Why Visit America

by Matthew Baker

  Sam dismounted from the horse with the flag as a couple of soldiers in camouflage face paint strolled over to the pole at town hall to take down New Glory.

  “This town is under the jurisdiction of the United States. Every person here is a citizen of the United States. Starting today, this town will remain under martial law until every last citizen has taken a vow, swearing loyalty to the United States, renouncing loyalty to the micronation America,” Sam hollered.

  Belle Clanton, who had been just about to embark on a group hike in the hills, had already received over a dozen separate texts from those of us in town. After recruiting those of us there for the hike to form a posse, she got to town the quickest way that she could, mounting the horse in the stable behind the hacienda and then galloping bareback through the gulch at a breakneck speed, taking the nearest shortcut to town, through the hills instead of around. Old Glory was already flying from the pole at town hall. Belle came riding into town just as the pair of soldiers in the camouflage face paint were setting fire to New Glory, dropping the flag into a trash can.

  Those of us in the posse still hadn’t arrived, but at the sight of that flag burning she spurred the horse straight at the militia, reining the horse only meters away from the front line. Sam turned from the fire to face her. Dismounting, she squared off against him and the foreign soldiers, outnumbered nearly a hundred to one.

  The doors to the buildings were all propped open for the breeze. All the windows were open too, were pushed up or cranked out. Even those of us in buildings could hear the exchange that followed.

  “Sam,” Belle shouted.

  “Belle,” Sam called.

  And then she and he both fell silent, staring at each other across that lonely expanse of cracking pavement. Nobody moved. Sunlight shimmered on the barrels of the firearms. Fingers hovered over triggers. Thumbs hovered over hammers. None of us had ever felt such palpable tension in the air. Not ever. An actual tumbleweed, swear to god, suddenly blew into the road, and then stopped awkwardly in the middle of the street when the wind died. Pam Cone was still playing the harmonica, watching the scene from over at the saloon.

  Belle was armed only with the colt derringer that she had inherited from her parents with the farm. She carried the gun to scare off mountain lions and bears. The gun had a pearl handle and only a single shot.

  The tumbleweed blew off into an alley.

  “We’re here to enforce the lawful dominion of the United States,” Sam yelled.

  “Goddamnit, Sam, what do you love so much about the United States?” Belle shouted.

  Sam hesitated for a second, which surprised all of us, that he’d need to think. He glanced away from her, glancing over toward town hall, and then turned back toward her with a desperate expression. He looked haggard, with a weary slump to his shoulders and dark pits under his eyes, and instead of the cleanly shaven face that he usually had, his face was stubbled and gaunt and sagging. His wrinkles had deepened dramatically over the past few months. He looked bad, we suddenly realized. As bad as after his wife had died. All of those months when he’d been grieving.

  “It’s the great experiment. A land of progress. A land of equality. A place where all of humanity can experiment, and innovate, and invent, and try new things. The first place on the planet where people of every race and every culture came to live together. To collaborate. To coexist. That’s what makes the United States special,” Sam shouted.

  “The United States isn’t any of that anymore,” Belle shouted.

  Kimberly Khan came running back to the playground with a loaded carbine, quick hurried up the steps of the slide, vanished headfirst into the top of the tube, gradually slid down the bends in the slide, then reappeared at the bottom of the tube, and came to a halt, lying there in the mouth of the slide with the stance of a sniper, grimly aiming the carbine at the street.

  “All that anybody in that country can accomplish is the occasional filibuster,” Belle shouted.

  She waited for him to respond to her, but he was silent.

  “Reps and senators are bought and sold by the highest bidder,” Belle shouted.

  She gave him another chance to dispute her, but he kept quiet.

  “It’s literally legal now for the one percent to buy elections,” Belle shouted.

  Sam glanced down at the pavement as a gust of wind rustled his pants and his shirt and the bandanna around his neck.

  “The United States has gone to hell, Sam. The roads are shit. The schools are shit. The healthcare is shit. All of the money’s being funneled to the politicians and the corporations and all of the millionaires are becoming billionaires off all of the debt and the exploitation. I know that you know that it’s true. The system is failing. The system is broken. It’s time to get out. It’s time to start over. None of us deserves to die in that hellhole,” Belle shouted.

  “But,” Sam said, then hesitated, glancing back at town hall with a look of profound sorrow before gesturing helplessly and exclaiming, “it’s our country.”

  Belle threw her hands wide as her hair whipped around her face with another gust of wind.

  “It was once. It doesn’t have to be anymore. You’re an American at heart, Sam. I know that you are. You were born here. Just look around you. What you said about the United States, about what it used to be, about progress and equality and being able to invent and innovate and try new things, that’s the spirit of America. You won’t find that in the United States. There the spirit of America is dead. Now the spirit of America lives here,” Belle shouted.

