Carry Me Home (104 page)

“What? What?”

“Ah ...” Tony whispered, “Linda’s pregnant. Three months. We already know it’s going to be a boy.”

There was low murmuring, some coughing. Forty-five vets sat before the collector assembly tables. Bobby, as judge, sat on the edge of table 1. Before him at a small card table was Sal Ianez, the court recorder, then two long tables, one for the prosecution, one for the defense. Beside assembly table 2 there were twelve vets in folding chairs—the jury. Calvin Dee was chairman. In clusters behind the vets were “civilian observers,” including Sara, Linda, Emma, John Pisano Sr., James and Isabella Pellegrino, and Professor Arnold Tilden of Nittany Mountain College with seven of his students. The proceedings had been going on for a hour.

In the jury box Howie Bechtel nudged Kevin Rifkin. “Hey, Blue Dog. How was your unit reunion?”

“Great, Man,” Rifkin said. “We had this one speaker ... an attorney. He said we should all get blood tests for this Agent Orange thing.”

“Fuckin attorneys, Man!”

“I don’t know, Man. But I told Wapinski. Half a dozen of us are going tomorrow morning. Over to RRVMC ...”

Gary Sherrick cleared his throat, smiled, glanced back at Wapinski, returned to face the courtroom. “As per order of this court and per the findings of the grand jury of High Meadow”—his voice was loud, distinct—“this court has set the date of Thursday, October eighth, nineteen hundred and eighty-one as the commencement date for the trial of The People of the United States of AMERICA versus THE MEDIA.”

At that moment he felt very down. For weeks he’d expected the final action, his final reward. He’d dreamed it, dreamed of reclaiming his daughter, of having the means to support her. Yet he’d dreamed too of the legal battle, of the judge saying, “There’s no reason for this court, Mr. RTL6764, to award you custody. We do have your medical records, the record of your cancer. There is no reason for you to be the custodian of this child when you may not live long enough to see her grow up.”

He felt very ill. But it was not the dream, not the delay of the award, reward, not even the cloak and dagger covert running about, spying, passing information on to Stan Gilmore of the Internal Revenue Service. It was something Bobby had said and he couldn’t even remember the words. Something about Judas Iscariot. Something about Hamburger Hill. Something about interrupting his belief that his blackness in white-controlled America was the source of all his problems—“true or not, that’s overcomable”—something about needing to interrupt his need for dismemberment because he wasn’t a Judas goat leading lambs to slaughter.

“Gilmore here. Whatcha got, Good Buddy?”

“I—I—” He felt sick to the pit of his stomach. His breaths came shallow, quick. He glanced over his shoulder, up Third Street, past the new restaurant, past the 7-Eleven, past the intersection with Callar Drive to the T with Crooked Street and the big Victorian with the screened porch. “I—I think something big is coming down.”

“Go on, Good Buddy.”

“I—I need some money to get away from this. He’s getting weird. Remember like Jonestown, like all those people killing themselves with that grape Kool-Aid?”

“Tell me more.”

“I told you about the vow, right? And irrefutable obligations?”

“A regular demagogue, huh?”

“He’s got an awful hold on em. And he’s really—he’s really sick. He looks terrible. He looks ... He’s almost crazy with frustration and anger.”

Gilmore tittered. “He-he. That’s what happens to people who try to screw Uncle Sam, Good Buddy. You’re doing the whole country a service.”

“I don’t know what he might do next.”

“Okay, thanks for the tip.”

“Stan?”

“Yeah.”

“You’ve got to get me some mon—Oh!” He hung up.

“Hey Man.” It was Mike Treetop. “What’s happenin, Bro? Come on in.”

“I ... Oh ... I ... I got ...”

“Johnny and I saw you from the window. Come on. You’ve never been in, have you? Use our phone.”

“I gotta go, Mike. I ... ah ... gotta split. I was just making an appointment.”

“Yeah. Okay. Look, Ty, sometime, huh? We miss you guys.”

“Sure Mike.”

“We’ll be up for the trial. You and Rodney going to do the race war thing?”

“I can’t talk, Mike. I gotta go.”

