“Too many trips around the block,” I said. “Also, I’m not so tough. You know that.”
“Because you cried?”
“Yes, because I cried.”
“Would it be impolite to ask why?”
“Just happens sometimes.”
“Will you please talk to me?”
“Could I just say I’ve had an intense life?” I felt his penis stir against me again, and I reached down to help it along. “It’s been a lot of years since I’ve fucked with a real one of these.”
“Is that why?”
“Nope. Fake ones are better. This stuff makes me itchy.”
“I’m a country boy. Do I want to know all this?”
“Yes, you certainly do. Look at you.” I sat over him and slipped him back inside me. “This is so fucking inappropriate.”
He caught his breath and didn’t speak.
“Tell me what it’s like in there.”
“Could you please shut up?”
“Tell me what it’s like in there.”
His words were jagged, harsh. “My spine.”
I leaned over and bit his shoulder, yanked his hair hard. “I’m going to make you cry too, before I’m through. Look at you. You already can’t talk.”
I rode him without speaking, but a humming had started deep within in my chest. “There’s a blinding place. You’ve got to find it. Don’t you dare come yet.”
The light was rising around me now. “We’re going to take it all the way. Come when I tell you. It’s all there. Come now. Now.”
He shouted, and I was lost with him. We probably sounded like we were being murdered.
When we were back to being two middle-aged people sweating on a bed, I said, “I like a man who lets me do things to him.” I was lying stretched on top of him, and I tried to roll away.
He held on to me, and I let him. “Please stop talking that way.” His face was streaked with tears.
I put my wet face against his. “I’m afraid we might understand each other.”
10
According to Ed Blake’s new information, Joe Magnus had only been in Vietnam a few months before some loose talk about fragging his lieutenant earned him a dishonorable discharge. Magnus’s racial fury took him to Montana, where a group of white survivalists were trying to make a community. They welcomed him as a hero because the lieutenant he’d threatened to kill had been African American. Magnus’s hatred of Asians and Jews was also righteous, so when Magnus heard that Royce had married a Vietnamese woman and named their baby after some old black woman, he learned Royce’s location in the Mendocino woods and drove down there to confront him.
Blake didn’t know what had transpired in the first meeting between the two men, or in a second one that took place soon afterward. What he did know was that within a few months Royce had moved his family eastward to Montana, to a village within thirty miles of Robert Mathews and the compound that housed the Silent Brotherhood. Royce soon developed connections with both Mathews and with William Luther Pierce, author of The Turner Diaries, a white supremacist novel still in print and considered a blueprint for the future by many racists. This book chronicles a white revolution occurring in the twenty-first century that begins in California and leads to the subjugation of the entire world by white men. All other races—and the Jews and homosexuals—are exterminated.
“Have you read it?” Blake asked.
“Years ago,” I said. “It’s sort of like the Story of O for racists.”
Showered and dressed and comfortable, we now were eating the promised porterhouse steaks, sitting in his kitchen on ladder-back chairs at his pine table, which he’d covered with a red-checked cloth. When I pointed at the tablecloth and then at the Tiffany-copy lamp made of plastic hanging over us he said, “Hey, it all came with the kit.” Between us was a companionship and ease I hadn’t felt with a man in a long time.
“There’s nothing better than western meat,” Blake said. “It’s one of the best reasons to live out here.”
“You know that sounds like Royce’s line of thinking? If you breed cattle and dogs for specific qualities, why not people? Haven’t you read his ‘position papers’?”
“I skimmed them. They’re in his file. And The Turner Diaries was required reading at the Academy.”
“Were they wanting you to join the white revolution or prevent it?”
He did not react well to that remark, just sat looking at me, his fork still in midair.
“Sorry,” I said.
In Royce’s first “position paper,” he renounced art as a deluded path and apologized for having written a counterrevolutionary novel; in the second, he described individual love as a form of impotence; and in the third, he wrote that “We must immediately begin to breed human beings for specific qualities.” The fourth was perhaps the most outrageous: “Anyone who understands Darwin knows that altruism is a form of weakness, and compassion must be overcome. The control of eugenics is our destiny.”
“Royce was always a seeker,” I told Blake. “I suppose we both were. When I visited him in Mendocino, he told me about this medieval religious group he admired because they had walked onto their own funeral pyre.”
“Your brother found that commendable?”
“It was this group called the Cathars. They were going to be exterminated by the Catholic Church. Royce admired them for their courage.”
“You and your brother are both so extreme.”
“Yes, I suppose so, but I’m not dangerous, just picturesque. But I believe my brother had a strong desire to die for something he believed in.”
“You’re suggesting that he and Robert Mathews might both have remained in the burning building to martyr themselves?”
“I don’t know what actually happened out there, but no matter which way you turn it, Royce killed Joe Magnus’s father, and that karma had to play itself out somewhere.”
“Karma? You really are a sixties person.”
“It’s just another term for ‘sins of the fathers.’”
This was a weird point to start smiling, but we were both filled with endorphins from the sex. “You and your brother,” Blake said. “What about ordinary reality? What about a perfectly rare steak?”
