No Truth Left to Tell

by Michael McAuliffe

. . .

  The attendees for the evening’s meeting gathered in the back room of Smokin’ Joe’s. Daniels, the first to arrive, dropped his chin as he navigated around tables occupied by diners sporting sauce-caked grins and sticky fingers. He didn’t want to be recognized, but there was little chance of that, as it was the abundant food that held the patrons’ rapt attention, not the animated man making his way through the crowd. Others arrived, one with a beer from the front bar and another with the grease stains of the day’s work on his pant leg. The group had a jumbled quality, with a disjointed collection of baseball caps and tattoos, and tattered shirts covering bulging bellies. No label got pinned on the attendees’ chests, but they all were white, male, and indignant.

  The Klavern meetings took place at different locations within a loosely drawn fifteen-mile radius of the grand dragon’s house, usually picked from an approved list. The Klansmen held their Konklaves under the guise of Civic Engagement Alliance meetings. An individual Klan member could, and occasionally did, host a Klavern meeting at his home, but only on special occasions like the anniversary of General Forrest’s triumphs during the War of Northern Aggression. Klavern meetings were held every three or four months and were low-budget affairs, with attendees paying for their own food and drink. A special events kitty existed, but no one seemed to know how much was in it because the Klavern’s Klabee, or treasurer, had moved out of the area with no clear records or money left behind.

  Because Daniels needed to do some recruiting, he ignored the titan’s warnings and scheduled the meeting. He also tasked Ellis Thornton with sharing the Klan’s underappreciated history with the rest of the Klavern. While new members had to complete the naturalization ritual, one involving a midnight ceremony of crosses, hoods, and nooses—all fueled by alcohol and gasoline—Daniels wasn’t sure his followers appreciated their holy mission. They might be familiar enough with the Klan’s racial philosophy of being pro-white and Christian—at least a particular strain of Christianity reserved for whites of European descent—but he suspected they didn’t know about the unique role the Klan had played in American history. It was the untold history of fighting for liberty that had first convinced Daniels to commit to the cause so he could be a part of purifying his country.

  Hell, it was his time to start the war and prove to everyone he was a true leader. The titan’s sudden unavailability didn’t diminish Daniels’s enthusiasm for the history lesson or the undertaking growing in his head.

  Thornton, an unemployed mechanic in his midforties with a patch of unruly hair that gave him the permanent appearance of having just emerged from a wind tunnel, accepted his assignment with all the eagerness of a teenager being told he needed to clean the toilet. Daniels had indicated it wasn’t a choice.

  After the grand dragon closed the sliders and called the Konklave to order, he offered a prayer for the white race and the righteousness of their cause. His offering was short and perfunctory, as eloquence was not an attribute the assembled Klansmen appreciated or rewarded. Daniels catalogued the most recent outrages perpetrated against the white community and introduced Thornton.

  “Listen close,” Daniels said. “I want y’all to know our past. Come up here, Ellis.”

  Thornton ambled over to Daniels. Thornton had never before spoken to a group, not even for a family toast, and as he stood, his head tilted upward like a lost tourist at a big city intersection.

  “Ellis, share this important knowledge with the brothers.”

  Thornton remained a stick man with a gaping mouth, no words forthcoming.

  “Ellis, when was the Klan started?” Daniels asked, impatient to get going.

  “The end of the War of Northern Aggression,” Thornton answered to the ceiling.

  “Why did we need a Klan?”

  “To protect our rights.”

  “You know who our first leader was?”

  “Yes sir, I surely do, but can’t recall just now,” Thornton said with a nervous smirk. “Some general.”

  “That’s General Nathan Bedford Forrest. A true hero,” Daniels said with reverence. “You got more to say?”

  “We was millions of members.”

  Daniels realized he had nothing to fill the next thirty minutes. He’d never asked Ellis Thornton whether he could actually read, and he now doubted it.

  “Ellis, did you read the materials?”

  “Yeah. Well, some. It ain’t in my head now.”

