The Land

by Thomas Maltman

  For a time I had to give up my moral compass. Such a compass wouldn’t do me any good until I had the answers I needed. In the meantime, I was gathering information I could use against them. I knew already, for instance, that convicts aren’t supposed to own and operate firearms like the ones we handled down at the range, information I could bring to the attention of authorities. I knew that in the machine shed behind Mother Sophie’s cabin they were building AR-15s from custom kits bought in pieces by mail order, a way to circumvent the assault weapons ban. I knew some kind of plan was in the works, something they intended to do before Y2K, though the men clammed up in my presence. I felt sure that if I stayed with them long enough I would find out what had happened to Maura or where she had gone. For a time, I needed to get lost, but I was already so lost now I didn’t know if I would ever find my way back to my old self. The old self had to die so Meshach could be born again. Meshach, who could stand in the fire.

  Before this, I would have sworn to you that I was not a racist. Growing up in the predominately white conservative suburb of Mount Greenwood, I hardly gave much thought to race at all, except on trips visiting my grandparents’ house in Fuller Park, which had gone from primarily Caucasian in the fifties to almost all black after white flight sent folks scrambling for the burbs.

  This one visit stands out in my memory. My grandpa Logan had just been released from the hospital and was recovering from congestive heart failure. My uncle Nolan took me with him to spend the weekend so we could help my grandma Zee around the house and finish building the prefab toolshed my grandpa wanted in the small backyard. At the age of fourteen—still reeling from my parents’ divorce the year previous—I dreaded such a trip. A little man-to-man time, my uncle Nolan had pitched it to my mother. My “please don’t make me go,” went unheard.

  We cruised the old neighborhood in his Buick, our windows down as my uncle Nolan pointed out landmarks. Rush Limbaugh squawked on the radio, his furious tirades against Clintonian sleaze at the “oval orifice” filling up the silence between my uncle and me. Rush segued into a bit about a new book called Bell Curve that wacko professors were censoring on campus. As “the most dangerous man in America” it was his responsibility to tell us the truth about this book and the truth wasn’t pretty. The book supposedly proved that intelligence was inherited, imprinted in your DNA, and while Rush didn’t say the next part out loud, it bubbled like a muddy river under the subtext of his rambling: whites were smarter than blacks from birth onward, so all the social programs in the world, from Head Start to welfare, couldn’t lift black people from the squalor of their basic inferiority.

  Uncle Nolan had one hand easy on the big wheel, the other casually draped on the seat rest behind me. Square-jawed and balding, he was a big man who looked nothing like my petite mother. A Vietnam veteran—he had been a clerk in the war—he was a wanderer and a vagabond, some seasons working the crab boats up in Alaska or hiring himself out as a handyman. I was just a gangly kid by comparison, beanpole thin after my first major growth spurt. I missed my father—the gap between us started growing a long time before the divorce, and I felt certain he wouldn’t have left us so easily had I not been such a letdown to him as a son—but Uncle Nolan wasn’t exactly father-figure material. He had once been a cheerful man, but time and liquor had not been kind to him, his voice tinged with a rough bitterness that made me miss the old Uncle Nolan.

  My uncle adjusted the dial before slipping his hand back behind my seat rest. Outside our windows, liver-colored lawns sprouted crab grass after a dry summer. Everything looked yellow; even the air smelled of urine. What always struck me about this neighborhood were the iron bars on the windows of some of the houses, as if people here lived in stucco prisons. “What do you make of all that?” Uncle Nolan asked after a long silence.

  “All what?” I said, though I knew he was referring to the show. I had discovered that I could kill many painful conversations with adults by directing questions back at them.

  “Truth is that the law is tilted in every way to favor these people with handouts. Affirmative action and all that shit. Take a good look around, Lucien.” He sniffed. “The supposed war on poverty has been going for over two decades. This look like uplift to you?”

  “It does not.” I had to agree.

  He gestured at the radio. Even at a low staticky murmur, Limbaugh sounded like an angry bee trapped inside the speaker. “All I’m saying is that there’s some truth to the man’s words.”

  We stopped at a corner store and Uncle Nolan sent me inside with a twenty-dollar bill while he left the Buick idling. I kept my head down as I hurried through the aisles, the only white person in a small store with too many mirrors on every wall and corner, so a thousand Luciens reflected back at me, pale-faced and skinny and trying not to look scared. I snagged a gallon of whole milk from one of the sliding cases and hustled to the cashier, an obese, Asian man wearing a stained apron as he stood behind the deli counter. We traded cash for milk without a single word passing between us, and then I hurried back outside, the plastic jug in one hand, the change for the twenty fluttering in the other like a fist of green flags.

  I walked out of the store and right into the midst to a trio of young black men who happened to be wandering past at the same moment. I had been told not to make direct eye contact—no gesture that would appear challenging in any way—so I only caught a glimpse of them: each with a single pant leg rolled up, red shoes or caps on backward, the tallest one sporting a rust-colored do-rag. They stopped at the same moment I did. “We’ll be taking that,” the tallest one informed me, nodding toward my fist of cash.

  “I don’t think so,” I said. The words left my mouth before I even knew what I was saying.

