in a paddy wagon you go, you un-American scary guy. Terror terror terror. The list is long. The United States bombs away in Panama, Yugoslavia, and Iraq, just to name a few, this is spreading goodness. If you call it spreading vile expansionist shit, if you call it criminal, you’re an enemy of the American people. So, as I say, militia movement folk just gotta stop feeling the specialness of the spotlight.”
Cory murmurs, “I read this Megiddo thing, too,” and stares down at the wonder of the text before his father, stapled and restapled, copied and recopied, worn by the hands of so many Settlement readers . . . including some of the mothers who use it as the reason above all reasons to avoid Rex. So the thing is rubbed, picked, and chafed to softness. Carried about preciously.
Now foil rattles and scrunches as Gordon’s hand finds a cookie. Then he pushes the pan toward Cory. Cory takes a cookie but seems he just wanted it for something to look at while his father yaks on for a good five minutes in his usual circular way.
The girl’s eyes continue to slide around the kitchen of this home Rex and his mother and his daughter share, his daughter Glory whose hair like this guest’s is also red and long and ripply, no, not red . . . Glory’s is dark auburn. And Glory is beautiful, disastrously so.
Standing against the sink, Rex, when he gets a chance, speaks solemnly, “It’s not the intention of any patriot group I’ve been in communication with or read or heard of to attack the US government for religious purposes or otherwise. Except for the common-law guys, the word is ‘stockpile.’ And ‘Be prepared.’ To be prepared for when or if the government makes a move on us . . . to disarm us. Or any illegal force makes such a move on the American people . . . or, as I mentioned other times, martial law for whatever bogus reason. There’ve been rumors—” He pauses significantly. “—that martial law would be declared on January first, following a government-initiated emergency.”
Gordon jumps in. “You know I don’t buy this martial law fretting because of the FBI’s and Pentagon’s and CIA’s place in the permanent state of exception within the American state. We have always a suspension of the juridical order. It’s part of the whole shebang!” He makes a funny face, which Rex refuses to acknowledge, then rattles on. “There are all those folks who think they need a new computer so when the three zeros blink into place on January 1, 2000, the end of the computer-dependent world won’t happen . . . a tale probably initiated by the big computer companies whose sales have stabilized and whose growth is subsiding.”
Cory laughs.
The girl’s eyes, not entirely veiled by her loose and blazing hair, seem to regard Gordon’s hand with obvious (to Rex) worship. So what else is new, Rex thinks to himself.
Cory laughs again. “Gordo, that is just crackpot conspiracy theory. You see scheming behind every closed door.” He winks a long dramatic wink at the girl, his tongue in his cheek.
She laughs like a grown-up.
Rex says nothing.
Cory is now smiling with satisfaction at the bottom side of his cookie.
The girl’s hands are red and yellow and orange in the seams of the knuckles and around her nails. Her smiling mouth is actually pretty, like a pink bow.
Gordon munches and grins at the same time, speaks now with a mouthful, “Well, certainly I am paranoid. FBI said citizens’ militias are paranoid. And I’m not one to question their expertise.” He places his right hand, open-fingered, on the Megiddo report before him. “Actually, all I’ve witnessed face-to-face and via snail mail on the citizens’ militia scene is a preponderance of . . . of normal Republican bullshit.”
Rex directs a refrigerated glare at Gordon’s profile, then raises his chin and looks away toward the door to the glassed-in front porch.
Gordon swallows chewed cookie. “But not as right-wing as what comes out of the big think tanks and certain foundations. And all that Intel spooky shit on the Internet. In fact, those are no doubt the Adams and Eves origin of all right-wing thought.”
Rex does not want to argue tonight. He lets the bait vaporize into the infinite galaxy of Gordon’s opinions, which Rex has always considered to be as red as Mother Russia. He notices the girl has a pack of cigarettes in one pocket of her work shirt as the great bursting jumble of her hair swishes somewhat to the side. In this break in Gordon’s blathering, Rex speaks gravely, “If you were not familiar with the Patriot Movement, and you read that report, you’d be worried about people in the movement. But the FBI is not worried about people in the movement. They are not expecting any bombs—”
“Because,” Cory marvels in his rumbly, cracking fifteen-year-old voice, “they know everything. If something’s in the works, they’re part of it, egging someone on, like McVeigh with OK City.”
Rex tries to continue where he left off. “They are not worried, not expecting—”
Gordon interrupts him. “Think about it. They want to—” and off he goes with a rather up-and-down, over-and-under philosophical speech. Then fetches another cookie, stuffs it into his cheek, and finishes up his rambling with muffing and sluffing, which nobody can understand.
Rex speaks stiffly: “The report is going out to all low-level law enforcement agencies, city, town, county, state . . . and the media and various organizations set up to save the world from the right wing, so they claim. But it is inadvisable to forget that these professional fund-raisers with their broad-brushstroke lists . . . and all the surveillance agencies and politicians know how to make people sweat. I would not be surprised if the fund-raiser outfits helped write this report. No question in my mind that this was written to drum up terror in ordinary Americans of ordinary Americans . . . and that creates terror in general . . . a generalized fear . . . a panic. Public mass hysteria is useful to all those birds.”
Gordon garbles words around another huge cheekful of cookie, “An old frick,” which, translated into English, probably was meant to be An old trick.
Cory laughs. “When they blew up the OK City building, the media announced for several hours that it was right-wing militias or Arabs. One said right-wing militias and Arabs. Midwest farmers and Arab rebels shoulder to shoulder! Call me sentimental but I love it.”
Rex again gets a simmering whiff of cigarettes. Must be the girl smokes no less than a pack a day. All her clothes and that hysterical mane of hair are saturated in the toxic stench.
Gordon pats the report affectionately. “FBI said that the citizens’ militias are paranoid about the UN’s plan to disarm the citizens of the world but they didn’t exactly deny the UN stuff. It was worded as if the UN did want to disarm us . . . but that . . . to be worried about it made us paranoid. They stated that the Gun Owners of America president, what’s-his-name, shouldn’t talk or write about this fact, that it would make people even more paranoid.”
Cory still hasn’t bitten into his cookie, just rocks it on the table. “Gun Owners of America is a newsletter for Democrats with guns, isn’t it? And I’ve got some Earth First! friends who are pro–Second Amendment. One has a shotgun for woodchucks in their collective’s garden. Another an AK for target shooting and so forth.”
Rex’s eyes have narrowed. His arms are now folded across his chest. As usual, this St. Onge bunch has taken the talk into territory where the air seems to have no oxygen and is crowded with distant shadowy characters he does not trust.
Cory chortles. “G-man logic is that to be informed and armed at the same time is to be paranoid.” His chortle turns into a giggle.
Gordon
