In Persuasion Nation (9 page)

So
Uncle Matt got on the iMac and made up these flyers, calling a
Village Meeting, and at the top was a photo he'd taken of the red bow
(not the real bow but Karen's pinkish-red bow, which he'd
color-enhanced on the iMac to make it redder and also he had
superimposed Emily's Communion photo) and along the bottom it said
FIGHT THE OUTRAGE, and underneath in smaller letters it said
something along the lines of, you know, why do we live in this world
but to love what is ours, and when one of us has cruelly lost what we
loved, it is the time to band together to stand up to that which
threatens that which we love, so that no one else ever has to
experience this outrage again. Now that we have known and witnessed
this terrific pain, let us resolve together to fight against any and
all circumstances which might cause or contribute to this or a
similar outrage now or at any time in the future—and we had
Seth and Jason run these around town, and on Friday night ended up
with nearly four hundred people in the high school gym.

Coming
in, each person got a rolled-up FIGHT THE OUTRAGE poster of the
color-enhanced bow, and also on these Uncle Matt had put in—I
objected to this at first, until I saw how people responded—well
he had put in these tiny teeth marks, they were not meant to look
real, they were just, you know, as he said, symbolic reminders, and
down in one corner was Emily's Communion photo and in the opposite
corner a photo of her as a baby, and Uncle Matt had hung a larger
version of that poster (large as a closet) up over the speaker's
podium.

And
I was sort of astonished by Uncle Matt, I mean, he was showing so
much—I'd never seen him so motivated. This was a guy whose idea
of a big day was checking the mail and getting up a few times to
waggle the TV antenna—and here he was, in a suit, his face all
red and sort of proud and shiny—

Well
Uncle Matt got up and thanked everyone for coming, and Mrs.
DeFrancini, owner of Tweeter Deux, held up that chewed-up foreleg,
and Dr. Vincent showed slides of cross sections of the brain of one
of the original four dogs, and then at the end I talked, only I got
choked up and couldn't say much except thanks to everybody, their
support had meant the world to us, and I tried to say about how much
we had all loved her but couldn't go on.

Uncle
Matt and Dr. Vincent had, on the iMac, on their own (not wanting to
bother me) drawn up what they called a Three-Point Emergency Plan,
which the three points were: (1) All Village animals must immediately
undergo an Evaluation, to determine was the animal Infected, (2) All
Infected or Suspected Infected animals must be destroyed at once, and
(3) all Infected or Suspected Infected animals, once destroyed, must
be burned at once to minimize the possibility of Second-Hand
Infection.

Then
someone asked could they please clarify the meaning of "suspected"?

Suspected,
you know, said Uncle Matt. That means we suspect and have good reason
to suspect that an animal is, or may be, Infected.

The
exact methodology is currently under development, said Dr. Vincent.

How
can we, how can you, ensure that this assessment will be fair and
reasonable though? the guy asked.

Well
that is a good question, said Uncle Matt. The key to that is, we will
have the assessment done by fair-minded persons who will do the
Evaluation in an objective way that seems reasonable to all.

Trust
us, said Dr. Vincent. We know it is so very important.

Then
Uncle Matt held up the bow—actually a new bow, very big, about
the size of a ladies' hat, really, I don't know where he found
that—and said: All of this may seem confusing but it is not
confusing if we remember that it is all about
This
, simply
This
, about honoring
This
, preventing
This.

Then it was time for
the vote, and it was something like 393 for and none against, with a
handful of people abstaining, which I found sort of hurtful, but then
following the vote everyone rose to their feet and, regarding me and
Uncle Matt with—well they were smiling these warm smiles, some
even fighting back tears—it was just a very nice, very kind
moment, and I will never forget it, and will be grateful for it until
the day I die.

