New Dark Ages

by Warren Kinsella

  The dirt road got narrower and narrower, and we were bumping all over the place. Fewer houses could be seen. I looked in the side mirror. Behind us, still, was the Punk Rock Virgins’ station wagon, being piloted by Eddie Igglesden. Beside him, up front, was Tit Sweat’s singer, Nagamo. Beside her was Luke Macdonald. The other members of Tit Sweat seemed to be in the back seat. No sign, still, of Patti or X.

  My discharge from St. Mike’s Hospital had happened without much fanfare. I had dried out, and they needed the bed. A doctor came and solemnly spoke to me about drug abuse as a couple of residents looked on. Sister Betty and Bembe appeared. They helped me sign out, then Bembe pushed the wheelchair while Sister Betty held my hand.

  I tried to make a couple jokes, but they weren’t laughing. When we got down to the lobby, the Hot Nasties, Leah, and most of Tit Sweat were there waiting for us. Leah hugged me, Sam squeezed my shoulder, Luke and Eddie kissed the top of my head. I thought Luke was going to cry, but he didn’t.

  I almost did.

  Bembe and Mike helped me get into the van, because I was still feeling a bit unsteady. Everyone else got in, and the others piled into the Virgins’ station wagon. Before we’d gotten out of downtown and onto the highway, I fell dead asleep.

  When I woke up, I was seriously jonesing for some speed. It felt like my head was going to split open like a great big watermelon. I needed my powdery white friend. Sister Betty reached up to the front and squeezed my hand, but none of them really said anything.

  When we turned off the highway and onto a dirt road, we passed a sign that read HAUDENOSAUNEE CONFEDERACY. When we reached the end of the road, Mike stopped the van and turned off the engine. Everyone was looking at me. I could see a path winding off through of the trees, but that was it.

  “Where the fuck are we?” I asked. “Are we going back to the States?”

  “Not yet, baby,” Sister Betty said.

  She only called me “baby” when she was worried about me. She had her hand on my shoulder. I was still wearing the Ramones T-shirt I’d put on when I was discharged.

  I was turned around in the seat, feeling completely uneasy, when Leah Yeomanson looked right at me. She was more serious than I’d ever seen her. “Kurt, we’re going to a sweat lodge ceremony,” she said. “Your life isn’t in balance. You are going to be purified and reborn, and we’re going with you.”

  “What the fuck?”

  Sister Betty smiled at me. “We love you, baby,” she said. “But you could’ve died. This shit is going to stop right fucking now.”

  CHAPTER 37

  Earl Turner looked out at the crowd. Things were getting ugly, and he looked super happy about it. Raging, angry, potentially violent crowds made for great TV. “And if it doesn’t happen on TV, it didn’t happen,” Turner would often tell Danny. He was probably right about that.

  Turner was at the podium, behind one of his AMERICA FOR AMERICANS signs. Behind him was his favorite prop: a couple dozen average-looking people, all white. “All normal,” as Turner liked to say, when he’d point them out. “All normal people, like you and me.”

  Some fans had been placed here and there so Earl Turner and his “normal” people wouldn’t get too sweaty under the klieg lights. But it wasn’t really working. The Albany Convention Center was a furnace, with lots of angry people stacked in there like cord wood. Danny could feel the heat throbbing up from Turner’s swarm of followers. And what a swarm it was, he observed, as he peered out from behind the curtains on the sidelines. It felt like something terrible was about to happen, in an explosion of blood and sweat.

  Some protestors, about three or four hundred of them in all, had somehow gotten into the convention center. Meanwhile, the protestors were surrounded by what seemed like thousands of spit-flecked Earl Turner fanatics, on the left side of the stage, closer to the entrance. A smattering of media and TV cameras were nearby, ignoring Turner and filming all the shoving and the pushing and the brawls that were breaking out.

  As a former drummer in a punk rock band, Danny had some experience watching crowds and knowing when things were about to turn ugly. In the old days, he’d sit on his stool behind his drum kit, observing punches being thrown, then chairs, then tables. When it got to that point — or when the cops arrived to beat the shit out of some punks and shut everything down — Danny would tuck his snare under one arm, grab his high-hat with the other, and get the fuck out as quickly as possible.

