The Brigade

by H. A. Covington

  “Oh, she was always like that, ever since she came back from the university,” said King with a shrug. “I mean, what else do you expect from U of O? I just figured she rebelled against her religious upbringing when she went to college, trying to be chic and fit in, and then she just sort of never grew out of it. I actually used to think it was kind of cute, kind of her way of retaining her youth.”

  “Yeah, well, baby tarantulas grow up into big fucking poisonous spiders,” Hatfield reminded him.

  But King was back onto his old refrain. “Why, Zack? I just don’t understand it. Why?” he went on in a monotone.

  “Because it’s expected of her,” said Hatfield.

  “What?”

  “Tony tells me that Marie Campisi asked Liddy that very same question, why?” Hatfield went on. “She said because she was past 30 years old and it was time for her first divorce.”

  “She’s planning on more?” asked King in a disconnected daze.

  “Yah, apparently that’s the big thing in all the feminist self-help and psychobabble books now. They call it life scheduling or some such shit,” explained Hatfield. “The first marriage is for kids, which of course she always takes with her in the divorce settlement after soaking hubby number one for every penny she can. Apparently the lesbian thing is also something every truly liberated woman is supposed to schedule now. At least one major lesbo relationship in your life or else you’re not a true Womyn. I think Pocahontas may be in for a shock, though. I actually looked that crap up on the internet, and after her lesbo fling, if she decides she prefers guys, Liddy is supposed to try to bag an older man who is very wealthy and who will most likely kick off by the time she’s 45 and leave her set for life. Or a wealthy older dyke if she decides she wants to keep on munching carpet. I think all Ms. Proudfoot has to her name is a welfare check and a line of noble Native American Womyn crap.”

  “Woe-men?” repeated King.

  Hatfield nodded. “That’s the way fems write it. I think that’s how it’s pronounced. It’s one of those PC shibboleths the media and the intelligentsia are trying to introduce into the language and make into an accepted and then mandatory term, like the word Ms. George Orwell wrote about it in 1984. Newspeak. Mind control. Just like we have to say African-American instead of nigger. When a totalitarian society controls the language, controls the words that people use in speech, and punishes them for using any word or terminology other than the prescribed ones, eventually the whole population will be so afraid they’ll start using the politically correct terms in their very thoughts, to make sure they don’t blurt out some word that will make them lose their jobs or get them arrested for hatespeech. The state ends up controlling not just their behavior and their speech, but shaping and controlling their very thoughts. Any questioning of the politically correct orthodoxy becomes literally unthinkable, because we don’t know how. We don’t have the words for it. The United States has been aiming for that for years. Anyway, your life has to be destroyed because it fits into Liddy’s life schedule, apparently. It’s all about her, of course. You’re a used component and now she’s throwing you away.”

  “But if she wanted a divorce she didn’t have to do—this!” King waved his hand around at the surrounding walls and Plexiglas. “Why this?”

  “To make absolutely sure that she gets Caitlin and Judy,” Hatfield replied patiently. He had explained the situation to King several times before, and so had his court-appointed attorney, but it was obvious that King simply could not yet wrap his mind around what was being done to him. “Under both the federal hatecrime laws and the Oregon Diversity and Tolerance Act, any conviction for hatecrime or hatespeech automatically terminates a convicted offender’s parental rights. If both parents are convicted, then It Takes A Village moves in and grabs the kids and sells them, but in this case, since Liddy can show that she is in what she will claim to be a stable lesbian relationship, once you’re convicted she’ll walk into family court and walk out 10 minutes later with Caitlin and Judy wrapped up in a bow, a present from the judge.”

  “All for one single word?” screamed King in horror. The walls were closing in on him and he was clearly beginning to go insane. “Just because I said dyke?”

  “Hey, buddy, settle down!” snapped the guard behind him. “You’re in enough trouble already! I’m a pretty laid back kind of guy, but it’s my job to make sure you don’t talk any more hateful stuff, and if someone hears you it will be my ass in the wringer and they’ll slap another count on you!” He took the phone briefly from King’s hand and said to Hatfield, “Sir, you’ve got five minutes left.”

