The Best in the West

by Kathleen Walker

  “It’s nobody from the station.”

  “That’s what you say.”

  The car in front of them made a right turn.

  “It’s okay for now,” Ken said to the backseat. “We’ll check it out later.”

  He sighed in disgust.

  “Probably one of those fucking Jews, those JDL kikes. They blew up a Klan office down in Mississippi. Christ. Could be the FBI too. You know?” He looked at her.

  “They’re really with us,” he went on, “but they give us problems. We had a G-man in our klavern once.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, he told us. You know most of the big problems came with the Kennedys,” he spat out the name. “He got what he asked for. So did his brother. Right, Bruce?”

  There seemed to be a grunt of agreement. “Bruce here is joining us,” he told her. “Right, Bruce?”

  “Oh?” She looked back and nodded to the man in the shadows.

  They left the wide avenues of the city and drove west.

  “What’s this story you’re doing?” Ken asked.

  “I don’t know yet. I want to see what happens at a meeting first.”

  “You gonna write about a bunch of dumb hillbillies?” he jeered. “You gonna write about how dumb we are?”

  “No.” She gave a small laugh.

  “I joined about two years ago,” he said. “I was living in Tennessee. I work, uh, construction. There wasn’t any work there and there were too many niggers. Right, Bruce?”

  “Yeah,” came the muffled voice.

  They rode the next miles in silence, passing out of the city and into the beginnings of the desert. Suddenly, he pulled onto the shoulder of the road and stopped.

  “Harry tell you about this?” he asked and moved toward her. Now she saw the gun tucked in the waistband of his jeans

  She felt the burning stab of fear in her stomach and gave a quick shake of her head. Damn, this was stupid. She had let it happen to her.

  “It’s only for a little while,” he said, his voice husky. In his hands he held a yellow-print bandana.

  There was nothing she could do, nothing. She couldn’t show fear, couldn’t babble at him, not if she wanted this story. She had no choice but to take the chance. She lowered her head and he tied the bandana over her eyes.

  “Can you see anything?” he asked.

  She wondered at his lack of smell as he fumbled at the knot at the back of her head. She expected the smell of sweat, a stale smell. He had no smell at all.

  “No, I can’t see,” she told him.

  She could sense the man in the backseat moving forward. She fought to control the fear. They would pull her out of the car, rape her in the desert and shoot her. Who would know? How long before anyone found her? Goddamn it, she didn’t want to die like this.

  The car pulled back on the road. She took a deep breath.

  Okay, okay, she told herself. Do the James Bond bit. How many beats of time were passing? Feel the road, the land around you. Was the road bumpy? Were there cattle guards? Were there strange noises? On the right? On the left?

  “Check the map.” Ken ordered as the car slowed.

  “It says Quail Road. This isn’t Quail Road,” came the confused backseat voice.

  “Shut up, goddamn it,” Ken shouted.

  She coughed and cleared her throat to show she didn’t care, didn’t realize the importance of the slip. Had it been a slip? Were they making motions to each other, signaling each other to make her think they were near or on Quail Road when it didn’t exist?

  After a few minutes the car stopped and her door was opened. Someone placed a hand under her arm, helping her out. It was Ken who untied the now musty smelling yellow cloth. Over his shoulder, she saw the small stucco house with the wooden porch.

  “Cover her face, damn it,” ordered the big man who walked toward them. “Cover her eyes. Ah, forget it, it’s too late.”

  “I’m Harry,” he said. “Don’t look left or right. Look down.”

  “Okay,” she said as he led her to the house.

  A few people sat in the tiny living room. He pushed her through and into the cramped kitchen where a heavy woman in a nurse’s uniform stood talking to a thin man in loose blue jeans. A young boy sat at the kitchen table.

  “What’s the number?” Harry demanded.

  She gave him Brown’s office number. He punched it out on the wall phone and handed her the receiver.

  “Okay,” she said to Brown. “Everything is okay.”

  “Let me talk to him,” Brown said.

  “He wants to talk to you,” she said, handing the receiver to Harry. “No problem,” he said to Brown’s words. “You keep your side of the deal and we’ll keep ours.”

  In the living room, he introduced her as “the television reporter I told you about who’s going to do a documentary show about the new Klan.”

  They stared at her.

  “Let’s get started,” he said. “I know some of you are thinking about joining us. So, we’ve got this tape of what we believe in and what we think is going wrong in this country of ours. The guy who’s talking is one of our national leaders and he is a great man. I’ve met him.”

  He turned in a small circle, including each of them in his head nodding. He wore a light blue sports coat, open over the start of a wide belly. His shirt was white, open at the neck. There was no trace of a beard on his fleshy face. His small eyes narrowed with the power and the importance of the moment.

  “He’s a man who cares more about America than any of those politicians in Washington. Listen to this tape. Listen to what he has to say. I think you are going to be shocked.”

  Ellen leaned forward, her notebook in her lap. Across from her a young woman with long straight hair sat on the couch next to the man from the kitchen, an obvious couple. The woman nodded with the drone of the tape while the man smoked.

