“Not for me,” said Whittaker. “They’ll have to hire one to find some poor slob to dump you on, though.”
“Well, we’ll talk about that later. Whit, I’m sorry if I don’t seem overly forthcoming about the past. Maybe it’s because I don’t want to cast a shadow on your own lives by unnecessarily bringing up things which are now dead and gone, thank God.” Jason leaned over and kissed his wife. “I’ll see you tonight.”
After he had gone, Mel said, “Dad killed people back then, didn’t he?”
“Yes, dear, and so did I,” Jenny told her. “And that is all that either he or I will ever have to say on that subject, Mel. But beyond that I’m not totally in agreement with your father here. In some sense, what we are is a part of you two in much more than the biological sense, and you need to understand us to understand your own nature, and there are some things that you do have a right to know, in a general way. You have a right to know where and when and what you come from, what brought you here. But your dad is right about the nightmares. That’s why we made sure that none of our children were ever exposed to any of this when you were really young, although ZOG left us no choice with Junior or Katie when they came calling that summer twenty years ago.”
“Mom, if it really bothers you, you know you don’t have to talk about it,” said Whittaker.
“There are certain things that I will never discuss with you, but to be honest I’m still not exactly sure what it is you’re looking for, dear,” said Jenny.
“How about when you and Dad first met, back in the day as you call it?” asked Melanie.
“Come on, you already know that story,” said Jenny in good-humored exasperation. “We told you often enough. Jason’s family and mine both lost their homes to foreclosure during the Second Depression, and we ended up in Brookgreen Gardens Apartments, or tenements would be a better word. That’s where we were living when I was born. You remember. We took you kids out there once a few years ago, and we showed you the apartments your father and I both lived in when we were children.”
“I remember they were full of Russians and Afrikaners when we visited that day,” said Whit.
“Yes, after the Revolution the government turned them into new immigrant housing, and believe me they’re a lot nicer place now than they were back then,” said Jenny. “In those days there were two kinds of tenants who lived there, dispossessed white people like us and illegal Mexicans, and both groups were jammed like sardines into a few ticky-tacky firetrap rooms. There was a lot of crime and violence and drugs and break-ins, because the Mexicans preyed on us like we were livestock. The police used to come through on sweeps, searching all the white people’s apartments for Party literature and guns, which were illegal under the Schumer Act, but they never bothered the beaners. The place was run by a residents’ council which in turn reported to the Missoula Human Relations Commission, and that was run by liberals and Jews from the university, so we didn’t have much say in our lives. If a white family was evicted for so-called anti-social behavior, meaning anything racial, then you were blacklisted. Even if you were lucky enough to have a job, no one else in town would rent to you for fear of the media and the HRC, so the next step down was a hobo jungle under a highway underpass somewhere. Or if it was winter the family had to load up whatever motor vehicle they had and head south for California or Arizona, where at least they wouldn’t freeze to death. A lot of those people never came back.
“Anyway,” she went on, “Through luck or bribery or finagling, a number of white families managed to get housed together on the same street in the complex, and there was a little playground there where it was more or less safe for the children to play in during the daytime, so long as we stayed in groups and we had adults to watch us. Your father first saw me when he was twelve and I was three. My own father had gotten hold of an old panel truck, and he was running an off-the-books moving and hauling service.”
“Off what books?” asked Whittaker.
“I mean the business was technically illegal. No business license, no sales tax records, no withholding tax records, no medical contributions, no government safety inspections, so forth and so on. The government in those days wanted everybody dependent on some kind of paycheck they could threaten to cut off. They didn’t like white people being economically independent, owning or running their own businesses, and so they tried to tax and regulate them out of business. Anyway, one day my dad needed an extra hand to do a moving job and he hired Jason for the day, and he came up to our apartment. Dad was on child-watching duty out in the playground. I was sitting in the sandbox wearing old clothes from the Salvation Army. I was eating a plastic bowl of god-awful microwave spaghetti my mother had gotten from a food bank, with a plastic spoon, and according to Jason I had red goo all over my face. I’ll take his word for it.”
