I was very tired when I reached the small town named Salvado, three hours east of Boise. It was after ten o’clock. As directed, I parked in the corner of a truck stop parking lot beside a yellow drop-off bin for clothes being donated to a local charity. My lights and motor were turned off, and the engine ticked while I twisted my neck and stretched my arms, trying to loosen them.
Within a few minutes someone tapped on my window, and the woman who had said her name was Mary asked me to step out of the car. “I’m so glad to meet you,” she said, touching my hand. “But I’m afraid I’ll have to drive now.”
Considerably older than me, Mary looked like what my father would have called “good country people.” She wore a flowered cotton skirt, a jean jacket, and work boots, and her gray hair had been pulled back into a neat bun. With a gap-toothed smile, she suggested I might want to grab “a few hours of shut-eye” because it was going to a long drive. Then she confiscated my phones and my trout bag and said she would have to go through my purple-flowered suitcase later.
I knew nothing about where I would meet Royce, but Mary’s manner was so reassuring that, after thirty minutes of back roads during which neither of us spoke, my long day caught up with me and I dozed.
I awoke as dawn began lighting orderly fields of wheat on my right. We were on a dirt road. Mary thrust a thermos of lukewarm coffee toward me. “It’s good that you slept,” she said. “I’ve had plenty of this, so the rest is yours.” We drove wordlessly on for another half hour while I sipped black coffee and the sun rose. The gold fields were lovely in the early light, and the dark green forest to our left glistened.
“Who owns all this land, Mary?”
“I don’t know,” she said.
“Do you know who I am?”
“You’re his sister, aren’t you?”
“And you know who he is?”
She didn’t reply, and I studied her rough knuckles on the steering wheel. “All of this seems so ordinary,” I said. “I thought I would be much more scared.”
At the end of the planted fields we crossed a small stream and passed by a group of trailers arranged in a rough horseshoe around what looked like a half-buried entrance to a bunker.
“What’s that?”
“A bomb shelter,” Mary said. “The original owner sold shares in it, but that was over twenty years ago. It can hold more than a hundred people. Lots of smaller shelters were built in this area around the same time.”
“Who owns them now? What are the trailers for?”
Again, she didn’t answer.
“Are we still in Montana? Are those the bomb shelters that the crazy preacher Billy Valentine built?”
All she said was, “We’re not in Montana.”
Soon we passed through some white gates that looked a lot like the ones at Blacklock, and I wondered if that was a deliberate gesture on Royce’s part. About thirty yards of driveway in, we arrived at a gray, low-slung bungalow, and in front of it stood Claude Dabley, whom I’d begun to think of as “The Narrow Man.” Everything about Dabley was lean and sharp, as if he had been elongated in a circus mirror. He wore khaki pants and a dark tailored shirt that seemed vaguely military, but maybe that impression was a result of the pistol he had holstered on his hip. Dabley did not seem happy to see me, although he stepped forward and nodded.
When he opened the door of the bungalow, I heard Mary drive away with my car, my suitcase, my phones, and my trout bag.
Across an expanse of Navaho rug, Royce sat in a wheelchair behind a gray metal desk. The right side of his face was the color of ground beef and twisted by a web of scars. The cheek drooped and his eyelid hung down, so he was probably blind in that eye, but the good eye was unmistakable, and the rest of my brother’s face was familiar too, though deeply scratched by age and pain. His right hand was hidden by a throw that looked like mink covering his lower body.
“So, it’s really you,” I said.
“Yes,” he said. “And it’s really you.” He gestured toward the oak armchair on the other side of his desk. “Sit down, Ellen. You look very good. Better than me.”
“I had a face-lift,” I said, “a few years after Momma’s. She paid for it.”
“Can we get you something? Coffee? Breakfast? I don’t think a facelift will work for me, do you?” His voice was disarmingly friendly. When he raised his left hand, I felt his odd charisma and slumped into the chair across from him.
“Don’t cry, Ellen,” he said. “It really doesn’t hurt much anymore. I have a great deal of help. Also, many medications.”
