Fiction: Orville Baumgardner and Saint Elmo’s Fire

By James Hanna

    

“Dear ladies of the League of Women Voters, thank you for inviting me to speak for an hour in your glorious assembly hall. If a ray of true hope has penetrated our country’s partisan gloom, it is the torch held up by you, dear ladies, in your search for fairness and truth. Truly, you rival the Mother of Exiles by beckoning me to your shore, for I assure you there is no one more homeless and tempest-tossed than me. Yes, unlike the cold meandering glare that adorns our ships of state, your glow is truly charitable and as warm as an April sun. No chilling light for you, my good ladies, no courtship of wood-rotted masts, but a glimmer befitting a fireside where chestnuts may be popped.          

“But, ladies, you have not summoned here me to belabor the obvious. You have asked me to speak because I’m an anomaly—a Republican Party stalwart who broke ranks with his brethren in sin and is willing to speak the naked truth to all who might listen to him. But even the most conspicuous crusader must provide a bit of fact, so let me give you my background before I discuss my breach. 

“I was born in Castleberg, Indiana, sixty-two years ago, and I spent my childhood collecting stamps and gathering butterflies. No childhood rebellions for me—I was utterly content to sit in the back of my classrooms and peek at girlie mags. I attended Butler University, where I in no way distinguished myself, but my gentleman’s Cs were sufficient to earn me a bachelor’s degree in economics. After graduating, I challenged the Democrat incumbent in House District 54, and to my amazement, I won the seat with seventy percent of the vote. I do not attribute this to the power of my ideas, but because I had the good sense to express no ideas at all. Ideas are invariably half-baked, at their time of implementation, so I spent my time reading great books instead of proposed legislation. I daresay I have read over two hundred books, including all of Shakespeare’s plays, and I believe my talents would have been better served had I been a thespian. But instead, I chose to upstage my cronies and call them what they are: disciples of distraction and darlings of disarray.

“Ah, I see that one of you has put up her hand. Please speak up, lovely lady, and may I say that the dress you have on compliments your thighs. You wish to know if I truly believe that the truth has set me free. To this I reply, ‘What is freedom?’ If freedom means one is condemned then I, a GOP castaway, am truly the freest of men. I am free to suffer cannonades and bare my chest to storms. I am free to guide my floundering craft into a blistering wind. And if that is insufficient to establish my sovereignty, I am free to be driven from harbors where pirates and charlatans feast.

“However, dear ladies, I also am free to stand in your wondrous light. I am free to bask in a glow reserved only for martyrs and saints. I say to you this: the immeasurable warmth of your cherished company would be cheaply bought if my suffering were to multiply fiftyfold.

“I see that another has put up her hand. Yes, you with the billowy hair. You wish to know more about how an imposter like me, a wholly contemptible man, found the hubris to cast himself as the conscience of the land. I would like to say that a burning bush put an end to my rakish ties—that my fetish for truth resulted from a grand epiphany. But, alas, my turnabout was born from the merest of jealousies—from the fact that I, the most artful of bounders, was not handed my fair share of the plunder my fibs and embellishments enabled our party to steal. Ladies, throughout my twenty years as an Indiana congressman, I conjured up lies so inventive that they had no precedent. It was I who concocted the rumor that the dreaded COVID vaccine was injecting socialist dogma into unsuspecting brains. It was I who claimed that kiddie soccer was coached by pedophiles—perverts whose calling was not to teach soccer and nurture good sportsmanship but to march our dear boys to drag shows and turn them into queens. I even improved on the rumor that school shootings are staged events—I did this by assuring my constituents that the deep state wanted their guns so that government surgeons could storm their homes and make women out of men. So ingenious were my fables, so infectious my deceit, that I blush to confess that my docile supporters swallowed every word. How sad it is now to look back on myself as no more than a pickpocket’s shill, a raconteur whose gift for diversion and uninhibited tongue enabled the robber class to get away with its sleight of hand.

