Revolution No. 9 (9 page)

At least that was how Monks remembered it.

Hammerhead was waiting for him. They walked back toward the lodge, the shackles clanking around Monks's ankles.

“Uh, getting back to what you said before,” Hammerhead said.

“What?” Monks said distractedly.

“That tic. In my eye.”

Monks stared at him, then remembered.

“What about it?” he demanded.

“You said it was probably nothing. What does ‘probably' mean?”

Monks shook his head. “It means you probably don't want to know.”

“Yeah, I do. Tell me.”

“Well—a tic like that is a classic symptom of a brain tumor. Pressing on the optic nerve.”

“A brain tumor?”

“Sometimes if you catch them very early, they can be lasered out, or treated by radiation. But by the time they start interfering with your vision, they tend to be the size of an
egg, and they're growing fast. They're pretty tough to handle by then.”

Hammerhead's square jaw moved from side to side, as if trying to work its way around the concept.

“Of course, I'm not
sure
,” Monks said. “Keep tabs on the headaches and delusions. If they go away, that's good. But if you start noticing them more…” He grimaced. Then he added, comfortingly, “There's other things it could be, too. Maybe a minor stroke. That's no problem in itself, but it makes you more susceptible to a major one. Then you're talking the rest of your life in a wheelchair, wearing a diaper.”

Hammerhead's face had taken on a stunned, flounder-like look.

“Is there, like—I mean—what should I do?”

“A hospital might be able to help,” Monks said. “Or at least tell you how long you've got. But if you buy into the antimedical sentiment around here—” He shrugged. “Enjoy yourself as much as you can, is my advice.”

W
hen Monks stepped into the lodge, Freeboot was sitting at the long wooden table with a kerosene lamp before him, poring over an open book. The pose was so like medieval paintings of scholars like Aquinas and Erasmus that Monks wondered if it was deliberately staged.

Freeboot kept reading for another half minute, a pause that also seemed staged.

“I'm a self-educated man,” Freeboot said. “I never had no benefits of formal schooling. But that also means I think for myself. My mind hasn't been crammed full of poison by people who want you to believe things
their
way.

“So here's how I see it. This country's gotten to be a big, spoiled, overgrown kid. Everybody figures if they got the best toys, that gives them the right to hog the sandbox.”

He watched Monks intently, apparently expecting a response.

“I told you, I'm not interested in discussion while I'm chained up,” Monks said.

Freeboot considered this a moment, then said, “All right.” He dug into a pocket of his jeans and tossed Monks a small key.

Monks sat on the floor and unlocked the cuffs. The clicks as they released were among the most satisfying sounds he had ever heard. He stayed sitting down, rubbing his chafed ankles.

“Does this mean I'm free to go?” he said.

Freeboot smiled thinly. “I'm working on trust, like I told you. I expect the same back from you.” He held his open palm out for the key. Monks tossed it back.

“Let's hope we won't need it again,” Freeboot said. “You with me so far?”

“About the country being a spoiled kid?”

“That's right. What's it going to take to make it grow up?”

Monks chose his words carefully, very much aware of the shackles still lying on the floor.

“I don't know,” he said. “I don't think there are simple answers to complex problems.”

“Oh, the problem's real simple. The system's set up so all the money's
going
to a few rich motherfuckers who've already got a ton of it, and it's being
taken
from the masses who need it.”

That was putting it simply, all right—a one-line summary of Marxist ideology with a contemporary spin, managing to combine the words
motherfuckers
and
masses.

“And the solution?” Monks said.

“What you got to do with any kid that gets out of line. A good old-fashioned spanking.”

Monks was startled. “Spank America?”

“Tough love,” Freeboot agreed. He smiled again, and this
time it seemed to have a leering, even sadistic edge. And yet Freeboot's brand of tough love seemed to have captivated Glenn, while Monks's own attempts had failed miserably. Was that the key—some mixture of cruelty and submission?

Freeboot abandoned the philosophic pose, leaning back in his chair and groping on the floor for a bottle of the Monte Alban mescal. He took a long swig and offered it to Monks. Monks shook his head.

“The next question is: How do you bring off something like that?” Freeboot said. “You'd need an army, right?”

Monks was still not clear on what “spanking America” entailed. He shrugged noncommittally.

