I'm ashamed

Aaron ramped up the time machine and got it into gear. He wanted to be the fly on the wall that evening in the White House that Dick told Pat.

The fog spewed out and enveloped him in mist, the machine jumped up and down, left to right, swooshed here, tousled there, and jumped up and down again. It came crashing down with a thud and yes! Aaron saw red carpet, white columns, and portraits of Lucy Johnson, Louisa Adams, Bess Truman, and Elizabeth Monroe.

He wondered if the Secret Service would notice that a rusty time machine had landed in the East Room, so he activated the invisible option and tiptoed out.

A sentry stood guard at the door when he went into the grand first floor hallway, and another at each entrance to the building.

“Some guards!” he said aloud, but clapped his mouth shut – too late. They heard and darted left and right, conferred with each other like high school footballers before a play, went back to their stations with wrinkled looks.

Aaron went up the stairs to the second floor. He’d find Nixon and his wife in there – he knew it, evening of August 8, 1974. Before he’d been born, but Aunt Wilhelmina told him about it. Made her sick, she said. Always hated that man, ever since the Checkers speech.

He rounded the corner into the private quarters and tiptoed in. He could hear raised voices. Yes, he’d clearly told her, she was clearly upset –

And then he saw the famous white hair and lantern jaw, the pasty-pink skin, the tell-tale Arkansas accent, his blonde-haired wife with the headband and the Yale law degree diction.

“I did not have sex with that woman!”

“But you did what with that cigar?”

Woops, Aaron thought – wrong dick.