Run You Down

by Julia Dahl

  The dog looks at her, but keeps barking.

  “Junior get the fuck over here!” She slaps her thigh and waves at me. “Junior NOW!”

  Junior obeys.

  “Sorry!” she shouts, waving at me. And then she addresses the dog: “Sit down, Junior. DOWN!” Junior does not sit down. She points her arms toward the old house. “JUNIOR! Go back home. GO! JUNIOR GO!”

  Junior goes. He trots in front of my car and goes to stand on the porch.

  “It’s okay,” she calls to me. “He’s harmless.”

  I doubt that, but I get out of the car anyway. The trailer this girl is calling to me from—its skirt rusted and come undone, a piece of plywood serving as entry ramp—looks as uncomfortable as any dwelling I’ve ever seen. The girl at the door is wearing an extra-large New York Jets sweatshirt and stretch pants. Baby-blue terry cloth slippers on her feet, mismatched wool socks, hair in a ponytail, nickel-sized black plugs in her earlobes.

  “Hi,” I say, standing at the base of the plywood ramp.

  “Sorry about that,” she says.

  “It’s okay,” I say. “I’m Rebekah. I’m actually looking for Ryan Hall.”

  “Ryan? I haven’t seen him in … a while.”

  “Oh,” I say. “So he doesn’t live here.”

  “Fuck no,” she says. “Not anymore.”

  “Oh” I say.

  “Hey, do you like jewelry?”

  “Jewelry?”

  “Come in,” she says. “I want you to try something on for me. If you have a sec.”

  The rules are that I’m supposed to tell her I’m a reporter now. But I’m not just a reporter. Yes; I’m looking for Ryan to find Sam because he’s connected to Pessie. But also—okay, I admit it—because I’m looking for Aviva. If anyone asks, I rationalize quickly, I can say I was just gathering information, off the record. For personal reasons.

  “Okay,” I say.

  Inside the trailer looks much better than outside. It is tight, but clean, and smells of baby powder. The enormous television is the dominant feature in the main room. Spreading like tentacles from its base is an impressive video game setup, with lots of plastic gadgets and knobs and weaponry. Charmed is on, but the girl has got the TV on mute and is instead listening to talk radio through an open laptop. A familiar and repugnant man’s voice growls about Obama. Beside the TV is a playpen, and inside the playpen is a little girl wearing a diaper and a t-shirt with a monkey on it. She grips the railing with her pudgy little hands and stares at the big screen. Beside the playpen, on what might once have been the kitchen table, is a little workshop. Silver and bronze and gold earrings hang in pairs on a neatly framed piece of window screen near the sink. Pliers and a small hammer lie beside a metal toolbox, drawers open revealing little loops and beads and chains. A mannequin’s torso is strung with necklaces of varying length, including a sleek pendant made of what looks like hammered brass. If it weren’t a swastika I would compliment it.

  “I’m Mellie,” she says. “Do you want something to drink? The coffee’s decaf.” She touches her belly; she is pregnant. “I’m supposed to be off caffeine.”

  “Decaf is cool,” I say. “Thanks.”

  “That’s Eva,” says Mellie.

  Hearing her name, Eva turns toward her mother. She is a beautiful little girl with a round face and big, hazel eyes. I’d guess she’s around one, but I don’t really know much about babies.

  “Hi Eva,” I say.

  Eva is sucking on a pacifier. She looks at me, then back at her mom, then returns her gaze to the television.

  “I need a model for some new earrings,” she says, pointing to the table. “The lightning bolts. I don’t have to use your face or anything, if you don’t want. Just, like, a close-up of your ear.”

  I look at the earrings she is talking about—a pair of silver SS lightning bolts, each about an inch long. Beside those are other similarly dainty designs: Celtic crosses, suns, swastikas, and several versions of the number fourteen. I’m not going to say yes to having my picture taken in this stuff—I wonder if my ears would catch fire?—but I don’t need to say no right away, either.

  “A lot more girls are doing the shaved head thing. If I wasn’t so fat I’d cut mine. Maybe after the baby comes. Hank would love that. Did you shave it yourself?”

