Shiva and Other Stories by Catska Ench, Barry N. Malzberg, Cory Ench Read Free Book Online

to inspect the goddamned Navy in California for six months if I didn’t shut up and get in line, but I just laughed at him. There was absolutely nothing that he could do. He was licked and he knew it. He had a sitting vice president who had shifted to an Independent ticket headed by a better man and there was no provision in the Constitution or in the articles of state that could touch me. He couldn’t even say too loud that I was a piece of shit because, after all, he had picked me the first time around and I had enough friends in the party to embarrass him on the renomination. Anyway, the Governor of New Jersey ended up as the fool’s candidate for vice president and Huey and I took to the road.
    We stirred the pots in Metairie and prayed with the ministers in Dallas; we lit fires on a reservation in Albuquerque and then we went to a meeting with Father Divine in Brooklyn. The Father Divine stunt was a ripper, it looked for a couple of days that it would cost us everything, that we would blow the election on that, but then the East came roaring in with the editorials and Rayburn was able to hold Texas and the rest of the South in line just as I knew he would. Father Coughlin went crazy and the Klan had some mighty doings in Florida and outside Atlanta, but Father Divine stood up in Times Square and on 125th Street and then Independence Square and said, these are good men, these are men who understand, I take the curse of racism and hatred from these men because having come from the fires of Satan, the hardest place in the country, they know the truth that will set us free. The Governor of the State of New York—Franklin’s state—met Huey in Grand Central Station and shook his hand. Out in the Midwest, crawling from stop to stop, we saw crowds like I had never seen in a hundred years in politics, and in California the farmers and the soldiers and the old soldiers came in a long line to Huey and shook his hand and wept. We know you got something for us, they said. We think you understand. Grandmas wiped his face with their handkerchiefs and now and then, seeing a hungry baby, Huey cried. Landon was flabbergasted, he gave it up in early October and went back to Kansas and just about sat on the front porch. Roosevelt fought and fought—no legs but enough courage, I had never denied that—but it all slipped away from him. As Vice President I slipped off to Washington now and then to preside over the Senate, get my face in the papers and pound the gavel and cloakroom a little.
    We got 341 electoral votes. We got New York and Pennsylvania. We got California. We lost Ohio and Illinois and we almost lost Texas too, and we sure as hell lost Georgia and Florida, but we didn’t lose too much else and in the early morning Wednesday when it was at last over, Huey turned to me and handed me a bottle, that same bottle I swear, and said, We did it, John. You did it and I swear I’ll never forget. I want to do good, John, he said. You got to believe that, I’ve only wanted all my life for the working man to have a break—and the working man in this country, he’s been screwed right out of his inheritance and his heart. We’re going to set this country aright, John, you hear that? For the first time we’re going to do it his way. I owe it all to you, John. Rayburn snuck in when it was all over; of course he couldn’t do anything officially then or later, but he made his position clear. Huey went out the next day and had the press conference.
    It was the goddamnedest thing I had ever seen. I had been Vice President of the United States and now I was going to be Vice President again and it was still the goddamnedest thing that I had ever seen. I guess I knew at the time that nothing could ever touch it again like that but I didn’t care. There are only a few moments in life, as Huey himself said, and if you are lucky you know when they are there and you use them and you try to run with them all the way to—and maybe, if you