AFTER THE MEETING Uncle
Matt and Trooper Kelly and a few others went and did what had to be
done in terms of Merton, over poor Father Terry's objections—I
mean, he was upset about it, of course, so upset it took five men to
hold him back, him being so fit and all—and then they brought
Merton, Merton's body, back to our place and burned it, out at the
tree line where we had burned the others, and someone asked should we
give Father Terry the ashes, and Uncle Matt said why take the chance,
we have not ruled out the possibility of airborne transmission, and,
putting on the little white masks supplied by Dr. Vincent, we raked
Merton's ashes into the swamp.

That
night my wife came out of our bedroom for the first time since the
tragedy, and we told her everything that had been happening.

And
I watched her closely, to see what she thought, to see what I should
think, her having always been my rock.

Kill
every dog, every cat, she said very slowly. Kill every mouse, every
bird. Kill every fish. Anyone objects, kill them too.

Then
she went back to bed.

Well
that was—I felt so bad for her, she was simply not herself—I
mean, this was a woman who, finding a spider, used to make me take it
outside in a cup. Although, as far as killing all dogs and cats—I
mean, there was a certain—I mean, if you did that, say, killed
every dog and cat, regardless of were they Infected or not, you could
thereby guarantee, to 100 percent, that no other father in town would
ever again have to carry in his—God there is so much I don't
remember about that night but one thing I do remember is, as I
brought her in, one of her little clogs thunked off onto the
linoleum, and still holding her I bent down to—and she wasn't
there anymore, she wasn't, you know, there, there inside her body. I
had passed her thousands of times on the steps, in the kitchen, had
heard her little voice from everywhere in the house and why, why had
I not, every single time, rushed up to her and told her everything
that I—but of course you can't do that, it would malform a
child, and yet—

What
I'm saying is, with no dogs and no cats, the chance that another
father would have to carry his animal-murdered child into their home,
where the child's mother sat, doing the bills, happy or something
like happy for the last time in her life, happy until the instant she
looked up and saw—what I guess I'm saying is, with no dogs and
no cats, the chances of that happening to someone else (or to us
again) went down to that very beautiful number of Zero.

Which
is why we eventually did have to enact our policy of sacrificing all
dogs and cats who had been in the vicinity of the Village at the time
of the incident.

But
as far as killing the mice, the birds, the fish, no, we had no
evidence to support that, not at that time anyway, and had not yet
added the Reasonable Suspicion Clause to the Plan, and as far as the
people, well my wife wasn't herself, that's all there was to it,
although soon what we found was—I mean, there was something
prescient about what she'd said, because in time we did in fact have
to enact some very specific rules regarding the physical process of
extracting the dogs and/or cats from a home where the owner was being
unreasonable—or the fish, birds, whatever—and also had to
assign specific penalties should these people, for example, assault
one of the Animal Removal Officers, as a few of them did, and finally
also had to issue some guidelines on how to handle individuals who,
for whatever reason, felt it useful to undercut our efforts by, you
know, obsessively and publicly criticizing the Five- and Six-Point
Plans, just very unhappy people.

But
all of that was still months away.

I
often think back to the end of that first Village Meeting, to that
standing-ovation moment. Uncle Matt had also printed up T-shirts, and
after the vote everyone pulled the T-shirt with Emily's smiling face
on it over his or her own shirt, and Uncle Matt said that he wanted
to say thank you from the bottom of his heart, and not just on behalf
of his family, this family of his that had been so sadly and
irreversibly malformed by this unimaginable and profound tragedy, but
also, and perhaps more so, on behalf of all the families we had just
saved, via our vote, from similar future profound unimaginable
tragedies.

And
as I looked out over the crowd, at all those T-shirts—I don't
know, I found it deeply moving, that all of those good people would
feel so fondly towards her, many of whom had not even known her, and
it seemed to me that somehow they had come to understand how good she
had been, how precious, and were trying, with their applause, to
honor her.

I
was twenty-six, beyond broke, back in my home town, living in my
aunt's basement. Having courted and won a girl I had courted but
never come close to winning in high school, I was now losing her via
my pathetically dwindling prospects. One night she said, "I'm
not saying I'm great or anything, but still I think I deserve better
than this."

