Shella (27 page)

It is different, though, prison. Being inside, you don’t work. When I was outside, before Tampa, I was with Shella. I didn’t think about her—she was there. When I was inside, I would think about her. Like studying. But all I ever figured out was that Shella had the answers, not me.

I thought about her a lot in the compound. No dreaming—I wasn’t asleep when I did it. Shella had bad
dreams sometimes. She woke up once, making noises like she couldn’t breathe. I grabbed her—she was strong. When it was over, my shoulder was bleeding. From where she bit me. She was sorry, sad about that. She poured some stuff on where she bit me.

She wanted to tell me what was in her bad dream, but when she started to tell me about the broomstick, I got sick and she stopped.

“Don’t you ever have dreams, honey?” she asked me.

I never thought about it before that. I guess I don’t.

Shella liked to dress up. She had all kinds of clothes. She even had eyeglasses she wore sometimes. I put them on once—they were just plain glass. She wore them when she put her hair on top of her head, when she went out sometimes, all dressed up like an older lady.

She didn’t wear the glasses for reading. Shella read all the time. I asked her to read some of it to me once, but I couldn’t understand the words. It wasn’t like the stories. After a while, I fell asleep.

One time when Shella got her period, she had terrible cramps. They hurt so bad she cried. I didn’t know what to do. I got a cold washcloth, tried to put it on her head. She threw the washcloth at me. “It’s my guts that hurt, not my head, you stupid bastard!” she yelled. But when I put on some of the music she liked, she said it gave her a headache.

I asked her if she wanted a cigarette. A drink, maybe?
She was curled up in a little ball then, holding her stomach. When I touched her back, it was like iron.

It hurt me to hear her cry like that. I filled the bathtub with hot water. The bathroom got all steamy. I put some of the green bubble stuff she liked in there. I pulled her robe off. Then I picked her up in that ball she was wrapped in and carried her inside. I lowered her into the tub. She tried to bite me, but I held her face hard against my chest until I got her in.

“It’s too hot,” she said, but I kept her there.

She came out of the ball and laid back. I held the back of her neck so she wouldn’t go under.

“The water’s all turning red,” she said, real quiet.

After a while, she started to cry again. But it was different, the crying. I let the water out of the tub. Then I stood her up against me and showered her off. All the bubbles and the blood ran down the drain.

She was still crying when I dried her off. I took her into the bedroom and put her on the bed.

“Could I have powder?” she said.

I knew the powder. Baby powder. Shella always puts it on under her pants. I spilled some on her. “That’s too much,” she laughed. A little laugh, like a giggle. But she wasn’t crying by then. I rubbed it all over her. Then she rolled over and I did it on her back too. On her bottom and legs too. Then I covered her with some sheets and she fell asleep.

It was dark when she woke up. I was in the chair, next to the bed. I patted her. She took my hand and kissed it. “I’ll make it up to you, baby,” she said. Then she went back to sleep.

I don’t dream, but I can see things, like on a screen if I close my eyes. I did that in the compound. A lot, sometimes for a whole day. I would think about why I was there, and then it would start. Shella.

A couple of nights after she had the cramps, Shella came in and took a shower. She was in there a long time. When she came out, she was naked. I was on the bed, watching TV. Shella turned it off. It was dark in the room, but I could see good. The neon sign outside the motel flashed off and on against Shella’s body. She was red, then she was blue.

“Do you want a cigarette?” she said.

I told her okay, and she lit one for me. Then she crawled onto the bed on her hands and knees, watching me. She licked me a couple of times and I got hard.

“You want something special?” she asked me.

“What?”

“Special,”
she whispered. “Like you haven’t had before.”

I knew she meant sex. I closed my eyes, thinking. I dragged on the cigarette until it was done.

“You can’t think of anything, can you?” Shella was still whispering. “Nothing you want you didn’t already have, huh, baby?”

“Anything is … I mean, anything you …”

“Ssssh, baby. I know. I was thinking too. Special. Like something I never did with anyone else, you know?”

“Yes.”

“But I couldn’t think of anything I haven’t done,” she said. She lay down on my chest. Her body was shaking.

Her hands dug into me. I could feel wet on my chest but I couldn’t hear her cry.

Nothing much happened where I was. People came in and out all the time, and you could tell some things were going on in other parts of the place. There was a lot of practice with guns. I did that too. I didn’t know anything about the guns, but they showed me. The guy who showed me, he liked to do that. He was glad I didn’t know anything so he could teach me. He was a good teacher—he wanted to make people smart, not tell them they were stupid.

The targets were pictures of people. Some were famous people. Some were just different kinds of people. Black people were their favorite.

Gunfire was always going on.

They had classes in other things. Political classes. And fighting too. One teacher, he was dressed all in black, even with a hood over his face. He said he was a ninja. He mostly talked.

Every time he would ask for a volunteer, I would sit very still. I was scared to do this. But one day he made me. He told me to come up behind him and get him in a choke hold, try and pull him down.

I was so afraid I’d break his neck that I grabbed him around the jaw instead of the throat. He hit me hard in the
ribs with an elbow and then chopped me in the neck. It hurt, where he hit me.

He told me to stick with guns. Some of them laughed.

I was there about two weeks when Murray told me the leader was going to talk the next morning.

Everybody in the whole camp was there. In a big hall in the back, with the doors open.

He was the man in the mug shots. The same man. He was a good talker. There must have been a couple of hundred people in the room, but he didn’t use a microphone and he didn’t shout.

It was a good speech. He said we were the warriors. The warriors of the right. Not the right wing, he said, the right way. Mostly he talked about race. Pure races. How they got all mixed together. Like dogs. Mongrel dogs. He said our race was like snow on the ground, covering the dirt underneath. When the snow melts, it could wash all the dirt away. But if you mix stuff in with the snow, it gets all filthy. It’s not beautiful anymore. Not pure.

He said niggers weren’t the real enemy. It was the Jews. It’s the Jews who gave us the niggers. The Jews needed animals to work the land around Israel—that’s where Israel is, Africa. So they started experimenting with different animals. They are real fine scientists. And that’s how they ended up with niggers, like a cross between apes and people. The niggers are just animals—they were being used by the Jews. He said even the stupidest niggers were waking up to this. Niggers in the big cities hate the Jews too. He said they were getting smarter to be feeling that way.
That’s what comes of educating niggers. He said the Jews hate themselves because they really want to be white. He said the big Jews are born smart, but the regular Jews, they’re always trying to be friends with the niggers.

The leader said that our race was dying. The niggers and the Jews breed faster than we do. Soon there would be more of them than us. And that would be the end. He said white men have always known this, but we always got ruined by fighting among ourselves. That’s what he said. He said there were a lot of white-power movements, but they always fought each other.

He said he would give examples. He said that Europe was all white men. Nothing but white men. If white men fight white men, white men have got to lose. He said that over and over again.