I wonder if when the friendship comitee is flying in the jet they might sEe ouT the winDowS Noof and other thousands of buTTerfies flapping Along on their WAy.
We will soon know this.
It is almost Texas. Our trip. They don’t really want me to go. I heard this: “Jane has enough prison visits in store with her mother, and this Death Row thing could get pretty heavy.” This is what the mothers said behind the door. With my secret agent hearts shapes glasses I can hear everything.
So then Bree, who is one of the grown-up girls and is very tall with red hair and a horror face that you get used to, let me be on the Death Row Friendship Committee and I told her how bad I wanted to meet Jeffrey. Bree said, “Sure.” But then the mothers all said, “No.” But Bree whispers to me very whisperishly, “Jane, never take no for an answer.” And me, I said back to her, “Exactly.”
Jeffrey is almost twenty years old. He has been on Death Row in Huntsville, Texas, for five years, waiting.
He has had appeals, he thinks, though he never sees a lawyer. A few times he got mail but he never sees articles, memos, or reports by the many Texas “state” lawyers who are in a panic about how they can’t deal with so many habeas corpus cases.
And so Jeffrey waits. He waits for whatever comes.
Today something is coming. Today. They are flying all the way here from Maine to see him and put their hands against the wire of his visiting cage. Fourteen children and seven adults. The rules are only two at a time and only an hour total. So he is interested in how this will work.
He keeps all their letters. Their letters are funny. He likes the jokes they send. Kind of twisted jokes. Gary Larson. Bugs who talk. Laboratory guys who invent things like a monster that has a lot of heads, the heads of the Brady Bunch. Yeah, that one, he gets it one hundred percent. And then the one where this hospital night watchman is doing secret experiments in static electricity by sticking all these really fat newborn babies on the ceiling. And then there are the homemade cartoons and jokes. Some ain’t bad. You have to believe the well-meantedness of some people for you to trust their sick humor.
These people from Maine are all coming to Texas JUST TO VISIT HIM. They are white kids, he’s pretty sure. His sometimes buddy Jeddy, a Panther, a Muslim, suspects they are Buddhists. Or Catholic Workers. Then Jeddy added with a snort, “Maybe they’re missionaries. They got a thing for the soul inside the dark face. You seen what they did to Queen Liliuokalani. First they save you, then they jail you.” He did his special laugh that sounds like haunted wind in eaves. “But you already here!!!” More haunted wind laugh.
Jeddy who is about forty is educated. He reads all the stuff about peoples of the world getting the shaft and others kicking the ass of the oppressor, which is inspiring. Jeddy doesn’t hoard his education. He’s like one of those who helps you cheat on a test by giving you the answers. Only there’s no test.
Meanwhile, Jeffrey likes to imagine his visitors won’t be anything like the ones who stole Hawaii or moved the Cherokees or firebombed the MOVE guys in Philly. His new friends will turn out to have stepped out of one of the Far Side cartoons: man-sized cockroaches or woman-sized flies pushing baby buggies with maggots in them, cows who walk on their hind legs and drink martinis until a car comes by, space aliens who rob chicken houses, puffy poodles who get engaged to junkyard dogs, lionesses who spit out tofudebeests, and sharks showing vacation slides of human legs dangling from inner tubes. What the hell, today he smiles.
At six a.m. Gate five, long before the sun spurts over bunchy many-roofed but flat South Portland beyond the runway, the Settlement Committee (or gang, depending on your view) boards the plane. The flight attendants warn against running and swinging their satchels. The Settlement adults are somber, life’s accumulated political realities weighing down the corners of their mouths.
Buckled in, the kids look out the windows and point. They wait. They watch other passengers snapping the overhead compartment doors shut. They giggle about the air vents and pamphlet pictures of people sliding out of the jet’s doors on slides into the sea.
Then, in due time, the plane lifts off, up, up, and up.
The flight attendants do a bit more scolding when they roll along the wagons of beverages and nuts. Settlement kids are too perky. The fourteen zhoop-zhooping kazoos are definitely not a hit.
Secret Agent Jane wears her heart-shaped glasses and her chin held high. Today for the first time she feels herself to be one of the Settlement. You know, life. Us versus them. It’s always been so.
See all the mikes! Hear all the networks and see the press corps leaning inward . . . their important rustling . . . their rapid-fire clear voices asking yet another question of Duotron Lindsey International’s infamous CEO Bruce Hummer, who, yet again, has laid off more thousands, is headed out of this country in search of the cheap, the “willing tos.” See Bruce Hummer’s infamous face tilting slightly as if to chew a piece off the largest mike. See his hard jaw working into knots as he listens to another question. Hear his answers fall over the miles of a nation, like velvet. The face grows. Fills the screen.
Growth! Growth! Growth! Growth!
The global quantity of available work is shrinking—this being a structural problem related directly to the passing of control over crucial economic factors from the representative institutions of government to the free play of market forces . . . Hans Peter Martin and Harald Schumann, economic experts of Der Speigel, calculate that if the present trend continues unabated, 20 percent of the global (potential) workforce will suffice “to keep the economy going” (whatever that means), which will leave the other 80 percent of the able-bodied population of the world economically redundant.¶¶¶¶
The screen seems to be blank.
So yesterday off they went, them who were going to Livingston, Texas. Not me. Gordie and I and Rick went over to Rex’s place. John Lungren followed in the lumber truck so he could do a delivery afterward. We ate Rex’s ma’s cookies out on their porch, which is glass instead of screens. Rain was smashing down on the flagstones leading to the porch and it sounded like a bunch of guys stomping on the porch roof. And even though we hadn’t gotten wicked wet coming in, we all smelled like rain.
One of Rex’s most devoted “men,” some kid about fourteen or fifteen, was lurking around in the shadows of the kitchen that was lit only by a wall lamp over the sink.
The rest of us out on the little porch were talking about the militia movement . . . our favorite subject, heh-heh.
This stuff really boils my blood . . . the farm crisis. Somewhat mostly in the 1980s, in which the government and banks manipulated the force of gravity. Now it is no longer called a crisis, just a commonplace occurrence of farm auctions, the equipment, the land, the life and suicides made to not look