Robert Kloss
BREAKING NEWS: Napoleon Bonaparte… Dead…. Murder or illness? Our experts debate!
…..According to “unnamed sources” the tiny tyrant died screaming the name of his sainted mother. In French. CNN filled up all four hundred separate television screens in their 365 degree war room with the faces and voices of experts from around the globe, and these discussed the man, the myth, the monomaniac. From the mousse he favored to his physical stature, “a short man no doubt but others responded to him,” these “political” and “historical” experts covered “all the bases.” PBS held a round table discussion featuring seven balding intellects, each a recipient of one Nobel Prize or another, plus a Jewish novelist most thought had won the Prize a few years back and was only too happy to assume the posture of one who had. One of these gentlemen dusted off a poem he had written years earlier on occasion of Waterloo and had updated that morning. A famous imagist poem, although most housewives who found themselves drawn into the fray concluded it had more to do with an old barn and a shovel than Napoleon.
So it seemed the heart attack had diminished the man.
…..“Your mother,” Dad said with authority, “was always aiming to dress you in a sailor outfit. I was always there to put my foot down. Over my dead body, I said. See what I mean?”
…..Pete nodded. “All right,” he said.
…..His dad snorted, handed the photos back. “For all the good it’d do you and those boys of yours.”
…..Pete ordered another glass of merlot. Dad sneered sideways behind his Miller Genuine Draft.
…..“It’d be good to let me see them. Instill some real values in my grandchildren. Masculine values.”
…..“Bonaparte is a mast whipping at the mercy of the wind storm of History,” said Tolstoy.
…..Foreheads pressed and numbed and now children whispered to each other.
As a small boy Pete believed the world was about to end. Even a child couldn’t watch the evening news without anticipating the final blast—how often did Dad tune into Tom Brokaw at six and there sat Tom, visibly shaken, a picture of Napoleon nestled over his shoulder, curled lip, all fury and indignation, the text reading “Destroyer?” Finally Tom would speak: “Emperor Bonaparte insists the United States has broken existing treaties by flying fighter jets over the soil of a sovereign nation.” And if you were such a child you couldn’t escape this news, even if you did run along and play at six o’clock. The End Times were everywhere. Even little Punky Brewster did an episode where she lay in bed refusing to eat until the President and the Emperor came to some accord. Punky’s old dad weeping at her side: “Honey, you have to eat! Punky, dearest, we can’t dictate policy to great men!”
…..We sense, now, the world gone wrong, because we can’t escape the hurricanes and health care legislation, but when we were children we lay rigid in our beds, starship sheets pulled taut to our chins, staring upward at our glow in the dark constellation stickers, mentally gauging the strength, the solidity, of our room, our bed, our house, and the earth far below. We considered, in this gauging, how in the press of a button, as Tom Brokaw said, as Punky said, it’d all be rubble or worse.
…..Our moms, our dads, our cats, our GI Joes, and our comic books.
“I’m sick Pete. You can see it in my eyes. You can’t keep a dying man from his grandchildren.”
We dream some nights of chasing our cat out of the rubble and down the streets. We all remember, for the entirety of our lives, the dream-terror of chasing her down the Eau Claire streets as fighter jets roar above, shooting flaming rockets into the comic book store. The flames disintegrating the Hulks and the Fantastic Fours, the ashes of these on the wind like dead leaves, while you’re still chasing her, your tabby cat, even faster now, because she sees a mouse or a bird, the last mouse or bird in creation, even while a tank rampages along otherwise deserted Water Street. Cannon swiveling with mechanical languor before finally fixing on a preening solitary—it’s your cat! The cannon fixed there and intent on firing. In your dream you scream and scream her name before she finally turns and runs back to you, as the tank bears down. You hold her tight, her soft fur tickling your nose, and you wipe your tears in her scruff. You wake with her purring on your chest. The thunder of your heartbeat.
“I don’t trust you intellectual fellows no more than I can throw you, professor. But times like these we make strange alliances. Now, let’s do this nice and easy. Let’s clean you up a little. Tell your wife and boy it’s all right. You’re gonna do the right thing after all.” The soldier adjusted his reflecting glasses and smiled.
…..Power lines snapping off and writhing like snakes in the bricks and wood. “Mama, what do bodies smell like when they’re being electrocuted?”
Although a thousand miles inland, and several thousand miles from France, the bomb drill sirens at Longfellow Elementary in Eau Claire, Wisconsin blew a minimum of once a week and some weeks even more so. Blue lights flashed and whirred and so school shopping at K-mart became forever linked in the Pavlovian fashion to cold sweats and the apocalypse. Chalk was dropped in mid-lesson and always Mrs. Waldusky tightened her lips confidently while her eyes darted, slightly anxious. As if this could well be the real deal. Her admonishments to those who whispered or giggled in-line, no longer a terrible bluster, screaming and smashing rulers, but a trembling, slightly, all too human, “children please be serious!”
