Handling Sin

by Malone, Michael

  Gates swerved away from him. “Should I stop? Shit.” “No, somebody else will…Oh dammit, okay, yes, dammit, stop!” Raleigh cursed his conscience. If not his conscience, his opinion of himself.

  “Whooaaa!” his brother whistled, as the headlights illuminated the person in the road. He was a young, thin, muscular man with thick blond hair. He was in a skintight black body suit with bones painted on it.

  “Not again!” Hayes grumbled as Gates opened the door, but if he’d thought he’d fallen prey to another band of Hell’s Angels—or whatever those Mount Olive thugs preferred to be called—he was mistaken. This young man, who appeared to be wearing rouge and mascara, was breathless from running, his teeth were chattering with fear, and panic raised his voice into a falsetto stammer as he called “You’ve got to help us.” He pointed off the road past what looked like an orchard of peach trees, toward a red flickering light atop a hill of tall pines.

  “What’s the problem? Fire?” asked Gates.

  The man (boy really) shook his head, wheezing, clasping his sides as he fought for breath. “Go for police. Come help. They’ve got my friends. Shoving them around. Making them dance. Kicking at them. Something awful is going to…I got away. Didn’t see me.” He was swallowing tears as he spoke. “It’s the Klan. I know it.” He pantomimed a pointed hood. “They’re going to kill Albert, I know it. Please!”

  Gates jumped down from the cab. “The Klan?”

  “Wait a minute, Gates, oh hell!” Raleigh slid across the seat and climbed out of the truck. He could now see that the boy was wearing stage makeup. He grabbed his arm. “Try to calm down, young man. What happened?”

  “Just please go get the police!”

  “If it’s the Klan around these boonies,” Gates told him, “they are the police. Are they up there? How’d they get your friends? Shit! He’s right! It’s a fucking burning cross up there!” He pointed at the red light pulsing smoke above the trees. “Quick, kid, tell me exactly what’s going on. Have they got guns?”

  The boy tried to talk so fast, his words stumbled together. He gestured across the highway, where the Hayeses now saw an old white bus with its hood up. Lettering on the back said “APPALACHIAN SCHOOL OF THE PERFORMING ARTS.” “Bus broke down, we saw lights up there, we went up, see if anybody could help us. Whole circle of them, white hoods, around the cross. Grabbed us. Saw we were ballet, started, you know, ‘Let’s have some fun.’ They came back down and got Laura and Shawn and Mr. Rosestein. Listen! Two guys in our company are black! They’re black! If you can’t stop them, you could go, get the police. I don’t know what to do! Yes, yes, I saw a rifle.”

  Gates rubbed hard at his mustache. “How many?”

  “Nine, three are girls and Mr. Rosestein’s an old man!”

  “How many of them, I mean.”

  “I don’t know! I guess about a dozen.”

  “Right, fine.” Gates opened the glove compartment and took out a white-handled revolver.

  Raleigh jumped in front of him. “Jesus Christ, Gates, what are you doing? Did you get Mingo’s gun out of his suitcase, dammit?”

  “Mingo has a gun? Great!”

  The little window in the trailer flew open. Simon Berg stuck his head out. “Kid? You found a hospital, I hope? Oh God. A skeleton? Okay, I’ve gone senile and I’m a basket case already.”

  Gates ran over to him. “Weep, Mingo’s got a gun in his bag. Get it, and tell him I want all those fireworks he bought. Move ass. The fucking Ku Klux Klan’s up there on that hill hassling a bunch of ballet kids.”

  “For your funny jokes, mister, the KKK is not a subject!” Berg slammed shut the window.

  Gates raced to the rear doors, hauled them open, and leaped up into the truck, followed by Raleigh and the ballet student.

  “Watch out!” Mingo shouted, hovering over Diane, who lay whimpering on the mattress.

  “I am not kidding, Berg!” Gates yelled. “Look over at those pine trees. See it! It’s the Klan.”

  “Aw, shit!” said Toutant Kingstree as he jumped to his feet. “What are you back here for? Drive, you motherfucker!”

  But Gates was flinging the clothes out of Mingo’s suitcase, where he soon found the pistol and the bag of firecrackers. Everybody stood staring at him. “Okay, guys,” he announced. “Here’s the plan. Mingo stays with the girl.”

