The store sold not only handsome tools and garden equipment but lots of sturdy clothing in third world fabrics cut in large, smocky styles. They sold little palm-sized books of spiritual inspiration, which lined the aisle leading to the cash register along with various kites, banners and wind socks in pastel solids or rainbow stripes. During one visit Sissy grabbed one of the wind socks and shook it at Miranda.
“What?” Miranda said. Sissy waved the festively colored fabric tube back and forth in front of Miranda’s face. “Don’t do that.”
“Wind sock people. They are taking over this neighborhood. They take over all the neighborhoods after we’ve made them cool,” Sissy said.
“I didn’t make this neighborhood cool. I just moved here.”
“That’s not the point,” she said, shoving the wind sock disdainfully into her large shoulder bag. Later she would wave it at someone, or toss it in the garbage. It was true, though. Miranda noticed that the owners of more than half the cute bungalow houses in this neighborhood refurbished them and then seemed to mark or declare themselves with a colorful wind sock. In the suburbs where Miranda grew up, people either hung cute “crafty” wood cutouts of ducks and dogs on their front doors or a year-round wreath of dried pastel flowers and brambly twigs. Here in the city they hung wind socks or sometimes wind chimes instead. The subterranean front door of Prairie Fire, covered in flyers and blocked by kids smoking cigarettes, looked shabby and degenerate next to Mother Mercantile’s marbleized portico. Prairie Fire was as much an anomaly in the neighborhood as the Black House. You knew eventually that the wind sock/hardware store element would not tolerate the Black House element, or its bookstore hangout either. But for now it all coexisted, in that exciting way city spaces sometimes contain things in opposition and transition. You could catch actual physical manifestations of larger cultural changes. For the moment tolerance was still the word, and the wind sock contingent considered Prairie Fire a good third place — a social space — for the neighborhood youth.
By the time Miranda starting going to Prairie Fire, Nash’s open-door policy on group meetings combined with the growing social divisions in the neighborhood to create a volatile mix, irresistible to people like Miranda and Sissy. Miranda could feel things gathering their own energy. She could see things happening. And she thought herself quite lucky to have landed, only weeks after leaving her mother’s house, so much amid it all.
Miranda sat beside Nash and again had admonished him about drinking Coke, which became sort of a running joke. Since she began regularly attending his Prairie Fire meetings, Nash increasingly engaged her in long, seemingly discontinuous conversations. No matter the subject, he responded to whatever she said with certainty and as if what he said wasn’t off-kilter and incongruent with what had been said previously. She did think it funny — if someone were to tape them, it would seem as if big chunks of essential conversation had been erased. She attempted to be equally absurd in her return statements. He could read it as flirting, but that would be a mistake. At least Miranda didn’t think she was flirting.
“I hate animal supremacists,” Miranda said, biting at the nail on her thumb.
“I think they are actually called animal rights activists,” Nash said.
She smiled at him and continued. “I do. Their blond dreadlocks and hemp clothes. Reggae-listening, green-panther, righteous rich kids.”
“Are they green panthers, or are they more rightly called panther panthers?” Nash said.
Miranda spoke in a stagy whisper.
“Just look at them,” she said. She tapped a finger on Nash’s arm and indicated several kids loitering around the magazine stand. The usual marauders. Miranda gestured toward a petite henna-haired girl. She wore a camouflage khaki jacket that had a large circle painted on it with fur written inside and a red bar crossing it out. Her pants leg featured a Beef Nation = Killing Fields patch; she also displayed an American Animal Diaspora insignia, not sewn but pinned loosely to her hat brim. Everything she wore had that same contrived, raggedy look. “Especially those militants.” She lowered her voice and shifted her eyes back and forth dramatically. “I live with some of them. Calling themselves Animal Marshals and Liberationists. All that pseudomilitary speak, and the uniforms. I don’t trust them.” She looked at Nash, bit her nail and then continued. “They are offended by fur coats. Yeah, fur coats are offensive, but it is because of the cost, not the animals. Someone spends twenty thousand dollars on a coat while there are people without food or shelter. Can’t people ever feel any shame? What kind of society tolerates the idea of people sleeping in the street while other people walk right by in twenty-thousand-dollar coats? That’s what’s offensive.” Miranda looked at Nash, her eyebrows pressing together, and she took a deep breath.
Nash shook his head. “I had no idea you hated animals,” he said.
She had already made her point, but that didn’t stop her because, well, sometimes she couldn’t stop. That was one of her problems. She would start out trying to be provocative but end up completely earnest about what she was saying. She would start out intending to be cynical and aloof and end up with an embarrassing catch in her voice.
“I just hate people who have the wrong analysis, you know? Who miss the economics. Who just see it as one issue. Who have just enough compassion for the cute animals. Who care about the rest of the people in the world only when it starts to affect their world.” She waited for a response, stared at Nash with her large brown eyes, her mouth a stern frown until she bit her lip, a waiting thing she did that she knew betrayed how anxious she felt and how urgent.
“That’s good for you, Miranda. You must protect yourself with the ‘breastplate of righteousness and the ammunition of determination’ or something, more or less, like that.”
His condescension upset her, but she also knew he was quoting something she should know but didn’t, so she just swallowed it. She liked him anyway — he was smart and funny, yes, but something else, too. It was nice, wasn’t it (or at least different) that he didn’t feel he had to prove anything? Most of the time Nash seemed content to be anonymous and almost egoless. But despite that, if someone did look closely, it was hard not to notice things. The excitement he betrayed during the meetings — she could see it, or thought she could. He had a weathered face, unremarkable except when he broke into this lopsided, purely local smile. He would undermine his own expressions by only half-committing his face to them. His frowns were belied by amused eyes; his grins pushed the edge of smirk by a narrowing boredom in his brow. It could be noted, this tendency. And read as unsettling, or intriguing. Miranda, anyway, noticed.
Miranda also began to notice things in the meetings Nash led (or “facilitated,” because naturally there were no leaders). They were held on Tuesday and Thursday nights under Nash’s highly mannered and hermetic nomenclature: SAP (Strategic Aggravation Players and/or Satyagraha by Antinomic Praxis); or the Neo Tea-Dumpers Front; or Re: the “Re” Words — Resist, Reclaim, and Rebel; or the “K” Nation (single-tactic group that merely inserted the letter k or removed the letter k—dislokations were what they called them — to cause psychic discomfort and disturbances. As in blac bloc instead of black block, or Amerika instead of America. They sent out ransom-note-style missives to unnerve their targets: Welkome, konsumers! You have been under attac. Better watch your bac, et cetera). It didn’t take long for her to realize that Nash’s groups never met more than once under the same name. She noticed that the same kids were at each meeting. These were the most wounded looking of the kids who frequented Prairie Fire. The fattest ones, or the ones with the worst skin, or the ones with the most solipsistic hygiene habits.