One Hundred Feet in The Sky

It is 1998. Glenn and I sit atop the water tower overlooking the town we live in, Hamilton, Kansas. It’s a small town with a two-lane highway that splits it right in half. The joke is that if you are driving down the highway looking for Hamilton, don’t blink or you’ll miss it. From up here, about 100 feet in the sky, you can see the top of the only grocery store in town. You can see the gas station, the post office, the bar, the restaurant and the small white-washed, brick high school Glenn and I graduated from one week ago. You can see the square yellow fields that surround the town like crooked quilts, and the cows, Lego cows from up here, grazing the pastures. There are not too many trees around but where you do see them, they grow in long twisting lines that follow the paths of the small, clear streams and heavy green rivers that flow through the land. If you think about it hard enough, you can smell the wet mud on the banks. You can smell fish.

What does it sound like? It’s quiet. You can hear dizzy little birds chirping, and the buzz of something – mosquitoes, flies, gnats. There’s always something that needs to be swatted away. Also, someone, somewhere, is using a weed eater – it’s pitch distinctively higher than a lawn mower. Someone is working on a car – someone is always working on a car. It starts. It dies. It starts. It dies. It almost starts. A wrench clinks onto a cement driveway. Most of the driveways here are gravel. Maybe it’s not a wrench. Maybe it’s dominoes clicking around on the table at the gas station where the old men sit around in overalls and play. There’s a basketball somewhere too, pounding on the ground. Or maybe it’s a hammer. A dog barks now and then. And there is always a semi, echoing down the highway. It is hot.

Our legs dangle over the empty city park. The grass is lush but might as well be iron spikes from this height. Glenn spits and watches it break apart toward the ground like cluster bombs. He says, “I shit you not David, I’d be surprised if we live to see another Christmas.”

Glenn has been talking like this for about three Christmas’s now. “Davey boy,” he says, “if you wanna survive when all the shit goes down, you best find me. We got guns buried in the hills outside town.”

I say nothing as a giant breeze of hot air rumbles through the trees and threatens to take the baseball hat off my head.

Glenn looks out over the town and says, “They probably won’t even waste bullets on your sorry asses. Probably just knock you over the skull with the butts of their rifles or stab you sons-a-bitches in the heart.”

“You’re an idiot,” I say to him, readjusting my University of Kansas hat I picked up on a campus visit, bending the bill to keep out the sun.

“We’ll see who the idiot is when you’re dead or they make you a slave,” he says.

Glenn is referring to the New World Order. It has something to do with gun control; the army at some point is going to swoop in, bust our doors down and take all our rifles and shotguns away. Black tanks will storm the cities and black helicopters will invade the sky – Glenn has already seen the helicopters floating above, scoping us out. The U.N. is involved. Bill Clinton is in on it. The media too. It is the end of the world as we know it. Millions will die; the survivors will become slaves to the One World Government takeover.

“The shit will go down, I promise you,” he says.

“And it makes sense for them to come to Hamilton first,” I say, looking over at Glenn and patting his flat-top haircut. “Cut the head off the beast. Start with the brains of the operation.”

Most people are completely oblivious according to Glenn. You can find some chatter about it on the Internet but you have to know where to look. A couple talk-radio guys bring it up now and then. Glenn’s family for the most part know about it. His grandfather is the one who told him about it in the first place. His cousin Jake knows but has his doubts it’s going to happen quite as soon as Glenn thinks. This is the debate that rages on for those in the know. Will it happen sooner? Or later?

Glenn wants me to know. He thinks I’m worth saving, I guess. He’s shown me the proof. We have looked through pages of a magazine called Soldier of Fortune. We have flipped past pictures of the things for sale – laser scopes for your automatic rifle, infrared night goggles, armor piercing ammunition – to the back pages where the letters are. Most of the letters are apocalyptic rants and tips for protecting yourself from the N.W.O. Once when I asked Glenn what the N.W.O. was, he replied, “New World Order, dipshit.”

Glenn is huge. Like six feet, four inches, huge. Two-hundred-and-fifty-pounds, huge. He looks like one of those professional wrestlers who wear the one-piece spandex suits because they’re too fat and hairy to go shirtless. The ones they seemingly pull off of the street in order to lose to the big name star. There is always black spit dried in the corner of his lips, his t-shirts and on the hairs of his chin from the heaping wads of tobacco he shoves in his mouth. The t-shirts he wears always have pictures of animals on them – deer, bears, elk – and usually mountains in the background. There is always the name of some Western state – Colorado, Montana, Wyoming – emblazoned underneath the pastoral scene. Places Glenn has never seen. When he’s not talking about the N.W.O., he can be found cleaning his guns, poaching deer from the inside of his pickup, or driving aimlessly around town talking to truckers on his CB radio. His handle on the CB is “Big Dick Daddy.”

I have many good times with Glenn. We’ve known each other since kindergarten. My first-grade teacher put us in the same reading group because, as she said to me in private, I could help him. Once, when our class was really into trading baseball cards, one of my classmates duped Glenn into giving up a valuable Willie Mays card his grandfather had given him for some no-name Cardinal’s pitcher. It was one of those hologram cards and Glenn believed that a card that displayed technology was far better than an old and faded one. His mom complained to our teacher and we were banned from trading cards from there on out. Glenn never got the Willie Mays back though.

What we did most together was play basketball. He was actually quite good but mainly because he had always towered over the rest of us. He could miss three shots in a row but still get the rebound every time until it finally went in. He loved playing basketball.

Over the years though, Glenn has changed. He has gone from the likable kid who was bigger than everyone, behind academically, and easy to boss around, to an oafish and unkempt and sort of belligerently intimidating person.

The truth is, Glenn is my cousin. Second cousin. And while I don’t relate to him on any level, it’s impossible not to feel responsible for him in some way; feel like him in some way. And not just because we are related but because we are both lower-middle class, because our fathers do manual labor for a living, because we live no more than four blocks from each other, because I was duped out of a pretty good baseball card once too. When we are at a party together and he spits on himself or fires his rifle in the sky when an airplane flies over, I cringe because I know in someway that I am the same thing as him.

“What are you going to do with yourself now that school’s over Glenn?” I asked looking down at grass the below.

“I’m gonna get prepared for the fight,” he says.

“What about a job?”

Glenn gets quiet and spits. Most of it lands on his t-shirt, right on the bear’s face. “What do you think I’m going to do? Pump gas or flip fuckin' burgers. What the Hell else is there to do around here?”

A green pickup drives by on the road next to the park. Glenn makes a gun with his thumb and finger. Aims. Fires.

“Not that getting a job matters anyway. Not when there’s a war coming.”