The Land

by Thomas Maltman

  “Not a ghost,” I said.

  “So you read the name, but what about the dates on the stone?”

  I thought back, trying to remember. “It was half buried in a snowdrift. I don’t think I could read the date.”

  Arwen folded her napkin and dropped it on top of her last remaining triangle, her appetite apparently gone. “Albert had a little sister named Arwen. He cherished her. She was only four years old when she followed him down to the river. He turned away for just a moment, looking for the perfect skipping stone. When he turned back she was out in the river, balancing on a boulder. One slip and that was it. The current took her away. They didn’t find her body until the next day.”

  “Shit. I’m sorry.”

  Arwen stood and picked up her plate and glass, her eyes distant as she looked out the window, where it had begun to snow again. “It’s okay. I do feel like a ghost some of the time. Or someone haunted by one. I imagine her out there in the night, this drowned little girl. Water drips from her hair and fingernails. Her skin is wrinkled and gray, the way it gets if you spend too long in the tub. She calls my name. Our name. She’s so lonely and cold. And sometimes, I feel like she’s inside me, like she’s found her way into me. A voice whispering that’s not my own.” Arwen forced a laugh, either trying to make light of her spooky story or to recover some of the lost mirth between us. “That doesn’t make any sense, does it? But now you know why my dad is so incredibly disappointed to see the woman his Arwen grew up to become.”

  She turned and headed downstairs. When I finished my sandwich, I followed her.

  In the den Arwen sat with her legs crossed reading from the Gemäldegalerie Linz. A scrap of yellowed paper had slipped from the book. I picked it up and held it in my palm, the thin paper fragile as a leaf, the words Berghof, May 4, 1945 written in a smear of lead pencil. Arwen had the book open in her lap, the page showing an expressionist painting of a nude couple sprawled together in the woods, their intertwined limbs green-tinted and blending with the vines and branches around them. Arwen was watching my face.

  “Berghof,” I said. “This came from the war.”

  She nodded and returned her attention to the artwork. “You’re putting it together.”

  Linz, she had told me. For a museum that was to be built. “Hitler was from Austria.”

  “Most of the artwork in this book was stolen by the Nazis for a museum Hitler planned to build in his hometown. The ones they deemed ‘degenerate’ they burned. Some of the art they stole has never been recovered.” Arwen told the story in a somber, measured tone, tracing the voluptuous lines of the lovers on the page rather than looking at me. “My great uncle brought this back from the war. They had already lost one brother, in Ardennes. So he stole it really, from Berghof, one of Hitler’s residences the Allies captured after the fighting was done. Before he died he passed it along to my father, a souvenir from the war.”

  “It must be worth a lot—”

  “Priceless,” Arwen said, glancing my way. “This is Albert Kroll’s most cherished possession. He takes it out to look at every night. Holds it like a child. But it doesn’t belong here. As I don’t belong here.”

  She went back to paging through the book, her shoulders hunched, so I left her alone. In my room, I read from The Turner Diaries, the book Roland had given me. Between my reading and the revelations about the stolen art in the album, I grew anxious. She stopped believing, Elijah had said about Maura. Was my wife.

  If you read The Turner Diaries you know what happens to those who stop believing. Early on in the novel a young woman is executed for sleeping with a black man, a placard with the words race traitor hung around her neck. This is just one of many violent, disturbing incidents in a novel that ends with a group of white rebels gaining power over the planet, but only with the help of nuclear weapons used to annihilate other races. I felt a burning in my chest while reading it and remembering my conflict with Noah in the halls, a pressure building behind my eyes. The Turner Diaries was poorly written, the prose amateurish, but the story infected me with a sense of paranoia that seeped from the pages into my fingertips and into my sleep and dreams. It wasn’t just that there was a race war coming. The novel showed me that the races were already at war and I’d been on the losing side all this time. And things were about to get much worse, the book insisted, a sibilant whisper vibrating inside my head. Which side will you choose when the time comes? I let that whisper linger, resisted stamping it out.

  Later that night I woke when I felt a cool breeze, a floating of the sheet as Arwen slipped beside me in the bed, bringing with her the aroma of crushed leaves and cloves, earth and pinesap and rain. “Do you mind sharing your bed with a ghost?” she said.

