My Flag

"What's liberty?" she asked.

What a stupid question. "It's the name of a statue," I explained, "and a bell. And it's for marching and flags."

"What else?" she asked.

I couldn't think of anything else. She was just flaunting her education. Maybe it was a capital city or a longest river or some other kind of knowledge. I stared at her.

"Do you believe in evolution?" she asked.

Do I hate Jesus? What kind of trap was she laying here? "No," I said.

"Do you believe in math?"

I didn't understand. You didn't believe or disbelieve math, it was just a lesson you did. I stared at her.

"Do you believe in history?"

Another trick. History was something you did at school. Of course I believed in history, I had been to its lessons. I looked at my shoes.

"Do you believe in science?"

"No," I said. Science had evolution in it. It was the work of Satan. Mom said so.

"You don't believe you should look at the world and try to find out how it works?"

I didn't understand. The world didn't work, it just was. It was just as God made it. I fidgeted.

"What does your daddy do?"

"He goes to abroad and kills sand niggers to save us from terrism," I recited.

"And your mom?"

She's daddy's Suzy Rottencrotch. I have to report her to Daddy in case Jody gets her, so he can make her wish she'd never been born."

"Suzy Rottencrotch?"

I tried to be patient. "Soldiers have pushers," I explained. "You have to push her around, see? That's pusher. Well, a pusher is a rottencrotch, somebody whose - you know - man thing has rotted away. Like mine."

"You haven't got a - um - 'man thing' because you're a girl."

Boy, she really was dumb. Not fit to be let out alone. "We're all boys to start with," I told her, "only some of us get rottencrotch and our things fall off. The we wait to be somebody's pusher, only not Jody's."

"But you don't believe in evolution?" she asked.

Now, why did she bring that up again? Somebody came in and handed her a sheet of paper. She looked at it for a while, her face becoming like a bag of lemons.

"I see," she said, "It's military wisdom. Delightful."

I waited for the next question.

"Do you like - er - diaperheads?" She was reading from the piece of paper.

How could you like diaperheads? They were terrists. You could do anything you wanted to them. Daddy had done lots. "No," I said.

"What about Jesus?"

I stared at her. What was she talking about?

"Jesus was a diaperhead, a sand nigger, wasn't he?" she asked.

I had her now. "Then why did he speak English?" I demanded.

"He spoke English?"

Didn't she know anything? Hadn't she ever read the bible? What was she, some kind of towelhead? "Jesus said, 'I am the resurrection and the life.' John 11:25." I said triumphantly. "That's the bible."

"And you think those are Jesus's actual words?"

"They're in the bible," I explained. "The bible doesn't lie." I was growing weary of this.

"So you believe Jesus spoke a dialect that was current briefly in early seventeenth century England and has never been spoken anywhere before or since? Perhaps you think he was an American tourist on holiday in the Holy Land?"

I didn't understand her question but I knew what she was about. She was talking evolution and science and other lies, telling me I shouldn't believe in the bible, the true word of God.

"I want my flag and my bible," I said.

"You're sure? You know what that means?"

It meant that I would stay here in America, but if going to a better place meant not believing the bible and taking up Satan's science, I'd rather stay here with Mom.

I could hear her in the next room talking to more of Satan's fiends. "There's nothing to salvage here," I heard her say, "and she's far too old to educate. I don't know what the screening department is doing sending us material like this. She's just wasted an hour of my time. Give her a travel pass to the women's reservation and send her back to her mother."

I wasn't keen on being beaten whenever Mom got drunk, which was all the time these days, but it was preferable to believing Satan's lies. We were proud of America. Not the real one, but that special America of the mind where flags waved, the bible ruled, and all good and important things happened. It's a shame I wouldn't see Daddy, who would live in the men's reservation, but if we prayed hard God would provide.

For the first time in my life I felt a twinge of doubt.