I’M STANDING IN THE MIDDLE of the nursery my son is never going to use.
My fists are like two anvils at my sides; I want to swing them. I want to punch holes in the plaster. I want the whole fucking room to come tumbling down.
Suddenly there is a firm hand on my shoulder. “You ready?”
Francis Mitchum—my father-in-law—stands behind me.
This is his duplex—Brit and I live on one side, and he lives on the other. Francis crosses the room and yanks down the Peter Rabbit curtains. Then he pours paint into a little tray and begins to roll the walls white again, washing away the pale yellow that Brit and I brushed onto the walls less than a month ago. The first coat doesn’t quite cover the paint beneath, so the color peeks through, like something trapped under ice. With a deep breath I lie down under the crib. I lift the Allen wrench and begin to loosen the bolts that I had so carefully tightened, because I didn’t want to be the reason anything bad happened to my son.
Who knew there didn’t have to be a reason?
I left Brit sleeping off a sedative, which was an improvement over the way she was this morning at the hospital. I’d thought nothing could be worse than the crying that wouldn’t stop, the sound of her breaking into pieces. But then, at about 4:00 A.M., all of that stopped. Brit didn’t make a sound. She just stared, blank, at the wall. She wouldn’t answer when I called her name; she wouldn’t even look at me. The doctors gave her medicine to make her sleep. Sleep, they told me, was the best way for a body to heal.
Me, I hadn’t slept, not a wink. But I knew it wasn’t sleep that was going to make me feel better. That was going to take some wilding, a moment of destruction. I needed to pound out the pain inside me, give it a home someplace else.
With one last turn of the wrench, the crib collapses, the heavy mattress landing on my chest. Francis turns at the sound of the crash. “You all right there?”
“Yeah,” I say, the wind knocked out of me. It hurts, but this is a kind of hurt I understand. I’ll have a bruise; it will fade. I slide myself out from the tangle of wood and kick at it with my boot. “Probably a piece of crap anyway.”
Francis frowns. “What are you going to do with it?”
I can’t keep it. I know that Brit and I might have another baby one day, if we’re lucky, but putting this crib back into a nursery would be like making our new child sleep with a ghost.
When I don’t answer, Francis wipes his hands clean with a rag and begins to gather up the pieces of wood. “The Aryan Women’s League will take it,” he says. Brit had gone to a few of their meetings. They were a bunch of former skinchicks who went to WIC with fake IDs and got baby formula for free, bilking the system to bring formula to women whose men were serving time for fighting for the cause.
Francis isn’t much to look at now. He runs the drywall crew I work for, has a decent rating on Angie’s List, and votes Tea Party. (Old skinheads don’t die. They used to join the KKK, but now they join the Tea Party. Don’t believe me? Go listen to an old Klan speaker and compare it to a speech by a Tea Party Patriot. Instead of saying Jew, they now say Federal government. Instead of saying Fags, they say Social ilk of our country. Instead of saying Nigger, they say Welfare.) But in the eighties and nineties, he was a legend. His White Alliance Army had as much clout as Tom Metzger’s White Aryan Resistance, Matt Hale’s World Church of the Creator, William Luther Pierce’s National Alliance, and Richard Butler’s Aryan Nations. Back then he was raising Brit on his own, and his terror squad would roam the streets of New Haven with tack hammers, broken hockey sticks, blackjacks, lead pipes—beating up niggers and faggots and Jews while Brit, still a baby, napped in the car.
But when things began to change in the mid-nineties—when the government cracked down on skinhead crews—leaders like Francis found themselves strung up by their own brass balls, headed to prison. Francis understood that if you don’t want to break, you have to bend. He was the guy who changed the structure of the White Power Movement from an organization to small cells of friends with common political leanings. He told us to grow our hair out. To go to college. To join the military. To blend in. With my help, he created and ran a website and message board. We aren’t crews anymore, he’d tell me over and over. We are pockets of discontent within the system.
And as it turned out, it was even more terrifying to people to know we walked and lived among them unseen.
I think about the Aryan Women’s League taking the crib. The changing table that I got at a garage sale and sanded down. The baby clothes that Brit picked through at Goodwill, that are folded up in the dresser. The baby powder and shampoo and bottles. I think about some other baby, some live baby, using it.
I stand up so fast I get dizzy, and find myself staring into a mirror with little balloons painted on its frame. I’d come home from work to find Brit at the table with a brush in her hand, and I teased her about becoming Martha Stewart. She said the only thing she had in common with Martha Stewart was a record, but she was laughing. She painted a balloon on my cheek and then I kissed her, and for that one moment, holding her in my arms with the unborn baby balanced between us, everything was perfect.
Now my eyes are ringed with dark circles; my beard’s started to grow in; my hair is matted. I look like I’m on the run from something.
“Fuck this,” I whisper, and I slam out of the nursery into the bathroom.
There, I find my electric razor. I plug it in and in one clean swoop mow a clear trail down the center of my head. I buzz each side, letting tufts of hair fall on my shoulders and into the sink. Like magic, as the hair falls away, a picture is revealed right on the crown of my head, just above the hairline: a thick black swastika, with my initials and Brit’s forming its knotted center.