“It's already out there.” Freeboot waved one arm in a wide, circling gesture. “All those working people who got thrown out on the bricks, because somebody sent their jobs to slave-labor factories in China. All those kids coming up poor, the best thing they can ever expect is to put on a Burger King cap. There's three and a half million homeless people in this country right now, man, and thousands more every month. Another big factory closed down every time you pick up a newspaper. That's the real, hard-ass result of the big rip-off that's going on.”

He watched Monks, his gaze challenging.

“I agree that spreading money around differently would help,” Monks said.

“It's not just about money. Those people have lost their
dignity
. You give
that
back to them, they'll give you dedication.”

“Dignity's a huge thing to offer.”

“Meaning what? My mouth's writing a check my ass can't cash? Let me tell you something else. The necks think the people on the streets are just going to disappear somehow. They're fucking wrong. Those people are tough, and they're not stupid.”

“Necks?”

“That's right. 'Cause when shit starts to happen, somebody's foot's going to be on them.” Freeboot crossed his ankles up on the table, displaying his bare soles, dark with dirt and horny with callus. “They think they can hide in their gated communities and nobody can touch them. They're gonna get spanked
hard
.” He drank again from the mescal bottle. It seemed that he was prepared to hold forth for quite some time.

“I'd better check on Mandrake,” Monks said, turning toward the bedroom.

“Hey, I took your chains off.” Freeboot said, annoyed. “You're not going to talk to me?”

Workers of the world, unite
, Monks thought.
You have nothing to lose but your chains
.

He turned back. “I understand what you're telling me,” he said. “But not why. What do you care what I think?”

Freeboot's face took on its heavy-lidded, hypnotic gaze.

“I got to have something to call you,” Freeboot said. “Coil says ‘Rasp.' Okay?”

Monks shrugged. He was particular about who used his nickname, but he was damned if he'd let Freeboot know that he was pushing a button.

“He says they called you that in Vietnam,” Freeboot said. “You got a good look at guerrilla war, huh?”

“I was never in combat. Mostly I dealt with the results.”

“Must have been ugly.”

Monks felt a tremor of razor-keen memory: jerking awake on the hospital ship USS
Respite
in the South China Sea, sodden with sweat from the wet heat, the sour bile taste of fear already in his mouth and adrenaline starting to course through his bloodstream, at the far-off thunder of medevac helicopters ferrying their bloody burdens from Quang Tri.

“Very,” he said.

“Well, there you go. All because those Vietnamese got
fucked over too much for too long and they started fighting back.”

Another simplistic judgment, about a war whose roots were a Gordian knot.

But the words that Glenn had been chanting came into Monks's mind:
number nine, number nine, number nine
—

Revolution Number 9.

Finally, the hints that Freeboot had been dropping clicked into focus.

“Are you talking about an uprising?” Monks said incredulously.

“I'm talking about Free Companies, like I told you. That's going to be the
real
new world order. Think
Road Warrior
, man. Roving armies doing whatever they want, armed to the teeth. They're already on the ground in Africa and South America, and all it's going to take here is somebody to light the fuse. They're everywhere, right there in
your
town.”

“This isn't Africa or South America,” Monks said. “We have systems of civil protection.”

Freeboot snorted in derision. “There aren't enough cops to stop them or prisons to hold them. The necks can call out the miltary, but they got a problem there, too. What about all the ghetto kids coming back from places like Iraq? They spend a year in hell, then get home and find out they still get treated like dogshit. Whose side you think they're going to come down on?”

“There was a lot of talk like this in the sixties,” Monks said. “Not much came of it.”

“People had things too good in the sixties,” said Freeboot, who could not have been born by then. “The people I'm talking about are
hungry
.”

He stood up suddenly, with the quickness and balance that Monks had come to expect.

“You think I'm just bullshitting,” Freeboot said. “I got something to show you later.” He padded to the door and vanished into the dusk.

Monks stood where he was, trying to weigh what he had just heard. Clearly Freeboot thought of himself as a leader out to liberate an underdog element of the population—the foot on the “necks” would be his.

On the face of it, his ideas were a mishmash of superficial political theory, megalomania, and chest-thumping fantasy, all wrapped up in a bubble of schoolboy logic—the kind of self-contained shell that couldn't be penetrated without going more deeply into the issues, which, obviously, he had no patience for. Like a lot of self-proclaimed prophets, he had gleaned a few high-sounding bits of philosophy and twisted them to suit his own purposes. And like a lot of revolutionaries, he seemed to idealize violence.

