We're All in This Together (6 page)

"See this," I said, and showed him my middle finger.

The old man cackled, then turned his attention to the watch.

So, I read the rest of
The Alien's Tomb,
and following a series of wrong turns and misadventures, discovered that the best I could do was to get back to the place
where I had started.

At some point, I nodded off, and woke up to see Joseph Hillstrom staring back at me. The man in the black-and-white photograph
was hatchet-faced, and his eyes held a spooky clarity, almost like a blind man's eyes. It was a gaze that seemed not so much
to look into the camera, as beyond the camera. I rolled away from him.

Beside the window, Papa was still in his chair, and slightly slumped, so that now the sunlight fell on his hair, and revealed
the pink scalp beneath.

I turned onto my back and blinked at the ceiling, letting myself come all the way up.

It was Nana who had told me the story of Hillstrom, the songwriter and organizer, convicted on circumstantial evidence and
executed in Utah in 1915 for killing two men in a robbery. My grandmother said that on the night of the killing, a witness
claimed to have seen Joe throw a pistol far into a field, although the weapon was never recovered. Furthermore, the police
knew that one of the dead men managed to fire off a shot; and when they came to see Joe, they discovered he was bedridden
with a bullet wound. Joe said he was shot defending a woman, but would not reveal her name, for it was a question of honor.
On the eve of his execution, Hillstrom had been lucid and fearless enough to write to a friend,
Don't Mourn!
Organize!

And he was the last thing Nana had ever seen. I could feel sweat on my forearms. I didn't know why I was suddenly uneasy.
I rolled back to look at the photograph of the dead man again.

"Old Joe is a kind of saint to the Movement, Georgie," Nana had said to me, and in the next moment, crossed her eyes to break
the mood of seriousness created by a story concerning murder and execution and martyrdom. I was about seven years old at the
time. "Not, mind you, that the gentleman in Rome with the silly hat and the special red telephone up to God is liable to recognize
him any time soon."

I forced myself to hold the eyes in the photograph, and after a moment the uneasy feeling passed. I supposed that was how
a saint should look: calm and guiltless, and made of steel that no pagan bonfire could ever melt. I supposed that was what
Nana had seen.

"Gore would have rolled back NAFTA."

Papa announced this apropos of nothing.

I sat up.

My grandfather still sat as before, slumped, the light falling on his white hair. He had been awake all along.

"That's Gil's new line. NAFTA this, NAFTA that." He gave the curtain an irritable snap. His good humor seemed to have passed.
"And if it's not one
N
word, it's another." He cleared his throat, and made a disgusted pronouncement:
"Nader.

"Al Gore did more for working people last night, while he slept in his bed, than Ralph Nader has done in his whole life. That
old man likes to needle me, George, and he knows how to do it."

"What's NAFTA?" I asked.

"A mistake," said Papa, and seemed to fumble for something more, before settling on "A well-intentioned mistake. A flawed
document of collective bargaining. A compromise.
A com-pro-mise.
Something that son-of-a-bitch Nader wouldn't know the first thing about." Papa pulled up the corner of the curtain. "I get
damned weary of all the blue cars," he said.

On my evening ride back from my grandparents' house I felt a wiggle in my rear tire, and pulled over to check it—a flat. Choosing
between calling Dr. Vic to pick me up, and swinging by the clinic to get a lift to the gas station from my mother, I opted
for Emma. I coasted the half mile to the professional park that housed the Planned Parenthood clinic and a number of other
doctors' offices.

What I hadn't anticipated, however, was that the GFAs had attacked again.

My mother was out front, working with a bottle of Goo Gone and a putty scraper to scour off a fake picture of a mauled infant
that had been plastered to the glass doors. This infant appeared not so much to have been aborted as microwaved, and then
dipped in red candle wax. For that matter, the infant appeared not to be an infant so much as a doll.

I braked at the curb, and she shook her head at me. Tendrils of hair stuck to her cheeks and forehead.

"You're just in time, George," said Charlie Birdsong, the clinic's head security guard, who sat on an upside down paint bucket
with his shirt off, perusing an issue of
Elle Girl.
"The GFAs have been busy with their Photoshop program again, and this time they used a buttload of Krazy Glue. And that's
with special emphasis on the Krazy, doc."

