Rex says, “Cute.”
Gordon says, “You’re not as nice as you used to be.”
“When was I nice?”
Gordon says, “I understand you guys, I really do. I just wish you were . . . not so charged with self-interest.”
“What does that mean?”
“I wish you were interested in protecting. This child, for instance.”
“She’ll be protected.”
Gordon raises his eyebrows. “Promise?”
Rex says, “We’ll protect anyone who wants to stay on this side of the blockade . . . if it comes to that. We have reason to believe it is going to come to that, state by state. She wants to be here, she can be here.”
Gordon rocks. His face above the beard is beaded up all over, both the heat-wave kind and the nerved-up kind.
Rex plays with his soft cloth cap, a sign that this visit is significant to him.
Gordon says, “Do you think the government is up to something? Some event . . . so they can declare martial law? Wouldn’t that actually be a coup d’état? You guys would just bounce off them like mice off a division of sixty-ton tanks.”
“I believe they . . . I believe something is up.”
Gordon says, “Our government, the one we see, they are playacting. Obviously, there is another one, the one you never see. It . . . was . . . eventless. A lot of gentlemanly little coups. The transformation is complete.” His voice has been mellow. No shouting. But he watches Rex hard in the storybook-blue light of candles and night.
Rex says, “I won’t argue with that.”
Gordon says, “So the event: it would be to maybe occur. . . .” He pauses. He thinks. “To get the public worked up—” He closes his eyes. “Like the Northwoods project false flag terror—”
“To create chaos,” Rex says quickly.
Gordon rocks back and forth. “Okay, so the government to our minds is now an alien government. It sucks; we agree. It ain’t we-the-people; it never was. It was designed to foster only a limited number of legal persons, like ten percent of the population. A master class. The rest of us don’t get democracy.”
Rex flinches. Turns his face away with a really pained expression.
“What?”
“Do not use that word democracy.”
“Why are you guys so stuck on that? I do not mean direct vote by a majority on every issue, like whether or not people in South Carolina should vote on whether or not people in San Francisco can raise hogs in their backyards.” Gordon sighs. “I mean the process of—”
“Whatever. Democracy is not what this is.”
“I agree. It is not—”
“Nor do we want a democracy,” Rex says gravely.
“Richard, there are many kinds of d—”
“Don’t say it.”
Gordon snorts. “If you don’t listen, you will never learn anything.”
“You are not the knower of all things.”
Gordon hangs his head, both eyes squinched. He imagines for a moment how it would be for all those he loves if, yes indeed, there was a direct vote on every issue by everybody in America; if, in fact, they had time for such. He sees legions of schoolteachers, of every school and every grade, marching chin-up to the polls. And school principals. And social workers. Only the most thin-lipped of them all, chin-up agents of the system. The prissy and the puritanical, the hard-assed and the switch-flippers. Those who despise hair. Those who despise free inquiry of the mind. Those who despise untidiness. The majority, wielding their whips and their pens, voting away the lives of the Settlement people and—yeah—voting away the patriot types, all the old-fashioned types, leaving them landless and without honor. Like a bad movie that has too many pilots, too many sayso’s. Like too many cooks. Too many chiefs. Like a sky of huge hail. And yet the octopus isn’t dropping flower petals and May baskets. Gordon covers his face with a hand. Why always does he find himself at a dead end? Why can’t he, like everyone else, find a faithful faith-fulfilling hobby horse to ride? He is sickened with envy of Rex.
He looks up at Rex’s shadowy face now, his own face tipped, a sheepish smile. “I will try not to use that word, my brother.”
Jane says gruffly, “Excuse me, but is this all we are going to do, this stuff?” She picks at one of Gordon’s shirt buttons proprietarily, but the heart shapes of her all-seeing secret agent glasses are locked on the person of Rex York.
Gordon makes hot whiskery farts-of-the-lips into Jane’s neck and she giggles. Then he says, “This is important, Jane . . . very, very important. Remember, patience is a virtue.”
Jane says evenly, “Do . . . not . . . say . . . that virtue thing. I . . . hate . . . it.”
