DELETED SCENE #1
Marty grabbed a half-sheet of paper and began to write down the puzzled library daydream that was still rocketing through his head...
I hear the National Anthem and it makes me want to week when I think of Kathie Jones sitting there at close of day, grown so old watching late afternoon sunbeams... Her eyes are still beautiful. Alone at that big desk she sits and grades papers long into the night, only stopping to put the percolator on the old potbelly stove, and then thumb through a weeks-old copy of the Liberator or Harper's She cannot keep the scissors out of her hand when she reads...
His pencil twitched. Where had THAT come from? The moment was gone, srambled away into random banality.
"Jealousy is normal," Radar was saying in the library. "But when I feel it, I just understand it for what it is and suck it up and deal with it."
Marty glanced up, his eyes bloodshot. They had woke and boke on the way to school. The librarian across the way shot him a withering look, hollering: "MR. SEVERIN!! THAT IS YOUR LAST WARNING!! WHAT ARE YOU DOING BACK THERE?"
He shrugged. "We're waiting for Godot."
"Well, you tell whatshisname that if he doesn't show up in about ten seconds, he's gettin' d-hall. And keep it down!"
DELETED SCENE #2
Lydia Shannahan sat up on her bed, playing her History book like a Martian lyre. The room gave up its face in daylight. A big gyroscope whirred and whined with the sounds of a slotcar motor from the back of the table on the other side of the room. From the walls, posters of DaVinci's Vitruvian Man glowed.
Everywhere, there were cool things that lit up. Lydia counted herself among that number. After marking her page on a severe formal portrait of John Brown, Lydia put the book in her backpack and made for the door. The bright lights all went off when she snapped her fingers.
DELETED SCENE #3
The twins found Justin far below decks in the basement, buring an oil lamp and playing God with model trains. (He'd figured out some more of the controls on his remote.)
"Just goofin' off." He held up a tiny locomotive in his hand. "Replica of the 666 Turbine Loco they tried to patent out here. It's got a slotcar motor. I... uhhhh, forgot we still had these."
The twins looked down at the figure-eight of track that spanned the workshop floor.
"Juss-tin!" Karrie cried loudly. "Mom said you'd finish the story."
"You were busy," he whispered. He had started reading them that story with his hand on his mother's belly when she told him she was pregnant with twins.
He'd written the story in Mr. Riordan's class. Riordan thought it was "Cute, but way too Post-Modern." Whatever that meant. He got an A-.
"Remember the title?" His eyes were flickering red behind his shades. Pulling up the old file.
"Sure." Alex nodded. " 'The Tinderbox'."
"The version I heard is from the Civil War. Like when those men in blue were puttin' in the new flags in the graveyard up the road, last July Fourth. That's a very special day to them. That's the day that America celebrates its independence from England. In the Civil War, we were fighting on that day at a place called Geddisburg." He said in in the old way without meaning to.
"But what gets left out of those re-enactments is that a lot of those men didn't really want to be there. The politicians made them want to go and kill. When those boys with war fever who lied about their ages actually saw their best friends go down on rifle balls in the mud of some podunk town in Virginia, they changed their tune pretty quick. The old songs are full of stuff like that. The good ones, anyway."
Justin sighed. "We get the easier, softer explanation, the one that tells the schoolkid that the Civil War was a just war where nobody died, and that there were only two sides to the issue, blue and gray."
"Is the Civil War a long way to walk? Alex asked up at Justin.
Karrie nodded fiercely. "Did you watch it?"
Justin smirked. "I was at Sharpsburg with a picnic lunch taking notes for a column while all the boys walked by and said: 'Hail Senator Webster, we that are about to die salute you.' " Karrie just looked puzzled.
"The Civil War happened a long, long time ago," Justin explained. "Before even our grandparents were born."
"Wow. So what was the Civil War about?"
Justin took a deep breath. "Well, see... umm... when... did you guys learn about Benjamin Franklin in school yet? And Thomas Jefferson and them?"
They nodded immediately. "Franklin invented electricity," Alex said.
"Don't ever let your Grandpa hear you say that." Justin smiled. "It was Nikola Tesla the whole way down. That man could find a Russian at the bottom of everything. Anyway... when Franklin and Jefferson and them got together and wrote the Constitution... there were a couple of million black people who were slaves. They never freed those people. So four score and seven years later there was a war because of it. But that's not it."
"Oooh, ooh, four score and... They told us this." Alex's eyes lit up. "Eighty-seven years. Abe Lincoln gave the Gettysburg address on the back of an envelope."
Justin roared with laughter. "Well done, you."
"What's a slave?" Karrie looked at him. Justin chose his words quite carefully.
"Black people in this country were sold as... as servants. They weren't treated the same as regular people, and got beaten and branded and sometimes killed. They didn't get doctors when they were sick. Mommies and daddies and babies all got split up and sold to different places."
Karrie looked revolted. "But... but... all those little babies..." She looked pleadingly at Justin. "Why?"
"Because a long time ago, a really bad, stupid man named Hegel said that black peopel were animals and everyone believed him. So it was okay to sell them like cows or dogs." He was looking for a quick out. "The Civil War wasn't just about slaves."
"So what was it about?" Karrie asked again.
"Slavery was... It wasn't working any more, and everyone knew it. The Civil War was just a big bloody death match to see who was Right. It's what Americans are famous for. We hold the title belt."
Alex tugged at his pant leg. "Tell us the story."
"Oh, yeah."
Justin never remembered all of what he said next. The twins were enraptured. Justin couldn't continue. He froze the program and moodily clomped through the house.
"Fuck this. I'm sick of making up stories. Time to go live my own."
The twins would just repopulate in a random part of the house when he clicked the program back on...
