“I agree,” said Jimmy. “I totally agree.”
“I thought you would. But we’ve got to be together on this—all of us. I’m going to propose that we guard this place like a prison, that we cut down trees and build a wall around the yard. It’ll be a lot of work, but I’ve got chainsaws, and there are plenty of hands here to get it done.”
Jimmy nodded. Ken had obviously given this a lot of thought. A wall was a good idea. It’d be just like in the old west. No fort was without one. That was when it really hit him: they were going to build a fort right here, and they were going to start on it today.
Footsteps sounded from overhead, and the stairs began their usual protests. People were starting to get out of bed. A new day had dawned, and they were rising to greet it. From the other side of the kitchen, the toilet flushed. Jimmy laced up his boots and refilled his cup. The Kwapik family entered the kitchen. The parents were a few years older than Jimmy, and he knew them the way you know people in a small town. They exchanged morning greetings, and Jimmy excused himself. He opened the back door of the kitchen and walked out, closing it behind him. He walked down the three stairs that led to the back door, let himself out and carefully closed the door behind him. He fished out a Camel from his pants pocket, straightened it out and lit it up.
The back yard was an array of colorful tents. A smoldering fire was still glowing in the ring under the big maple tree. Singing birds filled the air, and robins hopped across the lawn. The sun was now over the tops of the trees, and the sky was clear and flawlessly blue. The air had a slight chill, but Jimmy knew that would soon pass. He took a drag off his cigarette and inhaled deeply, blowing out the smoke in a long steady stream. He turned and looked up at the big white house with its dormers and green-trimmed windows; he smiled. The house was like an old friend. In Jimmy’s lifetime, it’d always been there and had never changed. He felt good. He felt like he belonged. He sipped his coffee, smoked his cigarette and wondered what this new day would bring.
He snubbed out his cigarette and walked to the outhouse.
Barry King hadn’t heard his first name in nearly three months, and King was glad for it. He’d always thought Barry had sounded weak and unbefitting for a man in his position. Inside the Devil’s Motorcycle Club he’d always been known as King. On the inside of Stillwater Maximum Security Prison the screws had never let him forget that his given name was Barry. The drug rap had been trumped up, and he’d paid bitterly for that. Then he’d gotten into some trouble on the inside and served a full year longer than his five-year sentence. He learned a lot about himself during that last painful year. He devoted himself to finishing his parole and never going back, and up until noon today, he’d never dreamed of leaving Saint Paul before contacting his parole officer. Everything had changed so quickly, so dramatically, that King was still trying to figure it all out. Now, just when he thought things couldn’t get any crazier, Grease gets himself killed and he’s suddenly leading the Club. One day, and so much had changed.
He rode at the front of the bus, arms crossed at his chest, dressed in his leathers and wearing his best frown. He’d just turned fifty, and the lines had grown deeper on his weathered face. Standing at just over six feet tall, King was wide in the shoulders and narrow in the hips. He shaved his head every day, his cheeks every other, and wore a fat Just For Men moustache that fell past his chin. A jagged white scar ran across his forehead and down his cheek. He was an imposing figure and he knew it. Every now and then he glanced back to make sure no one was pissing and moaning about their wounds. Satisfied, he’d return his attention to the road ahead and everything it was leading to.
While King had only been running things for a few hours, he’d taken control in no uncertain terms. He’d stopped the bus twice and forcibly ejected three of the girls who’d caught some lead at the rest area; one had even been the wife of a Club member. They’d left her crying and clutching her bloody stomach, standing alone on the cold shoulder. Their incessant wailing had quickly given him a headache. What was he supposed to do with them? He’d made a statement that he was in charge. The new leader of the Club needed to show his strength; it was expected of him. Well, he’d done that all right. King thought he’d never been happier in his entire life.
The fact that they were heading up to the Ely was something beyond his wildest dreams. Grease had come up with the idea. They had a debt to settle and a house to claim. The Devils had kept a clubhouse there for many years, long before he and Grease had joined up with them. The clubhouse had been taken from them in the bust.
