Through the iron sight, dark figures boiled up from a low ground fog, the snow exhaling as it melted in the warm morning air. Somewhere off in the trees a child was screaming. I could hear her even through the rubber plugs inserted into both eardrums, but I couldn’t tell if the child was hurt or only playing. The figures were no more than silhouettes, no more than ghosts in the creeping fog, thugs with gorilla arms scraping so low they might as well have been coming at me on all fours. Like beasts. I flicked off the safety, pressing the spring-loaded stock firmly into my shoulder, my face against the cold metal as I exhaled and pressed the trigger. Hot brass casings ejected around me in a concussive burst, splinters of light, as I kept my feet planted wide and swiveled from the hip, releasing and pressing the trigger at even intervals.
“Woo-eee!” Elijah whooped beside me when I was done. I held out the smoking SIG Sauer he’d nicknamed Mjolnir after Thor’s hammer, my palms cupped under the stock like a holy offering. Elijah received it reverently, his fingers brushing the runic symbols cut into the barrel. I took out my earplugs, tucked them in a front pocket, and we both pivoted to Roland who held a stopwatch.
“Eight seconds,” Roland said in his gravelly voice. “All head shots. He put down four niggers in the time it takes an old lady to blow her nose into a Kleenex.” The brim of his cowboy hat was so low I couldn’t read his eyes, sunk deep in a cavernous face, but he sounded pleased. The peppery smell of gunpowder drifted around us in a cloud.
“Swenson, we’ll make a soldier of you yet,” Elijah said, addressing me by the last name he’d recently wheedled from me. He glanced over at Roland as he shouldered the AR-15 and stepped to the firing range’s low fence. “Didn’t I tell you? This boy here is descended from Vikings.”
Roland grunted, his head dipping as he turned his attention back to his stopwatch. Off in the woods, I heard a child scream again, but it was the high-pitched holler of a kid at play and not of one afraid or in pain. They were just over the other side of the ravine, probably playing Agents of ZOG again, their favorite game. I slipped in my earplugs before Elijah could take his turn.
We were in a low valley well away from the trailers, the targets tucked against a shelf of granite to take the brunt of any errant bullets. Tacked onto straw bales, the silhouetted targets about forty feet away resembled gangbangers, their forms crudely distorted to appear more apelike, black fists clutching knives or pipes as they lumbered toward us. The ground fog that had come with the warming spell made them look even more sinister, like they had sprung up from the dark earth, demons and not men, hunting us in the rocky pine valley. I don’t know where they bought such targets.
I felt a tingling that traveled from my shoulder down to the tips of my fingers. I felt it right down to the fillings in my teeth, on a level of skull and bone. It surprised me how much I liked that feeling. Holding Mjolnir, I was no longer the broken kid who had spent ten days in a hospital bed. If you knew how to hold the assault rifle carefully, in my case tucked against my uninjured shoulder, it couldn’t hurt or bruise you. There is no preparing for such a feeling. Mjolnir was a marvel of engineering, a beautiful killing machine that fit naturally against my body. I stepped away from the low fence that separated us from the firing range as Elijah began to fire. I’d tried other weapons, including an M-4 and a genuine AK-47 that Roland owned, but the AR-15 was my favorite: light, accurate, and deadly.
Roland paused us for a smoke break. “You seen the news?” he said to me. From a pocket in his vest he unfolded a clipping from the Duluth News-Tribune and passed it my way. I saw the headline first—“Hate Crimes Hit Duluth and Aurora Bay”—and I felt a shelf within me fall away. The article didn’t just mention the racist flyers spread on the campus of NMSU, but also detailed an act of vandalism down in Duluth where a monument to three young black males, lynched at the turn of the twentieth century, had been spray-painted in red with the number “14” and the initials “ROA.” The reporter didn’t know yet that these were the fourteen words or that ROA stood for Race Over All. His article went on to describe the flyers on campus and say that police speculated the same person had done both of these acts. Authorities were also aware of a rural Christian Identity church called Rose of Sharon with possible connections to white supremacy groups. It ended with this quote from Professor Friedman at Northern, who was the child of Holocaust survivors: “This hatred must be uprooted from the dark soil and shown the withering light of day. It cannot be allowed to fester and spread underground. Only by yanking it out by the roots will we be safe.”