  “Not at all,” I said in a sleepy voice. I was still half-awake anyway. “Most of my previous companions have been of . . . a phantasmagorical nature.”

  “I’ll bet,” she said. She lay down in her dark nightie, so that only a few inches and the barest covering of nylon and cotton separated us.

  “I don’t know anything about you,” I said, after she’d settled in against her pillow, in case she was tempted to turn over and go right to sleep again. “Tell me a story.”

  “Once upon a time,” she began, “there was this guy who asked too many questions. It got him into all kinds of trouble.”

  “I don’t like this story,” I said. “The protagonist sounds like a jackass. I want a story about you.”

  Arwen sighed.

  “Something real.”

  She made a soft, irritated pfft! sound as if there was any other kind of story she might tell. She turned over so she faced me, her eyes unreadable in the dark. “Okay,” she said. “When I was a little girl I thought I could heal with a touch. Plants, animals, even other people. I think I got the idea from gardening with my mom. She must have said something about me having a green thumb and I just took the idea and ran with it.”

  “Arwen and Her Magic Green Thumb. This is good stuff. Maybe I should write it down.”

  “No more interruptions, wise guy. So anyhow, I thought I had some kind of secret healing power. When a friend fell at recess and scraped her knee, I pressed my finger into her wound and it stopped bleeding. I thought it was my magic that did it. I imagined this healing traveling down through the tips of my fingers into places that hurt. I thought I could heal anything . . .” Arwen’s voice trailed off.

  “And?”

  “That’s the story. You’re the guy who doesn’t like spoiled endings, right?”

  “Yeah, but . . .”

  Arwen placed her hand over my mouth, shushing me. In the dark she traced my cheekbones, her thumb against my lips. “You have a nice face,” she said. “An honest face.”

  I thought of all my accumulated lies. Noah’s tears as he let the flyers fall away. My phony salvation and the scam I was running with Mother Sophie’s people. My affair with a married woman. I wasn’t a good person. I don’t know what I was anymore.

  “Show me where you hurt.” Her cool breath washed over me.

  “Uh, where? All over.” Yet pain was the furthest thing from my mind. She hadn’t touched me like this before and it took me by surprise. Her hands in my hair, her face close enough to kiss. I felt my body waking up under her touch, the feel of skin on skin. I had thought it would be a long, long time before I felt such things again.

  “From the accident. Where are your scars?”

  “My collarbone. It’s held together with silicone screws.”

  Her fingers traced the line of bone, lingering over the puckered skin where they’d cut me open.

  “I can’t heal you like that old woman,” Arwen said. “Though I wish I could. I’m not a little girl anymore who believes in healing or magic. I don’t know anything about prayer or God or miracles, and I’m suspicious of anyone who claims to know the truth of these things. I can’t heal you, Lucien, b
ut I can know you. I’d like to know you. Where else were you hurt?”

  “I broke three ribs. Punctured a lung.” Her hand traveled there, sliding down my side without my directing. Instead of the old wound underneath, I felt something else. My body alive under the grace of her hands, every cell awake. It might not have been a healing, but it felt good.

  “This hurt?”

  “Not so much anymore.”

  “Where else?”

  I didn’t know what to say at first. How far was this going to go? Was I betraying Maura, my first love? The people at Rose of Sharon who believed in me?

  But Maura wasn’t here, so this was not a difficult decision to make. For one furious moment I could let all my wondering cease. Arwen repeated her question.

  “Surgeon had to rebuild my hip,” I said. “I’m like Lee Majors.”

  “If you say so,” she said. Her hand rested on my hip, a danger zone, since she had to sense what jutted through the vent in my boxers. Her hand lingered there, tracing slow, concentric circles.

  “Where else?”

  “I already told you I’m not right in the head.”

  “Who is?” She laughed softly. Then, Arwen moved closer and her mouth found mine and she took me in her hand, tracing the length without speaking. “You don’t happen to have any protection, do you?”