“Egalitarian inclusiveness,” he wrote. He stopped. There were papers everywhere on the pine desk. It was Friday, 18 September 1981. Most of the vets had quit early. Vu, Mariano, Van Deusen and Wagner had taken Joe Alamont to RRVMC for a second screening. Earlier Joe had gone with Bobby and some others but he’d been denied Agent Orange screening because of a less than honorable discharge. Several dozen guys had gone to Mike and Johnny’s The Apple Fritter—which was becoming their afterwork hangout. Others were at the White Pines; more were in the bunkhouse. Through the window High Meadow looked deserted. Even the grass and weeds seemed lonely, uncut, unkempt, abandoned.

Bobby glanced at the correspondence stack. The very size of it intimidated him. On top was a letter from Jinny Reed, Tim Reed’s wife, a voice seemingly reaching across space and through time. “I remember,” Jinny had written

he told me when he hired you, you were someone who might shake the place up. Henry didn’t like you at all (I think he felt threatened) but Tim insisted. When Henry fired you, Tim was devastated. After his first heart attack he talked about you incessantly, about your windmills and electrified road surfaces, about having an impact, and about how myopic Henry and all the planners were. At any rate, Bob, Tim wanted you to have the enclosed. Sometimes I think the only thing keeping him alive after the first attack was the thought of breaking into Harrison’s cabinets and getting your drawings and proposals. The night after he got them and told me to send them to you was the night of the fatal heart attack ... I wish you and Sara were still here. Your wedding was beautiful.

Love,

Jinny

Bobby tapped his fingers. It was hard to comprehend: Tim Reed, dead. He hadn’t yet opened the package, hadn’t yet told Sara. Beside the package was a design file containing Bobby’s sketches for a quadracycle car: twenty-one forward speeds, double derailleurs, very bicyclelike except with four wheels, a light, aerodynamic fiberglass and Plexiglas shell, supine seats for two pedalers, and a clutch-flywheel system for stability (gyroscopic effect) and assistance in hill climbing—all unproven, unprototyped. One more unfinished project, he thought.

There were other projects before him: an outline for a national Viet Nam Veterans Antidefamation League; a revised logo for EES reflecting the new phone number 626-6475—Call Nam-’64-’75; and a 200-year plan. Amid the projects, too, was the ever-expanding IRS file, and the new file on Agent Orange screening.

Bobby’s exam, as cursory as it had seemed, had been distasteful. They’d drawn blood, checked his pulse, temperature, reflexes, and asked about skin rashes. He’d been treated like a ’cruit, like a prebasic trainee. Yet, he’d gone to set an example. On the floor beside Bobby, Josh thumped, twitched in his sleep, opened his eyes, looked up sleepily, sighed, went back to sleep. “How ya doin, ol’ boy,” Bobby whispered.

With the end of a pen Bobby flicked open the IRS file. The latest form, 668(Y) Notice of Federal Tax Lien Under Internal Revenue Laws, stated:

... notice is given that taxes (including interest and penalties) have been assessed against the following-named taxpayer. Demand for payment of this liability has been made, but it remains unpaid. Therefore, there is a lien in favor of the United States on all property and rights to property belonging to this taxpayer for the amount of these taxes, and additional penalties, interest, and costs that may accrue.

This Notice of Federal Tax Lien has been filed as a matter of public record.... Penalty and interest accrue until the liability is paid.

On all property and
rights
to property ... Bobby thought. Then he muttered, “There’s no fucking way, Josh. There’s no fucking way out. Hundred percent penalties! It’s the damn
Empire Strikes Back
, is what it is. No wonder people are sick. We’ve been betrayed by our own government. How’d Granpa say it? ‘First you have to sell your crop.’ He didn’t tell me what to do when the government doesn’t want you to sell your crop. They’re killin us, Josh. Aw, fuck em. We’ve been broke before and bounced back. We can do it again.”

Bobby sighed, flicked the pen from the file, let the cover close. It was wearing him down. Last night, after everyone had left, Sara had donned a salmon-colored silk teddy, had caressed him, had looked so beautiful, so sexy, Bobby’s silver Jumping Mary medallion hanging in her cleavage, and he had fallen asleep.

