NOT AN AMERICAN

by Stanley W Rogouski

"Then I learned the old man had cancer. Some bum comes in off the street and says 'hey dad. Bet you didn't know you had a bastard son?' No. I just couldn't. Next year, my sister could be running the whole city, and I'm some bum living in an abandoned shopping mall. I just couldn't."

  Avellanos was staring at Ruiz so intently Andy Jackson and Jorge had put down their sandwiches.

  "You're not a bum. You served in the Marine Corps."

  “That's why I'm a bum," Ruiz said, his composure unsettled by Avellanos's gaze. "I served in that fucking war."

  Avellanos took out the waterproof envelope.

  "You do know about your aunt, right?" he said.

  "The chick who blew herself up 40 years ago? I think my mother must have mentioned it once or twice."

  "It must be difficult losing both your parents at once?" Avellanos said, taking out the newspaper clipping and the 8 x 10 photograph.

  "I never knew the old man. Technically he's still alive. He's in a coma. But stop changing the subject. How the fuck do you know about my father's sister?"

  Avellanos handed him the Xeroxed newspaper article.

  "Why the hell do you have this?"

  Avellanos put down the second photo. The middle-aged woman in the photo had graying hair and a thicker body, but was she very obviously the same person as the one pictured in the Xeroxed newspaper article. Ruiz was dumbstruck, staring at his doppelganger, now revealed to be his cousin.

  "Well hell," Ruiz said. "I knew I smelled my own blood back there at Burger King."

  For the next two months, John Avellanos and his cousin Martin James Ruiz lived with their two friends in the abandoned Abercrombie and Fitch store on Route 1081. The construction site at Winterborn II was not yet locked down. The unfinished block of stores on the eastern side was over a mile away from the demolition work taking place on the western side. It was a surprisingly good place to hide. The cops never came around. Nobody else seemed to be living there, and Avellanos proved unexpectedly valuable as the four men did various kinds of off the books work in and around Poison Springs. Almost always in a good mood, he was appointed their sole negotiator with prospective employers.

  "How did we ever get along without you?" Ruiz would often remark.

  Martin Ruiz grew darker as the days got shorter. The bluff, confident exterior he could project while interacting with strangers was the shallowest of facades. He became obsessed with his aunt, asking Avellanos for the old newspaper article so many times that he eventually Xeroxed him his own copy. Ruiz declined a copy of the photo of Laura Felton in her 50s, preferring to stare at the old photo of his aunt in her 20s. He pumped so much information out of Avellanos that he finally ran out.

  "I wish I had the guts to do something like that."

  "Murder innocent people?"

  Ruiz would laugh.

  "You know how many innocent people I've murdered?"

  "That was a war."

  "I killed innocent people because I was just following orders. Your mother declared war on the people who made me do it."

  "They're not around anymore."

  "This country is still a target rich environment for scumbags. Why is it that whenever you hear about some maniac going on a shooting spree, he always kills innocent people? Make it count. Take that scumbag mayor. If I were even going to go on a shooting spree, I'd walk right up the steps of city hall, right into Michael Catalinelli's office, put one bullet in his head, put one bullet in his heart, put the gun down in front of me, and let the cops blow me to kingdom come."

  "He's going to lose the election so you don't have to."

  "Then I'd find someone else. Take out the president. Take out the governor. Take out the owner of the New York Times or the Chairman of the Federal Reserve. And if you can't get close to someone important, just shoot a cop, any cop, anywhere. Oh you'll understand what I'm saying when you finally meet some of the cops in this town. But don't shoot some poor innocent bastard who just happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time."

  Martin James Ruiz was fond of exploring the hills above the construction site at Winterborn II. He seemed to consider the West Hill Mine Fire --- the existence of which anybody who had actually climbed to the top of West Hill had never doubted --- his own personal discovery, a tangible expression of the torment he felt inside. Sometimes, in the mornings, on days when they were sure they wouldn't find work, he and John Avellanos would race across the gigantic, unfinished parking lot. They would splash across the small stream, and continue over the old railway bed up the once lush, green, but now barren, eroded hill that topped out at a little under nine hundred feet above sea level. They would circle around to the back of the coal breaker, pause, eat breakfast, and talk while the sun rose in the east.