  A bearded man in the easy chair next to the couch puffed on his pipe. When Harry introduced her, he seemed to do a double take as though stunned. The nurse sat in a folding chair next to him. A big man in a denim shirt sat in another chair. An older woman with short gray hair sat on Ellen’s left. She assumed Bruce from the backseat was the man in the folding chair on her right. He had pulled the chair slightly behind their circle. She still couldn’t see his face.

  Ken stood across the room guarding the front door with his arms crossed high on his chest. Harry moved as the tape played, pushing his large body between the chairs, around the tables, smiling and nodding.

  It was a condemnation of Jews, nothing else. There was no talk of blacks or other minorities, no plea for a pure white America. There was, instead, a steady stream of talk about the Jews, how they owned the media, ran the country, were filled with evil. Rabbis slept with little girls, the voice said. Part of the Torah, it said.

  The young woman gave a yip of shock, her frightened eyes searching the room for other reactions. Ellen wondered if her husband beat her, he looked like the type. So did she.

  “God, that is horrible,” said the older woman, her face folding in lines of disgust.

  The nurse grunted with satisfaction. She heard it all before. The bearded man puffed quickly.

  “It was like Nazi Germany,” Ellen would tell them later in the newsroom. “I didn’t know people still believed this crap.”

  They did. She could see that. They believed all of it.

  Harry waited almost a full minute after the tape ended. He waited for the emotion, the tension to build. Then, he spoke.

  “You see what I mean. That man knows what he’s talking about. He’s been to college. He knows.”

  They nodded.

  “Now, I want to show you something you aren’t going to believe. This will prove to you what’s really going on in this country. This will show you who’s trying to run this country.” He left the room.

  She shifted uncomfortably in the hard metal folding chair. She ached with the long sitting. She tried to give them all a friendly,
safe smile.

  Harry was back, his arms full of boxes and cans of food.

  Thank God, she thought, he’s going to give us something to eat. “I want you all to look at these. Look. Right here.” His large forefinger stabbed at one of the boxes. “This is how the Jews run this country. Do you see?”

  He flashed the offending box with his finger now cemented on one spot.

  “Take it.” He thrust the box at the young woman. “Pass it around. Everybody look at it.”

  The woman stared at the box. She turned it, examining all the sides.

  “No, no,” he snapped. “Here.” He grabbed the box, pointing again. “See?”

  Ellen leaned forward.

  “Oh yes,” said the woman, smiling with relief. It was a test and she passed.

  “I see it. I do.”

  All of them were leaning forward now.

  “It’s on everything. Everything,” Harry shouted. “Go home and check your own cabinets. You’ll find it. Kosher,” he crowed. “It says kosher.”

  The faces in the room did not respond to the horror of his pronouncement.

  “The Jews force companies to put that on their food. They make them do it. And, if they don’t do it, the Jews won’t buy it. Do you believe that? This is one of the ways they are running this country. We say ruining.” He gave a sickly smile.

  They were obviously confused by this kosher thing. What did it mean? It was bad, they knew that, because it had something to do with those Jews, those filthy Jews.

  They began to slowly nod and to reach for the boxes and cans being passed around the circle. Yes, they could see that, another filthy Jew thing, those filthy, big-nose Jews running the country, those rich Jews. Ellen kept her head down. She had not opened her notebook, not written one word.

  The blindfold went on at the door. She felt no fear of Ken or Bruce. Twice on the ride back to the city Ken shouted out a license plate number. Twice they were copied down in the backseat.

  When they reached the parking lot, she saw her one mistake. She walked stiff-legged to her car, trying to stand between it and them. They would see her license plate. They would add that to their list. On Monday, they could easily get her address along with all the others from the Motor Vehicle Department.

  *

  “It’s right about here,” she said, pointing to a spot on the map. “I’m sure it is.”

  Frank Kowalski looked over her shoulder.

  “I am sure that guy with the beard was a cop or a newspaper reporter,” she said. She now remembered his reaction to her as the fear of being recognized.

  What an idiot she had been to go out there with those morons. No protection, nothing. And, for what, she asked herself. For what?

  “I ain’t the photographer on this one,” Clifford told them. Frank and Ellen laughed but she wasn’t so sure she wanted it either.

  Two days later Harry called.

  “So, you told them,” he hissed. “You told them, squealer.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You did have us followed, didn’t you, and you told them all about us. You know how we feel about squealers?”

  “I don’t know what you are talking about,” she said strongly. “I wasn’t followed and I haven’t talked to anybody outside this newsroom about anything.”

  She looked around the room, trying to catch someone’s eye, to signal someone to pick up another phone and listen.

  “Then how do that cops know? How?”

  “What cops?”

  “The ones sitting outside the house all the time, the ones following me. How did they find out?”

  “It wasn’t me, Harry. I gave you my word.” She filled her voice with indignation.

  “Yeah, well, maybe not.” Now he sounded unsure. “It better not be you. We’ll find out,” he said, his voice strong again. “And we don’t like squealers.”

  She could feel the sweat starting under her arms. She was almost panting.