  “You want to try again at another time?”

  “Not really.”

  Thornton shuffled his feet like he was looking for coins dropped on the floor. “I’m sorry, Frank.”

  Two or three members gave the whole episode a single clap.

  “I reckon history don’t matter much if we ain’t willing to take it up now. We have to protect our families from lawlessness—”

  Daniels started to deliver his set sermon of white supremacy, when a waitress—young, friendly, and black—knocked loudly, poked her head in the room, and asked whether the group needed anything. Daniels stopped and glared at the interruption.

  “No,” a seated Klansman, disguised by a smile, responded. “We done got all we need.”

  “OK, then. Just holler if y’all need somethin’.”

  After the door closed, the room filled with a conspiratorial cackle like they had just pulled off a new magic trick.

  The grand dragon laughed along with his flock and abandoned his speechifying. Without the diatribe, the meeting ended. Minutes later, everyone had left the back room except the two men at a table in the rear corner. With his damaged hand, he gestured to two young Klansmen who were leaning backward in their chairs and drinking beers. They were the sentinels from the white night.

  “Boys, I want a word.”

  Daniels explained his vision with the enthusiasm of an inventor and the bravado of a pimp standing in the middle of the block he controlled.

  “Y’all with me?” he asked.

  “It’s fuckin’ insane,” said one of the sentinels. The other one sat quietly while his partner did the talking.

  “Necessary is all,” Daniels replied. “Time’s come.”

  “How’s that?”

  “This town needs to pick a side,” Daniels said. “We gonna help ’em.”

  “We done woke the place up already.”

  “The crosses? They was feel-good, but that was child’s play.”

  “You ain’t playing no more then,” said the Klansman. “I give you that.”

  “I was evaluatin’ you. I need to know I got soldiers, not pussies.”

  “I ain’t no pussy, Frank.”

  “Prove it,” said Daniels.

  “I ain’t afraid of nobody—you need to know that right now,” the Klansman said again, “but you understand someone’s gonna get hit hard.”

  “I’m countin’ on it.”

  The two sentinels stared at each other for a moment like they were considering a dare.

  “We’re in,” said the talkative one. “Tell us when.”

  11

  VICTORY LAP

  Highway One, the main paved four-lane road in and out of Lynwood, unfolded over a twenty-mile stretch along a series of shallow hills and wide curves. While in the town limits, the road paralleled Jefferson Avenue before turning south over the bridge. The wide concrete structure stretched over the Concordia River, after which the pavement hugged the water for two miles before hitting a dead-end stop with a faded sign fronting the barrier. The sign said something about an extension coming soon. The area on the southern side of the river was known as Mooretown. To those who stayed north, the far side was littered with potholes and people of doubtful character. Most white residents didn’t venture to Mooretown often enough to know if the streets or the people were in need of repair or not.

  Enterprising African-American families had settled in Mooretown in the early twentieth century because they weren’t allowed to live anywhere else. Originally outside Lynwood’s legal limits, Mooretown eventually
was consumed by expansion. Despite its absorption into Lynwood proper, Mooretown remained segregated, populated by working-class black residents and new immigrants—documented and not—from South Asia and Central America. Mooretown’s streets, while narrower than those in neighborhoods to the north, were lined with mature oaks, magnolia trees, and the occasional cypress. Tucked in behind the rows of trees, one-story homes outlasted the decades as if weather and time were just passing visitors.

  . . .

  Daniels lived just thirteen miles from Mooretown, but to him, it was a world away, and that was still too close. It was June, and the cross burnings still pulled on him. Months after the hose blasts had extinguished the flames, the crosses had remained a tactile pleasure that Daniels wanted to experience again and again with concentrated effort, like racial masturbation.

  Daniels had two cars registered in his name, the pickup truck and a 1989 Ford Taurus used by his wife. The Taurus looked like countless homogenized sedans, and it disappeared in traffic like a camouflaged blind in the woods. Daniels drove his pickup with heavy pedal pride, but on occasion he took the sedan just to annoy his wife.

