McVeigh’s bomb in the heartland of America had accomplished what William Luther Pierce promised in The Turner Diaries: “But the real value of all our attacks today lies in the psychological impact, not in the immediate casualties … That is a lesson they will not forget.” Pierce might be a doddering old fool now, but because he had always presented himself as an author and a white organizer and the founder of the Cosmotheist Community Church, he had never done anything that would lead to his imprisonment. He still ran what remained of the National Alliance as a church in Hillsboro, West Virginia, but its members were primarily members of his family. Pierce declined to meet with me too.
Royce had been drawn to William Luther Pierce because he was the most educated and clear-minded of the white separatists. Pierce was not, however, the preacher who had induced Royce’s ecstatic state. That was a man called Billy Valentine. Mathews had summoned Valentine and Pierce to the compound to meet each other and see if an alliance among them might be possible. Pierce had been looking for a charlatan evangelist, but Valentine, unfortunately, actually believed what he preached. Royce, who in his vision had demonstrated great power, was unencumbered by Christian beliefs, so Royce was the man Pierce chose to ally with. In any case, within a few months, Valentine began channeling a coming nuclear attack by aliens that he called “War of the Giants,” so he split off his followers, who, over the course of two years, constructed an enormous underground bomb shelter in Montana. Seven hundred men, women, and children trundled inside on the predicted date, but nothing happened, and within a year Valentine had died of heart failure. The shelter, though it still existed, had since been abandoned.
Public records revealed that Timothy McVeigh had telephoned the Christian Identity compound called Elohim City in the Ozark Mountains of eastern Oklahoma a few weeks before the bombing. He had asked to speak to a man named Andy Strassmeir, a German national purported to have explosives training, and according to the last of Royce’s papers, Strassmeir was the man Mathews had sent Joe Magnus to work with. The person who answered McVeigh’s phone call had claimed that Strassmeir was not there, but perhaps the call had been some kind of signal. What is certain is that Strassmeir and Timothy McVeigh met at least once before. Strassmeir looked a lot like the sketch of John Doe #2.
“Here’s part of what makes it stink so much,” Ed Blake said. “Neither the FBI nor BATF interviewed Strassmeir. It’s just an incomprehensible omission. They should have been all over him. Instead, they let him slip out of the country through Canada.”
Blake had driven out to the casino to find me because I’d started avoiding him. Although I was losing steadily at twenty-five-dollar blackjack, I pocketed my remaining chips and followed him into the bar. We sat at a small table, and a waitress brought him two beers and me a Coke.
“So are you too now thinking that Joe Magnus and/or my brother might have had something to do with the Oklahoma City bombing?”
“I don’t know about that,” Blake said. “At this point Magnus is probably an informant for one of the agencies, and he certainly does not have a reputation for brains or discipline. And Strassmeir might have been an informant as well. Maybe different people were running different agendas. Maybe the left hand didn’t know what the right hand was doing.”
“But even if Strassmeir was acquainted with both Joe Magnus and McVeigh, what would be their connection to my brother?” I gestured toward his two beers, one draft, one bottled. “You’re picking up extremism, Blake. Ever hear the expression ‘one beer at a time’?”
“Ellen, sooner or later, you’re going to have to deal with me. With the fact of me.”
“You’re a fact, all right.”
“To answer your question, I doubt Strassmeir had anything directly to do with your brother, but since Strassmeir was not interviewed, an order must have come directly from above. So, here’s the real question: If there was a government informant who knew how to make bombs and he was directly involved with Timothy McVeigh, does that mean McVeigh might have been stopped? I think only BATF has cowboys who are stupid enough to have bungled this. Or maybe I’m just learning to be as suspicious as you are. But there’s no plausible explanation for not having interviewed Strassmeir.” He picked up the draft beer but didn’t drink it.
“Did you know all this before? I told you Oklahoma City was somehow connected.”
