gephardt, the former Congressman and a perennial favorite in the Midwest. At least another half dozen names were tossed out, but nobody thought any of them had a snowball's chance in hell.

It was an interesting field, and my entrance into history had probably changed the calculus. Kerry was a certified hero, and one of the few Dems with military experience. The historical perception was that the Democrats were weak on defense, so Kerry countered that. He was also better looking than me, and had blue blood credentials. Joe Lieberman also had foreign policy experience and was very conservative, but looked and talked like Droopy the Hound Dog. John Edwards, on the other hand, was devastatingly handsome, a smooth talking southern boy with solid liberal credentials and big supporters in the unions. Even Howard Dean came off well, with a youthful appeal and a freshness about him. Which of them would self-destruct first?

I refused to allow myself to be baited into saying something I shouldn't. Instead, I parried a few questions about using my own personal fortune to bankroll my reelection. "It's more complicated than that. It's not just about the money. When people donate to a campaign, they aren't just donating their money, they are donating their time and their interest. It's not just the cash you get; you get to hear what they have to say, they can tell you what is important to them. I won't lie to you and say the money isn't important, because we all know it is, but even more important is to make that donor want to work for you. More important than their money is their time!"

"And you think you can do that."

I shrugged and smiled. "I think so. The Maryland Ninth thought so, and they're not so different from people everywhere else. They have local concerns, but they love this country just as much as the people everywhere else. No reason I can't deliver the message that we are all in this together, and that I'm the guy to lead them."

"Will your family be campaigning for you?", came up.

"Maybe. Marilyn will be helping me out, I know that already, and that's good. Even the people who don't like me, they love Marilyn!" That got a few chuckles. "The girls are in school, so they might not be able to help until the summer. We'll have to ask them. I'm not sure about Charlie, though. He missed out the last campaign, and doesn't seem too thrilled about the idea. Besides, he has his own life now."

"What is he doing? Is he out of the Marines?"

"Yes, he is a civilian again. He and a friend of his are putting together a motorcycle racing team. Charlie was a nationally ranked motocross racer when he was a teenager, and wants to give the pros a shot." There were a couple of questions related to that. "You'll have to ask Charlie about that sort of thing. His mother and I don't know which is worse, him getting shot up in the Marines, or him racing motorcycles!"

Afterwards, I went back up front, and sat down next to my son. "Don't be surprised if you get some reporters asking you questions about going back into motocross. Some of them were asking and I told them you were getting back into the pros."

"Works for me. Bucky was hoping to line up some sponsors. Maybe somebody will read about us." He waited a moment, and then asked, "Is the fact that I saw a counselor going to come out?"

I sighed and nodded. "Yes, eventually. It won't be from me, but sooner or later, some reporter is going to find the right person to pay off and it will come out. Trust me on this, but if you have any deep and dark secrets, they won't be secret much longer."

"Is that going to hurt you? I mean, in the election?"

I shrugged and smiled. "Don't sweat it. I'm a big boy. If the biggest secret to come out of this family is that my son doesn't like to kill people, I can handle that real easy. You'll get the worst of it."

"What do you mean?"

"Wait until a picture of you shows up on the cover of The National Enquirer, wrapped up in a straight jacket, with the headline, 'The Buckman Family Curse Strikes The Next Generation!'"

"Jesus Christ!", he exclaimed.

"Welcome to my life, Charlie!", I laughed. "You think being called crazy is bad? They call your mother and sisters sluts and bimbos!" He looked shocked at that, so he must not have heard about some of the stuff that had happened. "Just do me a favor, and try not to get into too much trouble on the tour circuit. Don't get drunk in public and keep your pecker wrapped if you pick up a girl. Can you at least do that?!"

He laughed at me and said, "Yes."

You don't end up in the White House, at any position, unless you are a hard core political junkie. Watching the Democratic Follies, otherwise known as the primaries, was vastly amusing for us, and left me perpetually thankful I didn't have to go through with it! We stayed out of it, biding our time and building a war chest. With the sole exception of Joe Lieberman, every Democrat running was considerably more liberal than I was. One of the big strengths I had was that I didn't really need to pander to the Republican base, since I didn't have a primary challenge and all the Democrats were too liberal for the base. We didn't have a Tea Party movement yet, and if I did my job right, we wouldn't.

This was just guesswork on my part. I believed the Tea Party was ultimately a judgment on the economy. Lots of people got totally screwed over when the economy entered the Great Recession. So far that hadn't happened, and in fact the economy looked healthy. The 2001-2002 recession had been painful, but it was behind us, and jobs and wages were both rising. The nation also had a lot of structural problems, like jobs going overseas and the overall loss of manufacturing, but right now, the good economy was papering over these issues. During the Great Recession, which was far deeper and longer than anything since the Depression, those angry and screwed over people took their outrage out on their elected politicians, and sent a new batch to Washington. We weren't there yet.

Would we get to that point? That I wasn't at all sure of. This job was a lot like riding a tiger. You hang on for dear life and hope not to get eaten. Actually getting the tiger to go in a direction you want him to go is simply icing on the cake!

Currently things were good, but the housing markets and financial markets were both bubbles growing bigger and bigger. We needed to pop the balloons. My plan, which was not popular in all corners, was to increase financial regulation. I can remember being in the housing business with Lefleur Homes on my first trip. We would see these loans where you didn't need any money down, and you didn't even have to pay the principal, only the interest, and then had a balloon payment to pay off the principal when you flipped the property. I remember talking to a couple of bankers at the time and asking them who in their right mind thought these were good loans! These were disasters waiting to happen, which is precisely what happened.

I could see it happening again. The problem was that a lot of people liked things just the way they were. The finance companies loved it, and home buyers loved it, and Wall Street loved it, and home builders loved it. When the wheels came off in a few years, nobody would love it, and they would point their fingers at everybody else.

My solution, which I had been pushing for awhile now, was a two-parter. First, no new rules and regulations. All my life I had heard people complain, when something went wrong, "There should be a law!" Well, the odds were pretty good that there already was a law, but nobody was enforcing it. No new laws, we had plenty of them on the books already. Part Two was even simpler! We were actually going to fund the regulatory agencies! Many times Congress would pass a law to correct some sort of outrage, and mandate some new agency or program to fix something, but stop there. They wouldn't actually fund the program or office, so there might not be any employees in the agency.

Pay for some inspectors at the FDA, and some analysts and investigators at the SEC. Slip some money to the Surgeon General and pay for some of the public health programs already mandated by law. Almost every one of these programs and regulations had a positive benefit in terms of cash, in many cases saving $3 or $4 or $5 for every $1 spent. On the plus side, the U.S. government is so big, there is almost always something breaking down and letting something happen. Crank up the appropriate outrage and force Congress to get the agencies some funding. Never let a good crisis go to waste!

I almost never got everything I wanted, but I usually got some, and then simply told people to not stop pushing and go for more the next time. It's a never ending battle. I had used up a lot of my political capital getting the DREAM Act passed, and almost all of the rest of it in killing off a bunch of Pentagon weapons programs. I had gotten these bills through Congress, suitably watered down of course, but through the system, though with a fair bit of screaming. I had also lost some popularity by my refusal to lower taxes any further, and by continuing to run a modest surplus. I was going to face a backlash sooner or later over taxes, and probably sooner. On the other hand, Monrovia had built up my political capital and popularity again, by showing 'leadership in a crisis', and I was cynical enough to accept my son's wounds as part of that.

Through the winter and early spring the Democrats scrapped like a pack of feuding cats. I would have enjoyed it immensely, except for the fact that I got sick! It started out with just a routine evening in the White House Residence in mid-February. Marilyn and I had gone to bed, and for once I managed to join her at the same time. Usually she would fall asleep in her chair with Stormy, and I would chuckle when she roused herself and headed into our bedroom. I would usually watch some late television, but for whatever reason, that night she stayed up late and I went to bed around the same time she did. I wasn't feeling quite right, and had a crick in my upper back.

Marilyn snuggled up next to me, and ordered Stormy out from between us. She began running a hand across my chest, and I brought my arm up to let her rest her head on my shoulder. Somehow, doing that didn't make me feel all that comfortable, and I moved my shoulders around and tried to get comfortable. "What's the matter?", she asked.

"I don't know. My back is bothering me, a bit, anyway." I flexed my muscles and shrugged my shoulders, to see if that helped. It didn't.

"Not feeling well?"

"I'll be fine. Maybe I just need a good night's sleep."

"Okay." Marilyn kissed me quickly and then rolled over, her rump pushing against me.

I mused for a moment about missing out a chance to sample my wife's pleasures. After all these years, I still enjoyed making love to her, and never really felt any urge to stray. Still, we had been together long enough that we knew that if either one of us was feeling poorly, it wasn't a time to push things. As it was, while Marilyn zonked off to sleep in a minute or two, I just couldn't get comfortable. I twisted and turned, rolled from side to side, and kept moving. The pain in my back kept growing. It was in my upper torso, between my shoulder blades, and I was feeling a bit nauseous and sweaty. Something wasn't right.

I rolled over and sat upright, groaning as I did so. That didn't help much. I sat there on the edge of the bed, slumped over, as the pain scale kept moving up. Marilyn woke up, probably because I was moving around some, and she flipped on the bedside lamp, waking Stormy as she did.

"Carl, what's wrong?"

"I don't feel too good.", I told her.

"Do you want to see a doctor?", she asked.

Suddenly it all came back to me. Yes, I needed to see a doctor. My past history from my first life came roaring back. "I think so. I think I'm having a heart attack.", I told her.

Marilyn shrieked a little and scrambled out of the bed, grabbing her robe and running out of the bedroom. When this happened the first time, we had to call the ambulance and wait for them to show. Now, I had a doctor in residence, and an ambulance down below able to haul me away in a heartbeat. I had all sorts of amazing quality health care, probably able to give me a heart transplant at a moment's notice.

I knew it wasn't a heart attack.

I had gall stones. I was in the middle of a gall bladder attack. It is very painful and unpleasant, but not fatal. I was in my mid-40s when this happened to me the first time, too. The gall bladder is a small organ on the right side of the abdomen that is involved with digestion, and secretes bile into the intestinal tract. Every once in a while something goes wrong and the gall bladder accumulates some crystals that form into little stones, similar to kidney stones in the kidneys. When the stones work through the bile duct, it can be very difficult and painful. Nine times out of ten, that pain is located on the right side of your abdomen, somewhere near the gall bladder. You have pain there, the doctor figures it out quick, they yank your gall bladder, and you are back up and running. Okay, it's a little more complicated than that, but you get the idea.

I am that one-in-ten patient. I don't get pain near my gall bladder. I get pain up between my shoulder blades. I spent six months and three doctors going through gall stone attacks, visiting two separate hospitals, and God alone knows how many tests figuring it out. Every fucking doctor would examine me, tell me it sounded like gall stones, but it was in the wrong place, and order more tests. Finally I went to a surgeon who told me to stop screwing around. I could live without a gall bladder, so he would yank it, and if the pain stopped, we would know I was cured. It sounded crazy, but it worked.

Now, I had to go through the whole miserable experience all over again. Whoopee.

My health on this go had been much, much better than on my first trip through. Over the years I had skipped over some diseases I had on my first trip (for example, back then I caught pneumonia at 14 but didn't this time, no idea why) and had a few I didn't have then (terminal infections in that Honduran jail cell this time). I didn't smoke, I kept my weight down, and I stayed in shape. When I was smoking I had seasonal colds, four a year (a winter cold, a spring cold... ) along with frequent sinus infections, and my weight caused a bunch of other issues. Now, I only had colds every couple of years, and the biggest health issue I had was from eating all sorts of fried foods while campaigning at state fairs. I am a Southern boy and I love fried food! That stuff will kill you, but what a way to go! As far as anything else was concerned, my cholesterol was high, and I had been on Lipitor for ten years. Other than my right knee being shot, and gradually getting worse, I was a whole lot healthier than my first time around.

All of this flashed through my miserable mind as I sat slumped there in agony. The pain kept increasing, even as Marilyn ran back in, trailed by a pair of Secret Service agents. I knew these guys got all sorts of medical and first aid training, and they took a look and one guy started muttering into his sleeve. About thirty seconds later the night shift doctor and nurse came running in with a 'crash cart', everything needed to revive me.

Doctor Rhodes asked, "How are you doing, Mister President?"

"I've been better.", I told him. What was I going to say, that I had already diagnosed myself?

"What's wrong?"

"I have got a lot of pain, in my back, up between my shoulders, and I feel pretty hot, and have been sweating and nauseous. I mean, it sounded like those warning signs, you know, like we used to teach the kids in the Boy Scouts.", I answered lamely.

I knew what was going to happen next. It had happened to me before, and these guys don't fuck around with the President's health. "That's pretty smart thinking, Mister President. Let's take a look. Let's get your shirt off."

I awkwardly peeled off my undershirt, and then lay back on the bed. Marilyn was off to the side holding Stormy by the collar, and the agents were hovering over me. A few more came through into the bedroom also, along with a stretcher. Meanwhile, Doctor Rhodes and the nurse hooked me up to a portable EKG machine, and examined it for a few minutes. Meanwhile, the pain just kept increasing.

"Well, good news, your heart is just fine. Whatever is causing this, it isn't your heart.", he told me.

"Well, can you give me something for the pain then?"

"In a bit. I think we are going to want to run a few tests, though."

Oh, crap. There was no way to avoid it, and I didn't even want to try. "Like?"

"Maybe an MRI, an ultrasound, the stuff we can't do here. I think we're taking you over to George Washington University Hospital. Maybe we can do something about the pain there."He motioned to the others, and about thirty seconds later I was loaded onto a stretcher, wrapped in a sheet and blanket, and rumbling out of the room. One of the agents was holding onto Stormy while Marilyn scampered along, still in her robe.

I looked over at my wife, and told her, "I'll be fine. I'll be back in the morning. Go back to bed."

"Have you lost your mind!? I'm getting dressed and coming with you!"

"Ma'am, we need to go now. You should get dressed and have one of the agents bring you over.", interjected Rhodes.

"Okay." Marilyn bent over and kissed me, and then I was on the elevator, heading downstairs.

Well, that was a fun ride. We didn't have the sirens going in the middle of the night, but we did have the lights flashing on the whole fucking caravan, and about five minutes later I was being trundled into an exam room. The best part was that the White House is manned 24-7 by reporters with cameras pointed at every conceivable exit. This whole episode was going out live on the news channels right now. In the morning, the stock market was going to take a dive!

Marilyn showed up about ten minutes later, dressed and accompanied by a pair of Secret Service agents. "How are you feeling?", she asked.

"Like crap, if you must know. How bad are the reporters?", I asked.

"I didn't see anybody. Why?"

I snorted, and that hurt, too. "I just came roaring over from the White House with everything except sirens. You watch. They'll be pronouncing me dead by dawn. John McCain is warming up in the bullpen by now!"

"It won't be that bad, Mister President. Come on, let's get you to the MRI.", said, Doctor Rhodes.

Off we went, first to an MRI machine, and then to an ultrasound. Everybody looked at my heart first, and I simply told them to get pictures; my family was of the opinion I didn't have one. I got a few dutiful laughs over that one. Finally they decided I could have something for the pain, and a hypodermic went into the IV line that had been already run, and the pressure magically began to drop.

My mind was going over my past history. I knew that part of the improvement in my condition was simply that the stone was passing and the attack was ending. An attack would last anywhere from two-and-a-half to three hours, unpleasant all, and leave me beat and wiped out. I was starting to slide down the end slope now. One particularly bad evening I had two stones pass in a row, and I went through it for six hours. The best I could hope for then was a few old Tylenols with codeine from the back of somebody's medicine cabinet, and opiates mostly make me nauseous as hell.

If you ever have the chance to use the health care available to a President, take advantage of it. On the other hand, if you are the President, you don't get an option. I wasn't going home to go to bed. "Mister President, whatever happened seems to be passing. We still don't have an answer for what happened, so we would like to run a few tests in the morning. We are going to have you stay overnight."

I sighed and nodded. "All right. I suppose somebody ought to let the Vice President know, before he hears about it on the news in the morning."

Doctor Rhodes smiled and looked over at the agent in the corner. He spoke up and said, "The Vice President has already been informed, sir."

"Figures." I looked over at Marilyn. "You'd better get in touch with the kids, so they don't learn about it the same way."

Marilyn glanced over at the agent, who nodded. She said, "Don't worry. Let's get you up to your room."

I was too tired to argue. I slept until about 4:00 AM, at which point I was woken up so they could take my temperature and blood pressure, and then I crashed again for another four hours. When I woke up a second time, Marilyn was sitting there next to me. "How you doing?", she asked.

"Peachy! I'm in a hospital!"

"You can behave! You had me scared last night!"

I grimaced and shrugged. "Sorry. You knew it wasn't my heart. You've told me often enough I don't have one."

"It's not that funny when you're in a hospital!", she protested. "The girls called when their agents told them. So did Charlie."

"Did you tell them the inheritance is on hold for a little longer?", I asked.

"Well, Charlie did ask about your recliner, but I told him he had to wait."

"Little bastard! I'm not even cold yet!", I protested.

"They'll be over later on.", she replied with a smile. "They were properly nervous and worried. They're good kids." She nodded her head towards the door. "There's some people here to see you. I told them you needed to take it easy."

"Figures. Let 'em in. Do me a favor and call Suzie. She's probably heard about this too."

"She can fly down from the Mayo Clinic to tell you what is wrong."

I snorted and laughed. "That's what happens when your sister is a nurse."

Marilyn stood and gave me a quick kiss, and then opened the door to let in Josh Bolten and Ari Fleischer. No way was I going to be allowed to escape the job. I waved at them and said, "Hi, guys!"

"How bad is it, Mister President?", asked Josh.

"I'll be fine, guys. Tell the Vice President he can head back to the bullpen, I'm going to make it.", I answered, smiling.

"What happened?"

I gave them a brief rundown, but right now nobody knew. I was scheduled for some more tests today.

"I'll need to make a statement, sir. The networks have been running footage of you leaving the White House, and somebody managed to confirm that you are here.", said Ari.

I sighed and nodded. "Yeah. Listen, get together with one of the doctors and write something up. My heart is just fine. The President is resting comfortably and undergoing further testing. My family knows what is going on. Blah, blah, blah. Hell, tell them the Democrats are right, and that I really am heartless!"

Marilyn laughed at that. "Tell them the kids and I are arguing over the will already!"

I had another laugh at that. Still, Ari actually did have to issue a statement. There was an excellent chance the stock market would tank as soon as the markets opened. There had actually been cases where rumormongers had managed to plant credible stories and profited on the ensuing stock sales. I sent Ari off to speak to the doctors, and told Josh I was stuck here for a bit while they ran some more tests.

Those tests were scheduled for that morning. Again, when you are the President, you do not wait around in the hallway hoping to get fit into the schedule. Just like last night I had all sorts of senior doctors kibitzing over me, the same happened now. It wasn't just any old technician; I had the Chief of Internal Medicine and the White House Physician overseeing the top technician in the hospital! I got another MRI scan, another ultrasound, and now got something new, a radionuclide scan of my gall bladder.

Maybe the problem before was simply that I managed to get sick in a small town in upstate New York. Anything serious that happened got farmed out to the big city, Albany or Syracuse or Rochester. Insurance wasn't going to cover shipping my ass all over back then. In addition, there is a difference in the care you get with a small town clinic with a physician's assistant versus a major teaching hospital in the nation's capital. This bunch had a suspicion about my gall bladder before I even went to bed last night!

I couldn't eat until after all the testing, which took up the entire morning, and after that I got a semi-decent meal. Early afternoon, I met with the doctors, with Marilyn next to me. The diagnosis? My gall bladder was shot. The thing had all these tiny little gallstones in it, but a few were large enough to cause problems. The cure was pretty basic, which was to remove my gall bladder surgically, via laparoscopy.

Nothing was new about this. I had been through it once before. The really good news was that this bunch figured it out a whole lot quicker than on my first go. I wasn't going to have to go through months of guessing games while suffering. The surgery was scheduled for tomorrow morning. My lunch today was my last meal until after the surgery. Joy!

I sent Marilyn back to the White House, if simply to get her out of my remaining hair for the afternoon. She promised to bring the kids over later. I didn't get all that much rest, however. Both Josh and John McCain came to visit. "How are you feeling, Carl?", asked the Vice President.

I looked over at Josh and smiled. "He reminds me of the Vice President at my frat house in college, the guy whose campaign slogan was 'Only a heartbeat away!'" That got a laugh from both of them, and I told John, "I'm feeling a lot better now. Have you heard the latest?"

He shook his head. "Just what Ari told at the press briefing this morning. You were feeling better and spent the night comfortably, and that your heart is just fine."

"That's not precisely what he said.", added my Chief of Staff. "He told them that the reason they knew it wasn't your heart was that the doctors had absolute medical confirmation that the Democrats were right, and that you were indeed heartless."

I laughed at that. "He didn't!"

He shook his head. "No, he didn't. That would have made for a great press briefing, though, wouldn't it? No, he just gave a standard briefing. Your heart is fine, you are resting comfortably, further tests are scheduled."

"Blah, blah, blah.", I told him.

"Essentially. He did have a nice time informing Fox News that you were still alive."

"Huh?"

McCain snorted and answered, "Fox News reported in an exclusive early this morning that you had a heart attack and were in a coma on life support."

"Did they mourn or applaud?", I asked. John made a waffling motion with his hand. "Tremendous!", I said.

"So, what's the plan, Mister President?", asked Josh.

I snorted. "My gall bladder has to come out. They are scheduling the surgery for tomorrow morning. I gather it is pretty straightforward, but I am going to be here for another couple of days, and then be stuck in the White House for a week or so. You'll need to have Ari do some kind of a press briefing, probably with a doctor or two around. Big pictures, small words."

"How's Marilyn holding up?", asked John.

I smiled. "She was pretty nervous last night, but she calmed down when they told her it was my gall bladder. I sent her away, since she was driving me batty. She'll be back with the kids sometime tonight."

We chatted a bit more, but not of anything too important. After that, they left, and I watched some news and napped until dinner. Not that I got any dinner. Charlie, the wiseass, told me about the delicious lunch he had dined on, and how he was taking the girls out later for dinner. Then he asked, just in passing of course, not that he had any worries, what were my plans for the recliner back in Hereford. Marilyn and his sisters dutifully slugged him. After that, he took the girls out, and Marilyn stayed with me until visitor's hours were over, and then she told me she'd see me in the morning. I went to sleep hungry.

The next morning, the doctors waited until Marilyn showed up. She told me that the Vice President was going to be an Acting President while I was in surgery, and I simply replied that he shouldn't get too comfortable in my swivel chair. Twenty years ago, they would have had to cut me open and leave me with a big zipper. Now, with laparoscopic techniques, I would get a few holes and they'd stick robot arms in through them. I would be walking by that afternoon. It really is mind-boggling when you think about it. I signed a bunch of waivers, and then they began loading me up with some happy juice. They had me count backwards from 100; "100... 99..." Zzzzzzz! I was out like a light!

I stayed there until the next afternoon, and only managed to escape when I promised I would stay in the Residence and not sneak down to my office. Out in the real world, they would send you home the next morning, or sooner if they could get away with it. When Marilyn had her gall bladder removed a few years after I did, she was sent packing the same day, and she damn near collapsed just walking into our house. Hell of a system! When I left the hospital, there must have been a hundred reporters and photographers outside in the cold, waiting for me to die on camera. I simply walked out the door, shook a few hands, waved, and took off. We already had issued a statement where I was praising everybody and their brother at the hospital. Since the gall bladder attack had occurred on a Monday, and I wasn't released until Thursday, I basically took the rest of the week and weekend off. The White House Residence staff, and a lot of the West Wing staffers came out and greeted me when I got back, and I made sure to thank them all. Then it was up to the Residence, so I could get something decent to eat.

The kids were there to see me come home. The girls fluttered around offering help and pillows and iced tea and everything else. That lasted all of five minutes, and then they kissed me on the cheek and went back to College Park. I'm not sure Charlie lasted that long. He gave me the latest on his motocross plans, and then took off. I went into the bedroom, where I was going to get some bed rest on a real bed, without any tubes sticking out of me. Stormy jumped up on the bed with me and tried to push me around, which hurt some, but I pushed her off me as needed. Marilyn made me a late lunch of a ham and cheese sandwich, which really hit the spot. Then she asked, "How are you feeling. Can I get you anything else?"

I smiled and a wicked thought came through my brain. "Well, now that you mention it ... Remember Monday night, when this all started, what you were up to then?"

"What? I have no idea ... CARL! You are a dirty old man!"

I laughed as her face lit up. "No, I am a dirty middle aged man. Big difference."

"Forget it! You are on bed rest, remember? Besides, the doctors told me that you couldn't move around much, and that was definitely out!"

I wagged my index finger at her. "Now that is a lie, and I can prove it!"

"How?"

"Because if you had actually talked about that sort of thing with a doctor, your face would have turned so red they would have admitted you to the hospital, too!"

Marilyn turned beet red at that, and sputtered, "You think you're so smart!"

I just lounged back on the bed, and waggled my eyebrows at her. My wife simply rolled her eyes, but then smiled and sat down on the bed. "Stormy, get lost!" She pushed the dog off the bed, and Stormy wandered out of the room. "If you start bleeding and pop your stitches, I am going to let you tell Doctor Tubb!" She began to undo my pants.

"I'll just tell him how insatiable and needy and demanding you were."

"Now who's the liar!" Marilyn pulled my pants down, and then tugged my briefs off, and began to stroke me fully erect. "Are you sure about this?"

"I am now! How about a blowjob, and let's see how that goes."

She snorted in derision at me, but then smiled and bent over. I wrapped my hands in Marilyn's hair as she sucked me off, and she did a pretty nice job. I kept her in place, and when my hips started bucking upwards into her mouth, I decided I wanted to finish off this way. I just was whispering for her to keep going, and she began sucking harder, until I exploded.

Afterwards, I sighed happily. Marilyn smirked and asked, is that what you had in mind?"

"Honey, you know that a positive mental attitude is important to the recovery of the patient!"

"You are still full of shit!"Marilyn tossed me my pants and I pulled them on and took a nap. For the next few days, she had to be the one on top, but I do admit, my mental attitude stayed positive.

Chapter 156: Swift Boats

Monday morning I declared myself healed enough to go back to work. I was still sore, and still had some bandages over the sutures, but I was healing a whole lot faster than if I had gotten the big zipper. Monday morning I fronted the Daily Press Briefing. This proved an exercise in silliness.

For one thing, various assorted conspiracy theorists and websites were reporting that I was now dead, after suffering an aneurysm, and that the CIA had managed to clone me and were controlling me. At the same time, several of the cable channels played the movie Dave, where Kevin Kline played both a ruthless and corrupt President and his doppelganger, a mild-mannered owner of a temp agency who moonlighted doing impersonations for local ad agencies and TV stations and was hired by the Chief of Staff to fill in for the President when he suffered a stroke. Hilarity and drama ensue, and Dave Kovic, the impersonator, ends up making out with Sigourney Weaver, which isn't all that bad a deal when you think about it.

I simply went out to the podium, thanked everybody for their concern and prayers, and repeated Mark Twain's line about 'the reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.' I also told them that my name really was Carl Buckman, and not Dave Kovic, and that I hadn't been cloned, both of which got some more laughs. There were a few questions about my general health, but I had already had several doctors report my overall health was excellent, and that aside from my bum knee I was in excellent heath for a man of my age. It would be a couple of weeks before I would be able to begin my workouts again, and another couple of weeks after that before I would be able to get back to martial arts. As for my work schedule, I would take it a little easy for a couple of days, but it was expected I would be back in my regular schedule by the end of the week.

Meanwhile, while I spent my time recovering, most of the Democrats running for President were gone by the end of February, when it became painfully obvious that they had even less of a chance with the Democratic Party than I did! In theory, this is the time when the populace learns about the candidates and how they react to the stress and strain of a high pressure situation. In reality, you watch this and you just know there has to be a better way! In a very short time it was down to a few front runners. John Kerry was the favorite, with the most money and the most backers. John Edwards was a strong second, with good looks, a winning smile, and a wife who was bravely battling cancer but standing by his side. For the life of me, I couldn't remember whether he was going to have zipper problems in 2004 or 2008 and totally self-destruct in the process. Joe Lieberman was going nowhere, but was hanging in there for the moment. Howard Dean was another strong contender, with some interesting ideas and a huge youth turnout and Internet presence.

The Internet was actually one of our strong points. For years I had been pushing high tech and computerization on the Republican Party. We had massive databases of names of donors, and the ability to dun them for money relentlessly. What had changed was that the Internet was becoming more and more powerful. Some of the old fogies in the party couldn't understand it (hell, I couldn't half the time, and I was the guy supposed to understand this stuff!) and thought it was a passing fad or trend. I set up a parallel fundraising group in Austin, composed of a bunch of young and tech savvy Republicans, some still in college, and with some funding through ARI and Marty Adrianopolis. They had a simple job – figure out how to use the Internet and the still-in-the-dream-stage idea of social networking, to get people to commit time and money. Marty and I, a couple of old RPI grads, were going to show the other oldsters what the future looked like, and Austin was going to be our showcase.

We had already seen John Kerry, John Edwards, and Howard Dean split the vote in the Iowa Caucuses in January, with them finishing a close 1, 2, and 3. They went 1, 3, and 2 in New Hampshire later that month. February was a mish-mash, with everybody but those three dropping out over the month, and each of them winning a few and losing a few. The strongest was Kerry, and Edwards and Dean were in a much lower tie for second place.

After Super Tuesday, March 2, it was all over except for the convention. John Kerry had managed to win all but one of those primaries, and John Edwards managed to win Georgia. Howard Dean didn't win anything. Both Dean and Edwards withdrew the next day, though Edwards was making all sorts of noises about landing a spot on the ticket as the Veep.

There were still a number of primaries to finish the spring with, but with almost everybody else dropped out, John Kerry only needed to spend enough money to keep his name out front and win the last few states. He hoarded his cash, and what money he spent was actually spent on ads attacking me, not any other Democrats. He was beginning his general election campaign early, though not with a lot of spending. That would come later.

That doesn't always work, though. Presidential calculus has a strange mathematical basis, as I well knew. Kerry was a Northeastern liberal, with a patrician air about him. Edwards brought in a Southerner with strong blue collar and union support, and a scrappy personal history. Lieberman, however, was so conservative that half the time he voted with the Republicans, and was one of the strongest Dems on national security and the military. His downside? He was Jewish, and Orthodox Jewish, to boot. Was the nation ready for that? Dean was also young and scrappy, and quite liberal. Both Dean and Lieberman were from the Northeast, which did not do well for spreading the vote around. In the White House, and at campaign headquarters (located in an office building next door to the RNC on First Street in D.C.), it made for an amusing guessing game. I didn't think we would learn until the convention.

On June 5 President Reagan died, and politics went on hold for a few days while we buried him. You never really have a whole lot of ex-Presidents hanging around, since we are generally in our 50s and 60s when we get the job. I was a definite aberration in that regard. All of us who were alive attended, of course. Jerry Ford was there, the oldest of us, along with Jimmy Carter, Bush 41 and Bill Clinton. It was pretty much the same bunch that had been present for Bush 43's state funeral, and if anything, this was even bigger. I made an appropriate speech, as did most of the others. After it was over, however, we went back to the blood sport that was the 2004 election.

The Democratic Convention was about a month before ours, at the end of July, in Boston. That worked well for Kerry, since his power base was Massachusetts. From everything they were spouting and saying to each other, their focus was going to be that they could obviously do things better. We would be safer, have fewer wars, kill fewer bad guys, have more jobs, lower pollution, more savings, yadda yadda yadda! Not only was there going to be a chicken in every pot, it would be a bigger chicken, and there would be two of them!

Would they be able to pull it off? That was the big question. That was why they held elections, to see who would win. In practical terms, the election was mine to lose. The economy was relatively strong and unemployment was low. By every historical measure, that was a major benefit to the ruling party in a Presidential election. I still had ample opportunity to step on my crank. We had not had a major terrorist event since 9-11, but there were still lots of asshole ragheads who wanted Death To America! All it would take was for us to screw things up and take our eye off the ball. One bad event could undo years of rebuilding. A bad scandal would hurt, and in an operation as big as the Federal government, there was always something you could call a scandal. A sudden downturn in the economy would be very difficult to deal with, even if it started overseas and then slopped onto our shores.

Will Rogers once said that he wasn't a member of any organized political party, but that he was a Democrat. They managed to prove it once again at their convention in Boston. They went absolutely bonkers on security, even to the point of creating a designated 'Free Speech Area' for the inevitable protesters – who were not allowed anywhere else! The ACLU took them to court over that and lost. Meanwhile every whack job in Boston showed up to protest, including the local police union, which was protesting their contract! They even threatened to withhold protective services from the delegates! Inside the Fleet Center things went considerably smoother. The Democrats promised to keep America strong, fight terrorism, strengthen the military, make us independent of foreign oil, and otherwise slavishly copy the Republican playbook.

The real message to the audience was quite a bit different! "If you're not a white male, we love you!" The keynote speaker was a new fellow, the biracial junior senator from Chicago with divorced parents who had lived overseas and had an Arab name. Yes, Barack Hussein Obama was introduced to America that week, with an electrifying speech. Otherwise, it seemed like the only white male speakers were going to be John Kerry and his Vice Presidential selection, John Edwards. Everybody else was a woman, or a person of color, or gay/lesbian/something-even-weirder. They were trying out a strategy that might just well work! Let the Republicans keep the white male voters, and they would take everything else and beat our pants off.

I watched a fair bit of it in the evenings, with Brewster, Ed Gillespie, the Chairman of the RNC, and Marty Adrianopolis coming up to the Residence. The one thing I did was point this out to them, and in no uncertain terms! "You want to know why we needed the DREAM Act? There it is! If they get all the women and blacks and immigrants and gays, guess what?! They win!"

Marty had read my book, and Brewster didn't care in many ways (a true mercenary), but Ed wasn't buying it. He had seen the Republicans win a lot of elections when they appealed to the party base – white, male, Christian, rural, and Southern. "I am not buying it! You push for those groups, the party loses our core."

"Where are they going to go, Ed? A third party? That just means we lose for sure! This country has never had a third party that was viable since the Republican Party was invented! They can bitch all they want, but if we want this party to be viable in the future, we have to appeal to somebody other than a bunch of crackers, and I say that with the full knowledge that most people think I'm a cracker!"

"They will split the party and we will lose anyway."

"Then the party becomes irrelevant for another generation, until the crackers die off. We can be a regional party, and a spoiler party, but we won't be a national party with a chance to win the Presidency or the Senate. We need an outreach program to immigrants. Look at the list of speakers they have! We'll never get the blacks back, but there is no reason to lose immigrants, too!"

Brewster piped up at that point, "Ed, I don't like it either, but the numbers don't lie. It is very easy to run a primary to the base, but beyond that, it doesn't work. You want to win the base, you just ramp up Limbaugh and Hannity and the rest of the bunch and turn them loose, but with anybody with an IQ above room temperature it will go over like a lead balloon. If this is the way the nation is trending, and the numbers don't lie, we need to be out in front of it, or we will never catch up from behind."

"We will be slitting our throats."

"Ed, right now Texas is a solid Republican state, but if the Hispanics vote Democratic, in ten years Texas becomes a battleground state, and in twenty years it becomes solid Democratic. Ditto Arizona. Ditto ditto New Mexico. Wait until it's Colorado or Florida or Kansas. It's already happening, Ed." I replied. "On the other hand, we show some respect and support, we have a chance. Latinos aren't just a single voting bloc. Some are liberal, some are conservative. We have as much of a chance as the next guy."

We argued it back and forth, and I don't know whether we would win or lose this particular debate. Ultimately, I made the final decision. Brewster was ordered to ramp up Hispanic language advertising in all the various high Latino population states – even places like California, which we had no chance in hell of winning! The Kerry campaign would have to match us in a countermove, and they had more limited funds than we did. Furthermore, the campaign spots were to be tailored to what the focus groups were determining to be important to Latinos, not simply Spanish translations and voiceovers of our regular ads.

John and I simply had to keep our A game going. For all of 2004 we were planning a schedule of trips around the country. Every week or two one or the other of us would fly somewhere and visit a factory or infrastructure project, meet with workers, give a speech, and do a fundraiser with the local political bigwigs. We would always be stressing something that we had gotten passed. It might be a defense plant building ships or planes, it might be a lock on the Mississippi that was being rebuilt, or a highway in Minnesota that was getting repaved. We made sure to attend a few citizenship ceremonies, especially if it was a minority that we had a chance of swinging into the Republican column. We definitely focused on Latinos, regardless of what the base thought. We needed to keep them Republican, and not let the Democrats grab them. Marilyn called it cynical, and I called it realistic. It was one of those differences in our world views, I guess.

A lot of this is basic Campaign Politics 101, what I had done in northern Baltimore and Carroll Counties for years, only now across the entire nation. Thank God John had done this before, because he actually knew what he was doing. I could give a good speech, but after every trip he took to giving me a critique. It wasn't enjoyable, but it needed to be done, and it's the only way I would learn. By the summer I was able to critique him as well.

Politics got very ugly that summer. As the old saying goes, protect me from my friends, because I can take care of my enemies all on my own. On August 14 a television ad ran, from an outfit calling itself the 'Swift Boat Veterans For Truth', claiming that John Kerry was dishonest and lied about his service in the Navy, and hadn't been fit to command a 'Swift Boat', one of the small river patrol craft in Viet Nam, and was unfit to command as the President. It was run in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Florida, all states with a close race. The group claimed that they had served with Kerry, on his boat, in combat, and that he had never actually earned the medals he had received.

John McCain looked me up in my office the next day and asked, "Have you seen the ad?" He didn't have to specify which ad. It was the only one being talked about in Washington that day.

I grimaced. I remembered the controversy from my first go through. "Ari had it cued up for me this morning. It's not technically something the President has to do anything about, since it is campaign related, but he figured that there would be questions."

"What'd you tell him to say?"

"What's your take, John? You were Navy, even if you flew off the boats instead of sailing around on them."

He flopped down in a chair across from me. "I think it's disgusting. A bunch of armchair admirals, probably none of whom were anywhere near the war, telling us how it should have been fought. You?"

I nodded. "I'm just glad I was young enough to miss out on the whole thing. I can't say anything bad about you fellows who served, but that was one screwed up war, and you know it."

"So, what did you tell Ari?", he asked.

"I told him to say that while I had no knowledge of the ad or of the group that paid for it, I trusted the officers who commanded Lieutenant J.G. Kerry and recommended him for his medals. I figured that sounded both statesmanlike and neutral."

"That won't end it, Carl. This is going to keep going, and then Kerry is going to go after your service history and mine, tit for tat. I didn't spend seven years in Hanoi so that it could be run down in a campaign ad. You have your own skeletons to keep buried, too."

I snorted at that and agreed. "Do me a favor. Call Ed Gillespie and find out who this Swift Boat bunch is, and what their plans are."

He stood and said, "And you figure out what you are going to do about it if they keep going." I nodded agreement.

By that night I got the word from Brewster that the Swift Boat Vets were a 527 Group, so named for a section of the Internal Revenue Code that allowed political organizations to qualify for tax exempt status while raising money, as long as they didn't advocate for somebody and spent the money on issue education. As long as they didn't say 'Vote for Buckman' they could say any damn thing they wanted about Kerry and claim it was legal and protected tax exempt free speech.

John was right about this, in that if I couldn't shut this down, it was going to bite us all on the ass. John's service before he got shot down was not the stuff of legend. He had been a rebellious son and grandson of admirals and had graduated from the Naval Academy ranked 894 out of 899. As for me, I had already enjoyed the press pawing over my Nicaraguan adventure, and I had no interest in reliving it. I asked Brew and Ed to shut this thing down as soon as possible.

I was informed the next afternoon that the Swift Boat Vets did not plan to stop. They considered what they were up to a good idea and planned several more advertisements, along with books and interviews. Ed got the plans from some of the group's leaders, and when he suggested this might backfire by bringing back my problems, they didn't care. They figured the damage to Kerry would be worse than any collateral damage I might see, so I should tough it out. Brewster talked to several of the members. Most of them actually had no personal knowledge of Senator Kerry's actions in the war, but thought his actions afterwards, testifying about the war before Congress and such, were bad.

A second ad was scheduled for Friday, August 20, although for legal reasons the group couldn't directly reveal the ad's contents. Brewster managed a different tactic. If the 527 group wouldn't talk to us, maybe the production company that created the ad would. Brewster tracked them down and discovered the ad would include some rather questionable 'true statements' from supposed members of Kerry's crew. Fact checking was decidedly not part of the production company's mandate. Great!

John McCain was as disgusted with this as I was, and an informal poll I had among some of the other Cabinet level vets pretty much agreed with me. As far as the various campaigns were concerned, everybody had predictable reactions. The Kerry campaign was complaining about how the Buckman campaign was playing fast and loose with the truth, and how this was not something that should be expected of a President or decorated veteran. Meanwhile, the Buckman campaign was saying that they had nothing to do with the Swift Boat Vets, and they couldn't control what dedicated veterans were saying.

I decided I had to nip this in the bud before it got any bigger. I picked up the phone and asked to be connected to John Kerry. The White House switchboard didn't seem fazed by the request, but there was considerable surprise at the receiving end of the call. I didn't get to the Senator, but it was reported back that he was in a meeting and asked if he could return the call. I requested a private call that evening. He called me shortly after 8:00 that evening.

"Thank you for calling me, Senator Kerry. I appreciate it."

"It's my pleasure, Mister President. How can I help you?"

"First, let me say that I am personally quite distressed by the ad about your naval service. I want to assure you that I find these ads as distressing as I am sure you do, and that I have nothing to do with them. I apologize for any pain they may be causing you or your family."

Kerry answered, "Thank you, Mister President. I appreciate that, but I think that the best apology would be to arrange for the ads to stop. You may not have personally ordered them, but it is you now who seems to be benefiting from them."

I sighed. "I am afraid that may be true, unfortunately I am in no position to order the ads to be pulled. As you are certainly aware, I have no contact with groups like this, and can only request they end them by way of a liaison. I have made the request, but it seems likely the ads will continue."

"Mister President, I appreciate your personal apology, but that isn't going to be much help otherwise."

"I agree, sir. My understanding is that you will be speaking in Philadelphia tomorrow."

That seemed to surprise him. "Yes, at a regional meeting of the Veterans of Foreign Wars."

"John, with your permission I wish to join you tomorrow. I will issue a statement disavowing these ads and repudiating them. I would appreciate you standing by my side. Afterwards I will leave and you can continue with your meeting. I think this is the only way we can put this behind us.", I told him.

I could pretty much imagine the look on his face at hearing this, and I could also see the wheels turning in his head. In speaking to a veterans' group he was attempting to shore up his military credentials and foreign policy experience with a group that historically voted Republican. Did he allow me to speak, and possibly turn them against him, or say no and risk being rude to a sitting President in front of an unfriendly audience? After a silent minute he responded, "Of course, Mister President, if you feel that would be helpful."

"I think I need to do this, Senator. I do ask that you keep this quiet. I will meet you prior to your speech, and show you the statement I plan to give, but I don't want or need the grief I would get between now and then. I know it's a lot to ask, but I think I would trust your personal assurance over that of some of our political assistants."

John Kerry's response was slow to come, but he eventually agreed. He was speaking at the Spectrum in South Philadelphia. With any luck, he would get some coverage of a sound bite or two. I suspected that my butting in like this was going to get him all the coverage he could ask for!

Doing this quietly was difficult. Philly was close enough that I could take Marine One up. I told Brewster, Ari, and Josh – and no one else. Those three I swore to secrecy. None of them were amused. It would be vastly simpler to stay out of it, let the Swift Boat Vets do their thing, and take whatever lumps came our way. I was taking a big chance with this, and professional politicians don't like taking chances. Josh simply shook his head and sent the War Wagons and the rest of the zoo to overnight in Philadelphia. Brewster would drive up with them; Ari, Josh, Marilyn, and I would fly up in the morning.

Marilyn was quiet while I told the others what I was doing. Afterwards, she came to me and sat down sideways on my lap. "They're wrong. I understand why you are doing this, and I think you are right."

I put my arms around her waist. "You do, huh? So why am I doing this? Even I'm not sure I should be doing it."

"You're doing it because you're an honorable man and you are ashamed of what is happening. I am proud of you."

I snorted out a laugh at that. "Marilyn, I am many things, but an honorable man is somewhere way down the list."

"You are always too hard on yourself."

"And you are always too idealistic." I hugged her and added. "Maybe I'm just trying to live up to your expectations."

"Well, I'm still proud of you." She gave me a kiss that made me think tonight might be interesting.

We flew out in the morning, a little before the normal daily press briefing. Ari's deputy, Will Brucis gave the briefing, and was simply told that if anybody raised any questions about where we were flying to, to simply reply it was a campaign event. Under no circumstance was he to say more than 'a campaign event', and since he didn't know what I was up to, he couldn't speculate anyway. To be fair, nobody would really know what was happening until the evening news showed anyway, so even if the reporters found out, it was too late for them to yap about it.

This was a very low key and quiet trip, so when we landed at the Philadelphia airport there were no brass bands and politicians to greet me. We landed, the limo came out to the helicopter, and we got in. Fifteen minutes later we were sneaking in through a back entrance. It was easy to know where to go, since Senator Kerry had Secret Service protection just like I did. One of his agents greeted us and took us inside.

The look on some of the Senator's aides' faces was priceless. It was as if they were witnessing Darth Vader coming to talk to Luke Skywalker. I whispered to Marilyn that a few of them seemed to be holding up crosses so as to ward off evil. My wife giggled at that and told me to behave. Brewster was already present, and you could see the eyes on him as well, worried that he might brush against somebody and suck their thoughts and plans out by skin-to-skin osmosis. He came over to greet us, and a Kerry staffer came up and asked me to follow him to see the Senator.

John was using a back room as a conference room for his people, but he was the only one present. I had known Kerry ever since I had gotten into Congress, dating all the way back to my first bill, on Gulf War Syndrome. He had been one of the co-sponsors, just like almost every other veteran in the House and Senate.

"Good afternoon, Mister President.", he told me.

"Thank you for letting me come, Senator."

Kerry looked at his staffer and said, "I won't need you for a few minutes, Tim. I'd like to speak to President Buckman for a bit."

"Senator, you..." The staffer's eyes flicked back and forth between us, as he faltered in his speech. "You are scheduled to speak in half an hour."

"I'll be ready then." He politely showed the young man out the door and shut it behind him. Then he gestured towards a couple of chairs. "Please be seated."

"Thank you, John. I hope this doesn't put you behind your schedule. Perhaps I should have gotten here earlier."

"I don't think it's going to be a problem. You said you were planning to read a statement. Was that all?"

I nodded. "I have no intention of high-jacking your speech. I just want to go out there, with you by my side, say what I have to say, and leave. No questions or answers.", I told him.

"Could I see your statement?" I nodded and handed it over. He read it several times, and looked thoughtfully off into a distance that I couldn't see. Handing it back, he said, "Thank you. I would imagine that will cover everything."

"Good. As I told you, I never wanted something like this, and I can't seem to turn these jackasses off otherwise."

We chatted about our families until there was a knock on the door. John called out for them to enter, and Tim came in and said, "It's time, sir."

We both stood up, and John said, "We'll go out onstage together. I'll go to the podium and introduce you, and then step back. Sound right?"

"Sounds fine."

Out in the room with the others, Marilyn came up and shook the Senator's hand, and then kissed me. "I am very proud of you.", she said quietly.

"Yeah? Then how come you keep voting Democrat?", I teased back. John laughed at that. I turned my wife over to the others. She would watch from off stage. Instead, I fell in after Kerry as he was led towards the stage.

I saw a lot of shocked and surprised faces on some of the VFW big shots as we neared the stage. I had to give credit to Kerry, though. This was a tough audience for him, medals or not.

The chief big shot was at the podium, and he must have been cued in on the upcoming festivities. We waited in the wings while he said, "Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to introduce Senator John Kerry, the Democratic candidate for President, and President Carl Buckman, the Republican candidate."

I followed the Senator out onto the stage. In the audience, there was massive consternation, although there was a lot of applause as well. When John's name was first mentioned I had heard the beginning of some catcalls, but they shut down immediately as I was mentioned. John immediately went to the podium and said, "Thank you. It is always good to be here in Philadelphia, one of the true birthplaces of America. Before I say anything more, however, it is my privilege to introduce the President of the United States, President Carl Buckman."

Kerry stepped back and I moved up to the podium. There was a fair bit of applause, but also an awful lot of confusion. I pulled out a copy of my speech from a jacket pocket and set it on the podium. We didn't bother with a teleprompter, though one could have been made available, and instead simply had it printed double spaced with a big font. I waited a minute for everybody to settle down, and then began.

"I would like to thank Senator Kerry for graciously allowing me to speak to you today, and through you to the rest of the nation. This is a singularly appropriate venue because you, like the Senator, are veterans of a foreign war.

Several days ago a group calling themselves the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth began running a television ad claiming that Senator Kerry's honorable service in the Navy during the Viet Nam War was anything but honorable. This group claims that Senator Kerry did not earn his medals, and never served in the places and times he claimed. I say to you now that these claims are false and misleading. John Kerry did indeed serve bravely under fire, was wounded multiple times, and earned the Bronze and Silver Stars awarded him in combat.

As you here in this room know, combat is never neat and pretty. It is actually quite messy. Nothing is ever black and white, but is often an ugly shade of grey. I trust the officers who commanded the Senator and recommended him for his awards. I, too, have had to face scurrilous accusations about my time in the service. It is not something I would wish on another. By attacking Senator Kerry's honorable service, they actually attack mine, and by attacking Senator Kerry's courage, honor, and sacrifice, they attack mine as well.

I know that many of you have seen these ads, and I am sure that you have been confused by these claims. The group that created these ads believes that what they are doing will help me in my election bid. I have requested that they stop the ads, but they have not seen fit to do so. I apologize to Senator Kerry for whatever pain this has caused him and his family, and I repudiate the ads and the group that created them. I can understand why some people feel that an attack like this makes good political sense, but it is not right.

Let me make it clear, Senator Kerry and I have serious disagreements on where we feel the country should be heading, and how we plan to lead the country in the next four years. Regardless of these differences, I firmly believe that Senator Kerry is an honorable man who has America's interests at heart. Some of you will be voting for me, and some of you will be voting for the Senator. Make sure that your vote is influenced only by the truth, and not by malicious lies created by my supposed allies. Finally, I would like to thank you for your time, and to thank Senator Kerry for allowing me to speak here today."

With that I stepped back from the podium, as the room roared into a standing ovation. I shook the Senator's hand, and then waved to the audience and moved off the stage. Marilyn hugged me backstage and Ari, Josh, and I left the Spectrum.

"Well, you certainly stole the show, I'll give you that much.", commented Josh. "John Kerry could do a pole dance out there on that stage right now, and he would still only get second billing on the evening news."

"Of course, you probably lost the votes of the Swift Boaters out there.", added Ari.

I snorted out a laugh at that, and added in my best John Wayne accent (not a great one, but passable), "A man's got to do what a man's got to do!"

Marilyn simply groaned. "Enough out of you. Let's go back to Washington. I want to watch the news tonight."

The fallout was interesting. The Swift Boat Vets put out a statement saying that while they totally disagreed with my characterization of their group, they would acquiesce to my misguided judgment and stop running ads. The networks all dug up my history in Nicaragua again, and ran that mess for a few days, and some fact checking outfits began reviewing the Swift Boaters' claims. Meanwhile I was being lauded for my political courage and statesmanlike behavior. I commented to John McCain and a few others that if you actually did the right thing every once in a while, you could get some positive coverage, since nobody expected it anyway! Within a week, well before the convention, it was old news.

The Republican Convention was at the end of August in New York. I wasn't spending all that much time on it, but I was keeping an eye on things. Our overall plan was to run a very professional convention. Neither the RNC nor the reelection committee wanted any surprises! The neocons weren't even being invited, not even at the 4:00 AM sessions. I might not be as conservative as some of my brethren wanted, but the economy was generally in good shape and we weren't at war with anybody. The image we were presenting was that we were the professionals, the grown-ups, a couple of guys who had been around the block and taken a few knocks and knew what we were doing. Why mess with a good thing?

Our convention was held in the Big Apple, and was so slick and smooth as to be a snoozer. Mike Bloomberg had his share of crazies in the town, but they were under a severe security regime. Madison Square Garden was quiet. Most of the speeches pointed to the legislation we had passed, the solid economic performance of the nation, and the international respect we had maintained. 'Four more years!' was our mantra, and we repeated it with the devotion of a chanting mystic.

After the conventions were over, we examined the results. In most years, a party enjoys a surge in popularity after a convention of several points in the polls. This year was no different. The Democrats picked up 4%, and then settled back down, and we picked up 3% after ours. The next step would be the debates, to be held in late September and early October. John Kerry and I would meet Tuesday, September 28, in Houston, and John McCain would take on John Edwards a week later on October 5, in Spokane.

I managed to get into trouble shortly after the convention. Jimmy Carter, the ex-President, had become a Democratic gadfly over the years. He could be a real sanctimonious asshole at times, telling people how the Republican Party was a bunch of heartless bastards. He also thought he was a brilliant international negotiator. At the start of September, a bunch of Chechen terrorists took over 1,100 Russian adults and children hostage in Beslan, North Ossetia. By the time the Russians took control, hundreds of hostages were dead, along with the Chechens. Jimmy Carter managed to say, on camera, that the Russians had mishandled the entire situation, and that they should have negotiated and handled everything calmly and peacefully.

Needless to say, the Russians were not amused. Vladimir Putin called me and complained about the ex-President's remarks. Putin wasn't all that happy with America. Things might not be as warm as when he and I had our karate summit but we were still talking. The biggest problem was simply that Russia thought they were more important than they really were. They now were earning enough money through oil and gas exports to begin to rebuild their army and air force. It was still an incredibly inefficient system, but they had some money now and wanted more influence. Unfortunately for the Russians, they were still a second or third world economy at heart. Their only exports were oil, gas, and cheap but crappy weapons.

I sympathized with Vladimir without actually promising to do anything. I took his call while on a campaign swing in Tennessee, and afterwards, mentioned it to Josh Bolten. Unfortunately, I was overheard by a local reporter with a parabolic mike, as I said, "Somebody needs to tell Mister Peanut to shut his damn mouth and go build a house! It's the only damn thing he's ever been good at, anyway!" That made it to the news that evening, and I had to have Ari issue an apology the next morning. Mister Peanut was quoted the next day stating that the President of the United States should act and talk like the President of the United States, and not like the president of a drunken fraternity. At that point some of the networks dug up the fact that I had actually been the president of a drunken fraternity.

Like I said, a real sanctimonious prick.

The biggest worry we had in the campaign were the debates. At one point in American political life, political debates were considered high theater and a chance to actually argue your points of view with a contender in front of the populace. They would be written and published in newspapers, and discussed across the nation. Nowadays, they were nothing more than a chance to issue dueling sound bites and one-liners. Just like with everything else, we now had debate consultants to teach us what we were allowed to debate and say. Actual intelligence on the part of the debater was not considered important, and might be detrimental. If they were smart, they might try to actually answer the question rather than spout the canned response the campaign consultants wanted to deliver. Worse would be if they were stupid and tried to answer the question! As Abe Lincoln once said, "Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and to remove all doubt."

Did debates matter? The jury was out on that. It was considered universal political wisdom that they helped kill Richard Nixon in 1960. He was a jowly man, with a heavy five o'clock shadow of a beard, and was coming off a bout of the flu. On the black and white televisions of the period he looked pale and coarse compared to the young and healthy looking Kennedy. People who heard the debate on the radio, or read it in the papers, thought Nixon won, but on television Kennedy slaughtered him. Likewise, Ronald Reagan, a fine leader but decidedly no intellectual, learned his lines like the true professional actor he had been for many years, and blew away both Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale.

Huge amounts of time and energy are expended by the campaigns on how the debates are setup and organized. How many would there be? What format would they be? Did we have a traditional debate, with the candidates standing in front of podiums and answering questions from a moderator? Would they be seated at a table facing each other? Or did we go with a town hall format, where we would be on bar stools in a surround setting, free to stand up and move around? Who would be the moderator? Would he simply ask questions, or would he be allowed to push back against the canned answers and demand that the candidates answer the questions? The last thing anybody actually wanted was a moderator who went off script and told the candidate that he was a lying sack of shit, which is what most of us were!

There was a lot of nervousness about this year's debates. Nowhere is it stated in the Constitution that you have to have them. Typically you have two or three debates among the Presidential candidates, and one between the Vice Presidential candidates. The problem? I had never been in a debate – ever! It is rather unusual for Congressional candidates to debate, and we had blown off the Veep debate during the last election's debacle over my Nicaraguan vacation. John Kerry, on the other hand, had been in several debates as a Senatorial candidate. I was considered the underdog, not a good position for a sitting President to be in, and was widely expected to walk onto the stage, trip over my shoelaces, and then pee my pants. One theory, posed by one of the drier wits in the bunch, was that John McCain would be able to pick up the pieces when I screwed up the week before. Nothing like trying to live up to high expectations.

I thought debates were bullshit, and I had better things to do with my time (like run a government) then spend days and days practicing sound bites in mock debates. We limited the debates to one for the President and one for the Vice President. Big mistake! This was considered a sign of weakness on my part, fear that I couldn't cut it. Screw it! Maybe I wouldn't piss my pants on television and be considered the winner!

My attitude must have come through during the debate prep, because Brewster chewed my ass out royally, most powerful man in the free world or not! I was to knock off my shit, stick around and not duck out, and learn my lines, or I was going to be a one term President! It didn't help that John looked like a fucking perfectionist at this shit, either. I just reminded Brewster that I was legally allowed to write my own pardon in case I punched his lights out. He was not impressed.

That was the idea, anyway. The world has a way of screwing great plans up. On Tuesday September 14, Ari came into my office and asked me for a few minutes. I tossed down my pen and leaned back, nodding him towards an armchair in front of my desk. "Please! Have a seat. Rescue me from the budget, please!"

"Mister President, I just had a call about a story that was published in The National Enquirer."

"Elvis is still dead and there are no aliens in Roswell.", I told him.

Ari didn't look amused. "This is serious, Mister President. I just had a phone call from the Times about the cover story in this week's edition of the Enquirer."

"The Times? The New York Times?! I mean, not the Duluth Times or the Boise Times? Somebody at the Gray Lady reads the Enquirer? What's going on, Ari?", I asked, giving him a curious look.

"I sent somebody out to pick up a copy, but the Times is asking for a comment on a report that you have an illegitimate child.", he responded.

"So? We've had these kooks and cranks for years. What's new about that?" It was true, too. All public figures attract this sort of thing, and it always fell apart in the details.

"This is different, sir. They have a birth certificate and a diary of the mother from 1974."

"1974! I was a teenager then! What are you talking about, Ari?"

"Have you ever heard of a Michael Petrelli?"

"No."

"What about a Jeana Colosimo?"

Chapter 157: Fatherhood

Tuesday, September 14, 2004

I stared at Ari Fleischer, slack jawed and disbelieving. Suddenly he had a nervous look on his face. "Mister President?"

I took a deep breath and said, "You want to repeat that, Ari?"

"According to the story, Michael Petrelli is the son of Jeana Colosimo and you. There is reportedly a birth certificate, issued at Elmhurst Hospital in Queens, New York, on March 29, 1974. Did you know this Jeana Colosimo?" He was reading from a notepad in his hands.

I smiled to myself and shook my head. "Good Lord! Jeana Colosimo? I haven't heard that name in thirty years."

"Mister President? Did you know this woman?"

I shrugged my shoulders. "Maybe, Ari. I knew a Jeana Colosimo back in high school, in fact she was my girlfriend for a couple of years. That was in Towson, Maryland, though, not Queens. Is there any proof on this? Where'd this Petrelli name come from?"

"No idea, Mister President. Could it be another scam?" We had been hit by a hoax about a year ago, also, when some dim bulb claimed I was the father of her love child. It took about ten minutes to determine that she was a hooker in San Francisco, and got knocked up when I was at the G-8 Summit in France.

I shrugged. "No idea. Probably. It's obviously happened before. What do you think we should do about it?"

"First, tell me about the girl you dated. Were you serious about each other?", he asked.

I nodded. "This was all before I met Marilyn, of course. We met in college. This was high school. Anyway, yes, we were pretty serious. Let me think, we met near the start of my junior year, so I was..." I had to do the math in my head. "I probably had just turned 16. We dated until the summer after I graduated, not quite two years."

"And you were sexually active?"

I smiled again. "Very!"

"How come she has never come up before?", he asked.

"Good question." I thought for a second, and then snapped my fingers. "Of course! Jeana was a year behind me! When I was a junior she was a sophomore, and when I was a senior she was a junior! More than that, though, they built a new high school. Towson High was way overcrowded, so they built Loch Raven. At the start of my senior year, they split the school boundaries. Anybody who was a sophomore or junior in the new boundary went to Loch Raven. All the seniors stayed at Towson. She would have been a graduate of Loch Raven! That's why none of the reporters who ever investigated me ever found her! She wasn't a student at Towson High! They tracked down all my classmates, but she was a year behind me at another school. No wonder nobody ever stuck a microphone in her face!"

"I have somebody running out to get a copy of the Enquirer. Maybe they have a picture you can look at, see if it's her. Why'd you break up?"

"Well, like I said, I was a year ahead of her. I was heading off to college, and she still had her senior year to finish. Besides, remember when you asked me once about how I busted my nose?"

It took him a second to remember that conversation, and then his eyes popped open. "NO! Don't tell me!"

"Bingo! Her old man was running an armed guard around her the rest of the summer. I never heard from her again."

"I don't think I want to tell anybody that particular story!", he replied. "All right, let's surprise them with the truth. If anybody asks about the story, I'll simply say that we don't know anything about this Michael Petrelli. If there is anything to it, they are going to figure it out for us soon enough. If it's a scam, it's better if the press figures it out, and not us."

"Okay."

"What if it's not a scam?", he asked.

"What do you mean?"

Ari looked at me and said, "What if it's true? What if this is the Jeana Colosimo you used to date, and this guy really is your son? What do we do then?"

It was my turn to shrug. "No idea, Ari. It sounds pretty far-fetched to me. A thirty year old guy pops up in the middle of a Presidential campaign claiming to be my love child? He's probably just looking for a payoff."

He nodded. "Probably. I'll let you know."

Ari left and I sat there a few minutes more, reminiscing about my misspent youth. Jeana Colosimo! I hadn't thought about her in years! She had been the love of my life at one point, but even then I always knew she was just a placeholder until I got to RPI and was able to maneuver my way to meet Marilyn. I couldn't imagine Jeana getting knocked up, though. She had been on the Pill. I had never been that stupid!

Ari brought by a copy of the Enquirer after lunch. There I was on the cover, along with a picture of a very nondescript man in his late twenties or early thirties, and a picture of the mother. She looked vaguely familiar, but if it was Jeana, she had not aged well. The Jeana I had known was a centerfold knockout. The picture showed a middle aged woman who had put on a lot of weight. I just shrugged at Ari and told him I couldn't tell.

I told Marilyn about it that evening, over dinner. ("How was work, dear?" "Fine, honey. I was hit with another paternity suit!") The last time this happened, Marilyn was royally pissed and wanted the hooker put in jail. She wasn't happy, but she understood.

"This might be real?", she asked.

"I have no idea. I dated a girl named Jeana Colosimo, that is a fact. Is this woman that person? Is this man her son? I have no idea. This was all thirty years ago. I have no idea what happened to Jeana after I went to college."

"She's the girl you told me about, the one you dated the longest in high school, wasn't she?"

"Yeah, I suppose. You never met her because she was a year behind me, and ended up over at Loch Raven."

She thought for a second, and then quietly asked. "Did you love her?"

I stood up from the table and came around to her side. I picked her up and gave her a big hug. "That was long before I met you. Okay, yes, I loved her. I also told you once, that you weren't the first woman I loved, but you were the last. Nothing has changed since then, nothing."

Marilyn hugged me back fiercely at that. I let her sit down again, and went back to my plate. She giggled for a moment and then asked, "Did this Jeana get the Carl Buckman Experience?"

I snorted my wine out through my nose, which caused a burning sensation. Marilyn was laughing at my discomfort, and I just pointed at her. "You are pushing your luck!" That just made her laugh even harder.

Unsurprisingly, Ari was asked the next morning at the press briefing about the story in the Enquirer. I was watching it on the closed circuit television.

Q: "What about the story in The National Enquirer about President Buckman having an illegitimate son?"

A: "Well, I can tell you that when I mentioned the words National and Enquirer, the first thing the President said to me was that Elvis was still dead and that there were no aliens in Roswell. I think that pretty much sums up the President's thoughts on the subject."

Q: "So the President is stating that Michael Petrelli is not his son?"

A: "The President is stating he has never met or heard of Michael Petrelli. I think it is pretty suspicious, though, that this Petrelli character pops up in the middle of a hotly contested and close election campaign."

Q: "What if he is related to President Buckman?"

A: "I am not going to play the what-if game. What if aliens land on the South Lawn? Ask me when the aliens land."

I smiled to myself. I liked the line about the aliens. That made it to the evening news. Meanwhile I had much more important things to worry about, like debating John Kerry, and, oh yeah, running the country.

The story didn't go away, however. By the end of the week it was being reported in both the New York Times and the New York Post that the Jeana Colosimo in Queens really was the same Jeana Colosimo I had known at Towson High. The Colosimos had moved from New York City to Baltimore in 1971, which was when I met her, and they still had family in Queens. (Mr. and Mrs. Colosimo had died several years ago.) Then, in 1973, the Colosimo family sent Jeana back to New York City to live with several very strict aunts and attend a parochial girl's school in Queens. That didn't work out so well, since by the middle of the fall semester she was very obviously 'in the family way'. The nuns kicked her out as a bad influence and Jeana ended up getting a GED right around the time she gave birth to a son. She named him Michael after her father, to try and get back into his good graces but that failed, and she ended up living with her aunts for a few months. Desperate to get away from them (they were from the old country and barely spoke English, and spent most of the time lecturing her in Italian) she hooked up with the first guy she met, Mario Petrelli. The marriage didn't last even a full year, but by then she had been able to get out of the house and start getting a few college credits at the nearby community college. By that time she was calling the baby Michael Petrelli, but it wasn't clear if Mario had adopted the child. Jeana had spent the next thirty years in Queens, working as a secretary in various office jobs, and had died in a car accident in June.

Meanwhile, Michael Petrelli was being investigated as well. Michael had grown up in Queens, and his most noticeable accomplishment was a total lack of accomplishment. He had graduated from high school with middling grades at best, and never gone to college. He had gotten some training in being an auto mechanic over the years, and had spent the last ten years working as a mechanic, occasionally employed, and occasionally under the table. He had alternated between having his own apartment and living with Jeana in her apartment. He had first learned about me when he was going through his mother's things after her funeral, and discovered her diaries. His birth certificate didn't have his father's name on it.

The New York papers were able to track down a few cousins of Jeana, who reported that Jeana had been 'knocked up by some guy down in Baltimore' but they never knew the name. They also reported that Jeana had always had a diary and wrote everything in it. I began to get a sinking feeling in my stomach about all of this. One of the cousins reported that she herself had gotten pregnant as a teenager, and that Jeana knew it, and thought it was romantic, at least until she had to start taking care of a baby on her own. Is that what made Jeana go off birth control, a desire to emulate her cousin?

Mario Petrelli was tracked down. He turned out to be an insurance salesman in Hempstead. He had married Jeana, but it hadn't worked out and ended almost as soon as it began. No, he had never adopted Michael, and no, he had no idea he was using his name. He hadn't talked to Jeana in well over twenty years and didn't even know she had died.

The biggest question in my mind was why Jeana had never told me. Okay, she was in Queens, and I had left Baltimore for a number of years, but it wouldn't have been difficult to track me down, either at Rensselaer or in the Army. My lawyers informed me she had a claim against me for child support at least until Michael was 18, and maybe beyond, depending on circumstances. Maybe she thought I didn't have any money, but by the mid-80s I was becoming well enough known as a businessman that she must have learned about me. Still, I had never heard from her. Shame? Pride? Now I would never know.

By Sunday morning, there was more than enough smoke floating around to start hearing the word fire. Will Brucis, who was appearing on Meet the Press, was asked point blank about the mounting evidence that I had an illegitimate child. "What evidence? All we've heard so far is that President Buckman had a relationship with a woman when he was a teenager who may or may not have been this man's mother. He hasn't contacted the President and he hasn't asked for any DNA or paternity test. All we know for sure is that he sold a story to a tabloid that can't even be called a newspaper." The Washington Post gave the whole thing the nickname 'Babygate'. How cute!

Will's comments actually managed to move the ball, but not necessarily in a helpful direction. Michael Petrelli called a lawyer, one of those sharks who give ambulance chasers a bad name. I was informed that Angelo DeSantos had a series of billboards with his likeness on them near local police stations and jails, and also near any dangerous intersection he could find. Michael might be an idiot, but Angelo knew a gold mine when he fell into one. Michael had already sold his story to the Enquirer, cheap, for living expenses. Angelo was going to raise the bar considerably higher, and come after me. According to the about to be released Forbes 400, I was the 10th wealthiest American, with an estimated fortune of just under $14.1 billion. By the end of that week Angelo DeSantos had filed a law suit for half of my assets, just over $7 billion, along with thirty years of appropriate child support and fines and other payments, for another $1 billion. What's the Italian word for chutzpah?

It got better after that. Petrelli had promised the Enquirer that he would let them print Jeana's diaries. DeSantos read one of them and shitcanned that whole deal. He was going to have them published as a memoir, 'Secrets of a President's Lover', or some such crap. Jeana must have been very impressed, which isn't all that hard to do with a teenage girl. Her diaries were extremely explicit, much more than could be printed in a newspaper, although redacted snippets were tossed out as teasers. There was just enough let out to make me think this might be legit.

Brewster McRiley and Ed Gillespie were beside themselves over this. Our carefully crafted message that we were the bunch that knew what we were doing was coming down around our ears. Everybody in the senior campaign ranks was wondering if this was the most incredibly perfect October Surprise ever invented, but nobody was going to kill a middle aged woman in Queens in June to screw up my reelection. No, Michael Petrelli, the greedy bastard, had managed to do that all on his own. John Kerry kept his mouth shut and looked Presidential, with that somber and mournful look he possessed. Instead he let his designated asshole, John Edwards, make all the jokes he could get away with, at least until I called Kerry and reminded him of the favor I had done him with the Swift Boaters. He shut down Edwards after that.

On Tuesday the 28th, we had our debate in Houston, the same city where George Bush had announced to the country that I was his V.P. pick. It was a solidly Republican city, and I got a warm welcome. Still, Babygate hung over everything. There were no questions about it during the debate, and John Kerry never said a word about it. John Edwards, the philandering ass, had a team of joke writers that Mel Brooks would have been proud of, and made a few more jokes at my expense whenever he could get away with it. The best that we could say in response was that it wasn't the behavior to be expected of a Vice President, unless Edwards was running for Vice President of a drunken fraternity. John McCain promised to chew him up as needed.

My debate performance was uninspired, at least to my way of thinking. We spent half the time on domestic issues and half on foreign policy. Neither one of us truly beat the other. Regardless, since this was the first debate I had ever been in, and expectations for me were extremely low, the fact that I walked out on stage without my pants falling down around my knees benefited me. The pundits ruled the debate a draw, and congratulated me on my performance in the face of personal adversity. Good grief!

The idiocy mounted through October. Angelo DeSantos was going full bore New York crazy on me. He filed an injunction against the Secret Service to prevent their harassment of his client, which was insane, since the Secret Service had never even talked to his client. He filed a paternity suit against me, claims against Marilyn and the kids so that I couldn't hide my assets with them, liens on my home in Hereford and my jet, filed suit against Suzie and her family for some damn reason, and half a dozen different law suits against me for harassment and civil rights violations. I was going to be spending my fortune fighting the court cases.

I took a day off and met with my attorneys and the White House Counsel, John Weisenholtz. The Counsel's office wouldn't fight my battles for me, but they would protect the office of the Presidency. Their joint verdict, on everything, was that this was all smoke and mirrors. None of this would ever go to trial, and would all get thrown out in any pretrial stage. I could tie this up in court until we all died of old age. The claim for half of my assets was based on the nonsensical legal theory that Jeana Colosimo and Michael Petrelli formed a 'second family', and therefore deserved half of my assets, just like Marilyn, Charlie, Holly, and Molly who would split up the other half. There was no possible way that I owed thirty years of child support that had never been sought by his mother.

On the other hand, this was America. Anybody can sue anybody else for anything whatsoever. I could stand on my good name and spend the rest of my life fighting this asshole, or I could buy him off. I might have the law on my side, but Petrelli had a certain vestige of public sentiment, and he had some extremely racy diaries that I didn't need to see the light of day,

We waited until about a week before the election and then flew DeSantos down to witness a cheek swab being taken for a DNA test. This was placed in the hands of a pair of Secret Service agents, who then escorted DeSantos off the premises and flew him back to New York. DeSantos protested that he wasn't allowed to speak to the press in the Press Room, or from the South Lawn! Back in New York, they went with DeSantos and Petrelli to a lab, where a cheek swab was made of Petrelli, and they turned over my sample. Results were promised on Wednesday, November 4.

This all played fairly well in the press. My 'openness' in taking a paternity test was reassuring. Hogwash! I just wanted this over with. One thing I was sure of was that if this turned out to be an elaborate hoax, or the DNA test turned out to be negative, I was going to destroy DeSantos! He would be lucky to practice law in Cuba by the time I was done with him!

What would I do if it was positive? I just didn't know.

The election was on Tuesday, November 3rd, and for the first time I wasn't sweating out the results at the Best Western in Westminster. No, this time we set up in the Hyatt Regency in Washington, which was just a few blocks from the Capitol. Marilyn, the girls, and I flew home to Hereford to vote in the afternoon after the girls got out of class, picking up Charlie at the house, and then took the motorcade to our regular polling place at the high school. We voted, and then drove back to the house. Charlie joined us as we flew back to the White House. He had stayed out of the campaign as much as possible. His opinion? "How you put up with this is beyond me, Dad!" Good question!

Despite all that had been going on with this sideshow, the economy was humming along, and the world was relatively peaceful. By the end of the evening it was obvious I had won reelection, or election as President. I had a 5% margin in the popular vote, 63.5 million votes to Kerry's 57 million. I had an even bigger margin in the Electoral College, 334 to 203. The only states Kerry had taken were the three on the West Coast (Washington, Oregon, and California) along with Illinois (Chicago, strong Democratic bastion) and Minnesota in the Midwest, the Northeast (Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Connecticut) and a piece of the Mid-Atlantic States (New York, New Jersey, Delaware, and Maryland). I took the South, the Rockies, almost everything in the center of the country, and a big chunk of the Rust Belt. I lost Maryland, but favorite son or not, I hadn't expected to win it anyway.

By 10:00, as the Rockies began reporting their results, the projections had me winning. They refused to call it until the West Coast polls closed, but it was a mathematical lock by then. John Kerry called me about 11:15, just a few minutes after the networks called it for me. He congratulated me for winning and I congratulated him on a hard fought and clean campaign. We kissed over the phone and promised to work together and make sweet, sweet political love on a bed of roses. Blah blah blah! Kerry had run a relatively clean campaign, as had I; if I ever saw John Edwards I would drop kick him into a greasy dumpster and weld the lid down!

Some of the pundits were calling it a mandate, but that can be a very slippery slope for a politician. The most dangerous thing a politician can believe is his own press clippings.

Any relief I had was short-lived. The following morning I got the results of the DNA test. I was a father again, thirty years after the fact. I showed Marilyn the results and we both shook our heads in disgust and disbelief. How I was going to explain this one to her parents was beyond me!

The election results were almost drowned out by Angelo DeSantos crowing the results of the DNA test on national television. By now he was playing the sympathy card, how being an absentee father had left my son without the support and guidance needed to make him a success. This was somewhat muted when the New York Police Department picked up Michael Petrelli with a bunch of his buddies while tearing up a bar in celebration of his soon to be billions in wealth. Petrelli was a moron.

I met with my lawyers and decided to put this all behind us. I would make an offer to buy out any claims from this clown and get him to shut up. Needless to say, DeSantos publicized this as my 'surrender.' What a putz! I agreed to a meeting the Monday before Thanksgiving in Washington. DeSantos wanted it in New York, and televised. We laughed that off and said if he wanted to see a payday while he was still young enough to enjoy it, to be at the Hay-Adams at 10:00 AM on November 22, and to have his client with him, or there was no deal.

I met with my staff briefly that morning, but simply to make sure the world hadn't blown up overnight. At 9:45 I left the White House and went with the zoo over to the Hay-Adams, where we had a conference room booked. We entered the room at 9:55 to learn that DeSantos was still coming down with Petrelli; they wanted to be the last to arrive. I looked at the others and just rolled my eyes.

Angelo DeSantos came into the room first, looking oily and smarmy. He reminded me of a used car salesman. He looked like the kind of lawyer who chased ambulances, pleaded out mobster wannabes, and made bad deals with insurance companies. He was wearing a shiny suit, had some garish jewelry on his fingers, and his hair was oily and slicked back.

Michael Petrelli came in after DeSantos. He was in a suit, probably the only one he owned, and had a blank look on his face. If he were to pass you in the street, you would never even notice his passing. This was a guy who had lucked into the biggest payday he could ever dream about, and was otherwise completely clueless.

I had with me three lawyers, Tucker Potsdam, my long time lead attorney and tax lawyer, John Weisenholtz, the White House Counsel, and David Boies, who I had retained to handle this disaster if it ever went anywhere near a courtroom. I had used him before, and he was one of the finest legal minds, inside or outside of a courtroom, in America. I also had a couple of Secret Service agents standing post inside the room.

Tucker directed DeSantos and Petrelli to seats on the opposite side of the conference table. DeSantos tried to come around the table to shake my hand, but was blocked by Tucker and pointed back towards his seat. He looked at me and said, "We are just trying to be civil, Mister Buckman."

I looked him in the eye and said, "Sit down, Mister DeSantos." Once he was seated, I added, "We all know why we are here. You have ten minutes. What do you want?"

"There is no reason for hostility!"

"Time's a'wasting, Mister DeSantos. Nine minutes fifty seconds.", I answered.

He blustered for a moment, but a tap on my Rolex and a "Tick tock!" from me got him on track. He took longer than ten minutes, but it didn't matter. He was looking for a stupendous payoff, multiple billions of dollars worth. Petrelli sat next to him quietly, but he had an eager look on his stupid face, and was nodding along, like this was something that DeSantos had promised him, and now it was really going to happen. There really was a Santa Claus, and he was coming in November!

He kept rambling until I held up my hand and said, "Stop. Time's up." He wanted to keep going, but I simply said, "You've had your chance, Mr. DeSantos. Now it's my turn."

I glanced at the others, on my side for a second, and they had looks of incredulity on their faces. I shrugged and gave Boies a wry look and shook my head. Then, before DeSantos could start up again, I looked directly at Petrelli, and said, "I have no idea what this shyster has promised you, but let me tell you what is really going to happen."

DeSantos jumped up and began to protest being called a shyster. I looked at him and bellowed, "SIT DOWN AND BE QUIET OR THE NEXT THING YOU KNOW THESE TWO SECRET SERVICE AGENTS WILL BE DRAGGING YOU OUT OF HERE IN HANDCUFFS!"

"You can't..."

I motioned towards the agents and they moved up behind him. Suddenly DeSantos shut up. I held my hand up and they moved back. I began to speak again. "This is Mister David Boies. He is one of the finest trial lawyers in the country. He argues cases in front of the Supreme Court. Mister DeSantos here is not fit to shine his shoes on the courthouse steps! I am going to let Mr. Boies speak for a moment."

Boies popped right up at that. He opened his briefcase and pulled out a stack of legal papers. He handed one of them to Petrelli. "This is a Federal injunction barring you from bringing suit against the President as long as he is in office. As of November 3rd, that will be January 20, 2009." Privately, Boies and Weisenholtz had told me that this was bogus. Jones v. Clinton had ruled that the President could be sued by private parties for acts committed before he was the President. We didn't care; this was just the opening salvo anyway.

He handed over another document. "This is a Federal cease and desist order, barring both you and your lawyer from discussing this case in the press. You say word one and you can fight this from behind bars." Another document. "This is a Federal warrant to seize any and all records and documents of one Jeana Colosimo, and to sequester them with the Federal court until their authenticity is verified. Until that time they may not be sold or published. That means you turn over your mother's diaries to a Federal Marshal. We have one waiting downstairs, and he will accompany you to New York and take possession of any such diaries."

There were several other injunctions and court orders thrown down in front of Petrelli and DeSantos. Boies had told me that these were only stopgaps, and in some cases, pretty weak stopgaps. Most of them were from favors that my legal team had called in from various Federal judges, since almost none of this was actually under Federal jurisdiction. If Petrelli wanted to fight it, he would ultimately get his day in court, although it would probably not be with DeSantos running his legal team. He seemed as contemptuous of Petrelli's lawyer as I was. At that point, Boies turned things back over to me.

"Now, as to your claims against my assets. You have no claim! The legal theory that you and your mother form a second family and are thus entitled to half of my wealth is ridiculous on its face. No court has ever found this to be realistic. The same goes for any claim for back child support. Your mother had the claim against me, not you, and for whatever reasons she had, she never came after me for support. Maybe if she had I would have agreed to something. However, she didn't. You, on the other hand, have no legal standing to make such a claim."

I pointed over at Tucker. "That's my estate lawyer. My lead estate lawyer, I should say. He heads a team of estate and tax lawyers larger than DeSantos entire firm. He's the guy who wrote my will. So, since we've already established that you can't get any money out of me in a lawsuit, let's see what else you might get from me. Tucker?"

Tucker took off his glasses and tossed them on the table. "Under the provisions of Mister Buckman's current last will and testament, any and all children of Mister Buckman will receive on his death $10 million each. Mrs. Buckman will receive much more, but inasmuch as you have no relationship to her, you have no claim against her. The vast bulk of Mister Buckman's estate will be transferred to the Buckman Foundation, Mister Buckman's charity. Again, you have no claim against that. Mister Buckman is currently 48 years old and has a life expectancy of another 30 years. You will be 60 years old before you ever see anything other than legal bills. Further, even as we speak, Mister Buckman's will is being rewritten to specifically exclude any children not the issue of Mister Buckman and his wife Marilyn Buckman. In order to get anything, you will first have to invalidate Mister Buckman's new will, which you will not be able to even attempt until after his death, during probate, again, in 30 years."

That hit Petrelli like a bombshell! He had a look of horror on his face, and his head whipped around to stare at DeSantos. "You said..." The two of them began to argue with each other, snarling like a pair of loud Italian cats.

I gave a disgusted look to my team, and let them wrangle another moment or two. Finally I got sick and tired of them, and bellowed out, "ENOUGH ALREADY! SHUT UP!" The two agents stepped up behind the bickering assholes and they shut up. They settled down and turned to look at me. "So, you can't sue me for any money now, and you'll be an old man before I die and you can get any other money. Here's my offer. This is a onetime only offer, and there will be no counteroffer. Take it or leave it."

The two men looked at each other, and then turned back to me. I continued, "First, I will pay you $10 million. You will be explicitly cut out of my will. You are going to get the same payout as my children, only you won't have to wait until I die."

Petrelli looked horrified as he realized his free billions were gone. DeSantos however had a look on his face that said he still thought he was smarter than me. I continued, "That will be the payout for simply being a recipient of my DNA. Your mother also left you something. Obviously it was not her intelligence, wit, or charm, since you have none. She did, however, leave you her diaries. I am willing to buy those diaries from you, for another $10 million. You will turn over all the diaries. They will be destroyed without ever being published."

Petrelli began to look hopeful again. I still wasn't done. "Finally, in compensation for the loss of your mother, and the terrible pain of growing up without a father, there will be a lump sum payment of a further $5 million, to ease your suffering. That amounts to $25 million, to be paid out in four payments of $6.25 million a year. After that, I won't be the President, so whatever embarrassment value you think this has becomes nil. You will agree to never discuss this agreement or the terms of the agreement. If you refuse to turn over all the diaries or violate the terms of the agreement it becomes null and void, and you will be required to pay back any and all payments, plus penalties."

I nodded to David Boies, and he pulled out another document and slid it across the table. "These are the terms.", he said. "They are nonnegotiable."

I had argued about buying the bastard off – in every meaning of the word! Maybe I could go along with the $10 mill inheritance package, since it was the same amount my other kids would get. The other $15 was blackmail and nothing more. I'd rather spend twice that to bury him.

Instead I was faced with a solid wall of my lawyers and senior staff, all of whom wanted this thing buried. I met with David Boies privately and he put it bluntly. "Carl, grow up! This guy can keep this going for years. You can make it expensive for him, but you can't stop it. He can fight this forever, starting one law suit after another, and eventually he will win one. The stays will run out, the court orders will be overruled, the diaries will be unsealed. At some point a court somewhere will rule that the diaries can be published, and that the two of you will get to argue over who gets the proceeds. Do you want your wife and children reading about your sweaty fun and games in the back seat of your father's car?"

"We never did it in my father's car!"

"Oh, shut up! Nobody cares! Do you really want to spend the next four years of your Presidency as a late night joke? Who do you want to play you in the TV movie!?"

"Shit!", I muttered.

"Here's something else to think about. The more you fight this, the more valuable the diaries become. The longer you fight, the more people will want to see what you are fighting about. I had some of my people look into the value of the diaries. Conservative estimate, $30 million, moving on up to $50 million. Like I said, grow up. Make the damn deal!"