We were laughing now. “Royce should have gone to Vietnam with Joe Magnus and gotten himself killed. Then he wouldn’t be trying to make us complicit in his behavior.”
“We’re not complicit in his behavior, Ellen.”
I stopped laughing and laid my fork back onto the plate. “Then why do I feel responsible? Aren’t all white people somehow complicit? If only by doing nothing about people like him?”
He grasped the salt shaker in a way that made me realize he was trying not to touch my hand. “This is all very interesting, Ellen, but who do you think took the children, and where are they?”
“Has it occurred to you that Royce might have them? That would explain the sense that Ruby is hiding something. Because she would never admit to that. Jesus Christ, I hope that’s not what happened.”
“You think Ruby could have turned her children over to her father?”
“I think it’s possible. And if he’s still alive, Royce is capable of anything.” My gorge rose. “It doesn’t play. Because why would he leave Ruby behind?”
“You’re right, it doesn’t play. Stop this.”
I looked at my hands, made from the same human stream as Royce’s. “You’re a nice man, you know that?”
“Lots of people don’t think so.”
“Being with you is like seeing a car wreck on the road and knowing you’re going to plow into it.”
He reached over and touched my fingers. “Listen, I understand what you’re trying to tell me, Ellen. I see the ways you’re like your brother. But Royce Burns was—or still is—an evil person, and you’re not.”
“You believe in evil?”
“Of course, don’t you?”
“I don’t know yet.”
When I got back to my hot
el room, the phone was already ringing. It was after 2:00 A.M., and I had given the switchboard instructions not to call my room under any circumstances except an emergency.
“Ellen, they found the children,” Blake said. “They’re both dead. There was another cave, a fully stocked area, and it does look like a white militia thing. The children had been shut up inside a refrigerator. No signs of suffering. They were gone when they went in, or at least unconscious.”
I tried to control my breathing. “So it’s possible Ruby has been telling the truth?”
“I don’t know. We’ll need more time to figure out what happened.”
“How can I help?”
“An FBI agent named Pete Peterson is on his way to pick you up right now. He’ll take you out to Loretta’s house while they break the news to the Redstones. I want you to be there with them, not only for Ruby’s comfort but also to give me your sense of their reaction.”
“I hope a doctor is coming with us.”
“Yes, Pete’s picking him up first.”
“And you’re going straight back to the site?”
“I’m still here.”
“Thank you for including me in all this, Blake. I mean it.”
My brother would have considered it weakness, my grief for children I had never even met.
After we arrived at Loretta’s house and Pete Peterson gave Ruby and Lightman the news about their children’s deaths, Lightman had to be forcibly restrained and sedated. Ruby remained shrunken and ashen on the sofa, silent with what seemed like shock. She kept murmuring, “I knew they were safe with God, I knew they were safe with God.”
I sat with Ruby all night while the house filled with friends and neighbors, and press vans and police cars began lighting up the street like a carnival. Ruby’s lips kept moving, but she no longer formed discernible words. After a while she pushed Lightman away from her and fell asleep, leaning close against me on the sofa. She was still sleeping this way when, soon after dawn, several FBI agents arrived to arrest her. Her fingerprints had been found all over the door of the refrigerator.
11
A few nights later, Blake and I sat in his unmarked car outside the Santa Fe jail, waiting for a police van that would transport Ruby to a more secure facility, when he gave me a piece of information that would remain off the record for a long time. On the naked chests of her children, inside their clothes, the coroner had found handwritten slips of paper that read GOD LOVES THE CHILDREN OF NOD.
I tried to imagine Ruby writing these notes. Did she fasten them to the children’s chests before or after she gave them the Benadryl? Because they had not been sedated with anything mysterious, just ordinary cold medicine from a drugstore. In Ruby’s handwritten statement, she described what she called “the plan.” She was supposed to meet up at the Catacombs with a woman named Mary, who would then take the three of them to see her father, and Ruby had given the children the Benadryl so they wouldn’t be afraid. But after several hours of waiting, no one had showed up, and she could offer no explanation of what else had happened. She did not remember how she got back to the reservation or who had hit her and tied her up. She knew only that she had waited and waited while the children were asleep on the cots, and she opened the refrigerator and took out a child-size carton of apple juice and drank it.
“Let’s talk about Nod,” I said to Blake. “I’m sorry to say that I think I know what it means. According to our dead grandmother, Cain killed his brother Abel and was banished to the land of Nod, where there were no other people, so he married an ape, or maybe a bear, and that’s where the dark races all come from. According to Granny, Nod was Africa. I hope you realize that versions of this theory still float around in Christian fundamentalism. It’s brought to you by the same folks who, not that long ago, believed slavery was sanctioned by the Bible.”
Blake studied the contents of a box of donuts. Finally, he said, “Where does Granny’s theory leave the Asians and Native Americans?”
“Well, you know how fast those mud people propagate. They’ll take over the world if they’re not stopped.” I reached over his arm and picked up the chocolate glazed. “These aren’t just for you, are they?”