A breeze gives several glass and metal mobiles a shiver, and some large dangling wooden ducks, nearly as big as decoys, spin contentedly. And the candle flames flutter and twist.
Secret Agent Jane considers.
It is so boring it is hard to keep track. And the number of words is more than a thousand hundreds. I will NEVER remember them all. A black dictionary. Coke dealers . . . or Coke machines, I think. Joories. Even with these power glasses, it just goes on and on. But you cannot imagine how important their talk is. I think it is very important and inlegal and big.
HEY!
You must stop talking! Look at meeeeeeeee! You ordinary people are children!!!! You need meeeee! I am the EXPERT. I am the OFFICIAL. Ho, there! Shut up! Trust only MEEEEEE. Quiet down now. Shhhhhhh.
In the shadowy night, the voices of two ordinary men continue.
Gordon says, “Okay, so let’s suppose they do it. Create some huge emergency. Bigger than their practice run, the OK City building, like next they do a whole city—Boston, for instance. And everything is shut down. Airports, TVs are all tied up with the event. Soooo then you guys, thousands of you—millions of you, if you got that big—would take over.”
Rex’s normally steady eyes blink.
Gordon says, “And then those who don’t like the militias might mis- understand, might think you are not defending but offending them.”
“Rex says coldly, “Well, that’s too bad. If—”
Gordon cuts in. “I, for one, might be a little suspicious, might think you are wanting to take things into your own hands—like executions, all justified in your minds. And you’ll be pushing your God on us all. You will be defending an awful lot of people against their will and, Mister Man, that ain’t defense!”
“If they don’t like it, they can leave,” says Rex, with a hard, level look. “This country has a Constitution. This is all the government we need. We are just upholding the Constitution, state by state. If people are against the Constitution, I am sorry, but this is not the place for them to live. They can leave.”
Gordon squints at Rex’s unshifting and always dignified figure. “Richard, I beg your pardon, but the Constitution is only a pile of old paper. It was written by followers of the Enlightenment . . . totally out of wack when positioned alongside so-called ‘rugged individualism.’ Riffraff like us are on our own.”
Rex sighs. “The Constitution is for everyone.”
Gordon is shaking his head.
“Once you know how it works,” Rex adds, after a moment of watching Gordon’s shaking head. Then, “You know how it works if you study it. You have to study it. It’s up to you . . . or them . . . or whoever.”
Gordon growls.
Rex ignores the growl and says, in an ordinary, sane, civilized way, “It’s all there.”
Gordon howls. “And now all these investor rights agreements, which are above the Constitution! The U.S. one! And the State ones! And bloodsucking foreign policy!”
Rex tsks. Rex opens his mouth to offer yet another thought in a sane, quiet way.
But Gordon booms. “The original intent! The Enlightenment has been swallowed up by ambition and the friggin’ American dream and complexity and—”
Rex cuts in, “There is nothing complex about the Constitution.”
With grim laught
er, Jane says, “I don’t believe this.”
Gordon says, “Oh, yeah, yeah, the Constitution might work if we were a tiny country full of nice people. But then again, not really, because our culture is set up for people who need a bunch of others doing all the shit-work for them. It’s not set up for people who expect to empty their own chamber pots and pick their own turnips, it’s set up for big commerce. And growth. Cancerous growth. And . . . and . . . and . . .”—he stutters now, rushing on, fearing Rex will try to speak—“and even if we did touch the Constitution up a tad, try to make it less about masters and slaves, nothing’s going to work ’cause this damn country is full of . . . of humans! Humans are such fuckups!”
Rex stares at Gordon. He’s obviously not going to humor Gordon with this kind of foolishness.
But Gordon needs no humoring to work up a spiel. He rocks the chair so hard, Jane grips him to stay on board. He raves for ten minutes.
Rex waits it out.
Militias are BAD! Militias are SCARY!
There are no good citizens’ militias because citizens should only be working toward excellence and nice scores and diplomas and voting and working at their jobs and shopping and relaxing. Getting entertainment and, yes, consuming. And only concerned with being attractive and clean. The rest will fall into place!
