Presidential Press Secretary Jacob (Sonny) Thompson walked briskly through the dusty press camp prepping the bleary-eyed correspondents like a high school cheerleader and assuring them of great unrehearsed homespun pictures of the President working the soil.

The press secretary's charm was artfully contrived-bright white teeth capped with precision, long sleek black hair, tinted gray at the temples, dark eyes with the tightened look of cosmetic surgery.

No second chin. No visible sign of a potbelly. He moved and gestured with a bouncy enthusiasm that didn't sit well with journalists, whose major physical activities consisted of pounding typewriters, punching word processors and lifting cigarettes.

The clothes didn't hurt the image either. The tailored seersucker suit with the blue silk shirt and matching tie. Black Gucci moccasins coated lightly with New Mexico dust. A classy, breezy guy who was no dummy. He never showed anger, never let the correspondents' needles slip under his fingernails. Bob Finkel of the haltimore Sun slyly suggested that an undercover investigation revealed that Thompson had graduated with honors from the Joseph Goebbels School of Propaganda.

He stopped at the CNN television motor home. Curtis Mayo, the White House correspondent network newscaster, sagged in a director's chair looking generally miserable.

"Got your crew set up, Curt?" Thompson asked jovially.

Mayo leaned back, pushed a baseball cap to the rear of a head forested with billowy silver hair and gazed up through orange tinted glasses. "I don't see anything worth capturing for posterity."

Sarcasm ran off Thompson like rainwater down a spout. "In five minutes the President is going to step from his house, walk to the barn and start up a tractor."

"Bravo," Mayo grunted. "What does he do for an encore?"

Mayo's voice had a resonance to it that made a symphonic kettledrum sound like a bongo: deep, booming, with every word enunciated with the sharpness of a bayonet.

"He is going to drive back and forth across the field with a mower and cut the grass."

"That's alfalfa, city slicker."

"N"atever," Thompson acknowledged with a good-natured shrug.

"Anyway, I thought it would be a good chance to roll tape on him in the rural environment he loves best."

Mayo leveled his gaze into Thompson's eyes, searching for a flicker of deception. "What's going down, Sonny?"

"Sorry?"

"Why the hide-and-seek? The President hasn't put in an appearance for over a week."

Thompson stared back, his nut-brown eyes unreadable. "He's been extremely busy, catching up on his homework away from the pressures of Washington."

Mayo wasn't satisfied. "I've never known a President to go this long without facing the cameras."

"Nothing devious about it," said Thompson. "At the moment, he has nothing of national interest to say-"

"Has he been sick or something?"

"Far from it. He's as fit as one of his champion bulls. You'll see."

Thompson saw through the verbal ambush and moved on along the fence, priming the other news people, slapping backs and shaking hands.