  Before the cross burnings, Daniels had avoided Mooretown. He believed any face like his would get beaten or murdered there. He held fast to that view despite never having had any encounter—good, bad, or indifferent—with blacks while navigating the roads in any neighborhood, much less Mooretown. His primal fears had been allowed to grow unfettered in the dark without fault or challenge.

  Wanting to flex his whiteness, he kept returning to Mooretown after the cross burnings, his corrosive confidence building with each trip. His victory laps peaked with two in one week in early summer. He had been sanctified, with a new persona befitting his status as an emerging leader for his own kind.

  He also collected and reread every news article he could find about the cross burnings. One article—complete with a grainy photograph of a tall, thin man with a surprised look—reported that a prosecutor had started coming to Lynwood from DC to help the investigation. After studying the picture, Daniels added the local airport to his regular cruising, to find the smug face and maybe—just maybe—show him what happened to carpetbaggers.

  On this particular outing, drizzle hung in the air as Daniels drove his wife’s car into what had become familiar enemy territory. He smiled as he again passed the Crescent Street house in Mooretown. From the anonymity of the car, he stared at the discolored dirt with small bits of charred wood mixed in. He hadn’t realized until reading the articles that they had staked the cross so close to the house that flames had damaged the roof.

  Daniels stopped his car at the intersection of Seventh Avenue and Dakota Street even before the light turned yellow. He wasn’t in any hurry. He had the time and was armed with an attitude of impunity.

  A blue Mercury Grand Marquis pulled alongside Daniels’s car. Both cars idled at the intersection with the windows down, one because it had no AC and the other because it was spewing cigarette smoke. Daniels stared to his left into the Marquis. Its driver, a bareheaded black man with a close-cropped beard, stared right back. Daniels took the look as an act of defiance.

  “What you lookin’ at?” Daniels demanded from behind the car’s sheet metal skin.

  The driver didn’t respond. The only perceptible change was a slight clenching of the man’s jaw.

  “You! I asked you a question.”

  The stoic driver glanced in front and then behind him through the rearview mirror.

  “Won’t fuckin’ answer,” Daniels said loud enough for the man to hear. “What a pathetic nigger.”

  In that moment, Daniels believed he was in complete control and that no one would dare challenge him. If he’d had a better angle, he might have noticed a small fanny pack resting on the front passenger seat of the Marquis, but he couldn’t have seen the rotating blue light in the glove compartment.

  When the traffic light changed, the black man—who had said nothing during the brief encounter—gunned his car forward and with a sharp right turn cut off the Taurus. Daniels’s car lurched forward, but with nowhere to go, it ended up on the shoulder. A walrus now separated from the herd.

  “What the hell—” was all a stunned Daniels could muster before the black man was out of the car and on him. Daniels fumbled to find the right button to lock the door, but he was too late. The man ripped the door open and grabbed Daniels’s neck with a vise grip. He pushed Daniels into the center, reached over, and shifted the gear knob into park. It was all done with force and efficiency.

  “You just fucked up real bad, moron,” were the black man’s first words.

  “Get off me!” Daniels shouted. Other profanities rose up in his throat, but the python-like hold reduced them to garbled syllables.

  “You got any illegal shit in this scrapheap?” The man surveyed the inside of the Taurus with a precision that came only from practice. “I think you must, because you’re so stupid.”

  A corrugated brown box sat on the right back seat, its flaps half open, an invitation to look further.

  “What’s in that box?”

  “Get away from me,” Daniels repeated.

  “Out!” the black man ordered as he released his hold and backed up. He pulled a detective’s shield from his back right pocket and stuck it in Daniels’s face. Daniels abandoned the seat. “I’m the police, you fuckin’ idiot.”

  “A cop?” Daniels was confused. “You lie. What’s your name?”

