The Paper Pauper on a Whistle Perch

A Paper Pauper on the Whistle Perch

By

James R. Parrish

A Paper Pauper on a Whistle Perch

Copyright © 1988, 2016 by James R. Parrish

Cover Art

Mac Hernandez

Editor-in-Chief

Kristi King-Morgan

Formatting

Niki Browning

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof

may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever

without the express written permission of the publisher

except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Printed in the United States of America

Second Printing, 2016

ISBN 13: 978-1535303200

ISBN 10: 1535303204

Dreaming Big Publications

www.dreamingbigpublications.com

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: The Paper Tiger

Chapter 2: Acting President

Chapter 3: Top Secret Meeting

Chapter 4: John Houston

Chapter 5: Danger From Within

Chapter 6: Undercover Affairs

Chapter 7: Meeting With the President

Chapter 8: Power and Purpose

Chapter 9: In Pursuit

Chapter 10: The President’s Speech

Chapter 11: No Quarter

Chapter 12: Back Down to Earth

Chapter 13: To Serve and Protect

Chapter 14: Old and Gray

Chapter 15: Ellie Sue

Chapter 16: Confirmation or Denial

Chapter 17: Making Preparations

Chapter 18: Mulling, Musing

Chapter 19: Mister Pirogue

Chapter 20: A Country United

Chapter 21: God’s Instinct

Chapter 22: Taking Back America

Chapter 23: One Nation Under God

Chapter 24: A Nation Abuzz

Chapter 25: On the Whistle Perch

About the Author

Chapter 1

The Paper Tiger

He grimaced, and his eyes rolled beneath closed lids. The staccato of automatic rifle fire and exploding hand grenades of the terrorists’ attack only a half mile away barely entered Vice President Franklin Jefferson Adams’ subconscious. Yet, the fury of foreigners battling on American soil added to the ogres and ghouls already claiming him in fitful sleep.

As the rackety-racking of battle continued, Adams thrashed his feet and kicked aside rumpled covers. His long, muscular body twisted onto its right side in the big bed he’d moved near the smoke-blackened, mahogany-paneled inner wall of the spacious study of Blair House. He was gripped by fearful images.

Sweat oozed from his wide forehead and ruddy, unshaven face and drenched his shaggy red hair and bushy brows. He’d always been fastidious, but because of recent personal setbacks and the sad state of the union, he no longer cared about his appearance. He needed desperately to rid himself of the frequently screaming or awesomely silent demons, which controlled him. In his mind, he was killing himself.

His forty-one year old frame, once so athletic but now so gaunt, shuddered in clinging, perspiration-soaked green cotton pajamas—American-made, he’d have mentioned had he been awake. Both his eyes, bloodshot now but normally clear as blue water over pristine sand and coral, wallowed without aim between tear-wet lashes. He moaned faintly as he fought the ogres of his conscience gone almost insane in an America beset by savages of terrorism and politics.

Even as he shrank inside himself, he bellowed like a doggie wailing for mama’s help from a stalking, hungry cougar. He shivered from the dampness of his pajamas and a March breeze, which prickled through a narrow crack in a slightly gapped window in predawn hours in the District of Columbia.

Yet the external iciness held little sway in his predicament. All the evil, vicious, combatant forces of a modern world and a nearly bankrupt America churned within him. His conscience fought about as effectively as a newborn calf succumbing to a wild destiny in a harsh, soul-eating world.

Adams had never wanted to be a public official. Now President Balboa Boston’s long-standing illness—not generally known by the public—and the terrorists’ poor country war, the moral decay in a Christian society, the huge national debt, the trade deficit, the unfair trade situation, and his wife’s adultery with and defection to Secretary of State Benedict Rothschild all combined to thrust Adams into almost complete agony.

This anguish had persisted, had been exacerbated, for almost nine months—ever since his wife Lisa has moved to Rothschild’s mansion and had taken their son and daughter with her. Buffeted by Lisa’s desertion and threat of divorce, Adams had been rocked by mental devils, when asleep or awake.