Bobby yawned. He looked at the sheet he’d begun. “Egalitarian inclusiveness,” he’d written. His concentration had been broken. He could not remember where he’d planned to go with that idea. On a new sheet he wrote:

Just as if any sector of a defensive perimeter is breached the perimeter is breached; and if any sector of our economy is ailing, the economy is ailing; or if any cell in our body is sick, we are sick; if any human on earth is denied hope, freedom or opportunity, our hopes, freedoms and opportunities become tentative, precarious, subject to denial.

It is 205 years since the words “When in the Course of human Events ...” gave birth to this nation; and 194 years from the penning of “We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility...” These founding documents projected their ideal, their plans, pan-generationally 200 years into the future. These documents, their spirit and their reach are models for us today. Dual citizenship of the state of residence and of the United States—though not formalized until the ratification of Article XIV in July 1868 (when the concept was a radical departure from existing systems of government)—has today, in 1981, become so accepted as to be virtually unnoticed, unrecognized as a concept, and in reality has become a system of triple citizenship—citizens voting for, and in turn being taxed by, local, state, and national governments.

The future must be one in which Human Beings will have triple (or quadruple) citizenship of (town), state, nation and world (“We the people of the United Nations, determined to save succeeding generations ...”). The concept of world government is not original. It predates Caesar. But putting the power of that government into the hands of the people as citizens, world self-government, has never been attempted. A 200-year plan must be one of universal, egalitarian inclusiveness.

For years Bobby had mulled these concepts, let them foment. The urgency he felt in September 1981 motivated him to condense his notes. All citizens of the world were to be seen as created equal, with equal rights and equal opportunities under a unified system of global laws—which Bobby conceived of as equally restraining citizens
and
governments. Bobby was aware of the potential for great abuses, exactly as the founding fathers of America recognized the potential for the great abuse of a federal system of government and the needs for checks upon the powers of that government—not just internal checks and balances between the branches, but external checks by the states and by citizens. Bobby recognized how any government must first be a servant of the people, not first a controller of people. Therefore this new system of world government necessarily would have a federal form—a union or federation of independent governments, not a dominant world government that might deform into a dictatorship ... perhaps evolving in stages, citizens of Europe, citizens of North America. A form that would be limited; that would deal only with abuses recognized internationally—either between states, by multinational commercial bodies, or within renegade states tyrannizing world citizens who were simultaneously citizens of that state.

Of course, having been subjected to out-of-control government—“The rights of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated”—being caught in the grasp of the IRS and the administrative authority of OSHA, Bobby saw the potential for tyranny, via taxes and bureaucratic regulations, in his strong global formation. Therefore, to give it teeth to deal with abuses yet to restrain it so that it itself would not become abusive, was the dilemma to be resolved. Bobby wrote, “How not to create a monster! The system must be able to expand for crises, then must have a built-in mechanism that automatically shrinks the system when crises pass.”

Bobby stopped. This one concept, this multilevel citizenship concept, would be the basis for a global plan, an expansion of the Great Experiment that is America. “I, too, have a dream,” Bobby wrote.

I dream of a community, a nation, and a world not polarized into ethnic or racial factions, of a citizenry not fearful of stepping from their homes, not fearful of losing their homes ... of a world citizenry that puts private interests and personal gains second, behind the glory of a worldism in which each separate nation, each separate state, each separate community lives and exists in a mutually profitable manner. ... I want to see every man, woman and child living in their land in environmental harmony with the world ecosphere....

Become intoxicated with the myth, with the dream for your own good and the good of all your neighbors on earth....

... without abandoning the primacy of nationalism, for a hazy homogenized all-humanism;

... without abandoning individualism and distinctiveness for robotic conformity;

... without adopting the new dehumanizing aspirations of the mega-techno-capitalists with their economic primacy theories that seek to inherit personal and national sovereignty via the piece-by-piece transfer of power and influence to the officers of international corporations without the consent of the governed.

His juices were flowing yet he was exhausted. “The American dream,” he wrote, “is a human dream. It is one an individual creates because he has the freedom and opportunity to create it. It is NOT something anyone is, or can be, given.”