Big Guns

by Steve Israel

  He stretched his long arms toward the TV’s power switch, but it was too late.

  “Good morning,” Lois wheezed. Her face was flushed and glistening under her floppy beach hat. She hugged her ACLU tote bag to her heaving chest.

  Sam dropped his arms and hoped that somehow the mayor wouldn’t notice the news. “Good bike ride this morning, Mayor?”

  “Not bad. That streetlight is still . . .” She gazed at the television and asked, “What’s going on?”

  Sam glanced at the Patriot Protectors boarding their vehicles. “Just some idiots playing army. We have a lot of work—”

  Lois sat in a chair with a soft groan and stared miserably at the screen, cupping her chin in both hands.

  “Turn it louder, Sam.”

  “That streetlight—”

  “Sam.”

  They watched the coverage from Stutsville: Big Bob and Joe Cook, the brandishing of guns, the blaring of horns, the revving of engines.

  CNN went to commercial. Never before had Sam been so relieved by an erectile dysfunction ad. But he saw that Lois’s lips were so puckered that she seemed to be swallowing her own cheeks.

  “Sam, this cannot continue,” she said quietly.

  When Lois said that something couldn’t continue, it meant she was about to start something big. It could be a battle against a housing subdivision, a Taj Mahal replica, a chain drugstore, or maybe the entire gun industry.

  “This isn’t our business, Mayor,” Sam said carefully. “Things are safe here.”

  “What about the rest of the country? America leads the civilized world in gun deaths.”

  “Let them figure that out in Washington.”

  “You and I both know that Washington won’t solve this, Sam. We have to do this ourselves. Like those mayors who signed that Chicago Compact.”

  Sam focused on the smoothing of the piles, making sure there were no loose edges.

  “Sam?”

  He stared at the pile and listened to the rattle of the air conditioner and the ticking of a nearby clock. That clock had been on that wall ever since he was a boy, marking the uniquely slow passage of time in Asabogue, when the days seemed longer and the potato farms stretched to the horizon, when ordering coffee didn’t involve more than two syllables, and guns were handed to sons with pride. He could still feel the warmth of the wood and texture of the grain. He could still see the glint of pride in his father’s eyes.

  “That’s a bad idea, Mayor. We’re not Chicago. People like their guns here.”

  “They don’t need assault weapons here, Sam.”

  “Government starts banning some firearms, you never know where it stops.”

  Lois’s eyes widened. “Oh, Sam. Now you sound like the NRA!” There was a long and uncomfortable silence. CNN returned to its coverage of the caravan winding out of Stutsville, headed for Chicago.

  “You go after our guns, you’ll lose this town,” Sam muttered. “You’ll lose the year-rounders who stood by you all this time.”

  Lois narrowed her eyes on Sam, as if challenging him. “What about you, Sam? Do I lose you?”

  He stayed silent.

  For the next hour they tensely reviewed the business of Asa-bogue, the little village where ACLU tote bags and NRA Lifetime Membership cards mixed in an uneasy alliance.

  9

  They called it Gunstock.

  Thousands drove to Chicago in a mid-June heat wave that brought the blacktop routes to a shimmer. They jammed the roads in a rumbling procession of spewing RVs, SUVs, motorcycles, and pickup trucks, from Stutsville, Indiana, and also Wisconsin, Iowa, Michigan, and as far away as Arizona and Florida. No matter where they came from, they had one view, plastered on their bumpers in various iterations:

  MY OTHER AUTO IS A 9MM!

  KEEP HONKING, I’M RELOADING!

  BULLETS ON BOARD!

  Twelve thousand people occupied Grant Park, penned between the tall gray office buildings lining one side, and the blinding sparkle of Lake Michigan on the other. They wore their hearts not on their sleeves but on T-shirts of all sizes and colors:

  YES LADIES, I’M PACKING!

  FROM MY COLD DEAD HANDS!

  GOD, GUNS, GLORY!

