Begin to Exit Here

by John Welter

  “Is everyone staying home?” I said.

  “I hope so,” Trollope said.

  It was an extremely hot, sunny day, and Trollope had a bottle of Dr Pepper. I had a Coke.

  “I’ve never seen a Ku Klux Klan parade before,” I said. “Do they have batons?”

  Trollope glanced at me and looked away. “Well, in the old days they didn’t,” he said. “They just wore sheets and carried crosses and things. But they’re always trying to change their image. Maybe now they have batons.”

  I drank some Coke and smoked some of my cigarette, then said, “Will they be driving go-carts?”

  Trollope sniggered and wiped some sweat from below his eyes. “I think they’ll just be walking,” he said. “They don’t have a permit for go-carts.”

  “Oh. This is a pretty primitive parade,” I said.

  “Yeah. Pretty basic.”

  “Do you think any of them will bring musical instruments, like accordions?” I said.

  Trollope put his fingers over his mouth and laughed.

  “They wouldn’t seem so sinister if they played accordions,” I said.

  “Then I wish they would,” Trollope said.

  It was about quarter of two. The Klan was supposed to assemble and begin the parade at two. It looked as if maybe another five or ten pedestrians were on the sidewalks down the street, but there was really hardly anyone gathered, except cops. I saw Harmon. He was sitting on top of one of the one-story buildings down the street, shaded by a tree big enough to do it.

  “Well lookit there,” I said, pointing at Harmon. “There’s Harmon, on top of a building.”

  Trollope stared at him. “What’s he doin’ up there?”

  “I think he’s hiding. He wants to see a violent parade, but evidently doesn’t want to be in it. Could you get one of your snipers to shoot a limb off over his head?”

  “I could ask,” Trollope said, holding up his walkie-talkie.

  “Or just throw some tear gas at him,” I said. “Harmon loves tear gas. It’s his favorite fragrance.”

  “Tear gas is expensive,” Trollope said. “It would be more economical to just shoot him.”

  “Well, if that’s all you can afford, okay.”

  It was sort of fun, waiting for the Klan. Kind of like a party that shouldn’t have been happening. The television camera crew that had been standing in the shade of the Pizza Hut awning walked over to Trollope and me with the refined or unavoidable look of self-importance that most TV news guys had, as if reality didn’t matter unless they got it on tape. The reporter was Cindy Kudzil, who everyone called Cindy Kudzu. As Kudzu approached Trollope with her microphone, I said to him secretively, “Don’t talk to her.”

  “Why?” he said quietly.

  “Just to piss her off.”

  The camera guy aimed the camera at Trollope as Kudzu asked Trollope where the Klan was. He delicately dabbed some sweat from his forehead with a paper napkin from his shirt pocket, then said, “Well, they’re scheduled to show up pretty soon. But we don’t insist that they do.”

  “Do you anticipate much trouble or violence?” Kudzu said.

  Trollope shook his head. “We have some background on these boys, from the State Bureau of Investigation and so on,” he said. “I estimate they’ll be less dangerous than a crowd of well-bred, law-abiding college students overturning cars after a big basketball victory. Generally, the Klan behaves better than college students.”

  I was writing that down and smiling. To show my grasp of the severity of everything, I said to Trollope, “What if the Klansmen start playing basketball?”

  “I hope they don’t become that violent,” he said.

  Kudzu seemed irritated by my presence. Looking at my black shirt, sunglasses, and Cleveland Indians cap, she said, “Are you with a paper?” Actually, she meant, “Get the fuck out of here.”

  I wondered what lie to tell her.

  “I’m an agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Fireworks,” I said, then looked away, as if preoccupied by the seriousness of everything. Kudzu and the camera guys walked down the street, probably saying bad things about me. Trollope and I immediately resumed standing there pointlessly, waiting for some ignorant dickheads in sheets to hold a parade in a town that despised them.

  “Do you think they’ll wear sheets?” I said.