“Well, I’ve done some poking around, and I do still have a few sources. I’m sure there are many fine agents in BATF, but something is really wrong about all of this.” His head tilted forward, and he kept peering into my eyes, as if he were trying to understand something.
“I can’t let you in anymore, Ed Blake. I don’t know why.” I studied him, this man who was kind and smart and trying so hard.
“I’d give up if I could.”
“So, yes, okay, yes,” I finally said. “What you see in me is pain. Before I met you, I had detached from a lot of painful events in my past, but that detachment was dependent on keeping a certain distance. You don’t know this about me, and why should you, but it’s not about sex. It’s the language of sex that matters, and you and I speak something that might make me lose my bearings. The deepest anyone ever got inside me was a woman, and you remind me too much of her. She derailed me. I was sober by then, and she still derailed me. I didn’t drink or use, but I spent nearly a year unable to function.”
He smiled, still trying to make me connect with him from someplace other than the surface of my gaze. “Was she a cop?”
“No, she was a shrink.”
I wanted to tell him about Meg but couldn’t.
When Meg left me, I claimed I didn’t know why, but I did. Meg’s heart had enveloped me, or, in lesbian parlance, bottomed me. Also, she was witty and smart and accomplished, but I don’t know if I would have cared so much about those qualities, given how she made me feel. “Feeling safe is so unfamiliar.”
But after a while my restlessness returned, and several years later, when we were living in Vermont, Meg said she had concluded that my hypervigilance was hardwired. “Your intensity, the force of your personality, is not, as I had hoped, the result of the sexual abuse by your uncle, or the death of your father, or the fact that you cracked your skull when you were five.” No, she said, my wildness was innate, and I had simply worn her out. Meg said I was like a tuning fork. Meg claimed she never knew whether I was going to take off for Iceland on some whim (it wasn’t a whim, I just wanted to see a place where the crust of the earth was very thin) or end up with a shaman in Peru for two weeks. It wasn’t good enough for me to go to Delos, the island off Mykonos that is now a museum and where only archaeologists can stay overnight. No, Ellen, the great Ellen, had to convince them to let her sleep out there. Meg said I lacked a healthy sense of limitation. She said I was exhausting. She said she’d been cheating on me.
“But you love me,” I said. “I know you do.”
“Well, I something you,” she said. “You’re a powerful person. But, Ellen, I think if I had loved you more, I could have handled you better. I’m very sorry. Maybe it’s true I didn’t love you enough.”
She had loved me enough, I knew that, but while I was in Peru a friend of ours commiserated her right into bed. “I hope you’re having stupid sex,” I said. “I hope it’s boring vanilla sex. I hope you have to watch porn to get off.”
“I can’t continue living with someone who thinks she has a license to do anything that comes into her head,” Meg said. “I loved it at first, you know I did, but then you started treating me like I was home base, like I was some kind of holy object you would show up for and say a few worshipful things to, then take off again. You treated me like I was not a real person, Ellen. Not an actual living person.”
“That’s a lie, Meg.”
“Feelings can’t be lies. I’m telling you how I felt.”
We sold the house in Vermont. I kicked out the tenant in my Cambridge apartment, buried myself deeper in AA, and within a couple of years developed a stalker w
ho was following me everywhere. At first I thought she was harmless, just some Beacon Hill matron who imagined I’d be flattered. I had started going to meetings that were mostly African American and Hispanic (that’s how I happened to meet Estelle), thinking that this strange white woman wouldn’t follow me there, but she did. Her name was Diane, and she wasn’t even an alcoholic. She just sat in meetings glowing at me. Sometimes, walking down a street, I could spot her behind me, followed by her small, bald husband trying to keep her in sight. Then, when Diane rented the apartment on the floor above me, I realized I might have a serious problem. She began leaving presents in front of my door. I didn’t open them, but once when I was carrying a package the size of a shoebox to the trash, I thought about a bomb. Maybe one day I’d open my door and she’d be standing there glowing and holding a hatchet. So, after Estelle moved back to the Low Country, I wasn’t far behind.