So I made the damn deal. I offered $25 mill to a guy who figured $25 kay was a decent year. The papers sat on the table for a moment, and then Petrelli reached out for them. DeSantos' arm snaked out and he grabbed them first. He began looking them over. "We need some time to review this."

Boies looked at me and I nodded. He responded, "Twenty-four hours. In the meantime, the Federal Marshal downstairs will accompany you back to New York, where you will turn over the diaries. They will remain in Federal custody until this is resolved."

DeSantos gave an almost imperceptible nod. It was time to end this. I stood up. "I have wasted far too much of my life messing with this idiocy. Mister Petrelli, I have no idea why your mother never informed us of your parentage. That was her decision, not yours and not mine. What most disappoints me is how anybody with half my genes could act the way you do. You may be my offspring, but you are certainly not my son. I hope to never hear from you again." I left the lawyers in the room, and took the agents with me. Enough of this!

Chapter 158: The Calm Before The Storm

I wasn't surprised when DeSantos agreed to the terms, and had Petrelli sign the papers the next day. The marshal returned to Washington with the signed papers and the diaries. The diaries were turned over to the Federal Court while the final paperwork was finished. Eventually the diaries were turned over to me. I went home to Hereford that weekend and left Marilyn in D.C. I never read them. I just grabbed a box of kitchen matches and went up to the helipad and threw the diaries into some old cardboard boxes, doused them with lighter fluid, and set them on fire. It was chilly, but I didn't really care. I just stood there and watched, occasionally kicking unburned pages back into the fire, until nothing was left. I didn't think I would ever understand why Jeana had never come forward, but I just didn't want to read her diaries to try and find out. That just seemed too private and personal. It was so long ago, and so bittersweet.

The press was loathe to let a good scandal alone, though. John Edwards had mostly shut up once it became obvious he was staying in the Senate, and neither Petrelli, DeSantos, nor I were talking. Nature abhors a vacuum, however, so reporters began reporting on the lack of anything to report. It came to a head the first week of December. Brian Williams had just taken over the NBC Nightly News from Tom Brokaw, and had managed to finagle a one-on-one interview with the President as a big and flashy intro. It was big and flashy, all right, but not perhaps in the way he imagined.

We were set up in the Map Room, like on some previous interviews, but it was just me and Williams, without Marilyn or any other members of the family. It was supposed to be a discussion of my plans for a second Buckman administration, both personnel wise and about future legislation.

Williams: "First off, Mister President, congratulations on your victory in the election. Does it feel good to know you won't have to ever run for office again?"

Me: (Chuckling.) "I think that's a little premature, Brian. I might not be running for office, but there are certainly going to be plenty of elections coming up where I might be called upon for some influence. If I do my job right, maybe I'll be able to help a few fellow Republicans."

Williams: "And if something goes wrong?"

Me: (Smiling.) "Then maybe my fellow Republicans won't want my help. We'll just have to see, won't we?"

Williams: "Do you consider the Petrelli scandal one of those things that can go wrong?"

Whoa! Where did that come from!? I was sure it showed on my face, because I stopped smiling or laughing and gave Williams a hard look.

Me: "That's really not something I intend to discuss, Brian."

Williams: "Mister President, you must admit that some voters were influenced by the scandal."

Me: "I wouldn't agree with that, and I think the final election results speak for themselves."

Williams: "You have refused to discuss the scandal until now. Why is that?"

Me: "I have no intention of discussing anything of the sort, Brian. I am here to discuss the changes coming in the next four years."

Williams: "Mister President, why haven't you discussed what happened, and explained it to the American people? Isn't it unrealistic to expect it to remain hidden after all these years?"

Me: "Let me put this to rest, then. I think it is painfully obvious that the American public has the ability to differentiate between my performance as the President of the United States and whatever occurred with a couple of teenagers thirty years ago. It was never anything more than a personal issue to the people involved. No laws were broken. There was no scandal and no cover-up. Since then the issue has been resolved and we have all put it behind us and moved on with our lives. There will be no more discussion of it than that."

Williams: "What about the diaries? Was there a payoff?"

Me: "Move it along, Mister Williams. The topic is getting old."

Ari Fleischer was leaving, effective January 1, with Will Brucis taking over his job. Once we were off camera, I told Ari that as a Christmas present NBC was losing their White House press privileges until further notice. He was alarmed and argued against it, but I didn't much care. Williams had knowingly violated our pre-interview agreement. "An NBC reporter lied to the President of the United States! Actions have consequences, Ari, and not just for me. Maybe it's time for a few reporters to learn that, too."

I had won reelection (or election, depending on how you looked at it), but things were changing. Several top people had told me that if I won, they would be leaving sometime in 2005. In a way I was somewhat dismayed, but working at that level is incredibly wearing. Forget about having a family or a life outside of the White House. You are on call 24 hours a day, each and every day, and might be here today and around the other side of the world tomorrow. Ari was only the first to announce he was leaving.

Colin Powell told me he would stay until the summer, but he would be gone after the July 4th holiday. He thought Condi Rice would be a good choice, and I thought so, too. She wasn't incredibly high profile, and despite being a big fan of George Bush, had been relatively smart and moderate. She agreed to move over, and said she would think about a new National Security Adviser.

Mike Gerson was planning on leaving as my chief speechwriter. Technically he had been George's speechwriter, while Matt Scully was mine. Matt was staying put, and Mike was leaving. He had proposed a replacement named Marc Thiessen, who used to be an aide and writer for Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina. That made me really wonder. Mike was much more conservative than I was, and he had only stayed with me out of loyalty to Bush. When he mentioned Helms, I immediately got nervous. Jesse Helms was about a billion years old and was so conservative that he thought Abe Lincoln had been more than a little premature in freeing the slaves, that AIDS was God's punishment on the faggots and queers, and that being a Democrat was akin to being an atheist. I told Mike I would meet with Thiessen, but that I was going to look at a few other candidates as well. Then again, a link to the conservative wing of the party might not be a bad idea. I was going to have to give that one some thought.

One of the toughest jobs in the White House is that of Chief of Staff. He travels everywhere with the President, works ludicrously long hours, and has no personal life. Josh Bolten had stepped up to the plate when Andy Card had died on 9-11. He told me he was leaving right after the inauguration. He also recommended that Frank Stouffer move up from assistant. Frank had been with me since the 2000 campaign, and was only 30 years old, incredibly young for such a senior position, but he had managed to impress Josh. I was happy with that choice. For a guy who started out as my body man, this was an incredible rise in just five years. By the time he left the White House, Frank was going to have his pick of Republican Party, K Street, or private sector jobs.

I made a major change in the Inauguration this time. I told people that I didn't care how many Inaugural Balls there were, Marilyn and I were attending just one! I told John that if he and Cindy wanted to make the rounds, they were free to do so, but eight Balls in one night, which is what happened the last time, was simply ludicrous. I would be happy to speak to each Ballroom via closed circuit television, but driving from one to another was insane. John, on the other hand, told me he was going to use this as another chance to shake hands and line up supporters for 2008. Fair enough. If we did the closed circuit thing, I would make sure I mentioned the help he had been and how he was making the rounds.

As always, we invited my family (what there was of it) and Marilyn's family (as many as wanted to come), along with some of my friends from back home. Tusker and Tessa came down, as did Bucky, who escorted both the girls. Charlie brought a blonde model he had met at a bike race. Jake Eisenstein, Jr. came with his wife. Marilyn and I attended a combination Maryland and National Ball, and Cheryl Dedrick was there with her husband, proudly representing the Maryland Ninth. She had won reelection twice now, and remained a loyal supporter. Maryland may have voted for Kerry, but the Maryland Ninth had voted Buckman by a landslide!

It turned out that Marilyn was the belle of the ball in more ways than one. She selected a nice scarlet red Versace gown with a slit up one leg to about mid thigh, and up top it featured a matching bolero jacket. The really interesting part was when she took the jacket off after we got to the Ball – under the jacket the top was a red sequined bustier, backless and strapless! Marilyn must have been tanning topless, and she looked good! I gave a wolf whistle that a few other people noticed, and Marilyn blushed and preened, twisting around to show me, and everyone else. Later on I discovered that she hadn't worn pantyhose, but stockings. She whispered to me during our first dance that she wanted my inauguration to be memorable. It was! She also made most of the tabloids and women's fashion magazines, and her dress became the season's must-have for evening gowns. Versace ended up making it in about a half dozen colors, as well as black, and the just-above-the-knee length black version became that year's LBD!

It was a lot more relaxing to be able to just attend the single ball, even if I did have to break off every few minutes to a sound room to make a televised appearance at one of the balls. At least this time nobody was going to take a snapshot of Marilyn snoring with her mouth open and drooling on my shoulder. We were actually able to dance, and I could have an extra drink or two. Unfortunately the guy carrying the football wouldn't let me nuke John Edwards's home town. He still pissed me off with his shit during the end of the campaign about Michael Petrelli. He was another putz I wouldn't mind nuking. (If he had managed to contact me after Jeana's death, and introduce himself in a civilized fashion, we might well have had a very different relationship. Selling the story to The National Enquirer and then suing me for billions was not a civilized introduction!)

Shortly after the Inauguration, I managed to tweak Marilyn on national television. One of the perks of being the President is being able to host musical groups at the White House. Sometimes this means wearing a tux to the Kennedy Center for a night of classical music (good) or opera (dreadful). Occasionally it means you get to dress casually while Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band rock the East Room – that was awesome! Whenever this goes on, of course, it's going out on PBS, and for the good stuff, one of the networks. I remember when I introduced Bruce Springsteen that I commented on the air, "It's a bit tricky for the President to get out at times, but one of the perks of the job is being able to call up Bruce Springsteen and ask him to come over to the house and play a set or two."

In mid-February we had a night of bluegrass and country music, with Alison Kraus followed by Brad Paisley. Marilyn and I were definitely looking forward to this; we never asked the opinions of our children, who were under orders to attend and smile. My job in all this is to act as the host, to introduce the performers, make a joke or two with them, and then sit down and listen. Pretty straightforward and simple. First up was Alison Kraus with her band Union Station, and that was pretty cool. I'm not madly crazy about bluegrass, but I won't turn it off if it comes on the radio, either.

The fun started when Ms. Kraus was finished and it was Brad's turn on the stage. His music was a more modern country style. I went up to the low stage, and did a quick intro, but then, before I sat down, I decided to have a little fun. "Brad, before I let you perform, I need you to do something for me. Could you help me for just a minute?"

Paisley looked a little amused and confused, but he was a game trouper. "Of course, sir. What can I do?"

I turned towards my wife and said, "Marilyn, can you come on up here with me?"

Marilyn looked mystified, but she was game. She joined us on the stage and said into the mike, "I have no idea what he's up to.", which got us some laughs.

I answered that with, "Brad, the First Lady and I have had an argument for years now, and you are qualified to settle it."

He glanced over at Marilyn, who had a curious look on her face, but he was in too far now. "I'll do what I can, sir."

"Okay.", I continued. "Correct me if I'm wrong, but you began singing and playing guitar back in high school, right? Back when you were a teenager, right?"

"Yes, sir."

I looked towards his backup band. "How about you guys? The guys I mean, not the ladies, were you in groups then, too?" I got several agreements and thumbs-up from the band, though I doubt much of it made it to the microphones. "Okay, so here's the question. You'll see why I have to ask you, and why I couldn't ask Alison earlier. Marilyn and I have been arguing for years about this. She says that performers like you join bands and musical groups because they love music and performing and I say that teenage guys join bands in order to meet girls."

Paisley started laughing loudly at this, and his band pretty much broke down. Even the backup singers, all women, were laughing fit to bust a gut. Meanwhile the audience was laughing, as was Marilyn. "You are a rat!", she told me.

Paisley was grinning as he spoke into the microphone. "Nothing like putting me on the spot, Mister President! Who do I make angry, the lady of the house, or the guy who can order the IRS to investigate me?" I just smiled at that. "I'm going to have to say – the music and the performing. Sorry, sir, my mother would never forgive me if I got a lady angry at me!"

"Hah!", added Marilyn, giving me a superior look.

I wasn't done, though. I looked back at the band. "Guys? The music or the girls?!"

"Girls!", roared out from the band.

Brad was laughing again, and Marilyn punched me in the ribs lightly. "Brad, I think you've been outvoted! I think I'll let you get on with the music now."

"Good idea, sir, and I'll let you get on with your divorce!"

Marilyn laughed and hugged me, then went over and kissed him on the cheek, and we sat back down. Even the kids seemed to enjoy the evening after that, and clips ran on most of the comedy and news shows the next day.

I was hopeful that this year I would be able to get some stuff accomplished in Washington. Certainly last year, an election year, was a lost cause. Nothing gets done in D.C. every fourth year. Now, I wanted to head off a housing bubble, even if that caused a recession. A recession is nothing unusual, and was often the result of a bubble collapsing. The trick is not to let the bubble get too big. The Great Recession was caused by artificially inflating the bubble to monstrous size, and then suddenly popping it. I wanted some sort of increased banking regulation and to chew on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, make people look at them more realistically. If we had a mild recession in 2006, which was five years after the last one, then by the time the elections rolled around in 2008, we would be on the rise again, always good for the incumbent party. It's a cold calculus, but a realistic one. It was still a lot less painful to work with than to keep blowing smoke up everyone's ass until the wheels came off, and we suffered the worst recession since the Great Depression!

Oh, I also had to keep balancing the budget in the face of some heavy Democratic and Republican opposition! The Republicans were really pushing for a tax cut. I had been putting them off for three years, and running budget surpluses and paying down the debt. The Dems wanted to keep taxes where they were and increase entitlements. Everybody wanted to keep the gravy train rolling on biscuit wheels, especially with the gung-ho housing market. I knew what would happen and I desperately wanted to keep things under control.

Worst of all for me, I now had a split Congress. The House was still solidly Republican, but the Democrats had managed to take back the Senate, with 50 Dems and Bernie Sanders as an Independent, versus 49 Republicans. The worst part? Harry Reid was the new Senate Majority Leader, and Harry didn't like me. We had never really jelled. He was a fair bit more liberal than me, and we disagreed on a number of items. Even when I had a liberal position, such as being pro-choice, he turned out to be pro-life! I could already feel an itch between my shoulder blades from where I knew the knife was going to go in!

One agency I really wanted to see get better was FEMA. I had been trying over the past few years to beef it up. It might have been a dumping ground at the top for political operatives in need of a job, but a lot of the people at the lower levels were quite dedicated. I had been pushing since 2001 for realistic and large scale exercises and disaster training. I remembered back during my first trip, FEMA had been sucked willy-nilly into Homeland Security, and it hadn't done well there. One thing that Homeland Security had done was imbue everything it touched with antiterrorism. They no longer practiced for routine disasters like tornadoes or floods or earthquakes. Everything became terrorism related disasters, like nuclear drills, chemical attacks, biological attacks, and such. Never mind that none of that ever happened, and that we were hit with natural disasters on a routine basis. FEMA didn't worry about those.

Well, this time around we didn't have a Department of Homeland Security. FEMA's main focus was still natural disasters, and I had hammered both Joe Allbaugh and Michael Brown, the heads of the agency. Allbaugh was leaving after the inauguration, and Brown was taking over, and I was stressing the need to handle disasters proactively. There was a really good reason for that. In seven months the largest natural disaster in U.S. history would be barreling straight for the Big Easy. Hurricane Katrina was coming, and it would not be pretty.

In April, however, my life turned upside down. It was a Friday night, and the twins were with us, having come over from College Park. Charlie was between races, and he was at the house in Hereford.

The girls were now juniors, and had selected majors. Molly had told us she wanted engineering, and had settled on mechanical engineering, which was my father's field. Holly had bounced around a bit on the science side, first going with physics, then over to chemistry (like I had once been in another lifetime), and then switching back to physics. Molly was planning on staying at College Park for a fifth year and getting a masters degree, but Holly would be moving on to get a doctorate somewhere else. We were both pretty proud of them. They weren't straight A students anymore, but still had GPAs that put them on the Dean's List and probably had them graduating with some sort of honors.

Regardless, the phone rang in the Residence and a Secret Service agent announced that we had a visitor, Buckman Tusk. "Send him on up!", I told him. Bucky and the Tusks were on the list of approved 'whenever' guests. To Marilyn, sitting next to me in her lounger, I said, "Bucky's here. I wonder what he's up to." She simply gave me a curious look.

There was a knock on the door a moment later, and I stood and opened it. I could see one of the agents standing post, and Bucky was at the door, so I let him in. "Well, look what the cat dragged in! How you doing, Bucky?" Bucky was wearing riding leathers and carrying a helmet, so he must have ridden his bike down.

"Good, Uncle Carl, real good. How are you and Aunt Marilyn?"

"I'm doing fine. Come on in. You can ask Marilyn herself." I pointed him towards the living room.

"Hi, Bucky come on in.", my wife called out. She waved at him from her chair.

Stormy climbed off the two-person lounger where she had been laying next to Marilyn, and padded over. She stood on her hind legs and Bucky braced as she put her paws on his shoulders and licked his face. Big damn dog! After a moment he pushed her down. "Down, you mutt! You really are a monster!", he laughed. Stormy gave a pleasant woof, and nudged his legs, and then went back and jumped into my chair.

"What's up, Bucky? Charlie's back in Hereford. If you rode down here to see him, you two got your signals crossed.", I told him.

"No, I'm here to see Molly.", he answered, a funny look on his face.

Holly, who had just wandered in, said, "Hi, Bucky! I'll go tell her you're here."

I shrugged. "I thought she was going out on a date tonight."

Bucky gave me a really odd look at that. "I know. That's why I'm here."

I just stood stock still for a bit. "You are?"

"We're going out, Uncle Carl. Didn't you know that?"

"Huh?!" I could just feel myself standing there and staring stupidly at him.

Marilyn added, "Carling, close your mouth before the flies go in."

"You knew about this?", I asked her.

"Carl, everyone knows about it.", she answered, rolling her eyes.

Molly came out of her room and she was wearing riding leathers and carrying a helmet of her own. She said, "Hi, Bucky!", and then stood on her tip-toes and kissed Bucky! On the lips! I stood there with my jaw flapping but no sounds coming out. After the kiss, my youngest daughter said, "Don't wait up for us, we'll probably be late."

Holly had been watching and grinning at me from the side. "Make sure you use protection!", she called out as they left.

That woke me up! "Holly!"

"Well, Dad, we wouldn't want any repeat of past family history.", she teased.

"HOLLY!"

She sat down in my lounger with Stormy. "Daddy's angry. You'll protect me, right, Stormy?" She got a loud WOOF from the mutt as she rubbed her belly.

I turned to my wife. "How long has this been going on?"

"What, dear?"

"This! Molly! And Bucky!?", I demanded.

"I don't know. Since last year?", she asked Holly.

Our eldest daughter replied, "Since she went out with Charlie and Bucky last summer on that race tour in August."

"I thought that was an unpaid internship."

Holly smirked. "Maybe Molly got paid a different way."

"HOLLY!", I thundered.

Holly just laughed, and Marilyn said, "Holly, you're not helping."

"Dad, don't you remember her sitting on his lap at the Christmas party we had? And at the Inauguration?"

"They said there weren't enough seats.", I answered lamely. Had they really been dating for almost a year without telling me?

"Daddy, for a guy who is almost as smart as me and Molly, you're awfully dumb.", she replied.

"So, are you seeing anybody I need to know about?", I asked her.

"No, I just sleep around."

"HOLLY!"

"Maybe I could help with the gays and lesbians if I started dating girls, too, Dad."

"OUT!"

Marilyn laughed and pointed out of the room. "You're really not helping!"

Holly just laughed and scrambled out of her seat, with Stormy romping behind her. They went back to her room. I turned to my wife. "You knew?"

"Everybody knows! Where have you been?"

"I don't know. Running the free world?", I responded.

She snorted. "I think Holly is right! You can be pretty dumb."

"Marilyn! It's wrong! He's like our second son. It's like ... like ... incest!"

"Oh, please!"

"Well, he's certainly much too old! He's six years older than she is!", I argued.

From Holly's room sang out, "I told her that he was already way past his sexual prime!"

Marilyn laughed again and I yelled, "HOLLY!" I sank down onto my chair again. "Shit! When did this start?"

"Last year, when they set up their racing team. Bucky hadn't seen the girls for a few years. Guess what, they grew up! They weren't the little girls who used to bug him and Charlie anymore.", she explained.

"And she and Bucky are ... you know!"

"Mister President, ever heard of 'Don't ask, don't tell!'"

I just growled and threw my hands up in the air. "Aaaaggghh! Daughters!" I looked over at her and pointed a finger. "This is all your fault!"

"My fault?!"

"I wanted sons, but you said, 'No, let's have twin daughters!' This is all your fault!"

"Oh, puhhhleeeease! As I recall, it's the male who provides the X or the Y chromosome, so don't blame me!", was Marilyn's reply.

"Yeah? I recall Henry the Eighth and what he did to a few of his wives when they didn't provide some sons! You are on shaky ground here, your Highness!"

Marilyn just snorted and ignored me.

Thankfully the media never twigged to my daughters' romantic liaisons, or maybe they just didn't care. When the summer started and the girls were out of school, Molly went on an internship with Harley-Davidson that Tusker had arranged, and Holly spent the summer goofing off and visiting friends. If Charlie was anywhere near where we were, we tried to take an afternoon off and watch, but that is such a production to travel to that we mostly watched on ESPN.

It was still blood curdling to watch, but I knew enough about what he was doing to see that he really was good at it. The boys had made their business plan based on being in the top ten in the rankings after two years, and it looked like Charlie was there and more. Charlie had begun racing at the end of 2003 and had very quickly proved he could still outrace almost everybody on the smaller regional tracks. In 2004 he continued, and by mid-summer had been picked up by a pair of major sponsors. The first was Red Bull, the god-awful energy drink that tasted like kerosene, only worse. High energy, that was Charlie, all right!

Amazingly, the Marine Corps was the other major sponsor, and it had nothing whatsoever to do with me! The services often had NASCAR teams, and the presence of a certified Marine hero in the top ranks of motocross was definitely aimed at their demographic target. They actually built a recruiting campaign around Charlie, with ads and posters of him in his combat gear side by side with him in his racing gear. The Few, the Proud, the Hopelessly Insane!

In any case, it was beginning to look like Charlie might be able to make a go of this. He was going to begin racing in the AMA Pro Championship races, and was actually getting a real paycheck from his sponsors. If he continued at this pace, he had a chance to make it to national ranks by next year. He told me once what some of the top tier people made, and it was in the millions. Who knew!? To a considerable extent, however, this destroyed the Charlie-Bucky team, but both boys explained that that had only been a short term plan anyway. Bucky would go back to work at Tusk Cycle, and Red Bull would have professional handlers who would deal with the racing and transportation. Then Bucky arranged for an agent from Creative Artists Agency to handle endorsements and appearances.

As for me, I tried to stay on top of the tiger rather than inside him. In May we had a little war that nobody outside of the administration even knew about! For several years the CIA had been quietly supporting the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan against the Taliban. Things had begun heating up a hair, so we airdropped in a few Special Forces A-Teams to help and began flying a few more B-2 patrols. In turn, the Taliban complained to their bosses back in Pakistan, who decided a more active role was needed. In early May the CIA reported that an infantry brigade was slowly being prepared for action in Pakistan, much as it had been before 9-11.

We really didn't want the Taliban to win, so I called in the new Ambassador from Pakistan, Jehangir Karamat. Karamat had been a four star general in Pakistan's army at one point, so hopefully he would be able to convince his superiors of the folly of poking a tiger through the bars of a cage. I met Karamat with the Secretaries of State and Defense, and told him we knew about the planned 'invasion'. Of course he denied everything, which was what we expected, and then he called home. Two days later a motorized infantry battalion crossed the border. We waited until they bedded down for the night, and then a pair of B-2s carpet bombed their encampment.

We didn't broadcast this to the world, hoping the Pakistanis would take the hint and go home. Pakistan is really an army with a country attached, not the other way around. The remnants of the battalion did begin going home, but the Air Force and Navy decided to screw around. A large flight of French-built Mirages and U.S.-built F-16s lifted off from Masroor, near Karachi, and sortied towards the Truman carrier group in the Bay of Bengal. They tried to fly beneath the radar and completely failed. They were picked up almost immediately by airborne radar and warned off. About half turned back then, and the rest turned back when they were lit up by fire control radar from the F-18s which were shadowing them. Smart move.

Not so smart was the captain of the Pakistani submarine Khalid, a French-built submarine that was shadowing the Truman group. She was trying to maneuver into an attack position, though it wasn't working, since the Scranton, an Improved Los Angeles class American sub was shadowing the Khalid! The Truman launched an anti-submarine equipped Sea King helicopter which positioned itself directly over the Khalid and then hammered her with active sonar to let her know we knew where she was. Unfortunately, that simply rattled the Khalid's commander, who promptly launched a pair of Exocet missiles at the nearest American destroyer, the Kidd. The Exocets never even came close to the destroyer, but the Sea King dropped a pair of homing torpedoes and sank the Khalid.

We kept the whole thing quiet, to allow the Pakistanis to save face. They backed down, although diplomatically things were very frosty. We lost nobody, and only spent some money on ordnance and fuel. I heard later that Pervez Musharraf, the President of Pakistan, was on thin ice with his ruling junta of generals, and was drinking a lot. Ambassador Karamat was also recalled and replaced.

That was a relatively simple problem. Otherwise, it was becoming trickier, not easier. Condi Rice was good, but she didn't quite have the gravitas and respect Colin Powell did. Still, I wasn't going to get rid of her. She and Colin had developed a fairly decent team, and it was she who pointed out to me the problems developing in Iraq. It had been 14 years since Bush 41 had kicked his can down the road, and he was really feeling feisty again. The provocations were becoming more frequent and the rhetoric was becoming noisier. She thought that we needed to get proactive over there.

Since Bill Clinton's time, we had been enforcing a no-fly zone over both the southern, Shiite, part of the country and the northern, Kurdish, part of the country. Every once in awhile Saddam Hussein would get to feeling aggressive and light up one of our planes with a fire control radar, and occasionally launch a missile at it. Our response was predictable, in that we would then destroy the SAM and radar sites. I had raised the bar, by adding a Tomahawk strike or two at one of Hussein's innumerable palaces, razing it to rubble. It wasn't an intentional attempt to kill him, but if he died, I wouldn't lose any sleep.

Meanwhile, the Kurds up north were busy forging a national identity. Kurdistan was an area of the map that occupied northern Iraq, eastern Turkey, northwestern Iran, and northeastern Syria. The heart of it was in Iraq. Still in all those countries they were a generally oppressed minority. Now, under American aerial protection, they were developing an autonomous nation, and the central government in Baghdad was squawking loudly. We said (diplomatically of course), "Up yours!", to Hussein, and sent over a few teams of Special Forces trainers, and Bismarck Myrick as Special Envoy.

After Monrovia had calmed down in the fall of 2003, we had brought Bismarck Myrick back from Liberia to a hero's welcome. Colin Powell had awarded him the State Department's Distinguished Service Award, their highest honor, and had given him a nice testimonial dinner. Marilyn and I attended the dinner, as well, and I made sure to make a few nice remarks as well. "Ambassador Myrick, as you undoubtedly learned in both the Army and in the Foreign Service, the reward for a job well done is usually a bigger and tougher job. We haven't quite figured out what that job is yet, but your nation is not through with you. I hope you enjoy your time here at home, but I can promise you that when the time comes, both Secretary Powell and I will be calling on you again." By early 2004 I had sent him to the Middle East as my Special Envoy to the Turks and Kurds with a single order – Make peace!

Meanwhile, we extended the no-fly zone coverage to also ban helicopter flights. One of Bush 41's mistakes after the Gulf War was to limit the no-fly zones only to fixed wing aircraft. He allowed helicopters for humanitarian assistance. Saddam Hussein didn't have a humanitarian bone in his body, so he simply sent in gunships and troop carriers to kill anybody he didn't like. We banned them up north (he could kill all the Shiites he liked, and then take it up with the Iranians!) and backed it up by shooting down a flight of three gunships strafing the Kurdish Peshmerga militia north of Kirkuk. That settled things back down again. Meanwhile, Myrick began shuttle diplomacy between the Kurds and Turkey. The Turks and Kurds hated each other, and Turkey was an ally in NATO, and had a Kurdish extremist problem. Myrick's mandate was to get both sides to calm down and cooperate enough to begin construction of a pipeline carrying Kurdish oil through Turkey. The Turks desperately needed the oil and the jobs, and seemed willing to loosen their restrictions on the Kurdish minority to get the oil. We'd just have to see.

Chapter 159: Katrina

August 23, 2005

Hurricane season officially starts on June 1 and runs through the end of November. Most of the activity is in August and September, but hurricanes in the extremes are not uncommon. Agnes in 1972 was a nasty one, in June, and Sandy in 2012 was in late October and very bad. I knew what was coming, and was not looking forward to it.

It had been a long time, subjectively, since I had witnessed Hurricane Katrina, and while the details were a touch vague, the aftermath was not. Put simply, a massive hurricane blew in off the Gulf of Mexico and took direct aim at New Orleans. Despite all the time in the world to prepare, disaster preparations weren't all that great, and somewhere around two thousand people died! There was plenty of blame to go around, including George W. Bush, who only days into the disaster had publicly praised his FEMA boss, and then fired him just a few days later. Coming on top of the disasters that the two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had become, Hurricane Katrina buried any hope that history would remember George Bush kindly. It stood as a case study in how not to do disasters.

For the last few years I had been beating on Allbaugh and Brown to make FEMA a better agency. While the government is too large for me to actually oversee each and every little operation, I could demand accountability and request realistic and periodic updates. One thing I stressed to them was that they needed to run frequent and realistic dry runs. Get together with the state of California and the city of Los Angeles and practice what you would do during a major earthquake. Go to the Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Oklahoma, and pick a city to practice a tornado disaster in, and then go to that town and practice what you would do. Go find a city on the Mississippi and practice what would happen when the levees break and it floods.

This stuff happens all the time, and while you can never predict it will happen in any particular place, you can definitely predict it will happen somewhere on a regular timeline. Flooding in Dubuque will be different than flooding in Duluth, but a flood is a flood, and what you learn in one place will be useable in another. The same went for tornadoes, earthquakes, hurricanes, forest fires, and so forth. Furthermore, if you handle it right, the practice sessions get a huge amount of positive publicity.

As part of this, the agency had prepared a list of the Top 10 Cities for various disasters. For floods that was mostly cities along the Mississippi, for hurricanes it was cities along the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts, for earthquakes there was a different list, and so forth. Then each city was provided a grant to determine the best ways to evacuate the city as needed, and exercises were planned around these lists. New Orleans landed on two lists, hurricanes and flooding. For real fun, they played a game in New Orleans called Beat the Feds. We would provide them a grant to study the problem, half the money would disappear, they would dust off the previous study and retype it, and report that they needed more money for another study. Actual preparation was secondary at best.

One of the overwhelming concerns I had was that Hurricane Katrina was going to smash into quite probably the single most unready city in the country. If New Orleans didn't exist, we'd have had to invent it! It is easily the most corrupt city in the nation! Per capita it has one of the highest murder rates. The police in New Orleans have a national reputation for graft and corruption, and more than a few of those murders are committed by cops killing for hire. Other crimes weren't far behind. Physically the city itself is mostly below sea level, and protected by a system of levees and pumps. Since an incredibly corrupt city and state government handled the contracts for most of this stuff, it was questionable whether it would function even in good times. As for the government, New Orleans had a black Mayor and a white Governor, neither of whom really cared much for the other one, and they were both Democrats and neither of them liked me.

In good times, the city had a certain reputation for fun. 'Laissez les bons temps rouler!' – Let the good times roll! – is the city's slogan. Mardi gras is just an excuse for a gigantic party, and it seems like there is always a party. It's a fun place for visitors.

In bad times, the place turns to shit!

Being informed of weather events takes up about 60 seconds in the morning when I get my daily brief. Most of the time it is fairly quiet and normal. In a nation the size of America, it is always raining somewhere, it is always hot and sunny somewhere, and it is always snowing somewhere. I am informed when things start going bad, but you can also always figure it's going to go bad somewhere. There are certain criteria that need to be met to declare someplace a disaster area, and you can count on the appropriate Congressman or Senator to call me asking for Federal assistance. As a general rule, you pretty much rubberstamp the requests for assistance. After all, dealing with disasters is really the job of any government. You normally don't say no.

Katrina became an official storm on Tuesday, August 23, though it was just a Tropical Depression in the Bahamas at that time. It was given a name, Katrina, the next day. By then it was obvious that this was a storm that was going to hit the United States somewhere, and not veer right and head into the middle of the Atlantic. I was informed that morning that we had a possible hurricane level event in the offing, named Tropical Storm Katrina. As soon as I heard that name, I knew I had to get involved.

Shortly after my briefing, and my early morning staff meeting, I called Michael Brown. "Michael, it's Carl Buckman. How are you doing this morning?"

"I'm fine, Mister President. How can I help you this morning?"

"Well, have you been following the weather news?"

"To a certain extent, sir. It's a big country. You've obviously got something in mind. What's up?", he asked.

Okay, he's right. It is a big country, and this thing hadn't even made it out of the Caribbean. "There's a brand new tropical storm and it's aimed right at Florida. We don't need another Hurricane Andrew.", I told him, reminding him of the hurricane that devastated southern Florida years before.

"No, sir, that would be bad. I will look into it with my forecasting staff."

"That's all I can ask for now, Michael. Hey, maybe you can use this as a live fire training exercise."

"I'll look into that, sir. Thank you, Mister President."

We hung up. I could expect a response from him by the end of the day. Presidents don't just call up to say 'Hello!' If I called, I would expect a positive response.

I heard from Brown late on the 23rd that, as per my suggestion, they were going to use this as a large scale training exercise. I told him I thought that was a good idea, and if he needed me to give any appropriate orders, to simply let me know. I kept an eye on things over the next few days. On the 24th it kept strengthening, and looked like it would clip southern Florida and head into the Gulf. It did that on the 25th. The FEMA preparations for Florida went fine, and nobody died, but there was some property damage. Everybody gave a sigh of relief as it drifted into the Gulf and began to weaken back into a tropical storm. I went along with them, but I knew better. I simply told Michael Brown to keep the exercise running, since a big storm like that could still cause a lot of coastal flooding. I also brought it up at my morning staff meeting.

On Friday the 26th, everybody took a deep breath and let out a loud, 'Oh shit!' That sigh of relief had been premature! All day long Katrina increased in strength, reverting back to a hurricane and heading towards the Gulf Coast. Predictions were that Louisiana was going to get slammed. The National Hurricane Center was officially predicting a hurricane level impact on the Louisiana coastline. In response, I ordered a conference call for that afternoon with everybody I could grab. I knew what was coming, and I knew that the locals were figuring this to be just another big storm that the Big Easy could ride out, with hurricane parties and a lot of bourbon and rum.

The conference call was a big one, with the Governors of Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, the Mayors of New Orleans and Mobile, the head of the Army Corps of Engineers, the boss of the National Hurricane Center, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In my office, on speakerphone, I had John McCain, Frank Stouffer, Will Brucis, and Michael Brown of FEMA. You might not like the government, but by God we had a hell of a communications system! We started out with a briefing by Max Mayfield, the head of the Hurricane Center, on what the storm was doing and what we could expect. It wasn't good. The storm was strengthening, moving back up to hurricane strength, and getting stronger by the minute. At current trends it would go from a Category One up to Category Three by the 27th, and probably still be growing when it made landfall. It was aimed directly at New Orleans.

According to the head of the Army Corps of Engineers, Lieutenant General Carl Strock the levees were perfectly safe up through a Category 3 hurricane, but he made no assurances beyond that. New Orleans would be safe.

"You sound pretty positive, General. What happens if one of the levees fails?", I asked.

"In a case like that, you might expect to see some isolated problems, but unless the storm gets to a Category 4 or 5, we'll be fine.", I was told.

"General, I am not going to tell you your business, but I would make sure that you plan on some immediate and major repairs if something goes wrong.", I warned him.

"We already have taken that into consideration, sir."

That was not what I wanted to hear. "General, I am not reassured. From what Doctor Mayfield is telling us, Category Three might be on the low side of estimates. Anything higher than that is going to scrape New Orleans down to the original mud flats. Mister Brown, your agency has done some assessments. Is that a correct statement?"

Mike Brown nodded, though nobody on the call could see that, and he said, "Yes, sir. Everything we have seen says that there will be widespread destruction throughout southern Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, and even into eastern Texas. If the levees fail in New Orleans, most of the city will be underwater."

Governor Blanco of Louisiana immediately requested a state of emergency be declared, seconded by Haley Barbour of Mississippi. I went along with that, and promised any assistance we could offer. That was when it became tricky. Ray Nagin, the Mayor of New Orleans refused to issue a mandatory evacuation warning, and only wanted a voluntary evacuation. He wanted, instead, to set up temporary rescue centers on higher ground, just in case, and stock them with some food and water, if necessary.

"Mayor Nagin, let me make sure I understand you. Everybody else wants to shut down the area and get everybody out, and you don't? Do I have that correct?", I asked.

"Mister President, that is hardly my position..." He was off and running. The bottom line was that if he ordered an evacuation, he would be causing chaos among the residents who were unable to leave, and there would be widespread liability for shutting down the city. If you read between the lines, he was worried about getting sued in case the storm wimped out or missed the city! I think he knew just how unprepared his city was for a disaster, so he was simply going to hope it didn't happen. If it did, hey, not his fault!

I listened to him futz around for a bit and looked over at John McCain, who seemed as disturbed as I was. Finally I had enough, and simply cut him off. "Okay, I've heard what I need to hear. Let's get to the heart of the matter. According to the Stafford Act, I have the authority to declare a state of emergency as needed. It's needed. Governor Blanco, Governor Barbour, Governor Riley, let's just draw a horizontal line through the middle of your states. All the counties or parishes below that line are emergency areas. If you haven't already done so, call out your National Guard, all of them, every last one. Issue immediate and mandatory evacuation orders for anybody living on any body of water. I don't care if it's a duck pond; have them move inland and away from it. Mayor Dow, Mayor Nagin, issue the evacuation orders."

"Mister President, you don't have that authority.", replied Nagin.

"Mayor Nagin, we've never met, so you don't know me. I'm going to make this real simple. When push comes to shove, you don't tell me what I can do, I tell you. If it comes down to it, I will declare martial law, throw your ass in the stockade, and drop the 82nd Airborne on your city to take control. Are we clear on that, or do I have to give you a demonstration?", I replied.

Nagin shut up, and a moment later the White House switchboard came over the line and reported his connection was broken. I stared at the others for a second. I was sure he would report that it was a communications failure, but the reality was that the bastard had hung up on the President of the United States! Unbelievable!

There was a stunned silence for a moment, and then I heard the voice of Hailey Barbour, the Governor of Mississippi, come over the line. "Uh, Mister President, were you serious about martial law?"

I grinned at the rest of the people in my office, most of whom also looked a little stunned. "Hailey, I really don't want things to get that far, but I think this storm is going to get bigger, not smaller. I think it would behoove everybody involved to go above and beyond in taking precautions. Governor Blanco, New Orleans is your city. I would suggest that you talk to Mayor Nagin and explain things to him in a clear and certain manner. If he fights me on this, he will lose. I am expecting mandatory evacuation orders for the storm zone in time for the evening news. Is that understood, madam?"

I could hear the gulp in her voice. "Yes, sir."

"Thank you. General Myers, you are authorized to prepare as needed for this event. I've been to Fort Polk a few times, but that was twenty-some years ago as a lieutenant. Do you have helicopters there?"

"Yes, sir, and we have already begun moving them away from the storm area.", he answered promptly.

"AWAY!? Why are you moving them away?!"

"Mister President, if a hurricane goes through that area, those birds will be destroyed on the ground. It is standard procedure to move them out of the area, and then move them back in as soon as the weather allows us. I would also add that we are beginning to move more equipment in from elsewhere in the South."

John McCain chimed in at that point. "Carl, he's right. Helicopters and airplanes are very fragile in high winds. We lost a lot of planes at Homestead in Florida during Andrew."

"Oh, okay. I guess that makes sense. I was airborne artillery, so I never learned all that much about flight operations. When will they be able to begin flying rescue missions and supply deliveries after the hurricane goes through?", I asked.

"We'll have to stop at least a day before the hurricane hits, and we won't be able to start up again until anywhere from 36 to 48 hours afterwards, depending on weather conditions and wind speeds. The same goes for any fixed wing flights.", he told me.

"Huh!" So much for any ideas about flying missions right up to the hurricane and right after. "That settles it. We need to start getting people out now! Nagin wants to ride this out and hope he gets lucky. I don't have that luxury. I am going on the air tonight to let people know. Is everybody clear on this?"

I heard a chorus of 'Yes, sir!'s out of everybody, and I let them all go. Then I turned back to the people in my office.

John McCain spoke first. "If this thing wimps out, you are going to look like a five star horse's ass!"

I nodded wryly at him. "John, I am going to look like an ass regardless. I am going to get the personal blame for not stopping a hurricane, no matter what. That's fine. That's why I get the big bucks. The difference is whether I look like a horse's ass with a few hundred people dead, or with a few thousand people dead. Wait until the levees break and the networks begin airing footage of dead bodies floating in the streets!"

"Jesus!", muttered Frank lowly.

"Yeah! We do not need for that to happen! We have two choices here, bad and unbelievably worse!" I looked over at Will, who had been relatively quiet. "Get me time on the networks tonight, all of them, and get me Matt and Marc to help me write a speech."

"Got it!"

I turned to John and Mike Brown. "I want you two to hightail it down there. We can't manage this long distance. John, if I do need to declare martial law, or something else equally drastic, you give me the word. I will back you completely, and take the heat. Hailey and Bob won't give us any trouble, but Blanco's a lightweight, and I wouldn't trust Nagin as far as I can throw his worthless ass."

"Let's hope it doesn't come to that!", John replied.

"I'll need to pack a few things, but I'll be ready by the time the Vice President is, sir.", answered Brown.

"We'll figure it out, Mike. Carl, I need to pack a few things, too.", added John.

I sent the others on their way, and jotted a few notes down for the speech. Matt and Marc came in a few minutes later. As we were going through the speech, I had to take a call from Jeb Bush, the Governor of Florida. We added the panhandle of Florida to the disaster area.

The biggest problem we had on the first go was that in most emergencies, assistance is requested at the local level, and then works its way up. A storm wipes out a town, and the mayor requests help from the state, and if enough of that happens, they request it from the Feds. This time I was ramming it down their throats, and not everybody appreciated it.

Will jumped through hoops and got me on the air that evening at 7:00. By then John and Mike were already on their way to Shreveport. I had spoken to John privately before they left. "Keep an eye on Mike. He tends to think like a politician, so make sure he stays focused. Otherwise, you can speak with my voice. If you need something done, I will back you fully, and take the heat." We shook hands, and he left, to head with Brown over to Andrews.

At 7:00 PM I spoke from the Oval Office, looking as somber and serious as I could.

"My fellow Americans, thank you for giving me this chance to speak to you about a matter of national importance. By now, all of you must be aware that Hurricane Katrina is in the Gulf of Mexico and will be hitting our shores in the next few days. The potential danger that this storm imposes is so great that it will be necessary to take extraordinary measures to deal with it. Earlier today, I spoke with the Governors of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida, the Mayors of New Orleans and Mobile, and the Director of the National Hurricane Center, and many others. As a result of those discussions, it is necessary to take some extraordinary measures.

As of this afternoon, I have ordered a state of emergency declared in the southern halves of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, as well as in the western panhandle region of Florida. In the counties and cities in those areas, a mandatory evacuation order has been issued for all residents. This is not voluntary. If you do not leave on your own, you will be removed to safer areas. As we speak, National Guardsmen and Army soldiers are being rushed to the area to assist in maintaining order and helping in the evacuation.

This is a major storm. I know that many of you in the area the storm will impact have been through other hurricanes before, and believe this will be no different and that you will be able to simply ride it out. This storm is far larger than anything you have ever experienced in the past! It will affect an area from the Florida Panhandle to Texas. Even if you survive the storm, roadways and bridges may well be washed out for days and weeks to come. You need to evacuate, and do it now! By the time the storm hits, it will be too late. I urge everyone in the designated storm emergency areas to immediately prepare an emergency kit and leave the area."

I also gave them some emergency advice from the National Weather Service and FEMA, and then repeated the need to leave. I also told people without transportation to get to a refugee center immediately, as trucks and buses would begin ferrying them to safety. Then I spoke to that part of the nation which was outside the storm zone.

"Many of you now watching this, perhaps most of you, are asking yourselves why I am disturbing your dinner or your regular television schedule for something that doesn't concern you. Americans in Maine or Minnesota or California are wondering why I am making this a national broadcast. It doesn't affect them. The truth is that it does affect you, each and every one of you. This is not a Gulf Coast problem, this is an American problem.

The people in this coastal region are American citizens, as are all of us. We pull together in times of trouble, and now is no different. When a tornado hits the Midwest, a blizzard buries the Rockies, or an earthquake happens in California, we as a people draw together to assist, to help people that we have never met before and might never meet again. This is part of what makes America the great nation that it is. Now that time is coming again. We must all draw together to assist those impacted by this event, and I know, deep in my heart, that we Americans will do so.

So I will let you go now, as our nation's emergency preparedness teams prepare to assist the Gulf Coast. I wish them the best, and my prayers are with them and with the people in the way of this storm. I know yours are as well. Thank you and God bless you."

I sat there facing the camera until the technical people began fiddling with the lights and moving around the room. Marc Thiessen gave me a nod and a thumbs-up, and Matt Scully said, "Good job, Mister President."

"Thank you. I just hope we have enough time to get people out of there. This is going to be bad enough without the networks broadcasting bodies in the streets and people screaming at refugee centers.", I told him.

"You really think it will be that bad?"

I nodded. "We'll know for sure tomorrow. By then the storm will have figured out where it is going to make landfall and what area gets destroyed. The problem isn't really the winds, it's the water. New Orleans is mostly under sea level, like Holland. If the levees go, the city washes out to sea."

"Shit!", he muttered.

"Exactly!"

"If that happens, they are going to be picking people up off the roofs of whatever is left standing with helicopters."

I nodded. "Probably every single one in the inventory, and it still won't be enough."

Marc looked thoughtful and commented, "You know, not every helicopter is owned by the government." I shrugged and looked at him curiously. Where was he going with this? "It's just ... one time I was at a cocktail party, and this friend of a friend said that one of the biggest air forces in the world was actually all the helicopters owned by the oil companies to service the oil and gas platforms out in the Gulf. Now, I am sure that right now they are hauling guys off those platforms, but what about after the storm? Maybe they could help in the rescue?"

I looked over at Matt, and he looked back, equally confused and curious. "Really?", he asked.

"It might be worth checking on."

"Okay.", I said. "Marc, you call who's ever in charge over at FEMA now that Mike Brown is heading down to Louisiana. Maybe they've already thought of this, but let's find out. The oil companies might not want to do it, but maybe they'll want to bank some good will for when they have an oil spill or something."

"Sounds like a plan.", he agreed, standing.

I sent the pair of them out, with orders to keep an eye on the weather in the Gulf, and plan on a few more speeches as needed. If it became as bad as I knew it would, I was going to have to make a 'fact finding' trip down there after the storm. I fully expected to find the fact that New Orleans had been well and truly trashed, along with everything else in the area. Afterwards I went upstairs and simply sat with Marilyn for the evening.

Saturday the 27th, I had a conference call with John McCain, Mike Brown, and Max Mayfield from the Hurricane Center. It wasn't a good prognosis. The storm had already been upgraded from Category One last night, and was now at Category Three, which is a whole lot more storm. It was a big storm, and was guaranteed to hit a stretch of coastline from the Florida Panhandle all the way west to Houston. It was still aimed dead center at New Orleans. John and Mike filled us in on the latest, and Mike told me he had heard from his people in D.C. about the helicopter idea.

The problem was that the helicopter support companies were under long term contracts to the oil companies and their support companies. It was more than a little fragmented, with hundreds of offshore rigs and dozens of refineries ashore, simply a gargantuan industry. I decided to cut the complaint off mid-stream. "Mike, let me make a phone call and see what I can do. Be prepared to follow up afterwards."

I hung up and told the switchboard to get me Lee Raymond, the Chairman of the Board of ExxonMobil, the biggest oil company in America. It always amused me to hear the awe in people's voices when they heard the operator say, 'Please hold for the President of the United States.' I was sure that today would be no different. It wasn't.

I had known Lee for a number of years, though I couldn't say we were friends, rather more like acquaintances. We had met a number of times, he was a Republican and very big on corporate citizenship. "Hello?"

"Lee, it's Carl Buckman. How are you doing, sir?"

"Just fine, Mister President. How can I help you?"

"Lee, I need your help. I know that you know just how bad this storm, Hurricane Katrina, will be. One of my people told me yesterday that the oil and gas industry has one of the largest fleets of helicopters in the world. What I am looking for is assistance after the storm passes through."

"Uh, yes, sir. The industry as a whole does have lots of helicopters, but I can assure you they are all busy right now. I can guarantee they are pulling people off the rigs as they shut down, and moving out of the path of the storm. It would be much too dangerous to be out on a rig in this kind of weather.", he replied.

"I'm sure it is. No, I am talking about afterwards. I am speaking to you not just as the head of ExxonMobil, but as the head of your industry. I know you'll be moving people back out to the rigs, to get them up and running again. I won't insult your intelligence and claim to know your business. Still, I know that there has to be some slack in your operations, some sort of surge capacity. You're too smart a guy not to do that, and you know everybody in your business better than anybody in Washington does. What I am asking is that after the storm, if you can free up some of that capacity to assist in rescue operations, to do so.", I said.

"Yes, sir, I understand what you are asking. I will see what I can do."

"Feel free to use my name. Call who you have to call in your company and elsewhere. Your nation needs your help, and that help will be remembered." That was the quid pro quo, of course. He was going to have a big marker to call in at some point in the future, and I was going to have to concede on whatever it was.

"Of course, Mister President. I'll get right on it."

"Thank you, Mister Raymond. After this is all over, we can meet here and you can tell me how you did the great job I know you'll be doing. Thank you sir." We said our good-byes and hung up. I smiled to myself. I knew that three things were going to happen. After the storm some of their helicopter capacity would be offered to the government, that some wonderfully heart warming commercials would be generated about how they were helping, and that before I was out of office Lee Raymond would be knocking on my door for something worth billions of dollars and I would give in.

I spoke to General Myers later in the morning, and I got a little testy with him. He was looking for permission to move some men and supplies from well outside the storm area into pre-positioning sites. I told him not to ask in the future, but to simply do it. We had money and manpower; we didn't have time! In that regard, we worked up a letter to every state governor, asking for assistance in the crisis. They were to assume that if there was a request for National Guard assistance from their state, even if they weren't in the storm zone and hadn't been affected, that the request was in my name and they would be looked to for immediate assistance. I did a little editing, and made sure we took out anything mandatory, and used lots of phrases like 'request', 'assist', 'support', and 'national emergency'. The letter was sent to every governor that day, hand delivered by the local ranking military leader. It was also leaked to the press.

Results were generally positive. Three governors of mid-western states promptly activated their National Guard units and ordered them to prepare for any and all assistance measures, and made sure to do this on television. Another governor declined however, stating through his press spokesman that state law prohibited that sort of action without there being an immediate need in his state. Legally that might have been true, politically it was a disaster! Within six hours that same spokesman was tap-dancing in front of the cameras and stating that what he really meant to say was that of course the Governor was going to help, but voluntarily, not because it was required. I got a good laugh out of that.

Meanwhile, Nagin was still being an asshole, and Blanco was definitely a lightweight. She had approved a plan to use school buses and other buses to move people out of the area, but had refused to sign an order allowing non-livery or non-commercial licensed drivers to drive them! John had overridden that immediately, and sent out the word. If you can drive heavy equipment, load up with refugees and head north. They would sort them out when they got somewhere. Some guys were even loading people onto flatbed trucks and taking them north. The roads were clogged and traffic was moving at a snail's pace, but it was moving, and the farther they got, the safer they would be.

Sunday is normally a quiet day at the White House, just like it is everywhere else. Aside from my morning Daily Presidential Brief, I am able to mostly relax, watch some television, read a book, or spend a few hours in my personal study just reviewing things. Marilyn can head out to church, maybe with the kids if they are around (I almost never go, since I'm not Catholic, and when I show up, I have to show up with the entire zoo. Incredibly disruptive!) Otherwise, we just get to do the normal things. Not so Sunday the 28th.

Sunday morning, I woke up to find that our worst fears were coming true. I knew what was coming, but for the life of me couldn't remember just how bad it was going to get. Overnight the storm had strengthened dramatically, and was now up to a Category Five. The news was full of dire warnings and predictions, and the Weather Channel was giving minute by minute updates. The mandatory evacuation order I had issued and the other precautionary measures were major topics on the Sunday news shows. Opinion seemed evenly split, with half the pundits thinking I wasn't doing enough, and the other half replying that I had gone off the deep end and this thing would be a fizzle. I don't recall any of them, however, volunteering to head south and report from the front lines.

I gave John and Mike and General Myers carte blanche to do what needed to be done. It was obvious now that any strategy to simply ride it out would be hopeless. Ray Nagin was finally figuring out there was a problem, and was screaming for immediate assistance. He wanted fleets of helicopters to lift everybody out. We ignored him.

Even at this late a date, with disaster quite literally looming over the horizon, some small town mayors and tourist boards wanted people to stick around. They would lose money from vacation cancellations and contracts would be broken, that sort of thing. They couldn't quite grasp the concept that a reservation is no good when the motel is under water!

There was nothing more I could do at this point. I had already rushed as much aid to the area as I could scrape up. I was as much a spectator as anybody else. I just watched the news and tried, failingly, to relax. It was out of my hands. By every schedule, Monday was going to be the big day.

Monday was the big day, all right! The storm made landfall before I even woke up, but since New Orleans is actually up the river about a hundred miles, it didn't hit there until about breakfast time. I called down to the Shreveport Command Center about 8:30 and got Mike Brown on the line. He sounded tired but functional. "Mike, what's up?"

"The storm has made landfall south of New Orleans. It dropped down to a Category Three before it landed, thank God! We expect it to hit New Orleans around lunchtime. Everybody is lying low right now. Rescue and evacuation operations are shut down. If you haven't gotten out yet, you won't."

"How bad is that going to be?"

"Sir, I just don't know. Ray Nagin was sending thousands of people to his refugee centers, and we got most of them onto buses and trucks, but that's done now. They ran into the night, but it's just too dangerous now. There's probably still five thousand people at the Superdome, and I don't know how many others in the city. We had soldiers breaking down doors and hauling people out and throwing them on buses, and they still wanted to ride it out."

"Jesus!", I replied.

"It's worse than that, sir. In one case some soldiers knocked on the door of a house and were shot at from inside. They backed up, but a minute later the house exploded. It turned out to be a meth lab. Elsewhere, there has been some looting. The local cops are even robbing places."

"Oh, hell! Where's John?"

"He's sacked out on a cot in another room. He and I have been running in shifts."

It sounded like they knew what they were doing, and they were on the scene. "There's probably not much we can do now until this thing blows over. Have John call me when he wakes up, but leave it at that. You get some rest, too."

"Yes, sir."

I hung up. I was still the President of the entire country, not just the Gulf Coast, so I couldn't simply sit around and listen to the news. I had two budget meetings, a Pentagon briefing, a Congressional lunch, and three photo ops. I followed the events as best I could. Shortly after lunch, Frank stuck his head into a budget meeting and whispered to me, "The levees have begun to fail."

I wasn't surprised, not at all. "Frank, remember that Army Corps of Engineers fellow who swore up and down the levees wouldn't fail."

"Yes, sir."

"Do me a favor. Give him a call and ask him why his letter of resignation isn't on my desk yet, and then ask who his number two is over there. Heads are going to roll, and we might as well start now."

"Yes, sir." Frank nodded in understanding. He knew by now I had remarkably short shrift with that sort of thing, and he also knew that as Chief of Staff he had to be my hammer at times. I expected accountability. I would back you to the hilt, but the job damn well better be done.

Throughout the day the reports of widespread and massive destruction poured in, from official reports and from the television news. Katrina was going into the history books. Had I done enough? I doubted it. I suspected bodies were going to be piled up like cordwood by the time everything was finished. The damage? Beyond anything this nation had ever seen! I told Frank we would be flying down as soon as the weather allowed.

All day Tuesday the extent of the destruction became known. The southern half of three states was thoroughly trashed. We had about 5,000 refugees and soldiers trapped at the Superdome, and another 5,000 spread around the other shelters. The levees had been breached at dozens of different spots, and most of New Orleans was under water. All the surrounding parishes and counties were destroyed. There was no power, no phones, no television, no running water, no sewer systems, no roads – no nothing! I told Marilyn that if it was us, we'd be sitting on the roof of our house and sharpening our knives, wondering who was going to take the first bite out of whom.

The weather finally allowed us to go down early Wednesday morning. Amusingly, my regular airplane, a 747 variant, was too big to land at Shreveport's airport. John's regular ride as Air Force Two was a 757, and it was sufficiently smaller that it could land there. I could either maintain my august dignity and take the 747 to a different airport and fly something smaller to Shreveport, or take a backup 757 direct. Then I was told that Barksdale Air Force Base was across the river from Shreveport, and any runway capable of handling a B-52 could handle Air Force One, so we took my regular 747 there and hop a chopper to Shreveport. We left long before the sun was up, and got into Shreveport at 6:00 AM local time. John and Mike met me at the airport, and we went first to the disaster headquarters, where we met the professionals - FEMA and the military - and the politicians. Governor Blanco and her entourage were there, overwhelmed but trying, and Nagin, with his own entourage, complaining that we weren't running fleets of helicopters into the city and bitching at full volume about how it was everybody's fault but his. Also present were a bunch of reporters, there to capture this as a photo op.

The schedule for the day was two-fold, start rescuing people, and start figuring out just how bad the damage was. First though, I had to deal with Nagin, who was making a real ass of himself, and being more nuisance than he was worth. For a guy who had slept through the storm on a bed in a hotel in Shreveport, he was mightily concerned about his constituents back home on the roofs of their houses.

Finally I had enough. "Mister Mayor, will you kindly shut up! I have enough problems without you adding to them.", I exclaimed.

"How dare you speak to me that way?!" He started squawking and complaining some more.

I looked around and saw a National Guard captain over to the side, talking to several Guardsmen. I waved to him and yelled, "Captain! Please!"

Nagin was now hooting as I ignored him. The Guard captain came over and came to attention. "Sir!"

I turned back to Nagin. "Shut the hell up. If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem." I turned to the captain and pointed to Nagin. "I have had it with this idiot. Get him out of here and put him on the first flight to the Superdome. He can help from the front lines."

The room went deathly quiet for a moment, except for the clicking of cameras. The captain may have been startled, but he simply acknowledged me and motioned over a pair of Guardsmen from the corner. Grinning, the two National Guardsmen took hold of Nagin's arms and dragged him out of the room, as he began yelling and screaming. His final words were a loud and clear, "FUCK YOU, BUCKMAN! FUCK YOU!" Most people were shocked by what had just happened, but not all. John, Mike, and Frank had sly smiles on their faces, because they knew what happened when I lost patience with somebody.

I turned to the others and simply said, "If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem! I got no use for more problems right now! Is everybody clear on that?"

We left the building just in time to see my new friends putting Ray Nagin on a Blackhawk that was spooling up and getting ready to head south. The captain saw me and saluted, and I returned it. I left John behind with Frank, and Mike and I climbed into a different helicopter, along with some agents and a few reporters. The reporters wanted to ask silly questions, so Mike and I simply put on the proffered headsets and ignored them. Minutes later, we lifted off and headed towards Fort Polk, which was about halfway to New Orleans.

Once we were aloft, I heard the pilot, a chief warrant officer named Hastings, say, "This is Army One, and we are airborne!" He sounded like an excited teenager, even though he was in his forties. I had to smile at that.

I chatted with him on the headset. "It's been awhile since I was in an Army helo, Mister Hastings. The last time I was in one, it was a Huey. I bet none of the crew is even old enough to have flown a Huey!", I admitted.

"Don't bet on it, Mister President.", came back the metallic reply. "I'm rated on them, and there's a few of the other pilots and crew chiefs who have flown them."

"Huh! You learn something every day! I have to admit, this is a whole lot nicer bird than a Huey."

"Roger that, sir!"

By now it was obvious that there was some really serious damage. We started seeing a lot of trees and power lines down, and some flooding. Fort Polk was an absolute beehive of activity. I was greeted by a Brigadier General who I never really caught the name of but who seemed to be in charge. I got some good news and some bad news. The good news was that the weather was clearing and he would be sending pretty much every helo he had available on supply and rescue missions any moment now. He was already in contact with a Coast Guard admiral, a guy named Thad Allen, and they were divvying up the load. The Coast Guard helicopters were all rigged for winches and search and rescue. They would focus on that. The National Guard and Army would go to places they could actually land, and there were more than enough spots like that to keep them busy. The bad news was simple – the destruction was beyond massive!

With that he led us outside, to a Hum-Vee, and we headed over to the flight line. We took off again and headed towards New Orleans. As we neared New Orleans the true devastation was becoming apparent. It was all you could do not to stare and gawp like a rube. During the last night before Katrina made landfall, it had weakened back to a Category Three storm, and it looked like there wasn't anything left. If it had still been at Category Five, it would have been as if God's road scraper had gone through, and taken everything back down to the original mud flats.

Roads and bridges were gone, trees were down willy-nilly, houses and garages were simply gone, either under water or floating down river, or simply missing. I didn't have words for it. Over everything was a bright sheen of sun reflecting on water, water that in most places was a brown and thick industrial sludge. They don't call the Mississippi the Big Muddy for nothing, and now we were adding in millions of tons of God only knows what else. Below us I could see people on the roofs of houses or on what passed for a high spot, frantically waving for rescue. I could hear the co-pilot calling in coordinates to the command center for follow-up rescues. That would be somebody else's job.

When we got into the city, the devastation was simply heartbreaking. I didn't know how we would be able to describe it. Behind me the reporters and the cameramen were in shock, though you could faintly hear them pointing at things and talking to each other. The side doors were open, and they were shooting video and taking photos. Eventually we found the Superdome, which looked pretty beat up but was still standing. Earlier we had gotten reports that the roof was damaged and leaking, but otherwise holding together. We didn't land, but instead turned east and kept flying. I was happy that I wouldn't have to put up with Ray Nagin at the Superdome, which was about the only amusement I could find at the moment. After a few hours the destruction simply became numbing to me. This was a disaster beyond anything the nation had ever seen.

We landed at an emergency and refugee center outside of Mobile, where the Army had set up a FARP, a Forward Area Refueling Point of the type used to refuel helicopters in war zones. They fueled up the Blackhawks, and we went through the line at an emergency chow hall, and then headed back. I was beat by the time I made it back to Shreveport, after a delicious meal of an MRE and some bottled water at Fort Polk. I slept the entire trip back to Washington. I was still tired when I got off the plane, and fell asleep in Marine One flying back to the White House from Andrews. I went to bed after leaving instructions to let me sleep in, and that Will needed to set up a national broadcast the next night, and that Matt and Marc needed to write a speech. I was going to have to report to the American people how bad it was, and what we would need to do.

Chapter 160: Katrina Aftermath, Kurdistan Beginning

I don't know which made more news that night, the first video of New Orleans after Katrina, or the video of Nagin being dragged out and cursing me out. I thought one of the better moments was when an ABC crew caught Nagin being loaded on the helicopter and trying to order the two soldiers to let him go. One of them, a black private, said, "Shut yo' mouth, [BLEEPED], and git yo' ass on the bird!"

The other soldier, a white corporal, laughed and added, "Yeah, y'all's getting a free trip to the Big Easy!"

It got better when Charlie Gibson reported that Nagin had refused to order the evacuation of New Orleans, and that when I had overruled him, he had hung up on the President of the United States. While he refused to name his source, he reported multiple confirmations of the story. I couldn't be surprised. We had almost a dozen people on that first conference call, and God only knew how many more were listening in over speakerphone. All this made for some fascinating comments from the nightly comics. It did not make Nagin look good.

For the next few weeks, right through the end of September, the only thing on the news was Katrina, Katrina, Katrina. The destruction was simply mind-numbing. While the photos of New Orleans under 20 feet of water were riveting, vastly more damage was actually done to coastal communities from Florida to Texas. In most of these towns and cities everything man-made was destroyed! Ninety-plus percent of the homes were gone, and the remaining ones were condemned. Ditto businesses; ditto ditto every church, school, hospital, clinic, police and fire station, etc. Every bridge was washed out, every road was cut, and every telephone pole and power line was down. Every single road was blocked by hundreds of trees. There was no electric, phone, or cell service, and every single transformer and substation was blown. Every radio, television, and cell tower had toppled. We could bring in every spare piece of equipment from around the nation and it still wouldn't be sufficient. Refugees in the millions were displaced, more than during the Dustbowl of the Great Depression. If John Steinbeck was still alive and was writing The New Grapes of Wrath, the Joads would live in Pass Christian, Mississippi, and would move to a trailer park in Beaumont, Texas, the day before Rita hit.

To add insult to injury, roughly a month after Katrina, Hurricane Rita slammed into the northeast Texas coast. Prior to Katrina, Rita would have been an unimaginable disaster in its own right. Compared to Katrina, Rita was small potatoes, and never got the press it truly deserved. Many of the repairs underway in Louisiana were destroyed, and worst of all, many of the refugees had been relocated to eastern Texas, and now went through it all over again. Thousands of people were suffering from post-traumatic stress, the same as some soldiers did after combat. Mike Brown had returned to Washington after a couple of weeks in Louisiana; when Rita was announced, he simply hopped on a plane and flew to Texas without prompting. He earned his paycheck that fall, in spades!

The good news was that by being proactive at the start and forcing the mandatory evacuation early, we managed to minimize the loss of life. Rather than the almost 2,000 dead that I knew could have happened, we lost just under 250. It was still too damn many, but a lot of people had been saved, and rescue operations had been much better coordinated and quicker than they could have been. I didn't need to fire Michael Brown, for instance, and he and John McCain got a lot of very favorable press for how they had handled things. I was content to let them, since John was going to need some help when he announced he was going to run for my job.

There was a weird dynamic going on, to my way of thinking. I knew how much better this had been handled than before, but it was still a disaster by any heretofore known standard. While the governors of Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, and Texas all hailed Mike Brown and John McCain for the work they had done and the leadership they had shown, since they were all Republicans it was treated as partisan politics. Meanwhile, Kathleen Blanco, the Governor of Louisiana, and Ray Nagin, the Mayor of New Orleans, were loudly complaining how we had all made everything worse, and how they would have done it so much better. Governor Blanco was still smarting at our overruling her on a half dozen different measures (for instance, she had refused to order the state fish and game department to rescue people; their boss ordered them in on his own, overriding her) and wanted to take back control of the National Guard and kick everybody else out – just send her the money and she would fix the problem! Meanwhile, Ray Nagin, who had been detained and dumped at the Superdome, was back and telling the residents of his city that I had personally taken my finger out of the dike, and thus flooded the city. He began a city by city tour of various refugee areas, telling them how I was personally delaying the recovery of the city (send him the money, not the Governor!) and that New Orleans would be rebuilt again as a 'Chocolate City', throwing racial tensions into the mix. Then it came out that in 2004, during a mock emergency meeting to simulate a hurricane hitting the city, nobody from either the Governor's staff nor the Mayor's staff bothered to show up. Congressional hearings were promised. Awkward!

Meanwhile, I began taking massive heat from the hard right wing of my own party. At least a half dozen televangelists began claiming that the reason 2005 had been such a deadly year for hurricanes was that America's leader (me!) had brought on God's wrath. I wasn't conservative enough, Republican enough, or Christian enough to properly lead America back to the path of righteousness. Among my many sins were my toleration of gays, immigrants, Jews, Papists (I had to tell Marilyn that I would need to divorce her to cure that particular sin; she was not amused!), and anybody else the preacher deemed unfavorable. Especially amusing was when Pat Robertson announced that when I had flown to New Orleans and Mobile, I had been on a recon flight for Satan. When Will Brucis was asked his thoughts about this at the next press briefing, he replied that he was simply incapable of understanding that kind of thinking.

The right wingers were also not amused when, in an interview after the storm, I was asked if I thought man-made global warming was to blame. "I think there is a link to climate change, though to what extent I am not sure. You can't tell me that seven billion plus people on this planet aren't having some sort of effect! That's not realistic."

"Are you saying that you believe in global warming?", asked an incredulous reporter. This was going against the entire Republican Party and conservative platform.

I nodded. "Yes, I would have to say I do. Now, we can argue about the extent and causes of it, but it's a scientific fact, and I say that as a mathematician and a scientist. The evidence is quite clear, and scientific opinion is overwhelmingly one-sided. That doesn't mean we know how to fix the problem yet, or what it will cost, or what the final long term effects will be, but the science is there."

This did not help with my standing in the Republican Party, which further dropped when Al Gore climbed up on his soapbox and loudly proclaimed how finally a Republican leader was joining him in his crusade. Wonderful! His name was anathema to the Republican Party, and the asshole was linking me to him. Just wonderful! Brewster McRiley told me bluntly that this would hurt campaign contributions from energy companies across the board in 2006 and 2008. Just fucking wonderful!

In the real world we had both good news and bad news. The bad news was very, very simple. The devastation was beyond calculating. Early estimates of the damage were in the $30 to $40 billion range, and were climbing by the day. Some estimates were topping out at over $100 billion. Adding in the damage from Hurricane Rita a few weeks later, which mangled East Texas, and screwed up the recovery efforts in Louisiana, and we were well over $125 billion. It was going to take years to rebuild the levees and clean up the mess, and in some places, there was nothing left to rebuild. The Good Lord had taken everything in the path of the storms! Worse was going to be the effect on the national economy. Building materials prices were already skyrocketing, as was the price of fuel. Almost a quarter of the nation's refining capacity had been shut down because of the storms, and gas prices were shooting up, and we were seeing gas lines again for the first time since the Seventies. If I had wanted a recession to take the heat off the economy, I was about to get it in spades.

The plus side? Since I hadn't reduced taxes, the odds were that we could pay for a lot of the cleanup. We weren't in a deficit situation and trying to pay for two wars off the books. It makes a big difference if you can go into a disaster with some money in the bank. It doesn't matter whether you are an individual, a family, or a country, the principle is the same. Our national credit rating was still exceptionally good, and if we did need to borrow, going into a deficit (quite probable, actually) would be a manageable situation, and one we could get out of in a year or two. Once again, I needed to figure out how not to let a perfectly good crisis go to waste. It is appallingly cold blooded, but that was how the game was played at this level. Maybe we could do something about the national flood insurance program, environmental concerns, and the like. I wasn't sure if I could pull it off, though. My popularity ratings continued to drop, and were now into the mid 40s.

The real plus side? My message that we were all Americans and we all needed to join together took real traction. Millions of people had been displaced by the storms, some for weeks and some for what looked to be many months, if not longer. All across the country, Americans were taking in their fellow citizens, providing temporary housing and food and support. Convoys of food and water, clothing, toys, and building supplies were pouring in from all over the nation. Utility crews were being rushed from all over America. Unsurprisingly, the youngest Americans took it to heart the most. College students were using their breaks and vacations to head south to help in the cleanup. Marilyn and I discovered this firsthand, when Holly and Molly announced they were going with some college friends down to New Orleans to help over the Christmas break. We simply nodded and Marilyn loaned them her American Express card for the trip. I knew the twins would be buying more than necessities with it; a close look at the next bill would probably end up showing thousands of dollars of emergency and relief supplies that I would turn a blind eye to. We had raised some good kids.

We stumbled through the end of 2005 without suffering anything else major happening. That didn't mean we got away scot-free. I was in a fairly routine press conference in mid-November, discussing some budget plans and the proposed Congressional hearings related to Katrina, when a question was lobbed out of the blue at me. "Mister President, how do you feel about Kansas requiring that creationism be taught in their schools?"

I had to blink for a second at that. Somewhere in America, every day of the year, somebody is trying to stop teaching evolution and begin teaching creationism instead. The latest round was when the Kansas Board of Education had some fundamentalists elected, and they promptly began phony hearings to discuss the 'controversy.' Just a week ago they had passed their new rules. Generally I had avoided this sort of thing. The scientists and judges would eventually win, and I wasn't going to convince any of the fundamentalists anyway.

Now somebody had dropped it in my lap. I needed this like I needed more holes in the head. After a second, I answered, "Well, I think it is the right of the citizens of Kansas to teach their children the way they see fit. If that means they want to stop teaching science and start teaching the Bible, then I suppose that is okay. On the other hand, it is also the right of every accreditation board in Kansas to yank the accreditation of any school that teaches creationism, and it is also the right of every college around the country to refuse to admit students who haven't been properly taught science."

That set a fox in the hen house! Punish children for the mistakes of their parents? How dare I suggest such an inhumane thing! More than a few op-ed pieces agreed with me, but not all. A number of newspapers, mostly from rural areas, railed about how Washington was taking over local education, and how much better children would be learning the values of their parents and communities, and how education was historically a state and local matter, and how I had overstepped my bounds by weighing in on the subject. I tried to stay out of it, since I was figuring the matter would eventually blow over. Sooner or later the fine citizens of Kansas would come to their senses and toss out the religious right.

Will and Frank came to me and asked me if I wanted to speak on this in some public forum. I looked aghast at this, and answered, "Not on your life! You want me tarred and feathered!?"

Will replied, "There are a lot of religious groups that want to ask your feelings on things."

"And that is exactly why I don't want to answer them! Ever heard that a little religion goes a long, long way? Will, we do not want to fight this fight."

"How so, Mister President?", asked Frank.

"Because religion makes no sense. You can't mix religion with science and math. The religious folks want me to be a true believer, and I'm not all that true. If I say that evolution is correct, then I am telling them that the Bible is wrong. There are huge numbers of people who believe that Jesus personally wrote the Bible in 17th Century English. Well, he didn't, and you know it. It's entirely possible the man couldn't even read and write, and if he did, it would have been in Aramaic! Do you think I actually want to get into this on national television?"

"So, how do you reconcile the facts?', he asked. "I'm just curious, is all."

I smiled at that. "The same way most of us do, by picking and choosing and ignoring what I don't understand. Am I a Christian? Yes, but not one who's all that fired up. They say there are no atheists in foxholes, and I've been in a foxhole, and that is true. Us scientific types believe in the Big Bang which started everything. Great, but somebody had to light the fuse, right? Let's leave it at that."

I refused to get dragged any further into this. The religious right did not have a friend in me, and they knew it. They had learned that very early on in my first term, when I refused to put into law any restrictions on stem cell research. George had planned a ban on research, and I shitcanned that, just about the same time I cleaned out the Faith Based Initiatives group. Likewise I had studiously stayed out of the Terry Schiavo case, refusing to allow the Justice Department into that mess, and counseling Jeb Bush to leave it alone. The same was true with my stance on gay rights. I was the only Republican to have voted against the Defense of Marriage Act when it passed in 1996. It wasn't so much a matter of gay rights (I wasn't 'Don't ask, don't tell', I was 'Don't ask, don't care.') as the fact that the law was unconstitutional on its face. These were fights I was never going to win.

Meanwhile, John began ramping up his campaign, and began flying out to Iowa and New Hampshire on a regular basis. I advised him to feel relatively free to publicly disassociate himself from some of my positions, though I was sure that was going to bite the both of us in the ass. For instance, I had managed to avoid supporting ethanol for fuel throughout the last campaign, since I didn't have to campaign in Iowa for the primary. Personally, I thought that using corn for fuel instead of for food was moronic! John was not going to have that luxury. He was going to need to campaign, and in Iowa, and somebody was going to ask him.

He wasn't the only one running, of course. Oh, no question, he was the front runner, and the strong favorite, but there were a bunch of others. Whatever unanimity the party had was breaking down. Mike Huckabee was the former governor of Arkansas (a job Bill Clinton once held) and was the vanguard of the Religious Right. Ron Paul, a Congressman from Texas, was pushing his Libertarian agenda, and Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, was pushing his business credentials. Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, was riding his leadership during 9-11 in the hopes of moving into the big leagues. There were others, too, without a hope in hell, but looking for support. Nobody had officially announced they were in the running, but everybody was forming exploratory committees dedicated to exploring for money and support among the local party faithful.

The standard plan would be to explore all through 2006 before making an official announcement sometime around the end of 2006 or the beginning of 2007. After that, they would be officially campaigning. The primaries would start in January of 2008, run for about three or four months, and be tied up long before the conventions.

Right now, everybody was running around New Hampshire and Iowa, trying to line up precinct captains and local supporters, and giving speeches and going door to door. No way would I ever have gone through with that! Some of these guys were practically living in these states. The theory was that they only had a little money, so they would concentrate in the early primary states. If they could do well, they could use that to force open donor's wallets and get enough money to bombard the next few states, and so forth. These were all long shot candidates, but it was a definite possibility, which was why they did it.

On the Democratic side, the odds-on favorite was Hillary Clinton, who had separated herself politically from her worthless philandering husband, and was now the junior senator from New York. After that, it was just a pack of wannabes, led by John Edwards, the V.P. nominee from last time, the guy who had ridden my ass about my bastard son. The dark horse candidate (and what a pun that was!) was Barack Obama, who had given such an electrifying speech at their last convention, and was the junior senator from Illinois. There was a very dangerous dynamic going on. Women loved Hillary, and most women voted Democratic. Blacks loved Obama, the first really serious black candidate this country had ever seen who could actually win white votes. Either one might win their nomination and face off against John McCain.

When this happened on my first trip, the country had been on a seven year binge of overspending and a real estate bubble, all of which broke the economy in the late summer of 2008. Until that point, McCain was winning. After that, he lost. Additionally, he had the albatross of a very unpopular President around his neck. I was nowhere near as unpopular as George would have been by now. McCain had an excellent chance at beating either Clinton or Obama, unless the wheels came off by 2008. It was my job to see that didn't happen.

It didn't always work out so easily. In early 2006, Harry Reid decided to poke a finger in my eye, because he was getting heat from Governor Blanco in Louisiana. He decided to put a hold on any further appointments I wanted to make. He had been making himself a nuisance for the last year, since the Democrats took power in the Senate, and was starting to feel like he was in charge. My appointments last year had taken longer to confirm, with a lot of hullaballoo at times, and several Federal judgeships were still sitting vacant. Now he informed us that nothing would get approved until hearings were held on the Federal response to Hurricane Katrina. He wanted Michael Brown's head on a platter, as a sop to Blanco.

I grimaced and had Brown over to the White House when I heard about this. I told him that I had no intention of firing him, and that his performance during the hurricanes had been good. My question was what were his intentions for staying at FEMA?

"I was planning to leave at the end of the year, sir, if that is all right. I have been getting some interesting offers from a few outfits over on K Street, if you know what I mean."

I nodded. "I am sure you have had some offers. I imagine you'll also be working on some political fund raising for a few people."

He smiled and nodded. "The Vice President has made a few comments along that line."

"That's only because John McCain is a smart guy, and is going to win this thing! Okay, so, you are going to leave by the end of 2006, but not right away. That works for me, and I'll support you, but don't be surprised if Harry Reid makes an ass of himself along the way. He is definitely going to be holding hearings on Katrina, and you and your agency are going to be giving testimony. I wouldn't be able to stop that even if I tried, and it would be hopeless for me to fight it."

"What are you going to do about the hold on appointments?", Brown asked.

"I am not sure, at least not yet.", I answered, with another grimace. "Listen, about you and FEMA, you're going to be leaving there. Now, don't get me wrong, but you're political, a money man and a fixer. That's why George put both you and Allbaugh over there. I'm not saying you both didn't do good jobs, but I want the next guy to be a pro, you understand."

"I follow you, Mister President. You're right, that's how we ended up there.", he agreed.

"So, like I said, you both did well, but I'm going to want one of your long time people taking over when you leave. Figure out a name or two for me. Neither of us wants to see an amateur in that job. If the climate scientists are right, the problems are going to increase, not decrease!"

"Crap!", he said lowly. He nodded in understanding and I let him go at that. I smiled to myself, though. Mike Brown would be leaving his job at some point, but not in disgrace. Assuming he did a decent job as lobbyist and fundraiser over the next couple of years, he was a prime candidate for a Cabinet post in a McCain administration. Commerce or Transportation would be naturals for him.

I thought about it, and then called and asked Frank Keating to come over.

John Ashcroft had resigned as Attorney General in February of 2005, after suffering through a very severe bout of pancreatitis in the spring of 2004. He was much more conservative than I was, and a whole lot more religious, but the man had integrity, and he fiercely protected the Constitution. During the remainder of 2004 he and I spoke frequently, and he told me he would resign right after the Inauguration. He liked my idea of Frank Keating as a replacement, and between the two of us we got Frank on board. Frank had been out of office since the start of 2003, and had taken a couple of positions on boards of various companies. He accepted my offer and we managed to get him confirmed as the new Attorney General in 2005.

That's not to say it was easy. There was a lot of rancor coming out of the Senate at this, and they delayed his confirmation for over a month. It wasn't that Keating was all that controversial a fellow, or that he hadn't been a decent Governor of Oklahoma. It was that it was a way for Harry Reid to be difficult with me without spending a lot of his influence doing so. It cost me more to confirm him than it cost Harry to slow things down. Harry also slowed down a number of Federal judgeships as well, again, at very little personal cost. Worst of all, we now had two empty seats on the Supreme Court. Sandra Day O'Connor had stepped down and William Rehnquist had died, and the Senate Judiciary Committee had my nominees (one male, one female, both moderates) on hold.

By 2006 I was getting extra pissed at this, so I simply decided to say 'Screw you!' to the Senate. On Monday, February 20, the Senate recessed for a week. On Thursday morning, February 23, I went down to the Press Room during the morning Daily Press Briefing, and made a statement. In part, it read:

"The nation's business does not end when the Senate is in recess. Crime still occurs when the Senate is in recess. The police still catch criminals when the Senate is in recess. The courts still function when the Senate is in recess. If the Senate decides to hold up all Federal appointments to the Justice Department, that is their right to do so. I have put forth names of qualified men and women to fill vacant positions throughout the Justice Department, and the Senate has put these names on hold, in some cases for many months. We can no longer wait and hope that crime will diminish during this period. Later this afternoon I intend to swear in, as recess appointments, the following people..."

With that I named an Associate Attorney General, a Deputy Solicitor General, two U.S. Attorneys, and ten Federal Judges. (A recess appointment of a Supreme Court Justice might well be unconstitutional; the Senate had officially expressed their displeasure after Eisenhower did it three times; I didn't dare try that one!) I had spoken to all of them beforehand, and all were stashed in hotels in Washington, waiting for this moment. There was no way for the Senate to reconvene in time to stop this. I did, however, warn each of the people involved that the Senate might well refuse to confirm them, and that some, if not all of them, might be out of a job in a year's time. While most of my nominees were Republican, as a bipartisan gesture I had named three Democrats as Federal judges, and they had all grinned and said they were the safest of the bunch.

Well, there's nothing quite like throwing bombs into a packed crowd to get the adrenaline pumping! The Democrats in the Senate were foaming-at-the-mouth mad at me for being so presumptuous to deny them their Constitutional duty to advise and consent. How dare I act so illegally! This was worthy of impeachment!

Despite it being a recess, Harry Reid and Arlen Specter, the Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which was where all the nominees were bottled up, managed to make it onto television that night. Unlike Harry, Arlen and I got along okay, but he was under orders from Harry to put a cork in the bottle. Both men were in full blown high dudgeon, and demanded that I cancel these illegal and ill-considered appointments, and promised a court fight when they got back from recess.

They might actually be right. The idea of a recess appointment dated back to the 18th Century, when the Senate was out of session more often than not, and a President couldn't afford to wait months to appoint somebody. In theory, he could appoint somebody as needed, and they would stay in office until the end of the current Congressional session, at which point they would need to be confirmed by the Senate to keep their job. This worked fairly well up until the 20th Century, when travel speeds had increased to the point the Senate could actually stay in town longer. Theoretically the Senate was in recess whenever they were out for more than three days, which is why I waited until Thursday to do this. On the other hand, ever since Clinton had been President, the Senate had begun having sham sessions. They would go away, and every third day some Senator, whoever was in town, would show up, bang a gavel, say they were in session, bang the gavel again, and go back into recess. It was total fakery.

Screw it. I threw it back in their laps. I claimed the sham sessions were just that, fakes, and dared them to push me on it. It would take a court challenge to throw the nominees out, or they would simply have to stop taking so many recesses and actually get some work done once in awhile. They could scream all they wanted, but in the meantime, the Justice Department was fully staffed. When the Dems started screaming on the Sunday morning news shows, our response was always that these were perfectly qualified people, most of whom had previous experience in the Federal justice system, that the delays were nothing more than political gamesmanship by the Democratic Party, and actually, what was the real problem? That I had candidates that weren't qualified, or that I was calling a halt to their little game of sham sessions? In the meantime, the President was giving this tempest in a teapot the consideration it deserved, which wasn't much. He was going to keep on serving the people of the United States, even if the Senate refused to.

It was a hullaballoo, all right. Not all of the Republicans liked my stunt, since one of these days they would have the whip hand over a Democratic President, and besides, this was saying that they weren't that important, either. I sort of apologized to them, but held firm, and suggested that they start beating on the Dems about this. Push the bipartisan nature of what I was trying to do. Push that we needed a full Supreme Court. Push that it was costing the American taxpayer by delaying court proceedings. Wrap these appointments in an American flag and fly the damn thing!

