Free The President's Angel by Sophy Burnham Page A

loved.
    He had no trouble making friends. Always in a pack, leader of the pack, and the mud sliding they did and pounding down alleys, and screaming, playing with swords or wrestling with each other, rough and tumble and a lot of physical activity. And then the way of it—the girls. The girls would walk past and the boys would go quiet for a second, as if a monster had passed (they were only ten or twelve) and then erupt into screams and shouts, catcalls, and they’d jump and push each other wildly, and run like crazy, running away from the girls and running toward them, showing off. And the girls in their ankle socks, carrying schoolbooks, would turn their imperious heads and sniff. Or else, sometimes, collapse into giggles themselves and run away.
    And later, in high school, he fell in love every third week, they were all so pretty. Betty and Nancy and Mary Lee. He had one girl, Lucy, and they necked and kissed and explored each other’s bodies in ways his mother would have beat him for if she’d known.
    One day he heard his father had died, this father whom he had never met. He called Lucy and took her out into the woods behind the school and kissed her fiercely. He felt her breasts and put his hand up her skirt, while she squirmed and twisted in delicious horror, as his hand went up into her underpants.
    â€œStop,” she whispered. “I’ll get pregnant.” He felt angry. He was hot, a demon then, and he came all over her, pumping himself clean between her frightened legs, and when he got up from the woodsy, earth-smelling forest floor, he stood looking down at her. He was a man! He wanted to crow. But she burst into tears. She kept smoothing her dress with tight little gestures and looking at him with aggrieved eyes. “Why did you do that?” she asked again and again—as if he had done something to her. And, “There’s a stain on my dress. What will my mother say?”
    He didn’t care what her mother said. Suddenly he disliked Lucy. He held out his hand, though, and pulled her to her feet and put one arm around her and told her everything would be all right. And walked her to the corner where she lived. He left her. He went to his room in his own house and jerked off. Afterward, she began to talk about marriage.
    He left town. And he never went back except for his mother’s funeral, that was all, and for the unveiling of the memorial they put up for him, favorite and most famous son. He started college and then his political career and left that sad little ragged childhood behind.
    Everyone voted for him in his hometown. They claimed him now, and now he couldn’t do wrong by them in that place.
    So what is life about? Why was he not happy? He had everything he’d ever wanted, and the goddamn pols worrying that he was not pursuing war. He kept thinking about the past—about Randolph, who’d been his best friend in sixth grade. Randy became a dentist, and he was dead too; and Don, who drove a truck till he retired, and now he drove a motorboat; and Jervey Moffett and Beth and Bev, and they were all gone mostly, and he himself President, the most important man in the world, who had indulged in sex with countless women, whose faces and names he couldn’t recall. And here he was thinking about Lucy. And what was life about? He didn’t have any idea at all.
    It was a strange world in those days, with chaos and destruction everywhere. The prince of one country killed 150 soldiers, all by himself, point-blank, a bullet to the back of the head. Chaos and chemical war, and the Ring of Fire waiting for us all. And in each human being a mind so magnificent that every one of us holds a universe, complete and separate; and such order in this chaos that the moon swings full across the sea of night like a God every twenty-eight to thirty days. That’s chaos there?
The chaos is inside of me
, he thought,
in me
.
    He kept thinking about Lucy,