We're All in This Together (16 page)

13.

My grandfather lay on his side on the bed in the guest room, blinking at the framed photo of Joseph Hillstrom. I didn't have
to ask him what he was thinking about. I lingered in the doorway, uncertain whether to enter.

In the photograph, Joseph Hillstrom's famously cool eyes were as small and undead as always, his lips thin and tense. Whom
did the fearless organizer see approaching? It was a question the photograph inevitably raised, and would go on raising for
eternity. I thought again of the morning I discovered Nana cold, the ambushed expression on my grandmother's face.

I thought,
Hillstrom did it.
Circumstantial evidence or not, we all know that he killed those men.
Don't Mourn! Organize!
The words were true, but the man was a liar.

"The thing was, Gerry said she couldn't live with it. The company people, they all thought she was so hard, they hated her.
She never gave the bastards an inch. Even our people, they never really understood, how it was between us, how a woman could
be a part of it." He closed his eyes. "But I was so relieved. I didn't argue, not a whit."

There was a note of finality in this last statement. I sensed the importance of it, but I couldn't follow his line of thought.
It occurred to me that my grandfather's line of thought probably now looked like the green dash that raced across life support
monitors in television shows, jagging up and plummeting down. Or maybe his thoughts weren't even going in one direction; maybe
he was so confused, so sad and so angry, that his thoughts were only flashes, bursts of neon
paint: MT OVER IT SHITHEEL! YOU LOST! . . . LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT
SHITHEEL!... COMMUNIST SHITHEEL!...

"I don't understand what you're talking about, Papa," I said.

The old man sighed, but didn't open his eyes. He pulled up a corner of the comforter and blew his nose on it with a dry honk.

"Couldn't help it," he said, barely above a whisper.

I thought he meant the comforter. "Do you want some tissues?" I asked. I remained hovering in the doorway.

"Gerry, she said, 'We tell them we're all in this together, and Tom Hellweg's old enough to understand that, and his wife's
old enough by now to understand what kind of man her husband is, but what about those kids? Where'd they sign on?' Gerry asked
me.

"They'd stand outside the gate in the morning, you know, those two kids, and their father had them taught to ask all the men,
'Can you spare a dime today, mister, or do you want to help Mr. Big Shot Henry McGlaughlin starve us some more?' And when
everyone was inside, they'd come around to different windows and stare in at people. Just stare in at them while they were
trying to work. One metal worker was trimming a girder, happened to glance up, and the little girl was on the other side of
the window with her shirt pulled up and her little belly pressed against the glass. The guy, he was so surprised, his hand
slipped, and the flame of his blowtorch caught the back of the shirt of the man next to him, and almost burned this other
fellow up.

"Someone would chase the kids off and they'd be back the next day. Someone would catch their father on the street and beat
the tar out of him, and those two kids would be back the next day, looking in the windows, asking, 'Do you want to help Mr.
Big Shot Henry McGlaughlin starve us some more?'

"When Gerry finally said we needed to do something, I was so relieved."

My grandfather opened his eyes, and squinted at Joseph Hillstrom. Joseph Hillstrom returned the gaze with his eternal, thousand-yard
stare. I hadn't moved.

"What did you do?" I heard an odd distance in my voice; I realized I was afraid of Papa's answer. I imagined the child pressing
up to the smudged window. Her face was empty like a doll's face, and her belly was a little balloon swelled against the glass.
I was afraid that my grandparents had them killed; that they had the blackleg and his family executed for stepping across
the line.

The purple bags beneath Papa's eyes were the size of butterfly wings. He must hardly have slept for weeks, sitting beside
the window until dawn, with his rifle and scope, on the lookout for the vandal Steven Sugar.

"First thing in the morning I called an old hand I knew at the yards in Norfolk, and I asked him if he could clear a spot
for a friend of the family who needed a change of scenery. Gerry made the offer, and the son-of-a-bitch Hellweg said he was
amenable to the idea, but only on two conditions: First of all, he wasn't partial to traveling coach, since it cramped the
leg he'd broken when he was a kid. Second of all, long trips gave him dry mouth.