  “I don’t know. Sheets, or those army camouflage clothes. I think the sheets are a little dressier.”

  “Yeah. They’re more formal. At work, we were wondering where the Klan gets their robes. It was suggested that they bought them at the KKK-Mart.”

  Trollope grinned, and sipped some Dr Pepper. I wondered if the Klan wasn’t going to show up at all; if some delays or accidents or loss of interest would harmlessly cancel the parade, which would have been fine. I didn’t want to work on Saturday anyway. I could’ve been working on a story to send to The Paris Review, or out at Baker Lake with Janice, or watching a baseball game on TV with her.

  “I hate this shit,” I said.

  “You mean being here?” Trollope said. “I thought you reporters loved this shit.”

  “I don’t love this shit. We’re standing around wasting our goddamn time, sweating on a summer day, waiting for some mean-spirited, ill-tempered, dangerously ignorant dickheads to exercise their civil rights in an asshole parade meant to express hatred toward anyone who isn’t like them. I’m not entertained. Maybe the fuckheads got lost. I wish they would. And no one would look for them. We’d send out blindfolded search parties. They’d come back and say, ‘No. We didn’t see anything. Guess they’re lost.’ That’d be a fun story to write: Klansmen lost: Blindfolded searchers unable to find them.”

  Trollope took the last sip of his Dr Pepper, then said, “Well, I’m sorry. Here they come.”

  I looked to my left and thought it was Halloween. Eight or nine men wearing billowy white robes and pointed hoods walked slowly down Jefferson Street in our direction.

  “That’s not enough for a parade,” I said. “And look. They don’t even have batons. These guys don’t know shit about parades.”

  As I quickly began taking notes and Trollope casually spoke into his walkie-talkie of the appearance of the Klansmen, another ten or eleven men, mostly in robes, came into view from up the street, as if all of them had parked their cars or trucks far out of view and came onto the street in two groups that now were assembling near Trollope and me in the middle of the street. I counted nineteen Klansmen. They didn’t seem to have guns, but I wondered what was in those robes. One of them carried a crudely constructed wooden cross in front of him, a cross about five feet tall that appeared to have been made by someone to whom carpentry was an alien profession.

  “I don’t see any accordions,” I said. “You’d at least think they’d bring balloons. What a sorry parade.”

  All of the men looked angry and sullen, as if those emotions armed them against this town and the contempt they expected to find here. An angry crowd, though, could never have shown as much contempt as an absent crowd. And that, mainly, was the kind of crowd waiting for the Klan. Maybe twenty-five people were on the sidewalks behind all the cops on what otherwise was a pathetically empty street. If the Klansmen had wanted to feed their hatred and anger on the ugly emotions of a crowd, they weren’t eating today.

  “This is neat,” I said. “They want somebody to hate them, but no one’s here. I bet they feel cheated. This is wonderful. Those dicks.”

  The Klansmen, who looked to range in age from the early twenties to the fifties, arranged themselves in parallel columns, with the cross guy in the front.

  “What do you call the cross guy?” I said.

  “I don’t know,” Trollope said. “You could call him the cross guy.”

  “That’s the same title I was thinking of,” I said, writing it down in my notepad. Several of the Klansmen held placards made of large rectangles of cardboard fastened to thin wooden handles. People with bad handwriting and lettering had composed various
messages on the placards, such as “Give the government back to the REAL PEOPLE: WHITE CAUCASIANS.”

  “That’s not fair to the black Caucasians,” I said, still taking notes and squinting at the placards for more slogans, none of which were particularly good and most of which were thoughtfully savage. One of them said, “There is a cure for AIDS: Kill Queers.”

  You had to start thinking that these people weren’t people. Such violent hatred couldn’t come from humans. But actually that was one of the emotions that no other animal had; the will to exterminate their own kind. I tried not to look at that placard anymore, but the other slogans were nearly as irrational. One slogan was “Liberty and justice for ALL doesn’t include everyone.”

