The President Is Missing(18)

“I need a minute with my White House counsel,” I say to him.

“Mr. President, please don’t—”

“Alex,” I say. “I need a minute with Danny.”

With a heavy sigh and a shake of the head, Alex leaves us.

Danny looks back at the door to ensure we’re alone. Then he looks at me.

“Son, you’ve gone crazier’n a March hare,” he says, a hint of the old twang in his voice as he invokes my mama’s favorite saying. He knows them all as well as I do. Danny’s parents were good, hardworking people, but they were away from home a lot. His dad put in a lot of overtime for a trucking company, and his mom worked the night shift at the local plant.

My father was a high school math teacher who died in a car crash when I was four. So when I was a kid, we lived on a grade school teacher’s partial pension and what Mama earned waiting tables at Curly Ray’s by Millers Creek. But she was always home at night, so she helped the Akerses out with Danny. She loved him like a second son; he spent as much time at our house as his own.

Normally when he triggers those memories, it brings a smile to my face. Instead, I lean forward and rub my hands together.

“Okay, you wanna tell me what’s going on?” he tries. “You’re starting to freak me out.”

Join the club. I feel my guard slowly lowering, being alone with Danny. In this job, he and Rachel were always my ports in a storm.

I look up at him. “We’re a long way from catching brookies at Garden Creek,” I say.

“Good. Because you could never cast a line to save your life anyway.”

Again, I don’t smile.

“You’re right where you’re supposed to be, Mr. President,” he says. “If the shit’s hitting the fan, you’re the guy I want in charge.”

I let out air, nod my head.

“Hey.” Danny gets up from his chair and sits down next to me on the couch. He lightly punches my knee. “Being in charge isn’t being alone. I’m right here. Same place I’ve always been, no matter what your title is. Same place I’ll always be.”

“Yeah, I—I know.” I look at him. “I know that.”

“This isn’t about the impeachment bullshit, is it? Because that’ll work itself out. Lester Rhodes? That boy’s so dumb he couldn’t pour piss out of a boot if the directions were on the bottom.”

He’s pulling out all the stops, dusting off another of Mama Lil’s greatest hits. He’s trying to take me back to her, to her strength. After Daddy died, she cracked the whip as hard as any drill sergeant I’d later meet, smacking me in the head if she heard a double negative or an ain’t, telling me I’d go to college or she’d tan my hide. She’d go to work early and come home in the afternoon with two Styrofoam cartons of food that would be dinner for Danny and me. I’d rub her feet while she checked our homework and interrogated us about our day at school. She always said, You boys aren’t rich enough to afford not to pay attention.

“It’s that other thing, isn’t it?” says Danny. “That thing that you can’t tell me, that’s had you canceling half your schedule for the last two weeks? The reason that you’ve suddenly become so interested in martial law and habeas corpus and price controls? Whatever it is that’s kept you quiet as falling snow about Suliman Cindoruk and Algeria while Lester Rhodes beats the snot out of you?”

“Yeah,” I say. “It’s that thing.”

“Yeah.” Danny clears his throat, drums his fingers. “Scale of 1 to 10,” he says. “How bad?”

“A thousand.”

“Jesus. And you have to go off leash? I gotta tell you, that sounds like a terrible idea.”

It just might be. But it’s the best one I have.

“You’re scared,” he says.

“Yeah. Yeah, I am.”

We are quiet for a long moment.

“You know when the last time was I saw you this scared?”

“When Ohio put me over 270 electoral votes?”

“No.”

“When I found out Bravo Company was deploying?”

“No, sir.”

I look at him.

“When we were getting off that bus at Fort Benning,” he says. “And Sergeant Melton was calling out, ‘Where’re the E-4s? Where’re the goddamn frat-boy maggots?’ We weren’t off the damn bus yet, and the sergeant was already sharpening his knives for the college boys, who got to start at a higher pay and rank.”

I chuckle. “I remember.”

“Yeah. Never forget your first smoke session, right? I saw the look on your face when we were walking down the aisle of that bus. It was probably the same as the look on mine. Scared as a mouse in a snake pit. Do you remember what you did?”

“Piss my pants?”

Danny turns and looks at me squarely. “You don’t remember, do you, Ranger?”

“I swear I don’t.”

“You stepped in front of me,” he says.

“I did?”

“You sure as hell did. I’d been in the aisle seat, and you were by the window. So I was in front of you, in the aisle. But the moment the sergeant started going off about the E-4s, you elbowed your way in front of me so you’d be the first one off the bus to face him, not me. Scared as you were, that was your first instinct, to look out for me.”