A DISTANT THUNDER

by H. A. Covington

  Finally they brought a Burger King down from Seattle, although of course I didn’t call him that in my mind at the time. I didn’t even know what a Jew was. On the third day I was taken in to the principal’s office. Mr. Jenkins left, and I found myself facing a plump little man with thick glasses and a big nose and a frizzy reddish beard that looked like pubic hair, and a little blue and white knitted beanie on his head. “Hello, Shane,” he said in a friendly voice. His glasses reflected the flourescent lights on the ceiling in an odd way and kind of blanked out his eyes with white light, so it was like I was talking to some kind of funky robot, which I actually thought was pretty funny. I smiled at him because he looked really dumb with no eyes and the beanie, and he no doubt took that as me being overawed by his magisterial presence. God, kikes are such arrogant bastards! “My name is Jacob Mandelbaum,” he tells me. “You can call me Doctor Jake. Or Rabbi Jake, because I’m also a rabbi. Do you know what a rabbi is, Shane?”

  “No, sir,” I said. By this time I had figured out that it was best if I said as little as possible, even though that as well had its perils, because they claimed I was being “unresponsive” and I couldn’t stay in school and Dad wouldn’t get his job back and we would have to go live in a Motel 6 unless I was responsive to the social reconditioning therapy, at which point they totally lost me. It was winter and what did air conditioning have to do with anything? But I’d tried simply explaining what happened with Bobby Fernandez and that just made them mad, and I’d made a couple of attempts to figure out what they wanted to hear and say that so they would let me go and leave me alone, but it just led to them trying to trip me up with more questions like the stupid ones about Dad allegedly touching my peepee and others even more deranged. I had no idea what was happening to me or why, and so I’d decided I’d best clam up and see if I could get away with giving them some kind of bare minimum, enough to make it all go away. At eight years of age I didn’t think all this out quite in those terms, but close enough.

  Doctor-Rabbi Jake told me, “Well, Shane, I am of the Jewish faith, and in my religion a rabbi is kind of like a minister or a priest in a Christian church, but also much more. Among Jewish people a rabbi is a teacher, and he spends most of his life accumulating wisdom. You see, long ago in Bible times, God Himself chose the Jewish people as his very best and favorite people on earth, and gave us the task of guiding and inspiring all the rest of the peoples of the earth so that they will be good and do His will. In order for us to accomplish this divine mission, He gave us His word as set down in the holy books, the Torah and the Talmud, and in every generation He gives the Jewish people and all of mankind certain holy men, great rabbis called tzaddiks, which means saints. These men spend their lives studying those holy books so they have answers for all questions and so they have all the knowledge on earth that mankind ever really needs to know. The Jewish people are the custodians of that divine knowledge, Shane, and I am proud and happy to say that finally, after many thousands of years, the nations of the earth are beginning to acknowledge that fact. Our great American President and our wonderful American soldiers who are fighting for democracy and freedom in the Middle East are striking down the enemies of God and bringing more and more of earth’s peoples into the Brotherhood of Man, which is the ultimate goal of Judaism. And of course they are also reaping the bounty that God gives to those who do his will, in the form of the petroleum reserves which have been so long abused by the wicked sons of Ishmael, who are only now being taught the wrongness of their false faith and their hateful ways.”

  “Ishmael?” I asked. I had a vague impression in my mind of Moby Dick.

  “Yes, Shane, Muslims are the sons of Ishmael by our father Abraham, but not righteous children. The Jewish people are the sons of Abraham by his true wife Sarah who bore Isaac, but Muslims were born of Sarah’s handmaiden, a shiksa slave named Hagar, and so all Muslims are the sons of a whore and thereby bound to serve the true children of Abraham, the Jews. Never mind, that’s theology and it’s a bit beyond you now. If you go to a true Christian church your preacher can explain this to you later. But I have more than the knowledge of the word of God, Shane. I’m also very learned in the science of the human mind.”

  “You’re a shrink?” I asked. I had heard about shrinks.

