LITMIR.BIZ

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emergency.”

      Gordon jumps in. “You know I don’t buy this martial law fretting because of the FBI’s and Pentagon’s and CIA’s place in the permanent state of exception within the American state. We have always a suspension of the juridical order. It’s part of the whole shebang!” He makes a funny face, which Rex refuses to acknowledge, then rattles on. “There are all those folks who think they need a new computer so when the three zeros blink into place on January 1, 2000, the end of the computer-dependent world won’t happen . . . a tale probably initiated by the big computer companies whose sales have stabilized and whose growth is subsiding.”

      Cory laughs.

      The girl’s eyes, not entirely veiled by her loose and blazing hair, seem to regard Gordon’s hand with obvious (to Rex) worship. So what else is new, Rex thinks to himself.

      Cory laughs again. “Gordo, that is just crackpot conspiracy theory. You see scheming behind every closed door.” He winks a long dramatic wink at the girl, his tongue in his cheek.

      She laughs like a grown-up.

      Rex says nothing.

      Cory is now smiling with satisfaction at the bottom side of his cookie.

      The girl’s hands are red and yellow and orange in the seams of the knuckles and around her nails. Her smiling mouth is actually pretty, like a pink bow.

      Gordon munches and grins at the same time, speaks now with a mouthful, “Well, certainly I am paranoid. FBI said citizens’ militias are paranoid. And I’m not one to question their expertise.” He places his right hand, open-fingered, on the Megiddo report before him. “Actually, all I’ve witnessed face-to-face and via snail mail on the citizens’ militia scene is a preponderance of . . . of normal Republican bullshit.”

      Rex directs a refrigerated glare at Gordon’s profile, then raises his chin and looks away toward the door to the glassed-in front porch.

      Gordon swallows chewed cookie. “But not as right-wing as what comes out of the big think tanks and certain foundations. And all that Intel spooky shit on the Internet. In fact, those are no doubt the Adams and Eves origin of all right-wing thought.”

      Rex does not want to argue tonight. He lets the bait vaporize into the infinite galaxy of Gordon’s opinions, which Rex has always considered to be as red as Mother Russia. He notices the girl has a pack of cigarettes in one pocket of her work shirt as the great bursting jumble of her hair swishes somewhat to the side. In this break in Gordon’s blathering, Rex speaks gravely, “If you were not familiar with the Patriot Movement, and you read that report, you’d be worried about people in the movement. But the FBI is not worried about people in the movement. They are not expecting any bombs—”

      “Because,” Cory marvels in his rumbly, cracking fifteen-year-old voice, “they know everything. If something’s in the works, they’re part of it, egging someone on, like McVeigh with OK City.”

      Rex tries to continue where he left off. “They are not worried, not expecting—”

      Gordon interrupts him. “Think about it. They want to—” and off he goes with a rather up-and-down, over-and-under philosophical speech. Then fetches another cookie, stuffs it into his cheek, and finishes up his rambling with muffing and sluffing, which nobody can understand.

      Rex speaks stiffly: “The report is going out to all low-level law enforcement agencies, city, town, county, state . . . and the media and various organizations set up to save the world from the right wing, so they claim. But it is inadvisable to forget that these professional fund-raisers with their broad-brushstroke lists . . . and all the surveillance agencies and politicians know how to make people sweat. I would not be surprised if the fund-raiser outfits helped write this report. No question in my mind that this was written to drum up terror in ordinary Americans of ordinary Americans . . . and that creates terror in general . . . a generalized fear . . . a panic. Public mass hysteria is useful to all those birds.”

      Gordon garbles words around another huge cheekful of cookie, “An old frick,” which, translated into English, probably was meant to be An old trick.

      Cory laughs. “When they blew up the OK City building, the media announced for several hours that it was right-wing militias or Arabs. One said right-wing militias and Arabs. Midwest farmers and Arab rebels shoulder to shoulder! Call me sentimental but I love it.”

      Rex again gets a simmering whiff of cigarettes. Must be the girl smokes no less than a pack a day. All her clothes and that hysterical mane of hair are saturated in the toxic stench.

      Gordon pats the report affectionately. “FBI said that the citizens’ militias are paranoid about the UN’s plan to disarm the citizens of the world but they didn’t exactly deny the UN stuff. It was worded as if the UN did want to disarm us . . . but that . . . to be worried about it made us paranoid. They stated that the Gun Owners of America president, what’s-his-name, shouldn’t talk or write about this fact, that it would make people even more paranoid.”

      Cory still hasn’t bitten into his cookie, just rocks it on the table. “Gun Owners of America is a newsletter for Democrats with guns, isn’t it? And I’ve got some Earth First! friends who are pro–Second Amendment. One has a shotgun for woodchucks in their collective’s garden. Another an AK for target shooting and so forth.”

      Rex’s eyes have narrowed. His arms are now folded across his chest. As usual, this St. Onge bunch has taken the talk into territory where the air seems to have no oxygen and is crowded with distant shadowy characters he does not trust.

      Cory chortles. “G-man logic is that to be informed and armed at the same time is to be paranoid.” His chortle turns into a giggle.

      Gordon stares into his son’s dark eyes which are wet with giggle-tears.

      The girl is staring through the plate of cookies out through the other side.

      Suddenly, a harsh ca-chunk! Gordon turns. “What’s that?’

      “Refrigerator,” says Rex.

      “Sounds like it’s in pain.”

      “It still works.”

      “I never heard one do that.”

      Rex steps to the table, pulls out a chair, finally settles in.

      Gordon says, almost in a jolly way, “Law enforcement agencies can get a better position at the congressional trough when they have people shivering in terror.”

      Rex senses that “the Prophet” and his “followers” do not really care about building the militia network. They just get high by wallowing in the idea of it. Rex can’t fathom this but does not confront or accuse.

      Gordon is still (happily, it seems to Rex) going on: “And there are so-called antiterror . . . ahem, police-state bills lined up waiting for the public to cheerlead them into becoming law. Everybody gets a little something.”

      Cory distractedly taps his own nose with his cookie. “That’s where another government-executed act of terror will come in. Like the declassified Operation Northwoods back under Eisenhower, tabled as Kennedy came in . . . where they planned to shoot a plane of college kids down and blame it on Cuba . . . or shoot some people walking around in Miami and blame it on Cuba. But CIA operatives later on really did shoot a plane down somewhere . . . I forget where . . . but it’s common knowledge. And one did a car bomb in New York. Blamed Castro. The US government loves certain kinds of right-wing stuff. As long as it’s a roadblock to socialists, the Red Sandwich, and all that.”

      Gordon grins broadly and his wild eye opens so wide that it seems the eyeball would plop out. Rex doesn’t dwell on the whys and wherefores of this almost holiday pleasure in their voices but he has a flash, a three-second accounting, that the real and felt sting of what an enemy can do to you is owned by only one person in this room, Richard York, who was there, with real rockets, real roars and shrieks and crumbling walls, and pounding pounding pounding guns behind and in front of barely human whines, dripping jungle, land mines, and ingenious traps,

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