“I’ll second that!” affirms Uncle Sam, striding out onto the Death House stage, tipping his top hat, jabbing his finger at the multitudes in that gesture of his beloved by all Americans, draftees sometimes excepted. The people crammed into Times Square roar their welcome. “Thank you, friends and neighbors! Thank you very—!”
“The Lord lift up His countenance unto thee,” the people cry, their hands raised in praise and supplication, like bank tellers caught in a raid by audacious and handsome bandidos, “and accept the sweet savor of thy sacrifices!”
“Thanks! I’m sure He—”
“The Lord lift up His banner—”
“All right, that’s enough now, the shades of night ‘re—”
“…and do battle for thee at the head of thy thousands against this iniquitous generation! The Lord lift up His—”
“SHUT PAN AND SING DUMB, YOU BEAUTIES, BEFORE I REAR BACK AND WHOP AN INIQUITOUS BELCH OUTA YA SHARP ENOUGH TO STICK A PIG WITH!” Uncle Sam’s steely blue eyes are flashing, his red bow tie is standing on end, and his teeth are showing white as hoarfrost in a powerful mean grin. “WHEE-EE-O! I don’t care how much a man talks, if he only says it in a few words! It’s like the monkey remarked tryin’ to stuff the cork back in the elephant’s asshole: A little shit goes a long way! LISTEN TO ME! Do you know that all the great work of the world is done through me? Size me up and shudder, you scalawags! The power to tax involves the power to destroy, and don’t you forget it! I am the Thunderer, Justice the Avenger, kin to the whoopin’ cough on my mother’s side and half brother to the Abominable Snowman, a wonder, a grandeur, and a woe! WHOO-OOP! I am in earnest! I will not equivocate — I will not excuse — I will not retreat a single inch; and I will be heard!”
There is a moment of awed silence — then the crowd bursts into a tumultuous frenzy of applause, whistling, wild cheering.
Uncle Sam grins, stuffs his hands in his back pockets, and rocks back and forth on the stage, acknowledging the cheers and winking at folks he recognizes. “All right, then,” he bellows, stilling the roar, “get a muzzle on your passions there, you cockabillies! I know, nothin’ great was ever achieved without enthusiasm, like the Prophet says, but now the day is done, and the darkness falls from the wings o’ Night, as a feather is wafted downward from a eagle in his fright — flight, I mean — so we gotta get crackin’, children! We gotta beat the drum slowly and play the fife lowly, we gotta ring down the curtain, men’s hearts wait upon us, men’s lives hang in the balance — you hear? We gotta bring the flamin’ Jubilee before the hills conceal the setting sun and stars begin a-peepin’ one by one!” Uncle Sam clamps his corncob pipe in his jaws, withdraws a match from behind his ear, and holds it halfway between the two electrodes on the electric chair — sparks fly and ignite the match, which he cups over the bowl of his pipe. “The law,” he hollers, blowing blue smoke: “it has honored us; may we honor it!”
“Ya-HOO!”
“That’s tellin’ ’em, Uncle Sam!”
“Hit ’em where they ain’t!”
“Hey, it’s really wonderful to see so many of you here tonight!” beams Uncle Sam. “It’s the biggest crowd since the hangin’ at Mount Holly in Aught-Thirty-three! And lemme say right here and now, it’s you ordinary folks who’ve made this show possible tonight! If I might quote our elusive Vice President, where’er the hairy li’l tyke might be—” a ripple of consternation passes through the crowd at this news, if news is what it was—“‘God musta loved the common people, he made so many of ’em!’ And I might add, He did a tolerable fine job of it, too!”
The people applaud themselves enthusiastically, Uncle Sam joining in. His handclaps crack and pop like rifle fire through the city streets.
