Rex rubs his face, looks at the plate of cookies, “sees” the head and shoulders of his mother, Ruth, pressing each cookie with the cutter, giving shapes to their sweetness just hours ago. Ruth York, not a granny-looking older lady. She’s only sixteen years his elder, her still-black hair held back by a silver clasp, T-shirt snow white with a rearing palomino stallion, a cactus, a prairie dog, and a rattlesnake in striking pose. Heavy medallion of bronze on a chain. It’s a wolf’s head staring out from an aureole of sun. Her usual bracelet, turquoise. She has not one iota of American Indian blood in her veins but she, with his father just before he died and their American Legion friends, flew to the Southwest as a tourist and left her heart there. Well, one of them. She has a lot of hearts. And in some ways she is his best friend due to their mutual rocklike dependability and their mutual silences.
Rex refocuses on the softly lit room as it is now. He does not want to feel riled at Gordon or the boy. They are not the enemy.
But their hands move in the periphery of his sight, churning with their words. His own black-faced compass watch looks readier than ever to do service, ticking away the moments, pointing north, while his hands are folded in a mannerly fashion on the table.
Gordon’s deep wandering voice says, “The guys I’m hearing from via the US mail, patriot groups and so-called Christians, seem only to get launched into action when some rich rancher can’t anoint himself king. And one real estate critter in Massachusetts they were all hopped up to go and defend. The irony is that militia groups being in service to the rich rancher and real estate mogul is probably okay with the Bureau and whatnot. They do it themselves every day!”
Cory says huskily, “At least the Panthers used to arrange free breakfasts for kids. They had something like justice in mind. You know, love and outrage.” Cory’s cookie breaks in half seemingly by itself, a half to each hand. “FBI put the bullets to the Panthers, sent in spies, and did plenty of framing, like of Mumia on death row and the one girl who escaped to Cuba, Assata Shakur. You are not supposed to rise up. The proof is everywhere. So if I think the government wants to control all us little people, then—”
“You bear watching.” Rex states the ominous fact.
“Hey,” says Gordon softly in his run-out-of-steam mode. “Speaking of rising up, my brother, have you finally read The Recipe for Revolution, the short version at least, the one that has the cartoon Abominable Hairy Patriot?”
The girl makes some sound. An abrupt intake of kitchen-sweet air.
Rex’s eyes spring to her face, then to Gordon’s face, which is now struggling with that Tourette’s-like eye thing again.
So this girl is the one, the mastermind of the booklet with the orange cover and of the other writings Gordon has been so proud of. The big one, The Recipe for Revolution, kind of lost him. Not to the point enough. Not that Rex is stupid. It’s just that some minds are fueled by the gorgeousness of life while other minds are more straight on and wound tight like trigger springs.
“I gave them to Todd. I let him borrow them.” Rex feels caught. But it’s true. Todd, one of two teenage members of his group, seemed charmed by the stuff.
Gordon sits up straighter.
Rex adds, “But I skimmed it first. It was pretty good . . . like poetry.”
The girl tips her head in a little thank-you nod.
Cory says, “She’s a swashbuckler. Watch out.”
The girl giggles.
Rex nods at that face that looks like a fantasy movie’s special-effects human-lioness and her sort-of-gold-sort-of-green eyes are on him.
One night after supper, a bunch of us were sprawled in rockers on the long porch next to the Settlement kitchen doors. I especially remember Rick Crosman and his son Jaime, and John Lungren and Lou-EE St. Onge and Paul Lessard and Jeremy Davis and Butch Martin. And me, of course, heh-heh.
John Lungren was a quiet guy but when he spoke, it was in a measured way and something you’d need to hear. John was a finish carpenter and had that climbing-all-over-everything build, gray hair, steel-rimmed glasses with large lenses just slightly out of fashion . . . heh-heh. He was leaning back in a deep wicker rocker, knees high, but looked full of portent, not foolish.
He said that as we speak hundreds more small factories are grinding to a stop and big ones up up and away, not his exact words. He groaned and said not that labor unions have lost their needfulness but they were losing their stoutness. We knew all this, but it’s like a chant and warriors’ drums. You repeat. You repeat. It empowers the blood. And he was going somewhere with this. “More farms, thousands more, are being auctioned to agribiz.” He said a guy he knew from “home,” Millinocket, a guy named Tiny 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