“I have nothing to say,” I responded.
“Now, didn’t I tell you that wasn’t true?” chided Goldberg with a sudden grin that made him look demented. “I think you may know Sergeant Sorels here? The lad here says he has nothing to say. Do you think he has nothing to say, Sergeant?”
“I think he’s got plenty to say,” boomed Sorels.
Okay, this was a dumb thing to do, but I was a punk kid and hey, a punk kid just has to mouth off sometime. “Hey Sorels,” I said, “I heard something about you, and I’m wondering. Is it true your dick is the size of a felt-tipped pen?” Sorels said and did nothing, which if I’d had a lick of sense I would have recognized as a terrible danger signal and made a break for the door.
Goldberg sighed. “That was a very silly and childish thing to say, Shane. You are being disrespectful to Sergeant Sorels, which is stupid, but you’re being disrespectful to me as well, which verges on the suicidal. Leon is a muscle, and I tell him when to flex. Flex, Leon.”
Sorels may have been muscle-bound but it didn’t slow him down any. The ape was on me as fast as a striking rattlesnake and all of a sudden I was hanging upside down in the air. Sorels lifted me up with one hand like a doctor lifts a newborn baby, he was so strong, and I thought he was going to pile-drive my skull into the floor. Instead he turned me around facing away from him while I clawed at the air, grabbing at the table and chairs, and a moment later I felt the first crashing blow of the nightstick into the small of my back. My back and hips seemed to be exploding as if the muscles were tearing themselves apart in spasms of fire. I lost control of my bladder and pissed in my pants, but since I was hanging upside down it didn’t run down my leg but down the front of my belly and chest, under my shirt, and over my chin and ears. Sorels continued to hold me upside down by the ankles with one hand, and with the other he beat me like a rug with his nightstick. “Not in the kidneys again,” ordered Goldberg. “No permanent injury. Not today, anyway.” So what followed were a series of forceful, controlled taps on my elbows, my kneecaps, my belly, my balls, my ankles, and the soles of my feet which seemed to shiver my legs into splinters, even through my shoes. Then he dropped me onto the floor in a crumpled heap and gave me a bit of the boot. His spit-shined shoes had steel toes. It hurt worse than anything that had ever happened to me; I was convinced my bones were breaking and he was going to beat me to death. I howled like an animal. Needless to say, no one came to help me or even to investigate screams of agony coming out of a school administrator’s office. So what else is new, white boy? By then every white man and woman in America had internalized one of the primary lessons of living in a police state: see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. You hear screams, you just keep on walking, white boy. Well, thank God there were a few of us who didn’t walk away.
There was obviously no point in proceeding further with our little tête-a-tête, so Goldberg and Sorels left me lying on the floor soaked in my own urine and a surprisingly small amount of blood. The FBI man stuffed his card into my shirt pocket as I lay stunned and broken on the carpet. “Like I said, I’m in a good mood today, so you can thank your lucky stars I am going to give you some time to think about things. I’ve written a cell phone number on the back of this card,” he said. “Call me within 48 hours, Shane, and we’ll make a date for you to come into the Federal building in Olympia. Then you’re going to have something to say. Oh, yes, you’re going to have so much to say! Don’t try to run. If you make me chase you I am going to be very pissed off, and when I’m pissed off then the Sarge here is pissed off. You don’t want to get the Sarge pissed off. No, no no.”
“You don’t want to get me pissed off, punk,” rumbled Sorels.
Goldberg slapped me gently in the face. “Don’t try to disappear and you make that call, boy! Because if I don’t hear from you within two days, I’m going to come looking.”
