The Last Good Guy

by T. Jefferson Parker

  As before, Atlas was self-deprecating and self-amused, and it was easy to picture him forty-plus years ago, hustling his shelter rescues door-to-door. I tried my best to reconcile that seven-year-old boy with the staggering evil that Penelope saw in him. It was hard to age the puppy savior into the child rapist he had allegedly become.

  It was also hard to believe that sweet, daft, smart, and lovely Penelope Rideout was a chronic liar, or worse.

  I let my church-drowsy mind wander from one questionable Penelope Rideout story to the next, like a dinghy drifting from one island to another. From her Navy Top Gun nonhusband to her faked family pictures to her vaguely referenced jobs to her ceaseless moving from one city to the next across the continent to her half a lifetime of telling her own daughter she was her sister.

  And I wondered again exactly where her accounts of the pastor’s seduction and rape landed on the cold, hard scale of truth.

  As I tried to assign answers to these mysteries, Reggie Atlas continued with his theme that Christians don’t just talk, they do. Jesus in action. Jesus is action.

  I remembered Penelope’s words:

  He told me that we would come together in Jesus with all our hearts. As husband and wife. Twelve beautiful children would appear . . . and our family would become the foundation of the lost tribe of Israel . . .

  Over the next month, young Reggie had rescued eight of twenty-one dogs, three of nine cats. His takeaway from this was: Plans sometimes don’t come all the way true, but don’t let perfection become the enemy of action. What if Jesus had cursed the loaves and fishes as not enough, the water into wine as insufficient? I liked that idea. Melinda slashed a big exclamation point on a blank page of her notebook and showed it to me.

  We left the cathedral a few minutes later, under a humid blue sky and white thunderheads rising in the south.

  37

  ////////////////////////

  ALFRED BATTLE’S White Power Hour started approximately two hours after Reggie’s sermon ended. I had taken Melinda and Frank home and driven to Escondido. By then, the thunderheads were gray anvils behind Battle’s compound; rain was on its way.

  White Power Hour. I and my good friend Morbid Curiosity were hoping to see for ourselves what puppy-rescuing Pastor Reggie Atlas—through the generosity of his many followers—was secretly financing for hate engineer Alfred Battle. And maybe even to find some clue to what Marie Knippermeir’s SNR Security was doing for the good of mankind out at Paradise Date Farm.

  I had guessed my chances of being recognized by the Paradise Farm SNR guards at fifty-fifty. Higher for Burt being spotted as the window washer. So I was alone, with sunglasses and a hat to hide my battle scars, banking that the public setting, the police presence, and the gun at the small of my back would dissuade another attack.

  I brought Justine’s red Porsche Boxster to a stop at the corner of Holiday Lane and Orange Hill, where the Escondido Police had Orange Hill blocked off with portable bollards. Officers manned a checkpoint, looking through the windows of the incoming vehicles, though it appeared that a roving trio of armed and uniformed SNR Security men was deciding which cars to let in and which to turn back.

  A dozen protesters of various races were corralled behind police sawhorses and yellow crime-scene tape, some of them waving hand-painted signs, while others used their phones to film the cars lined up to enter the rally grounds. Many of them focused on Justine’s Boxster as an obvious privilege machine, staring intently through the window at me as they brandished their signs: #StopHateNow! Nazi-Free Zone, #SanDiego Too Great for Hate!

  When it was my turn to try out for the team, I rolled down the window and said hello to Officer Brantley, while his counterpart on the opposite side of the car leaned down to peer through the lowering window.

  “Here for the rally?”

  “Yes, Officer.”

  “Do you have a weapon of any kind on your person or in this car?”

  I handed him my driver’s license, PI license, and a concealed-carry permit.

  He gave me a long stare. “Not the first one of these I’ve seen today,” he said, finally looking at the permit.

  He asked where my sidearm was holstered and I told him. As he studied my CDL, I looked over at the three SNR guards who were looking at me. Saw no hint of recognition or anything else on their faces.

  The cop handed me back my docs and one of the SNR Security guards waved me through.

