Joe Lehman
1 May 2003
Quagmire Excerpt 2
He never did like guns. That was a given. As a younger boy during the schizophrenic periods he spent in rural Maine, he had gladly gone hunting with his “uncles”. He recognized it as a rite of passage and he was always eager to please Brother Ray and Comrades Freddy and Tony. Like any little boy he could never resist the satisfaction of seeing the grown-ups reward him with a smile. Especially since there was never a father there to do that job for him exclusively. He thought back to the rabbit. He never was able to pull the trigger up close. It didn’t matter that he should have, he knew that now. It was already dying, lying there choking its death gurgle, which was surprising, considering by all logic a creature of its size should have been killed instantly. He stood over the thing point blank, his petite quivering nine-year-old hands clutching the rifles trigger. He could feel the breath of the men behind him, hovering over him, gently encouraging him. Of course, he knew that usually meant “be a man” in their minds. He just stood there with his hands shaking, the rifle shaking along with it as a cool spine-tingling gust of wind swept over him. The poor creature’s eyes just begging him, pleading with him, reading nothing but confusion. It did not know what was happening, what it meant that it had been shot, or why. It only took a few seconds for its gurgled breathing to slow down and its heart to stop beating. To him, it felt like slow motion. When it was dead, its eyes never closed, they just continued to stare up at him, only now completely empty. Of course, it was a stupid thing to do. Looking back he probably would have taken the second shot. It seemed to be the more humane thing to do. But then on the other hand, he didn’t see that as making sense. This was a rabbit, not a deer. Another shot would have splattered its guts across the field rendering virtually impossible to clean up and eat. He got the feeling they knew that, and had just wanted him to take the messy second shot for the sake of being manly.
He had always told himself he had always felt superior in his militant prowess to need to carry a gun. In his pride he had felt that guns were somehow beneath him, although he did vocally advocate the right for his people to carry them, as part of his firm belief in the self-determination of poor people. Still he had always felt an individualistic pride at being able to handle himself without the need of a gun, (which was surprising considering his known feelings toward individualism). After all, he had taken care of his body very well over the last few years. The martial arts talent had made him slim and agile, bringing him an inner confidence and peace, a sense of gracefulness. And of course he had used his martial arts moves in many a confrontation over the past few months alone, that some had begun to question the nonviolent stance he had espoused. Of course, he was no fool, he knew there was no point in any inflated pride over his “expert” moves. He remembered the time the previous January when he, as the papers described, “kicked the gun out of the hand of the cop who had surprised him on the street.” That had certainly gone down in lore. The way it actually went down was, he had been strolling one afternoon with his girlfriend, his little brother, and little cousins. A passing couple had asked called out to them for directions, before they, and two other pigs pulled out guns and surprised him. The “kick” was more of an instinctive swat with his foot. If pigs flew maybe it came into contact with the gun pointing at him, it probably just disoriented the bastard and he dropped it. He had not known if the men were cops or thugs out to kill him. He did remember the surprised look on the pig’s face before he immediately turned to run away. That whole show was pointless of course, as they immediately had him pinned down on the pavement, his hands cuffed behind his back. His friends and the little ones screaming and wailing as they dragged him away. There was no point, the whole thing had been so ridiculous, if not shocking and humiliating for him, and yet he still could not bring himself to carry a gun. And yet here he was carrying one now.
He should have told himself. He should have told himself everything. He knew everything warned in the Activist’s Handbook, he knew the risks, the sacrifices. Yet he never did imagine for one minute, it would happen to him. Lord he had never expected it would be his own private war now. After all, what was his position, if not so peripheral, at best? He never conceived that he would gain prominence in his own right. It just happened. Had he been half as smart as he liked to think he was, he would have realized ahead of time that some enterprising cub journalist working his way up from the Siberia of covering anti-Globalism protests would find a sweet human interest story. A teenage boy, acting as a more vocal mouthpiece, more unabashed and vociferous than most cautious adults, for a Boston-based Socialist group, must be decent press. And off the runaway train went rolling. Suddenly, he was a big deal. He was no longer just another one of the many youth members of the league, he was now, Joseph Hayden, organizer of the people. He was the young man who toured Indian reservations, calling attention to the corporations reaping the profits of their gaming industry. He was the poor white boy who walked hand and hand with black Roxbury youth calling for improvements of their housing. He was the young man who brought a youthful face to a revived trend of Marxism, proselytizing the students of Massachusetts’s high schools with literature “inappropriate for school grounds”. And of course, his “mysterious” and “troubled” past was juicy enough: Orphan son of radical labor union organizer (worked himself to death in a meatpacking plant); raised by various Socialist activists, moved around from spots in Maine countryside, secluded New Hampshire locales, working class Massachusetts suburbs, and inner-city Boston area; A regular fixture in a “leftist cult” that was “terrorizing” Connecticut, and an instructor in “political education” courses for the commune’s children every summer. And an impenetrable “security guard” outside abortion clinics, defending the right to choose, from the fundamentalist brownshirts that terrorized the women that entered. Now public enemy # 1, and he made it all even more mysterious by his rather peripatetic lifestyle. No stranger to changing locations, when he first got wind of the constant surveillance he was under, he started keeping a system of never sleeping in the same place every two nights. He’d room with friends and members of his surrogate family all over the city. He was like Yasser Arafat, always moving from place to place. So often, that it was difficult to tail and gather a public record of him. In addition he constantly altered his social security number and the DMV numbers on driver’s licenses. He called it living off the charts, somewhat.
