I’M GUESSING THIS LAWYER’S PRETTY decent, given how swanky his office is. The walls aren’t painted, they’re paneled. The glass of water his secretary gets me is a heavy crystal tumbler. Even the air smells rich, like the perfume of a lady who would normally shy away from me on a public street.
I’m wearing again today the jacket Francis and I share, and I’ve ironed my pants. I have a wool cap pulled low on my head, and I keep twirling my wedding ring around and around on my finger. I could pass for any ordinary Joe who wants to sue someone, instead of a guy who would normally skirt the legal system and take justice into his own hands.
Suddenly Roarke Matthews is standing in front of me. His suit is ironed with knife-edge pleats, his shoes are buffed to a high gloss. He looks like a soap opera star, except that his nose is a little off-kilter, like he broke it playing football in high school. He holds out a hand to greet me. “Mr. Bauer,” he says, “why don’t you come with me?”
He leads me into an even more imposing office, this one full of black leather and chrome, and gestures to a spot on the love seat. “Let me say again how sorry I am for your loss,” Matthews says, like everyone else does these days. The words have gotten so ordinary in fact that they feel like rain; I hardly even notice them anymore. “On the phone, we talked about the possibility of filing a civil suit—”
“Whatever it’s called,” I interrupt. “I just want someone to pay for this.”
“Ah,” Matthews says. “And that is why I asked you to come in here. You see, it’s quite complicated.”
“What’s so complicated? You sue the nurse. She’s the one who did this.”
Matthews hesitates. “You could sue Ruth Jefferson,” he agrees. “But let’s be realistic—she doesn’t have a pot to piss in. As you know, there’s a criminal prosecution under way that the State has undertaken. That means that if you file a civil suit simultaneously, Ms. Jefferson would ask for a stay of all discovery, so she couldn’t incriminate herself during the pending criminal prosecution. And the fact that you’ve filed a civil suit against her can be used against you in cross-examination during the criminal lawsuit.”
“I don’t understand.”
“The defense will make you out to be a gold digger with a grudge,” Matthews says bluntly.
I sit back, my hands on my knees. “So that’s it? I don’t have a case?”
“I never said that,” the lawyer replies. “I just think you’ve chosen the wrong target. Unlike Ms. Jefferson, the hospital does have deep pockets. Moreover, they have an obligation to supervise their staff, and they are responsible for the nurse’s actions or inactions. That’s who I would recommend filing the lawsuit against. Now, we’d still name Ruth Jefferson—you never know, right now she has nothing, but tomorrow she could win the lottery or receive an inheritance.” He raises a brow. “And then, Mr. Bauer, you might not just get justice—you might get a very handsome payout.”
I nod, imagining this. I think about being able to tell Brit how I’m going to do right by Davis. “So what do we do to get started?”
“Now?” Matthews says. “Nothing. Not until the criminal lawsuit is over. The civil suit will still be viable when it’s done, and that way, it can’t be used to incriminate your character.” He leans back, spreading his hands. “Come back to me when the trial’s over,” Matthews says. “I’m not going anywhere.”
AT FIRST I didn’t believe Francis when he said that the new wave of Anglo supremacy would be a war fought not with fists but with ideas, spread subversively and anonymously through the Internet. But all the same, I was smart enough not to tell him he was a crazy old coot. For one thing, he was still one of the legends of the Movement. And more importantly, he was the father of the girl I couldn’t get my mind off.
Brit Mitchum was beautiful, but in a way that knocked me off my feet. She had the softest skin I’d ever touched, and pale blue eyes that she ringed with dark eyeliner. Unlike other skinchicks, she didn’t buzz her hair at the crown and let wispy bangs frame her face and the back of her neck. Instead, Brit had thick hair that spilled down to the middle of her back. Sometimes she braided it, and the braid was as thick as my wrist. I thought a lot about what it would feel like to have those curls hanging over my face like a curtain as she kissed me.
But the last thing I was going to do was make a move on a girl whose father could have my spine snapped by making a single phone call. So instead, I went to visit, often. I pretended to have a question for Francis, who liked seeing me because it gave him a chance to talk up his idea for an Anglo website. I helped him change the oil in his truck and fixed a leaky garbage disposal for him. I made myself useful, but when it came to Brit, I worshiped from afar.