By March, Reid caved in. We allowed a token Democrat and a token Republican judge to be non-confirmed, after negotiating with both of them (they both found lucrative positions in the private sector), confirmed everybody else, and scheduled confirmation hearings for the Supreme Court nominees. Harry Reid and I kissed and made up on television, in a wonderful bipartisan show of support. As I stood next to him I debated wearing body armor.

In March we had hearings on Katrina and Rita and the Federal response. As predicted, Mike Brown was front and center for almost a week, as every Democrat reamed him a new one and every Republican praised him to the sky. Not a damn one of them cared a lick about what happened, but they all wanted air time and sound bites to use during their upcoming campaigns. Unsurprisingly, the formal report was scheduled to be issued after the election, and early indications indicated that despite the rhetoric coming from the Congressional hearings, most of the problems were going to be blamed squarely on Ray Nagin and Kathleen Blanco. Mike Brown resigned right after the July 4th holiday, and we jointly introduced his replacement at a Press Room briefing, and I sent him out with a party and a public commendation. Screw Harry Reid!

That was just part of what happened between the fall of 2005 and the spring of 2006, of course. Katrina was just one of the issues I had to face. Right now I was continuing the slow and steady pace I had always proclaimed. I wasn't cutting taxes. We seemed to be at a good point for reasonable economic growth and a moderate surplus. The surplus paid off the older debt and gave us a cushion for disasters, like Katrina. As always, it was better to have a disaster with money in the bank than having to borrow it. Meanwhile we had cancelled enough pie-in-the-sky military programs to free up the funds to ramp up training and begin a pivot away from Europe and towards Asia. The F-35 was dead, as was the next generation Navy destroyer/cruiser package, and I had ordered a new frigate design instead of the ridiculous 'Littoral Combat Ship' that the Navy had pushed. Support assets had been heavily beefed up, and we had massively expanded and improved our facilities on Guam and the surrounding islands. Interestingly, some of our local allies seemed rather heartened by this. They could see the Chinese putting huge sums into their own military and were getting nervous. The Philippines, for example, had previously kicked us out, and were now making gestures at allowing us access to the old Subic Bay Naval Base and Clark Air Base facilities. Meanwhile we were drawing down our assets in Europe.

Overseas, we were continuing to keep the lid on things without having to invade anybody. I had small Special Forces teams assigned to the Kurds. North Korea I was pointedly ignoring. The current South Korean administration was making accommodating noises to their northern brethren, who were waving the nuclear flag and demanding money. I told the South Koreans they could do what they wanted, but the U.S. wasn't coughing up a dime, and we weren't making any concessions. Iran we had sanctions on, and we kept them in place, and thumbed our noses at them and Iraq in general. Afghanistan had settled down into a nice little civil war, and we were providing low levels of support to the Northern Alliance. We were also kissing up to India, to try and wean them from the Russians, and keep the Pakistanis under control.

The wheels began to come off that finely crafted strategy in February of 2006. Turkey announced they were building a new oil pipeline extending to the Iraqi border in Kurdistan, and were looking forward to making a deal for Kurdish oil with the semi-autonomous government in Erbil. At that point Saddam Hussein began mouthing off. The Kurds were nothing more than a bunch of rebels (true) and the oil was the property of the Iraqi people (read that as his property.) The Iraqi nation demanded that Turkey break off their illegal theft of Kurdish territory and property. Also, the Kurds should behave and get in line to allow him to kill them off easier.

Prime Minister Erdogan of Turkey basically told Hussein where to head in. The Turks had a reputation for being tough fighters, and they had decent weaponry through NATO and modern purchases. Their national economy was also quite a bit stronger than Iraq's. Meanwhile, the Kurds also told Hussein to go pound salt. The no-fly zone was being rigorously enforced, and I had zero interest in loosening it.

Reconnaissance overflights, satellite intelligence, and signal intercepts all began raising the possibility that Hussein might be contemplating something in terms of ground action, but it wasn't clear yet what was happening. The National Security Council was informed by Richard Clarke in mid-February that the Republican Guard was moving troops and mechanized units into the no-fly zone and towards the Kurdish boundary areas. A major concentration was in the vicinity south of Kirkuk, one of the areas Hussein had 'Arabized' by moving in lots of Sunnis to work in the oil fields and then kicked out a lot of the Kurds.

Part of the brief by Richard was the past history of Hussein against the Kurds. Put bluntly, the man was a genocidal maniac. Depending on time frame and specifics, he had killed off anywhere from 50,000 to 250,000 Kurds over the years, and had used chemical weapons on more than one occasion. Now it looked like he was gearing up to go at them again. If we let him, the result would be predictable. Kurds would stream across the borders into Turkey, Syria, and Iran, potentially destabilizing all three countries, something that would only benefit Hussein. As it was, under stable conditions they had actually been moving into Iraq. Turkey had found one of the best benefits to cooperation with the Kurds over a pipeline; it calmed down the PKK, the Kurdish Worker's Party militia in the eastern provinces, who tended towards guerilla attacks on the Turks.

The best current intelligence was that Hussein was either preparing for an attack on Kurdistan, or was simply trying to provoke us into doing something stupid and then playing the martyr for the Arab world. "That's the best you have, Richard? That he's either going to attack or he's not going to attack?", I asked sarcastically.

"Mister President, that's the best we can say right now. The preparations you make are the same. He might not even know at the moment. He might just want to scare people and make up his mind later.", Richard added.

He wasn't backing down, or trying to give me an answer I wanted. I could live with that. I looked around the room. I shrugged and nodded. "Let's look at this as two parts. What do we do now to try and deter the bastard, and what do we do next if he attacks anyway?" There was a murmur of agreement at that. I looked back at Clarke. "When would their preparations be ready? If they attack into Kurdistan, what would be the timetable and what would be their objectives?"

We were meeting in the Situation Room, and Richard put one of the analysts on the spot. A Navy Commander flashed a map of the border region up on a screen and overlaid it with some symbols. "Current projections have them still maneuvering assault and support units towards the border. It's still February, and Kurdistan is very cold right now, but will warm shortly, in another month or two. By summer it will be blistering hot. The campaign season will begin by the end of March, maybe earlier if the weather improves, and run through the end of November. At the current pace, if they want to attack in March, they will be on schedule for that."

She flashed another map up on the screen. "The main focus of their assault units is currently in Tikrit, a Sunni stronghold south of Kirkuk. From there they can quickly push forward to the border, with a first leap to the border, and then a second into Kurdistan itself. Depending on their focus, we are either looking at an assault east of Kirkuk, one centered between Erbil and Kirkuk, or possibly both, in an attempt to isolate and surround Kirkuk. After subduing Kirkuk, they would be positioned to move on Erbil, and then Mosul. It all depends on the level of resources they have to commit."

"And that level currently is?", I pressed.

"Unsure, sir. Certainly enough to capture Kirkuk and thoroughly trash it. Moving on to Erbil would probably require some consolidation and major resupply.", she replied.

I grunted a response and looked around. "So, what do we do about this? Do we back down, or do we back up the Kurds? Assuming the Iraqis actually do something, I mean."

"We have to back the Kurds! We can't cave to Hussein.", answered John McCain.

"It's as simple as that? We go to war? Nothing less?"

"Yes, sir. It's as simple as that. We are backing these people now, and we have troops on the line training them. If there is an attack, we are going to lose troops.", he replied.

"So, do we pull the troops? Try and deescalate things?", I pushed back.

"It won't work, Mister President.", responded Condi Rice, the Secretary of State. "Pulling back will be taken as a sign of weakness, not of trying to calm things down. It will be seen as weakness by Hussein, as well as by the Kurds and by Erdogan."

I grunted at that. "Turkey's a member of NATO. Any chance we can get NATO in on this?"

"Marginal. They are only obligated if a fellow member of NATO is attacked. If Hussein goes after Turkey, maybe then.", she said.

"If we do go in, we will need Turkish assets. At the minimum, we will need to use Incirlik to fly combat patrols out of. Will they go along with that?", I asked.

Condi looked over at Tom Ridge, the Secretary of Defense. He nodded back to her. She turned back to me and said, "Everything I am hearing is they are prepared to cooperate. They might not send in troops, but they will allow overflights and cross border support. Erdogan is very interested in calming the Kurds down in the eastern part of the country."

"Is there any chance that we can get Hussein to back down on this? Does he understand that he is looking at Gulf War Two with this?", I asked, to no one in particular.

"I don't think it makes a difference, Mister President." I turned to face the speaker, Eric Shinseki, the National Security Adviser. After the Able Danger incident, I had brought him on board officially as Deputy National Security Adviser under Condoleeza Rice. Now that she was the Secretary of State, he had moved up to his old boss' job. "Iraq's foreign policy is whatever wacky idea Saddam Hussein wakes up with. The man is a textbook psychopath, and I am not being facetious. The only thing he cares about is staying in power. If he kills off every last person in the country but himself, that is just fine as far as he is concerned. Current estimates are that Hussein is facing internal pressure related to their collapsing economy, and needs an external threat to distract the public. This fills the bill. The average Iraqi doesn't like the Kurds. Hussein's been spending the last fifteen years rebuilding his army. He figures it's about time he used it."

"Shit!", I muttered. Unfortunately, it made sense. "Does anybody here disagree with Eric? Is there any chance we are going to be able to smart our way out of this?"

There were a lot of silent faces looking back at me. The Vice President said, "Carl, you know what we have to do."

"Doesn't mean I have to like it, John." He snorted and gave me a half smile. He was right, too. I knew what needed to be done. I shrugged and said, "Okay, then let's do it."

I looked around the table. "We need to try to shut this down. If we can't, we need to prepare. Condi, you and Tom get to play diplomat. I want you on Air Force One tomorrow, first stop Ankara. I want you to discuss this whole situation with Erdogan. If he can pressure Hussein to back down, fine, but if we have to go in, get him on board. After that, see everybody else you need to. Tom, you need to do double duty. You and the Joint Chiefs need to start getting assets figured out. I don't want to send in troops now, but we are going to need some options. Get me those options." I turned next to Eric. "Eric, I want you running point with NATO. Start trying to drum up some support, characterize it as supporting Turkey, a fellow NATO member. The Brits will probably assist, but see what you can do with the others, too."

"Yes, sir.", said Tom. Condi and Eric nodded in agreement.

"Condi, prep things for a phone call to Putin. Iraq's a Russian client. Maybe he has some pull."

She nodded at that.

"Richard, you crank up anything you have for intel." I looked over at Winston Creedmore, who had been added to the National Security Council. "Does Counter Terrorism have anything on this?"

"No, but I'll order a top level verification on this. Maybe the Russians have something we can access.", he replied.

I nodded. "Thank you. This doesn't look like it is going to start for another month or two, so we should be safe with a meeting next week. Frank will schedule something for when Condi, Tom, and Eric get back." I looked around and saw people nodding and taking notes. "Thank you. John, I need to see you privately."

John and I went upstairs to the Oval Office, where we sat down in a couple of armchairs. "I am getting a very bad feeling that we are going to have to do something about that asshole.", I told him.

"Who, Saddam Hussein?", he asked. I nodded grimly, and he asked, "Sorry you didn't help your predecessor in taking him out?"

I grimaced at that. "No, not really. That was different. George and that bunch wanted to invade Iraq and make it into America Junior. They had no plan for ever getting out, and didn't want to, in fact. I am nowhere near as certain as they were. I'd be satisfied to kick his ass up between his ears and go home."

"And do you think we can do that? I don't. I think we are going to have to take him out of the game for good this time."

I sighed. "That's what I'm afraid of. It's one thing to send in a few A-teams and fly patrols out of Incirlik. This is shaping up to be a major campaign. I do not want to get bogged down halfway around the world trying to invade Iraq!"

"Carl, you may not have a choice. Short of dumping the Kurds to their fate, we will have to get involved.", he told me.

I sighed and nodded. "I know. Just because I don't like it, it doesn't mean I won't do it."

It would be a crowning monument to my hubris if I ended up in a war in Iraq, after killing off George Bush just to prevent us from going to war in Iraq! Was it possible for me to change anything? Or was the best that I could do be to simply delay the inevitable? Had I managed to improve anything in the last five years?

I followed the travels of Tom Ridge and Condi Rice as they bounced around the Middle East. I got nightly updates as they met with anybody they could think of to calm down the situation. Erdogan was not happy with Hussein, and agreed to allow combat patrols out of Incirlik, as well as logistic support across the border. We could even send troops and equipment across the country by train as needed. Kuwait was also on board, since they still had harsh memories of what Hussein had done to them in 1991. Most of the rest of the neighbors weren't as cooperative. Iran would love to see us bogged down in Iraq; they were traditional enemies, but they hated us as well. A fight would weaken us both and leave them in a stronger position. They would not be looking for peace to break out. The same was true in Syria. Jordan did want peace, but was relatively defenseless against the Iraqis, as was Saudi Arabia. Condi told us that she had asked the Jordanians and the Saudis to attempt some diplomatic pressure, and try to get Hussein to back off. According to them, Hussein simply replied that it was a training exercise, and they needed to mind their own business. That was also what we heard from the neutrals Swedes and Swiss.

A real sore spot was Israel. They were watching the developing situation with considerable alarm, and for good reason. Even though they were not the target of any attack, Saddam Hussein was probably targeting them with his missiles. During the Gulf War, which they sat out of since an Israeli presence would have destroyed the coalition, Hussein had fired missiles at them, simply hoping for a response. If he did the same, and the Israelis responded with a counterattack, it could blow up any hope of an Arab solution to the problem. I wanted this as contained as possible.

I even called Vladimir Putin in Russia to see if he could pressure the Iraqis into backing down. This was a long shot at best. Iraq was a long time buyer of Russian weapons. Putin had no overwhelming interest in not selling them more, as long as the Iraqis paid cash on the barrelhead. They had been manipulating the oil-for-food program for years, and pouring the funds into Russian weapons. I simply told Vladimir that if he couldn't help us, to stay out of our way, because if we had to go in, Iraq wasn't going to be a customer for long.

Eric worked NATO, and got a lot of sympathy but not much assistance. Britain agreed to assist, and began to mobilize some troops, but most of the rest simply said they would wait and see. I sighed, but couldn't blame him. It wasn't their fight. I told him to simply come home, and we would figure it out if we needed to.

When Tom and Condi returned, I met with them together, and then we had a full meeting of the NSC. It didn't seem as if any of our diplomatic efforts were paying off. Hussein continued to slowly funnel troops and armored vehicles towards a general area south of Kirkuk, and was beginning to conduct wartime drills with them. He would surge his troops forward, and then stop and back away. Routine training exercises were the explanation, not that it was our business to ask! The Kurdish government, such as it was, was getting nervous and had invited us to bring in troops. Unfortunately, that is nowhere near as easy as you might think. That was a big focus of the meeting.

America has a large and powerful army, but it isn't easy to get them anywhere fast. If the shit were to hit the fan, there would be limited things we could do quickly. We could shuttle an Air Force wing or two into Incirlik within a few days. Incirlik was far enough away from Iraq that they couldn't attack there, but that worked the other way, as well. Combat flights into Iraq would need tanker support. We could send in the Marines, but the nearest beach was in southern Iraq, near Basra. The Marines would need to fight their way north, through the Iraqis, to meet the Kurds in northern Iraq. That was simply insane. Theoretically we could ship them through the Bosporus and into the Black Sea, and then land them in northeastern Turkey, but there were a bunch of treaties designed to prevent that sort of thing, and no way was Russia going to be amused by our sending our Navy into the Black Sea.

The Navy could sail a carrier or two into the Gulf, and fly combat patrols, as well as launch Tomahawks from several different directions, but that ignored one of the fundamentals of combat. You can bomb a country, strafe it, fly over it, sail around it, hell, you can even nuke it, but you can't control it until you stick a teenager with a gun on it. We needed to get troops into position. That isn't easy. I could order the 82nd Airborne into position, and they would get elements in place within 24 hours. After that it gets dicey. The 82nd is primarily an infantry outfit, though if they had trucks they would have some mobility. During the Gulf War we sent them in first, but only the fact that Hussein held off on attacking American units saved them from being anything more than a speed bump.

It would take a heavy armor presence to really stick it to the Republican Guard. The nearest American armor was maybe a brigade's worth in Germany, perhaps 100 M-1 Abrams tanks and a matching number of M-2 Bradleys and other vehicles. Those could be loaded on trains and shipped by rail from their locations into eastern Turkey. That might take two weeks, if we were lucky. We could probably scrape up about another brigade's worth by pulling everything else possible out of Europe, and by asking for assistance from the Brits. They were the only ones I could see helping us. Again, maybe in two to three weeks they might be showing up. If we needed to bring in a heavy division, the only place we would get one or two of those was from here in the States. That would require moving the division to the nearest port, loading it onto appropriate shipping, and then sending it across the Atlantic and through the Med to Turkey, where they would disembark and be rail freighted to eastern Turkey. Even at high speed, that was going to take at least a month and probably more. Another possibility was the 101st Air Assault Division, the 'Screaming Eagles'; they could be brought in, but they would go after the 82nd, and since nobody had developed a helicopter that could fly across the Atlantic Ocean, their gear mostly needed to be shipped as well.

Just as problematic, all of our contingency planning for Iraq was based on a repeat of the Gulf War. We had several divisions' worth of equipment pre-loaded on ships at Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. They could sail for Kuwait in a heartbeat – but we weren't attacking from Kuwait! To do any good in Kurdistan, we would need to sail them through the Red Sea into the Med, and then up to Turkey. It would probably take just as long as bringing in a division from the States.

I sat there while General Peter Pace, the Marine replacement for Richard Myers as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, gave us a briefing on what units could be sent to Iraq as needed. Ever since the Gulf War, most military planning had been focused on Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, the southern half of Iraq. Not as much planning had gone into the northern half, and it was showing. We didn't have a huge range of options. At the end, all of the eyes turned to me.

"Okay, so this is why they pay me the big bucks, I guess.", I said, with a wry smile. "First, if the Iraqis move into Kurdish territory, we will back up the Kurds. Does anybody here have an issue with that?" I looked around, and mostly saw nods of agreement. "Going once ... going twice ... Sold! The Kurds are our official allies. Condi, start figuring out how we go about formally recognizing the Kurds as a nation. Somebody will have to draw some borders up, etcetera, that sort of thing. Talk to the British, see if we can get them on board, anybody else you can think of, too."

"Yes, sir. Give me a few days and I will be able to report on that.", she answered.

I turned to General Pace. "General, you are going to need to start getting some units prepared to move. We have, what, maybe a month, tops, before the Iraqis move. Start lining up the troops and prepping the way. Position your planes and support, that sort of thing."

"Understood, Mister President. Any preferences?"

I shook my head. "I never made it higher than battery commander, General. You'll know more than I would. If it hits the fan, figure I'll order the 82nd in immediately, and follow that up with anybody we can scrape out of Europe. Let's meet again a week from now, and you can brief us on what to expect, and when."

"Aye aye, sir!"

I had to smile at that. Just like Charlie, a typical gung-ho jarhead response. "You sound just like my son, General." I looked at everybody. "I don't want to have to do this, but if I do, I want it massive and lethal. The American public is going to want to know why we didn't deal with this jackass before, so we'd better deal with him now! Richard, really get cracking on any intel you can provide, and dial in anybody you have over there with the Kurds. Condi, you and Eric try to get anybody with any kind of influence over Hussein to get him to back down. Anybody here, if there is something that needs doing and you need me to do it, let me know. What do I need to do to make this better?" I looked over at Paul O'Neill, who was still in place at Treasury. "Paul, this is going to cost us a fortune! How much and what will be the effect? Crank up your wizards and figure that one out, please."

"You got it!", he acknowledged.

One problem I grappled with was just how public to make this. As a general rule, you don't want to tell the enemy your plans, and troop and equipment movements certainly qualified. On the other hand, part of having a big military is to use it as a deterrent, and by definition, it won't deter anybody if they don't know you are up to something. Would it deter Hussein, though? We had no proof that it would, and as had been said, his idea of policy was whatever idea he had when he woke up in the morning. If I moved troops in now, when international law still considered the Kurdish territories part of Iraq, we would be guilty of invading a peace loving country! Worse, by our responding now, he might just well move up his timetable to try and preempt us.

Over the next few days, things kept getting tenser. By the beginning of March I signed off on the order to begin moving troops and planes. The 82nd Airborne was moved to a higher state of readiness, and all leaves were cancelled, and the transports began lining up on the runways. Rail cars were ordered into special trains and the kasernes in Germany were emptied and loaded onto the flatbeds; they would begin moving towards Turkey as soon as practical, for 'routine training.' The 4th Fighter Wing, a mix of F-15s and F-16s in North Carolina, was ordered to surge to Incirlik, also for routine training. The Air Force began warming their bombers up, and began moving tanker and support aircraft into position. The Navy began moving a couple of carriers into the southern end of the Persian Gulf, and accompanied them with some Tomahawk missile armed ships and subs.

None of this was cheap. It costs hundreds of millions of dollars to move things around, and none of it had been budgeted for. Treasury had already told me that we were going to blow through the contingency funds the Pentagon had for this sort of emergency.

We wanted a couple of months to prepare and move the chess pieces into place. We didn't even get two weeks.

Chapter 161: A Rock and a Hard Place

Tuesday, March 14, 2006

It was 3:00 AM when the Secret Service came to wake me. I came to with an agent standing by the side of our bed, gently nudging my right shoulder. I was spooned up behind my wife, who wasn't wearing anything (things had gotten vigorous that evening!) Thankfully she had pulled the sheets up around her shoulders. It took me a few seconds to realize what was happening, and then I groggily looked around. The light in the bedroom was on, and the agent who had been standing post outside the Residence floor was standing next to me. "What the hell?", I asked.

"I'm sorry, sir, but there's a problem.", he replied.

"Huh? What?" I rolled over and looked up at him.

Marilyn mumbled something and then rolled over. Seeing the light on, she opened her eyes and asked, "Carl, what ... WHO ARE YOU!?" She scrambled down even further under the covers.

"Mister President, you need to come with us. There's a problem. There's a call from the Pentagon.", repeated the agent, who began trying to help me out of bed.

I sat upright and rubbed my eyes. "You couldn't call?"

"You slept through it, sir."

"Christ on a crutch. Okay, give me a second." I rubbed my eyes again, and then rolled upright. "Go back to sleep, Marilyn. I'll handle this."

I stood up and headed into the bathroom. At least I had my briefs on. I took a leak and grabbed a pair of khakis and my bathrobe. When I came out, the agent had retreated to the living room. "What's going on?", I demanded.

"They need you in the Situation Room, sir. They wouldn't say why, but they really want to see you ASAP!". He answered.

"This better be good!", I muttered, instantly realizing that whatever the reason was, I sure didn't want it to be good! That would mean something had gone very wrong somewhere in the world.

He followed me down the elevator and to the Situation Room. I remember hearing that Johnson had gone down there at night in his pajamas to run the Viet Nam War. I hoped it wasn't a precedent. I thought it might be, though. There is normally a flow and banter to conversations in the room, and now the air was icy and tense. An Army light bird was running the night shift. "You guys want me for something?", I asked.

He took a deep breath. "Yes, sir. It's Iraq. They have made their move. Heavy bombardment and an attack against Peshmerga positions both east and west of Kirkuk." I grunted and nodded. They had been surging back and forth for the last two weeks, feigning an attack and then backing down. Classic strategy, get your enemy used to your operational tactics, and then when he gets used to them, the next time you don't back down. You move forward. "Sir, they are using chemical weapons."

I stopped and stared at the lieutenant colonel, and then glanced around the room. The others were nodding somberly at this. "Seriously? They used gas? Is this confirmed?"

A major piped up from the corner. "Yes, sir, we are getting aerial confirmation from drones near Kirkuk, and it's worse than that."

"Talk to me, Major."

"They have hit at least two A-teams working with the Peshmerga. We had confirmation from a commo sergeant in one of them, and both are off the air. They are using mustard gas, and it's pretty ugly.", he continued.

I expelled my breath softly. "Ohhhhh ... shit!" Every eye in the room was on me. "All right, give me fifteen minutes to take a quick shower and dress. When I get back, I want a briefing. Start calling in the entire National Security Council, and tell the Joint Chiefs that we will begin operations shortly. Tell them to take the safeties off, because we will be going in hot and hard."

Everybody seemed to stand taller as I said that. I headed back upstairs, to find a worried Marilyn in a bathrobe. "What's wrong?", she asked.

"Don't worry. It's Iraq. You should go back to bed."

"Just like that? What are you doing?", she pressed.

I stopped in the bathroom door and faced her, trying to smile. "I have to take a shower and get dressed. I'll just be downstairs. Don't worry. We're fine and the kids are fine. I just have to go be Presidential for awhile." I turned back and stripped off my robe and pants. I didn't need my wife to worry that I was getting our country involved in a war where people were using weapons of mass destruction.

That's what it was, of course. Mustard gas was a chemical weapon, part of the unholy trinity of nuclear weapons, chemical weapons, and biological weapons. For years our country had active programs in all three areas, but we had renounced chemical and biological weapons for quite some time. Personally, with my previous life experience as a chemist, nerve gas and the other gasses just scared the living hell out of me. A thimbleful of Sarin was enough to kill everybody in a small town or city, and we and the Russians didn't have just thimblefuls, we had warehouses of this stuff spread around the world! The U.S. had been destroying it, as had Russia, but there was still some around.

Mustard gas was a blister agent, and dated back to World War I. It was nasty shit, and exposure can cause huge pus filled painful blisters on any exposed skin. It can also cause blindness and, if inhaled, can totally fuck up your lungs. Even better, if it doesn't kill you, it can cause cancer. The only really good thing about mustard gas is that it isn't incredibly lethal, unless you are breathing the shit straight. It mostly incapacitates the enemy, and overloads whatever medical support they have. It is persistent, so normally you can't enter the area for days or weeks after an application. Civilians, especially children and the elderly, are much more susceptible to mustard gas. Casualties would be very, very high.

More to the point, when the United States forswore using chemical or biological weaponry, part of the evil bargain was that we classed them with nuclear weapons, and proclaimed them equally evil. If you used them, we would retaliate with nukes. This was the first time since the First World War that anybody had used chemical weapons on American troops, and as sure as death and taxes, there would be calls for me to nuke Baghdad.

It was closer to twenty minutes before I made it out of the bathroom, and while I had shaved, I was only wearing khakis and a sport shirt and some loafers. Marilyn was still up, and had a glass of juice ready. I was tempted to tell her I would get something downstairs, but she was too worried. I smiled and drank my juice, and then gave her a big hug. "It will be fine. You should go back to bed. I'll talk to you later." With that I headed back out again.

I arrived back in the Situation Room and was still the only member of the NSC which had arrived, but that was only because I happened to live on the premises. I was promptly informed that everyone had been contacted and was either en route, or not available. Eric Shinseki was currently in Tel Aviv, meeting with Ehud Olmert, the new Prime Minister. Ariel Sharon had suffered an almost mortal stroke in January, and was now pretty much a vegetable.

I sat down at the end of the table, facing the big display screen. "Are there any changes? Are we sure they are using chemical weapons?", I asked.

Lieutenant Colonel Parker was still there, and was cueing up a map of northern Iraq. "Yes, sir. There is no question about it. We managed to get through to one of the A-teams, and the exec confirmed it. They took both high explosive and chemical rounds, and he confirmed the presence of mustard gas. Casualties have mostly been from the HE, but mustard gas can take up to 24 hours to show the symptoms. Still, he confirmed that gas rounds landed and the characteristic smell is present, and that skin blistering is beginning."

I nodded. I picked up the phone and reached the switchboard. "I need to speak to the Prime Minister of Israel as soon as possible. If he's in a meeting, ask somebody to break in. If that doesn't work, get the Ambassador or General Shinseki to break down the doors over there. Thank you." I hung up the phone. It was doubtful that the Prime Minister wouldn't take my call, but he might have been occupied or something.

Vice President McCain was the first person to arrive, followed closely by Frank Stouffer. "What's going on, Carl? Is it Iraq?"

I nodded. "Yes, and they are using mustard gas.", I answered.

John's eyes opened wide at that, though Frank didn't really react. He might not realize just how nasty the stuff was, and how bad a situation this was. Before John had a chance to ask me anything further, Condi Rice came in, dressed about as informally as the rest of us were. "Mister President?", she started, just as the phone in front of me rang.

I looked at the light bird. "Colonel, drag them down there and tell them what you've told me so far. I have to take this." The colonel motioned them to the other end of the room, and I picked up the phone. I stuck my left index finger in my left ear to drown out the babble around me, and held the phone up to my right ear. "Hello?"

"Mister President, this is Ehud Olmert speaking. You asked to speak to me?"

"Thank you for taking my call, Mister Prime Minister. I apologize, I truly do, but this is very important."

"Of course. How can Israel help you, sir?"

"Mister Prime Minister,", I started. "As I am sure General Shinseki has informed you, the United States intends to help defend the Kurds against an Iraqi attack. That attack has just begun, and it is our intention to respond. The response will begin within a matter of hours. Now, the last time the international community went to war with Iraq, in 1991, Hussein responded by firing missiles at your nation. We are very worried that he might do the same at this time, and I must inform you, sir, that he has already used poison gas against both Kurdish and American troops and civilians."

I could hear him inhale sharply at that. Israel is a small country, roughly the size of New Jersey, but with a bit smaller population. Unfortunately for them, everybody in the Middle East hated them and wanted them exterminated, and everybody had some sort of weaponry that could reach them. Only the fact that they had an overwhelming conventional weaponry superiority, plus nuclear weapons, kept their enemies at bay. When Hussein fired his Scud missiles at them in 1991, the intention was to draw them into the fray, and thus break up the Coalition. If he fired chemical rockets at the Israelis, there was a very good chance that Baghdad would disappear in a nuclear fireball.

After a second, he responded, "That is a most serious claim, Mister President. Are you sure on this?"

"We already have battlefield reports, sir. I am sure that with your extensive intelligence sources, you will be able to verify this in very short order."

"If this is true, Mister President, it is a most grave and serious matter.", he said slowly.

In diplo-speak, the phrasing used by diplomats, the word 'grave' is used only in the most dangerous and serious of circumstances. If one nation tells another that there will be grave repercussions to an action, it means there will be a war.

"That is why I am calling you. My nation realizes that yours is uncomfortably close to Iraq, and that there may be an attempt to draw yours into this affair. It is our sincerest hope that you refrain from any such response.", I told him.

"What is your current intention, sir?"

"We will be beginning a military response shortly, certainly by the end of the day. We intend to bring the full weight of our military to bear to defend an ally, just as we would do with any other ally in the area." 'Just like we would do with you' was left unsaid.

"And if Hussein were to repeat his past history by launching missiles at Israel.", he pushed.

"While we certainly would understand Israel's desire to respond, I have to be honest and say that it might not be helpful. On previous occasions you have held off on retaliation, and that worked best for everybody."

"That will be very dependent on Saddam Hussein's actions, and the type of attack he makes, if he makes one at all. Now I will be honest, Mister President. If chemical weapons are unleashed on my nation, we will be making a response, and it will be overwhelming and appropriate."

I sighed mentally. "I appreciate your candor, sir. Let us hope that this does not occur. I am sure I will be speaking to you frequently in the near future. I am sorry I have not been able to visit and meet you prior to this. National Security Adviser Shinseki is in your country now, and I wish that he stay there as my personal representative, along with our Ambassador. Is this satisfactory?", I asked.

"Of course."

We finished with some very brief pleasantries, and hung up. I knew that Olmert was going to get the Israel security apparatus in high gear in a matter of seconds. With any luck, I would be able to talk to Shinseki at some point.

By now we had also gathered in Paul O'Neill, my soon-to-be-retiring Treasury Secretary, and Tom Ridge, the Defense Secretary. General Pace was in Europe, at a NATO conference, and was on the speakerphone, as was Eric Shinseki. Richard Clarke was one of the last to arrive. I looked around the room. "Has everybody here got the gist of what has happened? Eric, have you had a chance to talk to the Prime Minister yet?"

"He's on my list right after we hang up. The Israelis are not going to be amused.", came from the speakerphone.

"When I talked to him, he basically implied that if the Iraqis lob chemical weapons at them, they will nuke Iraq to cinders.", I responded. Around me I heard a few quiet gasps, but not many. This was not an unexpected response.

"That would be in line with their public statements, sir. I think it would be quite likely.", he answered.

"Eric, try to keep them calm. If they do that, this thing gets out of hand quickly."

"Understood, sir." I heard some fumbling around, and he continued, "Mister President, I just received a request to meet with the Prime Minister."

"Okay, Eric. You go see him, and then call me back. Thanks." There was a click and that connection broke, followed by a comment from the switchboard the line was disconnected.

I looked at the others, now seated around the table. "Colonel, think you can do this in ten minutes?"

He nodded affirmatively. "Yes sir!" With that he threw the map of northern Iraq up on the screen, focusing in on Kirkuk and the border between the Arabs and the Kurds. It was neither a straight line, nor a defined line, but more a fuzzy area where both types might live side by side, harmoniously or not. For the next ten minutes he showed where the Kurdish Peshmerga had units, where the American adviser groups were, and where the Iraqi Republican Guard was attacking. It looked a lot like a pincer movement designed to surround and isolate Kirkuk, and kill any civilians or soldiers in the pocket. He also threw up onto the map locations where there were known and suspected chemical attacks.

You don't normally use chemicals on areas you plan to move through. For trained and prepared troops, chemical warfare is quite survivable, but it is very unpleasant. The pace of combat slows to a crawl, because everybody is moving around in chemical resistant suits and gas masks, and everything needs constant decontamination with lots of water and other chemicals. Most of the time you use chemicals as an area denial weapon, to keep the other side from moving through the area. It is also very effective if you plan a genocidal extinction of your enemy. Both uses seemed to be at work here. If the Iraqis managed to surround Kirkuk, they could move in and kill the Kurds at their leisure. Casualties would be massive and one-sided. From there, they could move forward, deeper into Kurdistan, probably towards Erbil, and repeat the process.

I looked around the table. Every eye was on me. "Does anybody here have any reason that we should not be making a response to this? Before I give an order, tell me right now if I am going to screw this up completely. I know we have discussed this, but chemical weapons will throw a real kink into this. If they hit Israel with them, Iraq will go up in a mushroom cloud, and we get into a real disaster then!"

I looked around the table. John McCain simply said, "Go!" Across from him, the youngest guy in the room, my Chief of Staff Frank Stouffer, simply nodded and gave me a thumbs-up. Richard Clarke also nodded and gave an approval, as did Tom Ridge and Paul O'Neill.

Condi Rice interjected, "Before we do this, sir, we need to get Turkey on board. I know we have already discussed this with them, and they have told us they will go along, but we will need to formally make the request and tell them about the chemical weapons."

I shrugged. "Okay, good point. Here's what we'll do. Condi, you get in touch with Erdogan and give him the latest. Tell him we are going to attack from the south regardless, but we really need to go in from the north. Promise him your first born male child if you have to, but get him on board. The same will go with Eric and the Israelis, to keep them from jumping in. Call them, too, and get the Ambassador in the loop. General, I am going to go upstairs and get dressed and get something to eat. By the time I am done, I will have some answers and will travel to the Pentagon. Make some phone calls and tell everybody to get ready. Also, call an emergency meeting of NATO, or whatever you can manage over there, and inform them. I would dearly love NATO support. Condi, the same goes for the U.N. I hereby am ordering the 82nd into action. Tell the Navy and the Air Force to prepare for an immediate 'Execute' order. Frank, get the Congressional and Senate leadership to my office this afternoon. Also, get Will to set up a national broadcast tonight. I have to tell the country I just put us at war, and tell Matt and Marc to see me about a speech. John, I want you out of Washington for the moment, just in case these idiots want to try something here. I want you safe."

Around the table, I heard a chorus of 'Yes, sir!'

I stood up and the meeting was over. I touched the Vice President on the arm and said, "I might be overreacting, but just in case, get on Air Force Two and go somewhere. Before this is over, I imagine I will be using you as a personal ambassador. Either way, you will be in the loop." It was standard procedure to separate the President and the Vice President in a crisis; I had been part of that on 9-11.

He nodded. "I don't have to like it, but I understand. Where do you want me first? Fort Bragg, to see off the 82nd?"

I laughed at that. "Oh, God, no! I've been through that before. That is going to be the biggest clusterfuck you have ever seen! Total chaos! Try one of the Air Force bases."

He nodded. "I'll make a tour, talk to family groups, the support staff, whatever. You just keep in touch with me."

"I promise!"

McCain went on his way and I headed upstairs to start dressing like the President and get something to eat. Breakfast for me is normally pretty light, but by now I had been up for hours, and I was hungry.

By mid-morning I was at the Pentagon, accompanied by Tom Ridge and Frank Stouffer. Everybody else was working the phones and sorting out the mess. In the Pentagon War Room, with General Pace on the intercom, I gave the official 'Execute' order. We were at war.

The first offensive action would be a massive and coordinated missile and bomb attack. Hundreds of Tomahawk missiles would be launched by every sub and ship in the area, all aimed at Iraqi air bases, port facilities, military bases, and air defense systems. This would all be followed up with bombing attacks by B-2, B-1, and B-52 bombers, with fighter support out of Incirlik in the north and Kuwait and the aircraft carriers in the Gulf. Iraq was to be bombed back to the Stone Age. As before, in our attack on Afghanistan, we were not just limiting our targets to purely military targets. We were also going after everything government related, as well as civilian infrastructure and industrial sites. Baghdad was going to be very dark and isolated, because every bridge and power plant was going to disappear, and any chemical plant was going to be flattened. It doesn't take much of a factory to make chemical weapons – any decent chemical, pharmaceutical, or fertilizer factory will do – but Iraq was going to lose them all!

Portions of the 82nd were already airborne, heading first to Incirlik and then on to Erbil. The experts all figured that was far enough outside of the combat zone to act as a forward base and, as my own history with the 82nd showed, you really prefer to land and go into combat as a unit, rather than jump in. They wouldn't be on the ground until tomorrow. Meanwhile, the pre-loaded trains in Germany would be moving, and heading towards Istanbul, and then east into Turkey and to the Kurdish border. The Army had some pre-positioning ships with an equipment load for an armored division at Diego Garcia, in the middle of the Indian Ocean, and they were being sortied and convoyed up through the Indian Ocean, the Red Sea, through the Suez Canal, and then north across the Med to Turkey. That, however, like any reinforcement from the States, would take weeks, at best.

So, for the moment, we were looking at an infantry heavy response. In addition to the 82nd, most of the Rangers and Special Forces types at Bragg would be heading over, as soon as transport was lined up. Further, we could send in the 173rd, an airmobile brigade in Italy. Fortunately, we had beefed up the purchases of transport aircraft, specifically C-130s and C-17s. They might not be as sexy as invisible fighters and bombers, but boy are they necessary – and a hell of a lot cheaper! Regardless, we were going to be infantry-heavy at first, with armor assets and the 101st coming in piecemeal later.

To a certain extent, that's what I told the Congressional leadership that afternoon. I met with them in a conference room in the White House, and it was a long afternoon. From the Senate I was faced with Bill Frist, Mitch McConnell, Harry Reid, and Dick Durbin, and out of the House I had Denny Hastert, John Boehner, Nancy Pelosi, and Steny Hoyer. Roy Blunt was the House Majority Whip, but he was out of town. "Gentlemen – and you too, Nancy – I have some disturbing news to tell you all. First, let me ask, are all of you, or any of you for that matter, familiar with what has been happening in Kurdistan for the last few years?"

I received a number of blank looks, and an equal number of 'Yes, of course!' comments from people who couldn't find Kurdistan with a GPS and a guide dog. That didn't surprise me one bit. We are a people with almost no knowledge of anything outside the borders. "Well, let me just explain that Kurdistan is centered on the northern no-fly zone in Iraq. As you can imagine, the place is filled with Kurds, who are not Arabs. Anyway, Saddam Hussein and the Iraqis hate the Kurds, and vice versa. The only thing keeping the Iraqis from killing the Kurds has been our no-fly zone."

"We have troops there, too, don't we?", asked Denny.

"Yes, and that's why I called you here. For the last few years, we have had small groups of Special Forces teams working with the Kurds, training them and familiarizing them with us and so forth. We tightened up the no-fly zone, too, so Hussein can't go after them with his gunships. For all intents and purposes, the Kurds are independent of Baghdad, and have been working on commercial deals with Turkey. For one thing, they have a lot of oil, and the Turks are building a pipeline into northern Iraq to buy it from them. We also have a number of American oil companies making deals over there."

"So, we have an interest in Kurdistan, but what's gone wrong?", asked my old buddy John Boehner.

"For several weeks now we have been monitoring an increase in Iraqi military activity, activity that could be construed as preparations for an attack into Kurdistan. We have been talking to all our allies over there, and trying to get the word to Hussein to back down. It didn't work. This morning the Iraqis began a heavy armored assault into Kurdistan. They are also using chemical weapons. There have already been American casualties among the embedded troops we have there."

As soon as I said the words 'chemical weapons' everybody began talking! The questions ranged from 'What type?' to 'How many are dead?' and always included 'How come you let this happen?!' and 'Why weren't we told!?' I let them go for a couple of minutes and then held up my hands. They began to settle down.

"Thank you. You can all start pointing fingers later. We have been trying to defuse this without escalating it into combat, but Saddam Hussein doesn't care. We did not know about the chemical weapons. It doesn't matter right now. Early this morning we had a meeting of the National Security Council. We have been preparing for this possibility for weeks now. Earlier today I gave the Execute order to make a military response. I have ordered our armed services to begin attacking a wide range of Iraqi targets, and we will have troops in Kurdistan by sometime tomorrow. Tonight I will go on television and tell this to the American people."

There were some stunned faces in the room, but some angry ones, too. Harry Reid was the Majority Leader in the Senate, and he demanded, "Why haven't we been told this before?"

"Tell you what, Harry? The attack occurred in the middle of the night last night. What do you think I'm doing now? I'm telling you!", I responded.

"You have been preparing for war!? You didn't think the American public had a right to know this!?", he pushed.

"No, not particularly. The Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines spend their entire time preparing for war. It's what they do. How they do it, that we keep secret."

"Mister President, you have an obligation to tell Congress and the American people when you put American troops in harm's way!"

"Maybe so, Senator, but I also have an obligation to those troops, and to their wives and husbands and mothers and fathers and sons and daughters, and that obligation is a whole lot more important to me than whatever obligation you have to the fine folk in Las Vegas. I can keep my mouth shut a whole hell of a lot easier than some of your counterparts, so I sleep easy at night if I don't tell Congress everything we are doing!", I answered.

There were some angry looks at that! How dare I tell them that Congressmen and Senators couldn't keep a secret!? How insulting! Of course, if I had said anything to them, it would have made the evening news that day, but only from the highest of motives, I am sure.

Denny Hastert decided to play the peacemaker. "Okay, Carl, that's beside the point. What have you authorized and what is the plan?"

I nodded in thanks, and gave them a more detailed rundown on what would be happening, and a semi-accurate timetable. I also cautioned them all to keep their mouths shut for the next 24 hours. Nancy Pelosi responded, "Is that really possible, Mister President? Right now you have issued alert orders to half the military, and there are troops flying out of Fort Bragg as we speak!"

I opened my mouth to counter her, and then shut it. She was right! "Nancy, that is a very good point. It's probably already made it onto CNN, hasn't it?" I smiled and shook my head. "Well, I will speak tonight to the nation and make it official."

"How long will this last, sir, and what is the outcome you want?", asked Bill Frist. He was a heart surgeon who ended up a Senator, sort of like a mathematician who ended up a Congressman.

"How long? Not sure. At best, a few months, but that's a long shot. Probably through the summer, at least. The outcome? We want to see Kurdish independence and to settle Saddam Hussein's hash once and for all!", I said, shrugging my shoulders.

There were some people looking at each other. John said, "You're going to need a war resolution in the Senate, at least."

I looked at the Senators in the room. "Probably so. I'll be honest. I have no idea how to go about doing that. Bill, Harry, I am going to need your help on this. I will get Carter Braxton to talk to your staffs and you, and see about doing that. He's better at that than I am. In the meantime, pick out some people on the Armed Services and Intelligence committees and we'll get them into a briefing with the Pentagon tomorrow."

There were some nods at that, and then I got an interesting question from John Boehner. "Sorry you shut down the guys who wanted to invade Iraq in 2001?"

"Why, because now we have to do it anyway?", I countered. He nodded, and there were a few semi-smiles around the room. I shook my head. "No, not really. It's one of those things we take classes on in the service. If we had attacked Iraq five years ago, on the basis of faked evidence and a desire to conquer the country, that would be an offensive war, a war of aggression. We would have had to go in alone, without any international support. This is a defensive war, where we are defending people against weapons of mass destruction, and we already have a number of nations who have promised help. There's a world of difference. We have the moral high ground on this, in spades." I thought for a second, and added, "Go talk to Lindsey Graham. He's a reserve JAG lawyer. He can give you chapter and verse on the laws of war and the concept of a 'just' war. This stuff dates back to the Middle Ages."

A few of the people looked skeptical, but there were also some thoughtful looks in the group. At that moment, there was a knock on the door and Will Brucis stuck his head in. I waved him in. "Will, I just informed the leadership here about the Kurdish operation. What's up?"

"It's public, sir.", he told me.

"The Kurdish operation?"

"Yes, sir. CNN is reporting that the 82nd Airborne has received deployment orders and is doing an emergency recall and cancelling all leaves. I also have had at least three phone calls for a comment."

I looked over at Nancy Pelosi. "Nancy, it looks like you're smarter than I am. Good call." I turned back to Will. "Tell everyone I will be speaking to the nation this evening, and start getting the cameras set up. I need to speak to Matt and Marc, but I will tell everyone tonight. Also, tell the Pentagon to be prepared to answer questions tomorrow."

"Got it!"

Will ducked out again, and I turned back to the leadership. "Now, I don't mean to be rude, but I need to get ready for this evening. When I learn more, I will let you know. Thank you." With that I stood up, and I received a chorus of 'Thank you, Mister President.'

At 7:30 that night I spoke to the nation from the Oval Office. The military mobilizations were the main topic of the national news that evening, along with reports of combat in Iraq. Nobody knew about the chemical weapons yet, or the American casualties. At 7:00, the networks all ran special reports on what was happening, and made their predictions of what I was going to say that evening. Their prediction? That I was going to talk about the mobilizations! Circular logic in full force.

At 7:30 I found myself looking into a camera with a red light on it, and with one eye glancing at the teleprompter. A producer began giving me a countdown, and then as we got down to five seconds, he shut up and began counting down with his fingers. At zero, he waved and pointed at me. Show time!

"My fellow Americans, thank you for allowing me to speak to you this evening. By now you have already heard that our nation's armed forces are mobilizing, and that some have already been sent into danger. I wish tonight to explain what has happened, and why this response was necessary.

In 1991, following the Gulf War, President Bush instituted two no-fly zones over Iraq. The southern zone was designed to protect the Shiite marsh Arabs from attack by the Iraqi Sunnis, and the northern zone was designed to protect the Kurdish people from a similar attack. For fifteen years, despite relentless provocation, America has protected these minorities from the attacks of Saddam Hussein and his army.

In northern Iraq, the Kurdish people have formed an independent nation under this protection, the Republic of Kurdistan. The Kurds are an ancient people, with their own language and culture. During this time of protection, they have formed a democratic government, have instituted elections, and have conducted peaceful foreign relations and trade with neighboring nations. For several years now, American Special Forces soldiers have worked with the Kurdish armed forces, training them and in turn learning from them.

Until 1991, the Iraqis tried on several occasions to destroy the Kurds, and several of their attacks used chemical weapons. Following the Gulf War and the establishment of the no-fly zone, Iraqi aggression has been on hold. For the last month, however, Saddam Hussein has been moving armed forces towards the border of Kurdistan, and has been making a wide variety of threatening statements. When the intentions of Saddam Hussein became obvious, we immediately began to mobilize diplomatic power across the region to force the Iraqis to back down. We also began a quiet mobilization and preparation of our own.

It is my sad duty to say that our diplomatic efforts to restrain Iraqi aggression have failed. Late last night, Iraqi ground forces began an armored assault on the Kurdish border regions. The Kurdish military, the Peshmerga, are fighting valiantly, but they are outnumbered and outgunned. Worse, in addition to conventional weapons, Saddam Hussein has ordered the use of chemical weapons on unarmed civilians in the region. I am sorry to report that there have been American casualties, along with those of our Kurdish allies. Chemical weapons are one of the most hateful and terrible weapons available, and their usage cannot be allowed or tolerated.

Upon being informed of this unprovoked assault on a peaceful ally, I immediately summoned the National Security Council. We were unanimous in our belief that an immediate military response was necessary. As I mentioned before, while we hoped that diplomacy would cause tensions to ease, we also made preparations if they did not. This morning I gave orders to begin Operation Kurdish Dawn, a military defense of Kurdistan. This operation has been underway for several hours now. We began with a massive bombardment of Iraqi military and government targets from ship and submarine launched Tomahawk missiles, followed by air raids from American carriers in the Persian Gulf, as well as from land based fighters and bombers operating from bases in Kuwait and Turkey. Further bombardment will continue, and strategic bombers from here in America and other bases are also targeting Iraqi bases.

This will not be sufficient. Earlier today I ordered the 82nd Airborne to deploy to Kurdistan, along with elements of the U.S. Army Rangers, and the Special Forces. The 4th Fighter Wing has been surged forward to Turkey, and armored and air mobile elements are being brought in from Europe and here at home. Additionally, I have received assurances from several of our European and Middle Eastern allies that they will commit troops and support to the cause of Kurdish freedom and defense.

This aggression will be countered. Kurdistan will be defended, and an ally in this region will be strengthened. A previous President once said, 'Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.' Liberty is the birthright of all people, and in defending Kurdish liberty, we defend our own. The defense of liberty is never easy, and the price involves more than simply cost. Regardless, we are a nation and a people willing to pay such a price.

Thank you for your time, and God bless our nation and our soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen. Thank you."

Chapter 162: Going to War

It is very tempting to bury yourself in a single cause once you are in the White House. The stuff that lands on your desk is really important, life and death matters in many cases, and you can spend every waking hour micromanaging pieces of the job. Obviously war is the most important thing, and it is very tempting to put all your time in on this.

Not all Presidents can keep from doing this. Roosevelt lined one of the downstairs rooms with maps, giving it the still current name of the Map Room, and would spend hours in there every day following troop movements and how the front changed. At least he managed to win his war. Johnson would spend hours every night wandering the hallways in his pajamas and bathrobe, and would haunt the Situation Room. Worst of all, telecommunications had advanced to the point that he could actually pick up a telephone and be connected to a platoon leader in the Mekong Delta on a search and destroy mission, and give him tactical advice and orders. He did that several times.

What a REMF Navy Reserve Lieutenant Commander thought he knew about infantry tactics was questionable at best. Johnson and McNamara thought they were smarter than all the generals and admirals around them, and didn't mind firing them. However, after that, the Pentagon went out of its way to keep the President from exercising tactical control, and the post-Viet Nam generation wasn't above telling us to behave ourselves. That generation was pretty much gone now, but we had learned that lesson. The problem now was that a lot of the current military leaders came of age during Desert Storm, and thought that war was a video game. I wasn't sure how that was going to work out, but my own low level experience said that it was a whole lot dirtier than that.

Not much happened until the afternoon of the 14th, as we began lining up assets and preparing a response. At that time, shortly before I spoke to the nation, the Navy launched over 400 Tomahawk cruise missiles at Iraqi targets from ships and submarines. The initial targets covered air bases, air defense sites, military bases, and anything that anybody could imagine might be harboring chemical weapons stockpiles. Other targets covered most of the country's infrastructure, including bridges, power plants, chemical factories, canal locks, and dams. Shortly after that, we had F-15s and F-16s flying combat air patrols and interdiction runs out of Incirlik and Kuwait, and F-18s doing the same thing off carriers in the Gulf. Then the heavies showed up, B-1s and B-2s and B-52s, to destroy anything the cruise missiles might have missed.

Back in the 1920s, an Italian general named Giulio Douhet came up with the theory that by massively bombing an enemy, you could win a war without troops. His theory, which was refined into the concept of strategic bombing, was that by bombing the enemy, especially his deep targets – infrastructure and cities – you would inflict massive damage and destroy their will to fight. It certainly sounded like a good idea, and for most of the Twentieth Century that was what we tried to do. It didn't work in Germany or Japan, it didn't work in Korea or Viet Nam or Serbia, and it didn't work in Iraq the first time. In every case it became necessary to send in the troops. Fortunately, by the time we got to Desert Storm, everybody knew that this was going to be necessary. Bombing could still be extraordinarily useful, but it was not going to help the Kurds on its own.

By Wednesday afternoon we were beginning to develop a pretty good feel for what was going on and the Iraqi strategy. Saddam Hussein had two corps of Republican Guards armored and mechanized troops in the field. This worked out to about six divisions, though they were all considerably smaller than an equivalent American division. Still, that was about 75,000 troops, and 1,000 T-72 tanks, and lots of other older tanks, armored personnel carriers, and trucks. They were split into two groups, and were trying to pincer Kirkuk between them, so as to envelope it. Chemical weapons were being used in isolated Kurdish towns and cities, but not in areas the Guard planned to move forward through. It was standard Russian doctrine, because that was where they got most of their equipment and training from.

By the morning of the 16th some of the real horror began becoming known to the rest of the world, as Iraqi civilians began arriving after fleeing the areas which had been hit with mustard gas. The chemical burns and blisters were so horrible that most of the media refused to show it. Not all, however, and some of the tabloids ran front page pictures in full color, which was enough to make you vomit. After that, the others started showing them also. We also started getting reports of American casualties along with Peshmerga troops caught by the mustard gas, and found out that Bismarck Myrick, our Special Envoy, was one of those who had died. Condi Rice told me that, and I promised her that we would do right by his family.

It took a full day to fly the lead elements of the 82nd to Incirlik in C-17s, where they then transferred to smaller and handier C-130s for the flight to Erbil. Erbil was far enough from the front that it wasn't in danger of being immediately overrun. They were offloaded there, and then carried on whatever local transportation they could beg, borrow, or steal in order to get to the front. The Peshmerga were fighting valiantly, but Kalashnikovs and RPGs were not going to cut it against T-72s, and they were falling back. The battle plan was that the infantry forces we were sending in first would be able to stabilize the front lines long enough that our armored and airmobile stuff coming in from Europe would be able to break the Iraqis.

That was the theory, anyway. How well it would work was anybody's guess. The 82nd brags that it can be anywhere in the world in 24 hour, but it's a whole lot more complicated than that. Yes, the lead elements, say the first few battalions, can manage that, but afterwards it becomes a real scramble. It would take about a week for the rest of the 82nd and the Rangers to get there, and at least another week before the 173rd Airborne Brigade in Italy showed up to help, and possibly another week after that for the armor in Germany to make it onto the scene. Even that would be light, since we only had one heavy armored brigade available, the 1st Brigade, 1st Armored Division, with M-1 Abrams tanks, and a second brigade, the 2nd Stryker Cavalry, which used a light infantry vehicle. Strykers couldn't fight tanks, or at least not easily. The Brits were also sending a heavy armored brigade, the 7th Armored, also stationed in Germany, which would probably arrive at the same time as ours. Meanwhile, transports returning to the States would pick up any gunships available from the 101st, while the transport helos would be shipped over. The biggest issue in most cases was the lack of enough air transport assets. Even with the beefed up purchases of transport aircraft, we just didn't have enough planes to fly everybody around at once.

The Air Force was in better shape. That first day's missile and bomb attack took the starch out of the Iraqi air force, and subsequent attacks totally destroyed it. I was informed that they tried to stop us, but that in the first two days of combat American pilots shot down 19 planes, with no losses of our own, and nobody else was coming up to play. Once the 82nd was in place, they would be able to call on close air support.

The first contact between American and Iraqi ground forces came on Friday the 17th in a small valley somewhere northeast of the town of Azwya. This was basically south of Erbil and west of Kirkuk, and the western pincer was moving through to try and trap Kirkuk. They had been pressuring the Peshmerga heavily, and while the Air Force was trying to do close support, the Kurds didn't have radios to reach them. They were basically light infantry, brave and trained adequately, but without the gear they needed. They were falling back north up the valley, when a short battalion of paratroopers came over the hill like cavalry, riding a ragtag bunch of beat up civilian trucks. They had with them a battery of 105s being hauled by some Hum-Vees.

The paratroopers managed to form a line across the valley, with the 105s behind them in a reverse slope position, and held firm as the Iraqis advanced. The Peshmerga coalesced around them, like ice freezing around starter crystals in a glass of freezing water. Meanwhile, they began calling in accurate fire support from the Air Force. It was textbook infantry tactics when facing a superior mechanized unit, and it worked; the Republican Guard was stopped cold in its tracks and withdrew to lick its wounds. What they don't show on the sand tables, though, is the price you pay for this. That short battalion had been outnumbered over three to one, facing most of the 1st Brigade, 6th Nebuchadnezzar Mechanized Division, and so far we had a casualty count of over twenty dead and over fifty wounded, and it was expected to end up even worse.

For three nights in a row I spent a couple of hours after dinner in the Situation Room. Kurdistan was seven hours ahead of us, so by dinnertime the day's events would be over. While American troops had night vision equipment, the Peshmerga didn't, and we still didn't have anywhere near the strength to start any night assaults. That was still going to be one of the big issues with this war. Hussein had smartened up a lot. He wasn't letting us get ready for six months and then attack him at our leisure. So far he was the one calling the tune, and even as we pounded him from the air, he had ample combat power to hurt us and the Kurds.

I had gone back up to the Residence on Friday the 17th after getting the latest from the Situation Room and hearing about Azwya. My basic instincts were to get in Air Force One and go over there, but I knew that was simply stupid. I was an out of date battery commander; trying to take control at a headquarters would have been as stupid as Johnson calling some kid in the Delta. Marilyn caught my mood and simply sat quietly in her recliner reading near me. Stormy was dozing next to me in mine. The phone rang about 8:15, and I grabbed it from the coffee table next to me. "Hello?"

It was a pleasant alto voice. "Mister President, this is Colonel Dillard in the Situation Room. We'd like you to come down, sir. The Iraqis have launched missiles."

I swore softly, and Marilyn looked over at me. "I'll be down in a couple of minutes, Colonel." I hung up.

"Problems?", asked Marilyn.

I smiled and shrugged as I stood up. "Just the usual. You know the end of the world and western civilization as we know it."

"Let me know if I have to be worried."

I leaned down and kissed my wife, and then slipped a pair of shoes on and headed downstairs. Once in the Situation Room I grabbed my usual spot at the head of the table and looked at the others. A woman in a Marine uniform with eagles on her epaulets was facing me. "Colonel Dillard, I presume?"

"Yes sir, thank you for coming." She flashed a map of the Middle East onto the big screen. "Approximately fifteen minutes ago, we had eleven launches of either Scud or al Hussein missiles from Iraqi territory. Two were launched at Kuwait, three at Turkey, and six at Israel."

The map had red stars in what I assumed were impact points in the three countries. "Did we get any of them?", I asked. I remembered back during the Gulf War the Patriot missile batteries blew the things out of the sky left and right. During the run up to this war, I was cruelly informed that the performance of the anti-missile systems was extremely overhyped.

"We got some, sir." A few of the red stars turned blue. "One of them was hit by a Patriot battery over Kuwait City, and the other impacted in the desert. There were no chemical signatures. Three were targeted at Incirlik. Again, one was shot down, one impacted in a deserted area of the air base, and one hit in downtown Adana a few miles away. Again, there were no chemical weapons signatures detected. Israel was targeted by six missiles, and the Israelis managed to knock down two of them. The other four landed in what appear to be relatively uninhabited sections near Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and Haifa."

"Four?! That's all we got? Four?"

"That's way better than we did the first time, sir, back in '91.", she answered defensively.

"Jesus Christ!" How much money had we wasted on this stuff? "So, what's the results? Please, for the love of God, tell me the Israelis didn't nuke Baghdad!"

That actually got a small smile from them. "No sir, not yet, anyway." The map changed to a close-up of Kuwait. "The Kuwaiti impact was a desert area, and there were no casualties." We switched to the Incirlik area. "One missile hit an empty transient taxi area and exploded. There were no casualties or damage, but they probably have to fill in the hole. The second impact was much worse. It landed downtown and hit a hospital. We are still getting reports, but there appear to be massive civilian casualties."

"Oh, shit! And Israel?" They were the real wild card in all this. If they responded, the game went into extra innings and nobody knew what would happen.

"From what we could see by satellite, nothing major was hit, at least in Israeli areas. One of the missiles smacked outside of an apartment complex in a Palestinian neighborhood. The Israelis don't consider that to be a big problem, which does not endear them to the Palestinians.", she reported.

I scratched my head. "But no chemical warheads?"

An Air Force major piped up at that. "No, sir.", he said. "We are seeing no chemical signatures, and all intelligence and BDA is pointing to conventional HE warheads."

I turned to face him. "Why not? Not that I'm complaining, mind you, but they have chemical weapons, and Hussein has proved any number of times that he doesn't mind using them."

"I don't think he can, sir. I did a brief tour at the Aberdeen Proving Ground and learned some about them. Chemical agents are actually pretty nasty stuff. They are toxic, corrosive, volatile – you just don't want to mess with them. The best way to use them is actually by airplane. You rig up planes like giant crop dusters, like we did with Agent Orange in Viet Nam. They called it Operation Ranch Hand. However, the planes are easy to shoot down, and it isn't exactly secret. The next easiest way is to load them into artillery shells, which is what they have been doing. The toughest is to load them into a missile. It's hard enough to shoot missiles, and figuring out how to disperse the chemicals when they get there is tough. The payloads are small. The only chemical payload worth doing, I was told, is nerve gas, and they either don't have it or aren't using it."

"Huh. Makes sense, I guess." I had never really learned too many of the details on this stuff. Yes, we had some training back at Artillery Officer's School, but you really don't get more than an intro. Nasty shit! "Is the Vice President still in Ankara? I am going to have to talk to him" I had sent John McCain to Ankara yesterday to talk to Erdogan and hold his hand. That was looking prescient right now.

"Yes, sir. It is 0340 Ankara time."

I picked up the phone and asked to speak to the Vice President, and then hung up. They would track him down half way around the world. "How are they doing this?", I asked.

"Mobile launchers. During the Gulf War they had some in silos, but they were too easy for us to target. Mobile launchers at night. They have them hidden in a barn, then just drive them out, set them up, and launch. After that they go back into the barn and reload."

I grunted an acknowledgement. The phone rang at that and I picked it up. "Hello?"

"Carl, it's John McCain. You've heard about the rocket attack?"

"That's why I'm calling. How bad is it?", I asked him.

"Terrible! One missile slammed directly into a hospital in downtown Adana. What the explosion didn't destroy is now on fire. There are going to be hundreds dead!", he reported.

"Oh, crap! John, you need to talk to Erdogan. Tell him we are sorry and promise that we will help with rebuilding the hospital. Promise your children if you have to! If he forces us out, it is game over!"

"Carl, I am meeting with the Prime Minister right now. He is furious with the Iraqis! He wants to talk to you.", replied McCain.

My eyebrows rose at that. "Put him on." As I said this, Condi Rice and Tom Ridge came in. They must have been called as well. I pointed them towards the colonel and mimed that she was to brief them. Then I turned my attention back to my phone.

"I'm handing the phone to the interpreter, Carl."

I nodded. This was not the usual method, where we had mutual interpreters and so forth. We just didn't have the time. After a moment of fumbling around, I was greeted, "President Buckman?",

"Prime Minister Erdogan, thank you for talking to me. I have just heard about the attack on your hospital, sir. You have my sympathies and those of my entire country. This is a horrible action. I promise to help you rebuild it, sir, even better than before."

"Thank you, President Buckman, but that is not why I asked to speak to you. I have been talking to your Vice President McCain, and wish to offer our help. Saddam Hussein, he is..." Suddenly there was a vitriolic attack from the background that I couldn't understand. It seemed that Turkish was a fine language to cuss in! After a moment, the translator continued, "Saddam Hussein is a mad dog and a monster who must be stopped!"

"Your assistance will be most welcome, sir. I am not qualified to tell you what needs to be done, but I will have our generals talk to your generals and we will figure this out. Is that acceptable?"

"Yes, yes, of course. We will kill this animal! What he does is an abomination against Allah! My entire country is repulsed by this attack!"

"I couldn't agree more, sir. After this is over, I hope to make a visit. I would like to meet with you, and certainly to help with the reconstruction of the hospital. I hope that will be possible."

"Yes, yes, of course!"

There was some fumbling on the other end, and then I had John McCain back. "Carl, it's me again. Erdogan is simply furious over this."

"John, I have Tom and Condi here, and I think they are trying to get Pace on the phone. Stick around over there. I don't know what is going to play out, but this is a big help. We'll get back to you, and probably sooner than later."

"Roger that!"

We hung up and I looked over at my Secretaries of State and Defense. "Okay, now you know as much as I do. I just spoke to John McCain and Prime Minster Erdogan. Erdogan is royally pissed at the Iraqis and has offered to begin assistance. As in combat assistance, not just letting us use the air base at Incirlik!"

Tom gave a low whistle and smiled, and Condi said, "Well done, Mister President!"

"Don't thank me, thank John. When I called him, he was already meeting with Erdogan. Anyway, you need to fill in the various ambassadors, and talk to Eric in Tel Aviv. Tom, you need to get together with Pace and figure this out. What can the Turks add to this?"

At that point the phone rang, and somebody announced it was Prime Minister Olmert from Israel. That was not a surprise. As the others watched and listened, I picked up the phone. "Prime Minister Olmert, this is Carl Buckman. Thank you for calling me. If you hadn't called me, I was certainly going to call you."

"Mister President, I assume you have heard that Saddam Hussein has decided to attack the peaceful state of Israel."

So much for pleasant chit chat. "Yes, Mister Prime Minister, I am quite aware of this. I was just talking to our mutual friends in Ankara. They have also been targeted, and they have taken serious casualties."

"We have heard that as well, and you may give them our sympathies, but that is not why I called. I know that your Ambassador and your General Shinseki have been asking that Israel not respond to this provocation, but I assure you, our forbearance will not last forever. You need to do something about this, or we will!"

"I understand your concerns, and I can promise that we will redouble our efforts to stop these attacks.", I said.

"I must tell you, sir, that I have talked this over with my advisers, and we are agreed that if that mad dog uses chemical weapons against the state of Israel, we will have to make a response, and it will be most grave indeed."

Well, that was blunt enough! "I understand your concern, and I will take it up with my advisers. Please, allow us to see what we can do first, to end this threat."

"Good day, Mister President." He hung up on me, and I winced.

"That didn't sound very good.", commented Tom Ridge.

I grimaced. "No, not at all. He pretty much stated that if they get hit with chemical weapons Iraq is going to turn into a radioactive hole in the ground." Nobody else looked like they enjoyed that prospect either.

Before I could discuss it further, it was announced that General Pace was on the speakerphone. "General, thank you for calling. Before we get too far along, let me ask you something. Hussein launched some missiles last night at Israel, just like in the Gulf War. Can we stop them? What can we do? The Israelis are not amused!"

"That is really tough, Mister President. Iraq is a big place, about two thirds the size of Texas, and those missiles can be launched from something the size of a tractor trailer." His voice was clear, but sounded like he was speaking from a car or limousine. "During the Gulf War we spent 40% of all our sorties on Scud hunts and never found a one of them."

"Great! Well, we are going to have to do something about them, because they are pissing off the Israelis and the Turks."

"Yes, sir. I just had my driver turn it around and I will be in the Pentagon in a bit. I will be in touch."

"Call me when you figure something out."

I hit the button and cut off the call. "Well, you heard it. We have both a real problem as well as a real help here. I want the Turks involved as much as we can. That gets a third NATO member involved, and we can get some more cooperation out of the others. Kuwait is on board, and the Saudis are making nice, too. Tom, we need to figure out a way to neutralize the Scuds, and I don't much care how we do it. Send more Patriots to Israel. Start running Scud hunts at night. Whatever it takes! Condi, get together with your embassies and with Eric and John and make sure we are all speaking with the same voice."

Tom Ridge asked, "Isn't the Chinese symbol for crisis the symbols for danger and opportunity mixed together?"

I shrugged and gave him a blank look. "No idea, but if that's true, we got us a genuine crisis going on. Let's try to maximize the opportunity part of that." I stood up. "I am going to let everybody else work on this. You know how to do your jobs better than I do." I looked at the team in the Situation Room. "Colonel, Major, thank you for the information. You and the whole crew have been very helpful." I headed back upstairs to tell Marilyn that the world was going to survive another day.

There really was nothing more I could do about this, so I went upstairs and spent the rest of the evening with Marilyn and the twins. Saturday morning I met with General Pace and took a few phone calls, but otherwise I took the weekend off. For the next few nights the Iraqis continued to launch anywhere from six to ten missiles at their neighbors. The Kuwaitis didn't seem to care, since none even came close to hitting anything but a few camels in the desert. The Turks were really pissed by it all, especially when a second hit an apartment building on the outskirts of Adana. The Israelis continued to stew, but held their fire. Even the Saudis managed to catch one, in their desert near Riyadh, though nobody could understand why they had been targeted.

That first battle in the Azwya Valley had been the worst of the fighting, so far. We were beginning to hear the phrase 'Kurdish Coalition' in the media, and it wasn't a phrase we had coined. Helicopter gunships began trickling into the theater from Europe, although the necessary support was lagging badly. The airhead at Erbil was dangerously overcrowded and the Kurds began using nearby roads and flat terrain as secondary airstrips. The Turks were restricting their participation to fighter and close air support; while the Kurds were properly appreciative, there was just too much bad history to allow Turkish ground troops into Kurdistan. The 82nd and the Rangers were forming a defensive line and the Republican Guard seemed to be gearing up for an assault, but with American troops in the line and close air support overhead, they were being handed a bloody nose every time they got rambunctious. Even so, the infantry was being chewed on. The momentum in the war had shifted from the Iraqis, to a stalemate. Meanwhile, behind them, the rest of Iraq was being systematically trashed by the Navy and Air Force. When this war was over, whoever was left alive was going to spend the next generation rebuilding.

If I had one complaint about Bush 41 in the Gulf War it was that he had allowed public opinion to influence how the war ended. After four days of rampaging practically at will through Iraqi armored formations, he had called for a truce after 100 hours. The fact was that public horror at the carnage they saw televised from 'The Highway of Death' was a major factor in the truce, and it allowed over 70,000 Iraqi troops and their equipment to escape into southern Iraq, including large elements of the Republican Guard. One more day and he could have destroyed any remaining Guard units and put a massive crimp in Hussein's personal power base. The Republican Guard was separate from the regular army, with a different chain of command and superior equipment, pay, and privileges. After the Gulf War ended, they formed the foundation he rebuilt his power on. When the time came, I wanted to cripple the Republican Guard beyond reconstruction.

Whether I would be allowed to do that was questionable. So far public opinion was almost uniformly favorable. The use of chemical weapons and the horrifying casualties which were coming to light had solidified American and international disgust with Saddam Hussein. The American casualties during the gas attacks, and our subsequent response had my personal approval ratings back into the 80s, the highest it had been since 9-11. I could afford to trade some of that approval for a definitive end to the Hussein regime.

Part of that approval was the fact that after almost a week into the war the press was beginning to show up. Unlike the Gulf War, when the Pentagon instituted formal procedures to embed reporters with military units during the six months of run-up to combat, this mess had come up too fast. We didn't have the time to brainwash the reporters properly ahead of time. Now they were just showing up on their own, flying commercial into Adana and Aleppo and Tabriz and then making their way across the border into Kurdistan. There were even some managing to make their way to Erbil on commercial flights chartered to bring in air freight supporting the troops.

That didn't always work out so well for the reporters. MSNBC managed to send a crew into a town northwest of Kirkuk that had been shelled with mustard gas. They got all sorts of ghastly footage of dead bodies on the ground, but in doing so managed to contaminate themselves. Since mustard gas is an oily and persistent agent and doesn't manifest symptoms for up to 24 hours after contact, they managed to get back to Erbil before breaking out in hideous pus filled blisters that caused screaming agony and blindness and necessitated immediate hospitalization. Ooops!

I think my lowest moment during the war occurred Monday night the 20th. We were barely a week into the conflict, and only a few days after the battle in the Azwya Valley. That night Richard Engel, NBC's famous war correspondent, was on the air, after managing to make his way into the war zone. The man must have a death wish, I thought to myself, since he made a living going to places everybody else wanted to leave! Regardless, Brian Williams announced that in an exclusive report, Engel was broadcasting from the battlefield where American paratroopers had first made contact with the Republican Guard. Marilyn and I had finished dinner and were sitting there with the mutt, having a drink.

"When the first members of the 82nd Airborne landed at the airport in Erbil, the local Kurdish Peshmerga fighters were a bit skeptical. They had been on the border facing the Iraqi army for many years, and that border has never been a peaceful place. Who were these fancy new soldiers, and what were they going to do in Kurdistan, those were the questions on everybody's minds. As a way to introduce themselves to the Kurds, one of the 82nd's officers showed the Kurds a picture of President Buckman, from when he was in the 82nd, when he received his Bronze Star."

The picture Marilyn had framed with my citation flashed on the screen. When I was in Congress I had only used it a few times in my first campaign against Andy Stewart, but during the Vice Presidential campaign it had been dragged out repeatedly by the national campaign. I grimaced as it came on the screen.

"The photo was simply meant to show the Kurds that President Buckman was with them in spirit, but whether it was because of poor translation or the fevered hope of the Kurds facing a genocidal enemy, it became much more! Within days a myth had swept through the Kurdish Peshmerga, a myth of the American warrior President who had sent his personal paratrooper army to Kurdistan, soldiers who had never retreated or been defeated. Hard pressed Kurdish soldiers talked of nothing less.

Here in the remote Azwya Valley, the 82nd Airborne's soldiers had to live up to a reputation beyond anything they had ever imagined. I have been asked not to give the names of the soldiers or their unit designation, but it was a battalion of paratroopers who were sent to this remote valley to try to hold off an armored assault while the rest of the division landed and was able to form up. They were only sent to delay, and then were expected to make a fighting withdrawal.

When this battalion of soldiers arrived here, they managed to set up a defensive line, and were then attacked by the Republican Guard. Outnumbered three to one, and facing tanks and armored personnel carriers, they fought a desperate battle with the support of the Kurdish Peshmerga. One captain, on realizing they wouldn't be able to withdraw after all, told his men they had to 'Die hard', and a sergeant put it more poetically. He told his troops that their rank in hell depended on how many of the enemy they took with them, so they had to take as many as they could. Sadly, both that captain and that sergeant are now casualties. The price these men paid is dear. One in four of the soldiers who arrived here is either dead or wounded, but they held their positions and the Republican Guard was forced to retreat.

In the Kurdish language, 'Peshmerga' means 'a warrior who faces death.' I asked a group of the Peshmerga soldiers what they thought of the American paratroopers. They looked at each other, and then nodded and smiled. One answered, 'They are Peshmerga. They are warriors who face death.'

This is Richard Engel reporting from the Azwya Valley in the Republic of Kurdistan for NBC News."

Marilyn said, "Wow! Did you know about that?", and then she looked over at me. "Honey! What's wrong?"

I was sitting there in my recliner, tears streaming down my face, listening in horror to the story. Could I change nothing!? I had killed George Bush and 3,200 innocent people to become President, so that I could bring some peace and sanity to the White House, to silence the relentless beat of the war drums. It all meant nothing! Here I was, just delaying the inevitable, with a war on my hands that I had never wanted. Now I had men dying because they were my 'personal paratrooper army who had never retreated or been defeated!' What circle of Hell had I descended into? The most ridiculous and horrendous part? This fresh 'glory' would have teenage boys lining up at recruiting stations across the nation, eager to replace those paratroopers I had killed off.

"Carl, what's wrong?"

I screamed incoherently and threw my glass across the room, where it hit a bookcase and fell to the carpet without breaking. I stood and stalked over to the wet bar where a bottle of Canadian Mist was waiting, and poured myself a stiff couple of shots of whiskey. I drank that down straight, but that didn't help, and I knocked that to the side.

Marilyn came over and wrapped her arms around me, and held on. "Carl, what is it? What's wrong!?"

I wanted to push her away, but she held on to me. "I never wanted this! I NEVER WANTED ANY OF THIS! I don't want men to die because of me! Why is it that I kill so many people!?" I freed myself from her and grabbed another glass, and filled that with the whiskey. I drank some down, and tried to remember a decent quote about drinking, but nothing was coming clear.

Marilyn was scared as she sat next to me, but she didn't try to stop me. I've never hit my wife. I've never hit any woman. I would have probably hit her if she tried to make me stop drinking. I just sat there at the bar and drank that bottle of whiskey.

I just wanted the killing to stop. How many Americans had I killed now? How many thousands of Americans had died because I decided they should die? How many American families had I destroyed? I didn't care about other countries. They had their own leaders who could worry about them. I only cared about the Americans I had killed over the years. How many were there? How many fathers or mothers, sons or daughters, brothers or sisters?

I woke up late the next morning in a recliner in the living room, with Marilyn sitting next to me. My head was pounding medium bad, but the worst was the feeling that an army had marched through my mouth. My tongue and teeth felt gummy and stale. I couldn't remember the last time I had drunk enough to warrant a hangover, but it was probably in college. They don't get better with age. I looked over at Marilyn, and she eyed me curiously.

"Feel like talking?", she asked.

"I feel like taking a shower.", I answered.

"Can you do that without a drink?"

I tried to give her a witheringly superior look but I don't think it worked. "I've never really understood that whole hair of the dog routine." I tried to get out of the recliner and had to rock it back and forth a couple of times to build up the momentum needed. "I am getting too damn old for this shit."

"It helps if you don't sleep in a chair.", she answered.

I gave her another look, and then headed to the bathroom. "What time is it?"

"I called down and said you weren't feeling good, but would probably be down by lunch."

"Yeah."

I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror as I brushed my teeth and downed half a bottle of Advil. I hoped I didn't have any photo ops today, because my eyes were so bloodshot as to need a redeye correction. I took a long shower and then shaved and got dressed, and had a few more Advils. I was actually feeling almost human, at least except for the eyes, by the time I was dressed.

Marilyn was waiting for me in the living room. "Feeling better?"

"Yeah."

"I don't ever want to see you like that again, Carl. It scares me to see you like that."

I nodded. "I know. Sorry about that. Sometimes..." I couldn't finish the sentence. I kept thinking about the men who had died in my name.

"Carl, you didn't kill those men. Saddam Hussein, he killed them, not you.", she told me.

"You don't understand. I sent them there, my undefeatable personal army."

Marilyn cut me off. "BULLSHIT! That's so much BULLSHIT and you know it! They didn't die for you! They died for each other! You told me that once, remember? I asked you when you were in the Army if you would die for a flag, and you told me that nobody died for a flag. They died for the guy next to them. Do not give me BULLSHIT!"

"You don't..."

"Understand? I understand enough! I know you, Carl Buckman! I know you better than you do! If it had been you on that battlefield, it would have been you saying and doing those things. This is not about you! Don't take this from those men!", she responded hotly.

I shrugged. I gave her a hug and muttered an apology, and then headed down to my office. Several people asked if I was feeling better, and if anybody saw my eyes, they kept their mouths shut.

I deliberately avoided discussing the Kurdish War with anybody today, and stayed away from the Situation Room that night. I didn't need Marilyn any more pissed at me than she already was. I kept it on a back burner for a few days, as more troops reached the front, and more damage was done to the Iraqis. By the end of the second week, we began getting some feelers from the Iraqis by way of an envoy to the Swiss and from the Swiss to the Saudis. Hussein might be willing to stop if we would leave Iraqi soil and allow him to enter into talks with the Kurds. There were a few of us in the room when Condi Rice told us that, and we all scratched our heads. John McCain was back in the country, and he said it best. "Let me get this straight. They want us to leave so they can declare victory?"

She tossed the note on the table and replied, "Essentially."

"He's nuts!"

Condi looked at me, and I simply added, "What he said."

She gave a wry smile and shrugged. "If I don't pass this along, I am not doing my job."

"Why don't we send a reply, that if the Iraqis are willing to send us Saddam Hussein's head in a box we'll go home?" At that, I looked over at General Pace. "Can we drop leaflets over Iraq?"

He smiled. "Yes. We can also simply broadcast that over the radio and television airwaves."

"Okay, whatever. Why don't we do that? If we aren't already doing it, let's post a bounty on the man's head. We'll stop when they send us his head. They can keep the leftovers."

"You don't really want his head, do you, Mister President?", asked Condi.

I grinned back at her. "Sure, why not? We can stick it on a pike at the front gate, and march the diplomatic corps past it. Maybe they would get the message." She looked horrified at the thought. "No? Okay, that might be a bit much. Maybe we can mount it over the main gate at Fort Bragg?" The military guys and anybody else with a military background snickered at the thought. "Seriously, though, we need to make sure we get the message out that the best way to end this is by getting rid of that jackass in Baghdad. I don't care who takes over, but I am not interested in stopping until the Hussein problem is settled once and for all."

For real shits and giggles, I ended up doing an interview with David Brooks and Mark Shields for the PBS NewsHour during this time period. Like many interviews I had given, this one had a few unexpected side effects, but had generally proved positive. We had been speaking from the Map Room, and the discussion had been about the war in Kurdistan. Shields was a liberal and a writer for the Washington Post, while Brooks was a conservative writer for the New York Times. They typically sparred on the Friday edition of the NewsHour, but this was taping on Tuesday. Most reporters at that level of journalism are pretty smart fellows, but every once in awhile somebody reverts to their roots, where they started out asking idiotic questions like 'How do you feel?' to a mother who just ran over her baby with the family car.

Shields: "What kind of a message are you trying to send with this war?"

Me: (Staring at him briefly.) "MESSAGE?! I'm not sending a message! We've been sending messages for months now! If I wanted to send a message I'd call Western Union! No, the time for messages is over! Now I am sending death and destruction! You want to know what kind of message I am sending?! How about this for a message! If you kill my citizens and my soldiers and my diplomats, I WILL SEND DOWN THE THUNDERBOLTS OF THE GODS! How's that for a message!"

That was on Tuesday, and Will Brucis looked totally flummoxed by my words, as did Brooks and Shields. Presidents simply didn't talk that way! I just said, 'Screw it!', and we finished the interview. By Friday, though, the segment had been edited and was ready for their regular debate, this time with moderator Margaret Warner. The interview segment was only lightly edited, as much for clarity and timing as anything else. Certainly that segment made its way in, in full. Then, however, they digressed.

Shields: "I was curious about what the actual troops the Commander in Chief commands thought about this kind of talk, so I visited a few Army bases and spoke to them. I spoke to the enlisted guys, not their officers and especially not the Public Information specialists you always get saddled with. By and large, President Buckman is extremely popular with the troops. They loved being called thunderbolts. They all lit up when I played them the interview."

Brooks: "Not all of our Presidents have been well respected by their soldiers. Bill Clinton in particular was more tolerated than respected. Carl Buckman, on the other hand, is fairly well thought of. He was the youngest battery commander in the 82nd Airborne since Viet Nam and he earned a Bronze Star rescuing his troops while injured and behind enemy lines. That means a lot to these guys."

Shields: "You saw that when he made that bet with the Navy a few years ago about who would win the Army-Navy Game. The winner would get a deluxe dinner at the White House and the loser would get cold MREs. When Army lost and was scheduled for MREs out in the cold of a New York winter, he showed up in a captain's uniform and ate with them. That's the kind of respect troops understand and appreciate, and it means a lot to them. That sure never happened when I was a Marine, let me tell you!"

I had to think about that for a bit. It hadn't seemed all that significant to me at the time. It was simply standard Management Techniques 101, loyalty up and loyalty down, that sort of thing. On the other hand, I had known a shitload of managers over the years who thought that because they were the boss, their shit automatically didn't stink.

There wasn't much happening on the Kurdish front that week, but the domestic front heated up a touch. Carter managed to get a war resolution going. In theory, only Congress has the right to send the nation to war, but the President has the requirement to defend the nation. This was all written into the Constitution at a time when muskets and cannons were high tech, and communications took months to get anywhere. We have actually only had five instances where Congress declared war. Following the debacle in Viet Nam, Congress decided to rein in the President with the War Powers Act. Stripped of all the verbiage, after 60 days, if Congress disapproved, they could stop funding things and require you to bug out of whatever you had gotten into. There hadn't been a President since who didn't think it was unconstitutional, but we tended to walk pretty carefully around the subject.

The answer was the 'war resolution'. You don't declare war anymore, since wars need victories. It was much more likely that you were fighting to restore the status quo to some shithole, or keep oil and trade flowing, or stop genocide, or simply to do something to show the country that you cared. In this case, we were fighting to defend the Kurds, not to conquer and defeat the Iraqis. Condoleeza Rice had tried but failed to get a U.N. resolution against the Iraqis. The Russians had fought against it by claiming we didn't have any proof, and when it passed, they vetoed it. I called Putin and told him we were going in anyway, and that I sure hoped the latest weapons shipment had already been paid for, since we were going to destroy them. Chemical warfare really was a trump card on this, and all the neocons were baying at the moon and howling about how I should have done this in 2001. Since the neocons also hated the Russians, I used them to push for the resolution as a poke in the eye to Putin. I got the resolution I needed for funding purposes, and I let the legal types argue on the Sunday morning talk shows about the laws of war.

Christ, but I hated this mess!

