A DISTANT THUNDER

by H. A. Covington

  Carter sat down and looked back at me. “That is horse shit, and don’t you ever let me hear you say anything like that again, or I’ll break your jaw,” he said to me. “My child’s death was fore-ordained on the day four centuries ago when those morons at Jamestown traded two perfectly good barrels of sipping whiskey to some Dutchmen in exchange for twenty niggers. Stupid deeds have consequences, and evil deeds have evil consequences, and sometimes they even go beyond the seventh generation the Bible commands that the sins of the fathers must be atoned for. Generation after generation of our people lived out their lives as disgusting cowards who left this job to be done and this bill to be paid by us, may they burn in hell. You and me just paid another jolt on that divine tab that we never run up, and we’re gone pay more before it’s done, but somebody has to pay that tab! God will not be mocked. He will not be cheated of his due. We used up all our passes long ago and He will no longer give the white race a free lunch. The reckoning for our weakness and our sloth and our cowardice as a people will be paid, and all the damnable, heart-wrenching, soul-destroying interest that goes with it. Because until the scales are balanced nothing good can ever come again in the world.”

  There was a protocol for burying Volunteers who were killed in action, and whose bodies weren’t taken by the enemy. Wherever possible, the remains were given to the surviving family if that family were above ground themselves, in both the physical and the political sense, so that our dead could receive a public interment, a Tricolor on the coffin, and if possible a firing party with black sweaters and ski-masks. Rooney and I had both donned the balaclava and participated in several such firing parties for the benefit of the news media. In this case there were no open and above-ground relatives, and so we would have to bury my wife ourselves, in secret, lest ZOG seize her body and cremate her and flush the ashes down the toilet like FATPO liked to boast of doing, or else they’d bury her in some unknown, unmarked pauper’s grave beside winos and niggers. In such cases, our people were always buried with a Tricolor of some kind, even if it was only one of the pre-10/22 toy ornaments, and also with a paper signed by the ranking officer giving the name of the slain Volunteer and a brief description of his or her service and the circumstances in which they had died in action. We also buried them wrapped in plastic sheeting so that there would hopefully be something left in that far off time when we could come back for our loved and honored dead, and love them and honor them before all the world with no more running and hiding. In this case all we were able to find for her shroud were heavy-duty black plastic garbage bags, several of which we pulled over her legs and her head. Someone, Carter or China maybe, had smoothed her features out so that she no longer wore that horrible grin, and closed her eyes. I watched her now peaceful face disappear beneath the black plastic, never more to see her in this world. Before we bound her tight with cord, China stepped forward, bent down, shifted the bags and put the battered and tattered, faded green stuffed alligator Chompus in with her sister. “He was Rooney’s before he was mine,” she explained. “We used to fight over him when we were children. He is hers now, forever.” It seemed right that she should have something with her from South Carolina.

  So we buried my love in her garbage bags beneath a solitary pine on a hilltop high over the distant sea. After she was covered and the branches and leaves laid over her to conceal her from the monsters of ZOG who would seek to desecrate her resting place, Noble Gill opened the Book and spoke the words of the psalm that we had heard together, hand in hand, on the night of October 22nd. “He breaketh the bow...He snappeth the spear in sunder...I shall be exalted among the heathen, I shall be exalted in the earth. For the Lord of Hosts is with me...”

  * * *

  Shadows. Just shadows.

  How could shadows take my love away from me?

  Some years later I went through a kind of nostalgia phase, I guess you’d call it. People in the Northwest Republic were just starting to get interested and get into serious historical research about the revolutionary period, now that enough years had gone by to give it a little distance and make it history, and I was able to get hold of one of the Party’s chroniclers who helped me track down in some archive or other the actual police logbooks and reports and documentation of that night. Long story short, I ended up knowing who those Chehalis police were who had heard the Fattie radio call, and who on that one night of all nights had decided to be good coppers again for a bit and not to ignore us when they saw us coming down the street. One afternoon I found myself sitting in my study reading their meager report of shots fired in the dim and rainy night. The shadows at long last had names.

