Listlessly,not at all the person who strode into their apartment this morning glad at their return, Rulon Nelson handed over a folded newsletter to Jay.
“What is this?”
“Just read it.”
James Strickland began to peruse it, but Nelson said, “Out loud.”
“Alright?” Jay said, sensing an irritation in his usually upbeat friend.
He cleared his throat.
“A mural painted nearly seventy years ago at the University of Rhode Island is set to be taken down. This, after staff said students complained about a lack of diversity in the picture. The Memorial Union was dedicated in 1954 at the University of Rhode Island. When veterans returned from World War II and enrolled at URI, they and other URI community members raised money in memory of those who lost their lives in the war. Money raised was for a modern student union, which gave it the name, Memorial Union…”
Jay looked over the other article title.
“‘University to Remove WW-II Murals Because They Show Too Many White People’. Hum.”
He looked over the rest of the paper.
“‘Political Power for European Americans!’”
“What?” Michael murmured.
Jay read out, merrily, “ ‘European peoples should organize and advance our own interests just like every other group. Join our fight for Heritage and Identity! The American Freedom Party (AFP) supports the right to keep and bear arms. Emancipate yourself from the dinosaur Democrat and Republican parties. Join a Nationalist Party that puts America first, The American Freedom Party!
“Poor, poor white people,” he shook his head in mock sympathy. “They just can’t get a break.”
“Doesn’t that piss you off?” Rulon almost snarled.
“I’m well past being pissed off,” Jay said, handing the paper back. “Or surprised. I’ve moved toward being cautious and smart and having a little determination to not be a statistic or live in a world evil people are trying to make. The only thing I am confused by, Rulon my friend, is why you have it?”
Nelson looked embarrassed, almost surly.
“My dad sent it to me.”
And then he said, “He always has. I… I think there are a lot of dumb people. When you grow up feeling poor and like you’re missing out, and you don’t know other people than you… Look, I’m not saying growing up a Mormon out in the West is the same as being a white supremacist but… it makes you a little sympathetic and you don’t even realize it. A year ago, two years ago…. I wouldn’t have known,” he shook his head. “I’m so stupid.”
Jay looked to Michael and Michael said, “It’s just white stupidity. I have it too. Sometimes.”
“You don’t,” Jay said, truthfully, “and it’s called blindness, and everyone has it. You accept the things you’ve been told without understanding the implications. You hold a mirror to the oppressed and choose to see yourself as oppressed. You blame the weak and suffering for your own weakness. You make devils out of people you’ve never known so you can feel like an angel.”
“Can we leave?” Nelson said, looking sad and miserable.
“We can,” Jay says. “But where?”
“I was at this new club downtown,” Nelson said, and without looking away from the window Michael said, “I don’t go to clubs,” at the same time Jay, on the couch, said, “I’m too old.”
“It wasn’t the club I was thinking about,” Nelson said. “It’s by the riverwalk. I had never seen the riverwalk until I went there. It’s below the street line, on the lower part—”
“The shady part where people get raped?” Jay raised an eyebrow.
“No one’s been raped on the riverwalk,” Nelson said. Then he said, “Was anyone raped on that riverwalk?”
“Are we supposed to be going to the riverwalk?” Jay asked. “Is that your idea?”
“Kind of.”
“Well, then I doubt three grown men will be raped togerher. You wanna go?” he asked Michael.
Michael nodded.
“Let me go slip some clothes on,” Jay said, by which he meant trousers instead of shorts. “It’s a leisurely drive into the city and the night is sort of beautiful, really.”
“We should go out into the country,” Michael said “No matter what the city looks like, the country’s always the country.”
“We could pass through town and keep going south, see where the road takes us.”
Nelson is asleep in the back of the car, his legs wide apart. Now that he’s offered the suggestion, it’s as if he’s done his part.
They pass Saint Ignatius and about ten minutes later they’re coming toward downtown.
“The night is brighter,” Jay says.