Chapter 163: Kurdish Dragon

The Sunday news shows all ran the footage from the Brooks and Shield interview, and the chattering classes all pontificated on what it meant. The liberals were rather unhappy with my barbaric worldview and the conservatives couldn't understand why I hadn't gone after Iraq in 2001 when I had my first chance. The only one who seemed to understand, or at least was able to express it cogently, was Bob Schieffer, on Face the Nation. He devoted his personal essay piece to it.

"President Buckman's statement about sending down the thunderbolts of the gods has been one of the most talked about public statements of his presidency, by turns praised and ridiculed. The more bellicose among us loved it but many here in Washington considered it ill-advised and war-mongering. How dare the President make a statement such as that? It must be the sign of a foolish and uncultured barbarian, and they wonder why his press secretary isn't running around and apologizing for him.

I have known Carl Buckman for almost twenty years, since before he became a Congressman, and long before he became the President. While we don't agree on a lot of things, he is not a foolish and uncultured barbarian. He is a warm, smart, sophisticated, and civilized man. He is most definitely not a war-monger. He is generous to a fault, and exceedingly gracious. He is loyal to his subordinates, perhaps too much so, and they return that loyalty. He adores his wife, dotes on his children, and even has a big, goofy dog that he drags around with him everywhere.

He is also one of the most ruthless men I have ever known, and I say that in a positive sense. You can see that in his personal life. When, both in junior and senior high school, he was attacked by bullies, he didn't respond eye-for-an-eye. He destroyed his tormentors, crippling them. He extends that protection to those around him, as well. When his wife was assaulted in the Bahamas and a young mother-to-be was attacked in a diner in his hometown, those attackers were hospitalized and arrested. You may attack him once, but you will never do so a second time. You do not mess with Carl Buckman and get away with it.

If you want to know what the Buckman Doctrine is, that's it in a nutshell. He takes his responsibilities very seriously. When he took responsibility for the nation, he became equally ruthless in dealing with threats to the nation. So when he says that if you kill American citizens and soldiers and diplomats he will send down the thunderbolts of the gods, he means it. Speaking as a member if the so-called Washington elite, I am horrified. Speaking as an American citizen, that sounds pretty good to me."

Will Brucis raised the topic at the morning staff meeting, and I had laughed and said I thought that Bob had me figured out, but there was no specific 'doctrine'. When Will was asked later in the morning at the daily press briefing, he simply smiled and said, "There's never been a discussion of any sort of Buckman Doctrine, so I can't really answer that. I can say that the President disagrees with the characterization of Stormy as big and goofy. He considers Stormy big and loveable. We've begun taking suggestions and voting on them back in the offices." That prompted a flurry of emails and letters offering other descriptions, generally favorable, of the mutt.

The late night comics also had fun with this. Jon Stewart discussed it and then began scribbling out a note – 'Note to Iran and North Korea: Don't piss off Carl Buckman!' Stephen Colbert did ten minutes on it, extolling the Buckman Doctrine, and then segued into his 'Threatdown' segment, where his Number One Threat (Bears) were warned by him to stay out of my neighborhood. Oh, brother!

After roughly a month had gone by, at the start of the second week of April, I was called to the Pentagon for a dog and pony show. The 1st Armored from Fort Bliss in Texas, parent unit of the 1st Brigade sent from Germany, had managed to get their gear onto transports and had sailed for Turkey, and the ships would be docking in Izmir shortly. The troops would follow on chartered commercial airliners. It would take another two weeks to offload the equipment, sort it out, and load them on trains and send them into Kurdistan, and then some additional weeks to prepare and practice. That one division was far more powerful than everything the Iraqi Republican Guard had available to stop them, no matter how they were combined, but effective combat action wouldn't be able to take place until sometime in May. The Pentagon wanted to show me a different plan.

As things stood, we were currently in a stalemate position across the front. Republican Guard units were on Kurdish soil with two wings poised to wrap around Kirkuk. The Iraqis were still bombarding the front lines and Kirkuk, but were increasingly forced to operate at night. Nobody was advancing, the Guard because they didn't have enough combat power, and the Americans and Kurds because they didn't have the mobility. The European-based units were forming up in the Kurdish rear, along with the Screaming Eagles, which were also forming up. Before things slowed down, the Iraqis had managed some reinforcements to the Guard, so they were operating at almost the strength they had prior to the attack. Meanwhile the nightly Scud attacks had ended. The best guess was that while the Iraqis had about a hundred missiles at the start of the war, only about half had actually worked (missiles are quite fragile and tricky) and they had run out of missiles to launch.

Fortunately, the gas attacks had also run down, probably because rear area bombing had destroyed the chemical depots and manufacturing facilities, or because interdiction had slowed transport to a crawl. The Pentagon had modified some drones so that they had a chemical signature detection capability. While they were initially used to map out areas of chemical weapon contamination to avoid, probes inside Iraq showed areas with three really major mustard gas spills, one at an army base where it was suspected that the gas was being stored and loaded onto shells, one at a fertilizer factory that had been destroyed, and one on a road that had been bombed one night. In all three locations it was seen that the Iraqis were avoiding those areas, and routing traffic around and away from them.

The Pentagon's plan called for an armored envelopment of the envelopment, sort of. As it stood, the British had the 7th Armored, a brigade of Challenger 2 tanks and Warrior armored fighting vehicles on the eastern pincer, and we had deployed both the 1st Brigade of M-1 Abrams tanks and M-2 Bradleys and the 2nd Stryker Cavalry, a brigade of Strykers, which I had never really seen before, on the heavier western pincer. The 101st was also ready to move into action. These outfits would be the offensive punch needed to destroy the Republican Guard.

In Phase One, to be launched in the dead of night, the 101st would be airlifted into blocking positions south of the Guard units facing the Kurds and Americans. They would form the anvil upon which the hammer of the armored units would land. Then, at dawn, Phase Two would begin. The Brits planned to swing wide to the east, and come in on the Iraqis from the Iraqi right flank. The Americans planned to smash straight forward into the Republican Guard starting in the west, and then to swing eastward and roll them up from the Iraqi left flank. If the Iraqis tried to run, they were going to either run into the 101st to the south or the Brits to the east or the American and Kurdish infantry to the north.

I stared at the computer simulation at the Pentagon. I knew our equipment was good, and that during the Gulf War we had blown through Iraqi positions like shit through a goose, but this was beyond that! During the Gulf War we had enjoyed massive combat superiority. The killing was going to be done by the armored formations. As it stood, we planned to assault six armored and mechanized divisions of highly motivated troops with two heavy brigades and one light brigade. Audacity didn't begin to cover this idea!

"You plan to take them head on?", I questioned. I looked over at the Army Chief of Staff, and the Army colonel who had given the presentation. I could see from Colonel Buford's uniform that he was an armored officer himself, probably up from Fort Knox, the home of the armored corps. "I know I'm just an overage battery commander, but I always thought you wanted to attack when the odds were in your favor, not the other way around!"

It was the colonel who answered. "Yes, sir, I know. To be fair about it, that's how I was taught, too. The difference is the equipment we have now. The stuff we have now, it's like science fiction! I had a platoon of M-1s back in the Gulf War, and when we hit the Iraqis at 73 Easting we never knew they were there until we rolled in on them. We were just better than them, with better equipment and training. Now ... sir, our training and equipment is even better, and we know where they all are! We have recon drones all over the front, with cameras and laser designators and GPS. Sir, before I came to this assignment, I had a training battalion out at Fort Knox, where we developed the doctrine and tactics for this. Since then we have been spreading the training out. When we go over the ridge and into a Republican Guard area, they won't know we're coming, but we will know where every one of their vehicles is! We'll be able to blow them away before they even know we are coming at them! We can do this, and do it now!"

I looked at the other officers and they were all nodding in agreement. I was suddenly hit with a wry observation. "You know what they say about military intelligence, Colonel? We bet your life?" He bristled at the implication. "Settle down, Colonel. It's nothing personal. From my point of view, I'm the one you want to bet their lives. So what do we do if this doesn't work, hmmm? What happens if the Republican Guard doesn't just sit there and act like targets?"

The colonel hit a button on his computer and showed two different variations on the ops plan, to allow for disengagement and containment moves, to keep the Republican Guard in a killbox (his word, not mine) and either reduce them slowly or hold long enough for further forces to arrive. My biggest concern was the 101st, stranded between the Republican Guard to the north and the regular Iraqi army to the south. What if they were assaulted from both sides?

"Sir, this is not going to be the Battle of the Bulge, where the 101st got stuck in Bastogne and surrounded. The Iraqis simply don't have the firepower, and they will be getting hammered by close air support. Additionally, we have no intelligence at all that indicates that regular army units are involved in this. They aren't even moving.", I was told. "I've been in contact with the G-3 of the 101st, and he concurs with this plan. This is what they are there for, deep insertion and strategic control."

"When are you going to be ready to do this?", asked Frank Stouffer. "When does the President need to decide by?"

I nodded at Frank. It was a fair question, and I turned to face the officers.

"The units can be in place for kickoff 2200 local time Tuesday April 11. We will need a go/no-go decision as soon as possible to make sure everything is finalized, today if possible. If we delay, sooner or later even Saddam Hussein is going to realize the mess he's in and try backing out. Once that happens, we lose any chance of completely destroying them.", said the Chief of Staff.

I glanced at Frank, who gave a subtle shrug. I looked at the officers and said, "Give me a few minutes, please." Everybody filed out, leaving me sitting there, staring at the screens. They simply stared back.

I knew what my answer was going to be even before they left, but it scared me. I remembered the movie Patton, in which Patton, played by George C. Scott, argues with Omar Bradley, played by Karl Malden. Patton was pushing for greater speed in the conquest of Sicily, pushing his men to the breaking point and beyond, and arguing that the faster they moved, the better it was. They would face higher casualties now, but the war would end sooner, and ultimately there would be far fewer casualties overall. It was a heartbreaking calculus, but it was also absolutely true.

It was entirely possible that at some point Saddam Hussein would wake up and realize he had stuck his dick into a grinder, and it might be a good idea to stop turning the crank and pull out. That would leave us back where we started from, with no resolution and a lot of dead Americans I would need to avenge somehow. That was unacceptable. I wanted to destroy Saddam Hussein, and to do that, we would first need to destroy the Republican Guard.

I called the others back in. I didn't bother sitting down; this was going to be a very short conversation. "The operation is approved, as planned. General, tell the boys, from me, 'Good hunting!' What's the name of this thing, anyway?"

"We're calling it Kurdish Dragon, sir."

Kurdish Dragon? Where the hell do they come up with these names? I nodded and left.

Tuesday was full of routine meetings and photo ops, and I stayed away from the war. I was simply informed that preparations were nominal, whatever that meant, and that the planned assault was still on. I couldn't bear to stay up late and kibitz from the Situation Room, and Marilyn wasn't about to let me drink anything stronger than iced tea, so I stayed up to watch Stewart and Colbert and then went to bed. The next morning, before my regular staff meeting, I was told during my Brief that the attack was 'nominal' and proceeding. I took that to be good, and simply asked for a quick briefing that afternoon. I was informed they would have a briefing in the Situation Room at 4:00 PM, and that it would be a good idea to bring everybody who needed to learn what was happening. I wasn't quite sure how to take that, but I thanked him and promised to be there.

I went down to the Situation Room at 4:00, accompanied by John McCain, Frank Stouffer, and Will Brucis. Tom Ridge was already there and waiting for us, and I could tell that he had been chatting with the briefing officer, who I noticed was the same Colonel Buford who had presented the plan to us two days ago. "Colonel Buford, it's been two days now since you showed us your plan, and about one day into it. How is it going so far?", I asked.

"Mister President, thank you for coming. Phase One of Operation Kurdish Dragon took place the other night. There were no losses, although we did have a few mechanical problems. The 101st was airlifted to their landing zones and have taken control of the road network south of Kurdistan. They are now in fortified positions with good supply. Phase Two, the assault phase, began this morning at 0600 local time, or 2200 last night Washington time. Right now it is midnight local time in Kurdistan, and operations are slowing for the night. Beginning this morning, the British 7th Armored began by departing their go line and moving south from a position just west of Sulaymaniyah. They skirted the eastern edge of the Republican Guard positions and have now maneuvered into a position where they can begin turning west, assaulting the Iraqi right flank. They destroyed roughly half a brigade of the 7th Adnan Infantry during this maneuver, mostly screening units." As he said this, a computerized map of Kurdistan was thrown up on the big screen, and a blue arrow began to grow and move on the right hand side of the map, marking a giant curve around the Iraqi units designated in red.

"Part of our thinking was that by having the Brits move first, it would attract their attention, and perhaps get them to focus in a direction opposite from where we would be attacking. That occurred two hours later, when the 1st Brigade and the 2nd Strykers attacked, here, just west of Azwya." A second blue arrow began moving south on the map to the west of Kirkuk, only this one was headed directly towards the westernmost Guard position, rather than trying to maneuver around it.

"How did that go, Colonel?", I asked.

"Quite well, sir. The 1st Brigade took direct aim at the 1st Hammurabi Armored Division, using the 2nd Strykers as a reserve. By the end of the day, the Hammurabi Division had been destroyed completely, and the 1st Brigade was resupplying and preparing for the assault on the 6th Nebuchadnezzar Mechanized.", he answered.

I nodded with a grimace. "How bad were our losses, Colonel? Will we be able to deal with the 6th Nebuchadnezzar?"

"We don't have any, sir."

"Well, when will you have the details on the losses? How can we be sure they will be able to move if you don't know about the losses?"

Colonel Buford gave me an odd look. "You misunderstand me, Mister President. We didn't have any losses. The 1st Brigade and the 2nd Strykers destroyed the Hammurabi Division with no American losses."

I stared at the Colonel in disbelief! My jaw dropped and I couldn't speak, even though John McCain and Tom Ridge were asking questions excitedly, and Frank and Will tried to understand. After a moment I waved them into silence and asked, "Are you serious? One heavy and one light brigade attacked a dug in enemy division and destroyed it without any friendly losses?! That's... impossible!"

The watch team in the Situation Room was smiling broadly, and Colonel Buford simply nodded and said, "I told you the other day, sir. What we are doing now is like science fiction!"

"But... how!?"

Before the colonel could answer that, Will Brucis interjected with a question. "Excuse me, but neither Frank nor I served. I just don't understand what these units are. What's the difference between a brigade and a division? I need to know if I am going to tell the press what is going on."

I nodded. "Colonel, you want to give the civilians a quickie answer?"

He smiled and nodded. "Okay." He turned to the side where Frank and Will were sitting. "You build an army by putting together pieces of smaller units. At the most basic level you have tank companies, which are mostly tanks, and infantry companies, which are mostly soldiers plus some vehicles to drive them around in. A tank company might have from a dozen to a dozen-and-a-half tanks, and an infantry company might have 100 to 200 soldiers. With me so far?"

Both men nodded.

Colonel Buford continued, "Everything else gets built up bigger and bigger. A tank battalion usually has two or three tank companies plus an infantry company, and an infantry battalion would have two or three infantry companies plus a tank company. A brigade is made up of a mix of battalions, and a division is made up of a mix of brigades. At the top, you have something called a corps, which is made up of several divisions. Until this morning, the Iraqi Republican Guard had two corps of three divisions each."

Frank turned to me and asked, "Where were you in this?", as he motioned up and down with his left hand.

I motioned down at the bottom. "I had an artillery battery, which is sort of like an artillery company, the same level of troops and organization the colonel is talking about."

"So this Hammurabi Division was bigger than the brigade which attacked it?", asked Will.

I answered, "Will, back when I was young and foolish and in the army, the standard rule of thumb was that if you were planning on making a successful attack, you needed odds of at least three to one to pull it off. In other words, to destroy a division, we would have to attack with three divisions. Follow me?" He nodded. "So, we just did the reverse! We attacked with the equivalent of about a brigade-and-a-half a division of about three brigades! That's impossible!"

I looked over at Colonel Buford, but it was one of the watch officers who stepped in at that point. "It's more like attacking four brigades' worth. The Republican Guard has top priority on equipment and manpower. For instance, a regular Iraqi Army armored brigade has three tank battalions of three tank companies each, while the Republican Guard has three tank battalions of four companies each. It's like getting a free tank battalion. The same thing happens with their mechanized brigades. In effect they are at least a quarter stronger than an equivalent regular army unit." Colonel Buford nodded in agreement.

"So, how did they do it?", asked Frank.

Excellent question! Colonel Buford fiddled with a keyboard and a close-up of a tactical map showed on the screen. "This is just an example, from something we have been practicing. This isn't from today. Anyway, this is an enemy battalion down here, spread out in a defensive position..." He used a laser pointer to start showing dots on the map. " ... and here are the American positions of a tank company with some M-1s and Bradleys. The important thing is that before the battle even starts, we've had drones flying over the entire area, and have every enemy position pinpointed. More than that, those positions are actually downloaded into the computers in each American vehicle. When they attack, they will already know where the enemy positions are. When they roll into battle their guns will already be pointed at the enemy! They just need to find them in their sights and pull the trigger, and then move on to the next shot."

"And that's what they did?", asked Frank. "How many tanks did they destroy?"

"A Republican Guard armored division might have, on the books anyway, about 400 T-72 tanks, and about 250 BMPs, or some other armored personnel carriers. They also have about 12,000 or 13,000 troops. In reality, they don't have that many T-72s, so they have maybe half that many and fill out the rest with older T-55s and T-62s. For all practical purposes the older tanks are nothing but moving targets, but against light infantry they are still pretty dangerous. From what we have been seeing, the Hammurabi Division doesn't have any tanks left, and only a couple of dozen infantry vehicles."

"How many soldiers did we have attacking?"

"Nowhere near as many. An American heavy armored brigade probably has about 100 tanks, tops, and maybe 5,000 troops. Believe me, they were on the short end of the ledger!", said the Colonel.

"What about the soldiers? Can't they keep fighting?"

John McCain answered that one. "It doesn't work that way, Frank. Combat is actually quite specialized. Tankers without a tank are just really lousy infantry. It's the same for artillerymen without their guns." I nodded agreement with that, since I knew just how right he was. "As for the infantry, most of their gear is on the vehicles, and right now they don't even have food and water. They might as well just sit down and surrender."

"The 1st Brigade deployed in a single long line, with the 2nd Stryker right behind them as the reserve. The M-1s and Bradleys blew away the T-72s and BMPs and then kept rolling, blowing straight through the lines, and the Strykers came through on their asses, blowing away anything left over, like BMPs and trucks. Meanwhile, the drones kept reporting what was ahead of them, and the Apache gunships were shooting at things and watching the flanks. The plan now is to pivot to the east and smash the next division on the lineup, the 6th Nebuchadnezzar. That shouldn't be any worse, because they suffered severely when attacking the 82nd in Azwya a few weeks ago."

"And nobody was hurt? We didn't lose anybody?", I pushed.

"We lost about half a dozen tanks and Bradleys from mechanical problems, thrown tracks and the like, and probably a couple of dozen guys got banged up bouncing around inside them. You always get that sort of thing.", he answered. He hesitated another second, and then added, "Mister President, these guys are really amped up. The 1st Brigade has taken to calling themselves the 'Thunderbolt Brigade', and the 2nd Strykers went in carrying a couple of battalions of Kurdish Peshmerga, and they are calling themselves 'Task Force Thunderbolt.' They even renamed the forward operating base in Erbil 'Forward Operating Base Thunderbolt.' When you were on television and called them the thunderbolts of the gods, they loved it! These guys are ready to invade Baghdad and just keep going!"

"Holy shit!", I muttered. I looked over at Tom Ridge and John McCain, both Viet Nam veterans. "Do you believe this?"

Tom threw his hands up in the air. "I mean, I get reports on this, and I've been to the bases to see the troops and all, but this ... I mean, I've been told about this, but you just don't believe it."

"Same here.", admitted the Vice President.

I looked over at Will Brucis. "We want to be real low key on this. I can see several possible outcomes. For one thing, tomorrow this may all break down and the Iraqis could hand us our cranks on a platter!" John snorted in amusement at that, but nodded his head. "For another thing, even if that doesn't happen, it might not work out so well, and we could still get stuck in a mess. And finally, I want to destroy the Republican Guard, not just win. If we start bragging, people are going to start thinking we should stop, like in '91. Nobody gets away free on this!" I thought for a second. "What's the feeling from the press on this whole thing? What are you hearing the most from them?"

He gave me a wry look. "Probably the biggest thing is that we did this whole thing without inviting them to the party!"

"Excuse me?"

"They spend half their time comparing this to the Gulf War in '91. In that one Saddam Hussein was polite enough to give us six months to prepare, and every journalist in the world showed up and was officially embedded and linked up with a unit and given free satellite time. This time? We had the absolute rudeness to have a war and not invite the press! Not a one of them had ever even heard about Kurdistan before this and couldn't have found it on a map with a laser pointer and a GPS. It is going way too fast for most of them, and we never geared up for public relations. Now it looks like we are going to defeat the Iraqis before the network anchors have managed to unpack their bags. Some of them are simply freaking out about that!"

I stared at Will for a moment and then broke out laughing. "Unbelievable! They are complaining because we are winning without giving them a chance to tell us how to do it." I looked over at McCain. "And you want to be President? Have you lost your mind?"

John returned the laugh. "No more than you did."

I shook my head. "I was a simple boy once, growing up in the Baltimore suburbs. How did I ever land here?" I turned back to the military people and stood up. "Gentlemen, ladies, I appreciate the information. Nothing you have told me here today makes me want to change the plan. Colonel, let the brass know that I want to keep the pressure on! Turn up the heat! Crush them!"

"Yes, sir. The plan is that by this time tomorrow the British will have begun swinging west, and they plan to hammer the 7th Adnan Infantry and finish them off. That will effectively surround them. Uh, what about prisoners, sir? We blew through the 1st Hammurabi and left a lot of stranded Iraqis behind. Should we collect them?"

I snorted. "What prisoners? No, I am not being quite that bloodthirsty. Send them home. Disarm them and point them south. They can walk. The 101st can pen them up before they get back home. If they don't like that, they can try walking north and taking it up with the Kurds. I want them out of the war for good."

He shook his head earnestly. "Understood, sir!"

At that, the briefing was over, with plans for another in a day or two. As I went back upstairs with John, I commented, "That colonel, I think this ops plan is his. If it works out, he's not going to be a colonel much longer, and I won't have to do a thing about it. He'll be getting a boot upstairs."

He snorted and smiled. "If it doesn't work out, he won't be a colonel much longer either." He drew a thumb across his throat and made a gurgling sound.

"With your shield or on it, John. With your shield or on it."

We had our next major briefing in five days, with the full National Security Council at the Pentagon. The progress was simply astonishing. After six days, the 1st Armored and 2nd Strykers had managed to annihilate three Republican Guard armored and mechanized divisions. The British 7th Armored had decided to get in on the fun, and while they weren't quite as dialed into the drones, they had already managed to savage major parts of two divisions in the eastern corps. The 5th Baghdad Mechanized had made the only Iraqi offensive actions. Two brigades had attacked east into the 7th Armored, and another two had attacked south into the 101st. Both attacks were annihilated. It got better after that. The 173rd Airborne had managed to become motorized, with the help of transport battalions which Germany and Norway committed as part of their NATO obligations, and they were putting pressure on from the north. The Germans also offered, as did Norway, assistance with chemical weapons decontamination. The Republican Guard was being penned in and destroyed, and all they had to show for it were a lot of footsore soldiers marching home without any weapons.

Those soldiers weren't making it back to Iraq, however. The 101st was blocking the way. They had thrown up roadblocks, and when Iraqi units approached those roadblocks, snipers would stop any vehicles they were operating. A Barrett .50 could blow through an engine block from a mile out, so Iraqi trucks and transports weren't going anywhere. As for the infantry walking, a Hum-Vee with a Ma Deuce stitching a line across the road was a convincing argument. Eventually the Iraqis would send out somebody who could speak English under a white flag, and the 101st would tell them the facts of life. We would bring in water, food, and medical supplies to designated relief areas, but to get there, the Iraqis would have to walk, and they would have to do so without any weapons. By then, a never ending string of C-130s was bringing in supplies via LAPES deliveries, and the 101st was sitting fat and happy. They had handily fended off several probing attacks from regular army units to the south; the soldiers of the 101st had taken almost no casualties, while the attackers reeled back bloody and beaten.

By now, we had casualties. No M-1s had been shot up, but the Guard had managed to blow up about a dozen Bradleys and Strykers, and an Apache had friendly fired on a couple of Bradleys. In addition to the losses from Azwya, we had another hundred dead and wounded, including the pilot of the Apache who, upon learning what had happened, went out behind his gunship and ate his Berretta. Casualties come in all shapes and sizes. I told the Chief of Staff to get Walter Reed and the psychologists warmed up.

An interesting question came up at that point. "Mister President, the 1st Armored out of Fort Bliss is deploying to eastern Turkey. They will need to sort out and then offload and move to the front."

"Do we really need to do that? It almost sounds like we are about done with this thing. Can we send them home?", I asked.

I got several very unhappy looks out of the professionals at that. "We can, but do we really want to? We are going to need those troops to invade Iraq, and probably more.", said General Pace.

"Why do we want to invade Iraq?" I looked around the room at the other faces. "That was a serious question. I am not trying to be flippant or rude. What is the benefit to the United States of invading Iraq? What do we get out of it and what will it cost? Why should we do this? The floor is open for discussion."

Several people wanted to answer this at the same time, so I held up a hand and pointed at General Pace and said we would go around the table clockwise until everybody had a chance to speak. The discussion went in several directions, none of them wholly unsuspected. We had several different views:

1 - Kick the Republican Guard south with their tails between their legs, and leave it at that. Don't invade Iraq. We said we were doing this to defend the Kurds. Some of the Coalition members would balk at offensive action.

2 - Invade Iraq to get Saddam Hussein. Basically, go in and conquer the place and kill off Hussein, and then leave.

3 - Invade Iraq to force regime change. Take the place over and install democracy.

There were some significant issues with each choice. Option One left Hussein in charge, and declaring victory to the Arab masses. The odds were that he would spend the next ten or twenty years rebuilding his army and causing trouble, until he was an old man and died or he invaded someplace else. Let's face it, Saddam Hussein was an asshole. He had been an asshole for a long time, he liked being an asshole, and he was good at being an asshole. The odds he would stop being an asshole were pretty low. That left us where we started this whole sorry exercise, trying to contain an asshole.

So, how do we get rid of Saddam Hussein? He was costing us a fortune! By most estimates we had been paying out $1 to $2 billion every year paying for maintaining the no-fly zones, and been doing that for 15 years. Now we had a prospect of having to maintain significant forces in Kurdistan as well as Kuwait, and at least doubling our costs. It sounded a lot less than the cost of a war, but multiply it over a decade and a real war might be cheaper! The problem with Option Two was that it would almost certainly fail. Iraq was a pretty big place, and it would be pretty easy for a fellow on the run to find a place to hide. We weren't going to be able to just swoop in and kill or capture him, or we'd have done it already.

So, if a snatch and grab wasn't realistic, and we really wanted to grab Hussein, we would need a full blown invasion. That would be very problematical. Right off the bat we would lose about three quarters of the Coalition. Turkey might be pissed at the Iraqis and willing to defend the Kurds, but they were not about to send troops into Iraq. The same would be said of the rest of NATO, except maybe the Brits. Likewise, while the Iraqis might hate their dictator, they really hated non-Iraqis! Hussein would be able to trot out all the cant about Crusaders and colonialism and infidel invaders.

Two or three American divisions would be perfectly capable of invading and conquering the country, but then what? American military power was supremely capable of defending something, or smashing it to smithereens, both of which we had just demonstrated. It was not capable of controlling a subject population, which I knew from our experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq on my first go. Regardless, once we activated Option Two and went into Iraq, it would be very, very easy to fall into the trap of mission creep and go to Option Three, which was to take the place over and make the place into America Lite. That was nothing but a recipe for civil war, with us smack in the middle.

One thing that was clear, however, was that if we were going to go into Iraq, for whatever reason, we were going to need the full blown capabilities of a heavy armored division like the 1st Armored. We might as well bring them into the theater. If we didn't go in, we could send them home. I agreed to that, at least.

It was Richard Clarke of the CIA who had some interesting information. Rather than offer an opinion up on what we should do, he announced, "I am going to counsel caution. This morning we received an interesting report out of Baghdad. Several large explosions were detected by satellite at an army base to the east of the city. Also in that area were units of the Special Republican Guard, Hussein's Praetorian Guard. We're not really sure what that means, but we were able to intercept some signals that indicated that Hussein is ordering regular army units north, out of Baghdad and towards Kurdistan. Some of the army units might be pushing back against the Republican Guard. I am not ready to say this is true, but at least a couple of my analysts think this is the first sign of a crack in the regime."

I glanced around at the other faces. Lord knows but that we would all prefer that the Iraqis clean up their own mess! "Huh. Well, I don't want to commit anything until we get more information on this. Keep me informed." We left the meeting with no firm plans. Operation Kurdish Dragon would continue, as planned, but after that there would have to be a huge rest and recuperation period before we could ever invade. That might not be until the late summer.

Four days later I received a call from Richard Clarke asking to meet me as soon as possible. "Iraq?"

"Yes, sir. We need to talk."

"Come on over now." We hung up and I wondered what was happening. In the last four days Kurdish Dragon had finished destroying the Republican Guard. For the last couple of days, as soon as they started hearing tank engines over the horizon they had begun abandoning vehicles without a fight, and running southward. They were even photographed by drones pointing at the drones and holding their hands up in surrender. Our tanks would roll through and capture or blow away the abandoned equipment and then move on. At least these troops would have a chance to salvage some food and water before beginning the march back to Iraq.

We had continued to sustain some losses, but at a very low level. We were setting a new standard for armored combat. Kurdish Dragon had managed to effectively destroy half a dozen armored divisions, and at the total cost of about two battalions worth of American and British troops. It was so lopsided as to be meaningless. In some ways our troops were now stronger, in that well trained but otherwise green soldiers had been blooded and tested. They knew that with adequate supplies they could meet anybody in the world in combat now.

Whether that would be necessary was what I wanted to discuss with Richard. As it stood, the 1st Armored was at a marshaling site in eastern Turkey, where they were working up prior to moving into Kurdistan. We intended to have them work up in Turkey for a couple of weeks and then be transported into Kurdistan.

Richard was shown in, and he had a large briefcase with him. I had him sit down around the coffee table, and he sat on the left side of the couch. "Here, sir. Sit down next to me. It will be easier to show you some things."

"Sure." I sat down to his right, and he opened his briefcase and spread out several folders. He pulled some photos out of one of the folders. "What gives?"

"Mister President, we can't be sure, but there seems to be a very good chance that the Iraqi Army, the regular army, is in a state of rebellion against Saddam Hussein."

"Really? That would be good news."

"Yes, sir!" He pointed to several of the photos. "These are from both satellite reconnaissance and U-2 overflights. See, here ... and here ... the damage here was not done by American aircraft. This damage is characteristic of artillery ... this is a mortar crater, here and here ... this tank is burning. These photos are from two army bases in the immediate Baghdad area, and this one is known as the home base of an armored brigade from the Special Republican Guard."

I gave a noncommittal grunt at this, and Richard continued, "There's more. From radio intercepts we know that Hussein has ordered regular army units north. That is in addition to the ones he already ordered to attack the 101st. He has ordered at least one armored and one mechanized unit from central Iraq to move north, towards Kurdistan, and we picked up a lot of radio and cell phone chatter about this. This base here..." He tapped one of the photos with damage on it. " ... is the home base for the 34th Mechanized Infantry, and there has obviously been some fighting here that we didn't cause!"

"So? What is this telling your analysts?", I asked.

He had an excited look in his eyes. "Okay, we can't be 100% sure, but this could be the first real crack in their system. We will know better in the next 24 to 48 hours, but we could be seeing the beginning of armed resistance to Saddam Hussein."

"What? Are you saying the regular army might be fighting against the Republican Guard?"

"Yes. Maybe. We'll know in a day or two for sure."

"Hold here for a second." I grabbed my phone and spoke to the secretary outside, and asked her to find John McCain and Frank Stouffer if they were available. I knew Frank was down the hallway, and I didn't think John was away, but they both might be in meetings.

They weren't. Both came in about a minute later, John on Frank's heels. "What's up? I had to cancel a call with Ken Mehlman." Ken was the Chairman of the Republican National Committee.

I motioned them to take my place on the couch next to Clarke. "Richard, show them what you just showed me."

For the next ten minutes, the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency gave the Vice President and my Chief of Staff a reprise of the CIA's latest intelligence. I used it as a useful review. Afterwards, Frank looked at me and asked, "So their army is fighting amongst itself?"

"It's more than that. If this is true, it means a possible civil war. The thing to remember, Frank, is that in a lot of dictatorships - and let's face it, that's what we have here – you have two separate armies. You have the regulars and you have the dictator's personal army. In World War II, for instance, you had the regular German army, the Wehrmacht, and then you had the SS with their own army, directly sworn to Hitler. Different generals, different chains of command. The Soviet Union had something similar, in that the KGB maintained an army separate from the regular army. In Iraq, you have the Republican Guard as Hussein's personal troops.", I told him.

"It goes even beyond that.", said Richard. "Back in 1991, when President Bush issued the ceasefire, that allowed at least half the Republican Guard and its equipment to escape back into Iraq. Saddam used those troops to maintain control over the country. Now? Kurdish Dragon has simply destroyed the Republican Guard! I doubt he has an entire Guard division left, and they are scattered around the country. If he starts ordering the regular army into a suicidal attack on us in the north, and they balk, he doesn't have the troops to force them. That's what I mean by radio and email chatter. We are getting signs they are talking to each other about that sort of thing."

"How can they do that? I thought we destroyed all their power plants and radio stations.", I asked.

Both Richard and John shrugged at that. "Trust me on this, Carl, I used to fly bombers over Viet Nam. You never really get everything. Besides, they can always use portable generators and radios.", replied McCain.

"Huh." I looked at Richard. "And you think we will learn more by tomorrow?"

"Yes, sir. It is either going to grow or be shut down quick. We will know for sure in one day. Two, tops!"

"Huh." I looked at the other two. "I really don't want to have to go into Iraq to get that asshole. I mean, I really, really, really don't want to go in! If the Iraqis want to hand us his head, I will be more than happy to call a truce and let them be."

"Put more pressure on them. Move the 173rd closer to the border, and start rebuilding the 1st and 2nd Brigades. Tighten the noose. Start advertising that the rest of the 1st Armored is in Turkey and is practicing for an invasion. Get the Iraqis scared enough to do something about Hussein.", argued John.

I gave a thoughtful look to Richard. "Think that might work? Can we make it work? Do we still have a psychological warfare plan?"

"Let me sit on this overnight. After I get the morning briefing, I will talk to some people in the Pentagon. I don't want to frighten them so much they decide to pull together in the face of the Crusaders.", he replied.

I shrugged. Damned if you do and damned if you don't. "Okay, keep us informed. It might be too early, but this could be very good news."

The news didn't stay secret for long. The next morning, during my regular staff session, Will Brucis hit me with a question. "Boss, I got a question from Al Jazeera this morning, asking for a comment on what is happening in Baghdad. They are reporting that there is open fighting between the regular army and supporters of Saddam Hussein and the Republican Guard."

I sat back in my armchair. "Really! That's interesting. What are they telling you?"

Al Jazeera was an international news agency based in Qatar, and astonishingly, fairly independent and accurate. Unlike the average Middle Eastern news station, they were not a mouthpiece for the government, nor did they spout mindless conspiracy drivel. They had a huge Muslim audience, and were one of the few independent news agencies who had managed to get reporters into both sides of the war so far. The American right wing hated them, but whether it was because they were Muslim, Arab, or not pro-Israel wasn't clear.

"According to what I was told, their local correspondent in Baghdad reported that Saddam Hussein yesterday ordered three divisions of the Iraqi army north, to Kurdistan and the fighting, and two of them refused. At that point he ordered two others north, and one of them headed north, but the other left its base and headed towards Baghdad. Now there is fighting between some of the Iraqi army units and some troops loyal to Hussein.", explained Will.

"That is really very interesting.", I told him. I thought for a second, and added, "For now, all we want to say is that we are aware of the reports, and are looking into them, but otherwise have no knowledge of the events."

"Also, that we are hoping that the new government in Baghdad wishes to end hostilities.", added Frank Stouffer.

"New government?", I commented.

"Why not? Al Jazeera reports throughout the Arab world. Let's see what they make of that."

I looked at Will, who shrugged his shoulders. "Be a bit like throwing a fox into a hen house. Why not? They don't believe a word we say anyway, so let's get somebody else to do the dirty work."

I snorted and laughed, and approved the plan.

Will made the appropriate responses and comments at the morning's press briefing, for the first time labeling what was happening as an 'insurrection.' No response was made from Baghdad, probably because they had better things to do, like deal with an insurrection! I kept getting information from the CIA about what was happening, and we ordered a total stand-down of all forces attacking Iraq. They didn't need any help tearing the place apart, they were doing a fine job all by themselves.

By May 1, Al Jazeera was reporting that Baghdad was in the midst of a civil war, and that Saddam Hussein was with an armored unit of the Special Republican Guard. The reporter also stated that his two sons, Uday and Qusay, were in hiding. On the morning of May 2, Al Jazeera reported that their reporter had been found floating in the Tigris River. Investigative journalism is a chancy job in the Middle East.

Richard Clarke convened a meeting of the National Security Council on Wednesday, May 3, to discuss the mess over there. We still had the 1st Armored working up in Turkey, but they had been able to reinforce and resupply all our units in Kurdistan, and we had managed to fly in enough Strykers and Bradleys to rebuild the 2nd Cavalry and 1st Brigade. The 101st wanted to know when they could stop being jailers and have some more fun. Even the 82nd was beginning to rebuild and reorganize after their extended thumping. Clarke opened the meeting with an interesting tidbit – Qusay Hussein was being reported as dead.

"Which one is he?", I asked. "I know Saddam's got two sons."

Richard nodded. "Here's the five cent wrap-up. Saddam is a brutal and murderous megalomaniac who knows how to run an army and a country and appeal to the masses. He has two sons, who are simply brutal and murderous megalomaniacs without any of the other endearing qualities. Uday is the oldest. He's 41, and simply out of control. He drives around the city in an armored limousine, and when sees a pretty woman, he orders her into his car, and then takes her home to rape her. If she's lucky, she gets let go in the morning, otherwise he dumps her body in the Tigris. That is one of his more positive personality traits. Everything else about the man is worse. He has been widely reported to torture Olympic athletes if they don't win medals and tournaments. For years he was the heir apparent, but he became too out of control even for Dad, who six years ago named his younger brother Qusay as next in line."

"Qusay is 39, and though not as flamboyant as his older brother, is equally barbaric and genocidal. Saddam put him in charge of the Republican Guard and the Special Security Organization, their secret police. He is also Hussein's anointed successor. As of this morning, he is out of the picture. We have received confirmed reports that he died in a battle with a regular army armored brigade attacking Guard headquarters. Meanwhile, we are also getting reports that Uday is trying to arrange asylum in Riyadh."

"The rats are leaving the sinking ship.", remarked Eric Shinseki. Several other people simply nodded agreement.

"Suggestions?", I asked.

We had a wide range of suggestions, but they came down into the same categories as the last time we discussed this. We could let them be, or we could invade. There was a definite pro-war party, with John McCain and most of the Pentagon in that camp. Condoleezza Rice was the face of the peace camp, as were Frank and Paul O'Neill. After some wrangling, I held up a hand and called a time-out.

"Okay, I think I have heard from everybody. John, Peter, I really appreciate your thoughts on this. I believe that you are absolutely correct when you say we could go in and whip them in a matter of weeks. I also believe that world opinion would be strongly against this, as Condi and a few others argue. Regardless, we could do this now, and without working up a real sweat. My problem is, what do we do with the country next? They may hate Hussein, but they sure don't love us. The Shiites might hate the Sunnis and the Sunnis might hate them back, and some of them hate the Iranians or Turks or Kurds or Kuwaitis or Saudis, but the one thing everybody hates is us! I can guarantee that if we go in, we will be fighting this war long after I am gone and long after John leaves the Presidency. I think we are going to just sit on this for the next week or two and see what happens. If we get an accurate location on Hussein, we can drop a nice big JDAM on him, but otherwise, let's let them stew on this.", I said.

There were a few unhappy faces, but some thoughtful ones also. We decided to wait a week to see what would happen, and keep the 1st Armored practicing with the Turks. It was costing us a fortune, but an invasion would be even more expensive. Both Treasury and the OMB were showing this as being incredibly destructive of the budget. We were definitely going to be in a deficit situation.

The end came three days later, when the Iraqi army managed to kill Saddam all on their own. Uday was still on the scene, but nobody cared about him. Aside from his murderous tendencies, politically he was a lightweight. He wouldn't last a week. Sunday May 7, the Iraqi Revolutionary Council announced that they were in control of the country and wished to discuss a ceasefire. The Council looked to be a bunch of second tier colonels and generals, with a civilian propped up in front for legitimacy. I ordered a ceasefire. The Kurdish War was over.

Chapter 164: Kurdish Aftermath

I called a meeting of the National Security Council for Monday morning the 8th. For the first time in months, we had an abundance of smiles around the table, and I possessed one of them. I wanted this damn mess over and done with, before it defined my Presidency like it had once defined George Bush's.

We started with a quick briefing on whatever was new from Richard Clarke. Nothing much had come up overnight. Saddam and Qusay were now confirmed dead, and Uday was on the run, though he was spouting defiance. The Revolutionary Council was proclaiming power and at the moment had a lock on what was happening. There were some elements arguing with them, but they needed a focus point to coalesce around, and Uday Hussein was simply too much of a mad dog for them to tolerate. Without a central figure to rally around, they would be rounded up and either be put down or forced to join in.

Otherwise, it was a matter of winding this sucker down, and quickly. The Pentagon went along with my order to send the 1st Armored back to Texas. As was pointed out by several people, it would take just as long to load them up and send them home as it took to get them there, so if the Iraqis decided to get stupid in the next few weeks, we would still have overwhelming force available. I gave a wry grimace at that. It was true, though. If the Iraqi Revolutionary Council fell apart, we would be able to turn things around for a few weeks at least.

Condi Rice got the biggest jobs, and she had standing orders to draft the rest of us as needed, no questions asked! Job Number One was to conclude some form of peace treaty with the Iraqis. Technically it would be between the Iraqis and the Kurds, with an acknowledgement of the new borders, and with the rest of the Coalition signing on as Kurdish defenders. That was a big enough job right there, But Job Number Two was to formally create the Republic of Kurdistan as a new nation, and get them into the United Nations and generate a few peace treaties with some neighbors.

As part of the diplomatic offensive I was heading to the Middle East, with stops in Turkey, Israel, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Kurdistan. I needed to talk to the various leaders involved, and make future plans. The critical countries were Turkey, Israel, and Kurdistan. The other three were more formalities – thank you for your recent support and what can we do to promote peace in the Middle East.

Israel was still unhappy about what happened with the Scuds. Everybody's best guess was that they wanted Iraq's WMD plans dead and buried, and any Scuds still around to be destroyed. Oh, and would we be so kind as to maintain a weapons embargo on them, along with all the other sanctions? Needless to say, that wasn't going to happen. Since most of the sanctions had been against Saddam Hussein, and he wasn't around anymore, we had about zero reason to keep the sanctions in place. I told Condi not to even try to make the argument. The country had been almost leveled and would take decades to rebuild. We wouldn't pay for the rebuilding (I was not about to institute an Arab Marshall Plan!) but if they could get some money from the Saudis, they were welcome to try. It would be a few years before anybody knew who was going to rise to the top of the pile in the Council, and even longer before they would be strong enough to act frisky again.

Turkey was expected to be easier to deal with by a wide margin. After all, the good guys had won, and Turkey was on the side that wore the white hats. I could fly to Ankara, meet with Erdogan, visit Incirlik and Adana, make a donation to rebuild a hospital, thank their Air Force, and so forth. There was no reason we couldn't get a nice treaty going between them and the Kurds.

Kurdistan was likely to be just as good. After all, we had just pulled their chestnuts out of the fire, and they were well aware of it. Sign a peace treaty, visit the battle sites, condemn chemical warfare, and get the Kurds and the Turks to sign a formal peace treaty. Meanwhile, maybe I could introduce the Kurdish President to the President of ExxonMobil while I was at it. They had all that lovely oil that was just waiting for a Turkish pipeline to be built. The Brits would probably do the same thing with BP. Fair's fair. The Kurds had a lot of oil, and now it was going to be legally theirs to play with.

I told Condi to get her track shoes on, because there was a lot on her plate. She needed to line up a trip for me in a few weeks, but some of the other stuff would take as long as it took. If she needed to play shuttle diplomat, she could use whichever plane in the fleet she needed. This could be her golden moment to shine, and I would let her have as much credit as she wanted. Privately, I told her to try and show John McCain helping, since it made for good politics in the 2008 campaign. It showed his 'foreign policy credentials', which is something I had lacked when running for Vice President. (Somehow, being airdropped into Nicaragua and escaping back to Honduras while shooting up a drug airstrip didn't count as foreign policy experience with the chattering classes, and owning a multimillion dollar estate in the Bahamas was not the signal we wanted to send, either.)

On the plus side, John had acquired plenty of foreign policy experience by now. During the Kurdish War, I had used him as a roving emissary to several countries in the region, and he had visited several other countries over the years as well. Foreign policy was actually one of the few areas where a President had a chance to put his own spin on things, for right or for wrong. Domestically, Presidents were often hemmed in by any number of special interests which limited their actions. Monetary policy was controlled by the semi-independent Federal Reserve, and fiscal and budgetary policy were dominated by a Congress which was all too often bought and sold on K Street.

Only in foreign policy does a President actually have any room to maneuver. He can launch the country into war or run away from one. He can meet foreign dignitaries, negotiate treaties, make state visits, and impersonate somebody much more important than he really is. The Congress back home might not go along with him, but that is always the case. We do have checks and balances, so they can defund his wars, refuse to ratify his treaties, demand hearings and cooperation, and otherwise make his life miserable. Still, a lot of what he does overseas can be summed up under the general saying, 'It is better to ask forgiveness than to ask permission.'

If it works, you can look, well, Presidential! You are a leader striding the world stage! You can look solid and decisive, and bring pride to the country. You screw up and you look like a fucking moron, and the rest of the world knows it. Not all our Presidents have been able to pull this off. It was an awful thing to say of the man, but it was the primary reason I had maneuvered him into the World Trade Center on 9-11. George W. Bush was clueless on foreign policy. He allowed himself to be led around by people with an agenda and blundered his way into a pair of disastrous wars. Equally awful, and in some ways even more dangerous, his domestic and fiscal policies involved borrowing staggering sums from the Chinese and other foreign lenders, who suddenly felt that they had a lot more to say about the world than they otherwise deserved.

We had managed to avoid a long term war in Afghanistan, and the Kurdish War was probably going to cost around $120 billion. That's a lot of money, I will grant you, but it was basically a one-time event. On my first go, fighting two wars simultaneously had cost about $300 billion a year for over ten years in a row. Further, he had lowered taxes drastically, and had been in a deficit situation almost from the beginning. I had kept taxes at the point where he had left them after his first budget, 5% lower than the Clinton years. We had suffered a deficit in 2002 (9-11), 2006 (Hurricane Katrina), and would do so again in 2007 (Kurdish War). On the other hand, we had shown significant surpluses in 2001, 2003, 2004, and 2005, more than sufficient to pay for the deficits and continue to pay down the national debt.

Congress hated me for this. The Republicans wanted to lower taxes and damn the deficit, and the Democrats wanted to raise spending and damn the deficit. This was completely understandable, but only in the most self-aggrandizing sense possible. By either raising spending or lowering taxes, they were heroes to their constituents, and would get re-elected. Mind you, by constituents I wasn't referring to the voters. The average Washington politician couldn't care less about the voters. They were generally considered clueless sheep. No, the important people they had to impress were the lobbyists who represented their core interests. Big Tobacco, Big Pharma, Big Banks, Big You-Name-It – they were the ones who coughed up the campaign contributions necessary to pay for the television ads aimed at the sheep.

It was an unbelievably corrupt system. It had been bad enough in 1990 when I had first gotten into politics. Only the fact that I had enough cash that I could ignore the lobbyists allowed me to stay reasonably true to the voters. Since then it had gotten exponentially worse. Mind you, the lobbyists, the guys with the cash, thought the system was working just fine, and for them it was. Even I was complicit in this. I had about $25 million a year of my own money flowing into the American Renaissance Initiative that allowed me to buy enough politicians to get some stuff passed. I had managed to become one of the largest lobbyists in Washington!

The morality of all of this was questionable at best. The legality was considerably less of an issue. If it was illegal, I could always spend enough lobbying money to make it legal. It was enough to give a Jesuit logician a headache.

In the meantime, we arranged a Middle Eastern visit for the end of May. I couldn't do it any sooner than that for the simple reason that Holly was graduating on the 21st of May. Our little girls were growing up and moving on with their lives. Holly was graduating cum laude with a Bachelors of Science in Physics. Molly was doing equally well, but was just finishing the fourth year of the five year combined Bachelors/Masters of Science in Mechanical Engineering. For once I refused to speak at a graduation. I simply wanted to be Dad and watch my baby graduate. Holly had already been accepted into the graduate program at Princeton, probably one of the best physics programs in the nation, and the rest of us were simply going to be the average family, assuming average families were surrounded by Secret Service agents.

The following weekend was to be the beginning of the Middle Eastern trip, but we weren't leaving until Sunday the 28th. Saturday the 27th I was scheduled to speak to the graduating class at West Point. It had been four years since the first time I had spoken there. That had been the first class after 9-11, and the class that Roscoe Buckminster had graduated in. How many of those boys that had graduated that day had I killed since then? Now I was going back, to spout more patriotic bullshit to the boys and girls after our latest war.

It was a supremely depressing take on the whole affair, but I knew it wasn't accurate. I had been a captain, a battery commander. If I had managed to stay in and stay healthy, I had been already scheduled to do a tour as a battery commander at Sill, and then to attend Command and General Staff College at Leavenworth. Following CGS I would have done a staff tour somewhere, and then taken command of a battalion as a lieutenant colonel. (This all assumed I managed to avoid stepping on my crank in the process, questionable at best. At every rank there is a Darwinian selection process at work, and the higher you go, the tougher it gets.) The important thing to remember was that by the time I made it to battalion command, I would have to accept the loss of subordinates as a cost of doing business, or I would never have been able to maintain my sanity.

Now was simply the same thing on a larger scale. By any measure, the Kurdish War was far and away the most lopsided war in history, even including the initial losses following the Iraqi attack. Kurdish Dragon had been the stuff of legend, a performance worthy of the history books. The Army had proven that the Gulf War was not a onetime event. The Republican Guard hadn't been beaten, it had been annihilated. The ratio of forces involved and the ratio of losses inflicted was one for the records! The Battle of the Azwya Valley and the Destruction of the 1st Hammurabi would be studied on the sand tables for a generation. By any objective measure, the numbers of losses had been very low, but that didn't mean much to those boys' parents.

I mentioned some of this to Marilyn, both sides of it. She understood and had a simple response. Shut up, smile, and fake it! Marilyn is nothing if not practical. I just smiled and agreed with her, and started writing. I ended with the following.

"Four years ago I spoke here, and I sent that class out into a world changed by the events of 9-11. I told them then that this was a damn dirty business we are in. Those young men and women are most likely first lieutenants right now, with maybe a few captains thrown in. Their pay isn't the world's greatest and there is never enough leave to do the things they want. They have missed holidays and birthday parties while standing watches and doing duty. Some have had children born while they were deployed. Others have spent time in hospital, recovering from wounds and injuries received on duty. Regrettably, some have paid the ultimate price for serving their country.

I also told that class that this was a job worth doing, and it was probably the best job in the world. I wouldn't have missed it for the world! Every word I said that day was true, and I have had several of them write me and tell me just how right I was. Now our world has changed again. A few months ago I had to use those young men and women, and in some cases I had to use them up. The one promise I can make to you is that while I will use you, I will never waste you. What you bring to the Army, and what you bring to your nation, is far too valuable to be thrown away. So I tell you, like I told them, this is still the best job in the world.

Now we send you to the Army. You have taken the King's Shilling, and now go to fight the King's battles. As generations before you have done, stand by your troops, stand by your comrades, and stand by your honor. In your time here you have heard the motto 'Duty, Honor, Country' many times. Now you get to find out what that really means. Those who came before you faced this challenge. Now it is your turn. I look forward to seeing how those who follow you look upon your time when it comes time for them to face their challenge. Thank you, and God keep you safe."

It seemed to be a hit, and was quoted on most of the networks that evening, even as I wondered to myself how many of those earnest young faces would be cursing me before their time was up. Then we flew back to Washington for the night, in preparation for our overseas trip.

It was going to take a couple of weeks to see everything and meet everyone. I was taking Marilyn, and for senior staff would have Frank Stouffer and Eric Shinseki. John McCain would stay in Washington, and the traveling party would link up with Condi Rice when we landed in the Middle East. We were figuring one day apiece in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Kuwait, two days in Israel, and at least three days in both Turkey and Kurdistan. The Kurdish portion of the trip was questionable for Marilyn, simply because for all practical purposes the place was still a war zone. I wasn't expecting to find any five star hotels in Erbil, and some of the places I planned to visit would be very rough battlefields. I would have to give that one some thought.

Our first visit was to Israel. The Israelis were not amused that they had been attacked by the Iraqis, and were rather upset by the possibility of poison gas. Condi and I met with Ehud Olmert and several of his top people and reiterated America's support for the State of Israel. In general I had taken a hands-off approach to the country. Intellectually I knew that many of their actions regarding new settlements were not helpful to the peace process. That couldn't be helped, however. There was not a single blessed thing I could do to get them to actually change their actions. Worse, there was a rabid pro-Israel lobby in America, and if I tried pressuring them, it was going to fail and screw me over back home.

To make matters worse, I informed them that I would be meeting with a representative of the Revolutionary Council at some point, and trying to make nice. As part of that, almost all of the economic sanctions that had been in place under Saddam's rule would be lifted. Some had been international, some had been American, and some had been more local, but they would be ending. They had only been put in place to force him to behave; now that he was gone, they were superfluous. I expected the Iraqis to be going hat in hand to the Saudis for assistance rebuilding, and I was going to talk to the Saudis about that very thing. On the plus side, the Iraqi economy was well and truly trashed. The entire country was going to take a generation to rebuild. They were not a threat to anyone anymore.

The Israelis wanted all the sanctions kept in place to prevent the Iraqis from rearming. Their argument was that any money that got to the new generals in Baghdad would immediately be used to buy new weapons to replace all that we had just destroyed. That was what all generals wanted to do. Olmert and his people were absolutely right. That was what would happen, and there was nothing we could do to prevent that. The political reality, however, was that the sanctions would be lifted, and the money would be spent. If Hussein had been able to evade the sanctions and use oil-for-food money to buy stuff from the Russians, we couldn't stop it now that there was peace. The best I could do was say that we would argue for keeping the sanctions in place at least until Uday was caught and killed. He was still on the loose, but the noose was getting tighter, and we expected him to be either caught or to seek asylum outside of the country.

In total honesty, the Israelis couldn't claim that I was being anti-Israeli. During the war at least a third of the fighter-bomber sorties by the Air Forces of the various countries had been on Scud hunt missions. They actually managed to get one, this time, when the Iraqis managed to launch a Scud in plain sight of a drone. The drone had tracked the launcher back to the barn, and while we couldn't stop the missile, we could plaster the barn the launcher was hiding in, and there were a number of reported secondary explosions, large ones that indicated a missile storage facility. Likewise, they couldn't claim I was giving them grief over their internal policies, since I had never said anything about them. I had also promised them a large amount of foreign aid (for instance, 'reconstruction from war damages' - total bullshit, since most of the damage was in Palestinian areas that wouldn't be touched) and a free hand with some future arms purchases.

We spent two days and two nights there, and then flew to Saudi Arabia. That lasted longer than I had expected. I wanted to talk to their Foreign Office about the Iraqi sanctions, and ended up speaking to Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the former ambassador to the U.S. who I had kicked out of the country. Awkward! The surprise was when he introduced me to Colonel Rafiq Tawaziq of the Iraqi Revolutionary Council. Tawaziq was their new Foreign Minister, and was in Saudi Arabia to make nice. He said the days of Saddam Hussein were behind them and that Iraq wished to rebuild and join in the family of nations and be friends again. Uh, huh! I could believe as much of that as I wanted. Again, we talked about the sanctions and the importance of rebuilding the nation and not the armed forces. I got a definite vibe from the Saudis that they were planning on loaning money to the Iraqis. I wasn't quite sure where that would all lead, but it would be out of our hands in any case. On the plus side, when the war had started the price of oil had skyrocketed. Now that the war was over, the price had dropped, and the Saudis were pumping extra to make up for the loss of Iraqi production. I wondered how the future increases in Kurdish oil production would be appreciated.

The meeting with the Kuwaitis was all sweetness and light. The Iraqis hadn't managed to do anything to them but blow up a few sand dunes. They nodded in understanding about the future of sanctions and oil pricing and Kurdish independence. As long as the Iraqis didn't head south looking for the '19th Province' again they were relatively content. I toured the air bases where American Air Force fighters had flown from, and also met with a few Kuwaiti pilots who had flown CAP and interdiction missions.

Jordan was another short visit. They had stayed out of the fighting completely, but that didn't mean they got off scot free. Jordan shared a border with Iraq, and during the fighting well over 100,000 Iraqis had fled Iraq and were now in refugee camps inside Jordan. Jordan was a basket case of an economy, and politically unstable due to the presence of so many Palestinians and refugees. There wasn't much we could do for them, other than cough up some money for aid.

Finally it was off to Turkey. That was going to be a big trip, three days, in several locations. First, we flew into Ankara, and met with Prime Minister Erdogan. This was considered a big deal, and we met with him and his Ministers, and had a formal state dinner. After two days in Ankara, we then flew to Incirlik, with the Prime Minister joining us for the short flight. In Incirlik I reviewed the troops and met a bunch of generals. I also managed to meet up with a representative of Kurdish President Massoud Barzani, one of his nephews. He would travel with us to the Republic of Kurdistan. He had also been one of the individuals who had been involved pre-war with the Kurdistan-Turkey pipeline project. Smart fellow, he spoke fluent Turkish and English.

Also, in Incirlik, we drove into nearby Adana and surveyed the damage from the Scud attacks. The hit on the apartment house was bad enough, but the damage there had been to one side and had been contained. The hit on the hospital had been dead center, and what hadn't been destroyed by the explosion had burned to the ground. There were hundreds of dead, and a pile of rubble reminiscent of 9-11. I symbolically helped shovel some debris for the cameras, and then presented the director of the hospital a check for $1 million from the Buckman Foundation, along with a promise that America would also be offering assistance. Then I looked straight at the cameras and told everyone listening to send money directly to the Buckman Foundation, along with a note saying it was for the hospital, and I would match the contributions. That got me kissed on the cheeks by every damn Turk in the country!

From Turkey, I was flying to Kurdistan, and that is where things got interesting. For one thing, Erbil was the only place we could fly into. Kirkuk had an airport but had been totally trashed by the Iraqis. Erbil was the place to go anyway, since it had served as our airhead in the region, and was the Army's forward operating base. Unfortunately, Erbil was somewhat backward as to facilities. There was no way we were flying the white whale of Air Force One, a Boeing 747, into Erbil! Instead they had cleaned up a C-130 and rigged it for people transport, with a shitload of web seats. I had long experience with that in the old days; they weren't all that comfortable, but the flight was only about an hour long. Neither of the regular Air Force One pilots was current on his C-130 rating, so I would be chauffeured around by the wing commander, a full colonel, with a major as the co-pilot, and my regular pilot kibitzing from the navigator's seat.

The only argument Marilyn and I had on the entire trip had been when I told her that she needed to stay in Turkey while I traveled on to Kurdistan. "I'll be back in a few days. Try not to get in any trouble while I'm away." I figured we could get her a few photo ops doing something humanitarian.

"Excuse me? Since when do you go and I don't?", she asked. "I'm going, too!"

Now it was my turn to look horrified. "No you aren't! It's a war zone!"

"There's a cease fire, remember? The war's over. I'm going!"

I looked at the others for some assistance, but everybody in the room had decided to look somewhere else. Cowards all! "Marilyn!", I replied, exasperatedly.

"Get over it!", she told me.

"Aaaaggh! So be it! Don't say I didn't warn you!" I threw my hands up in disgusted surrender. We cancelled the photo op plans and Marilyn would travel with me.

The day we were to fly out of Incirlik, the dress code was what I called 'combat safari casual.' For me that meant khakis, a denim shirt, a Desert Camouflage Uniform jacket with the proper patches sewn on, and some jump boots. It was comfortable and practical; there has never been a neat and clean C-130, and a suit and wingtips would get messed up. Marilyn wore a long denim skirt and a linen blouse, and a khaki jacket, though with fairly average hiking shoes. She was also wearing a head scarf, which she had worn in all the Muslim countries we had visited. No use pissing off the locals. I simply wore an old and comfortable slouch brim fedora.

The reporters were all wearing safari jackets with tons of pockets and epaulets, most of which looked brand new and still had the pockets starched shut. All they were missing were the pith helmets and riding crops.

Actually Marilyn's head scarves made for nice gifts from the locals to us. The President is always getting loads of gifts from foreign leaders, and I was no different. The important thing to remember is that they belong to the President, not to whoever holds the office. As a general rule I was not allowed to keep them. I couldn't turn them down, however, since that would be an insult to whoever gave them to me, so almost everything goes to the National Archives. However, I am allowed to keep a few small odds and ends, generally for no more than a few hundred dollars in value, though they need to be itemized and are considered income for tax purposes, so I have to pay income tax on them.

So, if I visit Uganda, and receive a tribal chieftain's mask and spears, they have to figure the value. Under $350, I can keep them (but I won't since I have zero use for a mask and spears.) More than that, they go to the National Archives, unless I want to pay for them out of my own pocket. The scarves she received were generally quite lovely, hand woven and dyed, in silk, and in several cases Marilyn would take the gift and wear it to dinner that evening with our hosts. That certainly earned some personal good will.

We ended up in a waiting room with everybody who was traveling to Erbil. A Hercules could carry about 90 passengers, and I wondered if a single C-130 would be sufficient. About half the plane would be filled with my staff and traveling party, and the rest would be reporters. I was assured that quite a few were already on the ground in Erbil and would be set up to film my arrival. Every one of those waiting was praying that my plane would be shot down by the Iraqis on final approach, so they could get a good picture of it. In the meantime, I simply chatted with a few of the reporters – off camera and off the record! – while we waited. I mentioned to somebody that it had been over twenty years since I had ridden a Herky-Bird, and I wondered if they were any more comfortable than before.

At that point, somebody asked, "Mrs. Buckman, have you ever parachuted, like your husband?"

I snorted out a laugh, and Marilyn answered, "No, I'm not that crazy! That would be my husband. That's too dangerous for me!" I laughed again at that.

Fletcher Donaldson, who was along for the trip, then asked, "Mister President, is it that dangerous? Has anything ever happened when you were parachuting?"

It was a perfect opportunity to set up Fletcher. I nodded slowly, and answered, "Well, we don't really talk about that sort of thing, but yes, it's happened, I had a really bad jump once, in fact."

He was scribbling furiously on a pad. "What happened?"

"Well, first, after I jumped, my static line tore, so my chute wouldn't deploy. We were only a few thousand feet up, and the static line pulls the chute from the pack, so I had to pull the chute out by hand! Only that didn't work; the chute got all tangled up and wouldn't open properly, so I had to cut it loose. By now, I was barely a thousand feet off the ground, so I had to pull my reserve chute, and that deployed, but as I looked up, I saw that it had torn apart, right down the middle! I was only about five hundred feet up now, and it was really looking bad."

I waited long enough until he asked, "So? What'd you do next!?"

I smiled and gave him a funny look. "That's easy, Fletcher. I died! What do you think happens when you jump out of a plane without a working parachute?"

Around the room the groans were loud and long, although most of the military people were grinning. They had all heard some variation of this at some time or the other, as had Marilyn.

"Nothing personal, Mister President, but it's not nice to tease somebody whose company buys ink by the barrel!", he told me.

I laughed, "I'll keep that in mind, Fletcher. I'll keep that in mind!"

At that point we got the signal to head out to the plane. I helped my wife up the ramp, and was directed forward to the front row of web seats. It was too loud to talk much on the plane, and I just leaned back and closed my eyes and relaxed. I woke up about an hour later, when Marilyn nudged me as we began descending. She leaned into me and yelled into my ear, "How can you sleep on this thing!?"

I smiled back at her, and yelled back, "Just like the old days! At least I don't have to wear 125 pounds of gear!"

"You are crazy!"

I just laughed and nodded and squeezed her hand.

C-130s are quite lively and maneuverable with the right pilot, and we moved around a fair bit as we lined up and dropped down to the runway. I think the pilot decided to show off a bit and do a combat landing, even though we weren't under fire, and the Iraqis had never gotten close to Erbil. Marilyn looked unhappy as we swooped in, and a few of the reporters looked a little green before we landed. As for me, it was almost like old home week.

After landing, the bird taxied for a bit. C-130s don't have windows for the passengers, but I knew that they were heading for a stretch near the terminal with cameras and a podium set up. One big difference over the normal procedure was that because of all the reporters on the plane, and the lack of the different seating compartments and exits, we all just trooped off the plane. Marilyn and I would go out first, and then after a few minutes everybody else could leave.

Marilyn and I went down the ramp, to find a bunch of dignitaries. I waved to everybody on the way, and headed over to the crowd. They had a podium set up and some video cameras. I was welcomed to Forward Operating Base Thunderbolt by the commander of the XVIII Airborne Corps, and to the Republic of Kurdistan by President Barzani. I thanked everybody and told them how I looked forward to meeting everyone and seeing everything and otherwise spend all my time doing wonderful things in Kurdistan. It was a pretty standard speech actually, totally devoid of anything that could be remotely considered 'content.' It didn't matter. All that mattered was seeing the American President on camera in Kurdistan, where American troops had won a war. Anything I said would be cut down to five seconds, or ten seconds, tops. Then the network anchors would tell the country what I was saying. Hell of a system!

That first day was a lot of showmanship. I posed for just about everybody, and we took pictures of me smiling and shaking hands with everybody in the entire country! After that I was able to meet with some of the troops from the 1st Armored and take some photos with them in front of their M-1s. I also met with some of the guys from the 101st but most of them were still on the line between the Republican Guard prisoners and Iraq. (They were being repatriated slowly.) Then we were escorted to a temporary building which had been thrown up as a headquarters building. At that point we were able to get down to business. For once, Marilyn was able to attend the sort of thing that had become old hat to me, and I had to whisper to her a few times what we were talking about. I heard from both the Americans and from several Kurds who commanded Peshmerga troops.

One interesting thing I learned was that several Army units had actively recruited and embedded Peshmerga units into their structure. This worked best with the infantry units, mostly the 82nd and the Rangers, since the Peshmerga were mostly a light infantry bunch with limited mobility, and this could work well in a defensive situation. Still, the 2nd Stryker Cavalry had also adopted some Peshmerga units, with dismounted troops riding on top of the Strykers as they moved around. The Kurdish leaders seemed to like the arrangement, and I gave approval of what obviously was working. I simply commented that I'd have to see that, even if for no other reason than to satisfy my own curiosity. I was promised that tomorrow I would be able to meet some troops and get out into the field.

The Barzani family hosted us that evening for a state dinner. Like a lot of places in the world, Kurdistan is run by a few well placed families. The Barzanis were the largest and richest in Kurdistan, but there were several others as well. They had several homes in the area and we stayed at one of them. We had brought some nice clothing with us for a state dinner.

The next day we were scheduled to see the troops and visit the battlefields. Professionally speaking, I was looking forward to this. Personally, I was dreading it. The day after that I would be visiting some of the field hospitals. All of the wounded men that I had put there, and all of the dead I had put into the body bags ... no matter what Marilyn might say, I knew it had been my fault. Maybe I was just not tough enough to be a general.

First stop was the Azwya Valley, where the 2nd Battalion of the 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment had done their version of Custer's Last Stand in front of the 6th Nebuchadnezzar. Their colonel and the new company commanders were there to show us around. All of the original company commanders had either bought the farm or had been evacuated to a hospital. Also present were several Peshmerga leaders, all of whom kissed me on the cheek. I couldn't understand a word of what they were saying, but they all seemed pretty pleased with the 82nd Airborne!

I stood around and smiled and looked at what they were pointing towards, but after a bit, I moved away and sat down on a rock and just looked out at the battlefield. By now it was sort of empty and quiet. The dead had been buried, the wounded had been taken away for treatment, and the survivors had moved elsewhere. All that was left were the burned out remnants of Iraqi tanks and armored personnel carriers, and the debris of battle. Now it just seemed desolate and pointless, even as I knew, intellectually, it had been anything but.

After a few minutes, Marilyn came up from behind and laid a hand on my shoulder. "How are you doing?", she asked.

I reached up and touched her hand, and stood up. "I'll be fine. God, I never wanted this. I never wanted anything like this."

"Are you all right?"

"I'll be fine." I put my arm around her shoulder and we walked back to the others. "I guess I'm not much of a general."

"That's okay. We have plenty of them. We just needed a good President. I think we got that."

"It's a low bar to aim for.", I commented. Around us photographers were shooting pictures of us. I wondered which one would get a Pulitzer for snapping me being introspective on the battlefield.

We had flown to the Azwya Valley in a bunch of Black Hawks. Now we loaded up and headed west, to the start line of Kurdish Dragon. It was a short flight, and when we got there I knew it would be more of the same. From that point, the 1st Armored and the 2nd Stryker Cavalry had surged forward, trashing the 1st Hammurabi as they went. Along the way, both Marilyn and I had headphones on, and a colonel was giving us a running travelogue along the way. Below us we could see burned out areas with the remnants of tanks and APCs clustered. The American armored forces had gone through the Republican Guard like a combine goes through dry wheat; now all that was left was the chaff.

We landed in a wide clearing near a bunch of armored vehicles and trucks, with a lot of men in uniforms off to one side. We climbed off the Black Hawks and sorted ourselves out, and then my wife and I were led over towards the men and vehicles. The colonel giving the tour mentioned that this was one of the top companies from the 2nd Stryker Cavalry, and had been in the entire Kurdish Dragon campaign. As we got closer I could see that the armored vehicles were about a dozen or more Strykers, though some looked pretty odd. The men were a mix of American soldiers in DCU uniforms, and what looked like a more motley batch of Peshmerga. As we approached, a noncom ordered the company to attention, and the American soldiers snapped to. The Kurds were slower, but some of them yelled something, and they came to attention as well.

Colonel Jeffries, who was our tour guide, led us to the men, and we stopped in front of a tall black officer. "Mister President, this is Captain..."

I never heard another word the man said. I took a close look at the captain, and I could see him smiling, just perceptibly, and his eyes were darting back and forth between me and Marilyn. It took me a few seconds, and I totally lost whatever the colonel was saying. "Nooooo ... it's not..." The black face in front of me cracked a big smile, and I knew. "Oh my God! ROSCOE!? What in the hell are you ... Marilyn!"

"ROSCOE!" Marilyn squealed happily and pushed past me and wrapped Captain Roscoe Buckminster in a tight hug.

Roscoe laughed and wrapped his arms around her. "Damn, it's good to see you, Aunt Marilyn! You too, Uncle Carl!"

He reached out to shake my hand, but I hugged him as well. "Damn, boy! What are you doing here?"

"They let anybody in this country!", he replied.

Around us any attempt at military decorum had collapsed. Roscoe's troops were staring at us, and the Kurds were jabbering among themselves. Colonel Jeffries asked, "You know this officer, sir?"

I laughed at that. "Colonel, I've known Roscoe his whole life. His father was one of my oldest friends."

Marilyn added, "I used to change Roscoe's diapers!"

"Aunt Marilyn, we didn't need to know that!", protested Captain Buckminster as some of the others laughed.

"Damn, it's good to see you!", I repeated. "What the hell are you doing running an armored company? You're only out of the academy four years now?"

"I was the exec, actually, and then when we were loading the trains in Vilseck, Captain Rodrigo fell off the flatbed and broke both legs! The Colonel gave me the company rather than bring somebody else in at the last minute. I just made Captain a week ago.", he told us.

"Captain Buckminster's company performed excellently during Kurdish Dragon, sir.", interjected Colonel Jeffries. "His promotion was quite deserved."

I nodded and smiled back. "I'm not surprised. His father was an excellent soldier as well. He saw action in the Gulf War. Maybe it runs in the blood." I clapped Roscoe on the shoulder. "Colonel, I don't know what your schedule was going to be, but I think I found where we're having lunch, even if it's cold MREs."

He smiled and agreed. "Yes, sir, understood!"

Just then, as we began to turn away to continue our tour, one of the Peshmerga came up to us from where they were jabbering to each other. It was like he was pushed forward by a few of the others. They were all pointing to the 'All American' patch of the 82nd Airborne on my jacket. The Kurd looked at me and asked, haltingly, "You are American President?"

I nodded and smiled. "Yes, I am President Buckman."

He immediately turned to the others and rattled something off in Kurdish, which made for a lot of chatter. He turned back and asked, "You are soldier? Like..." he paused and added, "Parachute soldier?"

"Yes, I was a soldier, a paratrooper, in the Airborne, like the men in Azwya." I shrugged and smiled, adding, "Many years ago."

My official interpreter, who spoke much better English, translated this and the Kurds began speaking to each other with a lot of animation. Then he turned to me and asked, "Your leg, they want to know if you were shot in the leg, and if that is why you need a cane."

I was using an old and slightly battered hickory cane. My brass and walnut model was back in Erbil. I shook my head. "No, nothing like that. I simply had a bad landing and hurt myself. I had to leave the Army then."

Roscoe piped up and said, "Tell them that the President, when he hurt his leg, then rescued his troops and they marched to safety and attacked drug sellers." The translator zipped through that and there was even more talk in Kurdish.

I looked at my young friend. "Roscoe, if your mother heard you telling a whopper like that, she'd wash your mouth out with soap!"

"Mom was the one who told me, sir.", he said, smiling and not backing down.

The first Kurd, the one who spoke broken English, he came up and said, "You are warrior. You are Peshmerga!" Then the bastard shook my hands vigorously, and kissed me on the cheeks!

The American troops all applauded and yelled at this. These boys must have really impressed these bastards! Jesus Christ, I'd been adopted!

I introduced Marilyn to everybody, and the Kurd asked, "You have sons? They are soldiers, too?"

"Yes, we have a son. He was in the Marines, sort of like soldiers on ships.", I answered.

Well, they kept jabbering to each other. I guess this was proof I was from a warrior family, or something. It seemed like the Buckmans met the minimum requirement for Peshmerga acceptance.

At that point Roscoe gave us a tour of his command. He had a Stryker Rifle Company, and he led us over to one of the Strykers, basically an eight wheeled armored car with a machine gun up on the roof. It had a hatch in the back which was open, and Marilyn and I got inside and looked around a bit, and then left. Then he showed me one of the odd looking jobs, which had a big honking gun on the roof. "What is this thing?", I asked.

"That's a Mobile Gun System, an M-1128. It's a Stryker with the machine gun replaced with a 105 mm tank gun. I had a platoon of these until I became the exec in Vilseck. I'll tell you, you fire this thing, it has a kick like a mule!", he replied.

"Huh. You shoot any tanks with these?"

"Not really. Oh, you can, but the 105 is a bit light for the frontal armor of a T-72. They can handle the sides just fine, though, and can really carve up BMPs and APCs." He pointed at a few other Stryker variants. "That one mounts some TOW missiles, and that one over there has a lid that pops open and can fire a 120 mm mortar."

"You've got your own little army here.", I commented.

He nodded. "We also grabbed an engineer platoon and a scout platoon, an anti-tank platoon, a few other things as well. Dad always said it was better to have it..."

" ... and not need it than to need it and not have it! Yeah, who do you think taught your old man that one?!", I replied. Roscoe must have been doing okay. He had the makings of a small battalion under his command.

"He told me he taught it to you."

I snorted at that, and he then introduced me to a few of his platoon leaders, as well as a few of the Kurds. I wasn't sure what kind of rank structure the Peshmerga had, but it seemed to suit them, and their men gave them the proper respect, and their morale was good, too. "These guys would ride on the roofs of the ICVs until we got into battle, and then hop off. It reminded me of some of the newsreels from the Russian front in World War II.", he told me.

"Riding on the outside of a tank is a good way to get shot!", I told him.

Roscoe simply nodded. "As far as these guys are concerned, it's the price of doing business. I lost some guys, too. We make sure these guys get the same medical treatment our guys do."

I waited until the Kurds were out of earshot, and asked, "So, tell me about the Kurds. Are they any good?"

He glanced over at them and lowered his voice. "Hey, I'm just a captain, but I'd rather they be on my side than the other way around, you know?" As it was, he seemed to consider them his troops as much as any of the Americans. When it came time for lunch, they actually had a mess tent set up, and lunch was a mix of American food and some Kurdish food (lamb in a stew over rice, with flatbread.) The Kurds lined up just like the Americans; they also seemed to like Tabasco sauce, since a lot of the troops pulled bottles out and passed them around. It might not be the way it was shown in the books at Fort Knox, but it seemed to be an effective combat outfit.

I did the usual President-meeting-the-troops routine, which usually consisted of asking, 'How's it going?', 'You guys eating okay?', 'Had a chance to call home yet?', and that sort of thing. It sounds terminally trite and phony, but it's good for morale, and if there was a problem, we needed to know. Morale seemed good, for both the Americans and the Kurds. The only complaint seemed to be that too many of the MREs these guys had been sharing with the Kurds had pork in them. They swapped around as best they could, but some of the Americans complained that pork chops could get old after awhile. Colonel Jeffries commented that Natick (whatever that was) was developing halal MREs. I told him to make sure we put a rush on that, and I would check on it when we got home.

"Have you called your mother?", asked Marilyn.

Roscoe blushed. "Uh, actually, when we were in Erbil, I called my fiancé."

"Your fiancé?! You're engaged!? When did that happen?", she exclaimed, just beating me to it.

He grinned. "We've been seeing each other for six months or so. We met in Vilseck. She works on the base."

"She's a German girl?", I asked.

He shook his head. "Irish. Actually her parents are Jamaican, but they moved to Ireland, which is where she was born, and now she works in Germany. Mom knows, but hasn't had a chance to meet her yet."

"You've got your own little UN there! Well, if you can send her a message, we will be stopping off in Germany on the way back, and we'd love to meet her. Marilyn is going to talk to your mother about you as soon as we get out of here anyway." Roscoe rolled his eyes at that. "How's Tyrone doing? What's he now, first year?" Tyrone Buckminster wanted to go to West Point, and I hadn't been able to talk him out of it, so I used one of my Presidential appointments and sent him there.

"He'll be a firstie this fall."

"Does he want Armor, too, or does he want Artillery like your old man and me?", I asked.

"Neither. He wants to be a combat engineer."

I shrugged. "Nothing wrong with that. They can be useful critters to have around."

That got a laugh out of a lieutenant with the 'castle' insignia of a combat engineer. "Tell your brother that when he gets out of the Army, at least he'll be able to get a job!", he interjected.

I nodded. "That's true enough. Roscoe and me, all we learned was how to shoot things and blow them up."

At that point Colonel Jeffries told us we had to move along. The next flight would be longer, as we were visiting the British 7th Armored. I shook hands with as many people as I could, and Marilyn gave Roscoe another hug. After that it was back on the Black Hawks and a flight eastward.

For some reason, seeing Roscoe there in Kurdistan, and doing well, made the rest of the trip much more enjoyable. I visited the Brits and did a similar tour of one of their tank companies, and then we returned to Erbil. The next day was our last, and I made sure we toured the hospital set up. American casualties were relatively light, and British casualties were almost nonexistent, but the Kurds had taken it on the chin before we got there. I didn't just visit the American troops, but also stuck my head into the British tent, and then visited some of the Kurds.

The Kurdish casualties were much more severe, and the mustard gas casualties were gruesome. I was going through one ward, with some reporters tailing behind me, and my interpreter began talking to one very morose young man who was obviously missing his right leg, from just above the knee. I asked my interpreter about the young man, who looked to be in his early twenties. He said, "He used to play football. He was very good, a champion player."

"Uh ... football ... oh, yes, soccer! We have a different name in America. Soccer, running around and kicking the ball, yes?"

He nodded. "Yes, football. Difficult to do now. Inshallah!"

Inshallah – it is God's will. "Yes." I approached the young Kurd, and sat down in a folding chair next to him. "Let me tell this soldier a story." The interpreter began talking to the soldier, and I talked to him for a few minutes, stopping every few sentences to let the interpreter catch up. "I knew a soldier once, who was an athlete. He ran miles every day ... He was a good soldier, and young and proud ... One day he was hurt, and he could no longer be a soldier ... Now where he once had great pride, now he only had great bitterness and great sorrow." The young Kurd's eyes flicked down to my leg, and then back to my face. "He had many friends, however, and they told him, 'Come, join us, and we will go into business together.', and he did so for many years ... Then his friends told him, 'Come, you are wise, and you should write books to let people know what you know.', and he wrote many books ... Finally, his friends told him, 'Come, you are very wise, and you should become a great leader of our people.', and they elected him a leader of his people ... Now, let me ask you ... Who was this soldier? Was he me?", I asked, slapping my right leg with my cane. "Or was he you?"

The Kurd's eyes opened wide at this, and he talked to the interpreter for several minutes. Afterward, I said goodbye, and Marilyn and I went on our way. The interpreter told me that the young man seemed impressed, and I told him that anybody can kick a football, and that his country needed doctors and teachers and engineers even more. Before we left, I told President Barzani that the Buckman Foundation would help rebuild the country, and promised several million dollars in aid.

I was going to be out of a job in a few years. Maybe I was looking at a new job now, cleaning up the messes I had gotten the world into.

Chapter 165: Survival

From Erbil, we flew back to Incirlik, where I met Erdogan one more time and spent a last night in Turkey. We switched back to the 747. I found out that my promise of matching funds to rebuild the hospital had ended up going world-wide! In just a matter of days, the Buckman Foundation was on the hook for over $12 million for that hospital! This thing was going to be gold-plated by the time we were done. Marilyn just told me that I was rich and to get over it. Well, she was right, I was rich, so I got on television and promised matching funds for all private donations to build schools and clinics in Kurdistan as well. In for a penny, in for a pound.

Originally the plan had been to fly home from Turkey, but we had added one last stop. From Incirlik we flew to Ramstein Air Base in Germany. I had two purposes to this side trip. First was to visit Landstuhl Hospital, which was just a few miles away, and was where all the serious wound cases from Kurdistan ended up being flown to. They were even treating Kurdish Peshmerga and civilian casualties. That was really heart-wrenching. You had these great kids, many of whom, especially from the Azwya Valley battle, had lost arms and legs, and they wanted to get fixed up so they could go back to their buddies. I understood it, but it was still very tough to see.

Secondly, Condi and Tom Ridge had managed to call a NATO summit meeting at Ramstein. This was going to be a fairly quick meeting, just a long day or so, and I was going to thank the NATO members who had been part of the Kurdish Coalition. The biggest help had come from the British, who had sent the 7th Armored and a squadron of Tornado fighter-bombers, and Germany and Norway, who had sent chemical decontamination teams, medical units, and transport battalions. Foremost, of course, was Turkey, without which we couldn't have done anything. I met with the various NATO representatives, and Tony Blair flew in from London, so I made sure I met with him and Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor. The countries that didn't provide assistance, or weren't supportive? They didn't get too many smiles and handshakes, and they might find the next NATO summit meeting a little chillier.

From there, we went home. It had been a long day, and we climbed back onto Air Force One, and I planned to sleep a chunk of it. It was about a nine hour flight, although with the time change, we would arrive back in D.C. about three hours after we took off. Very weird. We would sleep most of the night on the plane, and then land in the middle of the night, and I would be up all night after that.

Marilyn and I loaded last, and we simply settled into some of the seats in the front. Think first class, only nicer. Anyway, once we got on board, we were seated, and a few minutes later the engines spooled up and we began to roll. There is no waiting around when you are the President. We went to the head of the line.

Marilyn told me, while we were taxiing, "You need to call your daughter when we get airborne."

"Which one?"

"Molly."

I shrugged. My baby was 22, and had one more year to go to graduate with her Masters. She and Bucky were still going out, and she was spending her summer working at an internship at Harley-Davidson that Tusker had arranged. He was a major dealer for them and had some pull at their Milwaukee headquarters. Holly would be moving out completely in the fall, when she went to Princeton for her doctoral program. She hadn't settled down on any one guy, but by all accounts she was as heterosexual as her siblings. She had told me she didn't have time right now to settle down. Neither did Charlie, for that matter, who seemed to prefer slinky blonde models that he met at various races. He called them 'bike bunnies.'

Once we were at altitude, I picked up the handset in the console next to me and asked to be connected to Molly. I hung up, knowing the massive telecommunications capabilities of the United States Air Force, the National Security Agency, and the White House Communications Center would be able to track down a college kid who was under surveillance and wasn't actually trying to hide from anybody. A few minutes later, the phone rang again, and I picked it up. Marilyn had an amused look on her face, so I suspected I was being set up. I wondered what my daughter wanted now. "Hello?"

"Daddy!? I am so glad you called! Mom said I had to talk to you. Actually, Bucky has to talk to you. Hold on!"

"Bucky?" I was talking to dead air. I looked over at my wife. "Do you know what is going on?"

