Finale

Thursday, July 14, 2022

I woke first, as was my normal habit, and Marilyn woke a minute later. I lazed in bed as she climbed out and headed into the bathroom. There had once been a time when I would have hustled out of bed and taken on the world. Now I was feeling lazy. I snorted and smiled at that. Screw it! I was sixty-six years old and could justify sleeping a little later.

I listened to my wife futz around in the bathroom for a few minutes and dragged myself awake. The clock on the dresser said it was 7:12. When I heard her in the shower, I rolled over and kicked the sheets loose and struggled upright, stretching and scratching, and then stumbled into the bathroom. I used the toilet (but didn’t flush, because I would never hear the end of it from Marilyn!) and then brushed my teeth. My morning pill regimen now included an aspirin along with my Lipitor, but I counted myself fortunate in that. I knew people who took many, many more.

I debated working out but decided I didn’t need to. If I was completely honest, I was simply feeling lazy. The older I got the lazier I felt. I grabbed some underwear and set it on the counter and pulled out a pair of khakis and a sport shirt and hung them on a hook behind the door.

Marilyn got out of the shower and said, “Good morning.”

“Morning, hun.”

“No workout?”

“I’m sure there must be a good excuse not to, but I can’t remember it at the moment.”

She harrumphed. “Sounds like you’re just being lazy!” She had a rather superior look as she said this. Rats! She saw right through me! I gave my best aggrieved and affronted look and denied this, and then got in the shower myself. Through the door she asked, “Are we doing breakfast?”

“Don’t we always?”

“You know what I mean.”

“I’ll make some eggs when I’m dressed. Give me a few minutes, okay?”

“Thank you!” she replied.

I rolled my eyes at that. If I had really wanted to, I could have squeezed in a short run or some gym time before cooking, but then I would need to shower a second time, and I was definitely feeling lazy. I smiled at that. It was good to be the king, even if the kingdom was just a few dozen acres in Hereford.

I got out of the shower and shaved around my mustache and goatee. If it had been gray when I started growing it after the 2008 election, it was white now, as was the thin horseshoe of hair around my head. I glanced over at Marilyn who was now rubbing some lotion on her legs. “For the life of me, I will never understand how you can get into the bathroom before me and I still get finished before you,” I told her, as I pulled on my briefs.

She babbled out a few excuses that generally worked out as, “Just because!” At that point we heard some high-pitched barking from the living room. “Stop complaining and put the dogs out,” she ordered.

I pulled my pants on and zipped them up. “They’re not dogs. They’re an animal husbandry experiment that went very, very wrong!”

“You love them, and you know it!”

I grabbed my shirt and went bare-chested to the living room, and the dogs headed to the patio door off the dining room. I opened it and they scampered out to the back yard, and I put my shirt on. This was the first time I had ever owned more than one dog at the same time, and now we had three, which was further proof of my encroaching senility and decrepitude.

Our latest canine misadventure started last summer when we were visiting Charlie and his family in Laurel. He was having a backyard cookout, and we had been invited, along with the rest of the family. Marilyn and I happily agreed because this gave us a chance to play with the grandkids. Charlie and Megan had three girls, all blonde and blue-eyed honeys like their mother, while Bucky and Molly had three boys, none of whom looked alike. They had to be Bucky and Molly’s sons, though, and not the mailman’s since everybody agreed that the only way boys could get into that much trouble was if they combined Buckman and Tusk genes! Holly and Mickey were there, too, along with a fellow that Holly had been sweet on.

In any case, there we were in Laurel last year when Missy, the youngest Buckman, who had just turned five, came up to me and tugged my hand. “Grampaw, Lady and Rocky are fighting in the backyard!”

I gave my granddaughter a curious look. “Who’s Rocky?” Lady was a pedigreed long-haired dachshund bitch known officially as Lady Channing Beresford III. This was the only thing I never really understood about my son. Megan had grown up with long-haired dachshunds and now was breeding them. What Charlie was doing with such strange critters was beyond me! I couldn’t hear any of the sounds I would have associated with a dog fight, either. Missy took my hand and pulled me towards the French doors leading to the back yard, followed closely by Bucky and Charlie. Missy pointed to the two dogs.

“Rocky lives next door. He crawls under the fence when he wants to play.” Rocky looked to be a basset hound, and Lady and Rocky weren’t fighting, not by a long shot!

As Bucky and I tried to keep from laughing, Charlie turned bright red and shuffled Missy off to her mother before any questions could be raised. Megan came along about two seconds later, irate about how Rocky was polluting the bloodline and demanding that we stop laughing and do something about it! The more she demanded, the more we laughed, until eventually she ran out of steam about the same time as Rocky did. I think the best part was when Missy proudly told us that she had helped Rocky dig the hole under the fence, so that he could come over and visit and play. He had been visiting for a week now!

