The rally was down a long country road, deep in the piney woods. A few guys on Harleys blew by me, did the white-power salute and I gave it back. There was another turn-off and I saw activity down the short piece of red-dirt road. I went two hundred yards past and pulled into a fire road in the trees.
Staying low, I moved through the brush until I was twenty yards from the activity. It was a checkpoint. I watched bikes and pickups and SUVs roll up, show a piece of blue paper to a half-dozen guys who looked like hell’s bellhops: greasy hair, gaps where teeth used to be, chains rattling on their boots, leather holsters holding serious ordnance. I figured the blue sheets were official passes, probably signed or somehow protected against copying. Someone smart at the top, like Ben had said.
I looked in the direction of the gathering, thinking of sneaking through the woods. I discerned a couple guys in camo among the trees, holding rifles and smoking. Step on a twig and draw fire; no thanks.
It was the checkpoint or nothing.
Dark was falling. I crept back to my truck. It looked impossible to slip past the grimy crew at the checkpoint, but could I wangle an invite from someone less inclined to study me? How did the process work?
Nothing to do but find out.
I drove back to a spot a couple hundred feet from the turn-off, turned around as if aiming at the rally, pulled off the road. I got out and began rummaging through my glove box, throwing maps out on the road like they’d been tossed there in a rage. I saw a stripe of red beneath my seat: the ridiculous flag yanked from Beefer’s truck: Hank Williams, Jr. on a Stars’n’Bars. How would it play to this crowd – heroic icon or cartoonish blasphemy?
I hung it in the rear window as a big van roared up from behind, a half-dozen people in the rust-bucket vehicle, four burly men and two women. I shook my head and started jamming the stuff back in the box as the truck rumbled up beside me. My keychain dangled from my pocket, the WP medallion flashing against my jeans.
The van stopped and the driver yelled out the window.
“Problem, bud?”
I did childish rage. “I’m turning around and gonna miss the fuckin’ blow-out, that’s the problem. I’m stupid. That’s another problem.”
“My pass. I thought I stuck it in the glove box, but musta left it in the saddlebag of my hog.” I kicked the tire, yelled, “Fuck!”
The guy driver jumped out and moved toward me. He was six four or so, Harry’s size. Wearing a pirate’s beard. Hard muscles all over, with wild hair half restrained by the bandana. He sucked from a bottle of Dixie beer and stared into my face. He scratched his beard and I saw the word KILL inked across the knuckles of his right hand.
“Where’d you get it?” he growled. “The invitation here.”
“Sonny Rollins,” I said, figuring these guys weren’t into jazz.
Suspicious eyes. “Never heard a him.”
“Sonny’s ramrodding the movement in Memphis. Sonny couldn’t make it but got me a pass; thought I might make good contacts. I know Sonny through Donnie Kirkson.”
The hard eyes somehow got harder. “How you know Donnie?”
“He got in Holman two months ’fore I got out. We helped keep the niggers off each other.”
His hands curled into fists and his eyes tightened to bunkers.
He yelled, “BULLSHIT!”
My heart stopped. I think everything stopped.
“Uh…what?”
“That was a goddamn bullshit charge. I heard the runaway looked at least eighteen. They been after Donnie for years, finally used that goddamn bullshit charge to lock him up.” He calmed a degree or two, did concern. “Donnie doin’ all right, bro?”
“Puttin’ on a little weight,” I said, patting my gut. “Prison food. But he’s hangin’ tight.”
The guy flashed a look at my keychain. Studied the flag. A grin took his face. He sang, “Are you ready to par-teeee?” echoing a Hank Williams, Jr hit song.
“I was, but now I ain’t,” I said, climbing back in my truck. “Y’all take care and party hard for me.”
The guy started back into his van, thought a moment. “Come on in behind us, I’ll vouch for ya. One of the guys on security is my cuz. We all forgit shit now’n then, right?”
“I wish you’d stop forgettin’ to wear underwear,” the scraggly blonde in the passenger seat crowed out the window, provoking a chorus of hoots and catcalls inside.
“Thanks, brother,” I said. “Eighty-eight.”
“Fuckin’ yeah,” he grinned. “Eighty-eight. Fall in behind.”
The air at the rally smelled of beer and sweat and barbecued pig. I walked to a white tent bordering the woods where a hog was roasting in a pit and three guys were pulling beers from ice-tubs and setting them on the slat-board counter. Aryan Nation flags hung from the rear of the tent. I tossed down a ten-dollar bill, took away a can of Bud and a half-cup of ’cue ladled over a grocery-store bun that was mostly air.
“Hey, buddy, you forgot your change,” a voice yelled to my back.