She laughed and didn't answer. After about sixty seconds I heard some scrambling on the phone, and then Bucky Tusk came on the line. "Uh ... Mister President ... I mean, Uncle Carl..."

I had a funny feeling about what was coming next. "I'm here, Bucky. What's up?"

"Uh, well, Molly and I, we ... Uh, I am asking for your daughter's hand in marriage ... uh, sir."

I rolled my eyes and looked at Marilyn. I cupped the mouthpiece in my hand, and said, "You knew about this, right?"

She laughed. "Molly called me this afternoon, while you were busy. Quick, say yes before they get scared."

I snorted and took my hand down. "Okay, Bucky, it's not like we've never met you. You will be a welcome addition to the Buckman family." I could hear Molly squealing in the background, so she must have been hanging over his shoulder. "Now, let me talk to my daughter."

"Oh, Daddy, thank you, thank you, this is great!" She babbled on for a minute or so.

"Hold it, young lady. Let me ask you a question. When does the wedding have to be?"

"What do you mean?"

I grimaced and shook my head. "Is this a quickie wedding, as in we need to marry you off right away?"

"Huh?"

"Before nine months pass?"

"DADDY! NO!"

"Hey, I have to ask." Marilyn smiled and punched my shoulder. "Okay. Listen, we are going to need to make an announcement pretty quick. If you told your mother, she's probably told a dozen people already..." I got punched again for that one! " ... so you'd better figure on an official announcement sometime tomorrow or the next day."

"Uh, yeah, okay."

"Here's your mother." I handed the phone to Marilyn.

She took the phone and told me, "You are a rat!" Then she spoke into the handset. "Molly? I just told your father he's a rat!"

They started running me down, and I simply waved over one of the stewards, who was grinning. He must have either heard, or equally likely, Marilyn had said something. "I think we are going to need a bottle of champagne, please."

"Yes, sir. Congratulations!"

"Yeah? Do you know how much weddings cost? It'd be cheaper if they just eloped!"

He laughed and went towards the galley. The rest of the crew around us was smiling, too. Marilyn must have said something! When he returned, Marilyn was hanging up the phone. She told me, "You really are a rat, and a cheap rat, too!"

"I love you, too, honey."

The steward popped the cork and poured us some champagne, and we toasted an engagement. Then I asked the steward, "Do me a favor. Don't say anything, but go back and find Fletcher Donaldson and drag his lazy carcass up here, please. Thank you."

"Yes, sir." He set the bottle in a cooler, and headed to the back of the plane.

A couple of minutes later Fletcher Donaldson came forward. He glanced around and saw it was simply Marilyn and me and a steward and an agent. "Celebrating, Carl? What's up?"

Fletcher was probably the reporter who had been following me the longest, since the days I had been running for Congress while still running the Buckman Group. He had been calling me by my first name since those days, including through my days in Congress. Now, while he was deferential when others were around, when it was just us, he used my name and I didn't correct him.

The same was true for a few other top people and close friends. Certainly my family and personal friends didn't call me 'Mister President', and my Vice President called me Carl, as did most of the Cabinet, and certainly the Core Four - State, Treasury, Defense, and Justice. Fletcher was one of only a handful of reporters who did so, and that group included Tim Russert and George Will, who I had known almost as long.

As a President I had to balance between an 'Imperial Presidency' and something a lot less formal. Both Nixon and Reagan were probably the most imperial Presidents, with a general disdain for Congress, a love of the perquisites of office, and an out of control 'court' of subordinates who frequently broke the law. At the other end you had Jimmy Carter, who would be seen carrying his own luggage and wearing sweaters while turning the heat down in the White House. He didn't look non-imperial, he looked cheap! For what it was worth it seemed like I had managed to strike some sort of balance. No, I didn't carry my own bags, but I did work with Congress, and while I certainly relied on my staff to get things done, I was more than happy to hold them accountable for their actions.

"Have a seat, Fletcher. Champagne?" I pointed at a seat facing back towards Marilyn and me, and motioned the steward over. "Another glass, please."

"Yes, sir."

He was back a few seconds later, and promptly poured some champagne into it. I immediately protested, "Hey, wait, that's the good stuff! He's a reporter. He can't tell the difference between champagne and swill!"

Fletcher grabbed the glass before the steward could take me seriously. "Ignore him. He's heading back to America, where the people don't like him nearly as much as the Kurds do."

Marilyn laughed at that. "That is cold, Fletcher!", she said.

"But true, so true. What's up?", he asked.

"Fletcher, I have decided to take pity on you for teasing you about jumping out of planes. I am going to bless you with an exclusive!"

Marilyn gave me a curious look, but Fletcher's ears twitched and he suddenly got a look like a pointer aiming for a quail. "An exclusive?"

"You are going to get one day, maybe two, before the rest of the world gets informed of one of the most momentous events of the Buckman presidency!"

He looked over at my wife and said, "Why do I have the funny feeling I am being set up for something?"

"Because you're smart?", she answered.

"Nuts to the pair of you! Okay, Fletcher, actually it's not going to be that helpful to you, but your editor and publisher might appreciate it.", I said.

He sipped about half his champagne. "Oh? While that might be enjoyable to the average reporter, I don't live in Baltimore any longer. I moved to D.C. a few years ago, so I don't have to see them all that much. What's going to make them appreciate me?"

"Maybe the Sun's Society page editor might like you." I shrugged. "Anyway, I figure the Sun is our hometown paper, so you guys might as well hear about it first. Molly just got engaged. We just found out tonight."

Fletcher grinned and said, "Congratulations! Who's the lucky fellow? Anybody I know or might have heard of?"

I poured Marilyn and myself some more champagne, and gave her a funny look. "You know, he might know him, after all." I turned back to Fletcher. "Actually, I think you do know him, or at least his family. It's Bucky Tusk, Tusker and Tessa's boy. I know you've met them."

"Ummmm, your business partner, long red hair? Him?"

I nodded. "It's got a lot of gray these days. That's Bucky's dad, and we weren't exactly partners. I was simply an investor in his bike shop. We've known Bucky since he was a baby."

"Bucky and Charlie were business partners in a race team for a bit.", added Marilyn.

"Huh. How's that going?"

"Pretty good, I guess. He's defending his national championship again. We're planning on going to see a few of his races at some point. There's one up in New York at Unadilla where we can go see the races and see some of Marilyn's family at the same time.", I said.

"So, when's the wedding?"

I had no clue, so I shrugged and looked at Marilyn. "Nothing definite, but she graduates next May, so it will probably be next summer.", she answered.

"Are you doing the big White House wedding?", he asked, as he poured himself some more champagne.

That finished the bottle, and the steward brought out another bottle. I thanked him and said, "No idea. When was the last one? Didn't one of Nixon's daughters get married at the White House? Or was that just the reception?"

"My daughters are getting married in a church!", announced the bride's mother.

I glanced at Fletcher. "I guess that settles that! Listen, we'll be issuing a formal announcement after we get home and talk to the kids and the Tusks. Feel free to give your people a head's up. It will all be official in a day or two, tops."

With that I yawned, and Fletcher took the hint. He stood up and then refilled his glass. "I think I am going to take this back with me and make everybody in the press section jealous."

I laughed at that, and after he left, Marilyn and I headed towards our room at the front, and we took our glasses and the rest of the bottle with us. Time for a little Mile High Club action.

Over the next few days, I needed to consider my schedule. It was now the middle of the summer, and we had a mid-term election to win. There were a few advantages to winning a war. My approval ratings had shot back up following Kurdish Dawn and Kurdish Dragon. I was now in the mid-80s, which I hadn't seen since Enduring Freedom had destroyed Al Qaeda and the Taliban. I had a full schedule of campaign appearances across the country, assisting various Congressional and Senatorial candidates either hold their seats or unseat those pesky Democrats. That was going to take up the balance of my summer and go on into the fall.

One of the first things that happened, though, was a joint interview with the various armed services journals. Army Times, Proceedings of the Naval Institute, Air Force Magazine, Coast Guard Magazine, and Leatherneck all wanted to speak to me about the Kurdish War and my efforts on behalf of my fellow veterans. We agreed to a meeting in one of the conference rooms. The service magazines had an interesting readership. If you are in the service, you have probably run across them, and might even have a subscription, but otherwise the odds are you've never even heard of them. Certainly long term veteran non-coms and officers would be familiar with their own service's magazine. In addition, the writers and journalists are often ex-military, or if civilian, would have decent knowledge and familiarity. I wouldn't have to explain the difference between a tank and an armored personnel carrier, for instance.

I think a big part of the interview request was that Al Jazeera had managed to tape my meeting with the Kurdish soldier in the hospital in Erbil. They had broadcast it throughout the Muslim world, translated into the local language, and the original English language version made its way to the American networks. American commentators mentioned that this was similar to my long efforts to ramp up employment and education opportunities for American veterans. Now reporters wanted to know my thoughts on the subject.

Each reporter had their own list of questions, but I suspected the interview would be reported in each magazine almost verbatim. I tried to give thoughtful answers.

Q: "Were you aware, when you spoke to the Kurdish soldier that your response would end up going world-wide?"

A: "Not really. Oh, I am always aware that just about everything I say or do is being recorded, and I knew there were reporters along, but otherwise never gave it too much thought. I was just trying to cheer up a wounded soldier, one ex-soldier to another."

Q: "And what do you feel about the response to that, here at home and world-wide? It has been played in just about every VA hospital in the country."

A: "What I told that soldier applies to any wounded or injured soldier, in any country. Many years ago, when I was injured, I received the same talk from another soldier. We are only as handicapped as we think we are. Life does not end when we leave the service. That service just takes a different shape."

Q: "You have often told veterans and people ending their service to go into politics. Why is that?"

A: "Interesting question. I think, historically, that if we go back to the foundations of what we consider Western Civilization, and by that I mean the Athenian democracy and the Roman Republic, military service was practically a requirement for political office. They didn't expect you to be a general, but they did expect you to know which end of the spear to hold, and which end went into the other guy. That has certainly been the case in America as well, at least until recent years. Up through the Korean War, I think the percentage of the Congress which had served was in the 80%-90% range. That changed after Viet Nam. Nowadays it is somewhere around 10%-20%. I think this country would be better served if that ratio were to rise again."

Q: "How so?"

A: "One of the things I hear constantly are calls by what I call 'chickenhawks' to go to war somewhere in the world. These types have never served and their children have never served but boy are they happy to tell me and my children what to do! In my experience, the last people who actually want a war are the people who have already been in one. I might not be a war hero, but I saw enough in the Army to know just how bad it can get."

We also got into some social issues affecting the services.

Q: "You are a proponent of gay rights. Do you plan on repealing 'Don't ask, don't tell'?"

A: "I don't know as I am a proponent as much as somebody who doesn't think people should be judged based on who they sleep with. It's not so much 'don't ask don't tell' as it is 'don't ask, don't care.'"

Q: "But do you plan to repeal the current law?"

A: "No. I think that would be premature. However, I do think that time is coming, and sooner than you might think. My bet is that the current ruling on homosexuality in the military will be finished in ten years or less. It's a generational thing. People my age or older want the rule, but not the younger generation. They don't understand it or agree with it. Every time they take a poll on this the responses from the senior people in the services are starkly different from those of the junior people. Ten years from now 'don't ask, don't tell' will be history. Twenty years from now nobody will understand why we had it in the first place."

Q: "There are those who argue that having gays in the military will cause a decrease in unit cohesion and efficiency."

A: "I seem to recall we had that same argument about blacks in the military and women in the military. We seem to have survived those two crises. In addition, I just love the people who claim that in combat having to share a foxhole with a gay comrade will be a problem. This just shows they don't know what they are talking about! I've been in a foxhole, and the only thing I cared about the guy in it with me was whether he had enough ammo and whether he was going to do something that might get me killed. Never share a foxhole with anybody braver than you are!"

Q: "Are you going to loosen the restrictions on women in combat?"

A: "That one I'm not in favor of, but I'll be honest about it. I think it's because I'm enough of a dinosaur to think that combat is a man's job, not a woman's. Not everybody agrees with that, of course, and the law allows women into most military fields, and I have no intention of changing that. My biggest issue, however, is simply whether a woman is qualified or not. Men and women are different. On average, men are bigger and have much greater upper body strength. Now, I am perfectly aware that there are any number of women out there who can probably kick my butt, but on average the loads we carry are more than what the average woman can handle. Gender norming is what they use to get around this fact, and I think it is a pernicious problem. If I was going to be in combat, I would want the people around me to be able to carry the load, which just might include me. Then again, my wife and daughters tell me I'm just a grumpy old man, so I don't think I am going to win this argument."

My responses on women and gays made the Sunday morning shows the week after the interviews were published. As always, the religious right considered my remarks a sign of the end times and the collapse of civilization, and the liberals thought I was a hidebound antique. Some days you just can't win.

At the start of September, I had one event which I was the host of and wasn't political. The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra was beginning their fall season at the Meyerhoff. As one of their larger patrons, and the honorary chairman of their fundraising committee (funny how that worked out!) I had the privilege of opening the season up. As President I had missed some years because of scheduling conflicts, but this year I was available. It was a black tie affair, a real gala event, and I would play host and shake hands with the powers that be in Maryland. Bob Ehrlich, the Governor would be there, along with Martin O'Malley, the Mayor of Baltimore, and any number of other state and city politicians, several Congressmen, at least one Senator, and a variety of bigwigs. The concert would be an evening of Wagner, and would be preceded by a very nice (expensive!) cocktail party, my treat.

Marilyn and I arrived at the main entrance on Cathedral Street. We had driven up in the limo from D.C., which took no longer than flying from the South Lawn to somewhere in Baltimore and taking a limo from there. I was sure there was a place, a park or something, we could land in, but it's pretty rude to simply take over a public park and land your helicopter there. Once we pulled up to the front, we waited while the agents looked around at the rope line, and then a door was opened, and I stepped out, and then gave Marilyn my hand to help her out.

Camera flashes began going off, and I waved to the crowds on the other side of the rope line, mostly reporters and photographers. It was guaranteed that this would make the front page of the Society section in the next Baltimore Sun. From there we would head inside to the cocktail reception, which was invitation only. You couldn't even get in the building without an invitation, and people would be entering through a discreet magnetometer system. I knew that agents were out in the crowd, and probably on some nearby roofs, and just inside the rope line was a line of Baltimore City Police officers.

Marilyn slipped away for a second and went over to say hello to Cheryl Dedrick. I waved, but then saw Bob Ehrlich waving and trying to catch my eye. I moved towards him.

"GUN!"

I didn't even have a chance to look around. I heard a few muted POPs, but I was being bodily dragged back to the limo and was thrown inside. Tires squealing and sirens flashing, we were gone in a matter of seconds.

"WHAT ... WHAT HAPPENED!?", I managed to get out. 'WHERE'S MARILYN?!" I looked around, but she wasn't in the limo with me. I could taste blood, so I must have bitten my tongue when they grabbed me.

"There was a gun, sir! Mrs. Buckman is in the next car!", I was told.

I wondered vaguely where we were going, but they really don't tell you that stuff. They had the plan, and the protectee doesn't need to know all the details. Besides, I was feeling a little off at the moment, probably from nerves, and I knew I must have bitten my tongue, since I could taste a lot of blood, and my breathing was a bit difficult.

"Where..." I managed to say, and I could feel some blood dripping out of my mouth onto my dress shirt. The Residence staff was going to be pissed. It would never get clean...

"SHIT! JUMPER IS HIT, REPEAT, JUMPER IS HIT! DIVERTING TO SHOCK TRAUMA!"

Somebody must have been hit by something. I vaguely wondered who, and why everybody was grabbing me and tearing off my shirt. Then I didn't remember anything more.

The next thing I knew, I was waking up in some place that seemed like it was a hospital room, but that didn't make any sense. I hadn't been hurt or sick, so why was I in a hospital? I tried to move around some, but I was really stiff, and had a bunch of tubes going into both arms, and some more going around my head. None of this made any sense, so I tried to sit up, and that didn't work either. I lay back down to try and figure it out.

I woke up a second time in the same place, but things seemed a little clearer. I was able to open my eyes, and the ceiling above whatever I was on had tiles and what looked like wires and hangers and medical type stuff around me. I was able to twist my head slightly to the right, and I saw some medical equipment, and I could hear a BEEP ... BEEP ... BEEP like on some hospital show on television. I could hear a few muted voices, but maybe that was on that hospital show. I tried to speak, but my mouth was pretty dry. I turned to look at my left, but didn't make it that far.

The third time was the charm. I came to and felt awake and conscious. I was able to turn my head and actually see that I was hooked up to a monitor that was showing my pulse and breathing and blood pressure, and it was obvious that I was in a hospital bed. A nurse was down at the end, and she was talking to somebody on a phone. And my wife was there. Marilyn was sitting in a chair staring at me and crying. What happened? Was I dead, and I was now in some out-of-body experience watching people hover around my corpse.

"What happened?" I tried to say it again, but it was just hoarse croaking. The nurse came over with a small cup of water and a flexible straw, which she held to my lips. Marilyn was now standing on the other side, and holding my hand in a death grip. The nurse only let me drink a bit, and I moved my tongue around to wet everything. Then I had another sip, and could ask, fairly clearly, "What happened? Where am I?"

"Oh, God, Carl, you were shot!", exclaimed Marilyn.

I gave her a funny look. "No, I wasn't shot! Where am I?"

At that point, a couple of doctor types came in. "Good morning, Mister President.", said the first one. "Yes, you were shot. You are in the Shock Trauma Center in Baltimore." The pair of them began peering at me and poking and prodding and shining lights in everything.

"Hey, wouldn't it hurt if I had been shot?"

The second one snorted. "Trust me, sir, you'll be feeling it soon enough."

"Who are you?"

The second guy said, "I'm Doctor Hawley. This is Doctor Renfrew. He's the surgeon. I'm the infectious disease guy."

"Infectious ... what the hell is going on?", I demanded.

"You were shot last Friday, at the Symphony, sir. They brought you here, and we got the bullet out, but then you got an infection, and it was pretty bad.", answered Renfrew, the first doctor.

I looked at my wife. "Last Friday!? What day is it now?"

"Wednesday. You've been unconscious for over four days!" She squeezed my hand.

"Four..." I shook my head in disbelief. "What happened?" Nobody answered that.

I looked around the room, and noticed that there was an agent, one of my detail in the corner, and he was nodding his head. "Welcome back, Mister President. Director Basham will explain it to you. He's on his way over now."

"Who's running the country now?"

"John was named Acting President.", answered my wife.

My eyes popped open at that phrase! "I think I've seen this movie before! Let's hope it doesn't end the same way."Marilyn broke down at that and bent down over me, and simply began to hug me and cry. My right arm was relatively free, and I brought it up to rub her back, and in doing so, I felt that pain I had been expecting, in my chest. That made me groan, and I looked over at Renfrew. "Where was I shot? What happened?"

The agent nodded to the doctors, and Doctor Renfrew answered, "You took a bullet to the upper right chest. It wasn't really big or powerful, but it went through one of your ribs and ended up in your right lung. You were brought here, and we were able to get it out fairly quickly, but you got an infection, either from the shooting or from here in the hospital, and we've been treating that since then."

Doctor Hawley added, "It was pretty serious. We've kept you unconscious and on some pretty heavy antibiotics and painkillers for a few days. Yesterday you began to improve, so we began backing off on the sedatives, and here you are, awake again."

"Huh. Four days. I guess I'm not all that important after all.", I mused, smiling. "So, I'm going to live?"

"Probably another thirty or forty years, sir, at least.", Hawley answered with a smile.

I snorted and smiled at that, as Marilyn rubbed my head. "Twenty, twenty-five, max, Doc. Alzheimer's, strokes, and dementia run in my family. I doubt I'll make it much past 70 and still be functioning."

"Carl! Your mother is still alive, and she's 77!"

"She's hanging in there long enough to drive a stake through my heart.", I said, laughing. That hurt, too. "When can I get out of here?"

"You're still in pretty rough shape, sir. Not for a few more days."

I just nodded at that, and the two doctors began doing some more prodding and poking. Then the agent interjected and said, "Director Basham is here."

I looked at the doctors. "Unless you are going to open me up again, I need to speak to some people. Okay?"

"We'll be back, sir, along with your regular doctor."

They went out the door, and Ralph Basham came in past them. He had been one of the Three Amigos, and when Brian Stafford, the previous director had retired, I had named Basham his replacement. I was able to wave my fingers at him. "Hi, Ralph. Is it good morning or good afternoon?"

"Good afternoon, Mister President.", he answered formally. "I am here to apologize for what happened, and to tender my resignation." He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out an envelope. "My deputy is outside to receive your orders."

"Good Christ.", I muttered. "Ralph, why don't you tell me what happened and let me be the one to decide whether you need to leave? All I know so far is that somebody shot me. What happened?"

He came closer and laid the envelope on the bed next to me, but I ignored it. "Yes, sir. We caught the shooter, so we have it figured out. Have you ever heard of a Robert Mooradian?"

"Who?"

"Robert Mooradian."

I searched my memory, but nothing leaped out. "Sorry. Should I?"

"No, sir, but we have to ask anyway. He's a 25 year old carpet salesman from East Patchogue, Long Island. For want of a better phrase, he's not wrapped all that tight." I nodded, and motioned for Basham to continue. "He's a third generation Armenian carpet salesman. His grandfather came to this country shortly before the Second World War, and reportedly told his children and grandchildren about the Armenian Massacre by the Ottoman Turks during the First World War. Most of his family was killed, and he escaped and eventually landed in New York."

"Okay, I've heard of it, but what's that got to do with me?", I asked.

"Well, like I said, this guy, the grandson, he isn't quite all there. Gramps complained about the Turks to all his kids and grandkids, but in general they considered themselves American, and they simply put up with grumpy old Grandpa when he got on one of his rants. The grandson, Robert, he decided that when you went to Turkey and helped them attack Iraq, it was like you were attacking Armenia."

"That's crazy!", I protested.

"That may well be the eventual diagnosis, Mister President.", he admitted.

"So, how did he get close enough to shoot me?"

"He basically got up to the rope line. It looks like he began to track your movements from the time you got home from Europe, but hadn't been able to figure out how to get to one of your campaign stops. Then he learned about your annual appearance at the Symphony and drove down, hoping to get lucky. He stole a gun from an uncle, a long retired transit cop who lives in Queens. You got lucky there. It was a forty year old .38 snub nose with even older ammunition, and it had degraded with time. He got three shots off and then the gun jammed."

"He fired three times?"

Basham shrugged. "The first one hit your chest. After that, you were covered up, and a Baltimore cop managed to grab this guy. He wrapped up this guy, who kept firing, but they managed to subdue Mooradian and disarm him. He's been talking to us ever since, even when his lawyer tells him to shut up!"

Shit! "What happened to the cop?", I asked.

"He's okay. He was wearing his vest and the ammo was really lousy. He's got a bad bruise and some bruised ribs and a story to impress his grandkids some day. He'll be fine. He got some mandatory time off and has been fishing in the Bay for a couple of days, along with one of my guys who's keeping an eye on him."

"I'll want to meet him, thank him."

Ralph nodded. "Yes, sir. Sir, you have to accept this. It happened on my watch..."

"Ralph, shut up. I am not going to fire you or let you quit. Put that out of your head right now. Now, I assume you have some sort of investigation going on. You don't need to answer that; I know it's true. If the investigation says you screwed up, or any of your people screwed up, we can hang the appropriate people then. You know that I won't have any problem doing that. So, give it a rest, let the job continue, and let's see what they figure out."

Marilyn spoke up at that. "Mister Basham, I saw one of your agents bleeding. Didn't he get shot, too?"

"Yes, ma'am. The bullet that hit the President clipped one of the agents in the arm first."

"Then, your men were doing their job, weren't they?"

He didn't answer, so I turned to my wife and said, "Go out there and find this replacement fellow."

She smiled at me and went to the door. She opened the door and said something I couldn't hear, while Basham simply shook his head. She led another man into the room.

"You asked for me, Mister President?"

"Who are you?"

"I'm Brian Nagel, the Deputy Director of the Secret Service, sir. Director Basham ordered me to come here.", he replied.

"You don't think I should fire him?"

"No sir!"

"Good for you. Come here. Take this envelope back to your office and have it shredded. You are still the Deputy Director." I turned my head to Basham. "If it's necessary to fire you, I'll let you know, but until then you are still the Director." Nagel looked relieved and Basham looked embarrassed. "Wait a minute ... if McCain is the Acting President, can I do that?"

For the first time, Ralph Basham smiled. "You're still the President, sir. Mister McCain is already on his way over to see you."

I smiled. "Good! This can get confusing, can't it!?"

"Yes, sir."

"Listen, you get back to work. We'll talk some more." I turned to Marilyn. "When's lunch? I'm starving!"

When Basham and Nagel left, Hawley, Renfrew, and the White House Physician, Tubb, came in. "Gentlemen! Any chance I can get something to eat? A nice steak and a beer would be good."

They looked at each other and smiled. "We'll take that under advisement, Mister President.", answered Tubb. He joined in on the poking and prodding, and they had a nurse pull some of the tubes out of me. Then I got a small bowl of broth and some red Jell-O.

I was grumbling about that when John McCain showed up. "Hello, John. Would you like some delicious broth and Jell-O?", I asked.

He smiled. "I wouldn't want to interfere with your recovery. It's good to see you, Carl! How are you feeling? Hi, Marilyn."

"Hi, John.", she said.

I answered, "Okay. A little sore. It's weird, but it seems unreal. I don't remember being shot, and now I am waking up four days later. What's been going on? Somebody told me you were named Acting President."

McCain nodded. "We did that the next morning, when it became obvious you were going to be out of it for awhile. We used Section Four of the 25th Amendment like you did, but nobody was too worried. Not to be blunt about it, but we knew where you were, at least." It was my turn to nod in understanding. "Now that you're awake, if the doctors clear you, you can get the job back. I think the White House Counsel is drawing up some paperwork already."

"Sounds good. Has anything been going on in the world that I missed?"

"Just the usual mayhem and chaos. Everybody has been calling with words of sympathy. I am sure that some of them might even be real."

Marilyn snorted and rolled her eyes.

"And you still want this job?", I asked, shaking my head and smiling.

He laughed at that. "When do you get out of here?"

I looked over at my wife who looked mystified, so we called in Doctor Tubb. I needed to do some more healing in the hospital, and then begin rebuilding my strength and do some rehabilitation and physical therapy. Currently the plan was to spend one more night at Shock Trauma, and then transfer me to Bethesda for a few days, until I could return to the White House.

That part didn't surprise me. Shock Trauma is actually the Shock Trauma Center, part of the University of Maryland Medical Center, and is one of the finest emergency rooms in the nation. All it handles are severe emergencies and trauma cases – like gunshot victims, for instance. I wasn't even sure they had beds that weren't in an Intensive Care Unit. They definitely were not a long term care facility or a rehab center.

"I probably need to make a statement at some point, but I must look like hell right now. I assume there are reporters down below waiting to pronounce me dead?" All three of them laughed and nodded at that. "You should come up with a statement that since only the good die young, I will be around for a long time to come. Something like that, anyway."

"You need some rest, Mister President.", announced the doctor.

Suddenly I felt tired. "Maybe so." Marilyn kissed me and they left.

I dozed for a few hours and woke up again when a nurse came in to poke and prod. I was able to catch the evening news, and I wasn't surprised to find that I was the lead item. It was reported that I was awake and responding, and my condition was improving rapidly. Then they had excerpts from the press briefing with Marilyn, John McCain, and Doctor Tubb. They reported the same things (awake, responding, improving) and that I had thanked the brave Secret Service agents and Baltimore City Police officers, and the doctors and nurses at Shock Trauma. I would remain hospitalized for a few days more, and would be able to give a statement in a day or two.

I thought the best line was when somebody asked Marilyn if I seemed back to normal. She replied, "Well, Carl asked for a steak and a beer, and he got kind of grouchy when they served him broth and Jell-O. That's pretty normal, don't you think?" I had to laugh at that. Then I ate my evening meal of broth and Jell-O.

Marilyn brought Charlie and the girls to see me that evening. Charlie had flown in from where he was racing, and Molly and Holly came in from where they were going to school. It was good to see them, and then we sent them back to their own lives. Charlie had missed a race over the weekend, and the girls were starting the fall semesters at Princeton and Maryland. They really were all grown up.

The next morning, after some more poking and prodding, and some more broth and Jell-O, along with juice and tea, I was transferred to the Naval Hospital in Bethesda. For that they simply brought in a regular medevac helicopter, loaded me on, and flew me to Bethesda. I got another checkup, and they pulled the rest of the tubes out, along with the catheter, and had me actually walk around some. I was a bit weak and unsteady, but everybody seemed to think I was making good progress. They also told me I would be able to get more solid foods in me. I asked for a steak; I was offered a vegetarian hamburger. "As soon as I get out of here, we are going to the drive-thru at McDonalds!", I told everybody. Marilyn damn near died laughing at me.

I was also able to meet with some of my staff. John Weisenholtz, the White House Counsel brought over a letter to be signed by me and Doctor Tubb that said I was alive and healthy and able to resume my duties as the President. There was a procedure to follow in order to send John McCain back to the dugout. Frank Stouffer came over and we reviewed what I had missed so far, and Will Brucis came over and we discussed an evening press conference. That could be held here at Bethesda, and Frank said he would have somebody bring over some clothing, something casual. Then I got some broth and a green salad, no dressing, for lunch. After lunch I did some more walking, and a physical therapist showed up to torture me. I really needed to get out of the hospital!

The press conference was going to be fairly brief, maybe twenty, thirty minutes, tops. Will limited it to the major networks and a few print reporters, and it would be in a conference room here at Bethesda. He had them set that up, and Marilyn and the physical therapist helped me to take a shower, and get cleaned up and shaved. The only bandages I had were a fairly large one covering my upper right chest. Will had me put on some slacks and a zippered sweatshirt. I almost looked human by the time I was able to totter into the press conference. Totter is actually close to the truth. My right knee was really beginning to bug me, and since I normally supported myself with a cane on my right side, and my right chest now had a hole in it, that made using the cane a lot more difficult.

Still, I much preferred being able to meet reporters on my own two feet. The last President who was able to meet people in a wheelchair was FDR, and the sorry truth was that in the modern television age, it would be the kiss of death. Still, as I got to the doorway into the conference room, I stopped, took a deep breath, stood up straight, and handed my cane to one of the agents. I looked over at Marilyn and smiled.

"How are you feeling?", she asked.

"Like I've been shot and been unconscious and in a hospital for a week."

"You'll be fine."

I planted a smile on my face and stepped forward, no matter how much my body was screaming at me. The camera lights were bright, and I didn't have any makeup on, but I simply brazened it out. I marched forward and waved to everybody, and Doctor Tubb held out a chair for me to sit down in. Marilyn followed me and sat down next to me, so that she and Tubb had me sandwiched. A table was in front of me and microphones were in front of all three of us.

"Hello. Thank you for coming. I just wanted to take this brief opportunity to let everybody know that the reports of my demise are greatly exaggerated. I'll be making a brief statement, and then take some questions." I waited a second for everybody to settle down and get ready, and then it was show time. I had a short statement on the table in front of me.

Me: "Hello, and thank you for coming. Part of my appearance here today is to reassure people that I survived the attempt on my life, and let them know I am quite alive. A greater part is to be able to publicly thank everybody involved in protecting me and saving my life. The First Lady and I would like to thank the Secret Service agents and Baltimore City Police officers who risked their lives protecting me and everyone else last Friday evening. We would like to thank the doctors, nurses, and staff at the Shock Trauma Center in Baltimore and at Bethesda Naval Hospital here in Bethesda. We also wish to thank the millions of people who have kept us in their thoughts and prayers over the last few days. It is very much appreciated. Finally, I wish to personally thank John McCain for stepping into my shoes while I was incapable of discharging my duties. Now, I am sure there are going to be a lot of questions, so let's get started."

Thus began a rather lengthy question and answer period. I knew it was relatively late in the day, and that their editors would be freaking out trying to edit it and cut it down for broadcast but I just didn't care. The most important thing right now was for me to show the nation that I was alive and well and looking Presidential. I never really noticed who was asking questions, but simply tried to give everybody a chance.

Q: "How are you feeling, Mister President?"

Me: (Smiling.) "The First Lady asked me that right before we entered. I told her I felt like I'd been shot and in a hospital for a week!" (Laughter in the room.) "Seriously, I'm rather sore, and a bit weak, but I am getting better every day, and should be back to normal in a few weeks. Until then I am just going to take it a bit easier and follow my doctors' orders." (I looked at Doctor Tubb.) "Sound right?"

Tubb: "President Buckman's condition is much better than he was over the weekend. I can categorically state that the President is in excellent physical condition for a 50 year old man, or even one ten or fifteen years younger. This has helped him considerably in the healing process. We expect that the President will be able to return to the White House in the next few days, although his full recovery and physical therapy will take longer."

Q: "What kind of therapy?"

Me: "Well, I've got a bullet hole here, in my chest." (I pointed at my right chest.) "Lots of muscle damage. It's rather sore at the moment, and I'm a bit weak. I need to build up some strength and let things heal, and get back to my regular range of movement. It's really quite routine, but it needs to be done."

Tubb: "The President..." (He gave them a couple of minutes of medical Latin, all of which I knew would be cut.)

Q: "Is it true that the first thing you asked for was a steak and a beer?"

Me: (Laughing, with Marilyn laughing next to me.) "Absolutely! Anything is better than broth and Jell-O! The first thing we are doing when we get out of here is the whole motorcade is going through a drive-thru somewhere!" (The room really laughed at that one.)

Q: "There are reports that the assassination attempt was made by Armenian terrorists. Is that true?"

Me: "I am not really at liberty to answer that. I can say that there does not seem to be either a terrorist aspect to this, or any current foreign connection. Beyond that, I will simply say that a suspect has been arrested, and that the investigation is continuing."

Q: "Is it true that you are firing the head of the Secret Service?"

Me: "No, that is not true. Let me elaborate on both these topics. There are actually two investigations going on right now. The first is on the actual attempt – who was involved, how did it happen, that sort of thing – and the second is related to that, but is an internal investigation into the Secret Service's procedures. The first investigation is still ongoing, and I have answered a few questions from the Secret Service on that. I will say that I do not intend to make a lot of comments on whoever has been caught. I am a firm believer in the concept of innocent until proven guilty, and the individual involved deserves his day in court. As to the Secret Service itself, I certainly don't plan to start firing people when we don't even know what happened yet or if there even was a breakdown."

Marilyn: "One of the Secret Service agents and a Baltimore policeman were shot saving my husband. I think we are both more worried about their recovery than in starting a witch hunt!" (I nodded at that.)

Q: "Have you met them yet?"

Me: "No, but I definitely intend to."

Q: "Does this change your thinking on gun control?"

Well, I knew this was going to come up at some point. I had a name, dating back to my sponsoring the Defending the Second Amendment Act, as being pro-gun. What I was secretly hoping for was that somebody would ask Marilyn her thoughts. She might be a Democrat, and more liberal than me, but we had talked about guns, and she didn't have a problem with the Second Amendment. On our first trip around, while we hadn't owned guns, Parker had. It never bothered us then, either.

A: "I'm not against gun control laws. I'm against stupid gun control laws. While I can't go into all the details, my understanding is that the person who shot me stole the gun from a person who owned the gun legally, had registered the gun, and was storing it properly. No gun control law short of a confiscation of all guns could have prevented this person from getting that gun, and no way will we ever do that!"

Q: "Mrs. Buckman, are you in favor of gun control laws?"

Marilyn: "Just because I'm a Democrat, it doesn't mean I hate all guns. Carl has owned a gun since he was in the Army and I feel fine with it being in the house. Guns aren't toys, and you have to store them and care for them properly, and both Carl and Charlie have been taught to do that. If you treat them properly, I don't have a problem with people owning guns."

I could see a few people looking at each other curiously. That line of inquiry was going nowhere.

Q: "Are you officially the President at the moment? I mean, the Vice President became the Acting President when you were unconscious."

Me: (Nodding and smiling.) "That is true. This morning I signed a letter, witnessed by Doctor Tubb here, that stated that I am healthy enough to return to my duties as President. That letter was sent to both the President Pro Tempore of the Senate, Senator Stevens, and the Speaker of the House, Congressman DeLay. This is per the 25th Amendment. I had already talked this over with Vice President McCain. For what it's worth, I am getting to be a bit of an expert on the 25th Amendment, since it's how I ended up as the President. I really do want to thank John for stepping up like he did. It tells me that I picked the right guy."

Q: "Are you endorsing the Vice President when he runs for your office?"

Me: "I wasn't aware that John McCain has formally announced his candidacy. Until then I can't endorse him. I can state that I think he would make a superb President, and that if he does officially throw his hat in the ring, I will enthusiastically support him. That's two years from now, folks. Let's worry about that a little later, okay?"

Q: "Do you remember what happened when you were shot?"

Me: (Frowning and shaking my head.) "Not really. It all happened so fast, I didn't even know there had been an attack. I just remember being grabbed and dragged into a car, and while I was asking the agents what happened, they noticed I was leaking. After that things got real hazy, and I woke up in the hospital a few days later. Marilyn and I decided that, just like in the Billy Joel song, only the good die young, so I'll be around for a long, long time." (Marilyn laughed at that and took my hand.)

Q: "Mrs. Buckman, what did you feel when you learned your husband had been shot?" (What an idiot fucking question!)

Marilyn: "I was pretty scared, but I knew Carl is really tough. I spent some time calling the kids and other family members, and by the time that was done, they had the bullet out and Carl was sewed up again. The problem really was the infection he got. That was really serious. Now, I just want to get him home so he can get better."

Me: (Laughing.) "The way it will work is that Doctor Tubb will tell Marilyn that I ain't doing my physical therapy enough, and then he's going to turn her loose on me, to nag me to death. Very unpleasant!" (Tubb laughed and Marilyn protested and slugged my left arm.)

That ended the press conference. I was a bit weak, but I kept up the fakery until we got out in the hallway, and they loaded me into a wheelchair and we hauled ass away from the cameras. I spent the next few days getting better. They started giving me some solid foods, cut back on the pain-killers, and had me doing physical therapy twice a day. By Sunday, Charlie, Molly, and Holly were able to spend some time, and we all managed to catch up. Suzie called, as did a number of my friends, and I talked to Marilyn's mom, who promised to let everybody on that side of the family know how I was doing.

Over the weekend, Frank and some of the other senior staff made morning pilgrimages to the conference room at Bethesda, where they set up a mini-office for me. Thankfully the world was fairly quiet. I did have to return a whole bunch of calls from various heads of state and American politicians, either to thank them for their kind words and thoughts, or to let them know I was still alive and a pain in their ass. Sometimes it was both!

Monday morning I was deemed fit to leave the hospital, even if I still needed more therapy, and I was loaded into the limo and taken back to the White House. I glanced around and asked the agent with me if they had to clean the blood out of the car. He turned bright red, and began to stammer out an apology, but I just laughed and let him off the hook. Maybe it wasn't that funny a joke. At the White House, it seemed like most of the West Wing and Residence staff was there to greet me and applaud when I got out of the car. I thanked them all, and said how much we appreciated it. By then I was able to actually move around well enough to not tire out completely or need a wheelchair. I am not one to be an invalid. I just hated it!

Chapter 166: Lame Duck

2006-2007

It took me the better part of a month to get to a point where I really felt back to my old self, and even then I knew I was lying. The therapists had me doing exercise and lifting some light weights to rebuild torn muscle tissue in my right side, and taking a lot of long walks and some laps in the pool to rebuild my stamina. Needless to say, with my shitty knee, long walks were a real problem! One of the things I did was talk to Doctor Tubb about getting a knee replacement. He wouldn't do the work, but he could at least let me know the questions to ask a specialist. We brought one in, quietly, and had a long talk. The answer wasn't a happy one, as far as my job was concerned. Yes, I was definitely a candidate, and the surgery and follow-up care were relatively straightforward. However, the big problem was going to be post-operative. I was in for at least several weeks of hospitalization followed by several more months of physical therapy. It would make the fun and games with getting shot seem simple. I decided to hold off. In just over two years I would be out of a job anyway. I could do it from the unemployment line.

Once I was up and around, we had a number of awards ceremonies. Most were for the heroes from the Kurdish War, and I awarded a lot of medals as I visited their home bases. Unlike television, where the President shows up five minutes after the battle and hands out a medal, in the real world there is a ton of paperwork and review. I gave the Presidential Unit Citation to the 82nd, the 101st, the 1st Brigade, and the 2nd Strykers. There were a shitload of Purple Hearts, a number of Bronze Stars, a few Silver Stars, several Distinguished Flying Crosses, one Distinguished Service Cross, and two Medals of Honor. Too many of the medals were awarded posthumously, including both Medals of Honor, which went to a corporal and a lieutenant in the 82nd for service in the Azwya Valley. Also awarded posthumously was the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which I gave to Bismarck Myrick, for his service leading up to the war. The most painful to me was when the mother of 1st Lieutenant Martin Stevens, one of the Medal of Honor recipients, told me that he had been one of the members of the West Point football team that I had eaten cold MREs with after that ridiculous bet, and she said he had been so proud to meet me and talk to me.

Afterwards I simply went into a private office and cried. Maybe I'm just not tough enough to be a general.

A different award ceremony was much happier. I gave the Secret Service's Award of Valor to John McEnrole, the agent who got between me and the bullet which did a through-and-through on his arm, and a Baltimore City Police Medal of Honor to William Hopper, the police sergeant who grabbed Mooradian and took him down, while still taking two rounds to the chest. We did a very nice ceremony back at the Meyerhoff, under very high security.

One thing the shooting had done was to totally screw up my plans to campaign for Republican candidates during the last part of the 2006 mid-term elections. Marilyn and the doctors wouldn't even let me get out of the White House until the beginning of October, which only left me about five weeks to help out. On the plus side, I had pretty good approval ratings. The Kurdish War had been fairly successful, and had boosted me to the low 80s. I had dropped as soon as it was over, and people understood some of the budget problems it had caused, but getting shot had boosted me back to the low 70s. (Nothing like almost getting killed to make you popular. Try it sometime and find out!)

Still, I managed a campaign swing every weekend through the remainder of the election season. I would fly into a town on Friday night, meet the Congressman or candidate, and give a speech and attend a fundraiser. Saturday morning I would travel to a nearby district and repeat the process through lunch, and then on to another district in the evening. Maybe I would try to help a Senator in a tight race. Sunday we might fly someplace else, and repeat the process, and then fly home Sunday night, late. It was really quite exhausting, and by the end of the season I was worn down to a nub. I had lost at least ten pounds during my hospital stay, had only regained some of it after I got out, and then lost another ten during the election. I needed a vacation. I told my staff that I intended to lay low over the winter and build up my strength and stamina.

Unfortunately, as President, you really don't get a vacation. Never mind the fact that everybody and their brother is constantly coming to you so that you can fix their problems. No, the biggest issue is that it is politically a really bad idea to take a vacation if you are the President. People want to know who the hell he thinks he is, taking time off at government expense, to fuck around! It doesn't matter that the expense is come out of my pocket. I am obviously goofing off on their tax dollars! I need to stay in Washington, at my desk in the Oval Office, working 24 hours a day, and I should pay the government back for the time I wasted going to the bathroom!

There were actually reporters who counted the days you took off and reported them, and not to your benefit. One report, which actually made it onto MSNBC, showed that I had spent 107 days in 2005 on vacation. When Will Brucis told me that, everybody on the staff was completely mystified. The best that anybody could figure out was that they were counting any day that I was not physically present in Washington for a complete 24 hours as a vacation day. In other words, if I took Marine One to Hereford on Friday night, and then flew back at the crack of dawn on Monday morning, that counted as four days of vacation. Even that didn't account for everything, so we were rather confused. Will tried to get the network to detail what days they were counting, but they refused, citing freedom of the press. Fox and CNN, in a pleasant little bout of commercial rivalry, looked at the travel logs and came up with a vastly lower number, on the order of about 20 that year, including a week at Hougomont, another week in the backyard in Hereford, and four days in Ireland following the G-8 summit in Scotland. MSNBC never retracted their story, but they did stop pushing it.

The Irish vacation was actually one of the better ones we took. We were staying at a very nice and very private hunting lodge in County Cork, not that either Marilyn or I ever hunted. No press was invited or allowed on the grounds, but the day we left the G-8 summit some reporter asked what we planned to do. My first thoughts were to say something rude and unprintable, and Marilyn knew it, so she laughed and wagged her finger at me, telling me to behave. Instead I laughed and made a joke about doing quality control inspections of Irish distilleries. Some smart fellow over at John Jameson must have heard the interview, because the next day, right after we woke up, one of our Secret Service agents asked us about our plan to visit the John Jameson distillery in Cork. Marilyn and I gave him confused looks, and he told us the invitation had come in that morning, and then chided us on changing the schedule without their knowledge. I promised Marilyn I would take her on a tour of a rum distillery if she went along with this, and we did a distillery tour. I did quality control checks on I don't remember how many different samples, and got pleasantly snockered with some of the John Jameson execs, and then took several cases back home of some very select whiskies that don't make it to the stores. Good trip!

Since I had become President, I had only been to Hougomont four times. It is just politically lousy to be known for owning an 'estate' or a 'vacation resort' in a foreign country. It hadn't been sitting empty, however, because I used it frequently to give staffers a nice vacation, and Congressmen and Senators (and their staffers) could be reliably counted upon to be bribed with a nice vacation there as well. It pays to be wealthy. In 2007, during the winter Congressional recess, I planned to make a 'national security inspection' into a vacation. We had some big military bases in Guam and I was told it had some lovely beaches. Marilyn and I decided to find out.

The election results on the morning of November 8 turned out to be pretty much the same thing we had on the morning of November 7. The Democrats had a thin majority in the Senate and the Republicans had a slender but significant lead in the House. All that had been accomplished by the expenditure of several billion dollars was that they rearranged the deck chairs on the Titanic. The real winners were the lobbyists on K Street. The real political discussion from here on out was going to be the 2008 Presidential race, and the fact that I was now a 'lame duck' and unable to accomplish much more during my time in office.

Well, screw that! I had maybe one more year of being able to accomplish anything in this town. 2007 was going to be the last year anything would get done. 2008 was going to be an election year, and a big one. It was time for a new President, and the Democrats would be all over it, and even with my backing and the incumbency of the Vice Presidency, John McCain was going to face a primary challenge. If I wanted to do anything, it would have to be in the next 12-14 months.

Certain things were going to pretty much handle themselves. We had won Kurdistan, and the next few years there would be some consolidation. By reacting to the chemical warfare, but not invading Iraq, we had shown a lot of 'moral leadership' around the world and in the Middle East. Winning the peace was going to be a slog, and expensive, but straightforward. Come to terms with the new Iraqi leaders, keep the peace going between the Turks and the Kurds, and try not to get too big for our britches. I knew there would be calls that we use our military strength to face down Iran and make them behave. That would simply be disastrous. We had a military that was second to none in killing people and breaking shit, and generally worthless when it came to keeping the peace or nation building.

The Kurds did authorize a standing military force and basing rights, which the Pentagon eagerly dropped on my desk. They had plans to station a couple of heavy armored brigades and a fighter wing there. I shot that down as being too big and expensive. They grumbled, but I did sign off on a composite brigade and some military infrastructure projects. Tom Ridge told me that was actually what they wanted all along. The composite brigade would combine a heavy armored battalion, a Stryker battalion, and an airmobile infantry battalion, along with some engineering and logistical support elements. In command of this composite brigade was one freshly minted Brigadier General Buford, now sporting a nice and shiny Distinguished Service Medal (which is not the same thing as the DSC, which is a combat medal) for coming up with the ops plan for Kurdish Dragon. He was young for the rank, and I suspected he was a rising star. We also coughed up some cash to do some infrastructure upgrades at Incirlik, with the Turks. Depending on circumstances, I could see making one more Middle Eastern trip before I was out of office, to touch bases with the Kurds, Turks, Arabs, and Israelis.

We also had a major training element with the mission, training and building up the Peshmerga as a regular infantry army. They were still a light infantry force, but they were going to have access to some captured T-72s and APCs. A number of Western arms firms had an interesting trick where they would take crappy Soviet era equipment, and refurbish it. They could take a T-72, yank out the Russian diesel engine and put in a decent German version, rip out all the electronics and fire control systems and put in American or British, chuck the Iraqi-made ammo and get much better quality Western versions, take off the appliqué reactive armor and bolt on some nice Israeli upgrades, and any number of other things. You end up with a tank that was two or three times the quality of what you started out with, for a fraction of the price. It was still a T-72, but it could take on any other T-72 in the world and probably beat it. (Western gear could still blow it away without getting a scratch.) Elsewhere around the world, similar events were taking place where Western firms would rebuild Soviet planes like MiG-21s and -23s and Hind helicopters, taking basically decent airframes, gutting them, and rebuilding them as fairly decent gear at a reasonable price. The Russians hated us for it, since it really showed how shitty their equipment really was. We generally thumbed our nose at them.

In November, Marilyn and I flew back to Forward Operating Base Thunderbolt to share Thanksgiving dinner with the troops still on duty in Kurdistan. We were at peace, but it was a watchful peace, where you patrolled the border with your weapons locked and cocked. The 82nd, 2nd Strykers, and 1st Brigade had all been sent home, but the 101st was still patrolling the new border, and the British 7th Armored was based in Erbil as an armored backup. General Buford's 47th Brigade Combat Team was still being created and hadn't shipped in yet, but was scheduled for sometime around February, at which time the 101st and the 7th would transfer back out.

Marilyn and I flew from Andrews to Aviano, Italy, on the regular Air Force One, the 747. Erbil was still too small to handle something that needed such a long runway, so this time we transferred to a cleaned up 'VIP' version of a C-17 for the flight to Erbil. Marilyn commented that it was a lot quieter than our last flight in and out, and I just smiled at that.

This was definitely not a 'state visit' type of flight. The 101st was not going to have the band playing, and there wasn't going to be a lot of pomp and flash. I did expect to meet President Barzani, as well as the commanders of the 101st and 7th, and there were going to be reporters along and already present and set up for the landing. (That was in case we went down in flaming wreckage on the final approach; the reporters were all looking forward to that!) Mostly, though, it was to simply sit down with the troops in a combat zone and share dinner. We would be gone the next morning.

We actually had two dinners with everybody. The first was at Thunderbolt in Erbil, and of course we invited the Kurds and the British to join in. The Kurds weren't quite sure what to make of this strange American ritual, but we made sure to have plenty of extras, and President Barzani and his family joined us, along with any Peshmerga who happened to be around. As soon as we were done, however, Marilyn and I hopped into a Blackhawk and flew with a flight of Blackhawks and Chinooks carrying food down to a base south of Kirkuk, where one of the 101st's battalions was deployed. This was a fair bit rougher than back at HQ, but a good hot meal of turkey and stuffing was greeted with some real appreciation.

As always, you end up with two sets of conversations, one with the officers and commanders, and one with the troops. When you are talking to the commanders, it's always discussions of the overall objectives, liberally laced with 'What do you need me to do to make this work?' With the troops it's always personal stuff – 'How's the food?', 'Getting your mail?', 'Are you able to call home?', and the like. Late November in Kurdistan gets definitely nippy, so I asked about the weather and how they were holding up and patrolling, that sort of thing. I had been in their shoes once, and I cared; not all politicians do, and the troops can tell the difference.

I refrained from a lot of speechifying during the visit, but I did make sure I thanked everybody. I did this before the meal.

"I've been where you guys are. I've missed holidays and birthdays and anniversaries because I had the duty, or I was on alert. My son was born while I was deployed to Honduras, and my wife..." (I pointed over at Marilyn.) " ... wasn't too happy about that. So I thank you for what you are doing. I wouldn't ask this of you unless it was important, but I do ask you, because it is important. It has been said that we sleep safely in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to fight those who would harm us. Today, you are those rough men, and I thank you, and your nation thanks you for the protection you provide."

Both times I spoke I received a standing ovation from the troops. Great kids. How many had died because of the orders I gave them?

I had a few more Cabinet replacements coming up. Tom Ridge in Defense had had enough, and was leaving; He suggested Robert Gates, who had been a big wig in the CIA under Bush 41 and Reagan, and seemed a good choice. I sort of remembered him from my first trip through. Also leaving the Cabinet was Paul O'Neill, who had been Treasury Secretary for six years. I decided to ignore all the various suggestions and I plucked a woman named Elizabeth Warren from the depths of the FDIC. There were howls of protest at this, since she was an academic and pro-regulatory, and worst of all, a Democrat! It wasn't unusual to have somebody from the other party in the Cabinet, but they were almost always in the who-gives-a-shit areas, like Commerce or Interior or Veterans Affairs. It shows you are fair and bipartisan, without actually having to put up with them telling you what to do. It is quite unusual to name one to the Core Four.

The one thing I didn't want was a repeat of my first life, where one Goldman Sachs partner after another ran Treasury like it was a piggy bank for investment bankers. Those guys made Bonnie and Clyde look good by comparison! I managed to ram her name through the Senate, despite a rather rancorous confirmation process. Her fellow Dems loved her, but the Republicans didn't, and everybody was worried that she would screw up their cozy relations with the finance industry. I smiled and told her to lie through her teeth as necessary, and then once she was in, to rampage through them as needed. That cozy relationship was more than a little too cozy. I wanted the finance industry clamped down on, hard, and I wanted names for every open regulatory slot who would go along with that.

I also was privately pushing the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, to tighten up on every banking regulation he could get his fingers on. When Greenspan had retired in 2006 I had named Bernanke as the Chairman, mostly out of a lack of anybody else I felt comfortable with. He was both an academic and a member of the Federal Reserve Board when I named him. With Congress constantly wrangling and generally bought and paid for by both K Street and Wall Street, I wanted as much financial regulation rammed back into the system as I could manage without getting Congress involved. I also gave both Bernanke and Warren standing orders to slow down the housing bubble, and ignore whatever Congress wanted to do with that mess.

That wasn't the end of it, however. Harry Reid and the Democrats were still busting my nuts by delaying confirmation hearings on any number of appointed officials. Most of the governmental agencies that regulate the financial markets all had bosses that needed to be confirmed by the Senate. This included the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Reserve, the Office of Thrift Supervision, and so forth. Some of the seats had been empty for a year or more. I had a list of two dozen names ready to go.

I made a preemptive move. After it became obvious that the Congress that would return was the same as the one we had, I called a meeting at the White House of the leaders of the Senate, and of the Finance and Banking Committees, both Republican and Democratic. The Dems wanted to bust my nuts and the Republicans wanted more influence than the Dems would give them, and nobody wanted to piss off the financial firms who flooded their campaign coffers with cash. Nobody actually wanted to fill these positions; they really wanted them to go away so that we could have unfettered and unregulated capitalism, which is what the financial firms dreamed about.

Screw that idea! I laid out the game rules to the Senate leaders. Here is my list of candidates. There are just as many Democrats as Republicans listed, which in many cases was required by law. They have extensive experience and have been properly vetted, and most of these names are well known to you already. Pick two, any two, you don't like, and I'll withdraw them. Otherwise, I expected confirmation hearings to begin before the end of the session, and I expected them to be approved. If you didn't like that, I would wait until after the Senate reconvened in January, and during the first available recess would name them all as recess appointments.

There was a lot of squawking at this! How dare I usurp the power and privilege of the United States Senate, the world's greatest deliberative body! My God, I was a dictator in the mold of Stalin and Hitler! I let them rant, and then stood up and smiled. "You heard me. Pick two. I don't care if you flip coins. The rest get approved by the end of the year, and I don't care if you have to run the confirmation hearings by candlelight in the wee dawn hours! Frank will stay here to let me know your plans. Otherwise, watch me on television in January. I've done it before and, by God, I'll do it again!" I left the room.

Secretly I had given Frank the authority to raise the limit from two candidates to three, but that still left almost two dozen appointees. He came back to my office two hours later grumbling and exhausted, but the Senate had caved in. At that moment I was a hell of a lot more popular with the American public than Congress was. Frank let the three candidates know they weren't going to be confirmed.

Lame duck, my ass!

One major legislative push I had planned was more infrastructure investment. I didn't expect this to be a problem, though. In 2002 I had rammed through several major spending bills on infrastructure as part of my first year in office. I had wrapped them in the mantle of GWB's martyrdom as cynically as possible, and they all passed. A number of them, however, were five year bills, so 2007 was when we had to let them die or renew them. I wasn't just going to renew them, I was going to expand them, and just like in 2002, they were going to get a prominent mention in the next State of the Union Address. I expected more of a fight, simply because George was now cold and forgotten, President for only eight months, and I couldn't wave that flag anymore. I simply told Matt and Marc to start typing and figure out a different approach.

By the end of 2006, Charlie had managed to hold onto his national title as an MX Motocross Champion. The MX class was the larger bikes, 450 cc or so, larger than the other categories, which was good, since Charlie was a big guy. He wasn't so much tall as he was broad, with shoulders that would fill a doorway and muscles on top of his muscles. If the motorcycle broke down, he could probably pick it up and run it around the track.

The season ended in mid-September, just a few weeks after I was shot, and Charlie had only missed one race that season. Now he was in the off-season period, but that didn't mean he was out of work. Now that he was a big time pro, his 'team' had changed. Bucky, his original 'Crew Chief', was now acting as his business manager, but otherwise was spending his time becoming the heir apparent at Tusk Cycle. Sister Molly, his 'Assistant Crew Chief' was in her final year at College Park, finishing her Masters, and looking for a job somewhere. Charlie himself was busy with a new endeavor – acting!

One thing Marilyn and I had done over the years was produce good looking children. In my first life, Maggie had been a knockout, and Parker had been quite handsome, and only Alison had issues, related to the Williams Syndrome she suffered from. Now, in this life, Charlie was quite good looking, and Holly and Molly were simply stunning. They might all have been nitwits and knuckleheads, but that was probably a father's reaction to their antics. In reality, by any quantifiable measure, they were all 9s and 10s.

Unsurprisingly, Charlie's sponsors wanted more out of their marketing dollars than simply their names on some mud-encrusted bikes. As part of their contracts he was obligated to do a certain number of public appearances, do meet-and-greets before and after races, schmooze the locals who were brought in by the corporate types, and do some ads. Charlie had two major sponsors by now, with several smaller ones. The big one was Red Bull, and whenever there was a race, they would always have local distributors at a party with their stars, and Charlie would pose for photos for local ads and such. The Marines also used him like this, but often without his racing outfit, and instead dressed in camo and a t-shirt that showed his Semper Fi or globe-and-anchor tattoos. Tusk Cycle, a small sponsor these days, had him do meet-and-greets at their Honda store, and had posters of him at all their stores. Honda pushed that, also, since he rode a Honda when racing. (He rode a big Harley around otherwise.)

In any case, Charlie was a big and good looking young man with curly blond hair and a big mustache, and it wasn't surprising that Red Bull began using him in television ads. At first, they began simply using race footage, with some shots of him drinking Red Bull before and after. Then they decided to take a chance, and actually have him say some words, which went surprisingly well. I wasn't quite sure how happy this made me and his mother, since a typical commercial might show him drinking Red Bull, racing, drinking more while getting a trophy and hugging a blonde bike bunny, and then drinking more at a nightclub, with more blondes. Some of the scenes seemed a bit raunchy, but I guess they sold a lot of Red Bull. Charlie didn't seem to mind hanging out with blonde models and starlets, that was for sure!

Charlie even began acting, as in the movies. He was cast in a thriller as himself, so that the hero could build some credibility to his character, a motorcycle racer. It was sort of like XXX with Vin Diesel, only lamer. He was only onscreen about 30 seconds, and had two lines, which he told his sisters ad nauseam. Regardless, Charlie got a week's vacation in southern California out of it, and met another leggy blonde.

It was a relatively quiet time legislation wise. We had the usual budget and spending bills, but since we weren't in a serious prolonged deficit situation, as long as I said no to any of the nuttiness, we would be okay.

One thing that I did push for was increased natural gas drilling in various shale formations around the country. The technology to actually do this relatively cheaply was now available, and oil and gas prices had been rising over the years to where it made economic sense. Since I had managed to avoid wars of conquest, which really pissed off the oil producing companies, and scared the pants off the speculators on my first go, prices were lower and more contained. Still they had been rising. More importantly, without Dick Cheney and George Bush kissing a lot of oil company ass, we had managed to avoid the so-called 'Halliburton Rule', which exempted drilling companies from some state and EPA regulations. With more regulators looking them over, the process seemed like it was being cleaner and more transparent. I knew that this could be a real gold mine. I pushed for some sensible regulation, though I made sure not to spout any 'Drill, baby! Drill!" nonsense. Yes, Lee Raymond wanted me to allow all sorts of shenanigans for his help after Katrina, but I pushed back and reminded him of the introductions I had made in Kurdistan, and then asked if he wanted me to call Barzani and introduce him to some people I knew at Chevron and Conoco Phillips. He grumbled, but backed off a bit.

One item I didn't have much trouble with was a bill called the Computer Safety and Protection Act. I mean, who isn't in favor of having a safe computer? In addition to the rather innocuous title, there were several rather vague provisions in the bill, authorizing the funding of an agency to consider potential dangers to American computers and the Internet, and determine the best way to respond to any such dangers. No additional funding was requested beyond an initial few hundred million, peanuts to the budget, although the agency was authorized to accept funding from other government agencies if they could assist existing efforts.

We had tried this a year ago, but the Democrats had stomped on it, not so much because they didn't like computer safety, but because it was an easy and cheap way to bust my balls. They still wanted to bust my balls, but during the '06 election, the Democratic National Committee's computers were hacked! They started by pointing fingers at the Republicans, and Brewster McRiley and his bunch, and the FBI Cybercrime Unit got involved, but it turned out to be a hacking outfit in Kiev. The Ukrainians had done it. This year we had no problems slipping it through.

The Computer Safety and Protection Agency, or CSPA for short, was a brand new cyberwarfare agency. It was charged with defending America's computers and networks from foreign threats, and since the best defense is a good offense, they also were responsible for that. Criminal hackers were an issue, but they were the least of our problems. Much more worrisome were the Chinese, who had rampaged through our defense contractors' networks under Bill Clinton, and were still probing us relentlessly. In addition, we had been engaging in a low level cyberwar, allied with the Israelis, against the Iranians, aimed at shutting down their nuclear weapons program. We stuck to software and programming; the Israelis had added some 'biological interference', a cute euphemism for targeted assassinations of Iranian scientists.

In any case, CSPA was going to be the new cyberwar office. The initial public funding was simply to get them started and into some offices. The real money was in the funding from other agencies. The Pentagon, CIA, and NSA were all going to shovel some serious money, as in billions, from various 'black' accounts that didn't get scrutinized by Congress, and they would get first take on whatever was discovered and have massive input into the CSPA. In fact, the CSPA's first director was a Deputy Director at the NSA, and his deputy was an Air Force three star.

As for the 2008 elections, immigration was a sticky issue, but not quite as bad as it could have been. The DREAM Act had brought in a lot of Hispanic voters, many of whom went Democratic, but not all of them; on social issues many Hispanics are quite conservative. The overall effect had been a positive one for the economy, but it had not ended illegal immigration. As long as the U.S. economy showed more growth than Mexico's we would continue to get illegals. Some of the provisions in the DREAM Act, calling for strengthening the borders for instance, were not all that productive, but we had to do them. Some time was spent on this legislation in 2007.

I could sense that things were getting difficult for the Republican Party. The Republican Party was beginning to fracture along the various fault lines of the groups that made it up. We had always had a conservative base and, if anything, it was now getting more religious and conservative. It didn't matter what I said, but the average Republican Congressman was being pushed to the extremes by the hard right base of the party.

At its very root, gerrymandering was to blame for this. Gerrymandering is the process where Congressional districts are drawn so that it becomes very uncompetitive to run, for one party or the other. For instance, let's say that the area around a particular city has enough population for four Congressional districts. If you simply draw a '+' sign through the middle of the city, and carve up the area into four equally populated districts, then you probably have four fairly competitive districts. But let's suppose that the Republicans have managed to get control of the State House. They can carve the districts up so that you still have four districts, but now, one district in the heart of the city is overwhelmingly black and 95% Democratic, and the other three snake around through the white and Republican suburbs, creating three mostly (70%) Republican districts.

This had been going on for thirty years plus, and with modern computing power, the district maps could be drawn so that individual streets would be in one district or another, based on income levels. As a result, states that might vote 55% Democratic based on statewide voting might have 75% of the districts being Republican! (When they could get away with it the Democrats did the same thing. It had really started out in the court ordered Voting Rights Act battles in the 1960s. There weren't any angels in this stuff on either side.)

The ultimate effect was that many districts in the nation, well over 80%, were completely uncompetitive. One party owned them, lock, stock, and barrel. The primary was the real election, not the later general election. Primaries have lower turnouts, and tend to go towards the extreme branches of either party. In Republican terms, as Brewster had told us many times, if he wanted to win in a Republican primary all he had to do was turn loose the Jesus freaks and the gun nuts and it was a lock. The average Republican district was over 75% white and English speaking. With the Democrats, they had a lot darker complexion in the electorate, and a lot more non-native English speakers.

The party was priming itself for irrelevance. Senate races were statewide contests, and the Senate was slowly becoming Democratic. The older Republicans, mostly business Republicans like myself, were either retiring or being forced out by far right types who managed to make it through the primaries with little voting, only to lose in the general election. Some of these candidates were just incredible losers, but they believed in Jesus, guns, and ending abortion. On my first go we had people like Christine O'Donnell, who was so wacky that she had to preface her campaign ads with statements like, "I'm not a witch.", and some other mouth-breathers who thought rape was okay since you couldn't get pregnant that way. They would make it through the primary and be destroyed in the general election. This time it was just really beginning, but the trend was gaining speed.

By mid-2007 John McCain was in full-blown primary campaign mode. He was generally flying out to various states at least every other weekend. The economy was fairly strong, the deficit was under control, and we weren't in combat. He had a number of primary opponents, but not as many as might be expected. I knew some of these guys were going to run, because they had been flapping their gums ever since the last election. Rudy Giuliani was trying to parlay his credibility from 9-11 into a nationwide campaign, but that wasn't flying with the hard core base of the party, who were not about to vote for a twice-divorced pro-choice New York liberal, no matter that he was a Republican. Mike Huckabee, the Governor of Arkansas, was the darling of the religious right wing of the party. Otherwise, nobody else in the party could stand him, since he could be all sorts of sanctimonious. The only other major contender was Mitt Romney, the Governor of Massachusetts. The fact that a Republican was smart enough to get elected to state-wide office in one of the most liberal and Democratic states in the country should have been read as proof that he could appeal across the country; To the hard core right it meant he was just another damn liberal, and besides, he was a Mormon, and not really a Christian.

John was the presumptive nominee, and to the extent that my blessing meant anything, he had it. My blessing meant nothing with the right wing. By now I had proven myself to be anything but a true Republican. I made deals with Democrats, had put two Supreme Court justices in place who hadn't banned abortion, I didn't go to church (and they whispered about my Catholic wife and children), and I hadn't lowered taxes or cut spending enough. That was roughly one quarter of the party, and they did not like me or John. Three quarters, however, did like us, so that was good for John. One permanent worry we had was that Huckabee might run a third party candidacy when he lost in the primaries, which would doom the party in the national election.

On the Democratic side, things were rather unsettled. The field was wide open. John Kerry had been thumped the last time, so he was staying in the Senate. His VP nominee, John Edwards, was running, as was Hillary Clinton, and that new darling of the Democrats, Barack Obama. In reality they were the only serious candidates, but just about every other Democratic Senator and Governor had announced they were either exploring the possibility or were actively running. Iowa and New Hampshire were making money hand over fist on television ads.

John had the upper hand. A decent economy always favors the party in power. On the Republican side, he was getting the lion's share of the donations, and was the presumptive favorite. As long as he didn't step on his crank, he would do fine. I was pushing him to pick a moderate running mate, and not to pander to the base. He needed to always remember that the Vice Presidential selection might not help, but could always hurt. A loud mouthed nitwit would come back to bite him in the ass. On the Democratic side, it was a tossup at the moment, and we just were waiting and watching for somebody to self-destruct. They all had some fatal flaws, but which ones would show first?

I was able to take it all with a certain degree of relaxation. This was the end for me. I just needed to make it to the election without fucking up. I wasn't running, and if I campaigned too much, it might hurt John. Marilyn was happy, as well. I would be getting out of politics for good, although it was expected I might still have a say from the sidelines. We could go home, and visit Hougomont and travel, and it wouldn't be a zoo any longer. I promised her we would take a long vacation trip, somewhere, anywhere, just the three of us, her, me, and Stormy. That got her to laughing pretty good. I also told her I was going to get my knee replaced, which was a bit more sobering, but she agreed with me on that, too.

2007 was relatively quiet. We continued catching various terrorists, but generally it was overseas. For most of these guys, while they would love to visit the Great Satan and kill themselves gloriously for the Jihad, it wasn't all that easy. The average jihadist wasn't very well educated and didn't speak English. Half the time they would balk at the idea of shaving off their beards and trying to blend in; I guess Mohammed wanted them to wear beards or something when they got to Heaven. Regardless, they stood out to most Customs officials like flashing lights, both here in the States and overseas. It was vastly simpler for them to carry out their grand vision somewhere overseas, where they might be able to drive across a porous border and kill their neighbors.

That didn't mean we didn't still have problems. One of the big changes we had made in 2001 was simply to require that all airplane cockpit bulkheads and doors were changed to bulletproof titanium and were locked before flight, and were never unlocked until after landing. If the pilots had to eat MREs, so be it. At least once a year since then, terrorists had managed to get on board a plane, generally overseas, and tried to take it over, but couldn't get the door open and ended up being taken down by the passengers. The results might be gruesome back in the cabin, but we didn't have planes flying into buildings. If something happened, the pilots could radio a warning, and be diverted to a landing at an isolated military airstrip, at which point the local SWAT team could board the plane and remove the bodies. In a couple of cases they removed the terrorists' bodies as well, and looked on any questionable circumstances with a blind eye.

Likewise, we had now instituted a continuing armed combat air patrol over most major American cities. Most of the time it was just a way for the local Air Force and Guard pilots to rack up some flying hours with nothing to do, but every once in awhile, something exciting happened. One suspicious 727 was shot down coming into Miami when it refused to answer a routine FAA flight query, and then ignored an F-16 ordered to intercept it. It turned out to be a bogus transport flight that was being piloted by an Arab flight crew that stole the plane in Bogota. The F-16 put a few rounds across the plane's nose (which is surprisingly difficult, since the pilot had to disengage the tracking system designed to prevent wasting rounds.) At that point the 727 tried to ram the F-16, which evaded and shot him down. It was like something out of some techno-thriller!

Meanwhile, the FBI continued to catch jihadist wannabes. Now they were learning how to kill, and why, over the Internet. The results were often amateurish, but could still kill if they made them work. The counterterrorism people were working overtime chasing these assholes down.

There were still some things I needed to get involved in. Vladimir Putin was really starting to feel his oats, and he cut off oil and gas exports to Western Europe for several days at the beginning of the year. The excuse was that he was actually punishing Belarus, White Russia, and the pipelines to the West simply went through Belarus. Not everybody was buying that. I ended up taking a lot of phone calls from Germany, Poland, and the Balkan States, asking me to use whatever influence I had with Putin to get him to open the valves up. That sounded great in theory, but the reality was somewhat more limited.

The 'karate summit' had been one of the high points of our relationship. The simple fact was that Putin and Russia had more money, and they were spending that money rebuilding their armed forces. The more they rebuilt, the more confident and feisty they became. Vladimir didn't really need me or the U.S. anyway. They didn't have a lot of trade with us, and while everybody was a whole lot more polite about it that on my first go, they could tell us to go pound salt.

One sticking point was the fact that I had destroyed Iraq during the Kurdish War. Iraq had been a major Russian client state, and we, along with the Brits, had run through them like shit through a goose. The Russians had argued against any sort of U.N. involvement, and then had vetoed a formal U.N. condemnation or intervention. I had ignored his complaints, and treated it as a NATO problem, and the Russians hated NATO. The new junta running Iraq was spending more money rebuilding than buying weapons, which had been one of the conditions we had insisted the Saudis stick into their loan agreements. Worse, after two disastrous wars using Russian equipment, what rebuilding they were doing involved recycled and modernized Russian equipment bought on the open market. None of that money was going to Russia.

Russia was trying to parlay their dislike for us by sucking up to the Chinese. They had the one thing the Chinese really wanted, which was resources. They began offering trade deals to the Chinese. Two can play at that game. I had Condi Rice lead a trade mission to Germany, and give our blessing to a new liquefied natural gas offloading facility in the Baltic. With American natural gas supplies rising, we could export to them. If it worked as well as the experts said it should, the Europeans could build three or four of the things along the Baltic coast line, and we could feed them natural gas for years to come. If nothing else, American gas, while possibly more costly, was probably going to be a lot more reliable and a lot less political. That got Lee Raymond off my back.

Chapter 167: Wedding Bells

We began to see quite a bit more of the Tusks over the winter. Tessa would come down and she and Marilyn began planning the wedding. Tusker would come down with her, and he and I would drink beer. I think we had the better deal. The wedding was scheduled for Saturday, June 23, and just kept getting bigger. It was sort of like Stormy in that regard, in that it began small and cute, and quickly became a monster that would devour your dinner! Normally a bride would be married at her home church, but that was Our Lady of Grace in Parkton, which was nowhere near big enough to handle what this thing was going to be, and there was nowhere nearby really able to provide the security necessary.

It was decided that we would have the wedding at the Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle, probably the fanciest Catholic church in Washington. After that, everyone would come back to the White House for the reception. Since this was just too big for a pair of housewives to really coordinate, we brought in the Chief Usher and the White House Social Secretary to actually run it. That way my daughter might actually manage to be married while I was still in office. All I needed to do was get out my checkbook and simply write out lots of zeroes. I don't know what Tricky Dick spent marrying off Tricia, but even accounting for inflation, I had a terrible feeling I was going to blow that budget to hell and gone!

I checked in with the Social Secretary from time to time to see just how elaborate this thing was growing. They had hired a professional wedding planner to assist them. They couldn't use Marilyn's wedding gown, since both the girls were considerably bustier than their mother had been at that age. Instead, Molly was getting a Vera Wang original, who was personally designing the dress, as well as the bridesmaid's dresses and Marilyn's and Tessa's dresses. I didn't want to think about what that was going to cost! Father Smith, Marilyn and the kids' regular preacher at Our Lady of Grace, would be doing a command performance at St. Matthew's, which was somewhat unusual but was eased by a generous contribution (from me; I learned about it after the fact) to the parish's building fund. We managed to keep the number of bridesmaids and groomsmen down to five on each side, without any of the silly miniature bride and groom nonsense, and the kids eschewed any ring bearer or flower girl – the only members of the family young enough for that sort of thing were their second cousins up in New York, and they weren't that close to them. Holly was going to be the Maid of Honor, and Charlie was the Best Man, and the rest of the slots would be college buddies and other friends.

The real expense, however, would be in the reception. Since this was purely a personal event, nothing would be covered by the taxpayers except for overall security. The cost was probably going to be at least several hundred dollars a plate by the time it was done. Yeah, I know, I am wealthier than Croesus, but still! When I married Maggie off on the first go, we spent about $75 a seat at the reception, at a country club in Albany, and had a pretty nice time. That wasn't going to cut it for just the hors d'oeuvres on this thing!

Meanwhile, the list of guests just kept growing. If we invited immediate family only, that was Marilyn and me and our three kids, and Tusker, Tessa, and Bucky. Then move out to the next layer, all of that first level of relatives, Marilyn's parents and her brothers and sisters, and their families, and the various Tusks and Harpers (Tessa's family), and the Rottingens. That totaled another 100 people right there! Forget about saying 'No children!' since that simply wasn't done in the Lefleur household. Marilyn and I would never hear the end of it from her family. Add in a few dozen more, for friends of the bride and groom and their 'plus ones'. Then start adding in friends and guest of the proud parents. For instance, we added Bill and Melinda Gates. Marilyn and I had been at their wedding, and we invited them. Ditto the Dells. The entire Buckminster family was invited, including Captain Buckminster and his fiancé if he could get leave, as well as 2nd Lieutenant Buckminster, wherever he was stationed. Add in my partners at the Buckman Group, Marty Adrianopolis, and my top lawyers. Tusker invited a few people he knew at Honda and Harley. Then, for real fun, let's add in John and Cindy McCain, and my senior staff, some of whom had been with me since my Congressional days. Then, if I invite one Cabinet member, I had to invite them all. What about Congress and the Senate? I limited that to the Leaders and Whips and the Speaker, and tossed the Dedricks in for good measure.

It seemed to keep growing. By the time the summer rolled around, the wedding was beginning to approximate the royal wedding of Charles and Diana, though hopefully without the same end. Will Brucis had one of his people coordinating the broadcasting of the event. That took me by surprise! Broadcasting?! I told him to sell the rights and maybe I could make a profit on the deal. I contemplated just giving the wedding planner a power of attorney over my bank account. That probably wouldn't be enough, though.

And then June 23 rolled around. The festivities actually started the weekend before. As the best man, Charlie was in charge of the bachelor party, and he asked me for a favor, so I in turn called in a favor from Jake Eisenstein, who called in a favor from Steve Wynn. We loaded the wedding party onto the G-IV, both the guys and the girls, and flew them out to Vegas. Steve put them into a couple of giant suites at the Wynn, one for the guys and one for the girls, and promised to run them everywhere in limos, so none of the idiots would do something stupid, like driving drunk. We flew them out Friday afternoon, and he promised to load their remains back onto the Gulfstream on Sunday evening. We kept the Secret Service presence quiet and low key. I was reliably informed afterwards that the hangovers should be mostly over by the morning of the wedding, that the arrest reports had been buried, and that the videos were completely deniable. When I saw them the following Monday morning, they all looked back through bleary and bloodshot eyes. Marilyn and I were unsympathetic with our children.

All sorts of strange people began showing up in the White House. I think the wedding planner took up residence somewhere, and Vera Wang and crew wandered through at all hours, with Marilyn or the girls in tow. I had the house on 30th Street reserved for the Lefleur family, when they came down. Otherwise I had several blocks of rooms set aside at the Hay-Adams, Hyatt, and Ritz-Carlton. We also had just about every limo in the city reserved. For the honeymoon, we would load the happy couple into the G-IV and send them to Hougomont, with instructions to the Secret Service detachment to stay away from the house and the immediate grounds, and to keep the paparazzi far, far away.

My daughters decided to have fun with Dad by changing things at the last moment, or at least threatening to. One of the wackier hoaxes was when, four days before the wedding, Molly asked if Stormy could be taught to carry a pillow on her back, maybe strapped to her collar, with the rings on it. Stormy could march down the aisle in front of her. She was part of the family, right? My jaw dropped and I stared, and then stood up and started hollering while she and her sister scampered out of the room, laughing. Marilyn sat there listening to this, and I rounded on her.

"Don't blame me! They just like to push your buttons!", she said.

"Stormy? Carrying the rings?! Have they lost their minds?!" I looked over at the doorway, and who came romping in but the mutt, who jumped into my empty recliner. "Don't you start!", I told the dog. "I'm down to my last nerve, and you are standing on it!"

I got a WOOF in return, so I just rubbed her head. There was no way in the world Stormy was going to get involved in this disaster. I'd probably have to pay for a $1,000 Vera Wang designed pillow to carry the rings.

Marilyn laughed at all this. I began to start heading down to the Oval Office and working late, and heading to the Situation Room to see what was happening. Maybe there was a nice war somewhere which would give me a little rest. I told Frank I needed the overtime to pay for it all. He replied, "I'd laugh, but you'd probably un-invite me, which would make my girlfriend un-invite me. No thanks!"

"You have time for a girlfriend? I have to give you more work!" He laughed at that and left. It wasn't all that funny, actually. The poor schmucks who worked around the White House often had no time for their own lives. Fifteen or sixteen hour days were not unheard of. It's very easy to take advantage of them. Burnout is quite common.

Friday afternoon was the rehearsal, which I missed due to a phone call with the Japanese Prime Minister. The rehearsal dinner was at the Hyatt, where the men in the bridal party had a suite. I did make it to the dinner. I wasn't all that worried about screwing up my part in the proceedings. My job was easy. Molly would be the last one up the aisle, and I would be with her. It wasn't like I was going to get lost.

It was at the rehearsal dinner that I first met my other children's dates for the first time. Holly brought a long-haired and bushy-bearded chemistry doctoral student from Princeton named Jerry Something-or-other. He truly resembled a homeless vagrant who had been cleaned up and pushed into a suit that didn't quite fit, as if the last time he had worn it was when he graduated from high school. I whispered to Marilyn after Holly introduced us, "Is this the best she could do?"

"You behave yourself!", was my wife's reply.

"I'm just saying, I mean, he looks like a bum!"

"I'm sure he's very nice.", she added, a bit defensively, I thought.

I shrugged. I had glanced over at Holly, who was talking to Jerry. "Well, if they are still seeing each other at Christmas, tell Holly she should get him some decent clothing and a haircut for Christmas." Marilyn just laughed at that, and promised to try.

He seemed a bit of a nitwit, too. I was getting a drink at the bar, where Charlie and Jerry were standing with beers in their hands. I ordered a couple of glasses of Riesling, so I could take one to Marilyn, and I overheard Jerry ask Charlie, "So what school did you go to?"

Charlie didn't miss a beat. "The University of Monrovia. I majored in International Relations."

Jerry seemed impressed, but asked, "Where's that?", at which point Holly, who had been listening, dragged him away.

I smiled at my son, who tipped his beer towards me and said, "Our school motto was Semper Fi."

"Ours was Airborne!"

"OOO-RAH!"

I chuckled and left to take Marilyn her wine. With luck, Holly would come to her senses.

Charlie's date, on the other hand, was a spectacular looking blonde. After we had been introduced, I had asked Marilyn privately if she was another member of Charlie's Blonde-Of-The-Week Club.

"Megan is a very nice girl. She and your son have been dating since February.", I was informed.

"February! Charlie, with a girl for more than two weeks?! Something must be wrong! Did you check his temperature? Maybe he's sick?"

"Carl! That's awful! That's your son you're talking about! Besides, maybe he's settling down.", my wife protested.

I looked at her curiously. "Charlie? Settling down? Charlie Buckman? Are you sure we are talking about the same person? Charles Robert Buckman, and not Charles Horace Buckman?"

Marilyn had the good grace to give me a guilty shrug at that. "Well, it's possible, isn't it? They met when he was doing that dreadful movie in Hollywood. She was one of the biker girls in the background. We had a chance to talk the other day. She's a very nice girl. You should be nice to her."

"Okay, I'll be nice. I wonder what caught Charlie's attention first, the legs or the..."

"CARL!"

"Just wondering, honey, just wondering."

She punched my arm. "You're not supposed to notice those things!"

"Well, I can guarantee Charlie noticed them!" I got a finger wag at that point, and decided to keep my mouth shut from that point on.

Ultimately, everything worked out. The women's bridal party spent Friday night in the Residence, and I hid in my bedroom. Charlie had the men at the suite in the Hyatt, and I had issued my strongest warnings about letting Bucky or anybody else get liquored up. I also told the Secret Service to pat the nitwits down and confiscate anything that looked like it might be fun. Bucky was to show up at the wedding straight and sober, with Charlie and the rest of the crew in the same condition. Marilyn and Tessa were to supervise the bridesmaids.

The wedding was to take place at 4:00 PM at St. Matthews, and the reception was to begin at 7:00 PM at the White House in the East Room. Since it was to be a full Mass at the church, we probably wouldn't get out of there before 5:00 or 5:30, and then we would have to take photos, just like at any other wedding. Then it would be off to the White House, and if anybody got there earlier, they could hang out in the State Dining Room, which was being set up for something to eat and drink before the official reception. I think the final count ended up somewhere north of 375, but I lost track of both the invitees and the budget.

As we were all leaving the White House to go to St. Matthews, I gave a pronouncement to everyone around. Nothing was to disturb me the rest of the day. If somebody started a war, I wasn't to be informed unless they used large nuclear weapons. Small ones weren't going to cut it. Likewise, if I was disturbed, my response would probably involve large nuclear weapons, and I wasn't being all that particular if the individual disturbing me was foreign or domestic. I was going to nuke somebody! Marilyn just rolled her eyes and hustled me out the door.

All things considered, everything went quite well. On my first go, Maggie had been so nervous she had thrown up for 24 hours ahead of time, and was on the verge of a nervous breakdown by the time we started walking down the aisle. Then the flower girl, Parker's daughter Elspeth, got an itch on her butt, and decided to scratch it the entire time she was walking down the aisle in front of us. The entire church got to watch my granddaughter scratch her ass in church. Maggie and I almost died laughing as I walked her down the aisle, and everything after that went fine.

It wasn't quite that bad this time. Molly was a lot calmer, for one thing. I waited with them in a small room off the entrance of the church. Charlie had the intended victim up front, in another small room near the sanctuary. I found a seat and watched while Marilyn and the girls fussed, then got up and wandered down to see Charlie. I slipped in and found Charlie joking and Bucky nervous. Tusker was standing there with his son, and smiled as I came in "How you holding up, Bucky?", I asked.

"Uh, okay, Uncle Carl. Uh, is ... how is...", he stuttered out. Charlie simply muttered something and shook his head, smiling.

I smacked my son on the back of his head and said, "I can't wait to see you doing this. I'll laugh my ass off!" I turned back to Bucky and answered, "They are all here. Your bride is waiting for this whole mess to start and looks gorgeous." I looked over at Tusker. "Is he going to make it, or do we need to get a crash cart in here to revive him?"