  They would continue inside to explore the site of the worst kept secret in Poison Springs, the West Hill Mine Fire. While the three old sets of railroad tracks, the rusty metal and rotting wood slowly being reclaimed by the soggy, humid earth could seem almost idyllic on the way up, the West Hill Coal Breaker itself was a disquieting sight, appearing out of nowhere like a massive industrial Golgotha, a great haunted house spread out over enough space for half a city block.

  Built in the 1930s to replace an old wooden coal breaker, the West Hill Coal Breaker had survived being demolished because it was in a remote area two miles away from and 900 feet above Route 1081. It had survived the "mythical" West Hill Mine fire, partly because it had been made of tar coated steel instead of wood, but mostly because it had been built strictly to code, 200 feet away from the mine shaft. It had also been built, or rather, overbuilt during the New Deal, at the moment when Anthracite coal mining had become obsolete. It was, like the USS New Jersey, the Nikon F6, or the Renaissance ceremonial armor at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a state of the artwork of industrial engineering that had never really been used to its full capacity.

  The Poison Springs city government, which originally denied the West Hill Mine Fire existed at all, did circulate warnings that the old coal breaker was dangerous and structurally unsound, and did put up a chain link fence to keep people out. But nobody ever took the warnings seriously, partly because the West Hill Coal Breaker was so obviously not structurally unsound, its magnificent design and solid construction having the unintended consequence of environmental neglect. After all, the West Hill Coal Breaker had been one of the largest anthracite coal breakers ever built, 12 stories tall, and bigger than a football field. If it had been sitting on top of a great coal seam fire, later found to be the worst the Winterborn County had ever seen, how could a structure of that size have remained standing? It became a tourist attraction, the subject of many a dare for local high school kids, who would consider a visit to West Hill to be a sign of "cool." It also became a popular spot for target shooting, the concrete wall on the western perimeter littered with piles of beer bottles and beer cans perfect for anybody who preferred climbing West Hill to paying for time on the gun range.

  Martin Ruiz would always insist on scampering over the concrete wall, and through the gap in the chain link fence, where he always seemed to lose his green and yellow hat on the wire mesh, daring Avellanos to follow him into the West Hill Coal Breaker. Avellanos would always follow, scooping up the hat off the ground as he ran along, and placing his hat back on his head after he passed him on the run. Ruiz loved the gigantic industrial ruin, in spite of, or, perhaps, because it was so dangerous. With its unstable floors, sharp hunks of scrap metal that cut like razor blades, remains from the last, unprocessed batch of coal that would rain down on your head whenever a piece of the roof gave in, the only thing you did not have to worry about inside the West Hill Coal Breaker was getting bitten by a wild animal. Wild animals seemed to avoid the whole area, proof, many people would argue, that there was something lurking underneath the old coal breaker that was far more deadly than a piece of scrap metal or a shower of debris.

  Ruiz would sometimes dare Avellanos to climb up one of the metal staircases to the 11th or 12th flo
or, where looking out of one of the broken windows provided a panoramic view of the entire Winterborn Valley, downtown Poison Springs, Route 1081 coursing south, Route 1080 running from east to west, WillyMart and the original Winterborn Center, and the vast construction site that was to have been the new Winterborn Center, Winterborn II, the ski resorts and hotels in the mountains to the east, the Scahentoarrhonon River early in its run from the Catskills, all the way down to the Chesapeake Bay. Avellanos, who had a mild fear of heights, would play up his anxiety, sending Ruiz into such fits of laughter that it seemed completely out of character. Sometimes Ruiz would spend hours in one of the old offices writing in a notebook, tossing the pages out the window and never showing his companion. At other times, he would stop in the middle of the first floor, which had been covered with graffiti, and where he and Avellanos would examine the creativity of five decades, everything from Jim Morrison to George Washington, Swastikas to American eagles, even a spray painted portrait of Emiliano Zapata next to a spray painted portrait of Mao, neither of which had been molested, either by trespassers or the weather.