So I was pretty blown away when one day she came out to a chopping block where I was splitting wood for Francis. “So,” she says, “are the rumors true?”
“What rumors?” I asked.
“They say you took down a whole motorcycle gang and that you killed your own father.”
“In that case, no,” I said.
“Then you’re just a little pussy like the other guys who like to pretend they’re big bad Anglos so they can bask in my daddy’s glow?”
Shocked, I looked up at her, and saw her mouth twitch. I raised the ax over my head, flexed my muscles, and sent the ax hurtling into the piece of wood, which cleaved neatly. “I like to think I fall somewhere between the two extremes,” I said.
“Maybe I want to see for myself.” She took a step closer. “Next time your crew goes on the hunt.”
I laughed. “There is no way I’m taking Francis Mitchum’s daughter out with my guys.”
“Why not?”
“Because you’re Francis Mitchum’s daughter.”
“That’s not an answer.”
Hell, yes, it was, even if she couldn’t see it.
“My father’s been taking me out with his crew my whole life.”
Somehow I found that hard to believe. (Later I found out it was true, but he left Brit buckled into her car seat, sound asleep, in the back of his truck.) “You’re not tough enough to run with my crew,” I said, just to get her off my back.
When she didn’t reply, I figured that was that. I lifted the ax again, and started the downswing, only to have Brit dart, lightning-fast, into the path of the blade. Immediately I let go of the shaft, feeling the ax spin out of my hands to wedge itself deeply in the ground about six inches away from her. “Jesus fucking Christ,” I shouted. “What is wrong with you?”
“Not tough enough?” she replied.
“Thursday,” I told her. “After dark.”
EVERY NIGHT, I hear my son cry.
The sound wakes me up, which is how I know he’s a ghost. Brit never hears him, but then she is still floating in a haze of sleeping pills and Oxy left over from when I busted my knee. I get out of bed and take a piss and follow the noise, which gets louder and louder and louder, and then disappears when I reach the living room. There’s no one there, just the computer screen, green and glaring at me.
I sit down on the couch and I drink a six-pack and still I can hear my boy crying.
My father-in-law gives me almost two weeks of grieving, and then starts dumping out all the beer in the house. One night, Francis comes to find me when I’m sitting on the living room couch, my head in my hands, trying to drown out the baby’s sobs. I think for a minute he’s going to deck me—he may be an old dude, but he could still take me—but instead, he yanks the laptop from its power cord and throws it at me. “Get even,” he says simply, and he walks back into his side of the duplex.
For a long time, I just sit there, the computer pressed up next to me, like a girl who’s begging for a dance.
I can’t say I reach for it. More like, it makes its way back home to me.
With the touch of a key, a webpage loads. I haven’t been here since before Brit had the baby.
When Francis and I teamed up to create our website, I read manuals on coding and metadata while Francis fed me the material we would post. We called our site LONEWOLF, because that was what we all had to become.
This was no longer the eighties. We were losing our best men to the prison system. The old guard was getting too old to curb-stomp and wield nunchucks. The fresh cuts were too plugged in to get excited about a KKK rally where a bunch of ancient yahoos sat around drinking and talking about the good ol’ days. They didn’t want to hear an old wives’ tale, like that black people stank when their hair got wet. They wanted statistics they could take back to their lefty teachers and relatives who got tangled in knots when they said we were the real victims of discrimination in this country.
So we gave them what they asked for.
We posted the truth: that the U.S. Census Bureau said Whites would be a minority by 2043. That 40 percent of black people who were on welfare could work, but didn’t. That the fact that the Zionist Occupation Government was taking over our nation could be traced right to Alan Greenspan at the Federal Reserve.
Lonewolf.org quickly became something bigger than itself. We were the younger, hipper alternative. The fresh edge of rebellion.
Now, my hands move across the keyboard while I log in as the administrator. Part of the reason for running this site is the anonymity, the ability to hide behind what I believe. We are all anonymous here, and we are also all brothers. This is my army of nameless, faceless friends.
