We're All in This Together (2 page)

"Thanks, George," he says, pausing to catch his breath. Then,
seeming less to speak to me than to himself, "Man's too old to get
wound up like this. Especially over this. As if there's any real
difference between the two of them. One's a fool from Tennessee
who wants to tell us how to live, and the other's a damn fool from
Texas who wants to tell us how to live. Either way, we were going to
end up with a fool. No difference." He crutches down to the
sidewalk,
his wife beside him and rubbing his back. They disappear
around the hedge.

I return to my grandfather. With his palm pressed gently against
the billboard, he looks almost prayerful, not unlike the photograph
in a recent newsmagazine I have happened to see, of a penitent at the
Wailing Wall in Israel.

"Papa," I say. I feel a sudden need to be reassured that I am not
crazy. If there is anyone who can explain what I
saw
—
what I
thought I
saw
—
it is Papa. "On the way here, I was on my bike,
and I saw this cab

He turns and blinks at me.

Until now, I suddenly realize, Papa has not even been aware of my
presence, does not even realize that the Desjardins have left, maybe
doesn't even know they were here in the first place. Which is why,
when he sees me now, sees my raw eyes and flushed cheeks, Papa
construes their meaning in the only way that must seem possible to
him.

The old man steps forward and embraces me, hard. "Don't worry,
George," he says, "the paint will come off."

I open my mouth, close it.

We spend an hour soaking the pink paint off the billboard, and
then my grandfather and I drive to the sporting goods store and
browse until we find the right weapon.

1.

For armor, I went looking in the junk closet in my grandparents' garage. When I opened the door a cascade of twenty-year-old
Halloween decorations an

d disassembled fishing poles poured out, along with a lot of other interesting things: moth-eaten life preservers, sheaves
of ancient AFL-CIO newsletters wilted up like onion skins, a few ratty lures, a tire gauge with a cracked face, a Richard
Nixon mask. I sat on a milk crate and put the mask on my hand, made it talk to me. I was in no hurry. "Maybe he'll just forget,"
said Tricky Dick. "McGlaughlins have long memories," I said. "But you're a Claiborne," said Dick, "I recognize you by the
devilish toe." This surprised and silenced me. I sat in the cool dark of the garage and tried to think of some silly song
for Nixon to sing. Maybe he had really forgotten, maybe he had come to his senses, I thought, but a moment later, through
the wall, I heard the old man's voice calling for me.

I sighed, shook off the mask, and dug the softball equipment out from the bottom of the closet, a too big chest protector
and a pair of cracked shin guards that reeked of mold. There was, however, no catcher's mask and no jock.

Around the back of the house, on the patio, I reported to my grandfather.

"Well, there's nothing to be done about it," he said. "I'll just have to aim low."

Papa was stoned, and eating peanuts. He took one salty piece at a time, rolling it between his fingertips, and finally plopping
the peanut into his mouth. The automatic rifle lay balanced across the arms of his deck chair.

Gil, who besides living next door was also my grandfather's best friend, made a disapproving noise from the back of his throat.
He was attempting to fire the black stub of a roach held in a twisted paper clip, flicking a lighter and sucking wetly.

My grandfather made an impatient hand-it-over gesture. This elicited another critical grunt, but then Gil passed over the
works.

The afternoon, bright and dry, spun with pollen and carried the sound of children screaming from the public pool. Nearby,
the five-hundred-shot ammo boxes were stacked up in a pyramid, like a display of beer cases at the supermarket. I put a hand
in the pocket of my shorts and checked my package for reassurance.

Papa thumbed the light and drew deeply. The joint hissed to life, and he exhaled with relish. He raised a gray eyebrow at
me. The corner of one bloodshot eye twitched. "What's the problem?"

I shifted my weight from foot to foot and tried to formulate a response that didn't sound too cowardly. The chest protector
sagged around my torso. When I imagined being shot at, I saw myself running in circles, faster and faster, until my evasive
maneuvers had gained the impossible quality of an accelerated film reel, and I was like a fool in a silent movie, doing a
hotfoot jig on a bed of firecrackers. Then, an instant later, I saw myself take a direct hit in the sack, and plummet to the
ground in a boneless heap, dead, balls pulverized.