  But it was those times, where Ruiz in his very bleakest of moods would walk decisively through the West Hill Coal Breaker out to the old tipple and the mine shaft, which played and replayed themselves over and over again in John Avellanos's imagination that winter, spring, and summer, and eventually convinced him that his cousin had committed suicide. Avellanos would always follow, even though, unlike the stoutly built coal breaker itself, the old tipple was, without a doubt, structurally unsound and in danger of collapse. He would wend his way through around the line of iron hopper carts that had once brought the coal 100 yards from the tipple out to the conveyor belts. The smell was palpable, so strong that Avellanos could almost imagine he saw smoke wafting out of the half collapsed mouth of the very obviously unstable old hole in the ground.

  Once to Avellanos's horror, Martin Ruiz jumped into the iron hopper cart nearest the mine shaft, and actually succeeded in moving it, even though it had not been used for at least 75 years, and its wheels seemed permanently rusted into the iron rails that led down into a long burning fire with an infinite supply of fuel.

  "We're standing over the mouth of hell," he said, rocking the old hopper cart back and forth until he managed to shake it loose from the rust, "the actual literal mouth of hell."

  "Come down here you idiot," Avellanos yelled. "You're going to kill yourself."

  "I was a few years younger than you," Ruiz said, as he continued to rock the old cart back and forth and the wheels began to move. "We had almost finished clearing Fallujah. I had been awake for 34 or 35 hours. I was popping caffeine pills by the handful. I was losing touch with reality. Then I got cut off. I had no idea where I was but I heard Arabic and I heard automatic rifles and I heard a little girl. She was just about to scream out when I grabbed her around the mouth. She bit my hand and tried to escape. The voices and the sounds of the automatic weapons got louder, and her teeth just got tighter and tighter, or seemed to get tighter and tighter on my hand. I don't know how it happened. I don't know how I did it. But the next thing I knew I had cut her throat and let her fall to the ground. My knife was covered with blood. The voices speaking Arabic and the sounds of the automatic weapons were gone. Had they even been there? I don't know. Maybe. Maybe not. But the girl was dead and I had done it."

  He jumped out of the iron cart.

  "So who's the terrorist? Me or your mother?"

  Avellanos got in between his cousin and the mine shaft.

  "I will fight you if you try to kill yourself."

  Ruiz suddenly burst out laughing. Avellanos was tall and well-built, but he had no idea of what violence really was. It would have been entirely too easy just to have bashed his brains in with a rock, and jump down into the mine shaft anyway. It lightened a mood that had come right up to the edge despair, and only barely managed to pull itself back. Ruiz straightened up his yellow and green knit had, a cheap, mass produced hat they sold in bulk at WillyMart, but which he had made so completely his own it was difficult for John Avellanos to imagine anybody else wearing it. He cocked it rakishly down over his forehead, reached around the back of his neck, and pulled off his dog tags.

  "Bend over," he said, putting them around his cousin's neck. "There you go."

  "Why are you putting your dog tags around my neck?" Avellanos said.

  "Since you support the troops, the troops support you. I knight you Sir Guilty Liberal Supporter of the Troops. Arise."

  A week later, at the "inner base camp," Andy Jackson and Jorge were insulting each other in mutually incomprehensible languages. Martin James Ruiz appeared even more somber than usual, quite a contrast to Avellanos, who was in an unusually good mood. The weather had grown chillier, and Avellanos, who hated shaving with cold water, had stopped altogether. The scraggly beard, and the way his hair was beginning to creep over his ears, made him look so much like his cousin he could have been the same person in two different moods, two cardboard cutouts in the lobby of a movie theater. Their dress heightened the contrast. The somber Ruiz, who always dressed as flamboyantly as possible, wore a bright red flannel shirt and the colorful yellow and green knit hat. The effervescent Avellanos wore a plain blue sweatshirt and a new pair of jeans. After Andy Jackson remarked to Ruiz that he looked like he was wearing a parrot on the top of his head, Ruiz started to laugh.

  "I'm going to miss you Andy."

  "Where are you going?" Avellanos said.

  "I'm leaving town. It's getting much too cold for me here."

  "Are we welcome to come along?"