  I rub my hand over my head. “No,” I say. “It was kind of an accident.”

  “Have you ever done any modeling?” she asks, pouring me coffee into a mug with a deer and the words ADIRONDACK STATE PARK on it. She takes some milk out of the fridge and I add a little, wave off sugar. “I know a guy who makes t-shirts and panties and stuff and he’s always looking for hot skinhead chicks. Do you have tattoos?”

  “No,” I say.

  She shrugs. “Well, anyway. He’s up in Troy. I could give you his number.”

  I suppose I should take this as a compliment. Wait till I tell Iris: I’ve been spotted by a Nazi model scout!

  “You sell online?” I ask.

  “Yeah,” she says. “Online and at shows. I did pretty good on Etsy for a while but I got kicked off last year—which is total bullshit. If you say your swastika’s Buddhist you can sell whatever you want. And people can sell vintage SS pieces.” She shrugs. “I do other stuff, too, like hoops and stars and crosses. But the white power stuff sells the best. There aren’t that many other people making it. I’ve got a pretty good following now. Valentine’s Day and Christmas are my big holidays. And I’ve done a couple wedding parties. It’s kinda slow right now so I’m trying some new stuff. I like the lightning bolts ’cause they’re subtle, you know? Like, if you want to represent at work but your boss is a liberal or a nigger or something.”

  I’ve never known how to respond to people who use racial slurs easily. I don’t encounter them much, fortunately—although there is one photographer for the Trib who talks like he’s living in 1950s Alabama—but when I do it’s always a little shocking. Mellie looks perfectly normal. Throw a pair of boots on her and she’d blend right in on Bedford Avenue.

  “Have you been doing it a while?” I ask.

  “A couple years. I started right around when I got pregnant with her. Hank goes to the gun shows with his dad and there’s always all these wives and girlfriends wandering around kinda bored. Nan—that’s his grandma—used to bitch about how there’s never any good accessories for women. Nothing, like, feminine. That’s sorta what I’m known for. We go to bike rallies, too, and the patriot marches. Here,” she says, opening a plastic file box that’s tucked beneath the kitchen table. She hands me a shiny black business card with a Web site address printed in hot pink: WWW.WHITEGIRLPOWER.COM.

  “Cool,” I say again. “So when are you due?”

  “July eighteen. It’s a boy. Thank God. Hank’s obsessed with the bloodline. Well, really it’s his dad, Connie, who’s obsessed. But Hank, too. Him and his dad are really close. Especially now that Ryan’s a faggot.…” She pauses. “Wait, how do you know him again?”

  “I’m actually looking for a friend of his. Sam Kagan?”

  Mellie’s expression changes. She raises an eyebrow. “You’re friends with Sam?”

  “Well, no. I’ve never met him. I’m looking for him because…” I don’t want to tell the whole story, so I use shorthand: “I’m adopted. And I think Sam might know my birth mom.”

  “You’re adopted?”

  “Yeah,” I say, hoping I don’t have to extend this lie too much longer.

  “Me, too.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “My birth mom was a junkie. She got locked up when I was a baby and my dad wasn’t in the picture. I was in foster care for a couple months then my mom’s cousin ended up adopting me.” She looks up expectantly. It’s my turn.

  “My mom gave me up. She had me really young.”

  “So you’ve never met.”

  I shake my head.

  “Oh wow,” says Mellie. She lowers her voice. “Sam’s a Jew, did you know that?”

  “Oh?” I
say.

  “Yeah. One of those crazy black hat kikes. Like, with the coats and the…” She makes a spiral beside her head.

  “Huh,” I say, trying to sound like I don’t quite know what she’s talking about.

  “Do you think you might be Jewish?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. It’s not a lie. Okay, it’s a lie. I am denying my Judaism in the home of a Nazi.

  “I hope not, for your sake,” she says. “They’re really dangerous. I mean, they’re breeding an army down there in Rockland County. You know they all have like ten kids. At least! And they’re all on welfare. I mean, they’re seriously worse than niggers and spics on that. But nobody knows about it. That’s what so crazy. They’re taking over the school boards and the city councils and they’re all fucked up sexually. They have arranged marriages, like the Muslims. And men and women can’t even touch. And they let people molest their kids. Seriously.”