  The road to Alfred Battle’s hilltop compound was narrow, steep, and winding. Through my windshield, the orange grove looked only slightly better than it had the night I’d followed Battle here. Drought-worn trees, not many leaves and not much fruit. I waved to a heavyset older woman in overalls and a wide straw hat, standing amid the trees. She waved back. Work gloves, white and clean. Marie, queen of breakfast meats? I pulled into a bulldozed dirt lot crammed with cars. Followed the hand signals of a blond boy in a bright green vest.

  I walked up a dirt path toward the White Power Hour. Smell of kettle corn and barbecued meat. Three open-sided canvas tents staked on a brown lawn. One white, one red, and one blue. Big. People milling around inside. Behind them stood the centerpiece home, a faltering two-story yellow farmhouse half swallowed by ivy.

  From a distance I saw Alfred Battle, old, tall, and dapper, standing beside a stage in the white tent. Looked like the same brown suit he’d worn to grab Reggie Atlas’s payola. Two men in beige chinos and black golf shirts loitered behind Battle, both with pistols on their hips.

  But what mugged my attention was the red, white, and blue banner hanging behind the stage. It was a grand vertical rectangle, long sides down, composed of three red uppercase letters in a heavy contemporary font, outlined in white and set on a blue background:

  S

  N

  R

  I thought of the newspaper column by the Union-Trib writer who wanted to know what the letters meant, and how the SNR regional office in San Diego wouldn’t tell him. I wondered how Alfred Battle had come to name the company his wife had bankrolled.

  One of the golf shirts looked across at me. Once again, it irked me that I hadn’t seen the faces of my attackers while they were busy beating mine. In a fair world you would at least get to see who’s behind the punches. And the kicks and gun butts. Besides being a PI working on a job, I was also a man itching for revenge. I’d seen Connor Donald’s snarling-lion tattoo. Maybe that would have to be enough.

  Framed by the towering banner behind him, hawk-faced Alfred Battle considered me from a distance.

  I drifted into the red tent, joining the audience watching a big-screen TV. Images of Charlottesville raced across it, mobs of haters, mobs of protesters, most of them young, most somewhere between angry and furious. Flying fists, torches, shields. A cheer went up as a white mob and a black mob dashed against each other.

  From behind the half-privacy of my sunglasses, I studied the men and women around me. Young and old. Some teens, too, and younger children. All were white and most were everyday-looking people who wouldn’t stand out.

  But some would. Tattoos were big: Confederate battle flags, iron and Gothic crosses, even a few swastikas mixed in with the bald eagles, American flags, Don’t Tread on Me rattlesnakes, and pierced hearts. And plenty of bling: Confederate battle-flag headbands, skull-and-dagger key rings, a young couple wearing matching singlets with images of a screaming Richard Spencer front and back. Trump buttons, Trump trucker and cowboy hats.

  A conference table had been set up and furnished with reading material, presided over by a preppie-looking young man, mid-twenties maybe, wearing a dark suit and an open-collared white button-down shirt. Behind him hung a green, black, and white banner, vaguely Nazi in design if not in color, with the letters KEK as its focal point.

  A poster board stood on the table beside him, and he watched me with a curious, open expression as I took it in. The top of th
e poster was a meme I recognized, Pepe the Frog, combined with an exaggerated cartoon of Donald Trump. Beneath Pepe/Trump’s grinning face was an oversized sheet of paper, yellowed and wrinkled to look like parchment, with what looked like a poem or meditation of some kind, printed in an Egyptian-looking font.

  “That’s the flag of Kekistan behind me,” he said. “And the froggy meme is Kek. Kek is an ancient Egyptian god with the head of a man. And below Kek is our Kekistani prayer.”

  I read it.

  Our Kek, who art in memetics

  Hallowed be thy memes

  The Trumpdom come

  Thy will be done

  In real life as it is on/pol/

  Give us this day our daily dubs

  And forgive those who bait against us

  And lead us not into cuckoldry

  But deliver us from shills

  For thine is the memetic kingdom, and the shitposting,

  And the winning, forever and ever

  Praise KEK

  “We got lots of play in the Charlottesville coverage,” he said. “What we’re trying to do is have some fun and make a serious point at the same time.”

  “What serious point?” I asked.