“And he sang the worm song!” said Mel, giggling.
“Nobody loves me, everybody hates me,
I’m going to eat some worms!
Big fat juicy ones, long thin skinny ones,
Chomp them while they squirm!
Nobody loves me, everybody hates me,
I’m going to eat some worms!
First one’s easy, goes down greasy,
Second one sticks to my tongue!”
“Yes, he did,” said Jenny primly. “He was as silly at twelve as you are at thirteen, and at that age he thought it was funny to tease small children. I didn’t appreciate his humor and I threw a toy of some kind at him, I can’t remember what. So that’s how I met your father.”
“Mom, you know that’s not what she meant,” said Whittaker. “She means later, in the NVA. Look, really, if it was in some horrible way in the middle of a murder and you don’t want to talk about it, really, we get it.”
“No, although you didn’t really meet people as such in the Volunteers,” said Jenny. “We both had code names, several apiece, it just happened that we knew who each other was. I didn’t end up with the Army until about eighteen months after 10/22, and once I was involved I didn’t meet Jason again right away.”
“Well, how did one go about becoming a Volunteer in those days?” her son asked. “One of the things we hear sometimes is that a lot of people wanted to join the NVA, but they never did because they couldn’t find the Army and had no way to contact them.”
“Yes, that was true,” agreed Jenny. “There were Volunteers assigned to recruiting duty in every community where the Army operated, and it was actually one of the most dangerous assignments going. If a recruiter made a mistake and approached the wrong person, they risked being betrayed and arrested. I had a cousin, Jared Wardlaw, who was about my age back then, and he was a Volunteer. To tell the truth, I can’t remember how he got involved himself, but he was. One of my uncles had died and left my mother enough of an inheritance so we were finally able to get out of Brookgreen Gardens and rent a proper house, the one on Connell Avenue where your grandparents used to live, remember? That’s where we were on 10/22. That’s where we met the Myers family and I started baby-sitting Georgia. Her mother was a patronizing liberal bitch who made a big deal out of paying me above the going rate to show her noblesse oblige, but money was money in those days. Anyway, back then you had to have an actual state-issued license to drive a car, but you could get one very young in Montana because all the kids out on ranches needed to be able to drive, and so I had a provisional license when I was fifteen. Jared started using me to carry messages and sometimes packages to various comrades around town. I had no record, my dad’s car was clean, and I could giggle like a fool at cops and Fatties, which meant I could get through the checkpoints.”
“Guns and explosives?” asked Whit, fascinated.
“I don’t know. I never asked, which impressed Jared and convinced him I had the right stuff, as people used to say back in those days.”
“Didn’t you know what you were involved in?” asked her son.
“I guessed pretty quick, yes,” said Jenny with a chuckle. “I can’t
remember when I figured out that Jared was with the NVA, but I do remember I told him one night that I knew what he was doing and if he needed help with anything else he just had to ask. A few days later he took me to see A.J. Drones, who was the Missoula Commandant. A.J. and I had a long talk and he liked what he saw, so he gave Jared the nod to bring me into his crew, and I started doing other stuff. Proactive, as we used to say. Anyway, that’s how I became a gun bunny. When my father found out he asked me to leave home.”
“Grandpa threw you out of the house because you were a Volunteer?” asked Melanie, scandalized.
“No, honey, he didn’t throw me out of the house, at least not like you mean. He simply said to me, ‘Jenny, I’m sorry you’ve had to grow up this fast, but in this filthy world we live in I suppose it was inevitable. I won’t say what you’re doing is wrong, but right or wrong, it’s a done deal. If it was just me involved I’d say to hell with it, but you’re endangering your mother and your brother and sister if you stay here. You have the right to put your own life at risk, but not theirs.’ So I left. He was right, and I’ve never held it against him.”
“Were you scared?” asked Melanie, wide-eyed.