My uncle called in a favor and soon I was on a roofing crew, one of
three grunts riding from job to job in the freezing open back of a
truck. My fellow-grunts, Tyrell and John, were the only black guys on
the crew, and hence I was known as the Great White Hope. Once
everyone had seen me work, I became the Great White Dope. Our job was
to move the hot tar from a vat on the ground to the place on the roof
where the real roofing was done. Tyrell had a thick Mississippi
accent and no top teeth. He stayed on the ground, pulleying the
smoking buckets up to us, muttering obscenities at passing grannies
and schoolgirls. John was forty-two, gentle-voiced, and dignified,
with a salt-and-pepper beard and his own roofing tools, which he
brought to work every day, even though he was never allowed to do
anything but lug tar. John had roofed all his adult life, and claimed
to have virtuosoed his way into this job by appearing on the job site
one day and outshingling the best white shingler.

"I guess I don't remember that," said Rick, our supervisor.

"I don't think you were there that day maybe," said John.
"It was Lawrence hired me."

Lawrence was dead now, a famous Fezziwiggian presence, mourned by
all.

"You are so full of shit," said Rick. "If you were so
fast then, why are you so shitty now?"

"You roof like my mother," said Terry, the owner's brother.

"Maybe your mother roofs good," John mumbled.

"She don't," said Terry. "But still she's faster than
you."

All that fall, John grieved over the fact that he was not allowed to
do the real and dignified work of a master roofer.

"It ain't right," he'd say to me. "I can do it. They
need to give me a chance. I'm an older man. Got responsibilities.
Can't just keep carrying tar my whole life."

In late November, talk turned to the yearly Christmas party. Drinks
and food were on Walter, the owner. People got shitfaced. Also there
was gambling.

"Then we're gonna see," Rick said one day. "We're
gonna see if John here is a better gambler than he is a roofer."

"You gotta hope," said Gary.

"As a roofer, John, face it, you suck," Rick said. "Nice
guy, shit roofer."

"Too fucking slow, John," Terry said. "We keep giving
you chances and you keep screwing it up."

"But maybe why he's a shit roofer is, he's a gambling man,"
said Rick.

"What y'all are gonna find out is I'm a roofer and a gambler
both," said John.

"Excuse me saying it," Rick said when John had gone down to
help Tyrell load the cauldron. "But that is a prime example of
nigger-think. He
thinks
he's a roofer because he
says
he is.
Thinks
he can gamble because he
says
he can."

"Has fourteen kids and lets the welfare pay," said Terry.

One payday John asked could I give him a ride home. I gave him a
ride, but, it turned out, not to his home. We drove deep into South
Shore, past houses we'd roofed, then into an area too poor to roof,
down a block of slumping two-flats.

"My friend's place," John said. "I'm gonna get you and
your lady some Sherman Juice so you can have a little party."

What was Sherman Juice? We'd started drinking at the shop and I was
now too drunk to ask. In the kitchen, under duelling photos of M.L.K.
and J.F.K., sat an ancient black woman in a rocking chair. A mad kid
dashed around, humming at me:
You devil, you white
. John's
friend did not have any Sherman Juice but did have a Polaroid of his
girlfriend going down on him. In the photo, taken from his P.O.V., we
could see, in addition to his penis, his feet, in black socks. She
was looking at the camera, smiling, sort of.

"Wow, is she pretty," I said politely.

The friend and I sat there together, admiring her. Then John and I
went somewhere else. Where we went was John's wife's apartment. They
lived apart. Living apart, they got more money, and with more money
they could buy a house sooner. In the apartment was a TV and fourteen
kids around it. John named them, rapid-fire, with only a few
stumbles.

"You really have fourteen kids," I said.

"Yes, I do," he said. "Every one mine. Right, baby?"

"I should hope so," said his wife.

No chairs, no couch, newspapers on the windows. John and his wife
cuddled on a blanket.

"When we get our real house, you come over," John's wife
said. "Bring your lady."

"Bring your lady, and we'll all of us have dinner," John
said.