The flyers before me had the words it’s okay to be white on one sheet and save yourself from cultural marxism printed on another, along with the address for Rose of Sharon. I had a bad feeling that these flyers were part of Roland’s plan for me, so I ignored them for now.
While he set a kettle of water on a tiny woodstove, crackling with heat, Elijah chatted on about his daughter, Sarah, off at a home school Caroline was running in one of the nearby trailers. I kept my face impassive, knowing that Maura would have ended up a co-teacher at the school, a fate she dreaded. She loved her daughter, but not other people’s children so much.
There were reminders of her everywhere in this place. Alongside crayon drawings by Sarah, a photo of Maura and Elijah holding hands up in the mountains decorated the icebox, an endless desert plain stretching behind them, Elijah squinting into the sun. Maura looked young, deeply tanned, and—as much as it pained me to admit it—happy. I also spotted Maura’s black guitar case—plastered with stickers from coffee shop folk artists such as Ani DiFranco, Emmylou Harris, and the Indigo Girls—propped against a wall by the bathroom door. Looking at it, I remembered her own lullaby, how it had been supposed to call the fox away. I could hear her voice, faintly smoky, if I shut my eyes.
Now here I am in the fox’s den, but where are you, Maura? Would you have really abandoned your music as well as your daughter?
I knew that had been one of her daydreams, to get back to the desert, a place where she would never be cold or deal with snow again, because “you don’t have to shovel sunshine,” she’d said. A place where she could work on her music, maybe even record an album one day. A place where she would be free of him. She would tell me this and then with a toss of her hair dismiss it all again.
Maura’s presence was everywhere in this room. The ghost of her sandalwood perfume, like she had just been here and gone, drifted in the undercurrent of more pungent odors, the wood burning in the stove, scorched eggs in the sink, and the musk and souring hopes of a man who had some kind of nervous breakdown, if what Mother Sophie had said was true.
A few months before she left, Maura had cut her hair pixie style. The first time I walked in the back break room and saw her, I’d done a double take. “Whoa,” I said.
“You don’t like it?” Maura had watched my face, her eyebrows arched, her cheeks brightened with a splash of rouge. The short haircut accentuated her bright, hazel eyes.
“I do,” I said, stepping closer. “It brings out your eyes. You look like Dorothy Parker.”
“I was going for a young Joan Baez.”
“Who?”
Maura smiled tentatively. “I’m guessing neither of us knows who the other is talking about. Fair’s fair.”
I stepped closer. “Dorothy Parker wrote this poem called ‘Flappers’ during the Jazz Age.” I searched my mind, trying to recall how it went. “Her golden rule is plain enough / Just get them young / and treat them rough.”
Maura didn’t laugh and despite her brave new haircut, her transformation, she appeared nervous and uncertain. “I think she and Joan Baez would have gotten along just fine.” She ran her hands through her hair, revealing one elfish ear. “And, I do feel like a new person. Like anything is possible. Elijah hates it. He’s so pissed he won’t even speak to me.”
“Forget him,” I said, thinking he must be the source of her distress. I looked up at the lobby cameras to make sure the other two tellers, Dorothy and an older woman named Monica, were engaged in transactions. “I think you’re even more beautiful now.”
I leaned in for a kiss, but Maura put a restraining hand on my chest. “Not now. I’m wearing lipstick. And if I don’t get back out there soon, they’ll get suspicious.” She sighed. There was no sparkle of flirtation in her eyes, her voice drained of emotion. “Listen, Lucien. I need a friend more than anything right now. For so long, I’ve been trapped. Like there’s no way out, but I think I know what I need to do now. I’m going to make my break.”
My heartbeat quickened. Was she talking about divorce? Would this make it possible for us to start a relationship? I wanted so badly to hold her again.
“And when I do,” she continued in a soft voice. “We won’t be able to be together.”
“What?” This jolted me.
“If it comes out that we were together, Elijah will use it against me in court.” She spoke a low rush, her words hurried. “He will take Sarah away from me. I won’t let that happen.” She glanced away from me at the cameras and chewed on her lower lip. Her hands remained on my chest, near my beating heart. “You have so much life ahead of you. There are things you can only experience once for the first time. Like having a child. It’s the most powerful, life-changing moment I can imagine. You need to be with someone who hasn’t felt all that before, so you can experience it together. You only get one chance to be new. It’s a gift.”
Even as she held a hand against my heart, I pressed against her at hip level. She didn’t pull away. “I don’t care about any of that,” I said. “I want you.”
“You don’t get it,” she said, but her eyes were luminous. She pressed her face against my chest, sighing, her body relaxing against mine. She loved me, too. I felt it in the sweetness of her touch. “What am I to do with you?” I felt her quiet laughter against my chest. “I have to go. You, however, might need to stay here a few minutes. Just until that tent in your slacks lowers.”
Elijah set the mugs down and then got out a wooden chessboard from another cabinet, the elegant soapstone pieces nestled in their black velvet bags. “You got time for a game?”
“Sure,” I said, pleasantly surprised that he’d remembered. “But I get to be black this time.”