“That’s what it is,” Michael realizes.
As they cross the Dorr Street bridge and come into downtown, looking for a place to park, it is Nelson who murmurs, “What the hell is going on?”
They stop the car on Chase Avenue where the street makes a bend alongside the twisting river and the descending stair that leads to the riverbank. They park on the grass getting out to look west.
“It looks like…sunrise.”
But even as Jay has said this, they hear the sirens. A fire truck is roaring down Chase, heading west along the drive.
In his usual calm voice, Jay says, “If we drive to the parking lot across the street we can park our car at the top, and then cross over into the Addison Hotel and see everything from the roof.”
It takes less than ten minutes, and even before they arrive on the twenty story roof of the Addison, it is plain to Jay as it is plain to the ten other people gathered looking at the orange western sky Lassador is burning.
Old West End, Summit, LaGrange, Stickney. The fire moves from the first and radiates to the other three. By the time they are on the hotel roof watching red flames swallow a town, the blaze moves to Glendale and Collingwood. These are the places where, between the occupied houses are the vacant ones, filled with debris and the kerosene cans of the homeless. In the West neighborhoods are all the kindling a strong fire will need. While they watch from a distance, four miles west of downtown the city burns. Beside them a man about forty five in an Hawaiian shirt says, “We should have a TV. We should have a radio or some news.”
But nobody leaves. They all remain, leaning over the parapet, watching fire engines zoom down Chase into the darkness only to be found, presumably, in the light of the blazing west fire.
Michael turns to Jay and is surprised that the fire light does not really shine on his face, that, though it seems so close, it is not.
“It looks like the world is burning,” Jay says. “but I feel like it’s been burning for a long time.”
On their way back, Nelson drove. Jay was about to say something when they missed the turn onto the Dorr Street bridge and kept driving down Chase, his path hugging the river. Nelson drove them west until the sky was orange, until they were coming toward the chaos. Jay did not say, “Don’t drive onto Stickney,” or “be careful where you go.” Nelson was not stupid. He knew how to skirt around disaster, and Jay had wanted to see this. He had wanted to gaze on hell, for hell had been threatening to show its face. Now Michael saw on Jay’s glasses the reflected fires of burning houses. They saw the looted shops, the people clubbing one another, the derelict on the streets, wrapped in blankets, faces covered in grime, mouths agape at having lost their vacant homes to kerosene explosions. The rioters did not stop rioting. The looters did not stop looting. Guns began to fire and did not stop firing, and quickly, with precision, Rulon Nelson drove them through hell and into the blackness beyond.
“Fuck it,” he said. “Fuck all of it. But we had to go into it. Because it’s us. You know? It’s us.”
Neither Jay nor Michael replied. They didn’t have to. They drove down a darker, fireless Chase, hearing the wail of sirens. They drove till there were no sirens, and then till there were crowded street blocks and they drove, at last until there was no noise, and there were no houses. They drove onto till what had been Chase was only a road level with a wide river and, at last, Rulon stopped.
They got out of the car and, as if he had run from Lassador to here, Rulon Nelson squatted, hands on knees, breathing heavily, and then, at last, he began to vomit. The night was filled with the violent sound of his vomiting, and when he was done, business like, he reached into the car, took up his water bottles, took a swig, swished it around in his mouth, and spat in onto the grass.
Jay said, “All fires stop. Eventually. The fight, the rage, the flame. It is in their nature to go out. The city runs out of itself in the end, and so does all the madness. We just have to stand a little bit firm.”
The crickets were loud in the night, and so was the rush of the wide river as the waves caught the stars and reflected them back. Against the car, Michael Cleveland wrapped his arm about James Strickland’s waist. Rulon Nelson hands folded before him like a choir boy, sat on the hood. The crickets sang and did not stop their pulsating singing, and the river roared and did not stop roaring. The stars shone brightly, and did not cease their shining and here in this place they were blessed to be on the kind earth.
