We're All in This Together (7 page)

My grandfather cleared his throat.

"Then we'd have a white space right in the middle of everything. What would we do then, Henry?"

Papa gave a relieved smile, as if he'd already considered such a scenario, that Jesus might someday dwindle away to nothing,
and leave the wall gaping. "Gore. How would you like that, Geraldine? c We could put up a nice one of Al Gore."

The old woman's eyes cleared then, and for a moment she was the woman who had played catch with me in the yard when I was
small, winding up and stinging it into the pocket of my mitt; the woman who cried, "Is that my devil-toed grandchild?" when
I answered the telephone; the woman who sat at my grandfather's right hand, and demanded that the flunkies from the corporate
office give the workers their fair share, or else their board of directors might as well just pull up a few lawn chairs and
watch the pigeons crap on the dry-docked skeleton of their aircraft carrier until it turned completely white.

Nana squeezed Papa's hand, and at same time, met my eyes with a knowing, mirthful gaze. "Do you think this mean Al Gore died
for our sins, darling?"

And that was how a photograph of Al Gore had come to take Jesus' coveted position to the left of Joseph Hillstrom, and the
Son of God had been relegated to a spot above the light switch.

The next day, as I took my turn in the rifle seat and Papa stretched out on the bed, I contemplated the odd juxtaposition
of the clean-cut politician in his navy blue suit, and the hatchet-faced convict in the high collar.

If you think that Al Gore would have rolled back NAFTA
. If you think that Joseph Hillstrom could eat Al Gore's
gizzard with a smile on his face.

I looked away, flipped up the edge of the orange curtain. Except for a single squirrel, painstakingly dismantling an acorn
in the shade of the hedge, nothing moved. A shiny blue pickup came around the bend, and disappeared a dozen yards later around
the edge of my grandparents' roof. I dropped the curtain. From the bed, Papa's breath came shallow.

"Papa," I said.

He didn't answer. He was asleep. Maybe it was better that way. There was something I wanted to ask, just say out loud, just
to try on. His hands were folded in his lap.

"Doesn't it seem like—Joseph Hillstrom—with the gun, and with the bullet wound, and the mystery woman thing—doesn't it seem
like—"

"—No." His voice was clear and hard; it was like a voice a behind my ear, and I jumped a little in my seat.

"No?"

"Suspicion is not proof, George. Suspicion is never proof. 'Suspicion' is how they see things the way they want to see them.
It's an excuse for cracking down. Bosses use it, cops use it. Presidents use it. And it counts for nothing." His hands lay
still on his belt buckle and his eyes remained closed.

Then what about Steven Sugar? What have you got him besides
suspicion?
I wrote on my legal pad. If my summer of correspondence had taught me anything, it was that it was easier to be a smartass
when you didn't have to use your mouth.

I turned over the corner of the curtain to see an aqua-colored sports car round the corner. "You're right about the blue cars,"
I said, tore off the sheet, and crumpled it up in my pocket.

Late that afternoon, we switched positions, and I drowsed off on the bed. I jerked awake at the champagne pop of the rifle,
and the sound of Papa cursing, "Goddammit!"

We rushed downstairs, and out to the lawn.

The squirrel lay twitching in the grass, in a pool of red paint. The paintball had hit him in the head; his neck appeared
terribly twisted, corkscrewed almost. The animal's limbs fluttered and swam in the paint, as if it were trying to dig itself
out of something, sand or mud, but just kept sinking.

Papa ran a hand through his hair. "I saw him out of the corner of my eye, George. It was—reflex."

The squirrel stopped moving and a little while later I dug a grave in the backyard with my grandmother's trowel. Gil crutched
over with his peppermint tin. He rolled a joint, but my grandfather took a pass. "I feel like shit, Gil. A squirrel, for God's
sake."

"Back in Nam, I believe this is what they called 'collateral damage.'"

"Yup," I said. I knew all about it.

"Oh, shit," said Papa. "Shit, shit, shit."

Gil fired up the spliff. In the cooling twilight, the dirty burn of the cannabis mixed with the deep green scent of the full
summer trees, and produced a carnival smell, sweaty and sweet at the same time.

