In the Blood (26 page)

“Hey, buddy, you forgot your change,” a voice yelled to my back.

“Keep it, brother.”

The speed with which he jammed the bucks in his jeans told me Aryan catering units weren’t used to tips. I walked away pulling strands of oversweet and undercooked pork from my teeth, thinking maybe the gratuity was premature.

Night was almost full and the fire was growing. The fire committee was three beer-swilling behemoths feeding the blaze from a stack of applewood and oak. They’d grunt in unison and launch six feet of log on to the fire, sparks cascading into the purple sky.

The growing crowd was mainly males, only about ten per cent female participation. Most of the women in attendance were biker chicks, demoiselles of denim and leather, some looking hard and some looking lost. The young girlies had punked-out spiky hair like it was the eighties, the older mamas had hair hiked high – prom night in Waco, Texas, circa 1975. The older ones all shared the same voice, a graveled purr, like buttermilk laced with broken glass. The younger ones tried to emulate the effect, failing because it was the voice of No Way Out, and they hadn’t learned that yet.

A band was playing, four skinhead types in risers in front of a wall of Hi-Tone amps. It was headbanger speed metal, distorted power chords
punctuated by shredding guitar leads. The musical structure was strident and anthemic, the skinhead lead singer in a white tee, torn jeans rolled to mid-calf, hightop Doc Martens. He was curling around a microphone stand, his mouth a rictus of agony, less singing than screaming.

“Fuck the watermelon-eating niggers…”
he howled.

“FUCK ’EM!”
the crowd roared in response.

“Fuck the tortilla-eating spics…”

“FUCK ’EM!”

“Fuck the goat-eating A-rabs…”

“FUCK ’EM!”

It was sad and small and it wasn’t all that long ago the singer might have called out the potatoeating Micks or the spaghetti-sucking wops. I waved my beer in the air and shrieked out the response with everyone else, using the time to scope out the crowd. I figured, given my years on the force and Mobile a half-hour distant, there was probably someone in there who I’d rousted or arrested. I pulled my ball cap lower over my eyes.

After ten minutes I needed a break from the noise and the smell of sweat and the constant Heil Hitlers and other tribal salutations. I wandered a couple hundred feet from the fray to the woods, walking into the trees until the brush softened the sound. It was almost peaceful, the moon high and bright.

I startled at the crack of branches breaking and
heavy breathing and spun to see a tall, wide-shouldered guy in a black shirt pushing from the brush at my back. His arms were marbled with muscle. He was talking to himself, in the clutches of something potent, meth, acid, ecstasy, or some ugly hybrid of any or all.

He saw me, narrowed his eyes.

“They’re coming.”

“Hunh?” I said. Normally I say
Pardon?
or
Excuse me?
but among this crowd,
Hunh
was the word.

“They’re coming, brother. We got to stop them.”

I decided to play along. “I know. They’re right over the horizon.”

He wiped his face with his hands, shook his head. “They’re breeding them like tomatoes, using different strains.”

“You lost me.”

He looked from side to side, like there were informants in the trees. He waved me closer, leaned to speak in a whisper.

“Super niggers. They’ll be able to fly. I heard it from a guy who heard it direct from Meltzer.”

“Hunh?”

“Won’t really be flying, but they’ll have legs so strong they’ll jump like bullfrogs. They’ll be bouncing all over the fucking ghetto and cops’ll have to build big nets to catch ’em.”

I couldn’t help chuckling at the inanity. A mistake. He grabbed me by my shirtfront and rammed me into a tree.

“Don’t laugh at me,” he rasped. “I’ll goddamn kill you.”

His trip was turning ugly. I said, “I’d never laugh at a man who knows what he’s about. If you took me wrong, I apologize.”

He blinked at me so hard I could tell I was little more than a hazy shape in his addled mind. His grip fell loose and he patted my arm.

“You’re OK, dude. I thought you were laughing.”

“No man, I was listening. You heard from a guy who heard it from Meltzer.”

He stumbled backwards a step, rediscovered his chain of thought. “The guy was s’posed to keep it secret but got drunk and told me ’bout this crazy doctor who’s doing a Frankenstein act with…I dunno, that cell shit.”

Frankenstein. Flying people. Crazy doctors.
I backpedaled slowly away, making a note to be careful about laughing.