I’d gotten it when she said yes, she’d marry me.
I had been twenty-one, and pretty shitfaced at the time.
When I came to show Brit this testament to my love, she didn’t even have a chance to comment before Francis walked up and smacked me hard on the back of the head. “Are you as stupid as you look?” he asked. “What part of undercover don’t you understand?”
“It’s my secret,” I told him, and I smiled at Brit. “Our secret. When my hair grows in no one will know it’s there, but us.”
“And what if you go bald?” Francis asked.
He could tell, from the expression on my face, that I hadn’t thought about that.
Francis didn’t let me out of his house for the next two weeks, until all you could see was a dark shadow under my buzz cut that sort of looked like mange.
Now, I take a straightedge and some shaving cream and finish the job. I run my hand over my smooth head. It feels lighter. I notice the movement of air behind my ears.
I walk back into the nursery, which isn’t a nursery anymore. The crib is gone, and the rest of the furniture is stacked in the hall. Everything else is in boxes, thanks to Francis. Before Brit is discharged this afternoon, I will haul back in a bed frame and a nightstand, and she will see it as the guest room it was a few months ago.
I stare at Francis, daring him to challenge me. His eyes trace the lines of my tattoo, like he is feeling for a scar. “I get it, boy,” he says softly. “You’re going to war.”
THERE’S NOTHING WORSE than leaving a hospital without the baby you went in to have. Brit’s in the wheelchair (hospital protocol) being driven by an orderly (more hospital protocol). I have been relegated to bringing up the rear, a stocking cap pulled low on my forehead. Brit keeps her eyes on her hands, folded in her lap. Is it just me, or is everyone staring at us? Are they wondering what’s the medical issue with the woman who doesn’t have a bald head or a cast or anything else visibly wrong?
Francis has already pulled the SUV up to the horseshoe driveway of the hospital. A security guard opens the back door as I help Brit out of the chair. I’m surprised by how light she feels, and I wonder if she will just float away from me once her hands stop gripping the arms of the wheelchair.
For a moment, pure panic crosses over her face. I realize she’s recoiling from the dark cave of the backseat, as if there might be a monster hiding inside.
Or a car seat.
I slide my arm around her waist. “Baby,” I whisper. “It’s okay.”
Her spine stiffens, and she steels herself before ducking into the car. When she realizes that she is not sitting next to an empty baby carrier, every muscle relaxes, and Brit leans back against the seat with her eyes closed.
I slip into the front seat. Francis catches my eye and raises his brows. “How are you feeling, ladybug?” he asks, using the term of endearment he used to call her as a child.
She doesn’t answer. Just shakes her head, as one fat tear snakes down her cheek.
Francis revs the engine and peels out of the hospital driveway, as if he could outrun everything that happened there.
Somewhere, in a freezer in the basement, is my child. Or maybe by now he’s gone, carved open like a Thanksgiving turkey on the coroner’s table.
I could tell him what happened. I could tell him the Horrible Thing I see every time I close my eyes: that black bitch beating on my son’s chest.
She was alone with Davis. I overheard the other nurses talking about it, in the hallway. She was alone, when she wasn’t supposed to be. Who knows what happened, when no one was looking?
I glance back at Brit. When I look in her eyes, they’re empty.
What if the worst thing isn’t that I’ve lost my child? What if it’s that I’ve also lost my wife?
AFTER HIGH SCHOOL, I moved to Hartford and got a job at Colt’s Manufacturing. I took a few classes at the community college there, but the liberal shit those professors dished out made me so sick I quit. I didn’t stop hanging around the college, though. My first recruit was a skateboarder, a skinny kid with long hair who cut in front of a black dude in line at the student café. The nigger shoved him, and Yorkey shoved him back and said, “If you hate it here so much, go back to Africa.” The food fight that ensued was epic, and it ended with me reaching out a hand to Yorkey and pulling him from the fray. “You know,” I told him as we stood outside smoking, “you don’t have to be the victim.”
Then I handed him a copy of The Final Call, the Nation of Islam newsletter that I’d planted on bulletin boards all over the campus. “You see this?” I said, starting to walk, knowing he’d follow. “You want to tell me why no one’s marching into the black student union and arresting them for hate speech? For that matter, how come there’s not a White student union?”
Yorkey snorted. “Because,” he said, “that would be discrimination.”
I looked at him as if he was Einstein. “Exactly.”
After that, it was easy. We’d find the kids who were bullied by jocks and interfere, so that they knew they had protectors. We invited them to hang out with us after classes, and as we drove, I’d plug in a playlist of Skrewdriver, No Remorse, Berzerker, Centurion. White Power bands that sounded like a demon growling, that made you want to mess with the world.
I made them believe they had worth, simply because of the color they were born. When they complained about anything on campus, from the registration process to the food, I reminded them that the president of the school was a Jew, and that it was all part of a bigger plan by the Zionist Occupation Government to suppress us. I taught them “Us” meant “White.”
