“But you did see both of them while they were here?”
“I saw ’em.”
“Talk to either one?”
“No.”
“What’d you think about them staying here together? Black man, white woman. Unmarried.”
Her mouth thinned down. “Lord’s business, not mine.”
“So it didn’t bother you?”
“Didn’t say that.”
“Then it did bother you.”
“Didn’t say that neither. I got nothing against niggers.”
“No, of course not. Your husband either, right?”
“Well?” she said. “What’re you harping on that for? The race thing. What’s that have to do with them two wandering off someplace, getting their fool selves lost?”
“Maybe they didn’t wander off and get themselves lost.”
“No? What’d they do, then?”
“Ran into some trouble, could be. Right here in Creekside.”
“What trouble?”
“With some people who aren’t good, tolerant Christians like you and your husband.”
“Nonsense,” she said. “Wasn’t no trouble the night they stayed here, nor the morning they left.”
“They have any visitors that night?”
“Visitors? Who’d visit them?”
“So nobody did.”
“I don’t spy on my guests.”
“Allison called her mother long distance,” I said. “She or Rob make any other calls from here? Local or long distance?”
“No.”
She finished scratching numbers on the credit card slip; slapped it and my MasterCard down in front of me. I signed the slip, pocketed my copy and the card.
“Nice talking to you, Mrs. Bartholomew.”
“You think so?” she said.
I smiled at her, the old wolf smile; she didn’t react. At the door I stopped and turned and indulged in a little more hard pushing, to see if I could get a shove in return. “One more thing. Who do I talk to about the Sentinels?”
She was on her way through the doorway back there, probably heading after more gin; the words halted her, stiffened her back. She half turned before she said, “The what?”
“The Sentinels. Or the Christian National Emancipation League. I’ll settle for either one.”
Good push, but not much answering shove. She said, “I don’t have no idea what you’re talking about,” and left me alone with the lie.
Chapter Twelve
It was four-fifteen when I drove down from the motel and put the car into one of the angled spaces before the Modoc Cafe. The outspill of light through the cafe’s plate glass window laid a saffron tint on the gathering twilight. In close to the glass, the curtain of rain had a burnished silver cast.
Lena was on duty now, Lorraine nowhere in evidence. A man and a woman sat in the last of the left-hand row of booths; they were the only customers. I claimed the first of the right-hand booths. Lena took her time coming over to me, and when she did she left her professional smile behind. But there was no hostility in her expression. Just a guarded blankness, like an empty house with its security alarm switched on.
“Persistent, aren’t you,” she said.
“I get paid to be.”
“Maybe you don’t know it, but this isn’t a good place to be persistent in. Creekside, I mean.”
“And why is that?”
“People here don’t like pushy outsiders.”
“Who keep asking questions about things nobody wants to talk about.”
“That’s right.”
“How about you? What do you think of pushy outsiders?”
“I think I don’t want to answer any more of your questions.”
“Not even to save a couple of lives?”
“If those kids are still alive.”
“You think they might not be?”
“I didn’t say that. I hope they are.”
“So do I. So do their families.”
Small silence. Then she asked tentatively, as if she were leery of the answer, “Where’ve you been the past couple of days?”
“Oregon. Being persistent.”
“Do you any good?”
“Some. You were right about the boyfriend’s name—it’s Rob. Rob Brompton. Not casual between them, either. They’re planning to be married.”
“Doesn’t surprise me, I guess.”
“But you don’t approve?”
“Marriage is a shitty proposition when both people belong to the same race. Black and white makes it twice as shitty.”
“They don’t think so. It’s their mistake anyway, if it is a mistake.”
“Sure. I made a couple myself and neither of mine was any darker than vanilla ice cream. So why’d you come back here from Oregon? What’s here for you?”
“The truth, maybe.”
“What truth?”
I shrugged and said nothing, watching her.
“They disappeared here or close by, that how you figure it?”
“That’s how I figure it.”
Lena nibbled at her lower lip, the way you do when you’re trying to make up your mind about something. Pretty soon she said, “You gonna order? Can’t keep sitting here if you don’t.”
“Milk. Low-fat.” Not even the Modoc could screw up a glass of milk.
She went away, came back with the milk. And with something else for me too: conscience and innate decency had won out over fear and self-interest, for a change.
“That Saturday night,” she said, leaning close so she could be sure her voice wouldn’t carry, “just after the kids left, Mike Cermak came in. He passed right by them and the two men they were talking to out front.”
“Two men. You’re certain of that now?”
“That much I am.”
“The men wouldn’t have been wearing camouflage fatigues, would they? One young, one about my age with a big hooked nose. Father and son, possibly.”
Her eyes narrowed. “I can’t tell you what they looked like. I wasn’t lying when I said it was dark and the window was fogged up.”
“Was a pair like that in the cafe that night?”
“I don’t remember.”
“You know the ones I described, though.”
“No, I don’t.” Which was yet another Creekside lie. She knew, all right.
“Rough trade,” I said. “I had a little run-in with them the other night.”
“Is that so.”
