by Mackey, Jay
The captain has been asking more of the same questions. Now he stares at me with an expression that is either frustration or fury. I can’t tell which, and I don’t know that it makes any difference. I know he wants me to say something, but, short of a full confession, I don’t know what I can say that will satisfy him. So I sit.
After a silence that is too long even for me, he says, “What is it that I’ve said that is confusing you?”
That’s easy. “Everything,” I say.
He jumps to his feet and slams the table with both fists. Blam! “Goddamnit! Don’t tell me that. I know you’re involved with this thing, and you, I, goddamnit, we’re fucked if we can’t get past this ‘I’m innocent’ shit. There’s something about this that stinks, but I’m running out of time to find out what.”
He sits again and stares. I’m pretty sure I get his expression now.
“Okay,” I say. “I don’t get this stuff about running out of time, and something stinks. What does that have to do with me?”
He smiles. Maybe because I’m saying something, but I’m afraid I’ve fallen into some trap he’s set.
“Let me tell you a little about what’s going on. Maybe it will enlighten you. Last time I was downstairs, there was a debate going on, whether to use the confession and parade you around, or to have you die while they pursue and capture you.” He cocks his head at my obvious confusion. “Right. That doesn’t make a lot of sense does it. How do you die as they pursue you, when they already have you? Hmm. Give you a sense of something a little off, somewhere? And that maybe we should get some truth out on the table before they decide that the dying thing is the best way to go?”
I nod. He seems to like that.
“So,” he says. “What else is confusing you?”
I’m now thinking that I need to trust him, at least a little bit. I’m fucked, I know, but I don’t want to be fucked and not know why. “A couple things. One, who is ‘they’? You talk like you’re on my side, and ‘they’ are making decisions about me that you don’t agree with.”
“Oh, I’m not on your side. Don’t misunderstand me. I’m on the side of the truth. And ‘they’ is the central government people, or at least they say they’re central government. They came with President Bowers but they’re mostly Russian thugs.”
“Shit.”
“Yeah, shit is right. So, what else?”
Now I’m feeling like this whole thing is fucked up worse than I could have imagined. “The gun. You talk about having a gun with my fingerprints, but I’m doubtful. And I never had any gun with a silencer.”
“The fuck you didn’t. The silencer was right there on the roof next to the rifle.”
“Roof? I was never on any roof.”
Blam! He slams his hands on the table again. “Don’t give me this shit. This ‘I’m innocent” shit. You know that’s a lie.”
He gets up and walks out, taking the light and leaving me in the dark.
38
14 days until the Pulse Anniversary
After a long, quiet trudge back to the house where Shanna had been staying a couple miles north of the capital, we huddle and try to make sense of what had just happened and what we should do next. We’re all trying to decipher what Shanna was signaling as she came out of the capitol doors. Her shrug, her upturned hands, her whole demeanor was negative, so we’re thinking that whoever she talked to denied that there was any attack planned.
Flip is the last person to be with her as she died. He says her last words were, “No war,” which he interprets as confirmation that the president’s people said there isn’t any war being planned, and that’s what we expected would happen. So he’s all for taking immediate action. I swear he’d grab some guys and storm the capitol building if anyone would join him.
Shanna’s death has people more upset than the war. This one woman, who has to be at least sixty—and maybe seventy—with gray hair and wrinkly face, says, “I can’t believe they just shot her. The Red Hats. They shot her.”
Someone else says, “Pounds has to pay for this.”
Another, “It wasn’t enough to deny that he’s planning this atrocity of a war, he has to kill the messenger. Why didn’t he just have her detained when she was inside? No. He killed her.”
There’s lots more like this, with people crying and screaming and being sad and angry at the same time. Eventually, people wear down, and the conversation turns to what we do next. The older lady, who seems like she’s in charge of Shanna’s people now, says we need to go to the press, ASAP.
She says, “Some reporters were there when Shanna got shot, so they know part of the story. But they don’t know why she was shot, so we need to tell them. About the war, and how the president reacted: by having her killed.”
Flip asks, “But will that change anything? Will the truth get the president to do anything differently?”
“Pounds will lose the element of surprise, at the least, assuming he’s planning this as a surprise attack, which it certainly appears he is,” the lady says. “With the shooting of Shanna, the worldwide condemnation might get him to back off.”
“He doesn’t care about worldwide condemnation,” says Flip, pacing around the small living room where we’d all jammed together. “This is about his enemy, Andrea Vega. He hates that she refused to concede to him, and especially that she’s now leading an area that’s doing better than his country. He wants what she has, and that’s what’s driving this.”
“How do you know that?” asks Jake. “Just because some guy we don’t really even know has said this was is coming, how can you make all these assumption about anybody’s motivations?”
“I know that fucker Pounds,” snaps Flip. “That’s how.”
Several people talk at once. I’m standing in the doorway to the dining room, away from the center of what’s quickly turning into an impassioned argument. I’m trying to figure what I think, and I’m having a hard time with it. The one thing seared into my mind, though, is the sight of Shanna, lying in a pool of blood. That’s just so wrong. So, so wrong.