…..The boys nestled safely in their bedrooms in their starship PJs and their dinosaur sheets.
“No matter the Emperor’s right notorious brilliance as a general, it’s a little hard for an agent of freedom to condone a man given to these why to these transgressions against the natural decency of mankind,” said the old President on occasion of rejecting a fruit basket received from St Helena.
“Let’s see your passport there. Nice and easy.”
Foreheads pressed tight to the basement walls—in the great belly of the school. They lined the hallways, the music rooms, the cafeteria, the gym with children. Silent save their breathing, heavy, their quiet groans as muscles and joints stiffened, as teachers, severe gray haired women in knee length navy blue skirts and ruffled white blouses paced along the ranks, explaining why they must keep their heads down, why they must cover their soft precious necks with clasped hands, why they no longer did these drills in the classrooms under their desks: in short because the old ways of doing things, of cowering under desks in classrooms filled with all those windows “would be bad, children, frankly quite bad. Why, a bomb blast would send all that glass right into you. A child such as you, sniveling down there, Peterson Smith, could become decapitated in no time!” And, just in case someone had not heard this sermon the previous week, Mrs. Waldusky reminded them, “that means it cuts your head off.” Sarah Westerburg, in her red velvet dress with little red ribbons tied in her pig tails begins weeping. Again. “Children, you well know nobody nowhere is entirely safe from the horrid French and their missiles. However, the basement is our best shot ha ha in case of attack. In fact, there are so few windows in our general area that if I hazard a guess only a few of you would be maimed by flying glass. Let me tell you each: with five hundred blessed heads in these hallways a half dozen or so of you is really not so many. Your odds are good! Children, take heart!”
…..soldiers in the jungles and flashes of orange smoke and banana trees cut down by heavy artillery—
You wake mom from her slumber long enough to ask her a question about all these things you have seen on the news and in your dreams.
…..She tells you about the Nazis and the Holocaust and how everyone who had blond hair and blue eyes was all right and how now it’s really like that.
…..“But we don’t have blond hair and blue eyes!” you say, barely able to breathe.
…..“Your dad does Pete. Your dad has blue eyes.” And then she’s snoring again. For the rest of the week you wander daydreaming of the moment Napoleon comes to your house with tanks and glowering trench coated thugs, capturing you and your mom. They send you in stinking cattle cars to camps nestled somewhere in the valley, and here they will make soap of you, while your dad remains at home, watching football with the French soldiers; all of their eyes, in your mind now, a preternatural blue.
…..They currently knew nothing but strange fictions.
Some nights all these thoughts build and build, your heart pounding, so you think of nothing else, your throat becoming smaller and smaller, until you become convinced you can no longer breathe, that you are dying, and you begin to scream.
…..Often your mother calmed you but the last time your father came. His hair messed like a child’s, he wore only a white t-shirt and holey white briefs. He crouched next to you, put his hand on your mouth. His arm hairs brushed your nose. “Shhhh,” he said. He pushed his hand down harder. “Shhhh.” His breath like a gust from a furnace. This is before he drank, before his breath smelled of schnapps and beer, and there was only that heat.
Thrown to the ground. The asphalt scuffing his trousers, scraping his palms bloody. He looked up. Smiles and reflecting sunglasses. The sun down all around them.
…..“Don’t you know a war’s on buddy?” one soldier said.
…..“Why are you doing—” Pete began.
…..“He wants to know why!” another soldier laughed. His colleagues smiled. “For a know it all professor you’re not a real smart guy are you?”
“Today we celebrate the life of Napoleon Bonaparte. Now, this may seem controversial to some. But to paraphrase the English writer Thomas Carlyle, Napoleon had true heroic qualities, in the sense that his actions dictated the motions of entire nations, and forever after altered the course of world history,” said the current President.
Of course, once the third and fourth grade classes of Longfellow Elementary recognized their own little Frenchman, they silently decreed no quarter. At recess, they removed his shorts, hoisted them onto the flag pole while he screamed for help. Later, fourth graders chased him, hurling rocks at his back, his legs, and these sometimes smacked his head. His ears rang and stars flashed in his eyes. They sandwiched him in on the school bus, twisted his nipples and spit in his ear, threatened to capture him for the duration of the bus route, take him home with them. “We got a fort,” they said. “I’ve got a Bowie knife at home too,” another said. “My dad gave it to me. Want to see it Pete?” They stole his tennis shoes, tied the laces, tossed them over electric wires, chased him on their bikes whenever his mom sent him to the corner store for bread and milk. Pinned him to the sidewalk and dripped yellow loogies onto his face, down his shirt. Pulled his underwear over his head until the band snapped.
