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

front, working with a bottle of Goo Gone and a putty scraper to scour off a fake picture of a mauled infant
that had been plastered to the glass doors. This infant appeared not so much to have been aborted as microwaved, and then
dipped in red candle wax. For that matter, the infant appeared not to be an infant so much as a doll.
    I braked at the curb, and she shook her head at me. Tendrils of hair stuck to her cheeks and forehead.
    "You're just in time, George," said Charlie Birdsong, the clinic's head security guard, who sat on an upside down paint bucket
with his shirt off, perusing an issue of Elle Girl. "The GFAs have been busy with their Photoshop program again, and this time they used a buttload of Krazy Glue. And that's
with special emphasis on the Krazy, doc."
    Echoing this sentiment, my mother sighed wearily and knocked her skull a few times against the papered glass doors.
    GFA was shorthand for God's Favorite Assholes, the name my mother had awarded to the group of Evangelical Christians who maintained
an isolated community in the scrubby hills north of Amberson. Every once in a while I'd see one around town, at the supermarket
or Sam's Club: the female GFAs tended to be bright eyed, and almost squirrel-like in the way they would challenge your gaze
and at the same time rush past you with a giant cube of generic toilet paper; the typical male GFA was more dour in his bearing,
lank haired, and often outfitted in the kind of T-shirts you could buy for a dollar at gas stations, featuring air-brushed
illustrations of wolves or caribou. These good Christians eked out their livelihood largely by selling buckets of fishing
worms to tourists, and otherwise mostly kept to themselves.
    The exception to their isolation, unfortunately, was my mother's clinic. Until recently, they had limited themselves to staging
conventional—if exuberant—pickets in front of the building, blasting Christian rock music from the back of their rusted blue
minivan and using a megaphone to address the pregnant women who were rushed across the parking lot in a protective wing of
volunteers. "Leave your whoremaster and come unto the Lord!" one particular GFA harpy was infamous for howling as she stomped
back and forth on the roof of the minivan.
    Recently, however, the GFAs had apparently discovered the power of Photoshop and taken to creating enormous posters of tattered
fetuses—like the one now plastered to the glass doors of the clinic—and applying them with industrial epoxy during random,
late-night guerrilla attacks. Vandalism, it seemed, was on the rise all over town.
    (After the first assault on Papa's billboard, my mother had pointed out that the vandalism fit the GFA's pattern. "No," said
my grandfather after a moment's thought. "It's the damn paperboy. Those kooky wormdiggers are on a mission from God. They're
above politics."
    There was no reason to believe that the GFAs were coached by Steven Sugar—or vice versa—but if the two ever did get together,
there was no telling what kind of damage they might do.)
    What's NAFTA? I asked my mother. After fifteen minutes of pouring over Elle Girl with Charlie my mind had started to wander.
    She stepped back from the glass and took the legal pad from me. Seriously? My mother plucked one of my shirtsleeves to dry her sweaty hands.
    I yanked away, and tapped the question impatiently with my finger: What's NAFTA?
    My mother blew a damp bang out of her eyes and checked her watch. Her face was flushed with exertion and the poster hung in
tenacious ribbons from the glass. Emma shook her head. Ask Charlie. I want to finish dealing with the slaughtered unborn here in time to get home for the news.
    "Charlie, what's NAFTA?"
    A sallow-faced, affectless Native American man, Charlie was as unimposing as any armed person could possibly be; along with
his habit of whiling away his time at the security gate by reading the women's magazines from the lobby, the price sticker—$241.99—was
still stuck to