“Even I don’t buy that,” I muttered.
He grabbed a yellow sheet of paper from the counter. I saw his right hand drift to his back. “Lookey here,” he stuttered, “This is the work order. Came in two weeks ago. See that? Lookit the date.”
Grant took the paper and perused the date. He set it on the counter and held out his hand to Jerry. “Ain’t no thing,” he smiled.
Jerry took his hand to shake it. Abruptly, Grant yanked him onto the counter, twisting his arm and locking it behind his back. “A frickin’ coincidence!” he hollered. “You expect me to buy that?” The glass counter cracked beneath them.
“Hey,” I yelled.
Martin thrust himself into Jerry’s face. “What the hell did you do, Jerry?!”
I grabbed Martin and pulled him off. Jerry groaned. “It’s on the work order.”
“Papers get forged all the time, you little pissant!”
“I didn’t do—”
Grant yanked the revolver from Jerry’s back and shoved him up and against the back wall. “Tell me!” He pointed the gun at Jerry’s face, pulling back the hammer.
“No!” I launched myself at Grant and ran into his elbow with my forehead. Lights flashed in my eyes and I crumpled to the floor.
“No, please!” Jerry was sobbing. From my vantage on the floor, I could see him through the cracked glass of the display case, holding his hands out in front of Grant. “I didn’t do it!”
Grant was rock still, both hands trained on the weapon, his breath seething through his nostrils. Any second now, I expected to hear the deafening bang ending Jerry’s life.
Twenty-Three
“Well, all right then.” It was Martin’s voice. Between Grant’s stance, I could see Martin bend down and pick up the magazine he’d thrown to the floor. He smoothed it out and put it back in the rack, then strolled up to Grant’s side.
Cocking his eye at Jerry, he said, “I believe you.” Gently, he put his hand over the barrel of Jerry’s gun. “I think we’ve made our point.” After a moment, Grant relinquished the weapon.
I released my breath. Jerry collapsed against the back wall. Martin spun the weapon in his hand and set it down on the counter. He looked at me.
“You all right?”
I nodded.
“You staying down there for a reason?”
Grant bent forward and held out his hand. I hesitated, then let him help me to my feet. He studied my forehead. “You should get some ice on that.” I took it for an apology.
Jerry ran his hands over his face, then he grabbed the gun off the counter. “Get out,” he said. We looked at him. “All of you. Get out of my store.”
“Jerry,” I said.
“Get out!”
Grant shuffled his feet. “No.”
Jerry looked confused. Hot tears stained his eyes red, threatening to run down his flushed cheeks. He gripped the gun so hard his hand shook.
“Why don’t you put that down?” said Grant. “We both know you ain’t gonna do nothing with it.”
His face contorted, a mask of rage. “I could!”
Grant nodded. “I believe that. But you ain’t. And I ain’t gonna kill you, neither.”
“How do I know that?”
“Because,” said Martin, leaning over the counter and tracing the line of the crack with his finger, “if he’d wanted to, he’d have done so already.”
He glanced between Martin and Grant. “I didn’t call that cop!”
“Yeah.” Grant nodded and turned around, idly perusing the products on the shelf. “But we had to be sure, didn’t we? Worse thing we could all do at this point in the game is overreact.”
“Ya think?” I blurted.
Martin actually laughed aloud, prompting an uncertain grin from Jerry before it evaporated from his face.
Grant snorted. “Yeah.” Then he eyed me sidelong. “Yeah, I do. And don’t be looking my way, ‘cause you brought all this on.”
“Me?”
“So did you, Jerry.” He turned back around. “So did all of us. It started with you panicking at the first sign of that cop. Then it spread to Martin—knowing we’d have to do something about that.”
Martin smiled grimly and examined his fingernails.
“And lastly to you, Peter. So convinced that it’s all going to hell. That, gentlemen, is what fear will do to a unit. Fear takes hold in one person. It’ll spread like a disease to everyone else.”
“It’s an infection,” said Martin.
“Yep. Thing is, you gotta control it. You can’t let it control you.” He nodded curtly in Jerry’s direction and said, “Now go put your gun away.”
