Page 83 of After Hours at Dooryard Books
“You thanked me. You also paid me. Thanks for helping the kids with their homework and feeding them, if we’re spending the afternoon thanking one another for things we’d have done anyway.”
The zines are inches away, in the top drawer of Patrick’s desk. Iris and Hector are only sixteen. It’s probably his responsibility to tell their parents what they’re up to. But all he can think about is that phone call he made from the policestation ten years ago. The Valdezes are better parents than his aunt and uncle ever tried to be. They wouldn’t hurt their kids. But he still can’t bring himself to open that drawer.
The next morning, Iris comes into the shop to work a shift. “Hey,” he says. “Welcome back.” He opens the drawer. “Are these yours?”
She draws in a breath and looks ready to lie her head off.
“I liked them,” Patrick says. “So did Nathaniel and Susan. Did you write it all yourself?”
She shakes her head. “Hector assembled the Gestetner. When we found it in the basement it was in pieces. My cousin did the Spanish translations and our friend Raul wrote one of the articles.”
“Why did you put them in the shop?”
“We told some friends they could grab a copy if they wanted one. Sorry.”
“Just be careful.”
“Sure,” she says, not even bothering to make it sound like a convincing lie.
“You know, people have gone to jail for encouraging draft evasion.”
“There are dozens of papers like ours. They can’t go after all of us.”
Patrick might think this is the optimism of youth, except for how Susan has said the same thing.
“They’ve slowed down the bombing,” Iris says.
“Only because of the election,” Patrick says. “Johnson is worried the Democrats won’t have a chance otherwise.”
“Which is because Johnson knows people hate the war, which he knows because tens of thousands of people have protested.”
“The point is that they don’t need to arrest the publisher of every radical newspaper. They only need to make an example out of a couple of kids.”
That night at the Times Square diner, Patrick described thatNew York Timesarticle on deviants as a gay Bat Signal. That had been a bunch of men seeing a chance for casual sex and seizing the opportunity; it’s not the same thing as writing a radical newspaper. But change can only happen if individual people know how to find one another and become a collective, a movement.
Patrick feels a swell of—not hope, exactly, but something like a contact high with someone else’s hope. Hector and Iris’s entire conscious life has been a period of time that Patrick can only think of as a steady downhill slide, but they still believe they can change things. Hell, maybe the reason they think they can change things is that itisa mess: nothing’s solid anymore, so they can shape it the way they want.
“I want you to be safe,” he tells Iris.
“Who do you think gets to be safe? You think this war will be over when Hector turns eighteen?”
Whitman said that he liked agitation but disliked agitators; Patrick likes agitation and he loves agitators but, at heart, wants everyone to be safe and warm and fed.
“Also,” Iris says, “I’m not the only person here”—she gestures between herself and Patrick—“risking jail time and a criminal record in order to do something they know isn’t wrong.”
Mr. and Mrs. Valdez have to know that Patrick’s gay, but somehow he hadn’t thought the twins would pick up on it. You can usually count on teenagers to be oblivious about adults’ personal lives.
When Nathaniel asked why Patrick doesn’t keep it a secret, Patrick told him that hiding makes it too easy for people topretend there’s nothing wrong. That’s what Iris is talking about: taking what they stand for and bringing it out into the streets.
“The problem with you is that you’re too smart. Do your parents know about this?” He holds up the zine.
She puts a hand on her hip. “Are you kidding me?”
“What happens if they find out?”
“They won’t like it.”
“Would they stop you?”