I lay on the floor in the conference room in a daze, passing in and out of consciousness and in a fog of agony, for many hours. I vomited my breakfast and some blood, but fortunately I didn’t choke on it. No one came into the conference room during the whole day. By the time I staggered to my hands and knees and crawled out the door I saw by the clock in the guidance counselor’s office it was four o’clock in the afternoon. I had missed a day of school and no one had even bothered to check on me. By then my brain was functioning again and I had belatedly realized that Rooney was in danger. No one was in the office. I used the phone on Mrs. Dorfman’s desk to call Carter on his cell phone, which actually wasn’t all that good an idea—they could have been monitoring the call—but I was dazed and still a little new at revolutionary life skills, so to speak. Carter answered and I gabbled out what had happened. “Are Rooney and China okay?” I muttered through swollen lips.
“They’re fine,” said Carter. “China spied blue in the hall and she told Rooney and they both cut out after homeroom, and they’re in a safe place. We’ll figure out what’s going on. Now get out front of the school. I’m too far away to pick you up, so I’m calling 911 and I’ll get you an ambulance.” I managed to stagger out of the building and meet the paramedics on the front steps of the school. “What the hell happened to you, kid?” demanded the driver.
“Sorels,” I moaned. They didn’t say anything else, but loaded me onto their gurney and headed out to the ER at Providence Hospital where I was born. I heard the driver on his radio calling in that he had a Sorels Special. Now, I will give the steroid-sucking son of a bitch this: he was damned good at what he did and as the administrator myself of more than one punishment beating as part of my duty to the Republic, I have to recognize and acknowledge a master craftsman when I meet one. In the emergency room I discovered to my amazement and that of the staff that nothing was broken or seriously injured. No bones, no internal organs bleeding, nothing. Just bruises and incredible pain. Sorels was an expert and as bad as it had been, I had to admit that all I had gotten was a taste.
Somebody had called the police when I was admitted and told them they had a serious assault case, and a couple of uniformed Dundee cops showed up while I was being bandaged. “Jeez, they really worked you over, huh?” said the lead cop. “Who did it to you, Shane?”
“Your former colleague Sergeant Leon Sorels,” I told him in disgust. “And don’t pretend you’re gonna do a damned thing about it. You assholes never do anything about Sorels.”
The cop sighed. “Leon’s hanging out with that FBI task force now, isn’t he?” he asked me.
“Yeah. It was Sorels and some FBI agent named Goldberg,” I replied. I almost said Jew FBI agent, but my PC filter was up.
The two of them looked at one another and the older cop closed his notebook and put it back in his pocket. “I’m sorry son,” he said quietly. “Truly, I am.” Then they turned and walked out the door, but the lead cop turned and said, “There’s something else. I feel ashamed. Ashamed to be wearing this uniform and ashamed of this piece of red, white, and blue embroidery on my shoulder.” I didn’t see him again until a couple of years later, when he and I were both Volunteers and we spent a night together waiting for a tickle to go down. There was never any legal follow-up of any kind on the assault against me.
The nurse looked after them and made a face. “That’s Baxter and Wallace. They’re not too bad, but that SOB Sorels sends us a lot of business and they can’t do anything about it.” (I met her too later on. Betsy Lamm, one of the best medics the NVA ever had.) The ER doctor was a Pakistani who wanted to admit me after wrapping my ribs and giving me a painkiller shot that made me really woozy. (I did not meet him later on in the NVA.) “You may have a concussion, oh yes,” says Apu, and he might have been right, of course. “We need to keep you here overnight for observation. What is your insurance, please?”
But just as they were loading me on the gurney to take me upstairs I heard Carter Wingfield’s distant voice outside saying “We’ll take him home.” The Paki tried to argue but Carter cut him off. “No, we’re not relatives, but we’re t
he only people who give a damn about the boy. He doesn’t have any insurance,” and that settled that. Adam Wingfield loomed into the little cubicle, filling it like some giant bearded medieval ogre in greasy overalls. He gave me a grim smile. “Hey there, old hoss,” he said. “Looks like you done busted your revolutionary cherry. Your first beating from the law. Sorels?”
“Yeah,” I said. Adam’s eyes gleamed, and not in a kindly way.
