According to Ed Blake’s new information, Joe Magnus had only been in Vietnam a few months before some loose talk about fragging his lieutenant earned him a dishonorable discharge. Magnus’s racial fury took him to Montana, where a group of white survivalists were trying to make a community. They welcomed him as a hero because the lieutenant he’d threatened to kill had been African American. Magnus’s hatred of Asians and Jews was also righteous, so when Magnus heard that Royce had married a Vietnamese woman and named their baby after some old black woman, he learned Royce’s location in the Mendocino woods and drove down there to confront him.
Blake didn’t know what had transpired in the first meeting between the two men, or in a second one that took place soon afterward. What he did know was that within a few months Royce had moved his family eastward to Montana, to a village within thirty miles of Robert Mathews and the compound that housed the Silent Brotherhood. Royce soon developed connections with both Mathews and with William Luther Pierce, author of The Turner Diaries, a white supremacist novel still in print and considered a blueprint for the future by many racists. This book chronicles a white revolution occurring in the twenty-first century that begins in California and leads to the subjugation of the entire world by white men. All other races—and the Jews and homosexuals—are exterminated.
“Have you read it?” Blake asked.
“Years ago,” I said. “It’s sort of like the Story of O for racists.”
Showered and dressed and comfortable, we now were eating the promised porterhouse steaks, sitting in his kitchen on ladder-back chairs at his pine table, which he’d covered with a red-checked cloth. When I pointed at the tablecloth and then at the Tiffany-copy lamp made of plastic hanging over us he said, “Hey, it all came with the kit.” Between us was a companionship and ease I hadn’t felt with a man in a long time.
“There’s nothing better than western meat,” Blake said. “It’s one of the best reasons to live out here.”
“You know that sounds like Royce’s line of thinking? If you breed cattle and dogs for specific qualities, why not people? Haven’t you read his ‘position papers’?”
“I skimmed them. They’re in his file. And The Turner Diaries was required reading at the Academy.”
“Were they wanting you to join the white revolution or prevent it?”
He did not react well to that remark, just sat looking at me, his fork still in midair.
“Sorry,” I said.
In Royce’s first “position paper,” he renounced art as a deluded path and apologized for having written a counterrevolutionary novel; in the second, he described individual love as a form of impotence; and in the third, he wrote that “We must immediately begin to breed human beings for specific qualities.” The fourth was perhaps the most outrageous: “Anyone who understands Darwin knows that altruism is a form of weakness, and compassion must be overcome. The control of eugenics is our destiny.”
“Royce was always a seeker,” I told Blake. “I suppose we both were. When I visited him in Mendocino, he told me about this medieval religious group he admired because they had walked onto their own funeral pyre.”
“Your brother found that commendable?”
“It was this group called the Cathars. They were going to be exterminated by the Catholic Church. Royce admired them for their courage.”
“You and your brother are both so extreme.”
“Yes, I suppose so, but I’m not dangerous, just picturesque. But I believe my brother had a strong desire to die for something he believed in.”
“You’re suggesting that he and Robert Mathews might both have remained in the burning building to martyr themselves?”
“I don’t know what actually happened out there, but no matter which way you turn it, Royce killed Joe Magnus’s father, and that karma had to play itself out somewhere.”
“Karma? You really are a sixties person.”
“It’s just another term for ‘sins of the fathers.’”
This was a weird point to start smiling, but we were both filled with endorphins from the sex. “You and your brother,” Blake said. “What about ordinary reality? What about a perfectly rare steak?”
We were laughing now. “Royce should have gone to Vietnam with Joe Magnus and gotten himself killed. Then he wouldn’t be trying to make us complicit in his behavior.”
“We’re not complicit in his behavior, Ellen.”
I stopped laughing and laid my fork back onto the plate. “Then why do I feel responsible? Aren’t all white people somehow complicit? If only by doing nothing about people like him?”
He grasped the salt shaker in a way that made me realize he was trying not to touch my hand. “This is all very interesting, Ellen, but who do you think took the children, and where are they?”
“Has it occurred to you that Royce might have them? That would explain the sense that Ruby is hiding something. Because she would never admit to that. Jesus Christ, I hope that’s not what happened.”
“You think Ruby could have turned her children over to her father?”
“I think it’s possible. And if he’s still alive, Royce is capable of anything.” My gorge rose. “It doesn’t play. Because why would he leave Ruby behind?”
“You’re right, it doesn’t play. Stop this.”
I looked at my hands, made from the same human stream as Royce’s. “You’re a nice man, you know that?”
“Lots of people don’t think so.”
“Being with you is like seeing a car wreck on the road and knowing you’re going to plow into it.”
He reached over and touched my fingers. “Listen, I understand what you’re trying to tell me, Ellen. I see the ways you’re like your brother. But Royce Burns was—or still is—an evil person, and you’re not.”
“You believe in evil?”
“Of course, don’t you?”
“I don’t know yet.”
When I got back to my hotel room, the phone was already ringing. It was after 2:00 A.M., and I had given the switchboard instructions not to call my room under any circumstances except an emergency.
“Ellen, they found the children,” Blake said. “They’re both dead. There was another cave, a fully stocked area, and it does look like a white militia thing. The children had been shut up inside a refrigerator. No signs of suffering. They were gone when they went in, or at least unconscious.”
I tried to control my breathing. “So it’s possible Ruby has been telling the truth?”
“I don’t know. We’ll need more time to figure out what happened.”
“How can I help?”
“An FBI agent named Pete Peterson is on his way to pick you up right now. He’ll take you out to Loretta’s house while they break the news to the Redstones. I want you to be there with them, not only for Ruby’s comfort but also to give me your sense of their reaction.”
“I hope a doctor is coming with us.”
“Yes, Pete’s picking him up first.”
“And you’re going straight back to the site?”
“I’m still here.”
“Thank you for including me in all this, Blake. I mean it.”
My brother would have considered it weakness, my grief for children I had never even met.
After we arrived at Loretta’s house and Pete Peterson gave Ruby and Lightman the news about their children’s deaths, Lightman had to be forcibly restrained and sedated. Ruby remained shrunken and ashen on the sofa, silent with what seemed like shock. She kept murmuring, “I knew they were safe with God, I knew they were safe with God.”
I sat with Ruby all night while the house filled with friends and neighbors, and press vans and police cars began lighting up the street like a carnival. Ruby’s lips kept moving, but she no longer formed discernible words. After a while she pushed Lightman away from her and fell asleep, leaning close against me on the sofa. She was still sleeping this way when, soon after dawn, several FBI agents arrived to arrest her. Her fingerprints had been found all over the door of the refrigerator.