The French Revolution

by Matt Stewart

  “Of great concern to me is a rash of unsolved rapes that occurred in the mid-1990s here in San Francisco. I’ll give you an example. Tina Winslow is a handicapped woman who lives in the Excelsior. For years she endured rape and incest from her brother, but was too intimidated to report it.”

  Esmerelda’s felt her husband’s hand fidget in her grip, his lungs pulling like a vacuum cleaner. “Honey?” she asked, and saw he was crying.

  “These crimes have gone unpunished for decades. I’ve learned that the criminal is not only at-large, he is among us.” He went quiet, foreboding, true: “The rapist is Jasper Winslow.”

  Voices real and imagined chopped across the plaza:

  what?

  did he really just say that?

  how could he say that?

  asshole

  liar

  fucknut

  isn’t that Van Twinkle’s old man?

  the singer, Wolfman or whatever?

  heard they found him after Katrina drinking motor oil and snorting

  Vicodin, a world-class weirdo

  damn . . .

  . . . what about Robespierre? what did she know what did she do did she cover it up did she obfuscate not tell I can’t believe Robespierre Van Twinkle’s remotely involved she’s the best politician ever deeply decent strong-willed honest and good no chance she misbehaved but then again maybe maybe possibly can’t rule it out you just don’t know and it’s her father her dad her dad

  All eyes swept to Robespierre. Her throat clenched, and there was a pitter-patter in her forehead and some whine in her ears, and the worst thing in the world was happening, her life wrested away by her father, the long-lost pops, the dead man reborn as rock star; in the end he’d ruined her and Tina Winslow and everything but the stupid war in Iran, her only dad did all this.

  Calmly she walked off the stage.

  “Excuse me!” Leslie Han blurted. “I object! This is neither the time nor place for accusations out of left field! Let’s get back on track with the debate!”

  Esmerelda turned to her husband. His face was choked and runny, his hand retreated from hers. “Jasper,” she said softly as he tugged on his earlobe. She pulled him close and kissed the tears on his sallow jowls, rubbed his bony shoulder.

  “Ahhh,” he murmured. “Ahhh.”

  The political editor was standing and saying something, but all eyes were fixated on Robespierre’s rapid poker-faced exit. Leslie Han left his podium and put his arm over her shoulder, walking alongside her until they were both off in the wings.

  Joel Lumpkin was alone on the stage. Last man standing. As usual. He allowed himself a smirk, close-lipped and masked by his wrenched nose and cosmetic wallpaper. He closed his eyes and listened to the shocked silence of an underdog victory, everyone unsure of what to believe; could this be true?

  When he looked back down at the world, the old sow in the front row was up and sidearming objects from her purse: Tic-Tacs, a can of tuna fish, a roll of dimes, fancy-looking scissors, a calculator with oversized buttons, a heating pad, what looked like a light dumbbell. Landing close, around him, slamming against the podium, accompanied by Esmerelda’s shouting: “YOU FUCKING DOUCHE BAG LIAR SCUM! YOU SOULLESS LIFE-SUCKING PIECE OF SHIT! MY LAWYER IS GOING TO TURN YOUR ASSHOLE INTO A PRISON PARKING LOT!”

  Even though it was strategically enervating, Joel couldn’t resist a few small chuckles. Did the stupid ever learn? He smiled broadly as a team of cops shoved past Big D on their way to clamp down Esmerelda.

  Then Big D putting a gun in a cop’s face and pulling and screaming white noise, a cacophonous rebel yell.

  Offstage, Marat hugging his sister and whispering that everything was going to be all right, he was there for her, always, his only sister, the only one who knew.

  Big D and his boys pulling out guns and shooting at everything, cops and trees and TV cameras but mostly at Murphy Ahn, the shitfucker Octopus traitor hogging the stage, so many bullets they couldn’t miss, a fire hose on a match.

  Joel Lumpkin’s bodyguards turning heel and skedaddling, they weren’t paid enough for that shit and the man was dead anyhow, fuck if they were going down with the ship.

  The audience racing and shoving and frozen solid, thinking this is San Francisco this doesn’t happen here this isn’t real is this death am I dead where am I?

  Murphy Ahn’s face an exploding jack-o’-lantern, black burgundy shrapnel over the San Francisco city seal backdrop. Screwed landless veterans watching the broadcast and cheering it on.

