Bonnie’s trapped in another smile. “Actually, we do fund-raising.”
How brilliant. Psychic blackmail. Rich people writing out checks to keep this Bonnie from exploding like those blobs of hot dough Nolan had to scrape off the walls when he worked in the doughnut shop.
No need to feel sorry for Bonnie. She’s got a fat scene going. She—or someone—must be a whiz. Somebody’s bankrolled the woodwork, the painting, the carpets. The gold letters above the receptionist desk: WORLD BROTHERHOOD WATCH. PEACE THROUGH CHANGE. Somebody paid the bills for that. And it’s not like they’re selling a product.
“Well, great. Whatever,” says Nolan. “I want to work with you guys.”
Bonnie eyes the Asian receptionist. What is Ninja Girl supposed to say? She’s hanging Bonnie out to dry. Or maybe she’s just bewitched by the spell of this magical situation. An incoming call blinks on and off, but no one moves. Is Bonnie from outer space? Nolan should just push up his sleeves, flash his tattoos, and cut to the chase.
“That’s wonderful,” Bonnie rattles on. “Actually, we do have a volunteer auxiliary which has been very helpful with mailings and phone calls and stuff. Mostly it’s older women, but we also attract some really cool energetic kids.”
Older women? Really cool energetic kids? “Wait a second,” says Nolan. “Do you know who I am?”
Good question. Bonnie takes a step back. God only knows what she’s seeing.
“Listen,” says Nolan. “I’m not pretending I understand anything about you or your organization, but I’ll bet most of the people you deal with are pretty much like yourself.” Jesus, don’t let her think he means Jews.
“We reach out to all kinds of people. I’m sorry, Mr. Nolan. There’s something I’m not—”
“Reach out? All kinds? Can I ask how many white supremacists you guys have reached out to?” He runs one hand over his bald head. Does he have to draw her a map? He’d rehearsed saying “white supremacist.”
“Not. So. Far,” says Bonnie. “I see.” And she does. So this is where they would have started if he’d showed his tattoos up front. It’s just that they have gotten there by a smoother road. Even so, Nolan can watch revulsion and fear warring with something she believes, or wants to believe: the filthiest skinhead slimeball is some mother’s son.
Only now does she notice the duffel bag. She’s not the world’s most observant person. Maybe it’s the glasses. But once she sees it, she can’t stop staring. Or looking paler and more afraid. Nolan draws the line at going through the books-and-dirty-laundry routine again.
“World Brotherhood Watch. May I help you?” The sound of the other shoe dropping has roused the receptionist from her trance. “To whom may I direct your call?”
Bonnie’s face takes on the strangest look, as if she’s trying to place Nolan, almost as if she thinks she might have met him before. As if she knows him from somewhere. She does a guppy thing with her mouth several times before she says, “Why don’t we go to my office? Would you like to leave your bag at the desk?”
“No, thanks, it’s light.” Obvious lie number two. But there’s no way he’s going to leave it and let Kung Fu Girl help herself to his drugs and ARM’s fifteen hundred bucks.
“Actually,” says Bonnie, “it would be a good idea if you left it out here.”
The chick can get tough if she needs to! Nolan’s not going to fight her on this. Anyhow, it’s an ultimatum: Lose the duffel or forget the invite back to the inner sanctum. It’s a test Nolan has to pass, a test of faith. If he’s going to put his life in these people’s hands, he might as well trust them not to root around in his stash. Nolan walks around behind the desk and shoves the bag in an empty corner.
“Guard it with your life,” he says, grinning into the steely center of the receptionist’s glare.
Bonnie punches a code into the wall, and Nolan follows her through a door, past cubicles and offices full of busy worker bees. Nolan glances at Bonnie’s ass, mostly because it’s there, modestly announcing itself under her unsexy business skirt. Something about it breaks his heart. She’s got a nice ass, and she doesn’t know it, and now it’s almost too late. The ass has got another couple years. The husband’s already stopped caring. It’s funny, how a woman always knows when you’re looking. Even Bonnie stops and turns.
“Listen, I have a better idea. Let’s take you to meet Dr. Maslow.”