My grandfather tamped the turned ground with the toe of his shoe. He shook his head. He had been shaking his head almost continuously
since we found the paint-spattered body.

"But it's not as though you shot the president, Henry. It is just a squirrel," said Gil.

"It's a travesty is what it is," said Papa. He went inside, and slammed the sliding door shut.

Gil raised an eyebrow at me. He leaned on his walker and extended the smoldering joint. "Toke?"

I shook my head. I was curious, and not overly self-aware, but drugs never seemed worth it. "When people in my family get
high, they get arrested. Or pregnant at eighteen."

"Or they kill squirrels," said Gil, and winked at me as he helped himself to a long, hard draw on the spliff.

When I left to go home, Papa was in the bathroom, blowing his nose very hard and running the faucet.

5.

The following morning, we reconnoitered in Papa's Buick. Gil drove the Skylark in slow loops through the dozen blocks of their
north Amberson neighborhood while I sat in the front and watched to make sure he didn't drowse off. Papa sat in the rear with
the rifle under a blanket at his feet. My grandfather hoped that we might catch Steven Sugar unawares, and beat him at his
own game.

We undertook these missions in the afternoons, when the well-kept row houses were either empty for the workday, or curtained
against the heat. A few sprinklers swepts back and forth, and on the lawn of one local eccentric, a rank of glitzy whirligigs
detected a faint wind, but the majority of movement was limited to the heat snakes that curled up from the macadam.

"Henry, you realize that we've transformed into disaffected young black men? Armed gang members who cruise the streets for
their enemies? The parallel is unavoidable." Gil made this remark as he steered us past the whirligig house.

It had been over a week since Steven Sugar spray-painted
COMMUNIST SHITHEEL!
across Al Gore's face in hot pink, the longest interval between attacks so far. July had melted into August. As the miniature
windmills stirred, they spilled colored speckles across the road.

"I'm not complaining, mind you," said Gil, "I actually kind of like being a disaffected young black man." He gave me a bloodshot
sidelong wink.

Papa took a peanut from the can in his lap and popped it in his mouth. My grandfather wore the kind of sunglasses that are
given out at an optometrist's office to protect a patient's dilated eyes: a pair of filmy orange squares.

Gil's eyes fluttered and his head nodded. The Skylark drifted left. I shook his shoulder, and he snapped up straight. "You
know, Henry, like in the rap music. Compton and South Central. Long Beach."

"Like a drive-by," I said.

"Old school," said Gil.

"It's not the same," my grandfather said, finally unable to contain himself.

"It's not?"

"We're not out to kill the little shit. That's the difference. We're sending a message."

"The methodology's the same. It's a hit, Henry."

"No, it is not." Papa stomped his foot several times in the backseat well. "It is not."

We drove past a postage stamp of a park, a tetherball with no ball, a slide, a few benches, and trees. A tabby cat lay on
its belly in the grass, waiting for a pigeon to get careless.

"Back when I was organizing," Papa began, and I had to stare down at my shoes to conceal a smile. This opening gambit was
one of my mother's favorite pieces of shorthand, our family's equivalent of the "When I was a boy, I had to walk to school
. . ." speech.

If I complained about the too soft spray of the showerhead in our latest apartment my mother was wont to say,
Back when I was
organizing,
and sounding her best and gruffest Papa imitation,
we
considered ourselves lucky indeed if, on occasion, the company goon
squads deigned to release us from our cages to bathe in a rainstorm.

The grin was still curling the corners of my mouth when I glanced up and caught sight of Papa in the rearview mirror. For
an instant, a trick of refraction briefly caused the skin of his cheap sunglasses to warp translucent; and I saw that my grandfather's
eyes were locked on me. I quickly cast my gaze away. We took a right onto a new street, like the other streets, houses and
grass and pavement.

He continued: "We never lost a fight. Because we knew it was a fight. When some scab crossed the line, he was kicking another
guy's kid right in the face, tearing the clothes right off another man's wife, burning down his house. That's a goddamn fight."
He stomped his foot again, and this time his optometrist's sunglasses slid off his nose and down into the well.