Elijah handed me one of the bags and shook out his pieces. “We’ll start from the beginning. We never did get a chance to finish our other game. I’ve been thinking about it since.”
We arranged the pieces and when he opened with his white pawns to C3 and D4, I responded with Benoni, the Son of Sorrow, just like Bobby Fischer, one pawn to C5, my knight challenging, and going fianchetto with my bishop on the kingside.
Elijah wagged a finger. “This is why I like having you around,” he said. He took a long time deliberating his next move. He would need to establish outposts on the C6 and E6 squares. My job was to get those lanes open for my bishops and to avoid trading them early. He didn’t play with any chess clock, so this meant each of us had as much time as we wanted for moves, and Elijah proved to be a slow, methodical player, cracking open more peanut shells between moves.
My attention wandered, usually my fatal weakness in matches. The best chess players can envision the entire board three moves ahead, all the various possibilities spanning out in their brains. On my high school team, our top board had been a guy with Asperger’s, and he could bring his full mind onto the board, shutting out everything else around him with a concentration so complete he nearly stopped breathing. I moved in the moment, by comparison, hoping for my opponent to make a mistake.
The shelf across from us was stacked with paperback Westerns, most of them by Louis L’Amour or Zane Grey. While Elijah deliberated I picked up a copy of The Lonesome Gods and flipped through it until I came across a heavily creased page with an underlined passage about how intuition is a higher form of knowledge, one that connects us to lost gods and the ancients who walked these lands before us. Touching the scored words, I knew Elijah was a mystic. “This is good stuff,” I said, thinking of my nightly sojourn under the stars with Kaiser. How I imagined being the voice in the wilderness.
“It’s one of my all-time favorite books,” Elijah said, when I looked up from the page. “It’s the one that gave me the strength to break away from home and family and set out on my own path. I thought I was being led by intuition, like Vernon in the novel. My parents had lost their way, forgotten the strength and purity of our Anglo-Saxon heritage.” As he said this he moved his knight to
put pressure on the D5 square, a move I was anticipating.
“Your parents didn’t agree?”
“Oh no,” Elijah said. “My dad taught math at the local junior high. They didn’t know what to do with me. In those days, I thought my anger was my strength.” He studied the board, his hands under his chin. “What’s your last name, Meshach?”
“Swenson,” I said automatically. I didn’t see any reason to lie about this.
Outside, we heard heavy footsteps, boots crunching through snow. I wondered who was coming this way, but Elijah didn’t even look up from the board.
“Swenson makes you Scandinavian, a descendant of Vikings. A conqueror like Bjorn. Roland will be pleased to hear it.” I found it curious he didn’t say whether or not it mattered to him. A knock came at the door a moment later. “I don’t think we’ll get a chance to finish this game, either,” he said. “Roland’s going to want to talk to you about these here flyers.”
I felt a sinking disappointment. Here I was playing chess with a violent ex-convict, a known neo-Nazi, a man I had cuckolded, and I was enjoying his company. He’s the enemy, I reminded myself, you’re not supposed to like him. The flyers had been shoved aside for the chessboard and I’d been doing my best to ignore them. “I thought my anger was my strength,” Elijah said, his eyes studying the board as if memorizing it so we could continue the game later. “But I was wrong.” The knock came again and Elijah looked up and met my eyes. “He’s going to ask something of you. But you don’t have to do it. Understand?”
I was too surprised to say anything before Elijah got up from the table to let Roland inside. Roland stopped to warm his hands over Elijah’s woodstove before neatly folding his coat over a chair nearby. Waves of cold still radiated off him when he squeezed in beside me at the small table. While Elijah put away the chess pieces, Roland traded the copy of The Lonesome Gods I had been paging through for a book of his own, laying it before me. With a cover the dull red of drying blood, his paperback copy of The Turner Diaries didn’t look like much at first glance.
“This book will tell you what we’re all about here.”
I gestured at the Bible I’d brought along. “I’m already meeting with Mother Sophie to talk about the book of Isaiah.”
“That’s good,” Roland said, “but this here is another kind of instructional book. Mother Sophie tells me you’re between jobs.”
“You could put it that way,” I said. I opened his book and saw where someone had printed the words We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children in block letters on the inner leaf. Fourteen words in all. I would soon learn that these were the fourteen words around which they based their mission here on The Land. I shut it for now and studied the front and back cover.
On the back the slogan What Will You Do When They Come to Take Your Guns? was printed in bold black letters. On the front cover a young man and woman crouched behind a fence. She clutched an assault rifle while he squatted with the twelve-gauge up against his shoulder. On the other side of the fence an oblivious cop approached while behind him a squad car with the words Equality Police was just pulling into an alley.
The book looked tawdry and self-published, but looking at it also filled me with foreboding. I was about to go in deeper with these people. Is that what Elijah had tried to warn me about before Roland came in? Why?
Elijah tapped the front cover. “That was me and her, right there. My Maura. We were going to upend the system.”
“Maura?” I said. I didn’t ever think she had shared his sympathies. Those few people of color we had for customers she had treated with a cold equanimity, “Your wife?” In the few times I’d been around him he rarely mentioned her. This was another strange thing to me, how Elijah could be so completely different around different people. Around me, he turned contemplative, but Roland or Bjorn brought out his aggressive side.