  Sam looked at all of us, at every one of us there, glancing between the windows and the doors and the porches of the buildings lining the street, and each of us felt a powerful sense of familiarity when he locked eyes with us, as he recognized each of our faces, as he remembered each of our names.

  “There’s nothing as American as seceding,” Belle said.

  Sam turned back to look at her, and those of us closest to him suddenly saw tears shimmering in his eyes, and his voice cracked when he spoke.

  “I love that country,” Sam said.

  “We all did,” Belle said.

  “With all of my heart,” Sam said.

  “It can’t be saved,” Belle said.

  Sam looked down at the ground, then blinked, and grimaced, and a couple of tears streaked down the furrowed wrinkles in his face.

  “I know,” Sam whispered.

  The soldiers behind him looked concerned.

  “Sam?” murmured a soldier in a tigerstripe uniform, frowning at him, as if realizing that he had changed, that he was about to order the soldiers to stand down, that he was about to order the soldiers to pull out. We all saw the look on his face. He wasn’t one of them anymore. He was finally one of us. Goosebumps tingled down our necks and our arms. Belle looked as moved as the rest of us, but while what she’d said might have finally gotten through to him, what she’d said had only hardened the resolve of the soldiers, and before he could speak the soldiers acted without him. “You’re all a bunch of agitators,” shouted a soldier in camouflage face paint, as a soldier in military fatigues shouted, “Y’all are a bunch of subversives.” The soldiers raised the shotguns and the rifles and the pistols and the revolvers to ready positions, stocks to shoulders, grips in hand, looking unanimously enraged. Belle reacted on instinct, drawing the colt derringer, and seeing her raise the weapon the soldiers responded by opening fire on the town. Johannes, who at that exact second came strolling out of the library with a book of haikus, completely oblivious to the standoff in the street, got clipped in the shoulder, flipping backward over a hedge, as the rest of us ducked behind railings and windowsills and doorframes and tables and benches for cover, firing back at the soldiers with whatever we happened to be carrying as bullets shattered glass and dented metal and splintered wood up and down the street.

  The shoot-out was over in less than a minute. From a tactical perspective, the militia had chosen a catastrophic position, exposed on all sides
. By the time the gunfire had ceased, every last soldier was on the pavement, either dead or dying or feebly attempting to crawl away, streaked with blood. Brain matter was spattered across the pavement. Both of the horses had been slain. Sam hadn’t moved, miraculously hadn’t been shot once, hadn’t fired a shot either, was just standing there in the road with a look of shock. Johannes had staggered back up off of the ground, holding the wounded shoulder, grimacing bravely, showing the heroic fortitude that only a true poet could possess. The rest of us all seemed to be more or less okay, except the president.

  Belle was sprawled across the pavement where she’d been standing only seconds earlier. She had been shot in her chest and her abdomen, had taken a pair of bullets just above her knee, and was bleeding from the ear where her earlobe had been grazed. Her fingers were twitching horribly.

  Sam was the only trained physician at the scene. He could have run to any wounded person there. He didn’t hesitate. He ran to her, dropping to the ground. A gust of wind blew the cowboy hat from his head, and he didn’t reach back for the hat or turn to watch the hat tumble away, he was so intent on her condition.

  “It should have been you,” Belle said.

  “Don’t try to talk,” Sam said, wrenching off his bandanna to use as a tourniquet.

  “You should have been president,” Belle said.

  “Just lie still for a second,” Sam said, tying the tourniquet tight around her thigh.

  “From the beginning,” Belle said.

  Sam shouted for somebody to get a car.

  “Take care of this place,” Belle said, coughing up blood, then fainted away, and though he tried to resuscitate her, she couldn’t be revived.

  Sam rushed her to the med center in the back of a station wagon.

  By then those of us in the posse had arrived at the scene, horrified by the carnage. We were furious at the militia for invading our country and shooting our president, would have liked to have executed each and every one of the soldiers who were still alive, but we don’t enjoy killing, and we aren’t without mercy, so we let the soldiers who could still move attempt to crawl away to safety. Still, none of the soldiers managed to get further than the outskirts of town. The last of the soldiers expired under the yucca tree behind the school, with a whimper.

  Just as we were beginning to clear the bodies from the street, a fluorescent camper van came gliding into town on the highway, driven by a foreigner wearing a silk headscarf and far too much mascara, who brought the camper van to a halt before leaning out the window.

  Bev Whittaker, whose heart was still pounding from all the excitement, was standing over the body of a soldier nearby.

  “What’s all of this?” the driver said.

  “Just fought a battle,” Bev Whittaker said.

