Small Great Things Page 4

  I'd taken shots with my grandpa's handgun, but I'd never used anything like this. I listened to the man explain how the gun worked; then I put on the headphones and goggles for protection, tucked the stock against my shoulder, squinted, and squeezed the trigger. There was a volley of shots, like a coughing fit. The sound drew Raine's attention, and he clapped, impressed, as the target zipped back to me with three clean shots in the forehead. "Look at you," he said. "A natural."

  Raine folded the target and tucked it into his back pocket, so he could show his friends later how good a marksman I was. I took Meat's leash again, and we walked across the meeting grounds. On the stage, a man was grandstanding. His presence was so commanding that his voice became a magnet, and I found myself being pulled to see him more clearly. "I want to tell you all a little story," the man said. "There was a nigger in New York City, homeless, of course. He was walking through Central Park and several people heard him ranting, saying that he would punch a White man in his sleep. But these people, they didn't realize we are fighting a war. That we are protecting our race. So they did not act. They ignored the threats as the raving of a crazy fool. And what happened? This beast of the field approached a White Anglo--a man like you, maybe, or me, who was doing nothing but living the life God intended him to live--a man who cared for his ninety-year-old mother. This beast of the field punched this man, who fell down, struck his head on the pavement, and died. This White man, who had only been taking a walk in the park, suffered a fatal injury. Yet, I ask you--what happened to the nigger? Well, my brothers and sisters...absolutely nothing."

  I thought of my brother's killer, walking free out of a courtroom. I watched the people around me nod and clap, and thought: I am not alone.

  "Who is he?" I asked.

  "Francis Mitchum," Raine murmured. "He's one of the old guard. But he's, like, mythic." He said the speaker's name the way a pious man spoke of God--part whisper, part prayer. "You see the spiderweb on his elbow? You can't get that tat until you've killed someone. For every kill, you get a fly inked." Raine paused. "Mitchum, he's got ten."

  "Why do niggers never get charged with hate crimes?" Francis Mitchum asked, a rhetorical question. "Why are they being given a free pass? They would not even be domesticated, if not for the help of Whites. Look at where they came from, in Africa. There's no civilized government. They're all murdering each other in the Sudan. The Hutus are killing the Tutsis. And they're doing it in our country too. The gangs in our cities--that's just tribal warfare among niggers. And now, they're coming after Anglos. Because they know they can get away with it." His voice rose as he looked out at the crowd. "Killing a nigger is equal to killing a deer." Then he paused. "Actually, I take that back. At least you can eat venison."

  Many years later, I realized that the first time I went to Invisible Empire camp--the first time I heard Francis Mitchum speak--Brit must have been there, too, traveling with her father. I liked to think that maybe she was standing on the other side of that stage, listening to him hypnotize the crowd. That maybe we had bumped into each other at the cotton candy stand, or stood side by side when sparks from the cross lighting shot into the night sky.

  That we were meant to be.

  --

  FOR AN HOUR, Brit and I toss out names like baseball pitches: Robert, Ajax, Will. Garth, Erik, Odin. Every time I think I've come up with something strong and Aryan, Brit remembers a kid in her class with that name who ate paste or who threw up in his tuba. Every time she suggests a name she likes, it reminds me of some asshole I've crossed paths with.

  When it finally comes to me, with the subtlety of a lightning strike, I look down into my son's sleeping face and whisper it: Davis. The last name of the president of the Confederacy.

  Brit turns the word over in her mouth. "It's different."

  "Different is good."

  "Davis, but not Jefferson," she clarifies.

  "No, because then he'll be Jeff."

  "And Jeff's a guy who smokes dope and lives in his mother's basement," Brit adds.

  "But Davis," I say, "well, Davis is the kid other kids look up to."

  "Not Dave. Or Davy or David."

  "He'll beat up anyone who calls him that by mistake," I promise.

  I touch the edge of the baby's blanket, because I don't want to wake him. "Davis," I say, testing it. His tiny hands flare, like he already knows his name.

  "We should celebrate," Brit whispers.