“She was, yeah.”
Was? Holy shit. “What happened to her?”
Elijah sipped from his Sanka, which must have gone cold by now. “She stopped believing,” he said.
“You take that book home with you. I want to know what you think.” Roland interrupted my train of thought. He reached around me and picked up the flyers. “If you’re between jobs, then maybe you can help us get the word out. You think you can hang these up on campus?”
I accepted the flyers, glancing once more at the words. I didn’t see anything offensive in it. It was true, right? There wasn’t anything wrong with being white. As for the other one, I had only vague notions of what they meant by cultural Marxism. Weren’t these ordinary thoughts most Americans held to be true? My upbringing had certainly raised me to hate “pinko commies,” as my uncle Nolan called them.
Elijah studied me across the table. “They find out you’re the one spreading those and it’s all over for you at school.”
“Don’t scare the kid,” Roland said, shaking his head.
“He needs to know how the world treats people like us. There’s always a price for things. He needs to know that there will be a price.”
“I do know,” I said, making up my mind. I knew better the price than he realized. They were testing me here and I had to prove myself. If I could prove myself, I could keep coming to The Land. Then I might get the answers I longed for. For those answers I would pay anything. Distributing these flyers didn’t seem like too much to ask. “I’ll put these up if you think it will do some good.”
“Getting the word out always does good,” Roland said. “These pamphlets might look like a joke to some people. But they will rile up discussion. The kind of discussion your politically correct professors won’t care for. The kind that might bring the right kind of people our way.”
“Just don’t push things too far,” Elijah said.
Roland put his arm around me and scowled across at Elijah. I also didn’t understand his concern. Did Elijah doubt me, or was he trying to protect me? I didn’t know, but I vowed that if he had something to do with Maura’s going missing, I would make sure he paid a price as well.
“I hate censorship,” I said. “I can’t stand it. A university should be a place where people debate ideas freely.” I held the flyers to me, met Elijah’s hard gaze. I had halfway convinced myself what I was saying was true. “Maybe they need to hear this message.”
On the way to campus I passed the looming facade of the Aurora Bay State Hospital, which looked like an old mansion from the front, all red brick neo-Georgian revival, the modern facilities spanning out behind, concrete and gray and lacking any character. I wheeled my Continental around at the next intersection. I may have been given a task, but I had another mission. If you lose something, one of the best things you can do is return to where you lost it. This was where I had lost a person, the sight of her vanishing.
I pulled around back, the circular drive where the ambulances roll patients into the emergency room by gurney. I parked against the curb, across the street, where Maura had asked me to drop her off that night. My engine rumbling, I sat in the car and shut my eyes, remembering. The rain drumming on the roof, the low murmur of the radio, and Maura’s tremulous voice. “I can make it on my own. You can’t go in with me. You can’t.” Her face ashen—tight with pain—as she urged me to leave her. The last glimpse I had of her, standing under a streetlamp, her handbag clutched against her belly.
And I had driven away and not a mile from here my Civic hydroplaned right through a stop sign and a kid in a pickup plowed into me. Ten days later, when I could walk again, I had made a habit of going downstairs to quiz the night shift staff if anyone had seen Maura enter the hospital, but none remembered a woman matching my dazed description.
I thought I knew why she didn’t go in, not with five thousand in stolen bills burning a hole in her handbag. But where else could she go for help if she had miscarried? And why had she been so afraid?
I sto
od where she had stood, watching a past version of myself drive off into the rain. Below me, the steeply sloping street dropped away toward Aurora Bay. Wind hurried high clouds across the water, and the sun speared through in silver shafts and the bay burned like molten gold where light touched water. Beyond, the vastness of Lake Superior brewed with squalls of snow, a darkness shimmying this way in skirts. I imagined this inland sea, the burying ground for many shipwrecks, as a great, breathing thing. The swirling clouds snuffed the last of the sun as the first fat flakes flew past. Maura had not gone this way.
In the other direction, I walked where she must have walked that night, and when I saw it on a shelf of land above me I stopped in my tracks. A square, homely structure with a glass windbreak. A bus stop. It gleamed there, a beacon of safety. Of course. Maura was so smart, so resourceful. She might have been driven by desperation to steal, but she was a planner.
The wind whipped more flakes past me, a thickening snow flying horizontal. I wanted to keep going, to climb the hill and sit on that bench in the shelter, as surely Maura must have sat, waiting for the warm bus to fan open its doors like great gills, a behemoth that swallowed her whole, like Jonah, and carried her elsewhere.
Surely it must be so. It had to be. Behind me the bay frothed and the hospital that had been my prison glowered, a facade of concrete and blank-eyed windows.
Tell me you got away from all of this, Maura. Tell me you made it. I know you did.
I couldn’t go any farther. Before the storm intensified, I had a job to do. If Maura had gotten away, she might come back. I needed to stick with these people. I needed to know more. I knew that Roland would find some way to check up on me. I limped back to my car and drove away. I needed to make it to campus at a time when classes would be in session, to make sure no one saw me. I needed to go now.
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