  I wondered who it left out. Another slogan was “Let our children pray in school! Put God back in the classroom!”

  I looked at Trollope and said, “Why does God need to go to school? I thought he was omniscient.”

  Trollope just shook his head and lit a cigar, staring with a kind of patient annoyance at those potentially dangerous Halloween guys whose presence forced most of the entire police department to work on a Saturday to protect the Klansmen’s rights to dress badly and publicly share their absence of humanity. Once the Klansmen were aligned in two relatively straight columns in the middle of the street, the cross guy dropped his cross. It banged and bounced and broke on the pavement. The crossbar fell off. As the cross guy stooped over to get the broken cross, you could hear him say, “Shit!”

  “I guess that’s the invocation,” I said. “This parade moves too slow.”

  The cross guy and another Klansman worked for a few seconds to fix the cross by pounding the two pieces together on the pavement. Now that the cross looked even more primitive, with a slanted crossbar, everyone was ready for the parade. The Klansmen began marching down the street, chanting something unintelligible in unison. It sounded as if maybe they practiced being unintelligible together. I should have followed closely along as they marched, but I knew that would place me in danger of eventually understanding something they said. I promised Janice I wouldn’t endanger myself, so I lagged far behind them, where all they were was a receding noise.

  It didn’t look like there was going to be any violence, a blessing that I knew would distress Harmon. As I lagged behind the Klansmen and got up to where Harmon stood on the roof of the building, I stopped to look at him.

  “I’m sorry there wasn’t any bloodshed,” I told him. “I asked Trollope to have a sniper shoot you. He said the police don’t do personal favors.”

  “Fuck you,” Harmon said philosophically.

  “Don’t flirt with me,” I said.

  Now it was time to take that bizarre, upsetting event, evaluate its dozens of details and meanings, throw away most of the facts, pretend I wasn’t human and had no emotions or ideas, then write a pointlessly brief and superficial narrative from the illusory point of view of someone who didn’t exist: the objective reporter.

  I started writing experimental leads on the computer.

  Nineteen Ku Klux Klansmen with accordions and tubas performed James Brown’s “I Feel Good” during an African Unity parade on West Jefferson Street Saturday.

  Dressed in linens purchased at JCPenney White Sale . . .

  Police and State Bureau of Investigation agents identified all of the Klansmen in Saturday’s parade in downtown St. Beaujolais as known white men.

  Riding on a float decorated with 80,000 white carnations shaped like a shotgun . . .

  It was time to look through my notes and hunt through my mind for a memorable way to start off a story about the Klan without calling them witless dickheads, which strayed too far from the AP style. I tried it this way:

  Nineteen Ku Klux Klansmen in brilliant white robes and pointed hats began their White Pride parade in downtown St. Beaujolais Saturday by dropping their wooden cross and breaking it on the pavement.

  Following repairs to the cross, the Klansmen marched in two columns down West Jefferson Street, fervently chanting something unintelligible to a crowd that barely existed. Police estimated that 30 people watched the Klansmen on their four-block parade. There was no violence, except to the quiet.

  26

  We were sort of fishing, just floating aimlessly far out on the greenish brown water of Baker Lake, a lake named after a famous man no one knew anything about. Bright sunlight shimmered on the water here and there like blinding, liquid mirrors meant only to make us squint away from them. Way above us in the faint blue sky, so faint as if the sun had scorched most of the blue away, a baby thunderhead was trying to be born from a regular cumulonimbus cloud, swelling and puffing around its edges of whiteness so harsh in the sun it made your eyes itch and start to water, looking at where the blurry edges of the cloud in its own shadow seemed to melt into the sky.

  Janice knew how to fish and actually had a fishing rod with a lure on it. She rested the rod under one of her bare thighs, letting the rod lean on the edge of the boat, as if a fish would eventually see the submerged lure and bite on it. I just came along to look at her and talk. I had no practical value.

  “How are you doin’ at the paper?” she said, opening a can of 7UP for herself.

