NOTE: If you haven’t been following this from the beginning, and if you want to know the full sequence of events, start with the introduction. Click on Archives on the right.
Albrecht sits with his feet up on the chair opposite, in the driveway of the Intaglio home. He has set up the patio furniture on the black asphalt of the newly paved driveway. His brown leather bomber jacket and Stetson keep out the cold while cleaning his long-barreled revolver. He has a pocket-size automatic on the table next to him along with a rag and a small plastic bottle of gun oil. Someone in a long down coat with the hood up is standing with him. Yellowing horse chestnut leaves fall around them, palmate, five, and seven fingered. A leaf lands with its seven fingered leaf on his rag. Spread as if to grasp it.
Bel Vionnet looks up from under her hood as I walk over through the open gate. Albrecht salutes, tapping his gun barrel against his temple.
“Fred, do you need to clean your piece? I’ve got the right stuff here.”
“No thanks, Albrecht, I haven’t bought one.”
“I’m going to keep telling you buddy, it’s time to get yourself some protection.”
“From whom?”
“You’ll know when they come, and the cops are overwhelmed by people who can’t even speak our nation’s language.”
Albrecht takes his booted feet off the chair and gestures toward another vacant one opposite him at the table.
“Bel, Fred, why don’t you pull up a seat?”
“Thanks, but it is too cold to sit out here, even in the sun.”
Bel turns to keep her back to a momentary breeze.
She rubs her palms together and jumps up and down to warm up.
“I don’t think that time has come. Any way Albrecht, where have you been? I haven’t seen you around.”
“Yeah, I just got back from a trip out West.”
“Back to your spiritual roots!”
“You know, I had to get away from a domestic situation.”
“Yes, sorry to hear about that.”
“It’s okay bel. Go out West, see how those folks are taking over out there.”
“Those Folks, Albrecht?”
“Yeah, the ‘Amigos’ from points South and the ‘Allah’ crowd from the desert.”
“I don’t sense the danger, Albrecht.”
“No, you will. It is coming your way.”
“I see Hispanics doing yard and roof work and operating restaurants and working in politics and so on.”
He shakes his head. Sets his revolver aside and picks up the automatic.
“You know, I found this in the house yesterday and it all came back to me. I mean I could see grandad in my mind’s eye, you know. It was like, if someone told me his spirit came down from heaven to visit, I could have believed it.”
“What did Grandad say, after his descent from heaven?”
Albrecht looks up at bel with the automatic in his lap.
“Come on bel, I am not into old-time religion. You know me better than that. I just know something comes over me every once in a while.”
“Your grandad’s inspiration!”
“You remember the Virginia Company?”
“Yeah, James Town, around 1606.”
“And bel, right, 1606, they were armed ready to profit from their courage.”
“It was also the beginning of one of the great killings of our history.”
“It is called creative destruction bel. We have built the greatest country in the world out of a wilderness in the last 200 hundred years.”
“Albrecht, I think that is candy-coated history, to say the least.”
“Okay Fred, but I just want to tell you Grandad reminded me what it takes to make things happen.”
“Our history is a lot more complicated than that, though.”
“It simply reminds me who I am, hard conservative and ready to fight.”
“But Albrecht, there is nobody to shoot it out with around here.”
“You Liberals don’t get it. You are too distracted by all this impeachment nonsense.”
“That is serious business.”
Albrecht pulls the clip out of the handle of his automatic showing that it is empty.
“Nice and compact, looks easy to carry.”
“Fred, that man was never unarmed. He gave this to my grandma, and she had it in her purse at all times.”
“Dare I ask if she used it?”
“Don’t think so.”
“Well, you have followed your grandparent’s example alright.”
“Yup, the old man taught me how to shoot at a range South of here.”
“What did your parents think of that?”
“Oh, Dad is too wrapped up in art to know anything, and Mom is too wrapped up in him.”
Bel steps toward him and looks down on him closely, speaking softly.
