Right to Die

off a bridge abutment just because some fucking judge’s got his head up his ass. So I send Rosey off for a few days while I get squat outta the Nazi. Go figure.”
    “I can’t. Mind if I talk to him?”
    He lowered his voice. “You gonna rough him up any?”
    “Not planning to.”
    He shook his head, disappointed. “Hey, Yary. Yary!"
    One of the orange vests looked over at us as the other two stopped with their brushes.
    My friend motioned him over with two jerks of his cupped hand. To me, he said, “Stay here and talk to him. I wanna spend some time with my guys.”
    “Right. Thanks.”
    Yary drew even with the foreman about forty feet from me and tried to ask him a question. The foreman just stayed in stride and walked on by.
    Yary continued to me, the hardhat jiggling askew on the shaved head. He slowed before stopping about five feet away and reflexively touched a hand to his ear. “I don’t have to talk to you.”
    “Monday night you sounded like all you wanted to do is talk.”
    “I would have. Till you and the nigger cops and kike moneychangers—”
    “Tell you what, Yary. You stop the slurs, and I won’t fracture your skull. What do you say?”
    He kept his distance. “Go ahead.”
    “What brought you to the library?”
    “A bus. It was real big, see? With seats and windows and everything.”
    I shook my head and sighed. “The foreman said he’d look the other way if I needed to get rough with you.”
    “You can’t do that. You’d lose your license or whatever.”
    I sidled a little closer to Yary. He thought about backing off before deciding he couldn’t and keep face.
    “Just had a talk with a couple of the boys at the clubhouse.”
    Yary didn’t reply.
    “You know, Gun. Rick and Tone? They said to give you their best.”
    “How do you...” Yary squinted, then jammed his hands in his pockets, suddenly looking very young.
    “They told me where you were, Gun. After a while.”
    “Look, I don’t want no trouble from you.”
    “Little late for that.”
    “You don’t understand. None of you understand us, the Trust, the Movement. We’re just trying to get back what’s ours, that’s all. What the race mixers... what the government’s let the others take away. One thing I learned from that, from Martin Luther King and Jesse Jackson and their kind. You can win in this country if you just keep talking, just keep in people’s faces so they can’t believe that you’re still around, bothering them, making them face what the truth is. About how everything’s been taken away from people who earned it by people who didn’t. Once I chased this big nig—once I purified the crew here, one of them started listening to me. Hearing what I was saying.”
    “Why did you go to the debate?”
    “To get some publicity, man. Free publicity. But even the TV and radio don’t care about Andrus and her ‘friends.’ They’re shoveling all this shit about the right to die. That’s not the point, don’t you see it? It ain’t the right to die we got to worry about. It’s the right to live, to take back what’s ours from them that took it from us.”
    “You don’t see Andrus and her crowd as a threat, then.”
    “Threat? Threat, shit no. Those assholes are just a distraction, get it? They’re just being used to get attention for issues that don’t mean shit so the real issues, the raping of our people by the others, don’t get settled.”
    Watching Yary talk, become animated and sincere, I decided he scared me more than Rick with his automatic. Finally, Yary said, “So what do you think?”
    “What do I think?”
    “Yeah. About the Trust, the Movement.”
    “I think from your rap sheet that you’re not as nonviolent as you make out.”
    “That was then, man. This is now, you know? I learned my lesson, learned it real good. Now I’m into friendly persuasion.”
    “I think Rick and the others are thinking about taking the Trust in a different direction.”
    Yary clouded over. “The fuck you telling me?”
    “When I visited the old clubhouse today, I got an armed response.”
    “Armed? With what?”
    “A Colt forty-five.”
    “I don’t believe it. I don’t fucking believe it.”
    “Yes you do. You just don’t want to admit it.”
    “They wouldn’t do that. They’re not that stupid.”
    “They’re that stupid, Gun. Stupid and impatient. Not everybody’s interested in waiting out the revolution.” Yary started to tell me how it wasn’t a revolution, but just