LITMIR.BIZ

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of Rex’s sort, prepared, prepared, prepared, in their queer-seeming nervousness, shall be vindicated.

      

Shutting off the small kitchen lamp, Rex York heads for the attic stairs to bed.

      The living room’s front drapes, shimmering and whirling with headlights, make his heart jump at this hour. He freezes.

      The brilliance intensifies around the mutter of an engine, the deep boast of eight cylinders.

      He moves lightly back through the kitchen to the glassed-in porch without putting on any lights and he just stands there, listening to the slams of the truck doors. He can make out Gordon St. Onge’s silhouette next to the dark bulk of the old Settlement truck and another man behind him. And a swingy-hipped tall female.

      Without a word, Rex pushes open the glassy storm door and allows the three visitors to enter. Now in the kitchen, lit only by lamplight from the living-room doorway, Gordon doesn’t swipe off his billed cap, just sits down at the shadowy table and spreads before him a thickness of papers.

      Rex tugs the chain of the ship-in-a-bottle lamp on top of the old cluttered dresser by the cellar door, noting that the room has instantly been swollen full of the weird warm grassy swampy smell of Settlement-made soaps and salves. But also the stink of cigarettes.

      Gordon says with a whine, “I want a cookie.”

      It’s true, Rex himself doesn’t touch sugar. Even without sucking in, he’s awfully muscular in the middle for fifty. Dark blue Dickies shirt and pants. Never short of wiring jobs large and small, his van out in the dooryard reads York Electric and shows a smiling lightbulb on the go. Little work cap on the lightbulb’s head, pliers in one hand. Rex himself never wears a cap when on the job. But always the black military boots with the pants cuffs down over. Unlike the lightbulb, Rex is not a smiler. Because of the clipped, brown down-to-the-jaws mustache and his grainy silences, his eyes have the power to bore into you. Your skin sort of rustles all over under his stare.

      Meanwhile, you might notice that the hair at his temples is thinning but his wedding ring is as thick as it ever was even though his wife Marsha is remarried, and living in Massachusetts. Gone. Gone. Gone.

      Rex isn’t short but seems so when next to the giant Gordon and Gordon’s giant fifteen-year-old son. And the girl, also taller than Rex, these two youngsters still standing.

      In the center of the top page of the stapled papers next to Gordon’s hand, Rex sees the FBI seal, like a wide-open but crusty eye.

      Cory St. Onge. Mostly Passamaquoddy in the face like his mother Leona but there’s that Frenchie sparkle to his eyes you’d know instantly was Gordon’s father’s if you’d been around that far back. And yes, Rex was. Meanwhile, Cory doesn’t ask for a cookie.

      Rex remembers this kid back when he was Leona St. Onge’s bushy-haired long-armed infant being passed around to be cooed over and bounced, one of the two oldest, whom Gordon managed to plant in two women in what seems like the same moment.

      Noticeable is the fact that Cory has started to let his last haircut grow out enough to have it tied back with rawhide. Does not look like a hippie. Looks like a pissed-off Indian warrior, which Rex would never say impresses him because he is not the praise-and-compliments type, but he.izzz.impressed. Mainly because Cory is on his side against that which wants to roast the common man.

      Rex “is loath against” the FBI but also academia and TV-radio-print talking heads always blathering to divide the common man by occupation, by “privilege,” by skin, by past horrors, to paralyze the common man’s defenses, to shrink ’em and, yes, divide ’em. But here in this kitchen the common man is a titan, the enemies of the common man are specks.

      And the girl. A recent development. Not a stranger though. She was here, for instance, when Gordon brought a bunch of kids around for the CPR-tourniquet-and-fire-safety-tips meeting. Several men from the Border Mountain Militia were on hand, and as tough as they think they are, they all looked weirded out by the girl’s grotesque face. No introduction has ever been made to explain her connection to the St. Onge family. And he’s never heard her name. In true redneck fashion, identities of new visitors will eventually tumble down in bits and dribbles as natural as sunlight and starlight. But one thing is for certain, though she’s not an actual leper, she could, if these were the Jesus of Nazareth days, use upon her face the “laying on of hands” by the son of God. Or by today’s methods, about fourteen surgeons.

      Rex also can’t miss that the girl appears to be memorizing everything in his old farmhouse kitchen. He doesn’t trust her. Not that she’s an operative and not that he, Richard York, is overly paranoid. It’s more of a tripled-full-alert cognizance in the back of his brain like when one of his Winchesters is stacked in the back of the attic stairs with a chambered shell and so it is too alive to forget.

      Rex reaches amid some plastic and glass clutter next to the ­linoleum- covered drainboard and long sink, then places a foil-covered pan on the table by Gordon’s hands and the stapled papers. And he pulls out a kitchen chair for the girl. Rex, first and foremost a “gentleman.”

      Gordon sighs. “Well, the Patriot Movement citizen militias, excitable Christians, and various white types of the anger and violence class, with crazed minds and racist objectives are expected to blow everything up on January 1, 2000, in this coming year of our Lord, A.D.”

      Rex’s eyes grow warm with about five rogue twinkles for about five quick seconds. Still he has nothing to say. Nothing yet is necessary to say and, besides, Gordon always does such a stellar job of filling in any silence with vast blobs of unnecessary yak.

      Cory now straddles a chair at the table.

      The girl is also, at this point, sitting, watching Gordon’s shirtfront from the corners of her wide-span eyes.

      Gordon sniffs indignantly. “Well, we citizens’ militias of whatever stripe shouldn’t feel too select. I read where climate-change-worried scientists, tree sitters, and animal cruelty objectors are considered terrorist enemies of America, too. And high school kids who pass out useful facts about the military, their booth too close to the booths of the military recruiters set up in their school . . . these kids are listed as, get this one, a credible threat. Union organizing today in the age of corporate conglomerating . . . watch out! You are an enemy of America! Pissed about poverty? Watch out! Feeding the homeless in parks? That’s against the law. Off in a paddy wagon you go, you un-American scary guy. Terror terror terror. The list is long. The United States bombs away in Panama, Yugoslavia, and Iraq, just to name a few, this is spreading goodness. If you call it spreading vile expansionist shit, if you call it criminal, you’re an enemy of the American people. So, as I say, militia movement folk just gotta stop feeling the specialness of the spotlight.”

      Cory murmurs, “I read this Megiddo thing, too,” and stares down at the wonder of the text before his father, stapled and restapled, copied and recopied, worn by the hands of so many Settlement readers . . . including some of the mothers who use it as the reason above all reasons to avoid Rex. So the thing is rubbed, picked, and chafed to softness. Carried about preciously.

      Now foil rattles and scrunches as Gordon’s hand finds a cookie. Then he pushes the pan toward Cory. Cory takes a cookie but seems he just wanted it for something to look at while his father yaks on for a good five minutes in his usual circular way.

      The girl’s eyes continue to slide around the kitchen of this home Rex and his mother and his daughter share, his daughter Glory whose hair like this guest’s is also red and long and ripply, no, not red . . . Glory’s is dark auburn. And Glory is beautiful, disastrously so.

      Standing against the sink, Rex, when he gets a chance, speaks solemnly, “It’s not the intention of any patriot group I’ve been in communication with or read or heard of to attack the US government for religious purposes or otherwise. Except for the common-law guys, the word is ‘stockpile.’ And ‘Be prepared.’ To be prepared for when or if the government makes a move on us . . . to disarm us. Or any illegal force makes such a move on the American people . . . or, as I mentioned

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