"I don't recall being that nervous when I got married."

"At least he's not bringing his children to the wedding.", I retorted.

Tusker barked out a laugh. "Oh, that is cold, buddy, that is cold!"

Bucky breathed easier on hearing his fiancé was there. Charlie asked, "Why aren't you with the girls?"

"Because the guests are still arriving and because a pack of half a dozen women would drive a saint crazy, let alone me! If I'm in here, your mother can't tell me to behave!"

He snorted out a laugh, and then reached into his jacket and pulled out a silver flask. "I can help your problem, you know."

I gave him a wry look. "I thought I told you to keep him sober."

"Hey, he's sober, and so am I. We've been behaving all night long." He waved the flask under my nose. "Hmmm?"

"Screw it, why not." I took it from him and took a swig, and then handed it to my soon-to-be son-in-law. I swallowed my drink with a bit of a grimace. "That's right, you like bourbon, don't you?" I might not like it, but I did get that familiar warming feeling as it went down. I also knew that if we sat around drinking it long enough, I'd learn to like it, too.

Charlie grinned and took a sip and passed it to Tusker. "As opposed to that sissy stuff you drink from Canada and Ireland. I'm surprised your party hasn't censured you for that already."

"My party! The Republicans? Please, don't ruin my day and tell me you're a Democrat! It's bad enough with your mother and sisters, but I was hoping that you at least actually had hair on your balls!" I took back the flask and took a second sip.

They all laughed at me, and they took another sip again, and then I took the flask from them, put the cap back on it, and slipped it into my pocket. "You'll get this after the I do part.", I told them. Charlie lightheartedly protested as Tusker and I left and headed back to the womenfolk. I waved at several people and shook a few hands on the way, and we found the bridal party trying to sort themselves into the proper order. Tusker went over to Tessa and gave her a hug.

I looked at Marilyn and asked, "How's it all going in here?"

"Remarkably well. Molly's good. Isn't she gorgeous?!" She pulled my youngest over to stand in front of me, and sandwiched her with her sister on the other side.

I had to smile at that. Molly was wearing white, with an off-the-shoulder brocaded bodice and Chantilly lace everywhere else. It also had a long train, but when I had asked about that earlier, I was assured it could be removed for dancing later. She also had a white veil and a circlet on her head, but that was pushed up and out of the way for the moment. The other members of the wedding party were all in rose gowns, each one different, including the mothers of the bride and groom. Marilyn was wearing a calf length dress with a bustier top and a matching jacket; Holly's dress was a slim fitting sheath with spaghetti straps.

I stepped back and eyed the trio thoughtfully. "Gorgeous! Molly, you are almost as beautiful as your mother was when we got married."

Marilyn blushed and smiled, and Molly grinned. "Nice one, Dad!"

Holly added, "Dad's just trying to get lucky later."

Tusker heard that one and began to cough. I looked over at him and said, "At least you only had boys! It could have been so much worse!"

One of the agents knocked on the door and entered. He smiled and said, "I was told to tell you that the guests are all here and you can get started whenever you want."

I looked at Molly. "Ready?"

Molly answered, "Ready!"

"Last chance. No cold feet?"

"No cold feet, Dad. Are you ready?"

I chuckled at that. "Baby, I'm not going to walk you down the aisle, I'm going to run you down the aisle, and when I get to Bucky, I'm going to say, 'Here! She's your problem now!'"

"Daddy!"

"Wait!", cried Holly, who reached up and pulled the veil back down over her sister's face, and then she and Tessa straightened it out. "Okay, ready!"

We began to file out of the room. I hung back with my wife for a second, and whispered in her ear, "I've been informed that weddings are good places to pick up chicks for later, that women at weddings get all sorts of wild and crazy ideas."

She grinned at me and whispered back, "You never know. Just how wild and crazy were you hoping to get?"

I waggled my eyebrows at her and she laughed, and then went to her place in the lineup. I moved back to stand next to Molly. As I went out the door, I handed my cane to one of the agents. "Do me a favor and hold onto that. I may be old and decrepit, but I think I can hold myself together long enough to walk my daughter down the aisle."

The agent was one of the guys who worked out with me some mornings. "Yes, sir. I'll put it with your wheelchair, right next to the walker.", he laughed.

"Good idea. Thank you."

I took my place at the end of the line with Molly, as her sister straightened the train out behind her, and then the music started up and we simply had to wait for everybody in front of us to move on out. We had the groom's parents, then Marilyn, then the ushers and bridesmaids, and then Holly. Finally it was just Molly and me, so I tucked her arm inside mine and as the processional began, we slowly moved down the aisle. My knee was really beginning to bother me these days, but I was all smiles as I escorted my baby. Down at the front I carefully lifted her veil off her face, and kissed her on the forehead. No, I didn't make any smart or snarky remarks to either one of them. Marilyn would have killed me. Then I moved back to the pew next to Marilyn. I glanced across the aisle, and Tusker gave me a thumbs up, which I returned. (That photo ended up in Business Week in an article on Tusk Cycle.)

Really, when it comes down to it, isn't all that any of us want out of life is to see our kids married off and doing well? What more is there, in the final analysis? One down, two to go.

I smiled at the two people sitting in the pew with us, our still single children's dates. We went through the ceremony and the Mass just fine. Marilyn had ordered that her children were going to be married in a church with a proper Mass. During the wedding plans discussion this had been uttered in an imperious tone that had the rest of us nervously stepping back a pace and going, "Sure thing, whatever you say!" When the time came for communion, I just stayed in my seat, since I wasn't Catholic, and let the others go past me. Jerry stayed seated; Megan stood and took communion with the others. I was sure that would please Marilyn.

And thus my baby got married. They didn't do any silly homemade wedding vows. It was all pretty conventional, but that works for most of us. Marilyn cried appropriately, and I just hugged her with an arm around the shoulders. Then we all marched back down the aisle and got sprinkled with soap bubbles from those little plastic bottles that everybody got. After a bit, with everybody and their brother shaking hands and congratulating each other, the wedding party headed back inside for photos while everybody else made their way over to the White House. If you didn't have your own limo, we provided, and if that wasn't enough, we had luxury coach buses available for the short drive. Since everybody was going to get into the booze before we made it back, I pulled out the flask I had confiscated and we passed that around until we finished it off – about one swig each! Luckily, it wasn't the only flask around.

I'm glad I didn't have to be presidential that day, because from that point on, things got a little blurry. On the plus side, I'm a fairly happy drunk, unlike a few of Marilyn's brothers. Luke and Rafael, for instance, are mean drunks, and getting them lit up is a good way to start a fight. I didn't tell my wife, but I told the Secret Service agents watching over everything to keep an eye on a few of them. Rafe, in particular, was a mouthy hard core Republican, and I didn't need him getting drunk and spouting off to the Senate Majority Leader! Some of the others, like Michael and John, were happy drunks and the more they drank the more they smiled and laid back.

The group was much too big to do a formal receiving line and have all the guests come through, to shake hands and congratulate us. I did a top of the head calculation, and if each guest spent only 30 seconds with us, that would make the line three hours long! Instead, we simply had the wedding party troop into the East Room two by two, and then did a quick champagne toast. After that, it was party time.

And it was a very nice party! To a certain extent, the politician joined in with the proud father as I ended up circulating and working the room. In some cases I was acting the politician, shaking hands with people, and inviting them to donate to the McCain campaign, and I know I introduced John to several of my business acquaintances over the years. Holly's date, Jerry the grad student, seemed pretty dumbstruck by the whole affair. I asked my wife if they were serious, and Marilyn told me she wasn't sure. I asked her if this was a trial run for them, and she simply gave me a mystified look, and I told her it was up to her to find out. That earned me an amused salute.

Megan, on the other hand, seemed quite at ease in the setting. Charlie was away for a moment, and I had a chance to talk to her. She really was a beautiful girl, about 21 or 22, long golden blonde hair, figure like a centerfold's, and leggy. In heels she was probably as tall as he was. "Enjoying yourself?", I asked her.

She smiled and nodded. "Yes, thank you. It reminds me in a way of some of the big parties in Hollywood, all the famous people, I mean."

"Oh? I never moved in those crowds."

She smiled. "Hollywood ... it's all image and glamour, who you know and who you're seen with. I've been to a few Oscar and Emmy parties, where it's just wall to wall stars and producers and directors. I mean, I was just somebody's date, eye candy for the crowd, but you know what I mean."

"Is that how you met Charlie?" Eye candy? I found that a bit disturbing.

"No. Charlie's not into that. We met on the set of Vapor Lock. He was only there for a few days, and I was just a random biker babe, standing in the background during a party scene, drinking colored water and pretending it was something else. Charlie had to keep saying his lines over and over again, because the co-star was too coked up to remember his own lines." She gave me a nervous look at that. "I mean, Charlie wasn't doing anything ... this isn't going to cause trouble, will it?"

I snorted at that. "The Attorney General is sitting at a different table. If you don't tell him, neither will I."

"Okay. Anyway, it was so bad they decided to shoot the whole thing again in the morning, before anybody had a chance to get too stoned. Charlie had been hitting on me – nicely, I mean, not creepy - and asked me to dinner, and I said yes. He was a real gentleman, too, which was a big improvement over some of the people you get out there. So the next morning, Charlie did the scene again, and then he was out of there, but he had my number, and he called me a few times, and we managed to meet up again. We've been seeing each other since then."

"Marilyn told me that was when you met. Did you like being in the movie? I know absolutely nothing about that business." That was true, too. Most Hollywood donations go to the Democrats.

She gave a laugh. "Yes, I mean, I am trying to be an actress, and it was a paycheck, but I could tell, even as we were shooting it, that the whole thing was a disaster! I mean, it was just straight to video, $200 million down the toilet. I cashed my check as soon as I could!"

"Acting isn't working out for you?" Did this girl see Charlie as her next meal ticket?

"Just not like you think it will. It takes longer than you imagine, and there are so many idiot roles like that one. I think everybody goes out there thinking that they are going to wake up the next morning doing Shakespeare and Spielberg, and it sure isn't like that. I think I am going to end up doing commercials and character roles at some point. In another year or so I'll be past my sell-by date anyway."

"You're kidding me! How old are you, 21, 22?"

"I'm 23. Right now, I am competing against girls straight out of high school who are even prettier, and look better under hi-def. I figure if I haven't made it by 25, the only starring roles I will land will be with studios and movies where you don't get invited to the White House, you know?"

"A lot of that happen? The non White House stuff", I commented.

"Easy money, but I don't think I want to go down that path. I think I'll head back to Omaha first."

I smiled at that. Just then, Charlie returned. "Hey, Dad, hitting on my girl?"

"Not while your mother is in the same room. Here, have a seat while I circulate. Megan and I were just having a very nice talk." To Megan I said, "We'll talk some more, later."

I wasn't quite sure how to take Megan. She was a smart girl, that I was sure of. Was she also a gold digger? I didn't think so, but she was an actress. Maybe she was acting like a nice girl? Or was I over thinking things? Maybe they were in love. She was Charlie's problem, anyway.

I wandered through the room some more, and found myself at the table the Buckminsters were at. After Harlan's death I had wondered if they would move back to Mississippi, but Anna Lee had told me that she had built a new life in Alexandria, working as an OB-GYN nurse at a clinic. There were nine of them there. Anna Lee had brought a fellow about our age that she introduced as a real estate agent. It had been six years since Harlan's death, so I suppose enough time had passed for mourning. Mary Beth and her husband were there, along with their daughter, a three year old who was running circles around the table and chasing after some of the Lefleur grandchildren. Mary Beth was expecting a second child, too.

Neither Roscoe nor Tyrone was married yet, but both had brought their fiancés. It was amusing, in a way, when I approached the table. The two boys were chatting to each other, and facing the dance area, as I came up from behind and said hello. The two of them were in their dress uniforms, and they popped up and whirled around, coming to attention like a pair of cadets facing a surprise inspection by the Commandant. I had to laugh. "Captain Buckminster, aren't you looking spiffy with your medals all shiny. What is that, a Silver Star I see? And you, Second Lieutenant Buckminster, fresh from the Academy and all bright eyed and bushy tailed!" Behind me I heard Anna Lee start to laugh. "Oh, for the love of God, at ease, you two, before your mother and sister die of laughter."

The boys relaxed as Anna Lee and Mary Beth laughed at them, and I shook their hands and let them introduce me to their ladies. Roscoe was on leave from his outfit in Germany, and had brought Elizabeth with him; Marilyn and I had met her last year when we flew into Ramstein. Tyrone was there with a girl from Rhinebeck that he had met while at West Point. "You still with your company in Vilseck?", I asked Roscoe.

He nodded. "Yes, sir. I still have the company, but I'm also the Assistant S-3 for the battalion."

I nodded. "Assistant S-3? Impressive!" I had given Roscoe his Silver Star for his leadership in Kurdistan at one of the awards ceremonies. In a way I knew where this would lead. For all the bureaucracy of the Army, the bottom line is leading people effectively while getting shot at. Roscoe had proven his ability to do that. He would be moving onwards and upwards. "What's next, Leavenworth?" That was the Command and General Staff College.

"Yes, sir. I'll be in the next class."

"Good for you. Hey, whatever happened to your old captain, the fellow who fell off the train and handed you the company?", I asked.

"He was in the body shop a couple of months, and then transferred to a battalion S-1 slot back at Fort Hood."

"Huh." I looked over at Roscoe's brother. "So, Tyrone, where are you stationed now that you've graduated? Did you decide to go Engineer?"

"Yes, sir. I'm training out at Fort Leonard Wood, in Missouri. It's sort of nowhere, but nice."

We chatted a bit more, and I continued moving around. After a bit, we had a lovely dinner. While the only people in tuxes were those of us in the wedding party, the whole thing was as glitzy as any state dinner, and much more comfortable.

Eventually it became time to dance, and I was leading off with a father-daughter dance with Molly. The music had really been the only argument we had about the entire wedding. I had the Marine Corps Band at my disposal, 'The President's Own', and they don't just do marches. They frequently played dance music at state dinners and other social events. Molly wanted a DJ to play the kind of music she and the younger kids wanted to hear. Generally Marilyn and I couldn't stand that music, and our children couldn't stand the country music we listened to. Eventually we settled on the Marine Corps Band through the first half of the evening, starting from the processional into the East Room and through dinner, and then we brought in a DJ. I felt incredibly embarrassed telling this to the band leaders, but they took it in stride, and actually laughed it off.

Still, she might complain, but I was going to have my way on one thing, that first dance! She might be listening to something God-awful in a few minutes, but our first dance would be to "I Loved Her First", by Heartland. It was a real tear-jerker, and quite lovely, and was one of the best wedding songs I had ever heard. It had come out last summer, and by the end of 2006 had topped the charts.

As soon as it started coming from the loudspeakers, Molly looked at me and said, "Daddy, you promised, no country."

"Just this one song, honey, and then they'll play your stuff." With that I took her in my arms, and danced her around the center of the floor, but as I did so, I sang the words into her ear softly. I had done the same thing during my first trip, when I married Maggie off to Jackson, and the result was the same. Molly was crying into my shoulder by the end of the song, and then wrapped her arms around my neck in a big hug at the end as the audience applauded. I handed her off to Bucky, and went off to sit with Marilyn, who was also smiling and crying. I smiled at my wife and said, "You women cry too much."

She leaned over and hugged me. "You're just a big old softy, aren't you?"

"Don't tell anybody, you'll ruin my reputation!"

Chapter 168: Off to the Races

August 26, 2007

We managed to get our lives back to a semblance of normal by the start of business Monday. Molly and Bucky had been packed off to Hougomont on the G-IV, Holly and her boyfriend went back to Princeton Sunday, and Charlie and Megan left on Sunday as well. He was taking her back to Hollywood, and then was flying to meet his racing team.

Charlie's professional motorcycle racing career was the stuff of legend. A local level pro champion as a teenager, he had given it up when he went into the Marines. Once he was out of the Marines in the fall of 2003, he had decided to give it a try again. He had raced in the 2004 season, never losing a single race, and worked his way up to the AMA Championship series by the end of the season. He had won the MX series, the larger and heavier bikes, back to back in 2005 and 2006, and this year he was defending his title, trying to make it three in a row.

The weekend of the wedding had been an off week for racing, so he didn't lose any points for missing a race. The previous weekend, that had been a problem. He had missed Budds Creek in Maryland to run the parties in Vegas, and his sponsors weren't amused. When I heard him comment on that I asked him about it.

Charlie's reply? "I guess I'll just have to win the rest of the season and take the championship again. That should get them off my back."

"It's good to see somebody so humble. It's a refreshing break from the usual egos I see here in D.C.", I answered dryly.

He simply laughed at that. "It ain't bragging if it's fact!"

I grumbled and rolled my eyes. Damned if he didn't, too! The following weekend he won in Buchanan, Michigan, and then two weeks later he took Unadilla in New York. He only placed second in Lakewood, Colorado on July 22, but won the next two races in Washougal, Washington, and Millville, Minnesota. His next big race was in Delmont, Pennsylvania, on August 26, which was a bit east of Pittsburgh. That was close enough to take Marine One to.

Every year we tried to see one of Charlie's races. It's difficult, however, since the President has to take a giant entourage with him everywhere. I hated taking the zoo for a personal trip. Fortunately there is usually a track somewhere in Maryland, Virginia, or Pennsylvania close enough to take a helicopter to. We would send up the appropriate advance elements, and then fly up for the day, and be back in Washington by the evening. Half the time the press never even noticed, since there was no flaming wreckage on the South Lawn to clue them in. We never made an announcement, but simply flew to the nearest drop off point – perhaps the local police barracks or fire department parking lot – and picked up a quiet convoy to go to the races.

We tried to keep it low key. We didn't do local interviews unless somebody stuck a camera in my face. We didn't meet with local politicians. I didn't have fundraisers or dinners. It wasn't that kind of trip. It wasn't like NASCAR, either. There are no grandstands and no luxury Skyboxes. You generally stand outside a chain link fence, and your seats might be a pair of lawn chairs with a beer cooler in between, and a beach umbrella in case it rained. It didn't matter all that much to Marilyn or me. We would have never gone if Charlie wasn't involved, but he was involved, and he was our son, so we tried to make a race during the season.

The security involved in low key situations like this is still quite intricate. The President just doesn't go places. No matter where I am, I have a lot of heavily armed Secret Service agents in very close proximity. We have the War Wagons, a doctor and nurse in attendance, an armored limo, and usually extra vehicles as decoys, and around that are typically local and state cops in an elaborate motorcade. We also have some lower impact alternatives for when I wanted something a lot more subtle. Put the locals and Staties in unmarked cars, cut down on the decoys, use a War Wagon and not a limo, and dress everybody in civvies.

Another thing you did was simple misdirection. Tell people you were going to be someplace else, and they look someplace else. In the case of Delmont, we told the press we were going to Camp David for the weekend. Since no press is allowed at Camp David, nobody was there to see us not land. Even though people might know that my son was a nationally ranked motocross champion, they also knew we didn't attend his races. Toss another factor into the mix – I don't look all that Presidential! Real Presidents look like Bill Clinton, Mitt Romney, or John Kerry – tall, full heads of hair, square jawed, and handsome. As I occasionally joked with my wife, I was just a middle aged bald guy with bifocals and a busted nose. I might be in good shape and not overweight, but I was 51 years old, my hair was more than a little thin and more silver than dirty blond, I had bags under my eyes, and I was getting a bit jowly. Put me in a dark suit and slap on some makeup and give me a speech, I looked like the President. Put me in cargo shorts and a Hawaiian shirt and I looked like your neighbor getting ready to mow the lawn.

This wasn't an unusual situation, historically speaking. Since nobody actually cared all that much about the V.P., he didn't need to be all that handsome. FDR looked rather patrician; Truman looked like a clerk in a shoe store. JFK was young and handsome; LBJ looked like a sad sack hound dog! Neither Truman nor LBJ would have had a shot at running for President after their boss had served his full term, but wasn't everybody surprised when they died! Now I was in the same situation. GWB was arguably better looking than me, and my replacement probably would be, too.

When we went to Delmont, we took the small and quiet version of the zoo, and most of them stayed in the parking lot. Even though I had survived an assassination attempt just a year ago, I wasn't terribly worried. We had several dozen agents around us in three layers - immediately around us, more wandering through the nearby crowds, and the rest farther out, wandering randomly. Meanwhile, Marilyn and I wore cargo shorts and Hawaiian shirts, sneakers, sunglasses, and big straw hats. We didn't look like the President and First Lady of the United States. We looked like a couple of gym teachers from the local junior high.

One thing I noticed, in the pictures we saw of the races and Winner's Circle, was that Megan was in a lot of the pictures. Charlie might be getting kissed by the local Miss Motocross, but he often had an arm around Megan while he did so. I saw her in enough photos that I called in one of my Secret Service agents and broke about a dozen laws. Who was this girl? I sent him off to do a very quiet background check.

It came back pretty much like Megan had told me at the wedding. Megan Morgan, born Megan Pulaski on May 4, 1984, in Elkhorn, Nebraska, a small neighborhood on the outskirts of Omaha, which had just this year been annexed by Omaha. Her father, John, was a family law lawyer and her mother, Barbara, worked as a receptionist at a local park called Chalco Hills. She lived her entire life in Elkhorn in the same house with her parents and two younger brothers, John Jr. and William (he went by 'Will'.) She went to public schools, first Westridge Elementary, then Elkhorn Middle School, and finally Elkhorn High. Good grades, cheerleader, Girl Scouts, all the usual stuff. Got a part in a middle school play in the 7th grade, and was hooked. Her last two years in high school she played the female lead in the school play, to rave reviews. After high school, Megan went to the University of Nebraska, where she majored in theatre.

Following her graduation from Nebraska, Megan took the bus to Hollywood and Vine, in the hope that she would soon be discovered and become the next Marilyn Monroe or Elizabeth Taylor. Fortunately, she had a cousin she could stay with while she went about being discovered. On the advice of her agent she changed her professional name to Megan Morgan, since it sounded less ethnic and more alliterative. Unsurprisingly, discovery never happened, and like millions of aspiring actresses before her, she ended up waiting tables in bars and clubs while doing bit parts and non-speaking background roles. Some of the jobs had some nudity (unnamed dancer in a strip club in a biker movie, unnamed doomed sorority girl in a horror flick, etc.) but there was no evidence she had done anything worse than that.

While I wasn't any kind of expert on Hollywood, I knew enough about the business to know that every year thousands of kids, guys and girls, hop off the bus from Omaha and every other damn place with stars in their eyes and dreams in their hearts. A handful make it big. Most end up working bit parts and whatever they can land for a few years, and then move on. Some end up making a living as character actors or doing commercials. Some drop down to the lower levels, where they end up doing XXX stuff and can't ever show their faces in public again. Megan hadn't sunk to that point, and instead seemed to be in the vast middle ranks. Back in Elkhorn and Lincoln, she was damn hot stuff. In Hollywood, she was just one more good looking leggy blonde with big tits. They grew them on trees out there.

I kept my mouth shut, and didn't even tell Marilyn I had her investigated, since that would have been tantamount to telling Charlie. Charlie seemed happy. Maybe he was settling down after all, inconceivable as that might be. If she was a gold digger, she was certainly subtle about it. There had been no requests for money or loans or influence from my son. Megan might simply have come to the conclusion that whatever she was looking for in Hollywood was a real long shot, and that a relationship with Charlie Buckman was a better long term possibility. Even that sounded too cold and calculating. Maybe they were simply falling for each other, and she was spending time with him.

So there we were, Marilyn and I, on Sunday, August 26, in the early afternoon, on the side of the track, in a couple of folding chairs and with a six-pack of Iron City on ice in a cooler between us. The weather was in the mid-70s, the sky was clear, and the day was beautiful. In front of us, a bunch of filthy and muddy guys in colorful racing leathers went round and round, half the time on the ground and half the time flying through the air. Marilyn and I cringed more than once, but by now we were used to that. I can't even ride a bicycle without both hands on the handlebars. Charlie had all the luck in the family on that score.

And then he ran out of luck.

He was leading on the third lap, and overtaking the lagging racer, and was being closely followed by the rest of the pack. Suddenly, the guy in front of him went down, and my son was fucked. He crashed into the downed bike and fell off, collapsing into the wreckage. The riders behind him, half of whom were airborne, couldn't evade. One after the other, they slammed into the pileup, generally stopping their crash on my son's body. Within seconds there was a giant clusterfuck of broken bikes and broken bodies, with Charlie's at the bottom.

It took all of thirty seconds to happen, as Marilyn and I stared in horror and disbelief. The race was over. Officials came pouring out onto the track, some waving flags and shutting it down. Around us everybody was on their feet and screaming. Pit crews and sponsors came out, and a couple of ambulances pulled up. Marilyn was crying as she held onto me. Beside me, one of the agents in my travel detail vaulted the fence and headed down to find out what had happened to Charlie. Within seconds, Doctor Tubb and his nurse showed up at our sides.

It was strange watching this unfold in front of me. My son was underneath that unholy mess, and yet one of the odd things that ran through my head was that this was bound to make the news, and for once it wouldn't be because I was there. A crash like this was definitely going to make the highlight reels. Then a chill ran up my back. It might not make the reels, either. They normally don't include it in the highlights when somebody is killed.

It took several minutes to unpeel things. Most of the young men were able to walk away from it, though some looked a little battered and shaken up. A few more had to be carried out, but they were conscious and would give a wave or a thumbs up. Often they had to wait to pull a bike off somebody under the pile, to get to the next person down. As I scanned the group in front of us, I could see the agent on the periphery, but I could also see some guys in Red Bull uniforms, and standing with them was Megan Morgan, a shocked expression on her face.

At the bottom of the pile, was Charlie, and he wasn't being helped to his feet. Megan collapsed at that point, and the ambulance was brought up. The agent ran back over, and spoke to us from the track side of the fence. Marilyn and I rushed over.

"He's alive, sir!", he exclaimed.

"How ... what..."

"He's alive! He's all messed up, but he's alive. I heard them say that he needed to be transported to Pittsburgh. They are going to try to send him out by air."

I pointed back at the mess. "Go back and offer them Marine One! Go!"

He ran back, and I couldn't wait any longer. I tried to climb over the fence, only to slip back. It was getting to be a real bitch, this getting old. A different agent stopped me and said, "No, sir, you can't go!"

"Get out of my way!"

He grabbed me and kept me where I was. "No, sir! You'll just be in the way! They know what they're doing! You have to stay here!"

"SHIT!" I stepped back and put an arm around my wife. I knew he was right, but I simply hated it. I grabbed Doctor Tubb and pushed him towards the fence. "See what you can do!" He ran off and joined the agent. I could see that Charlie was on his side, and wasn't moving, but they had his helmet off. He was being worked on by a couple of EMT types, and then they cleared the way and backed the ambulance up. They pulled a stretcher out, along with a back board. One of the ambulance personnel was talking on the radio.

The agent who had gone up to the wreck and the ambulance returned. He had Megan in tow, along with Tubb. "They have a Life Flight coming in to medevac him. They are prepping him for transport now. I am told the odds are good if they can get him to the hospital, but he's in serious condition."

I looked at the scene, and then at the agent. I nodded and said, "Yeah, okay, but we need to follow them. As soon as this Life Flight takes off, we are next."

"I'll set it up, sir."

He began speaking into his sleeve mike. Marilyn was standing there crying, and she had Megan with her, wrapped up in each other's arms, and Megan was practically hysterical. I gave them the latest news, and we simply waited, the seconds ticking by like hours. Charlie was loaded onto the stretcher and placed in the ambulance, which was driven into an empty section of the parking area. We heard the helicopter rotors, and watched as an air ambulance landed, and he was transferred. A minute after the Life Flight helicopter took off, Marine One landed, and we hustled over. Marilyn and Megan were still wrapped around each other, so we took Megan with us.

We had to wait for the Life Flight helicopter to lift back off the helipad at the hospital before we could land. There were a lot of people staring as we came in, but we were just directed towards the Emergency Room, and that was as far as we could go. Charlie was hustled straight into their trauma center, but just like anybody else, we had to hang around the waiting room.

My day job began to intrude at about this point. The Secret Service must have been in contact with the staff back at the White House, because almost immediately a cell phone rang and one of the agents handed it to me. It was Frank Stouffer, my Chief of Staff. "How's he doing, Mister President?"

"Jesus! How did you..."

"Sir, please! This is the White House. We know everything, remember! I heard from the Secret Service."

I snorted out a laugh at that. "Yeah. We don't know yet. They airlifted him to the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. We flew in after that. He's in the emergency room now. We just don't know."

"Will and I will be there in a couple of hours. Under no circumstance are you to say a word to the press.", he told me.

"Frank, there's no need..."

"Mister President, with all due respect, shut up! This is already on the news. If the press isn't already in the parking lot, they will be within minutes. Will has promised to inflict bodily harm on everyone if you go on the news."

I muttered something under my breath, but the rational part of me knew he was right. "Okay, Frank, see you in a few hours."

My Chief of Staff and my Communications Director were prescient beyond belief. I handed the phone back to the Secret Service agent and said, "We need to get out of the lobby."

"Working on it, sir. We should be able to move into a conference room in a bit. It's Sunday, so a lot of the administrators aren't here..."

He hadn't even finished his sentence when the door to the parking lot swished open. Bright lights and a camera barged in, and a loud voice yelled out, "IS HE DEAD YET? CAN I GET A PHOTO OF THE BODY? WHERE'S THE BODY?!"

Marilyn shrieked and fainted dead away. I turned towards her and saw her slumping down, and an agent next to her grabbing her and picking her up. He looked a bit mystified, and the head agent swore, and he pointed at two agents and ordered, "Shut them down!" To the rest of us he said, "On my six!", and then he stormed through a door into the interior of the hospital, into an empty hallway and around a corner, leaving the yelling reporter behind us. Once out of the view of the lobby room, he turned to the agent I knew was his second in command. "I don't care if it is Sunday, somebody must be running this place. I want them here, now, and their head of security. We need to get a handle on this immediately!"

Things weren't quite as dire as they seemed. Marilyn came to and was set back on her feet. After about thirty seconds a secretary type appeared and led us all deeper into the hospital, and deposited us in a large conference room. A couple of minutes later an administrator showed up, and he and the Secret Service made the arrangements they needed. Meanwhile, I got a report that the rest of the motorcade was already well under way at top speed here to the hospital, and would probably arrive here in about a half hour. Also, Frank and Will had been driven over to the Naval Observatory and had been picked up by HMX-1 and were being flown up.

I pulled some chairs from around the conference table and pulled them to the side, and set Marilyn and Megan down, and then I sat between them. My wife was still a little out of it, and Megan was staring at everyone scurrying around. In front of us order began to arise from chaos. Doctor Tubb, and a nurse took one look at Marilyn and gave her a sedative. Within a couple of minutes she was lights out, and we loaded her on a gurney they hauled in and set in the corner, and covered her with a blanket. She didn't need to be involved. We still didn't know what was happening to Charlie. Half an hour later the motorcade arrived, and we got into high gear. More agents and staff came in.

It was kind of odd, just sitting there and watching what was going on. It was a Sunday afternoon, and America was relatively quiet that weekend. We weren't invading anybody, we weren't in the midst of a budget crisis, and we didn't have any major scandals going on. It was just business as usual, and the First Lady and I had managed to take the afternoon off. Megan simply commented, "This is unbelievable!", as everybody scurried around.

After Doctor Tubb took care of Marilyn, I asked him, "Doc, can you find out what's going on with Charlie? We haven't seen anybody to tell us."

"Yes, sir, I'll look into it."

"Find out where the best hospital is. I mean, if there's a hospital or doctor or treatment, we'll do it."

He hesitated a second, and replied, "This is the place you want him to be at, sir. Pittsburgh is really good. If it had been you in an accident near here, this is where we would have taken you."

"Okay, thank you. Now, please find out about Charlie."

He nodded and took off out the door, leaving the nurse to check on Marilyn. Suddenly I felt underdressed. We were still wearing our shorts and flowered shirts, and Megan was in muddy jeans and a t-shirt. I caught somebody's eye and he came over. "At some point I am going to be on television, and right now I look like a muddy tourist in Maui. Any chance we can scrounge up some decent clothing?"

"Yes, sir, it was in the motorcade; we'll get something sent up. One of Charlie's agents is en route with his and Miss Morgan's clothing; they'll be here in an hour. Another has taken possession of the motorcycle pending the investigation."

Megan looked confused. "What investigation?"

I knew the answer already, but I nodded to the agent to explain. "The President's son was injured while the President was present. Was it an accident? Or was it part of a plot to get the President somewhere he was vulnerable? There will be an investigation."

"That's crazy! He landed on a downed bike!"

"That will also be investigated."

Before Megan could say anything, I laid a hand on her arm. "Don't worry. I am sure that it was an accident. These guys are professional paranoids, but they have to be. They simply have to investigate everything. I was almost killed a year ago. It kind of goes with the territory."

The agent nodded and moved away. Next through the door were Frank and Will, both of whom came up and asked how Charlie was doing. I gave the 'I don't know' speech again, and Will took off to find a doctor. Frank simply went to work with the weekend administrator and talking on his phone. I just ignored them. I turned my head to Megan and said, "I think we are going to be here for a bit. Tell me about Megan Morgan."

"Me?", came out in a squeaky soprano.

I smiled and nodded. "You just landed on the front page of every newspaper in America. What are they going to be reporting about you?"

"What!?"

"Welcome to the nightmare. Oh, crap, that reminds me, I have to call the girls!" I grabbed a phone and called Holly and Molly. I told them what happened, and what we knew so far, which was diddly, and they both promised to get out there by that evening. Molly would bring Bucky with her. After hanging up with both of them, I told Frank to make it happen, and he didn't even blink, but just grabbed his own phone.

Doctor Tubb returned a minute later and reported that Charlie was in surgery. We should expect something more in about an hour. After that, I looked back at Megan and said, "Now, where were we? You were going to tell me how you met Charlie."

She gave me an odd look. "How do you do that?"

"Hmmm?"

"Switching back and forth like that, how do you do it? It's like you are running five different conversations in your head!"

"Ahhh, yes, that." I nodded and shrugged. "It drives Marilyn nuts, too. It's just how I cope. In this job, if you can't manage your time and compartmentalize things, you will be very unhappy and not get much done. It's just the way it is. Not everybody can do it. Marilyn certainly can't."

"It seems so ... so..."

"Cold blooded?" Megan didn't answer, but I could see in her eyes she agreed with me. "Don't worry, I've heard it before, from my own wife. It is simply how I manage to cope with everything. I just keep everything separate. I don't mix business with home, although in this job you have to. Still, I try. It doesn't always work, but I try. Tell me about your folks. What do they do?"

For the next hour or so, I got Megan to open up and tell me about her life, although every five or ten minutes I had to turn that part of my life off and turn back into the President for a few minutes. She basically told me what I had already learned about her. After a bit, I simply told her, "I need to ask a very personal question. Are you and Charlie serious? About each other, I mean."

"Yes, I think so."

"You think so? Please, I am not trying to be rude, but I was not kidding when I said you were about to be on the front pages of newspapers. You saw some of the hoopla over Molly's wedding. Charlie is much better known than my girls are."

She smiled at that. "He kind of likes the attention, you know. Anyway, yes, I think we are getting serious. I mean, he hasn't asked me to marry him, but we are both being exclusive about each other. During the spring he told me that he had never dated a girl more than a few weeks before, and we were already at four months by then. I had to laugh at that."

I smiled. "That's pretty much been my son's pattern, as long as I've known him. What about you? How do you feel?"

"It's strange, but I feel the same way. No, I never swapped boyfriends every few weeks, but there is something there. I think I knew it back in the summer. Listen, have you ever heard of the casting couch?", she asked.

I looked askance at her. "You mean, in Hollywood?" She nodded. "What, having to do a, what do you call it, a 'horizontal audition' to get a job? That's real?"

"Yeah. I mean, it's only that blatant with some of the slimier producers and directors, and I always managed to stay away from them. Still, there's a more subtle version. Maybe you get an invite to a dinner or a party as a date, and everybody knows how the date is going to end, that sort of thing. Charlie knew I was auditioning for this one role on a sitcom, and he knew I had been to various parties, but he never really understood some of what happens behind the scenes. I mean, I could have told him it was simply something I needed to attend, and never told him what was really involved, and maybe I could have landed the spot, and he might never have known what happened, but I didn't. I turned down the date and spent the weekend with Charlie, and I never thought twice about it. My agent was furious, but I didn't want to have to lie to Charlie."

She looked kind of guilty about admitting to some of what happened in Hollywood, and by implication, some of what she had participated in. I simply reached out and squeezed her hand. "Megan, I am the last guy to start casting judgment. Charlie's no saint, and before I met Marilyn, I wasn't one, either. If I had to rank the virtues, I would rank fidelity considerably higher than chastity. Regardless of what you two did before you met, if you can hold your head up after, that's just fine with me and Marilyn."

She looked relieved at that. Marilyn kept snoozing on the gurney, and now began to snore loudly. Megan's eyes widened, and she turned to stare at the First Lady of the United States snoring like a drunken lumberjack. I simply grinned at her and said, "We all have our crosses to bear. There's mine!"

"That's awful!"

"Marilyn would agree, and then punch me."

There was a bit of commotion at the door, and Doctor Tubb came in with another doctor, this one in some clean scrubs. Tubb brought him over and introduced him. "Mister President, this is Doctor Whiteman. He was the lead surgeon for your son."

"Mister President.", he said, glancing over at Marilyn snoring in the corner. "Uh, should we wake Mrs. Buckman?"

I glanced at him and Tubb, and then over at Marilyn. "Doctor, it's probably best if you tell me first. This is Megan Morgan, Charlie's girlfriend. How bad is he?"

"He's going to make it, Mister President. He's in rough shape, but he's going to make it."

The entire room let out a collective sigh of relief. At that, we sat down at the conference table, and Will and Frank joined us. The lead agent also sat down. I introduced them and explained they needed to know what was happening. Then we got into the specifics. "Your son is still unconscious, but that's a good thing for now. There are two separate issues here. The first is that he has a lot of bone damage. It looks like he was lying on his left side when everybody landed on top of him. Almost all the damage is on his right side. His right arm is broken in a couple of places, and his right leg is broken in at least five more." I cringed at that. "Worst of all is that he has multiple broken ribs, a condition known as a flail chest. That's pretty serious. Because of the way the ribs hold the chest muscles in place, your son is on a ventilator for the time being; we are worried about a possible pneumothorax. That's where his lung begins to collapse. We have his bones stabilized for now. All of this will require some extensive surgery and a lengthy rehabilitation, but it's not medically the most serious issue."

"It's not?! That sounds pretty bad, so far!", I commented.

Whiteman shook his head. "No sir. The really life threatening issues are the internal injuries. That's what my team was actually working on. The broken bones we have stabilized, and they can wait until he is stronger. Mister Buckman had several very serious internal injuries. We had to remove about a quarter of his liver, and sew the rest together. That's not that serious, since the liver will grow back almost completely. He had some damage to his hepatic artery, which we fixed, and when I left, another team was doing a resection of his small intestine, which was torn. We also sewed up some tears to his right kidney, but even if that fails, he can survive on his other kidney. These are all survivable injuries, at least on an individual basis, but because of all the other trauma, it becomes much more serious. Still, with good care, he should survive. It's going to be lengthy, however. We can't begin to work on the skeletal damage until his vital signs stabilize and his liver and kidney function improve."

Will interrupted. "Excuse me, but I am going to have to give the press something. What do we call this? Serious condition? Critical condition? What?"

The two doctors looked at each other, and then Whiteman said, "Critical condition."

Tubb added, "I would add 'but stable.' Everything I am hearing is that his condition is not deteriorating."

Whiteman thought for a second, and then nodded. "I could concur with that. These things are much more complicated than that, but for the press we could say critical but stable. With any luck, we should be able to upgrade him to serious condition in another day or two."

"Critical but stable. Got it."

"When will he be awake?", I asked.

"Probably not for another 24 hours or so. He's unconscious now, and we have him on painkillers. Maybe tomorrow afternoon."

Megan had just been listening so far, but she had a question. "Will he be able to move? I mean, not right away, but will he be able to walk and move around again?"

Paralysis? Oh sweet Jesus! I had never thought of that until now! Whiteman looked blank for a moment, and answered, "I just don't know. He's unconscious, so we can't run the usual tests. I can tell you, however, that I have seen the X-rays, and we took a whole bunch of them, and there doesn't seem to be any trauma to his spine or skull. I have no reason to think there would be any issues, but we just won't know until he wakes up."

"Can we see him?", she asked.

"No, not yet. He'll be in a critical recovery section. Maybe tomorrow. He's unconscious, so he won't know if you're there or not.", said Whiteman.

"He'll know.", she said.

The doctor glanced at me. "Visitors are normally restricted to family members."

"Miss Morgan has our permission to see him.", I replied. I squeezed her hand.

"Thank you." She gave me a weak smile and nod.

"I need to get back and see how Mister Buckman is doing.", he said, standing.

I stood as well. "Thank you, Doctor. When Marilyn wakes up, we will let her know." I let him go, and then turned back to the others. To my lead Secret Service agent, I said, "I'll be staying the night. I don't much care if it's the Ritz-Carlton or the Holiday Inn, but we will need to set something up. I will probably go back to Washington tomorrow, but we'll need something more permanent for Marilyn. I am sure she will stay here until Charlie can travel."

"Me, too!", piped up Megan.

I nodded at that. "Maybe get a nice suite somewhere. The girls are coming in this evening. Figure on them for a day or two, also."

"Yes, sir. We are already working on this.", he told me.

"Good." I looked at Frank and Will. "I'll either be with Marilyn or here, but I'll go back to Washington tomorrow evening. I really want to be around when Charlie wakes up."

"Yes, sir.", answered Frank. "I'll sort it out with the hospital, but we might as well keep this conference room until you go back to D.C."

"We're going to need to make a statement, sir. We need to get you cleaned up. The reporters are already six deep outside.", added Will.

"Okay. Start writing. I need to clean up and change clothes in any case. Megan, too, for that matter."

Frank looked at Megan. "Welcome aboard, Miss Morgan. You should probably call your parents and let them know what's about to come their way. By the time the statement is finished, there will be reporters on their doorstep."

"Holy sh...", she cut off her statement in mid-sentence, and gave an embarrassed look. The rest of us just smiled. "Okay", she finished.

At about that time some of the race track people started arriving. It was Charlie's team, and Megan took the lead with them, rushing over and giving them the news. They seemed like my son's friends, not just business people, and seemed truly concerned, which spoke well for them. They wouldn't be able to speak to Charlie until he was out of intensive care, but Megan promised to keep them in the loop, and they all left slowly and unhappily.

I managed to take a quick shower and shave, and then dressed in a suit. Meanwhile Will batted out a quick piece where I said that Charlie was still alive, but in critical but stable condition, we thanked everyone for their prayers, and thanked the ambulance and medevac and hospital staff. Yadda, yadda, yadda! No questions and answers. I heard a variety of questions shouted out, but I ignored them. At least a couple were about Megan, so I knew that cat was out of the bag. By the time we were done and I got back to the conference room, the twins and Bucky had arrived, and Marilyn was awake, and Doctor Tubb was telling them all the latest news.

I told Marilyn we were arranging a suite until Charlie was ready to be moved. At that point the Secret Service chimed in, and said we had a large suite at the Hyatt Regency in downtown Pittsburgh. They weren't thrilled about having me stay in a hotel they hadn't made arrangements for weeks ago, but that worked both ways. This was so sudden that any bad guys wouldn't have expected it either. Even the lead agent agreed that the accident was undoubtedly just that, an accident, and not a bizarre plot to strand me in Pittsburgh. The odds of it being anything more sinister were nonexistent, and were the stuff for a Tom Clancy novel, and not real life.

After a final check on Charlie's condition (still unconscious, surgery was finished and he was in recovery, we couldn't see him) we went over to the Hyatt. Megan got her own room in the suite, and she and the girls caught up with each other when they arrived. We ordered up some room service, since nobody wanted to chance the press corps in the dining room. Marilyn was still upset and Doctor Tubb knocked her out for the night. Bucky and I stayed up and talked marriage and business for a bit, and then he looked in on his wife. After that, I went to bed.

Monday morning, I woke at my usual time, and Marilyn woke up also. "Feeling better?", I asked.

She nodded. "I think so."

"I am going to have to go back to Washington today, but we are keeping the suite as long as necessary. I assume you plan to stay."

She nodded. "Of course!"

"Okay, but are you going to be alright? We can't keep knocking you out. It's not healthy. You have to be tough, for Charlie's sake if not your own.", I told her.

"No, I'll be fine. Yesterday ... it was just such a shock, and then when that reporter wanted to see the body ... that was when I lost it. I'll go over with you. I'll be fine.", she replied.

We cleaned up and dressed, and then went out to the living room of the suite. I had to give the Secret Service credit. They had arranged for a large continental breakfast, juice and pastries and the like, and that was sufficient. The kids slowly wandered out of their rooms, including Megan, all wearing hotel-supplied bathrobes. We told them that we were going over to the hospital, and that I would be heading back to Washington later in the day. They were welcome to stay as long as they wanted. With any luck their brother would be conscious later. The same applied to Megan. She could stay and come over with the others.

When we got to the hospital, Marilyn and I were brought in through a side door where there didn't seem to be any reporters, and were ushered down a string of hallways to the conference room we had commandeered on Sunday. By the time we got there, it now being a regular workday, the hierarchy of the hospital was out in force. We met the chief administrator, the head doctor, the various department heads and chiefs of this and that, and were assured Charlie was in the best hands possible. I was willing to take that with a certain degree of surety, since Tubb had told us more than once that the University of Pittsburgh was a top notch teaching hospital.

Charlie was still unconscious, but his vital signs were holding steady and possibly improving. They were doing blood work on an hourly basis, testing for liver and kidney function, and the results were encouraging. There was blood in Charlie's urine, but that also was diminishing slightly. The head of internal medicine was cautiously optimistic, and if everything continued going well, they would upgrade his condition to serious by Tuesday. At that point the head of orthopedics got into it. He had reviewed Charlie's X-rays and described the procedures needed. The easiest were the breaks in Charlie's right arm. He had clean fractures in both the right radius and ulna, and could be cured with a cast. The most involved would be the breaks in Charlie's right leg. His femur was broken in two places, his fibula in three, and his tibia in one, and the breaks were not clean and neat. Charlie was probably going to end up with some titanium plates and screws holding him together. The most serious injuries were the multitude of broken ribs in his flail chest. Where the average treatment for a broken rib was simply to bind the chest and bring the bones together, to let them heal, this might require surgical reconstruction. We would know better in a few days. At the end of this was going to be some fairly lengthy and intensive rehabilitation. There was an excellent chance that Charlie's pro motorcycle career was over.

The final doctor to speak was a neurologist, brought in to consult about any possible spinal or head problems. Leaving aside the fact that Charlie had rocks in his head for riding motorcycles, he agreed with the emergency room doctor. Nothing in Charlie's X-rays or physical condition indicated neurological problems. When Charlie was awake, he would run some tests, but if there wasn't a problem, he wasn't going to be involved.

After that, I did Presidential stuff with our impromptu office, and Marilyn fretted. She fretted less at about 10 AM, when the kids all appeared. That gave her somebody to talk to, while I talked to people back in D.C. It seemed as if half the calls were from friends or enemies wishing Charlie back to health. As the saying goes, keep your friends close, but your enemies closer. Will managed to set up a press conference in another conference room, and then we wrote up another statement. We kept it simple and said that Charlie was still in critical but stable condition, and that his condition was slowly improving. Then we thanked everybody and their brother.

At noon Will brought me out to the press conference and introduced me and then I read the statement. As I finished, I stated that I would take a limited number of questions. There were an awful lot of unfamiliar faces in the audience, since the regular White House press corps was mostly back in Washington. Still, I recognized quite a few people, and I didn't bother with names, I just pointed and answered.

Q: How long did I intend to stay in Pittsburgh?

A: "I'll be heading back to Washington by the end of the day. Mrs. Buckman intends to stay as long as necessary."

Q: What did we plan to do if our son's condition worsens?

A: "That does not seem to be an issue. Charlie's condition is improving, slowly perhaps, but it is improving. We are confident that Charlie will survive and get back to normal."

Q: Can you give us more detail, and if not why not?

A: "We are not giving out more detail than that."

Q: There have been reports that your son is paralyzed and in a coma.

A: "Those reports are false and I have no idea where you are getting them. Charlie is unconscious, which is not the same thing as a coma, and there is no paralysis." (I went out on a limb with that one.)

Q: Is it true that you were at the race yesterday and interfered with your son's medical treatment?

A: "We were at the race. We interfered with nothing. I have no idea what you are talking about."

Q: Is it true that your son's girlfriend is a Hollywood stripper? (I had to look at Will for that one. He looked as mystified as me.) A: "I have no idea what you are talking about. Miss Morgan is an actress, and your questions are best directed to her. I'd ask her fast, though, because once Charlie wakes up and is able to move around, I doubt he will be all that polite with rude comments like that one."

Will stepped in at that point and shut it down. I moved back to the conference room and pulled Megan aside, to tell her what happened. "I've heard worse. Omaha can be pretty conservative. There's a certain part of the population that thinks anybody who lives in Hollywood or is an actor is going straight to hell.", she said with a shrug.

"Okay, but feel free to call your folks and give them a heads up."

"I did that last night. I'll call again, now."

"Say hello for Marilyn and me."

Megan's eyes popped open at that idea.

I went back to being President, and we all had a buffet lunch in the conference room with the others. Charlie woke about 2:00 or so, and we were all taken down to his room. We had to wear gowns and masks to see him, but nobody minded. Marilyn and I were the first to be allowed in, but we promised the others they would have a chance. Just as we entered, the neurologist came out and smiled. "I just did some standard tests. Your son's nervous system and spine are fine. No problems."

Marilyn and I sagged in relief, and then were shown into his room. He was buried under a forest of tubes, but we found him there, looking towards us. With the ventilator tube in his mouth, he couldn't speak, but his eyes were open and he was following us around, and he gave us a thumbs-up with his left hand.

I smiled and said, "I always told you that you were an organ donor in training." I could see the smile in his eyes, and his left middle finger extended. I laughed for both of us. "I'm glad to see you are awake. Everyone's been worried."

"Oh, Charlie!", cried out Marilyn. She moved to hug him, but a nurse stopped her. We were directed to his left side, which was the uninjured side. She took his hand and squeezed it, and I could see that he squeezed back.

"I have to tell, you, Charlie, there's not too many organs anybody would want right now. Did anybody tell you what happened?" I asked. He nodded slightly. "It was pretty scary." He nodded again, but gave me another thumbs-up. "Don't worry about it. We talked to the doctors this morning. I won't sugarcoat it. You were badly hurt, but you are alive and will get better. You'll need some rehab. We're not sure how long, but you'll be walking around soon."

He nodded slowly. His mother spoke this time. "I'll be staying here for a while." He looked confused at that. "You're in Pittsburgh. That was the nearest big hospital.", she explained.

He nodded again.

"Time!", said the nurse. We had only been allowed five minutes.

"Megan is waiting to see you.", said Marilyn. "Can we send her in?"

At that, Charlie's face lit up, and he nodded enthusiastically, or at least as much as he could.

"Okay.", I told him. "Charlie, before we go, I have to tell you I have to go back to Washington today. Your mom will stick around, though, and figure out what we need to do. I'll try and get back here next weekend." He nodded in understanding. We left and sent Holly and Megan in next, suited up in gowns like us. Molly and Bucky would go in last, and then we were probably done for the day.

Marilyn and I took off our gowns and we headed back to the conference room. As we walked, I said, "Well, that's two."

"What do you mean?"

"Didn't you see how Charlie looked when you said Megan was outside? She's got him on the hook. All she has to do is reel him in." I formed my right index finger into a hook and mimed putting it in my mouth and tugging my cheek.

"It's about time! Maybe she can get him to stop racing and get a real job."

I had to laugh at that. "Honey, I don't think Charlie is ever going to be happy doing something nine to five. Let's just get him on his feet again first, and worry about the other stuff later."

Back in the conference room, I told the others that Charlie was awake and conscious, and looked like he was going to live. After that Will, Frank, and I left to head back to D.C. I shook hands with the hospital administrator and all the doctors and nurses I could. Then I kissed my wife good-bye and was escorted up to the helipad, where Marine One was waiting to take us back to the White House. I smiled to myself as we got closer to D.C. For the first time since the girls had gone off to college and Marilyn had moved down to Washington with me, I was going to be a bachelor again. I expected my wife to be spending a lot of time in Pittsburgh for the foreseeable future.

As much as I wanted to go up to the Residence to get some sleep, we needed to formulate an updated press release, and see what disasters had occurred while I was away. There were a number of well wishers that I thanked for their concerns over my son's condition, and I gave everyone the same limited but promising information.

Then things took a wrong turn. I was sitting in my swivel chair, when there was a knock on the door, and my lead agent stepped inside. "Mister President, we have a problem." He looked terrified.

I gave him a blank look and asked, "Oh?"

"It's the First Lady, sir. She's in jail!"

Chapter 169: Unbelievable

Frank and Will looked as confused as I did. I said, "What did you say? It sounded like you said the First Lady was in jail."

He gulped, and nodded. "Yes, sir. She's been arrested and is in the Pittsburgh jail!"

Will hopped up and flipped on the television. It was already pre-tuned to CNN, and there, in living color, was the image of my wife in what looked to be a riot, and then it cut to the stunned anchor reporting that 'Mrs. Buckman has been taken away in a police squad car, to where we don't know yet... '

I looked back at the agent and said, "You want to tell me what the hell is going on?"

I had one eye on the television as I asked this, and I had to pause as the anchor showed the footage of what apparently started everything, Marilyn wading into a crowd of protesters and making a wild roundhouse swing at an old guy. She rocked him back slightly, but then a woman next to him punched Marilyn! At that it became a free-for-all, with the Secret Service detail and about a million cops wading in.

"Sweet Jesus!", exclaimed Frank.

"Oh ... My ... God!", added Will slowly. They both turned to stare at me.

I was just as flabbergasted as they were. The door knocked again and another agent barged in. It was John Thompson, the supervisory head of the Presidential Detail. He was responsible not just for me, but also the much smaller details watching over Marilyn and the kids. He came to a stop in front of my desk, and saw that we already knew something was the matter. "Mister President, I can explain..."

I looked at him while pointing to the television. "You can explain that?!"

"Well, not explain it, but I can tell you what happened.", he admitted. He motioned for the first agent to retire, and he silently slipped out.

I looked over at Frank and Will. "You two might as well stick around. I think Charlie's accident just became old news." I turned back to Thompson. "Proceed."

"It all happened about fifteen minutes ago, shortly before you arrived back here. Mrs. Buckman had just visited Charlie and told him she would be back tomorrow – that's what she told us – and was leaving the hospital with your children and Miss Morgan. I don't know why, but her detail had the limousine brought to the main entrance rather than a side entrance. That was where the protesters were massed."

"Protesters! What protesters!?"

"It's the Westboro Baptist Church, sir." I must have given a really blank look at that. "I'll get to that, sir. Anyway, they were there protesting your son..."

"WHAT!"

"Please, sir, I'll explain in a bit. Anyway, they had a bunch of signs and a bullhorn, and were yelling out 'God hates fags!' and 'Death to Charlie Buckman!' when Mrs. Buckman came out the door. The team was moving them down to the limo, but when they got to the limo, she kept moving, around the car and across the grass to the protesters. She barged right up to the head of the protesters, Fred Phelps, and punched him in the face." My eyes flicked over at the others, and I was sure they were as ashen faced as I was. "At that, the woman next to Mister Phelps, a daughter we think, punched Mrs. Buckman. At that point the detail moved in to get her out of there, and the rest of the protesters moved in, and then the Pittsburgh City Police and the Pennsylvania State Police got involved. Eventually everybody was taken to the local jail to be sorted out."

"Including my wife!?"

"Yes, sir."

"INCLUDING MY WIFE!?", I roared out. By now I was standing and bending over my desk and yelling into the face of the agent.

"Sir, she committed assault and battery..."

"SHUT UP!"

I pushed myself off the desk and slumped back down into my chair. In a much lighter tone, I asked, "You want to tell me how she managed to do this while surrounded by the elite United States Secret Service? And how she managed to break through the combined ranks of both the Pittsburgh cops and the Pennsylvania State Troopers?" Somebody on my wife's detail had managed to fuck up by the numbers, since I could think of about a half dozen procedural violations with this mess.

John managed to look even more embarrassed. "Not really, sir. I don't have all the details, but it sounds like everybody was taken by surprise. It looked like she wanted to argue with them, but she just kept going, right through the line of cops. The LEOs, the local law enforcement officers, were afraid to touch her when she went through them."

"And she is where, now?"

"It was pretty tense there, for a moment, anyway. They wanted to arrest her but her detail wouldn't let them, and we had a standoff until Mrs. Buckman said she would go to the jail if the protesters were taken in, too. Everybody was transported to the local police station. We have a female agent with her right now. The locals have not put her in the general lockup or with the protesters.", he told me.

"Well, I am so glad that she is safe from the other PRISONERS!", I yelled. "Now, when can she get out of there?" My wife's volunteering to go to the jail probably kept the Secret Service and the local cops from shooting each other. This was just about the only bright spot to this that I had heard so far.

"Sir, the latest we've been told is that she will be in jail overnight, and then be booked and processed in the morning..."

"Tremendous. Now, just shut up and stand there. I'll get back to you in a second."

I thought hurriedly for a few seconds. I could call the Attorney General, and get Frank Keating to yank Marilyn out of there, but that would just create even more problems. It didn't sound like my wife was in any particular danger. I picked up the phone. "Get me David Boies. He's one of my attorneys. I don't care if he is undergoing a heart transplant. Wake him up and hand him a phone. Thank you." I turned back to Thompson. "Now, who or what is this Westboro Church and why do they want my son dead?"

Just as I asked this question, the phone rang. I picked it up. "DADDY!"

"I'm here. Where are you guys?"

"We're at the Hyatt!", answered Molly. "Mom's been arrested!"

"So I've been told. I'm trying to get a lawyer for her..."

"You have to get her out of jail!"

"We'll do that. I just learned about this. Now, are you all there? Did any of you guys get arrested, too?"

"DADDY! No!"

I sighed. "Let me speak to Bucky."

I heard the phone fumbling some, and then my son-in-law came on the line. "Hello?"

"Bucky, keep a lid on those women! I am leaving you in charge." I heard him chuckle. "Under no circumstances are any of them to talk to a reporter or go anywhere near the jail unless I tell you to, got it? Don't even let them out of the room!"

"Got it, Uncle Carl. They really want to go down there and bust out Aunt Marilyn.", he replied.

"Tell them they can't bail out their mother if they are in jail with her!"

"Yes, sir!", he laughed.

"I have to go."

"I have to tell you, Uncle Carl, she was pretty awesome! I had to see it to believe it!"

Awesome! Great! "You are not making me any happier, Bucky! I am expecting more calls on this. Keep those women under lock and key!" I hung up and put the phone back down. I looked back at Thompson. "You were saying?" The phone rang again, and I swore. I picked it up and said, "Hello?"

"Carl, it's David Boies. I just heard about your wife. How can I help?"

Finally, somebody who might be able to help! "David, just get her out of there!"

"I'm in New Mexico at the moment, but I have somebody making some calls. I'll get somebody in Pittsburgh and call you back. I'll call you back in half an hour or less."

I agreed to that and we hung up. I looked back at John Thompson and motioned him to start. "Just who the hell is this Westboro whatever and why do they want to kill my son?"

"It's the Reverend Fred Phelps of the Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kansas. They are the bunch that protest at military funerals.", he began.

I vaguely remembered these crazies. They hated gays and figured that God was punishing America and the Army because we weren't killing them off. Or something like that. "So? Charlie's not gay! Trust me, he's not gay!"

"It doesn't matter, sir." Then he began to explain about Reverend Fred Phelps and the Westboro Baptist Church. Phelps was a uniquely American creation. In any sane society somebody would have either locked this guy up in jail or locked him up in a psycho ward, and thrown away the key in either case. He was an old guy, in his mid 70s, an Eagle Scout, a disbarred lawyer, an abusive husband and father, a Democratic political wannabe who kept running for office in Kansas and losing in the primaries, and a preacher.

His Baptist church, Westboro Baptist, was unaffiliated with any other Baptist organization and his theology was suspect, to say the least. It was very small, only a few dozen parishioners, mostly members of his extended family. Church doctrine was organized around whatever Fred Phelps hated the most. Gays headed that list, but it also included almost every religion other than the Baptists, including Judaism, Catholicism, Mormonism, Buddhism, and Islam. He also wasn't all that thrilled with most Baptists! As a general rule, he hated practically every Democrat in the nation, and yet he continued to run for office in Kansas as a Democrat.

Phelps' God was a hateful God, and Westboro Baptist's agenda was simply to picket every military and political funeral around the country, waving signs that said 'God Hates Fags!' and all sorts of other crap, including wishes for death to other people. They had a website which basically said the same thing. Today, since they didn't have any convenient funerals to harass, and they had been in Cleveland on Saturday protesting at the funeral of a soldier who had died when he fell asleep at the wheel and went off the road, Fred and his merry minions decided to protest Charlie being in the hospital. They had crude signs made up and bullhorns blaring 'God hates fags!', 'God hates Catholics!', 'God hates Buckman!', and various exhortations for God and everybody else to kill all of the above.

More than a few states and municipalities had enacted laws banning protests at funerals because of him, and Phelps and his church had been arrested more than a few times for disturbing the peace and other crimes. At least one law suit had made it to Federal Court, suing the Phelps family for emotional distress, and had been found in favor of the complainants; the Supreme Court had not yet taken it up. Phelps kept winning the lawsuits based on the First Amendment right of free speech.

"So what set Marilyn off with these idiots?", I asked.

"When she and your children came out, Phelps saw her, and began yelling into his bull horn that she was an idol worshipper and had raised her children up in the ways of Satan, that sort of thing, and how they were praying that God would strike down her son so that people would learn about how gays were destroying America. What really set her off, we think, was when he called her the Whore of Babylon."

Frank and Will visibly winced at that, and I just buried my face in my hands. Anywhere else this would almost be amusing. Almost. In reality it was an unmitigated disaster. I was saved from a response by the phone ringing. It was David Boies again, this time with a conference call including a criminal lawyer from Pittsburgh who was taking the case. He assured me that he would go over to the jail immediately and figure things out. Simply let the Secret Service know he was coming. I jotted down his name.

As soon as I hung up, I turned to Thompson. "Tell your people at the Pittsburgh jail to expect this guy, Paul D'Agosta, to be coming. He is to get access to everything. Then get out of here. The next Secret Service agent I see had better be Ralph Basham, and it better be now!"

"Yes, sir!" He turned around and moved out.

I looked over at Frank Stouffer and Will Brucis, both of who were simply sitting their slack jawed and disbelieving. "Please, for the love of God, tell me this isn't as bad as I think it is."

They looked at each other and shook their heads. Frank said, "Sorry, boss. I got nothing to help you."

"It's probably worse.", added Will. "I can't even begin to think about how I am writing this press release!"

"Shit! I don't suppose I can use my power to pardon on my own wife."

Will visibly cringed at that, and Frank commented, "You could, but Harry Reid will try to use it to have you impeached. He won't be able to do it, but it sure won't look good."

"Harry Reid is the leader of the Senate, not the House. Only the House can impeach me, and we have a lock on the House." Frank opened his mouth to say something, and I simply held up my hand. "I know, I know, it would still look horrendous."

"What I want to know is how in the hell the Secret Service let your wife anywhere near these nuts?", said Will.

My phone rang. It was the secretary announcing the arrival of Ralph Basham, the head of the Secret Service. I ordered him in. "That's a very good question, Will, so let's find out."

Ralph came in and moved to the desk in front of me. "Mister President, I am really sorry about this."

"Ralph, I am glad you are here. Will was just asking me how the hell this could happen. I sure hope you have an answer other than a total and colossal clusterfuck by the agency that is supposed to protect me and my family."

He sighed. "No, sir, that would be the answer. This is a complete and total breakdown in security on our part. Your family should never have been brought out a door anywhere near the protesters, they should have been immediately placed in the limo, and Mrs. Buckman should never have been allowed to get near the protesters. I have no excuses for the agency. I have ordered a complete review of what happened, and the supervisory agent in charge of her security has been placed on administrative leave pending disciplinary action."

"Yeah? Well, that ain't going to cut it, Ralph! I am expecting a complete review of the entire damn system! Oh, and you can expect to explain this to the Senate, too! Your little agency has just managed to put my entire administration into the hot seat for the next few months. Congratulations and thank you." I pointed at the door. "OUT!" This was going to cost him his job.

Basham left, and I looked over at the other two. "I am going upstairs. I don't care if a nuclear war breaks out. I am taking no calls except from my family or their lawyers. Will, I leave you to figure out a graceful way to dig me out of this. Feel free to throw everybody under the bus, including my wife. Hell, throw her under the bus, and then back it up over her a few times!" I stood up and headed up to the Residence.

I went upstairs to the Residence, wondering to myself just how much worse this was going to get. I doubted Marilyn was actually going to have to spend any hard time in the house of many doors, but the video now endlessly repeating on the news channels clearly showed my wife punching a preacher in the face and starting a riot. That must have violated at least some laws, even if it was only disturbing the peace! I was tempted to drink more than I should, and I held off on that, but decided that one drink wouldn't hurt, so I made myself a Seven & Seven. Who knew, maybe I could get drunk enough to get sent to jail. Marilyn and I could share a cell.

I was still nursing my drink, and contemplating looking for some leftovers in the kitchenette, when the phone rang. "Hello?"

"Mister President, this is Paul D'Agosta. I have somebody here who would like to speak to you." I heard the phone fumbling.

"Carl!?"

I sighed to myself. It was Marilyn. "I'm here. Having fun, are we?"

"Carl, don't be like that."

"Like what, honey? Are you meeting new friends? You know, it's important to be polite to your cellmates."

She gave a small shriek. "It's not funny!"

"It's too bad you're not here! We have a double feature down in the movie theater. We're going to watch Women in Chains One and Two. Sounds exciting! I love buttered popcorn..."

"CARL!"

"Let me speak to your mouthpiece. I think that's what they call lawyers in prison.", I asked.

"ASSHOLE!" I heard her faintly telling D'Agosta. "Here! He's being a jerk!"

"Yes, sir?"

"Mister D'Agosta, what's going on?", I asked.

"I already have an appointment with the Allegheny County District Attorney in the morning. Your wife is not in a cell or a holding tank or anything like that. She has not been searched or processed. She's in a small office and they promised to bring in a meal and a cot, and one of her detail will be with her at all times..."

"That would be one of the detail that managed to get her tossed in jail?"

"Mister President, I am not going to get into that, but it is not being helpful. You need to calm down while we sort this out."

"Yeah, okay, sorry."

"Now, like I said, I am meeting with the District Attorney tomorrow, early. I don't think he is any more interested in this going to trial than you are, so we have an excellent chance of getting this all tossed out.", he told me. "With any luck at all, she'll be out of here early in the morning."

"Okay, thank you. I'll be expecting your call. Can I talk to my wife again."

Marilyn took the phone and said, somewhat frostily, "Yes?"

"Sorry about earlier. I'm just not used to the idea of you going to jail. That's usually my job. I love you. Are you okay?"

"I know. I'm fine. I'm just so pissed! I love you, too. I'm sorry if this is going to be a problem."

"That's all right, we'll figure it out. Just be careful. You don't want to become somebody's prison bitch."

"CARL!"

"Hey, if they book you, can you bring me back a copy of the photo, you know the one with the numbers on it, maybe an 8x10 glossy, with you in a prison unif..."

"ASSHOLE!" She hung up the phone.

I smiled to myself and made another drink. I sat down in my recliner and Stormy jumped up beside me. I rubbed her head and asked, "You're not going to bite a mailman, are you? I can't afford to have you in puppy jail, too." Stormy licked my face and then passed gas.

Wonderful! I had to wonder if there was some subtle moral to be drawn from that, but if there was, it was too subtle for me. I finished my drink and got up, to wander into the kitchen. I toasted some bread and opened a can of sardines and made a sandwich, which I had with iced tea. I didn't need to drink any more. No matter how much my family might drive me to drink, I had to resist the temptation.

I called the kids back and told them the latest. Then I called Utica and told Marilyn's mother about her daughter being in jail. That was not an enjoyable conversation.

I woke up the next morning feeling somewhat better about it all. I knew, realistically, that this ridiculous incident was not going to land Marilyn in the Big House, where she would be a prison bitch making license plates for the rest of her life. Even if these nut jobs decided to press charges, my wife was a first time offender, and even a hack public defender would be able to plead this thing down to time served, some kind of fine, and maybe some public service. Much more likely was a reduction from assault and battery down to disturbing the peace or making a public nuisance, which were misdemeanors, not felonies. As far as the family was concerned, it would be embarrassing, and fun to tell at Christmas and family reunions, but nothing more.

Unfortunately, this wasn't just my family. Marilyn and the Secret Service had fucked up by the numbers on national television. My administration had been relatively scandal free up to this point. There had been Babygate in 2004, which had also been personal, but since it occurred when I was a kid, had never really amounted to much. Granted, the fruit of my loins had managed to get arrested more than once since then, usually for DWI or possession of cocaine or something equally stupid, but he had abided by the terms of the agreements and kept his mouth shut. The New York papers would make a stink for a few days and then let it die. Once I was out of office, nobody would give a shit.

My real children, Charlie, Holly, and Molly, were all pretty well behaved, and kept their sinning off the pages of the papers. Charlie was relatively well known, primarily because he was a celebrity in his own right in the small field of motorcycle racing. Holly and Molly were quite unknown outside of their appearance that one time on Saturday Night Live. Marilyn and I had raised some good kids, and could be proud of the results.

As far as official scandals, I had managed to avoid anything that stuck to me. Jack Abramoff had managed to get caught buying a bunch of Congressmen and Senators, and had also taken down some mid-tier Bush appointees in the process, for influence peddling. There had also been a minor problem in the Pentagon, related to both Navy and Air Force contracts and appropriations. That had mostly splashed on Tom Ridge, but outside of Congressional outrage and a few generals and admirals getting retired, hadn't been too bad. There had also been some isolated incidents where the Government Accountability Office caught various lower level people taking bribes, but that happened all the time. There hadn't been any tell-all books by disgruntled Cabinet Secretaries I had fired, or any of that sort of thing. (Okay, there had been a tell-all book by Dick Cheney; it received lousy reviews and didn't make back the advance paid to him.)

Some of the worst issues with the Bush 43 administration, as I originally remembered it, didn't surface, because I had changed things too much. We never went into Iraq and Afghanistan, so we simply didn't have those scandals. We had also been much lower key on our implementation of the PATRIOT Act, and weren't sending people to Guantanamo or torturing people or doing military tribunals. It's rare that you get in trouble by not doing something.

This mess, on the other hand, had massive potential to get sloppy! I could envision several outcomes, none of them pleasant. For one thing, the Secret Service was under the control of the Treasury Department. Elizabeth Warren was the unpopular bank regulator in charge of Treasury, so any scandal with the Secret Service was going to be on her hands. I could foresee any number of calls for her head. I was sure she would survive, but be politically weakened. Ralph Basham was already a dead man walking. There was probably going to be a large scale investigation into the Secret Service, probably tying in last year's botched assassination attempt, and anything else they could scrape up – and they could always scrape something up if they looked hard enough!

This was definitely going to weaken me, as well. I was going to have to protect Warren, for one thing. Fire her and I look petty and weak, keep her and I look stubborn and obstinate. Marilyn was going to be all over the news. Just wait until somebody in Congress decided to subpoena her to testify at hearings! She wasn't employed here, so I doubted I could even claim Executive Privilege. Harry Reid was still smarting from when I rammed a bunch of recess appointments down his throat, so he would be gunning for me. Max Baucus was the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee (they oversaw Treasury), and while he and I didn't have any personal issues, when Harry Reid decided to have him chew on me, Max would obey orders.

My morning staff meeting was the Marilyn Show, all Marilyn, nothing but Marilyn. The confrontation had taken place too late in the day to be on the evening late night comedy shows, but had certainly made the news, and was already running nonstop on the morning news shows. By tonight, with 24 hours of lead time, the comedy shows would have more than enough time to do this up proper. Worst of all, Senate Democrats were lining up to castigate me, the Secret Service, me, the Treasury, me, Allegheny County, me, Pittsburgh, me, Marilyn, and me. The only people not talking were Marilyn, Fred Phelps, and the Westboro Baptist Church, simply because they were all still in jail. Even the cops were keeping silent; I was guessing that somebody from the Chief of Police's office had put the fear of God in them. I knew that wouldn't last long.

At nine, the phone rang, interrupting the meeting, and the voice on the speakerphone told me to pick it up. I shrugged at the others and grabbed the phone. It was the voice of Paul D'Agosta. "Mister President, I have somebody who wants to talk to you."

"Carling!? You there?"

"Hi, honey. What's happening? You still in jail?"

"No.", she answered. "I'm back at the Hyatt. I was just released."

"You sound good." I decided to lay off the jokes until I could see her in person. "What happened?"

"Here, talk to Mr. D'Agosta."

The phone fumbled as she passed it along. The others – Frank, Will, and Mindy – moved to leave, but I waved them back into position. Whatever I learned, they would need to know. This was no longer a family matter. "Mister President?", comes over the phone.

"Mister D'Agosta. I gather my wife is freed from durance vile. Thank you for that. What's going on out there?"

"Yes, sir. I stayed with Mrs. Buckman all night, and scheduled a meeting with the District Attorney early in the morning. He was no more interested in this going to trial than you or she was. He is dropping all charges on everybody and sending everybody home. The Secret Service managed to bring one of their vehicles into the building and we hustled Mrs. Buckman out and through the crowds and brought her over here to the Hyatt. Security is extremely tight at the moment, at least it seems that way to me."

"No, I imagine it is really tight right now. Probably some new faces, too. Okay, so no jail time, no felony record, none of that stuff?", I asked.

"She's completely clean. Not even a misdemeanor. No prosecutor with an iota of ambition wants to be the guy who puts the First Lady in jail, no matter which party her husband is in. The desk sergeant was heard to say that if somebody wanted the First Lady searched, they could send the Police Chief down to do it, since nobody else would be that stupid! I can't promise anything on the civil side. This idiot Phelps and his bunch spent the night making themselves a real nuisance, and are demanding your wife be turned over to them. The Pittsburgh Police aren't being anywhere near as accommodating with them, and the last I heard they were still being processed out, slowly. I would bet my bottom dollar you're going to get hit with a civil suit.", he replied.

"Wonderful! Listen, thank you for everything. Make sure you let David Boies in on all of this, and make sure you keep an eye on Marilyn and the kids while they are out there. I am going to owe you on this, and not just your bill."

"Understood, Mister Buckman. They'll be fine, but I'll make sure I check in with them."

We said some good-bye pleasantries, and he passed the phone back to my wife. I promised I would call her later in the morning, and then hung up. I turned to the others and said, "Well, you probably heard everything. Calamity Jane is out of jail, but the nut jobs are baying at the moon."

I looked over at the others. Frank asked, "Is Mrs. Buckman all right?"

I sighed and nodded. "It would seem that her hard time in the big house wasn't too hard. She's back at the Hyatt. No charges for anybody. Phelps and his bunch are being turned loose. I suppose I'm being a dreamer if I say I hope he drops this."

Frank had the good grace not to laugh. It was Will's chance to snort derisively. "Not hardly. Publicity is the lifeblood of kooks and crazies, and let's face it, they now have publicity in spades! Phelps is going to milk this for all it's worth."

Mindy asked, "Isn't there any way to shut him up?"

"No, not at all. The bottom line is that the man is crazy. As in, howl at the moon, line your hat with tin foil, talk to imaginary friends crazy! If we were to line up every single gay and lesbian in the country and shoot them all, it still wouldn't be enough. He wants everyone not like himself to die. Fifty years ago they would have locked him up in an asylum and given him Thorazine but we're much more evolved now. Now we give him free air time.", Will answered.

"Any chance we can do something legally about them? Classify them as a hate group or something?", I asked.

Will and Mindy shrugged, but Frank responded. He was a lawyer, after all. "I don't know. Their first amendment free speech and freedom of religion rights are pretty potent shields. Your best bet is to call Frank Keating and have him look into it. My bet? If they tell people to kill your family, they are protected. If somebody listens to them and kills somebody, maybe not so much."

"You're just a bundle of fucking joy, Frank. You want to call Frank and take this up with him, please? I can't believe they aren't already watching these guys."

I dismissed everybody and called my wife back over at the Hyatt in Pittsburgh. I let her ramble on. It would seem that the cops were very pleasant with her, and much more sympathetic to the mother of a critically injured athlete and war hero than to the fruitcakes down in the holding cells. Security was much tighter than before, and her lead agent, in fact almost her entire detail, had been replaced. Ditto for the kids. Holly, Molly, and Bucky planned to visit Charlie in the hospital and then go home, to work and to college. Megan planned to stick around for at least a few days more. She and Marilyn were going to visit him in the hospital again today. I made her swear six ways from Sunday not to punch anybody out.

The media were all over this today. I watched the news at lunchtime and saw more of what had been shown the other day. In addition, the Hyatt had been staked out, and a telephoto lens got an excellent picture of Marilyn as she headed back to the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. My wife had a shiner the equal of anything I had ever gotten! I asked Mindy to get me an 8x10 glossy. I just had to wonder what Charlie would think about his mother with a black eye. He'd probably laugh so hard something else would break.

I stayed away from the Press Room, and my schedule didn't have me traveling anywhere for the rest of the week. That was the good news. Better news came that afternoon, when Marilyn and the girls called; Charlie was improving rapidly, his condition was upgraded to serious, and they wouldn't need thoracic surgery on his ribs. His right arm had already been put in a cast. His right leg was going to involve some major surgery, probably several operations, and they simply had the bones immobilized. If anything was set wrong, they would break it and reset it during the surgery as needed. That might not begin for another week or two. I promised to come up for the weekend.

The bad news came in the form of politicians. John McCain joined me late in the afternoon. He had been in the Senate before becoming the Vice President, and he had ties there, like I had ties in the House. This entire mess looked like amateur hour and did not reflect well on the professional image his campaign was pushing. Harry Reid was going to make a nuisance of himself over this, looking for anything under the sun that they could throw at me, and by extension, John. By the end of the week I should expect a Senatorial delegation requesting an audience.

"Let me guess. They want to consult with me or some such nonsense? I don't suppose anything else might happen in the rest of the world that could let me duck this.", I commented.

"Nothing serious enough, anyway, no matter what you might personally want. You won't be able to duck them.", he replied.

"Any ideas what Harry wants?"

"Basham's head, for starters. Warren's, too, but I think they know they won't get it. He'll ask anyway. It's odd, though, since they don't really want Warren out of there. She's a Democrat. The Republicans will want her gone."

I sighed. "I am going to trust you to shut them down about her. Basham's on death row right now. He's probably cleaning his desk out as we speak. What if I fire him now? Can we shut them down prematurely?"

"No. This isn't about him, this is about embarrassing you and me. He might be all they get, but they are going to want hearings and an investigation of the Secret Service. Even if you gave them Warren and the rest of the Secret Service's management, it won't be enough. They want the hearings to embarrass us."

I shrugged and made a wry face. "Talk to some people over there. Set up a meeting for Thursday or Friday. We can have Basham fall on his sword in front of them. I'll give Ralph the good news."

John snorted and said, "It will be a start, at least. It's just a start, though. Reid is going to be calling for testimony from everybody involved, and I heard through the grapevine he plans to subpoena your wife. He figures she can't invoke Executive Privilege and will personally embarrass you on live television."

I stared at him for a second, but then put my head back and gave a long laugh. After a minute I straightened up and grinned at my VP. "Tell Harry Reid that I am going to do him a favor, and let him think that one through. Ask him what he thinks is going to happen when he calls the First Lady to testify and she walks in, with me holding her hand? I'll tell you what will happen! They'll swear her in, and she'll spend half the time sweet-talking everybody there, and the other half the time ripping them all new assholes! I won't have to say a word! She's more popular than me and Congress combined!" I shook my head and smiled. "Ask Harry if that's really the picture he wants to have on national television!"

"Yeah. That's true enough. Still, he's going to be a problem."

"Fine. Force it out now, sooner rather than later. He wants to drag this along for as long as he can, even into next year. Get with the Republicans on the Committee and have them order up hearings and an investigation now! Bury this thing now. By the time you have a primary, it will be old news."

"I'll see what I can do." He stood and left, stopping at the door and saying, "Tell Marilyn that the next time I see her I'll give her some tips on surviving in prison. I'll teach her the tap code we used in Hanoi."

"You, too?! Out!"

He laughed and left.

This whole mess was a gift from Heaven for the late night comics. Marilyn in jail was the lead joke on every television show that evening. Then they started up on the photo of Marilyn with a black eye. It stayed that way for the next few days. I couldn't wait for Bill Maher and Saturday Night Live to play with this.

Thursday I had a meeting with the leaders of the Senate Finance Committee, Treasury, and the Secret Service. The bloodletting was about to begin. I had Max Baucus, the Democratic chairman of the committee, and Chuck Grassley, the Republican ranking minority member, in the White House, along with Elizabeth Warren, Ralph Basham, and Frank Stouffer. Harry Reid wasn't there, but he might as well have been. While both Max and I were friendly enough, Max was taking direct orders from Harry to create as much havoc as humanly possible. Ralph promptly handed me a letter of resignation, much like he had after I had been shot; this one I accepted.

Chuck nodded and looked over at Elizabeth. "This is a good start, Mrs. Warren, but not sufficient."

"With all due respect, Senator, I don't work for you. I work for President Buckman. If he wants my resignation, all he has to do is ask."

Chuck got a distasteful look on his face, and Max replied, "We were certainly hoping for more cooperation. This entire situation shows a serious breach in security! We need to understand what happened and why. Without more cooperation, the committee is going to have to hold hearings. Madame Secretary, I am sure that we will also be appointing a Special Investigator to look into this disaster!", Max added. "We will be examining the entire Secret Service, and if necessary, your entire department."

It was time for me to sort some of this out. "Cool your jets, Max. You can go back home and tell Harry Reid that he can have an investigation of the Secret Service and that's all. He has to leave the rest of Treasury alone. If he doesn't like that, I drop Marilyn in his lap on live television. You've met my wife. You want live television committee hearings? I can guarantee that Marilyn Buckman will get you all the live television you could ask for! When she gets done with you guys, you won't be able to run for dogcatcher, let alone the Senate!" Max looked like he was sucking on a spoonful of sewage, which made Chuck smile. I turned to face him. "Don't laugh, Chuck. Nobody is going to look all that good if I have to do that. I would prefer to avoid it, but if you make me go nuclear, I'll go nuclear." The sly smile left Chuck's face as I said that.

I closed it out by announcing that Deputy Director Nagel was taking over for Basham, and was already conducting an investigation into the breakdown in the protocols for protection and what had happened. Max countered by demanding that their investigator be involved. I agreed, but insisted that the investigation be finished within three months, which Chuck agreed to, pissing off Max. Afterwards, I met with Ralph Basham privately, and thanked him for his service over the years. When he left, I thought back to when I first met him, as one of the Three Amigos who had investigated 9-11. What a hell of an end to a great career.

The only thing good about the day was when, late in the afternoon, I got a call from Marilyn. She was still in Pittsburgh with Megan. I was getting two or three calls from her a day. Charlie was improving, and his condition had been upgraded to serious on Tuesday. He was still intubated, but his internal functions were rapidly improving, and there was hope that they would be able to start working on his broken bones soon.

I got a message over the intercom that the First Lady was calling, and I picked up the phone. "Hey, there, hun. How's it going?"

"Just fine, sweetheart!" The voice was weak and scratchy, and a few octaves lower than Marilyn's, and was the best sound I had heard in my life!

"CHARLIE! Oh my God! How are you!? Did they take the tube out!?"

"Hey, Dad. How you doing?"

"I am doing great now. What's going on?"

"Here's Mom."

I heard some fumbling, and then Marilyn said, "Isn't this great!? They took the ventilator off a few hours ago, and after a bit they were able to remove the breathing tube. Charlie's still weak, and he has to rest a lot, but he's getting better!"

"I'll come up tomorrow night. I'll be able to see Charlie Saturday morning." I spoke to my son again, and promised to see him that weekend.

I actually flew up Friday afternoon. I had Marilyn call Paul D'Agosta and invite him and his wife to dinner Friday evening, and then had her make arrangements with the Hyatt to reserve a small private dining room. I wanted to meet the lawyer who got my wife out of jail, but didn't need to be photographed with him. Nothing personal, but I didn't need to have Will explain the caption, 'President Meets With Prominent Criminal Defense Attorney!'

I landed at the helipad at the hospital and was ushered straight down to Charlie's room. He was out of the intensive care unit, and was now in a more normal room. I noticed quickly that there was a much more stringent and strict security protocol around Marilyn and Charlie than before. I also didn't recognize any of the faces of the agents. It was as if an entire new detail was installed. They all looked creepily serious and stern.

Charlie still had about a mile of tubing going into him, and both his right arm and right leg were in gigantic casts, but he was off the ventilator and could speak normally. The bed was inclined to about thirty degrees or so, so he wasn't flat on his back. I didn't even have to gown up to get into the room. I went in and his face lit up. Marilyn was on his right side, and Megan was sitting on his left, holding his left hand. "Hey, Dad! You made it!"