  Hatfield ignored him, and when King got the phone back to his ear he went on. “Martha Proudfoot claims that you made her feel threatened because of her gender, her sexual orientation, and her race. I think she claims you said dyke squaw, actually. You’re lucky the D.A. kept it in state court and so you’re only looking at five years for the speech. If they’d gone federal with it they might claim that making the Proudfoot woman feel apprehensive was an act of hatefully-motivated assault, which they can do under the statute, and then they could hit you with actual hate crime, which is mandatory life, maybe without parole if the judge thinks you actually intended to strike her.”

  “Strike her?” laughed King bitterly. “My God, have you seen that creature? She’s built like a bulldozer! I just lost my temper is all, when I walked into my living room and found them doing—dear Christ, what they were doing—I can’t even talk about it!”

  “The Chocolate Ritual,” said Hatfield. “I know. It is supposed to be for bonding between female lovers. Most people have no idea of what homosexuals actually do. You were unlucky enough to get a crash course.”

  “The girls were upstairs!” whispered King in horror. “They were upstairs, Zack! How could Liddy do that with Caity and Judy upstairs? Not to mention the fact that they must have known I would be home any minute?”

  “Oh, they knew,” said Zack with an assured nod. “My guess is that they wanted to provoke exactly the kind of incident that occurred, so they could hang this hatespeech rap on you, and thereby Liddy gloms onto your daughters and the house and all your property. No messing around with alimony or child support payments or constant trips back and forth to court. You’ll be a certified hater. One bang of a judge’s gavel and she gets the whole kit and kaboodle. I wonder what the Proudfoot woman’s cut will be from that night’s work? Steve, you know that the FBI had some child psychologist and a couple of agents in the other day and they grilled the girls for four or five hours?”

  “Yeah, Pritkin, my lawyer, told me about that. Caitlin is six years old! Judy is four! What in God’s name could they expect to get from children?” demanded King incredulously.

  “Whatever Liddy coached them to say. But I did hear something interesting. I name no names, of course.” He figured King could guess that he was referring to Len Ekstrom’s daughter Christina, who was a police dispatcher in the Justice Center, but he didn’t think it was a good idea to mention her anywhere her co-workers might hear her name in connection with a hatespeech case. “They asked the girls if you’d ever said any bad things about black people or Hispanic people as well as gay people, that kind of crap. This thing up in Idaho last month has them really freaked out and maximum paranoid. The Marines just recaptured Coeur d’Alene a few days ago, and the feds are seeing white supremacist rebels under every bed now. They asked your girls if they’d ever seen any flags in your house. Green, white, and blue ones.”

  “That’s lunacy!” gasped King in shock.

  “In case you hadn’t noticed it, the people who rule us are lunatics. Among other things.” Behind King the guard was holding up two fingers. “That’s the two-minute warning.”

  “My life is over now, because I uttered a single word in anger,” muttered King, still unable to comprehend the magnitude of his fall.

  “Your life is over now, because you uttered a single word in anger,” confirmed Hatfield.

  “No
one on earth will help me,” King moaned.

  Hatfield glanced up at the guard behind the broken man in the orange jumpsuit, uncertain as to how much the guard could hear of his end of the conversation. “No one on earth will help you,” Hatfield repeated aloud. But before the guard led Steven King away, Zack caught his friend’s eyes, and he winked.

  Outside the jail, the rain was falling softly, steadily, and the light was already fading. Zack pulled out a wireless phone, punched in a number, and quickly texted a message, ARE YOU ALIVE? Before he hit send, he thought rapidly and decided that the question might get picked up and noticed by some kind of government monitoring, and so he changed the message simply to ????? Then he hit send, and waited in the rain under a streetlight for several long minutes. Finally the little window on the phone lit up and he saw a reply.

  I AM THE GHOST OF CHRISTMAS PAST.