“Gotta head back to the rally, brother,” I said. “Nice meeting you.”

“We all gotta hold together, man,” he called after me. “Some mad scientist grew a special baby. They’re gonna make clones outta it. We gotta fight for our own.”

The word
baby
had been much in my life of late. I turned back to the guy.

“You know anything more about that baby the guy was talking abo—”

“Spider, you there?” A voice from the far side
of the trees cut me off. Feet were pounding through the underbrush, approaching fast.

“You out here, man? Yo, Spider?”

Spider’s mouth dropped in fear. I spun and disappeared into the woods, stopping and crouching behind a clump of briar. I heard a commotion and looked back. Moonlight revealed four guys circling the druggie.

Someone said, “You gotta learn to keep your mouth shut, Spider –” and I heard a fist smack into flesh.

I ducked away, re-emerging two hundred feet distant in the light of the meadow. The bonfire was raging. The fire crew had stripped off their shirts. Sweat glistened on their torsos as they humped logs into flames licking twenty feet into the night sky.

I passed by a lone biker chick leaning against a tree, pushing back loops of fake-blonde hair, sucking a beer. Her eyes sparkled with amphetamine.

“Hey there, handsome,” she purred. “How ’bout we go back in the bushes and crank off a quick fuck?”

“No thanks,” I said over my shoulder.

“Don’t like to fuck girls?” came the taunt.

“Don’t like to fuck quick,” I said, putting more jump in my steps.

I heard a roar at my back and turned to see a dozen bikers thundering into the parking meadow, cranking accelerators on straight-piped Harleys to
announce their arrival. A roar arose from the crowd, three hundred voices howling at once. Bodies parted for the biker escort, a large white step van following the Harleys. The growling phalanx entered the field and I saw fists raised in salutes of joy.

“He’s here,” said the hulking man behind me, so softly it sounded like prayer. Someone else said, “Praise God.”

Arnold Meltzer had arrived.

I watched the step van pull in front of the stage. A ladder allowed access to its roof and two rangy guys scampered up like monkeys, unrolling a carpet across the top and setting up a microphone and PA horns the diameter of truck tires. The crowd tightened around the vehicle and I was pressed toward the front.

“Arn-old, Arn-old…”
rose in a chant from the crowd, all eyes aimed toward the van. It was a scene of tumult and exultation. A woman beside me was crying with joy.

“Arnold, Arnold…”

A cheer filled the air as a man slipped from the rear of the van followed by four others. The quartet climbed the ladder with automatic weapons slung over their shoulders, took wide-stance positions atop the van, eyes staring into the crowd. Dressed in black pants and blue shirts, they had wide black belts of shiny leather holding holstered sidearms.

I blinked, looked again at a man atop the van, close to the edge. It was the deputy from the scene
at the burned house, Briscoe’s man. What was his name?

Briscoe’s voice yelled in my memory:
“Baker! Git to the car and you git calm.”

I filed the name away as Meltzer ascended the ladder, the crowd deafening in its adulation. He was a small man with an imperious, military bearing, hair short and neat and black. He moved as though lighter than air, a pixie. His perfectly tailored white suit seemed an improbable choice until I noted how much it stamped him as different from the rabble below; it was, in effect, a uniform.

I was close enough to see his mouth, and its full and pursed femininity surprised me, as if someone had pasted the lips of Marilyn Monroe on Adolf Hitler. The mouth twitched and blossomed as the crowd roared, palms slamming together, fists waving, boot heels pounding the hard dirt.

Meltzer patted his hand downward in the silence motion and the crowd obeyed as readily as sheep; in seconds all I heard was breathing. He looked out over the throng and moved to the mic with catlike grace.

“Ih-ehs-isn’t it a buh-beautiful night t-tuh-to b-be white, my Aryan buh-buh-brothers and ssss-si-issssss-sisters?”

Arnold Meltzer stuttered. Not gently, but racked by the struggle to push words out, hunching his shoulders, clenching his fists, fighting for syllable by tortured syllable. Had I seen the contortions
from behind, I would have thought his body gripped by epileptic seizure.

When Meltzer finished his sentence, the crowd exploded, first into joyful screams and rebel yells, then into a rising chant:
Arn-old, Arn-old, Arn-old…

It occurred to me that Meltzer’s acceptance of his impediment played perfectly in a crowd where all were afflicted, mentally, emotionally, economically, educationally. He may have been smarter, wealthier, and better educated, but he too was deeply wounded.