  Discordant music—Nugent, Springsteen, Skynyrd, and Greenwood—blared from hundreds of radios and from giant loudspeakers hoisted on steel columns on a large white tented stage in front of the lake. They planted flags that drooped in the searing heat, revived only by the occasional tepid breeze. The flags were red, white, and blue; bright yellow, sprouting like dandelions, warning, DON’T TREAD ON ME; and black flags with thick white letters that read COME AND TAKE IT! They cooked on portable grills, filling the air with the scent of lighter fluid, charcoal, and sizzling meat. They dug their arms deep into ice-filled coolers of beer. Vendors sold survival gear, holsters, scopes, and souvenirs on card tables. There were also complete selections of ammunition in different shapes and calibers: soft point and armor piercing; lead round nose and full metal jacketed; 12-gauge shotshell, 8mm Mausers, .38 Specials, .44 Magnum, .45 Colt Pistol, .22 Long Rifle. The bullets were lined up like miniature rockets on a launchpad, the sun glinting off the brass, nickel, and steel casing. “All bullets kill, but some bullets kill better than others,” a vendor bellowed.

  So many organizations converged on Chicago that day. From AGL (American Gun League) to ZAG (Zionist Americans for Guns). There was GROAN (Gun Rights Owners Action Network), and GROWL (Gun Rights Owners Women’s League). The Second Amendment Foundation was there, along with the Second Amendment Institute and the Committee for the Second Amendment but Not the Sixth. There were Mothers Against Gun Control and Grannies Against Gun Control, Armed Paraplegics of America, and the Armed Postal Workers Union Local 42, AFL-CIO. There was the TSA Watchlist Gun Rights Network, plus a distinctly small but noticeable group called Nuns With Guns (NWG).

  The CPD (Chicago Police Department) showed up as well, dressed in their riot gear finest. They positioned themselves in a perimeter defense around the park, like nervous observers at a high school dance. They realized that if all hell broke loose, they were massively outgunned. And out-acronymed.

  A few blocks away Mayor Michael Rodriguez, who had by now returned to his natural state of agitation, sneered at a video feed in the Crime Command Center. He pounded his feet to a stream of multilingual muttering. It was like a Santana concert.

  Sitting beside him, the city counsel opined, “Not a prudent combination. The purchase of beer and bullets on city property, I mean.”

  “Then why the fuck did you issue assembly permits?” snapped the mayor.

  Learned counsel considered the question through several puffs of his pipe. “They do have the right to protest, Mr. Mayor, do they not?”

  “I do have the right to return you to the Zoning Board of Appeals. Do I not?”

  Counsel’s thick pink lips slumped around his pipe.

  *

  Roy Dirkey sat on a metal folding chair behind the Gunstock stage, nervously fanning himself with a hard copy of the most important speech of his career. He’d been guzzling from water bottles, but his throat itched and his forehead percolated with sweat. Plus there was that noose-like clenching of his neck muscles. I’d rather be in Afghanistan, he thought, and reached for more water.

  Gunstock organizers in headsets and black T-shirts rushed around in the hot, dim space around him, shouting orders over a voice that blared onstage. Dirkey’s Divas stood nearby, studying e-mails and exchanging anxious glances. Sunny sat across from Dirkey in a short floral skirt, her hair tied back.

  “Ready?” she asked.

  “Ready,” Dirkey replied as bravely as he could. But his voice quivered. Sunny leaned forward, gently squeezed his arm, and said, “Remember. Just be yourself, speak from the heart . . . and read it exactly the way I wrote it.” She gave a small laugh, triggering a weak smile from Dirkey.

  Hours of rehearsals had nearly broken the congressman. Sunny forced him to fit his slack tongue around her sharp
words; to say “freedom” instead of “fraaay-dum” and “you” instead of “y’aaaalllll.” She barked at him to “speed it up” and then to “slow down,” as if he were shifting gears in a sputtering old car. She adjusted his body language, pestering him to “stand straight, but not like that, you look like a Nazi.” During one frustrating practice, Sunny remarked, “I wrote a Winston Churchill speech that’s being read by Gomer Pyle.”

  Onstage, Dirkey heard Jack Steele readying the crowd for his national debut. The Borscht Belt once had Georgie Jessel, the Bullet Belt had Jack Steele. For the past hour Steele had been introducing warm-up acts: obscure politicians, minor celebrities, and several pro-gun musical acts including the favorably received heavy metal band Sweating Bullets. Now Dirkey watched as Steele raised his arms to quiet the audience.

  “Friends! Are you ready to meet a real patriot?”

  “Ready!” the crowd hollered in unison.