Six weeks before, Rothschild had succeeded in having President Boston kick Adams out of his office in the White House.

With no real role in government and without his wife and children, Adams had come to feel that life no longer had a purpose. He was lost without Lisa.

Three weeks ago, when the terrorists’ car bomb had destroyed most of Blair House and had killed Adams’ secretary and executive assistant, the vice president had holed up in the single undamaged room. He’d moved a bed into the study, which already had a small kitchen. He’d lived on TV dinners, sandwiches, soup, frozen chili, and other prepackaged Mexican food he’d loved since a child in Texas.

Such a diet, he had suspected, had contributed somewhat to his already beleaguered and ever-increasing mental malaise. He knew he’d retreated into a mental state as a defense mechanism. Adams knew that something greater than himself commanded him.

President Boston was an old man, and Adams knew Rothschild and his bunch in the White House—and not the President—really controlled the executive branch. Rothschild was a henchman for international brokers of global economics and was selling out democracy to the interests of world financiers bent on controlling the industrial output and economies of the free world.

As more grenades and rifle fire erupted out there somewhere, Adams’ long body listed to the left, then back to the right, as if he rode a strange, half-working rotisserie, which sizzled beneath charred chunks of the terrorists’ victims. He grasped a pillow to his chest and folded his legs into prenatal position. He sweated profusely.

Lisa, Lisa! he muttered. I need you. Devils claim me, and they claim America. We bankrupt our country to provide defense for our trade enemies, especially Japan. Why don’t we stop Japanese imports if the Japanese won’t share free trade?

He knew he whispered of government when he thought of his wife. He wondered which was more important to him. Yet he knew. Nothing could ever replace Lisa.

Suddenly Adams heard another burst of gunfire, and he quickly rolled and sat on the edge of the bed. With trembling thumb and forefinger of his right hand, he massaged his eyes, then dabbed at the perspiration on his forehead.

Lisa, he whispered, we give away billions of dollars in foreign aid, but we do not help Mexico, our neighbor and friend. But Lisa, dear Lisa, why have you gone away?

He tried to force himself to think positively. He lost the struggle. He looked about the room and hoped to find the friendly object. After all, he thought, during these past months without Lisa, he’d had no family to people his house. He’d found himself trying to make friends with the objects, which remained, in battered Blair House. Now he saw many objects left there by previous vice presidents. Spontaneously, he spoke:

"I hear the crying of the terrorists’ victims, the wailing of freezing soldiers at Valley Forge, the shrieking of men charging up San Juan Hill, the sobbing of soldiers on the death march in the Philippines, the groaning of Marines and civilians slaughtered in Beirut.

"I hear the buzz of rockets, the clatter of hand-to-hand combat in the jungles of Vietnam and Central America. I hear the plagued whimpering of men with frostbitten feet and hands in South Korea.

"I hear the praying of the dying and their families during World War II and the Holocaust. I hear the suffering of the Blacks in the South.

"I hear the tears rolling from unemployed Americans who lost their jobs as President Reagan and his men permitted a world trade order to subjugate American labor and the American economy to worldwide preferences.

"I hear workers in steel and garment plants groveling for welfare and objecting at America’s letting Japan, South Korea, and other lesser nations take over American industries vital to the country and its people.

"I hear the protests of our allies forced to stop selling arms and munitions to Iran while the Reagan bunch did. I hear the appeals of the communist Contras asking for and getting more American dollars to fight the other communists, the Sandinistas.

I hear the soul of America gasping, struggling to survive.

Rather out of breath after his long monologue, Adams silently berated himself for having been so melodramatic. Generally, he thought but didn’t speak in such fashion. But these days, everything was melodramatic to him. Besides, in looking at the objects in his cloistered vice presidential retreat, he lived mostly in fantasies or, if asleep, in nightmares. Lisa and Rothschild had forced him into the haze in his mind.