Nolan hopes this change of plans doesn’t mean she knows he was checking her out, and now she’s scared to be alone with the punk storm-trooper rapist. Or maybe Bonnie finally gets what Nolan can do for Brotherhood Watch. The alien’s made itself understood. Take me to your leader.
Bonnie knocks on a half-open door.
“Come in!” cries a voice. You’d think that, with his history, Maslow would ask who’s knocking. Nolan watches Bonnie’s posture change as she pushes open the door. Hesitant, girlish, slightly stooped—she’s shrinking in front of his eyes. Is it terror? Awe? Respect? Sex? You’ve got to consider sex first.
Outside the windows, the silvery jaws of the city yawn and snap shut, gobbling Nolan and spitting him out, spiraling toward the horizon. The view leaves him slightly motion-sick, and the inrush of sunlight starts him sweating again, though the air conditioner is set to maintain the climate control of heaven.
Maslow’s on the phone, one elbow on the desk, cradling his head in his hand as he uses their entrance to end his conversation. “Come in! Excuse me, yes, of course, I’ll try to get there, Mount Sinai. Give my love to Minna, all right, see you later. Good-bye.”
Bonnie’s jumping out of her skin. “Is something wrong? Is someone sick?”
“Nothing serious.” Maslow’s lying. “An old friend’s wife needs a cheer-up visit.” Nolan imagines patients in ICUs all over the town, waiting for Maslow to arrive so they can yank out their tubes and die happy. But he can see why Maslow might have that effect. His presence is working on Bonnie like a Valium IV drip.
“Meyer Maslow,” says Bonnie. “I’d like you to meet Vincent Nolan.”
Maslow stands and extends his hand, not quite far enough, so that reaching for it throws Nolan slightly off balance. Nolan recognizes Maslow from the photos on his books. The same crisp features, untouched by the putty that old age likes to stick onto old guys’ faces. Maslow’s movements have a catlike grace. Useful, Nolan thinks. For all those times he had to get small and slip through the cracks and vanish.
Maslow’s book-jacket gaze meets Nolan’s straight on. Does he look that way at everybody? Bonnie doesn’t bring everybody back into his office. Maslow gives Bonnie a funny look. An I-told-you-so look. As if Maslow had been…expecting him. A shiver runs down Nolan’s spine.
The Warrior faces and analyzes the forces he has to deal with. And what is Nolan facing? It depends on which Nolan you ask. The old Nolan sees a fat-cat Jew with a million-dollar corner office. The new Nolan sees a hero who survived Hitler to fight for justice and tolerance, to write books and start this foundation. According to their Web site, Brotherhood Watch has saved thousands of lives worldwide. Nolan can only hope that Maslow will step up to the plate and save his.
Maslow’s hand is dry and powdery, and like the rest of him, perfect. Every white hair clipped to perfection, like the mane of a show dog, and his eyes are the eyes of the Lassie or Rin Tin Tin you tell all your little-boy secrets. That face will wait forever for Nolan to explain why he’s come. If Nolan had a dog like that as a kid, he wouldn’t be here now.
“Thanks for taking time,” says Nolan. “I read about you guys on the Web. And in the newspapers. I read all your books. I especially liked The Kindness of Strangers. And Forgive, Not Forget. And the new one, One Heart at a Time.”
Maslow wasn’t expecting that. Score ten points for Nolan.
“You read the new one?”
“I read them all,” Nolan lies. “And reading them really changed me. They made me think that I should come in here and…offer my services. See if you guys wanted to, like, debrief me. There’s a couple of things
I could tell you from the years I spent in ARM. The American Rights Movement?”
“Yes. We know what ARM is. And we know its other name: the Aryan Resistance Movement.” Maslow’s eyelids flutter shut. He can hardly stand the thought. Nolan doesn’t blame him. Considering what he survived—escaping the Nazis, in hiding for years, half a dozen close calls and near-death experiences, and after all that they caught him and sent him to the camps—how’s the guy supposed to feel about a bunch of white punks stomping around and giving each other the Hitler salute? Nolan wouldn’t blame Maslow for hating guys like him. Once again he hears Raymond’s voice: To the Jew, we’re all the same.