Trust us, it will fall into place. We are your strong leaders. We GIVE you defense. We GIVE you security. The Pentagon and CIA and FBI and police and others official enough to do it right; these are good.
Citizens must TRUST their defense providers. TRUST US!
Put your guns down. Guns are bad. Bad boys. Bad! Don’t be like those screwball dangerous citizens’ militias, which are a bunch of wacko macho racist sexist scary guys who bomb babies!
Fear them. Trust us!
Back on the farmhouse porch, Secret Agent Jane speaks to us.
When I tell the lady up the road, Ber-NEECE, and her guy about this, they will look at me with saaaad eyes. Gordie is very wrong to talk about inlegal stuff. Bernice’s guy, who is really her son, says it is very urgent that I keep an eye on things here. They use a very good tape recorder for my words. They are both real schoolteachers, not weird like up at the Settlement. Gordie isn’t a true crook. He just needs to shape up.
Almost gasping, Gordon continues.
“. . . and you are aware that in 1886, a corporate-pampered Mammonworshipping courtroom reporter of the California Supreme Court gave constitutional rights to the Pacific Railroad Corporation—a corporation, which is a piece of paper? Yes, a courtroom reporter! A little twist of wording and a lotta closed doors after that. The corporate citizen was hatched. It was inevitable. The shit was rising. Nothing can hold the shit down once it soaks a bit! . . .” Gordon is in full scream mode now. His right boot blonks the beer bottle he’d recently lowered to the floor. Oops! Over it goes, liquid snaking along the boards.
Again, Secret Agent Jane speaks to us.
Something about taking over the government. And something about murder. Some words are very real. Some words are like air. Even with these glasses, this job is harder than you think.
The candles flicker.
Quietly, Rex says, “I remember when you used to talk like this. I thought you’d gotten over it. All that commie college crap.”
Gordon gives a great hoot. “College! This was not talked about in college. This is—”
“Off the deep end,” says Rex.
“But you aren’t off the deep end?”
“I am for the Constitution.”
“You like being defined as a consumer? You miss your old definition? You miss being called a citizen? Though it was an illusion all along, you liked it, huh?”
Rex sniffs to cast aside this vague line of thinking.
Jane swings one leg over the chair arm. The leg twitches and flicks like a really annoyed lion cub might work her long spotted tail.
Gordon grins unhappily. “And because it is inside us all, it has defined us all. We are too childlike to become a resistance.”
Rex squints, wiggles his lips around, the big mustache creaturish, his eyes pale and metallic in the near dark. He hears his old friend’s voice going incredibly soft, the weird in-and-out tidal waves of his passion.
“It is beyond touch. Humans made it. But it can’t be turned by our hand!”
Rex’s eyes widen with a gotcha sort of twinkle. “I thought you said it could. You are always saying a bunch of your type of people could fix it: windmills, big gardens, cute little villages.”
Gordon is profoundly and thunderously silent.
Rex says, “So now you are saying you think it’s completely hopeless. You had all the answers a minute ago: democracy and process and whatever. Now you’ve talked yourself into a hole.” He shakes his head, eyes smiling, and turns away. Goes to the screen door, facing out.
Jane’s long bare golden-brown leg, dangling over the chair arm, has ceased motion. Gordon closes his hand around it and tucks her into her favorite curled-up sleep position against his chest. She’s pretty sleepy, almost gone, even though her secret agent all-seeing glasses remain quite well situated on her face.
Rex turns back to face Gordon.
Gordon has an ugly flash. He sees the lie of his argument to Rex. Not that the words are lies, but talk is cheap, isn’t it? In practice, Gordon St. Onge is nothing! Just hiding behind his windmills, solar collectors, and the new gate. He looks up at Rex’s face, the thinning hair and heavy to-the-jaws mustache, Rex who has now folded his arms across his chest, looking like he knows Gordon’s thoughts. But then he just says, “Democracy is chaos.”