  “Some kind of reenactment?” the driver said.

  “The war’s over now,” Bev Whittaker said.

  The driver surveyed the bodies in the road with a look of contemplation.

  “God bless America,” the driver said, and we thanked her.

  The camper van maneuvered carefully through the bodies and then carried on down the highway.

  We buried the soldiers in a mass grave out in the hills (see: MAP OF AMERICA, WAR MEMORIAL #1).

  Belle survived, to our great relief, but she’d taken a bullet in her spine, and she’ll never recover use of her limbs. She now spends most of the day in a wheelchair. She needs help taking drinks of water. She needs help taking bites of food. She needs help getting to the bathtub. She has to be washed and dressed by other hands. She’ll never be able to hike the land again. And yet, though she was initially discouraged by the change, even overwhelmed, she’s adjusted with characteristic resilience, with sheer grit and determination, and says she doesn’t regret taking a stand against the militia. America is her dream. She would have willingly died for it. She took those bullets for it happily. She can still see, and hear, and smell, and taste, and speak, and cry, and laugh, and has found that in many respects her life is even richer than before. Only a change in perspective.

  Sam was appointed interim president while she was hospitalized. Upon being discharged, she gladly resigned, and though he felt he didn’t deserve to be president after having invaded the country with a foreign militia, he accepted the position when she insisted. America has prospered under him, as we had always known the country would.

  Sam had just one condition, which was that he would only agree to be president if she would allow him to serve as her caretaker, without pay. Visitors to his home will almost always find the house empty, as he now spends day and night out at her hacienda. Aside from when volunteers cover for him, he’s the one who lifts her in and out of bed, and combs her hair, and trims her nails, and flosses her teeth, and brushes her teeth, and holds a dixie cup to her mouth for her to spit out swished mouthwash, and washes all of her clothing, and prepares all of her meals, and switches the station on the radio when she wants, and turns pages for her when she feels like reading. He’s also the one who figured out how to take her to her favorite view. Earlier this autumn he bought a covered wagon from a company online, and now every afternoon, whether rain or shine, he helps her into the wagon and hitches the wagon to a pair of horses and then drives the wagon through the vineyard, bringing her where cars can’t, into the gulch and across the creek and through the narrow ravine winding deep into the hills, where a rocky trail leads to a scenic overlook above the plains that she discovered when she was young. Sam sits with her in the back of the wagon at the crest of the hill, and she talks with him as he helps her take sips of mint julep or eat slices of pumpkin pie. He never makes a decision about the country without consulting her first, and occasionally she and he spend the time deliberating over bureaucratic affairs, but often she and he spend the time discussing personal topics instead. Memories. Regrets. Horoscopes. The meaning of dreams. We like to be there when we can, just to sit there in the covered wagon, listening to her and him talk as we watch weather cross the plains below. To us, there’s no experience as powerful in all of the country (see: MAP OF AMERICA, SITE OF HISTORICAL IMPORTANCE #3).

  Welcome, dear visitor, to a proud and storied nation. When you put down this guidebook, look around you. A nation isn’t land. A nation is people. We’re what we are because of who we are. Love is greater than hate. Love is greater than greed. Love is greater than fear. America is a country whose people love each other. As you walk through these streets, look at the people you pass. There’s the love between friends. There’s the love between spouses. There’s the love between parents and children. There’s the love between neighbors, fellow citizens of a great nation. But there’s no love as pure and as beautiful as the love between bitter enemies, united at last.

  To Be Read Backward

  My birth had been a messy one. It happened while nobody was home—I came to life coughing up turpentine, chunks of clay, black oil paint, violet, gray. Then the pills. I don’t remember much of it. It was all over so quickly.

  The first thing to register was the depression. I felt completely hopeless. I felt totally numb. I was obsessed with the fourth dimension. Couldn’t stop thinking about it—the shape of it, of everything. I moped around the basement all day, smoking cloves, wearing a ratty sweater, thinking.

  It only got worse after meeting my parents.

  “Yes, yes, divorced,” my mother said, wiping her glasses with the hem of her shirt.

  They’d come down to the basement when they’d gotten home. My mother had silver hair, whereas my father had none. They both wore digital watches.

  “Do I have to be?” I said.

  “You won’t be forever,” my father said.

  “But where is she?” I said.

  “Really couldn’t tell you,” my mother said.

  “Who even is she?” I said.

  “You’ll learn all of that in time,” my father said.

  “What about this?” I said, showing my parents a green ticket that had been in my pocket. The tick
et was bent and wrinkled and had a tiny tear along the top edge. “175” was printed across the ticket in faint black ink. Beneath the numbers the surface of the ticket was warped by a rippled water stain. “Does this have anything to do with her?”