by Jess Walter
Instead, Fadeley grabbed the device out of Kumnick’s hand and turned it over in his own hand before Kumnick could finish scanning him. “Is that a stud finder?” Fadeley held it in his hand and pretended to be impressed, although he was trying to figure out what to do next.
“Yeah,” Kumnick said. “A stud finder will do a lot more than find studs.” Fadeley wanted to see if it would work, so he ran it over Kumnick’s chest, and it produced a long beep. Kumnick smiled, reached inside his camouflage shirt, and pulled out dog tags. Written on the tags were the words “Liberty or Death.” They talked about other things the stud finder might react to. “Hmm. Glasses?” Kumnick teased.
“Yeah, frames?” Fadeley said.
“You think so?” Weaver asked. They’re trying to scare me, trying to intimidate me, Fadeley thought. Or worse. Fadeley slowly set the stud finder down on the bench seat between himself and Weaver.
When the informant turned back around, Kumnick had a pistol, a small .22-caliber gun, black, with a pearl handle. Fadeley saw that it was pointed at his head.
“I’ll be damned,” Fadeley said. Then he laughed nervously. “I’ll be damned,” he said again. And then, for Byerly’s benefit: “A little derringer.”
“Where’d you come from back East?” Randy asked.
“New Jersey. Eighteen miles from Philadelphia.”
The Wagoneer sat alone in the parking lot, basketball hoops on one side, the cool, dark waves of Lake Pend Oreille slapping the sand on the other. Inside the car, the questions were about Fadeley’s background, where he was from, what he believed. Kumnick kept the gun pointed at Fadeley’s head, but the informant played along, laughing and talking tough until Kumnick set the gun down in his lap, still cocked, and finally relaxed the hammer and slid the gun back into his coat pocket. Fadeley’s hand loosened on the holstered pistol strapped to his ankle.
The conversation turned back to Philadelphia and Fadeley’s childhood. “I grew up fighting black kids on a daily basis. I grew up fighting Puerto Ricans,” he said.
They’d finally hit on a subject Randy was interested in. “Yeah, I run into them in the service. Mexicans are bad, but Puerto Ricans make them look tame, I think.”
Kumnick said the problem was that white men didn’t stick together anymore. Once again, they were talking about loyalty. Kumnick and Fadeley talked more about this group and how to form it. Fadeley hoped they trusted him finally.
“We have a problem,” Kumnick said. “And if something isn’t changed where we show some new leadership for the patriot movement, it’s going to be dead.” He said that’s where he disagreed with the men “to the south,” Richard Butler and his aging neo-Nazis at the Aryan Nations compound.
“The next group coming up—and this is what I consider ourselves,” Kumnick continued, “we’re going to be new leaders in the new age.” Weaver was still quiet. Kumnick asked how committed Fadeley’s men were.
“Three of the four are very, very dedicated.”
“Okay. I’ll tell you what we do.”
And then Kumnick seemed to forget his trepidation, and he laid out his plan for the next white uprising. This was the whole reason Fadeley had come down here, to hear where the vanguard of the white terrorists wanted to strike next in their war against the Jew-controlled government. Among people like Kumnick and Weaver, Fadeley believed, there was the seething potential for danger. Members of the Order I and II had robbed armored cars, murdered people, and bombed buildings, and here was Kumnick saying they’d gotten off to a good start but had grown sloppy.
Finally, the scattershot Kumnick got around to his own contribution to the white revolution:
“Okay, I’ll tell you what we do,” he said. “It’s so simple, it will blow your mind. You get a quick-set epoxy…. Go out to all the banks and shoot epoxy into the locks. When they’re closed. Hey, come that following morning, there won’t be a whole bank in town that will be able to open for four or five hours until they have, you know, pulled all the locks and gone through them.”
“Super Glue,” Fadeley said simply.
“Yeah. Right.” But Kumnick wasn’t done. He had other plans. They could somehow mess up people’s television reception. And maybe cut some power lines. And then, his masterstroke. Boundary County is home to acres and acres of hops fields used by Anheuser Busch to make beer.