Why, he wondered, had the United States, with its great affluence and generosity, permitted itself to be sated by Dollar Diplomacy? And why had his country girl Lisa gone to power mad Rothschild?

Stirred by his ever-recurring frustrations and another volley of gunfire somewhere out there, Adams reached to a bedside table, snapped on a lamp, picked up a TV electronic control gadget, and flicked on a large television set two dozen paces across the room.

The tube was emitting an old war movie about Reagan’s heroes in Central America back in 1988, and a strange foreboding hit Adams.

Suddenly he flounced upward off the bed and stood. He started to turn off the TV set, but a weird portent grabbed him. He sank backward onto the edge of the bed and placed the TV gadget on the bedside table.

Like a chilling omen of doom, the television set beeped notice of an upcoming bulletin:

. . . beep . . . beep . . . beep . . .

. . . BULLETIN . . . BULLETIN streaked methodically across the bottom of the tube.

. . . beep . . . beep . . . beep . . . beep . . .

His ears rang, and he glared at the American soldiers sneaking through dense jungle foliage. Why hadn’t Reagan, North, Poindexter, and their cohorts left well enough alone?

. . . BULLETIN . . . BULLETIN . . . BULLETIN . . .

. . . beep . . . beep . . . beep . . . beep . . .

The pall of the television addendum increased Adams’ already-heightened anxiety. Was the announcement to be about more terrorist activity? Or about the storm which had been gathering in the Atlantic? Or about another crisis in government? No, he decided, this was the weekend and hours before daylight. The government was at rest. Maybe the government needed more weekends.

President Boston, Adams said to himself, why did I ever let you talk me into being your running mate? So you needed a younger man from the South to balance your ticket? So why didn’t you pick a politician? All I ever wanted was to live with Lisa and my children and work and Dad’s farm.

He peered disgustedly at the television and watched one of Reagan’s heroes thrust a bayonet into the belly of a smaller Central American fighter.

Adams shrank partially back into his mental retreat. Yet he could not shut out the action on the TV set.

. . . BULLETIN . . . BULLETIN . . . BULLETIN . . .

. . . beep . . . beep . . . beep . . . beep . . .

Another fusillade of rifle fire cracked somewhere outside Blair House, faded, and then erupted again. The sounds of war ravaged their way amidst the ogres’ grip on Adams.

Attempting to dislodge his mind from the disturbances, which clutched his brain, Adams reflected about the great, but tinsel pride he’d enjoyed watching a network television replay Sam White’s comments slightly more than four years before.

As one who’d always—until now—easily faced adversity, Adams relived White’s declarations about the nominations:

"A surprise selection as vice presidential nominee, Franklin Jefferson Adams brings to the ticket a charisma of his youthful thirty-seven years to offset Boston’s seventy years of age. Adams brings to the ticket a solid reputation of courage.

"Adams will provide a fresh element to this Presidential Campaign of 1996. The veteran politician, Presidential nominee Balboa Boston, the experienced governor of New York who success fully engineered this brokered convention, has again pulled a political coup by naming a young non-politician, but one who is known as a national hero, as running mate.

"Like his famous namesakes, Franklin Jefferson Adams represents the average man of rural America. He is tall, handsome, and rustic. He appeals to persons of all ages. His selection undoubtedly will appease the large group of women delegates who have been clamoring for a woman for the ticket’s Number Two slot.

"Two years ago when Adams was in the District of Columbia to represent the Farm Bureau’s interests, he became an international hero when he ignored personal danger and charged into a flame-struck Canadian Embassy and single-handedly saved twenty-one members of the Canadian diplomatic corps. This attack by terrorists was the first major onslaught by terrorists on American soil.

"Immediately afterward, Adams’ only comment was that he could have done no less—since Canada had helped sneak Americans out of Beirut during the great hostage crisis of Jimmy Carter’s administration.