I took their weed and molly and tossed it in the dumpster, because addicts snitched. I made them over in my image. “I’ve got a great pair of Doc Martens,” I told Yorkey. “They’re just your size. But there’s no way I’m passing them on to a guy with greasy hair in a man bun.” The next day, he showed up with his hair neatly trimmed, his scruff shaved. Before long, I’d created my own wilding squad: the newly minted Hartford division of NADS.
I wager I taught the students at that school more than any hotshot professor. I showed them the elemental differences between the races. I proved that if you’re not the predator, you’re the prey.
I WAKE IN a pool of sweat, fighting my way out of a bad dream. Immediately, I feel across the covers for Brit, but there’s no one there.
I swing my legs over the side of the bed and start moving, fighting through the dark like it’s a crowd. I might as well be sleepwalking, the way I’m drawn to the room that Francis and I worked so hard to repaint before Brit was released from the hospital.
She is standing in the doorway, her hands bracing her, like she needs help staying upright. The moon’s coming through the window, so she’s trapped in her own shadow. As my eyes adjust to the night, I try to see what she sees: the old armchair with a doily over its top; the iron frame of the twin guest bed. The walls, white again. I can still smell the fresh paint.
I clear my throat. “We thought it would help,” I say, my voice small.
She pivots, but only halfway, so that for a second it looks like she’s made out of light. “What if it never happened?” Brit whispers. “What if it was just a nightmare?”
She’s wearing one of my flannel shirts—that’s what she likes to sleep in—and her hands are splayed over her belly.
“Brit,” I say, taking a step toward her.
“What if no one remembers him?”
I pull her into my arms, feel the hot circle of her breath on my chest. It’s like fire. “Baby,” I vow, “I’m not going to let anyone forget.”
I HAVE ONE suit. Actually, Francis and I have one suit that we share. There’s just not much of a need for fancy clothing when you work drywall during the day and run a White Power website at night. But the next afternoon, I put on the suit—black, pinstripes, the kind of thing I imagine Al Capone would have looked really sharp in—and a white shirt and a tie, and Brit and I drive back to the hospital to meet with Carla Luongo, the lawyer in Risk Management who has agreed to see us.
But when I come out of the bathroom freshly shaved, the tattoo on the back of my head stark and unmistakable, I am surprised to find Brit curled on the bed in my flannel shirt and sweatpants. “Baby,” I say. “We have a meeting with the lawyer, remember?” I’ve told her this a half hour ago. There’s no way she forgot.
Her eyes roll toward me like they are ball bearings, loose in her head. Her tongue pushes words around her mouth like they’re food. “Don’t…wanna…go…back.”
She turns away from me, pulling up the covers, and that’s when I see the bottle on the nightstand: the sleeping pills that the doctor gave her to help her transition. I take a deep breath and then haul my wife upright. She feels like a sandbag, heavy and immobile. Shower, I think, but that would require me to get in with her, and we don’t have time. Instead, I take the glass of water on the bedside table and throw it in her face. She sputters, but it gets her to sit up on her own. I pull off her pajamas and grab the first things I can find in her drawer that look decent—a pair of black pants and a sweater that buttons up the front. As I am dressing her, I have a sudden flash of myself doing this same thing to my baby, and I wind up yanking so hard on Brit’s arm that she yelps and I kiss her on the wrist. “Sorry, baby,” I murmur, and more gently, I pull a comb through her hair and do my best to bunch it together into a ponytail. I stuff her feet into a pair of little black shoes that might actually be bedroom slippers and then haul her into my arms, and out to the car.
By the time we reach the hospital, she is near catatonic. “Just stay awake,” I beg her, anchoring her to my side as we walk in. “For Davis.”
Maybe that gets through to her, because as we are ushered into the lawyer’s office, her eyes open a fraction wider.
Carla Luongo is a spic, just like I guessed from her name. She sits down on a chair and offers us a couch. I watch her nearly swallow her tongue when I take off my wool hat. Good. Let her know who she’s dealing with, right up front.
Brit leans against me. “My wife,” I explain, “is still not feeling well.”
The lawyer nods sympathetically. “Mr. and Mrs. Bauer, let me first just say how sorry I am for your loss.”
I don’t respond.
“I’m sure you have questions,” she says.
I lean forward. “I don’t have questions. I know what happened. That black nurse killed my son. I saw her with my own eyes, beating at his chest. I told her supervisor I didn’t want her touching my baby, and what happened? My worst fear came true.”
“I’m sure you realize that Ms. Jefferson was only doing her job…”
“Oh, yeah? Was it also her job to go against what her boss ordered? It was all in Davis’s file.”
The lawyer stands so that she can grab a file on her desk. It’s got the little colored confetti of stickers on the side that is some secret code, I imagine. She opens it, and even from here I can see the Post-it note. Her nostrils flare, but she doesn’t comment.
“That nurse wasn’t supposed to be taking care of my son,” I say, “and she was left alone with him.”