The hate stuff was never what Nolan liked about ARM. Of course, he agreed that the big bucks weren’t going to honest working men like himself, but he was never fully convinced that his tax dollars were being raked in by the eight Jewish bankers who secretly own the Federal Reserve. Anyway, the ARM guys got steamed if they so much as heard the word hate. They claimed they didn’t hate anyone. It was just that they loved the white race. Which was also a problem for Nolan. Loving a race is a lot to ask. It’s hard enough loving a person. He’d thought he’d loved Margaret, right up until and including the morning when she’d patiently waited till he’d finished moving out of their place, loading the last of his stuff into his truck, and then she got in her UPS van and drove off, smiling and waving.
Mostly, Vincent got into ARM because its take on the government was so dead-on. ARM said things that no one else had the brains or the balls to say about those greedy slobs in Washington, figuring out how to turn a dime by taking away Nolan’s freedoms. Clinton, Bush, it was all the same shit. What sensible person would give a rat’s ass who was in the White House? Those twenty-one babies in Waco weren’t old enough to vote. That stuff was pretty persuasive, Waco and Ruby Ridge, the shock of finding out that the government you paid taxes and pledged allegiance to could massacre women and children just for trying to live the way the Constitution guaranteed. Also, being in ARM had a certain…entertainment value. Sometimes the ARM guys could be funny, especially when they got loaded.
Raymond would never have been so hospitable if Nolan hadn’t pretended to go along with the entire ARM program, and probably Nolan would never have joined ARM if not for Raymond’s hospitality. Not that Nolan would ever admit that. Becoming a white supremacist for the free lunch seems even sleazier than joining because you believe that the white race is an endangered species, or because you like wearing the camouflage gear and the boots.
Nolan wasn’t a racist, in the sense that he didn’t believe in hating people unless you knew them personally. But look, it wasn’t lost on him that the Jewish swimming pool owners who contracted with Skip thought nothing of calling Vincent at dawn, ordering him to hustle over to Woodstock just because they’d found a mouse floating at the deep end. Let the Jew get a net and drag the mouse out himself. Or better yet, let the Jew share his wealth and give poor bastards like Nolan a shot at the weekend house and the pool.
The absolute low point was the incident with Mrs. Regina Browner, a Jewish woman, as it happened, an old Jewish woman, as it happened, but with plenty of energy left for being a pain in the ass. She kept insisting that frog died in her pool because Nolan had overdosed it with chemicals, when obviously the frog had drowned without any chemical help. She said frogs didn’t drown. What did she want Nolan to do? Autopsy the slimy fucker?
She’d been at him, bitching and carrying on. When she threatened to complain to Skip, Nolan lifted all starved-down, nipped and tucked ninety pounds of her in his arms. He’d never done anything like that. He felt awful the minute he picked her up and saw how light she was, like those balsa-wood model planes he used to make as a kid. But by then he’d set something in motion and couldn’t put her down until he’d gently deposited her in the shallow end of the pool.
Of course he’d jumped in and fished her out, apologizing the whole time, because he was sorry and also because he knew that, if she pressed charges, she could do some damage. He was glad she didn’t drown. That’s what he said in the letter he wrote her that night. He wrote that he’d meant her no harm. He’d been having a miserable summer. He said his doctor thought he might have an allergy to algaecides, which made him act weird around pools. That was the only lie he told. It was true that he was sorry. If only she had stopped yelling at him five minutes sooner. He couldn’t believe he’d become a guy who could drop old ladies in pools. He was glad—he deserved it—when Skip let him go.
After a hairy couple of weeks, Mrs. Browner agreed not to press charges if Nolan took twenty hours of anger management class.
Bonnie and Maslow are staring at him.
Nolan smiles. Okay. It’s the moment.
“And I want to help you guys,” he says. “I was thinking…” Deep breath. Count to ten. “I want to help you guys save guys like me from becoming guys like me.”
Nolan can’t help grinning. He got that sucker right! The line he’d practiced, chanting it in his head to put himself to sleep during some very rough nights. I want to help you guys save guys like me from becoming guys like me. Tough, tongue-twisting sonofabitch. But he did it. He meant it. Means it.
But what does he mean, precisely? I want to help you save guys who happen not to have a place to crash from becoming the kind of guys who could keep quiet and go along with Raymond’s bonehead ideas in return for a chance to camp out on his lumpy living room couch? And sure, you would want to save guys from becoming a guy like that.
