Tim, told of a guy he’s been in touch with, Steve. Steve and Jeannie, who farm in one of those black dirt states, Michigan maybe. Steve, the farmer, was all set to blow his brains out all over the cab of one of his trucks but just as he was sorting through his ammo boxes his neighbor stopped by, another ruined farmer. The neighbor talked militia. Some of the common-law stuff, which we were all suspicious of, bit of a dead end. Whatever. John said Steve, the depressed farmer, was alive and wearing a thin pissed-off undepressed grin the next morning because he was fervid to see the militia network grow.
Rex York’s militia . . . um . . . it was at first about fifteen guys, not always at once. When a bunch of us from the Settlement got interested the Border Mountain Militia attendance about doubled in size. He had another bunch of . . . um . . . names, who were just names to me. I never saw them.
But I was getting antsy and so was Cory, because even with the winter bivouacs, the Border Mountain Militia was . . . um . . . well, it was like we were all just floating in an oarless rowboat.
All the talk of a national network sounded pretty limp . . . um . . . you know . . . like fantasies. Some of us guys, the under-twenty-fivers, had started spending deep and meaningful time with the anarchists tenting up on Horne Hill at Jaxon Cross’s father’s place. But still something kept us going back to Rex’s kitchen and Rex’s glassed-in porch.
I personally watched how it was, how the more helpless some of Rex’s founding members, older guys, would seem, so helpless-feeling in the face of the total power and limitless violence and LIES of Washington and its satellites, the more they needed to pretend they were not taking it lying down. We were . . . in the way of nature’s way, um . . . you know, like Sitting Bull said about the difference between individual fingers versus a fist . . . um, small scale, yeah . . . but maybe, like Cory says, evolution hasn’t kept up with global dominion over us all, that our brains still get twitterpated over an eensie army of brothers.
So, um, another thought was how these guys twisted their heads to call themselves patriots. Patriots of any country are proud to . . . um . . . you know, be led by a ring in the nose. So for that little while, they weren’t what they thought they were.
Things were becoming more obvious, all this war on the world stuff by scheming advisers, State Department, CIA, Pentagon, Oval Office . . . it was not a nation’s self-defense . . . but most of Rex’s non-Settlement guys were not ready to let go of the glow behind the pledge of allegiance to the flag that they had recited a hundred billion mornings in school, hand over heart, and the belief in the American virtue of saving the world from black hats. You could not get too logical with these guys. But that didn’t make me . . . um . . . want to dismiss them. These guys were scared and Rex’s cookie-smelling kitchen was a safe place to talk big, talk tough, talk mean, talk personal family-sized self-defense, talk a little bit crazy, and to PRETEND you were a man.
So, why did some of us young guys who were pretty snuggly with the anarchists on Horne Hill still turn up dutifully for the Border Mountain Militia meetings? Why? Why? Why? Well, man, think about it; it’s all pretend anyway, isn’t it? Name one single thing you can do to stop the red-white-and-blue boulder from rolling and bouncing toward us all with its intentions of full spectrum dominance. The big rock is on us here in the United States as well as out there, right? “Full spectrum dominance,” the government’s own words, means all little people on this planet look the same to the big cocks on top of the global human pile.
So man, oh, man, I couldn’t let Rex down. That kitchen was the only America, the one that the big cocks thought they had but totally didn’t.
Bree, the neighbor girl, fifteen, sits on her narrow bed, fully dressed, having just arrived from being out. Her posture is a ready march-forth! square-shoulderedness. Her wide-set honey-green eyes flick in her head in grave study of her innermost strategic maps.
As always, an old green work shirt and jeans. Tall scuffed logging boots, steel-toed, these that she wears while working the woodlots with her father and brothers. The kind of boots so many Settlement girls have turned in their Settlement-made moccasins for, in their delirious admiration of her, she whom they call “our logger girl,” she whom they never knew at all till this summer, now the center of everything.
Yes, tonight, she had again “borrowed” her sleeping brother Poon’s truck, leaving him the usual note on the kitchen table: Be back real soon.
Poon is one of those people that you can easily push around. He holds his heart and his opinions deep as dud depth charges and so his objections to his fifteen-year-old sister with no driver’s license running off with his pickup are always just the slight reshaping of his eyes, a perfect sorrow.
Bree’s room seems so spacious these days since all her “art stuff” is over at the Settlement in the Quonset hut attic “studio” she shares with Claire’s very dear and totally pretty university friend, Professor Catherine Court Downey, who says she is staying at the Settlement “only for a while.” Catherine calls it “some healing time,” which refers to her getting off a bunch of pills and onto a “perfect diet.” Not that she has weight to lose. Just something more impenetrable than flesh.
Her four-year-old Robert is not gregarious but rides easy on the wave of Settlement humanity of various ages. He does his part. His father is Vietnamese-American and is only a figment in most ways. You never see him, not at the Settlement. Does he even know that’s where the professor and Robert are off to? “A businessman on the go,” Catherine has bragged or complained; Bree’s not sure which, for at the oddest times Catherine sings her sentences.
Catherine never works on her watercolor painting in her half of the canvas-tarp-divided studio. On her studio cot, she often rests from her teaching, meetings, and paperwork, her interim-chairmanning. And shopping. She shops a lot, the browsing kind, but also the back-seat-and-trunk-heaped-with-bags kind.
Meanwhile, this little bedroom at the home of the Vandermasts no longer stews with the vapors of turpentine and linseed oil. Its revised purpose (besides a bed to sleep in), its consequence to “a world needing rescue” has been delivered in fabrics of blue and gold.
Take note that in one corner of this room is a roughly carved eagle perching on a hop hornbeam pole and, tautly rolled around it, a flag. And yes, this is top secret. A creation made right there at the Settlement under Gordon St. Onge’s nose, so to speak. Well, really only on evenings when he was off making shingle or lumber deliveries, this urgent mission was accomplished deep in the bowels of the horseshoe of porches, kitchens, and shops, the Clothesmaking Shop to be exact. Over a dozen teen and preteen girls had designed and/or cut and/or stitched this full-sized state of Maine flag look-alike, the sailor, the farmer, the moose, the Christmas tree, the star with rays. And DIRIGO (I lead). Then across the top, applied in tall blocky letters of roadside warning sign yellow-gold, a new declaration: THE TRUE MAINE MILITIA. Oh, yes, all ready to go for when the time is right. Plans are in the works, plans that make Rex York’s militia seem like a bunch of old bulls hunched under a tree watching rain clouds bounce along in a swollen sky of red-white-and-blue hopelessness.
Now the true revolution begins!
Rex York isn’t whimpering yet but his whole big bed trembles.