  “The United States of America needs chaos and darkness. Tear it all down and build it back again. Honor your ancestors. Don’t let our white children go extinct.”

  “What’s the fun part?”

  “Don’t you think he’s hilarious? Pepe the Frog mixed with Trump? There’s this whole video where Kek follows Hillary around before the election, then gets inside her and causes her nightmares and convulsions. Remember how old-looking she got toward Election Day? Then falling down, and that whole charade about her being exhausted? No way, citizen—that was Kek, working his magic.”

  “So it’s a put-on to get attention for your cause. Sort of get people laughing?”

  “Exactly. I’m not a racist, either. I’m a race realist. To quote my man Michael Enoch, ‘Diversity means you’re next, white people. Your heads are on the chopping block.’”

  He gave me a canny look, trying to see how his story was going over.

  “You’re a normie and that’s cool,” he said. “But here’s something to think about. Unless we take some dramatic action on all this immigration, our grandchildren will live in a country that hates them. As a result of America’s ongoing moronic military intervention around the world, we’re digging our children’s graves. You have kids?”

  I shook my head.

  “There’s a new website for single whites who happen to like other single whites. Man-woman, no gay crapola, no lesbos. It’s all straight white people, ready to breed. We have to replenish, that’s a fact. We need men like you. Check it out. I’ve got a daughter. And I will not bring her into a world where it’s okay for her to be fucked by darkies who give her drugs, who won’t work for a living because of biological limitations, and who’ll throw her in the garbage the minute they’re tired of her. Would you wish that on your daughter?”

  “Well, when you put it that way, I would not.”

  “Well, then, check out the site. Are you staying to hear Kyle Odysseus?”

  “Should I?”

  “He’s the future of this republic. And, hey—if you ever feel down or in need of a pick-me-up or just someone to talk to? Pray to KEK!”

  I tipped my hat and moved along, eyeing the hate-lit set out on the table. The Confessions of Nat Turner, Mein Kampf, The International Jew, Vigilantes of Christendom: The History of the Phineas Priesthood, and assorted titles by Thomas Dixon, George Lincoln Rockwell, Alfred Rosenberg, Hermann Göring, Ludwig von Mises, H. P. Lovecraft.

  On the “What You Should Be Reading” table I noted Cuckservative: How “Conservatives” Betrayed America; Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right; Barbarians: How Baby Boomers, Immigration, and Islam Screwed My Generation; Black Lies Matter; and ¡Adios, America! The Left’s Plan to Turn Our Country into a Third-World Hellhole.

  The blue tent was crowded with card tables set up as information centers for various California far-right organizations. I was surprised by how many there were.

  “More than any other state,” said a young blond woman. She rose from her chair and shook my hand. She wore a sleeveless navy dress and a diamond, ruby, and sapphire bracelet.

  “Laurel Davis.”

  “Blake Hopper, Fallbrook.”

  “Enjoying the Power Hour?”

  “My first time. Lots to see.”

  “Well,” she said, “some of these groups represented here aren’t much more than websites. But most of them do meet regularly, have dues and budgets and fund-raisers. Stated objectives and agenda. We’re the Institute for Historical Review of Newport Beach, and we don’t deny the Holocaust, but we do question the numbers. Serious historians have been questioning them for decades.”

  “Do you have a different number?”

  “There are several different accounting methods. Just as there are different ways to interpret the same historical events. Our research is continuing, of course, but right now we’re at just under eight hundred twenty thousand confirmed Jewish dead.”

  “Low, isn’t it?”

  She held my gaze and pursed her lips. She wore diamond, ruby, and sapphire earrings to match the bracelet. She looked like a Fourth of July magazine cover.

  “Low?” she asked. “Well, I’ll admit that after eighty years of academic, governmental, and Zionist brainwashing aimed at people like you and me, it can be easy to believe so. But if that number offends you . . . like I said, we’re finding out new things all the time.”

  “No offense at all,” I said. “I studied some history in college when I wasn’t surfing. Only got a BS, but I did learn that the past is constantly being revised. It’s human nature. Sometimes they get it right and sometimes they get it wrong.”

  “That’s why we exist,” she said with a small smile. “To get it right.”