Reading those words I felt a wash of nausea rinse through me, cold and oily. I hadn’t any idea that when Roland sent me to campus with the flyers, I was part of a larger plan. What had I done?
Elijah took the article from me, his brow furrowing.
“How?” I said.
Roland exhaled smoke from his nostrils. “I sent Bjorn down there. He was itching for some action.”
“You went too far,” Elijah said. He crumpled it in his fist and let it fall to the ground.
“We got the attention we wanted.”
Elijah shook his head. “They’ll be watching us now.”
“They already are.” Roland smiled grimly around his cigarette, his eyes on me. He took out another paper from his pocket and handed it to me. “You ready for act two?” he said. “I’d like to see the Star Tribune pick up the story next.”
The hand-drawn brochure he passed my way featured a comic with four frames that told a simple story. In the first frame, a young skinhead comes across a lovely young woman who is being groped by two African-American hoodlums. Was it my imagination or did the face of the woman look like Maura, her high cheekbones and aquiline nose? I tried to blink her image away, her memory, her face in a place where it should not be. Not here.
The artist had drawn one gangbanger sneering, the other with his tongue lolling as he attempts to fondle her breasts. Their features were crude and simian, huge lips and noses. In the second frame the skinhead flips into action, smashing in those faces and saving the young woman’s virtue. His reward? In the third frame a Jewish judge, his long nose curling snaillike on a cruel face, sentences the skinhead to prison where he languishes behind bars. The final frame shows the skinhead out of prison and now reunited with the woman, her gingery hair flowing as they stand before wheat fields spreading endlessly, a new world bought and paid for with blood. All of this happens without a single word being spoken, the pictures doing all the talking.
I handed it to Elijah, who took it without a word. “You remember when Jones drew this for us before he went away?” Roland said to him. “I been saving this for the right moment.”
Elijah looked at the woman and then back at me. Did he also notice how she resembled Maura? Had the artist used her as a model? Elijah’s jaw tightened but he dropped his head as if resigned to something. “In another world, Hitler makes it into art school and finds his place in Vienna. He never goes to jail. Never writes Mein Kampf.”
“What?” Roland said with a frown. “I swear I don’t understand you sometimes.” He took the pamphlet from Elijah and gave it back to me. “So you think you can make copies of this at Kinko’s? Then you can spread these on campus.”
I didn’t answer right away. I was thinking of Noah, who now probably suspected I had vandalized the monument down in Duluth as well. Why hadn’t he reported me? I let the weight of the consequences settle in my gut, where it didn’t sit well. I had hurt a good person. I had made another good person afraid. Elijah kept his head down and it seemed like he wanted to look any direction but my way. Why? What had his strange comment about Hitler meant?
Ten days had passed since Thanksgiving, and in that week, I had gotten myself in so deep with these people I was having trouble telling the real from pretend. They knew my last name, knew my major, knew my skills as an artist and programmer, knew that I was from Chicago after they asked about who my people were. I didn’t see any sense in lying about these things. I had been coming here every day since to play chess with Elijah and talk strategy. This was my new school. My university. The texts were the Bible that Mother Sophie had given me and the battered copy of The Turner Diaries that Roland tasked me with reading. This was the school where I was learning how to survive the apocalypse coming for us at the end of the year. This was where I was learning how to fight and how to hate. I told myself that I was only pretending and I tried to hide as much as possible what I was doing here from Arwen, mostly out of shame, but the real truth is that I hadn’t expected how easily I would take to all of it. On some level, I came here because I liked coming here.
For a time I had to give up my moral compass. Such a compass wouldn’t do me any good until I had the answers I needed. In the meantime, I was gathering information I could use against them. I knew already, for instance, that convicts aren’t supposed to own and operate firearms like the ones we handled down at the range, information I could bring to the attention of authorities. I knew that in the machine shed behind Mother Sophie’s cabin they were building AR-15s from custom kits bought in pieces by mail order, a way to circumvent the assault weapons ban. I knew some kind of plan was in the works, something they intended to do before Y2K, though the men clammed up in my presence. I felt sure that if I stayed with them long enough I would find out what had happened to Maura or where she had gone. For a time, I needed to get lost, but I was already so lost now I didn’t know if I would ever find my way back to my old self. The old self had to die so Meshach could be born again. Meshach, who could stand in the fire.
