America Rising (27 page)

She and Ian and several other organizers and volunteers were standing under a tent behind the stage at Audubon Park. A local zydeco band had just launched into their set, and the air thrummed with the stirrings of the giant crowd and the sounds of guitar and accordion and fiddle and the staccato scraping of the rubboard. Under the tent the mood was a mix of euphoria and relief. So far everything had gone well, and they were looking forward to a smooth finish to the day and their first good night’s sleep in weeks.

The commotion started slowly, almost imperceptible at first, like ripples disturbing peaceful waters at the furthest edges of a pond. No one under the tent noticed, except perhaps for John Doe, who as usual was part of the group yet somehow apart from it. AnnaLynn felt rather than saw the subtle change in his demeanor and followed his eyes past the stage where the ripples were coming stronger and more frequent.

She saw it a second after he did. A young black man she recognized as one of SayNo’s steady volunteers—Tyrell something, she couldn’t remember—was tearing through the crowd, sweat and desperation painted on his face. He burst through the crush of bodies and ran to her, breathless and panting.

“A mob. . . I tried calling. . . you didn’t answer your cell.” AnnaLynn said something soothing, hoping to calm him. He shook off her efforts. “There’s a mob. . . coming down Magazine Street. . . they’ve got guns. . . no police.” He looked at her with plaintive eyes. “I tried to warn you.”

For a moment, AnnaLynn Conté went blank. Then the weight of Tyrell’s news hit her and she almost buckled beneath it. Euphoria, hope, relief all vanished. Conversation died. Every eye went to her, seeking strength, direction, wisdom. Almost instinctively, she looked around for John Doe. But he was gone.

What followed was indelibly stamped into the minds of millions, whether watching it unfold before them in real time or on video, viewing it on tinny cellphones or still photographs or the high-def images of professional videocams. A small army of Bane-iacs—estimates ranged from two to three-thousand—marched determinedly down the breadth of St. Charles Avenue. American flags billowed from car antennas. Confederate flags did too.

The mood was raucous, angry, resentful. Marchers shouted catcalls and chanted slogans. Patriotic music fought with guitar-heavy Southern rock on throbbing car stereos. Many of the crowd carried baseball bats and lengths of pipe and heavy chain. Others carried weapons—shotguns and hunting rifles held loosely in their hands, pistols strapped to their sides or under their armpits.

No one seemed to be in charge, but a large, bearded man dressed in overalls and heavy boots marched in the lead. He held an aged Mossberg side-by-side shotgun that was like a stick in his meaty hand.

The mob continued its surge down St. Charles, turned on Walnut, again on Magazine. Spectators gathered, followed, their numbers growing. Reporters for local Internet news sites streamed the procession live. A local TV news crew, drawn by the promise of a violent confrontation, joined them. They were met by jeers and a hail of rocks; they moved back but kept filming.

The mob reached the park entrance. Its mood was now frenzied. Its angry shouts grew louder, more numerous. The raucous music boomed even more feverishly. Flags waved. Pipes, chains, baseball bats thudded rhythmically on the pavement. A man raised a rifle and fired in the air. It subsequent blasts went unheard in the mob’s cheers.

Then it happened.

A slight young man with short reddish hair, wearing faded jeans and a frayed blue workshirt, appeared as if from nowhere in the center of the street. He stood like a lone sentry, his face expressionless, his eyes on the bearded man with the shotgun. Then John Doe began to walk. Calmly, deliberately, each step measured, marching into the depths of twin barrels. The bearded man blinked as if he couldn’t believe it. He shifted the shotgun to the crook of his arm and glared at the approaching figure.

At fifty yards out the jeering started. John Doe kept walking. At thirty-five yards a volley of rocks skittered on the pavement around him. John Doe kept walking. At twenty-five yards a rock grazed his cheek, left it torn and bloody. The bearded man lifted the twin barrels of his shotgun. “You better stop there, boy,” he called.

