read:
F REEDOM .
T HE RIGHT TO BEAR ARMS .
First letters a kind of homespun Gothic, tall columns and buttresses all but dripping with blood.
I NDIVIDUAL RIGHTS. REMEMBER THOSE?
O R A PIECE OF PAPER CALLED THE CONSTITUTION?
B ACK BEFORE THE GOVERNMENT DECIDED ITS NEEDS SUPERSEDED YOUR RIGHTS.
G OVERNMENT DOESN'T EVEN EXIST—IT'S ONLY THE PEOPLE'S VOICE—SOMETHING ELSE IT SEEMS TO HAVE FORGOTTEN.
I F YOUR AMONG THOSE WHO THINK IT'S IMPORTANT THE GOVERNMENT REMEMBERS THIS—SOMEONE WHO FEELS A CALL TO GO ON REMINDING IT —
Y OUR NOT ALONE.
I wrote die phone number down in my notebook, glancing up out of habit to record the time as well. 11:12 A.M.
Hour or so later, I watch the messenger climb out of his van and walk up the sidewalk to the mailboxes. He scans them, and
moments later rings the bell outside Verne's door. I take the package inside, pour a large drink, setde down to read. Get
up after a while to put on coffee and go on reading.
Ten at night, Jodie shows up at my door. She's thrown him out again but is mortally afraid he'll be back before the night's
over—with a load on, as she says. Or with buddies. She's most afraid when his buddies come over. They sit there all night
long drinking and after a while (Jodie's words again) their eyes glaze over, like they've gone somewhere else. Things have
got a lot worse since he was laid off. And he's been bringing home new friends and drinking buddies that scare her more than
the old ones did. He talks a lot these days about inalienable rights, the right to bear arms, what he calls the burden of
freedom.
• • • •
There's no easy explanation: that the world has changed around them, become something they no longer realize, for example.
What they're trying to do, it seems to me, is to return to something diat never existed, some notion of the U.S. cobbled together
out of received wisdom—from old movies, nouns that drop in capitals off the tongue, catchphrases, that call of solitude at
the secret heart of every American, the simple demand to be left alone.
• • • •
They're not heroes, though in another time, and this is part of what I findso fascinating, they might have been. They want to be heroes. They want to be heroes all alone, all by themselves, to and for themselves.
• • • •
This is where the world makes sense to me, maybe the only place: looking out the window of this trailer. Out into America.
• • • •
Six in the morning, just past dawn. I'm sitting outside with a firstcup of coffee watching herons glide on the breeze, hawks
setde onto trees. I look about me—at these trailers with porches or rooms built on, the battered pickups and cheap old cars,
at the juke joint just up the road. And realize that I love it all.
Putting the pages back into the envelope, I thought about Rabelais's dying words: Je m'en vay chercher un grand Peut-être. I go looking for a Great Maybe.
That's what Ray Amano had done. And I had no idea how it turned out, what he found when he went looking, where he was. I'm
remembering forward now, to a time many years later when, like Amano, I'd vanish into my own Great Maybe, book passage on
my own drunkboat, walk off suddenly into Nighttown and come back with dark news.
8
Y ou boys might not want to do that." They were only a few years younger than I, but we'd come up so differently the gulf would
be un-breachable. I remembered what I'd told Dana Esmay: that we existed in different worlds, that it wasn't like in movies,
with secret passageways to get from there to here.
Maybe you couldn't get from there to here. Maybe Mother was right: their lives had nothing to do with the one we lived, and never would.
They were, the three of them, pretty much standard-issue Southern suburban white males, dressed in slacks and print shirts
over white T-shirts. One, living on the edge, had grown his hair out and wore a small moustache. He seemed to be the leader.
'What the
F REEDOM .
T HE RIGHT TO BEAR ARMS .
First letters a kind of homespun Gothic, tall columns and buttresses all but dripping with blood.
I NDIVIDUAL RIGHTS. REMEMBER THOSE?
O R A PIECE OF PAPER CALLED THE CONSTITUTION?
B ACK BEFORE THE GOVERNMENT DECIDED ITS NEEDS SUPERSEDED YOUR RIGHTS.
G OVERNMENT DOESN'T EVEN EXIST—IT'S ONLY THE PEOPLE'S VOICE—SOMETHING ELSE IT SEEMS TO HAVE FORGOTTEN.
I F YOUR AMONG THOSE WHO THINK IT'S IMPORTANT THE GOVERNMENT REMEMBERS THIS—SOMEONE WHO FEELS A CALL TO GO ON REMINDING IT —
Y OUR NOT ALONE.
I wrote die phone number down in my notebook, glancing up out of habit to record the time as well. 11:12 A.M.
Hour or so later, I watch the messenger climb out of his van and walk up the sidewalk to the mailboxes. He scans them, and
moments later rings the bell outside Verne's door. I take the package inside, pour a large drink, setde down to read. Get
up after a while to put on coffee and go on reading.
Ten at night, Jodie shows up at my door. She's thrown him out again but is mortally afraid he'll be back before the night's
over—with a load on, as she says. Or with buddies. She's most afraid when his buddies come over. They sit there all night
long drinking and after a while (Jodie's words again) their eyes glaze over, like they've gone somewhere else. Things have
got a lot worse since he was laid off. And he's been bringing home new friends and drinking buddies that scare her more than
the old ones did. He talks a lot these days about inalienable rights, the right to bear arms, what he calls the burden of
freedom.
• • • •
There's no easy explanation: that the world has changed around them, become something they no longer realize, for example.
What they're trying to do, it seems to me, is to return to something diat never existed, some notion of the U.S. cobbled together
out of received wisdom—from old movies, nouns that drop in capitals off the tongue, catchphrases, that call of solitude at
the secret heart of every American, the simple demand to be left alone.
• • • •
They're not heroes, though in another time, and this is part of what I findso fascinating, they might have been. They want to be heroes. They want to be heroes all alone, all by themselves, to and for themselves.
• • • •
This is where the world makes sense to me, maybe the only place: looking out the window of this trailer. Out into America.
• • • •
Six in the morning, just past dawn. I'm sitting outside with a firstcup of coffee watching herons glide on the breeze, hawks
setde onto trees. I look about me—at these trailers with porches or rooms built on, the battered pickups and cheap old cars,
at the juke joint just up the road. And realize that I love it all.
Putting the pages back into the envelope, I thought about Rabelais's dying words: Je m'en vay chercher un grand Peut-être. I go looking for a Great Maybe.
That's what Ray Amano had done. And I had no idea how it turned out, what he found when he went looking, where he was. I'm
remembering forward now, to a time many years later when, like Amano, I'd vanish into my own Great Maybe, book passage on
my own drunkboat, walk off suddenly into Nighttown and come back with dark news.
8
Y ou boys might not want to do that." They were only a few years younger than I, but we'd come up so differently the gulf would
be un-breachable. I remembered what I'd told Dana Esmay: that we existed in different worlds, that it wasn't like in movies,
with secret passageways to get from there to here.
Maybe you couldn't get from there to here. Maybe Mother was right: their lives had nothing to do with the one we lived, and never would.
They were, the three of them, pretty much standard-issue Southern suburban white males, dressed in slacks and print shirts
over white T-shirts. One, living on the edge, had grown his hair out and wore a small moustache. He seemed to be the leader.
'What the
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