“No, dear, when you’re fifteen you usually don’t have sense enough to be scared of stuff like that,” said Jenny. “If it were happening to you today, you’d probably think it was some kind of big adventure. But mostly I just didn’t care. It had been made clear to me all my life that America held no future for me, unless I was prepared to conform and be somebody I wasn’t. Girls could get into college a lot easier than white boys in those days, but the family simply didn’t have the money, and I wasn’t good enough in school to get any kind of scholarship. Math and science bored me, and I had no interest in all the politically correct rubbish about Indians and evil white oppressors and the joys of les—of so-called alternative lifestyles they used to peddle at Hellgate High in those days. I refused to burn that pinch of incense that everyone had to start burning in high school. As trite and un-romantic as it may sound, my choice was take a chance and go with the NVA or end up living in a trailer and working in a laundromat or waitressing in some greasy spoon, assuming I didn’t give in to despair and go on meth or crack or something. A lot of white kids did, back then. I decided I’d rather die young with a gun in my hand than a few years later in some desolate wreck of a white trash life. I think that’s what motivated a lot of us, although you won’t hear that in Mr. Ballard’s H&MP class. Nor should you, I think. Don’t get me wrong, you two. You’re not being lied to. The pride and the hope, the honor and the courage, were all there. There was just a lot of other stuff as well that there’s probably no need to mention. A lot of history is like that, I think. Then I met Jason again, and he met me without the red microwave goo on my face, and we both had a lot better motive than just having nothing better to do.”
“You fell in love with Dad?” asked Melanie. “How did that happen? How did you know he was the one?”
“Here comes the mushy girl stuff!” said Whit in disgust.
“He came back for me,” said Jenny.
“Huh?” asked Whit.
“To make a long and complicated story short, in the fourth year of the war we both ended up for a time with a Flying Column,” their mother went on, refilling her coffee cup. “The Montana Regulators, under Commandant Jack Smith. Jason and I knew each other, of course, from around town in Missoula. We’d met a few times down through the years, but because of the difference in our ages, it was just casual acquaintance. I’d had a boyfriend for awhile with the Missoula Brigade, but he was arrested and murdered by the FBI, and I’d decided getting involved with a fellow Volunteer wasn’t a good emotional investment. The way things worked out, Jason and I didn’t really have much to do with each other NVA-wise in the Regulators. We were always scattered across a couple of hundred square miles so the Americans couldn’t catch us all in one fell swoop, we generally moved and hit in groups of about fifteen or twenty people, and we only all came together for really big operations.
“Then one day in January the FATPO raided an NVA safe house in Helena and arrested four comrades, a married couple named John and Susan Morse and two teenaged Volunteers, Greg Ennis and Joey Cermak. They were taken to the FATPO barracks on Eleventh Avenue in Helena, what used to be the Montana State Law Enforcement Training Academy. The Fatties had taken it over as their headquarters. Commandant Smith heard about it, and he decided we’d go in and rescue them.”
Whit stared at his mother. “Mom… I know you and Dad were NVA and I know Dad marched across the bridge in Portland, because he’s got the medal, but neither of you ever said anything about the Helena Raid!”
“Doctors usually don’t discuss the patients they lose, dear,” said Jenny with a wry smile. “Nor do armies give medals for lost battles. I assume you had it in school? What did they teach you about it?”
“Well, frankly, Mom, Mr. Ballard said it was a screw-up. Pardon my language,” said her son apologetically.
“A screw-up in spades. The Commandant was a very brave man, we were all young and cocky and we were used to shooting from the hip, and we had fought and beaten them time and again, always outnumbered and outgunned, seldom with much of a plan. We pressed our luck once too often, and we came up very short.”
“Mr. Ballard says that after the loss of the whole Olympic Flying Column at Ravenhill, the Helena Raid was the worst NVA military disaster during the whole War of Independence.”