"We understand that Adams came to this convention to represent family farmers and to insist that the platform contain a strong plank supporting retired citizens. He said that all persons who had spent their lives paying Social Security had earned the right to enjoy these retirement benefits. A certain contingent left over from the Reagan Administration had continued to claim that the only way to balance the national debt was to eliminate Social Security.

"A staunch family man, Adams believes in the sanctity of family and church. He has a beautiful wife and two very attractive children. He speaks with deep conviction that something needs to be done to change the system so grassroots people can have more influence in the way national politicians are elected.

"He has castigated politicians for accepting campaign funds from the rich and powerful. He seeks more power for the unorganized, not-so-rich rank and file.

"When Adams stormed into the Canadian Embassy to save the Canadians, America badly needed a genuine hero. With their greed for high salaries and use of narcotics, professional athletes had become tarnished idols. Undeclared wars fought without the public’s support had made soldiers unpopular. Dishonesty and downright lying by national politicians about covert operations sowed distrust in the nation’s leaders. No longer were a professional athlete, a Congressional Medal of Honor winner, or a President held in high esteem. America needed a new kind of person to adore.

Franklin Jefferson Adams didn’t want the honor, but instantly he became the hero America needed…

. . . BULLETIN . . . BULLETIN . . . BULLETIN . . .

. . . beep . . . beep . . . beep . . . beep . . .

Announcement of the upcoming bulletin interrupted Adams’ memory. He grimaced and glanced at the TV set. His eyes widened as he watched an American-led patrol ambush a Central American squad.

He closed his eyes and forced scenes about America’s war by proxy to leave him. He tried to focus on memory of Lisa and his children, but he had little control of his mind, and again he remembered Sam White’s coverage of that first convention in which he had been elected.

…When a television camera crew or reporter did locate Adams, he always talked in a deep, sincere voice about his real convictions in God and family, in the integrity of the American worker, and in the necessity of getting the federal government back on track to provide good government for Americans first, instead of taxing them so heavily for defense of foreigners. His down-on-the-farm honesty gripped the American public…

. . . beep . . . beep . . . beep . . . beep . . .

. . . BULLETIN . . . BULLETIN . . . BULLETIN . . .

Disgusted that he could remember White’s comments so well, agitated by the raucous beeping of the television set, and shaken by the terrorists’ rifle fire still erupting nearby, Adams groaned.

Lisa, oh, Lisa, he said.

" …Adams said politicians are more concerned about getting elected than they are about providing good government. He said politicians are a necessary evil who’ll promise anything popular when they’re running for office but who don’t intend to fulfill those promises. He cited President Reagan’s campaigning to balance the budget but then spending more money than all other Presidents in history and almost bankrupting the country.

In a rather refreshing touch, he invited the President to visit his father’s farm in Texas to learn the purpose of a real pork barrel—one in which hog meat was packed to ship to market…

. . . beep . . . beep . . . beep . . . beep . . .

. . . BULLETIN . . . BULLETIN . . . BULLETIN . . .

"…So Franklin Jefferson Adams, a salt-of-the-earth, common sense, God-loving family farmer, who we’re told has made no political commitments, will add a fresh breath of grassroots honesty to what has become a long, name-calling, often degrading national election.

"We hope he’ll insert some tall Texas tales in homespun humor, properly identified of course, into an otherwise dull electoral routine. We predict he’ll tell no lies while championing the cause of the average American. His wit and sincerity could be quite welcome to American voters.

When he accepted the nomination, Adams said he thought the office ought to select the candidate and that he would serve, if elected, but that he would not hit the campaign trail telling lies and making promises…

. . . beep . . . beep . . . beep . . . beep . . .

. . . BULLETIN . . . BULLETIN . . . BULLETIN . . .

Again the television set interrupted his thoughts, and Adams put his hands over his eyes, shook his