"So, by that night we had them in a first-class car from Portland to Boston to Norfolk with a case of beer and a bottle of
whiskey." My grandfather barked an abrupt laugh and broke into a series of deep, hacking coughs. He put the corner of the
comforter up to his mouth and continued hacking for more than a minute. When the coughs passed, he continued in a whisper.
"And the next I heard—the last I ever heard—my old friend Tom Hellweg was working as a riveter, pulling a pension and a family
health insurance plan, double overtime and five weeks of vacation a year, just like any worker deserves. A living wage and
some respect, what Gerry and I spent the better part of our lives fighting to get for our people."

I let out the breath I had been holding.

My grandfather looked down at the wet smear on the comforter. He touched it with the tip of his finger. "You understand that
it was a moment of weakness, George," he said. "If Tom had his way, that could have been the daughters of any one of the hundred
men at the Works who would have lost their jobs. You understand that, don't you? You understand that compassion will get you
nowhere when you're dealing with a man who doesn't even have compassion for his own offspring?"

"Yes," I said, and Papa nodded and then he said a few more things, about the president's shameless pandering, about the unchecked
corporations and the systematic dismantling of the Bill of Rights, about the obscenity of "compassionate conservatism" and
about a lot of other things that were also true and which made people feel bad to even talk about. But they needed to talk
about it, damn it. Staying quiet was the reason we were in so much trouble in the first place, and he, for one, wasn't going
to shut up. He wasn't going to be picked on
(GET OVER IT!),
either, and he wasn't going to be intimidated
(LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT!),
and he certainly wasn't about to be libeled
(COMMUNIST!),
not by anyone, boy or man. No, no, no. Not at this late stage.

When he ran down, I tucked another blanket over him, and he shut his eyes and fell asleep. I sat down in the armchair by the
window and took aim at the yard, at the blue plastic backing of the billboard, at the empty street. I woke up the same way,
hunched over the rifle, the street still void of targets.

It was late afternoon when my grandfather came to. The wind had suddenly kicked up, blowing eddies of dust and cut grass down
the street, and shivering the tree branches. The rush of air came in through the open window and rustled the orange curtains.
Papa groaned and pulled himself upright.

"Thunderstorm," I said.

Papa rocked back and forth, slapping and rubbing his arms, as if he were cold, although it must have been eighty degrees in
the upstairs room, and humid, too. "Gotta wake up, get the juices flowing," he said.

I offered to stay the night. He said that wasn't necessary. His eyelid twitched, and he plucked at it. "If you really wanted
to help out an old man, though, I wouldn't protest if you went next door to see if Gil couldn't scare up a few spare herbs."
Red blooms appeared on his arms where he slapped them.

"What do you think of Dr. Vic?" I asked. I had never spoken to my grandfather about the situation at home. I assumed that
he and my mother had discussed it; but that he wanted to give me space to bring it up on my own.

Papa shrugged. "As a doctor, or as a son-in-law?"

"Both," I said.

"As a doctor, your grandmother liked him. That was what mattered to me. Lipscomb was honest, and to the point, and didn't
make any promises he couldn't keep. She was terminal from the get-go and he told her straight. Lipscomb said he'd make her
as comfortable as he could, and I believe he did that." Papa rubbed his thighs and clapped his hands. "As a son-in-law, he's
a fat man, which is embarrassing in light of his profession. He's also too old for her, which means that it's likely that
before all is said and done she'll have to be his nurse. Furthermore, he gave money to that sacrilegious son-of-a-bitch who
stole the election, which was at the very least a failure of some kind of nerve, and a goddamned shame in general. And, of
course, he's boring, which is a personal disappointment."

He reached out, then, his long, wrinkled finger hovering less than an inch in front of my face. The gesture froze me; I thought
he was about to give me the finger, like Dr. Vic the night before; that he was about to accuse me of sulking, of cruelty to
animals, of admiring Steven Sugar for his courage, of envying his capacity for destruction, of all these and many other crimes
of which I was guilty. An apology filled my mouth. I nearly blurted out, "I'm not really like this. I want to fix this!"

