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.
I know you’re mad, but don’t call Sheba. She’s too gentle a spirit for your fits. If you want to yell at somebody, yell at my picture. It won’t change anything, but then again none of your yelling or beatings ever did.
Avon read the letter twice, then burned it up in the ashtray with his Bic disposable. As far as he was concerned, the boy was dead now, laid out by the side of the road with a state trooper’s bullet between his eyes.
Which, maybe that’s how it shoulda gone.
He puts his feet up on his desk, thinking how over time this country takes everything from a man. It grinds him down, separates him from the people that matter, but then being a man of principle has always been a recipe for isolation. That’s why the Bible is full of prophets and martyrs. Consequences. That’s how they trap you. If you stick to your principles, vote your conscience with words and bullets, well—there aren’t many who will stay by your side, the human animal being driven by a need for safety, comfort.
Avon holds no illusion that if the shit hit the fan, Girlie would be gone in a New York minute. Love is a lie, just like all the other lies, or what’s the name of that Al Gore movie, the made-up one they call a documentary, A Convenient Truth?
All Avon knows is that one day he’ll be looking down the barrel of somebody’s gun and he’s gonna have to answer the celestial question—did I live true to my principles? Was I a man? What else matters? Some woman you got used to? A child born from some Wednesday fuck? They were all bricks stacked in the tower you called your life. And Avon’s tower was going to reach all the way to heaven.
The conditions of Avon’s parole state that he is to avoid all contact with other convicted felons and is not allowed to possess a firearm, plus all the standard bullshit about not leaving the state, et cetera. Before he went in this last time, Avon buried all his weapons in the backyard in an insulated steel box he’d welded himself. It took a winch to get it in the four-foot hole he dug with the John Deere parked behind the garage. It takes most of his second night home to dig it out. He drops it in the back of his pickup and pulls into the garage. By dawn the hole has been refilled and the John Deere’s engine is ticking behind the garage once more.
Avon is in the kitchen making coffee and eggs when Girlie gets up.
“Aie, my floors,” she says, seeing him standing on the linoleum in his filthy work boots. He ignores her and takes his breakfast into the garage. In prison the best he could do on his hot plate was Spam on toast. At home he’s been living it up, milk, butter, hamburger every night. He sets his plate on the worktable, climbs up into the pickup bed. The steel box has three combination locks on it, each set to the birthdate of a founding father. He cleans the box thoroughly before opening it, oiling the hinges.
Inside the guns have been set into foam cutouts. Nothing extreme. Working guns for a working man. A compact semiautomatic rifle, a shotgun, and three pistols, two semiautomatic and a revolver. He has enough ammunition to hold off federal agents for a few hours, but Avon has always been practical. He knows that when the shock troops arrive, he won’t be walking out of here. He just wants to make it as painful for them as possible, so that when they say his name it’s with a scar on their souls.