We're All in This Together Read online

  My grandfather made an impatient hand-it-over gesture. This elicited another critical grunt, but then Gil passed over the works.

  The afternoon, bright and dry, spun with pollen and carried the sound of children screaming from the public pool. Nearby, the five-hundred-shot ammo boxes were stacked up in a pyramid, like a display of beer cases at the supermarket. I put a hand in the pocket of my shorts and checked my package for reassurance.

  Papa thumbed the light and drew deeply. The joint hissed to life, and he exhaled with relish. He raised a gray eyebrow at me. The corner of one bloodshot eye twitched. "What's the problem?"

  I shifted my weight from foot to foot and tried to formulate a response that didn't sound too cowardly. The chest protector sagged around my torso. When I imagined being shot at, I saw myself running in circles, faster and faster, until my evasive maneuvers had gained the impossible quality of an accelerated film reel, and I was like a fool in a silent movie, doing a hotfoot jig on a bed of firecrackers. Then, an instant later, I saw myself take a direct hit in the sack, and plummet to the ground in a boneless heap, dead, balls pulverized.

  I decided to abandon any pretence of courage. "Why don't you shoot at Gil, Papa?"

  "With that walker? He's too slow."

  "Thanks, kid."

  "I said, Til aim low.'" His eye was still twitching.

  "High or low, Henry, it seems to me that the boy has ample reason for concern. His face and his ball bag are exposed.

  "Your prudence is well earned, George." My grandfather's best friend waited a moment before adding an afterthought: "If it is wrong to be prudent about one's ball bag, then I, for one, would rather not be right." To punctuate this declaration, he threw me a wink and, simultaneously, stuck his hand under his armpit and squeezed off a long, wheezing fart.

  Years ago, Gil had been an important official, a psychology professor and a dean at the university. Now he was just an old man, dying with uncommonly good cheer.

  In his time, my grandfather, Henry McGlaughlin, had been an important official, too: the president for thirty years of Local 219. At a single word, he was capable of shutting down the Amberson Ironworks, and leaving the skeleton of an aircraft carrier shrouded on a dock for months, like a rich man's summer sloop. Of course, that too had been years ago, and now he was an old man, as well—but dying more slowly than his friend, and with no cheer to speak of.

  I was fifteen years old and I wanted badly to please my grandfather, but I was a clumsy, unhappy boy, and I put little stock in the concept of trust, and none at all in faith. In the last few months my world had come to feel like a suit that I put on backward. Dr. Vic had offered me his opinion that this was all a phase—"a life passage," he called it—and that when I emerged, I would be a man. I asked Dr. Vic when he expected to emerge from his life passage. It took him a minute, but then he slapped his knee and said that was a good one.

  Papa thrust the paper clip back to Gil. "Here, Gilbert. Stick this in your mouth."

  When my grandfather turned back to me, his eyes were suddenly watery with feeling. "We're in this together, George," he said. "That's the thing."

  This was a way of saying that we were a union of two, and in a union, you stood up for the next guy and you never broke ranks and you faced down the bosses and the finks and the goon squads with a solid front. "We're all in this together"; it was the essential promise that an organizer made to the workingmen who risked the livelihood of their families in an action. If another guy's family was hungry, you gave them half of what you had. If another guy came up short on his rent, you turned out your pockets. If another guy needed a hand, you reached out.

  Here, in this place, Papa needed my help to confront a fink, a young fascist and vandal named Steven Sugar. And I needed somewhere to go, a safe place.

  "Together," he repeated, and clasped his hands to show what the word meant.

  I knew this was a practiced gesture, a piece of his old soapbox rally, but I couldn't doubt it.

  If another guy needed a hand, you reached out.

  So I went back to the garage, padded my crotch with a pair of athletic socks, pulled the Richard Nixon mask over my face, and stuck a southwester on my head. Then I ran back and forth in the sun for an hour while my grandfather tried to shoot me full of holes.

