by David Rabe
“Peace creeps,” he says, grinning. “Our day is coming, you bunch of dirty yellow nigger-loving peace creeps.”
Someone near Whitaker lifts his voice in loud protest that fades into, “Says you!” The young Nazi continues to grin, looking down with pitying eyes upon the ignorance gathered before him.
“We’re going to take a little break now,” he says. “I’ll be gone for a while.”
Two or three cheers arise, bringing on laughter.
Still, no tension shows in the young man’s voice or stance. “And when I come back,” he says, reassuringly, “we’ll have a leader of the Ku Klux Klan give a little talk and Herb ’The Skull’ Booker of the L.A. chapter of Hell’s Angels has some things he wants to say to you peace creep commie bastards and if we’re lucky, George Lincoln Rockwell, who is at this moment in the dirt of one of the commie peace creep jails of this city, suffering for his heroism, his inability to stand still in the face of the insult of a red Cong Commie flag being waved in the air of the streets of America. And he tore it from their hands, spit on it, and for that crime he was hauled off by the misguided flunkie police of the misguided white officials of this great city, thrown into jail, a hero, George Lincoln Rockwell, who if freed before this day is out, and if certain of the mood and merit of this crowd, will come here to speak to you.”
A group of people standing directly in front of the big swastika count from one to three and deliver a loud and coordinated, “Booo!” The young Nazi’s voice changes, shrillness entering somewhere into it, even though the pleasant, friendly smile remains. “And he will say the truth into your sweet faggot peace-creep nigger-loving ears.”
As his predecessor vanished, so he also drops from sight through the trapdoor. Loud, raw sounds of music replace him, a guitar and chimes, a group of male voices in a folksy style, homey and amiable, singing with wonder and happiness of the bells that will ring and ring, the shouts of triumph and joy, when the white man’s day has come:
“‘We’re gonna load those ships
Gonna wave farewell,
Gonna get those apes back in those trees,
Gonna send those niggers back,
Gonna send those niggers back.’”
Whitaker yells, “Can we keep Willie Mays?” He takes a big drink of whiskey. “Willie Mays won’t do Africa no good. They’ll never win the World Series.” Herb “The Skull” Booker, he thinks. He likes the nickname. Ku Klux Klan—all these men in white sheets. George Lincoln Rockwell. It feels like a goddamn circus, and to have the whiskey at his fingertips is luxurious, the fulfillment of his wish given as he asks for it. Giddiness comes flying at him. While at the bar he downed a number of shots and beers, and though his capacity is large, he has eaten little. He is slipping forward past random figures, while the singing fades. Sudden martial music squalls into the graying air, the drums and brass of the armies of the Third Reich. Weaving to the very front of the crowd, Whitaker finds that he is staring into the brown, shiny face of the black police captain. The man stands without expression, as blank and mute as a stone, as if nothing moves in his brain, and he has not even heard the music, the singing, the words. Willy, Whitaker’s only sure friend in jail, was black. It was Willy who gave him the word about calling Negroes “blacks,” and it was to Jones, another black guy, that he went with his dumb grief at his loss of Sharon. Not even three days since his last evening with her, he trudged up the concrete stairs to his barracks, leaving behind the phone booth where he’d just called her. Down the aisle of bunks and lockers he went until he stood in front of Jones’s bunk, noticing for the first time the pinkness of the soles of those brown feet. He communicated his wish for Jones to follow him down to the porch. Jogging quietly, Whitaker crossed to the field between the barracks and the parking lot of the post shopping center. He felt thin in the emptiness and oddly singular, turning to shout to Jones, who was taking his time. Sharon was married—she’d gotten married, Whitaker yelled, his voice delivering his disbelief and hurt more fully than the facts he meant to be stating. Jones chuckled and went back inside.
“How about you,” says a voice. “You.” A Nazi is speaking. The eyes above the moving lips are fixed on Whitaker. “Yeah, yeah,” he says.
“What?”
“Let’s talk. Comeer. Comeer.”
A young black guy, thin and wearing colorful clothing, is close by, dancing and nervous, turning constantly, nibbling his fingers.
