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His earliest memories are of lying in golden fields and staring up at a cloudless blue sky, but also of perching on a skyscraper beam high over the city, and waiting at a train station, and reading a newspaper and laughing at the idea anyone would read newspapers anymore. Once he’s been among others for long enough, watching them grow old, feeling their emotions rise and fall, he comes to realize he doesn’t perceive time the same way they do – he’s shipping out to fight the Germans, or the Vietnamese, or the Iraqis, at the same time he’s eating lunch on a college campus and waking to the sound of hoofbeats and shouted warnings about the Redcoats.
Mostly, he follows the music. Folk tunes, slave songs, protest chants and radio hits. He sees the word “balladeer” on a faded poster during the sixties, and it sticks in his head as the best description of who he is. When he picks up a banjo or a harmonica, telling the story comes easily, and that’s how he finds himself in a late twentieth-century guitar shop, watching a young man in a rumpled jacket pick clumsily at the strings of a potential purchase. He can’t make out all the words, but the song he’s singing under his breath is something about a beautiful girl he knows he doesn’t deserve. Two weeks later - practically instantaneously, for him – he watches the same young man tackled to the ground on TV for putting two bullets in the chest of the President of the United States. The nation holds its breath until the President is announced to be in stable condition, and he feels their anxiety like a physical chill in the weather.
It’s not about the President, he thinks when he sees an anarchist factory worker buried under a similar dogpile of authorities seventy years earlier. Reagan, McKinley – they were bad men by many measures, but it’s about the President as a symbol, a stable leader the people can look up to. If he can be murdered in broad daylight, who can’t?
The anarchist gets the electric chair, as does the anarchist who takes a flurry of shots at Franklin Roosevelt twenty years later, a tiny Italian who shouts defiantly at his jailers in broken English. The Balladeer witnesses the two deadly shocks almost simultaneously. He finds himself barely able to watch as Czolgosz and Zangara – both poor, desperate, angry, with foreign names and misguided ideas of justice – spasm in pain under the crude Westinghouse devices, finally falling silent.
More and more often he finds himself alone at the carnival bar’s corner table, pressed against the dusty fifties jukebox. The bar is done up like an old western saloon, floors streaked unevenly with sunlight, walls plastered with pinups and election posters, and every surface seems to be permanently covered in grime. In sharp contrast to the overwhelming emotions of the cities, the carnival leaves him alone with his thoughts. His only companions at the run-down fairgrounds are the shooting game’s Proprietor and the condemned ghosts of the assassins of presidents, who drift occasionally through the bar after their deaths, taking little notice of him. The jukebox crackles and shuffles uncontrollably through military marches, Civil War ballads, rock and roll, bits of speeches and advertisements. The Balladeer’s favorites are old folk songs, but he can’t seem to get the jukebox unstuck from the early sixties. He resigns himself to the Beach Boys’ harmonies as he watches the Proprietor wipe down the bar with a rag so dusty it makes the task pointless.
“How goes the American dream?” the carnie calls out in his usual tone of halfhearted mockery. “Save any souls, sell any ideas? Liberty and justice, wagons on the prairie, little pink houses for you and me?” He leans in over the table. “C’mon, tell me.”
“Things're alright. You?”
“Business is booming, pal. The good people of our nation aren’t happy – and it’s a near given they aren’t happy, but now they see a way to take out all that rage on the rich and powerful. One successful sucker and everybody thinks they can do it. You must know by now, right?” The greasepainted devil waves a newspaper airily as the new girl wanders into the bar. Squeaky Fromme, a wretched Manson groupie with a letter X carved in her forehead and a joint near-constantly in her hand. She ignores the two of them, swaying alone to “Surfer Girl” in whatever drug-fueled haze she’s currently in, her red dress floating around her ankles. The Balladeer wonders how long Squeaky’s been at the carnival from her perspective, and if she thinks anymore about the day she pulled a gun on her Commander in Chief.
“Surfer Girl” is still in the Balladeer’s head, matching up with the rhythm of the steam locomotive’s engine, when he boards his train at the station and takes a seat next to Charles Guiteau, the deranged preacher heading to assassinate James Garfield. He doesn’t ask who the Balladeer is, instead launching into passionate ramblings on the state of the world in the late nineteenth century. The train window is too dirty for the Balladeer to see his reflection, and he wonders what his face looks like these days. It only takes a few minutes of nodding understandingly at Guiteau’s ravings for Guiteau to start confiding in him his ambitions for high treason.
“It’s far from desirable, but it has to be done,” says the scruffy lunatic. “What the Union needs is a man of the Lord who recognizes evil where it stands – not an untrustworthy crook. Garfield’s removal will bring the new stability that Americans sorely need. I trust you’ve heard of my own plans to run for office?”
“Of course,” says the Balladeer, who can already see the preacher’s body swinging from the noose. “Best of luck.”