Now I was entangled with a man. God’s sense of humor was getting tiresome.
So, I invited Ed Blake to come with me to Oklahoma.
4
We started at the maw of what had been the Murrah Federal Building, though there was little to see now, other than bombed-out rubble and ongoing construction of what would later become the Oklahoma City National Memorial and Museum. These cranes and craters and trucks and beelike workmen could tell us nothing. The original explosion had sliced off the six-floor facade of the Murrah Building, exposing the interior in layers, and a month later experts imploded what was left of the structure with more explosives. The three bodies that had been missing were recovered. So was an unidentified left leg.
The leg found in the rubble of the Murrah Building was first described in a statement by the medical examiner’s office as belonging to a light-skinned male less than thirty years of age. “This leg was clothed in a black military-type boot, two socks, and an olive drab blousing strap.” A few months later, the chief medical examiner insisted to reporters that “DNA analysis by the FBI has shown conclusively that the leg is not male but female.” And six months after that, experts began to claim that the leg had belonged to a previously identified female victim they had accidentally buried with the wrong leg.
“Who knows what to make of any of it?” Blake said. “What they’re saying now may be absolutely true. I still think it’s hard to falsify DNA analysis, although it sure would explain a lot about your brother.”
There were other factors we speculated about on the three-hour drive east toward Elohim City. The significance of the date of the bombing, April 19, on the two-year anniversary of the governmental destruction of the religious compound at Waco, was already known, since Timothy McVeigh had proclaimed it himself. And the execution of Richard Snell on the same day as the bombing could have been a coincidence. But Snell had connections to Elohim City and to other white supremacists, and he sneered at the warden that “something big” was going to happen that day. If that report was true, then foreknowledge of the bombing must have extended beyond McVeigh and Nichols and into at least some of the terrorist web.
There had also been the complicated business about a man named Kenneth Trentadue, who supposedly hanged himself in his cell a few months after the bombing. Kenneth Trentadue’s brother Jesse, who was a lawyer, had not believed the verdict of suicide, and he had insisted on the release of Kenneth’s body, which, it turned out, exhibited multiple lacerations and bruises. Kenneth Trentadue had received three severe blows to his head, and his throat had been cut; the government’s medical personnel continued to argue that these injuries were self-inflicted, but Jesse Trentadue believed that, in the course of a brutal interrogation, his brother had been murdered. But why? Because his brother looked so much like the sketches of John Doe #2? An inmate named Alden Gillis Baker, reported to have been Trentadue’s cellmate at one time, claimed he actually saw the agents beating Trentadue and now feared for his own life. Later, Baker also reportedly hanged himself.
Except for these troubling conversations, the drive was long and boring, so Blake and I punctuated it with stops at casinos, where I could indulge what began to look like a gambling habit, and I told him more about my life than I should have. He sat beside me at the blackjack table playing absentmindedly with one-dollar chips while I described the night Jordan shot herself and mumbled about Meg leaving me for someone who wasn’t even good-looking. I did turn the stalker episode into an amusing tale, but I couldn’t think of anything funny about Jordan or Meg. I chatted up my visits to Iceland and the Peruvian shaman. I talked too fucking much.
Before we reached the police station in Stillwell, a small town on the edge of the Oklahoma Ozarks, Blake said, “Can I ask you something without making you angry?”
“I hope so.”
“I don’t understand what you mean about being a lesbian. When we were on the mesa at El Morro, I thought …”
“Yes, it was great.” I was glad to be driving so I wouldn’t have to look at him. “And, yes, it did mean something.”
“It was great and it meant something, but …”
Two rabbits hopped alongside the road, but mentioning them would be avoidance. “All I can tell you is that the first time I fell in love with a woman, it was like I had stepped through a mirror into a different reality. In college, there was this woman I wanted to be with so much that my throat ached whenever I saw her. I assumed I was happily married, but I followed this woman around all the time, just so I could look at her. At the time I didn’t understand that this was a sexual attraction because the only feeling I’d ever had that was anything like it was in art history class, when I first saw pictures of all those Greek statues. Maybe it has something to do with art, I don’t know, but a shrink once said to me, ‘You can’t imagine what you’ve never imagined.’ And I had never imagined being able to feel like that.”