When things started to fall apart in Minneapolis, Grease had called an emergency meeting. King had no idea of what the plan was, so when Grease proposed they return to Ely and reclaim what was rightly theirs. He’d been as surprised as anyone. There had been no arguments, and they’d quickly cut out of town. The bungled heist had been foolish, thought King; Grease and the Prospect had gotten what they’d deserved. The guys wanted to retaliate, but King had held them back. There would be many more battles in the coming days, and they would need to be more careful. There was also the fact that the lucky punk and his friends had done him a huge favor. King never forgot a favor.
King pondered the situation, suppressing the urge to jump up and scream at the top of his lungs: “Right on, man!” While he and Grease had been friends for many years, best friends for most of those, he’d recently grown tired of him and had secretly wished him dead.
King had no idea of what to expect once they got to Ely. The little town was populated with armed outdoorsmen who wouldn’t back down when it came to a fight. King knew this because of past confrontations. Well, he’d fight them on their own level. His plan was to move in slowly, taking a little bit of the town at a time. He doubted that many would have the stomach to fight against them because he planned on unleashing holy hell.
And that’s what Devils did best.
The bus rumbled ever north, accompanied by the growling Harleys in their motorcade. A familiar road sign informed them that they were just ten miles from Ely. King was growing more apprehensive with each passing mile. They would need to stop soon. He watched the driver, a man known as Meatball, navigate the twisting corners with all the skill of a professional driver. Meatball had stolen the bus from the school district that had employed him, leaving fifty children waiting on the sidewalk at the elementary school. King liked the chubby man despite the fact that he never seemed to bathe. Meatball was somewhere in his mid-thirties and weighed somewhere close to four hundred pounds. His shaggy beard was speckled with bits of food, and sweat stains drooped down his T-shirt.
“Look!” Meatball said, pointing ahead to a glowing fire in the distance.
King did look, as the light was the first he’d seen in nearly an hour. A little party? He thought to himself. They’d probably have food, beer, and who knew what else. Maybe they’d have some good-looking women. After a moment’s thought, King nodded to himself and spoke: “That’s where we’re headed,” he said. “Are you up for a little party crashing, man?”
“Damn right. I’m starting to get a little hungry.”
King chuckled. What had he expected Meatball to say?
The bus hit a pothole, and Meatball returned his attention to the road. There was a moan from deep in the back of the bus. King quickly turned his head and scowled, reminding everyone just who was in charge.
The Little Chapel in the Woods had been located outside of Ely for as long as anyone could remember. The building had changed over the years as had the denomination of its members. The church was indeed inside the woods, a quarter mile trek down a rutted gravel road, far from the beaten path. The little brick structure served its congregation’s needs for shelter and privacy. A fine cottage had been constructed on the site to accommodate its pastor. For the past two years a woman by the name of Margaret Bask had been living in that cottage. She had been the church secretary one year prior to that, a job that consumed about ten hours a week of her time. Bask had taken over f
or Pastor Dan Schmidt after discovering some embarrassing discrepancies in his bookkeeping. Now she went by Sister Margaret, a title bestowed upon herself despite the fact that she wasn’t affiliated with any church, nor had she any siblings of her own. She just liked the way it sounded.
Bask had been attending church nearly every Sunday of her life, preparing for the day when God would grant her wishes and give her a church of her own. As a young girl growing up in rural Wisconsin, Bask watched the way the congregations adored their leaders, and she’d always longed for that type of affection. When the opportunity had presented itself, she saw nothing wrong with blackmailing Pastor Dan. She merely reasoned that it was the Lord working in his own mysterious ways. Two thousand dollars was a lot of money, and he had taken it. She had the receipts to prove it. Bask gave Pastor Dan an out: publicly hand over the church to her and leave town the same week, and she’d take care of the missing money. Pastor Dan agreed, and she’d taken the pulpit by storm, delivering fire and brimstone sermons that drove away a good many of her congregation, but at the same time creating a fanatical base of worshipers who lived their lives to serve her and the small church. And while she wasn’t growing rich off of the collection plate, she lived quite comfortably and had no intentions of giving up the life she’d created for herself.
