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cc&d v185

this writing is in the collection book
Charred Remnants
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Charred Remnants, the 2008 Down in the Dirt collection book
The Yellow Pimpernel

Pat Dixon

    Glancing at his watch, the President noted ruefully that he would have to set aside his writing yet once more because of the demands of his office.
    Life, he thought, gently gnawing on his lower lip, is an array of compromises and trade-offs.
    His eyes glanced up at his leather-bound copy of Marcus Aurelius, and he sighed.
    We share some of the same frustrations, Marcus, old boy. What would you think of my modern world, eh? Pretty horrendous—but somehow you would have found the inner strength to plug along and give your best.
    He sighed and glanced at his fingers, which rested on the keyboard of his laptop.
    How many languages did you master, Marcus, old boy? Two? He felt quietly proud that he had kept up his own studies of Latin during the past four decades and had taught himself modern and ancient Greek, German, Russian, French, Romanian, Italian, Arabic, Japanese, Hebrew, and, of course, Spanish. Drawing a deep breath, he put his bookmarks back into his volumes of Goethe, Kafka, Dostoyevsky, Leibnitz, Pirandello, Karl Barth, Dante, and Schweitzer and gently closed them. Glancing calmly at his open Greek Testament, he reread five more verses and then tucked the red silk ribbon flat before closing those pages, too.
    “Martha, axe my wife t’ step in here for a moment, will y’ please?” he said into the intercom.
    He began tucking his books back into the private drawer of his desk, barely hearing the reply, “Certainly, Mr. President.”
    As the door opened and his wife appoached, he hit the “save” command on his computer and closed the document—deceptively titled “Baseball Dream Teams.” Then he picked up his portable CD player and put the earphones loosely into his ears.
    “How’s it goin’, Hon?” she asked, closing the door behind her. Her eyes showed a keen, intelligent interest and, to a lesser degree, concern for her husband.
    “Three more pages done—I’m inching towards a new kind of interfaith synthesis which will bring atheists and Buddhists and—and—” (he paused to grin boyishly) “and Rastafarians together, uniting them with the mainstream monotheists and polytheists. But I’m still not sure what can be done with the Christian Scientists and the—the L. Ron Hubbardites.”
    “Do you have a publisher for it yet?” his wife asked.
    “Yep. This essay will appear in The Yale Theological Review, and when I have the next two essays completed, Yale’s press will bring out my next collection. They’ve agreed to let me do a ‘Dummies’ version of five of the essays for HarperCollins so the public will have a crack at my latest thoughts, too.”
    “That’s really great! Would it be all right if I glance over what you’ve added?”
    “Mmmm—Lady-love-lotus-blossom, I’d rather you didn’t. I have to pop out of here in another minute or so to join the Prime Minister of Israel for a photo-op in the Rose Garden. I’m just ‘getting in character’ now with my language tracks, an’ then I’ll have to go. ‘Ooh my little pretty one, pretty one. / When you gonna give me some time, Sharona?’ I’ll let you read it tonight—or better yet, I’ll read it to you. I know you won’t have trouble with the French, German, and Italian, but you’d need me to translate the Russian and Greek passages. Damn—I wish I knew ancient Hebrew better! ‘Never gonna stop, give it up.’ Ha. ‘Such a dirty mind. / Always get it up for the touch / Of the younger kind. / My my my i yi woo. M-M-M-My Sharona.’ Talk me down, Hon. I sure as heck can’t go out there singin’ this song.”
    “Okay. Focus, Babes. Tell me again why you sign your serious articles and books with the pseudonym S. P. Blakeney?”
    “Well, when I was a kid, I saw that ol’ Leslie Howard film, The Scarlet Pimpernel, about a shrewd guy who pretended to be a goofball so’s he could do a lot of good on the sly. I al’ays thought ol’ Leslie an’ me looked a heap alike, an’ I kinda modeled m’self after him in some ways. An’ I read the book a whole ton o’ times, too. So’s when I started writin’ my highbrow stuff, I sorta hid b’hind the character’s name—Sir Percy Blakeney—S. P. for short in my book.”
    “An’ why do you have the little yellow flower on the dust jackets and embossed into the cloth of the covers? Tell me again.”
    “It’s ‘cuz I r’late to the yeller rose of Texas, but this here ain’t really a rose. It’s a pimpernel, a little five-petal thing-dingy that really don’t come in yeller—least ways it don’t yet, but some botanicalist’s gonna invent one just to prove me wrong on ‘at. An’, o’ course, yeller was the main color o’ Mighty Mouse’s costume, an’ he was the other boyhood he-ro o’ mine.”
    “An’ plus it’s a kinda ‘in joke’ for you an’ me, who knows your secret identity. Right?”
    “Course it is. Neither m’ daddy nor my mom knows I kin read this kinda stuff, let ‘lone write it! Wouldn’t be proper—be like braggin’. ‘Sides, it’d be a security breech. Couldn’t trust ‘em to keep the secret. ‘Come a little closer huh, ah will ya huh? / Close enough to look in my eyes, Sharona. / Keeping it a mystery gets to me, / Running down the length of my thighs, Sharona.’ Whoa! Don’t be thinkin’ them kinda words, fella! Not just now, anyways. Ha. Anyhow, I gotta go now, Hon. Wish me luck!”
    “Good luck, Dubby-babe! I know you’ll do just great out there.”
    She gave his arm a tight squeeze and his cheek a tiny kiss, and they left the Oval Office together.
    The President gave her a shy little wave as he walked toward the open doorway, flanked by Secret Service agents who wore dark suits, sunglasses, and earphones in their right ears.
    His wife walked toward the elevator, humming to herself.
    “ ‘There’s a yeller pimpernel in Texas, / La-la-la-laaaa dee-deeeeee,’ ” she sang barely audibly. The doors opened, and she stepped in, pressed a dark button, and glanced up at the indicator lights as the doors reclosed.
    “ ‘When you gonna give it to me, give it to me? / It is just a matter of time, Sharona. / Is it just destiny, destiny? / Or is it just a game in my mind, Sharona?’ ”
    She began to giggle to herself. Now he’s got me doin’ it! she thought.
    “ ‘Never gonna stop, give it up. / Such a dirty mind. / Always get it up for the touch / Of the younger kind. / My my my i yi woo. M-M-M-My Sharona.’ ”
    As the elevator doors opened, she glanced in her mirror and adjusted her facial expression to that of a Stepford Wife before she stepped out. Her secretary was peering out of a doorway forty feet away, holding the correspondence they had begun answering.
    She found that it was difficult to walk to the rhythms of either “My Sharona” or There’s a yeller pimpernel in Texas, so, with a bland, stoner smile on her mouth, she shifted to the more martial song that her husband sang some nights while wearing his yellow flannel pajamas and the set of vintage Mouseketeer ears they had found fifteen years ago at a Dallas flea market. It seemed appropriate to sing it aloud.
    “Here I am to save the day! Yup. Here I am, Traci, dear—all ready to get back to work.”
    “Ready when you are, Mrs. Bouche. You sure are the perky one today. Wish I knew the secret of—of—of—of all your energy!”



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