“Well,” Kumnick says. “All the hops burn…. Hey, when you go into the tavern and they ain’t got no beer, shit … I mean, they are totally gonna be upset.”
Kumnick said he knew what had gone wrong with The Order. “They got too fast, they didn’t think this thing through and, uh, they absorbed too many people too quick and boy, you’re gonna get a ringer every time.”
These were the crack soldiers, the storm troopers of a white revolution that Fadeley had driven north to root out.
FRATERNITY PRANKS weren’t the only plans Kumnick had for the revolution. He talked about burning a house that was being repossessed by the IRS and spoke fancifully about shooting the agents who came up to investigate it. But later he backed away from those plans, saying the weather wouldn’t be right to ambush IRS agents. Weaver was quiet and didn’t say much whenever the talk returned to forming a terrorist group. And Kumnick just came up with bizarre plans that sounded more and more like hazing than guerrilla civil war.
“You know what I would like to do,” said Kumnick. “I would like to catch some agents [and] let them go naked. I’m serious man. You know, like take everything away from them, including … their money and all that…. Hey, they’re gonna have a hard time explaining it, you know. You talk about embarrassment. They would wish they were dead.”
Kumnick was a big, jittery man who talked nonstop and occasionally took off for the woods when he got an inkling that the heat was about to come down on him. Some people believed he was a federal informant himself. That Tuesday, he talked like a sprinkler, spraying words all over the inside of the truck about what he could do. “I told the sheriff the other day, you know, I says, you know, just playing around, you know, you guys ever come to my property, you’ll probably step on, you’ll probably step on a nail, and I shit on that nail at least four times, you know, you’re gonna die anyway. You know?”
“Yep,” was all Fadeley could say.
Fadeley tried to bring Kumnick back to reality a couple times. “I realize we are starting out small, which is what we should do,” he said.
“Right,” Kumnick said.
Fadeley said their biggest problems were finances and communication.
Kumnick said he was sending for some military radios. “This is what makes the difference between a real fighting unit and those guys that are just a bunch of jokers, see?”
They sat in the Jeep and talked, and Fadeley was painfully aware of the gun in Kumnick’s coat pocket. He tried to appear as snitch-conscious as the other two men. Kumnick said they had to be careful of the guys who would talk “when they put the electrodes in their testicles.”
Again the talk turned tough, and Fadeley wondered if he should reach for his gun. He played along with Kumnick but wanted to make sure Byerly knew how to find him if this started to go badly. The conversation “doesn’t go any farther than this Wagoneer,” Fadeley said clearly into the transmitter. “It is a Wagoneer, isn’t it?”
Kumnick talked again about the need for security within the organization. He said that if someone decided to leave, “they’re leaving permanently. Because if they think they’re gonna go blow a whistle …”
“The old story,” Fadeley said.
“Right, right,” Kumnick said, recalling that The Order I even had to dispatch one of its own. “That’s where The Order did one thing right. They did get rid of somebody, and they ain’t found ‘em yet, you know?”
Weaver still didn’t contribute to the conversation about forming this group, and so it was just Kumnick and the guy they thought was Gus Magisono, talking in circles about security and snitches.
“What’s your last nam
e?” Randy asked Fadeley.
“Magisono.”
“What is it?”
Fadeley repeated it and said, “Italian.”
“Right,” Randy said. “But you know there are black Greeks and white Greeks and there are black Italians and white Italians.” Randy said you couldn’t trust all white people either, but he wasn’t worried because Yahweh would show him who to trust.
“Right now,” Randy said to the stocky informer, “I don’t know about you.”
“If I start to find wires on the midget, he ain’t goin’ home,” Kumnick added.
They were bluffing, testing him to see if he called in help or ran away. Again, Fadeley had to try to play it cool, to act as tough as them. “That’s right,” Fadeley said.
“Your ass is dead if you want to know the truth,” Kumnick said.
“And the same with you,” Fadeley answered.
“I’d put the. 22 in your ear and pull the trigger,” Kumnick said.
Fadeley coolly called their bluff again. “And the same with you.”