“You interested in the organization?”
“This?” Whitaker says.
“The Nazi Party. I saw you come to the front of the crowd.”
“This here the recruitin’ sergeant, man,” the black guy says. “You watch out he don’t git you. He don’t talk to me. How come is that, Sergeant?”
The Nazi, smiling, turns to look at the black guy.
“I’d be awful damn pretty in one a those suits you wearin’, man, awful pretty,” the black guy says. He looks at Whitaker. “They want you ’cause you blond, so you be more fun.” The words swarm on his tongue, a hint of hysteria in their speed, and a hint of some danger in the gleam in his eyes, the bitterness in his laughter.
“How ’bout it?” the Nazi says.
“Let him be,” says the black guy.
Something lives between them, an emotion, or energy, as if the black guy has taken up a dare and to win he must keep close to the Nazi, like a man terrified of snakes poking with a rake, a cane, a pencil into the sleeping coils of a cobra.
“Because I’m black is the answer,” he says. “Because I ain’t white.”
“Because you’re not human.”
His response is strictly tension; his lips move and his tongue flicks to make a sound, but only air rushes out.
“You know that,” the Nazi tells him.
Whitaker has turned, he is leaving.
“Where you going?” the Nazi calls.
“He gone, man,” says the black guy. “You lose him.”
“C’mon back here.”
“Good-bye, man; good-bye.”
Whitaker strides against the grain of the crowd. It is the last Saturday of his final free weekend and he is walking about in the cold of a fading winter day like a man with all the time he could ever wish for. When he has no time at all, no real time. And money is time and he has thirty-eight dollars. He knows what he wants, a girl, a lush red room, the money to buy the wealth of both, the happiness of her body, wine bottles on the night table; he wants a gorgeous slut like those he saw endlessly passing by him on the arms of braying and balding buyers and sellers of the world as he huddled two years ago in the hotel vestibule with the two or three others who earned their living, as he did, parking rich men’s cars in Milwaukee, where he’d gone to try something different, get a taste of big city life. It was there that his draft notice found him. Shit, he thought. And then somebody told him he could get training as a mechanic. Most people had never even heard of Vietnam or a possible war at the time. He sure hadn’t. He was twenty. So why the hell not?
Carburetor, he thinks, mixes the right amount of gas with the right amount of air to get combustion. In a six-cylinder engine, how does the spark go from cylinder to cylinder? One. Five. Three. Six. Two. Four. What’s it get you? He doesn’t know. He has no answer. For all his questions there has been no answer given to him ever; and now he is alone and nearly drunk and afraid that if he goes to Vietnam, he will die there.
Though aware for several instants of the three figures approaching, he has resisted thinking about them explicitly. Now he glances right and left to determine whether they have been spied by a consequential number of any of the others in the crowd. Above the three heads flutters a rectangle of red and blue cloth carried on a pole. The last of the whiskey is sweet on his tongue and he can barely believe his first conclusion, which is that the cloth is a Vietcong flag. They look like high school kids, skinny, all wearing glasses. Acne is so extreme on the face of one it seems the scars from some awful burn. They are punks, Whitaker thinks. He can see it in
the way they walk—the diaries they keep, the mothers they worship, the altars of sweet kindness and good virtue at which they think they mean to lay their lives.
He hears a thump, a stumble. Someone flies past him. Colliding in sudden struggle, a squat, sturdy man with a Nazi armband pulls at the flag clutched in the hands of two of the three boys, the third having scampered away. There are gasps, grunts, and curses. Then a police paddy wagon, inert and silent till now at the curb, winds up with a roar. Its light goes on and spins. Distant parts of the crowd splinter and move in bits and pieces toward the commotion, where they reassemble in a murmuring, excited circle around the violence.
Locked in a tussle with the two youths, his fury splitting his mouth open, the Nazi howls as he is overwhelmed from behind by the dark mob of police who pinion his arms to his sides and grab his flailing legs while he screams, “George Lincoln Rockwell! America!”