“I see that another has raised her hand. Saintly lady, please say your piece. Was I a modern-day Ebenezer Scrooge? you ask. Was I visited by three ghosts? Was I whisked to realms where I could take stock of the darkness I had sown? I repeat, gentle lady, that I became a pariah because I am a spiteful man—because I was paid a mere pittance for being the Charles Dickens of shams. Although my lies spurred millions to lose sight of the American dream, the corporate fat cats I profited did not seat me at their feast. Instead, I was paid just a few thousand dollars—a sum that hardly compared with the fortune Mitt Romney, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio shared. Those three are too woefully shopworn to fetch such a price for their souls, yet they were invited to dine with tycoons while I supped from a bowl of gruel.

“And so, being loathe to settle for such an insulting fee, I chose to take a pauper’s revenge on those who had overstepped of me. ‘Flatterers!’ I hollered. ‘Suckerfish! Eaters of broken meats! Shirkers of duty, soldiers of shams, corporate-indentured cheats! Since you do nothing but suck on the tit of Babylon’s Great Whore, an infamy has befallen you which I will no longer endure!’ And when they called me a miscreant and deemed me of no further use, I cried, ‘I am truly a turncoat, but I’m no longer a traitor to truth!’

“They say that hell has no fury like that of a woman scorned, but not even the venom of Circe, a wrath that turned men into swine, compares with the rage of the fraudsters that placed me in their sights. Ladies, they called me the antichrist, they voted me out of their pack, they made me the target of so many threats that I sleep with a gun by my side. They even had me indicted for groping a girl of thirteen, but I swear on a tower of Bibles that I barely touched the child.

“Ladies, I turned the other cheek, hoping to prick their shame, but their appetite for vengeance was too gluttonous to tame. Had I performed a murder or two, they might have set me free, but I had committed a far greater breach—the sin of disloyalty. 

“Ah, I see yet another hand raised. What is your question, my dear. You wish to know if my sail is so tattered, my banishment so complete, that I have become a disciple of our waning democracy. How I wish that were true, gentle lady, but my exile is absolute—my intolerance for falsities too tempered to defeat. This sham we call democracy is something I will not spare, for the ocean I cleave is so barren, the stars I have charted so dim, that my soul is a suitor to nothing but a raw and pitiless wind. If I may paraphrase Bob Dylan, whose prophecies yet blaze, I’ve been ten thousand leagues from the mouth of a graveyard, a journey I cannot retrace. So, consider the Allegory of the Cave before claiming yourself to be free and then ask yourself this: ‘Am I pondering shadows instead of reality?’ 

“Are we truly free when our founding thieves, our chauvinists of old, are able to reach across history and take away our votes? Are we free when insatiable moguls wed to parliamentary whores have license to ship our jobs abroad so they can stuff their pockets more? And are we free when our lords are so grasping that they see enemies where there are none and claim the right to slaughter our youth in completely unnecessary wars? ‘Defend our freedom!’ our helmsmen cry out, but our chickens have come home to roost. So, to this, I say, ‘Do not speak of freedom while giving despots a boost.’

“Ah, I see yet another hand raised. So, what is my mission? you ask. Dear lady, I have no mission—my exclusions afford me no quest. I am haunting a broken dinghy on an ocean too furious to cross. I am Coleridge’s ancient mariner abandoned to mounting seas with only the snarl of the cresters to keep me company. And should I spot an occasional flicker, a promise of dawn’s early light, my hopes are quickly buffeted as these specters fade from sight. They are not the glimmer of home fires enabling me to plot my course, but the taint of Saint Elmo’s Fire adorning the spires of rotten crafts.

“And there you have it, ladies. Such is the destiny of a wretch whose soul is too barren to be buoyed by idolatries. I have no wish to be saved from the deafening waves by a siren’s melody. I wish only to know which of our so-called saviors will steal the least from me. And with this sad confession, my dears, I thank you for the chance to stand in your splendid assembly hall and be warmed by your innocence. Alas, I see that my time is now up, that my hour is consumed, but if you have any further questions, I will be at the back of the room.

 

 

 

 

 

James Hanna is a retired probation officer and a former fiction editor. His work has appeared in over thirty journals, including Crack the Spine, The Literary Review, and Sixfold. He is also a frequent contributor to A Thin Slice of Anxiety. James is the author of seven books all of which have won awards. Global Book Awards recently gave him a gold medal for contemporary fiction.