We're All in This Together (3 page)

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 complaint 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."

"It's old school," I said.

Gil cackled, waving smoke.

"Hey, Old School." My grandfather snapped his fingers for the bowl they were sharing. "Pass that along."

It happened that this incident nearly coincided with the delivery of my grandfather's billboard. He had composed the text
some time after Nana died, and ordered it professionally made by a union printer in Providence.

"Take a good long look, George," Papa said to me when I came over to see the sign. He wore a big smile on his face as he tapped
the text with a finger. "This is what democracy looks like." He moved his finger to the drawing of Al Gore. "And this: this
is what a president looks like."

The first attack took place a week after that. Spray-painted across Al Gore's face, in glaring pink, the words:
GET OVER IT SHITHEEL! YOU LOST!

From the get-go, there was only one suspect. "Get over it? Get over it?" my grandfather asked rhetorically, as the two of
us rubbed at the paint with soapy sponges. "Who does this little terrorist think he is, George Will?"

Then, no sooner had the sign been cleaned than it was vandalized for a second time, and on this occasion Papa had stumbled
out of bed to investigate a clatter outside. They were gone before he could make a positive identification, but down the street,
he thought he saw a pair of diminishing forms on bicycles. There were also two other pieces of evidence: first, a second act
of vandalism against the billboard-
LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT SHITHEEL!
-and perhaps more ominously, a hunter's flare that he discovered still smoldering in the hedge alongside the house.

Papa stomped out the flare, then went inside and called Gil. They had watched satellite television and smoked buds until first
light, at which time Henry McGlaughlin went into action.

Summarily, he placed phone calls to Mr. and Mrs. Rodney Sugar of 113 Elkington Drive, then to the Amberson Township Police,
and, finally, for good measure, the ACLU.

Papa offered no introduction to the Sugars, but went right to the crux: "Your son has impinged on my free speech, and I want
to know what you plan to do about it."

"Pardon?" asked the groggy female voice on the other end of the line.

"My free speech has been impinged. Violated. Trod upon. My First Amendment right. By your son."

There was a moment of silence before Mrs. Sugar gathered her wits. "Free speech? At five-twenty in the morning? Are you serious?
Well shit on you, you crazy old coot."

She hung up, but before lunch the Sugars' lawyer messengered over a response.
Mr. McGlaughlin,
the attorney wrote,
we are aware of,
and sympathetic to, your recent loss . . . However, if this harassment
continues, on behalf of my clients we are prepared to apply for a
restraining order
. . .

The investigating police sergeant gave the area around the sign a cursory inspection, and grimly scratched his goatee with
his unopened notebook. "Okay, chief," said the officer, "It does appear that we have a case of vandalism on our hands."

"Yes, my former paperboy—"

"I know, I know. But there's no proof. The parents say you've got the wrong man, and you're ready for the bughouse to boot.
Now, that's not for me to say, but"—the officer paused, and made a point of sniffing the air—"are you aware that cannabis
is illegal in the state of Maine, Mr. McGlaughlin?"

My grandfather took a deep breath and looked up at the sky. "Are you aware, Officer Corcoran, of a document called the United
States Constitution? It has a list of amendments—laws, that is—the first of which gives me the right to free speech."

The officer flipped his notebook open, squinted at a blank page, and flipped the notebook shut again. "If that's how you want
to play it, chief, that's fine with me." He put his hands on his hips and shook his head at the ground. He licked the mustache
of his goatee with the tip of his tongue. "Let's face it, a sign like this, I bet it pisses a lot of people off.

"Tell you the truth, it kind of pisses me off. It's unpatriotic as hell if you ask me. Now look, I believe in free speech
as much as the next guy, but not so far as this sort of garbage goes. What do you think about that, chief?"

"I think," said Papa, "that you have a very nice goatee, Officer."

The ACLU lawyer came third. Papa told her the whole story, and she listened, asking a few questions, but mostly staying quiet.
When he finished, she apologized. "There's no angle, Mr. M."

"What about my free speech? How's that for an angle? You know, I gave money to you jokers when it meant something. I gave
when Hoover was in office."

"Your free speech isn't being violated by an entity here, sir, just by a paperboy. Look, if your paperboy were being funded
by an interest group, or backed by the KKK or something, I'd have this thing on the front page of
USA Today
tomorrow." Papa heard the hiss of compressed air as the ACLU lawyer opened a soda. "Besides, and I'm hardly being facetious
here, but down in D.C. we've got Ashcroft probably planning to compile a database of everyone who's ever had fun before. If
we let this guy out of our sight for a minute, he'll start having people scourged for picking their wedge on the Sabbath.
Really, sir, and with all due respect to the good and honorable work you've done, when it comes to brass balls, Old Mary Hoover
couldn't have budged the pair that Ashcroft is hauling around. Take my word, as an American citizen in the year 2001, a dink
paperboy is not the worst problem you've got."

Of course, by this time, my grandfather's Sunday
New York Times
had become something else entirely. Which brought us up to the present day, and the third attack, the one that had convinced
my grandfather to settle matters himself.