“Keep it, brother.”
The speed with which he jammed the bucks in his jeans told me Aryan catering units weren’t used to tips. I walked away pulling strands of oversweet and undercooked pork from my teeth, thinking maybe the gratuity was premature.
Night was almost full and the fire was growing. The fire committee was three beer-swilling behemoths feeding the blaze from a stack of applewood and oak. They’d grunt in unison and launch six feet of log on to the fire, sparks cascading into the purple sky.
The growing crowd was mainly males, only about ten per cent female participation. Most of the women in attendance were biker chicks, demoiselles of denim and leather, some looking hard and some looking lost. The young girlies had punked-out spiky hair like it was the eighties, the older mamas had hair hiked high – prom night in Waco, Texas, circa 1975. The older ones all shared the same voice, a graveled purr, like buttermilk laced with broken glass. The younger ones tried to emulate the effect, failing because it was the voice of No Way Out, and they hadn’t learned that yet.
A band was playing, four skinhead types in risers in front of a wall of Hi-Tone amps. It was headbanger speed metal, distorted power chords punctuated by shredding guitar leads. The musical structure was strident and anthemic, the skinhead lead singer in a white tee, torn jeans rolled to mid-calf, hightop Doc Martens. He was curling around a microphone stand, his mouth a rictus of agony, less singing than screaming.
“Fuck the watermelon-eating niggers…” he howled.
“FUCK ’EM!” the crowd roared in response.
“Fuck the tortilla-eating spics…”
“FUCK ’EM!”
“Fuck the goat-eating A-rabs…”
“FUCK ’EM!”
It was sad and small and it wasn’t all that long ago the singer might have called out the potatoeating Micks or the spaghetti-sucking wops. I waved my beer in the air and shrieked out the response with everyone else, using the time to scope out the crowd. I figured, given my years on the force and Mobile a half-hour distant, there was probably someone in there who I’d rousted or arrested. I pulled my ball cap lower over my eyes.
After ten minutes I needed a break from the noise and the smell of sweat and the constant Heil Hitlers and other tribal salutations. I wandered a couple hundred feet from the fray to the woods, walking into the trees until the brush softened the sound. It was almost peaceful, the moon high and bright.
I startled at the crack of branches breaking and heavy breathing and spun to see a tall, wide-shouldered guy in a black shirt pushing from the brush at my back. His arms were marbled with muscle. He was talking to himself, in the clutches of something potent, meth, acid, ecstasy, or some ugly hybrid of any or all.
He saw me, narrowed his eyes.
“They’re coming.”
“Hunh?” I said. Normally I say Pardon? or Excuse me? but among this crowd, Hunh was the word.
“They’re coming, brother. We got to stop them.”
I decided to play along. “I know. They’re right over the horizon.”
He wiped his face with his hands, shook his head. “They’re breeding them like tomatoes, using different strains.”
“You lost me.”
He looked from side to side, like there were informants in the trees. He waved me closer, leaned to speak in a whisper.
“Super niggers. They’ll be able to fly. I heard it from a guy who heard it direct from Meltzer.”
“Hunh?”
“Won’t really be flying, but they’ll have legs so strong they’ll jump like bullfrogs. They’ll be bouncing all over the fucking ghetto and cops’ll have to build big nets to catch ’em.”
I couldn’t help chuckling at the inanity. A mistake. He grabbed me by my shirtfront and rammed me into a tree.
“Don’t laugh at me,” he rasped. “I’ll goddamn kill you.”
His trip was turning ugly. I said, “I’d never laugh at a man who knows what he’s about. If you took me wrong, I apologize.”
He blinked at me so hard I could tell I was little more than a hazy shape in his addled mind. His grip fell loose and he patted my arm.
“You’re OK, dude. I thought you were laughing.”
“No man, I was listening. You heard from a guy who heard it from Meltzer.”
He stumbled backwards a step, rediscovered his chain of thought. “The guy was s’posed to keep it secret but got drunk and told me ’bout this crazy doctor who’s doing a Frankenstein act with…I dunno, that cell shit.”
Frankenstein. Flying people. Crazy doctors. I backpedaled slowly away, making a note to be careful about laughing.
“Gotta head back to the rally, brother,” I said. “Nice meeting you.”
“We all gotta hold together, man,” he called after me. “Some mad scientist grew a special baby. They’re gonna make clones outta it. We gotta fight for our own.”
The word baby had been much in my life of late. I turned back to the guy.
“You know anything more about that baby the guy was talking abo—”
“Spider, you there?” A voice from the far side of the trees cut me off. Feet were pounding through the underbrush, approaching fast.
