We're All in This Together by Owen King Read Free Book Online Page A

bed.
    "Let me see it," he said. "Come on."
    "See this," I said, and showed him my middle finger.
    The old man cackled, then turned his attention to the watch.
    So, I read the rest of The Alien's Tomb, and following a series of wrong turns and misadventures, discovered that the best I could do was to get back to the place
where I had started.
    At some point, I nodded off, and woke up to see Joseph Hillstrom staring back at me. The man in the black-and-white photograph
was hatchet-faced, and his eyes held a spooky clarity, almost like a blind man's eyes. It was a gaze that seemed not so much
to look into the camera, as beyond the camera. I rolled away from him.
    Beside the window, Papa was still in his chair, and slightly slumped, so that now the sunlight fell on his hair, and revealed
the pink scalp beneath.
    I turned onto my back and blinked at the ceiling, letting myself come all the way up.
    It was Nana who had told me the story of Hillstrom, the songwriter and organizer, convicted on circumstantial evidence and
executed in Utah in 1915 for killing two men in a robbery. My grandmother said that on the night of the killing, a witness
claimed to have seen Joe throw a pistol far into a field, although the weapon was never recovered. Furthermore, the police
knew that one of the dead men managed to fire off a shot; and when they came to see Joe, they discovered he was bedridden
with a bullet wound. Joe said he was shot defending a woman, but would not reveal her name, for it was a question of honor.
On the eve of his execution, Hillstrom had been lucid and fearless enough to write to a friend, Don't Mourn! Organize!
    And he was the last thing Nana had ever seen. I could feel sweat on my forearms. I didn't know why I was suddenly uneasy.
I rolled back to look at the photograph of the dead man again.
    "Old Joe is a kind of saint to the Movement, Georgie," Nana had said to me, and in the next moment, crossed her eyes to break
the mood of seriousness created by a story concerning murder and execution and martyrdom. I was about seven years old at the
time. "Not, mind you, that the gentleman in Rome with the silly hat and the special red telephone up to God is liable to recognize
him any time soon."
    I forced myself to hold the eyes in the photograph, and after a moment the uneasy feeling passed. I supposed that was how
a saint should look: calm and guiltless, and made of steel that no pagan bonfire could ever melt. I supposed that was what
Nana had seen.
    "Gore would have rolled back NAFTA."
    Papa announced this apropos of nothing.
    I sat up.
    My grandfather still sat as before, slumped, the light falling on his white hair. He had been awake all along.
    "That's Gil's new line. NAFTA this, NAFTA that." He gave the curtain an irritable snap. His good humor seemed to have passed.
"And if it's not one N word, it's another." He cleared his throat, and made a disgusted pronouncement: "Nader.
    "Al Gore did more for working people last night, while he slept in his bed, than Ralph Nader has done in his whole life. That
old man likes to needle me, George, and he knows how to do it."
    "What's NAFTA?" I asked.
    "A mistake," said Papa, and seemed to fumble for something more, before settling on "A well-intentioned mistake. A flawed
document of collective bargaining. A compromise. A com-pro-mise. Something that son-of-a-bitch Nader wouldn't know the first thing about." Papa pulled up the corner of the curtain. "I get
damned weary of all the blue cars," he said.
    On my evening ride back from my grandparents' house I felt a wiggle in my rear tire, and pulled over to check it—a flat. Choosing
between calling Dr. Vic to pick me up, and swinging by the clinic to get a lift to the gas station from my mother, I opted
for Emma. I coasted the half mile to the professional park that housed the Planned Parenthood clinic and a number of other
doctors' offices.
    What I hadn't anticipated, however, was that the GFAs had attacked again.
    My mother was out