I smiled at that, and went around to his left side. I reached out and squeezed the hand I could touch. "Damn, it's good to see you talking! How are you feeling!?"

He sighed and tried to shrug, but winced as he did so. "Okay, I guess. I feel like I've had about a dozen motorcycles run over me. What isn't broke feels like it's broke."

Marilyn came around and gave me a quick kiss. "Megan rigged up a video camera to a television and showed him the accident."

I looked over at Megan and smiled. "Very enterprising. Hi, Megan, good to see you, too. Not trying to be rude."

She waved it off. "We watched it several times."

"It's pretty grotesque.", commented Charlie.

"I think you scared your mother and me out of a few years of our remaining decrepitude. You're supposed to inherit from us, not the other way around. Seriously, how are you feeling?"

I got another sigh in response. "Tired. Weak. Everything hurts, at least when I move, and I can't even move to scratch. I don't even like sleeping on my back, and every two hours they come in and roll me from side to side."

"Yeah, it sucks to be alive.", I responded.

Charlie's left middle finger surreptitiously extended.

"I saw that!", warned Marilyn.

"So did I!", added Megan, who punched his left shoulder lightly.

"When I get out of this bed, you are in big trouble!", he told her.

"I'm not worried."

I glanced at Marilyn, and she gave me a smile and a knowing glance. Charlie was hooked, that was for sure. We all chatted briefly, and a doctor came in to give us the latest.

Charlie was improving rapidly, but he still had a long way to go. His internal injuries were healed or healing. His right arm had been set normally, and could be expected to heal normally. His broken ribs were very serious, but it looked as if surgical intervention would not be necessary. He was restricted to sleeping on his back, and not raising up until they had knitted together more, a process that could take several more weeks. In the meantime, there were plans to take him back into surgery next week, to begin working on his leg. There would probably be two separate operations, one on his thigh bone, and the other on his lower leg, and he was going to be loaded up with a variety of metal junk. Depending on what was discovered, and the X-rays were pretty gruesome, Charlie was going to get a collection of pins, screws, and plates to hold his leg together. They would be permanent, and his racing career was probably over. Eventually, when the bones had healed, he would be able to begin physical therapy, which would last for many more months.

My son took this all in stride, not arguing or complaining. "The physical therapy, does that have to be done here? Do I have to stay in the hospital?", he asked.

"No, and you probably shouldn't. If nothing else, you need to start moving around and getting independent again. You can stay in town and visit here for that.", answered the doctor.

"We have a nice home in Washington.", I commented. "And Charlie's a veteran. I imagine I have enough pull with the Navy to get him into a physical therapy program at Bethesda.'

The doctor smiled and agreed, "Yes, Mister President, I suspect you could. If not Bethesda, certainly Walter Reed, or any of the good teaching schools down there would have a decent program. Try Georgetown or George Washington, for instance." He shrugged. "Getting the patient into a home setting is generally a positive thing in its own right. By then, he'll be ready for a change of scenery."

"Or sooner!", added Charlie.

We could have kept this up for awhile longer, but Marilyn said, "We need to be getting over to the Hyatt for dinner. I told Paul we would meet him and his wife at 6:30."

"Who...", asked Charlie.

"Your mother's lawyer.", I answered dryly. "Megan, I would invite you, but I am probably going to get a very large bill out of this, and I hate to swear at Marilyn in front of other people."

"You bastard!", exclaimed my wife.

Charlie laughed, and ended up cringing. "Dad, have you seen the video?! Mom was awesome!"

"Yes, I could tell by the black eye she was wearing afterwards." It was mostly faded, at least now.

He laughed some more, and winced some more. "Don't make me laugh!"

Marilyn punched me in the arm. "Don't you get started!"

"Honey, I haven't even warmed up yet. Charlie, you get better. Megan, keep him from chasing the nurses around. We'll be back in the morning." I escorted Marilyn out of the room, and we went over to the Hyatt.

Dinner was quite nice. Paul D'Agosta was a noted criminal attorney in Pittsburgh, and had some experience with the high and mighty, at least in Pennsylvania terms. His wife Susan was not as practiced, and was rather awestruck by Marilyn and me. I assured her that the Secret Service would be happy to take down the criminal element in the room if Marilyn got out of hand.

"Wha ... criminal element! Are you kidding me!? You're the one who's spent all the time in jail, Mister, not me!", squawked Marilyn.

"At least I had the good sense to not do it on live television! Think that might have screwed up an election or two?"

"Good point, Mister President.", finished Paul.

"Paul, like I said before, it's Carl and Marilyn. I think anybody who can get my wife out of the slammer can call me by my first name."

"Oh, you are in so much trouble!", she protested.

"I was really looking forward to seeing you in one of those orange jumpsuits in shackles. Maybe working on a chain gang somewhere."

She looked at the others. "He is in sooo much trouble! Do you have any idea how many times he's been in jail? I've lost track!"

"Really?", asked Susan.

I sheepishly nodded and said, "Yes, actually that is true." I looked over at Marilyn. "I can't keep track either, now that you mention it."

She gave me a superior look and said, "See? I told you so! When was the first time? That jail in Florida?"

I looked at the other two. "I was in college, and sleeping on the beach is a capital offense in Florida. Some buddies and I ended up spending the night in the tank and paid a fine in the morning, and bugged out of town." I looked back at Marilyn. "No, the first time was my 13th birthday. I spent the day in jail after busting up some guys who wanted my lunch money and the bus driver lied about it. The cops investigated and turned me loose."

"Okay, then there was the time you were arrested in Honduras."

"The charges were dropped."

"We were arrested in the Bahamas, remember?"

"We were in custody, not arrested, and we were simply taken to a clinic for medical treatment."

"You were in jail after shooting your brother."

"Charges were dropped.", I repeated.

"Carl, I've defended mobsters with less time in jail than you!", commented Paul.

I smiled. "Who said crime doesn't pay?!" I looked at my wife. "A few more arrests and you can run for office, too. Just make sure we have a nice booking photo for the campaign posters."

"You are in sooo much trouble!"

After that we got into a few legal issues related to the arrest, and Paul was able to give me an up-to-date status on Marilyn. Good news, there were no criminal charges. Bad news, Fred Phelps and the Westboro Baptist Church had filed several civil lawsuits for millions of dollars against both Marilyn and me. Nothing was going to stick to me, since I wasn't even around when this happened, and they couldn't, by law, sue me for any actions I committed as the President. That was called sovereign immunity, a doctrine based on the legal theory that the King can't go to jail. Marilyn, on the other hand, was fair game. The suits were civil actions based on Marilyn punching Phelps, and also interference with their legally protected protests. Yadda, yadda, yadda.

"Paul, keep an eye on this stuff. They aren't getting a penny out of me without it going to the Supreme Court. In addition, Frank Keating is working with a crew to try and shut them down. First Amendment or not, nobody has the right to be a jackass!"

"Speaking as a lawyer, I must respectfully disagree. Then again, as long as the client's check clears, I can be very flexible on how I interpret the law.", he said as he tipped a wine glass in my direction.

"I can drink to that.", I agreed.

That night, Marilyn and I watched some television mindlessly in our suite, and then stayed up to watch Bill Maher rip the pair of us up on HBO. Nothing like watching a bunch of liberals ripping me a new one. A big part of his semi-serious panel discussion was the obvious incompetence of the Secret Service and how I had begun to throw them to the wolves as I fled across the snowy wastes. Wonderful.

Afterwards, we went to bed. I was looking forward to that, since I had been a bachelor for most of the week. Before I turned the lights out, I asked my wife if she had learned anything new in jail, while being some con's prison bitch. That earned me an outraged squawk, and we had to 'wrestle' around for a bit. Afterwards, I asked if she ended up back in jail, if I could come by some night and watch, and we ended up squawking and wrestling some more. Worth it, though.

Saturday, we slept late and headed over to the hospital mid morning. Megan had come back to the suite while we were still at dinner last night, and she came with us. Once again, I could see Charlie's eyes light up when she came in, and not for when his beloved parental units came in. The boy was about as subtle as a rock. We talked for a bit, and a nurse reviewed his progress. Marilyn took a call from my sister Susie. She wanted to come in from Rochester to see Charlie. He was her godson, and she wanted to bring in a second opinion. She was head of orthopedic nursing at the Mayo Clinic, and wanted to bring down the head of orthopedics as long as we sent up the G-IV.

I shrugged when Marilyn told me this, and agreed to it. She called for the Gulfstream to be warmed up, and I asked a nurse to have Charlie's doctor look us up. I didn't need grief when the pros from Dover showed up unannounced. I simply informed him that I had received an offer of a second opinion from the Mayo Clinic and agreed to it. He didn't bat an eye, and told me that he knew the man who would be coming down.

After that, Charlie did something unusual. He was there laying flat on his back, and he asked, "Mom, Megan, can you do me a favor? I need to speak to Dad alone for a few minutes."

"What's wrong?", they both asked.

"Nothing. I just need to speak to Dad for awhile."

They looked at me, but I just shrugged. I had no more idea what he wanted than they did.

"We'll be right outside.", said Marilyn.

Megan squeezed his hand and stood up. "I'll be right outside." Charlie smiled and nodded.

They left the room, and I waited for the door to close. "Okay, what's up?"

He turned his head to see the door was closed. "It's Megan..."

"Is there a problem?" Was she pregnant or something?

"No, it's just ... remember after Monrovia, when we were talking that time, and you told me that Mom was how you survived?"

I smiled and nodded. I moved around to the side of the bed and sat down where Megan had been sitting. It still felt warm. "I remember. I think I said how she kept me from going crazy."

"Yeah. Dad, uh, Megan, well, she's the one who keeps me from going crazy. Or makes me go crazy. Something like that." He paused for a second. "I talked to her about Monrovia. I've never talked to a woman about that, even when they've asked."

"Yeah, your mom's the only one I talked to about Nicaragua."

"Anyway, she's the one."

"Ah, hah! I thought that might be the case."

"You did?"

I snorted and rolled my eyes. "Charlie, you are about as subtle as a fart in church! I've seen how you look at her, and I've seen how she looks at you! Have you said anything to her yet?"

"Uh, no, not yet. I mean we've talked, but not anything permanent."

"Staying here with your mother isn't permanent? Oh, brother!"

"Dad!", he protested.

"Okay, so, you love her. You want to marry her? Is that your plan?", I asked.

"Uh, I guess."

I rolled my eyes a second time. "You are hopeless. Listen, your mother is never going to put up with you shacking up for the rest of your life. You are going to have to tie the knot anyway if you want to have kids. Believe me, the legal and financial implications are significant. She's not pregnant, is she?"

"NO!"

"Settle down, Romeo! Let's get realistic. You aren't getting married anytime before you can get out of here. You've known her less than a year. I knew your Mom almost four years before we got hitched. Ask her, and if she says yes, go for a decent engagement. What about her career? If she gives up acting and you give up racing, where does that leave you? You have to talk about these things."

"So you think I should?"

"Charlie, I told you long ago, you can't get into trouble chasing girls; you only get in trouble when you catch one! Well, you caught one! Your life is about to get very complicated. God save you now! You need to talk to her, not me."

"So, how did you ask Mom? All of us kids once asked her and she never answered.", he asked.

"I never did. I just drove her over to the jewelry store and we picked out a ring. We simply knew." I remembered back to that afternoon and smiled to myself. It was shortly after Marilyn and I climbed out of the sack. I wasn't telling my children that little detail! "I'll bring Megan in and give you guys a chance to talk." I stood and patted his shoulder (gently) and went to the door.

Opening it, I found Megan and Marilyn looking at me nervously. "What's wrong?", asked Marilyn.

"Nothing." I pointed at Megan. "You, in there." Then I pointed at Marilyn. "You, with me." Megan scooted inside, and Marilyn moved to follow her, but I took her hand and kept her out of the room. "You need to give them a few minutes."

"What's wrong!?"

"Nothing. Everything is just fine."

"What...", she began. Then she stopped and turned to face the door. Inside she could hear Megan squealing, 'Yes! Yes! Yes!', over and over. Marilyn looked at me with a big grin. "Does that mean what I think it means?"

"Pretty much. Let's take a walk and give them a few minutes." I put my arm around her waist and we strolled down a hallway, followed by my detail. We stopped in a lounge and I sat down on a couch and pulled my wife down next to me. I told her about our little conversation. "I told you, two down, one to go!"

"Well, I think they'll have to hold off on the wedding for a bit. I don't think they are going to want to go on a honeymoon in the hospital."

"Probably not."

We gave the kids about half an hour, and then wandered back down the hallway to Charlie's room. We entered to find his fiancée carefully draped over him from the safe side of the bed, kissing him quite thoroughly. I cleared my throat, and she popped up with a guilty look on her face. I commented to Marilyn quietly, "It's a good thing he's got a catheter in place, otherwise this would be really embarrassing."

The others must have heard me. Charlie gave me a smirk, Marilyn poked me in the ribs and Megan turned beet red. Then Charlie said, "Mom, Dad, uh ... Megan ... I asked Megan to marry me and she said yes."

"That must have been why we heard the 'yes, yes, yes' from outside in the hallway.", I replied.

Megan blushed again, and Charlie answered, "Just be glad I'm in bed and can't run you down and beat you up with your cane."

"I think I can outrace you, at least for the next few months. After that, I might be in trouble." I looked at Megan. "Never mind me. Congratulations and welcome to the family. The twins will love this. Have you had a chance to talk to your family yet?"

"No. I called my mom but I had to leave a voicemail."

I nodded. "Have they met Charlie yet? I mean, once they actually meet him, they might put the kibosh on the whole thing anyway. I'm sure they'll figure you can do better."

"Very funny, Dad!", answered my son.

"No, not yet, but I just know they'll love him as much as I do!", the girl replied happily.

I muttered to Marilyn, "Just like my mother warmed to you!"

That earned me another dig in the ribs. Marilyn said, "When you speak to them, invite them here next weekend. We'll fly them out and Carl can come back again."

"You'll fly them out?"

"We own, well, Carl owns, a plane. It's much nicer than flying commercial. They can be here in a few hours.", Marilyn explained.

Megan looked a little shocked by the idea. She might know I was the President, but I think this was the first time she really understood I was also a multi-billionaire. "Wow! Okay, I'll do that."

Charlie squeezed her hand. "Don't sweat it. You'll get used to it. Believe me, I don't have anywhere close to their money. I'm going to need to work for a living at some point when I get out of here. I wonder if Uncle Tusker needs another mechanic."

"You could always go to school.", offered his mother.

Charlie simply laughed and waved her off with his free hand.

That night, Megan joined Marilyn and me for dinner. Charlie pushed her out of the room, simply to get some rest and sleep. No matter how much he loved her, he was probably ready for the break. She heard from her parents shortly before we went down to dinner in the main restaurant, and got them to accept a visit to Pittsburgh next Saturday. After dinner, we all called it a night and headed back to the suite. Megan began calling her relatives and friends, and Marilyn called the twins.

Chapter 170: Hurricane Marilyn

That night we watched Saturday Night Live. I don't normally watch it, since I thought the first cast (Chevy Chase, et al) was the best, and anybody since then had been downhill. Still, I knew after all the comedy this week they were going to have to do something about Marilyn in jail. Marilyn wanted to go to bed, but I insisted we watch. I knew something crazy was going to happen.

Darrell Hammond (as me): (In a command post, surrounded by generals and admirals.) "Are we ready for the operation?"

Army General: (Standing before a flip chart showing a building with lots of arrows on it.) "Yes, sir! The extraction of the asset is planned for later today! This is a high value asset and is being detained in a maximum security facility. Delta Force will parachute in, breach the interior walls, and perform the extraction."

Navy Admiral: "Navy SEALs will secure the perimeter and deal with any fast reaction forces targeting the extraction."

Air Force General: "We have satellite reconnaissance and stealth drones in place, close air support, also."

Hammond: "Casualty projections?"

Army General: "High, sir. The asset is closely guarded and is considered a high value target. The men are all volunteers. They know this is a one way mission, and they understand the need."

Hammond: "And the asset?"

Army General: (Flips a page on the chart, showing a blown-up picture of Marilyn Buckman.) "Marilyn Buckman is currently being held in the Allegheny County Jail, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania! We have managed to insert an agent who reports that Mrs. Buckman is currently being forced to teach classes in knitting and crocheting."

Navy Admiral: "The CIA reports that she will begin baking cookies as soon as they break her spirit. There are reports that a foreign consortium led by Famous Amos has been bidding for her secret chocolate chip cookie recipe!"

Hammond: "NO!"

Air Force General: "Mister President, we cannot allow enemy powers to gain access to Mrs. Buckman's cookie technology!"

Hammond: "We can't let that happen! The mission is approved, but first ... LIVE FROM NEW YORK, IT'S SATURDAY NIGHT!"

Pretty much like everybody in the studio audience, I was laughing hysterically from the moment Marilyn's picture was shown. Even Marilyn was laughing at it. "I hope your children are seeing this. I am going to want this immortalized in video!", I told her.

"You can be eliminated!"

Later in the show we had part two of the madness. Amy Poehler, the designated Marilyn Buckman impersonator (this required a wig), was sitting in a prison cell wearing an orange jumpsuit, facing several other prisoners, and they were all knitting.

Poehler: "Remember, knit one, purl two!" (The wall next to Marilyn collapses. Two cast members in combat uniforms and carrying guns jump into the room.)

Soldier One: "Mrs. Buckman, we're Delta Force! We're here to rescue you!"

Soldier Two: "You have to come with us!"

Poehler: "But we were just going to start talking about mixing different yarns."

Soldier One: "We have to leave now!"

Poehler: "Ladies, don't forget what we learned about slip stitch!"

Soldier Two: "We have to go now!" (Both soldiers took 'Mrs. Buckman' by the arm and pulled her through the hole in the wall and across a computer generated battlefield. They ended up on a different battlefield set.)

Soldier One: "Status on the extraction?"

Soldier Two: "Not good! We're surrounded!"

Soldier One: "Casualties?"

Soldier Two: "At least half are down or captured, and the enemy is getting closer."

Soldier One: "Choppers?"

Soldier Two: "Shot down! We didn't know the Pittsburgh Police Department had anti-aircraft capability!"

Soldier One: "Ground?"

Soldier Two: "They have tanks. We've only got one choice left! You have to prepare Mrs. Buckman for pickup. I'll join the remaining survivors and hold them off as long as we can!"

Soldier One: "Go!" (Turns to 'Marilyn' and opens up a duffle bag.) "Mrs. Buckman, you need to put on this harness."

Poehler: "The color really doesn't work with the jumpsuit. Do you have something else, maybe in a light red or yellow?"

Soldier One: "Mrs. Buckman! Please!"

Poehler: "Oh, all right. Oh, damn, I broke a nail!"

Soldier One: "Mrs. Buckman!"(He began helping her.)

Poehler: "What's this for, anyway?"

Soldier One: (Reaches into the duffle bag and pulls out an inflated balloon, clips it to a wire and lets it free, to float out of sight.) "Ever watch James Bond?"

Poehler: "No. Why?"

Soldier One: "No reason. Have a nice flight!" (Poehler gets lifted up off the stage by the wire, as the soldier kneels down and starts shooting his gun.)

Curiously, Marilyn took a certain exception to the portrayal of her by Poehler I simply laughed at my wife as she stewed.

Charlie must have been the only guy on the planet who hadn't seen the clips by the time we saw him the next day. My Sunday breakfast was interrupted by Will Brucis when he called wanting to know my official reaction to the skits. I simply told him the truth, that I had laughed until I cried, and then told him the White House wasn't going to take an official policy stance on Marilyn Buckman's cookie technology. It was going to be one of those 'neither confirm nor deny' moments.

Needless to say, the Sunday morning news shows were all over this whole mess. ABC's This Week with George Stephanopoulos ran the intro clip in full, and then George asked Fletcher Donaldson about it.

George Stephanopoulos: "Fletcher, you've actually been to the Buckman's home in Hereford, Maryland. Is Marilyn Buckman's chocolate chip cookie recipe really so valuable that we can't allow it to fall into enemy hands?"

Fletcher Donaldson: "I can't answer that, George. I don't think I've ever had one of her cookies. I can say that her jam and jelly recipes are worth protecting."

George Will: "I'd have to agree with that. I managed to get a jar of Buckman's Berries Strawberry Jam one Christmas and it was pretty good stuff. It's interesting, though, to compare Marilyn Buckman with Hillary Clinton, who once famously commented that she had no intention of staying home and baking cookies when she could do something more important. Marilyn Buckman is quite happy baking cookies and being a stay-at-home mother for her children and husband, and she considers that as important as anything else she could be doing, and I applaud her for that."

That got into a full Roundtable discussion of the two women's styles and whether Marilyn's 'career choice' was correct and how my extravagant wealth had allowed my wife to be 'less productive' or if I had forced her into a 'subservient' role. After a bit, Marilyn looked at me and said, "Do you like my cookies?"

I smiled and waggled my eyebrows, and replied, "And your buns, too!"

"Oh my God! You're awful!" I started tickling her at that, and only stopped when Megan wandered out of her bedroom to find the President of the United States of America and the First Lady of that great nation wrestling on the couch. Still it showed how anything in Washington could be politicized.

Monday morning back in D.C. the political aspects were all over the place. I was treated to the latest on the witch hunt over at the Secret Service. The Senate Finance Committee planned to name a Special Investigator this week, and was dragging their heels on it, trying to delay everything past the end of the year and into the primary season. The Secret Service wasn't waiting for them, and their internal affairs operation was crawling all over the protection details. It was expected that they would actually be questioning me and Marilyn at some point. I wasn't precisely sure what that would gain them, but I couldn't see an upside to stonewalling them.

During the morning staff meeting, something interesting came up, though. Needless to say, SNL had everybody talking, and there didn't seem to be an end in sight to the merriment. It was Mindy who said, "Why don't you send Mrs. Buckman out to talk to people?"

"I think that's how we got into this mess! She went out and talked to people!", I countered.

"No, not protesters! Put her on the late night shows!"

"Huh?" I wasn't sure where this was going.

Frank wasn't either, but Will had a curious look on his face. "Keep going.", he told her, making a rolling motion with his hands.

"Marilyn Buckman is one of the nicest and warmest people you will ever meet. Everybody gets along with her. She comes across as a regular person, a nice person, not a Washington person. She can relate to people. Use that! Send her out on tour! Get people on her side and, by extension, your side, and not let this be your average Washington scandal. Let her show them it's about real people. She comes across as real people."

"On tour?! What?!", I wondered. "Where?"

"Put her out on the talk shows. She's done Oprah before. Put her on the late night shows. Are you telling me she couldn't wow them on Leno or Letterman?"

"Could we get her on? It seems awfully sudden..." The thought of Marilyn on a talk show was a new one.

Frank rolled his eyes. "Mister President, she's the First Lady! They would all kill to have her on!"

I shrugged. "When you put it that way ... What would she do?"

"Simple, talk to them.", finished Mindy. "About whatever they want to talk about. Where's the downside? She's not going to get into politics, since she doesn't get into politics here. She's a stay at home mom without any agenda other than taking care of her husband and children. What could she possibly say that would be harmful to you?"

"Huh." I had to scratch my head at that. "She'll never go for it. She's never even campaigned for me on her own."

"Have you ever asked her?", Mindy pushed back.

"You're getting pushy in your old age, Mindy!", I replied with a smile. She didn't look overly sorrowful at my characterization; she was only in her late-thirties. I looked at Will. "Could we do it?"

"Piece of cake. Frank is right. Any of the shows would love to have the First Lady of the United States on as a guest. They'd probably have her as the only guest."

I shrugged again. "What's the worst that could happen? She could say no, I suppose." I grabbed the phone and asked that they track down my wife. Hanging up I added, "It's not like she knows the nuclear launch codes. I just hope she doesn't say something like I have a two inch..." I was about to say dick when I remembered I had a lady in the room. I just snapped my mouth shut.

"I don't think you have to worry about that, Mister President.", answered Mindy with a smile.

"What!?"

"Girl talk, Mister President."

I groaned loudly. "No ... you and Marilyn ... no!"

Mindy giggled and nodded, "You don't have to worry."

I just groaned, as Frank and Will laughed at me. I was rescued from this line of questioning with the announcement over the intercom that my wife was on the line. I hit the button and then punched another to put it on speaker. "Marilyn, you there? I have you on speaker with my staff."

"Hello."

"Good morning, Mrs. Buckman. How's Charlie?", asked Frank.

Marilyn gave us a rundown on my son's condition. He was improving, his condition had been upgraded to Fair, and once his ribs healed further would move up to Good. They were scheduling his next operation for Tuesday, to begin working on his leg.

"That's good Marilyn. Make sure you give him my best, both him and Megan." The others looked at me curiously, but I waved that off. "Honey, the reason that I called is that we want to talk to you about doing a publicity tour, sort of."

"A tour?"

"Yes, it's actually Mindy's idea. Here, I'll let her explain it."

Mindy spoke up, and she and Marilyn talked for a few minutes. After a bit, Marilyn said, "I've never done anything like that!"

Will responded, "I'll have one of my top people on this, traveling with you the entire time. Mindy, will have somebody, too." Mindy nodded in agreement.

"But Charlie, I can't leave him..."

I snorted at that. "Honey, I love you dearly, but you are probably driving him bonkers. He has Megan with him. She can drive him bonkers. It will be good practice for the future."

"CARL!"

"Come home this afternoon and we'll talk about it."

Marilyn groused some more, but agreed to come back to D.C. for a few days. We hung up, and I had some curious faces looking at me. "Megan ... I think you all met her at the wedding ... Charlie asked her to marry him and she said yes."

"Congratulations, Mister President.", replied Frank. "At least he's your son. You won't have to pay."

I snorted. "Don't bet on it!" The others all congratulated me as well.

My wife made it back to the White House by mid-afternoon, grousing to me that Charlie had sent her packing with a bit too big of a smile. I just promised her that we would head back up for the weekend, at which she mentioned that Megan had managed to get in touch with her parents, and they would also visit for the weekend. I nodded and made sure that we told Frank and the Secret Service about our plans. I had a new lead agent on my detail by now, also.

Marilyn reluctantly agreed to make a few appearances, and Will promptly ran into his office and began making phone calls. Half an hour later he came back to announce he had Marilyn on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno on Wednesday, and The Late Show with David Letterman on Thursday. I blinked at that. Leno did his show in L.A., and Letterman did his in New York. Marilyn was going to have to criss-cross the country to do this. She might be able to fly to California Wednesday morning, since she would pick up three hours going west, but she'd lose them again heading back east, so it would be long couple of days for her. Mindy and Will both would have somebody with her.

"What if I screw this up?", she asked me later, when we were alone.

"Well, it will probably be the end of my Presidency. I'll be impeached and imprisoned, and you and the children will lose your citizenship and be forced to flee from Inspector Javert..."

"Carl!"

"Marilyn, don't worry! Everybody likes you. They don't like me, which is why we are sending you out, not me. Just act like yourself. You'll be fine.", I reassured her.

"You're no help!"

I wrapped an arm around her shoulder. "I wasn't hired to be helpful. I was hired to..." At that point I smiled at her and waggled my eyebrows.

"Forget it! I want my money back!" I just laughed.

Marilyn flew out to Los Angeles Tuesday afternoon. She spent the night and did a little sightseeing and shopping the next morning. Taping would be in the afternoon. She called me afterwards to say it had gone well, but they were heading to the airport to fly to New York City. I promised I would watch it that night.

I don't normally watch Leno, but tonight I made sure I did. He came out and did his normal routine of an opening monologue. Then he did a quick 'Jaywalking' segment, where he asked random people on the street questions about the President. A few were:

"Who is the President?" – Most people got it right, but a couple were blank stares.

"What is the name of the First Lady?" – He got a couple of 'Mrs. Buckman' answers, usually from people who knew my name. One person, who knew my name, answered 'Hillary Clinton.' Oh, brother!

"What color is the White House?" – He actually got a few wrong answers on this one.

Then he took a commercial break, and after that, introduced " ... tonight's guest, the First lady of the United States, Marilyn Buckman!" There was huge applause, and a group of the biggest guys I had ever seen, as in pro basketball big, all dressed in suits with dark sunglasses on, came out in a shoulder-to-shoulder tight group, completely surrounding Marilyn on all sides, and they trudged across the stage. All you could see was Marilyn's hand sticking out from the front and waving to people. They stopped a few feet from Leno, who shook the exposed hand and commented about how security had really been beefed up. Then her 'bodyguards' all peeled away, leaving Marilyn standing there in her clothing, a skirt suit, but also wearing a K-pot helmet and a bullet-proof vest! The audience was laughing their asses off at all of this.

Jay: "Wow! They really have your security tightened up these days!"(He led her over to the desk area.)

Marilyn: "It's pretty serious these days." (She took off the helmet and shook out her curls, and Jay helped her out of the vest. They sat down on the set.) "I can't believe Carl used to actually wear all that stuff!"

Jay: "Back when he was in the Army?"

Marilyn: "Yes! He once told me that when he had to jump he often wore 125 pounds or more! Better him than me!"

Jay: "Welcome to the Tonight Show."

Marilyn: "Thank you for having me. I've never done this sort of thing before."

Jay: "Really?"

Marilyn: "Nope. I had Oprah at the house once, and we've done a few interviews in the White House, but never anything like this."

Jay: "I feel honored. The accommodations okay? Everything in the Green Room alright?"

Marilyn: "Just fine."

Jay: "Better than where you were staying last week?"

Marilyn: "Oh my God, what a mess that was!"

That was the break that Leno needed to ask her how everything happened, and gave Marilyn a chance to explain what happened, and how she ended up in the Pittsburgh jail.

Jay: "So what made you take a swing at that guy?"

Marilyn: "He just got me so angry! My son is in a hospital, inches away from dying, and that [BLEEPED!] is shouting to have him killed! Ohhh ... I can't say that on television, can I. Am I in some kind of trouble?"

Jay: "Your husband can always write you a pardon."

Marilyn: "He'd like that, too. I'd never hear the end of it!"

Jay: "What did he have to say when he found out you were in jail?"

Marilyn: "Oh, he was just full of jokes about that! At one point he told me that the kids wanted to see me, and that the normal thing was for parents to bail out their children, and not the other way around! What a rat!"

There was a lot of laughter over that exchange. They also discussed Charlie's condition, his engagement, what all the kids were up to, and other relatively routine family matters.

Letterman was similar the next night, though his tone was a touch snarkier, which was his style. He started off with a Top 10 List from the Home Office in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the Top 10 comments from the Pittsburgh Police on seeing the First Lady show up. ("Number One – 'Oh, good, she can bake us some cookies!'")

That weekend we met Megan's family in Pittsburgh. Charlie was in better spirits by then, with the first operation, the one on his femur, his thigh bone, complete. His right leg was in a giant cast, but it wasn't like he was going anywhere. His ribs were healing normally, and his breathing was less painful. Next week they would work on his lower leg. Megan's parents were a bit flummoxed by it all. They knew their daughter was dating Charlie Buckman, but I don't think they had really connected him to me, and they were more than a little awestruck, especially when I had to take a few business calls. It was a little unsettling for a small town lawyer specializing in wills, pre-nups, and custody cases when I had to take a call from the Attorney General of the United States! Nice people.

The following week Marilyn went to New York for a couple of days. She did Jon Stewart on Monday night, and Stephen Colbert on Tuesday. After finishing taping, she caught a fast flight back home, and was in Washington in time to watch Colbert with me that night. One fun segment was about her politics.

Stephen: "Is it true that you are not a Republican like your husband?"

Marilyn: "No, I'm not."

Stephen: "You mean you're a Communist?"

Marilyn: (Laughing) "No, I'm a Democrat!"

Stephen: "Same thing."

Marilyn: "You sound just like my husband."

Colbert: "What about your children? Are they also dedicated to the violent overthrow of the American government and the downfall of Western Civilization and all that is decent and good?"

Marilyn: (Laughing harder) "I don't actually know. They all tell their father they're Democrats, but half the time I think they just like to watch him yell and stomp around the house when they do so."

Stephen: (Eyes lighting up and smiling.) "Really? They like to push his buttons, huh?"

Marilyn: "The girls, especially."

Stephen: (Himself a father of a daughter.) "They can do that, can't they?"

Marilyn: "One time the girls were giving him some grief, and Carl told Charlie, 'I hope you have many daughters, and I hope they're all just like your sisters!', and Charlie asked, 'What did I ever do to you!?'"

I had to joke with Marilyn about what her parents would think of Colbert's denunciation of Democrats. She replied they were asleep by then. True, so true.

That blitz took care of any attempt by the Democrats to tie me personally to the mess with the Westboro Baptist Church and the Secret Service. That didn't mean this was over, though, not by a long shot. The Secret Service was being dragged through the mud, and I told Brian Nagel that I couldn't provide any cover. If something was going to come out, he needed to be upfront about it, and take the beating he was going to get. It didn't matter if there weren't any more problems; if somebody looked hard, and I could guarantee they would, they would find something, even if they had to invent it.

The Westboro Baptist Church was a problem of a different nature. They were suing Marilyn and me for everything under the sun, starting with assault and battery (by Marilyn) and moving on up to abuse of power and wrongful imprisonment (the Pittsburgh Police Department) and finally to a variety of violations of their civil rights (against me.) What joy!

On the other hand, they really overstepped their bounds this time. This wasn't some small town police chief trying to be nice to a local widow and running them out of town. They had managed to piss off the President of the United States and the federal agency responsible for keeping him safe. The Allegheny County Prosecutor might have kicked them loose, but that didn't mean that there weren't any federal charges we could hit them with! First and foremost, as soon as they were cut loose by the Pittsburgh cops, the whole lot of them had been loaded into a prison bus and taken to the East Carson Street office of the FBI, where they were made comfortable in a new set of cells. They were then informed that they had committed a number of federal crimes, including threatening federally protected individuals and assault and battery on a federally protected individual.

After as much delay as they could get away with, the Justice Department reluctantly turned them all loose. With normal people, that would be the end of things. Over the years I had heard any number of ridiculous statements from various radically liberal Hollywood types, including some really stupid ones saying I deserved to die. The usual response would be a couple of extremely unsympathetic and unsmiling federal agents descending on the celebrity, who would then explain what might happen if said celebrity didn't make a quick and abject public retraction. Said retraction was almost immediately forthcoming. The sort of publicity this could generate was not positive publicity.

That only works, however, if the people making the threats were sane, and feared the consequences of their actions. That doesn't actually apply to crazy people. This had been the case with almost all of the various Presidential assassination attempts over the years. Very few (several attempts on Lincoln, an anarchist attack on Hoover, two attempts on Truman) were politically based. The bulk of them were nut jobs who were being told by the voices in their heads that they needed to kill the President. That had been the case with most of the post-Kennedy attempts, like the ones by Squeaky Fromme and Sara Jane Moore on Jerry Ford, and John Hinckley on Ronald Reagan. It had also been the ultimate conclusion with Robert Mooradian's attempt on me the year before, although Mooradian had first tried an insanity defense, and had ultimately pled guilty to attempted murder and was serving life without parole at the Federal Penitentiary in Marion, Illinois.

As far as the Justice Department could tell, Fred Phelps and the Westboro Baptist Church were a bunch of certified crazies. The crazies liked the publicity they were getting. These guys ran on a shoestring budget, and anything that got them in the news was a way for them to get their message out to the masses. As soon as they were cut loose, they went back to the hospital and began protesting again. That earned them a second trip to a federal lockup, until a lawyer got them cut loose. Their regular lawyer, Shirley Phelps-Roper, was Fred Phelps' daughter, and had been arrested as the person who had given Marilyn the black eye.

When they got out the second time, they really went too far. They decided to go after the hospital, the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. They put up on their website, www.godhatesfags. com, the names of some of the doctors and nurses working on Charlie, with their home addresses, and pictures with bulls-eyes superimposed on them. Justice immediately assigned U.S. Marshals to protect all the doctors and nurses, and yanked the kooks all back into jail a third time, and then got a court order to shut down the website.

I told Frank Keating to use any trick in the books to put a crimp in these assholes' nuttiness. Anything was fair game, and if he wanted my lawyers to chase them down as well, to simply let me know. They had declared war on the wrong guy! My biggest problem was that almost everything they did was covered with the twin mantles of freedom of speech and freedom of religion. Sooner or later they would win on this, guaranteed. They would probably even beat the 'threats against federally protected individuals' laws. In the meantime, however, we could tie them up. For instance, the Justice Department managed to freeze the church's funds, and the IRS revoked their tax exempt status by declaring they weren't a church, but a political organization. This wasn't a bad approach; the Klan had been broken by lawsuits that made them pay damages. The individuals in the church were also targeted, and even the bus they had driven in on was impounded. As for the personal lawsuits against Marilyn, we countersued.

Was this an abuse of power? Illegal seizure? Malicious prosecution? You're damn right it was! On the other hand, there are some cases you just can't lose. The only group in America who actually liked these guys was the American Civil Liberties Union. Everybody else was uniformly disgusted by them. This did not play badly for me in the court of public opinion. I simply needed them muzzled until I was out of office. After that I could go after them with both barrels!

Chapter 171: Family Matters

Marilyn's blitz of the talk shows did what we intended it to do. It put a human face, a very likeable human face, on the clusterfuck in Pittsburgh. Marilyn was polling in the low 90s, and all across the country people were rallying to her side on this. Only the ACLU was defending them, and they had offered their services. (Westboro Baptist promptly condemned them as being part of the 'Jewish power elite', but with their assets frozen, it wasn't like they could actually pay for lawyers; they couldn't afford to be picky.) Harry Reid and Congress were not going to be able to come after me by chewing on Marilyn.

Likewise, Elizabeth Warren was out of the line of fire at Treasury. The Dems who wanted to fry me were simply consternated by the fact that the Secretary of the Treasury was also a Democrat. That took care of another concern.

On the other hand, the Secret Service was about to get a reaming the likes of which they hadn't seen since the Kennedy assassination. Politically, attacking me through the Secret Service was cheap and easy. I wasn't all that interested in helping to fend off the attacks, either. Her detail had screwed up across the board, and if anything had happened to her I would have never forgiven them. The Senate Finance Committee assigned a Special Investigator to the case, and turned him loose with a budget that would have made Ken Starr drool.

Well, if you look hard enough, you can always find something. A Special Investigator isn't simply a single person, but is everybody who he hires to look into things. A lot of it is just incredibly boring! Follow the money – hire a bunch of accountants to go over every file related to money. Follow the emails – hire a bunch of computer guys and print out libraries full of emails. Follow the testimony – hire a bunch of lawyers to take depositions from anybody and everybody.

Follow the money, and that's what they did. There is no bill too small to notice, and that is what killed the Secret Service. By the end of October an accountant with nothing better to do was going over the expense reports of everybody assigned to anybody on the Presidential Protective Detail. This wasn't just the people assigned to me, but also the agents assigned to Marilyn and the kids, as well as anybody else around, such as the advance parties that go to various places to prep for a Presidential visit.

One such preparation trip came in advance of my speech at the Organization of American States in Brasilia, Brazil, in March, 2006. I flew in, made a speech notable for its lack of notability, enjoyed a state dinner, and then flew home. I didn't even stay the night. Regardless, several dozen Secret Service agents flew down ahead of time to go over motorcade routes, speaking locations, itineraries, and the like. They then went home with their report. It took them several days. When they are in a country, they generally use cars assigned to the embassy, although sometimes they use rental cars.

Why then was there an expense account charge for $20 for a cab ride for someone with the initials VF? Who was VF? Nobody at the embassy had those initials, and neither did anybody on the prep team? Why did the agent who put in the expense report suddenly clam up and refuse to answer? Why don't we just send somebody from the Special Investigator's office to Brazil on the taxpayer's dime and ask the cab company about this VF?

It was like watching a sweater unravel when somebody pulled a loose bit of yarn. Within a matter of days, and with the entire disaster being leaked to the press via speed dial, the Secret Service was gutted like a fish! VF turned out to be Victoria Federica, a 'model' and part-time prostitute hired by some of the team as entertainment. They sent her home the next morning, and since nobody wanted to pay the $20 cab fare, they charged it to the U.S. of A. The cheap and stupid bastards managed to sink themselves because nobody wanted to pay a hooker an extra $20 to cover her cab fare.

I learned about this comedy of errors from Frank and Will. The Washington Post had a photo of the young lady in question, and she was quite attractive. I commented to them that I was getting screwed by the young lady and hadn't even managed to get screwed. Will simply promised that if I ever said that in public, he would personally beat me to death with the microphone, and Frank promised to hold me down and help. I nodded in acquiescence.

Harry Reid and Max Baucus managed to get their scandal, big time! This was front page news for two weeks, as the numbers and names of the agents came to light, and the phrase 'Wheels up, rings off!' came into the American lexicon. It seemed that this was an accepted practice amongst the prep teams. I called in Acting Director Nagel and read him the riot act, and ordered him to clean this mess up immediately. I was both unable and unwilling to deflect any blame that might be forthcoming. The Secret Service was going to get slammed on this, and they had nobody to blame but themselves.

John McCain was furious about all of this. Mud splashed on the President was the same as mud splashed on the Vice President. The primaries would begin in January, and the Senate Finance Committee was promising Congressional hearings on the Secret Service beginning after the winter recess. What that would do was to insure that after the holidays, the press had some nice and juicy blood-letting to go along with the primaries. John was my presumptive heir apparent. If I looked bad, he looked bad, and Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee were loudly demanding an even larger investigation, including sworn testimony from Marilyn and my family. (I called Brewster McRiley and Mike Duncan of the RNC and told them to explain how that was never going to happen.) Their theory was that if I looked bad, John looked bad, and if John looked bad, they would look good.

We did what we could do to mitigate the problem. Nagel cleaned house in the prep teams, and a dozen agents resigned or were fired by mid-November. It wasn't enough, and I let Nagel go as well, replacing him with an Assistant Director from the finance side of the Secret Service. That was the investigatory unit responsible for counterfeiting and other securities related crimes. The only ones lower in the hierarchy than them were the uniformed guys, and I promised that if it became necessary, they would be the only ones left. I didn't care how much blood had to be shed, but I wanted the Secret Service cleaned up!

It wasn't entirely the winter of my discontent. By the end of October Charlie had recovered enough to get booted out of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. I had been going up most weekends to visit, and Marilyn and Megan had worked out a schedule where one of them was always around for him. Megan had flown to Los Angeles in September for a small part, but had been unhappy about it and declined the role. It was obvious that she had been chosen because of her relationship to Charlie, and her outfit was on the skimpy side of skimpy. She had a long talk with her agent and then flew home to Omaha for a few days before coming back to Pittsburgh. Marilyn wasn't completely sure, but she told me that she thought Megan's acting career was over.

Charlie was either oblivious or simply smart enough to know when to keep his mouth shut. By the end of September his ribs had healed enough that he could begin some rehabilitation on his upper body. He told me privately that it was worse than anything he had gone through when he got shot in Monrovia. He still had a giant cast on his right leg, and a much smaller cast on his right arm. A month later his casts had come off and his catheter had come out, and he was able to walk upright and use the bathroom, although he needed a lot of help. He balked at moving into the White House, but was amenable to the idea of moving into the house on 30th Street. We converted my first floor library into an infirmary and arranged for Charlie to begin rehabilitation therapy at Walter Reed.

First, however, we had to get him out of there. Aside from the substantial bill from the hospital's accounting office (he had medical insurance through his racing team and the track, but he would still have been bankrupted if he was a normal guy) I donated $10 million to found the Buckman Wing for Really Dumb Children Who Ride Insane Motorcycles and Become Organ Donors. Strangely, they insisted on a more conventional name involving the use of the words Orthopedics and Rehabilitation. I told Marilyn my title was more accurate and for once she agreed with me. We had a very nice ceremony, thanked everybody and their brother, and had some nice people from the Pittsburgh City Hall in to help; they had their hands out, too, and they received a nice little payoff to the Police Benevolent Association. Afterwards we loaded Charlie onto Marine One and we flew him to the Naval Observatory, which was the closest helipad to the house on 30th Street.

Marilyn wanted to stay around for a bit to make sure Charlie settled in properly. I dragged her away, whispering to her that Charlie and Megan looked like they could 'settle in' just fine on their own. She elbowed me in the side and said her son was better behaved than that, but when I rolled my eyes at her, she giggled and said, "He's as much of a barbarian as his father!"

I shrugged and gave a bland smile. "She's an actress. Maybe she has a nurse's costume available."

"You are a dirty old man!"

"You're the one with the AARP card!", I laughed.

"You have one, too!"

That was true. It had showed up in the mail at Hereford when I turned 50. I used it as a bookmark.

"Do you know why Ben Franklin preferred older women as mistresses?", I asked, needling her because she was five months older than me. Marilyn had already turned 52, while I was still 51 for a few more weeks.

"No! Why!?"

I lowered my voice and whispered, "Because they were so grateful!"

"OOOOHHH! You are a rat!" Marilyn tried to slug me, but I wrapped her up in my arms and laughed. "I'll show you old!"

"I certainly hope so!", I laughed.

Marilyn didn't believe me about Ben Franklin, so once we got back to the White House, I made a call over to the Library of Congress. I managed to speak to the Librarian, Doctor Billington, and he laughed and promised to send over a copy of the letter that Franklin wrote. He also warned me that I was playing with fire. I just asked what was life without a little heat.

For Thanksgiving we stayed at the White House for a traditional feast. Last year we ate in Kurdistan. This year the Iraqi border was quieter, and we had fewer troops in place. We managed to get the entire family down. Molly and Bucky came down from Lansdowne, Charlie and Megan came over from 30th Street, and Holly showed up with the same guy who had been at the wedding with her. He still looked like a scruffy bum. When I asked Marilyn if they were serious she said they were very serious, and were moving in together into a new apartment. "You met Jerry at the wedding! Where have you been?", she replied.

"I don't know, running the free world, maybe?"

"Hmmmph! Some father you are!"

As a family we had to actually appear in public together the day before Thanksgiving, at the annual Pardoning of the Turkeys. For years and years turkeys were given to the President as gifts from various poultry boards, but the general rule was to thank those giving the bird, praise the quality of the bird, and a day later, eat the bird. Trust Ronald Reagan to screw up a really good idea. He decided to give the turkey a 'Presidential pardon' and make it into a national event. Personally, I would be more than happy to go back to the old way of doing things. We now had two turkeys to pardon, and they always had cute or patriotic names, like 'Liberty' and 'Freedom.' I would privately call them 'Juicy' and 'Delicious.'

The entire ceremony had some problematic issues. The worst was that Jerry still looked and dressed like a scruffy bum. Charlie, Bucky, and I were wearing suits and overcoats or trench coats, and the ladies all had on smart suits or dresses and matching overcoats, scarves, and gloves. Jerry was wearing jeans, a Pearl Jam t-shirt, a ratty parka, and a wool cap with a hole in it. I took one look at him and muttered, "Are you kidding me?! Hold it a minute." He was near enough my size, though taller by a couple of inches. I went to the closet and pulled out a spare dress coat and a clean watch cap. "Here, put these on.", I told him. "You can stand in the back for any photos."

He stood there and gave me a hostile look. "What's wrong with what I'm wearing!?"

I rolled my eyes. "Nothing is wrong if you are camping with the Boy Scouts. This isn't camping. This is the White House, the official residence of the President of the United States of America, and you are about to be on national television in the Rose Garden. Do you really want your parents to see you on the evening news in an outfit that looks like you're homeless and hanging around a trash fire in the Bowery?"

DADDY!", squawked Holly.

I looked at my eldest daughter. "Daddy nothing! This isn't the lab at Princeton. This is the real world, where you have to dress up every once in a while. And speaking of dressing up, it's too late to do anything about it now, but a haircut and a beard trimmer would go a long, long way towards making your boyfriend look a whole lot more presentable."

"Excuse me?", Jerry asked incredulously.

"Carl, don't you think you're going a little overboard?", asked Marilyn, smiling.

"No, I don't! I don't care if this guy is the next Einstein. Einstein wore suits. One of these days he's going to graduate and have to get a job. People hire people who wear suits and have haircuts and trim beards. That's the way the real world works."

"DADDY!"

"We'll go into this later, but Jerry, if you want to be with Holly in this, you need to change out of that coat and hat. If you stand in the back, nobody will see the jeans and sneakers. A scarf will cover up that thing you call a beard." I left so that everybody could stew and run me down. Marilyn would calm them down. Twenty minutes later, Jerry – now in the clean coat, scarf, and cap – and Holly and Marilyn came down to the Oval Office, where I was hanging out with the others. Jerry and Holly looked mulish, and Marilyn looked amused. I nodded and smiled, and reminded everybody "Remember, big smiles!"

Holly grumbled, but Marilyn pushed me towards the door.

We ended up standing out in the Rose Garden in the cold, the whole mob of us dressed in overcoats and scarves and gloves, with two gigantic white turkeys standing there on a table. I had just given the turkeys their pardon, wishing them a long life. (That rarely lasts more than a few weeks or months longer; these birds are so big they have major health problems.) Normally this gets maybe 30 seconds on television. There are usually a few softball questions from the press. Then I was asked, "Mister President, what are you thankful for this year?"

I couldn't help myself. I simply couldn't stop. It was just too easy! "Well, I'm just like any other American father. I'm thankful my son has gotten out of the hospital, my daughters have gotten out of the house, and my wife has gotten out of jail!" As I could have expected, Charlie, Megan, and Bucky broke down in laughter, Jerry looked confused, and Holly, Molly, and Marilyn all slugged me.

We made the news that night, and got more than just 30 seconds! Will was hard pressed to spin that one, because he was laughing too hard to be taken seriously.

Marilyn calmed down Holly and Jerry. She promised to take the pair of them to a decent men's store to get some new clothes. To be fair, he didn't have a lot of money, being just an average grad student, which is sort of like indentured servitude to the college, only without the more enjoyable aspects of slavery. She told them it would be our Christmas present.

Charlie's cost of care irked me. I was rich and could take care of any deductibles or maximums, but so many people couldn't. For the average American, treatment like he was getting would bankrupt them. I contemplated starting a legislative battle to do something about the abysmal state of health insurance in the country, but shitcanned the idea immediately. There were so many problems with the whole idea! First off, the only program that actually made any sense was a nationwide extension of Mitt Romney's plan from Massachusetts. If I did that, I was directly supporting John McCain's biggest Republican rival. I was also pushing a Democratic proposal; I remembered how this had chewed Hillary Clinton up in the 1990s (and Barack Obama in the 2010s, though nobody but me knew that.) If this was going to ever get done and make it through Congress, a Republican President would need to do it! I sat John down one afternoon and tossed this out. My suggestion? Win the primary (quite probable) and win the general election (quite possible) and then do it. He would have a third term Republican Presidential mandate and a Republican House. He could name Mitt Romney as his Secretary of Health and Human Services, and develop something that just might work.

"You want me to name him to the Cabinet? After what he's been saying about me?", protested John.

"Hey, you win and it will be your Cabinet. What you do is your business. I'm just saying it would pay some benefits, and in more ways than one. Keep your friends close and your enemies closer, that sort of thing."

He cocked his head to the side and smiled, to ask, "Like you did with me?"

I shrugged. "I never classified you as an enemy. More like a potential problem."

He shrugged back. "Maybe."

"Yeah, maybe. Let's face it; I was never going to go through the primaries like you guys did. Or you've been doing. George didn't even want me, other than as a bone to the moderates. When I landed in this job, I had two main rivals and I needed to handle them, and fast. There was you, who was George's only real opponent in the primaries, and Cheney, who was smarter than George and could control him, and didn't like that he couldn't control me! Dick I had to destroy. You, on the other hand, I had no real reason or ability to destroy, but I did have a chance to make you an ally. I'm not telling you anything you don't already know."

"True enough. I wasn't quite sure whether you were making that cold a calculation or not, but I could see it happening."

"It was more like I simply needed to handle things, or I would be the one being handled. You certainly had a much better reputation than I did back then, and you could have been a real pain in the ass to deal with in the Senate if you had wanted to be. Cheney was simply toxic waste and needed to be dealt with, and dealt with permanently! He would have been nothing but trouble, and would have poisoned the well for all of us in 2004.", I answered.

"And your thinking on Romney?"

"He's the only Republican with the seniority and respect to challenge you. Forget Huckabee. When the primaries are over, he goes off to become a television preacher. No, Romney will still be around, and he can make a nuisance of himself. He won't win, since the base trusts him even less than they trust you or me. Do what I did. Convert the potential challenger to an asset. Put him in the Cabinet and work his ass off. It shows the moderates you haven't forgotten them, and shows the public how you're bigger than such petty primary nonsense."

John laughed at that. "You going to pick my Vice President, too?"

"Oh, Lord! That one I am leaving to you! You really have to work with them, and you can't fire them, like you can a Cabinet Secretary. In addition, you really want somebody who can take over if need be. I know we don't always see eye to eye, John, but I feel a whole lot better knowing you are around then, say, Cheney or Romney, if Marilyn finally gets tired of me and kills me in my sleep!"

John laughed at that. "I am going to tell her you said that!"

"Please, it's a family joke by now!" I scratched my head for a moment. "You want a few ideas? How about Jeb Bush? Governor of Florida, brother to slain martyr George, son of a great President? He's out of a job but has a good name in the party. Here's another idea. What happens if Hillary ends up as the candidate? You can trump them with Condi Rice. She's a woman and she's black. Two minorities for the price of one!"

"That is so cold!", he said with a smile. "Of course the party base would never tolerate her."

"You have to watch those guys. You can't play to the base. The guy they want will never get elected. You have to do this on your terms, not theirs.", I warned. "Ever heard of Sarah Palin?"

"Who?"

"Sarah Palin. She's the new Governor of Alaska. Hard core Republican, female, young, a hunter, very conservative, damn good looking. Sounds like the perfect candidate to get the base all revved up, right?" He nodded. "I met her once, at a Governor's conference. She has the IQ of a doorknob! That doesn't really matter in Alaska, which has a total state population of a mid-sized city in the rest of the country, and where even the Democrats are conservative. You put her on national TV and she will come across as an idiot. You can pick any number of favorites from the party base, and as soon as you put them on national television, with a reporter who has actually read something other than the Bible or Guns and Ammo, they will flame out spectacularly. You really have to watch those guys!"

"I'll give this all some thought. First I have to win the primary."

I gave him a thumbs-up on that, and he took off.

After Charlie and Megan had a chance to settle in, the Pulaski family came to Washington for a visit. Megan's parents, John and Barbara, and her two college age brothers, John Jr. and Will, came at the invitation of Marilyn and me. We put the two boys in the Queen's Bedroom and Molly's old room, and John and Barbara in the Lincoln Bedroom. Unlike some of my predecessors, Marilyn and I did not abuse the privilege of having guests stay in the White House. The place is very impressive, and the Pulaskis were suitably impressed. Marilyn and I gave them a tour while they were there, including the Oval Office. (I showed them the 'Red Button' but my wife told them it was fake.) We also told them that our home in Hereford was much less fancy, and that someday they would have to visit us there, or maybe join us at Hougomont for a vacation.

The Pulaskis were very nice people. The boys were Cornhuskers like their sister had been, studying business (John Jr.) and pre-law (Will.) I told them that I had talked to Megan any number of times while Charlie was in the hospital. If you wanted to get a good feel on people, do it while they are under stress. Staying with Charlie while he was racing and in the hospital was stressful, and she passed muster with Marilyn and me. They seemed to have done a good job with all of their children. Megan was going to be a fine addition to the Buckman family.

Then in December, something quite unpleasant occurred. A week before Christmas, Tuesday, December 18th, I was interrupted in the afternoon during a meeting with the Council of Economic Advisers. Frank Stouffer wasn't involved, but he knocked on my door and slipped inside.

"What's up, Frank?", I asked.

He cleared his throat. "Mister President, there's a call for you that I think you should take."

"Can't you tell the secretary to take a message and I'll call them back?"

"Sir, I really think you need to take this, sir."

I gave him a peeved look, and stood up. "This will just be a few minutes, folks." I followed Frank out of the conference room and headed back to the Oval Office. "What's going on, Frank? This better be good."

"Sir, you should take the call."

"Who is it?"

Frank didn't answer, but simply opened the door to my office and ushered me in. He didn't follow, but closed the door behind me. I went to my desk and sat down, and then picked up the phone. "Hello?"

"Carl, it's Suzie."

"Suzie! What's wrong?! Is John alright? The boys?" Had something happened? Suzie sounded relatively calm, but maybe she was in shock!

"They're fine, Carl. They're all just fine. The home just called. Dad just passed away. I wanted to let you know. He died about an hour ago.", she told me.

That stumped me for a second. "Huh."

"I talked to John before I called you. I'm coming home to see to him. John's coming, too.", she told me.

"Okay. Would you like me to send the Gulfstream?"

"Please? It might make things go faster." She paused for a moment. "I'll let you know what the arrangements are. Would you like to come to the funeral?"

I snorted. "Suzie, the man disowned me thirty years ago. You're going to be standing at the graveside a long, long time before I ever show up!"

"Carl...", she started lowly, and then stopped. "I understand. I'll let you know afterwards."

"Thank you, Suzie, and I'm sorry, for your sake, at least." I waited for the click, and then hung up.

Frank must have been standing at the secretary's desk waiting for me to get off the phone, because a few seconds after I hung up, he knocked on the door and let himself in without waiting for me to acknowledge him. I looked over at him blankly. "I'm sorry for your loss, Mister President.", he told me.

"Frank, I lost my father thirty years ago."

"Still ... Should I send the CEA home, sir?"

"Over this? Hell!" I stood from behind my desk and headed towards the door, but for some reason never made it past the couch. I simply sat down and stared at the wall for a moment. "Hell, Frank, cancel the meeting. It's as good a reason to play hooky as I've ever heard of." My mind went blank for a minute or two as I remembered back to previous times. Frank moved towards my desk. The next time I noticed him he was sitting down across from me with a couple of shot glasses and a bottle of Crown Royal I kept in a sideboard. I nodded and he poured a couple of shots. I took one and said, "Skoal!", and then remembered that was my father's favorite toast.

"Skoal!", he replied. We raised our glasses and drained them. I set mine down and he refilled them, but neither of us grabbed for them. "What happened, sir?"

I shrugged. "Old age, probably. I didn't ask and Suzie didn't tell me. I'm sure it was the Alzheimer's'. He's had that since 2000 or so."

"Will you be..." He let it go at that.

I shook my head. "Not hardly. The man made his bed, and now he can sleep in it, alone, as needs be."

"Sir..."

"Suzie is flying down. Let them know to send the G-IV for her. She and her husband will come down to handle that. Why she wants to do that is beyond me. She changed her name and ran halfway across the country to get away from my family."

"Do you know what the arrangements will be?", he asked.

"You're a nosy bastard, Frank, you know that?", I said with a half smile. Then I sighed and picked up my drink. I sipped this one, savoring the warmth of the whiskey hitting my throat. "Probably out in Arcadia. Most of the Buckmans are buried out there. It's one of the reasons Marilyn and I chose plots at a cemetery in Dulaney Valley, so we wouldn't contaminate the family gravesite." I sipped my whiskey. "The family ghosts would probably rise up and throw us out!"

"Will you be putting out a statement?" I gave him a hard look at that. He looked somewhat apologetic, but pressed on. "Will is going to be asking. Somebody is going to learn about this and ask. We need to be prepared."

"No statement."

"Sir?"

"Frank, you heard me. If anybody asks, explain that it is a personal family matter and that neither I nor the White House will be discussing it. If the reporter gets pushy, throw the dummy out."

Frank sighed and nodded, sipping his own whiskey. "I understand. I have to tell you, though, that it's going to be a problem. Politically it looks bad. Ungrateful son, and all that sort of thing."

"Christ!" I finished my glass and poured another, topping Frank's off as well. "I'm the ungrateful son? My father disowns me and doesn't even have the decency to tell me he's doing it! Were you aware that I only discovered it during the legal wrangling after I killed my brother? He disowned me on the orders of my mother, the psycho bitch! Did you know she bought the knife my brother had on him, and loaned him her car to stalk us with?"

"I don't know what to say, Mister President. I just can't imagine it."

"You want to know the crazy thing? For years now I have had armchair psychologists, none of whom have ever actually met me or talked to me or my family, explain my success. I am overcompensating and trying to win my father's approval, and when that fails, I am forced to do something even greater. You want to know the funny part? I've known since I was a kid that my family thought I was a failure. I've known it all my life. The only thing I ever wanted from my father was permission to move out!", I told him. I was just musing loudly at that point. "Frank, were you ever in the Cub Scouts or Boy Scouts?"

"Yes, sir, both."

I nodded. "Remember that first camping trip, how all the little boys were scared or homesick?"

He nodded and smiled. "I was one of them. You get over it, and then it becomes a big adventure."

"Exactly. Still, that first time, you miss home. Home is safety and security and people who love you and take care of you. Here's something to think about. I never got homesick, not even a little. For me, home wasn't any of those things. Home was just a house I lived in."

Frank just sat there and nodded. What could he say to me, after all?

I thought about it, and said, "If we have to say anything, just say that it's a private family matter and the President requests that the Buckman family's privacy be respected. They won't, of course. Just watch. There will be reporters and camera crews at the church and the graveside, hoping to film me attending, and hoping for some fireworks when I meet my long estranged family. When I don't show up, they'll start interviewing everybody. I wonder if my mother will show up. I bet she'll give a great interview! Probably blame everything on me and then have another nervous breakdown!"

Frank capped the bottle and put it back in the sideboard. "Neither one of us needs any more of this, and you don't need to be hanging around the office if you have any more."

"True enough. I'll be known as the American Boris Yeltsin! I'll be fine, Frank. I just think I need to go upstairs and forget about the day. I need to tell Marilyn and the kids the news. Did you know my daughters have never met my parents? Charlie did, once, when he was still in diapers, but he doesn't remember them. Marilyn refused to allow my parents to even touch him! They've never met any of my aunts or uncles or cousins. How screwed up is that?"

"I'll see you tomorrow, Mister President."

"I'll see you tomorrow, Frank, and I won't be hung over, either, I promise."

"Good night, sir."

I told Marilyn, and she told the kids. Afterwards we ate dinner and watched television silently. The images simply flickered across my vision, however. My mind was on my history, my life on the first go and on this one. Was there ever a way to have kept a relationship with any of my family? Mom was crazy, but not Dad. Dad was weak. Did I still miss him after thirty years? Or did I miss some fictional version of my father that I had never really known?

The story came out, and Will issued the 'private family matter' response. It made the national evening news but didn't get more than about 30 seconds. Some of the tabloids tried for more, and managed to snag a few interviews from cousins who had written me off back in the old days and had since come to the realization that they had also written off potential megabucks. Only one of my cousins had ever tried to contact me, and that was for money for a business. I dumped it on Jake Junior at the time and told him to apply our standard methods to evaluate it for investment. It failed the test and I had Jake inform him. I never heard from any of them since that.

Suzie called and gave me a report after the funeral. It turned out that Dad was buried next to Hamilton, and that Mom still had a plot next to Dad. The nuclear family from Hell.

Chapter 172: Campaign 2008

There wasn't going to be a whole lot of grand legislation going on in 2008. This was an election year, and it was going to be a big one. We would start off with the primaries, which would take up most of the late winter and early spring. After that we would have a brief lull through the summer, and then go into the conventions. After the conventions it would be full out bloody warfare. This was on top of the regular fun and games. Every House seat was up for election, as were one in three Senate seats. The chance of actually accomplishing anything was remote at best.

That wasn't to say nothing would get passed. Both the Democrats who ran the Senate and the Republicans who controlled the House could be counted on to pass some bills that had absolutely zero chance of ever getting through because they would never be passed by the other house. It didn't matter what the bill was for, the real purpose was to attach a name to a bill or to a vote against a bill. "Congressman Blathermouth voted against food stamps for hungry children! It's time to fire Congressman Blathermouth!" Well, that's not really what happened. The bill that was voted on was actually about raising taxes in Congressman Blathermouth's district, so when he voted that down, he also voted down the food stamp increase rider. Both sides played this game. Congressman Blathermouth would take the same vote and trumpet about how he held the line on taxes, so re-elect him so he can continue leading the fight.

I did expect to get some legislation passed, but it would be mostly bills supplemental to other bills that were already in place. For instance, last year I had pushed through a five year extension on some major infrastructure spending bills – bridges, highways, water and sewer improvements, canal locks, and such – and this year we would need to pass the proper budget and spending bills. How much that was going to cost in special appropriations and earmarks in order to buy recalcitrant politicians I wasn't sure yet.

It was amusing in a way. Every year you had various Congressional leaders who would hoot and holler about the pernicious effects of earmarks, and how they were nothing but bribery using the taxpayers' money. They would promise to ban all earmarks, and make all government spending more transparent. God save us if that ever actually happens! If a little bribery is needed to pass a piece of important legislation, then pay the damn bribe! For my money, politics was the art of the possible, and some appropriately spread around cash made a lot of stuff much more possible.

You actually don't use the earmarks to line anybody's pocket. That would be illegal. Instead you use the money to fund a project or lower a tax for somebody back in your district. If the thankful citizens and businesses in your district wish to reward your outstanding performance with a campaign contribution, well that that's just peachy!

America has the best government money can buy. As for efficiency, well, that's a different matter.

In 2004 I ran for re-election, and as far as the Republican Party was concerned, I ran unopposed. Ron Paul tried to run against me, but I don't remember him getting a single vote. Now, in 2008, we actually had a race. John McCain was the front runner, and the presumptive winner. Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee were the only other major players in the game. Everybody else, and there were probably another half dozen candidates running in Iowa and New Hampshire, was praying for a miracle.

John had everything going for him, as long as we didn't step on our cranks. That was why the Secret Service scandal was so troublesome. John's theme was simple – "Four More Years!" I was nowhere near as unpopular as George Bush would have been at this point. The things that sank GWB – two very unpopular wars, a disastrous response to Hurricane Katrina, and government spending that was completely out of control and had us trillions in debt – those things just weren't tainting me. Meanwhile I had managed to win my war, had at least partially fixed some immigration issues, and was pushing a relatively popular infrastructure repair plan. The economy was strong, we had gotten through the Katrina recession, and although we still had Wall Street and housing bubbles, they weren't anywhere near as crazy as they could have been.

John's mantra was simple. Keep him in place to keep the good times rolling. We were the grown-ups, and we knew what we were doing. John had been at the heart of all the wonderful things President Buckman had done, so let's keep him in office to keep it all going!

Mitt and Mike were at the two extremes of the party. Mitt was pushing that he was the strong business leader, having run Bain Capital at the same time I had been running the Buckman Group, and we needed to run the country like a business. It wasn't something we could really use, but I told both John and the top campaign people that Mitt wasn't all that great a businessman. The Buckman Group had eaten Bain Capital's lunch on more than one occasion. In addition, Bain Capital had much more of a shark mentality to it then I had with the Buckman Group. We had invested our money along with our clients. Bain had typically invested in takeovers that left the target company highly leveraged. Bain got its money out in fees and preferential treatment; if the target company went belly up or laid off workers, Bain had made their money already. The Buckman Group got its money out in stock appreciation, warrants, and options. The risk is greater, but the upside is very, very nice!

Mitt was unabashedly appealing to Wall Street and the financial sector, and they were funding him lavishly. John was also getting a lot of cash from business interests, but his seemed more diverse. Both men frequently got contributions from the same people, as they tried to hedge their bets. Lower taxes were promised.

Mike Huckabee, on the other hand, was appealing to the party base. He was the designated conservative and Christian, and he was the only one the party base actually trusted. Unfortunately, nobody else wanted him! He could command maybe a quarter of all Republican voters, or maybe even more than that. Unfortunately for Mike, the other parts of the party, like the businessmen and the defense advocates and the libertarian wing, wanted nothing to do with him. Nobody expected Huckabee to do more than win some isolated Southern and Midwestern states, but there was immense concern that he would form a hard right Christian third party and run in the general election. If that happened, he would split the Republican vote and the Democrats would win in a landslide!

On the Democratic side, the only two serious candidates were Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, and nobody could figure out who would get the nod. Hillary was the first really serious female contender, and she had all the old style Dems and women supporting her. Obama was the first black candidate who actually had a chance of winning white votes, and he was very appealing to the minorities who were a major part of the Democratic base. Money was pouring into both of their coffers. They were battling each other tooth and nail, and it was incredibly ugly. Both candidates were promising 'Change!' It wasn't clear to me what they wanted to change, other than to increase social spending programs. Keeping the budget balanced would be accomplished by massive cuts in the military and making business pay its 'fair share', whatever that meant (probably a tax hike.) Both candidates were very much old school Ted Kennedy style liberals. Otherwise, the only other significant candidate was John Edwards, who had a lot of name recognition from his run for V.P. in 2004, and the exact same platform as the other two. None of the rest, and there were at least another half dozen with their names on ballots, had a snowball's chance in Hell of getting a single delegate to the convention.

The first primaries were in January, beginning with the Iowa caucuses on January 3. I will never understand how the whitest, most conservative, and most religious state in the nation got to choose who would be the candidates for national office. If you won in Iowa, or at least beat expectations, you got a major boost going into future races. Donors would start coughing up cash, and you would be able to keep going. Some of the long shot candidates only ran in Iowa and New Hampshire, praying for that long shot victory which would get them the credibility to continue.

Mike Huckabee won Iowa big on the Republican side, getting about a third of the total vote. McCain and Romney basically tied at number two, with a quarter of the vote each. Everybody else picked up a few dribs and drabs. Even the television pundits discounted this win for Mike, since the only reason he won was because most of the state was fundamentalist Christian, and he had them sewn up. He was not expected to win in New Hampshire, which was a more diverse state. He didn't. John took New Hampshire with a strong showing by Mitt, and Mike took a distant third place. After that, Romney took his home state of Michigan, beating John by a nose, and both spanked Mike. It was very even going into Super Tuesday.

On the Democratic side things were very unclear. In Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada, despite boatloads of cash being spent, Obama and Clinton were tied dead even. Edwards was way in the back. Obama won big in South Carolina at the end of January, and this was very significant. South Carolina was the first primary in a state with large numbers of black voters, and it told. I suppose there was a black voter who voted for Hillary, but I don't think anybody ever discovered her name. Otherwise, he took every black vote in the state. He whipped Hillary by over two-to-one, and put a real kink in her plans.

Super Tuesday was February 5, and was the day that everybody had to win. All the wannabes on both sides had dropped out by the end of January. The only ones left on the Republican side were McCain, Romney, Huckabee, and Ron Paul. Ron had zero delegates and zero money and zero chance, but he was staying in to get his libertarian agenda out there. The Democrats were down to Obama and Clinton, with Obama having about a 10% lead at the moment. Even John Edwards had quit, but he was making lots of noise about being the best candidate as Vice President. He was hoping that Obama and Clinton would fight such a nasty fight that the eventual winner wouldn't choose the other one as their running mate. It was the same strategy that got him selected in 2004 as the V.P. nominee.

I'll be honest and admit that I was surprised by the strength of Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee. The three men weren't as close as the two leading Dems were, but I had expected John to be the prohibitive front runner at this point. I was doing what I could for him. He certainly had my public endorsement, but that was to be expected. If I didn't endorse my own Vice President as my replacement, I was telling the world I had picked somebody unqualified, which would reflect poorly on me. Behind the scenes, I was making as many phone calls as I could. John's big chance was to take Super Tuesday. Over 40% of the Republican convention votes would be divvied up, covering 21 states, on that one day. John needed to smack down Romney and Huckabee decisively.

John spent a lot of January on the road, campaigning. I had a chance to speak to him towards the end of the month. "How's it going, John?"

He smiled and asked, "Getting worried, Carl?"

I made a wry grimace. "I wouldn't say, worried. Maybe concerned is the right word. I never thought Mitt or Mike would be anywhere near this close to you."

"This game isn't over yet. Let's face it, Mike plays well to the religious crowd, but that isn't going to help him everywhere. They've never trusted you or me, and they sure aren't going to vote for a Mormon. As for Mitt, he's running against you. I've heard he's been telling the financial types that you've betrayed your class.", he replied.

I stared at him briefly. "My class? I'm a middle class suburban kid who's made twenty times more money than he's ever seen! What was it Ann Richards said about George's dad? He was born with a silver foot in his mouth? Sounds like Mitt to me."

John laughed at me. "Don't shoot the messenger! I'm just passing this along. Call some of your old buddies and ask."

"I might just do that! My class, my ass! The balls on that guy!"

"Like I said, this thing isn't over yet. What would you say the most important states for me to win on Super Tuesday will be?"

I had to think for a second. "California's the big prize, and I'm sure they won't go for Huckabee. Hmmm..." I thought a bit longer. "Illinois is big. So is New Jersey. New York, maybe. They won't vote for you in the general election, but you need to win the primary. You tie up four or five of the biggest states and the day is yours. Otherwise..." I shrugged again.

He smiled. "I know you're making phone calls. So am I. I've been doing this longer than you have. Don't go counting me out yet."

I nodded in agreement. "Okay. I'll start writing my speech for the convention."

Mitt's comments pissed me off. I made a call to Jake Eisenstein Jr. and confirmed what John told me; Mitt really was running down my record at the Buckman Group and, by extension, John's record working for me. I reminded Jake of my record back in the old days, and also reminded him of the times we spanked Mitt's ass, which got a few good laughs out of my old partner. "You planning on coming back here after you're out of a job?", he asked. Technically I had enough stock in the blind trust to let me do that.

"Not as long as John's the President. If Mitt's running the show, or God save us, the Democrats, I just might have to! You start telling your buddies the truth about Mitt Romney, huh?"

"Nothing like a little incentive! I'll see what I can do." We were good friends, but he liked running the show, like I enjoyed running the show. He wouldn't want me to come back. We closed our conversation with some gossip about our families, and hung up.

To what extent that helped, I'm not completely sure. I do know that within a matter of days, and before Super Tuesday, Wall Street money began flowing more to John McCain and the tap began drying up for Mitt. This was really critical for both men. Iowa and New Hampshire are very small states, and the emphasis during those campaigns was very much about meeting as many people as possible. Super Tuesday states are much bigger, and there was no way to shake that many hands and visit that many living rooms. They needed massive amounts of campaign funding to buy the television air time needed to reach that many people. John also scored some major endorsements from the governors of both California and Texas on January 31. Those were two must-win critical states.

One of John's strengths was that he had a major funding source not available to either Mitt or Mike. The outfit that Marty Adrianopolis and I had founded down in Austin, Austin Consulting Group, had developed all sorts of Internet based funding schemes. In addition to the traditional campaign and RNC websites Austin managed, they also operated the McCain Friendster, MySpace, LinkedIn, and Facebook sites. Nobody knew yet which of these social networks would end up becoming important, but they were operating McCain issue and fundraising pages on each of them. Just as important, they weren't operating any for Romney or Huckabee. They were pulling in millions off the Internet.

Brewster McRiley wasn't directly working for John McCain, but his management of my 2004 campaign had propelled him to the top levels of the Republican Party. If John McCain won this fall, Brewster would be a lock for the next RNC chairman. As it was, he was coordinating a lot of funding for the RNC, and at the same time his McRiley Associates group was running three Senatorial campaigns and six House bids. He was also working on purchasing Austin and folding it into his operation. Brewster wanted to become a one stop shop for Republican elections! He wanted John to win, too.

Things got amusing when the pending purchase of Austin was raised in a column on politics in Business Week. Both Marty and Brewster were quoted. Both men were known as long time friends and associates of yours truly, and the question was raised as to my financial involvement in the Austin Consulting Group. Donna Brazile asked them about it the next Sunday on This Week with George Stephanopoulos.

Brewster laughed at the accusation. "Carl Buckman was involved with the Austin Consulting Group only to the extent of suggesting its creation. That was it."

When asked where I had come up with the idea, Marty snorted and answered, "Everybody knows about Carl Buckman the billionaire and Carl Buckman the soldier and Carl Buckman the philanthropist, but nobody remembers Carl Buckman the mathematician and computer scientist. They forget about the guy I went to RPI with, who got his doctorate in math at the age of 21, who wrote code for Bill Gates, and who sat on the boards of Microsoft, Adobe, and Dell. Carl told me that it was time for a couple of old Keggers to show people how to raise money by computer. After all, he helped invent modern computer networking."

"What are Keggers?", asked Stephanopoulos.

Marty smiled. "Kappa Gamma Sigma was our fraternity, KGS. We called ourselves Keggers. It was appropriate, too. Both Carl and I were bartenders during parties back in the day."

Brewster added, "I so believe that of both of you!", to which everybody laughed. It made for an amusing interlude.

Like a lot of people, I spent that Tuesday night watching the election returns on television. On the Republican side, John McCain showed some real strength, and basically put it away. There were 21 states in play for the Republicans, and John took nine, Mitt took seven, and Mike took five. That didn't sound like much of a landslide, but it was. John McCain took California, New York, New Jersey, and Illinois, the four largest states and the ones with the most delegates to the convention. John took two-thirds of all the delegates up for grabs. It was a landslide.

It wasn't anywhere near as clear on the Democratic side. Super Tuesday wasn't the day that determined the winner there. Both Obama and Clinton claimed a victory. Obama won 13 states to Clinton's 10, but Clinton picked up a few more delegates in the bigger states she won. This thing was going to keep going on the Democratic side, probably for at least another month. Meanwhile, they were blowing through money like it was confetti, the rhetoric kept getting uglier and uglier, and everybody was waiting for somebody to completely fuck up and blow it. All it would take would be one idiotic comment to be caught by somebody with a video camera or a cell phone for a campaign to be sunk.

I couldn't let the primaries be my whole life, no matter what kind of professional interest I might have. In February Fidel Castro resigned as the President of Cuba, to be succeeded by his brother Raul in a unanimous vote. Like The Who said, "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss!" I doubted there would ever be the political will in the U.S. to make nice with the Cubans until both men were in the ground.

Elsewhere overseas, Hugo Chavez was being a major league asshole down in Venezuela. He fancied himself the new leader of the socialist world, fulfilling the destiny of his hero, Fidel Castro. He did this by playing games with the oil they exported, nationalizing businesses, and giving oil and money to various countries he supported, all the while turning the proceeds over to the poor in grandiose schemes designed to buy their allegiance. For years now I had gotten a variety of requests from the right wing of my party to do something about Chavez and install a President more amenable to American influence. I had always pushed this away. I didn't need to start a war I couldn't win, and America had a bad enough reputation south of the border for colonialism and interference. Chavez could strut around like a jackass and make all the speeches he wanted to, but he had no ability to harm us.

In Russia, Vladimir Putin was in the last few months of his term as President, and he was term limited; he couldn't run for President again. This wasn't a big problem for Vladimir. His handpicked successor was Dmitry Medvedev, the Prime Minister. Medvedev became the President and Putin took the job of Prime Minister, and ran the place anyway. It would be the equivalent of John McCain winning the election and naming me the Vice President, and then letting me run the country in his name. "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss!" Nobody expected any difference in Russian policy.

I was scheduled for another Middle Eastern tour during the summer. This was going to be a relatively simple tour, hitting Turkey, Kurdistan, and Israel. This would be my third trip to Kurdistan, and the second to Turkey and Israel. In a way this was a farewell tour for me. The Turks and the Kurds were squabbling, but nothing serious. Nobody wanted to screw up the very nice oil relations they were developing. When they redrew the maps, the Kurds grabbed as much of the oil territory as they could get away with, and they now had an awful lot of oil. Behind the scenes, State and Commerce were developing some nice talking points and a three-way trade agreement which I would sign. I wasn't asking that they love each other, just that they behave and not shoot each other. They could squabble with each other as much as they wanted, but everybody wanted the oil to flow!

Israel wasn't as happy with me. Yes, we had destroyed Iraq, but that wasn't enough. They wanted us to destroy Iran for them! They were constantly screaming about Iranian nuclear ambitions, the plans and facilities for an Iranian bomb. The Iranians knew how to build one, but they needed to generate enough fissile material. We had a ton of economic sanctions in place against the Iranians, but they were slowly developing the ability, and there wasn't much we could do about it short of a full scale nuclear pre-emptive strike. No, I was not going to do that.

Nuclear proliferation was a problem facing the whole world. Technology had advanced to the point that if you could get the fissile material, anybody could build a bomb. It might be big and bulky, but it would work. Shrinking the package down to a size you could put in a missile warhead was a separate issue, and was much trickier, but you could easily make something that would fit in the back of a minivan, and with a little practice, something that could be made into a bomb suitable for an airplane to deliver. In addition to the original five nuclear powers of America, England, France, Russia, and China, the nuclear club now also included India and Pakistan. Israel was known to have nukes, but they wouldn't confirm that publicly. South Africa under apartheid also had nukes, but had dismantled them before the blacks took over, so there wouldn't be a "Black Bomb." Otherwise, there were probably another dozen Western European and Asian nations who had the ability to create a bomb in anywhere from six months to two years.

Generally speaking, these nations were all considered relatively sane places. Even Pakistan had strong controls on the nukes, and weren't about to let the nut jobs get their hands on one. That didn't apply to Iran and North Korea, where the governments were controlled by crazies. Iran was a major supporter of Islamic terrorism, and in poll after poll, at least of third of the population thought nuking Israel and America would be a good idea. In my first life, Iran eventually got the bomb, and within a matter of months had turned one over to Hezbollah, with tragic results for everybody.

North Korea was a different matter. Completely sealed inside its own borders, with about zero contact with the rest of the planet, the world's only Communist monarchy actually seemed to believe the nonsense they spewed out. They constantly provoked South Korea and the United States, lobbing shells over the border or harassing ships and planes. If they had been another country, I would have smashed them years ago, but if I responded to them appropriately, they would attack South Korea. There were tens of thousands of artillery tubes and missiles aimed at Seoul, which was close enough to the border that North Korean troops could walk there in a day. Throw in nuclear weapons, and it gets very dangerous indeed. The South Korean administration wanted us to tread very lightly. They were in the midst of an appeasement mode, hoping their pleasant actions would pay dividends. I couldn't see any, and I knew the next few South Korean administrations would take a considerably different tone.

For seven years my response to the demands that I do something were the same. Ignore them! Behind the scenes, diplomatically I made sure that the Buckman Doctrine was well known to both countries. Yelp all you want, but if you actually attack us or our allies, you'll never do it a second time. It was questionable whether the North Koreans believed me or their own press clippings more. To my critics, I simply refused to get into a debate. I didn't issue challenges or warnings, I didn't draw red lines or lines in the sand, and I refused to get caught up in hypothetical scenarios. Ambiguity could be quite useful.

As I was leaving office, my inevitable conclusion was that the world was somewhat stable, but massively fucked up in a lot of places. On more than one occasion I wondered what, if any, effect I had on things. Sooner or later, in an awful lot of these places, the locals were going to get sick and tired of the assholes running things, and they would revolt. Generally that led to wholesale slaughter and civil war. The assholes running these countries were often the only people holding things together! Some days you just couldn't win!

In America, which at times I considered as screwy as any third world shithole, the Republican and Democratic primaries slogged on. John McCain rode his Super Tuesday wins to glory. Mitt Romney dropped out a few days after Super Tuesday, and gave a speech calling for unification of the party under John McCain. Mike Huckabee decided to keep going, betting that he could grab enough Southern and Western states with his religious and socially conservative message. It worked, too, but not to the level that was needed. Mike picked up a few small states, but John picked up the 'Potomac Primary' of Maryland, Virginia, and D.C., and then ran the board on 'Super Tuesday II' at the beginning of March. That gave John a mathematical lock on the nomination, and Huckabee dropped out. John was the official Republican nominee.

On the Democratic side, things just dragged out. I thought the damn thing was going to go right up to the convention, something that hadn't happened since 1980, when Ted Kennedy tried to screw with Jimmy Carter's re-election run. It didn't work out that way. While Obama and Clinton were essentially tied after Super Tuesday, Obama ran the board in all of the February primaries, generally beating Hillary two-to-one all month long. The March primaries went back to the draw that the earlier primaries had been. The whole damn thing dragged on into June, with Obama slowly gaining ground on Clinton, using crazy 'super delegate' rules to pick up more votes. Eventually Barack Obama clinched the number necessary, mid-June, and Hilary dropped out. There had been huge amounts of bad blood shed by then. The odds that Obama would pick Clinton for his running mate were too low to be meaningful. Meanwhile, reports of John Edwards' zipper problems were slowly surfacing, despite his repeated denials. Within the next few months he was going to self-destruct disastrously. He would not be the V.P. candidate.

Amidst all the sturm und drang of the primaries, my personal life continued forward. Holly's romance with Jerry (whose last name I had now learned was Spicoli) was moving forward. They were now sharing an apartment in Princeton as they finished up their doctoral work. It wasn't clear to me what would happen after they graduated. They both had a couple of years to go before that would happen. Would they stay together? Split up? For what it was worth, Marilyn and Holly had dragged Jerry to Philadelphia and bought him some decent clothing, and then had taken him to get a haircut and trimmed his beard. He actually looked human now, and not like something from a homeless shelter. I still didn't think he was happy with me, but I could live with that.

Bucky and Molly had bought a house in Columbia, Maryland, in January. That was halfway between his operations with Tusk Cycle (four sales locations now and Bucky was the company's executive vice president) and her job at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt. (Yes, I made a call. The Director took a look at her resume and agreed that she was qualified. That was the extent of my involvement. Nepotism is not always a bad thing.) She was also working on her doctorate at night. They were even beginning to talk about children, which certainly made Marilyn giddy with delight! I smiled and told Marilyn I already knew my job with the coming generation - load them up with sugar and give them back to the owners! My wife laughed heartily and agreed completely. Grandchildren are a grandparent's revenge!