The Buckmans got lucky and about three months later five puppies were born. They were, without question, the oddest-looking things since The Island of Doctor Moreau! They had the coloration, faces, and ridiculous ears of bassets, but were short and long like chubby wiener dogs, and had long hair. I damn near died laughing, and Marilyn and I promised to take a couple of them off their hands once they were weaned. We named them Dizzy and Dusty, and they scampered everywhere after us. They were so short that we had to help them up into our recliners with us, and Marilyn actually bought a small set of steps and left it next to the bed, so they could clamber up at night! Ridiculous!

Meanwhile, Sami was still alive and healthy and chasing after Hamid. Sami pretty much ignored the two genetics experiments, who also tried chasing him around. Sami was tolerant, but occasionally would give them a growl and they would back off and chase Marilyn and me.

After I let them back in, I moved over to my recliner while Marilyn did some puttering in the bedroom. I sat down and was immediately set upon by a pair of mutts. They began to ‘Arf’ at me, so I reached down and helped them up to my lap before I moved the recliner back. After getting my face licked, they curled up on each side while I rubbed their bellies.

“That’s what you call making breakfast?” asked Marilyn as she came out of the bedroom.

“Take it up with them!” Dizzy and Dusty were squirming around on their backs as I rubbed their tummies.

“Is Daddy rubbing your belly?” she asked them. “Does that feel good?”

“Everybody likes to have their belly rubbed!”

“Including you?”

“Find out for yourself!” I replied, with a leer.

“I’m not that curious,” she answered, and headed off to the kitchen.

I laughed, and climbed out of the chair, leaving the mutts behind, and followed her into the kitchen. I began pulling staples from the refrigerator while Marilyn put a few dishes into the dishwasher. “So, today you are home, right?” she asked.

“Yeah. I thought you knew that.”

“Just checking if you changed your schedule. Tomorrow you’re still going into Washington?”

I nodded. “I’m meeting the reelection committee. Not sure when I’ll be home, but it’s a Friday, so everybody will want to get home early.”

Surprisingly, Charlie was the odds-on favorite to win reelection to the Senate this fall. It was still too early to be sure, but things were looking very positive. He hadn’t faced a primary challenge and had run a fairly error free campaign. On the Democratic side, things hadn’t gone so smoothly. A nasty primary fight had taken place between a Congressman from the Maryland Third, in downtown Baltimore, and a State Senator from Frederick County. That had been expensive and ugly, but the Congressman had won. Normally, in liberal and Democratic Maryland, that would have meant a very tough fight for Charlie, but by May, that began to change. It came out that both the U.S. Attorney for Maryland and the Maryland Attorney General were chasing said Congressman for a lengthy list of improprieties related to building permits and campaign funding from when the Congressman was a Baltimore City Councilman. The Congressman was crying ‘Foul’ and stating that this was all politically motivated, and while the U.S. Attorney was a Republican, the Maryland Attorney General was a Democrat, so that wasn’t flying. A grand jury was sitting and listening to testimony, and indictments were expected to be issued in plenty of time for the election. The Democrats were coming apart at the seams over it. I told Charlie a couple of times that it was better to be lucky than to be good, and that he was very lucky.

This was not to say that Charlie hadn’t done a decent job in his first term of office as a Senator. I had pulled what strings I could, and we managed to get him a good staff and a very good chief of staff and got him a seat on the Senate Armed Services Committee. After that it was up to him. The results were interesting.

Shortly after being sworn into office, Jeb Bush had announced he was creating a ‘blue ribbon panel’ to determine what to do about Somalia. Amidst that, Charlie had gone over there on a routine ‘fact-finding tour’. Unlike the other Congressmen and Senators who went and never set foot outside of the American compound south of Mogadishu, Charlie played hookie and broke loose. He caught a Blackhawk to a Marine base outside of Merca and found his own facts. In particular, he took a play from my old playbook and geared up as the world’s oldest lance corporal, and then went out on a patrol to an advance base and spent a couple of nights there before coming back. He took along a reporter and video team and gave them a running commentary on the whole thing, none of which was flattering to Hillary. That made the news - big time! I was unhappy; Marilyn and Megan were very unhappy! I was given the job of chewing his ass out when he made it back to civilization.

Charlie didn’t get shot at (at least not much, he told me) although he told me afterwards it was one of the scariest things he had ever done. Just driving around was an invitation to an IED strike, and the destruction and death were ceaseless and random. He did, however, discover a critical fact on his fact-finding tour, and that was that Somalia was unwinnable, which I had been saying for years. When he got home, he promised to work towards ending our involvement there.

In his first year, he cosponsored a bill with somebody on the Senate Appropriations Committee to increase funding for Somali veterans’ medical and psychological treatment, and then managed to get involved in hearings on corruption and mismanagement in the Veterans Administration. He was very careful to avoid throwing any of the blame on Jeb Bush or his appointees, but it was quite something to see him grilling a former administrator of a VA hospital and have them plead the Fifth on national television. Some of his senior colleagues thought he had overstepped the bounds, but he was gaining a national reputation as a Senate expert on the military. His next bill was to radically increase funding for prosthetics and related research.