“And I see a heap o’ folks not so common, too! Yes, there’s Vince Astor out there! And Charley Merrill! Jack Rockefeller — hullo, Junior! Give the folks a wave there — can you put a spot on him? We wouldn’t be here without him! Jack Rockefeller, everybody!” Uncle Sam pauses for a burst of cheering, waves at others he recognizes, tips his top hat to the ladies (underneath his hat he’s wearing one of those Dr. T beanies from the Dr. Seuss movie, and when he tips his hat, the yellow rubber fingers make naughty gestures to the ladies): “H’lo, Dinah! Duke! Dottie! Glad you could come! And there’s Jonny Wainwright and Old Man Tose and Artie Sulzberger — and whoa! I see Billy Faulkner, our Nobel Prize-winning mythomaniac! Howdy, Bill!”
“How do you do, suh!”
“How about a few dozen immortal words for us tonight, you old blatherskite?”
“Mah pleasure, suh! What about? Drinkin’ or huntin’ or—?”
“About God, Billy! About God and the Phantom and the chosen people!”
“Waal… In the beginnin’, uh… God created the earth…”
“That’s pretty good…”
“Then He created man completely equipped to cope with the earth.… Then God stopped.”
“He stopped?”
“Yuh see, God didn’t merely believe in man, He knew man. He knew thet man was competent fer a soul cuz he was capable of savin’ thet soul — and not only his soul but hisself…”
“Himself?”
“Yes, suh! He knew thet man was capable of teachin’ hisself to be civilized. It ain’t only man’s high destiny, but proof of his immortality, too, thet his is the choice between endin’ the world…and completin’ it!”
“Aha! A lofty bit of talknophical assumnancy there, Billy — but what about the Phantom?”
“The dark incorrigible one, yuh mean, who possessed the arrogance and pride to demand with, and the temerity to object with, and the ambition to substitute with…and the long roster of ruthless avatars — Genghis and Caesar and Stalin and Bonaparte and Huey Long—”
This mention of the Kingfish gets a big cheer. “That’s whom I mean, okay,” says Uncle Sam, stoking up his corncob pipe. “But what do we do about him, Billy? What do we do about the goddamn Phantom?”
“The answer’s very simple, suh,” says Faulkner, stroking his moustache. “Ah don’t mean easy, but simple… It begins et home.”
“At home?” Uncle Sam blows a smoke ring that floats out to hover over the Nobel laureate like a halo.
“Yup. Let us think fust of savin’ the integer we call home: not whur Ah live, but whur we live: a thousand then tens of thousands of little integers scattered and fixed firmer and more impregnable and more solid then rocks or citadels about the earth, so thet the ruthless and ambitious split-offs of the ancient Dark Spirit shall look and say, ‘There is nothin’ fer us here… Man — simple, unfrightened, invincible men and women — has beaten us!’”
“Sweet Genevieve, Bill! that’s pretty highfalutin’ sesquipedalian advice! When I think on this majestic jazz, mine eyes dazzle! And that word ‘integer’ was a jimdandy, too! Let’s give him a hand, folks, he’s a good ole boy! And pass him a bottle a redeye! That’s right, on the house, nothin’ too good for an old Massassip screamer — that boy can head-rassle with the worst of ’em! All them little integers swarmin’ around — WHOOPEE! you gotta be born and reared up in the swamps to think ’em up like that!” He gives a puff and the smoke halo over Faulkner’s head disintegrates with a little tinkle into a sprinkle of gold dust.
While out front, Uncle Sam picks out more celebrities in the roving spots and hands out foot-long panatellas in appreciation to all those who’ve helped make tonight’s show possible, backstage consternation over the missing Vice President is growing. Some think he might have been assassinated. Others that he’s been kidnapped, or else overslept. Or got picked up as a derelict — those who saw him on the train report that he was looking pretty scruffy. Or maybe the Phantom’s got him! Even as, from back in the wings and down in the subway station, they join Uncle Sam, the Singing Saints, and all the citizens out in the Square in singing a special Happy Birthday on this 19th of June to the Duchess of Dreamland, Bessie Wallis Warfield of Blue Ridge Summit, Pennsylvania, they are thinking: Somebody may have to take his place. Maybe it’s me.