Before this, I would have sworn to you that I was not a racist. Growing up in the predominately white conservative suburb of Mount Greenwood, I hardly gave much thought to race at all, except on trips visiting my grandparents’ house in Fuller Park, which had gone from primarily Caucasian in the fifties to almost all black after white flight sent folks scrambling for the burbs.
This one visit stands out in my memory. My grandpa Logan had just been released from the hospital and was recovering from congestive heart failure. My uncle Nolan took me with him to spend the weekend so we could help my grandma Zee around the house and finish building the prefab toolshed my grandpa wanted in the small backyard. At the age of fourteen—still reeling from my parents’ divorce the year previous—I dreaded such a trip. A little man-to-man time, my uncle Nolan had pitched it to my mother. My “please don’t make me go,” went unheard.
We cruised the old neighborhood in his Buick, our windows down as my uncle Nolan pointed out landmarks. Rush Limbaugh squawked on the radio, his furious tirades against Clintonian sleaze at the “oval orifice” filling up the silence between my uncle and me. Rush segued into a bit about a new book called Bell Curve that wacko professors were censoring on campus. As “the most dangerous man in America” it was his responsibility to tell us the truth about this book and the truth wasn’t pretty. The book supposedly proved that intelligence was inherited, imprinted in your DNA, and while Rush didn’t say the next part out loud, it bubbled like a muddy river under the subtext of his rambling: whites were smarter than blacks from birth onward, so all the social programs in the world, from Head Start to welfare, couldn’t lift black people from the squalor of their basic inferiority.
Uncle Nolan had one hand easy on the big wheel, the other casually draped on the seat rest behind me. Square-jawed and balding, he was a big man who looked nothing like my petite mother. A Vietnam veteran—he had been a clerk in the war—he was a wanderer and a vagabond, some seasons working the crab boats up in Alaska or hiring himself out as a handyman. I was just a gangly kid by comparison, beanpole thin after my first major growth spurt. I missed my father—the gap between us started growing a long time before the divorce, and I felt certain he wouldn’t have left us so easily had I not been such a letdown to him as a son—but Uncle Nolan wasn’t exactly father-figure material. He had once been a cheerful man, but time and liquor had not been kind to him, his voice tinged with a rough bitterness that made me miss the old Uncle Nolan.
My uncle adjusted the dial before slipping his hand back behind my seat rest. Outside our windows, liver-colored lawns sprouted crab grass after a dry summer. Everything looked yellow; even the air smelled of urine. What always struck me about this neighborhood were the iron bars on the windows of some of the houses, as if people here lived in stucco prisons. “What do you make of all that?” Uncle Nolan asked after a long silence.
“All what?” I said, though I knew he was referring to the show. I had discovered that I could kill many painful conversations with adults by directing questions back at them.
“Truth is that the law is tilted in every way to favor these people with handouts. Affirmative action and all that shit. Take a good look around, Lucien.” He sniffed. “The supposed war on poverty has been going for over two decades. This look like uplift to you?”
“It does not.” I had to agree.
He gestured at the radio. Even at a low staticky murmur, Limbaugh sounded like an angry bee trapped inside the speaker. “All I’m saying is that there’s some truth to the man’s words.”
We stopped at a corner store and Uncle Nolan sent me inside with a twenty-dollar bill while he left the Buick idling. I kept my head down as I hurried through the aisles, the only white person in a small store with too many mirrors on every wall and corner, so a thousand Luciens reflected back at me, pale-faced and skinny and trying not to look scared. I snagged a gallon of whole milk from one of the sliding cases and hustled to the cashier, an obese, Asian man wearing a stained apron as he stood behind the deli counter. We traded cash for milk without a single word passing between us, and then I hurried back outside, the plastic jug in one hand, the change for the twenty fluttering in the other like a fist of green flags.
I walked out of the store and right into the midst to a trio of young black men who happened to be wandering past at the same moment. I had been told not to make direct eye contact—no gesture that would appear challenging in any way—so I only caught a glimpse of them: each with a single pant leg rolled up, red shoes or caps on backward, the tallest one sporting a rust-colored do-rag. They stopped at the same moment I did. “We’ll be taking that,” the tallest one informed me, nodding toward my fist of cash.
“I don’t think so,” I said. The words left my mouth before I even knew what I was saying.