  He tensed, squaring his shoulders. I had no choice but to meet his eyes. They were bright as pennies, keen and alert. He was clearly the leader and not just because of his size. Maybe they were just wannabes and not real Bloods, boys playing at being gangsters, I had to hope. This could have gone either way. We each had our roles to play in this moment, but I had gone badly off script.

  I looked away from him for help—any help at all from my uncle Nolan—who was watching the scene unfold, his mouth agape as he sat behind the steering wheel. He gave one toot on the horn to make sure the trio would turn his way and then he motioned like he was reaching into the glove compartment.

  The teen in the do-rag showed his teeth when he looked back at me. “That your daddy?”

  “Not really,” I said. I glanced at his friends and back at him, saw him shove his hands in his baggy pants pockets. I was starting to realize how much trouble I might be in for, but once I committed to a course of action, I saw it through, whether it was wise or not. I don’t know where such stubbornness comes from. He wasn’t getting this money, not today.

  “‘Not really’?” His sharp laughter broke the tension. “Yeah, maybe you look more like the milkman. That’s you, the milkman’s son.” Satisfied with insulting me instead of robbing me, he laughed again as he and his crew continued on their way. “We let you go this time,” he turned to call out as he went.

  Inside the car, my uncle Nolan was livid. He slammed the glove compartment shut when I climbed in and set the milk gallon jug on the seat between us. “What the hell was that? You don’t walk around flashing cash like that.”

  I bit my lip and looked away. Here I had been given a simple task—the first thing he’d asked me to do on this trip—and I had failed him.

  “And for God’s sake, if some gangbanger demands you hand over your money, you hand it over. Got it? You think I want my nephew getting shot over a goddamn twenty-dollar bill? Your mother would never forgive me.”

  I wondered if he was right. What would I have done if they attacked me, throw milk on them? I didn’t understand my own actions. “I guess I’m just stupid,” I muttered.

  Uncle Nolan sighed heavily and rolled up the power windows a
nd clamped down the power locks. “You’re not stupid,” he said. “You just need to use better judgment. These people. They’re animals, okay? They will kill you for your shoes. For a goddamn pair of Nikes. You’re not in Mount Greenwood anymore.”

  I stared out the window, not really seeing anything. Later I would continue musing on this. Why had my uncle Nolan sent me in alone if the neighborhood was truly dangerous? Why not warn me beforehand about not being careless with cash? And what had he been looking for in the glove compartment? Uncle Nolan had never been the type to carry a gun before. When he turned Rush Limbaugh back up on the radio, I was almost relieved.

  My uncle Nolan never said the N-word. Not out loud. But it coursed under the surface of every sentence he spoke about black people.

  It was a short drive from the corner store to my grandparents’ house. My grandfather hadn’t fled with the rest of the white people in the fifties because he had renovated his brownstone with his own two hands, adding a cupola with a round wall of windows, some of them stained glass, so the light washed through in rainbow prisms. My grandmother kept her potted lemon trees in that light. How I loved curling up on the Turkish rug next to one of her many cats, the smell of citrus filling my senses. Before this visit, before the divorce, before I realized I would never live up to the expectations of the men in my family, it had seemed a magical place.

  Even bent by age, my grandfather had been a tall, imposing man who had loud opinions on everything. He would swear to you he despised racists in one breath, but in the next he would tell you that the history books had given a bum deal to Hitler since he had been a great leader, a powerful speaker who brought Germany out of the Depression. My grandmother, a tall, dark woman of Norwegian descent, didn’t bother to hide her racism. She looked a little like Greta Garbo, and she kept her hair dyed black.

  The day I was almost mugged she listened to my uncle’s angry retelling of my mishap at the corner store and drew me aside. “I know just the thing,” she said. She opened a mason jar of chocolate-covered Brazil nuts and handed me one. I downed the sweet obediently, still a child in her eyes. I knew what she was going to say before the words left her mouth because she tended to repeat herself, the same stories and jokes. My grandmother smiled and passed me another. “We call these nigger toes,” she said, “but don’t tell your grandpa because he doesn’t like that word. I’m glad you didn’t give those pickaninnies a single penny.” She chucked me under the chin and walked away. For a long time afterward the sweetness of that chocolate melting in my mouth mixed with the ugliness of the slur.

  I nodded and absorbed it all. My grandfather extolling the efficiency of the German war machine, which the world would never see the likes of again, my grandmother watching Aretha Franklin on the Zenith and griping that black people didn’t really know how to sing, they just screamed into the microphone. My uncle talking about the persistence of their poverty despite decades of social programs. There was a war happening in the context of their stories, and in this war, white people, particularly white males who were the true descendants of our august forefathers, were losing, piece by piece, a country that was rightly theirs. What was so wrong with having pride in your heritage? How I longed for fatherly love and approval, then and now.