  Ordinarily, I might have reflected on how that question had several levels, including metaphorical ones, but the thought and speech centers in my brain were difficult to access. I wanted to tell her I hadn’t ever been with anyone else but Maura before. “No,” I said. “Maybe we shouldn’t?” I didn’t think my newfound friends at Rose of Sharon would approve of such a midnight rendezvous. In just a couple of days I had traveled from grace into perdition and back into some kind of grace once more. I didn’t deserve such mercy.

  “It’s okay,” Arwen said. “There are other things we can do.” She began to trace the same territory she’d graced with her hands with her mouth, her lips smooth against my skin.

  You Will Not Replace Us

  Through the iron sight, dark figures boiled up from a low ground fog, the snow exhaling as it melted in the warm morning air. Somewhere off in the trees a child was screaming. I could hear her even through the rubber plugs inserted into both eardrums, but I couldn’t tell if the child was hurt or only playing. The figures were no more than silhouettes, no more than ghosts in the creeping fog, thugs with gorilla arms scraping so low they might as well have been coming at me on all fours. Like beasts. I flicked off the safety, pressing the spring-loaded stock firmly into my shoulder, my face against the cold metal as I exhaled and pressed the trigger. Hot brass casings ejected around me in a concussive burst, splinters of light, as I kept my feet planted wide and swiveled from the hip, releasing and pressing the trigger at even intervals.

  “Woo-eee!” Elijah whooped beside me when I was done. I held out the smoking SIG Sauer he’d nicknamed Mjolnir after Thor’s hammer, my palms cupped under the stock like a holy offering. Elijah received it reverently, his fingers brushing the runic symbols cut into the barrel. I took out my earplugs, tucked them in a front pocket, and we both pivoted to Roland who held a stopwatch.

  “Eight seconds,” Roland said in his gravelly voice. “All head shots. He put down four niggers in the time it takes an old lady to blow her nose into a Kleenex.” The brim of his cowboy hat was so low I couldn’t read his eyes, sunk deep in a cavernous face, but he sounded pleased. The peppery smell of gunpowder drifted around us in a cloud.

  “Swenson, we’ll make a soldier of you yet,” Elijah said, addressing me by the last name he’d recently wheedled from me. He glanced over at Roland as he shouldered the AR-15 and stepped to the firing range’s low fence. “Didn’t I tell you? This boy here is descended from Vikings.”

  Roland grunted, his head dipping as he turned his attention back to his stopwatch. Off in the woods, I heard a child scream again, but it was the high-pitched holler of a kid at play and not of one afraid or in pain. They were just over the other side of the ravine, probably playing Agents of ZOG again, their favorite game. I slipped in my earplugs before Elijah could take his turn.

  We were in a low valley well away from the trailers, the targets tucked against a shelf of granite to take the brunt of any errant bullets. Tacked onto straw bales, the silhouetted targets about forty feet away resembled gangbangers, their forms crudely distorted to appear more apelike, black fists clutching knives or pipes as they lumbered toward us. The ground fog that had come with the warming spell made them look even more sinister, like they had sprung up from the dark earth, demons and not men, hunting us in the rocky pine valley. I don’t know where they bought such targets.

  I felt a tingling that traveled from my shoulder down to the tips of my fingers. I felt it right down to the fillings in my teeth, on a level of skull and bone. It surprised me how much I liked that feeling. Holding Mjolnir, I was no longer the broken kid who had spent ten days in a hospital bed. If you knew how to hold the assault rifle carefully, in my case tucked against my uninjured shoulder, it couldn’t hurt or bruise you. There is no preparing for such a feeling. Mjolnir was a marvel of engineering, a beautiful killing machine that fit naturally against my body. I stepped away from the low fence that separated us from the firing range as Elijah began to fire. I’d tried other weapons, including an M-4 and a genuine AK-47 that Roland owned, but the AR-15 was my favorite: light, accurate, and deadly.