…..a little rat fink snitch spy
“Take off, Paulie,” Pete’s dad slapped his palm onto the bar. Paulie backed away slow with his hands up, mock frightened. “The guy’s a real clown, most of the time. But you have to be careful with those types of characters,” Dad explained.
…..The twenty inch TV over the bar showed flickering archival footage of Napoleon dedicating the Arch de Triumph with a busted bottle of champagne, while streamers and confetti rained down him. Napoleon surveying the troops before mounting his horse. Pete’s dad snorted, snuffed his cigarette, ordered another beer.
…..“You bring some pictures of them grandkids of mine?”
…..Pete handed two from his wallet. A pair of smiling perfectly happy little boys in sailor outfits.
…..“Jesus Christ,” Pete’s dad said. “Sailor boys huh?”
…..They showed the boys pictures that, with his whitening hair and ruddy nose, portrayed a man resembling an emaciated Santa Claus. Before the heart attacks even. Told the boys little else but myths.
…..Breaking News: Death Faked! Napoleon Sets Sail for New Conquests!
According to initially vague accounts, rumors, unnamed sources, and an electronically altered voice played eerily over a black screen, Napoleon Bonaparte had falsified his death and escaped St Helena Island, where he had been held these last years. Emperor Bonaparte, these often frenzied reports claimed, had been reunited with a “willful and extremely dangerous group of loyalists.” While no one quite understood where this ragtag group of revolutionaries was headed, satellite photos of a small shipping vessel seemed destined for the United States. Military heads theorized Napoleon had spent the last years concocting an elaborate plan to overtake the United States. These experts were divided on the “risk factor” although as one retired general from Boston said: “if anyone can pull off such a hare brained scheme it’s Napoleon” later adding, “he is, after all, above the limitations of History.” Still another famous genius punctuated this assertion with, “Emperor Napoleon c’est History.”
Before the funeral Pete stooped over little Jacob knotting his maroon and gray tie, smoothing the folds out of his little white shirt.
…..“Grandpa died of a heart attack,” Jacob said.
…..“That’s right Jake.”
…..“He’s in heaven now.”
…..“Maybe.”
…..“Nobody knows for certain,” Jacob said.
…..Pete kissed the boy’s forehead. “That’s exactly right Jake.”
A military roadblock: two canvass green jeeps parked across the road. Soldiers in camouflage and holding rifles leaned against their vehicles as if a photographer were snapping shots for the cover of Time magazine.
…..Driving from the opposite direction, Pete eased on the gas. “You’re kidding me,” he said, trying to sound annoyed with the inconvenience.
…..“It’s okay Pete. Just. Do what they say,” Beth said from the passenger seat.
…..Jacob in the back seat leaning forward until Pete felt his son’s breath warm on his hair. “Daddy why are we stopping?”
…..“Army men in the road Jake, that’s all.” The breath still there. “Sit down Jake and smile for the army man.”
…..The man knocked on the window until Pete rolled it down.
…..“Let’s see your passport there,” the soldier said. Pete handed over his driver’s license. “You got wax in your ears, fella? I said I want your fucking passport.”
…..“I don’t carry my—”
…..The door suddenly jerked open. Hands tore the seams of his shirt. Jacob screamed.
…..“A tough guy huh? Not too bright there tough guy.”
…..Steel blue eyes and the steel blue ocean. Waves ripple around them. He stands erect and unmoved while nearby mortal men heavily bundled, shiver.
“You know,” Pete’s dad told the bartender, “I tried teaching this guy how to throw a curveball, I think it was. Sure, a curveball. He was probably eight or ten, who knows. Anyhow, I got Pete here down in his catcher’s stance, you know, and, I don’t know, he must’ve heard some cute girls walking by, I don’t know, got the scent or something, because all of a sudden he’s looking there—” Dad gestured to the left, “when everybody knows the ball is coming here,” Dad drew a line right down the middle, “so how surprising is it when the little idiot gets an eyeful of that ball?”
…..“Don’t suppose it is at all,” the bartender said.
…..“But this guy, he thought it was. He sure did,” Dad laughed. Cuffed Pete on the shoulder, then rubbed him behind his head. “I never heard a kid bawl so hard. Never saw him run so fast either! Wouldn’t stop until he found his ma.” He chuckled again. “Don’t take it so hard, Petey, some boys just aren’t born athletic.”
…..“I think I’m over it,” Pete said.
…..“I hope to Jesus Christ you haven’t ruined those grandsons of mine.”
…..Pete said nothing.