Arn-old, Arn-old…

He allowed a full minute of adoration, drawing energy from the vocal thunder, then waved the chanting down, the pursed lips satisfied, the mouth of a man receiving dues a long time coming. Beside Meltzer, Baker’s puffed chest and wide stance might have been funny if he hadn’t been holding a weapon that could cut down an oak.

The guy beside me said, “Fuckin’ incredible, hunh? Arnold is God.”

“Who’s the guy beside him? The crew-cut guy to the right?”

“That’s Boots Baker, brother. Boots is a monster, Meltzer’s shadow. You walk up to Meltzer without being asked, Boots takes your head off.”

The guy grinned at the idea of heads coming off and turned to face front as Meltzer launched into his own particular form of sermon, his voice brittle through the metal cones of the public address system.

“A fuh-false prophet is more d-d-deadly than a wu-weapon, for a weapon can only ki-ki-ki-kill bodies, but false prophet can d-destroy souls. The f-false prophet can destroy ten thousand sssssouls with a ssssingle utterance. Wuh-we have s-seen a fu-fuh false prophet and learned of his tuh-terrible d-d-debasement…”

The crowd booed as Meltzer hissed and twitched out an obvious reference to Scaler, heaping manure on the man’s legacy, alternately painting him as mad, debased, delusional, traitorous. Meltzer shoveled for a few minutes, then segued to an allied theme.

“Those who wuh-would r-r-rule us like sheep have nuh-new weapons and n-new lies…”
he said, feet away from Briscoe’s deputy. There was a sneer on Baker’s face, as if standing atop that truck next to a lump of human garbage marked the pinnacle of his existence.

“We mu-muh-may hear terrible l-l-lies over the n-next weeks and muh-muh-months. Lies designed to-t-t-tear the wuh-white race apart. Lies designed to du-du-destroy our way of life. Sssstay strong and du-don’t ever waver. It will all b-be lies. Lies. Lies! LIES! LIES!”

The crowd picked up the rhythm and chanted the word
lies
until the ground shook. Meltzer seemed to be preparing the crowd for some upcoming news or announcement detrimental to the movement.

The speech ended with thunderous applause as Meltzer performed a series of salutes including
white power and the standard Nazi crowdpleaser. I wondered if successful white supremacists had to memorize salutes like NFL players memorized play-books.

I was ready to leave. My head hurt from the noise and assaults on reason and I had much to think about, including Deputy Baker being one of Meltzer’s honor guard. How the rant against the dead Scaler fit into anything. And Spider’s mention of a strange baby, a stream of babble reminding me of the mad screeching of Terry Lee Bailes.

The parking area was on the other side of the milling, agitated crowd, and I waded into the hoots and rebel yells and displays of the various salutes. The band had returned and was playing a heavymetal version of Dixie, the singer howling out revised lyrics.

I wish I was in the land of cotton,

the niggers and spics dead and forgotten,

It’s God’s way, it’s God’s way, it’s God’s way,

Dixie land

I crossed fifty feet past the barbecue tent, looked up to see Meltzer’s security detail fueling on pork. Baker was to the side, a solemn, powerfully muscled apparition in the rippling orange light of the nearby bonfire. He was scanning the crowd and looked into my eyes.

I saw reptilian curiosity, brow furrowing as neurons of recognition fired in his brain. I pulled my hat low and tight and ducked into a dozen men standing in a circle and comparing sidearms.

I heard Baker’s voice. “Hey you – stop!”

Baker was frantically waving several men to him, pointing in my direction. I sunk deeper in the crowd, staying low. I saw a group of heavies walking fast at the edge of the rally, looking in. I ducked and circled. When I looked again, I couldn’t see what direction they’d headed. Should I cut to the left or right to make my break? My palms turned wet.

I ducked lower, headed for the edge of the crowd. I decided to cut left, to the east.

A nearby voice hissed, “No. Right! Go to the right!”

I spun to the voice, saw only a wide back stumbling away under a dirty gray cowboy hat, beer bottle in hand, another drunk. But I took a chance on the strange twist of fate, dodging to the right. After a long two minutes, I emerged by the wood fence separating the rally grounds from the parking area.