  “You know, we got a bunch of people over there in Washington—”

  Booing rolled across the crowd.

  “In three branches of government,” Steele went on. “Gutless, useless, and clueless! All three could repeal the Second Amendment in the bleeding heartbeat of a liberal! Good news is, there’s one guy who knows a little something about our Constitution . . . Took a bullet for it in Afghanistan! Please welcome CONGRESSMAN! ROY! DIRKEY!”

  Dirkey summoned a smile, trying to ignore the tremors across his cheeks. Sunny brushed a hand across his back as he stepped onstage. He was assaulted by the sweltering air, the blinding sun, the deafening roar, and by Jack Steele, who wrapped the congressman in a bear hug that squeezed his ribs and lifted him a few inches off the ground. Roy grunted, and Jack set him down.

  “Knock ’em dead!” Jack rasped into Roy’s ear. Then, “But do it fast. I have a plane to catch.”

  Roy tugged at his blue suit jacket—no tie, Sunny had advised— and stepped up to the podium. He squinted at the heaving mass of bodies that stretched across Grant Park, whooping and yelping, stomping their feet and creating a thick haze of dust in the stagnant air. Roy placed his sweat-smudged speech on the podium and adjusted the microphone.

  He caught Sunny peering at him from just offstage. She was twirling her hair.

  “Thank you!” he bellowed, surprised at the thunder of his own voice, which seemed to bounce off the distant buildings and shake the entire park. He waited for the crowd to quiet, then resumed soberly. “There are so many important people to recognize here. But one in particular. My most important leader . . . Ladies and gentleman, whatever your affiliation or faith may be in this land of religious liberty, please join me in thanking Our Lord, Jesus Christ.”

  The crowd clutched their guns and bowed their heads, all except for the RAG (Rabbinic Assembly for Guns), who seemed uncertain.

  Dirkey continued. “Now, I may just be a country boy from Arkansas, but I do know a little something about Chicago. America’s first skyscraper was built here. Route Sixty-Six began here. Abraham Lincoln was nominated here. And today, here in Chicago, you and I will make history again. We won’t build a skyscraper, we won’t nominate a president. But we will keep the American people safe. Once and for ALL!”

  The crowd roared as one. Fists pumped.

  Just as practiced, Dirkey breezed through the story of the brave pioneers who settled Chicago, of how they crossed mountains and rivers, settled on farms and tilled fields, paved roads and built skyscrapers, how the generations that followed crossed oceans, stormed beaches, and made the world safe for democracy. “And through it all,” Dirkey declared, “Americans have always kept two things at their sides. GOD . . .”

  He paused, raised his right hand in a tight fist.

  “. . . and GUNS.” Dirkey punched quickly at the air. “GOD!” he repeated, punching on each word. “AND! GUNS! GOD! AND! GUNS!”

  The sprawling crowd responded exactly as Sunny had promised they would. The chant was slow and scattered at first, then it built like merging waves and crashed resoundingly onto the stage, sweeping over Dirkey: “GOD AND GUNS! GOD AND GUNS! GOD AND GUNS!”

  Dirkey allowed the chant to peter out. Now he went on to paint a different picture of America, one of crime-infested cities, terrorists lurking in communities, students walking in fear to school. The nation that won the Cold War was now in a cold sweat, intoned Congressman Dirkey. “And how do the liberals propose to keep our children safe? Well, I’ll tell ya! SURRENDER! Arm the criminals and disarm America! SURRENDER! Give up our guns and retreat from our streets! SURRENDER! Go from the home of the brave . . . to cowering in our homes!”

  Contemptuous boos filled the air.

  In the Crime Command Center, Rodriguez was now shattering the world record for foot thumping.

  Dirkey trumpeted, “Here’s my message to them: WE are Americans. We do NOT surrender! WE are Americans. WE fight back! WE are Americans. WE don’t wave the white flag. WE wave the red, white, and blue!”