  Marat holding his sclerotic sister, absorbing her sobs on his shoulder.

  Leslie Han directing the police toward the shooters, identifying Big D as the ringleader and hurling his cellphone at him, nailing him in the eye and freezing him long enough for the cops to get him five times in the gut, his gold-plated incisors catching on the edge of a metal folding chair as he fell.

  Jasper and Esmerelda on the ground, rolling through discarded programs and grass smelling of sulfur and spilled soda.

  Police feeding bullets into Big D’s crew, every man taken down from seven angles, then kicked, cuffed, kicked again.

  Errant bullets cutting common carotid arteries, lodging in legs, shattering shoulders.

  Slicing screams into thick, wet wheezes.

  In the back of Robespierre’s seating section, Karen Winslow walking Tina’s wheelchair carefully toward the subway, ninety-five years old and feeling it, lips buttoned in, barely able to see the sidewalk over Tina’s hair bun, pangs of misery hitting like thrown bricks.

  Billowing crowd noise when they realized the shooting was probably over and it was safe to make calls, 911 and their mothers and boyfriends to tell them they were safe, this shit was unbelievable, there was death everywhere, and blood, and everything all fucked up, but they were safe they were safe they were alive.

  An off-duty radiologist cupping a Van Twinkle volunteer’s head as she burbled on about Robespierre, how her heart belonged to Robespierre, flubbing her words with all the blood but still declaring her life for Robespierre’s ideals through the heaves until she stopped.

  On his knees Leslie Han performing CPR on Big D, his suit jacket stuffed in the gangster’s side, pumping hard until Big D sputtered into consciousness, somehow.

  Marat Van Twinkle carrying his sister to the paramedics, a scarlet curtain crashing down her face.

  Twenty million dollars bubbling in the bank, ready to rebuild.

  Esmerelda Van Twinkle crawling on top of her husband and kissing his lips, wiping his nose, telling him she was his forever, prison and Tina didn’t matter, the restaurants and record deals didn’t matter, he had so much more now, meat on the bones, depth and struggle, you could hear it in his voice, her champion, begging him to hold her while he sobbed apologies to his sister. A final shared moment before accusations and trial testimony tainted the rest of their lives.

  Marat sprinting through the war zone, threading the advancing SWAT team to find his parents rolling on the ground; pulling them up and shouldering them through a field of abandoned chairs to huddle under blankets; the Van Twinkle family locked together; united and devastated; guilty and wronged; faces chiseled with the weight of hard-fought years; excruciatingly rich.

  The national crucible cooling down, the Republic charred with glorious ideals, and faults.

  LIBERTÉ EGALITÉ FRATERNITÉ

  And with that, France was saved.

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks to Meredith Norton, Caroline Roberts, and Ben Lorr for their careful reads through early drafts. Their delicate, thorough comments helped deliver this book from screaming infancy into rambunctious semi-adulthood.

  Thanks to JJ Schultz and Jamey Graham for their generous technical help, which has made this book so much more than a book.

  Thanks to my grandmother Dorothy Stewart for helping me understand how fiction makes life better.

  Thanks to my parents, David O. Stewart and Nancy Floreen, for inspiring a lifelong love of words and letti
ng me run down this rabbit hole for years guilt-free.

  Thanks to Carrie Dieringer, Anne Horowitz, Tiffany Lee, Charlie Winton, and the rest of the Soft Skull/Counterpoint crew for making this book real.

  Thanks to my awesome editor Denise Oswald for her deft touch and immense patience and for generally being a badass motherfucker.

  Thanks to my amazing agent Lisa Grubka for making this book so much better and green-lighting all my zany ideas and never giving up.

  Thanks to my wife, Karla Zens, for comforting me when I’m high and low and all over the place in between, for her countless reads and brilliant feedback and permanent love. You will always be my first and last reader.

  Copyright © 2010 by Matt Stewart. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Stewart, Matt.

  The French revolution : a novel / Matt Stewart

  p.cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-593-76374-9

  1. Dysfuntional families—Fiction. 2. San Francisco (Calif.)—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3619.T4968F74 2010

  813’6—dc22

  2010004018

  Soft Skull Press

  An Imprint of Counterpoint LLC

  1919 Fifth Street

  Berkeley, CA 94710

  www.softskull.com

  www.counterpointpress.com

  Distributed by Publishers Group West