  That much was agreeable. But the troops of Gates Hayes did not respond with much immediate esprit de corps to his other suggestions, despite his rousing ad hominem battle speech, exhorting them to valor in defense of women, blacks, and ballet dancers, against (and, in Berg’s phrase, he minced no words) shit-eating, sheep-fucking, anti-Semite, white-trash, dumb, honkie, lynching, Nazi, chicken, dong-diddling, wife-beating, moron assholes, whose routing would be not only a duty and a pleasure, but “a piece of cake.”

  Raleigh said, “You have got to be kidding.”

  Weeper said, “Why was I born?”

  Toutant said, “I want to go to New Orleans, I don’t want to sidestep it to Heaven. Y’all go. Y’all are white.”

  Weeper said, “I’m a Jew.”

  Toutant said, “Man, that’s still the front of the bus.”

  Weeper said, “Look, I’m a midget, a pygmy, a crummy old man in lousy shape. You’re seven feet for crying out loud tall, you Alpine Goliath! You go!”

  Toutant said, “Seven black feet! You ever hear of lynching?”

  “You ever heard of Dachau?!”

  The ballet student said, “Do something, PLEASE!”

  Raleigh said, “I don’t believe this.”

  Mingo jumped up, “Y’all shut up! You’re scaring Diane. Raleigh, I think she’s getting ready to have her baby.”

  “Dammit, Mingo. She ought to know if she’s having a baby or not.”

  “I’m not!” The girl shook her head frantically.

  “Give me your watch,” Mingo told Raleigh. “I’m going to time these contractions.”

  Hayes wheeled around. “I thought…Diane! Have your contractions started?!”

  “Just a few,” she whispered. “It’s nothing to worry about, I swear. Honest.”

  “Oh, great!”

  While everyone yelled, Gates stuck a gun in Raleigh’s hand, filled Berg’s and Kingstree’s and the student’s hands with Mingo’s cherry bombs, buzz bombs, rockets, and matches, and pushed them one by one out of the back of the truck as if he were the training sergeant of a paratrooper squad. He headed them single file up the dirt road that ran beside the peach orchard. Quietly, but not happily, they went. Halfway up the hill they could hear the crackling of fire and barks of laughter.

  Starting at this point in the road, new cars and old pickup trucks lined the shoulders. A bumper sticker still wanted four more years of the former minor film star who had once been president of the United States. Another sticker wanted everyone to know that the occupant had visited the Magic Kingdom. Another wanted a particular baseball team to go all the way.

  Taking a Swiss army knife from his pocket, Gates stabbed a hole in the right front tire of a Pontiac Firebird.

  “What am I doing here?” Simon Berg asked no one in particular. “Jews travel through Georgia in the air on their way to Miami.”

  Toutant didn’t let this pass. “Black people can’t afford Miami. Here, give me that knife. I’ll do it.”

  While Kingstree punctured tires, Gates removed the fanbelts from all the trucks, on the premise that someone named Shawn knew what he was talking about when he’d said to the blond boy that the bus’s problem was a broken fanbelt. As Gates was stuffing these inside his jacket, they heard a shriek, then someone yelling, “You bastards!” Then more shrieks.

  “Motherfuckers,” growled Kingstree and ripped open a Mustang’s new radial.

  “Do something,” the young student pleaded.

  Gates gave them their battle positions. He and Raleigh would go in. The other three would surround the ridge from three sides. “Stay behind those trees, Weep. Don’t let them see you.”
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br />   “Not to worry,” Berg assured him.

  “All right, guys. Here we go.” Then their teeth-flashing commando grinned. “There’s only five of us, but God’s on our side, so that makes six.”

  His squad (in whose breasts, Gates—unlike Henry V—had not really stirred much joyful sense of “we happy few”) crawled into the fray. For there was no arguing with their leader, who had already hurried ahead in a crouching weave, motioning them with a military wave to follow. Another fifty yards, and they could see the clearing through the pines. It looked to be on the site of an old house, long since burned or collapsed, for nothing was left but four tall brick crumbled chimneys and wide stone stairs that now led to nothing. Between the two middle chimneys, red flames licked noisily at a giant cross. Moving in the smoky light were white-robed figures in high pointed hoods. They circled around an equally oddly dressed group, all in painted leotards and tights with leg warmers bunched at their ankles. These people looked to be awkwardly dancing.