  “Huh,” I say again.

  “Fucking Sam,” she says, shaking her head. Eva spits out her pacifier and starts whining. “You hungry?” she asks the child, already reaching for the refrigerator door. “If you see him, tell Sam to stay the fuck away from here. Connie’ll shoot him if he sees him. I might, too.” She pours whole milk from a plastic gallon jug into a bottle, twists the cap on, shakes it, and hands it to Eva. “He’s caused a lot of drama. First of all, he’s a total liar. Him and Ryan both. I can’t even get into it it’s so bad. People are always trying to infiltrate the Brotherhood, so Connie thinks he’s a narc. I don’t know if he’s like, FBI, or some Jew mafia, but the point is that now, even though we’re supposed to be saving for a place of our own that isn’t right on top of his whole family, Hank’s basically spending all our money on guns.”

  “Guns?”

  “Connie says it’s an investment. All this shit with Ryan and Sam has got him paranoid. I mean, race war is coming. If you look at history. And Connie says the first battle is gonna be with the Jews. He’s like, the Jews are organized, you know? Niggers can’t stop shooting each other. He’s got a connection down in the Carolinas and him and Hank have been bringing the guns up so when Obama really cracks down we can sell ’em to everybody who didn’t see it coming. We’ve already sold some, since fucking Cuomo’s fascist new law. People are starting to see what’s happening, finally.” She sighs and sits down at her jewelry table. “So, I get it. I do. But honestly, I kind of wish Hank would just get a job.”

  I’ve interviewed a lot of wacky people in the past six months at the Trib. In October I was on a day-long stakeout in Tribeca for a banker who’d been arrested for rape when some guy latched on to me and swore up and down he’d been “investigating” the bankers moving into the area and found a secret apartment they kept to take girls and torture them. He tried to convince me he had paperwork proving that Goldman Sachs was paying for everything and that if I came up to his apartment he’d give me an exclusive. Needless to say I did not go up to this man’s apartment. I expect conspiracy theories from people—but race war?

  Mellie continues. “Hank practically blew himself up a couple weeks ago trying to make some stupid pipe bomb. I love him but sometimes he’s a fucking idiot. That other trailer is, like, basically unlivable now.” She shakes her head. “I mean, I’d like my kids to grow up with a father, you know?”

  Junior starts barking outside, announcing a car. It is, I decide, time to go.

  “I should probably take off,” I say, setting my coffee down.

  Outside, a man shouts, “Shut up, Junior!” The dog shuts up. A car door slams. Another creaks open.

  “Oh wait, what about the earrings?”

  I have the front door open. “My holes are actually a little infected right now,” I say, stepping outside. “I wouldn’t want to, like, contaminate them.”

  In the dirt circle linking Mellie’s trailer, the old house, and the site of her boyfriend’s apparent attempt at becoming the Unabomber, a man who looks about fifty is lifting a wheelchair out of the bed of a pickup truck.

  “Hank ain’t home yet?” the man asks Mellie.

  “Nope.”

  The man is wearing a long-sleeved Orange County Choppers t-shirt and jeans tucked into what look like surplus military boots. He is very lean, with a close-trimmed gray beard, and most of his skin not covered by clothing is inked. From here, I see a spiderweb with a swastika at the center on one side of his neck and a large shamrock on the other. Each knuckle is adorned with some kind of symbol or letter or God-knows-what, and the back of both his hands have skulls on them. In Roseville, the women seemed to assume I was Jewish, but apparently I blend in here, too. I look at Saul’s car and suddenly realize there is a very real possibility that something—a Yiddish language flyer or a parking pass for a shul—might be visible. I should get out of here.

  The man rolls the wheelchair to the passenger-side door, then lifts an old lady who is missing both legs into it.

  “Who’s your friend?” asks the old lady, her voice rattling like a lawnmower.

  “Rebekah,” says Mellie.

