Our Napoleon in Rags. Kirby Gann

       HAYCRAH KEEBLER, HUMMING

      HAYCRAFT AWOKE BEFORE NOON and fried up a breakfast platter of potatoes on a crusty hotplate, adding apple juice in a fogged wine glass culled from the clean side of a steel sink. As he took his breakfast Haycraft fetched his thoughts, hopeful it would be one of those fugitive hours when the thoughts would come. He considered himself “a man of dialogue,” citing Plato’s discourses as the prime example, and in these mornings the dialogues took place within himself – or at least by himself, in that he ranted around the cramped room, index finger pointed and raised, or hands turned out in muddled exasperation, head shaking as he voiced a multitude of questions (one giving rise to another) and, less often, answers to them.

      Several points of view clamored in his head; he believed his particular genius lay in that he allowed himself to hear out each one. He often referred to his mind as the House of Representatives. If the dialogues would not come, he forced them to the surface via another fastidious protocol, his single obsessive hygienic rite: trimming his toenails. Haycraft Keebler had large feet with nails of maniacal growth. They required constant trimming and shaping, or else turned ingrown and disturbed his canvassing ambitions. He believed healthy feet formed the man: If the feet are distressed, then so the soul. Cryptically, he quoted Emerson: We see with the feet. Somehow this action with the clippers and file opened his inspirational well, acting as sergeant-at-arms to call his House to order.

      After soaking one foot at a time in a large steel mixing bowl filled with steaming, salted water, Hay positioned himself on the single chair in his room, an old elementary-school chair with adjustable pressboard desk, which he reconciled so that one heavy foot rested upon it within his vision and also before the long double-hung window that gave onto the wide avenue outside. Snip-snip and click, then turning the file to smooth the newly exposed ridge, always perfecting each toe in turn rather than the sweeping gesture of cutting all nails across the foot before starting over again with the file. Murmuring as he worked: It’s in the details, boys, always in the tiniest details . . . until the words fell way to a melodious hum of Stephen Foster or Broadway standards. He did not bother with the rinds spun onto the floor. His eyes centered upon the window and the street scene outside, or else the curtain of his mind’s eye opened upon a loaded memory: an old woman pushing her belongings in a grocery cart rendered ruminations on why the city had a home for battered women but no shelter for the homeless specific to women (their nightly risks must be enormous!); an eight-year-old running about midday underscored the result of budgetary cuts from the truancy division of the police force; two men scrubbing away the spray-painted faggots from their doorway inspired his most high-profile success of helping usher through a fairness ordinance through the Board of Aldermen. Or, if not actually ushering that ordinance, he had at least helped in bringing the matter to some attention.

      Everyone had a hard road, Haycraft knew. But you have to start with the small, concrete details. Can’t afford the broad gestures of historical perspectives – because that makes a question all or nothing, and absolute failure is not a possibility you can afford to entertain. His father used to tell him that. His father, whom Hay remembered as an amalgam of Thomas Jefferson, Merlin, and the apostle Paul.

      So Haycraft concerned himself with general issues but strained toward specific, practical steps. What bothered Hay in general was the disappearing middle class, the widening gap between the very rich and the very poor. He also found the local police force unnecessarily brutal and intimidating. In moments of lucidity he realized there was little he could do about these aside from pointing out the obvious to those who could hear him, and he accepted as likely that his commitment to these issues was mere cover to a deeper loneliness inside himself. . . . Alone and obscure, he responded by loving everyone in the abstract. But what bothered him in particular, in the details of daily life (and therefore actionable), was the debris that saturated Old Towne like a wild fungus ravaging a tropical village: He could see it from his school chair by the window, he stepped over it any time his schedule thrust him into the streets – the discarded junk, cars on cement blocks, engines in the alleyways, carpentry materials, old roof tiles, gutted fixtures and cracked moldings and furniture, asbestos lining, and refrigerators with stillattached doors ready to coffin some unsuspecting playful child. All this and more, uncollected. Here, in the district that displayed awesome examples of America’s domestic architecture. Such sights wore on Haycraft; they inspired him. It was all going to change. Forcing a public bus to crash was merely an initial, active step.

      Perhaps too firm of a step. He did hope the lady he had heard about was all right. He had been looking for an evocative statement, not an act of terror; he was an idea man.

      Such ideas found their way into the broadside newsletter that he wrote, typed, edited, printed, and distributed himself: The Old Towne Fair Dealer, on-time delivery of which he guaranteed and accomplished along with his voter registration routes, the words of the newsletter gaining an extra air of authority through their proximity to official documents. Other copies made their way under the windshield wipers of parked cars or met pedestrians face-to-face from telephone poles, or skittered down the street on the wind, clinging to pantlegs.

      —Madam, would you care to take a moment to learn of our mayoral race and its dire implications on the course of your life, he would say to a scrawny figure in giant sports T-shirt and curls, clutching one infant and flanked on either side by wide-eyed and silent dirty-faced urchins, figures from Dickens transported to the city Hay had taken upon himself to redeem.

      Grasping the mother’s attention, he launched into his most laden rhetoric – a style ingrained from his father’s campaigning days, when Haycraft himself had been the plump-cheeked child clutching the trouser leg, the difference being that this leg had been clothed in worsted wool, and that Hay’s face as a