  "Yeah you damned parrot head," Andy Jackson said as Jorge smiled. "Are you going to leave us?"

  "Mr. Avellanos here seems to like this town so much I thought maybe you three would stay."

  "Mr. Avellanos can go fuck himself."

  "How about you Jorge," Ruiz said in bad Spanish. "Do you want to go back to LA?"

  After Jorge responded with thumbs up and Avellanos remarked that he had never been to Los Angeles, Ruiz started laying out his plans. They had enough money to hitch hike, or even buy bus tickets, should hitchhiking prove difficult. It was Saturday. The next day, they would buy supplies and clean up after themselves. They would break camp and start on their way Monday morning.

  When Avellanos produced a copy of the Winterborn Daily Post, and pointed out that a freak early snowstorm was going to hit on Sunday night, which would be exceptionally large, even record setting for November, they put off their departure for mid-week. They would still go to WillyMart the next morning to buy supplies. As the evening went on, Andy Jackson and Jorge squabbled. Ruiz wrote in a spiral notebook. Avellanos sat back reading his copy of Emerson's journals. When he woke up the next morning, Jorge and Andy Jackson were snoring loudly, but Ruiz was gone. The notebook was gone. So was the green and yellow hat. All that remained were a few discarded pieces of paper. Avellanos went out to the "shower" to look for Ruiz, but there was no sign of him. Suddenly, he gasped. There was a copy of the Winterborn Daily Post that Ruiz had turned over to pages 2 and 3. He looked at the photos.

  "Former Senator Nicholas Felton dies at the age of 68," the headline read. "After a two year struggle with cancer, which came on so suddenly that it seemed to cut him down in the prime of his youth," the article continued, "Nicholas Felton, a lifetime resident of Poison Springs, who had spent the last month of his life in a coma, died Friday night. A Memorial Service is scheduled for Sunday afternoon at the family estate in East Poison Springs."

  Avellanos brought the newspaper back to the Abercrombie and Fitch, and woke up Jorge, who, much to his surprise, did not seem particularly worried. "Oh he pulls shit like this all the time," he said in English," then explained in Spanish that Ruiz, whenever he got into an odd mood, something the death of his biological father would have certainly provoked, would run off for a few days to be alone, to brood, ultimately to test his companions' loyalty. Jorge suggested that they should just go to WillyMart as original
ly planned. Perhaps Ruiz would even be waiting for them when they got back. Avellanos agreed, relieved at how unconcerned Jorge seemed to be. He told Andy Jackson about the new plans, but something felt wrong. Andy Jackson picked a fight. As comfortable as he was taking orders from Martin James Ruiz, he was contemptuous of his doppelganger. The fight got so bad it lasted over an hour, ending only when Jorge stepped between them and started cursing in Spanish.

  It was already well into the evening by the time the three men finally made it to WillyMart, and it was dark by the time they came out. There were snow flurries in the air as they walked out into the parking lot, and across Route 1081, each man carrying two plastic bags as they walked hurriedly back to the "base camp," not only angry about Ruiz having abandoned them, but anxious over the possibility of a "Citizen's Immigration Arrest."

  Citizens Immigration Arrests, which were a key part of the CCIA, and which allowed "any American" to detain anybody they suspected of being in the country illegally as long as they immediately called the police, had been stepped up dramatically after Halloween when a man who was later found to have been in the country illegally, had shot a clerk at a gas station convenience store. After the three men crossed over the bridge past the two houses covered with graffiti, and noticed two motorcycles, they turned around, intending to double back down the street and get back to Route 1081, but there were two more motorcycles behind them. When they saw men on foot, at least 20, come out from behind one of the vacant houses and line up on the sidewalk, they knew they were in trouble. It was "America's Guard."

  A bearded, heavy-set, middle-aged man stepped down off the sidewalk.

  "Look at what we've got here," he said, "an old bum, his boyfriend, and an undocumented immigrant from south of the border. Can any of you gentlemen speak English?"

  All three remained silent. Another America's Guard member, also middle aged, but tall, thin, and clean-shaved, stepped off the sidewalk. He walked up to John Avellanos. He smiled. Then he cupped his hands around his mouth.