  “And I’m not big on threats,” she snapped back. “I didn’t tell anybody and no one followed me.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “We’ll see.” He hung up.

  She went straight to Brown’s office. She wanted out, she told him, out of the series.

  “What good will it do?” she asked him. “The ones who think the same way they do aren’t going to change. I don’t think it’s worth a series. And frankly, I don’t think we’re going to tell anybody anything they don’t already know.”

  He shrugged. There hadn’t been any wasted time, no camera tied up for weeks. The idea sounded okay when she first brought it to him but he could see the problems now. Did he really want to give those guys airtime on his news? He could hear the phone calls. He frowned. Was it worth it?

  Of course, he didn’t like setting a precedent, letting a reporter pull out of anything, but her news judgment was usually good and she’d never done this before.

  “Sure,” he said, “if that’s the way you see it. You’ll have to come up with something else and fast.”

  The sudden wave of relief made her feel faint and guilty. “I wouldn’t drop it unless I really thought it was worthless,” she rushed to assure him. “I just don’t think it will work.”

  He nodded.

  “I feel bad about this,” she said.

  “God,” she told Frank Kowalski, “they scared me in a way. All that stuff was such garbage. It was awful.”

  He chuckled.

  “No, no, I’m serious. It made me sick. And, about half of the guys there were either cops or reporters.”

  She knew the bearded man with the pipe was and thought the man in the work shirt probably was as well.

  She shuddered. “And I thought they were bringing me something to eat. Do you believe that? I thought all those cans and boxes of food were for a snack.”

  Frank Kowalski laughed.

  “What does Brown want you to do?” he asked her.

  “Something happy,” she said. “A happy series. What the hell is happy?”

  19

  “I would have been scared to death,” Debbie told her.

  “I was when they put that blindfold on, but after that it was all right,” Ellen said. “It wasn’t anywhere near as bad as that time I was on the manhunt.”

  “What manhunt?”

  “It happened before you got here. Three kids helped their father and some other guy break out of prison. They went on a rampage, killing babies, everything. And guess who was following them.”

  “You?”

  “Of course.” Ellen laughed. “Now, that was frightening.”

  They sat at the edge of the pool, their legs dangling in the water.

  “I’m out there in a van with that fool Rappaport, right in the middle of the Tonto National Forest, two hundred thousand acres or something. We were there all night. There were these two state cops in their car who were about sixteen years old and jumpy as hell. We couldn’t even get out to go to the bathroom because they got scared when they heard the door open. I sat up all night and Rappaport slept. He was sure his wife was going to get pissed that he was up there with me.”

  She kicked at the water. It was October and the water was warm.

  “You know what I figured out that night?” she said.

  “What?”

  “That I didn’t want to die that way, out in some forest for some nothing story. Still, we did the story and it won an award. The funny thing is they weren’t even there that night. They were someplace else killing somebody.”

  She hadn’t talked to someone like this in a long time, not since Dale in Albuquerque. They used to share their station stories over Tecates with lime at Al Monte’s bar.

  “My father once told me what he was afraid of,” she told Debbie. “Here is this guy who fought hand-to-hand combat in Europe in World War II and he had this wild fear.”

  “What was it?”

  “It was about New York. That’s where he worked after the divorce.”

  “What did he d
o?”

  “His company handled international insurance, like Lloyds, you know? Insurance for things like revolutions, wars. He would go to these countries, meet the top guys and figure out what could go wrong and when. His company would insure companies and their people who were going to do business there.”

  “I didn’t know people did that.” Debbie said.

  “He loved it and when we were young we used to travel with him all over the world.”

  “You have brothers and sisters?”

  “Two brothers, one younger and one older. We spent holidays and summers in Hong Kong, Madrid, London.”

  “I’ve never even been to New York,” Debbie sighed.

  “My father liked New York but he couldn’t understand how the blacks put up with it. He thought that one day they were going to get mad enough to come out of Harlem and seal up the whole city.”

  They looked at each other.

  “You know,” Ellen continued, “it’s an island and he said if they got mad enough and organized they could cut off the bridges and seal off the tunnels and let everybody fry in the city.” She laughed.

  “I think he wanted them to do it. He said he didn’t understand how they could stand it, living there in Harlem and watching the trains taking all these fat cat businessmen in their Brooks Brothers suits back to Connecticut.” She leaned back, stretched her neck.

  “All the commuter trains to Connecticut go through Harlem. These guys, and I’ve seen this, are sitting there in this air-conditioned train, reading their newspapers, and playing these ridiculous card games that have been going on for years. They are going past the tenements where the people are hanging out of the windows, T-shirts, housedresses, hot as hell. They’re watching the trains go by. My father wondered why they didn’t kill all those bastards on the train. And,” she laughed again, “he was one of them.”

  “Is that what he was afraid of, that the blacks would do that?” Debbie asked.

  “No, he wasn’t afraid of that. He was afraid he would have a heart attack or something and fall down on the street and people would step over him, thinking he was some old drunk. That’s the way they are in New York. That’s what scared him, but it didn’t happen. He died four years ago of cancer. Real fast. Nobody stepped over him except the doctors.” She kicked the water.