Charlie was healing quickly, but even after months of physical therapy, he was still only about 80% back to where he had once been. He was out of racing this year, and whether he would ever race again was questionable at best. Megan and he were living together in the 30th Street house, and she was working for Brewster McRiley, as a receptionist/assistant. (She was the perfect girl – gorgeous for Charlie, Catholic for Marilyn, and Republican for me!) Charlie was now able to get around on his own quite well, and was driving, although he was delaying motorcycle riding until his doctors gave him the go-ahead. That happened in early March, and he took to riding a Honda street bike that Bucky rode over for him; it was smaller and less powerful than his usual Harley. Charlie was disappointed in his performance, though, and I could tell by the scowl on his face later. He was in some pain, and not moving the way he wanted to. He had a lot of metal in his right leg and that seemed to be a real issue.

Then something happened which took him by surprise. In late March, ESPN, the sports network, did an interview of Charlie, one of those 'What happened to... ?' sorts of pieces. They had footage from the crash, and even the footage of him in Monrovia. Charlie was dressed in a nice suit and looked relaxed and comfortable, and most importantly, was well-spoken and articulate. Marilyn and I almost never watch the sports channels unless we have to, but we watched this show. I thought the best part was when the interviewer asked Charlie about the accident.

Q: "Do you recall the accident and what happened?"

A: "Somewhat. As soon as Bill went down in front of me, I knew I was going to be next, and I couldn't do anything about it. Then everybody began landing on me, and I just felt some incredible pain and blacked out. I came to the next day in the hospital."

Q: "How badly were you hurt?"

A: "Pretty bad. I think just about everything on my right side was broken." (At that he shook his right arm and leg.) "I had a couple of breaks in my right arm, and another half dozen in my right leg, and I don't know how many broken ribs on that side. Internally I was a mess, with internal bleeding and a messed up liver and kidney. I couldn't even talk at first, since they had me on a ventilator."

Q: "You're lucky to be alive!"

A: "Very much so. I was told that fifty years ago I would have probably died, and thirty years ago I might have lived but probably would have lost the leg or not been able to walk."

Q: "And now?"

A: "Well, I clank a little when I walk, from all the metal holding my leg together, but otherwise, I'm in good shape. I do a lot of exercise and rehab therapy, and am getting back to my old self."

Q: "Last year was your third straight AMA championship, though it was on accumulated points, since you missed the last two races completely. Will you be in shape for the season this year?"

A: "We're not sure yet. I'm not ready today, but we're going to make a decision in another month or two."

Q: "Let's talk about something different. It's no secret that you are the son of the President, one of the wealthiest men in the nation. There have been some who have claimed that you have used his money to buy your titles. How do you respond to them?"

At that point, Charlie could have gone off on an angry tirade, but he looked calm and composed. I guess he had some experience with that sort of question.

A: "Yes, my father is quite wealthy, but I have to say that if he was using his money on my behalf, it would be to get me to stop riding motorcycles! He and my mother think I'm crazy! What really happened was that when I got out of the Marines and said I wanted to give pro racing a try, he insisted that I develop a plan, a real business plan, with a budget and a timetable. My first sponsor was Tusk Cycle, and Jim Tusk insisted on a plan as well, before he made the investment. Beyond that first investment, my parents and the Tusks have given me no financial assistance."

Q: "What's it like growing up in the White House? Did you ever race motorcycles on the South Lawn?"

A: "I've never lived in the White House. By the time my father became the President, I had been in the Marines for two years. Really, for me, my real home is in Hereford, in Maryland, and yes, I did race on our lawn."

Q: "One final question – What did you think when you saw the news of your mother being arrested outside your hospital."

A: (Charlie's face lit up with a huge grin!) "Was that cool or what!? I loved it! Mom is simply AWESOME!"

I looked over at Marilyn, who gave me a rather smug look. "See? I'm awesome!"

I snorted out a laugh. "Awesome!"

Marilyn looked very happy indeed. "Awesome!", she repeated.

I thought Charlie did well on camera, and it seemed ESPN did, too. A month later, ESPN called him back, to see if he was interested in doing color commentary for them. ESPN2 was going to be broadcasting AMA motocross and thought he might make a good 'expert' about the sport. My son called me after he received the call from his agent, who was still listed as his agent even if he hadn't done anything since the accident. I told Charlie to give it a try, and maybe he'd like it, and maybe he'd be good at it. He called his agent and said yes, and was scheduled to begin with the first races of the season in May. It was a temporary thing, with him doing one or two races until they got the ratings and assessments back, but it kept him from having to go out and get a real job, and the money was quite interesting.

Marilyn and I made sure we watched when Charlie was to be on the air. It was interesting. Charlie didn't really spend a lot of time in the booth, but was handed a microphone and sent to the sidelines with a cameraman, to do interviews of the racers. I think the most interesting moment was when Charlie was interviewing one of the racers and asked what he considered about his prospects for the season, and the guy answered, "A hell of a lot better now that you're on the sidelines!" Charlie just laughed at that.

Marilyn and I never really watched all that much sports. I mean, we always watched the Super Bowl, but that was as much about the commercials as it was anything else. As a politician, though, I had to do some sports attendance and watching. If nothing else, I needed to seem like 'one of the guys' with my donators and fellow politicians, some of whom were very much into sports. Every year I would travel up to Baltimore, to Camden Yards, to throw out the first pitch of the season at the Orioles first home game. In addition, as the Fan in Chief, it was required that I call up the winners in most championships and congratulate them, whether I gave a damn or not. I stopped caring about football when the Colts left Baltimore, but I had to call the winner of the Super Bowl and congratulate them, an act that really bugged the hell out of me in February last year when the Indianapolis Colts won the Super Bowl. I was tempted to tell them where to head in, but Frank convinced me to behave. At least I never had to congratulate anybody for beating the Orioles in the World Series.

Meanwhile the primaries churned on through the spring. As soon as it was definite that Barack Obama was going to be the Democratic nominee, I asked John to see me. Something very nasty was about to hit the nation, and I wanted to stop it.

Everybody was proclaiming that the selection of Barack Obama as a national nominee was proof that racism was dead, that America had entered a glorious period where we had managed to put the sins of the past behind us, and we were now truly a nation without race. You sort of expected this blather from the liberals, but even the conservatives were babbling on about this. Of course they weren't going to vote for him but after all, Barack Obama was a liberal, not a conservative, so they couldn't be blamed for that.

What wasn't so pleasant was the underlying tone out of the conservatives. Barack Hussein Obama shouldn't be elected, not because he was black, but because he wasn't American! His father was from Kenya. He had been born in Hawaii. He had lived overseas as a child. His father was Muslim. Where was his birth certificate? He was actually a secret Muslim. He hated Christians and wanted to sell America out to Iran and the terrorists. The conspiracy theorists were working overtime on this.

The Republicans mostly kept their mouths shut during the primaries. The hard core base of the party had enough to do running down Mitt and John that they didn't need to branch out to the Dems. Besides, they hated both Democratic front runners! To the party base, Hillary Clinton was just as hated as her husband had ever been. They would have been just as foaming mad crazy if she had won the nomination, probably claiming that Bill was secretly running the country from his liberal Democratic bunker.

We had begun seeing the hatred well up almost from the day that Obama cinched the nomination. You first saw it from the radio and television talk show hosts, Rush Limbaugh, Glen Beck, and the like. As soon as that happened, it started spewing up from every conservative website and forum. Some of the crap spewing out was unbelievable, going apeshit over the possibility Muslims and blacks were going to take over the country and rape their daughters.

"What's up, Carl?", asked John, when he settled himself in my office.

"It's this birth certificate nonsense coming out of the base of the party, that and the crap over Obama being a secret Muslim. Have you been following this?"

He nodded. "I get it in passing. It's not coming from the campaign, though. I'm not even sure it's coming out of any 527 groups. I think it's simple ranting from the mouth breathers."

"Do you like it?"

"Not particularly, but I don't know as we can stop it, either. As I say, it isn't coming from the political side. It seems to be coming from the entertainment side. Fox loves this stuff. It keeps their ratings high. MSNBC, too, now that I think about it. It gives them something to scold the Republicans about."

I snorted at that, and rolled my eyes. "That may be, but that doesn't mean I have to like it. Remember during the last election when you asked me what I was going to do about the Swift Boaters? Shoe's on the other foot, John."

McCain gave me a shocked look at that. "Like I said, Carl, this isn't anything organized. I can't go in front of the American Legion and say a specific group is wrong. This doesn't have an address on it. I can't show up on their doorstep and tell them to behave. The ones spouting this stuff don't like me to begin with. They don't like you, either, just to mention it."

That gave me a certain feeling of disgust. My Vice President was correct in saying that there wasn't anybody we could point a finger at and say they were the one responsible for this. What I wasn't hearing was any expression that he wanted to do something about this. That bothered me. "This is why I have told you we have to watch these guys carefully. Just as bad, however, you have to watch the damn consultants you hire. They like this, believe me!"

"Carl, I don't..."

I didn't let him finish. "Yeah, they like it. It's the perfect negative campaign. You don't have to spend a penny on it. You don't have to say anything positive about yourself. You don't have to make any statements as to what you would do or who you are. There is nothing that can come back to bite you about what you've done. You just have to let other people tell lies about the other side while staying out of it. It's the textbook definition of what is wrong in American politics today."

"You want him to win?! This is not going to be easy! I spent a lot more money fighting Romney and Huckabee than I should have, mostly because the base was fighting me. For once they actually get to do something positive for me!", he replied, getting a little hot about it.

I didn't need this to get pissy. "This is going to bite you in the ass, John. Listen, the only way you or me or any of us get elected is by winning the middle, the independents and the moderates. The base of the party wouldn't vote for Jesus if he ran as a Democrat. You could say the same thing about the Democrats if Jesus was a Republican. All of the money you spend, all of the ads you run, all of everything you do is aimed at the people in the middle. If you don't come across as somebody who can be trusted and is willing to stand up for a principle, you lose the middle."

"That is easy to say when you aren't facing this. People love this guy. He is going to have more money than God going into this. I am going to need every vote I can scrape up."

I sighed and nodded. "I know. Believe me, I know. He's a new and shiny toy straight out of the box, a magical Negro able to cure the problems of the nation with a single wave of his hand. He's not some old fuddy duddy who probably can't remember how to tie his shoes." John groaned at that one. "All I'm saying is that it isn't impossible for you to beat this guy without playing these games. Sure, he gives a hell of a speech, but so what? What's he actually done? You can't answer that, since he hasn't done shit!"

"That's true enough.", John agreed.

"I have to tell you something. Sooner or later somebody is going to ask me what I think about this crap being stated about Obama, and when they do, I am going to tell them, and I won't be pulling any punches. You know that sooner or later this is going to happen. Do you want to be ahead of the game or behind?"

McCain made a rude gesture, but one without any heat. "I hear you. I will talk it out with some people. This won't be easy. The base already hates us. Now they are going to want to tar and feather us!"

John might not like it, but this shit hurt us just as much as it hurt the Democrats. Negative campaigning worked, but it was a devil's bargain. When you did nothing but complain that the other guy was bad, it brought him down, but it also brought you down by a certain amount. When both sides do it, everybody ends up in the basement. When I had faced down the Swift Boaters, it actually helped me more than it helped John Kerry, since it showed I had 'character' and 'integrity', both qualities more notable for their lack in American politics.

Unfortunately, John was right about there being nobody you could pin this on. This crap was like a boiling pot full of raw sewage, bubbling up from the bottom. I could easily envision a scenario, following a statement by me that Barack Obama was an American and a Christian, and an appeal to broadcasters to stop repeating lies that they knew were lies. All it would take was for Rush Limbaugh to repeat my statement on air, and ask for comments.

Rush: "So President Buckman says that he doesn't need evidence that Barack Hussein Obama is actually an American and isn't a Muslim. What are your thoughts on this? Let's hear from some listeners!"

Listener: "That's not true! He wasn't born here! He was born in Kenya, and was raised a Muslim! You have to see the evidence!"

Rush: "That's not what President Buckman is saying."

Listener: "Carl Buckman is a murderer. You can't trust a word he says. He's really a Democrat, and you know it! His whole family is a bunch of liberals! He's not even a Christian himself. He doesn't go to church!"

From there it would just get worse. Any vestige of principle I had would be swallowed up with this.

I talked to John again a day later, as more of this crap began to surface. I didn't need my Veep pissed at me, but he had to know what I was going to say if I was asked, because I would surely be asked. Worst of all, was the fact that the people who were most likely to believe and spout this stuff were simply not going to be swayed by truth or logic. They knew what they knew, and if you disagreed with them, you wouldn't convince them, but you would definitely piss them off. The best that John or I or his campaign people could come up with was a statement along the lines that, 'I don't know who told you Senator Obama was [fill in the blank] but they were mistaken. I know the Senator and he isn't.'

One of the problems we had, not just as politicians, but as Americans, was the multitude of all news channels. You had Fox on the right, MSNBC on the left, and CNN in a diminishing middle. There were a lot of people who watched nothing but news shows all day long. I even saw this in my own family; since he had retired, Big Bob, Marilyn's dad, watched nothing but CNN when he watched television. Five hundred channels, but he only watched one; the others could all be taken off the tuner. Since the news channels couldn't possibly come up with actual breaking news every second of the day, they didn't even try. A typical 24 hours of 'news' was actually only 5-6 of what Walter Cronkite would recognize as news. The other 18-19 was actually commentary, talking heads just like the Sunday morning news shows, only with their pet commentators and lobbyists looking to push their paid interests.

John had to begin doing this dance just a few days after Obama clinched the nomination. He was speaking to a town hall meeting in Nebraska when a woman stood up and asked him what he would do about the fact that foreigners were allowed to run for office in this country, and why we weren't arresting them and deporting them to Africa where they belonged. John visibly winced at that, and then went into his little song-and-dance. It was a two-parter, where he first gave his 'I don't know where you got your information... ' speech, followed up by 'The real issue is not whether Barack Obama is an American. He is. The real issue is that he's a radical liberal... ' He would then highlight the differences between Obama's positions, taken from Obama's primary battle, and his own positions. I liked that approach, and decided I would use it as well.

The next big campaign events would be the conventions. The timing on these is always complicated by the fact that the Presidential race is also the same year as the Summer Olympics. In general, you end up with the conventions sandwiching the Olympics, with the challenger going right before, and the incumbent right after. I knew there had been some talk of doing both after, but that would have put the Republican convention into September, and that was too late. I told the RNC to select the standard choice, the week after the Olympics, which left the Dems to go the week before.

This was aided by the fact that I had no interest in attending the Olympics. Marilyn and I just weren't interested. If we went it would be as representatives of the United States, and that puts a different spin on things. Four years ago I had sent John McCain to Greece to represent the country at the Athens Olympics while I campaigned. This time the Olympics were in Beijing, and were supposed to show how Communist China was such a modern and thriving nation, their 'coming out party' for the world. Total bullshit, of course. By keeping our deficit levels down to a net zero during my administration, the Chinese didn't have anywhere near the influence on our foreign policy that they wanted to have. I didn't need to make nice with them.

I told John that he and Cindy could go if they wanted; I wasn't going, and if he didn't go, they would have to make do with our local ambassador. John and his wife went to the opening ceremonies and came home a day later to continue campaigning. The Beijing newspapers and television, all state controlled, reported this as a snub. Will dismissed this at the next press conference; simply reporting that time constraints prohibited either John or me from attending any further. I hadn't traveled to Beijing on any sort of foreign relations visit either, and hadn't hosted the Chinese President either. We had met, cordially, at a couple of Asian conferences, but that was it. They had an outsized opinion of their importance at times, and thought that the South China Sea was their personal lake. I made sure that our Navy sailed through there repeatedly to remind them it wasn't.

Chapter 173: The Home Stretch

The Democratic convention was scheduled to begin Monday August 4 and run through Thursday August 7, and would be held in Denver. The Olympics would begin the next day, Friday August 8, and run for just over two weeks, to close on Sunday August 24. Right after that, the Republicans would take the field, with a convention in St. Paul running from Monday August 25 through Thursday August 28. After that the campaigns would begin in earnest, and it would be tooth and nail for the next nine weeks.

There is a certain rhythm and protocol to the convention speeches, on both sides of the aisle. Normally, the first night the previous President speaks. In this case, I was speaking, and Bill Clinton, despite the cloud he had gone out of office under was speaking to the Democrats. The second night is the keynote speaker, supposed to throw out lofty rhetoric and nothing of substance. The third night is the Vice Presidential choice, and the fourth and last night is the Presidential nominee himself.

Barack Obama picked Delaware Senator Joe Biden as his V.P. choice, a solid liberal white male choice. From what we could figure out, he couldn't stand Hillary, and they were both smarting from the bitter primary fight. She was actually their keynote speaker on Tuesday, trying to rebuild the bridges she had burned during the primaries. From what I remembered from my first shot, he would end up with her in the Cabinet.

John McCain had been all over the playing field trying to figure out his Vice Presidential selection. He debated picking one of his primary opponents, like Huckabee (a favorite of the conservative base) or Romney (a favorite of the business and liberal wings). He also looked at some of the second tier candidates who had dropped out early, like Tommy Thompson of Wisconsin, who had been a Governor and a Cabinet member, and a few Senators, Governors, and Cabinet members. Ultimately he selected Jeb Bush. I had suggested Jeb, but I wasn't the only one to do so. Unlike on my first round, George hadn't had a chance to sully the Bush family name, so Jeb was a very viable choice, and acceptable to the base. Mitt would be the keynote speaker on Tuesday.

I met with the other three men shortly after John got back from Beijing, to discuss our speeches and the tone they wanted to set. John was, of course, the boss on all this, but we all needed to be on the same page. The tone was the one that we had pushed in 2004, and that John had kept pushing this time. We were the grownups, the professionals, and we knew what we were doing. Why mess with success? Send a winning team back for another four years.

Each of us had a different take on this for our individual speeches. Mitt was going for the requisite 'bringing the Party together' speech, how he was behind John 110%, and how their differences weren't that significant. He was helped in this by the fact that after he dropped out, he threw his delegates over to John, whereas Mike had kept fighting. Mitt had been hoping for the Veep spot that Jeb grabbed instead, and was now angling for something else, maybe a Cabinet slot. Jeb's speech was going to be targeted to the base because, of the four of us, he was the only one they actually liked. He was going to have the traditional 'attack dog' role in the campaign. John's speech was going to be a fairly standard 'Why I should be the boss' speech, only revved up for the masses, with lots of campaign promises. I planned to deliver something similar to John's but more along the lines of 'There's a reason I hired this guy', with examples of how John had done a great job as V.P. and how we needed to keep the momentum going.

Marilyn and I flew into St. Paul early Sunday morning; if I flew in on Monday it would make for an incredibly long day. The nice thing was that St. Paul is only about an hour-and-a-half up U.S. 52 from Rochester, so Suzie and John drove up and spent the day with us. I might have been talking politics with other people, but Marilyn wasn't too busy, and I still managed to have a very nice dinner with them. I could have gotten them into the Xcel Energy Center for a behind the scenes look, but they both passed on that. John had an early shift in the morning and they both headed for home after dinner.

It was more politics for me on Monday, and Marilyn was practicing for her speech. Yes, Marilyn was going to introduce me, so she had to practice first, even if it was just five minutes. After almost twenty years of my being in politics, my wife still hated to speak and campaign. She would go with me, and wave and smile, but she hated campaigning on her own. She would always ask, "What if I mess it up?"

My answer was always the same. "Then I'll have to divorce you and send you back to your family with nothing but the clothes on your back." Then I would toss in a variety of comments, like how she would have to eke out a living hustling guys on street corners, or driving escort vehicles for her brothers, or even going back to being a cocktail waitress at a bar up on Sacandaga Lake, like she had done in college one summer. The place was long gone, and I used to bust her chops that it was a good thing nobody had proof that I had married a cocktail waitress. At some point she would start laughing and calm down.

Finally, after eighteen years in politics, my wife was actually going to give a national speech, even if it was just a five minute introduction. On the plus side, at least as far as she was concerned, it would be her only national speech, since I didn't have to campaign anymore. I was standing back stage with her, as she stood there nervously, holding her hand to calm her nerves. I remembered a time when I had been nervous about speaking, but that was over a hundred years ago, when I was on my first go and very young. Then I had gotten my MBA, and you have to make a lot of presentations in front of classes to get that, and I got over my nervousness. Becoming a successful salesman made public speaking even easier.

A producer pointed towards us, and I leaned in to speak in her ear. "The speech is right there on the podium, and the teleprompter is right where you can see it. You'll be fine."

"And if I'm not?"

"See that guy pointing at us? He has this big hook and he'll reach out and..."

She grinned and said, "You're no help!"

At that point, we could hear, " ... and now let's welcome the First Lady of the United States of America!", and the applause and cheering began. The producer began gesturing wildly for Marilyn to go out on stage.

"Just go out and wave and you'll be fine.", I told her, and I gave my wife a slight nudge and she headed out from behind the curtain at the side, waving, and the cheering became deafening.

I glanced at a monitor backstage, and Marilyn waved and smiled as she walked to the podium. Below her, the crowd was yelling and cheering, and waving banners marked "McCain – Bush 2008". She went to the podium, and had to wait for the pandemonium to subside. I noticed that she didn't calm them down, but that floor wardens were doing that out among the delegations. Finally it was her chance to give her little speech. I knew it wouldn't be long, and it was simply an introduction for me, but I had gotten a copy of it ahead of time, and I smiled at the total nonsense she was about to offer up.

"Thank you for letting me speak tonight. When Carl asked me to do this, I asked him what to say, and he told me to tell everyone how wonderful he was and any other lies I could think of. When I asked him how many would be watching and listening, he told me it wouldn't be that many, just thousands of people in the audience, and millions more on television. I have to tell you, my husband can be a real pain at times!"

There was a huge amount of laughter and applause at this.

"Actually, what we talked about was what I would have done if I had known where we would both end up back when we first met. I think that if I had known what was going to happen when I first met Carl Buckman, I would have gone running in the other direction! We were both freshmen in college, and I can't for the life of me remember what made me go with my friends to that particular party. I'd never been to a fraternity party, or even to Carl's college, but I went anyway, and I met a really great guy.

I didn't know anything about Carl, but I knew he made me feel safe and loved. I didn't even know he was a Republican, a fact that still upsets my parents."

There was a lot of laughter at that one, along with her next line.

"Carl once told them that I was actually spying for the Democratic Party, so that I would be able to learn the secret handshake. I'm still waiting to learn that one.

That first night I didn't know he was already halfway to earning a doctorate in mathematics and writing a paper that would form a theoretical basis for computer networking. I didn't know that he was going to become a combat soldier who would earn a Bronze Star for heroism. I didn't know that he had become a millionaire before he even turned 18. I didn't know that when he left the Army an injured hero that he would go on to build a business that would employ hundreds of people. I didn't know that he would go on to write three books that would end up on the New York Times bestseller lists, and I didn't know that he would end up running for Congress and beating a corrupt incumbent in a dirty campaign fight. Finally, I didn't know that someday, that big, tongue-tied, smart, goofy guy would end up as President of the greatest nation in the world!

I think if I had known what would actually happen, I would have gone screaming into the night! I would have settled down with somebody nice and boring and predictable. Now, all I can say is that I am so glad that after that party, when Carl Buckman asked me to go out with him on a date the next night, I said 'Yes!' There have been times it has been hard and times it has been painful, but it has never been boring, and I've never been sorry!

So, join me in welcoming a man who is my hero, and a hero to the nation. Join me in welcoming CARL BUCKMAN, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA!"

Marilyn turned to face me and I could see her eyes were wet with tears, but she had a big smile on her face, and the audience was screaming and going berserk. I had asked her to stay at the podium while I came out, so that I could give her a nice PG rated hug for the cameras.

I walked out on stage, smiling and waving at the crowds, with flashes going off and pandemonium out in the crowd. I smiled at Marilyn and gave her a big hug, and then slipped my handkerchief out of my pocket and palmed it to her. She began to wipe her eyes, which set the crowd to cheering even louder. I just grinned and gave her another hug around the shoulders and waved. After a minute, I stepped to the podium, and Marilyn backed away, but I held onto her hand. She looked at me and I whispered, "Just stay with me a moment longer." She gave a slight shrug and came forward to stand next to me. I motioned for the crowd to settle down, and it slowly calmed down.

"Thank you, thank you. Now, before I get started, I have something to say first, and it's about this amazing woman who is standing here beside me. They say that behind every great man stands a great woman, but I am here to tell you that Marilyn Buckman has never stood behind me! No, Marilyn Buckman has always stood beside me, facing every challenge with me. For better and for worse, for richer and for poorer, in sickness and in health, Marilyn Buckman has stayed, not behind me, but at my side, and I couldn't have accomplished a tenth of what I have without her. So, thank you, Marilyn, for taking that chance on me all those years ago, and going out with me on that first date. I have been thanking God for you ever since!"

Marilyn started crying again, and I gave her another hug, and then she kissed me and ran off the stage. I waited a moment for the audience to calm down, and then began.

"Well, now that I have the important stuff out of the way, why don't we get down to why we're all actually here. You know, electing John McCain the next President of the United States of America!"

There was a lot of cheering at that, and I went into my speech. My speech was mostly pointing out the various times in the last seven years that I had used John to get something accomplished, like legislation or foreign affairs. In most cases I was able to give some details that weren't common knowledge, such as the role John had in keeping Erdogan and the Turks on board during the Kurdish War. After each item I mentioned I would hammer home the exact same phrase – "There's a reason I hired this guy! He gets things done!" It was hard to keep a rolling cadence with this type of speech, but by the end, I was getting the audience screaming along when I hit the note about getting things done.

I skipped any of the spin sessions or political coffee klatches after my speech, and Marilyn and I headed over to the Saint Paul, where we were staying. The only people in the limo were Marilyn and me, and a pair of Secret Service agents. I just stared out the window while Marilyn held my hand.

"Penny for your thoughts?", she said.

"I can't break a penny. Not worth that much."

"What's wrong?"

"Nothing. Just thinking about all of this. Would it have been better to just have gone off and been boring and predictable like you said?", I told her, looking at her face.

She shrugged and smiled. "Probably have been boring and predictable."

I chuckled at that.

She nudged me in the ribs and laughed. "I'm proud of you. You are a good man."

I had to smile at her. I waggled my eyebrows and asked, "And all these years I thought women didn't want a good man."

"You are so disgusting!", she laughed. Then I got another nudge. "Just how good are you?"

I waggled my eyebrows some more, and Marilyn laughed as we went inside. Later, at the Saint Paul, we spent quite a bit of time determining what was 'good' and what wasn't before we finally fell asleep. I might have hit 52, but the plumbing was still working just fine.

The next day we flew home, and I watched the rest of the convention on television. My speech got some air time Tuesday evening, but that was about it. By Wednesday everybody was talking about Tuesday night's speech by Mitt Romney, a 'healing moment' as he called it, and what this all portended for the future if John McCain won. Jeb did a marvelous job Wednesday night lighting up the fires under the base with a 'What has Obama ever done?' speech. He was the designated attack dog, and he did the job well. John gave a great speech Thursday, accepted the nomination, and thanked everybody before sending them all home. We picked up about a 4% boost after the convention, about the same amount the Democrats had picked up.

I was given a chance to speak to the nation on the upcoming election in early September. I agreed to a meeting with several reporters and a couple of cameras in the Map Room, without too many limits on topics. We talked about current foreign policy and my plans for the balance of my term, and what I thought of how John McCain was doing. Once they began questioning me about politics, it got interesting. For the most part I toed the party line, that John was holding his own, that it was a tight election, and that John would be a far superior President. Some of what I said did not reflect well on Senator Obama.

Chuck Todd: "Senator Obama has been quoted as saying that your administration is behind the citizenship controversy as much as Vice President McCain's campaign is. How do you respond to that?"

Me: "I heard that and I was somewhat surprised. Certainly none of this is coming out of either my office or that of the Vice President's and I am personally familiar with most of the people in the McCain campaign, and can assure you the campaign isn't behind it either. I have repeatedly stated that the Senator is a native born citizen and a Christian. What more does he expect out of me? Does he want me to personally track down every website and tell them to behave? That simply shows a surprising naiveté about the power of the Presidency on Senator Obama's part! If he thinks that just because somebody is the President that they can shut down rumors and innuendo in a nation of 300 million people, he is sadly mistaken. If I had that power, I think I would have used it a long time ago, in my own life."

Nothing like bitch slapping a candidate for saying something foolish out of exasperation. It is one thing to call somebody wrong, it is another to call them naïve.

Chip Reid: "It was reported recently in the Chicago Tribune that Senator Obama considers the Republican Party hidebound and antediluvian. How do you characterize the Democratic Party?"

Me: "As good and loyal Americans with a Presidential nominee not worthy of their votes. I like Democrats. I married one, remember!"

Chip: "What about the hidebound and antediluvian characterization?"

Me: "That simply shows how little the Senator knows about the Republican Party and what we stand for. I knew exactly what my party stood for when I joined it back in college. I don't know what party Senator Obama is talking about. I characterize our party as very progressive."

Thomas Friedman: "You consider the Republicans a progressive party?"

Me: "Very much so. You simply have to look at our history. Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican President, ended slavery. That's pretty progressive, don't you think? That continued on with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Were you aware that the Republicans in both the House and the Senate voted for civil rights at a far higher percentage than the Democrats did? Again, pretty progressive. Teddy Roosevelt was a Republican when he broke up the trusts and monopolies, helped unions, passed laws protecting our food and drugs that are still in effect, and created the National Park system. Sounds pretty progressive to me! Dwight Eisenhower created the interstate highway system, a radical idea at the time. Richard Nixon passed the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Air Act, the EPA, and OSHA, all progressive ideas. I would state that it's the Republican Party which is the true progressive party in this nation."

Thomas: "That doesn't seem to be the current philosophy of the party?"

Me: "No? Then tell me how a Republican Congress passed the DREAM Act, the most far reaching immigration reform bill we've had in decades. Again, progressive, and certainly not what Senator Obama thinks of us. If he doesn't understand what we stand for, how does he think he will work with us to run the country? This is a nation with many different beliefs. He is a hard core liberal, which is fine as far as it goes, but he has to be able to work with people who aren't, and I see absolutely no sign he can do that. John McCain has passed that test, if you ask me."

Chuck: "Do you think Senator Obama is qualified to be the President?"

Me: "Well, the Constitution specifies that you have to be a natural born citizen, or have natural born parents, and you have to be 35 or older. He meets those qualifications. Other than that, no, probably not."

Chuck: "Why not?"

Me: "A big part of this job is simply showing up and getting things done. You can throw out all the lofty rhetoric and speeches, but sooner or later you need to actually tell somebody to do something and make it all work. Now, this is simply my personal belief, not the official pronouncement of the President. Still, before I ended up here, I had commanded troops, had run a multibillion dollar business, and had been the House Majority Whip, another leadership position. John McCain had command in the Navy, and had been a committee chair in the Senate, a leadership position. Between the two of us we've been behind dozens of major legislative bills. Jeb Bush was a governor and then had business experience running things. Now, I like Barack Obama, even though our politics are different. He's a nice enough guy, but would somebody please tell me what major legislation he's ever been responsible for? What he's ever managed other than his Senate staff? I'll grant you that he gives a great speech, certainly better than I've ever done, but sooner or later you have to stop giving speeches and get something done. What's he done?"

That caused a real consternation in the Democratic campaign apparatus! Senator Obama spent the next week trying to tell people what he really meant to say, and that he wasn't naive and that he was able to work with anybody and that he had the skills to actually run things. Meanwhile the Democratic campaign loudly proclaimed how I was using the Presidency to actively campaign for my hand-picked successor. (They seemed to think this was unfair; our side thought it was business as usual.) John told me the next day that he loved my description of the party as progressive, since it both took the wind out of the Democrats' sails for a few days, and shut down the conservative base for a bit. They hated being called progressive, but they couldn't argue with the facts I had stated. Mind you, some of the current crop would happily repeal most of the laws I had mentioned, including the Emancipation Proclamation, but they weren't getting a vote.

Nobody made any major gaffes between the conventions and the election. At times it seemed like the winner would be the guy who made the fewest mistakes, or the loser would be the guy who made the last mistake. Fortunes were spent on advertising in the few remaining swing districts. The polls consistently showed McCain beating Obama, but the margin was thin, in some places less than the statistical error rate. It was going down to the wire.

Election night we turned one of the conference rooms into a war room. I couldn't be at McCain headquarters, since he had his own advisers and people there. I couldn't overshadow his parade. Instead, Frank and Will set up a bank of monitors, each tuned to a different network, and then a mess of us sat down and watched. Besides Frank and me, Marilyn was with us, occasionally rooting for the other side, just to get our goats. She earned multiple raspberries for that. Marty Adrianopolis came over, and Mindy stayed late as well. Brewster even sat in, with his cell phone nailed to his ear the entire night.

Even though I wasn't running, I still had duties to attend to. As was the tradition, I had to call all the new winners and congratulate them, Republican and Democrat, House and Senate. In a typical election year, this might work out to about 40 new Representatives and Senators. For instance, in my 1990 election to Congress, only 15 sitting Congressmen were tossed out, including Andy Stewart, who I had beaten. Probably about as many simply retired. Contrast that to the 1994 elections, when Newt and the rest of the Gang of Eight wrested control of Congress from the Democrats. There was a 60 seat swing in the House! Add in the Senate (another 10) and the various replacements from retirement, and Bill Clinton probably had made well over 100 phone calls that night. I had never had half of that.

The networks all trotted out their latest digital tricks to keep things exciting. In our war room, we brought out a bunch of white boards, and then made jokes about the networks. At 8:00, the first few races began to be called, and some trends became apparent. For one thing, Democrats were turning out in droves, but turnout also seemed higher in traditionally Republican districts. For whatever it was worth, having a black Presidential candidate had stoked everybody's fires. You were either coming out to vote him in, or coming out to prevent that from happening.

Nothing much was decided as the first states closed their polls. Probably the first state to be called was Massachusetts, for Barack Obama. That surprised nobody. I couldn't remember the last time Massachusetts voted for a Republican. I'm sure it must have happened sometime, but I wasn't sure it happened in my lifetime. (I mentioned that to Marty, who corrected me. Both Eisenhower and Reagan had taken Massachusetts both times, but that was it.) As things currently stood, if Jesus was a Republican and Lucifer was a Democrat, Lucifer would win Massachusetts by a wide margin.

Slowly, though, a trend emerged. By 9:00, as blank spots on the television maps began to become red or blue, and as our white board began to be marked up, I looked over at Brewster curiously. "Is it my imagination, or is this déjà vu all over again?"

"That's the way I'm reading it, at least so far.", he agreed.

Marty added, "I think everybody just wasted six billion dollars!"

"Christ on a crutch!", I muttered. It was crazy, but I think the only thing anybody had accomplished with all the money was make the investors of every local television station in the swing districts a bunch of money. The Northeast was going solidly Democratic and the South was still solidly Republican. Ohio and Pennsylvania, and a few of the Rust Belt states were still too close to call, so it might be a long night. Jeb Bush nailed Florida down, which John had hoped he would do; I had notably failed to deliver Maryland for George Bush eight years ago. We were going to be watching this until at least 11:00, before the West finished up.

Amidst all this, every few minutes somebody would hand me a name and a little Post-It Note with some details on a Congressional or Senatorial newcomer who had just won. A call would be arranged and I would congratulate them, and I would promise to meet them and congratulate them in person in January. It seemed like about the same number and tempo of newbies as the last couple of elections, though the Senate was going more Democratic. That didn't surprise me, in that Senate elections are statewide, and gerrymandering doesn't really help them. This didn't seem to be developing into a watershed election, where the prevailing theme was 'Throw the rascals out!' I had seen that in 1994, when the Republicans cleaned out the Dems, and on my first go, it occurred in both 2008 and 2010, first for the Democrats, and then for the Republicans.

Everything about this election said that we weren't throwing out the rascals. Whoever won as President was going to have to deal with the current crop of rascals. Unless things changed radically as the polls closed going westward, we would have a Republican House, with probably the same margin as now, and a slightly Democratic Senate, with the Dems picking up one or two seats.

John McCain picked up the entire South, and almost all of the Midwest and the Rockies. Barack Obama took the Northeast, the West Coast, Illinois, and a big chunk of the Mid-Atlantic region. It was a repeat of 2004, with only a few variations. It finally came down to the Rust Belt. John needed to take either Ohio or Pennsylvania to lock it up. He took both, with Ohio being called at 11:15, and Pennsylvania not being called until almost dawn the next morning.

Despite the landslide appearance of the final Electoral College count, the popular vote count was not a landslide. John McCain had won the popular vote by only 51% to 49%, much lower than my numbers had been in 2004. I did not take this to mean I had run a better campaign, far from it. By any number of measures, John was a better campaigner than I had ever been. His problem was who he had run against. Barack Obama had been wildly popular to the Democrats. In the states that voted for him, especially in the Democratic strongholds, he commanded from 60% to almost 70% of the popular votes. It was a lot closer in some of the Southern states that John had won, where the black voter turnout had been high, and John had only scraped up percentages from just over 50% to perhaps 55%.

I wondered whether it would have been different if Hillary had won the Democratic primary. As far as the Republicans were concerned she was just as polarizing as Obama had been, but to the Democrats she was almost as popular as Obama was. It might not have been vastly different. Regardless, there was an air of excited exhaustion around our little conference room. We had won, which is a whole shitload better than losing!

I delayed calling either man until almost midnight, after we heard that Obama had called John and conceded. John I congratulated and promised to support, Obama I complimented on a good and tough fight. Politics 101. As I made the calls, I glanced over at the couch Marilyn was sitting in. She had fallen asleep about 9:30 or so, much to everybody's amusement, and had only woken when she heard the final cheering. She gave us all a disgusted raspberry and then fell asleep again, sitting at the end of the couch, leaning against the armrest, head back, eyes closed, mouth open, and snoring. Stormy was sprawled out on the couch next to her, head in Marilyn's lap, and she was sleeping, too. After I made the calls, I stood up and thanked everybody, and promised I would talk to them in the morning, and then tapped Marilyn on the shoulder. She snorted and shook herself awake, and I led her and the dog back up to the Residence for a decent sleep.

Epilogue

Marilyn and I hung around the White House for another few days, as I made phone calls to everybody and their brother and congratulated everybody. John McCain made a comment that he was going crazy as he began to get ready to take my job in a few months. I simply gave him an evil laugh and told him it would only get worse from here! Mitt Romney was going to lead his transition team. That usually meant that whoever was running the team was going to play a significant role in the future, usually in the Cabinet. That wouldn't surprise me.

Me? I was tired! In seven years I think I aged twenty. I needed a serious vacation, and Marilyn agreed with me. By the end of the week, I told everybody they could do without me, and we headed down to Hougomont. As long as the world didn't blow up before January 20, I didn't care. John was welcome to the mess. I wondered if I had done a single damn thing to make the world a better place. I really couldn't tell anymore.

I knew that John had four years to try to make an impact. By the time the 2012 elections rolled around, we would have had three straight Republican administrations, twelve years, an above average record. The big winners had been FDR and Truman, who had racked up twenty years, but that would never be seen again. Reagan and Bush 41 had done twelve years, and Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover had also done twelve years. To go to more than three terms in a row, you had to go back to McKinley, Roosevelt, and Taft (four terms), and before that to Reconstruction, when the Democrats couldn't even run!

No, John would need to be a miracle worker to get a second term. The odds were that by the time of the next election, the economy would be in trouble, either because a bubble burst and we had a catastrophe, or he avoided bubbles but simply had a routine but ill-timed recession. In 2012 I expected a repeat of the fight between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, only Hillary would probably get the nod. The argument would be that Obama blew it against McCain, so let's give the other team a chance.

Then again, maybe he could pull it off. I truly believed that Hillary wouldn't be any better a President than Obama would be, or had been on my first go. It would be out of my hands in any case. From here on out, I wasn't just a lame duck, I was a dead duck! There wasn't much I could accomplish in the next couple of months, and after that, I could only offer assistance. If I volunteered without being asked, the term that would be used was 'meddlesome old fart.'

The three of us (Marilyn, me, and Stormy) landed in Nassau, and immediately jumped into a car to head to Hougomont. Frank and his fiancé were with us also, taking a vacation as well. As far as I was concerned, vacations are for lazing around. I expected a short briefing in the morning, and everybody could wear shorts and t-shirts for that. The same went for the National Intelligence Officer who gave me the PDB every morning. Otherwise, go make yourself a rum punch and take a load off. Dinner is on the grill at 7:00. Be there or be square!

The next morning, Saturday, I slept late and woke up when Marilyn crawled out of bed to let Stormy out. After the mutt came back inside, she jumped back into bed with me while Marilyn went to take a shower. There was no going back to sleep, because Stormy decided to crawl on top of my chest and lick my face. That's very cute when you are dealing with a puppy. When it's a 140 pound monstrosity, it can cause pulmonary collapse! I pushed her off and restarted my breathing, and then got out of bed myself. I went into the bathroom and brushed my teeth and took my Lipitor while Marilyn showered.

When she got out of the shower, I jumped in and cleaned up. After that, I was about to shave when I noticed it was time to swap out my razor blade, so I hit the 'Eject' button and popped off the triple-track head, and chucked it in the garbage. I opened the medicine cabinet and rooted around for a new one. "Marilyn, do I have any razor blades?"

"I don't know? Did you tell me you were running out?"

"I didn't know I was running out."

"And that's my fault because?"

I rolled my eyes at that. Whether you are the President or a ditch digger, as far as your wife is concerned, it's always your fault. I rubbed my stubble. "I suppose I can go a day without a shave."

"Do you want the Secret Service to go out and buy some blades?", she asked. As silly as that sounded, they would much rather do that then send the motorcade out with me so that I could go to the drug store and buy razor blades. There was actually an elaborate procedure for that sort of thing, so that nobody would be able to predict where I bought things and then be able to sabotage them. Randomly selected stores would be used, with the purchases made under phony names and payments made out of anonymous accounts. Similar things occurred with food for the White House

"Later. It's not an emergency."

Nobody commented about it that day, maybe because it was a Saturday. Marilyn and I weren't going anywhere, and I had delayed my usual visit with the Prime Minister until Monday. We just lay around the garden and the beach all day, sucking down the occasional Corona and tossing a piece of driftwood for Stormy to chase. Frank and his fiancée, Jenny, joined us for a nice dinner of grilled shrimp skewers.

Sunday morning was pretty much a repeat of Saturday morning. This time, when I got out of the shower, Marilyn said, "There's some new razor blades in the medicine cabinet."

"Thanks." I opened the cabinet door and pulled out the packet, and opened it. A five-pack plastic cassette came out with its load of blades and I grabbed my empty razor to load it.

And then I stopped.

I looked up at my reflection in the mirror. After two days I had a definite stubble, though it was a mix of my normal gingery dirty blonde and a disturbing amount of whitish-gray. I stared at my face for a few seconds. The last time I could remember not shaving was probably back in 1990, or maybe at the end of 1989, before I officially entered the 1990 Congressional race. It felt strange – and strangely liberating. I slid my razor back into the slot in the holder and put the blades back in the medicine cabinet.

"Wrong blades?", asked Marilyn.

I turned to her and smiled. "No, they're the right ones."

"So?"

"So, I don't want to shave this morning.", I told her.

She gave me an odd look and put her hand on my forehead. "Are you feeling all right? You don't seem feverish."

"Why?", I laughed.

"You always shave! I'd send you to the hospital, but the last time that happened, you had to be shaved there, too!"

I stepped back from the sink and went to the closet, grabbing a pink Hawaiian shirt with bright green parrots on it, and slipped into it, along with a pair of bright blue swim trunks. Color coordination, that's the Buckman way! I turned back to my wife, rubbed my face, and asked, "How's this for a look? Which of your brothers do I look like now?"

"Ooooh! That's mean! I am going to tell them you said that!" She pulled a beach cover-up out of a drawer and pulled it on. "Gabriel, maybe." I snorted out a laugh at that. Gabriel's beard was so heavy that his five o'clock shadow showed up at four, and his salt-and-pepper hair was more salt than pepper.

"Really? I'd have thought maybe your sister Pearl."

Marilyn started coughing. "You behave!" Then she giggled. "Besides, you asked which brother you looked like."

"True, so true."

"What's with the beard? You always complain about having to look good for the cameras."

"What's the worst that could happen? I lose the next election?"

Marilyn looked stumped at that. "Seriously?!"

I shrugged. "Maybe I'll let my hair grow out, grow a pony tail, start smoking those funny cigarettes..."

"I can't wait for you to tell Frank and Will that one!" We went out to the kitchen. "A pony tail and baldness? That ought to look good. Maybe you can have the official portrait redone."

I had to blink at that one. "Let me think about that one first."

"Good idea."

Nobody said anything to me again on Sunday, though Frank gave me a very strange look. He did say something to me on Monday, after lunch, because I was going to meet with the Prime Minister for a brief photo op and then a dinner at Government House. "You planning on shaving, boss?"

"Frank, I'm on vacation."

"Mister President, you're the President even on vacation"

"I'm only the President for another eight weeks, Frank. Maybe I'm getting a start on my retirement."

Marilyn and I were sitting on the rear veranda. Frank looked shocked, and sat down across from us. "Sir?"

"Frank, if I stop shaving and grow a beard, it won't be the end of the republic. It won't even be the pause of the republic. What's the worst that could happen, Frank? A usurper will rise up to throw down the king? Guess what? It's already happened. I'll be nothing but a footnote in eleventh grade history in a few weeks. Who cares?"

"We haven't had a President with facial hair this century."

"Frank, this is the 21st Century. The only Presidents we've had are George Bush and me."

"No, I mean, yes, you know what I mean!"

"Frank, Teddy Roosevelt had a mustache, and that was in the 20th Century.", I told him.

"Really? We're going back to Teddy Roosevelt?", he exclaimed.

"Nice mustache, Frank, big and bushy."

"You're not helping me here, Mister President!" He looked over at Marilyn. "Did you know about this plan?"

Marilyn laughed. "Frank, I've seen him with a beard and mustache. He had one through most of the Eighties, before he got into politics."

I nodded. "It wasn't as white. That's a bit disappointing.", I commented wryly.

"When was the last time we had a President with a beard? Lincoln?", asked my Chief of Staff.

I gave him a disapproving look. "Frank, really, Grant was after Lincoln. And he had a full beard and mustache. Lincoln didn't have the mustache. There were a few others, too."

Frank threw his hands up in the air. "I can't wait to see the press release Will writes about this one!"

"Don't worry. He can include it in his book, 'I Survived Carl Buckman.' He's writing it with Ari Fleischer."

Frank gave a manic laugh at that, and sighed.

Nobody really said anything at the dinner that evening. I said various statesmanlike things, such as that even though I was no longer the President, the Bahamas had no better friend, and I would be happy to act as an Ambassador of Friendship for President McCain. Our regular Ambassador, Ned Siegel, simply smiled and nodded. He wasn't going to complain about my facial hair, since he also had a beard and mustache. He simply said, "I like the look, Mister President."

"My Chief of Staff thinks it's the end of American democracy."

"Just tell him the truth. Only real men grow beards and mustaches!"

I laughed and added, "And God only made a few perfect heads. The rest he covered with hair."

Ned had a head full of hair, but he laughed anyway. "I'd ask if you've mentioned that to your replacement, but I want to keep my job a little longer."

"He's got one hell of a comb-over, doesn't he?" Ned laughed at that one, too. "Sucker must be glued down!"

We didn't hear anything out of the press over the next few days, so nobody back home must have been following the vacation trip. I was old news by now, almost forgotten. Everything was now McCain, McCain, McCain, and the changes he planned and what he wanted to keep. The only way I was going to make it into the news was if Air Force One or Marine One crashed in the near future with me on board.

We flew home on Monday, November 17th, after eight very pleasant days of doing nothing, without the world collapsing around us. None of the Air Force or Marine staff mentioned my beard, which I had trimmed into a goatee. They did stare, but they didn't say anything to their Commander in Chief. That lasted about as long as it took for me to walk into the West Wing and say hello. Will Brucis said, "Welcome back, Mister President. Have a good vacation?"

"Very nice, Will. Very restful. It looks like the world survived without me."

"Yes, sir, we struggled through. When do you plan to shave, sir?"

"I shaved this morning, Will.", I answered, smiling. I figured I could drag out his discomfort.

"Uh, yes, sir, I mean, uh, all of your face."

"Did Frank call you and tell you about this?", I quizzed.

"There might have been some hair related conversations. Are you going for a new look or something?"

"Why not? Think America will survive the shock? Worried I'll lose the next election?"

"Well, you've seen the uproar every time your wife changes her hair. That will be nothing compared to this!"

That was true enough. Marilyn had changed her cut a couple of times, and the press had given each style its own name! "It's only eight weeks, Will. The nation will struggle through."

"Yes, sir. I'll go warn the barber!"

I laughed loudly at that. Human hair grows about half an inch a month, or so I had been told once. Back when I was a civilian, I used to get a haircut whenever it got a bit too long, maybe every six weeks or so, unless I got caught up in something and forgot. Once I got into politics it became a scheduled event every two weeks! If my hair grew one-quarter inch, it was time for a precision styling. Your hair and appearance can't change one iota compared to your campaign posters or publicity shots. I could launch a war on somebody, but if my hair appeared mussed that would be the lead topic on the news, before the war.

My new look was national news that evening, with telephoto lens shots of Marilyn, Stormy, and me climbing down from Marine One. The regular networks just did a quick thirty second piece on it, comparing me to other presidents with beards or mustaches, almost all of whom, it turned out, were Republican. (Except for Grover Cleveland, a Democrat; not sure what the significance of any of this really was.) The news networks, on the other hand, spent massive time and money on this, bringing in various experts to consider the significance of my facial hair, and whether I could have been elected with a beard or mustache, and commenting copiously on Thomas Dewey, the last major candidate with a mustache, who had lost to Truman in 1948. Did the mustache cause Dewey to lose? Fox News did a half hour special on this.

Will, who was waging a losing battle against male pattern baldness himself, was at a loss to explain this silliness to anybody. He did point out that if any of the reporters bothered to go into their photo archives from my time with the Buckman Group they would find any number of photos of me with a mustache and goatee. The silliest exchange was on Wednesday morning, when it became obvious that I was ignoring the calls to shave.

Q: "Has the First Lady commented about whether she likes the President's mustache and beard?"

A: (Staring!) "No, that hasn't come up in any conversation that I'm aware of."

Q: "If she complained, would the President shave?"

A: "You'll need to ask her that."

Q: "Why are you ducking the question?"

A: "I am not ducking the question. I am giving it the attention it deserves. The Buckmans have been married 30 years. Mrs. Buckman is certainly capable of telling her own husband whether she likes his mustache and beard. He had it for ten years before he got into politics, and he's had it almost two weeks now. I would think that if she objected to it, she'd have divorced him back in the Eighties! Next question!"

I was dying of laughter watching that, and I made sure we replayed it for Marilyn that afternoon. Everybody wanted to know our divorce plans.

On the plus side, various mustache fanciers and beard lovers groups promptly named me their Man of the Year. It wasn't quite Time's Man of the Year, but it was a nice touch. Besides, I had gotten Time's nod in 2004, after being re-elected. Cosmopolitan had a special list of celebrities with beards and mustaches, and I placed in their Top 10. In the same issue was a list of tricks to use in the bedroom if you had a beard or mustache. I made sure to show Marilyn that article, and she turned beet red! Will simply refused to comment when questioned, and turned beet red himself.

The nation muddled on through the end of November and into December. Nobody was doing anything legislation wise, not with a new administration coming into power, and the Christmas recess beginning shortly. Assuming nobody attacked us between now and January 20, my responsibilities were relatively limited. Congress and the Senate would be sworn in on January 6th, and John would be inaugurated January 20th.

The week before Christmas, I had what would probably be my final press interview. I did a one-on-one talk with Tom Brokaw from the Oval Office. Tom was semi-retired from NBC News, having given up his regular anchor spot to Brian Williams several years ago, but he still did occasional stories for them. I never quite figured out how Ari and Will picked out who got to do interviews with me. Maybe it was whoever pissed them off the least lately.

We started off actually in the Map Room, with both Marilyn and me on a love seat facing Tom in a wingback chair. The plan was that he would ask us some personal questions, and then when we were in the Oval Office would segue into some policy questions.

Tom: "Thank you for speaking to me, Mister President, Mrs. Buckman."

Me: "You're welcome."

Marilyn: "Yes, thank you for coming."

Tom: "Mrs. Buckman, your time here in the White House is shrinking rapidly. Are you going to be glad to leave?"

Marilyn: (Smiling and glancing at me.) "Yes, I really am. Oh, don't get me wrong. It is an absolute privilege to live here, and the staff is simply amazing. It's just, well, when we first moved in, we told the kids that living here would be like living in a museum, and that's really true. It's amazing, but it's not home."

Me: "I think that's true. The staff here are simply unbelievable, and we can't thank them enough. Still, it will be nice to just go back to Hereford and be able to have some friends and neighbors over for a barbecue. You just can't do that as the President."

Tom: "Is that where you plan to live? Hereford in Maryland? You also have a vacation resort in the Bahamas and a mansion in Georgetown."

Me: "Home is Hereford. We love our vacation home in the Bahamas, and we'll definitely spend more time there. The home in Georgetown is not so much a mansion as it is a really big house, and was always more of a residence for when I needed to be in Washington. We haven't lived there since I was elected as Vice President. We use it for friends and relatives, and Charlie and his fiancé are using it currently, though that's probably only going to be until they get married and get a place of their own. We'll keep it, but only for when or if I have business here in town in the future."

Tom: "You mentioned your children. Mrs. Buckman, when you first moved into the White House, you were still a stay-at-home mom to your daughters and living back in Maryland. Now your children are grown up and moved out. Big change since then, isn't it?"

Marilyn: "My babies are all grown up! I miss them, but they're doing fine on their own."

Tom: "What are they doing? It almost seems like the nation has watched them grow up as well. Your son was in the Marines and your daughters were high school cheerleaders."

Marilyn: "Well, Charlie can't race anymore, but he seems to be doing well broadcasting for ESPN. This spring he started with them, and they've signed him to be an announcer and commentator. He's engaged, of course, to a lovely girl and they plan to get married sometime next summer or fall. Holly is still at Princeton and is working on her doctorate, and is with a very nice young man who also is a doctoral student, and Molly is living in Maryland with her husband, and they're starting to talk about children of their own. That would be very exciting!"

Me: (Laughing.) "I hope they have lots of daughters, so I can get a little of my own back!" (Marilyn laughed and swatted at me.)

Tom: (Smiling) "Looking forward to being a grandfather?"

Me: "I intend to be the grandfather who buys the grandkids the drum set, the guy the parents are always worried about. Then, I'll load them up with sugar and give them back to the owners."

Marilyn: "You would, too!"

Tom: "Take it from me, Mister President, you have it figured out already. Mrs. Buckman, let me ask you about what had the entire nation stunned a few weeks ago. What do you think of the President's new look?"

Marilyn: "I think that's the silliest thing to worry about, isn't it? Of course the kids tease him that he's actually using it to grow hair for a hair transplant."

Me: "They are out of the will for sure, now!"

Marilyn: "Maybe you can go for the full shaved head look next."

Tom: "Does kissing your husband tickle now?"

At that Marilyn giggled and I waggled my eyebrows at her, and she giggled some more and swatted me again without answering. After that she retired. They reset the cameras in the Oval Office and we switched to there for discussions of my Presidency.

Tom: "It's been a tumultuous seven years for you, Mister President, starting with your accession to office."

Me: "Very true. It's certainly not how anybody would ever want to get a job."

Tom: "Would you have ever run for President on your own?"

Me: "Very doubtful. The idea of spending two years traveling all over the country, and spending weekends, if I'm lucky, at home getting ready to repeat the process? No, I don't think I could ever have subjected myself or my family to that."

Tom: "You didn't have the so-called 'fire in the belly' for the job?"

Me: "Not for that kind of abuse. I've told John more than once I didn't understand how he had gone through with it, and he did it twice, first in 2000, and then again this year."

Tom: "Yet you did it in 2004."

Me: "It's a whole different game when you only have to fight the other side, and not your own at the same time. Again, I'll thank John McCain for the help he gave me in 2004. He secured that victory for me. Great guy, and he'll be a great President."

Tom: "Do you think President McCain will do better or worse than President Buckman?"

Me: "No idea. I think the question is whether President McCain will be a third term of President Buckman, and the answer to that will be no. John is going to be his own man and, I think, a competent and thoughtful President. Back in 2001, when I asked John to join me and take the job as Vice President, I told him that every once in awhile this country gets an object lesson in selecting their leaders. There have been 44 Presidents, and 9 of us got the job when our boss met his Maker ahead of schedule. That's a one in five chance, a 20% mortality rate. You'd never get an insurance company to sell you a policy for that! All too often in this nation's history, the Vice President gets picked not because he would be qualified to take over, but because it was politically expedient to pick him. Not every one of us has been qualified to take over in case we landed in the jackpot. I told John that if something happened to me, I would be comfortable knowing he would be the next President. I didn't expect him to do the things I had done, but I did feel confident knowing he would do the right things as he saw them, and not the politically expedient thing."

Tom: "And Jeb Bush as the Vice President?"

Me: "I think Jeb will do the right thing, too. I feel comfortable with John's choice."

Tom: "Who do you think did a good job when, as you say, they landed in the jackpot?"

Me: "Well, Teddy Roosevelt is one of my favorites. He was excellent. The same goes for Harry Truman, and Jerry Ford was very underrated at the time."

Tom: "And the others? Who didn't work out?"

Me: "These are just my opinions, but Andrew Johnson was nothing but a political hack chosen by Lincoln to try and hold the country together prior to the Civil War. When Lincoln was assassinated, Johnson was a Democrat surrounded by Republicans, and he was just chum in front of the sharks. Tyler and Fillmore didn't work out either. I think the most tragic was Lyndon Johnson. He had great domestic plans, but was completely incapable of handling anything overseas."

Tom: "Where do you think you rate on that scale?"

Me: (Shrugging.) "That won't be for me to say. I hope on the plus side, but I just don't know."

Tom: "What will the historians say in twenty years?"

Me: (Smiling.) "That will be the least of my problems. Strokes and Alzheimer's run in my family. Twenty years from now I won't even know my name."

That was a real stumper for Brokaw. He simply didn't know how to respond to that, and you could see it in his face. He decided to focus on the overall changes during the past seven years.

Tom: "When you took office the nation was under attack by parties unknown, thousands of Americans were dead, and President Bush was missing in action. On the domestic side, more than a few economists were concerned about future runaway deficits and a recession, if not worse. Today America is the undisputed superpower of the world, and you have managed a net surplus during your seven year administration. Inflation is low and unemployment is low. This is an enviable record for any world leader."

Me: "I think it's a matter of knowing what needed to be done, and what didn't need to be done. When I was sworn in, we had a pretty good idea what was actually happening. The problem was that there were an awful lot of entrenched interests with their own agendas. I came in with only one agenda, which was to keep the nation safe and strong."

Tom: "What were those entrenched interests?"

Me: "Let me preface this by saying that many of the people involved were acting out of what they honestly felt was the best interest of the country. However, when you total them up, the plans they had would have weakened us, not strengthened us. Defense contractors wanted to sell the Pentagon all their newest goodies, which would have been good for their shareholders, but not necessarily good for the economy as a whole. Congress wanted to use those toys, and a lot of conservatives believed that military action could be used for more than simply defending the country, but could also be used to help build more democratic societies in the countries which threatened us. I disagreed."

Tom: "How so?"

Me: "My belief was that we needed to take a very hard and realistic look at the rest of the world. We weren't going to get pluralistic and liberal democracies in nations with rampant unemployment, illiteracy, religious intolerance, and sectarian violence. American has an excellent military, but you use armies and navies to kill people and break things, not to build countries. We needed to play to our strengths, not our weaknesses."

Tom: "And those strengths were?"

Me: "That plays into our economic strengths. You can't have a strong defense without a strong economy. That means not buying every weapon ever designed, but investing in America. We needed to invest in our real strength, our human capital and our economic capital."

Tom: "Could you be more specific?"

Me: "President Bush's DREAM Act was a perfect example of strengthening our human capital, by fixing parts of our immigration system. His No Child Left Behind Act did the same for education reform. Infrastructure is an example of strengthening our economic capital. For the cost of an invisible bomber, we can buy several very visible repaired bridges and canal locks and sewer systems. Ultimately all of this will make us much stronger than any of our potential foes."

We broke for a few minutes for a bathroom break but then resumed, only this time on my 'philosophy' of governing.

Tom: "What do you think is the most important thing for a President to do?"

Me: "Learn to say NO, and say it over and over. And not just to the other party, either. It's even more important to say it to your own party, and louder and more often."

Tom: "What do you mean?"

Me: "Well, saying no to the other party is easy. After all, as a Republican it's pretty easy to say no to raising spending and creating new programs and agencies that the Democrats want. What's much more difficult is to say no when the Republican Party is demanding that you cut taxes or go to war someplace or do something else that will totally screw things up for the country. No, no, no! Just say it over and over."

Tom: "Which is more dangerous, the economy or foreign relations? Where do you say no more often?"

Me: "In the short run, foreign relations, but in the long run, the economy. With foreign relations, we have the most powerful military in the world, bar none, and everybody wants us to use it. The Republicans wanted to invade Afghanistan - No. Iraq - No. Iran - No. North Korea - No. Venezuela - No. The Democrats wanted to send the same army everywhere else, to get into the middle of civil wars and make everybody on the planet behave and be nice. No! You only use the military when you have to, not when you want to."

Tom: "And the economy?"

Me: "Again, the magic word is No. No, I am not going to raise Social Security and Medicare and food stamps and everything else under the sun. No, I am not going to cut taxes and borrow money from the Chinese. Deficits matter. You can go in the hole on occasion, but you have to pay it back. It's the same whether you are an individual, a family, or a nation. If you don't pay the bills, the economy gets weaker and weaker and weaker, and then, very suddenly, you're not a great nation anymore. So you just keep saying no, over and over."

Tom: "That doesn't make many friends. They could say that you are breaking campaign promises."

Me: "Campaign promises are made by people who don't have the responsibility of being the President. The job looks different when you aren't kibitzing from the cheap seats."

Tom: "Does Vice President McCain plan to continue the Buckman Doctrine?"

Me: "We never really had any specific 'Buckman Doctrine.' We always handled foreign relations problems on an issue by issue basis, and Vice President McCain was fully involved in any discussions."

Tom: "You may not have had a formal doctrine specified, but certainly there quickly came to be an understanding that any nation that militarily attacked American interests was going to be the recipient of a fearsome retribution. You effectively destroyed both the governments and the nations of Afghanistan and Iraq."

Me: "If you are going to play in the big leagues, don't be surprised by big league rules. If you attack America, or you attack our allies, nations we have formally promised to protect, don't be surprised when we return the favor. How we do that, that is up to the President and his advisers, but the fact that there will be a response should be understood."

Tom: "There have been persistent calls by both the left and the right to use military force to clean up the world, to topple dictators and act as a policeman. You have steadfastly refused to even discuss those topics."

Me: "It is not in America's interest to throw our weight around like a bull in a china shop. If people think that we can make the rest of the planet act nice and play well with the other children, they are astonishingly naïve. As for dictators, sooner or later their own citizens will figure out what to do and take care of the problem. If we get involved, nobody will benefit, least of all us. I've said it before; we can't be in the business of running around and shooting jackasses just because they are jackasses. We'll run out of bullets long before we run out of jackasses. Again, this is just one more example of the need to say no."

After the interview was broadcast, my thoughts made a bit of a stir. For one thing, NBC investigated my comments about my medical prognosis, and turned that into a special report. As I knew they would find out, my family had a real history of Alzheimer's and strokes. My father's mother had died of a massive stroke and his father had died of Alzheimer's. Both of Mom's parents had died of 'senility', but they died before Alzheimer's became a common diagnosis. My father had died last year of Alzheimer's, and both his sisters were currently in homes suffering from the disease. Only my mother was still healthy; I suspected sheer bile kept her going, hoping to see me dead before she gave up.

Neither the conservatives nor the liberals liked what I had to say about policy. The forces I had been fighting were still present. The neocons wanted us to conquer the world and remake it in our image; the liberals wanted us to police the planet and make people behave. The Republicans wanted to lower taxes and the Democrats wanted to increase spending. Everybody figured that I was a cynic and pessimist.

John didn't say anything to me. I think he was finally starting to feel the pressure, as the demands started landing in his lap, for him to do something after he was sworn in. At one point, following a morning staff session, he asked, "Your advice?"

I smiled and simply said, "Learn to say NO."

"You're a lot of help."

I laughed. "This businessman gets tapped to take over as the boss of a big company, so he goes to the old boss and asks for some advice. 'What should I do to turn around the company?', he asks. The old guy tells him there are three envelopes in his desk, and that when things go bad to open the envelopes in order. So, about a year later, things look bad, and he opens the first envelope. Inside is a note that simply says, 'Blame everything on your predecessor.' So the fellow calls a press conference and does just that, and things calm down. A year later, things are turning to crap all over again, so he opens the second envelope. Inside is a note that says, 'Announce a reorganization.' So he calls another press conference and announces that he plans to reorganize the company. Things settle down again, but another year goes by, and things are looking really bad, so he opens up the third envelope. Inside is a note that says..."

"Yeah, yeah, yeah. 'Prepare three envelopes.' I've heard this one before.", he finished.

"Now you know the secret of my success."

"Like I said, you're a lot of help!", he said with a smile.

"Welcome to the club, buddy. Now get out of here and let me get back to work.", I replied with a smile of my own.

By the end of December the transition team had the basic structure of the McCain administration laid out. Bob Gates and Condi Rice were staying in place at Defense and State, though Condi privately told me she wasn't sure how long she would stay. On the other hand Frank Keating was going back to Oklahoma, albeit on good terms. He was cooperating in a search for his replacement, helping with the interviews of several Federal judges with a reputation as being tough on crime. Liz Warren was also history after the 20th; John was talking to a partner over at Goldman Sachs about Treasury, Liz was talking to a couple of the Ivies about a full professorship.

Mitt was going to take over Health and Human Services; now all I had to do was get John to let him create a decent health plan. I debated to myself about letting John in on the secret of the American Renaissance Initiative. Mike Brown was getting Transportation. Other assorted fundraisers and supporters were divvying up other Cabinet positions. That was a pretty standard method actually. You were always careful with the Core Four, but for the others you generally just needed a political figurehead you could fire in case the shit hit the fan. Other supporters would become ambassadors somewhere around the world, the niceness of the posting varying depending on how much money they raised during the campaign. Again, you had professionals in the State Department to handle the details and clean up what their amateur bosses screwed up.

One interesting change was in the House. My old buddy John Boehner was no longer House Majority Whip, but was slated to become the Speaker. He had been Majority Whip for the last eight years, since I had given up the job when I became the Veep. Denny Hastert had been the Speaker for most of that time, but had decided not to run for reelection in 2006. Tom DeLay became Speaker, and Roy Blunt had snaked John out of the Majority Leader slot. Tom only lasted two years, however, before he had to leave Congress to fight Texas criminal conspiracy and election law fraud charges. (Ooops!) Now it was John's turn to return the favor to Roy, and he managed to get voted over Roy's head as the Speaker.

We had worked together for years getting stuff through Congress, and it was relatively well known that part of my success with Congress was due to the fact that we were long time friends and allies. More than a few afternoons or evenings had been spent sitting out on the Truman Portico, with him drinking bad Merlot and smoking, while I drank a much better grade of Riesling. Now I wasn't really sure how his new job would work out. It is not at all unusual for a really good Number Two to turn out to be a lousy Number One. On my first go, John hadn't done well holding out against the Tea Party. This time we really didn't have any Tea Party, but the Republican Party base was more conservative than either of us liked. I wondered how strong an ally he would prove to John McCain.

Meanwhile at the lower levels, people were moving out, up, or around. The ones moving out were typically heading towards much better paying lobbying jobs over on K Street or at some of the think tanks around town. The ones moving up or around were the Assistant and Deputy Assistant Secretaries, often moving up a level or two as their bosses decided they needed better paychecks as they got older and discovered just how much private college for their offspring was going to cost.

The week between Christmas and New Year I sat down with Frank Stouffer. Most of my senior staff was leaving with me, as John brought his own people on board, and I was ashamed to say that I hadn't been really following what they would do. I immediately started off with an apology. "Frank, I am sorry, but I just haven't spoken to you about what you are going to do after I'm gone. The last time we spoke about that was that in the Bahamas, and you simply said you were talking to some people. What are you and the others doing after the 20th?"

He smiled at me. "Well, I talked to some people." I raised an eyebrow, and he continued. "I wasn't sure if Marty Adrianopolis had called you yet."

"Marty? No, but I think there's a note for me to call him. Why?"

"Marty's leaving ARI. He and I are going into business together and forming our own lobbying outfit, Adrianopolis/Stouffer. Mindy will come with us until you get your act together. Elsewhere, Brewster is going to be the next RNC chairman, but you already knew that. We'll still be running this town, Mister President."

I heard the words he was saying, but they weren't quite registering, so I just looked at him stupidly and said, "Huh?!"

Frank gave me a smirk. "Marty told me it would take you awhile to figure it out. Marty is quitting at the American Renaissance Initiative, but he's not folding it. It's still your lobbying group. He's bringing in Michael Steele to run it. You've met him before, he's from Baltimore."

I blinked at that. I knew Michael Steele. It was the knowledge that ARI was 'my' lobbying group that had me set back. "But ... how ... you know..."

"What, that ARI was yours?", he asked, a real shit eating grin on his face. "I've known for years! I figured it out during the '04 campaign. You'd propose something, and within days, ARI is lobbying for it with an endless budget and legislation already written. It was too much of a coincidence, especially if you could see the timing from the inside."

"I'll be damned! Who else knew?"

"Mindy picked up on it while you were still in Congress, and she confirmed it with Marty. I snookered Marty Adrianopolis into confirming it for me after I had a suspicion. Tell me, just how much have you spent through ARI?"

"I will be damned!" I sighed and gave it all some thought. I guess Marty and I weren't the big sneaks we thought we were. I looked back at Frank and admitted, "Since we started? Probably $450 to $500 million, maybe more. I'd have to add it up."

It was Frank's turn to stare. "You spent half a billion dollars getting stuff passed! Jesus Christ!"

"It might be more. Frank, you have no idea how much money I am worth. I am worth way more now than when I became the President. The game is so slanted towards the top that I could spend that much money on politics, trying to even out the playing field, and still make more than I was spending!" I shrugged helplessly. "Who the hell else knows?"

He shrugged. As far as I know, it's just us four, you, me, Mindy, and Marty. You really had to be inside to see it fall into place. You and Marty buried it pretty good, but not from the real insiders. Neither Mindy nor I would have stuck if we didn't go along with you, so your secret is safe."

"Damn!"

"So, you'll now have two lobbying groups reporting to you, the American Renaissance Initiative and Adrianopolis/Stouffer, and Brewster McRiley will have McRiley Associates, the Austin Consulting Group, and the Republican National Committee working for you. Like I said, we're still going to be running things."

"I'm not following you. What do you mean about Mindy joining you and waiting for me!?". I asked.

"She's coming in with Marty and me, though she's not a lawyer. She's going to hang out as a lobbyist and manager until you get your shit together.", he said with a sly smile.

"What do you mean, get my shit together?"

"Mister President, with all due respect, the idea that you are going to simply retire and putter around the garden is ridiculous. In a matter of weeks, certainly within a few months, you are going to drive yourself mad with boredom. At some point you are going to decide to launch another crusade about something. When that happens, Mindy will join you and be your keeper. She's already cleared it with your wife.", he told me.

"Smart ass!" I flipped him the middle finger, which set him to laughing. "You think you have me figured out!"

"Boss, we've already started a pool on how long you last. The minimum is six weeks, the maximum is six months."

"You're full of shit! I can't wait to let Marilyn know this. She'll get a good laugh."

"She's in on it, too. She put a twenty down on you, and not on the long side, either.", he laughed.

"You little bastard! Get the hell out of here!"

Frank left still laughing. I called Marty Adrianopolis and confirmed everything Frank had told me. He also added that Cheryl Dedrick was going to be on the board at ARI. I knew she was out of a job in January. After 18 years, the Maryland Ninth had reverted to the Democrats. Along with the new winners, she had been one of the losers I called election night. Cheryl was going to play the lobbying game, as well as sit on a few corporate boards. I couldn't fault her; she had children bound for college, too.

Still fuming after both Frank and Marty told me how predictable I was, I went up to the Residence and asked Marilyn about it. Rather than denying Frank's report, she said, "They weren't supposed to tell you!"

"You mean it's true!? You really are betting twenty bucks on when I get bored and unretired!? Marilyn!"

"Oh, you behave. Yes. You'll go nuts sitting around all day! After a few weeks of vacation, a month at best, you'll get your knee replaced, and as soon as that's over, you'll just be stewing around the house. Mindy told me she was going to start scouting Washington office space in the spring, for whatever you call your new venture."

I was sitting down, and I harrumphed at her. Marilyn just rolled her eyes at me and then bent down and kissed me on my bald spot, which made me swat at her. A bunch of smart asses, the lot of them!

After lunch I went back down to the Oval Office. I met President-Elect McCain in the hallway. "Find out how long your wife is betting on you?", he asked.

I stared at him for a second. "Don't tell me you're in on this, too!"

Behind him a pair of secretaries coming down the hall giggled and turned around, ducking into an open door. I called out, "I saw that! This is treason! Treason!"

John shrugged and smiled. "I'm not too worried. In just a few weeks I'll be able to write myself a pardon."

"Treason!"

I already knew what some of the other various senior staffers were going to be doing after leaving the White House. Marc Thiessen had left immediately after the election, and was already working on K Street as a lobbyist. Matt Scully would be going to work as an editor for National Review. Will Brucis was heading over to ARI as the Director of Communications, essentially his current job, even though he didn't know it was my lobbying company. Both Matt and Will were contemplating books about their time in the White House and the Buckman administration; how successful they would be made me wonder. I suspected Fletcher Donaldson would do better; he had already approached me with plans to write a biography on me and wanted, not so much permission, but cooperation. Even I had been approached by a couple of publishing houses for my memoirs, but it wasn't like I needed the cash, and I really didn't care.

Congress was sworn in on Tuesday, January 6th. John would be sworn in on Tuesday, January 20th. In between, on Saturday night, the 10th, I would host my final dinner with the new Congressmen and Senators. I had done this in 2003, 2005, and 2007, and it was still my responsibility. I would speak briefly, but really the evening was to introduce them to President-Elect McCain, and he would be speaking as well.

That night went a little longer than planned, because just about everybody wanted photos taken with both John and me, two Presidents. Then, during the remarks section, I kept my remarks brief. After the usual welcome and a few bland statements about moving the nation forward and always being available to work with them (and mentioning that John McCain would be available in another ten days) I finished with my regular ending.

"Now, I am sure that some of you are probably feeling a bit overwhelmed by now. The folks back home sent you here to do a job, and you aren't quite sure what to do. Well, I'll simply remind you all that both John and I started out as freshman Congressmen, and if we figured it out, I'm sure you will, also. However, in case anybody here isn't completely sure what their job is, let me tell you something that happened to me during my freshman year.

I happened to be at my district office in Westminster, and Marilyn had just started working there as an unpaid intern. While I was there, a call came in and Marilyn answered it, and it was from a woman in Westminster, and she was complaining about something. Marilyn was telling the woman how I was a Congressman and worked in Washington and was very important, and how she needed to call somebody in Westminster to handle such a small problem, and the whole conversation was going downhill quickly. I called a quick time-out and took the phone, and I asked the lady what the problem was. She told me her garbage hadn't been picked up and wanted to know who was going to fix this! I took down her name and address and phone number and told her I would take care of it. Then I asked her why she had called me, and not the town. Her response? She didn't want to bother anybody important right off the bat!

So always remember the real reason you have been sent here. Your job in Washington is not to be important and do lofty things. Your job in Washington is to clean up the garbage. Good luck!"

As always, this got a lot of laughs, including from my properly embarrassed wife, who I had rescued back in 1991.

And so it went. The weekend before the Inauguration the staff packed us up and moved everything out, sending it either to Hereford or over to the house on 30th Street. The kids all came over to grab anything they had left behind, or it was going into storage. Marilyn and I moved over to the 30th Street house, giving everybody plenty of time to move the McCain's belongings over from the Naval Observatory. We spent the night of the 19th over in Georgetown, though we never told the press.

As the outgoing President, I had an open invitation to all the festivities, but that didn't mean it was a good idea to go. I didn't need to overshadow the new guy, even if he was my designated successor. Marilyn and I decided that we would go to the actual Inauguration, but afterwards, we would sneak out of town and go home to Hereford. We could claim we were coming down with a cold or something. We told John and Cindy the day before, and said good-bye to the staff before leaving.

We did host a farewell dinner the night of the 19th, relatively small, for the Bushes and McCains. President Bush was still moving around, but he was looking rather frail. We took a group photo of me, President Bush, Vice President McCain, and Vice President Elect Bush, and I commented to the others that this was a chance to get a photo of four Presidents together. The others all chuckled and smiled, but it was true. As Vice President, Jeb was assuring himself of a run at the White House himself. Whether John won or lost in 2012, Jeb would be back on his own in 2016, and probably be a leading candidate. Something to watch for in the future.

It was an enjoyable dinner. At one point I told Jeb to make sure he got his father to teach him how to salute.

"Salute? What do you mean?", he asked.

"There are a lot of times that you will be saluted by somebody, maybe one of the Marines around the White House, or when you are visiting a base somewhere, and you'll need to return the salute. Your father, John, and I already knew, since we were in the service once. Your brother, too." Both John and George nodded at that. "However, when Slick Willie took over from your dad back in '92, your father had to actually give him a lesson in saluting. At least that's what your brother told me once.

President Bush smiled and nodded. "That's true. We did it in the Oval Office right before the inauguration."

Jeb shook his head. "I'd better do that, or I'll never hear the end of it from my parents!" The rest of us laughed at that.

The weather on the 20th was cold and blustery, with a chill wind out of the northwest that cut through everything. Even though there were heaters in the stage, I was glad I had long johns on under my suit. John gave a good speech Not a great speech, but a good speech. I don't think any of us were ever going to be able to top John F. Kennedy. Afterwards, I shook John's hand and wished him and Cindy well, and we were escorted to our limo. We would be driven over to the house on 30th to pick up Stormy, and then go over to the Naval Observatory, where Marine One would fly us home. It wouldn't be Marine One for us anymore. That title is only used when the President is flying, and I didn't qualify anymore.

As we drove off, I had the driver swing by the White House one last time, and I had them stop in front of the wrought iron fence out front. I got out of the car and looked at the big white building, while the Secret Service agents scanned the curious crowd.

Marilyn got out, and asked, "What's up?"

I smiled at her. "Nothing. Just looking." She came up beside me and tucked her arm through mine. "Did I accomplish anything? Or was it all just a waste? I don't think I'll ever know."

She was silent for a second, and then answered, "It wasn't a waste, and you accomplished a lot. The ones coming after you will have big shoes to fill."

"Clown shoes.", I said with a laugh.

"No, just the shoes of a man who's like won't be seen again." She tugged my elbow. "Let's go home, Carl."

I looked down at my wife and smiled. "Yes, let's go home."

Content

A Fresh Start
by rlfj

Book One: Junior High

Chapter 1: The Worst Day in my Life

Chapter 2: Hard Time in the House of Many Doors

Chapter 3: Making Plans

Chapter 4: Back To School

Chapter 5: Planning For The Future

Chapter 6: Financial Planning

Chapter 7: Growing Up

Chapter 8: Ninth Grade

Chapter 9: The Science Fair

Chapter 10: Chemistry, the Experimental Science

Chapter 11: Working at Shelley's

Book Two: High School

Chapter 12: High School

Chapter 13: Moving Along

Chapter 14: Junior Year

Chapter 15: The Carl Buckman Experience

Chapter 16: Be Careful What You Wish For

Chapter 17: Independence

Chapter 18: Opening A Present

Chapter 19: A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year

Chapter 20: Academic Plans

Chapter 21: Senior Year

Chapter 22: End Of The Year

Book Three: Rensselaer

Chapter 23: Freshman Year

Chapter 24: Kappa Gamma Sigma

Chapter 25: Midnight Rendezvous

Chapter 26: Thanksgiving Dinner

Chapter 27: A Very Important Date

Chapter 28: Dueling

Chapter 29: Polar Bears and Baby Seals

Chapter 30: Second Semester

Chapter 31: Road Trip

Chapter 32: Meet The Parents, Part 1

Chapter 33: What I Did On My Summer Vacation

Chapter 34: Ocean City

Chapter 35: Meet the Parents, Part 2

Chapter 36: Lefleur Homes

Chapter 37: Sophomore Year

Chapter 38: Aftermath

Chapter 39: Sin City

Chapter 40: Time Flies By

Chapter 41: Summer Camp

Chapter 42: Junior Year

Chapter 43: The Summer Of Our Discontent

Chapter 44: Diagnoses, Fraternal and Personal

Chapter 45: Hazing

Chapter 46: Graduation

Book Four: Army

Chapter 47: You're In The Army Now!

Chapter 48: Fort Bragg Redux

Chapter 49: Bachelor Life

Chapter 50: Get Me To The Church On Time

Chapter 51: An Unplanned Guest

Chapter 52: Cruising

Chapter 53: Married Life

Chapter 54: Plans and Changes

Chapter 55: Making Babies

Chapter 56: International Relations

Chapter 57: The Anabasis of Xenophon

Chapter 58: More Hard Time

Chapter 59: Colonel Featherstone

Chapter 60: Starting Over

Book Five: Civilian

Chapter 61: Moving Home

Chapter 62: Back Home

Chapter 63: A Gentleman Of Leisure

Chapter 64: Vacation

Chapter 65: Off To The Bahamas

Chapter 66: La Valencia

Chapter 67: Complicated

Chapter 68: Hero

Chapter 69: Home

Chapter 70: Becoming An Entrepreneur

Chapter 71: The Buckman Group

Chapter 72: Microsoft

Chapter 73: Work and Home

Chapter 74: Hawaii

Chapter 75: Back Home

Chapter 76: Suzie's Graduation

Chapter 77: Reunion

Chapter 78: The Carl Buckman Experience, Part II

Chapter 79: Trouble

Chapter 80: More Trouble

Chapter 81: Consequences

Chapter 82: Back To Normal

Chapter 83: The End Of The Year

Chapter 84: Progressions

Chapter 85: A Growing Family

Chapter 86: Fall 1984

Chapter 87: An Ordinary Life

Chapter 88: Celebrity

Chapter 89: Letters To The Editor

Chapter 90: Eat Your Peas

Chapter 91: Oprah

Chapter 92: Same Old, Same Old

Chapter 93: Wreckage

Chapter 94: Family Business

Chapter 95: A Dinner Party

Chapter 96: In the Running

Chapter 97: The Rottingens

Chapter 98: The Powers That Be

Chapter 99: Changes

Chapter 100: The Race Begins

Chapter 101: Getting Ugly

Chapter 102: The Westminster Diner

Chapter 103: The Women's Vote

Chapter 104: Momentum

Book 6: Politics

Chapter 105: Vacation

Chapter 106: Orientation

Chapter 107: Mister Buckman Goes To Washington

Chapter 108: Settling In

Chapter 109: Chief of Staff

Chapter 110: 1991 In Our Nation's Capital

Chapter 111: Dog Fighting and Legislation

Chapter 112: 1992

Chapter 113: An Old Friend

Chapter 114: A New Contract

Chapter 115: The Bravest Man I Ever Knew

Chapter 116: 1994

Chapter 117: A Changing Of The Guard

Chapter 118: Armed Services

Chapter 119: Counterattack

Chapter 120: Mister Perfect

Chapter 121: Children, All Sorts

Chapter 122: Impeachment

Chapter 123: The Soapbox Rebellion

Chapter 124: A New Job

Chapter 125: Vetting

Chapter 126: Selection

Chapter 127: A New Campaign

Chapter 128: Stormy Weather

Chapter 129: Home Again, Home Again

Chapter 130: Conventional Wisdom

Chapter 131: Campaigning

Chapter 132: October Surprise

Chapter 133: 'The Buckman Crisis'

Chapter 134: Attack Dog

Book Seven: The White House

Chapter 135: Inauguration

Chapter 136: Waiting

Chapter 137: Treason

Chapter 138: Aftermath

Chapter 139: Picking Up The Pieces

Chapter 140: Oath of Office

Chapter 141: Funerals

Chapter 142: Intelligence

Chapter 143: War

Chapter 144: President Buckman

Chapter 145: Foreign Relations

Chapter 146: A Special Broadcast

Chapter 147: State of the Union

Chapter 148: A Summit at Camp David

Chapter 149: Springtime

Chapter 150: Graduations

Chapter 151: The Rose Garden of Hell

Chapter 152: Changes

Chapter 153: From the Halls of Montezuma

Chapter 154: A Summer Cruise

Chapter 155: Muddling Through

Chapter 156: Swift Boats

Chapter 157: Fatherhood

Chapter 158: The Calm Before The Storm

Chapter 159: Katrina

Chapter 160: Katrina Aftermath, Kurdistan Beginning

Chapter 161: A Rock and a Hard Place

Chapter 162: Going to War

Chapter 163: Kurdish Dragon

Chapter 164: Kurdish Aftermath

Chapter 165: Survival

Chapter 166: Lame Duck

Chapter 167: Wedding Bells

Chapter 168: Off to the Races

Chapter 169: Unbelievable

Chapter 170: Hurricane Marilyn

Chapter 171: Family Matters

Chapter 172: Campaign 2008

Chapter 173: The Home Stretch

Epilogue