I decided to abandon any pretence of courage. "Why don't you shoot at Gil, Papa?"

"With that walker? He's too slow."

"Thanks, kid."

"I said, Til aim low.'" His eye was still twitching.

"High or low, Henry, it seems to me that the boy has ample reason for concern. His face and his ball bag are exposed.

"Your prudence is well earned, George." My grandfather's best friend waited a moment before adding an afterthought: "If it
is wrong to be prudent about one's ball bag, then I, for one, would rather not be right." To punctuate this declaration, he
threw me a wink and, simultaneously, stuck his hand under his armpit and squeezed off a long, wheezing fart.

Years ago, Gil had been an important official, a psychology professor and a dean at the university. Now he was just an old
man, dying with uncommonly good cheer.

In his time, my grandfather, Henry McGlaughlin, had been an important official, too: the president for thirty years of Local
219. At a single word, he was capable of shutting down the Amberson Ironworks, and leaving the skeleton of an aircraft carrier
shrouded on a dock for months, like a rich man's summer sloop. Of course, that too had been years ago, and now he was an old
man, as well—but dying more slowly than his friend, and with no cheer to speak of.

I was fifteen years old and I wanted badly to please my grandfather, but I was a clumsy, unhappy boy, and I put little stock
in the concept of trust, and none at all in faith. In the last few months my world had come to feel like a suit that I put
on backward. Dr. Vic had offered me his opinion that this was all a phase—"a life passage," he called it—and that when I emerged,
I would be a man. I asked Dr. Vic when he expected to emerge from his life passage. It took him a minute, but then he slapped
his knee and said that was a good one.

Papa thrust the paper clip back to Gil. "Here, Gilbert. Stick this in your mouth."

When my grandfather turned back to me, his eyes were suddenly watery with feeling. "We're in this together, George," he said.
"That's the thing."

This was a way of saying that we were a union of two, and in a union, you stood up for the next guy and you never broke ranks
and you faced down the bosses and the finks and the goon squads with a solid front. "We're all in this together"; it was the
essential promise that an organizer made to the workingmen who risked the livelihood of their families in an action. If another
guy's family was hungry, you gave them half of what you had. If another guy came up short on his rent, you turned out your
pockets. If another guy needed a hand, you reached out.

Here, in this place, Papa needed my help to confront a fink, a young fascist and vandal named Steven Sugar. And I needed somewhere
to go, a safe place.

"Together," he repeated, and clasped his hands to show what the word meant.

I knew this was a practiced gesture, a piece of his old soapbox rally, but I couldn't doubt it.

If another guy needed a hand, you reached out.

So I went back to the garage, padded my crotch with a pair of athletic socks, pulled the Richard Nixon mask over my face,
and stuck a southwester on my head. Then I ran back and forth in the sun for an hour while my grandfather tried to shoot me
full of holes.

Separated by a distance of a hundred feet or so, Papa blasted at me from his position on the patio while I scrambled in and
out of the stand of trees at the edge of the backyard. As the paint balls whizzed through the air above and around me, they
tattered the leaves and burst against the trees with sharp, wet smacks. He yelled at me to stop moving so fast and play the
part right, but I pretended not to hear. I only ran faster, spooked by the champagne pop of the rifle, cedar chips crunching beneath my feet, ozone hanging in the air, paint-stained branches slapping against my back. I ran until I was
drenched through and seeing black spots out of Richard Nixon's eyeholes.

Then I heard Papa curse. That was enough, he called out. God­dammit that was enough.

I stayed in the trees until he finished unscrewing the automatic rifle from the tripod and tossed it to the ground with a
thud. According to the sporting goods salesman this particular weapon, an IL-47, was the top of the line in paintball assault
weapons; the IL stood for "Illustrator."

I emerged from the trees with my hands up. "I'm unarmed."