Carla Luongo looks at me. “How do you know that, Mr. Bauer?”
“Because your staff can’t keep their voices down. I heard her say she was covering for the other nurse. The day before, she was screaming her head off, just because I made a request to take her off my son’s case. And what happened? She was pounding on my baby. I watched her,” I say, tears springing to my eyes. I wipe them away, feeling foolish, feeling weak. “You know what? Fuck this. I’m going to take this hospital to the bank. You killed my son; you’re going to pay for it.”
Honestly, I have no idea how the legal system works; I’ve done my best to stay away from getting caught by the cops. But I’ve watched enough TV infomercials to believe that if you can get cash in a class-action lawsuit for having some lung disease brought about by asbestos, you most certainly have a bone to pick if your baby dies when he’s supposed to be receiving choice medical care.
I grab my suit jacket in one fist and half-drag Brit to the office door. I’ve just managed to open it when I hear the lawyer’s voice behind me. “Mr. Bauer,” she asks. “Why would you sue the hospital?”
“You’re kidding, right?”
She takes a step forward, gently but firmly closing the door of her office again. “Why would you sue the hospital,” she repeats, “when everything suggests that Ruth Jefferson was the individual who killed your baby?”
ABOUT A YEAR into my running the Hartford NADS crew, we had a steady income. I was able to lift guns from Colt’s by forging inventory, and then sell them on the street. Mostly, we sold to blacks, because they were just going to kill each other with them anyway, and also because they paid three times more for a weapon than the Italians would. Yorkey and I ran the operation, and one night we were on our way home from a deal when a cop car pulled up behind me, its lights flashing.
Yorkey nearly shit a brick. “Fuck, man. What do we do?”
“We pull over,” I told him. It wasn’t like we had the stolen gun in the car anymore. As far as the police were concerned, Yorkey and I were headed back from a party at a buddy’s apartment. But when the cops asked us to step out of the car, Yorkey was sweating like a coal miner. He looked like he was guilty as sin, which is probably why the police searched the car. I waited, because I knew I had nothing to hide.
Apparently, Yorkey couldn’t say the same thing. That gun hadn’t been the only deal going down that night. While I was negotiating, Yorkey had bought himself an eight ball of meth.
But because it was in my glove compartment, I went down for it.
The thing about doing time is that it was a world I understood, where everyone was separated by race. My sentence for possession was six months, and I planned to spend every minute planning my revenge. Yorkey had used before he became part of NADS; it was part of the skater culture. But my squad, they didn’t touch drugs. And they sure as hell didn’t squirrel them away in my glove compartment.
In prison, the black gangs have everyone outnumbered, so sometimes the Latinos and the White gangs will band together. But in jail, you just basically try to keep your head straight and keep out of trouble. I knew that if there was anyone in the White Power Movement who happened to be in doing time, they would find me sooner or later—but I was hoping that the niggers wouldn’t find me first.
I took to keeping my nose buried in a Bible. I needed God in my life, because I had a public defender, and when you have a public defender, you’d better hope that God’s on your side, too. But I wasn’t reading the parts of Scripture I’d read before, when I was learning the doctrines of Christian Identity theology. Instead, I found myself dog-earing the pages about suffering, and salvation, and hope. I fasted, because I read something about it in the Bible. And during my fast God told me to surround myself with other people like me.
So the next day, I showed up at the jail Bible study group.
I was the only guy there who wasn’t black.
At first we just stared at each other. Then, the dude running the meeting jerked his chin at a kid who couldn’t have been much older than me, and he made a space next to himself. We all held hands, and when I held his, it was soft, like my father’s hands used to be. I have no idea why that popped into my head, but that’s what I was thinking when they started to say the Lord’s Prayer, and then suddenly I was saying it along with them.
I went to Bible study every day. When we finished reading Scripture, we’d say Amen, and then Big Ike, who ran the group, would ask, “Who’s got court tomorrow?” Usually, someone would say they had a preliminary hearing or that the arresting officer was testifying or something like that, and Big Ike would say, “All right, then, let’s pray that the officer don’t throw you under no bus,” and he’d find a passage in the Bible about redemption.
Twinkie was the black kid who was my age. We talked a lot about girls, and how we missed hooking up with them. But believe it or not, we talked more about the food we craved on the outside. Me, I would have committed a felony for Taco Bell; Twinkie only wanted Chef Boyardee. Somehow, it didn’t matter so much what color his skin was. Had I met him on the streets of Hartford, I would have kicked his ass. But in jail, it was different. We’d team up when we played Spades, cheating with hand signals and eye rolls that we made up in private, because no one expected the White Power guy and the black kid to be working together.
One day, I was sitting in the common room with a bunch of White guys when a gang shooting came in on the midday news. The anchor on the TV was talking about how the bullets sprayed, how many people had been hit by accident. “That’s why if we ever go at it with the gangs,” I said, “we win. They don’t go target shooting like us. They don’t know how to hold weapons, look at that death grip. Typical nigger bullshit.”