Blake didn’t speak again until we were off the highway pulling through deserted country roads. “So you’re saying I’ll never be someone who can make your throat hurt?”
“I suppose it’s as simple as that. I’m so sorry, Blake.”
In the police station, we behaved with flawless professionalism. Blake showed his credentials, and a reluctant young officer phoned the only number he had for the Elohim City compound. When he got finally someone on that phone, he explained that he was bringing out some folks who wanted to speak to a resident, any resident. No, of course no one had to talk to these visitors, but he was going to drive them up to the gate. Yes, of course they were unarmed. One of them was a law officer from New Mexico, but the other was a woman.
We rode silently with this vacant young man through many miles of winding, paved roads, tucked deep into the heavily eroded crevasses of the Ozarks. Then we bumped down six miles of gravel road posted every fifty feet against trespassers. Eventually, we arrived at a red metal gate secured with heavy black chains, where two men holding shotguns stood waiting.
The deputy got out of the car and motioned us to follow.
These men were bearded and rough, but they were not unfriendly. “We just don’t want any trouble,” the large one said in a deep, booming voice. “We want to be alone with the Lord.”
“We don’t want to come through the gate,” I said quietly, “though I’d love to see where you live. I heard you even have geodesic domes for houses, like hippies did in the sixties. Is that true?’
There was no answer, so I said, “I brought a letter for Joe Magnus.”
“There’s nobody here by that name.”
I extended the sealed white envelope through the slats of the gate, but neither man reached to take it. “I don’t think he’s here now,” I said, dropping it onto the gravel. “But he was here years ago. Could you spread the word around, please? Say that Royce Burns’s sister is looking for him, and also for Joe Magnus. Let Magnus know that I’m staying at the Col-cord Hotel in Oklahoma City. Tell him I have a cell phone, and the number is in the letter.”
The next day, after more failed sex and silent poker, Blake said he believed Magnus wasn’t
going to show up, and there was business he needed to tend to in Gallup. He said he had come to the reluctant conclusion that I was paranoid about my brother and that Royce was probably dead.
“I’m paranoid? You’re just realizing that now?”
“Ellen, listen, if there were some kind of conspiracy about the leg they found in the Murrah Building, don’t you realize that they wouldn’t put out three different stories, they’d simply cover it up? That we’d hear nothing?”
“But the rattles prove Royce is still alive.”
“Even if your brother is alive, you’re on the wrong track in Oklahoma.”
“Then why did you come here?”
He didn’t answer.
“You go on back,” I said. “Magnus probably wants to find me alone. I’ll just try to lose more money.”
“You’re sure you don’t want to return to Gallup with me?”
“I’m sure.”
During my stay at the Colcord, I went to AA meetings twice daily at the Kelly Club, founded in 1947 and visited once by Bill Wilson himself. No one at the Kelly Club had ever heard of my brother or of Ruby, which was a relief. And hardly anyone at the club was white, which was also a relief.
I contacted a reporter from the local paper, and the Oklahoma Independent ran an interview in which I explained that I was looking for Joe Magnus, who had been a friend of my brother’s. And, yes, Joe Magnus was a federal fugitive but “just a minor one,” I said, hoping to bait him.
The casino I liked best was called FireLake, and it was thirty miles east of Oklahoma City in Shawnee. I figured that if Magnus was going to show up, he’d do so at the casino. Instead, the third night after Blake left, Joe Magnus ran me off the road at two o’clock in the morning. I remained calm because adrenaline sometimes makes me calm, and enough adrenaline sometimes makes me beatific. I got out of my car smiling loopily. “Hi, Joe, I was hoping you’d come find me. Just don’t hurt me, okay?”
Tomb of the Unknown Racist Page 21