She wasn’t going to talk about them no matter how much I prodded her; her eyes and her pursed mouth made that plain. If they were Sentinels, and I had a hunch they were, it meant that she wouldn’t talk about the organization, either. No use in even bringing up the name. Pressure her too hard and she would curl up inside her protective shell, shut me out entirely. Conscience and innate decency go only so far in this fear-ridden, cover-your-ass society of ours.
I said, “Let’s get back to Mike Cermak. You’re pretty sure he saw who Allison and Rob were talking to?”
“He must have. He’s not blind.”
“How does Cermak feel about answering questions from outsiders?”
“He’s an outsider himself,” Lena said. “At least, he wasn’t born up here and he keeps to himself. Mike’s okay.”
“Where can I find him?”
“He lives up at the top of Lodgepole Lane. Last house where it dead-ends.”
“Lodgepole Lane is where?”
“Back toward the highway, south. Turn right.”
“Okay to use your name with him?”
“You’d better, if you want him to talk to you. He—”
She stopped talking because the front door opened and the wet wind blew in a trio of men in their forties, none familiar to me. Lena knew them and she didn’t seem to want them to know she’d been having a conversation with me; she waved and called out names, moved off in their direction without another glance in mine.
I finished my milk and went out into the coming night.
/> Like Spring Valley Road, Lodgepole Lane was narrow and riddled with tire-snaring potholes. It climbed onto the hillside above the village, and by the time I reached its terminus, after about a third of a mile, it was so pinched in by evergreens, two normal-sized cars couldn’t have passed each other without swapping paint scrapes.
The only house up there was built on a couple of acres of cleared ground behind a crazy-quilt fence that was part grape-stake, part chicken wire, and part rough-wood poles. Typical Creekside home: old, badly in need of paint and a new roof. It seemed also to list a few degrees to the south, as if it had been pushed that way by a long succession of winter storms. Lights in its facing windows pressed palely against the early darkness. The yard in front and around on one side was an incredible clutter of things spread out under tin-roofed lean-tos: car parts, tools, stacks of firewood, lengths of pipe, plumbing fixtures, appliances, hundreds of other items less easily identifiable in the gloom. A homemade sign on the gate read: CERMAK’S BARGAINS—BUY, SELL, TRADE—FREE PICKUP AND DELIVERY.
The man who opened the door to my knock was not quite a stranger: he was the aging, uncommunicative hippie I’d tried to brace at the general store on Tuesday. He didn’t look any more cooperative tonight. Not hostile, just carefully neutral—like Switzerland. The hear-no-evil, see-no-evil type.
“Mike Cermak?”
Small reluctant nod.
“Remember me?” I said. “I’m the man who—”
“I know who you are. What do you want?”
“A few minutes of your time.”
“I can’t help you, man. I know nothing from nothing.”
“Maybe you know more than you think. Lena down at the cafe said you’d talk to me. How about it?”
“Talk about what?”
“Week ago Saturday night. The two missing college kids were out front of the cafe, having a conversation with two men, when you showed up. You walked right by them.”
“So?”
“So maybe you can tell me who the men were and what the conversation was about.”
I watched him fret over the wisdom of compromising his neutrality. Then, “All right, come inside. Too damn cold out here.” Still reluctant, but leaning the right way.
The interior of the house had the same junk-shop clutter as the front yard—a mix of private possessions and goods for sale, complete with price tags. A wood-burning stove made the place too warm. A fattish woman with long, braided hair sat on a scruffy sofa, making something that looked to be a beadwork purse. Cermak gestured to her and she got up without a word and left the room, taking her beadwork and a half-full glass of wine with her.
Cermak said to me, “I can’t tell you their names.”
“The two men who were talking to the kids?”
“Yeah.”
“Can’t or won’t tell me?”
“Can’t. Don’t know who they were.”
“They don’t live around here? Strangers to you?”
“. . . Not exactly strangers.”
“So they do live in the area.”
No answer.
“Do you know where I can find them?”
This time I got an evasion: “Won’t do you any good to look them up.”
“No? Why not?”
“They won’t talk to you.”
“Why won’t they?”
“Just won’t.”
“Were they hassling the kids?”
“Some,” Cermak said. “Bad scene.”
“The white and black thing?”
“Yeah.”
“Taunts, threats—what?”
“Taunts. Called him a nigger and worse.”
“How did he respond?”
“Didn’t respond. She wanted to argue, defend him, but the black kid hustled her away.”
“The men follow them?”
“No. Yelled some more shit and then got in their Jeep and split.”
“Jeep? What kind of Jeep?”
He shrugged. “A Jeep.”
“Open military style. Camouflage paint job?”
“Yeah.”
“Describe the men for me.”
“Young. Big and young.”
“Both of them?”
“Both, yeah.”
“What were they wearing?”
Another hesitation. Getting information out of him was like cleaning layers of paint off an old table: you scraped and scraped but it would come off only in little chips and flecks. “Soldier shit,” he said finally. “Camouflage fatigues, combat boots.”
“Armed?”
“I didn’t see any guns.”
