Shella (28 page)

He had a Bible with him, and he talked about what was in it. He talked about resources—he said that a lot, resources. How if we had enough resources we could have our homeland.

“Partition!” he yelled. And everybody cheered.

He said Partition was our own land. A couple of states for white people only. Our own schools, our own churches, everything our own.

The Promised Land, he said it like it was holy. He said it was promised to us, right from the Bible. The truth of God.

God was a white man, everybody knows that. Even the niggers know that. That’s why they hate us.

He talked for a long time. When he was done, everybody yelled. Some of them waved guns in the air.

Everybody talked like the leader, but he was the best at it. I practiced with the guns they had. I read the stuff they gave me. They watched TV a lot—they never watched the nature shows. They played cards a lot. Mostly, they just worked, like anyplace else. Cooking, cleaning, fixing. Some of them, they would just come and go.

Everybody called everybody brother in there. Everybody did it. I never heard white people do that before I went to prison the first time.

They never seemed to go out in the woods, but they were always dressed for it.

Murray came by the dorm one morning. He walked over to my bunk, sat down on the next one. I was glad I had some of the reading in front of me.

“How come you don’t put up no pictures?” he asked me.

I didn’t know what to say. I used to hate that, before I figured out I didn’t have to say anything. But that was for other places. I looked around the big room. Guys had pictures on the walls near where they slept. Mostly women. From magazines. Their favorites were women wearing soldier stuff, like a naked girl with a rifle. I don’t understand pictures, why people have them. I mean, maybe a picture of a real person, to remember them. But men who buy magazines, they don’t know those women. Shella tried to explain it to me once, but I stopped listening once she got crazy. When Shella talks about why men do things with women, she gets twisted up inside and scary. I couldn’t think of anything to say to Murray so I just shrugged. He gave me a look, like he knew something about me. I saw
the muscles flex hard across his arm as he looked at me.

I seen that kind of look all my life.

Murray came by where I was a lot. I got used to seeing him. One night, he just looked in the door. “Come on,” he said. “Cadre meeting.”

I got up and went outside with him. I followed him, walking across the compound. He was almost bouncing, he was so pumped up, humming to himself, clenching his fists.

Inside the room where he took us there was maybe eight, ten guys. Nobody was saying much, just smoking and standing around.

The guy in the white shirt came in the back door, turned an easy chair so it was facing us, and then he went and stood in the corner.

The leader came in and sat down. He had a suit on with a white shirt but no tie. He looked like the mug shot, just like it. Everybody stood up when he walked in. Then he made some gesture with his hand, like waving, and everybody sat down. I was the last one to sit, because I didn’t know what to do. And the guy in the white shirt, he never sat down.

“I just wanted to walk in here and tell you, again, how much the Nation values your sacrifices. I know it’s no fun, giving up what you did, making those sacrifices. Like the good book says, if there’s a reason, there’s a season. There’s a time for everything. Soldiers make sacrifices … that’s the way of the warrior. But tonight, you’re getting a little break. Not the whole camp, now, just this cadre. What we’re going to have is a little training exercise, a full-dress
rehearsal. Some of you have already been blooded, some of you haven’t gone the distance. Tonight isn’t that. Tonight’s just a way of spreading our message. Any questions?”

Nobody said anything. I was toward the back of the room, but I could feel people behind me.

The leader looked all around the room. He had a way of looking you in the face that didn’t challenge you. Not trying to stare you down, just making sure you was listening to him. You could look back at him and it wasn’t the signal to fight.

“Being a Christian doesn’t mean you don’t have anything to do with sex,” he said to us. “A man is going to want sex, that’s the way nature intended it. But in these times, a man has to be careful. There’s a lot of traps out there.”

He took a pipe out of his shirt pocket. A white pipe with a yellow stem. He pushed down the tobacco with his thumb, fired a wooden match, and took his time getting it going. Nobody else lit up. When he got it going, he took a puff. Then he held the pipe in his hand, looking at it, just settling down.

“You men are going to have a little party tonight. Just down the road, about an hour’s drive from here, there’s a little prostitution ring operating. They’ve got three trailers parked side-by-side in this spot out behind a tavern, back in the woods, where you can’t see them from the road. Billy knows where it is—he’ll be leading the convoy.