  “Yes, Shane, I’m a shrink,” said Mandelbaum with a delighted chuckle.

  “Are you going to put me in the cackle box?” I demanded. I knew about the cackle box from TV. It had rubber rooms, and people wore white jackets with arms all tied up, and everybody yelled and laughed and cried and screamed until the nurses came and gave you shots that turned you into a zombie and then you ate bugs like Renfield and sat around all day weaving baskets.

  “Oh, I don’t think your case is quite so bad as to require institutional treatment, Shane,” replied Doctor-Rabbi Jake with a smile, but I could tell he wasn’t quite sure and I was definitely on my guard. “But you see, I am a doctor of the mind. You did something very bad, something which tells me that everything isn’t right in your mind, Shane, that indeed something is very sick in your mind. I want to make you well. I believe Doctor Anderson and Ms. Winslow-Panetta have explained to you what racism is?”

  That one I had down pat from watching the videos. “It’s when you don’t like people who are different than you,” I recited by rote.

  “Mmmm, not exactly, Shane,” said Doctor-Rabbi Jake. “It’s when you hate people who are different from you. Do you know what hate is, Shane?”

  “Hate is when you really, really, really don’t like somebody real bad.”

  “Mmm, again, close but no cigar. Hate is when you don’t like someone because of what they are. What they may do is irrelevant. Hate is not an emotion, it is a political position, one that can no longer be tolerated in civilized society. It’s not just a psychiatric issue, it’s a criminal issue, and as such it is treatable by legal means. Hate is a social disease of the mind, Shane, and it is the duty of my profession to make sure that no one in America suffers from this disease and that everyone in America is all right in their minds, and not thinking bad thoughts. Humanity has just come through a very bad century, Shane, but we learned a lot from it. We learned that all of the world’s problems are caused by hate, specifically hatred by people of your race and gender. White males like you who hate people who are of different colors and religions and sexual orientations are a cancer on the body of society and you have to be excised, even if as in your case you are too young to understand all the reasons for it. I know this is a bit much for someone your age to understand, but for many past centuries of history white males like yourself rampaged through the world like marauding ghouls. You did very bad and cruel things to people of color, to indigenous peoples like the Native Americans and the peoples of sub-Saharan Africa, to women of all colors, to gay people, and last but not least, you did terrible and evil things to my own Jewish people. Nowadays we’re much wiser. We understand the evil that hatred has done in the past and the pain and the suffering that it still does, like what happened the other day on your playground between you and Roberto Fernandez. We understand that we have to stop the hate, Shane, stop it by whatever means necessary, and the best way to stop it is to nip it in the bud.

  “Now, Shane, your mind is full of hate. You might say that your mind is broken, and I have come all the way down here from Seattle to fix it. I don’t know exactly where you got this horrible sickness of racism from. It could be almost anywhere. Despite all the gains we have made in the past fifty years, American society is still deeply and pervasively racist, and anything and anyone can turn out to be an agent of the infection, sometimes even without knowing it. Somehow or another we have to get inside your mind and we have to get rid of all that horrible hate. We have to cleanse your mind, Shane, and your soul as well. We have to scrub away all that dirty and horrible old hate, and make your mind and your heart and your soul new and shiny and squeaky clean. Now Shane, I want you to tell me why you so atrociously attacked and injured
little Roberto on Monday?”

  “Because he kept trying to make me suck his dick and I didn’t wanna!” I said for what must have been the two hundredth time.

  Mandelbaum scowled. “Shane, do you know what homophobia is? No, of course not. You should know by your age, but you don’t, because you’ve never been taught. Those proto-fascist bigots in the state legislature are still dragging their feet on bringing sexual diversity education into the schools, although I’m pretty sure we’re going to get the votes next session. But what I want to know, Shane, is who exactly told you that an approach for sexual contact from someone of the same gender requires a violent response? In other words, who told you it was all right to hurt another boy who wants to play with you in that way? Was it your father?” Jeez, I thought, there they go on Dad and peepees again. Whuzzup wid dat? (I told you, we all talked and thought like whiggers back then. We got it off rap videos on TV.)