  There were two of them. Not FATPOs, just ordinary cops. Their names don’t matter now, since they’re both long dead. There was only one bullet, so just one of them is guilty, and the other is innocent and should not be falsely accused. The older man of the two was a problem cop who had a number of disciplinaries in his jacket for excessive force, drinking on duty, and so forth. He had gone to rehab for a couple of months for alcoholism, at taxpayer’s expense, of course. About four months after Rooney was killed he was placed on suspension for boozing for the umpteenth time, and while he was off duty on this enforced vacation he was racing his dirt bike through the woods and he managed to drive himself over a cliff and break his neck. His autopsy showed his blood alcohol level to be 1.2. Was he drunk that night beneath the street lights? His track record shows he might have been. Did my darling die at the hands of a drunk who just happened to hit a one in a hundred lucky shot? Did that goddamned liquor bottle manage to inflict one more blow of agony on me even after Mom and Dad were through with me? Do the gods have that kind of cruel sense of humor?

  The younger cop stayed with the force for the entire war. After Longview he and his family must have been worried about something, because they fled the country and settled in Arizona, of all the hellish places. After ten years down there in Aztlan amongst the cholos, they had applied to come back to Washington, surprise, surprise. As part of the process of his Homecoming, the former cop had to make a full admission by affidavit to the Bureau of Race and Resettlement and appear in person for a hearing before the Truth Commission, detailing his American military service and stating whether or not he had been involved in any activity the Party considered criminal, i.e. torture of prisoners, liaison with FATPO units, recruiting and suborning informers, participation in FBI raids or activities, etc. The cop listed a few minor acts of co-operation with the FBI. That call on a rainy spring night in Chehalis wasn’t on the list. Why should it have been?

  He didn’t even know what he had done. He and his family were allowed to Come Home and he got a job in a furniture factory where he was still working at the time I acquired all this information. Although I didn’t recognize the name, it is entirely possible that I had seen this guy on the street in Chehalis or Centralia or Dundee, both before and after Rooney’s death. But was it him or his boozehound partner who had fired the bullet that killed my wife? Looking over their two brief incident reports in the archives, I understood that neither of them realized they had hit anyone at all. Like me, in the darkness they had seen only flickering shadows in the oncoming Volvo on the rainy street, and the popping muzzle flash of my Uzi, and they had popped a few rounds in the direction of an enemy who was shooting at them. For them it was a minor occurrence. There was a lot of shooting in those days. They had survived it, written up their reports and gone home, one to his wife and one to his bottle, thankful to have made it through another shift alive. It was impossible ever to determine which of them had actually fired the shot that killed Rooney.

  So now I had a name, what the hell was I supposed to do with it? Go and confront the surviving man? Stan Brodka’ s son had that same choice to make a few years later with me, and he chose to do it, but this business with finding out about those men and Rooney happened before young Brodka came to my house that day, so I had no guide. Why should I go see this former cop over something which by that time was twe
nty-odd years in the past? He and I both had new lives to live. I had come as close to finding out the truth as I ever would. The guy couldn’t tell me anything I didn’t get from his yellowed report and he’d probably forgotten all about the whole thing. Should I try to get some kind of apology from him? Why? I’d shot at him and tried to kill him first. What the hell should I have expected him to do? And even if he did apologize, either because he sincerely regretted what had happened or else because he figured it would be politic to appease a vet who’d fought on the winning side and still might make trouble, what would that gain? It wouldn’t bring Rooney back. I now had all I would ever have of her in my memory, the smell of her hair and the sound of her voice and the feel of her head on my shoulder out there on that loading dock on the golden afternoon of 10/22, as we knew the world was changing and we couldn’t wait to be part of it all. How could dragging up the past and making this man feel bad for a life he didn’t even know he’d taken help anyone or anything? So I decided I knew all I’d ever need to know to satisfy my own mind, and I let it go.

  I did something else. I didn’t tell China that I had found out the man’s name. Never did. It was the only thing I ever withheld from her. This was either a very kind and noble thing to do, or else a very foul and disgraceful thing to do, and to this day I am damned if I know which.