  My grandparents had both died a few years ago. In the touch of Mother Sophie, I heard my grandmother’s voice again. In Elijah’s talks on history, I heard my grandfather. In Roland’s sternness, my father or my uncle Nolan spoke to me again. There were times with this new family I had found when I felt I was stronger than ever before, a man with faith and purpose. I didn’t just sit around complaining about the state of the world. I had become part of a group that was preparing for a real and defining action, even if they kept the details from me for now. I tried to tell myself that my upbringing had prepared me for this moment, but I knew the truth deep down. Though my grandparents had died years ago, they would have been afraid if they could see me now, afraid of who I was becoming. I didn’t know what I was capable of doing anymore.

  I stayed out with Roland and Elijah for another half hour, until the targets were so riddled with bullets they no longer resembled human forms. They were shadows, monstrous and deformed. Roland eventually drew Elijah aside, out of earshot, for a discussion. This had happened frequently the last week, a plan taking shape they didn’t want me to hear about. Bjorn had even gone away to scout soft targets, and he must have hit the monument in Duluth on the way. Today I had the distinct impression that Roland was talking about me this time, and from the turning down of his mouth I was sure Elijah wasn’t happy about what he was hearing. What could they possibly be saying? I had done everything they had asked of me so far, but I didn’t think I could spread those pamphlets on campus. I had a terrible feeling that I was being used by these men. Then Elijah signaled me to follow as he and Roland headed up the hill.

  Watery sunlight broached the clouds above the treetops, gilding the tops of the pines. On the way up the hill, Elijah suggested we stop at Roland’s trailer, a small but sturdy Scotty with a shell shaped like a turtle. Before this I’d only been inside Mother Sophie’s cabin and Elijah’s Airstream, so I wasn’t sure what to expect from a recluse like Roland. He’d built a proper porch out front, complete with a slanting, shingled roof, wind chimes tinkling in the eaves. We stomped mud from our boots, which Roland requested we leave outside the door along with Mjolnir.

  The trailer within was surprisingly tidy, a room both cozy and warm. Elijah and I sat at a Formica table across from a low queen-sized waterbed. I knew by now that most of the beds within these trailers were waterbeds—a practical measure in the event their wells dried up after Y2K or were poisoned by the star Wormwood falling to earth and causing nuclear meltdowns—in which case they could tap open the beds for drinking water. Elijah had given me a tour one day, including of the underground bunkers where they stored fifty-pound bags of powdered milk and five-pound bags of powdered peanut butter and enough sardines to feed an army of seals.

  From a cabinet above a small fridge, Roland fetched a milk jug with some caramel-colored liquid sloshing around inside. He planted this on the table with three coffee mugs with Alaskan scenes painted on the sides—mine had Mount McKinley on it. Roland had campaigned vigorously for the Alaskan Bush as the church’s final refuge in the End Times, but was overruled by Mother Sophie’s fear of bears.

  “You’re in for a treat now, Meshach,” Elijah said as Roland uncapped the jug. The smell of liquor nipped at my nose from where I sat. “This is Roland’s home brew. He’s got a still back in the woods, but don’t tell Mother Sophie. We’re supposed to be dry on The Land. Too much hooch and the boys end up fighting each other instead of the world out there.”

  My ears still rang from our time at the firing range. I don’t drink. The words were there on my tongue. The only liquor I’d ever touched had been the whiskey I shared with Maura the night we were robbed. The first time she held me. I thought of my mother’s alcoholism. The car she’d totaled the year her marriage dissolved. The nervous nights I waited up for her, trying not to imagine who she was out with. Bailing her out of jail when I was a junior in high school. I’d seen a lifetime’s worth of the damage liquor could do, but that was the old Lucien, weak and wounded. Here I could shed my weaker self as a snake sheds its skin. What was the harm in one drink?

  Roland filled each of our mugs two fingers deep with his witch’s brew. It smelled of molasses and turpentine. Then he motioned me up so he could sit beside the window, and I sat again, squeezing in beside him.

  “To the end of the world,” Elijah said, hoisting his mug. I toasted the others, clinking mugs. My first sip was nearly my last. The homebrew burned in my throat and seared my sinuses. A woody fragment of something snared in my teeth. The heat washing through my body caused me to remember Maura and the first and only time I’d ever tried whiskey. I felt my skin flushing.

  “Woo-eee,” Elijah whooped just like he had a
t the firing range. When I blinked back tears he laughed at me. I took another sip. The home brew had a smoky appley flavor that grew on you, the liquid gold of a fine autumn day distilled into this caramel concoction. Apples and gold and turpentine and some rusty nails thrown in for good measure. The heat spread all the way down to the tips of my toes. I grew conscious of the rotation of the planet, the earth spinning, my head spinning, Elijah watching me like an indulgent older brother, his eyes shining. I’d longed for a brother growing up. This odd family here that I’d found myself a part of was starting to feel more real than my own.

  I downed my entire mug and Roland poured me another before I could wave him off. He cranked open the window, tapped down his pack of American Spirit cigarettes, slid one out, and lit it.

  Then Elijah sighed heavily, as if he’d made up his mind about something. Whatever they’d been talking about on the way to the trailer. Elijah’s eyes were hard when they settled on me again. I never saw the next part coming. “Tell us again how you found us.”

  The spinning room no longer felt quite so pleasant. Where had the question come from? Mush-mouthed, I repeated what I’d originally said about being out on the highway and spotting the church.