  “I just don’t wanna do that,” I said sulkily. “It’s dirty.”

  “But why not, Shane?” Mandelbaum pressed me. “What makes you think that? Who told you it was dirty? Was it your parents?”

  I was desperately groping around in my mind for something to say that would get off this topic. I didn’t understand why, but somehow I understood within me that it was just wrong to be talking about little boys sucking on one another’s peepees. “The Bible says it’s dirty!” I told him. I had no idea whether or not the Bible actually said that, but I had some vague feeling that this was the case. I knew the Bible didn’t like anything to do with peepees. Don’t ask me where I got that. Not off TV, that’s for sure.

  “Ahhhh... “ exhaled Doctor-Rabbi Jake with satisfaction. “Now we’re getting somewhere! Do your parents read the Bible to you, Shane?”

  “No,” I said. Of course my parents didn’t read the Bible to me. They didn’t read anything to me or to themselves. They didn’t do anything except drink and fight and pass out on the floor. It was an incredibly stupid question.

  “Shane, you can tell me,” said Doctor-Rabbi Jake soothingly. “I’m your rabbi, remember?”

  “Well, my mom has a Bible,” I said, floundering around trying to figure out what he wanted to hear, and it was true. My mother did have one. It was a Gideon Bible that for some reason she had stolen from a hotel room some years before. She used it to prop open the kitchen door for a while, and later on as a coaster for her highball glass.

  “Aha!” exclaimed Mandelbaum. “Now, Shane, I want you to think carefully. This Bible that your mother reads to you from, do you know if it’s something called a King James Bible?”

  “Uh, yeah,” I said. That much I did know. I’d been alone in the house one rainy day and I’d picked it up off the coffee table, opened the whiskey-stained covers and looked it over. I got bored with it after a while and never tried to read it again, but I did remember the words “King James Translation” in faded gold letters on the black pseudo-leather spine.

  “That, to my mind, is conclusive,” said Doctor-Rabbi Jake, sitting back in the principal’s chair in satisfaction. “You see, Shane, the King James Bible is a very old version, and it has some beautiful language in it, coming as it does from the time of Shakespeare.”

  “Who?” I asked. It was a funny name. In my mind I saw some guy shaking a spear around in the air.

  “Ah, never mind, Shane, he is a dead white European male from very long ago and he is no one you’ll ever need to know about.” (Who would have thought the old man had so much blood in him?) “But because the King James version is so very old, written in the time when only white males were allowed to have any power or influence in the world, it contains a lot of hate, such as the command in Genesis about each species seeking after its own kind. One of the many divine injunctions which was intended only for the Jewish people, which shows the danger of allowing goyim, er, I mean non-Jews to have anything to do with the Bible at all. It’s like giving a child a loaded gun. The King James is especially hateful against gay people because of the gross mistranslations of Leviticus and people in racially mixed relationships, as witness that horrible story in Numbers about Phineas. Fortunately we now live in a much more enlightened age when Christian theologians with the input and assistance of Jewish scholars have produced several far more inclusive versions. I think the first step is definitely to have a word with your mother, and persuade her to hand over that King James she is clearly unfitted to possess or use and accept instead a copy of one of the inclusive versions.”

  To this day I don’t know what would have happened if Doc-Rabbi Jake had gone to our house and demanded that whiskey-sodden, stained, tattered old Gideon Bible from my mom. She probably would have sold it to him for the price of a bottle of Jim Beam. But then I did it again, and this time I really screwed myself for life. A sudden thought struck me. “Doctor Rabbi Jake, white people aren’t supposed to hate people with dark skins, right?” I asked.

  “That’s right, Shane. It is very wrong,” said Mandelbaum primly.