To imagine that this little clutch of misfits could cause widespread unrest was absurd. But it was still disturbing. Freeboot possessed undeniable charisma—and there was
enough
truth in what he said to make it persuasive, especially to listeners who wouldn't examine it closely.

Monks even admitted to a prickle of sympathy. Without doubt, there was a lot of gross injustice out there, and maybe in some ways it was getting worse. He'd had his own run-ins with the way of thinking that saw human beings as numbers on paper, livestock, pawns to be used by an elite who considered themselves godlike, and who kept themselves carefully shielded. And yet, society's rules were the only thing that kept most people safe from the chaos and bloodshed that had been common through so much of history.

When did it become acceptable—even necessary—to cross that fragile line?

He had to agree that in some circumstances, violence was the only way for the oppressed to recover both their rights and their self-respect. There could certainly be heroism in fighting for ideals, and glory in battle itself.

But he had seen so much horrifying pain, and dignity didn't usually go along with it.

 

Mandrake seemed to be asleep or sunk in lethargy. Monks decided to leave him alone until it was time for the next blood-sugar check, then to wake him and try to engage him in talk or play.

He walked back out into the main room. The shackles still lay where he had left them on the floor. He stepped around them as if they were a bear trap.

Then, seeing that he was alone, he went into the kitchen. He had wondered how food was stored without electricity. The mystery was solved by the sight of a new propane refrigerator. The rest was more rustic, with the same kind of cold-water porcelain sink as the washhouse, and a huge old Monarch wood cookstove. But unlike the rest of the camp, it was clean and well kept. He suspected the hand of Marguerite.

He quickly opened drawers and cabinets, looking for knives, but the only utensils were plastic, like the ones that Marguerite had given him last night. He went through the couple of dusty, disused-looking bedrooms next, but he found nothing that might work as a weapon. It seemed clear that this was intentional—even the fireplace pokers were charred sticks of pine. There were no other exterior doors, and the few windows were crossed with half-inch reinforcing rod, like prison bars, attached from the outside.

As soon as his shackles had come off, the thought of escape had entered his mind again, as Freeboot must have known it would. But the odds were still almost nil. Without
doubt, he was being watched closely. And if by some miracle he did succeed, Freeboot might take out his rage on Glenn—even on Mandrake. There were other cards to be played before any kind of desperate attempt. Freeboot was trying to impress him, and that might just open the way to a resolution.

Freeboot's book was still lying on the table. Monks leaned over and saw that it was Nietzsche's
Thus Spake Zarathustra
—the treatise in which he propounded his concept of the
Übermensch
, seized on later by the Nazis and distorted into a superior being with the right to dominate, without regard for law or humanity.

It was another almost ludicrous touch, part of Freeboot's show—and yet the volume was worn, obviously much handled, with notes written in the margins in an uneven, illegible script. Monks flipped through it, looking for a name or some other identifying mark. The only thing he found was a ripped patch inside the front cover, suggesting that a library pocket had been torn off. Probably the book had been stolen.

The coffee that he had asked for was waiting, in a small blue enamel sheepherder's coffeepot set at the edge of the fireplace to stay warm. He supposed that Marguerite had left it for him while he was at Glenn's cabin. There was food, too, this time a sandwich of packaged baloney and cheese on white bread, and a small bag of Cheetos. It was like a boxed school lunch.

He ate standing up in front of the fire, glad for the warmth seeping into his flesh. Then he went back into the kitchen and indulged himself in the luxury of brushing his teeth again. As he was finishing, he heard someone come into the lodge. He looked through the kitchen door and saw that it was Motherlode, Mandrake's mother, going into the boy's bedroom. Monks quickly rinsed up and went after her.

Her back was turned to the doorway as he stepped through. She was reaching up to the shelf where he kept the insulin.

When she turned around, she had a plastic-wrapped syringe in her hand. She stared vacantly at Monks, and then jerked in delayed surprise.

So that was where the syringes had been going.

Probably she was crushing the oxycodone pills into a liquid solution, then shooting it. Monks had heard that it was a quicker and more powerful rush than from taking them orally.

“Mandrake's going to need all of those,” he said.

“Okay. I won't take any more.” She moved toward the door, still holding the syringe.

“That one, too.”

Her face took on a sullen, hostile look—a transformation so abrupt and complete from her earlier placidness that it was like a special effect in a movie.