But today all that is about to change.
Many of you know me by my blog posts, and have responded with your own comments. Like me, you are a True Patriot. Like me, you wanted to follow an idea, not a person. But today, I am going to step into the light, because I want you to know me. I want you to know what happened to me.
My name is Turk Bauer, I type. And I am going to tell you the story of my son.
After I hit the post button, I watch the story of my son’s short, brave life hover on the computer screen. I want to believe that if he had to die, it was for a cause. It was for our cause.
I do not drink that night, and I do not fall back asleep. Instead, I watch the numerical counter at the top of the header, which marks each page view.
1 reader.
6 readers.
37 readers.
409 readers.
By the time the sun comes up, more than thirteen thousand people know Davis’s name.
I make coffee, and scroll through the comments section as I drink my first cup.
I’m so sorry for your loss.
Your boy was a race warrior.
Goddamned blue gum shouldn’t have been allowed to work in a White hospital anyhow.
I’ve made a donation in your son’s name to the American Freedom Party.
But one of them stops me cold:
Romans 12:19, it read. Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath: for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.
THE THURSDAY AFTER Brit dodged my ax, I had dinner with her and her father. We were well into dessert before Brit looked up, as if she’d just remembered something she needed to tell us. “I hit a nigger with my car today,” she announced.
Francis reared back in his seat. “Well, what was he doing in front of your car?”
“I have no idea. Walking, I guess. But he dented the front fender.”
“I can take a look at it,” I said. “I’ve done some bodywork.”
A smile played around Brit’s mouth. “I bet you have.”
I turned thirty shades of red while Brit told her dad that she’d convinced me to take her to see a movie after dinner, some chick flick. Francis clapped me on the back. “Better you than me, son,” he said, and then we were in my car, about to make a night of it.
Brit was like a live wire, buzzing in the passenger seat. She couldn’t stop talking; she couldn’t stop asking questions: Where were we going? Who would we target? Had I been there before?
The way I figured it, either tonight went well and that earned me Brit’s undying respect, or tonight went poorly and her father broke my neck for putting her in danger.
I took her to an abandoned parking lot near a hot dog stand that was pretty popular with faggots, who sometimes met here to hook up in the bushes behind. (Seriously, though, could there be any greater cliché than gay guys meeting at a wiener stand? They deserved to be beaten up for that alone.) I had thought about messing up some coons, but they were basically animals and could be pretty strong in a fight, whereas even Brit could pound a pansy.
“Are the other guys meeting us here?” she asked.
“There are no other guys,” I admitted. “I used to have a crew, but after one of them turned on me, I realized I like working alone. That’s how the rumor started about the bikers. The only reason I took down a whole gang by myself is because I can’t trust anyone else.”
“I get it,” Brit said. “It sucks to be abandoned by the people who are supposed to support you.”
I glanced at her. “Somehow I think you’ve lived a pretty privileged life.”
“Yeah, except for the part where my mother up and left me behind when I was a baby, like I was just…trash.”
I knew Francis didn’t have a wife, but I didn’t know what had happened. “Man, that sucks. I’m sorry.”
To my surprise, Brit wasn’t upset. She was furious. “I’m not.” Her eyes burned like coals in a fire. “Daddy said she ran off with a nigger.”
Just then, two men walked up to the hot dog stand to order. They got their dogs, and walked over to a half-broken picnic table.
“You ready?” I asked Brit.
“I was born ready.”
I hid my smile; was I ever that brave? We got out of my car and sauntered across the street, as if we were going to grab a bite, too. But instead, I stopped at the picnic table and smiled pleasantly. “Hey. Either of you limp wrists got a cigarette?”
They exchanged a glance. I love that glance. It’s the same one you see on an animal when it realizes it’s been cornered. “Let’s just go,” the blond one said to the short, skinny dude.
“See, that doesn’t work for me,” I said, stepping closer. “Because I’ll still know you’re out there.” I grabbed Blondie by the throat and punched his lights out.
He went down like a stone. I turned to watch Brit, who had jumped on the skinny guy’s back and was riding him like a nightmare. Her fingernails raked across his cheek, and as he stumbled to the ground she started kicking him in the kidneys, then straddled him, lifted his head, and smashed it back down on the pavement.