…..“They got mitts?”
…..“Not yet, dad.”
…..“God, I can almost see them now.”
…..Pete didn’t have the heart to tell the old man that the youngest, Henry, had died of a fever, several years before.
…..Enhanced satellite imagery shows a pale faced, although quite alive, Napoleon Bonaparte, with bayonet affixed, at starboard bow. Fishing vessel slicing through the steely Atlantic.
At the casket Pete squeezed his son’s hand and the boy squeezed back. Looked up, uncertain. Pete rested his hand on the boy’s shoulder. “It’s not so bad Daddy,” Jacob said.
…..“No, you’re right. It’s not bad at all Jake.”
Now Pete went to the front window and looked out onto the neighborhood, silent blackened houses, and the street lit orange by lamplights. He had nearly, out of some inexplicable longing, allowed that man into his boy’s life, and he could never again allow such a weakness. He was a father now and a father must protect at all costs.
“We all believed he was dead. It’s true. But now we wonder if they didn’t slip him a pill or two, to slow his heart rate I mean. They carried him out in heavy green wool blankets. He was quite dead to my mind. I’m astounded as the rest of you by these events,” said Napoleon’s personal secretary at St Helena.
…..Dad lingered in the doorway but only to yawn. Then there remained the soft glow of the night light. You watched that until your eyelids fell shut and you heard then only your pacified breathing.
They left the car alongside a dirt road. The gravel crunched under their feet. They stood surveying the boundless stretch of wheat shimmering. Pete put his hand on Beth’s arm and felt the goose-chill with his fingertips.
…..“We’ll be safe out here,” she asked. “Won’t we, Pete?” Her dark brown hair fluttered in the breeze. Her tired gray under eyes.
…..“We’ve come a long way,” is all he allowed. They set up camp nearby for the night and in the morning they continued on our way. The snow crested mountains in sight by then. Their hearts seized with awe like old time explorers. They drove to the base of the mountain as far as the car could go and in the nearest village they sought out a guide. Someone wise and trustworthy and cheap. They paid him in cash to take them as high as he could and he brought along his son to help them heft their things.
…..Then they set off, their hiking boots tied tight, the atmosphere going thin around them and Beth leaned on Pete every hundred feet and then every ten feet and Pete in turn leaned on the mountain. The guides far ahead of them. Pete turned every once in a while, scanning the prairies and farms stretched out before them, making certain he see the armies, the clouds of debris and smoke. The air was thin and distance was difficult to gauge with any accuracy. There was no news of Napoleon’s progress in the village. The east coast though, they now accepted, was gone.
…..Miles up they found a clearing of trees and grass and a spring. They let the guides spend the night and in the morning they left. Pete cooked a breakfast of eggs and hash browns and they made love through the morning and spent the day thereafter eating and drinking coffee from the campfire. They sat out in the chill grass looking at the mountain peaks still high above like monuments to long forgotten gods.
…..“Are you happy, Pete?” Beth asked quietly in the night. “Are you happy with our life?”
…..“Yes,” Pete said. “It’s nice here.”
…..They fell in love again after the pain of Jacob’s death and maybe they’ll try for a child again. Pete reflects how it’s no good idea to bring new life into a dying world, but there are certain instincts that override philosophical inclinations. Pete has for so long dreamed of Jacob, and of the one before, of Henry, often waking in fits of panic, breathless and streaked with cold sweat. Now he dreams only of Charles. The not-yet conceived gray eyes peering upward, curious. They will have built a hovel of branches and mud by then. A home.
…..The natives visit occasionally and trade goods with them, their moccasins stamping deer-like tracks into the mud trail. They bring seeds and pots and pans and medicines and chairs of wicker. Beth and Pete sit in those chairs each evening watching the sunset. Their hands entwined. Their breath stopped for the beauty.
…..Her belly beginning to rise. Camp fire flickering and the moon full and orange overhead. Autumn leaves shivering in a breeze. Pete put his arm around her, shoulders covered in a shawl she knitted herself.
…..“He’s coming,” Pete says.
…..There are no appropriate words. There is no expression. So she says, “I’m scared Pete.”
…..Pete nods. “Me too. I’m scared too, honey.”
…..He shudders at the blooming redness in the valley below. The smoke rising from the red. The roar of the cannons like thunder in the heavens. He pulls Beth tight against his chest. Her breaths are sharp and fast. Pete tries to make soothing noises but his throat is choked. The smell of gunpowder rising. The sound of drums firing off like air rifles.
…..He is coming.
…..The crunch of the gravel under a hundred thousand boots.
…..He is here.
–
Robert Kloss: “Life During Wartime or a Blooming Redness” is a selection from my memoir in nightmares, Birds of Prey.