  He couldn’t do that now. Watching the Turner supporters start to encircle the protestors, pushing and shoving at them, Danny was reasonably certain someone was going to get badly hurt tonight.

  Some big union types were with the protestors, because the labor movement detested everything Turner stood for. A couple of them were black, which made them stand out in this crowd. These big guys looked like they could take any one of the Turner faithful who were present. But not when they were outnumbered by a factor of twenty to one.

  The pushing and the shoving got worse. There was lots of cursing and yelling, too. The convention center’s security staff looked completely overwhelmed.

  The Secret Service detail that had been following Turner everywhere he went, meanwhile, were on or near the stage. They were speaking more and more into the little microphones in their sleeves, which Danny knew was never a good sign.

  One of the Secret Service guys, who liked Danny but hated his boss, walked over and spoke into his ear. “Be ready to move, Danny. This is a fucked-up situation.”

  Long before the big Turner rally had gotten underway, the Secret Service had angrily argued in favor of cancellation — or at least drastically reducing the number of people being allowed in. But Turner would hear none of it.

  “I’m not the kind of candidate who hides from the people,” he told them as Danny looked on. “I am of, by, and for the people. Deal with it.”

  So they’d let in this big crowd, maybe fifteen thousand in all. There were plenty of all-American moms and dads, of course, and farmers and truck drivers and fishermen and laborers and all that. And there were several neo-Nazis and Klansmen there, too, carrying signs saying NIGGERS OUT and WHITE IS RIGHT and HEIL TURNER.

  Danny had seen them before, at other Turner rallies, but never in such numbers and never acting as bold as they were tonight.

  He glanced at Turner, who couldn’t have looked any more pleased. The candidate had just finished his usual rant; his big hands were gripping the sides of the podium and he was nodding his head as the crowd chanted: “RIGHT! RIGHT! RIGHT! WHITE! WHITE! WHITE!”

  The trouble didn’t take long to start. Turner had only been speaking for about five minutes when it happened. The big union guys were pushing back at the neo-Nazis and the Klansmen, and fights were breaking out all over the place. And then — according to the media reports, because Danny couldn’t hear anything over the yelling and chanting of the crowd — a shot rang out, then another and another. People started screaming and rushing for the exits. It was bedlam. A fucking madhouse.

  As the floor of the convention center started to clear, Danny saw a fat guy in a homemade Nazi-style uniform holding a gun, standing over the body of one of the big union guys. Then half the Secret Service detail had their guns out, too, and they were shooting at the man with the gun. He dropped like a bag of wet cement.

  The other half of the detail, meanwhile, had surrounded Turner and were hustling him out of the venue. Turner didn’t look happy about it.

  One of the agents appeared and grabbed Danny’s arm. “Come on, kid,” he said. “Time to get the fuck out of here.”

  CHAPTER 38

  Chief John Rarihokwats was a small guy, under five feet tall, I’d say. He looked super old, too: his long hair was pulled back in a single braid that was just about pure white, and his face was hairless and lined. But when he shook my hand, it felt like he could crush it. He was clearly Native — “Indigenous,” he told us — but he had these deep blue eyes, hinting at the presence of white man’s blood, too.


  He was wearing running shoes, jeans, and this amazing leather thing that was sort of a jacket and sort of a shirt. A million tiny, colored beads had been stitched into it, in various designs. He pointed at one of them: “Bear. I’m from the Bear Clan,” he said.

  I pointed at my Ramones T-shirt. “I’m from the punk rock clan,” I said. No one laughed, but Rarihokwats smiled a little.

  Rarihokwats was standing in front of the sweat lodge. It was a low-lying hut, basically, with a rounded roof. It had been made out of saplings, it looked like, and then tarps and blankets and one big animal skin had been draped over it. It didn’t look like anything special to me, but to the members of Tit Sweat and Leah, I could tell it was a big deal.

  When Rarihokwats stepped out to greet us, the Native girls looked at him like we Catholic boys used to look at the cardinal when he’d come to the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception to pay us a visit: a bit wide-eyed and a bit intimidated.