  Zack Hatfield took a deep breath and after a brief moment of indecision, the last he would ever experience in his life, he texted back: I WANT IN. CALL ME. Then he closed his cell phone and walked off in the rain toward his battered, ten-year-old Toyota.

  * * *

  “Sure, there’s another way,” agreed Zack in a conversational tone, in answer to Ekstrom’s question. He took a sip from his can of generic supermarket diet cola; he couldn’t even afford a name brand of bellywash. “We can just stand by and wring our hands while Steve King’s life is destroyed, and the lives of two little girls are poisoned and twisted by perversion and politically correct horse shit, until they grow up into beastly toadstools like their mother. Oh, we can maybe squeak a bit in protest, but not too loud. We can do the things that powerless white men do these days to let off steam. We can write a letter to the editor, or maybe get drunk and call up a right-wing talk show, although we’d damned well better not say what we really think, or we’ll be up on hatespeech charges too. Then when we sober up we can sweat for days, hoping we didn’t open our mouths too much and hoping the FBI or the local PC snoops didn’t hear us, or that they’re too busy this week to put us in the crosshairs and come and tear apart our lives because we dared to annoy our lords and masters by making even that one little squeak. We can do that, Len. I think Steve might even be grateful for that much. Of course, that won’t keep him from being sent into living hell because he dared to say the word dyke out loud. And it won’t stop Liddy King and that goddamned Indian or whatever the fuck she is taking everything Steve has managed to accumulate in life, and living high off the hog on it while he suffers the tortures of the damned. And it won’t save Caitlin and Judy King from being raised to hate all men of their own race, and being taught that it’s right and natural for them to do disgusting things with candy bars when they grow up. Or maybe before they grow up.”

  “Suppose we all club together whatever money we’ve got and try to hire a decent lawyer for Steve?” suggested Ekstrom.

  “There’s no such thing as a decent lawyer, and even if there were, they wouldn’t stand a chance in these courts on a hatespeech case,” Zack told them. “No lawyer with enough clout to beat a hatespeech case will touch one, because of the repercussions to his own career if he does win. It’s like an accusation of witchcraft or heresy in the Middle Ages. There simply isn’t any defense. None is permitted, and you have to remember that under the law, an attorney never really represents his client. He’s an officer of the court, first and foremost, and he is not going to buck the system that makes the payments on his Porsche every month. Any shyster we hire would simply take our money and plead Steve out, just like that court-appointed Jew he’s got now is going to do. We’d be throwing our money away and letting these filthy courts keep up the pretense that there is some kind of fairness or justice left in them, which hasn’t been the case since long before any of us were born. Steve King is white, male, and he likes women, even though he picked the wrong one to like. He hasn’t got a chance, and we all know it. We either help him, or we cut him loose because we’re too chickenshit scared to do what has to be done, and we let him fall all the way into hell. Even if he survives prison, what kind of life do you think he’ll ever have again? He’ll have to register as a hate offender, and that means he’ll be lucky to find a job flipping burgers or changing rich people’s oil in one of those quick-lube places, if he can find one that isn’t taken by a Mexican. If we’re going to help him, it has to be now, and we have to actually help him. There is only one way. Those two bitches can’t be around to get up on a witness stand and swear his life away.”

  “It’s not just about Steve,” said Washburn heavily. “It’s about Caitlin and Judy as well.”

  “It’s not even about them, Charlie, not in the final analysis,” said Hatfield, shaking his head. “It’s about us. About whether we’re men or dogs, groveling and whimpering in front of this evil tyranny, thumping our tails between our legs and pissing on the floor in terror of their muscle-bound steroid thug cops and their FBI torturers in silk suits and their reptiles in black robes. Steve King is a friend of twenty years’ standing to all of us. What is being done to him ain’t right, and I’ve had enough of what ain’t right! No more!” Zack suddenly clenched his fist and roared aloud, a lifetime of rage and humiliation and contempt for the world around him welling up from his heart and his belly and his brain and bursting out of his body in an explosion.