Jerry arrives, stepping right into the midst of the yelling, which fades as people notice him. He looks a little ragged. His shirt sleeve is torn and he’s dirty.
“Where have you been?” asks Flip. “Haven’t seen you or Len since this morning.”
“Fucking Red Hats. They got Len,” says Jerry, sounding like he’s out of breath.
“What happened?” asks Jake. “You do something stupid?”
“No, shit. You got anything to drink?” Jerry looks around for someplace to sit, but every chair is occupied.
“What’s the matter?” says Jake. “Don’t you have any of that vodka of yours?”
Jerry doesn’t answer, but shoots Jake a dirty look.
“I know we’ve got water,” I say. I’d gone to collect a bucket from a well down the street when we first got here. Indianapolis supposedly has running water again, but if so, it isn’t working around this neighborhood.
“That’d be fine,” says Jerry. “Thanks.” He looks around at the faces now staring at him, waiting to hear his story. “Len and I were out on the street when all the excitement happened.”
I hand him a glass of water I’d fetched from the kitchen.
“Thanks, kid,” he says, chugging the entire glass before he continues with his story. “When the Red Hats came marching in, we were right there. They shoved us out of the way as they turned to go into the plaza. So we kind of followed them in. I knew something bad was going to happen. Those guys, all wearing masks, like they didn’t want anybody to know who they were. I haven’t seen that before. So then, when they grabbed Shanna and dragged her down the steps, we were right behind them. Len was close to Shanna when one of those fuckers pulls a gun and shoots her, in the stomach. Len goes crazy. Then another one pulls a gun and shoots in the air to scare everybody away.”
“That was a different guy than the one who shot her?” asks Jake.
“Yeah. Sure was. I s
aw that much myself. I don’t know if that was the plan all along, or if they were trying to arrest her, or what, but they shot her right there. Dropped her to the ground and turned around and marched out.”
“Are you sure the shot didn’t come from somewhere else? Somebody in the crowd, or a sniper?” asks Jake.
“No. No way. Len, he’s right there. He yells at the guy, ‘You shot her. You shot her. You can’t do that.’ That’s when the Red Hats, a couple or three of them, grab him and hit him, and he’s screaming at them the whole time. I try to get in there to help him, and they beat on me too. They start hauling him off, and he’s beat up pretty good now, and they try to grab me to take me too, but I fight them off, but not before they knock me down and kick me. But I rolled over and got away. Len, though. They took him with them.”
“Where’ve you been? It’s been a couple hours since all that,” says Flip.
“I tried to follow them. But they had some trucks parked down the road, and that’s when I lost them. Then I tried to find my way back here, which was harder than I thought it would be.”
We’re all bummed about Len, but nobody has any good ideas about what to do about him, and the conversation turns back to Shanna and what to do about the impending war.
The older lady had been very close to Shanna, apparently, and is very upset, but she’s very strong in voicing her opinions. She wants to do what Shanna would have done, which is to go to the press with the story.
Flip makes a strong argument for assassinating Pounds. Jerry agrees, but when Flip doesn’t get support from anyone else, he says, “Look. What would the world be like if someone had assassinated Hitler before the Second World War? How many people died because he lived and built his extermination camps? Six million Jews? How many more died in the war he started? Do you think groups of right-minded people like us sat around and thought about it? You bet they did. Did anybody get it done? No. And I don’t know how to do it. I’m just saying it’s something that we have to do.”
“Are you saying Pounds is another Hitler?” asks the older lady, who’s name I finally catch. It’s Moana or something like that. “Surely not.”
“I don’t know,” answers Flip. “He’s going after those he finds undesirable, like gays. Hitler had Jews. Pounds has gays. Maybe he is another Hitler. And maybe he’s going to start a war that’ll kill thousands. Maybe millions.”
There’s some debate; I say that makes sense to me, and Jerry is strongly for planning an assassination. He says he knows some people that could help. “If we just had Len,” he says. “He’s a sniper. He could do it.”
Jake brings it all to a head when he says, “Let’s take a two step approach. We go to the press. If nothing happens, then we consider other actions. I can’t believe I’m saying that, but I am. But I want to be clear: we are not the kind of people who go around assassinating people. At least, I don’t think we are.” The others nod in agreement.
Moana writes up a press release that she says we can deliver to some of the reporters. She asks Jerry for details on the sources he and Len had, and what, specifically they said. Jerry tells her what he knows, except for the names of the sources, because, he says, that would put them at risk. So we end up with “a high-ranking militia officer” and an “official in Pounds’ administration.” She types the thing on an old mechanical typewriter. Then she types it again and again, complaining about missing something called “carbon paper,” which would make copies automatically.
I take two of the releases and deliver them, one to an office in downtown Indianapolis that actually has a sign saying “Indianapolis Star” and another to a little house just north of downtown, where several reporters supposedly stay. The woman there who takes the release speaks with a very strong German accent, so I’m guessing they’re from foreign news outlets. It’s hard to even imagine that there are places in the world where they still have television and social media, but I guess that’s true. I don’t know how they get the news from here to there, but they must have ways, and they are probably better than having a kid deliver it with a bicycle.