I wiped my face on the sleeve of my safari shirt, fumbled with one of my chest pockets, and pulled out the rattles, wrapped in white tissue. I tossed them onto the green blotter of his desktop, and the tissue slowly unfolded. There were four yellowish rattles attached to each other, graduated in size, the smallest no bigger than a pea. “I thought you’d want these back.”
He glanced at the rattles without comment, then exposed his right hand so I could see the dark nubs of fingers, before he tucked them back into the fur blanket. “Because I heard Ruby wondered why I didn’t write my own letters.” As the left side of his face smiled ironically, the scars on the right pulled tight and squirmed.
“I need to know why you sent Ruby these rattles.”
“My foot is also damaged,” he said. “They tried to save it, but almost half had to be removed. The prosthetic is useless, and my knee is not strong. There are several scars over my body too, of course, and they itch a great deal.”
“Thank you for that information, but I want to know why you got in touch with Ruby. If you wanted to see her, why didn’t you do it last year, or five years ago, or ten?”
He sighed deeply, and I thought I heard a rattle in his breath. “When we located Santane, we merely monitored her occasionally. But then Ruby came to her. I thought it might be time to let my daughter know I was still alive.”
“I liked this situation better when you were dead.”
“I’m sure you did.”
“We buried you. We buried something. Maybe it was rocks. What the FBI sent fit into a child-size coffin.”
“I heard about that,” he said.
“How do you hear all these things? Is there some kind of white terrorist Pony Express?”
“Terrorism is not the correct word, Ellen. We are freedom fighters, and there are many more of us than you understand. It started in the fifties. Segregation ending, the busing fiasco, how stupid was that? All people want to be with their own, and we are no different, just clearer on what must be done. The Brotherhood’s actions and what McVeigh did were useful but premature.”
“I really didn’t think I would give a fuck about what happened to you in that fire.” I wiped my nose with my hand because the only tissue available was the one beneath the rattles. “But it’s hard to see you this hurt.”
“Of course you care about me, Ellen. I’m your blood.”
“I cared about Ruby and Lucia and River too, and they were my blood. I cared about them a great deal. And I cared about the children in the day care center in Oklahoma City, although I didn’t know them. It’s called humanism, I think.”
Ruby and the children’s names hung in the air, and he looked above me with his good eye as if he were trying to imagine them. “My sweet Ruby,” he finally said. “Dabley brought me a Polaroid of her, but he could not acquire one of her offspring. I so regret being unable to meet them. I don’t suppose you brought me any pictures?”
“No, I didn’t bring you any fucking pictures of her ‘offspring.’ I buried Lucia Burns Godchild—in case you don’t know her name—next to your supposed grave. Maybe you heard that River’s father took custody of his son’s remains but not of hers?”
“The personal aspects of this situation have been unfortunate in many ways,” Royce said.
The wood-paneled room was too warm. A large fire burned in a stone fireplace, and Dabley stood rigidly before it, staring down at the flames. The Navaho rugs, whi
ch were probably authentic, covered much of the planked floor. Behind my brother was a counter with a computer and a printer atop it, along with a thick pile of printed pages. To the right was a liquor cabinet with an ice bucket and glasses. A large window looked out at the dark green woods, and there were geological maps on several walls.
“Why did you want to see Ruby?” I said. “And why did you let me find you? Why do you have geological maps?”
“We brought Coca-Colas for you,” he said and gestured toward the liquor cabinet. “I understand you don’t drink alcohol anymore, and I respect that. Claude, would you mind preparing us some breakfast? I’m sure my sister hasn’t eaten in a while, and she’s had a very long drive.”
Dabley raised his head and stared balefully at me before he replaced the screen in front of the fire and left the room.
“Where are we, Royce? I know I’m somewhere in the Northwest. Are we still in the U.S.? For all I know, we’re in Canada. Or maybe Mary was driving us in circles all night. Who owns this land? Why did the FBI notify us you were dead?”