  “Love your hair, Rebekah.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  AVIVA

  For several weeks after he left Roseville, Sammy barely went outside the yellow house. He did little but sleep and talk to Pessie on the phone. I told him I thought it was unhealthy to be so attached. I said it was unfair to her. But he said I was wrong and that they understood each other. She came to the house every week with food and they cooked dinner together. I told her I thought it was very nice of her to be his friend after what he had done.

  “Sammy didn’t like to hurt me,” she said, looking down at her feet, which were still too long for her little body. She’d never grown into them, and at eighteen years old she barely looked fourteen. “Hashem has plans for him. He is going to help the other boys. But he cannot stay in the community. And I understand. Perhaps he is a little like you?”

  I asked Sammy what Pessie meant by helping the other boys, and he said she wanted him to start a group for Chassidish boys who’d been molested.

  “Are you going to do that?” I asked.

  “Probably not,” he said.

  “What are you going to do?”

  Sammy shrugged.

  “You know,” I said, “I had a very hard time after Mommy died and I went to Israel. I went to talk to a doctor and he gave me medication. It made me feel better.”

  “I don’t need crazy pills, okay? I just need to be left alone.”

  I decided not to argue, and a few weeks later I saw a HELP WANTED sign in the window of a Mobil gas station that was walking distance from the house. I convinced Sammy to go apply, and he got the job—which wasn’t much of a job: just a six-hour shift unloading trucks of beer each Monday and Thursday. On the second Thursday, Sammy met Ryan Hall.

  Ryan was riding in the truck with his father, who worked for a beverage distributor out of Albany. He invited Sammy to a bar to hear a band that night. At first I didn’t realize he’d fallen in love. Sammy hadn’t said he was gay, and I assumed he broke off the engagement to Pessie because of the abuse, or maybe because he didn’t want to live a frum life and she did. But after that first night, all he talked about was Ryan. I didn’t mind Ryan. He was polite and I was glad Sammy had a friend who wasn’t Pessie. But then I saw the tattoos. Ryan was coming out of the shower with just a towel around his waist one evening as I was coming up the stairs to drop my things after work. He turned the corner to go into Sammy’s bedroom and there on his right shoulder blade was a swastika.

  I went to the kitchen and waited for them to come down. I waited for hours. The sun went down. I drank a whole bottle of wine as I waited. Our mother survived the Nazis. She was born in the Warsaw ghetto and in 1942, when she was six months old, her parents got notice they were to go to Treblinka to a work camp. They died there, of course, like everyone else, but before they went they left her with my father’s former employer, a Catholic butcher named Josef Soskowitz. The penalty for protecting a Jew w
as death, but Josef and his wife told the Nazis my mother was theirs. There was so little food in the ghetto that my mother barely weighed ten pounds, so the officers believed the Soskowitzs when they said she was a newborn. When the war was over and my grandparents—like three million other Polish Jews—did not come back, the Soskowitzs followed the instructions they’d left and wrote to an uncle in what would soon be Israel. A few months later, Josef escorted four-year-old Bracha to Switzerland, where her mother’s cousin met them and brought my mother to Jerusalem to live with his family.

  My mother told this story to us every year on Yom HaShoah. When I was ten, someone spraypainted a red swastika on the outside of our shul and my mother took us to see it.

  “This is why we live the way we do,” she said. “This is what they want to do to us.”

  I had nightmares about the swastika. Over and over, I dreamt that the man who painted it was chasing me, spraying poison. My mother told me that she had nightmares, too, and that the nightmares were Hashem reminding us that the world is a dangerous place for a Jew.

  But Sammy never knew my mother. He never heard her tell her stories. When he and Ryan finally came downstairs they were high. Sammy kissed the top of my head and Ryan opened the refrigerator door and brought out three cans of beer. Suddenly, he frightened me. I thought, if I confront him now he will kill us both. I got up and told them good night and then I went upstairs and threw up the wine. It came out in a tidal wave. Sammy and Ryan went out and Sammy didn’t get home until the next afternoon. I was still in bed. I felt paralyzed by what that swastika on Ryan’s back meant. Sammy had to have seen it. Did he think it didn’t matter? When I heard him coming up the stairs I opened my door and he smiled at me. He looked happy.