  Gunstock erupted into a deafening cacophony of war cries, high-pitched shrieks, and primitive grunts. Dirkey noticed that even some of the police were agreeably nodding their heads. He stole a glance at Sunny, now grinning offstage. He rocked back from the microphone and waited. Sunny had told him that it wasn’t a speech, it was a seduction. You don’t read the words, she’d said, you read the audience. They’ll tell you when to continue and when to pause, when to whisper and when to shout. Pay attention to the way they pitch forward to devour the next word, or lean back to chew on what they heard, how they cup their chins or nod their heads, how their eyes narrow or widen. Then, when you own them, she said, you make them beg for more. So he waited, for what seemed like forever, as the crowd went from a hot boil to a smolder. He lowered his voice, forcing them to quiet themselves, as if to ensure that not a single word escaped into the hot air and drifted into Lake Michigan.

  Then he announced that he was returning to Congress the next day to introduce the American Freedom from Fear Act. He demanded that the Speaker of the House pass it immediately (a word seldom spoken by the Speaker) and that the president sign it. Then came the rhetorical jab that had always brought delicious giggles to Sunny in their rehearsals. It was the ultimate punch line, hitting right at the sentimental soft spot of the anti-gun Left.

  “You know, a, uh, great Democrat”—even now Roy’s tongue stumbled over the words great and Democrat so close together—“a great Democrat once said, ‘The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.’ Well, he was right then. And he’s right now. America, we will be FREE FROM FEAR!”

  He pounded his fist on the podium.

  “FREE FROM FEAR!” he repeated, with another pound of his fist.

  He kept pounding, just as Sunny taught him, like a drum major establishing the rhythm, until the twelve thousand people all across Grant Park, men, women, children, in midwestern twangs and southern drawls, in dialects and accents from around the world, chanted with him:

  “FREE FROM FEAR! FREE FROM FEAR! FREE FROM FEAR!”

  “God bless y’all,” Dirkey shouted as loud as he could, but his words were swallowed in the approving roar.

  He swept his arms in wide triumphant arcs as he ambled off the stage. Just before exiting, he stopped, fixed his hands on his hips, and turned toward the crowd. He soaked in their adulation, the surging of their bodies toward him, the ringing of twelve thousand voices, the judder of the stage beneath him. He felt an inescapable gravitational pull between leader and followers, a surge of adrenaline intoxicated by hundred-proof power. Dirkey waved his final farewell, arms thrust high above his head, fingers splayed. He stepped off the stage.

  Before Sunny could say a word, he wrapped his arms around her and pulled her in. “I did it!” he said, hoarse and breathless. The sweat on his face brushed against her cheeks; his lips pressed briefly against hers.

  She was speechless.

  *

  All the next day, the words “Freedom From Fear!” crawled across the bottom of America’s televisions, accompanied by imag
es of Roy Dirkey in his army uniform. Newspapers printed “FREEDOM FROM FEAR” on front pages, in type size previously reserved for “MAN WALKS ON MOON!” There were editorials insisting that Congress and the White House drop whatever they were (not) doing and blaze AFFFA to passage.

  The New York Times also noticed. They ran a story headlined “GUN RIGHTS RALLY IN UNLIKELY VENUE.” It was on page A15, under a story about an Army Corps of Engineers project threatening something called the bog turtle. The article failed to mention that the U.S. Congress was about to consider a new law requiring every man, woman, and child in America to carry a gun.

  10

  Three days after Roy Dirkey’s speech—hailed by Sean Hannity as “perhaps the greatest oration in Illinois since the Lincoln-Douglas debates”—Mayor Lois Liebowitz rapped her gavel against the old wooden dais in the meeting room at Village Hall and called the Asabogue Village Board to order.

  The room seemed airless, baked by a sun beating through old, thin windowpanes. A coffee urn gurgled next to now-empty cartons of jelly donuts that had been donated by Joan’s Main Street Bakery. Behind the dais a bright orange banner was stretched across the wall, bearing the village seal: a Native American clasping hands with a white settler, above the Latin words “Nos Relin-quens.” Loosely translated it meant, “We’re outta here!”

  Even before the meeting began, many of Lois’s fellow board members were, well, bored members. They shuffled in and slumped into worn leather chairs. Their eyes were glazed and their heads drooped. Lois thought it might be a quick meeting because her colleagues would want to hurry home for the Golden Girls marathon later that afternoon, but Councilman Ralph Kellogg was in no such rush. He took his usual seat, appropriately at the extreme right of the dais. He leaned forward, ready to pounce on any evidence of corruption, conspiracy, or crime by the Liebowitz administration.