“Now let me tell you a little bit about this operation. It’s run by white men, but they don’t act like it. They don’t serve niggers in the roadhouse, but out back, they get the same rights as white men. You understand what I’m saying to you, boys? You fuck one of those trailer whores, and you may be going in right behind a nigger. You may be pulling
sloppy seconds after a jungle bunny. Now, we
told
the guy who runs the operation we wouldn’t stand for this. Explained it to him real clear. He said he was gonna set up a separate trailer for them, and we went along. But we sent our own people in, and you know what they told us …? The niggers can only go in the trailer on the left, but the girls, they go to all of them. They’re on rotation, you see what I’m saying?”

Some of the men nodded. I just watched him. He was too smart—there had to be more.

“Anybody here know how to make a good fire?” The leader looked around the room.

One guy raised his hand. I could see from his face that he knew all about fires. The leader looked across at the guy in the white shirt. They kind of nodded to each other.

“Okay,” the leader said. “We got a rifleman here too?”

Three of the guys put their hands up. The leader looked at the closest one, a guy with long blond hair and a mustache. “Where’d you learn?”

“I was in the ’Nam,” the blond guy said.

“Good enough, brother. What about you?” He was asking another guy, a guy with a shaved head.

“Prison guard,” the man said.

The leader moved his eyes to the third man. He was bigger than the others, with his hair combed forward over his eyes, like bangs. “Hunting …” he said. Like he was ashamed of it.

The leader kept asking questions. He had a soft, friendly voice. Everybody liked him, you could see it.

“No reason why you can’t have a little taste before you get to work. Thing is, with whores, you got to be careful. A whore is a liar, always remember that, men. A whore is
a liar. Lying is their trade. Lying on their backs, lying with their mouths. So you have to watch yourselves at all times, be careful you don’t get something you didn’t bargain for. Everybody know what I mean?”

Everybody nodded. Somebody said “Yeah,” but so soft I couldn’t tell who it was.

“Is that right?” the leader said. “You all know what I mean, huh? Well, okay, how about
you
tell me what I mean.” He pointed at a guy right across from me. A bloaty-looking guy with real hairy arms.

“Don’t go out without your rubbers.… I mean, don’t go in without them,” the fat guy said. On his face was a look like he got the right answer.

A couple of men laughed, but they stopped when the leader looked at them.

“Yes, that’s certainly true,” he said. “But I’m thinking of something else. Some of these little girls, well, they’re not girls at all. Understand?” He looked around the room. “Now, who knows how you tell whether you’re looking at a real woman, or one of those transvestites … a homo-sex-ual dressed up like a woman?”

Nobody said anything. Nobody knew the answer.

I knew.

I knew the right answer.

I raised my hand. The leader nodded at me. I touched my Adam’s apple. The leader smiled. “Now, where’d you learn that, son?”

I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know why I raised my hand. I was stupid, that’s why I did it. I couldn’t tell him about Shella, how I learned those things, where I’d been. I felt myself being pushed in, like the air was too heavy. I didn’t know what to say.

“In prison,” I said.

The leader sort of chuckled. “Yes, that’s been the graduate education for many of us, hasn’t it? Well, you’re right. Right on the money.”

He bowed his head, like he was praying. I saw the others do it, so I did it too.

The man in the white shirt, he kept watching us.

After the leader left, the man in the white shirt took out a clipboard. He wrote something on it, then he kind of pointed at the guy who was with him the first time I saw him. The guy with the shoulder holster.

That guy explained what we were going to do. Some of the guys asked questions—you could see it was okay to do that with the leader out of the room. The way they talked about it, it was like this army thing.

But what they were going to do, it sounded like the same way they send a message in the city.

We went in three cars. I was in the back of a station wagon, Murray was next to me. He kept squeezing a set of those handgrips, the ones with springs, to make you stronger. Over and over, switching them from one hand to the other. The handles were red, wood.

They had asked me what kind of gun I wanted—they had a whole bunch of them spread out on a table. I took one that looked like the one the Indian gave me.

The roadhouse was like a long, dark diner. Neon sign
outside: Rebel Inn. The parking lot had mostly pickup trucks in it. You had to walk this dirt path around the back to get to the trailers.

There were three of them, like the leader said, one standing off by itself to the left.

“Twenty-two hundred hours, right on target,” one of the men said. The guy in the white shirt had said we should be there by ten o’clock, but I didn’t say anything.