People were beginning to forget where their grievances began, only that they hated everything their opponent stood for, like that old Dr. Seuss story about the Sneetches, those with stars on their bellies and those without. As if a star could make you worthy, as if a star could make you whole.
By August 27, the daily suicide rate had risen to 81,622.
DeWitt
Four weeks after Avon walks out of prison, Girlie’s sister calls and says she needs to be rescued. That’s the word she uses, rescued, like a soldier radioing in from behind enemy lines. Avon has been using his now unstructured days to take care of things around the house, repairing the generator and refilling the propane. At night, after the whiskey has kicked in, he reads internet printouts from the library. This is how he stays connected to the digital world—anonymously and on paper.
His buddy Arnaud taught him the Google Doc trick: free thinkers from around the country sharing ideas by contributing to the draft of an endless document on Google. Invite only, hidden from prying government eyes. Avon hasn’t been on since before his recent prison stretch, and to be clear, he never contributes, only lurks. It’s important to stay informed, but you have to find sources of information you trust. The internet is filled with propaganda merchants. Facebook, forget it. It’s amateur hour for desperate housewives and backyard BBQ conspiracy rubes.
It is the day before the Senate bombing and the so-called boogaloo. After the sun goes down, Avon sits at his desk, going through a stack of newsletters. He lets Girlie handle the bills. Seeing those form envelopes with their slim plastic windows enrages him. If it were up to Avon, they’d live in a cabin without electricity, drinking well water. But Girlie, though sympathetic to the sovereign movement, is not a full convert. She has too much to lose, being only a green card citizen and subject to censure and deportation. So, she runs her business primarily aboveboard, paying token taxes, depositing funds in an FDIC-insured bank account. When he’s not in the joint, he’ll often find her seated at the kitchen table, calculator out, running the numbers. In Avon’s mind numbers are a problem. If there’s one thing he can’t abide, it’s math—the way all those so-called experts always roll out their data to prove a point, to say they know things to a certainty, where right-minded Americans, like Avon, are only talking their opinion. Statistics. This was the downfall of human civilization.
Everybody knows you can use numbers to prove any damn thing you want, he used to tell his son, Samson, who had showed a proclivity for math from an early age. Like how they want us to believe that cow farts are heating the damn planet. But on the subjects that really mattered, the use of math wasn’t just wrong. It was criminal, a tool of oppression. Like how that Covid-19 bullshit killed hundreds of thousands of people, when no one Avon knew died. How it was part of the Deep State master plan to declare martial law, strip away our guns, and rob all citizens of their freedom, once and for all.
Plus, what could math tell you about hugging your kids in the morning, or hitting a perfect fast ball into the bleachers? What did math have to do with watching them raise the flag every morning at the military academy, that lone bugle playing? There’s no equation for falling in love. No algorithm for patriotism or loyalty. You knew something because you knew it. Because your gut always told you the truth.
His son, Samson, used to nod and chew gum. He’d been collecting baseball cards from a young age and was forever jawing on a powdery stick of pink pointlessness.
“Whatever you say, Pop,” he’d say.
“You’re damn right, whatever I say.”
Bathsheba, by comparison, was a good girl. Did as she was told. Didn’t question. Even after her mother got lymphoma and passed, the girl stayed just as sweet and as wholesome as ever, while Samson took to being mouthy and sour. Avon practically wore the strap out keeping that kid in line. And what thanks did he get when the boy reached eighteen without so much as an arrest for general teenagery? None. Nada. Zip. These days he doesn’t even know where the boy is. The last letter Samson sent couldn’t have been more than a page long, and all it said was that the boy was changing his name, or some other rooster-stupid idea, and moving to Texas.
I don’t want you contacting me or trying to find me, his son wrote in his smarmy, perfect penmanship. Talk about judgmental. The swoopy f’s alone were enough to make Avon want to swing a belt.
I want a real life, his son wrote, to be part of this country, this world, not outside of it. But you ruined that for me. Do you know how hard it is to prove I exist without a birth certificate? Without a social security number? It’s easier to walk over from Mexico and become a tax-paying American. And yes, I want to pay taxes. I want to vote. I want a marriage certificate and car insurance. I want to be visible, and I know what you’ll say—how sticking my head out of the ground is dangerous, how I should hide the rest of my days for what I did. What we did. But I was fifteen, and if that’s the price for being real, I will accept it.