“You out here, man? Yo, Spider?”
Spider’s mouth dropped in fear. I spun and disappeared into the woods, stopping and crouching behind a clump of briar. I heard a commotion and looked back. Moonlight revealed four guys circling the druggie.
Someone said, “You gotta learn to keep your mouth shut, Spider –” and I heard a fist smack into flesh.
I ducked away, re-emerging two hundred feet distant in the light of the meadow. The bonfire was raging. The fire crew had stripped off their shirts. Sweat glistened on their torsos as they humped logs into flames licking twenty feet into the night sky.
I passed by a lone biker chick leaning against a tree, pushing back loops of fake-blonde hair, sucking a beer. Her eyes sparkled with amphetamine.
“Hey there, handsome,” she purred. “How ’bout we go back in the bushes and crank off a quick fuck?”
“No thanks,” I said over my shoulder.
“Don’t like to fuck girls?” came the taunt.
“Don’t like to fuck quick,” I said, putting more jump in my steps.
I heard a roar at my back and turned to see a dozen bikers thundering into the parking meadow, cranking accelerators on straight-piped Harleys to announce their arrival. A roar arose from the crowd, three hundred voices howling at once. Bodies parted for the biker escort, a large white step van following the Harleys. The growling phalanx entered the field and I saw fists raised in salutes of joy.
“He’s here,” said the hulking man behind me, so softly it sounded like prayer. Someone else said, “Praise God.”
Arnold Meltzer had arrived.
I watched the step van pull in front of the stage. A ladder allowed access to its roof and two rangy guys scampered up like monkeys, unrolling a carpet across the top and setting up a microphone and PA horns the diameter of truck tires. The crowd tightened around the vehicle and I was pressed toward the front.
“Arn-old, Arn-old…” rose in a chant from the crowd, all eyes aimed toward the van. It was a scene of tumult and exultation. A woman beside me was crying with joy.
“Arnold, Arnold…”
A cheer filled the air as a man slipped from the rear of the van followed by four others. The quartet climbed the ladder with automatic weapons slung over their shoulders, took wide-stance positions atop the van, eyes staring into the crowd. Dressed in black pants and blue shirts, they had wide black belts of shiny leather holding holstered sidearms.
I blinked, looked again at a man atop the van, close to the edge. It was the deputy from the scene at the burned house, Briscoe’s man. What was his name?
Briscoe’s voice yelled in my memory: “Baker! Git to the car and you git calm.”
I filed the name away as Meltzer ascended the ladder, the crowd deafening in its adulation. He was a small man with an imperious, military bearing, hair short and neat and black. He moved as though lighter than air, a pixie. His perfectly tailored white suit seemed an improbable choice until I noted how much it stamped him as different from the rabble below; it was, in effect, a uniform.
I was close enough to see his mouth, and its full and pursed femininity surprised me, as if someone had pasted the lips of Marilyn Monroe on Adolf Hitler. The mouth twitched and blossomed as the crowd roared, palms slamming together, fists waving, boot heels pounding the hard dirt.
Meltzer patted his hand downward in the silence motion and the crowd obeyed as readily as sheep; in seconds all I heard was breathing. He looked out over the throng and moved to the mic with catlike grace.
“Ih-ehs-isn’t it a buh-beautiful night t-tuh-to b-be white, my Aryan buh-buh-brothers and ssss-si-issssss-sisters?”
Arnold Meltzer stuttered. Not gently, but racked by the struggle to push words out, hunching his shoulders, clenching his fists, fighting for syllable by tortured syllable. Had I seen the contortions from behind, I would have thought his body gripped by epileptic seizure.
When Meltzer finished his sentence, the crowd exploded, first into joyful screams and rebel yells, then into a rising chant: Arn-old, Arn-old, Arn-old…
It occurred to me that Meltzer’s acceptance of his impediment played perfectly in a crowd where all were afflicted, mentally, emotionally, economically, educationally. He may have been smarter, wealthier, and better educated, but he too was deeply wounded.
Arn-old, Arn-old…
He allowed a full minute of adoration, drawing energy from the vocal thunder, then waved the chanting down, the pursed lips satisfied, the mouth of a man receiving dues a long time coming. Beside Meltzer, Baker’s puffed chest and wide stance might have been funny if he hadn’t been holding a weapon that could cut down an oak.
The guy beside me said, “Fuckin’ incredible, hunh? Arnold is God.”
“Who’s the guy beside him? The crew-cut guy to the right?”
“That’s Boots Baker, brother. Boots is a monster, Meltzer’s shadow. You walk up to Meltzer without being asked, Boots takes your head off.”