The trust seemed to rise and fall as they chattered on about other separatists they knew and such. Finally, after more than an hour in the Jeep, Randy started it up and said they should get going. They drove back across the bridge to downtown Sandpoint and an antiques store where Kumnick’s wife was supposed to be waiting for them. The solidly built Kumnick—who might’ve passed for a brother of Kenneth Fadeley—walked inside to check, and for a minute it was just Weaver and Fadeley alone in the Jeep. Randy confided that he didn’t agree with Kumnick that organizing a group would help the cause.
“Frank is a good friend of mine, and I’d back him up to anything in a minute, but, like I told you, according to the Bible, things are go in’ down the tubes and … it don’t matter, and we can think, well, let’s do this or that. Frank … ain’t gonna change what’s comin’. You can get yourself in trouble trying to change it.” The Bible, Randy said, is clear that you should trust no man.
“Frank let me come along today, for whatever reason,” Randy said.
“Frank wanted you to come along today to get you an overall impression of me.”
“That’s probably true,” Randy agreed. “I know he wanted me to scope you out and see what I thought of you.”
“Sure.”
Frank’s wife had gone on to the pizza parlor already, and so they piled back into the Jeep and headed on again, a little more comfortable with each other.
Six blocks from the Edgewater, Papandrea’s Pizza was the consensus choice for best pizza in Sandpoint, and the end of the lunch rush of skiers and downtown workers was finishing up as the three men slipped inside the door. Frank’s wife, Mary Lou, was already there and Vicki showed up as soon as they’d ordered. She’d spent the day at the bookstore, trying to find a Smith’s Biblical Dictionary. “You know, one that’s not abridged.” Vicki liked to go to the bookstore when Randy went into town, which wasn’t often. “Yeah, see, I might be sitting here till three, so I sit and read.”
The men engaged in the bizarre small talk of white survivalists: the new. 223 rifle, the new Russian-made shells, this guy who was a snitch, that guy who lives in “Niggerville, Florida.”
Kumnick and Fadeley talked more about trust, and they agreed that the time in the Jeep had made each of them more comfortable. Now they got down to business. Fadeley said he was ready to start putting some money up if Kumnick could really provide weapons. But, again, there were no specifics from Kumnick, just a bunch of loose talk.
After a while, the informant turned to Randy, who had eaten quietly with his wife at the end of the table. “After hearing us talk about different things, without making a split-second judgment, do you feel comfortable?” Fadeley asked.
“Yeah.”
“Okay,” Fadeley said.
“You guys wanna get somethin’ goin’, that’s fine with me,” Randy shrugged. “I don’t. I haven’t heard nothin’…” He didn’t finish the thought.
Earlier, Kumnick had talked about torching some house near Randy’s place that the IRS was about to foreclose on in March, but when Fadeley brought it up again, Kumnick wasn’t interested anymore. He said the weather in March probably wouldn’t be good enough.
But Randy was interested in that subject, and he agreed with the others that IRS agents in Boundary County could spark a violent confrontation.
Some people were especially hard-core, Randy said. “They go in there and they can kill IRS. Of course, they are damned fools that might do it. They have no brains whatsoever.”
They talked more about the guy who lived in the place near Randy’s and his trouble with the government. “I’ll be honest with you,” Randy said. “If they try to throw him out, I hope he kills half of them.”
“Yeah,” Fadeley said.
But things could get quickly out of hand, Randy said.
“When people stop sayin’, ‘No more,’ hey, it doesn’t all of a sudden happen,” Randy said. “You can’t just bring four, three or four agents. You have to bring the whole army.”
FADELEY WANTED TO GET GOING, and he made one more attempt to get Kumnick on the record with something more than vague, unlikely plots and racist talk. At that point, he didn’t figure Randy Weaver was of much interest to his ATF contacts.
“What’s our next step?” he asked.
“Surprise resistance” Kumnick fired back.
“Okay.” But still, the talk was all philosophy, with Kumnick and his wife doing all the talking. Even when Randy tried to talk, Kumnick cut him off. The talk of jail worried all of them, but Kumnick said he was cool, that he’d go away if he had to.