  The Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, upon whom our travelers were about to descend—for to this chivalric organization the hooded men undoubtedly belonged—had been delighted to have their first set of visitors stumble into their midst. Their ordinary monthly ceremony provided its own pleasures, to be sure: the darkness, the costumes, the secrecy; and fire is, of course, always a thrill to the violent. It was all a lot flashier than the church services most of them would yawn through later this morning. But unbroken routine had taken the edge from their excitement in these forbidden fraternal gatherings. Their Klavern chieftain gave the same speech month after month, and while this man possessed all the qualities (zenophobia, paranoia, a vile mind, and a frightened soul) that a demogogue needs to inflame other bigots, he lacked the oratory. His long-repeated speech—even the faithful admitted—had gotten boring as hell; nor could he offer them with any impunity those physical outlets for brutality by which herded hate is nourished. No, the Klan, they all lamented, had lost something since its golden days. Now, they were so harassed, even hounded into court, even by white people, that they had managed to accomplish nothing much in the last few years except burn up some dirty schoolbooks, break the windows in a Jew’s store, whip a white woman known to be sleeping with a nigger, cheer and wave funny signs outside a prison during an execution, yell at voters at a Democratic polling booth, shoot a dog belonging to a Vietnamese family (in fact, a South Vietnamese, in whose defense one of the knights had been overseas fighting in his youth), and attend those monotonous monthly meetings.

  Consequently, they were surprised and delighted when they rounded up nine ballet school trespassers who were just asking for it; particularly thrilled when they saw that two of them were black, another (a man with waves painted all over him) was Chinese, the oldest was decidedly a Jewboy, all of them were wearing makeup and painted hose; particularly thrilled when all the white men looked to the knights like queers, the blacks looked like rapists, and the three women were obviously whores. Just the sort to relieve the boredom of the meetings they attended to relieve the boredom of their lives.

  The student ballet company of the Appalachian School of the Performing Arts was more than surprised. They were on a college tour with their original ballet, “Orpheus in the Underworld”—the young blond man who’d begged our travelers for help was himself Hades, King of the Dead—and they’d left Atlanta immediately after a performance to drive to their next university town, where they were scheduled to dance the following night. On this tour they were accompanied by their teacher, Mr. Rosestein, a man of sixty-some, whose only knowledge of the old bus he had finally wheedled out of his dean was that it was better than nothing. Or so he’d assumed, until it broke down, and he was looking into the excited eyes of a white-hooded man who pushed a rifle into his stomach and said they were all going to have some fun, because he (the Klansman) and his buddies were ballet lovers and especially loved to see niggers and queers dance, and they wanted, right now, to see a good show. Mr. Rosestein, whose enormous courage can only be judged by the extremity of his fear, and who had no idea that one of his students had slipped unseen away in the dark and run for help, attempted to dissuade the Klan by reasoning with them. For this folly, he was laughingly knocked to the ground by a rifle butt in the hands of a shy plumber who was just showing off with the help of a half-dozen beers.

  The students were told that if they did not quickly entertain their hosts, their old Jewboy queer teacher would get what he was asking for, and so would they. Further jabs, shoves, and threats to the three young women finally compelled all the dancers to begin randomly moving around the base of the burning cross in halfhearted steps of the ballet they’d performed earlier that night. Persephone (her leotard half painted with flowers) was crying in the arms of Eurydice, while the black Orpheus tried to comfort them until backhanded by one of the hooded spectators. This had provoked the shouts of “Bastards!” which the approaching rescuers had heard.

  Nudged and poked, the students were faltering on, to the jeers of their audience, who looked in their eerie robes like a corps of supporting actors in this performance of the poet’s visit to Hell. How long the Klansmen might have forced the dancers to continue, or what subsequent merriment they might have devised, will never be known, for their show was suddenly stopped by a single shot from a gun. This sound was immediately followed by the appearance of a remarkable-looking man dressed entirely in leather and holding a white-handled revolver, who leaped down from the detached stone stairs and landed in their midst. Behind him was a tall man in a suit and tie, who wore glasses and also carried a gun.