  “I should have seen that one coming.”

  “Here’s a flyer and a link to us,” she said. “We do important work. We are not the Hysterical Review, as lib pundits like to say. We do not hide anything. Not all conservatives are low-IQ knuckle-draggers like some of these people. Come to our site. Listen and learn. We accept Bitcoin donations and good American greenbacks.”

  “You’re persuasive. But save the paper.”

  She gave me a nod and a look that concluded she couldn’t help me, sighed, and put the flyer back on the table.

  I continued my blue tent tour: The Daily Stormer, the Fraternal Order of Alt-Knights, The Right Stuff, Western Hammerskins, Patriot Front, Soldiers of Odin—LA/Ventura, Crew 38, Alamo Christian Foundation, Conservative’s Forum, Jihad Watch of Sherman Oaks, Counter Jihad Coalition of Santa Monica, Traditional Values Coalition of Anaheim, ACT for America, San Diegans for Secure Borders.

  Most of the reps were confident and well rehearsed in their pitches and opinions. There were a few knuckle-draggers, as Laurel had pointed out, but most of the White Power Hour presenters were young and well-groomed. They looked like normies themselves until they opened their mouths.

  I wandered through a labyrinth of voices:

  Martin Lucifer Coon was a fraud and a degenerate . . .

  At the core of Jewish Identity is a malevolent supremacy . . . The root of the kike problem is of course sexual inferiority . . .

  Stay in your own nations, we don’t want you here . . .

  Kyle Odysseus says it the best—Islam isn’t just a religion, it’s an economic, judicial, and military system, too . . .

  Whites must be allowed to take their own side in their affairs . . .

  Racism has had its day. It’s over. The remaining chasms between blacks and whites are natural, biological, and can never be narrowed . . .

 
38

  ////////////////////////

  ALFRED BATTLE took the stage just before one. The crowd overflowed the shade of the white tent, leaving scores of people standing in the muggy monsoonal heat of the afternoon. I found shade under the less-crowded red tent just as a barrage of heavy raindrops hit the canvas above me and sent a ripple of surprise through the unprotected rally crowd. A moment later it stopped.

  Battle stood at the lectern in his heavy brown suit, silver-haired and gaunt. He looked uneasy. Said a few words about the white race ceasing to be the dominant race on earth and likely extinct within a century, perhaps two. This would be a “bleak and self-inflicted catastrophe.” And if you didn’t believe him, read his book.

  Next, he had some advice for his beleaguered race.

  “As my writings explain,” he said, “our solution is simple in concept, clear in design, and certain to be effective. SNR.”

  I perked up. At last: the mysterious initials explained.

  “Segregate, Nullify, Remove. The inferior. The infidel. The dark and savage, the addicted and addled, the perverted, the weak and the malformed. And so, too, their white enablers, these beautiful children of privilege and Hollywood and Satan. Segregate them. Nullify them. Remove them. Also.”

  The applause was polite. He shuffled his papers nervously until the applause trailed off.

  “But I am an old man,” said Battle. “Listen now to tomorrow. God bless you all, and bless this once great nation.”

  Odysseus looked thirty. Wavy brown hair and a boy’s face. Sleek in a trim black suit and a skinny black tie.

  “It’s difficult to retake and redirect the modern narrative,” he said. A clear voice with a measured tone. “But we’re going to have to. I’m Kyle Odysseus, a middle-class Orange County, California, boy. My real last name is Smith. But to best redirect one’s self, sometimes you need to rename yourself. An ontological fine point, but nonetheless true. We become what we imagine. When I got out of college I traveled the world. I didn’t just go to the places people think are pretty or important. I saw it all. I went through thousands of dollars and six pairs of boots. And when I came back I felt like Odysseus returning home from Troy. Kind of tired and pissed off. And like him, when I looked around at my quaint suburban home and tried to recognize the loyal girl who used to be my friend and partner, I was appalled. She had surrendered to sloth and narcissism. I saw the self-absorbed, money-stunned drones who used to be my friends, openly consorting with the black and the brown and the swarthy and the pederasts and the mad. I wanted to slaughter them all. Are you people listening? Do you even fucking hear what I’m saying?”