Our Napoleon in Rags. Kirby Gann
kerchief, his hair brilliantined, his teeth white, his tongue stinging from a drop of cachou. His discourse threatened unholy annihilation by the indifferent powers-that-be of the lowly citizen doing her best to make ends meet. Once this fear had been staked precisely in heart, Hay’s Fair Dealer appeared among the registration forms – forms he filled out himself in order to trouble the potential voter as little as possible, asking for signature only, sometimes signing for them beside their X.
UTILITY CREWS IGNORE OLD TOWNE STORM DAMAGE. PLASTICS TOOL & DIE: CITY ATTEMPT TO POISON OUR CHILDREN? From declining library funds to sewage anxieties to the rise in teenage prostitution and the latest police brutality; from calls for a civil review board to the syringe recycling program, Haycraft’s House of Representatives covered them all. Smothered and covered them all, he liked to say, with each article subtly steeped in his avowed subtext, his final goal: nothing less than full secession of the district from the city of Montreux. Old Towne as autonomous community. Haycraft Keebler, political philosopher and populist idealist, manic-depressive man-abouttown, was a secretly subversive character.
And who could not believe him? Who in such a lost and forlorn community could not be left with the suspicion that this charismatic and feverish man at the doorstep was not on to something?
Away with apathy! he shouted, striding through the alleyways. You are not so content! If our souls are on their knees, then let us bleach clean the pavement! Haycraft believed the people’s indifference only masked their fear, and that this fear was little more than a child’s staring at a lake, not yet knowing how to swim.
He embodied enough outward signs of the kook to prove convincing: ski cap in summer, pin-striped trousers held by buckled suspenders; massive feet bursting at the seams of plastic sandals – sandals he vehemently defended as necessity, for their massaging fibers allowed his head to remain clear and focused, and his odd widths and low arches made it difficult to find good, proper-fitting shoes. A polo shirt buttoned to the neck still could not hide the splash of hair graying over the collar, curling to the loose, stippled skin of the neck and chin, scarred with red streaks from years of poorly prepared shaving (he shaved using the same steel bowl where he soaked his feet, and prepared his skin with a bar of castile soap). Clean-cut but cursed with oily hair, all sixfeet-two and 220 pounds of him rooted in your doorway, the glint of passion in reserve cornering his eyes and you, tired from a hangover that has lasted into its third day or jonesing hard for a cigarette since you swore to quit (or at least cut back) instead of paying that new tax of seventy-five cents per pack, sickly full with beans and eggs for the umpteenth time, anxious over your station in life or else not giving a shit at all – your lack of a job or even direction crushing your blunted senses, and what’s this you hear about your benefits being cut off soon, and why won’t the kids shut up, and was that neighbor boy in the stolen SUV backed onto a fence post really trying to run over those police officers so that they had to shoot and kill him with sixty-four rounds? – and you, weighted with this day of your life in arrears, find this strangely focused but intensely assuring bear of a man in your doorway, unbidden, telling you that with the least bit of effort on your own part, with support from himself and his streamlined network of volunteer agents, this life of yours can change. For the better. For the problems you face are not yours alone, but the entire community’s. And that community is ready to act. All you have to do is sign here (or allow him to sign for you), join this mailing list, perhaps answer your phone if you have one. Endeavors will soon be undertaken.
Why not? What do you have to lose? He’s not preaching the glories of freshly minted religion; he’s not even asking for a handout. Here was a man with a mouth perpetually formed to say yes. Here was a man who spoke of practicalities. And he wanted to do all the work himself. Why not?