He tensed, squaring his shoulders. I had no choice but to meet his eyes. They were bright as pennies, keen and alert. He was clearly the leader and not just because of his size. Maybe they were just wannabes and not real Bloods, boys playing at being gangsters, I had to hope. This could have gone either way. We each had our roles to play in this moment, but I had gone badly off script.
I looked away from him for help—any help at all from my uncle Nolan—who was watching the scene unfold, his mouth agape as he sat behind the steering wheel. He gave one toot on the horn to make sure the trio would turn his way and then he motioned like he was reaching into the glove compartment.
The teen in the do-rag showed his teeth when he looked back at me. “That your daddy?”
“Not really,” I said. I glanced at his friends and back at him, saw him shove his hands in his baggy pants pockets. I was starting to realize how much trouble I might be in for, but once I committed to a course of action, I saw it through, whether it was wise or not. I don’t know where such stubbornness comes from. He wasn’t getting this money, not today.
“‘Not really’?” His sharp laughter broke the tension. “Yeah, maybe you look more like the milkman. That’s you, the milkman’s son.” Satisfied with insulting me instead of robbing me, he laughed again as he and his crew continued on their way. “We let you go this time,” he turned to call out as he went.
Inside the car, my uncle Nolan was livid. He slammed the glove compartment shut when I climbed in and set the milk gallon jug on the seat between us. “What the hell was that? You don’t walk around flashing cash like that.”
I bit my lip and looked away. Here I had been given a simple task—the first thing he’d asked me to do on this trip—and I had failed him.
“And for God’s sake, if some gangbanger demands you hand over your money, you hand it over. Got it? You think I want my nephew getting shot over a goddamn twenty-dollar bill? Your mother would never forgive me.”
I wondered if he was right. What would I have done if they attacked me, throw milk on them? I didn’t understand my own actions. “I guess I’m just stupid,” I muttered.
Uncle Nolan sighed heavily and rolled up the power windows and clamped down the power locks. “You’re not stupid,” he said. “You just need to use better judgment. These people. They’re animals, okay? They will kill you for your shoes. For a goddamn pair of Nikes. You’re not in Mount Greenwood anymore.”
I stared out the window, not really seeing anything. Later I would continue musing on this. Why had my uncle Nolan sent me in alone if the neighborhood was truly dangerous? Why not warn me beforehand about not being careless with cash? And what had he been looking for in the glove compartment? Uncle Nolan had never been the type to carry a gun before. When he turned Rush Limbaugh back up on the radio, I was almost relieved.
My uncle Nolan never said the N-word. Not out loud. But it coursed under the surface of every sentence he spoke about black people.
It was a short drive from the corner store to my grandparents’ house. My grandfather hadn’t fled with the rest of the white people in the fifties because he had renovated his brownstone with his own two hands, adding a cupola with a round wall of windows, some of them stained glass, so the light washed through in rainbow prisms. My grandmother kept her potted lemon trees in that light. How I loved curling up on the Turkish rug next to one of her many cats, the smell of citrus filling my senses. Before this visit, before the divorce, before I realized I would never live up to the expectations of the men in my family, it had seemed a magical place.
Even bent by age, my grandfather had been a tall, imposing man who had loud opinions on everything. He would swear to you he despised racists in one breath, but in the next he would tell you that the history books had given a bum deal to Hitler since he had been a great leader, a powerful speaker who brought Germany out of the Depression. My grandmother, a tall, dark woman of Norwegian descent, didn’t bother to hide her racism. She looked a little like Greta Garbo, and she kept her hair dyed black.
The day I was almost mugged she listened to my uncle’s angry retelling of my mishap at the corner store and drew me aside. “I know just the thing,” she said. She opened a mason jar of chocolate-covered Brazil nuts and handed me one. I downed the sweet obediently, still a child in her eyes. I knew what she was going to say before the words left her mouth because she tended to repeat herself, the same stories and jokes. My grandmother smiled and passed me another. “We call these nigger toes,” she said, “but don’t tell your grandpa because he doesn’t like that word. I’m glad you didn’t give those pickaninnies a single penny.” She chucked me under the chin and walked away. For a long time afterward the sweetness of that chocolate melting in my mouth mixed with the ugliness of the slur.
