The School on Heart's Content Road (31 page)

Now it is Gordon who is silent.

Rex says, “I have some paperwork on this if you are interested. I have quite a bit of material, including copies of the
Federalist Papers
and
Black's Law Dictionary
. If you aren't interested, I won't bother you with it. It's up to you.”

“Yes. I thank you. Please. I'd like to see this stuff.” Gordon smiles brotherishly, though in the sticky hot darkness his smile is just perhaps seen as a deep wrinkle. “So I see you've been doing a lot more than wiring new additions.”

A long flat silence now into which Jane gasps. “I'm bored out of my wits. Is anyone else bored out of their wits?”

Gordon is staring at Rex's dark shadowy form and blue-lighted profile. He says finally, “Meanwhile, back to your army. Your military capabilities. I'm not laughing at you, but some are. An—”

Rex interrupts with, “We know our way around here.” He turns his head as the breeze stirs again and the near hills sigh urgently. He looks back at Gordon. “To show you how much the U.S. government knows about Maine, they didn't even have half of the Piscataquis County towns on their maps when they were scheming with the utilities to dump all that nuclear waste on us a few years back. And the military. Any military. It's maps. Not geology maps like the nuke waste outfits, but maps. None of them know Maine like you and I do . . . not these hills. This . . . is . . . home.” He swallows, runs a palm over his mustache and mouth, then jerks a thumb toward the road. “Like the Vietcong. How do you suppose the Vietcong did so well?”

Gordon says, “They didn't win, though. The coke dealers won. Both cokes, cocaine and Coke. And heroin, rubber, and tin. And the big banks. World Bank. IMF. Robert McNamara moved from bombing strategies to banking blackmail strategies, after Bretton Woods was dropped. Remember, his next leap was to head the IMF. Or was it the World Bank? Same difference. Even the octopus gets confused. And then there are the CIA types. Oh, I already said drug dealers, didn't I? And the behind-closed-doors chemical makers and behind-closed-doors military jets, bombs, and doodad makers? Hmmm. And the behind-closed-doors manufacturing deals needing Vietnamese wage slaves to work on the island of Samoa making what is called
American made goods,
due to the handy fact that Samoa, with no labor laws, is a possession of the American government—possession? yeah, property—the island and all those quick-fingered Vietnamese girls! Property we speak of. And what else? Hmmm. Who knows what other Mammonish underworld schemes were realized? The truth is lost in a bottle at sea. Boogety boogety shoo.”

Rex laughs. “I don't think your mother would let you come to one of our meetings.”

Gordon squints one eye, raises the brow of the other. “Probably not.” Then he looks down. Jane has pulled part of his soft old chambray shirt from his pants and, still sporting her heart-shaped dark glasses, almost seems to be sucking on the shirt, her arms and legs loose and trusting. Gordon pushes with his knees to make the rocker creak to and fro ever so slowly. “I weep for my country.”

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.