Gordon snorts. “Richard, you’d frustrate a fieldstone.”
Rex chuckles. “Don’t start throwing things. Be nice.” His eyes grow almost warm.
Gordon says, “Okay, I don’t knock the citizens’ armed militias. Your common-law stuff. Your stashing funny foods, guns, whatever. I’m just saying we need something in addition to that, we need—” Again he is stalling out. Again the philosopher has found the bricked-up end of the universe. In the cheery candlelit gloom, he grins. Stupidly.
Meanwhile, all across America, evening descends into the various time zones.
And good American children are studying hard for tests, achieving, succeeding, becoming . . . uh, becoming what?
And then it seems the two old friends are coming to some agreement on something close to the heart.
“My brother, I understand how i’tis! All this antigun hysteria pumped up by the media and the foundations. It’s fucking scary, man, it is; I’ll give you that. It’s dividing our country like nothing has before, not recently. I am not laughing at you, brother!”
Rex says, “No. You’re just talking without cease. Nothing new.”
Gordon paws his own face with one hand, drives his fingers through his damp hair.
“I just do not like the Constitution. Not the commerce clause. Not the contracts clause. Not—”
Rex interrupts. “These are God-given rights.”
Gordon stares at him for three whole seconds with an exaggerated expression of disbelief.
Rex says, with nearly no intonation to his voice, “Hamilton said in 1775 that these were the sacred rights of mankind and not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. The Constitution is written by the hand of divinity itself and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power.”
“And you believe that?”
“I most certainly do.”
Gordon says carefully, “Okaaay.” He burps. Rearranges the child, whose head now lolls over his arm as limply as death. He lifts her secret agent glasses from her face, folds them with the fingers of that one hand. He looks over and sees one of the glass candle holders has gone dark. “Jesus, Richard, I fear some of this shit.”
Rex says, “You just want to come to one of our meetings and argue.”
“No, I would not! I promise. I’ll be good.” He laughs. He leans forward over Jane, resting both arms on her. “I . . . wan
t to get this all straight with you, my old blood brother. You see”—he lowers his voice—“this is a fucking scary time. No time for little-girl-like bickering.”
“That’s right.” Rex’s eyes quite twinkle. (But the darkness hides the twinkling.)
Gordon leans back, way back. Both the rocker and the floor give low contented creaks. “Have a seat, Richard,” he says. He pulls on the arm of the nearest rocker to bring it closer. The smell of pooling spilt beer surges in cold cloudy whiffs.
But Rex, saying “Thanks,” just settles on his haunches, elbows on his thighs, fingers laced between his knees. Someone as fit as he is makes this look real comfy.
Gordon says, “I heard you guys did a food drive to help flood victims.”
Rex doesn’t move anything but his lips, his voice low and grave. “A Dakota Indian reservation. Government wouldn’t help them. Nobody helps them.”
“Except the militias . . . your big network.”
“Right.”
Gordon watches as Rex stands slowly but nimbly, no cracking joints, the old porch floor squeaking, sits easy into the chair next to Gordon. His brown T-shirt shows up more plainly against the bluish fluorescent light of the kitchen window; it is spotted blackly with the wetness of both this late-summer heat wave and the exertion of argument.
Jane moans.
Gordon lays a hand on her back. He says, “I’ve had fantasies about you guys. Like imagining you all pulling up in your trucks with your M-16s and SKSes and so forth just as the cops were draggin’ her mother out of her little car . . . and you know”—he whispers this on a hot beery breath—“One of those swat assholes stood on Lisa’s face with his fucking Nazi black boot while they searched her, and they left her little dog to die in the car with the windows rolled up. And they left this child molested, you could say, a molested soul. And robbed; stole her home. Even her little possessions and dresses! The great American civil forfeiture laws. That comes after they frame you or get up a little hearsay. And you’re not rich enough to get unframed. The prototype for full fascism, fullll fascism coming soon. Where were you, Rex? Where were you and the boys? Why . . . didn’t . . . you . . . save . . . this . . . child?”
The School on Heart's Content Road Page 18