“I go back to Scripture,” Randy said, “where it says in there: ‘Some will be destined, and some will be destined to die. For this is the patience of the saints.’” At the end of the table, his pretty wife agreed with him.
Again, the conversation came around to this group they should form, and again, it was Kumnick and Fadeley doing the talking, comparing themselves to the Vietcong, the Afghan rebels, and the Contras.
“We’re only a little bit of a ring,” Kumnick said. “Put us all together, we’ll be a wave.”
They drove back to Connies, and Fadeley said he’d walk to his car from there, since it was a small town and it might not be good for them to be seen together. The others agreed. Fadeley tried once more to get some specifics out of Kumnick.
“Why don’t you do this,” he said. “Why don’t you send me down a little list … of maybe five … things you’d like to see the group accomplish by March, February, March, by say, the first of April.”
“Right.”
“Or three things,” Fadeley said.
Kumnick said “the glue thing” would be one of them. And then, maybe burning down the house the IRS wanted to repossess.
“Take care,” Fadeley said.
“I will.”
Fadeley watched them pile back into the Wagoneer.
“I got a long walk ahead of me,” Fadeley said.
The Kumnicks and Weavers were still sitting there, and he spoke into the transmitter. “They’re watching me, so stay away. They are watching me, so stay away!” Finally, the Jeep pulled away, and Fadeley began walking, his boots clicking on the sidewalk. He looked around for the gold Dodge that Byerly would be driving. He was beginning to realize how close he’d come to drawing when Kumnick pulled the gun on him. For some reason, Kumnick had only run the stud finder across Fadeley’s left arm. Man, that was close.
Fadeley was beat. He’d spent the afternoon in a Jeep with these nuts, a gun against his head. As far as he was concerned, no matter how loopy their plans sounded, these guys were dangerous, especially Kumnick. Weaver was a weird, racist zealot, but Kumnick was clearly the one who needed his attention. As he turned another corner, Fadeley allowed himself to relax. “Don’t see ‘em anymore.” He sighed. “Lord.”
SEVEN
DUST ROSE OFF the driveway like fog on a river as the summer of 1987 dragged on, hot and dr
y as any in memory. David and Jeane came for their yearly visit in late August, bringing more boxes of clothes and books for the kids. Sara, who was eleven, dove into the books, but that was no great shock, because she was so much like Vicki her grandparents expected her to be a good reader. Sam was the surprising one. A couple summers before, you couldn’t force a book into his hands, but by 1987, he read everything he got his hands on, and it wasn’t long before well-worn paperbacks filled up the kids’ bookshelves and gathered in piles under their beds: Trixie Belden, The Black Stallion, Heart of the Blue Ridge, Saddle and Ride, Eight Cousins. Sam loved adventure stories and books about warfare—The Story of the Green Berets and Naval Battles and Heroes.
Soon, Sam was reading and memorizing encyclopedias and Sara would get frustrated when they’d get into an argument over some piece of trivia and Sam would always be right.
Vicki’s first date for Armageddon had passed without any trouble, and back in Iowa her family got the feeling she was mellowing a bit, maybe even finding her place in the rough life of northern Idaho. David and Jeane’s visits had become nice breaks for both families, and as usual Jeane and her daughter stayed up all night canning fruits, vegetables, and herbs, and talking about all the nieces and nephews.
David and Jeane were amazed at the amount of work Vicki did. Besides teaching and taking care of three children, she kept the house repaired and served as doctor, cook, and caretaker for the whole family. In just a few days, she canned fourteen quarts of green beans, seven quarts of pears, and seven quarts of fruit cocktail—peaches, pears, red grapes and honeydew melon—all of it while bent over a stoked woodstove in the searing August heat. She and Sara planted, picked, and canned all manner of vegetables, not to mention mustard greens and nettles. Vicki studied books about medicinal and edible plants and herbs, and her knowledge of gardening made her the equivalent of a country doctor who, in her chatty letters back home, prescribed teas and roots for the ailments of people in Iowa.