Word count 1718

                                                   

Our local Harbortown newspaper ran a strange item last week “I have two bowls stuck together.  I’ve tried to pry them apart for a week.  Next Tuesday at noon, anyone who wants to separate them without breaking them, will be anointed King of Harbortown.  $5 entry fee.  See you at noon 5280 Simpson Street.

I was intrigued.  My college tuition was paid by money won arm wrestling, and I have Popeye arms.  At the appointed time I joined the queue as the fifth entry.  The first had sharpened his fingernails and tried to squeeze them between the bowls.  No luck.  The second was a burlesque performer who brought along a photographer for publicity shots.  Number three was a humongous college football player who had no technique but brute force.  The last person before me gave up in five seconds.  My performance was controversial, but successful.  I started indirectly by knocking the side of one of the bowls with the palm of my hand.  I could feel the bowl vibrating which seemed to loosen it up.  I was dubbed King Arnold and given a Burger King Crown with sequins and ribbons.

Amazing things followed that quickly.  My triumph made the local press and then jumped to social media and went viral.  The national press interviewed me and showed off my knowledge of government and history.  The election was coming up and the Unity party had no frontrunner candidate.  The party had been shut out for three consecutive contests.  The Progress party candidate was discovered to have worked through college as a prostitute.  Merle Jones, a Unity representative offered to make me the Unity candidate.  I won in a landslide.

For a while, I had a honeymoon period with Congress.  We had a majority in both houses and I was able to get through some popular programs.  No more military grade rifles for the public, bodily autonomy for women, and better healthcare.  To balance the budget, various cuts had to be made.  Tax loopholes were eliminated and many grants were cut.  The military did not get everything it wanted, but then we avoided getting into costly battles which were not our business.  A lot of bases were eliminated.

Everything was great – for a while.  Merle was still advising me.  He implied that all would go wrong if I didn’t follow his instruction to join some secret societies that practiced black magic.  My ex-wife Mograna, a witch want to be who had tried to burn my bed with me in it before we divorced took to television talk shows to claim I was the one who did all of the evil things she did, including her – I don’t even want to talk about it, but it involved animals.  While much of the public was turning against me, I started getting threats from our son Morbred who worshipped Mograna.  The relationship may have gone beyond mother – son.  The FBI tried to find him, but they never did.

To take a break I flew back to my home state Oregon and visited Short Sand Beach which was a childhood vacation spot.  It was the offseason and no one was there.  I gloried in the memories of a happy time in my life.  While looking out to sea, I heard running footsteps behind me.  I turned to see Morbred rushing to stab me with a knife.  For some reason known only to him, he put me in a small boat and pushed it out to sea after I was stabbed.

Good luck followed horrible luck.  Morbred was a poor killer.  His stabbings hit my collar bone and sternum, causing copious bloodshed, but little damage.  My next good fortune was being picked up by a Mexican fishing boat.  They couldn’t go to an American port because they were breaking a few laws.  We kept going until we got to the small isolated town of Villamosa on the Mexican coast.  Here I got even luckier – I’m a Catholic whose mother was mostly native American and my father was Portuguese and I spoke Spanish.  Not going to lie, my ethnicity both helped and hurt in the election, but I looked a lot like the locals.  It took me a while to pick up on the local dialect, but in a few weeks I fit right in.  I was an extra hand on the fishing boats, which was appreciated.  Everyone agreed not to rat me out.

I don’t want to try your patience.  I married a local widow Gloria, so I got a readymade family with three grown children.   I was able to correspond with a trusted friend Bill Toop in Washington D.C. who also kept my secret.  This story will be kept up to date and released when I die.  Bill has told me the following as it has occurred:  Morbred claimed he killed me, and his ravings got him sent to the funny farm, Lars Ericson wrote “The Truth About Arnold” which is to truth as a reality show is to reality, Mograna now hosts a horror show on television, appropriately named “Witching Hour”, and my first love Glinda, who left me for my best friend at the time Lester, left him for a starving poet.