Echoing this sentiment, my mother sighed wearily and knocked her skull a few times against the papered glass doors.

GFA was shorthand for God's Favorite Assholes, the name my mother had awarded to the group of Evangelical Christians who maintained
an isolated community in the scrubby hills north of Amberson. Every once in a while I'd see one around town, at the supermarket
or Sam's Club: the female GFAs tended to be bright eyed, and almost squirrel-like in the way they would challenge your gaze
and at the same time rush past you with a giant cube of generic toilet paper; the typical male GFA was more dour in his bearing,
lank haired, and often outfitted in the kind of T-shirts you could buy for a dollar at gas stations, featuring air-brushed
illustrations of wolves or caribou. These good Christians eked out their livelihood largely by selling buckets of fishing
worms to tourists, and otherwise mostly kept to themselves.

The exception to their isolation, unfortunately, was my mother's clinic. Until recently, they had limited themselves to staging
conventional—if exuberant—pickets in front of the building, blasting Christian rock music from the back of their rusted blue
minivan and using a megaphone to address the pregnant women who were rushed across the parking lot in a protective wing of
volunteers. "Leave your whoremaster and come unto the Lord!" one particular GFA harpy was infamous for howling as she stomped
back and forth on the roof of the minivan.

Recently, however, the GFAs had apparently discovered the power of Photoshop and taken to creating enormous posters of tattered
fetuses—like the one now plastered to the glass doors of the clinic—and applying them with industrial epoxy during random,
late-night guerrilla attacks. Vandalism, it seemed, was on the rise all over town.

(After the first assault on Papa's billboard, my mother had pointed out that the vandalism fit the GFA's pattern. "No," said
my grandfather after a moment's thought. "It's the damn paperboy. Those kooky wormdiggers are on a mission from God. They're
above politics."

There was no reason to believe that the GFAs were coached by Steven Sugar—or vice versa—but if the two ever did get together,
there was no telling what kind of damage they might do.)

What's NAFTA?
I asked my mother. After fifteen minutes of pouring over
Elle Girl
with Charlie my mind had started to wander.

She stepped back from the glass and took the legal pad from me.
Seriously?
My mother plucked one of my shirtsleeves to dry her sweaty hands.

I yanked away, and tapped the question impatiently with my finger:
What's NAFTA?

My mother blew a damp bang out of her eyes and checked her watch. Her face was flushed with exertion and the poster hung in
tenacious ribbons from the glass. Emma shook her head.
Ask
Charlie. I want to finish dealing with the slaughtered unborn here
in time to get home for the news.

"Charlie, what's NAFTA?"

A sallow-faced, affectless Native American man, Charlie was as unimposing as any armed person could possibly be; along with
his habit of whiling away his time at the security gate by reading the women's magazines from the lobby, the price sticker—$241.99—was
still stuck to the bottom of the butt of his pistol.

Without looking up from
Elle Girl,
Charlie said, "NAFTA. Okay. I used to work at a shoe factory. Full health benefits, eighteen-fifty an hour, vacation, and
a parking space based on seniority.

"Now, some poor destitute prick in Guatemala is working in my old company's new factory for, like, a buck an hour. Meanwhile,
now I work here, get accused of murder by white people, ten dollars an hour, and have to pull weekends in the bedding department
at Filene's to make ends meet. Plenty of parking spaces, too, but I had to sell my car. Now I ride the bus."

"What about the union?" I asked.

Charlie spat a laugh. "What about the union? Clinton was a Democrat, wasn't he?"

I contemplated this for a few moments, as my mother's scraper made a sound like a shovel blade being dragged across a rock.

Charlie flipped a page, sighed. "I'm telling you, it really sucks to be a fat girl."

My mother dropped me at the Citgo, and I spent a couple of minutes at the air station, pumping my tire up. Through the scarred
window I could see a glass cooler filled with Styrofoam tubs of GFA fishing worms. Each label was adorned with a small hand-drawn
gold cross and the promise that these were FAT WORMS! NONE FATTER!

A car honked and I turned around to see Gil and Mrs. Desjardins in their Land Rover. They waved me over. I rolled my bike
over to the driver's side—Gil's side—and he lowered his window.