Twink wasn’t sitting with us, but I could see him across the room. His eyes sort of skated over me, and then back to whatever he was doing. Later that day, we were playing cards for cigarettes, and I gave him a sign to come back in diamonds, because I was cutting diamond spades. Instead, he threw clubs, and we lost. As we were walking out of the common room, I turned on him. “What the hell, dude? I gave you a sign.”
He looked right at me. “Guess it’s just typical nigger bullshit,” he said.
I thought: Shit, I hurt his feelings. Then: So what?
It’s not like I stopped using that word. But I’ll admit, sometimes when I said it, it stuck in my throat like a fish bone before I could cough it free.
FRANCIS FINDS ME just as I put my boot through the front window of our duplex, pushing out the old casing so that it explodes onto the porch in a rain of splinters and glass. He folds his arms, raises a brow.
“Sill’s rotted out,” I explain. “And I didn’t have a pry bar.”
With a gaping hole in the wall, the cold air rushes into the house. It feels good, because I’m on fire.
“So this has nothing to do with your meeting,” Francis says, in a way that suggests it has everything to do with the last half hour I’ve spent at the local police department. It was my next stop after the hospital. I’d dropped off Brit, who crawled back into bed, and drove straight there.
My meeting, really, was not even a meeting. Just me sitting across from a fat cop named MacDougall who filed my complaint against Ruth Jefferson. “He said he’d do a little research,” I mutter. “Which means I’ll never hear from him again.”
“What did you tell him?”
“That that bitch killed my baby.”
MacDougall didn’t know anything about my son, or what had happened at the hospital, so I had to tell the whole sorry story over again. MacDougall asked me what I wanted from him, as if it wasn’t evident.
“I want to bury my son,” I told him. “And I want her to pay for what she did.”
The cop asked if, maybe, I was just overcome with grief. If I had misinterpreted what I saw. “She wasn’t just doing CPR,” I told MacDougall. “She was hurting my baby. Even one of the other doctors told her to lighten up.”
I said she had it in for me. Immediately the cop glanced at my tattoos. “No kidding,” he said.
“It’s a fucking hate crime, that’s what it is,” I tell Francis now. “But God forbid anyone stand up for the Anglos, even though we’re a minority now.”
My father-in-law falls into place beside me, ripping a piece of flashing out of the window cavity with his bare hands. “You’re preaching to the choir, Turk,” he says.
Francis may not have talked publicly about White Power in years, but I happen to know that in a locked storage facility three miles away from here, he is stockpiling weapons for the racial holy war. “I hope you’re planning on sealing this up,” he says, and I pretend he isn’t talking about the window.
Just then my cellphone rings. I fish it out of my pocket but don’t recognize the number on the screen. “Hello?”
“Mr. Bauer? This is Sergeant MacDougall. I spoke with you earlier today?”
I curl my hand around the phone and turn away, forging a wall of privacy with my back.
“I wanted to let you know that I had a chance to talk to Risk Management at the hospital, as well as to the medical examiner. Carla Luongo corroborated your story. The ME was able to tell me that your son died due to hypoglycemic seizure, which led to respiratory and then cardiac arrest.”
“So what does that mean?”
“Well,” he says, “the death certificate’s been released to the hospital. You can bury your son.”
I close my eyes, and for a moment, I can’t even find a response.
“Okay,” I manage.
“There’s one more thing, Mr. Bauer,” MacDougall adds. “The medical examiner confirmed that there was bruising on your son’s rib cage.”
My whole future hinges on the breath between that sentence and his next.
“There’s evidence that Ruth Jefferson may have been at fault in the death of your son. And that it could have been a racially motivated incident,” MacDougall says. “I’m putting in a call to the district attorney’s office.”
“Thank you,” I say gruffly, and I hang up the phone. Then my knees give out, and I land heavily in front of the damaged sill. I can feel Francis’s hand on my shoulder. Even though there’s no barrier between me and the outside, I struggle to breathe.
“I’m sorry, Turk,” Francis says, misinterpreting my response.
“Don’t be.” I pull myself up and run to the dark bedroom where Brit is hibernating beneath a mound of covers. I throw open the curtains and let the sun flood the room. I watch her roll over, wincing, squinting, and I take her hand.
I can’t give her our baby. But I can give her the next best thing.
Justice.
WHILE I HAD been plotting my revenge against Yorkey during my six months in jail, he had been busy, too. He’d allied himself with a group of bikers called the Pagans. They were hulking thugs who were, I assumed, somehow involved with meth, like him. And they were more than delighted to have his back, if it meant they could take down the leader of the Hartford NADS. Street cred like that went a long way.
I spent my first day out of jail trying to round up the old members of my crew, but they all knew what was about to go down, and they all had an excuse. “I gave up everything for you,” I said, when I had exhausted even the freshest cut in the squad. “And this is how you repay me?”
But the last thing I was going to do was let anyone think going to jail had dulled my edges. So that night, I went to the pizza place that used to be the unofficial headquarters of my crew, and waited until I heard the growl of a dozen bikes pull up. I threw down my jacket, cracked my knuckles, and walked out to the alley behind the restaurant.