“You’re making light of this, Ellen?”
“Of course not, I’m just trying to stand it. Listen, millions of Christians have been brought up with these views, or with watered-down varieties. You think all this stuff has gone away?”
He chose a donut with multicolored sprinkles. “I don’t understand how you and your brother turned out so differently.”
“I can’t account for it either. But maybe Royce and I aren’t so different, except for our values and politics. If you can describe his views as political rather than genocidal. Actually, I think it was television that changed me. When I saw the Freedom Riders on TV, I began to suspect that maybe I’d been born on the wrong side of a mess. It was kind of like figuring out your grandparents were Nazis. And Royce seemed to understand all of this when he wrote his novel, before he turned into a fucking monster. I just don’t know what happened to him. Maybe some kind of bizarre religious experience.”
Blake consumed half his donut in one bite. “Here’s something I’ve been thinking. If Ruby’s prints hadn’t been on the refrigerator, her story might have worked. That place really was some kind of camp for white supremacists, and Lightman didn’t have any idea that Ruby was in contact with people like that. I doubt he’d ever heard of the Brotherhood, and he believed her about the kidnapping. Of course, he did find her tied up and knocked out, which would have been pretty convincing.”
“Do you really think she some drank apple juice and doesn’t remember anything? Did you even find an apple juice carton? I assume there were no prints out there besides Ruby’s. And we still don’t know who assaulted her.”
“No juice cartons, and I’m sure anybody connected with the safe house is trained to wear gloves. They probably wear gloves when they’re in the shower.”
“Why are we so certain Ruby did this? Her fingerprints on the refrigerator don’t make anything clear. It’s not like she’s confessed, and other people drove all over the tire tracks. I mean, what if Nod is a real place? Could there be some kind of camp with that name? Or sometime back in the eighties?”
“I don’t see how that could have happened without one of the agencies knowing about it.”
“I need to understand what Ruby did or didn’t do. I need it for my own sanity. What I mean is, how the fuck could something like this happen?”
“Well, you may not even get to find out.”
“Because?”
“Because the FBI and BATF won’t want Ruby to stand trial. They’ll portray the children’s deaths as a personal crime and downplay any possibility that anyone from the Silent Brotherhood or its allies might still be operating. They’ll present Ruby as a nut job who killed her children, which you realize may be accurate. But I’m sure they will want to locate your brother, if there is the least possibility he’s still alive. Also, they’d probably like to find Magnus, unless they’re the ones running him now. Or maybe—and this is my cynical side talking—maybe some inside group has been manipulating this situation all along, for its own reasons.”
“For a law enforcement officer, that’s a pretty outrageous thing to say.”
“I suppose it is. But I think it’s what you believe.”
“Then you’d better give me another donut.”
“A fundamentalist donut,” he said when I chose a plain one.
“Listen, Blake, for someone who might be declared incompetent to stand trial, don’t you think Ruby has managed to concoct very contradictory and detailed stories? I can’t decide if she’s a skilled liar or a mental case or both.”
“It doesn’t matter, because they’ll get her to plead guilty, and that will be the end of it.”
“I’m getting her a lawyer. The white supremacist underground won’t want publicity either, so they’ll agree with the feds about that.”
&n
bsp; “I wish you wouldn’t keep pointing out parallels between these people and the United States government.”
“It’s all just white boys to me.”
“Are you joking?”
“I wish I were.”
“So where does that leave you and me?”
“Stuck in the mess with everybody else. There aren’t any right moves for people who get it, Blake. We might or might not have insights about what’s wrong, racism, sexism, money, but we’re powerless to change much of anything. That’s why you’ve ended up as a cop in Gallup and I go to AA meetings and take care of my crazy mother.”
This bitter analysis left us wordless, but I could hear Blake breathing, which soothed me.
One unmarked car waited across from us in the empty parking lot. Inside it was my young reporter friend from the meeting, Claudia Friedman. The rest of the press had been notified that Ruby was going to be moved at 10:00 A.M. tomorrow and that a press conference would be held then, but with Blake’s permission I’d told Claudia the truth.
A number squawked through Blake’s radio, and he said, “Okay, they’re bringing her out.” With the light in the car switched off, we slipped out, not even shutting our car doors, so they wouldn’t make any noise. Claudia did the same.
We moved quietly over to the dimly lit back door while two police cars and a van, all with their lights off, glided into the lot.
The side door to the jail opened, and Ruby moved sluggishly through it, flanked by two matrons and one male guard. Blake had told me they would all be wearing bulletproof vests. The hood of Ruby’s sweatshirt had been pulled up, her hands and feet chained.
“Ruby,” I said, “Ruby,” I repeated, until she finally glanced at me. Her face was shrunken, blank as a mummy’s. “I’m staying. I’m still here.”
12
Ed Blake and I were lying in bed in my room at the El Rancho Hotel when he volunteered the information that Santane had been living for many years in Albuquerque, only an hour and a half from the Nogalu reservation.
Tomb of the Unknown Racist Page 5