John Doe kept walking.

The jeers and rocks continued. The man’s shotgun stayed level. His thumb flicked off the safety. At ten yards out he raised the gun to his shoulder, sighted down the barrels. His fingers closed around the trigger. At five yards out he shouted, “Last chance, boy. This’ll tear you clean in half.”

John Doe stopped walking.

The mob went quiet. Spectators held their breath. Video cameras whirred.

John Doe started walking.

He kept his eyes fixed on the bearded man’s, two empty vessels that seemed to absorb the man’s thoughts, hold him in their thrall. The shotgun barrels wavered. The man’s trigger finger twitched almost imperceptibly. Another hair’s worth of movement and two slugs packed with eighteen steel pellets would tear through the air at 1,600 feet per second and pulverize organs, shred skin from bones, blast bones into random chips.

John Doe took one final step forward, pressing the barrels of the old Mossberg into his forehead, leaving two identical indentations, two blueish-white circles in his pale white skin. There was no one else in the world now. Only a man with a gun and a man not afraid to take its bullets.

Witnesses said later that John Doe and the bearded man held that position for four, maybe five minutes. But the time counters on the videocams said it was less than sixty seconds. Only those closest to them could see the tremor that wriggled up the bearded man’s spine, the beads of sweat that popped on his forehead, the softening of his angry features.

But everyone saw—and the cameras recorded—the shotgun come down, the man sag as if the blood had suddenly drained from his body. They saw John Doe touch the man’s shoulder, draw him close, whisper something in his ear. Then they saw him wrap his giant arm around John Doe’s shoulder and weep his pain into the faded blue workshirt.

N
ancy Elias was furious. And scared. Scared because for the first time in her fifty-seven years, her belief that the system she served so long and faithfully would endure had been shaken. Furious because the actions of “the crazies,” as she called them, were now putting that endurance to the test.

She’d never imagined that something like Rescue America Day could happen—millions of people across the country in the streets, demanding the kind of change she knew she could not give them. And if those millions were willing to leave their homes and jobs and routines to put voice to those demands, who knows how many more millions standing on the sidelines supported them. If they all ever came together. . .

Suddenly, the so-called “New Declaration of Independence” and the reprise of the old Bonus Army march Ray Carmody had warned her about seemed less more dangerous than ever, the kind of seismic upwelling that could knock entire governments off their foundation.

What was especially galling was that Ed Bane and the rest of his ilk had only made that upwelling more likely. Though the mainstream media had done its best to play them down, scenes of moms and dads insurance agents and grocery store clerks and teachers being attacked and in some cases killed by rage-fueled mobs played repeatedly on the ‘Net. With every viewing another fence-sitter moved, another supporter was lost.

Like those millions of Americans, she too had seen the video of John Doe. Many times. It was the most frightening one of all. She’d already called the director of the FBI and instructed him to find out just who the hell this young man is and to get back to her with the information within twenty-four hours. Actually, though, it didn’t really matter. All that did matter was that he was dangerous, the most dangerous foe she had ever faced. More dangerous than Ed Bane, more dangerous even than Frank Bernabe. There was only one way to deal with that kind of danger.

Even crazies had their uses.

* * *

Rescue America Day in Miami was typical South Florida chaos. The “organizers,” if you can call them that, had no plans to accommodate the three hundred thousand people who showed up at Bayfront Park expecting some minimal level of facilities and coordination, no idea what to do when demonstrators spilled out of the 32-acre park into the city’s downtown, clogging streets and sidewalks beyond even the usually brutal weekday congestion.

Trying to cover the event was like swimming in a giant vat of jello—a prodigious amount of energy expended without any discernible progress. Like other reporters attempting to make sense of the scene, after awhile I just gave up and settled for gathering anecdotes and recording impressions. When a line of thunderstorms trained over the city, dumping almost two inches of rain in less than an hour, everyone bailed and fled for their cars, some parked a mile or more away. It was pure pandemonium, total Miami. Which, I had to admit, on some level I found rather endearing.