The guy grinned at the idea of heads coming off and turned to face front as Meltzer launched into his own particular form of sermon, his voice brittle through the metal cones of the public address system.
“A fuh-false prophet is more d-d-deadly than a wu-weapon, for a weapon can only ki-ki-ki-kill bodies, but false prophet can d-destroy souls. The f-false prophet can destroy ten thousand sssssouls with a ssssingle utterance. Wuh-we have s-seen a fu-fuh false prophet and learned of his tuh-terrible d-d-debasement…”
The crowd booed as Meltzer hissed and twitched out an obvious reference to Scaler, heaping manure on the man’s legacy, alternately painting him as mad, debased, delusional, traitorous. Meltzer shoveled for a few minutes, then segued to an allied theme.
“Those who wuh-would r-r-rule us like sheep have nuh-new weapons and n-new lies…” he said, feet away from Briscoe’s deputy. There was a sneer on Baker’s face, as if standing atop that truck next to a lump of human garbage marked the pinnacle of his existence.
“We mu-muh-may hear terrible l-l-lies over the n-next weeks and muh-muh-months. Lies designed to-t-t-tear the wuh-white race apart. Lies designed to du-du-destroy our way of life. Sssstay strong and du-don’t ever waver. It will all b-be lies. Lies. Lies! LIES! LIES!”
The crowd picked up the rhythm and chanted the word lies until the ground shook. Meltzer seemed to be preparing the crowd for some upcoming news or announcement detrimental to the movement.
The speech ended with thunderous applause as Meltzer performed a series of salutes including white power and the standard Nazi crowdpleaser. I wondered if successful white supremacists had to memorize salutes like NFL players memorized play-books.
I was ready to leave. My head hurt from the noise and assaults on reason and I had much to think about, including Deputy Baker being one of Meltzer’s honor guard. How the rant against the dead Scaler fit into anything. And Spider’s mention of a strange baby, a stream of babble reminding me of the mad screeching of Terry Lee Bailes.
The parking area was on the other side of the milling, agitated crowd, and I waded into the hoots and rebel yells and displays of the various salutes. The band had returned and was playing a heavymetal version of Dixie, the singer howling out revised lyrics.
I wish I was in the land of cotton,
the niggers and spics dead and forgotten,
It’s God’s way, it’s God’s way, it’s God’s way,
Dixie land
I crossed fifty feet past the barbecue tent, looked up to see Meltzer’s security detail fueling on pork. Baker was to the side, a solemn, powerfully muscled apparition in the rippling orange light of the nearby bonfire. He was scanning the crowd and looked into my eyes.
I saw reptilian curiosity, brow furrowing as neurons of recognition fired in his brain. I pulled my hat low and tight and ducked into a dozen men standing in a circle and comparing sidearms.
I heard Baker’s voice. “Hey you – stop!”
Baker was frantically waving several men to him, pointing in my direction. I sunk deeper in the crowd, staying low. I saw a group of heavies walking fast at the edge of the rally, looking in. I ducked and circled. When I looked again, I couldn’t see what direction they’d headed. Should I cut to the left or right to make my break? My palms turned wet.
I ducked lower, headed for the edge of the crowd. I decided to cut left, to the east.
A nearby voice hissed, “No. Right! Go to the right!”
I spun to the voice, saw only a wide back stumbling away under a dirty gray cowboy hat, beer bottle in hand, another drunk. But I took a chance on the strange twist of fate, dodging to the right. After a long two minutes, I emerged by the wood fence separating the rally grounds from the parking area.
I slipped between vehicles, saw an orange Toyota Four-Runner ahead and to the side. It boasted all the trimmings, roof lights, chrome luggage rack, mud guards. I wouldn’t have seen the vehicle except that it was lit by twin halogen lamps. A white towel was closed in the rear gate of the vehicle, a red cross hand-painted in its center.
It was a small aid station, which made an ironic sense, given the stoners and drunks wandering through a farm field at night. It was a place to fix barb-wire gouges, burns from stumbling in the fire, noses busted in friendly fights, methedrine ODs, and so forth.
I heard a voice moan, “Owwww. That fuckin’ hurts,” and recognized the voice of Spider. I saw him in a chair beside the aid station, the medic’s back to me, pulling a suture tight.
“It hurts, gawdammit,” Spider moaned. “I hurt ever’where.”
I heard voices back in the field, the unwelcoming committee trying to figure which way I’d run. I yearned to hear more of Spider’s cryptic ramblings about Frankenstein babies, but crouched and zigzagged to my truck, blowing away with lights off before my pursuers arrived with a noose.