Taft 2012 - Jason Heller [56]
Time seemed to crawl. He’d known this was going to be a hard sell in an America obsessed with terrorism and rampant unemployment and partisan squabbles, but he had to play his own game. Or rather: he had to play no game at all.
A hand shot up in the third row, and Taft gestured magnanimously in its direction. It was a man—a fat man of perhaps forty, Taft saw, as round as himself though certainly not as tall, wearing thick eyeglasses and sporting an unshaven face.
“So, Mr. Taft,” the man sneered. “You say that the Department of Education holds the key to America’s future. But there was no such department in the presidential cabinet when you were alive, was there, Mr. Taft? Why should you place such weight on a bureaucracy you couldn’t possibly know anything about?”
Ah. A heckler. One of those malcontents who’d already decided to shout without listening in return. Taft knew the type well, and they made him cringe. Even when he held the highest office in the land, he’d always striven to appease both sides of any conflict, to compromise and find equitable resolution wherever possible. After all, it appealed to his sense of justice and fairness, the same sense that, early in his career, had led him toward becoming a judge. More than that, though, he’d always been sensitive to the sting of scorn, no matter how slight or even imagined; he always felt guilty when confronted by one of these closed-minded mockers, for surely their misunderstanding arose from his own failure to explain himself successfully. Nellie used to scold him for it. She assumed being president would grow him a thicker hide. He patted his gut, all those extra pounds he’d packed on since being elected, and again since awakening a hundred years later. He smiled sadly. A thicker hide, indeed.
“I say, sir, it is true that, in my day, the Office of Education was a minor entity in the Interior Department. But although its increased size today doubtless holds some inefficiencies, I find no fault with its enlarged mandate to help educate America’s children. How can we face the future, sir, without teaching our young people all they can possibly know?” He turned to call upon another raised hand, but the fat man shouted back at him.
“You’re full of shit! You don’t sound like William Howard Taft! You aren’t William Howard Taft! You’re a freaking hoax, and everyone with a brain has got to know it!” His eyes wild, the man suddenly leveled a large, black pistol in Taft’s direction.
Then several things happened at once.
As Taft, his imagination long sharpened by the keen awareness that both McKinley and Roosevelt had faced bullets from their constituents, hurled himself sideways to shield Rachel from harm, she did the exact same thing, and the two of them crashed into each other and fell to the stage while, Taft saw out of the corner of his eye, Kowalczyk went flying through the air, over the heads of the first two rows of the crowd, and tackled the fat man in a messy heap.
“Are you all right?” Rachel yelled.
“Unharmed,” Taft coughed.
“Stay down,” she said. As people swarmed around them, they turned to look toward the scuffle.
Kowalczyk stood up, the man’s gun in his hand and the man under the agent’s foot. “It’s not real,” he shouted. “It’s a toy gun. It’s a fake.”
The fat man began cackling. “It’s as real as he is!” he shouted, pointing at Taft. “It’s every bit as real as he is!”
TWENTY-FOUR
Taft closed his eyes to shut out the sight of Kowalczyk pacing furiously around their hotel suite. The man was barking instructions into his service radio, and it was giving Taft a headache. Slowly, however, he became aware that his bodyguard was calling for a larger contingent of agents to be dispatched to the campaign, and Taft stood up and motioned furiously for silence. Kowalczyk finished the call and drilled his eyes into Taft’s. “What’s wrong?”
“Please, Kowalczyk. No additional security! I know fretting about it is your job, but I’m already trapped in this entire century I never asked for. I don’t need the walls around