Jerry took a couple of breaths, then his shoulders dropped. He leaned into the back room and set the revolver on a high shelf. When he turned back around Grant said, “I will say this: you handled yourself a lot better when that cop came here. You didn’t panic. You took care of business. You handled it.” He smiled grimly.
Jerry sagged in relief. He reminded me of a whipped dog.
“There’s just one problem,” Grant said.
Jerry’s relief evaporated. I rubbed my head. “The cop knows who we are now.”
Grant nodded. “More or less, yeah. In fact, Peter, with your blog, it’s possible they’ve already opened up an investigation.”
“No.” Martin shook his head.
“What choice do we have?” said Grant.
“You can’t shut him down, Grant. We need him.”
“Why?”
I stared in disbelief. How could he ask that? Was he serious about trying to shut down my blog?
Martin answered for me. “Peter’s blog is our connection to the rest of the country. Without him setting the brush fires, we might be able to pull off the assassination, but there’s no way we’ll spark a revolt.”
“Besides,” I jumped in, “if I pull down the blog, they’ll know for sure we’re on to them. They’ll close the net.”
Grant regarded me coolly, his lips pressed into a thin line.
“If we’re gonna go down, let’s go down for a reason.” The words were out of my mouth before I had a chance to think about them, much less stop myself.
“Beat ‘em to the punch,” Grant said. After a moment, he nodded once. “You just might have a point, Cherry.” He turned around and looked at each one of us, holding our gaze a moment. “All right, gentlemen. All our cards are on the table now. No more secrets. Inauguration’s less than two months away. That means we need to be on site in a month. If you need a cover story,” he gazed directly at Jerry, “you’d best come up with one quick. We don’t need no missing persons bulletins going out and alerting the cops to be on the look out. Till then,” he nodded for Martin to follow him towards the door, “I suggest you keep your head down and stay outta trouble.”
With that, they left the shop, doorbells jangling behind them. Through the window, I watched them clamber into Grant’s SUV and pull out of the parking lot. I turned back to Jerry.
“You okay?”
“I’m fine, Petey,” he said. “You don’t have to keep mothering me, y’know?”
I opened my mouth to say something further, then thought better of it and said instead, “All right. See ya.”
I left, oblivious to whether or not Jerry replied.
***
Little happened over the next few days. I brought down the Christmas decorations from the attic and made a big deal about putting them up, even to the point where I managed to convince Martin to help me. He groused a little about bothering with it all, but I think it was good for both of us to get our minds onto something else. I strung lights in our windows and in the scraggly lilac bush off the front porch that Mom had planted more than twenty years ago, frustrated that only half our lights worked. I tried to talk Martin into going in with me on a new set, but he wasn’t interested. I did secure his help for a tree, though. We picked up a precut one from the local Wal-Mart and drove home with it strapped to the roof of his car. Settin
g it up was a two-man job, but after wrestling with the stand, getting stabbed with pine needles and covered in tree sap, we managed to get it more-or-less standing straight. Martin disappeared into the kitchen while I sat back and viewed our handiwork.
I wondered what we’d put under it. Martin had said the M107s were an early Christmas present, but I didn’t want to picture them sitting under the tree, ensconced in wrapping paper and ribbons. I don’t think I’d have enjoyed opening them Christmas morning if we did. Somehow, a sniper rifle just didn’t seem the proper way to pay respect to the holiday or to the Christ-Child.
Peace on earth, good will toward men.
Martin came back in the room a moment later with a pair of beers and dropped into the easy chair. I pursed my lips. He was playing Dad again.
For years, all Dad did was set up the tree and string the lights. The rest of the trimming was our responsibility while he sat back and watched. After Dad passed away, Martin began stringing the lights, leaving the ornaments and garland to me. I thought of mentioning it to him once or twice, but suspected that any objection on my part would result in no tree at all, nor much of a Christmas, either.