  “FBI,” announced the handsome man in leather. “Agent Simon.” He jerked a wallet from his jacket, flipped it open, closed it. “Anybody with a gun, drop it right now, you’re under arrest.”

  One of the Klansmen, holding a shotgun, did just that, but the plumber with the rifle shook his head. “What do you mean, FBI?”

  Gates raised his pistol and cocked it. “What do I mean? I mean I’m going to blow your chickenshit pointed head off if you don’t toss that dick-extender in the dirt and back the fuck up.”

  The Klansman glanced at his brother knights watching him, and decided he had to be brave. “You and who else?” he sneered.

  Gates smiled, his teeth gleaming in the red light of the blazing cross. “Me and the agent”—he pointed randomly into the group— “who set you dumb hicks up. Me and the ten agents out in the woods.” He pointed randomly into the night. “And let me tell you good ole boys the news. Half of my men are black and the other half are Jews, and they’d like nothing better than half a chance to waste you turkeys.” He yelled, “Am I right, men?” and fired another shot in air. It was instantly answering by booming volleys from in front, in back, and to the side of the clearing. The explosions sounded more like cannon than bullets (cherry bombs do), and long before they ended, so had the bravado of the shy plumber. He tossed his rifle away as if it had been shot out of his hand.

  The black Orpheus picked it up, and the Chinese Charon (for such was his role in the ballet) bent down on one leg to scoop up the shotgun. Hugging one another, the rest of the troop closed ranks around their teacher, whom they helped to his feet.

  “Right, fine. Keep those guns on them,” grinned Gates. “The rest of you go on back down to your bus. Is somebody named Shawn here?”

  A hefty young man in a turtleneck, with hair nearly to his shoulders, raised his hand. Gates motioned him over, turned his back, and gave him the fanbelts. “Try one,” he said.

  Too shocked and relieved to speak, the ballet students led Mr. Rosestein out of the clearing and down the hill.

  “Now, boys.” Gates smiled. “Let’s take off these cute hoods and see your pointed heads. Agent Whittier here wants to see what you look like.” He gestured at Raleigh, whose gun arm was perfectly steady; in fact, his whole body was as still as one of those stones Orpheus was supposed to be able to move with the beauty of his verses.

  Now the Klan chieftain himself st
epped forward to justify his high position. “Just what is it we’re supposed to have done, mister? This here is our land, you know.”

  Gates strolled up to the baggy-robed creature. “That’s what the Indians said.” He smiled.

  “We got a perfect right—”

  “No, you don’t. Not for illegal assembly, conspiracy to commit violence…what else, Agent Whittier?”

  Raleigh swallowed. Everyone looked at him. He opened his mouth, and to his amazement said, “Forcible constraint. Assault. Conspiracy to defraud others of their civil rights….” He stopped and closed his mouth.

  “Right!” grinned Gates. “Plus campfires without a permit. Plus, I don’t much like your outfits.”

  The Klavern marshal crossed his arms over his red insignia. “You’re full of shit,” he shrewdly guessed. “Lenoir, you believe this guy’s with the FBI?”

  Lenoir shrugged. Of all the participants in this drama, he was probably the most bewildered. For—as was not infrequently the case with members of secret organizations in the United States—Lenoir actually was an FBI agent. He didn’t know what to think. The firelight was obscuring, but he was fairly certain he did not recognize Agents Simon and Whittier, nor was the first man’s style at all conformable to Bureau procedures, as Lenoir knew them. On the other hand, Simon seemed to realize there was an undercover agent in the group. He could be with one of those countless committee-sponsored special task forces, and naturally nobody had bothered to brief the field man about it. Lenoir was sick and tired of having things sprung on him this way; he’d be damned if he wasn’t going to complain to his district chief. But meanwhile, his instructions were never to blow his cover, whatever the provocation. He obeyed orders. Therefore he shrugged.

  Now the Klavern leader tried a new tack. “Look here, buddy, you got nothing on us, we were just having a little fun. We didn’t hurt a soul. We just asked, polite as can be, those folks to do us one of their faggot dances. Right, boys?”