  I smile down at her. "You think they sell champagne in the cafeteria?"

  "You know what I really want? A chocolate milkshake."

  "I thought the cravings were supposed to happen before the birth..."

  She laughs. "I'm pretty sure I get to play the hormone card for at least another three months..."

  I get to my feet, wondering if the cafeteria is even open at 4:00 A.M. But I don't really want to leave. I mean, Davis just got here. "What if I miss something?" I ask. "You know, like a milestone."

  "It's not like he's going to get up and walk or say his first word," Brit answers. "If you miss anything it's going to be his first poop, and actually, that's something you want to avoid." She looks up at me with those blue eyes that are sometimes as dark as the sea, and sometimes as pale as glass, and that always can get me to do anything. "It's just five minutes," she says.

  "Five minutes." I look at the baby one more time, feeling like my boots are stuck in pitch. I want to stay here and count his fingers again, and those impossibly tiny nails. I want to watch his shoulders rise and fall as he breathes. I want to see his lips purse up, like he's kissing someone in his dreams. It's crazy to look at him, flesh and blood, and know that Brit and I were able to build something real and solid out of a material as blurry and intangible as love.

  "Whipped cream and a cherry," Brit adds, breaking my reverie. "If they've got it."

  Reluctantly I slip into the hallway, past the nurses' station, down an elevator. The cafeteria is open, staffed by a woman in a hairnet who is doing a word-search puzzle. "Do you sell milkshakes?" I ask.

  She glances up. "Nope."

  "How about ice cream?"

  "Yeah, but we're out. Delivery truck comes in the morning."

  She doesn't seem inclined to help me, and focuses her attention on her puzzle again. "I just had a baby," I blurt out.

  "Wow," she says flatly. "A medical miracle, in my very own checkout line."

  "Well, my wife had a baby," I correct. "And she wants a milkshake."

  "I want a winning lottery ticket and Benedict Cumberbatch's undying love, but I had to settle for this glamorous life instead." She looks at me as if I'm wasting her time, as if there are a hundred people waiting in line behind me. "You want my advice? Get her candy. Everyone likes chocolate." She reaches blindly behind her and pulls down a box of Ghirardelli squares. I flip it over, scanning the label.

  "Is that all you have?"

  "The Ghirardelli's on sale."

  I flip it over and see the OU symbol--the mark that proves it's kosher, that you're paying the Jewish mafia a tax. I put it back on the shelf and set a pack of Skittles down on the counter instead, with two bucks. "You can keep the change," I tell her.

  --

  JUST AFTER SEVEN, the door opens, and just like that I'm on full alert.

  Since Davis arrived, Lucille's been in twice--to check on Brit and the baby, and to see how he was nursing. But this--this isn't Lucille.

  "I'm Ruth," she announces. "I'm going to be your nurse today."

  All I can think is: Over my dead body.

  It takes every ounce of willpower for me to not shove her away from my wife, my son. But security is only a buzzer away, and if they throw me out of the hospital, what good does that do us? If I can't be here to protect my family, then I've already lost.

  So instead, I perch on the edge of the chair, every muscle in my body poised to react.

  Brit grabs Davis so tightly I think he's going to start screaming. "Isn't he a sweetie!" the black nurse says. "What's his name?"r />
  My wife looks at me, a question in her eyes. She doesn't want to have a conversation with this nurse any more than she'd have a conversation with a goat or any other animal. But like me, she's aware that Whites have become the minority in this country and that we're always under attack; we have to blend in.

  I jerk my chin once, so infinitesimally I wonder if Brit will even see it. "His name is Davis," she says tightly.

  The nurse moves closer to us, saying something about examining Davis, and Brit recoils. "You don't have to let go of him," she concedes.

  Her hands start moving over my son, like some kind of crazy witch doctor. She presses the stethoscope against his back and then in the space between him and Brit. She says something about Davis's heart, and I can barely even hear it, because of the blood rushing in my own ears.

  Then she picks him up.

  Brit and I are so shocked that she just took our baby away--just over to the warmer for a bath, but still--that for a beat neither of us can speak.