He watches Guiteau rant about God to his fellow murderers in a carnival tent later, and he watches John Wilkes Booth shakily scribble acknowledgements of his own damnation in his journal as the Union soldiers close in on him. He tries to ask Sara Jane Moore about her motives, startled by how normal she seems, and gets several bullets through his torso for his trouble. At the same time he’s talking to Guiteau, and Booth, and Moore, and absorbing the public’s terror of nuclear war and their passionate conflict over slavery and the pure, terrifying potential of signing papers that mean the country is theirs to take into the future, he finds himself riding backseat in a beat-up seventies car on a beat-up seventies highway, next to a box of audio tapes and a gasoline bomb. “Cecilia” crackles, muffled, from the radio.
“Samuel Byck,” he says, and the driver almost swerves off the road, swearing loudly. In the rearview mirror the Balladeer recognizes a heavyset man in his forties, forehead shining with sweat. He finally regains control of the car amid a flurry of angry honks from other drivers, and addresses his new passenger.
“Holy shit. Holy shit. I ... suppose it’s pointless to ask how you got into my car.” He squints into the rearview mirror as he changes lanes. Twenty miles from the airport. “Let’s get this over with. Whaddaya want?”
“I wanna talk to you. I’m … history, Sam.”
“Ha! Aren’t we all.”
“I mean I’ve been alive since this country was founded. I know where you’re going, and what happens to you, and what happens to everyone who tried what you’re about to try.”
Byck breaks into harsh laughter. “Yeah, I bet you do. I lose my wife, my kids, I lose my job, and I realize one thing. The people in power don’t know what the hell they’re doing. They’re just assholes with more cash and more power than the rest of us, screwing us over day and night. I try to do one thing, one thing to make a point, and I end up talking to myself in the car, hallucinating the ghost …” His words dissolve into a second laughing fit, more hysterical than the first, bordering on sobbing. He wipes spittle and sweat from his chin. “Dick Nixon will never care about the common man, not even when the common man flies a plane straight into the Oval Office window. So why are you doing it, Sam? I’m doing it to make a statement. Things aren’t right, they need to change.”
“Hardly a statement.”
“It’s the best I have.” He shrugs as he says it, and sniffles.
“You shoot yourself in the head!” the Balladeer shouts at him, impulsively. “You shoot yourself, you don’t even get the plane off the ground. You kill two people, injure more, terrify everyone. Booth gets hunted down, and tortured. Czolgosz gets burned in acid, so they can’t give him a proper burial. Hinckley gets locked up for most of his life. And you all – keep – doing it! Why do you keep doing it?” He sounds near hysterics himself, and clenches his fists in an effort to stay calm.
“I terrify people, yeah?” The idea seems to comfort Byck. “They’ll hate me. But they’re gonna know who I am. I’m gonna make a real impact. Haven’t you ever wished you could change things? You, out of everybody?” He sniffs again, wiping his face with his sleeve as they pass a sign informing them the airport is ten miles away. “Anyway, I’ve made up my mind. I’m gonna be on the news tomorrow. Nice talking with you, ya smug prick.”
He clicks his tape recorder on, but to the Balladeer it might as well be the gunshot through his skull already. Trying to shake off the image of the man bleeding out on the airplane carpet, the Balladeer staggers through the decades, over the purple mountains and through the pink suburban streets, and finds himself back at the carnival. The dingy bar is more crowded than the last time he was there – Booth telling a story about his acting days as several others watch in mild interest, Zangara drinking water as he rubs his sore stomach, Moore and Fromme half-heartedly and half-accurately singing along to the jukebox’s recording of “Love Me Do”. He spots Byck ordering a beer, dressed in the afterlife in the sweaty Santa Claus costume he once wore at protests, and avoids his eyes, but none of the murderers make much acknowledgement of him as he makes his way to the corner table and downs a drink much stronger than his usual one.
A newspaper lies in front of him – the same one he’d last seen the Proprietor reading, but he’s now able to turn it over and see a young man’s face splashed across the front page, under a headline about his cold-blooded assassination of President Kennedy in the fall of 1963. Even through the newspaper he can feel the shaken grief of millions with which the article was written – it would be naïve to expect the masses to be in total agreement with any President’s politics, but their horror at the broken façade of their elected leader’s safety seeps through the ink in waves. Blood all over the backseat of the convertible, children with no father, the Vice President being hurriedly sworn in on a plane. With shaking hands the Balladeer feels his own face, the one that’s been the same face for what might be years now, the one he’d only caught a quick glimpse of in Byck’s rearview mirror and now sees distorted in the side of the jukebox. He doesn’t really need to check, though, because he knows it’s the same face with the certainty that he knows the blue of the prairie sky.
The song ends, and a new one crackles in – “Heartache Serenade”, late 1963. The tears in his eyes spill over. This one’s for him.