I nodded and absorbed it all. My grandfather extolling the efficiency of the German war machine, which the world would never see the likes of again, my grandmother watching Aretha Franklin on the Zenith and griping that black people didn’t really know how to sing, they just screamed into the microphone. My uncle talking about the persistence of their poverty despite decades of social programs. There was a war happening in the context of their stories, and in this war, white people, particularly white males who were the true descendants of our august forefathers, were losing, piece by piece, a country that was rightly theirs. What was so wrong with having pride in your heritage? How I longed for fatherly love and approval, then and now.
My grandparents had both died a few years ago. In the touch of Mother Sophie, I heard my grandmother’s voice again. In Elijah’s talks on history, I heard my grandfather. In Roland’s sternness, my father or my uncle Nolan spoke to me again. There were times with this new family I had found when I felt I was stronger than ever before, a man with faith and purpose. I didn’t just sit around complaining about the state of the world. I had become part of a group that was preparing for a real and defining action, even if they kept the details from me for now. I tried to tell myself that my upbringing had prepared me for this moment, but I knew the truth deep down. Though my grandparents had died years ago, they would have been afraid if they could see me now, afraid of who I was becoming. I didn’t know what I was capable of doing anymore.
I stayed out with Roland and Elijah for another half hour, until the targets were so riddled with bullets they no longer resembled human forms. They were shadows, monstrous and deformed. Roland eventually drew Elijah aside, out of earshot, for a discussion. This had happened frequently the last week, a plan taking shape they didn’t want me to hear about. Bjorn had even gone away to scout soft targets, and he must have hit the monument in Duluth on the way. Today I had the distinct impression that Roland was talking about me this time, and from the turning down of his mouth I was sure Elijah wasn’t happy about what he was hearing. What could they possibly be saying? I had done everything they had asked of me so far, but I didn’t think I could spread those pamphlets on campus. I had a terrible feeling that I was being used by these men. Then Elijah signaled me to follow as he and Roland headed up the hill.
Watery sunlight broached the clouds above the treetops, gilding the tops of the pines. On the way up the hill, Elijah suggested we stop at Roland’s trailer, a small but sturdy Scotty with a shell shaped like a turtle. Before this I’d only been inside Mother Sophie’s cabin and Elijah’s Airstream, so I wasn’t sure what to expect from a recluse like Roland. He’d built a proper porch out front, complete with a slanting, shingled roof, wind chimes tinkling in the eaves. We stomped mud from our boots, which Roland requested we leave outside the door along with Mjolnir.
The trailer within was surprisingly tidy, a room both cozy and warm. Elijah and I sat at a Formica table across from a low queen-sized waterbed. I knew by now that most of the beds within these trailers were waterbeds—a practical measure in the event their wells dried up after Y2K or were poisoned by the star Wormwood falling to earth and causing nuclear meltdowns—in which case they could tap open the beds for drinking water. Elijah had given me a tour one day, including of the underground bunkers where they stored fifty-pound bags of powdered milk and five-pound bags of powdered peanut butter and enough sardines to feed an army of seals.
From a cabinet above a small fridge, Roland fetched a milk jug with some caramel-colored liquid sloshing around inside. He planted this on the table with three coffee mugs with Alaskan scenes painted on the sides—mine had Mount McKinley on it. Roland had campaigned vigorously for the Alaskan Bush as the church’s final refuge in the End Times, but was overruled by Mother Sophie’s fear of bears.
“You’re in for a treat now, Meshach,” Elijah said as Roland uncapped the jug. The smell of liquor nipped at my nose from where I sat. “This is Roland’s home brew. He’s got a still back in the woods, but don’t tell Mother Sophie. We’re supposed to be dry on The Land. Too much hooch and the boys end up fighting each other instead of the world out there.”
My ears still rang from our time at the firing range. I don’t drink. The words were there on my tongue. The only liquor I’d ever touched had been the whiskey I shared with Maura the night we were robbed. The first time she held me. I thought of my mother’s alcoholism. The car she’d totaled the year her marriage dissolved. The nervous nights I waited up for her, trying not to imagine who she was out with. Bailing her out of jail when I was a junior in high school. I’d seen a lifetime’s worth of the damage liquor could do, but that was the old Lucien, weak and wounded. Here I could shed my weaker self as a snake sheds its skin. What was the harm in one drink?
Roland filled each of our mugs two fingers deep with his witch’s brew. It smelled of molasses and turpentine. Then he motioned me up so he could sit beside the window, and I sat again, squeezing in beside him.