“Yeah, I figured. I seen it before. I’m getting tard of this mess. One of these days me and Mr. Sorels gone have a quiet word of prayer together,” he said in a cold voice. Adam lifted me into a wheelchair like I was a doll, and as I was wheeled past the desk I saw Carter pulling out a roll of bills and paying the cashier the several hundred dollars in tab I had already run up just for the ambulance ride and the ER. A few minutes later I was lying in the Wingfields’ darkened living room on the sofa with Ma slapping ice bags and slabs of raw steak onto my bruises and Rooney holding a glass of iced tea to my lips.
“You don’t understand,” I told Carter. “The Feds are after you! Never mind me, you guys gotta get outta here! You gotta get the girls out of here, Carter!”
“The Feds ain’t anywhere near ready to move on us yet,” Carter assured me. “If they were they wouldn’t have been leaning on you.”
“How do you know?” I gasped.
“We know, Shane. They’ve been watching us, yeah, but we been watching them too, and I don’t mean just the people you might expect. There’s more of us Party boys around and about than you know. Don’t sweat it. Now tell me what happened, from the beginning.” I did. After I’d finished Carter went off to make some calls and Ma went off to fix me a big plate of everything in the refrigerator. Rooney was left sitting on the coffee table by the sofa. She looked at me, and turned my head to face her.
“That day on the square, that day you didn’t walk away from me when I was in trouble, that was the first time you stood up for me, Shane,” she said softly. “This is the second time.” Rooney leaned over and I got my third kiss on my battered lips, which brought my average up to one kiss per year of our acquaintance, and every one of them worth a king’s ransom. More, because no king could ever have commanded what she gave me freely.
Later that night after I had been stuffed with enough food to feed a pack of wolves, there was a knock on the door and some muffled conversation. Carter came in and asked me, “Shane, some of our people have come down from Olympia to talk to you about what happened to you at school today. They’re from the Third Section.” I knew the Third Section was the Party’s counterintelligence wing. Yes ma’am, I’ve seen the Threesec movies and the televid series on TV as well. One of my long-standing favorites. Even back then there was already a kind of legend developing about the Third Section, a reputation for style and panache and making bad things happen to bad people. After Longview Third Section morphed into BOSS and the WPB. “You feel like talking to them?”
“Sure,” I said. The Third Section team turned out to be not secret agents with trenchcoats but an elderly man with a Southern accent who wore a casual windbreaker and the Party fedora, and with him was his tall, equally senior but still attractive and elegantly dressed wife. I saw the butt of a big .357 Magnum in a shoulder holster sticking out of the man’s jacket. They didn’t give me any names and I didn’t ask for any. With Three Section more so than the rest of the Party, you didn’t ask. They sat down and cheerfully accepted iced tea from Ma while I painfully sat up in one of the Wingfields’ armchairs. The man quickly and skillfully ran me through the whole episode, once, then again. He took no notes, but somehow I understood he didn’t need to. Then he turned to Wingfield and said, “I don’t think you have anything to worry about, Carter, but best to keep this young feller out of the way for a bit, and your girls as well. I have been known to be wrong.”
“Nothing to worry about?” I demanded. “They’re after us all!”