  Washburn looked at the other two men. “Me, too. I’m in. Len, I think Zack’s right. You’d best take a powder. Zack’s single and I’m divorced, and we both have crappy jobs and nothing to lose. You have a family and a business and you’ve got everything to lose. I wasn’t a Ranger like Zack, I was just a truck driver, but I remember enough of my military stint to fire a weapon. I’m sure two of us can do this. There’s no need for you to be involved.”

  “Steve used to come by the store starting when he was about 10, buying little bits and pieces and tools and screws for his go-kart,” said Ekstrom, his face distorted now as he almost wept in rage. “He was a fine, bright boy, friendly, not a malicious or selfish bone in his body, and he never changed. His father was a good man and a good friend. Those two girls of his are so beautiful, so sweet and wonderful. I see them when he brings them by the store. I must stand by while this terrible thing is done to them, simply because I am afraid? I can’t do that. God would punish me if I did that. I’m with you guys. I’ve just plain had enough. This time they’re not going to get away with it. They can’t. There has got to be some justice left somewhere, or all the world becomes hell. I am tired of living in hell. I never thought that I would be ready in my own mind to kill someone. But I’m ready. At some point in time, this madness and this cruelty has to stop. For me, it stops with Steve King. They’re not going to get him. No.”

  “That’s the real thing, all right,” said Zack with a sigh and a smile. “It’s taken how many years between us to reach this point? Sometimes I thought white men never would.”

  “We have,” said Charlie. “Okay, Zack, you’re the ex-Ranger. You should know how to plan a double assassination. How do we go about this? What do you want Len and me to do?”

  “I’ll do the planning and the actual killing. I need you two to provide an alibi, nothing more,” said Zack.

  “I think I may start year-end inventory a bit early,” said Ekstrom. “You’re registered with the Helping Hand temp agency, right?”

  “I’m registered with all the temp agencies,” said Hatfield. “For all the good it does me. I work about three days on a good week.”

  “I know Brenda down there,” Ekstrom told them. “I use their people sometimes when I have a truck coming in with heavy stuff, and I have a nod-nod wink-wink arrangement with her not to send me any Mexicans, so at least my money goes to one of my neighbors who really needs it. She won’t think it’s so unusual when I call her up and ask her to send you to me, just doing a good turn for a friend kind of thing.”

  “It needs to be at night, when no one is around in the store,” said Hatfield. “I show up around closing time and let your last
customers see me moving some boxes around. Charlie comes in just before you close up, and he hangs out for the evening jaw-jacking with his good buddies Len and Zack and helping you count sheet metal screws. I wait until traffic dies down a bit. I slip out the back and head for Seaside. I do the job, get rid of the gun and any clothing or gear I need to lose, come back when it’s over, and slip back inside. You sign my ticket for eight hours, documentary evidence I was there all night. That piece of paper can get you the rest of your life in prison, of course. Len, are you really sure about this?”

  “I’m sure,” said Ekstrom with a nod, and Hatfield could tell that he was. “I can also make you a key to Steve’s house in Seaside,” the older man continued. “Steve used to get all his keys made at the store, and he ordered some extra sets a while back. Not many people know that Homeland Security regs require anyone with a key cutter to keep the specs, names, and addresses for all keys made in case the FBI or DHS wants the information for some reason. I still have Steve’s house key pattern on my key machine’s computer.”

  “We can hoist the bastards on the petard of their own snooping laws,” laughed Washburn.

  “Will you need a piece?” asked Ekstrom. “I can let you have pretty much anything you want from my collection, and ammo as well.” Ekstrom was a licensed gunsmith, which was the only way he was able to make a serious living and keep his small hardware store competitive with Mighty Mart and House Depot and the other big chain stores. His was one of the last remaining actual merchant businesses on Commercial Street in Astoria; most of the other storefronts were now converted to yuppie fern bars, chintzy antique shops, “quaint” eateries of various kinds, and offices for left-leaning activist organizations.