Yorkey, the son of a bitch, was hiding behind a wall of muscle. Seriously, the smallest Pagan was about six-five and three hundred pounds.
I may have been smaller, but I was fast. And none of those guys had grown up ducking from my grandfather’s fists.
I wish I could tell you what happened that night, but all I have to go on is what I’ve heard from others. How I ran like a freaking berserker at the biggest guy, and revved up my arm so that my punch caught him square in the mouth and knocked out his entire front row of teeth. How I lifted one dude off his feet and sent him like a cannonball into the others. How I kicked a biker so hard in his kidney he allegedly pissed red for a month. How blood ran in the alley like rain on pavement.
All I know is I had nothing left to lose but my reputation, and that’s enough ammunition to power a war. I don’t remember any of it, except waking up the next morning in the pizza joint, with a bag of ice on my broken hand and one eye swollen shut.
I don’t remember any of it, but word spread. I don’t remember any of it, but once again, I was the stuff of legend.
ON THE DAY I bury my son, the sun is shining. The wind’s coming from the west, and it has teeth. I stand in front of the tiny hole in the ground.
I don’t know who organized this whole funeral. Someone had to call to get a plot, to let people know there would be a service. I assume it was Francis, who now stands at the front of the casket, reading a verse from Scripture: “ ‘For this child I prayed, and the Lord hath given me my petition which I asked of him,’ ” Francis recites. “ ‘Therefore also I have lent him to the Lord; as long as he liveth he shall be lent to the Lord. And he worshiped the Lord there.’ ”
There are guys from the drywall crew here, and some of Brit’s friends in the Movement. But there are also people I don’t know, who have come to pay their respects to Francis. One of them is Tom Metzger, the man who founded the White Aryan Resistance. He’s seventy-eight now, a loner like Francis.
When Brit starts sobbing during the reading of the psalm, I reach out to her, but she pulls away. Instead, she turns to Metzger, who she called Uncle Tommy when she was growing up. He puts an arm around her, and I try not to feel the absence of her as a slap.
I’ve heard plenty of platitudes today: He’s in a better place; he’s a fallen soldier; time heals all wounds. What no one told me about grief is how lonely it is. No matter who else is mourning, you’re in your own little cell. Even when people try to comfort you, you’re aware that now there is a barrier between you and them, made of the horrible thing that happened, that keeps you isolated. I had thought that, at the very least, Brit and I would hurt together, but she can barely stand to look at me. I wonder if it’s for the same reason I have avoided her: because I look at her eyes and I see them in Davis’s face; because I notice the dimple in her chin and think that my son had it, too. She—who used to be everything I ever wanted—is a constant memory now of everything I’ve lost.
I focus my attention on the casket being lowered into the ground. I keep my eyes extra wide, because if I do that, the tears won’t spill over, and I won’t look like a pussy.
I start making a list in my head, of all the things I will never get to do with my son: see him smile for the first time. Celebrate his first Christmas. Get him a BB gun. Give him advice to ask a girl out. Milestones. But the road of parenthood, for me, has been wiped clean of landmarks.
Suddenly Francis is standing in front of me with the shovel. I swallow hard, take it, and become the first person to start to bury my child. After pushing a scoop of dirt into the rip in the ground, I jam the shovel into the earth again. Tom Metzger helps Brit lift it, her hands shaking, and do her part.
I know I’m supposed to stand vigil while everyone else here helps to put Davis underground. But I’m too busy fighting the urge to dive into that tiny pit. To shovel the dirt out with my bare hands. To lift the casket, to pry it open, to save my baby. I’m holding myself in check so hard that my body is vibrating with the effort.
And then, something happens that diffuses all that tension, that twists the escape valve so that the steam inside me disappears. Brit’s hand slips into mine. Her eyes are still vacant with drugs and pain; her body is angled away from me, but she definitely reached out. She definitely needed me.
For the first time in a week, I start to think that, maybe, we will survive.
WHEN FRANCIS MITCHUM summons you, you go.
In the aftermath of my rout of the Pagans, I received a handwritten note from Francis, telling me that he’d heard the rumors, and wanted to see if they were true. He invited me to meet him the following Saturday in New Haven, and included an address. I was a little surprised to drive there and find it smack in the middle of a subdivision, but I assumed it was a gathering of his squad when I saw all the cars parked out front. When I rang the doorbell, no one answered, but I could hear activity in the backyard, so I edged around the side of the house and let myself in through the unlocked fence.
Almost immediately, I was run down by a swarm of kids. They were probably about five years old, not that I had too much experience with humans of that size. They were racing toward a woman who was holding a baseball bat, trying to direct the unruly group into some form of a line. “It’s my birthday,” one little boy said. “So I get to go first!” He grabbed for the bat and began to swing it at a piñata: a papier-mâché nigger hanging from a noose.
Well, at least I knew I was in the right place.
I turned in the other direction, and came face-to-face with a girl who was holding stars in her hands. She had long curly hair, and her eyes were the palest shade of blue I’d ever seen.