“Disaster is the word,” agreed Jenny grimly. “Anyway, I won’t spin this out until suppertime tonight. We assembled about fifty Volunteers and we went into Helena on the night of January twentieth, in six vehicles including two trucks. The plan was for the first two sections to attack the front of the FATPO barracks frontally as a diversion and to pin the enemy down with heavy fire, including our one mortar, while Commandant Smith and the third section battered down one of the steel gates at the rear, entered the jail section and extracted our people.
“Things were against us from the start. For one thing, although we didn’t know it, all four of our comrades were already dead, and so the whole operation was pointless from the start. It was a dark night, about six degrees above zero, so cold the actions on a lot of our weapons froze up and we had to wear gloves so the skin of our hands wouldn’t stick to the metal, except some of us forgot to bring gloves. Snow began to fall heavily as we drove in on Highway 15. Zero visibility. On top of that, someone along the way saw us going by, somehow recognized who we were, and called it in to the FATPOs. We never did find out who, but they had time to prepare. We never made it into position to begin the attack. The Fats were waiting for us and they ambushed us on North Main Street, all clumped together. Most of the Volunteers were killed in their vehicles, riddled with bullets in thirty seconds. I made it out into the snow and so did Jason and a few others. I never even fired a shot myself. I ran into a doorway to try and take cover, and I slipped on the icy steps and cracked my skull. By the time I came to, a couple of niggers in body armor had cuffed my hands and legs with plastic ties and were dragging me down a side street. They handed me over to some local cops who threw me in the back of a squad car.
“Now, what you have to understand, kids, is that in the context of that time and place, my life was over. At that point all I had to look forward to was most likely torture, rape, and murder in some federal holding facility, or at best a lifetime in prison. Congress had already passed a law stating that no one arrested for NVA activity was ever to be released from custody. Arrested, mind you, not convicted, although that didn’t really matter since they weren’t even bothering with trials any more. There I was, seventeen years old, and I was over. I sat there in the back of that car listening to the sirens and occasional spurts of gunfire still going on somewhere out there in the falling snow and I knew. There was no regret, just an overpowering despair and sadness that I can’t even begin to describe to you and won’t even try. This was the end. From now on there was only horror and pa
in and blackness. I think that’s probably the worst part of a ZOG arrest, the first few moments, when you’re sitting in the back of the squad car in cuffs and you can see the world going by the window outside as they take you to your first cell. You can see the people and the trees and grass and stores and the world, the world that you are no longer part of and never will be, that you will never have anything to do with any more. In my case it was just snow in the headlights, but already I felt cut off from everything. My heart was still beating and I was still breathing, but I was dead, a ghost. I know this doesn’t make any sense to you…”
She broke off for a moment, breathed deeply, and blinked back a tear. “The two cops or sheriff’s deputies were standing outside and I was all alone in the back. I don’t know for how long. Five minutes, ten, half an hour? I remember wondering why they didn’t sit in the car with the heater on, but I guess they were under orders to stay at the ready. Then I heard muffled shots and saw several muzzle flashes in the snow outside, the car door opened, and your father reached in and yanked me out. The two cops were lying in the snow spurting blood; I remember how bright red it was under the street light. He asked me if I could run, I said no, my legs were cuffed. He had a knife and he cut the plastic ties and then he said, ‘Now run! Hold my hand so we don’t get separated!’ So we ran, and we came to a house. We kicked in the door and utterly terrorized a man and his wife inside, made them give us the keys to his pickup truck, and Jason smashed through a roadblock and managed to get us out. I guess they couldn’t use their satellites to track us at night and under all the snow clouds.
“Later on Jace told me he’d seen me get captured. He circled around through alleys and yards and saw them throw me in the squad car. The last order that anyone in the Column gave over our phones was Go Eight, General Order Number Eight, otherwise known as the Beat Feet Retreat. In other words, every man for himself and get out any way you can. When that happens it means everything has gone south, and your first responsibility is to break contact with the scene and live to fight another day. Jason didn’t do that. He went against orders and he came back for me. He gave me my life back, and since then I’ve given it to him. And to you, and to our country. So now you know.”
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