“Easy,” he said. “Too many questions all at once. First, how is our mother?”
I struggled against a conversation that would in any way seem normal. “You’re a fucking monster, Royce. I’ve read your writings. I know what you did. Do you want me to believe you’ve changed?”
The right side of his face smiled, and I caught a glimpse of his false incisor. “I doubt you know as much about me as you think,” he said. “In any case, perhaps I am merely someone you disagree with politically.”
“Disagree with politically? Terrorism isn’t political. Terrorism is war.” I gestured toward his mouth. “Do you remember when the big horse threw you and that tooth got knocked out?”
“Yes, I was ten, and the dentist replanted it successfully, but Marie bumped into me and knocked it out again.”
I gestured toward his raw, sagging face. “It looks like you lost more teeth in the fire at Whidbey Island.”
He seemed amused that I named the location of the fire. “Yes, four permanent teeth are gone. I believe when we were children we called them the six- and twelve-year molars, but of course that is not their technical name. Do you really want to go down memory lane with me? I doubt that’s why you’re here.”
“Momma is okay,” I said. “Her mind is going, so she thinks you’re a character on The Young and the Restless.”
The look in his good eye might have been sadness.
I stood up, walked over to the fireplace, and removed the screen. Taking my time, I selected a split from the wood box and arranged it on the fire. “Let me ask you this again,” I said. “Why did you let me find you now? And why did you send Ruby the rattles?”
“Maybe the real question,” he said from behind his desk, “is why did you want to find me, Ellen? You’ve been searching for me relentlessly. What is it that you want?”
When I didn’t reply, he said, “You do realize you’ve made a great deal of trouble. There are factions, even among those of us who share the same goals. The publicity about Ruby created enough problems.”
“Publicity? It’s the publicity you care about?” I stood behind my wooden chair, locking my furious hands around the top edge. “Do you understand that three people are dead? That one of them was your ‘beloved’ Ruby? That she killed herself and murdered her children because of you?”
His one eye looked at me evenly. “I don’t think that’s a fair assessment of my role, but I do understand why you might see it that way.”
“What about your kidnapping plan? Was that really your concoction? You used to have an elegant mind, Royce, but I guess you lost something when those black and diamond snakes crawled up your legs.” He looked surprised, even alarmed by this reference. “Santane showed me the letter you left for her,” I said. “Other papers too. That little story ‘For Joey’—how touching. I saw Joe Magnus a few weeks ago. He’s a racist monster like you.”
“The plan I devised was quite simple,” he said, “and it should have worked. My assistant Mary would pick up all three and bring them here, and soon it would appear they had been kidnapped. Obstacles arose that were unanticipated.”
“Magnus said to tell you that if he finds you, he’ll kill you.”
“I doubt he’ll find me. He’s a known informant.”
“Did those obstacles that arose have something to do with the men removing guns from the Catacombs the day before?”
“Joey was not such a bad man,” Royce said. “He was confused, and he didn’t have the opportunities we did. But then he became so full of hate, and he turned that on me too.”
“I don’t know what you could possibly mean. Joe Magnus was always full of hate. He’s a racist, a terrorist, a member of the Brotherhood, and a killer. I just don’t know if you’ve become a killer too.”
“Ellen, why do you want to know more about these matters? It’s not safe to know more about these things. And it wasn’t safe for you to insist on finding me.”
“Well, my best guess is that you don’t have any intention of letting me leave here. I heard Mary driving away with my things and my car. So maybe you could just tell me this, are you still dangerous to anyone beside your own relatives? Why did Dabley propose bringing the children first? Were you planning to have them killed?”
“Do you really think I would be capable of doing such a thing?”
“I’m asking the question, aren’t I?”
“Ruby was born into my hands, Ellen. I have missed her bitterly. Santane too, but that is another matter. Santane has made her own life now.” The emotion in his damaged face seemed sincere.
“But what about Ruby’s children? Why did you want them brought first? I know about what happened at Nod.”