And then there were the three little kids. Now there was the clincher. He was rarely ever seen without the company of those three little kids, and the media loved this, the reserved nine-year-old half-brother from Seattle, and his cousins, the twin seven-year-old towheaded brother and sister, (now eight). They loved the local legend of his devotion to them, how supposedly when the twins were little two-year-olds, their mother, long gone crazy, off in the Pacific Northwest somewhere, whereabouts unknown, their father, New Hampshire native, quasi-member of World Socialist League, now completely “off the charts”, the twins now raised among the members, at eleven-years-old he made his promise to them in their cribs. His alleged words: “Your parents can’t be with you anymore, little ones. But don’t worry; you’ll always have me. I will never leave you.” And so they became his “little ones.” They loved his strict Jewish upbringing of them, how he would always have them recite the Barucha when he took them to Friendly’s or some other joint. Sometimes they could never figure out if he was trying to be their uncle or their father. Most of all they loved how he would parade them around with him, making quite a scene in their black coats and their little Che Guevara-like berets heckling outside wealthy Cambridge mansions, and Corporate buildings, chanting slogans like “a people united will never be defeated” and “power to the people” at the thoroughly annoyed rich folk. They were his appendage, always at his side, and soon enough that would be subject to a fatal exploitation. He never meant to have this new public role, it just happened. But he knew as long as the train was in motion he might as well take it for a ride, and so he exploited the position right away. And so did the government.
He began to notice what was going on, the little things at first. A few break-ins and hang-up phone calls were nothing new. They were always routine. But then when it all escalated, he knew it was all centered toward him. The bust on the street was first. Then came the rape of his friend. There was the daily brownshirt harassment of the local skinhead vermin. The drive-by shootings of headquarters’ windows emanating from unmarked cop cars. Then came the lies, the propaganda flyers, the disinformation, and the bitter rifts stoked between him and his friends. The arrests were becoming almost daily. One nuisance He noticed the charge after another. He noticed the changes he was going through too. He noticed how the pressure was slowly getting to him. The marijuana use, the blackouts, the constant mood swings. He was becoming distant, tired, burned out into an omnipresent drug-induced stupor. He could always visualize the scene of him slouching on a ratty sofa with a joint in his moth with a “Commie Fag” T-shirt on. He came to the acceptance that he could no longer rely on his hands alone, he accepted the .45 from the uncles. Then that one night, the pressure had really gotten to him. The brownshirts, (the last fuck-brains he had to worry about now), had accosted him one time too many on the street. So he gave them the scare of their life, pulling out his .45 and shooting at the lice, sending them scurrying like rats on a sinking ship. He barely even winged any one of them, all he did was give them a good scare. But it should have been no surprise later that night when he woke up to find SWAT hauling him out of bed, half naked. His ass in a courtroom again, this time, assault with a deadly. But he made bail. Just barely this time. And of course it was one more strain on the organization’s finances.
But hell finally broke loose that night in May. Those goons, those pig bastards finally did it. The squad stormed in under the cover of darkness, and they shot his baby brother. They hit him in the back. How could any one mean to kill a nine-year-old boy? Murdering Nazi pig sonsofbitches! It was supposed to be him they were after. But their intelligence was wrong that night. They didn’t know he had spent the night at another house. After all, he was always moving around. He thought Danny would be safe there. Now they had taken everything from him. He had nothing left. Nothing left to loose. Nothing. It was over.
Now he had left them. He had been gone for three months. Off the charts. Underground. Seventeen years old and on the run, knowing they were looking for him, the Boston cops and the FBI. They had covered up his brother’s death quietly. Now they were seeking him as a “person of interest” in “complicity” with this fatal shooting, still under investigation. Shacking up with friends through the network who would gladly shelter him. Moving from house to house all throughout New England, and for a few days in New Jersey, where they had burned him last. Now his trail was cold again. He was now stowed away in an old Connecticut farmhouse Freddy maintained. That one last embrace from his girlfriend and with his new baby girl for the first time, he knew would be his last. It was over. He knew he could never go back to them. He only had one mission now. One purpose. He knew what he had to do. There was nothing left to do afterwards but disappear. Driving along in Freddy’s battered old Nova, beret, sunglasses, and black coat in place, he felt the .45 tucked into his pants and clutched the automatic rifle with his free hand, the other on the steering wheel. He was approaching Massachusetts. He knew both the car, and the guns were registered in Freddy’s name. He knew they would immediately lead back to him, but Freddy was in deep enough shit as it was, so he really didn’t care. Besides he was too consumed with hatred and revenge at the time anyway…
