LAST NIGHT, WHEN I COULDN’T fall asleep, I watched some cable show that was on at 3:00 A.M. about how Indians used to live. They showed a reenactment, a dude in a loincloth, setting fire to a pile of leaves on the long line of a tree that had been split lengthwise. Then, after it burned, he scraped it out with what looked like a clamshell, repeating the process until the canoe was hollowed out. That’s what I feel like, today. Like someone has rubbed me raw from the inside, until I’m empty.
It’s kind of surprising, because I’ve been waiting so long for today. I thought for sure I’d have the energy of Superman. I was going to war for my son, and nothing was going to stop me.
But, strangely, I have a sense that I’ve reached the combat zone and found it deserted.
I’m tired. I’m twenty-five years old and I have lived enough for ten men.
Brit comes out of the bathroom. “All yours,” she says. She is wearing a bra and her panty hose, which the prosecutor told her to wear, so that she looks conservative.
“And you,” she suggested, “should wear a hat.”
Fuck that.
As far as I’m concerned, this is the memorial my son deserves: if I cannot have him back, I will make sure the people responsible for it are punished, and that others like them are left trembling with fear.
I run the hot water and hold my hands under the faucet. Then I lather up with shaving cream. I rub this all over my scalp and start to use my straightedge to scrape my head smooth.
Maybe it’s the fact that I could not sleep; or I suppose the crater that’s taken up residence inside me is making me shaky—for whatever reason, I nick myself just above the left ear. It stings like a mother as the soap runs into the cut.
I press a washcloth against my head, but scalp wounds take a little while to clot. After a minute I just let go, watch the streak of blood run down my neck, under my collar.
It looks like a red flag, coming from my swastika tattoo. I’m mesmerized by the combination: the white soap, the pale skin, the vivid stain.
FIRST WE DRIVE in the opposite direction of the courthouse. There’s frost on the front windshield of the pickup and it’s sunny, the kind of day that looks perfect until you realize how cold it is when you step outside. We are dressed up—me in the suit jacket that Francis and I share, and Brit in a black dress that used to hug her body and that now hangs on it.
We’re the only car in the lot. After I park, I get out and come around to Brit’s side. This is not because I’m such a gentleman but because she won’t get out. I kneel down beside her, put my hand on her knee. “It’s okay,” I say. “We can lean on each other.”
She juts out her chin, like I’ve seen her do when she thinks someone is about to dismiss her as weak or ineffective. Then she unfolds herself from the truck. She is wearing flat shoes, the way Odette Lawton told her to, but her coat is short and only reaches to the hip, and I can tell the wind whips through the fabric of her dress fast. I try to stand between her and the gusts, as if I could change up the weather for her.
When we get there, the sun is just hitting the headstone in a way that makes it sparkle. It’s white. Blinding white. Brit bends down and traces the letters of Davis’s name. The day of his birth, the hopscotch leap to his death. And just one word under that: LOVE.
Brit had wanted it to say LOVED. Those were the directions she gave me for the granite carver. But at the last minute I changed it. I was never going to stop, so why make it past tense?
I told Brit the carver had been the one to screw up. I didn’t admit it had been my idea all along.
I like the idea that the word on my son’s grave matches the tattoo on the knuckles of my left hand. It’s like I carry him with me.
We stand at the grave until Brit gets too cold. There is a peach fuzz of lawn, seeded after the funeral, already brown. A second death.
THE FIRST THINGS I see at the courthouse are the niggers.
It’s like the whole park in the middle of New Haven is covered with them. They’re waving flags and singing hymns.
It’s that asshole from television, Wallace Something. The one who thinks he’s a reverend and probably got ordained online for five bucks. He’s giving some kind of nigger history lesson, talking about Bacon’s Rebellion. “In response, my brothers and sisters,” he says, “Whites and blacks were separated. If they united, it was believed they could do too much damage together. And by 1705, indentured servants who were Christian—and White—were given land, guns, food, money. Those who were not were enslaved. Our land and livestock was taken. Our arms were taken. If we lifted a hand to a White man, our very lives could be taken.” He raises his arms. “History is told by Americans of Anglo descent.”
Damn straight. I look at the size of the crowd listening to him. I think of the Alamo, where a handful of Texans held off an army of spics for twelve days.
I mean, they lost, but still.
Suddenly, out of the sea of black, I see a White fist raised. A symbol.
The crowd shifts as the man walks toward me. A big dude, with a bald head and a long red beard. He stops in front of me and Brit and holds out his hand. “Carl Thorheldson,” he says, introducing himself. “But you know me as Odin45.”
It is the handle of a frequent poster on Lonewolf.org.
His companion shakes my hand, too. “Erich Duval. WhiteDevil.”
They are joined by a woman with twins, little silver-haired toddlers each balanced on a hip. Then a dude in camo. Three girls with heavy black eyeliner. A tall man in combat boots with a toothpick clenched between his teeth. A young guy with thick-framed hipster glasses and a laptop in his arms.
A steady stream closes ranks around me—people I know by a shared interest in Lonewolf.org. They are tailors and accountants and teachers, they are Minutemen patrolling the borders in Arizona and militia in the hills of New Hampshire. They are neo-Nazis who never decredited. They have been anonymous, hiding behind the screens of usernames, until now.
For my son, they’re willing to be outed once again.