"Don't be a smartass."

Asleep in his lawn chair, Gil sat with his legs spread wide and a wet spot on the front of his pajamas. In the sun, his bald
head was the color of skim milk, so pallid it hinted at blue. My grandfather had told me that the cancer was all through him,
the way it had been with Nana toward the end. To me, that phrase, "all through him," described an image of the disease as
a growth of black vines, twined around Gil's bones, thickening and choking, getting tighter and tighter, until eventually
something would snap and that would be it.

After I shrugged off the catcher's equipment and hung Richard Nixon's sweaty face on the fence to dry, I went to Gil and shook
him to make sure he was still alive.

He blinked several times, noted with only passing interest the dampness at his crotch, then looked around at the yard. "Looks
like somebody got murdered out here. Murdered bad."

The yard did appear truly gruesome, as if someone had been knifed in the neck and then staggered around dramatically for hours,
spouting from an endless reservoir of candy apple red arterial blood. There was paint all over the stand of larch trees, the
boles and the branches and the leaves; paint on the patch of wild rhubarb and on the back fence; paint on the grass and on
the dirt; paint on the igloo shaped birdhouse, as if a tiny Inuit had exploded; and even on the pool, where an errant paintball
had dissolved into a small pink slick.

Gil grunted himself up into his walker and clicked forward for a closer look. He stopped and peered at the scummy surface
of the water. The pink slick drifted slowly, gathering anthers.

"You shot the pool, Henry," he said.

"It's my fault. I shouldn't have jumped around so much."

Gil was sanguine. "Don't blame yourself. Maybe the pool had it coming."

Papa squatted down with a groan and began to snatch up the ammunition wrappers littered on the ground. "Never you mind him,
George, never you mind him at all. He's just a contrary old man. You can find one most anywhere. They like to sit off to the
side, and criticize, and pick, and pester, and make a general nuisance of themselves.

"Back when I was organizing, we had a name for them: we called them Company Grannies, because when there was an action, all
they did was stay at home, complaining and clutching their skirts, and when we finally got the bosses to the table, finally
got them to sign the contract and give us our share, the Company Grannies would tell us that we should have made a better
deal."

He hauled himself up and held on to the shooting tripod while he caught his breath.

It was from my grandfather that I came by my new height and gangly frame, but while he still maintained a couple of inches
on me his spine had developed a pronounced hook, which locked him into the permanent stoop of a man who has been kicked in
the shin. Papa hung over me with his rheumy brown eyes, batting them against the late light in a way that was almost girlish.
My mother believed that losing Nana had broken his heart and scooped him out.

My mother didn't know about the sniper's nest we were assembling in the guest room.

"Of course, I've come to realize that this particular sobriquet was a grave slander against elderly females, most of whom
can at least be counted on to make a fine dessert now and then, and who were at one time a useful part of society, but there
you are.

"In any event, although this particular specimen will be dead soon, as you get older you should be prepared to a meet a great
many more like him."

"That's true enough," said Gil. He held the roach clip up to the light, and daintily picked away a few tiny embers. "But I
will guarantee you of one thing: Al Gore, the very man himself, would not approve."

"Do you want to shoot at me some more tomorrow?" I interjected this question hopefully.

Papa patted me on the shoulder. "Don't worry, George. You did your best. You did your part. I just needed to get a feel for
the weapon. You just keep doing your part, help keep this old man on his toes, and everything will work out fine."

He gazed off across the paint-spattered lawn, and a thoughtful smile played across his face, as if he were seeing across a
great distance to a beautiful vista that was invisible to us. "When the time comes, I'll plug the little son-of-a-bitch."

We dismantled the tripod and packed the rifle and the ammunition to take upstairs.

He ordered Gil to make himself useful and go around the front and stand by the sign to give us some perspective. "And roll
up another one of those," he said, making a smoking gesture.

Then, when we were just inside, Papa stopped and turned back. He threw the sliding door open and stuck out his head to say
one last thing: "And you leave Al Gore out of this, goddammit. He's suffered enough."