I’d been hit a hundred times before, but never like that. I couldn’t remember the word hello.
“Well,” she said, “you’re a little old for games, but you can have a turn if you want.”
I just stared at her, confused, until I realized that she was referring to the hook-nosed profile poster taped up on the side of the house. I wanted to play, yes, but Pin the Star on the Jew wasn’t what I had in mind.
“I’m looking for Francis Mitchum,” I said. “He asked me to meet him here?”
She looked at me, her eyes narrowing. “You must be Turk,” she said. “He’s expecting you.” She turned on her heel and walked into the house with the easy grace of someone who is used to having people follow in her wake.
We passed a few women in the kitchen, who were bouncing from fridge to cabinets and back like popcorn kernels on a hot griddle, exploding one at a time with commands: Get the plates! Don’t forget the ice cream! There were more kids inside, but they were older—preteen, I was guessing, because they reminded me of me not that long ago—held in thrall by the man who stood in front of them. Francis Mitchum was shorter than I remembered, but then, I’d last seen him on a podium. His silver hair was lush and swept back from his face, and he was lecturing on Christian Identity theology. “The snake,” he explained, “has sex with Eve.” The kids looked around at each other when he said the word sex, as if hearing it spoken out loud so casually was their welcome into the sanctum of adulthood. “Why else would God say she couldn’t eat an apple? They’re in a garden, for Pete’s sake. The apple is a symbol, and the downfall of man is getting laid. The Devil comes to Eve in the form of a snake, and she’s tricked into messing around, and she gets pregnant. But then she goes back to Adam and tricks him into having sex. She has Cain, who’s born with the mark of the Devil on him—a 666, a Star of David. That’s right, Cain is the first Jew. But she also gives birth to Abel, who’s Adam’s kid. And Cain kills Abel because he’s jealous, and he’s the seed of Satan.”
“You believe in this bullshit?” asked the beautiful girl beside me. Her voice was as even as a seam. It felt like a trick.
Some White Power folks were Christian Identity followers, and some weren’t. Raine was. Francis was. I was. We believed that we were the real House of Israel, God’s chosen ones. The Jews were impostors, and would be wiped out during the race war.
I grinned. “When I was about their age, I was starving and I stole a hot dog at a gas station. I didn’t care so much about stealing, but for two weeks I was convinced God was going to smite me for eating pork.”
When she met my gaze, it felt like the space between the moment you turned on a stove’s pilot light, and the moment it was blue and burning. It felt like the possibility of an explosion.
“Daddy,” she announced. “Your guest is here.”
Daddy?
Francis Mitchum glanced at me, turning his attention away from the clot of preteens he’d been talking to, who were staring at me, too.
He stepped over the tangle of adolescent limbs and clapped me on the shoulder. “Turk Bauer. It’s good of you to come.”
“It’s an honor to be asked,” I replied.
“I see you’ve already met Brittany,” Francis said.
Brittany. “Not officially.” I held out my hand. “Hi.”
“Hi,” Brit repeated, laughing. She held on a moment too long, but not enough for anyone to notice.
Except Mitchum, who—I assumed—did not miss much. “Walk with me a bit?” he said, and I fell into step beside him as we returned to the backyard.
We chatted about the weather (late start to spring this year) and the drive from Hartford to New Haven (too much construction on I-91S). When we reached a corner of the yard, near an apple tree, Mitchum sat down on a lawn chair and gestured for me to do the same. From here, we had a bird’s-eye view of the piñata game. The birthday boy was up to bat again, but so far, no candy had been spilled. “That’s my godson,” Mitchum said.
“I was wondering why I got invited to a kids’ party.”
“I like talking to the next generation,” he admitted. “Makes me still feel relevant.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that, sir. I’d say you’re still pretty relevant.”
“Now, you,” Mitchum said. “You’ve made quite a name for yourself lately.”
I just nodded. I wasn’t sure why Francis Mitchum had wanted to meet me.
“I hear your brother was killed by a nigger,” he said. “And your father’s a flamer—”
My head swung up, cheeks hot. “He’s not my father anymore.”
“Take it easy, boy. None of us can pick our parents. It’s what we choose to make of them that’s important.” He looked at me. “When was the last time you saw him?”
“When I was beating him unconscious.”
Again, I felt like I was being given a quiz, and I must have answered correctly, because Mitchum kept talking. “You’ve started your own crew, and by many accounts, you’re the best recruiter on the East Coast. You took the rap for your second in command, and then taught him a lesson as soon as you got out of jail.”
“Just doing what needed to be done.”
“Well,” Mitchum answered, “there aren’t too many like you, nowadays. I thought honor was a commodity that was going extinct.”
Just then, one of the other little boys snapped the neck off the piñata, and the candy cascaded onto the grass. The kids fell on it, grabbing up sweets in their fists.
The birthday boy’s mother came out of the kitchen carrying a platter of cupcakes. “Happy birthday to you,” she started to sing, and the children crowded around the picnic table.