  A couple of years ago, by sheer coincidence, I was in a church cemetery in Chehalis attending the funeral of the last old comrade from Echo Company to pass on besides me. It was Volunteer Barry Robinson, aka Spiderman, the one who with his girlfriend Suzie Q. had gone with us on the Rothstein tickle. As the only remaining representative of the Old NVA Association in the county, I personally laid the wreath and planted the little Tricolor flag on the grave. I was leaving with one of my sons, going towards the car, when I happened to pass a headstone with a name I recognized. It was the name of the Chehalis cop who was one of the pair who had been sitting in the convenience store parking lot that night, and who may or may not have fired the shot that killed my wife Rooney, if it wasn’t his partner the drunk. He’d been dead almost ten years. I also saw that on his grave was a small red, white and blue Amurrican flag, indicating that he had fought on the Federal side during the war. Graves of U.S. veterans are the only places where the Masonic dishrag is allowed to be displayed anywhere in the Republic. This man had Come Home because he couldn’t bear actually to live in the United States that he’d fought to preserve, and presumably he kept his mouth shut about it all for the rest of his life, but in death either he or one of his relatives had decided to make a final statement and give us evildoers the finger. Well, we’d won. I guess we’re big enough to take a final defiant bird-flip from an old enemy.

  I looked down at his grave and I said to him the same thing Stan Brodka’s son said to me. “It’s over now, buddy,” I told him. “It took a while. For me and most likely for you too, but it’s over. Have a good one.” Then I walked away.

  After we buried my wife Tank Thompson sent me out to eastern Oregon on some routine mission that wasn’t really necessary. He told me that once I delivered the material I was supposed to deliver, I should take a few days off and recuperate. I told him, “That’s not necessary, boss. I’m on top of it.”

  “Well, let’s make sure,” he said. “Even in the middle of a war, Shane, a man who has suffered your kind of loss needs some time to himself. We owe it to you and you owe it to us, and to yourself, to get it all in perspective.” I knew what he was doing. He was giving me the opportunity to pack it in and leave if I couldn’t handle the Volunteer life without Rooney. The thought of deserting my comrades would have occurred to me even less after Rooney’s death than before, since the NVA was all the family I had besides my drunken mother who didn’t count, but I wasn’t offended. From the CO’s point of view the test made a very hard kind of sense. Far better for me to go ahead and take French leave now than come back and try to function in the NVA as an emotional basket case, and maybe crack up under pressure in some way and get some others killed as well as myself. One of our Oregon comrades had been apprised of the situation, and I was given the use of a hunting and fishing cabin that overlooked the upper reaches of the Columbia River, right up near the first dam. Now it’s the Robert Miles Dam, but I can’t remember what it was called in those days. It’s a very lonely country out there, almost desert-like, with huge green sweeps of hills and mountains almost like the Scottish Highlands, but more bleak. I hung out there for three days, slept a lot, ate Spam and beans, looked out at the wild emptiness and thought about Rooney. At night I heard the wind whistling around the eaves. On the fourth day I got in my car and began the long, careful drive on the back roads back to Dundee, avoiding Fattie roadblocks and bombed-out roads and bridges. I reported back in to Arthur’s farm, where Tank was headquartered, and no one said anything to me.

  I assumed we would simply pick up as if Rooney had never been there, I understood why that had to be, and I was okay with it. I knew she would have gone on without me had I been the one who caught the bullet. But that night I was surprised to see the whole Wingfield clan drive up in two SUVs, Carter and Ma and China and John Hunt and John Bell, and even Adam, come all the way from Idaho. Tank called us all into the barn. “We have a fallen sister to avenge, and like the ancient Greeks and Romans, we’re going to stage some funeral games in her memory,” said Tank. “You might call this the Rooney Ryan Memorial Tickle.”

  “Huh?” I asked.

  “We gone take care of something in this community we should have took care of long ago,” said Carter. “We’ve been working on it for a while, but it’s time we got this one done.”

  “Yeah,” rumbled Adam. “We gone kill Leon Sorels.” Adam had actually grown up in the South Carolina Low Country, and it was still in his speech.