I had fought beside women before. There’s a common misconception that skinchicks are subservient, barefoot, and pregnant most of the time. But if you’re going to be a skinhead girl, you have to be a tough bitch. Brit might not have gotten her hands dirty before, but she was a natural.
When she was pounding on a slack, unconscious body, I hauled her upright. “Come on,” I urged, and together we ran to the car.
We drove to a hill that offered a great view of planes taking off and landing at Tweed airport. The runway lights winked at us as we sat on the hood of the car, Brit swimming in adrenaline. “God,” she yelled, tipping her throat to the night sky. “That was unfuckingbelievable. It felt like…like…”
She couldn’t find the word, but I could. I knew what it was like to have so much bottled up inside that you had to explode. I knew what it was like to cause pain, for a few seconds, instead of feeling it. The source of Brit’s restlessness might be different from mine, but she had been reined in all the same, and she’d just found the breach in the fence. “It feels like freedom,” I said.
“Yes,” she breathed, staring at me. “Do you ever feel like you don’t belong in your own skin? Like you were meant to be someone else?”
All the time, I thought. But instead of saying that, I leaned over and kissed her.
She spun so that she was sitting on me, facing me. She kissed me harder, biting my lip, devouring. Her hands were under the tail of my shirt, fumbling with the buttons of my jeans. “Hey,” I said, trying to grab her wrists. “There’s no rush.”
“Yes there is,” she whispered into my neck.
She was on fire, and if you get too close to a fire, you go up in flames, too. So I let her slip beneath my zipper, I helped her hike up her skirt and rip off her panties. Brit lowered herself onto me, and I moved inside her like the start of something.
ON THE MORNING of the arraignment, I get dressed while Brit is still sleeping in the pajamas she’s worn for the past four days. I eat a bowl of cereal and I prepare myself for war.
At the courthouse are about twenty friends I didn’t know I had.
They are loyal followers of LONEWOLF, frequent posters on my site, men and women who read about Davis and wanted to do more than just type their sympathy. Like me, they don’t look the way most people would expect a skinhead to look. No one is bald, except me. They’re all wearing ordinary clothing. Some have tiny sun-wheel pins on their collars. Many wear a baby-blue ribbon for Davis. Some pat my shoulder or call me by name. Others just nod, the tiniest inclination of their heads, to let me know they are here for me as I pass down the aisle.
Just then a nigger comes up to me. I nearly shove her away when she starts talking—a knee-jerk reaction—and then I realize I know her voice, and that she’s the prosecutor.
I have talked to Odette Lawton on the phone, but she didn’t sound black. This feels like a slap, like some kind of conspiracy.
Maybe this is a good thing. It’s no surprise that the liberals who run the court system have it out for Anglos, and there’s no way we could ever get a fair trial because of it. They’ll make this about me instead of that nurse. But if the lawyer who’s on my side is black, well, then I can’t possibly be prejudiced, can I?
They’ll never have to know what I’m really thinking.
Someone reads the judge’s name—DuPont—which doesn’t sound like some Jew name, which is a good start. Then I sit through four other defendants before they call the name Ruth Jefferson.
The courtroom sizzles like a griddle. People start booing, and raising up signs with my son’s face on them—a picture I uploaded to the website, the only one I have of him. Then the nurse is brought in, wearing a nightgown and shackles on her wrists. She is looking around the gallery. I wonder if she’s trying to find me.
I decide to make it easy for her.
In one swift movement, I’m on my feet and leaning over the low railing that separates us from the lawyers and the stenographer. I take a deep breath and hurl a gob of spit that smacks the bitch on the side of the face.
I can tell the second she recognizes me.
Instantly I am flanked by bailiffs who drag me out of the courtroom, but that’s okay, too. Because even as I’m pulled away, the nurse will see the swastika snaking down the back of my scalp.
It’s okay to lose a battle, when you are in it to win the war.
THE TWO MEATHEAD bailiffs dump me outside the heavy doors of the courthouse. “Don’t think about coming back in,” one warns, and then they disappear inside.