“Did he ever shoot anyone?”
“Oh yeah.”
“Was he a soldier or something?”
“Law enforcement.”
Bel takes a step back looking up into the trees as a whirl of oak leaves rattle to the ground opposite.
“Albrecht, does his spirit often drop in on you?”
“He became my inspiration Fred, after he died, and I first went West. I found out I was an American.”
“You have always been an American.”
“Not a real American, who fights for his liberty and keeps his powder dry, so to speak.”
“What is a real American?”
“If you perceive the dangers of the immigrant and socialist threats, you are well on the way.”
“Isn’t it more a matter of law and civics?”
“No, basically it is just power.”
“Right, the power of law.”
“In a way, mixed with politics, and if Macadamia was president you would see it working right.”
“Well, I am sure Macadamia got your vote.”
“No, he did not.”
“What? but Albrecht, he was your man!”
“He still is but I didn’t want Mac to take my vote from a conservative who had a better chance of winning.”
“Strategic vote!”
“Right bel. Most voters are idiots. You know what? Back in ancient Greece the word ‘Idiot’ meant a private citizen!”
“Well, well, Albrecht, what have you been reading?”
“Oh, just a little history.”
“You got to know the ‘hoi polloi’.”
“Sure, they will buy what we tell them. We just need to keep their minds full of fog.”
“What do you mean, idiots and fog?”
“Keep mixing it up, liberal facts, conservative facts, and so on.”
“Lies, you mean?”
“Fred, wake up buddy, politics is the art of lying truthfully.”
“That sounds absurd.”
“It often is absurd.”
“So, you see no value in truth, honesty, and integrity?”
“Integrity? Politicians? Come on now! As I keep saying, Fred, belief is what it is all about. Facts are what people want to believe.”
“A fact is a fact regardless of what people believe.”
“That’s philosophy, not politics.”
A truck pulls up opposite towing a trailer with lawn care equipment.
“But it seems to me, some of us want to believe lies.”
“Nobody believes lies. That’s impossible!”
“Albrecht you are not making any sense!”
“Bel, I am just telling you how it is now.”
“Do you accept the difference between truth and lies?”
“Not in politics.”
“So, you believe in the deep state conspiracy”
“Yes, looks that way to me, bel.”
“Which deep state is that?”
“Fred, its people who have been in big government jobs for too long. The whole swamp needs draining!”
“A lot of those folks are patriotic Americans.”
“For goodness sake, you Liberals think …”
Someone starts a leaf blower next door. It revs into a deafening buzz and soon dies down again.
“Well, you are not making any sense to me, or maybe I get it. Maybe I should be far more worried.”
“It’s about power, that is; perception, belief, and ideology, and we have the winning ideology.”
A blond man from the truck starts blowing leaves towards the street from the yard opposite.
“You may think so, but these impeachment hearings are revealing scandalous behavior.”
“Bel, listen, you two are college-educated Liberals. The majority of Americans didn’t go to college. Out West, in the real America, they don’t care about these hearings…”
The propinquity of blower’s double stroke motor drowns out all conversation.
Bel keeps in the sun which hasn’t melted the puddle in the shade of the garage door. Even when the air is still, the horse chestnut keeps dropping its summer burden of leaves and nuts, round and spikey like sea mines with too many fuses. She picks up a nut fresh one out of its casing.
Albrecht looks at its deep brown finish in her fingers, and the leaf blower’s motor dies down to idle.
“That thing looks like someone spent all day working on it with furniture polish.”
“It is brand new and as shiny as your pistol.”
Albrecht goes back to work. Shakes the leaf off his rag and works the rag through the barrel of the revolver with his cleaning rod.
Bel heads for the open gate.
“Wait around bel, I am having a little planning discussion with the Fauxmont Militia at 11. Come join us.”
“So long guys, Happy Thanksgiving! I am going to get out of this cold.”
The two-stroke revs up again, blowing a cloud of red, yellow, brown and gray leaves and dust into her path.