Bask was a large woman in her mid-forties, wide in the hips and shoulders. Her dark hair was long and frazzled as if she were constantly trying to brush out a perm gone bad. She wore no makeup on a face that regularly struck fear into the hearts of the brave souls who lived at the very edge of the Minnesota wilderness. Bask possessed a photographic memory and could quote the Bible from back to front, which was exactly what she did, devoting her Sunday sermons to The Book of Revelation. Her interpretations of those passages were quite different from those of your typical Christian church. That chasm had only widened with the passing of time. She also read the daily papers online and watched as much television news as humanly possible. Doing so, Sister Margaret was able to weave the news of the day into her sermons, twisting the facts, pointing to obvious signs and fulfilled prophecies. She’d used the current recession as her hammer, and she drove it into the pulpit with fierce conviction, convincing her little flock that the end was near and that the rapture would soon be upon them. Her reasons for doing so had also changed with the passing of time. In the beginning, she’d merely been out to surround herself with adoring believers and to continue her lifestyle. Slowly, as Sister Margaret’s grasp the sanity pole began to slip on, she started to believe every word that came out of her mouth. Being a compulsive liar only made her condition worse.
Those who remained in the congregation began to question the direction she was taking them in. They were just regular folks who had grown tired of her gloomy prophecies. There was nothing in the Bible against giving an uplifting sermon, was there? And just as they were about to send her out of town on the next Greyhound bus, the economy fell flat on its face.
By six o’clock that evening that same group could be found on their knees in the Chapel, begging Sister Margaret and the Lord Our God for forgiveness. She had specifically warned them that this was how the beginning of the end would start. She would never know how close she had come to losing control.
Bask had just finished eating an entire frozen pizza, washing it down with a tall root beer float. The power outage had not affected her LP gas stove, thank God, and Bask had spent her afternoon baking the perishables from her freezer. Waste not, want not, she’d always been taught. The trouble was that the smells from her little oven were just too tempting, and she didn’t know when, or even if, she’d get to taste them again. She could feel the food sitting in her stomach like a big lead ball, and she badly wanted a nap. She wondered if she should tell everyone to go home and pray, allowing her to do so. No, she had a message to deliver. Bask had a few minor epiphanies while eating the tavern-style pizza. The first was that they had to do something. If things on the outside continued to fall apart, which she was certain they would, they were going to need to protect what little they had. She had watched the rioting on her television before Satan’s channel, the EBS, had taken over the airwaves. Like Noah, she was going to have to turn people away from her ark.
The other epiphany was how much she enjoyed a good tavern-style pizza. Whatever she thought about the evils of alcohol, she had to admit that those heathen drunkards sure knew how to eat. She set the timer on the stove, checked her watch and popped another pizza into the oven.
Bask entered the chapel by the back door into her office and selected a bright red scapular to go over the black kimono. She could hear men talking from beyond the door as she wrestled with the garment. Although she couldn’t hear their words, she didn’t like their tone. They sounded afraid, and she couldn’t lead a frightened army. Checking herself in the mirror she made some minor adjustments. She ran her fingers through her mat of tangled hair and walked out to the pulpit.
Conversation stopped like the needle being lifted from an old LP. Bask stood at the pulpit, gathering her thoughts and stifling a belch. There was nearly two hundred of her flock gathered in front of her, half of whom were standing shoulder to shoulder in the back. “My children,” she began, holding her hands cupped in front of her as if she were holding their souls in them. “You are the selected ones. God has chosen you to join me here to wait for the coming rapture. We’ve got to prepare for what lies ahead. We’re going to have to lock out the sinners from our little Shangri-La. So I have to ask: are you ready to fight the good fight with me? Can I hear an Amen?”