  Daniels’s face molted to crimson red. The initial exchange from the safety of the car provided the emotional charge he had sought since the white night. He wanted to preen, but this wasn’t what he expected.

  “My name don’t change a thing for you.”

  As Daniels stepped forward, the detective bent down and retrieved a small Glock from an ankle holster. With his free hand, he pushed Daniels against the car’s shiny skin and leveled the muzzle at the midsection just below the kill zone.

  “You move—even a cough—and you become a bitch real quick.”

  The detective handcuffed Daniels, wrists behind him, and secured the arrestee in the back seat of the Marquis. Daniels sat, still stunned at the fast turn of events, and refused to look his tormenter in the eye. He allowed for the possibility he had just made a serious miscalculation—he hadn’t been expecting the handcuffs and a gun. He twisted in the seat to watch the black man.

  The detective walked back to the Taurus and opened the back door on the driver’s side. He leaned over the bench seat and retrieved the box from the far side. He peeled back the flaps. After rummaging around inside, the man pulled out and examined his find, a billowy white robe with strange emblems and a matching conical hood hanging down from his outstretched hand.

  “Shit,” murmured the grand dragon.

  12

  THE RIDE

  Daniels was bound on three sides, and the handcuffs on his wrists forced him to lean forward like he was retching.

  The detective returned to his car with the box in hand.

  “Don’t look like no cop,” Daniels said, as much to himself as to the detective.

  “A cop’s not supposed to look like me?” asked Jimmy Batiste. “How’s that?”

  Daniels didn’t respond.

  “The box—”

  “It’s my wife’s.”

  “Car registration says Frank Daniels. Am I looking at one Frank Daniels?”

  “You got my wallet.”

  “You wanted to know what I was looking at. Well, I believe I’m looking at the fuckin’ Klan.”

  Batiste settled into the front seat, started the engine, and steered the car away from the shoulder.

  “Let’s go for a ride,” the detective announced.

  “Wait! Wait one goddamned minute!” Daniels yelled. “Where you think you’re taking me?”

  “A Klansman should get to see how black folk live. Don’t you agree? Maybe you can talk to my brothers like you did to me. They just might be interested in meetin’ you.”r />
  “It’s not what you think,” he protested, but the words were thin, beaten tin.

  “You think I’m just a stupid nigga—your words, not mine.” Batiste looked back at his newly imprisoned companion. “Go ahead, tell me what you really wanna say.”

  Within the span of minutes, Daniels had gone from cruising blacktop with an attitude to a back seat cell. He turned his head away and clenched his stained teeth. His twitching muscles broadcast his disgust at being so close to a black man.

  “You ready for the other side of the tracks?”

  “Mister—”

  “Mister?” Batiste interrupted. “Shit. Now you calling me Mister?”

  The detective laughed at the quick turn of events. He kept the Grand Marquis with the flow of traffic, the box in the front passenger seat, and a Klansman in the back. Daniels’s car remained on the right shoulder, an orphan. The car would be impounded, but not for hours. Batiste had time.

  The Klansman’s strained breaths dissipated through the car’s interior like the smoky remains of a cheap cigar. The grand dragon craned his neck to catch his car receding into the distance.

  When he finally lost sight of it, the grand dragon turned back to face his keeper.

  The detective was watching the Klansman. “Anyone goin’ to miss you?” he finally asked as he turned east onto Sixth Avenue.

  Batiste drove slowly, like he was a guide showing tourists the celebrity manors of Brentwood. But they weren’t in LA, and the homes in Mooretown were separated not by high hedges and walls, but by vacant lots and condemned buildings. The proper name of this area was Hickory Meadows, but distressed was the common euphemism used to describe it. It truly was in distress, suffering the same losses that other lower-middle-class sections of Lynwood experienced with the closing of the poultry factory and a once-bustling regional distribution center. Despite the setbacks, residents in and around Mooretown raised families, in defiance of the crumbling concrete around them. Nobody much talked about that in the fancy parts of Lynwood, but the detective had lived it.