The Patriots

Heather didn’t see the Patriots at first. When they walked in with their chests puffed out she was bent over herself yanking madly at the zippered heel of her mint and silver flats, holding for balance the perforated metal shelf of a Hostess™ products endcap. She didn’t hear them, either, their squeaking tennis shoes or some acknowledgement of their arrival, some gasp or cheer or cry of outrage and terror. Thinking back, recounting the event, she’d imagine that (occupied though she was with her shoe) she had sensed something, a change, a charge in the air. Maybe the shopping carts wobbling over waxed floor tiles grew for a fraction of a second as light and transient as helium and threatened to escape the grasp of the bored shoppers steering them, the fat lady in a pink track suit with a Ziggy Stardust hairdo, the man in the red and yellow Alden Grove Little League windbreaker whose eyes turned inward like he was staring at the woven roots of his divorce. Maybe the jingly announcement of price cuts on Dyson™ vacuums and boys’ swimwear over the store’s intercom system changed briefly, subliminally, to birdsong. Maybe Heather had perceived something, something unnatural and oracular, when the Patriots walked in. And maybe she hadn’t. Who can say how memory comes to rest against significance?

Donald was in another part of the store when she saw them. That she could say for certain. She had reached out for him instinctively, to protect him, to calm herself, to communicate down her arm and fingers and up through his forearm and into his heart and brain the urgent need to do nothing to aggravate these men. But Donald wasn’t there and her searching hand met empty air. At large stores like this, in the rare instances that she could coax him into one, he’d insist that they split up to hasten their exit. “Divide and conquer and flee,” he’d say every time with a twinkly smirk like he half expected the phrase to be repeated back to him someday.

The Patriots had a photographer with them, an eager little man with a sparse blonde mustache, and the camera’s flash made odd shadows of light on light in the already bright aisles. The Patriots acted as though he weren’t there, as though they were simply men at the store (they were all men) going about their days, simply normal men seeking out and fulfilling their normal needs for vacuums, snack cakes, boys swimwear. Their assault rifles hung by canvas or nylon straps over their shoulders or around their necks, their muzzles pointing like dowsing sticks straight down toward the tiled floor. One of them (she learned later that his name was Alec Fulger, that he hadn’t lived in town long, that he worked at a call center) wore a black tshirt with a cartoon of the First Lady being sodomized by Josef Stalin and stood with his thick wrist draped over the stock of his rifle as if nothing could be more comfortable. Fulger’s rifle was painted a pixelated tan and beige camouflage, which in the red and white fluorescence of the store struck Heather as absurd.

She heard Donald before she saw him. “What the fuck is this?” he said, his voice low and confused, as he rounded the corner where Heather and an elderly stock clerk and a young mother with angry crimson acne and two small girls stood gawking at the Patriots, afraid to move. She reached out and grabbed ahold of his arm. Do nothing to aggravate these men. The photographer’s camera flashed. Alec Fulger and the other Patriots posed in cargo shorts and blue jeans and sloganeering tshirts, simply average men at an average store wearing weapons of extraordinary power, smiling casually, too casually.

“What the fuck is this?” Donald said, pulling free of Heather’s hand. Stepping forward toward the Patriots he said it once again, louder, to signal that he knew exactly what it was, a photo opportunity, a publicity stunt.

“You’re looking here at my constitutional rights, sir,” Fulger said, his shoulders pulled back.

“Limpdick fucking cowards,” Donald said.

“Sir, you need to calm down,” one of the Patriots said.

“You don’t get to scare us—”

“Sir—”

“You don’t get to scare people into going along with your crazy bullshit.”

“Sir—” Fulger’s pale hand dropped to his gun’s grip.

“Tell you what?” Donald said, Heather pulling hard on the neck of his shirt, begging him to stop, to leave with her. “I’m gonna kick your ass and let you show the world who you are.”

Before a typhoon in Asia caught their attention, CNN© covered it for two days. MSNBC© and FOX© both covered it for four. The CEO of the store’s holding company put out a press release suggesting a forthcoming revision to company policy, and the NRA© did too, demanding no change whatsoever in any policy, public or private. The commentariat, the professionals on television and the furious anonymities at the buried feet of newspapers’ op-ed pages, competed with one another to find new political symbolisms in the event, to find new ways to call Donald and the Patriots stupid or brave. In the first interview she gave the man from CNN kept asking “What was it like?” and she wept embarrassingly and described her own horror at having been there, having witnessed it. Later, in another interview, she said that Donald wasn’t stupid or brave, he was right. He had quickly, much too quickly, made the decision to die so that someone would say so, and she loved him enough to give him that.