  Roland paused us for a smoke break. “You seen the news?” he said to me. From a pocket in his vest he unfolded a clipping from the Duluth News-Tribune and passed it my way. I saw the headline first—“Hate Crimes Hit Duluth and Aurora Bay”—and I felt a shelf within me fall away. The article didn’t just mention the racist flyers spread on the campus of NMSU, but also detailed an act of vandalism down in Duluth where a monument to three young black males, lynched at the turn of the twentieth century, had been spray-painted in red with the number “14” and the initials “ROA.” The reporter didn’t know yet that these were the fourteen words or that ROA stood for Race Over All. His article went on to describe the flyers on campus and say that police speculated the same person had done both of these acts. Authorities were also aware of a rural Christian Identity church called Rose of Sharon with possible connections to white supremacy groups. It ended with this quote from Professor Friedman at Northern, who was the child of Holocaust survivors: “This hatred must be uprooted from the dark soil and shown the withering light of day. It cannot be allowed to fester and spread underground. Only by yanking it out by the roots will we be safe.”

  Reading those words I felt a wash of nausea rinse through me, cold and oily. I hadn’t any idea that when Roland sent me to campus with the flyers, I was part of a larger plan. What had I done?

  Elijah took the article from me, his brow furrowing.

  “How?” I said.

  Roland exhaled smoke from his nostrils. “I sent Bjorn down there. He was itching for some action.”

  “You went too far,” Elijah said. He crumpled it in his fist and let it fall to the ground.

  “We got the attention we wanted.”

  Elijah shook his head. “They’ll be watching us now.”

  “They already are.” Roland smiled grimly around his cigarette, his eyes on me. He took out another paper from his pocket and handed it to me. “You ready for act two?” he said. “I’d like to see the Star Tribune pick up the story next.”

  The hand-drawn brochure he passed my way featured a comic with four frames that told a simple story. In the first frame, a young skinhead comes across a lovely young woman who is being groped by two African-American hoodlums. Was it my imagination or did the face of the woman look like Maura, her high cheekbones and aquiline nose? I tried to blink her image away, her memory, her face in a place where it should not be. Not here.

  The artist had drawn one gangbanger sneering, the other with his
tongue lolling as he attempts to fondle her breasts. Their features were crude and simian, huge lips and noses. In the second frame the skinhead flips into action, smashing in those faces and saving the young woman’s virtue. His reward? In the third frame a Jewish judge, his long nose curling snaillike on a cruel face, sentences the skinhead to prison where he languishes behind bars. The final frame shows the skinhead out of prison and now reunited with the woman, her gingery hair flowing as they stand before wheat fields spreading endlessly, a new world bought and paid for with blood. All of this happens without a single word being spoken, the pictures doing all the talking.

  I handed it to Elijah, who took it without a word. “You remember when Jones drew this for us before he went away?” Roland said to him. “I been saving this for the right moment.”

  Elijah looked at the woman and then back at me. Did he also notice how she resembled Maura? Had the artist used her as a model? Elijah’s jaw tightened but he dropped his head as if resigned to something. “In another world, Hitler makes it into art school and finds his place in Vienna. He never goes to jail. Never writes Mein Kampf.”

  “What?” Roland said with a frown. “I swear I don’t understand you sometimes.” He took the pamphlet from Elijah and gave it back to me. “So you think you can make copies of this at Kinko’s? Then you can spread these on campus.”

  I didn’t answer right away. I was thinking of Noah, who now probably suspected I had vandalized the monument down in Duluth as well. Why hadn’t he reported me? I let the weight of the consequences settle in my gut, where it didn’t sit well. I had hurt a good person. I had made another good person afraid. Elijah kept his head down and it seemed like he wanted to look any direction but my way. Why? What had his strange comment about Hitler meant?

  Ten days had passed since Thanksgiving, and in that week, I had gotten myself in so deep with these people I was having trouble telling the real from pretend. They knew my last name, knew my major, knew my skills as an artist and programmer, knew that I was from Chicago after they asked about who my people were. I didn’t see any sense in lying about these things. I had been coming here every day since to play chess with Elijah and talk strategy. This was my new school. My university. The texts were the Bible that Mother Sophie had given me and the battered copy of The Turner Diaries that Roland tasked me with reading. This was the school where I was learning how to survive the apocalypse coming for us at the end of the year. This was where I was learning how to fight and how to hate. I told myself that I was only pretending and I tried to hide as much as possible what I was doing here from Arwen, mostly out of shame, but the real truth is that I hadn’t expected how easily I would take to all of it. On some level, I came here because I liked coming here.