I opened the ornament boxes and began sorting through their contents. The musty boxes were full of memories: the fragile, tiny plate from Mom and Dad’s first Christmas together, tiny portraits of Martin and me as toddlers, the toy soldier Martin made out of miniature blocks of wood when he was in the third grade, one of my early attempts at an angel with lopsided wings and a crooked, crayon grin that Dad dutifully strung with ribbon and ceremoniously hung on the tree. It was all here. Our whole life was in this house.
In the base of the box I pulled out the unfinished manger scene my mother had been making before she passed away. Each year, my father had said, she’d mold another character out of clay and fire it in the kiln of a local craft shop, then painstakingly paint it and add it to the collection. It was meant as a keepsake for our families, once her children were grown up and married with kids of their own.
Of course, it was unfinished. We had a Mary, Joseph, Baby Jesus, a donkey and a wise man, but she never completed the rest of it. I was the last edition to her collection. It was just about all I knew of her. Dad had no skill in clay, and probably wouldn’t have done anything with it even if he had. Martin and I were both alone and single, with no marriage prospects anywhere in sight, and no need for generational keepsakes. I wondered what she thought about how her boys turned out. Would we be any different had she lived?
“You just gonna stare at them all day, or are you gonna put ‘em up?”
I glanced at Martin. He regarded me over the top of his beer, taking a long sip before setting it down and belching out his dissatisfaction.
“I was just remembering.”
“Remembering what? It’s not like you knew her.”
I put the manger scene back in the box and picked up an ornament. “You could always give me a hand.”
He snorted. “Nah. You go ahead. Decorating’s your thing.”
I pushed to my feet and approached the tree, selecting appropriate branches on which to hang our memories. “What do you want to do this Christmas?”
He didn’t answer. I hung a few more ornaments.
“You think maybe we should have someone over?”
“Who’d you have in mind?” he asked.
I shrugged. “Dunno. Just asking.”
“We’re probably better off just laying low.”
I nodded. It made sense, though I didn’t want to admit it. Our plan had become our life, displacing everything else—even Christmas. Soon, there would be nothing left.
I had no idea just how true that was.
“There’s something else we need to talk about,” he said. When I looked his way, he wasn’t smiling.
Twenty-Four
“What’d you have in mind?” I said, not at all sure I wanted an answer.
“You familiar with the Conquistadors?”
I frowned. Did he mean the historical explorers, or was there some sort of modern group I should’ve been familiar with? “You mean the Spaniards? Hernando Cortez and company?”
“You know any other Conquistadors?”
“Guess not.”
“You know what they did when they got to the New World?”
I shrugged, unsure where he was going with this, or what it had to do with Christmas.
“When Cortez landed on the mainland with his men, he scuttled the ships so that none of them would think about retreating. It was his way of saying, ‘No return.’ Julius Caesar did the same thing when he crossed the Rubicon and invaded Rome. There was no going back. When the Muslim commander, Tariq ibn Ziyad, set foot on the Iberian Peninsula in 711, he ordered his men to burn the ships so his men had no choice but to go forward.”
“What’s with the history lesson?”
“One more. The Chinese general Xiang Yu gave an order at the Battle of Julu to break the woks and sink the boats. They forded the river and destroyed all means of recrossing it. This way, the general forced his men to struggle to the death with the Qin, thus leading them to victory.”
“What did you do? Read a book?”
“They encourage you to study in the service. It ain’t all guns and grunts.”
“Huh. Could’ve fooled me.”
He threw his bottle cap at me.
“So what’s your point?”
He grinned thinly. “I think we need to burn the ship. We gotta make it so there’s no going back.”
I fingered the ornament in my hands. It was one my grandmother had made–sort of a miniature Fabergé egg. The outside was blue sparkles and a gold ribbon. Inside a gently carved opening stood a tiny manger scene made out of cleverly woven paper. Mary and Joseph leaning in awe over their newborn child. Made from a real egg, it was easily the most delicate ornament we owned. I wondered how it survived this long.
“Aside from the fact we don’t own a ship,” I began. My voice sounded thick in my ears. I cleared my throat. “Why would we need to do something like that?”