I managed to disengage myself from the scrambling mass just as a particularly violent storm cell exploded overhead, firing off jagged bullets of lightning and pouring down rain like God’s own firehose. Already a soggy, freezing mess, I ducked into a tiny doorway with a handful of similarly miserable souls, one of them being a tall, good-looking black man with the musculature of an NBA center and an expression that said he was either suffering a painful episode of gas or was trying desperately not to double over in laughter.

I couldn’t hear much over the constant buzzing of the crowd and intermittent cracks of thunder but it appeared he was being quizzed by a small, elderly white-haired woman in a flowered housedress underneath a leather coat at least three sizes too big for her. Then the noise abated for a moment and I could just make out her words.

“I said, Wassup, dawg? You a baller, yo?”

Oh, shit. I’d recognize that voice anywhere.

I elbowed between the two of them and said to the man, “I’m sorry to interrupt, but I think I know this woman.”

He grinned and said ruefully, “My condolences.” Then he took off as if he were scrambling for a loose ball in the NBA finals. I turned to the woman and said, “Hello, Marilyn. See what you did to that poor man?”

Marilyn Kravitz surprised me by blushing. I didn’t think she could be embarrassed.

“Hello, Josh Henson,” she said, as if I’d just caught her pinching pennies from the church collection plate. She looked so mortified I almost felt sorry for her.

“So how are you, Marilyn?” I said. “What are you doing here?”

“You think all old people do is sit around watching
Days of Our Lives
?” she crabbed. “It gets boring sitting in that goddam condo all day. I wanted to get a little action, see what’s crackin’. You feel me—”

I gave her my sternest expression.

“Mar-i-lyn. . .”

“Okay, okay,” she said, her face falling a little. “You don’t know what it’s like to be old, Josh. All everybody sees is your white hair and wrinkles and saggy tits and they want to throw you away like a piece of garbage or stick you in a home with a bunch of geezers. They think you don’t know anything modern or new, that you’re some kind of antique. I just wanted to feel with it, you know? I just wanted to feel alive.”

It was one of the most heartfelt things anyone had ever said to me. I felt ashamed for having mocked her.

“You’re more alive than most anyone I know,” I said. And I meant it. “Listen, Marilyn. If you promise not to talk like Snoop Dogg, I’ll take you out to dinner. What do you say we get out of this crappy weather and get something to eat?”

I figured that despite more than a decade in Miami she’d never eaten Cuban food, so we scooted through the rain to my car and battled the crush of traffic leaving downtown until I got on Southwest Seventh Street, which I took all the way to Little Havana. It was still early so we got into Versailles—the Taj Mahal of Miami’s Cuban community—with no problem and gorged ourselves on ham croquetas, roasted pork, arroz con pollo, creamy plantains and black beans so good you could almost believe Castro was a Republican. Marilyn drank her vodka and I sipped beer while I told her about Armando Gutierrez and AnnaLynn Conté.

“Good for her!” she said gleefully, clapping her hands together. Then, slyly, “You’re sweet on her, aren’t you?”

Luckily, our waiter asking about dessert and coffee kept me from having to answer. For a second I considered ordering a pair of hyper-caffeinated
café Cubanos
but decided the world wasn’t ready for a nuclear-powered Marilyn Kravitz. We skipped dessert too and waddled off to my car and I took her back to the downtown garage where she’d parked hers. As the Miata idled behind her boat-like Caddy she fished her keys out of her purse, leaned over and pecked me on the cheek.

“Thank you for dinner, Josh Henson,” she said. “It meant a lot to this old broad.”

I was touched by her sincerity. “Don’t mention it Marilyn. I had a great time. Next time I’m in Miami we’ll do it again.”

She opened the door and got one foot out. Then she twisted around and punched me on the shoulder.

“Dat be fresh, homes,” she said.