  I take a step toward her, where she's bent over my boy, but Brit grabs the tail of my shirt. Don't make a scene.

  Am I supposed to just stand here?

  Do you want her to know you're pissed off and take it out on him?

  I want Lucille back. What happened to Lucille?

  I don't know. Maybe she left.

  How can she do that, when her patient is still here?

  I have no idea, Turk, I don't run this hospital.

  I watch the black nurse like a hawk while she wipes Davis down and washes his hair and wraps him up in a blanket again. She puts a little electronic bracelet on his ankle--like the ones you sometimes see on prisoners who've been released on probation. As if he's already being punished by the system.

  I am staring so hard at the black nurse that I wouldn't be surprised if she goes up in flames. She smiles at me, but it doesn't quite reach her eyes. "Clean as a whistle," she announces. "Now, let's see if we can get him to nurse."

  She goes to pull aside the neck of Brit's hospital johnny, and I'm done. "Get away from her," I say, my voice low and true as an arrow. "I want to talk to your boss."

  --

  A YEAR AFTER I went to Invisible Empire camp, Raine asked me if I'd like to be part of the North American Death Squad. It was not enough to just believe what Raine believed in, about Whites being a master race. It was not enough to have read Mein Kampf three times. To be one of them, truly, I had to prove myself, and Raine promised me I'd know where and when the right moment came to pass.

  One night when I was staying at my dad's, I woke up to hear banging on my bedroom window. I wasn't really worried about them waking up the household; my father was out at a business dinner in Boston, not due back till after midnight. As soon as I threw up the sash, Raine and two of the guys spilled inside, dressed in ninja black. Raine immediately tackled me onto the floor, forearm against my throat. "Rule number one," he said, "don't open the door if you don't know who's going to come inside." He waited until I was seeing stars and then let me go. "Rule number two: take no prisoners."

  "I don't understand," I said.

  "Tonight, Turk," he told me, "we are custodians. We are going to clean Vermont of its filth."

  I found a pair of black sweats and a screen-printed sweatshirt I wore inside out, so that it was black, too. Since I didn't have a black knit cap, Raine let me wear his, and he pulled his hair back in a ponytail. We drove in Raine's car, passing a bottle of Jagermeister back and forth and blasting punk through the speakers, to Dummerston.

  I hadn't heard of the Rainbow Cattle Company, but as soon as we got there, I understood what kind of place this was. There were men holding hands as they walked from the parking lot into the bar, and every time the door opened there was a flash of a brightly lit stage and a drag queen lip-synching. "Whatever you do, don't bend down," Raine told me and snickered.

  "What are we doing here?" I asked, not sure why he'd dragged me to a gay bar.

  Just then two men walked out, their arms slung around each other. "This," Raine said, and he jumped on one of the guys, slamming his head against the ground. His date started to run in the other direction but was tackled by one of Raine's friends.

  The door opened again, and another pair of men stumbled out into the night. Their heads were pressed together as they laughed at some private joke. One reached into his pocket for a set of keys, and as he turned toward the parking lot, his face was lit by the glow of a passing car.

  I should have put the pieces together earlier--the electric razor in the medicine cabinet, when my dad always used a blade; the detour my father made to stop for coffee every day to and from work at Greg's store; the way he had left my mother all those years ago without explanation; the fact that my grandfather had never liked him. I tugged my black cap down lower and yanked up the fleece neck warmer Raine had given me, so that I wouldn't be recognized.

  Panting, Raine delivered another kick to his victim and then let the guy scurry into the night. He straightened, smiled at me, and cocked his head, waiting for me to take the lead. Which is how I realized that even if I'd been totally clueless, Raine had known about my father all along.