He pressed his lips into a thin smile and grunted. “Cause what we’re doing really is that final. It’s not something you can alter. Not something you can back off from.” He pointed at nothing with his beer, waxing philosophical. “You see, so long as you can back away, so long as you can turn around—you ain’t fully committed. It’s when you reach the point of no return, and you take that last step off the edge—and there’s no going back—that’s when you finally got what it takes to finish a job like this. You understand what I’m saying?”
I pursed my lips. “You’re having doubts about going through with it?”
He looked at me like I had two heads. “No.”
“So you’re thinking I’m having doubts?”
He hesitated, then, “Not that you’ve said lately.”
I hung the ornament and watched it sway on its hook. It was quite the treasure. “All right, I guess I don’t understand.”
That wasn’t entirely true. I had an inkling where he was headed with this, but I didn’t want to go there. It was something along the lines of his Nathan Hale fantasy—preparing to give up our lives for the sake of our country.
I suppose I ought to have not been surprised. If Martin was nothing else, he was consistent. Assassinating the President was indelible. He was right. There was no going back, once we did it. I wanted to believe I could use that fact to pull him away from the brink, before he dove headlong into the abyss. But here we were, peering over the edge. Soon, we wouldn’t be able to see anything else. This must’ve been what Nietzsche meant when he said, “If you stare too long into the abyss, the abyss stares back into you.” I felt swallowed by it.
Martin threw back his head and vented breath at the ceiling. “You’ve gotta be one of the most thick-headed people I know. Brilliant to a fault. You must be like one of them idiot servants.”
“Savants. Idiot Savants.”
“Whatever.”
�
��And I’m not.”
“Like I said. Whatever. I’m talking about making a major commitment here, doing something that forces us to go forward no matter what, and you’re acting all ‘Duh, what’s he talking about?’ Come on, Petey.”
I felt my collar grow hot. “Come on yourself! Can’t we just not talk about it for once? Huh? I mean, you’re like, relentless about it. It’s Christmas, for God’s sake. Give it a rest.”
“There’s no time.”
“Make some time.”
He sighed and shook his head. In the kitchen, the phone rang. I rose from my crouch and started forward. As I passed him I said, “You know what? Just go and do whatever is you think needs to be done. It’s not like my opinion matters anyway.”
I stomped into the kitchen and tore the phone off the hook. “Hello?” I demanded, sounding a lot more forceful than I meant to.
“P-Peter?”
“Speaking.”
“Don Knapp here. Have you seen Jerry?”
I swear my heart stopped. “Uh, not lately, why?” All I could think was that Grant had done something to him after all.
“Well, he didn’t come home last night, and his Mom’s a bit worried about him. Ah, she thinks he’s been acting a bit strange lately, ever since you boys got back from your camping trip.”
“Strange? How?”
“Ah, well he offered to cook dinner once or twice—and he ain’t never offered that before. And he’s been all kinds of moody and such. Did something happen up there?”
I lied. “No. I mean, we were all supposed to pitch in and cook. Jerry ended up doing most of it ‘cause Grant thought he needed the practice.”
“Uh huh.”
A new thought occurred to me, though I’m not sure why. Maybe it was déjà vu. Jerry’d done this once before two years ago, when Misty Culver broke up with him.
“Mr. Knapp, is the bay froze over?”
“I expect so. You think he’s fishing, do ya?”
“He might be.”
Jerry and Misty had dated off and on since high school, but two years ago she broke it off with him for good—saying he was a man without a future, and she wasn’t going to wait around anymore for him to grow up. Jerry’s argument that he would inherit his father’s business made no impression, and she hooked up with an engineering student at Rochester Institute of Technology. Last we’d heard they’d gotten married and moved out of state. That day Jerry vanished. Two days later, we found him out on the ice, huddled in his tent, his pole suspended over the empty hole he’d carved. He’d been sleeping in his car and spending his days fishing. He’d caught several salmon and steelhead, he’d said, but had thrown them all back, which I thought was just wrong. He mumbled something about making sure there were still plenty of fish in the sea, and didn’t argue when we convinced him to pack it in and come home. Unless I misjudged him, he was easily just as upset now.
The Spirit of Resistance Page 13