  Separated by a distance of a hundred feet or so, Papa blasted at me from his position on the patio while I scrambled in and out of the stand of trees at the edge of the backyard. As the paint balls whizzed through the air above and around me, they tattered the leaves and burst against the trees with sharp, wet smacks. He yelled at me to stop moving so fast and play the part right, but I pretended not to hear. I only ran faster, spooked by the champagne pop of the rifle, cedar chips crunching beneath my feet, ozone hanging in the air, paint-stained branches slapping against my back. I ran until I was drenched through and seeing black spots out of Richard Nixon's eyeholes.

  Then I heard Papa curse. That was enough, he called out. God­dammit that was enough.

  I stayed in the trees until he finished unscrewing the automatic rifle from the tripod and tossed it to the ground with a thud. According to the sporting goods salesman this particular weapon, an IL-47, was the top of the line in paintball assault weapons; the IL stood for "Illustrator."

  I emerged from the trees with my hands up. "I'm unarmed."

  "Don't be a smartass."

  Asleep in his lawn chair, Gil sat with his legs spread wide and a wet spot on the front of his pajamas. In the sun, his bald head was the color of skim milk, so pallid it hinted at blue. My grandfather had told me that the cancer was all through him, the way it had been with Nana toward the end. To me, that phrase, "all through him," described an image of the disease as a growth of black vines, twined around Gil's bones, thickening and choking, getting tighter and tighter, until eventually something would snap and that would be it.

  After I shrugged off the catcher's equipment and hung Richard Nixon's sweaty face on the fence to dry, I went to Gil and shook him to make sure he was still alive.

  He blinked several times, noted with only passing interest the dampness at his crotch, then looked around at the yard. "Looks like somebody got murdered out here. Murdered bad."

  The yard did appear truly gruesome, as if someone had been knifed in the neck and then staggered around dramatically for hours, spouting from an endless reservoir of candy apple red arterial blood. There was paint all over the stand of larch trees, the boles and the branches and the leaves; paint on the patch of wild rhubarb and on the back fence; paint on the grass and on the dirt; paint on the igloo shaped birdhouse, as if a tiny Inuit had exploded; and even on the pool, where an errant paintball had dissolved into a small pink slick.

  Gil grunted himself up into his walker and clicked forward for a closer look. He stopped and peered at the scummy surface of the water. The pink slick drifted slowly, gathering anthers.

  "You shot the pool, Henry," he said.

  "It's my fault. I shouldn't have jumped around so much."

  Gil was sanguine. "Don't blame yourself. Maybe the pool had it coming."

  Papa squatted down with a groan and began to snatch up the ammunition wrappers littered on the ground. "Never you mind him, George, never you mind him at all. He's just a contrary old man. You can find one most anywhere. They like to sit off to the side, and criticize, and pick, and pester, and make a general nuisance of themselves.

  "Back when I was organizing, we had a name for them: we called them Company Grannies, because when there was an action, all they did was stay at home, complaining and clutching their skirts, and when we finally got the bosses to the table, finally got them to sign the contract and give us our share, the Company Grannies would tell us that we should have made a better deal."

  He hauled himself up and held on to the shooting tripod while he caught his breath.

  It was from my grandfather that I came by my new height and gangly frame, but while he still maintained a couple of inches on me his spine had
developed a pronounced hook, which locked him into the permanent stoop of a man who has been kicked in the shin. Papa hung over me with his rheumy brown eyes, batting them against the late light in a way that was almost girlish. My mother believed that losing Nana had broken his heart and scooped him out.

  My mother didn't know about the sniper's nest we were assembling in the guest room.

  "Of course, I've come to realize that this particular sobriquet was a grave slander against elderly females, most of whom can at least be counted on to make a fine dessert now and then, and who were at one time a useful part of society, but there you are.

  "In any event, although this particular specimen will be dead soon, as you get older you should be prepared to a meet a great many more like him."

  "That's true enough," said Gil. He held the roach clip up to the light, and daintily picked away a few tiny embers. "But I will guarantee you of one thing: Al Gore, the very man himself, would not approve."

  "Do you want to shoot at me some more tomorrow?" I interjected this question hopefully.