“To the end of the world,” Elijah said, hoisting his mug. I toasted the others, clinking mugs. My first sip was nearly my last. The homebrew burned in my throat and seared my sinuses. A woody fragment of something snared in my teeth. The heat washing through my body caused me to remember Maura and the first and only time I’d ever tried whiskey. I felt my skin flushing.
“Woo-eee,” Elijah whooped just like he had at the firing range. When I blinked back tears he laughed at me. I took another sip. The home brew had a smoky appley flavor that grew on you, the liquid gold of a fine autumn day distilled into this caramel concoction. Apples and gold and turpentine and some rusty nails thrown in for good measure. The heat spread all the way down to the tips of my toes. I grew conscious of the rotation of the planet, the earth spinning, my head spinning, Elijah watching me like an indulgent older brother, his eyes shining. I’d longed for a brother growing up. This odd family here that I’d found myself a part of was starting to feel more real than my own.
I downed my entire mug and Roland poured me another before I could wave him off. He cranked open the window, tapped down his pack of American Spirit cigarettes, slid one out, and lit it.
Then Elijah sighed heavily, as if he’d made up his mind about something. Whatever they’d been talking about on the way to the trailer. Elijah’s eyes were hard when they settled on me again. I never saw the next part coming. “Tell us again how you found us.”
The spinning room no longer felt quite so pleasant. Where had the question come from? Mush-mouthed, I repeated what I’d originally said about being out on the highway and spotting the church.
“Rose of Sharon’s nowhere near the highway,” Roland said, taking a long draw on his cigarette and tapping his ashes into an ashtray shaped like a glacier. So this must have been part of what they’d been talking about earlier, planning to ambush me with questions.
“I just drive some days,” I said, which had been true before the accident. Once I’d driven all the way to Thunder Bay, Ontario, and back with no destination in mind, the radio turned up, windows down, my body fueled by gas station cinnamon bears and Mountain Dew. “No maps. Just go where the road leads me.”
A look passed between the men. The light in Elijah’s eyes darkened, like he had come to some regrettable decision. Smoke seeped from Roland’s nostrils. I thought I would remember this moment for a long time afterward, the light coming through the curtains, the sharp scent of tobacco, the hooch swimming in my brain.
“I don’t understand why you’re here,” Elijah said.
“I don’t know why I’m here either,” I said, trying to cut him off, since I was worried about where he was headed with this. “Or any of us.”
“Don’t go getting all existential on me,” Elijah said. His eyes narrowed as he watched my face. “You surprised I know what that means? My certificate may have come in the mail but I studied philosophy. There are existential paradoxes even in the Bible. When God asks Abraham to kill his own son, Isaac, as a test of his faith? There is a teleological suspension of morality in that moment. God has asked him to do an act he knows is wrong, wicked, and personally harmful. But what would you do for God? Who or what would you sacrifice? Could you sacrifice a child? Who? You ever had to sacrifice anything in your life?”
I burped more hot air, the home brew turning to acid in my larynx. What kind of man has an affair with a married woman without giving a thought to the damage he might do to another? What good had I done in my meager, selfish life? By spreading the flyers on campus, I had only added more evil to the world. I couldn’t stay still because of the tension in the room. I tried to meet Elijah’s gaze and figure where he was heading with this. “That’s a terrible thing for God to ask,” I said, hoping to keep us on this subject.
Roland shifted in his seat. He looked impatient to return to the interrogation, if that’s what this was. He stretched one arm across the seat behind me, ready to hold me here.
“Isn’t it, though? There are a good many atheists who would agree with you, Meshach. Who cite that very passage as one reason they lost their faith. Who put themselves in the place of God. But to think that way also means reading the Bible without any sense of context or history. At the time God asks this of Abraham, the Israelites are surrounded by pagans who regularly practiced child sacrifice. The Amarites killed their own children on altars. You’ve heard the rule, show don’t tell? Every good storyteller knows it. Well, if God exists, it stands to reason he knows how to spin a good yarn. He wanted to make an example so that every generation going forward never practices such a sacrifice. He tells the story for the sake of the children. Isaac is spared by the appearance of a lamb.”
“I don’t know,” I said, my thinking wobbly from drink. The home brew sloshed in my brain and stomach like flaming lighter fluid and words slurred in my mouth. I thought of Maura’s nightmares that these trailers would bust loose from their log foundations and slide all the way down the steep hill into the river. The small enclosed room rocked like a ship in the morning wind. “Seems like He could’ve just told people, don’t kill your own kids and most would have gotten the point.”
