Small Great Things (20 page)

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.

O
N 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.

T
HE 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.

A
FTER
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?”