From the roof of the trailer behind Whitaker comes the voice of the all-American-looking moderator: “The man is a hero. Like their leader, that man and the others who follow all believe in America. Who out here does not feel hatred for these commie flunkie bastard kids?”
“Yeah,” yells Whitaker. He shakes his fist. He doesn’t know what he’s doing.
At the curb now, the shackled body of the Nazi clatters into the back of the paddy wagon.
The teenagers have regrouped. They are examining the crowd building around them, pride and excitement ignited in their eyes. Whitaker, watching, grimaces and wants a big drink but his flask is empty. He tilts his head way back, managing to coax a few drops down his throat. It’s clear now that these kids plan to march directly over to the Nazi trailer waving their enemy flag. He hates them. He has known them and hated them all his life, the bookworms, the grade-A brownnosing teacher’s pets with chemistry sets in their basements, shortwave radios tuned to nowhere, and telescopes trained out their attic windows onto the moon. Because they have been told they are special, they think that the flag they carry is the flag of honor and decency because they carry it. It’s you you love, you pricks, thinks Whitaker as the three of them start off. They expect to be followed. They expect that everyone who sees them will helplessly fall in behind them. This belief is on their faces, in their eyes, and so no one is prepared for the second man who leaps at them, snatching the banner and running with it over the grass. For an instant it appears he might make it to the road where he will have a chance, if the driver of the car parked there with its engine running is in fact an accomplice. Then he stumbles, staggers, falls, and scrambling up, churns straight into the waiting arms of the black police captain. Bone hits bone. A cry goes up from the crowd. The flag falls loose. The two figures wrestle to a kind of standstill and fall over. They roll from shade to better light. This man wears no uniform, no swastika. Some of the spectators demand his release. He starts squirming to get free of this lone cop before reinforcements, who can be seen and heard rushing closer, arrive. The black captain has his nightstick across the chest of the man. With one hand clenching either end he strains inward to hold the man who is really a teenager, kicking and twisting but making no cry. Then there is an instant of relaxation as the policeman attempts to adjust his grip. When the teenager slackens his legs, trying to drop straight down to get loose, the black captain recovers and the stick drives inward to recapture the kid, but because his head has lowered to where his chest used to be, the club smashes into his face. Blood explodes, a startling, bright, almost fake-seeming quantity and color. The kid is instantly quiet, sinking onto his hands and knees, where he freezes, as if to wait quietly until all danger passes.
Then he vomits and falls over.
“Get out,” one of the cops is saying and pointing at the teenagers. “Get out, you sonsabitches.”
“We don’t have to,” says the tallest, the leader.
“Get out,” the cop says.
“You peace creep commie flunkies,” says Whitaker, grinning and giddy. “I came here to have a good time. I ain’t had no good time.”
The voice of the Nazi moderator calls loudly, suddenly, “Do you want to hear George Lincoln Rockwell? Do you want him to speak?”
“Fuck no,” yells some member of the crowd.
“Get out,” the cop says.
“Bunch a phonies,” says Whitaker.
“Shut up,” says a cop, pointing at Whitaker.
“Not me,” says Whitaker as the cop, with a companion, begins to advance upon him. “Okay,” he says, “okay,” his hands up.
“George Lincoln Rockwell will speak to you if you wish,” says the moderator. “All you need to do is let him know that you wish it!”
The generator fails. For a minute the sputtering of its confusion is audible while the floodlights illuminating the moderator dim, tremble, flare up, and go dark. Cheering erupts from a small part of the crowd, but most are barely attentive any longer, beginning to leave. Dusk is thickening, the chill fall of evening nearly upon them. The victim, the kid who went for the banner, is slumped limply against the rear-left fender of the paddy wagon, a handkerchief, leaking blood, pressed against his slack mouth.
On top of the trailer a thin shadow, the young Nazi, lifts both arms toward the sky, each finger straining to its farthest extension, and his voice, when it comes, is small and human, crying after them, stripped of the distortion of the speaker system: “George Lincoln Rockwell will speak to you if you wish him to. All you need to do is let him know. Just let him know you will be receptive. Make your feelings known. What do you wish?”