I’m the healthiest and happiest I’ve ever been.

Things were not going so well at home however.  My vice president, Sam McDougle, had come under Merle’s spell.  I admit to being part of the problem.  When the Unity Party chose me as a candidate, they picked McDougle as my running mate.  I was told it was to balance the ticket.  McDougle was a senator from the Midwest and as pale as you can be unlike formerly non-political brown skinned West Coast me.  Nobody, including me, paid much attention to his politics, but did research him for anything that could be used against the ticket.  I started to wonder if there was any connection between the seemingly affable McDougle and Morbred.

Bill’s reports began to disturb me.  McDougle was attempting to appeal to white racists and was pushing a loyalty oath.  His idea was there would be surveillance of citizens who refused to sign  or fill out a rather discriminatory and biased document which could single out those who gave the wrong answer or answers.  Some of the questions:

Have you ever supported certain third parties?

Were you, your parents, or spouse born outside the USA?

How long have you lived at your present location?

What is your religion?

Rather than the usual package of government benefits, a series of self contained villages were proposed as a substitute.  The indigent would be assigned work in the villages, and not be allowed outside.

Normally some of those crazy ideas would not have disturbed me, but Merle’s black magic had some efficacy with public opinion.  Polls indicated the popularity of the proposals had 35% approval and rising support.

I hopped a plane to DC.  When I landed I got a call from Merle.  “Hey, you seem to have some problem with me.  Why don’t you visit me and we’ll see if we can come to a happy conclusion.”  He gave me an address in suburban Virginia.  If calling me as soon as I got back when I’d told no one my plans was supposed to freak me out, it worked.  I got a cab to his address.  The driver gave me a funny look, but didn’t ask me if I was the president.  Maybe I aged a lot in exile.

The door at his house had a sign “Come on in.”  When I did I saw Merle in the middle of a ring of flower pots.  When he saw me, he asked “How you doing kid?”

I was honest “I’ve been better”.

“OK, Arnold, here’s how it works.  The guy inside the ring, me, has the magic, the guy outside the ring, you, doesn’t.  The guy outside can’t get in as long as I’m in.  That allows me to decide what I want to do with you.  Got it?”

My hope was that the villain would want to tell me how great and smart he was while I tried to think of a way out.  “Before you decide what you want to do, why are you getting McDougle to do evil things?”

“I’m a chaos agent; it’s what I do for fun.  I might make him drop his pants in public or hump a dog.”  He went on talking foolishness while I looked around the room, remembering how he told me the ring worked.  I noticed baseballs and bats.

Merle got into a groove like a politician on a roll.  He wasn’t paying that much attention to me.  I grabbed a baseball and threw it at him.  He dodged it, laughed at me, but backed up closer to the ring.  Next I threw the bat at his feet.  He backed up again, but this time he fell part way out of the ring.  I quickly grabbed an arm outside the ring and pulled him completely out.  Without giving it any thought, I jumped into the ring.

“Tell me Merle, can I cast spell now, and what should it be.”  The look of horror on his face told me I could.  “Go ahead, what should I do with you?”

Merle was clever, I’ll give him that.  “You could do to me what I was going to do to you.  A nice fat retirement somewhere outside the USA.  All I wanted was for you not to interfere with my plans.”

I was feeling confident “How about Merle retires to Vladivostok, but has no resources, can’t speak Russian, and doesn’t know who he is or how he got there.”

“Sorry Arnold, you didn’t say the magic work.”

“Please.”

Merle would regret giving the trick away, if only he could remember anything.  Merle had disappeared.  I assume that my wish was granted.

I made myself public and was reinstated as president.  I told McDougle what had happened.  Without Merle around, he claimed he had been tricked into his evil ways.  I told him that he could stick around if he became another vice president that no noticed.

As my first term winds down and I’ve righted the damage done in my absence, I think I’ll be a two term president.

In “Freedom Fiction”. This is a longer version than that.