  We were in some sort of a clearing. There were tall trees all around us, birch and maple, and no houses or other people at all. In the distance, I thought I could hear a stream or river. It was already starting to get dark.

  Apart from the little sweat lodge and a raging fire pit, there was nothing else and no one else there. Just us and Chief Rarihokwats.

  The Chief reminded me of X, sort of mellow but highly intense all at the same time. After the introductions, his blue eyes lingered on me. He barely acknowledged the existence of any of the others. It made me uncomfortable.

  He pointed at some big birch stumps that had been placed around the fire pit, in which an impressive fire had been burning. “Sit,” he said, and we all did. Rarihokwats looked at me for an uncomfortably long time before he spoke. His voice was deep and it resonated, like an acoustic bass guitar.

  “Do you know what a sweat lodge is?” he asked.

  I shook my head.

  “The sweat lodge is a place for teaching, for healing, for cleansing oneself,” he said slowly. “It is a very sacred place to us.”

  The fire crackled and spit.

  “Inside the sweat lodge, as you will see, it is pitch black. In the old days, they would put animal skins like that buffalo skin on the roof, to keep out the light,” he said, then chuckled a bit. “Now we use tarps, too.”

  He continued: “The sweat lodge has been cleaned out. There is grass for you and your friends to sit on and be comfortable. In the center, you will see a mound of earth covered by blankets.”

  I looked over and saw what he was talking about. The mound went to the door of the sweat lodge and disappeared inside it, like the back of a whale in the water.

  On top of the blankets was the skull of some animal and a bunch of necklaces and other stuff.

  “That is the altar. It points to the east, where the sun rises,” Chief Rarihokwats said. He gestured to the east, which was getting decidedly darker. “The altar ends at a pit inside the sweat lodge. In the pit, we place the rocks we are heating in this fire.” He pointed at the fire pit, where I guess the rocks were getting heated. “These rocks are sacred, too. I call them grandfathers. This is our path to the Creator and the universe. This brings us closer to the Creator. This will open up closed doors in your mind, Kurt.”

  It was the first time he had said my name, and it startled me. It was as if he’d touched me.

  After another long silence, and being the reigning small-talk champ, I asked about the trinkets on the blanket-covered altar.

  “Those are things that are important to the people who participate in the sweat lodge ceremony,” he said. “When they leave, they take those things with them and it connects them back to the energy of the ceremony.” He paused. “Do you have a possession like that?”

  I didn’t; I’d just come from a hospital and all I had with me were the clothes on my back. I basically didn’t have anything, in fact, besides my wallet and the keys to my mom’s house. But before I could say anything, Sister Betty spoke up. “Kurt didn’t know this ­ceremony was going to happen, Chief, so he had no time to prepare,” she said, reaching into the folds of her army surplus jacket. She pulled out a small jewelry box. “His best friend X could not be here but he knows about it. He wanted to give this gift to Kurt to use in the ceremony.”

  Betty opened the box. It was a silver chain with a shiny silver metal thing hanging from it. My eyes widened. Nobody else knew what it was, with the possible exception of Betty, but I sure did. It was the top of one of the machine heads from Jimmy Cleary’s guitar, the one he’d been playing the night he was killed. Jimmy’s mother had given X her son’s guitar after his funeral as she was cleaning out Jimmy’s room for the last time.

  Sister Betty and Chief Rarihokwats and everyone else were looking right at me. I really didn’t want to get emotional at that point, but my vision was getting a bit blurry.

  Sister Betty handed the box to me, hugged me, then sat down again.

  Rarihokwats looked satisfied. I think he had concluded that I was now taking the sweat lodge stuff more seriously, and I certainly fucking was. It felt like something really important was about to happen. There was another long silence, and then the chief told us that his name, Rarihokwats, meant “he writes.”

  “I understand you are a writer, too, Kurt,” he said.

  I nodded.

  “What happens inside the sweat lodge is very important to us,” he intoned. “It is sacred. I would ask that you do not write about it and publish it so others can see it.”

  I nodded again, turning over X’s gift in my hands, trying not to cry.