  When I was six, the boiler in our house exploded at a time that no one was home. I remember asking the insurance adjuster who came to assess the damage what went wrong. He said something about safety valves and corrosion, and then he rocked back on his heels and said that when there's too much steam, and a structure is not strong enough to hold it, something like this is bound to happen. For sixteen years, I'd been building up steam, because I wasn't my dead brother and never would be; because I couldn't keep my parents together; because I wasn't the grandson my grandfather had wanted; because I was too stupid or angry or weird. When I think back on that moment, it's white hot: grabbing my father by the throat and smacking his forehead against the pavement; wrenching his arm up behind his back and kicking him in the back till he spit out blood. Flipping his limp body over, and calling him a faggot, as I drove my fist into his face again and again. Struggling against Raine as he dragged me to safety when the sirens grew louder and blue and red lights flooded the parking lot.

  The story spread, the way stories do, and as it did, it swelled and morphed: the newest member of the North American Death Squad--namely, me--had jumped six guys at once. I had a lead pipe in one hand and a knife in the other. I ripped off a guy's ear with my teeth and swallowed the lobe.

  None of that, of course, was true. But this was: I had beaten my own father up so badly that he was hospitalized, and had to be fed through a straw for months.

  And for that, I became mythic.

  --

  "WE WANT THE other nurse back," I tell Mary or Marie, whatever the charge nurse's name is. "The one who was here last night."

  She asks the black nurse to leave, so that it's just us. I've pushed down my sleeves again, but her eyes still flicker to my forearm.

  "I can assure you that Ruth has more than twenty years of experience here," she says.

  "I think you and I both know I'm not objecting to her experience," I reply.

  "We can't remove a provider from care because of race. It's discriminatory."

  "If I asked for a female OB instead of a male one, would that be discriminatory?" Brit asks. "Or a doctor instead of a medical student? You make those allowances all the time."

  "That's different," the nurse says.

  "How, exactly?" I ask. "From what I can tell, you're in a customer service business, and I'm the customer. And you do what makes the customer feel comfortable." I stand up and take a deep breath, towering over her, intimidating by design. "I can't imagine how upsetting it would be to all those other moms and dads here if, you know, things got out of control. If instead of this nice, calm conversation we're having, our voices were raised. If the other patients started to think that maybe their rights would be ignored too."

  The nurse presses her lips together. "Are you threatening me, Mr. Bauer?"

  "I don't think that'
s necessary," I answer. "Do you?"

  There is a hierarchy to hate, and it's different for everyone. Personally, I hate spics more than I hate Asians, I hate Jews more than that, and at the very top of the chart, I despise blacks. But even more than any of these groups, the people you always hate the most are antiracist White folks. Because they are turncoats.

  For a moment, I wait to see whether Marie is one of them.

  A muscle jumps in her throat. "I'm sure we can find a mutually agreeable solution," she murmurs. "I will put a note on Davis's file, stating your...wishes."

  "I think that's a good plan," I reply.

  When she huffs out of the room, Brit starts to laugh. "Baby, you are something when you're fierce. But you know this means they're going to spit in my Jell-O before they serve it to me."

  I reach into the bassinet and lift Davis into my embrace. He is so small he barely stretches the length of my forearm. "I'll bring you waffles from home instead," I tell Brit. Then I lower my lips to my son's brow, and whisper against his skin, a secret for just us. "And you," I promise. "You, I'll protect for the rest of my life."

  --

  A COUPLE OF years after I became involved in the White Power Movement, when I was running NADS in Connecticut, my mother's liver finally quit on her. I went back home to settle the estate and sell my grandfather's house. As I was sorting through her belongings, I found the transcripts of my brother's trial. Why she had them, I don't know; she must have gone out of her way to get them at some point. But I sat on the wooden floor of the living room, surrounded by boxes that would go to Goodwill and into the trash dumpster, and I read them--every page.

  Much of the testimony was new to me, as if I hadn't lived through every minute of it. I couldn't tell you if I was too young to remember, or if I'd intentionally forgotten, but the evidence focused on the median line of the road and toxicology screens. Not the defendant's--but my brother's. It was Tanner's car that had drifted into oncoming traffic, because he was high. It was in all the diagrams of the tire skids: the proof of how a man on trial for negligent homicide had done his best to avoid a car that had veered into his lane. How the jury could not say, without a doubt, that the car accident was solely the defendant's fault.