He is staring out at them, a tilted silhouette pressing heavily forward, hands clutching the rod of the microphone stand, and there is about him some sense of enormity, weight, and thought. “You fucking peace creep bastards,” he says, addressing the spaces of lawn and wind. He shakes his head as if to shed a burden. And when he begins to shout now, it is not without the eerie trace of intelligence and humor, the unexpected awareness in his voice of the grade-B movie tyrants he is playing, the Capones and Neros stripped of all but fury. There’s slyness, too, the startling surprise of wit in his fanatic brain: “We’ve got your names and pictures. Remember that. We know who you are. We’ve got your names on a list. Nineteen seventy will be the year. Think of it. Dream of it. We’ve got your fingerprints, names and addresses, the names of your brothers and sisters, parents and children. We’ll come for you. Nineteen seventy.”
Whitaker walks away, and he keeps going until the reflecting pool stretches out in a dull gleam alongside him. Looking back he can see where he was only moments ago. The trailer remains with shapes bustling about. Whitaker turns to continue on. Forty or fifty yards to his right, a slight roll in the terrain levels out quickly. A swatch of red catches his eye and he sees a blanket with two youthful figures beginning, at the instant he is aware of them, to crawl about gathering up their belongings. A radio plays pop music. The blond head of the girl bounces and wavers to the changes in the sounds.
“These are my orders,” he says, hurrying toward them holding out his piece of mimeographed paper. The boy, on one knee, is stuffing books into a leather bag. “These are my orders,” Whitaker whispers into their bewilderment. The girl is looking inquiringly at the boy. Can he explain? Does he know this stranger?
“I have to go. I have orders,” says Whitaker.
“What do you mean?”
“I have to go.”
“Do you mean the war?” The boy speaks softly, his voice very cultured, graceful.
“I’m in the army,” Whitaker says.
“They can’t make you go.”
“Let me screw your girl,” Whitaker says. “Okay?”
“What?”
“C’mon.”
“What?”
“She’s a flower child, isn’t she? A love child, isn’t that right? I’ll give you a dollar. Let me dick her.”
“Hey, c’mon, man.”
“C’mon what?”
The boy looks to the girl. Whitaker looks, too, and her eyes are big an
d then they narrow.
“I’ll give you two dollars; ten dollars; twelve; the keys to my car. All my money.”
“No,” the boy says. “I’m sorry.”
“I ought to bust you up, that’s what I ought to do. I want to. I want to bust in your face. I don’t know why I’m not, you goddamn pussy. You jerk. You stupid jerk. You’re just lucky, you know that? I want to break you apart just because of how you look, that’s what I want more than anything. You baby-boy jerk. Do you know how lucky you are?”
He is crouching to look coldly into the boy’s eyes, so his gaze is as huge as the threat of his coiled body.
The girl is staring in horror.
“Yes,” the boy says. “I do.”
“That’s right.”
“Yes.”
6
As the first movie nears its ending, Lan tells Kim to guard her place while she goes for some snacks. Kim nods without looking away from the screen, and Lan hastens up the aisle littered with straw, bits of paper, sticks from cubes of sugarcane. She moves with her head bowed, as if in actual fear that her small body might interfere with the flow of the projector light that burns at the rear of the theater and streams through coils of smoke to deliver the image of big white wagons wobbling up a hillside. In the vestibule, she asks the usher to please remember her face because she does not want to have to pay on her way back in. He says he will remember her perfectly if she brings him a little snack, too. She gives him a quick look of exasperation, a brief, bright roll of her eyes, before going on down the stone stairs to the many stalls of wood and tin with their wooden benches and counters of food. Her appetite, at the sight of it all, doubles. She purchases a bowl of rice with fish and pork sauce, which she will eat hurriedly before getting three of some kind of fruit, one each for Kim, the usher, and herself. Studying the colorful displays glistening under the streetlamps, she begins to scoop the rice to her mouth, deciding upon oranges. She will order three and have them placed in a brown paper sack to make them easier to carry. Or maybe she will have grapefruit. Or maybe mango shoots. The stalls are innumerable, their odor intense and luscious, all the hundred wonderful thousand things in the world to eat.