  Chief Rarihokwats then started to explain what would happen. There would be smudging outside the sweat lodge, using some sage. Then there would be the passing of the pipe inside it. We were expected to wear “sweat clothes,” he said, which apparently meant wearing as little as possible.

  There would be drums and rattles and then things he would say, and then the Native people he had chosen — Leah and a couple members of Tit Sweat, apparently — would very carefully carry the sacred rocks, the grandfathers, to the pit in the sweat lodge, using a couple of metal shovels. The Chief would pour water on the rocks, and it would get very hot in there. If I felt sick at any point, he said, I needed to tell him. The same went for the others.

  The Creator would be thanked, as well as Mother Earth and the “totem powers,” he told us. The “spirit guides” would then be called.

  “Kurt,” Rarihokwats said, looking at me. “Kurt, what is the question you want carried to the Creator? What is the prayer you wish to make?”

  I looked at him, and then at everyone else, their faces reflecting the fire. I was conscious for the first time of my breathing, which felt kind of painful. My face felt wet.

  “I want to get better,” I finally said, and then I started crying in earnest.

  CHAPTER 39

  The execution of union leader Tom Edwards — because that’s what it was, really, an execution in cold blood, and in front a national TV audience, no less — complicated the lives of Theresa Laverty and, to a lesser extent, Pete Schenk. It also became an occasion for “police bureaucracy clusterfuck,” Schenk said to Laverty and Tommy, who both agreed.

  That was because the neo-Nazi who killed Edwards was not just a standard-issue Holocaust-denying, min­ority-hating supporter of Earl Turner. No, the killer (a sweaty, porcine loser named James S. Schipper) was also a card-carrying member of the Church of the Creator.

  By the time Laverty got the call from her boss in Fort Myers, James S. Schipper had been dead for three hours, a half-dozen Secret Service .357-magnum rounds embedded in his chest and neck. The blood-stained COTC membership card in his wallet, signed by Bernhardt Klassen personally, sent the Secret Service in search of the only known Church of the Creator expert working for law enforcement in the United States: Theresa Laverty.

  Tommy, of course, knew as much about the COTC as Laverty did, if not more. But Tommy wasn’t “official,” Laverty’s boss told her by phone. “Tommy is our resource.
He is not to be shared with those overpaid, arrogant bastards in the Secret Service, got it?”

  “Got it,” Laverty said, then hung up the phone. They were in their meeting space at the back of Fanelli’s again. She looked at Tommy. “They don’t want you helping out the Secret Service,” she said.

  Tommy grunted. He didn’t seem surprised.

  “Why not?” Schenk asked, genuinely bewildered. “A presidential candidate could’ve been shot, and the Secret Service needs help seeing if this Schipper guy acted alone or if there was some sort of COTC conspiracy. Why can’t Tommy help?”

  “At the bureau, we don’t like to share resources,” Laverty said. She paused, then half laughed. “And if this presidential candidate had actually been shot …”

  “It would have been a waste of a bullet,” Tommy said, arms crossed.

  “As a registered Republican, I’ll pretend I didn’t hear any of that,” Schenk said, only sort of joking. “Can one of you explain to me why the Secret Service is interested in learning about the Church of the Creator all of a sudden? The maniac who killed the guy at the rally is dead as a doornail. What more do they want to know?”

  Tommy pointed at Fanelli’s window, in the direction of Mercer Street. “In a few hours, you’ll know.”

  Laverty nodded solemnly.

  “Sorry, folks, I don’t speak in FBI code,” Schenk said, frowning. “Can someone tell me what exactly is going to happen in a few hours?”

  Laverty looked at him and shrugged. “Rioting. People throwing rocks at cop cars. Cops shooting at riot­ers. That sort of thing. The usual thing that happens in America when a black man is killed without cause by a white racist.”

  “Has any of that happened yet?”

  “The bureau says there’s already trouble in and around Albany, as word is spreading,” Laverty said. “The media are obviously leading every broadcast with the story — it happened right in from of them, on live television — so we figure there’ll be lots of trouble tonight. The black community sees this as an execution, one aided and abetted by Earl Turner.”