After a thunderous response, Bask’s mind slipped into second gear. “They will arrive with guns, very soon, are we ready to stand against them in God’s name?”
“Amen!” roared the congregation.
Sister Margaret Bask was nearly overwhelmed by the sight of all that blue steel inside the little chapel. The men, and quite a few of the women, were brandishing their weapons with considerable pride. She beamed back at them, thinking that she just might get that nap in yet.
She continued, shifting into high gear and launching into a sermon that would’ve made the Pope fall to his knees. Bask had never felt so powerful, and she became a little drunk because of it. She quickly forgot about the nap as she became enthralled with the way her followers hung on every word she spoke. What she’d only intended to be a ten-minute oration had lasted well over an hour.
The spell was lifted as people began to lift their noses and sniff the air. By that time it was too late to save the ruined pizza or the flaming cottage.
Sister Margaret, certain that this was the devil’s work, became enraged by this sudden turn of events. She’d loved her cozy little home, and now it was a burning torch in the night sky. Nearly everything she owned was now as crisp as the pizza, darkening her mood even further.
Without water, there was no hope of saving the cottage. The men used wet blankets and rugs to keep the flames from spreading, but like a candle in the night, the fire continued to burn for hours.
They continued to fight the fire until the distant roar of motorcycles filled the night air. The rumble grew until it sounded as if they were nearly upon them.
And then to everyone’s terror, the motorcycles stopped and the engines were killed.
Seven
On February 19, 1942, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt authorized the forcible internment of Japanese Americans with Presidential Order 9066. This granted power to local military commanders to designate military areas as exclusion zones from which any or all persons may be excluded. Lieutenant General John L. DeWitt administered the internment program. He testified before Congress that: “Japanese Americans were a dangerous element.” He further stated: “We must worry about the Japanese all the time until he is wiped off the face of the map.” Again, this was the man in charge of the internment program.
Over forty years would pass before Congress and President Ronald Reagan would officially apologize for this action.
The morning warmed unusually fast, evaporating dew from the green grass while turning the insides of the little tents into ovens. Even though many hadn’t gone to sleep until after four in the morning, nearly everyone had rolled out of their nylon steam cookers by eight, with even the most stubborn sleepers getting up by eight thirty. In twos, threes, and fours, the tired groups made their way into the kitchen where they were treated to a huge buffet-style breakfast. They ate off of paper plates piled high with pancakes, eggs, sausage, fried potatoes, fresh fruit and toast. There was cold milk, juice and plenty of hot coffee. The good food and unusual summer-like weather created the illusion that they were all on vacation.
Many from the group spent the morning down by the lake where the Dahlgrens maintained a lawn roughly the size of a football field. The lot was divided by the narrow gravel drive that led to the Birkland place. The grass ended at a small beach shaded by white pines that towered above the lake. Ken had his three fishing boats in the water and tied up at the dock. Small waves lapped at their sides hypnotically, causing their hulls to rise and fall in the rippling blue water. Children kicked off their sneakers and waded in the lake; it was still weeks away from swim temperature. Parents congregated by the beach visiting, some meeting for the first time. Buckets were filled and people cleaned up in the cool water, laughing as they dumped it over hair slicked with shampoo and conditioner. Jimmy had done this earlier and knew just how cold that lake water was. He’d changed into a fresh pair of jeans and a clean shirt and felt surprisingly good for all that had happened.
Not everyone was able to join in the festive atmosphere. Two of their number had died the night before, and now two more were packing up, having decided to risk the long drive back to Crown. Sharon Bauer had spent most of the night next to the freshly dug graves, grieving for her fallen husband. Someone had given her a sedative, and she’d finally been able to get a couple of hours of restless sleep. She wanted to go home. She needed to inform both Tom’s parents and hers that Tom had been killed. Bernie Lewis, a close friend of Tom’s, had offered to drive her back. She tearfully accepted, and after Ken had filled the tank on the Bauers’ Toyota, they crunched down the gravel drive toward uncertainty.
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