"Afternoon, stud," said Mrs. Desjardins, leaning over and blowing a kiss.

"It's evening, Lana."

"Evening, stud." Mrs. Desjardins smiled at me. Her lipstick was a radioactive green. She was dressed in a glittering cocktail
gown.

"How's it going, kid?" Gil was wearing his silky black pajamas.

"Fine," I said. "I'm kind of wrestling with this whole NAFTA thing, though."

He took this in stride. "Okay, run in the gas station, fetch me a Coke Slurpee, some Twizzlers, a jar of petroleum jelly,
and some Aleve." Gil snapped a twenty-dollar bill from his pocket. "Then you can keep the change and I'll tell you all you
need to know about NAFTA."

The clerk gave me a skeptical look and rang up the purchases.

"How old are you, kid?" he asked. The clerk was a Goth-type in his early twenties, with rings in each of his nostrils and
a fork tattooed on his Adam's apple.

"Excuse me?"

"Forget it." He shoved the things in a paper bag and told me to scram.

In the lot I passed the bag through the window to Gil and he handed it off to his wife. "Any trouble with Count Dracula in
there?"

"No," I said, not wanting to get into it.

"Right, then," said Gil, "NAFTA."

I nodded.

"Between you and me?"

"Sure," I said.

"I'll just close my ears, then," said Mrs. Desjardins.

"All you need to know about NAFTA, my boy, is this: it was inevitable. Your grandfather is going to tell you that it was a
compromise. I'm telling you that it was erosion." There was a merry crinkle around Gil's eyes. It occurred to me that in a
few months, or a year, I would probably be looking down on his face as he lay cushioned in velvet, hands folded on his chest.
"The lobbyists had been chiseling away for fifty years. The center, politically speaking, would not hold, George. Democrats,
Republicans, it doesn't matter. The money needs more money."

I nodded.

"You understand?"

"Not really."

Gil chuckled, and fingered at the top button of his black pajamas. "Look, it's a shell game. The politicians said it was about
'Free Trade.' Bullshit. It was about 'Cheap Labor.' Just like every other manner of deregulation in this country, NAFTA was
just another way of pumping up corporate profits under the auspices of the 'American Way.' Gore went along with it, just like
all the rest of them. Every single one of them—corporate flunkies, hypocrites—with their hands out and their eyes closed.
That's the System. Gore, Bush, they're both part of it, they both run on the same track. Stick a quarter in their backs, and
they'll race all day.

"And, as much as Henry disparages him, it so happens that there was, in fact, only one candidate who didn't belong to the
system." He winked at me. "And that was Big Ralph."

"Big Ralph," repeated Mrs. Desjardins with a little trill, "oh, dear me.

One of my earliest memories was of my grandmother setting the needle down on a scratchy Phil Ochs 78, and his guitar strumming
a melody, at once flat and deep, as if he were playing at the bottom of a hole and singing up to us:

I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night

Alive as you and me

Says I, "But Joe you're ten years dead."

"I never died," says he.

"I never died," says he.

This memory carried strong associations with the no-bake cookies she used to make and
The New Testament Bible
that we used for my reading lessons. On the title page of that thin blue book, I remembered the minuscule parenthetical that
Nana added in her cramped cursive:

THE NEW COVENANT

COMMONLY CALLED

THE NEW TESTAMENT

OF OUR LORD AND SAVIOR

JESUS CHRIST
(P-KTHUHEM)

"It doesn't matter if you believe in God, Georgie my love," Nana said to me once as she rubbed a wet washcloth over my chocolate-stained
chin. (She was the only one who could ever call me Georgie and hope to live.) "But it's imperative that you understand Jesus
was a real person. It's imperative that you realize that he was exactly the sort of man that these so-called Christians today
would have pilloried for being an agitator and a Communist.

"They killed him because he was a mouthy liberal."

In her final weeks, my grandmother made no last-minute conversion or requests for spiritual assistance, although once, after
Dr. Vic administered a heavy dose of morphine, she commented on the tintype of Jesus on the wall, the one that was nestled
between the black-and-whites of Emma Goldberg and Joseph Hillstrom. Papa had been sitting alongside the bed, holding her hand.
"When they dope me up, the Jesus gets so small, Henry. I keep expecting him to disappear altogether."