  “She would have liked that,” I said, nodding.

  “It’s time we sent that particular message,” agreed Tank.

  “So when and where do we send it?” I asked. “I thought Leon stayed pretty much behind the Bremer walls unless he comes out wrapped in body armor, armed to the teeth, and surrounded by his gun thugs. Hell, we’ve been trying to catch him in the open for years, now.”

  “He’ll be open tomorrow night, at the Forest Lodge Motor Inn, off Exit 88 on the Dundee side,” replied Tank. “We’ll catch him in the parking lot, going in.”

  “How do we know he’ll be there?” I asked.

  “Honey trap,” said Tank in a neutral voice.

  “Yeah, from what I hear that will sure work on that kinky bastard, but what makes you think Sorels is going to show up alone? He’s really cagey and he knows we want his ass bad. Surely he’ll at least bring some of his goons with him?”

  “He’ll be there, alone.” said China. Idiot me, I still didn’t get it.

  “But how can you be sure?” I persisted.

  “Because he’s been there before,” she said simply. Then I understood and I just sat there gaping. I knew that such things were done by the NVA, of course. There have always been women spies and they have always used the same weapons, but nonetheless the revelation fell on me like a ton of bricks. China got up and walked out, which you didn’t do to an NVA commanding officer in the middle of a briefing, but Tank looked at the floor and said nothing. I turned to Carter and Ma.

  “Why?” I shouted. “How could you let her?” I demanded of them in rage and pain and confusion.

  “I told you, son, we’ve got to pay the tab,” her father replied in a level voice. I suddenly knew that I was hearing the voice of a man in hell.

  “In Bible times, God asked Abraham to sacrifice his son,” said Ma, her eyes filled with tears. “God showed His divine mercy and stayed Abraham’s hand. These aren’t Bible times, Shane. God has demanded of me and my husband that we sacrifice our children, and He has not stayed His hand this time, because His people have become so wicked and cowardly that we no longer deserve His mercy and His succor. We have to earn it all back now. This time the sacrifice must be
made. Shane, I have two daughters, both of whom I have offered up to the Lord for the sake of our people. You loved one. I beg of you, don’t hate the other, because it is our sin that she bears upon her head. The sin of a hundred years when we should have fought against the Devil and his works, but did not.”

  “Adam?” I asked. “John Bell, John Hunt? Christ almighty, Sorels? Don’t you have anything at all to say?”

  “Say what, Shane?” replied Adam roughly. “That we’re all dying inside? Like you think it could be any other way? Our younger sister is a soldier just like her older sister was, Shane. She’s doing her duty, and now you do yours. Shut up and listen to the CO. We got a war to win.”

  I didn’t say a thing for the rest of the meet while we set up the details on how we were going to kill Sorels. Vehicles, escape routes, weapons, contingencies, timing and approach, the whole nine yards of a usual NVA operation. I couldn’t even look at any of the other Wingfields. Afterwards, when I was pulling sentry outside with an AR-180, down near the gate to the farmhouse, China came out and sat down on the swing beneath the tree I had chosen for my post. She didn’t say anything, and I knew she wouldn’t unless I spoke first. “Is this why you and Ted aren’t together any more?” I finally said.

  “Part of it, yes,” she told me.

  “Did Rooney know?” I asked.

  “God, I hope not,” she sighed.

  “I suppose I should ask why it had to be you?”

  China spoke in the darkness. “We had to get really close to him to get him out from the body armor and the Bremer walls and the herd of bullies and all the things that the Americans hide behind. With his—tastes—this was the only way. He’s an animal. I don’t think there’s any really human thought processes going on in that pointed skull. When he’s not killing and torturing he thinks about two things, lifting weights and women, and we couldn’t think of any way to get to him through pumping iron. I’m the youngest, I’ve grown up since he last saw me, and so he wouldn’t remember me from before the war, except maybe as a high school kid in a braid and a long dress. It worked. He didn’t recognize me. Rooney was married. I’m not. For all those reasons I drew the short straw. Do you want to know the details?”