  I knew what she meant. It was like I was on parole from my last offense, being fired, and she wanted to find out if I was healthy and sane or if events were now aligning and accumulating for another purge. I thought she wanted a particular kind of answer, one that would comfort her and make her feel safe about me, but I knew I didn’t have that kind of answer.

  “I’m okay,” I said.

  “Then you’re not okay, if that’s all you can say,” she said. “Answer me this. Why are you a reporter?”

  “I’m not. I’m a writer who got the wrong job,” I said, which wasn’t going to make either of us feel safe. “It’s just like you. You’re an archaeologist who works in epidemiology. Not many diseases occur among the dead.”

  She smiled kind of distractedly, amused but not happy, and said, “Yes. Dead people don’t get epidemics.”

  She lit one of my cigarettes and blew smoke into the air, watching where her fishing line disappeared into the glistening murk. It seemed like I might be down there, too, along with the lure and the invisible fish.

  “Sometimes I have no patience with you,” she said, not looking at me, watching the disappeared line. “Maybe you are a writer who got the wrong job, but you have to keep it. You have no idea where the right one is, or if it’ll ever be invented, and so you’re this kind of cheerful, ironic renegade, taunting everyone for having their dumb lives and their dumb traditions that can’t possibly include you. And do you know what this is like, Kurt? It’s like sneering at the only people who can help you because they won’t change all of civilization to satisfy your desires.”

  I felt dizzy and scared, like she was leaving me, or part of her had already left and I just found out. All I could do was quietly be afraid, waiting to see how far she’d left me, even though she was only three feet away and distant enough to make me faint.

  She looked at me once, studying my eyes maybe to see if I had enough sense to be scared now, then looked back down into the wavering murk.

  “My job isn’t what I want either,” she said. “I didn’t go to college for six years to study archaeology just to be a superfluous woman with a good education that nobody wanted, or one that can barely earn a living. But things simply became that way, Kurt, and it hurt me and angered me, sure. But hell, you have to realize that the whole country isn’t just kind of joyously sitting here waiting to provide you with exactly the career you want, and the fucking world doesn’t have to be fair or even care that you’re here. So now I’m studying volumes and volumes of statistics about diseases from people I’ll never even see, because it’s a job I got and it pays me a living wage and I can drive a car and save money every month and have some simple damn safety that just I provide.”

  The only safety I had was Janice, and it seemed in danger of being suspende
d now.

  “Kurt,” she said, holding her hand on her forehead like her head hurt. “This just accumulated in me. I don’t mean to sound harsh or mean, like suddenly I’m a bitch. I don’t know. Sometimes it hurts me that you have a career and you act like you’re just toying with people; like none of life is the way it should be and you’re the only one who knows that, so screw everybody and you’ll feel what you want and write what you want. Please don’t be mad at me for saying this, and if you are, I’m going to have to say too bad, because it’s true.”

  “I’m not mad. I’m dizzy.”

  “Dizzy?” she said, holding her hand over her eyes like a visor and staring at me in the sun. “Why are you dizzy?”

  “It’s kind of like you knocked the wind out of me, and I deserved it.”

  “You do,” she said.

  “Aren’t you going to worry about me?”

  “Not yet. I haven’t finished knocking the wind out of you. Sometimes I hate my job, too, Kurt, but I don’t sneer at everyone at work and tell them to go fuck themselves like you do.”

  “This is getting serious. Are you going to kill me?”

  “I don’t want you dead. You won’t behave better if you’re dead. And now I forgot what I was going to say, dammit,” she complained.

  “Don’t worry. I’m still dizzy.”

  “You should be.”

  “I think I’m bleeding internally.”

  “Good. Bleed some more,” she said.

  Closing my eyes and leaning my head over quickly with the thought of resting my head on the edge of the boat, my inertia and balance were wrong and I slid headfirst into the lake, which I thought Janice would find surprising as I tumbled once underwater and righted myself, pushing to the surface to tread water and look at her.