“Sentinels,” I said. “They were members of the Sentinels, weren’t they?”
A muscle twitched in Cermak’s cheek. He went to where another half-full glass of wine sat on an end table; drained the glass before he looked at me again.
“What do you know about the Sentinels?”
“Not as much as I’m going to,” I said. “What do you know about them?”
“Nothing, man. None of my business.”
“They’re racists. That makes them everybody’s business.”
“Not mine. Different universes.”
“I’ll bet you didn’t feel that way in the sixties. I’ll bet you did a little civil rights marching back then. Vietnam protests, ban-the-bomb protests.”
“The sixties are dead, man,” he said, “a long time dead. I’m older and smarter now.”
“Older anyway.”
“No bullshit lectures, all right? You don’t know me and I don’t know you.”
“But you do know the Sentinels.”
He avoided my eyes again, poured himself more wine. But sooner or later I was going to scrape off enough chips and flecks to find out what I wanted to know, and we both knew he was going to let it happen. Otherwise he wouldn’t have let me into his house in the first place.
I said, “Back to a week ago Saturday night. You see the kids again after the hassle?”
“No.”
“The next morning? Anytime since?”
“No.”
“How about the pair in the Jeep?”
“No,” Cermak said. “They don’t come into town much, don’t mix with the locals.”
“Who doesn’t? The Sentinels?”
“Those assholes were just passing through to the highway, or maybe making an emergency buy at the hardware store. It stays open late on Saturdays.”
“Passing through from where?”
Silence.
“Come on, Mike, where do the Sentinels hang out? Some kind of wilderness outpost, is that it?”
Cermak worked on his wine. And then, as if the fabric of his indifference had suddenly ruptured, he blew out breath in a hissing sigh and said harshly, “Screw it. All right, yeah, they got a camp back in the woods. Big place, started building it about a year and a half ago.”
“Where in the woods?”
“End of Timberline Road. Seven, eight miles west.”
“Sounds like you’ve been there.”
“Once. They bought a bunch of stuff from me before I knew who they were and I delivered it. I should’ve known when they gave me the goddamn badge.”
“Badge?”
“Blue and white triangle. Show it at the gate, wear it on the grounds. Everybody in there wears one.”
“What kind of place is it?”
“Hard to describe. They’d only gotten started on the construction when I was there. Cabins, prefab buildings . . . looked like it was going to be big. A big bad bummer.”
“How do you mean?”
“One of the things they were laying out was a parade ground. Guys in fatigues—I could just see them goose-stepping around in formation once it was finished.”
“Neo-Nazi?”
“I didn’t see any swastikas or shit like that. But yeah, that was the impression I got. Paramilitary for sure.”
“Fences? Weapons?”
“Plenty of fencing all around. Only weapon I saw was on the guard
at the front gate. Assault rifle. But you can bet they’ve got a stash.”
“How many people living there?”
“Couple of dozen back then. Lot more than that by now.”
“All men?”
“Mostly. But I saw a couple of women, and one kid about ten. Families, indoctrinate ’em young. Jesus.”
“Who’d you deal with?”
“Guy named Slingerland. Forty, blond, real Aryan type.”
“Was he the one in charge?”
“Didn’t seem that way. Somebody called the Colonel. Never heard his name.”
“Fifties, bull-necked, nose looked like a hawk’s?”
Cermak shrugged. “He wasn’t pointed out to me. I don’t remember anybody looked like that, but it was a long time ago.” One corner of his mouth twisted. “And I smoke a lot of dope.”
“The name Richard Artemus Chaffee mean anything to you?”
“No.”
“He’s head of an outfit called the Christian National Emancipation League.”
“Oh, yeah. Racist flyers all over the place.”
“But you’re not aware of any connection between the Sentinels and this league.”
“No.”
“Who owns the land the Sentinels camp is on?”
He shook his head. “Used to belong to a big cattle rancher. For all I know it still does.”
“What’s the rancher’s name?”
“Duquesne. George Duquesne.”
“Know anything about him?”
“Not much. Strictly low-profile.”
“So he could be one of them.”
“Wouldn’t surprise me.”
“And the Sentinels have been recruiting locals, right? Holding open meetings, preaching racism?”
“Not openly. Clandestine stuff, word of mouth.” Another lip-twist. “Whispers in the dark.”
“They seem to be having much success?”
“More than you’d think. You can sell any kind of shit to some of the poor stupid schmucks up here.”
“Ollie Ballard, for instance.”
“That creep.”
“Who else in Creekside?”
Cermak balked at that. “Gave you enough names. Christ, man, my old lady and me got to live here. No more questions. How about you split now and leave us alone?”
The fabric of his indifference had reknitted; he had it wrapped around him again—a cocoon of self-protection. Flower child grown old and gone to seed. Dropped out a long time ago and determined to stay that way: drink wine and smoke dope with his old lady, sell his bargains, and let the rest of the world slide by. But there was still a little love and caring left in him, still a little of the old sixties philosophy. Hell, by Creekside standards he and Lena were right up there with Mother Teresa in the humanitarian department.
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