“They’ve been after us all for years, Shane,” said the Third Section op. “I know that to you this is probably the worst thing that ever happened to you, but the fact is that Goldberg has probably already forgotten your name, as hard as that is to believe. He does about five of these gigs per week. That’s his style. He gets some local thug like Sorels and he beats or bribes people until somebody cracks. This is Goldberg’s standard operating procedure. Hell, it’s the FBI’s standard operating procedure. He goes into an area and draws up a list of anyone he thinks might be potentially useful as an informer, then he offers them money and beats the crap out of them. He probably would have had Sorels rough you up even if you’d taken his offer of cash, because he likes to use both the carrot and the stick. By beating and coercing as many people as possible he inevitably finds some who are weak enough to break, and every now and then one of them actually has something to tell him. Shane, despite almost a century of hype, the Federal Bureau of Investigation are the most completely incompetent secret police in history. The FBI couldn’t find the men’s room without a wiretap or an informant, and even then they’d have to offer him full immunity and the Witness Protection Program. They are politicized from top to bottom and so overloaded with affirmative action female and minority employees, so top-heavy with managerial chiefs and fewer and fewer Indians, that they can barely function. Goldberg was telling you the truth about wanting to build a conspiracy case that can bring down the whole Party. He’s ambitious. But he is chained to a legal and political system that is archaic, complex to the point of incomprehensibility, overextended, underfinanced, confused and quavering with senility. The courts are so backed up that it takes years for even the simplest of cases to come to trial. Do you know why we haven’t all been rounded up, arrested and charged under the Patriot Act of 2001, Shane? It’s because they can’t afford it. Every last penny the empire brings in has to go into maintaining America’s occupation armies in the Middle East in order to stave off the destruction of Israel for one more year, and every Patriot Act case costs a minimum of twelve million dollars per arrestee. That means Goldberg’s bark is way, way worse than his bite.”
“His bite ain’t too shabby,” I muttered, feeling my tender ribs.
The old man nodded grimly. “Yes, I know this is very hard for you to wrap your mind around in view of the fact that you’re sitting there with Leon Sorels’ bruises on your body and feeling the pain, but what happened to you is the lashing out of a dying Beast, Shane. You gave Goldberg nothing but the Five Words, which was exactly the right thing to do. In fact, it’s probably all he expected. He knows you won’t break without more effort than he’s probably willing to put in, and he’ll go in search of easier prey. If he had been serious about flipping you as an informer, then he would have used a lot more finesse. They do have informers of course, and they could probably round up every Party person in Lewis County right now, sure, but they no longer have the necessary resources to follow through if they did. Goldberg and the United States Attorney in Olympia have a set budget approved by the FBI and the Attorney General for this so-called civil rights task force. Our information is that budget was as thin as a strand of spaghetti to begin with, and it’s now exhausted. I doubt there will be any indictments at all for the horrific hatecrime of spray-painting Tricolors on walls. The whole so-called civil rights task force was just window dressing, some sound and fury to satisfy the local Chamber of Commerce types that the government won’t allow their cheap Mexican labor supply to be interfered with. ZOG simply has too many fingers in the dike, Shane, and everywhere they turn around, another leak springs forth.”
“So what do I do about this demand to call him in 48 hours?” I asked.
“Stay low for a week or so in case I’m wrong,” the old guy advised me. “The same for your girls, Carter. Then just go back to school like nothing happened. My guess is nothing will happen. Goldberg will simply write you off as too tough a nut to crack and move on. He does that whenever he meets resistance. As with all bullies, the best way to deal with him is to stand up to him. I doubt
he has even made any official record of your so-called interrogation, since failure doesn’t look good on his sheet. If you guys don’t want to trust my guess then I can dig it, no offense taken. The Party can arrange for you to be taken in somewhere else, Idaho or Oregon or Montana. But I honestly don’t think it’s necessary.”
The woman suddenly spoke up. “Shane,” she said gently, “Please don’t take offense, but I would like to ask you something.”
“Yes ma’am?”
“When Goldberg offered you medical treatment for your sick father, were you at all tempted to take him up on it? Knowing that your father may well die if he doesn’t get some financial help for his medical expenses, and soon?” I didn’t ask the woman how she knew that.
“The Bible says we have to honor our parents,” I told her carefully, knowing that Ma was listening. “I have a duty to my father, and if there was any way I could help him without betraying anyone else, I would. But the Wingfields are my friends, and one of them, well, they’re my friends, and I won’t save my dad at the cost of betraying them. My dad is my past, as horrible and disrespectful as that sounds. This family here is my present and my future, and I have to live in the present and look to my future and make my choice on that basis. I know you probably won’t understand that.”
A DISTANT THUNDER Page 22