He also copied me slavishly in terms of getting things accomplished in Washington. He cleared it with me ahead of time, but he did like I did and used the house on 30^th Street as a local residence as needed, most notably for dinner parties and political get-togethers. Likewise, he was able to offer fellow Congressmen and Senators (and their staffers) vacations at Hougomont, something I had done on numerous occasions. He had been paying attention after all. He was also doing all this on my dime, which simply proved he had been paying attention!

Some pundits and political observers were throwing his name around as a future Presidential candidate, and why not? More than a few got their start in the Senate. Two years ago, Charlie had been tapped to speak at the 2020 Republican Convention in New Orleans, introducing the keynote speaker, and had stolen the show and given a better speech! If he won reelection, the odds were he would give national office some serious thought in a few years. First, we had to make sure he won, though, so I was heading to D.C. tomorrow to check in with the reelection committee.

Some of the faces were different, however. Mike Steele had left ARI, and that had become a standard lobbying and think tank outfit. Frank Stouffer now ran Adrianopolis/Stouffer; Marty was semi-retired and living in Boca Raton with his fourth wife. Brewster was still running his outfit, but he was starting to think about retirement, too. Mindy was now in charge of AIP. Let’s face it; the old gang was all beginning to get a little long in the tooth.

Part of that extended to personal friends, also. President Bush had passed away a few years ago; I spoke at his funeral, as did most of the other remaining members of the Presidents’ Club. Tusker and Tessa were gone, too. They had died when a sinkhole had opened in Florida, collapsing the road they were driving on and causing them to crash. They were carried to their rest by an ex-President, a Senator, several major motorcycle manufacturing executives, and a bunch of biker club Presidents without their colors on. Hell of a sendoff! A couple of Marilyn’s brothers were also gone, cancer. My mother finally passed away as well, of excessive hatred as much as anything. She was eighty-nine and had spent most of her life cursing me. Suzie attended the funeral and told me our mother was buried next to my father and Hamilton. I doubted grass would grow over the site, it was now so toxic.

I was at a point in my life where reading the obituaries was becoming commonplace.

Marilyn’s voice brought me out of my woolgathering. “Fine. We can shop for birthday presents later this morning and then we’ll be all set for Saturday,” Marilyn she said.

“Which one is this again? Jack?” Jack Tusk was Bucky and Holly’s middle boy, soon to be age seven. Marilyn nodded in agreement at this. “We might as well go down to Towson,” I told her.

“I already told the driver that. Anyway, today is here and shopping, and tomorrow you are in Washington. Saturday is in Laurel. You still flying to Erbil on Sunday?” she asked.

I nodded at my wife, but my thoughts were on the changes in the Middle East between my first timeline and this one. On my first go-around, George Bush 43 had invaded Iraq and we had spent over a decade destroying the place. The only winner turned out to be Iran. The remnants of Iraq were destroyed in the partition following the Sunni-Shiite civil war, which spilled over from the Syrian Civil War, making the Iranians the most powerful regional player. That worked right up until the Iranians developed an atomic bomb and gave it to Hezbollah, who nuked Haifa in Israel. Two days later, Iran ceased to exist. The entire Middle East, from the Mediterranean to the Hindu Kush devolved into chaos, with a Sunni-Shiite religious war overlaying regional and tribal splits across the entire region. Millions had died by the time I recycled.

Now, although Syria had devolved into utter chaos, the mess had been contained. Iraq was only partially partitioned, with Kurdistan separate in the north. The Iraqi Revolutionary Council had become just one more military dictatorship in the Middle East, but they had a lock on Iraq and held it together. They didn’t dare to fuck with the Kurds, but they kept the nut jobs in Syria under control and managed to threaten the Iranians enough to focus them on their borders and not terrorism. So far, at least, they hadn’t given a bomb to any crazies, so both Israel and Iran still existed, as did all the other countries surrounding them.

I smiled. “Standard trip. Turkey and then Kurdistan. Nothing out of the ordinary. We’ll probably be home by next weekend.”

“Aren’t you getting too old for this kind of travel?” she commented disapprovingly.

“Didn’t you once place bets on when I would get too bored to stay at home?” I asked her. “Besides, I’m only sixty-six. You’re sixty-seven.”

For that I got a middle finger extended towards me. “I’m just saying. I think you work more now than you did when you were the President!” I smiled at that since it was definitely untrue. Or maybe it wasn’t.

“What are you planning on doing while I’m gone?”

“I’m running Camp Buckman!” she replied brightly.

I laughed at that. ‘Camp Buckman’ was shorthand for playing Granny and Gramps at the house in Hereford while grandchildren were in residence. While we always were happy to have them visit and stay, during the summer we gave a great rate on camping (totally free) for offspring while parents went away on their own or just took a weekend without mental breakdown! “Well, I’ll help once I get back. Let me know when they’re all gone. That will be the day I come home.”

I got a raspberry for that. “Did I tell you I talked to your sister Suzie yesterday?”

I blinked at that. “I don’t think so, or if you did, it’s evidence of Alzheimer’s. What’d she say?”