For a few seconds he scrabbled around for them. Then there was a crinkle of plastic and a grunt of triumph. Papa sat up, and
I looked in the rearview mirror to see that the sunglasses had been restored, but the thin orange lenses were dented now,
as if someone had clocked him. He sat breathing hard for several seconds.

When my grandfather spoke again, he sounded oddly sedated. "I'll give you an example," he said, and then he told us about
Tom Hellweg.

My grandfather, Henry McGlaughlin, grew up with Tom Hellweg in Bangor, a city in the northern part of the state. They had
lived on the same street, and once broke their legs together. This was in a sledding accident on Drummond Street Hill when
they were both thirteen, only a couple of years younger than I was now. The steepest road in town, Drummond scaled all the
way up from the bank of the Penobscot River to the residential hills where the long-departed lumber barons of the nineteenth
century built their mansions with fortunes made on the backs of unorganized sawyers and lumberjacks.

It was in one of these Victorians—which like many of the great manors of the previous century had by that time been carved
into a baroque and unheatable boardinghouse—that a half century after the last log spun down the Penobscot, the two boys came
to know each other.

They made an obvious pair, Tom and Henry, if for no other reason than because of their fathers, or rather, their lack of fathers.
Tom lost his in the mud of Amiens, and knew nothing of the man but the single gaiter that had been shipped home and sat in
the place of honor on the mantelpiece, right beneath the crucifix. Henry's father wasn't dead, but Old Renny McGlaughlin had
been in a threshing accident, and spent his days on a stool in the Whig & Courier, silently sipping black beer, with his stump
propped on the neighboring stool so folks knew to stay away.

Tom and Henry walked to school together; they played ball together and fished together and made lists of the things they would
buy with the money they made robbing banks together; they used a pulley system to send notes back and forth between Tom's
second-floor window and Henry's first-floor window; and after they filled the gaiter on the mantelpiece with daffodils and
cattails, when Mrs. Hellweg came home, the two boys were marched out into the yard together, and ordered to break off each
other's switches.

In other words, they were the kind of boys—the kind of friends—who looked out at the great, ice-sheathed roller coaster of
Drummond Street Hill one Sunday morning in February, and both saw that it wasn't road at all, but an enormous, shiny black
tongue,
na-na-nah-
nah-ing
at them, like a bully.

They lugged their two-man toboggan out into the freezing rain and along the sidewalk until they came to the crest of the hill.
A half inch of black ice coated the road, and the cutbacks and swoops glittered all the way down to Valley Avenue.

For a minute, they sat in the chute, their hands on the cold ground beside the runners, taking in the massive drop. It was
a mile to the bottom, maybe two miles, maybe ten. At the foot of the hill, a hundred yards beyond the road's end, the Penobscot
River poured between the snowy banks, streaming dark and bobbing with slabs of ice.

"You know, this is how my dad really lost his leg," said Henry, and slapped the blade of one of the toboggan's runners.

Tom turned to look at him.

"Cut him clean off at the knee."

Tom bit his lip. He scratched his forehead.

Henry cackled.

"You bastard," said Tom, and kicked off.

Henry clutched Tom around the waist, expecting the rush of speed that carried them the first few yards, but not the takeoff
that ripped the toboggan clean from its rails. His mouth opened in a scream and he was thrown forward. His teeth sank into
the back of Tom's head. The dark green on the pine trees streaked across the slate gray of the sky and he tasted his friend's
hair and his sweat and his blood. Wind shot through his clothes; his jacket ballooned with air; he flew.

At the bottom, in a snowbank more than a hundred feet beyond the crossing of Drummond and Valley, they came to rest in a pile
of tinder. Tom's right leg had twisted with Henry's left; blood speckled the snow; the icy drizzle fell on their bare heads,
their caps torn away or maybe disintegrated.

"We were a mile from home, and it was below zero, and we both had the same fracture, a clean break at the shin, and did it
hurt? It goddamn hurt." Addressing me in the rearview mirror, Papa opened his mouth and pointed at a discolored incisor. "And
this, too. I lost the tooth, and he had it sticking in the back of his head. You think that hurt a little?"

And the first thing Tom said was, "Do you think we can put the toboggan back together again? It won't be this good for long."