I rest my hands on my knees, catching my breath. I may not have access to the courtroom, but this is a free country, as far as I know. They can’t keep me from staying here and watching Ruth Jefferson get carted to jail.
Resolved, I look up, and that’s when I see them: the vans, with satellite dishes. The reporters smoothing their skinny skirts and testing their microphones. The media that has come to report on this case.
The lawyer said they needed a grieving parent, not an angry parent? I can give them that.
But first, I pull out my cellphone and call Francis at home. “Get Brit out of bed, and park her in front of the television.” I glance at the news vans. “Channel Four.”
Then I take a cap out of my pocket, the one I wore into the courthouse this morning so I wouldn’t draw attention to my tattoo until I wanted to. I center it on my head.
I think about Davis, because that’s all I need to make tears come to my eyes.
“You saw that, right?” I approach a slant reporter I’ve seen on NBC. “You saw me get thrown out of that building?”
She glances at me. “Uh, yeah. Sorry, but we’re here to cover a different story.”
“I know,” I say. “But I’m the father of the dead baby.”
I tell the reporter that Brit and I had been so excited about our first baby. I say I’d never seen anything as perfect as his tiny hands, his nose, which looked just like Brit’s. I say that my wife is still so upset over what happened to Davis that she can’t get out of bed, can’t even be here today at court.
I say it is a tragedy for someone who has taken a vow to heal to intentionally kill a helpless infant, just because she is upset at being removed from a patient’s care. “I understand that we didn’t see eye to eye,” I say, looking at the reporter. “But that doesn’t mean my son deserved to die.”
“What do you hope the outcome will be, Mr. Bauer?” she asks.
“I want my son back,” I tell her. “But that isn’t going to happen.”
Then I excuse myself. Truth is, I’m starting to choke up, thinking about Davis. And I’m not going to be broadcast blubbering like a girl.
I duck away from the other reporters, who are now falling all over each other to speak to me, but they get distracted as the doors to the courthouse open and Odette Lawton exits. She starts talking about how this is a heinous crime, how the State will make sure that justice is done. I slip along the side of the building, past where a janitor is smoking a cigarette, to a loading dock in the back. This, I know, leads to a lower-level door, which leads to the holding cells.
I can’t get inside; there are guards posted. But I stand at a distance, huddled against the wind, until a van pulls out with the words YORK CORRECTIONAL INSTITUTION printed on its side. That’s the only prison for women in the state, in Niantic. It’s where the nurse must be headed.
At the last minute, I step into its path, so that the driver has to swerve.
I know, inside that van, Ruth Jefferson will be jolted by that motion. That she’ll look out the window to see what caused it.
That the last thing she sees before prison will be me.
AFTER I TOOK Brit wilding, I became a regular visitor in her home, and I pretty much ran the website from Francis’s living room. On LONEWOLF we hosted discussions: tax forums that pitted Joe Legal, the White worker, against Jose, the Illegal Job Thief; threads about why our economy was being ruined by Obama; an online book club; a section for creative writing and poetry—which included a three-hundred-page alternate ending to the Civil War. There was a section for Anglo women to connect with each other, and another for teens, which helped them navigate situations like what to do when a friend said he was gay (end the friendship immediately, or explain that no one is born that way and the trend will vanish eventually). There were opinion topics (Which is worse: a White gay or a straight black? Which universities are the most anti-White?). Our most popular thread was the one about forming a White Nationalist K–12 school. We had over a million posts there.
But we also had a section of the site where we gave suggestions of what people could do individually or within their cells if they wanted to take action, without promoting outright violence. Mostly, we found ways to get minorities all twisted up believing that there was an army of us in their midst, when in reality, it was just one or two people.
Francis and I practiced what we preached. We adopted a stretch of highway in a mostly black area, and posted a sign that said it was being maintained by the KKK. One night, we drove to the Jewish Community Center in West Hartford. During Friday night services, we slipped a flyer under the windshield wiper of each car in the parking lot: a photo of Adolf Hitler in full sieg heil, and underneath it in bold letters: THE HOLOCAUST WAS A HOAX. On the back were bullets of facts:
Zyklon B was a delousing agent; for it to be used as a gas would have required huge amounts and airtight chambers, neither of which were present at the camps.
