15 Quotes by John M Vermillion

The Marshal didn’t bother knocking. What he observed was not unexpected, but still shocking. The sequoia of a man, seven feet tall and 360 hard-packed pounds of him, lay with back curled forward, limbs folded in front of his body, on the living room floor, moaning, with periodic sharp intakes of breath accentuating his spiritual desolation. 

Tetu Palaita is one of those for me. He is my son, my brother, my friend. I hurt for him so much right this moment I’m incapable of describing it. I’m finding it hard to be rational. I want revenge. Not justice. Revenge. I want to hurt whoever did this to Tetu’s family in the most brutal ways I can conceive. My perspective has taken a leave of absence.

Tetu’s attorney, David Hotchman, was a diminutive figure, slight in every bodily respect except, it was obvious, the muscularity of his brain. Every judge into whose court he came armed for legal combat was acutely sensitive to the fact that he or she needed to prepare with special intensity to keep pace with his legal argumentation. They couldn’t search for a precedent or two and hope that would be sufficient.

When I go on to wherever I’m going, I’m gonna look over you every day. If what I’m thinking is a prayer, maybe God will grant the only thing I can think of to ask for. Thanks for bein’ the greatest momma ever was. I sure don’t know why you loved me as much as you did, momma, or what you saw in me, but you did everything right.         This is my little opinion.

Pack couldn’t go home at the conclusion of his shift at the Cunningham Aircraft plant and relax. He wasn’t Chester A. Riley. He was a sheepdog protecting his herd from wolves like Rick Jason. For Simon Pack, there could be no long recovery time. Wolves were on the prowl, and without his vigilance, and those like him, his herd would disappear. He would not permit his America to perish in the flames of hatred. Back to work tomorrow.

Tetu stood his seven feet straight as a yardstick. His chin tilted upward. He was unable to mouth the words to the hymns. This struggle to hold back a torrent of tears consumed him. Yet he found the joyful noise soothing. What he was thinking in those minutes was, “Let this go on forever. Bang the death drum slowly. Bugler, play Taps for an eternity. I do not want the time to come when I’ll have to commit the bodies of these three people I have so loved to a cold place beneath the soil.”  

The big man jerked Jason to an upright position. “You shot me, mister. Now you pay.” He placed a bearpaw over Jason’s face and smashed his head into a tree, hard enough not to kill, but with enough force to knock him senseless. Then he broke each of Jason’s fingers, one at a time. For good measure he squeezed each of the Director’s hands until he could feel small bones crunching.

2100 Hours: The lights went out inside the compound. People throughout the auditorium began to shriek. It was chaos.          Then they experienced what felt like a sonic boom. Pack’s vehicle had blown apart, metal fragments hurled a quarter mile away. The CEV had knocked the main gate over as if it were a fist going through papier-mache. Once the explosion had run its course, the car was in flames, which caught some of the crew still wearing the night vision devices off guard.

If I lived to one hundred years of age, I could never become an elder. They do not appreciate my views. They believe the white man is a leech sucking the Kootenai out of their children’s bones.