Papa flicked a sleep seed from the corner of my eye. It was a gesture I remembered from when I was very small, when the hair
at his temples was black. "But disappointment is no surprise. I've been disappointed on a regular basis since Congress passed
the Taft-Hartley. Therefore, knowing what she knows now, if your mother insists on loving the man, then I will resign myself
to having a closet Republican for a son-in-law. At least he's not a Yankees fan.

"I spent my life working under a system of collective bargaining. Collective bargaining is a synonym for disappointment. The
act of collective bargaining is, essentially, the act of bilging a sinking ship that is beyond the reach of land or rescue.
Although it's hopeless, you keep on doing it until you drown."

"Why?" I asked.

"Because only a crazy person lets themselves drown."

He smiled, a wide, strong, yellow smile—so strong and so hard a yellow that it looked like it could have slipped out of his
mouth and fallen to the floor and not even chipped. I smelled his bad breath, the marijuana and the peanuts that were the
only thing I ever saw him eat anymore.

I smiled back.

The old man reached out for the jar of peanuts on the bedside table, grabbed a handful.

"And while it's my opinion that workers deserve democracy, real democracy, I also believe that in life the best we can hope
for is collective bargaining." My grandfather shrugged then, and said, "But I'm sure I don't have to tell you about that,
George. If I recall, you've known some disappointment yourself."

Gil's wife ushered me into the Desjardins' house, a dainty brick structure that for me always recalled the story of the big
bad wolf. The last piggie had inhabited just such a brick house, and no amount of wolfish huffing and puffing had managed
to topple it. In her gingham apron and slippers, stout, middle-aged Mrs. Desjardins went nicely with the fairy tale theme.

"And just in time," she said as she led me into the living room, speaking with the sitcom brightness that was her typical
tone. "Gilbert's being incorrigible again."

She was Gil's fourth or fifth wife, my grandmother had mentioned to me once, and like him, a former professor at the University
of Southern Maine. "I think she taught literary theory," Nana said, never one to hide her skepticism, "which is bullshit,
by the way." Although she was past fifty, Mrs. Desjardins was the sole person I knew who could be described—could
only
be described—as "chipper." At the reception following Nana's funeral she patrolled the living room with a garbage bag, briskly
collecting paper plates as soon as they were cleared, and stuffing them away like hazardous medical waste.

I had never understood what Gil saw in her, but I assumed it related to being old and still wanting to have sex and making
the best of a limited number of options. I tried not to think about it, though.

For his part, Gil always claimed that their relationship was largely based on Scrabble. I had heard him lecture on the subject
several times as the marijuana smoke wavered about his head and Papa looked on with a grimace. "The first time we played,
she froze the board, got us all blocked into one corner, and then waited for me to get impatient. And when I finally got flustered
and put down
cat
—it was the only thing I could do at that point and I just wanted to expand the board—she drops an
afalque
on the end and makes
catafalque.
Scored one hundred and sixteen points." Gil said that was when he knew. "I had wanted to fuck women all my life, George, but
she made me think about the part that would come later, the part that would come when all the fucking was through. It was
then that I foresaw I would need a challenging Scrabble competitor."

So when Mrs. Desjardins brought me into the living room I wasn't surprised to find the board was spread out on the table,
and Gil hunched over in concentration. Behind him, the bow window gave onto the rapidly darkening afternoon; thunderclouds
scuttled over the distant treetops. He was seated in the wheelchair that he used in the house and, oddly, there was a thin
band strapped across his forehead, holding a hat or something to the back of his bare skull.

"You have a visitor, Gilbert. The boy's come to see if you might have any drugs that he can run over to his grandfather."

"Hey, Gil," I said.

Gil threw up a hand. "A moment, please, lad." He wore only an undershirt and a pair of blue boxer shorts, leaving his pale-haired,
skinny legs and knobby knees exposed.

Mrs. Desjardins rolled her eyes at me. Over her shoulder, on the wall, hung an oversized Helmut Newton print of a towering
nude in heels, her face half concealed by a leather bandit's mask, and the rest of her body concealed by nothing whatsoever.
The photograph was taken from below and in front of the wrought iron gates of a castle. This angle emphasized the model's
blond-haired pubis, and minimized the bartizan in the background, which appeared to grow up from her head like a horn.