After we get the press releases out, Flip, Jake and I decide to go back to Lafayette. Jerry is staying in case any of the reporters want more information, and he’s going to try to find Len. I feel bad leaving, but I don’t know what I can do. I’m pretty sure we’re not going to try to break Len out of jail, if that’s where he is.
39
14 days until the Pulse Anniversary
On the drive back to Lafayette, Flip tries to convince Jake that an assassination of President Pounds is a good idea. But Jake is having none of it.
“When has an assassination of the leader of a country ever been a good thing?” says Jake.
Flip thinks for a minute and then says, “I’m not a student of history, maybe like you are. I keep saying this, but what if Hitler had been assassinated?”
“Yeah, you already went through that one,” says Jake.
“How about Stalin, then? Or Castro? Or Chávez, down in Venezuela? If he’d been removed from the scene, maybe Venezuela would be one of the richest countries in South America, instead of one of the poorest.”
“Yeah, and if Stalin had been killed, maybe Hitler would have won the war, and we’d all be speaking German.”
“Better that than what we got.”
“Are you sure of that?”
Flip’s car coughs a couple of times. I’m afraid it’s going to stop running here in the middle of the highway. We’re barely out of the Indy suburbs, still a long way from Lafayette.
Flip curses and says, “Damn car. It doesn’t like it much when you switch from gasoline to ethanol and back again.”
Jake says, “Yeah, these engines were never intended to burn pure ethanol. It eats away at some of the gaskets and seals.”
We’re all quiet while we silently pray that the car will keep running. When the thing seems to smooth out again, Flip says, “Maybe Stalin’s a bad example.”
“That’s the thing, you just don’t know. In most cases of political assassination, it’s because of a coup. If you’re not planning a coup, then what will really happen? Will things change?”
“We’re not going to stage any coup. We just need to get rid of the guy who is behind things that threaten us, threaten lives.”
“I don’t know, Flip. It just sounds dangerous. You can’t go shooting a president because you disagree with his policies.”
That seems to get to Flip, who practically spits his response. “Goddamn it. I’m trying to stop a war. You know that. We’ve tried to get elections and all that shit. But this is a crisis. This means lives. We’ve already had people killed. Look at what happened to Rick. To Wilson.”
“Still.”
“Still, my ass. What are you going to do if this news thing doesn’t work? If the stories don’t run, or people don’t read them, or believe them. What then? Are you going to go enlist and fight against those devils from Pennsylvania?”
“No, of course not.” I can tell that one gets to Jake. He hesitates before his answer, and I can see the look on his face when he turns to look at Flip. He’s not so sure of himself now.
Flip maybe notices too, and says, “Hey, kid. You’ve been pretty quiet in the back seat there. What do you think?”
He’s catches me off guard. I’m not ready to join this argument. “I don’t know,” I say. “I don’t much like the idea of shooting people.”
“Does that mean you don’t want to go to war?” says Flip. “Or you don’t think we should shoot the president?”
“Neither one.”
“Well, it may come down to one or the other, kid.”
Jake says, “I really hope not. I hope not, for all our sakes.”
The next few days are hard. Rob is still hanging out at Jake’s when we get back, but Rachel’s moved back in with her mom. I sleep at Jake’s, but spend some time at Rachel’s, even though she’s not ready to get back together with me. Oh, she’s friendly enough, but that’s jus
t it. It’s friend stuff, not more.
Mom is there at the DuBonnettes’, still working away with the administration trying to find legal solutions to problems I don’t understand. She’s no fan of Pounds, though. But she says the only way through is to just “keep working it, and working it, until, maybe, someday, a solution arises.”
When I see her, I tell her about Shanna, and about the coming war. Rachel had told her before, so it isn’t news anymore, but, even so, I’m surprised by her reaction. Or, really, lack of one. “I’m really sorry about what happened to your friend Shanna,” she says. “I don’t know what that was all about, but I’m sure it wasn’t because of this war you’re talking about. I just don’t think that’s going to happen.”
I argue, telling her about the reports we’d received and that Shanna and her people, who were in tune with what the government is doing, were on board.
“Maybe so, but whether people believe it or not, it just doesn’t make sense for a war against what’s now the USA.”
“Does any war make sense to you, Mom?”
“Probably not.” She’s shaking her head. Gets up from the couch and heads for the kitchen. Stops and turns back to me. “Listen, Brady. I’m in and out of government offices all day. I’ve seen no hint of anything like this war. Nothing big.”
“Yeah, but you’re in Lafayette. The central government is now in Indianapolis. The people here are not in the know.”
“We get people in here from Indianapolis all the time. And before that, from all over. That’s not the . . .” She looks frustrated, not sure what to say.
“Anyway, Mom,” I say. “It’s not just whether there’s going to be a war. The big thing is what we do about it.”
Her expression changes; she looks more relaxed. Almost happy. “You’ve changed so much,” she says as she takes a step toward me. “A year ago, it was hard to get you motivated to do anything, about anything. Now you’re fighting for causes, trying to right wrongs, stopping wars.” I think she’s going to come over and hug me, but she stops, and says, “But you’re still so young. You’ve got to be careful who you listen to, who you follow. Just because someone says something doesn’t mean it’s true.”