  Papa patted me on the shoulder. "Don't worry, George. You did your best. You did your part. I just needed to get a feel for the weapon. You just keep doing your part, help keep this old man on his toes, and everything will work out fine."

  He gazed off across the paint-spattered lawn, and a thoughtful smile played across his face, as if he were seeing across a great distance to a beautiful vista that was invisible to us. "When the time comes, I'll plug the little son-of-a-bitch."

  We dismantled the tripod and packed the rifle and the ammunition to take upstairs.

  He ordered Gil to make himself useful and go around the front and stand by the sign to give us some perspective. "And roll up another one of those," he said, making a smoking gesture.

  Then, when we were just inside, Papa stopped and turned back. He threw the sliding door open and stuck out his head to say one last thing: "And you leave Al Gore out of this, goddammit. He's suffered enough."

  2.

  In the guest room I remounted the rifle behind the small window that overlooked the front yard. Through the scope I sighted on Gil. Hunched over his walker, he was blithely rolling a spliff on the hood of my grandfather's Buick. A few feet away on the grass, the 15 × 15-foot sign was positioned at an angle to the street, to confront the drivers who drove north up Dundee Avenue, heading toward the South Portland mall and the 1-95 ramp. From the back, the sign was a plain wall of pale blue plastic, but earlier, while I scrubbed off the spray paint, I memorized the contents of the opposite side, which were printed in large bold letters, stark and undeniable:

  Albert Gore Jr. won the 2000 election by 537,179 votes, but lost the presidency by 1 vote. DISGRACE. The leader of the free world is now a man who went AWOL from his National Guard unit, a huckster of fraudulent securities, a white-knuckle alcoholic, and a gleeful executor of the mentally handicapped. CRIMINAL. Our nation is in the midst of a coup d'etat, perpetrated by a right-wing cadre that destroys the environment in the name of prosperity, hoards in the name of fairness, intimidates the voices of its critics in the name of patriotism, and wraps itself in the word of God. FARCE.

  And below that there was a solemn ink portrait of Gore, underscored by the legend:

  THE REAL PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES.

  I drew the curtain and tucked it over the rifle. The end of the barrel still poked from the corner of the open window, but in the shadow of the eaves it would be invisible from the outside, even if someone were looking.

  The effort of carrying all of the gear upstairs had exhausted Papa. He collapsed into a straight-backed chair in the corner of the room and watched in silence as I reassembled the gun. There was a jar of peanuts on the side table. He uncapped it and fished around with one finger. He spoke without looking up. "Well, that should just about do it, I think. Yes, sir, indeed. That should do it. Your grandfather is now a full-fledged lunatic."

  "What's that make me?" I asked.

  "My henchman," he said. "How's Gilbert coming along?"

  I bent down and looked through the Illustrator's scope. Gil was still picking through his battered peppermint tin of buds. "He's working on it."

  Papa sighed. In the blue gloom, his face was tired and sunken. He crunched a peanut.

  This was the room where, a few months earlier, my grandmother had lain in hospice.

  A series of mostly black-and-white 5 × 9 photographs in plain frames crossed the walls in a band: Martin Luther King Jr., FDR, JFK, Walter Reuther, Mother Jones, Cesar Chavez, Joseph Hillstrom, and others, all of them dead, most of them martyred. During one visit my mother described the decorating motif as "Vintage Progressive." Emma wondered out loud if they might do something to brighten up the place. To this Papa replied very smartly that as far as he was concerned, the room couldn't be much brighter: the walls were "covered with stars." Unable to speak, Nana signaled her concordance with this declaration by raising one small wrinkled fist, like the black sprinters in the 1968 Olympics. To this, my parent threw up her hands. If I ever wondered why she got pregnant at eighteen, Emma said, there was all the answer I needed.

  It was a few weeks later that I trotted upstairs with the newspaper to read my grandmother the latest travesty—the Bush Administration had pulled the country from the Kyoto Protocol—and discovered her staring at the photograph of Joseph Hillstrom, with that expression of recoil frozen on her face, as if Nana's last living act had been to take a sip of curdled milk.