Brittany stepped out onto the porch. Her fingers were blue with icing.
“Back when I was running a squad,” Mitchum said, “no one in the Movement would have been caught dead being a junkie. Now, for the love of God, Aryan boys are teaming up with redskins on reservations to make meth somewhere the feds can’t intervene.”
Happy birthday to you!
“They’re not teaming up,” I told Mitchum. “They’re banding together against common enemies: the Mexicans and the blacks. I’m not defending what they’re doing, but I understand why they might be unlikely allies.”
Happy birthday, dear Jackson!
Mitchum narrowed his gaze. “Unlikely allies,” he repeated. “For example, an old guy with experience…and a young guy with the biggest balls I’ve ever seen. A man who knows the former generation of Anglos, and one who could lead the next. A fellow who grew up on the streets…and one who grew up with technology. Why, that could be quite a pairing.”
Happy birthday to you!
Across the yard, Brit caught my eye and blushed.
“I’m listening,” I said.
AFTER THE FUNERAL, everyone comes back to the house. There are casseroles and pies and platters, none of which I eat. People keep telling me they’re sorry for our loss, as if they had something to do with it. Francis and Tom sit outside on the porch, which still has some shards of glass on it from my window project, and drink the bottle of whiskey Tom’s brought.
Brit sits on a couch like the middle of a flower, surrounded by the petals of her friends. When someone she doesn’t know well comes too near, they close around her. Eventually, they leave, saying things like Call me if you need me and Every day it’ll get a little easier. In other words: lies.
I am just walking the last guest out when a car pulls up. The door opens, and MacDougall, the cop who took my complaint, gets out. He walks up the steps to where I am standing, his hands in his pockets. “I don’t have any information for you yet,” he says bluntly. “I came to pay my respects.”
I feel Brit come up behind me like a shadow. “Babe, this is the officer who’s going to help us.”
“When?” she asks.
“Well, ma’am, investigations into these things take time…”
“These things,” Brit repeats. “These things.” She shoves past me, so that she is toe-to-toe with the cop. “My son is not a thing. Was,” she corrects, her voice snagging. “Was not a thing.”
Then she turns on her heel and disappears into the belly of the house. I look at the cop. “It’s been a tough day.”
“I understand. As soon as the prosecutor contacts me I’ll be in—”
He doesn’t finish his sentence, however, before the sound of a crash fills all the space behind me. “I have to go,” I tell him, but I’m already closing the door in his face.
There’s another crash before I reach the kitchen. As soon as I step inside, a casserole dish flies by my face, striking the wall behind me. “Brit,” I cry out, moving toward her, and she wings a glass at my head. It glances off my brow, and for a moment, I see stars.
“Is this supposed to make me feel better?” Brit screams. “I fucking hate mac and cheese.”
“Baby.” I grasp her by the shoulders. “They were trying to be nice.”
“I don’t want them to be nice,” she says, tears streaming down her face now. “I don’t want their pity. I don’t want anything, except that bitch who killed my baby.”
I fold my arms around her, even though she stays stiff in them. “This isn’t over yet.”
She shoves at me so hard and so unexpectedly that I stumble backward. “It should be,” she says, with so much venom in her words that I am paralyzed. “It would be, if you were a real man.”
A muscle ticks in my jaw and I ball my hands into fists, but I don’t react. Francis, who’s entered the room at some point, comes up behind Brit and slips an arm around her waist. “Come on now, ladybug. Let’s get you upstairs.” He leads her out of the kitchen.
I know what she’s saying: that a warrior isn’t much of a warrior when he’s fighting behind a computer. True, going underground with our movement was Francis’s idea, and it’s been a brilliant and insidious plan—but Brit’s right. There’s a big difference between the instant gratification that comes from landing a punch and the delayed pride that comes from spreading fear through the Internet.
I grab the car keys off the kitchen counter, and a moment later I’m cruising downtown, near the railroad tracks. I think, for a heartbeat, about finding that black nurse’s address. I have the technological expertise to do it in less than two minutes.
Which is about as long as it would take the cops to point a finger at me if anything happened to her or her property.
Instead, I park under a railroad overpass and get out of the car. My heart’s pounding, my adrenaline is high. It’s been so long since I’ve been wilding that I’ve forgotten the high of it, unlike anything that alcohol or sports or even falling in love can produce.
The first person that gets in my way is unconscious. Homeless, he’s drunk or drugged or asleep on a cardboard pallet under a mountain of plastic bags. He’s not even black. He’s just…easy.
I grab him by the throat, and he startles from one nightmare into another. “What are you looking at?” I scream into his face, even though I have him pinned by the neck, so that he couldn’t be looking at anything but me. “What the fuck is your problem?”
Then I head-butt him in the mouth, so that I knock his teeth loose. I throw him back on the pavement, hearing a satisfying crack as his skull meets the ground.
With every blow, I can breathe a little easier. It has been years since I did this, but it feels like yesterday—my fists have a muscle memory. I pound this stranger into someone who will never be recognized, since it’s the only way to remember who I am.