Either he was alarmed or I imagined it. “I see Ruby told you a great deal. Joey had arranged that without my consent. With a veterinarian. A barbaric, repugnant, insulting idea. If you know about that, then you know I put a stop to it.”
“Yes, with a snake.”
“A completely harmless king snake, but a big one. People are afraid of snakes. I learned a great deal from that event with Ruby. I began to understand how we might use the personal power of blood for our own purposes. Since I could not allow such a thing to happen to my own daughter, that proved to be a great lesson. We would have to find simpler, more scalable, more personally distant solutions to our problem of racial dilution.”
“What exactly do you mean by ‘our own purposes’?”
“I may be damaged, Ellen, but I remain a revolutionary. I am still a leader, and one of our current goals is to establish white communities, white neighborhoods, white towns.”
“And how is that so different from what exists now?”
“Because we have an analysis, a plan, and what we are doing is not defensive, it’s calculated.”
“White neighborhoods aren’t your only goal. What about those bomb shelters we passed? What are those for?”
“We live in dangerous times. You must know that nuclear war is inevitable, sooner or later. The planet is increasingly overcrowded with the lesser races.”
“You may still consider yourself a revolutionary, Royce, but you look like a pathetic, half-dead man stuck in a wheelchair, with a couple of lackeys to do your bidding.”
“I’ll bet you’re familiar with this line, Ellen: ‘One death is a tragedy; one million is a statistic.’”
“You’re quoting Stalin to me? You’re quoting fucking Stalin to me?”
“Well, he did summarize the problem nicely, didn’t he? Should we consider the group or the individual? Let me explain better. Nuclear war is, as I said, inevitable. Overbreeding in the other races means more and more uncivilized people will have their fingers on nuclear triggers. We believe that only technology and weapons can save us. Eugenics will build us a glorious future, and that work is going on now. Unfortunately, I will probably not live long enough to see it.”
“A glorious white future?”
&n
bsp; “Yes, of course, a white future. Or an Aryan one, whatever you choose to call it. White culture and civilization. We must begin breeding with the best of our human stock and get rid of the damaged and the weak. Once you accept that reality, solutions become more and more obvious.”
“So, are you building bombs? Making ricin? I know you learned to make ricin.”
“Do I look like I could accomplish those things?”
“And this remains my real question: why did you want to see Ruby? Maybe you’re planning something big, and you’ve decided to keep your own blood safe, no matter how polluted it is.”
“Then you understand why you’re here.”
I turned around, realizing I had walked into a trap, but not the trap I’d expected. “What’s going to happen, Royce?”
“By the time you know, it will be over.”
Dabley was standing in the doorway to the kitchen, listening to us. “I’ve made breakfast,” he said.
Royce slid open his desk drawer and removed a hypodermic needle. “Don’t be alarmed,” he said. “This is not intended for you. I take many medications on a daily basis. Could you assist me, Claude?”
Dabley wore cowboy boots with metal toes, and they clicked on the floor three times before he reached the rug. He was carrying a small medicine vial and a piece of rubber tubing.
“It’s only morphine,” Royce said. “To make inhabiting my body more bearable. Along with other medicines, of course. We will talk more later.”
“I never liked morphine that much,” I said, as if this were a reasonable remark. I scanned the room, trying to figure out what to do. “Shooting coke—now, that was another matter.”
“There’s no one else in my circle,” Royce said, “who would recognize a line from Stalin.”
“I’m not in your circle.”
Dabley had tied off Royce’s arm above the elbow and tapped the crook for a vein. As he injected the morphine, Royce said, “Ah, the circle of life,” and started to giggle. This was a terrible sound, a high, crazy giggle that hung in the air until his head dropped forward. Dabley reclined the wheelchair enough that he could tilt Royce back. He put several small pillows around his neck to steady his head. “He’ll be out for about an hour,” Dabley said. “He’s fine. He needs these respites. When he wakes up, he’ll have no more pain for several hours.”
Tomb of the Unknown Racist Page 25