There were no remains of mass murders at the camps. Where were the bone and teeth fragments? Where were the piles of ashes?
American incinerators burn one body in eight hours, but two crematoria in Auschwitz burned 25,000 bodies a day? Impossible.
The Red Cross inspected the camps every three months and made plenty of complaints—none of which mentioned gasing millions of Jews.
The liberal Jewish media has perpetuated this myth to advance their agenda.
By the next morning, the Hartford Courant would run an article about the neo-Nazi element that was infiltrating this community. Parents would be worried for their children. Everyone would be on edge.
That was exactly how we liked it. We didn’t have to terrorize anyone as long as we could scare the shit out of them.
“Well,” Francis said, as we were driving back to the duplex. “That was a good night’s work.”
I nodded, but I kept my eyes on the road. Francis had a thing about that—he wouldn’t let me drive with the radio on, for example, in case I got too easily distracted.
“I got a question for you, Turk,” he said. I waited for him to ask me how we could get top placement for LONEWOLF in a Google search, or if we could stream podcasts, but instead he turned to me. “When are you going to make an honest woman out of my daughter?”
I nearly swallowed my tongue. “I, um, I would be honored to do that.”
He looked at me, appraising. “Good. Do it soon.”
As it turned out, it took a while. I wanted it to be perfect, so I asked around on LONEWOLF for suggestions. One guy had gotten all decked out in full SS regalia to propose. Another took his beloved to the site of their first real date, but I didn’t think a hot dog stand with gay guys blowing each other in the woods was a terrific setting. Several posters got into a vehement fight about whether or not an engagement ring was necessary, since Jews ran the diamond industry.
In the end, I decided to just tell her how I felt. So one day I picked her up and drove back to my place. “Really?” she said. “You’re going to cook?”
“I thought maybe we could do it together,” I suggested as we walked into the kitchen. I turned away because I thought for sure she would see how terrified I was.
“What are we having?”
“Well, don’t be disappointed.” I held out a container of hummus. On top, I had written: There are no words to tell you hummus I love you.
She laughed. “Cute.”
I handed her an ear of corn and mimed shucking it. She pulled down the husk and a note fell out: I think you’re amaizing.
Grinning, she held out her hand for more.
I gave her a bottle of ketchup, with a sticker on the back: I love you from my head tomatoes.
“That’s pushing it,” Brit said, smiling.
“I was limited by the season.” I passed her a stick of margarine. You’re my butter half.
Then I opened the fridge.
On the top shelf were four zucchini propped up to form the letter M, three carrots creating an A, two curved bananas: r, r, and a piece of gingerroot: Y.
On the next shelf was a cellophane-wrapped package of chopped meat that I’d shaped into the letters ME.
On the bottom shelf was a squash with Brit’s name carved into it.
Brit covered her mouth with her hand as I dropped to my knee. I handed her a ring box. Inside was a blue topaz, which was exactly the color of her eyes. “Say yes,” I begged.
She slipped the ring onto her hand as I stood. “I was kind of expecting a Hefty twist tie after all that,” Brit said, and she threw her arms around me.
We kissed, and I hiked her up on the counter. She wrapped her legs around me. I thought about spending the rest of my life with Brit. I thought about our kids; how they would look just like her; how they’d have a father who was a million times better than mine had been.
An hour later, when we lay in each other’s arms on the kitchen floor, on a pile of our clothes, I gathered Brit close. “I’m assuming that’s a yes,” I said.
Her eyes lit up, and she ran to the fridge, returning a few seconds later. “Yes,” she said. “But first you have to promise me something. We…” She dropped a melon into my hands.
Cantaloupe.
WHEN I COME back from court and walk into the house, the television is still on. Francis meets me at the door, and I look at him, a question on my lips. Before I can ask, though, I see that Brit is sitting in the living room on the floor, her face inches away from the screen. The midday news is on, and there is Odette Lawton talking to reporters.
Brit turns, and for the first time since our son was born, for the first time in weeks, she smiles. “Baby,” she says, bright and beautiful and mine again. “Baby, you’re a star.”