  Now, it was July, the summer of 2001, and my grandfather was alone, save for the company of his discontent, which was ample. I understood; I had problems of my own.

  In the framed photograph above Papa's head, even Woody Guthrie seemed to have an idea of the direction things were heading. Woody was seated on a guitar case, his clothes white with dust, his jaw spattered with a sickly growth of beard and a ragged straw hat perched way back on his crown. On his face Woody wore the resigned grin of a man expecting to be punched and eager just to get it over with.

  "Well? What do you think? Have I lost it?" Papa rubbed a palm over his twitching eye and blinked at the floor.

  I examined my fingernails. "No," I said.

  He glanced up, cock-eyed, still twitching.

  "Maybe," I said.

  "I don't know either, George." He pushed himself to his feet and his knees went through a series of rhythmic cracks, like a figure on the castanets. "But what about him, though—do you think he's crazy?"

  Of course, by him, Papa meant Steven Sugar, his ex-Sunday paperboy, who I knew better as the commander of my high school's two-soldier chapter of the ROTC. The history of their dispute dated back to June, when my grandfather's Sunday New York Times began to arrive without the Travel section.

  When Papa called to point out this discrepancy, the paperboy immediately barked that he would come over to discuss the problem "face to face, sir." Roughly ten minutes later Steven Sugar appeared on my grandfather's porch and dispensed a half-dozen severe cracks with the decorative brass knocker before Papa could get the door open.

  A big round boy with a black brush cut and full freckled cheeks, Steven Sugar had a cuddly quality that was in no way offset by his full camouflage uniform. He listened to Papa's complaint at ramrod attention, his slight paunch jutting forward, jaw tipped up. In spite of this posture, however, my grandfather later said that he detected a smirking certainty about the boy, a glimmer of amusement in his eyes. It was a glimmer that my grandfather associated with petty-minded civil servants—state troopers, town selectman, postal clerks.

  "I can assure you that I check each and every copy thoroughly, Mr. McGlaughlin," said Steven Sugar.

  "Nonetheless," said the retired president of Local 219 to the ROTC Captain of Amberson County-Joshua Chamberlain Academy, "My Sunday New York Times lacks a Travel section."

  "You must have lost it, sir," said Steven Sugar, then added helpfully, "old people lose things all the time."

  This exchange instigated Papa's first compl
aint against the delivery service. In July, when the Style section started to disappear, too, and the Travel section had still failed to be reinserted, he lodged a second complaint. It was this protest which led, summarily, to the decision of the delivery service to remove Steven Sugar from his route; and then, to that now ex-paperboy's reappearance on Henry McGlaughlin's porch.

  "Listen here, young man," said Papa, yanking the door open before Steven Sugar could slam the knocker again. "Your service was unsatisfactory. I voiced my dissatisfaction. You have apparently been fired. This was not my intention. My intention was to receive the entire Sunday New York Times, which I paid for. This is where my involvement in the matter ends. Your employment is wholly beyond my sphere of responsibility."

  Steven Sugar's large face reddened.

  Seeing how upset the boy was, Papa tried to soften the blow with some advice. "Well, do you have tenure? If there's some sort of tenure system for paperboys, then you might have some recourse."

  "Recourse? Recourse?" The paperboy pulled off his camouflage hat and slapped it against his thigh.

  At the bottom of the steps, his lieutenant, the only other member of our high school's ROTC, stood with their bicycles. A lanky, frail boy named Tolson—who, like me, would be a sophomore at Joshua Chamberlain Academy in the fall, while Sugar would be a senior—glared and squeezed the brake handles.

  "Yes, recourse. That is, some means of appealing your termination."

  "Fuck you," Steven Sugar told my grandfather, and flipped him off with both fingers. "You can go fuck yourself right in the ass with your recourse."

  The paperboy climbed onto his bicycle and, with his lieutenant, made a couple of circles on the lawn, both of them flying double birds. Then they took off, Tolson ripping a divot with his back wheel, and Steven Sugar howling, "This isn't over, you shitheel!"

  That was the part everyone laughed about. "Shitheel," said Gil, clearly delighted. "That's one I haven't heard in a while."