Naturally not everyone was pleased to find hulking Keebler at the stoop of their home. Those who lived in the few blocks of restored mansions (trapped, like Beau and Glenda, by the Come Back to Montreux! campaign) could do without him. Desperately hip young lawyers and fund-for-the-arts economic developers and anti-Freudian existential psychoanalysts and the entire fey interior-design fetishists crowd preferred to keep to themselves behind gilded walls and sculpted cornices, protected by brick and iron barriers. Haycraft could not access many of them due to the elaborate security systems at their gates; others owned vicious canine defenders, an animal Haycraft held a nearly superstitious fear of. So he steered clear of these homes by habit (discreetly rolling a copy of his broadside and dropping it through the iron bars), although he was not afraid to approach these owners for brief recruitment talks should he find them offhand some evening in the Don Q, dining on one of Glenda’s homemade spanikopitas or drop biscuits. But Beau did not want Haycraft pestering the ostensibly well-heeled patrons, that sacred few. Credit-card charges zoomed directly to his bank account, but the ratio between checks cleared and checks written was always a precarious one for the Stileses.
It was the lower castes of the Old Towne citizenry that gave Hay his heroic impulses and adamant fervor; they were the ones who most needed the catalytic spark, the symbol of some martyr.... The educated near-rich he held no sway with and knew it – he approached their doors out of a sense of duty, not confidence; he stuttered and fretted and accomplished little if someone answered their door to his surprise. But The Lost, as he called them, inspired his obstinacy. With them he sought connection. The Lost had been his father’s territory – to his father the lost and the local amounted to one and the same thing. All politics is local, and the locals is lost, he had liked to smirk when playing at his homespun manner, often, to his young son. So it was not beyond the realms of possibility that when Haycraft crossed paths with a particularly fragile soul, he might see the meeting as nothing less than the end of his solitary ways. A savior’s life is a lonely one.
Haycraft came marching past empty playgrounds and vacant lots through a warren of rookeries, full of himself for having signed a new subscriber to his newsletter, a silk-hatted young man in a T-shirt inscribed with the maxim TATTOOS WILL GET YOU LAID. They had agreed that if his secession plans succeeded then Hay could promise the young man a place in his cabinet, or at least a position in the cabal or shadow government he expected to organize to unofficially run things. On that glorious October day of ecstatic light sinking on the crisping leaves and cigarette butts he crushed under sandaled feet, shreds of burnt tobacco streaking behind his heels, Haycraft hurried to stay on schedule (the modest summit meeting had forced an extension to his allotted hours), until he was struck still with the same intensity as Jesus realizing sight of his first disciple.
Lambret Dellinger was the vision. Just a boy, fifteen and spindly thin beneath a white cotton Tee and faded black jeans, a pair of scruffy Doc Martens lifted from a thrift store covering his feet. He sat huddled beneath the glass wicket in the back gate at the Don Quixote, where the alley gave way to a stone garden Glenda tended, fenced in by fraying, treated wood. His hair was so black it appeared nearly blue in the shade, spiraling coils falling over his dark brown eyes and soft pale cheeks that were each rouged by the coming evening chill. He had never shaven, had never needed to. He sat with his back to the fence, arms crossed over the knees, chin on wrists, eyes staring blankly through waves of sheened hair. Absently he rolled a length of iron pipe back and forth along the length of his foot, the metal singing a sharp note about him. The stink of the city sifted in the alley breeze.
Haycraft, unaccountably bereft, beheld him. So taken by the sight he did not even notice car parts freshly dumped the length of the alleyway, nor the rolled chain-link fencing coiled against the curb. He shifted his satchel higher on his shoulder, transposed his weight from one hip to another. It was no good, he could not speak. He moved the satchel from right shoulder to left, waiting, his mind an empty slate, his eyes enlarging at the prospect of the boy – a mere wastrel! – descried there, he felt certain, as a sign: a sign for Haycraft only. Alone and bursting with youthful life – the violet splotches beneath his eyes notwithstanding, nor the stink of the rag soaked with mineral spirits drying between his wrists – a portrait of raw elegance in repose. His hair, wild and abundant, fell in thick locks over a surprisingly serene forehead. Surely the boy knew Haycraft was there, gazing haplessly. Why didn’t he say something? Then again, why didn’t Haycraft speak? For hours each day, unrestrained speech sprung from Hay’s tongue to total strangers. Now it was no good. His thoughts crossed and recrossed and crisscrossed the