  “Then what about Muslims?” I demanded. “Mohammed who used to work down at the Speedy Mart on Harrison Avenue was a Muslim, and when some big kids from Centralia beat on him with tire irons everybody in town chipped in to hire Mr. Stevens as their lawyer and the judge let them off with a fine because they were drunk and they were just defending their country and standing up for Amurrica, and there was this colored girl in sixth grade, her name was Amina, and she had long black hair but she wore this long scarf over it, and somebody said she was a Muslim and a terrorist, and Mrs. Sackett made her stand up in front of the class and she ripped off the scarf and showed her hair to all the boys and they laughed at her, and Mrs.

  Sackett made Amina stand up and pledge allegiance to the flag and kneel down before a picture of Jesus or she couldn’t come to school any more and the school board said she was just standing up for Amurrica and supporting our troops, and then Amina’s house got set on fire by the Baptists and they moved away. Muslims have colored skins but Mrs. Sackett and Mr. Hansen and Ms. Rawlins and Ms. Gelinsky say they’re bad and Amurrica has to go into their countries and kill them unless they get civilized and make peace with Izrul and give us all their oil to prove they’re civilized now.”

  My defending Muslims? No, it wasn’t that. That was something the Burger King could have handled from a child, and I am sure he had a stock set of facile answers on hand for such a sitch. But completely unwittingly, I had freaked him out, and once you can throw a Jew off balance he doesn’t recover well, and usually goes into hysterics. In this case I used a dirty word. A Party word. First time in my life I ever said it, years before I even knew the Party existed, and I had no idea on earth what I was saying. My destiny called, and I didn’t even hear or understand it. Mandelbaum froze. “Who told you to say America like that?” he hissed. All of a sudden he was no longer friendly robot Doctor-Rabbi Jake.

  “Huh?” I asked, not having the slightest idea what the Jew was talking about.

  “You said ‘Amurrica’!” said Mandelbaum, his voice trembling and ponderous, accusing, heavy with menace.

  “Yeah,” I responded. “Amurrica. That’s our country isn’t it? Why shouldn’t I say Amurrica?”

  “There are some very, very bad people who say Amurrica, Shane,” said Mandelbaum, rising from his seat behind the principal’s desk like some towering, threatening mountain of Philadelphia cream cheese. He had completely and totally lost me. We lived in Amurrica, right? At least, that’s what I had always believed. Was everyone around me insane or lying? What the hell was this crazy man mad at me about? “Who told you to say Amurrica?” he almost shouted.

  “Everybody,” I said, completely mystified. “Everybody says Amurrica!” And it was true. Everybody who was eight years old did say Amurrica instead of A-MAY-rica or A-MER-ica. Jesus Christ on a raft, you stupid—we were children, you stupid motherfuckers...! Ma’am, I’m sorry, I did it again, I understand that word is a revolting niggerism which is no longer in any way acceptable in polite society, and
yet again I must ask your understanding and that you to remember my age and where I came from. Isn’t it strange, though? After all these years, I still hate them, and it’s not because of the many much more horrible things they did. Not for their murder and their tyranny, not because of the poverty and misery and denial of our very humanity. It’s the little, stupid wicked things that ZOG did that still enrage someone like me, after all these years. Browbeating and bullyragging on a child. The banality of evil, I have heard it called. They were real, real good at hurting children, those pieces of human garbage who ruled when we were the United States. It was their speciality.

  Mandelbaum came around the desk and leaned over. His proboscidian visage was right in my face. “Shane, I am going to give you one last chance to tell me the truth. Otherwise I will be forced by my duty to humanity to invoke a new law that our country has been forced to impose in order to deal with this kind of situation. The law of It Takes A Village. You cannot be allowed to remain in this shocking, vicious, racist environment.” Well, he got two out of three right. My home environment was shocking and vicious, but not racist. Just drunk. “Now you will tell me the truth, Shane! Have you ever seen a flag, a wicked and evil flag with three sections, one blue, one white, one green? Have your parents ever shown you such a flag or anything, a picture, a coffee mug, anything with such a flag on it?”