Roland tensed, but Elijah smiled, warming to the game. Hope rose within me that I had distracted him from his original line of questioning. “Where is your sense of drama, Meshach?” he said. “Isaac is spared by the appearance of a lamb. Generations later, God will sacrifice his own son on the altar. For all our sins. Yours. Mine. The Lamb of God is another name for Christ. Are you beginning to see how showing it as a story invites the reader into it, makes us all part of one tapestry of faith? Because the wages of sin lead to death, and death is coming, and soon. I would not want to find myself on the wrong side of the path.”
Roland tapped out more ashes, his cigarette drawn down to the filter. The faintly chemical odor added to my nausea. “Meshach,” he said. “Such a curious name. Never met anyone with a name like that before.”
There were deep shadows under Elijah’s eyes. He knocked his ring finger against the table. Why did he still wear his wedding band, if he knew Maura wasn’t coming back? “I think I know who you are,” he said, in a voice that sounded bruised by betrayal and hurt. “But I don’t know why you’re here.”
“I think I’m going to puke,” I told them because I felt a hot wave bubbling up from my belly, an undeniable urge.
Roland sprang into action, one hand hooking me under my left armpit, my bad side, and propelling me up out of my seat. Instant agony flared within my wounded body, but I couldn’t scream because if I did I’d retch everywhere. I gritted my teeth and swallowed down burning bile. Roland shoved me from behind, urgent to get me out of his tidy trailer. I fumbled at the latch, desperate, when he reached around me, one hand looped around my belt as if he was going to carry me out of here like a child in a sling. Somehow, I made it out the door and spilled down the stairs, not bothering with my boots as I went around the side of the trailer and heaved up the liquor, a hot, noxious stream gushing from my guts. Waves of it left my body, my stomach squeezing, until I was emptied out.
I stood wavering, the cold biting my feet, my throat scorched. Both men had followed me out and now stood glaring at me, their eyes full of questions and doubts. Behind them, Mother Sophie had come out on her porch as if sensing the disturbance. Elijah fetched my boots and carried them over. He thrust them into my arms and marched me through the snow to my Continental.
“I’m sorry,” I said. It looked like Mother Sophie was headed this way, so Roland must have gone over to head her off.
“You shut your mouth,” he said. “I don’t want her to know.”
My hands were shaking as I tugged open the door of the Continental and climbed inside, setting my hiking boots on the floor. Elijah leaned in before I could close the door. I hunched into myself, expecting a fist that didn’t come. “I don’t think you should come around here anymore.” His voice was soft instead of angry, like he didn’t want Roland to overhear. “I don’t think it’s good for your health.”
After peeling off my wet socks and tugging on my boots, I didn’t start the car right away. I felt exhausted and emptied out, a man in desperate need of water, but there was nothing in the car, not even gum to take away the bitter taste in my mouth. My throat ached, but at least I had time to think as I drove home. I knew even before I looked in the rearview mirror that Roland would be following me in his truck.
I thought about driving straight to the airport in Duluth or the Cities and getting on board a flight to see my mom. Just get the hell out of here. How had things turned so suddenly? Elijah knew. He must have figured out who I was. Or had it been Roland? Maybe he had known all along or something else tipped him. But if he knew, then why had he let me go? One minute I was so deep in the inner circle I was standing at the firing range with them, and the next they were ready to nail me to one of the trees.
I decided I didn’t have anything to hide. Let them follow me home. The strangest part to me was how Elijah had sounded protective even as he was dismissing me. Like he was warning me away. We aren’t done yet, you and I, I thought, as I led Roland to the place I lived now with my ghostly priestess and a dying German shepherd. There was no way to save myself, no place of safety for me anywhere on earth. Yet, I still didn’t have the answers I needed. I wasn’t going to run. She was my wife, he’d said. What did you do to her? Or did you put such a scare into her that she ran away, disappearing for good? I hadn’t forgotten that scene from The Turner Diaries, a woman brutally strangled for betraying the cause. I couldn’t get it out of my head. I vowed they wouldn’t scare me away. Not yet. “I don’t want her to know,” Elijah had said of Mother Sophie, which made me wonder, what did the old woman know? I had to go back there, but first I needed a plan.