The atmosphere stutters, like a thermostat clicking on. Maslow and Bonnie swap long looks. Whatever that exchange was about, score ten more for Nolan. Maslow taps his fingertips together, a gesture that reminds Nolan of a Catholic priest.
“I know how those guys think,” Nolan says. “I know how they wound up where they wound up. And I know how to turn them around.”
Maslow says, “Vincent. If I may call you that…. Help us understand. You’ve spent two years in one of the country’s most vicious hate groups. And now you want to come and work with World Brotherhood Watch?”
“In a nutshell,” Nolan says.
“I see,” says Maslow. “And in that nutshell, I assume, is a major change of heart?”
Change of heart. That works for Nolan. That’s exactly what it was. A heart transplant, a new pig’s heart for your damaged old one, one of those total blood exchanges you get in Transylvania. Maslow’s native land.
“Major change,” Nolan says. “Correct.”
“A conversion experience,” Maslow says.
“Exactly.”
“And how did you get to us?”
“Your Web site,” Nolan says. “Like I said…”
Maslow eyeballs Bonnie a memo: See what the World Wide Web can do! Let’s look into this further. “But something else must have happened—”
“That’s right. Something did, sir.” Nolan’s never called anyone sir in his life. Like some lowlife cornball Elvis.
Maslow says, “Vincent, Bonnie, please. Sit down.”
Bonnie sinks into the nearest chair. Nolan takes the other chair, and bingo, he’s back in the principal’s office on one of the many occasions when he and his mom were summoned in for a chat. Nolan’s mom always took his side, patiently explaining why her son might be bored, ignoring the sparks of hatred shooting out of the principal’s eyes. He’s also thinking of the time when he and Celia Mignano got busted for having sex in the art room. Both memories give him a pleasant buzz, like a swarm of mellow bees humming between him and Bonnie.
Maslow says, “Would you mind telling us how this change of heart came about?”
How did they get so far so fast? Nolan isn’t ready. He’d pictured a conversation. This is an audition. Only now he sees it’s useless. He could sit here and blab all day and never explain. Still, it’s not as if he didn’t know that sooner or later they would ask. That’s why Nolan prepared, mentally rehearsed his account of what pushed him over the edge.
“The thing is�
�I was at this rave…. Two weeks ago, may be three. That last freak hot spell before this one…”
“Rave?” Five seconds into the story, and Maslow’s left in the dust. He smiles and hands this one off to Bonnie, their resident youth-culture expert. “Mrs. Kalen has two teenagers.”
“Girls or boys?” As if Nolan cares.
“Sons. Max and Danny.” Bonnie likes just mentioning them. Something loosens in her face. “Twelve and sixteen.”
“You must have had them when you were a child,” Nolan says.
“Right,” says Bonnie. “A baby.”
Maslow’s fingers drum on the desk. What is it with Maslow and Bonnie? If only it were as simple as sex. It’s some neurotic head trip. Bonnie worships the guy. And he digs it.
“A rave?” asks Maslow. “Enlighten me.”
“It’s like a huge party,” says Nolan.
“Well,” says Bonnie. “A little more than that. It’s a whole…underground subculture. Kids get the word out, and thousands of them take over an old warehouse with giant sound systems and paint their faces and dance and—”
“Lovely,” says Maslow. “Do your sons attend these events?”
“Not so far.” Bonnie knocks on Maslow’s desk. The woman is superstitious.
Nolan says, “This one was outdoors. In a field. The dead middle of nowhere. In March. How smart was that? They’d dragged out these gigantic generators and the screens for the lights and…Did I say my cousin Raymond took me?” Nolan wishes he hadn’t mentioned Raymond. The urge to look over his shoulder must be visible on his face.
“Vincent,” says Maslow. “May I interrupt? When you’re as old as I am, everyone under forty looks the same age. But excuse me, I’m wondering…”
“I’m thirty-two,” says Nolan. He knows where Maslow’s going with this. Nolan’s near the top of the age curve for rave and rock-concert attendance. “That’s why I thought it would depress me, hanging out with a bunch of teens jumping around and waving glow sticks and puking. And frankly…I couldn’t see what it would do for me to exchange a big group hug with the rainbow coalition.”
A Changed Man Page 2