Spooner Read Free

nothing out there, not beast nor fowl, liked things to move suddenly;
     that sudden movement was always an invitation to stampede. Cattle, geese, bison, chickens, the common man: They were all the
     same, and now, in a moment of insight just before the end, he saw his theory also applied to diarrhea. Who knew, it might
     have been the key to the universe.
    Too late for that, though. The seats he’d been given, wonderful as they were, were fifty yards from the closest bathrooms,
     and there was not a chance of making it. He didn’t have the time; he didn’t have the strength. He was weak in a way now that
     went beyond all the ways he had been weak before. In Toebox’s final moments, he could not have lifted his own bosom.
    Which was why, even suffocating in his coat, he hadn’t been up to moving around enough to take it off. Instead, he sat inside
     it and sweated. The coat was made of vicuña and had been given to him for Christmas the previous year by the nation of Bolivia,
     along with a matching hat. Iris didn’t care for the hat and worried that it made him look like a Communist, but Toebox wore
     it anyway. He loved hats, and here, if you’d like to see it, is a list of the ones she cleaned out of the Washington apartment
     later that week after she got back from the funeral: an Elk’s cap, an honorary deputy sheriff’s hat, a mortarboard he got
     from the state university where he received his honorary Ph.D., several Stetson cowboy hats that were presented to him as
     mementos for serving as grand marshal of various parades and rodeos in the western regions of his district, a Brooks Brothers
     fedora he was given—along with a pin-striped, double-breasted blue suit—when he toured the plant, a Beefeater’s hat like the
     ones the guards wear at Buckingham Palace (a gift from the British ambassador to the U.N.), a Japanese helmet with a bullet
     hole through the side—the only one he paid for himself—and a yarmulke he got at some Jewish deal that he never did find out
     what it was supposed to be about.
    Back in the home district Toebox was known variously as A Man of Many Hats and Your Voice in Washington and The Working Congressman—there
     were highway signs that said those things everywhere you went—but while he was in fact many-hatted, and undeniably had a certain
     voice in Washington (forty-yard-line seats to the Army-Navy game spoke for themselves), the only work he’d ever done that
     you could call work was a stint in the U.S. Navy, where his specialty was waxing floors. Toebox’s floor waxing occurred in
     1942, early in the war, and led to a Purple Heart when he stepped into a puddle of water as he operated the waxing machine,
     briefly dancing out into the land of cardiac arrest, then was brought back more or less along the same route, when a medic
     hooked up his toes to the same outlet, more or less inventing the defibrillator. After that, he would not even plug in a toaster,
     and was eventually designated Section 8 and sent home to Iris.
    And there, as the district’s first war hero returned live from combat, he ran for and was elected to public office, and spoke
     mysteriously of the hidden scars of war, and while he was not reluctant to wear his medals and ribbons at parades and VFW
     speeches and appearances at high school gymnasiums, the specific incident behind his own hidden scars Toebox would not discuss.
     More than once some smart little crapper in the audience asked if he’d smothered an enemy grenade—there was always one at
     every school assembly bringing his size into it—and he would eye the kid for a long minute before he answered, pointing him
     out for the principal to deal with later, and say the same thing: “The real heroes didn’t come back, son.” Which would shut
     the kid up, all right, and as a rule dropped the rest of them into a respectful silence too.
    The farmers and ranchers in Toebox’s part of the country were appreciative of his visits to