A DISTANT THUNDER

by H. A. Covington

  “No,” I said. Suddenly it struck me how much China had grown up and how much she resembled her sister, although not as tall, and her hair was a much darker brown. But she wasn’t the child I had met that first night doing her homework at the kitchen table before supper. Jesus, she must be nineteen or twenty years old now. She had somehow turned into a woman without me noticing it, which is what seems to always happen with girls.

  “Thank you. Shane, do you think I’m a whore now?”

  “It’s not my place to think about things like that,” I said.

  “You’re evading the question, which means you probably do, but I can hardly argue with you. I am a whore, and I know it. But Shane, as God is my witness, I would never do it with a nigger or a spic or a gook or a Jew! I’d kill myself first, and if I didn’t Dad would kill me and he’d be right to do it.”

  “You know there are Party women who have done just that, when there was no other way to get something we needed?” I asked. I knew it. I didn’t like to think about it, but I knew it.

  “Yes. My heart goes out to them in their suffering and their shame. I can’t do that. I don’t have their courage.”

  “You’ve got all the courage any woman could ever want, Chine. Just like your sister. Chine, does he.. .does he hurt you?”

  “Every time,” she confirmed. “In body and in mind, in every way that a man can hurt a woman, he hurts me. Shane, even though you know I’m a whore now and I’m worthless, please, kill him for me! Kill him!” She started crying and left.

  So we whacked Leon Sorels. What goes around finally came around for the big man himself. The Northwest Volunteer Army caught up with Dummy-Dummy in the parking lot of the Forest Lodge Motor Inn beneath the neon lights, all alone, no body armor, no gang of Federal thugs, no rich men to look the other way, no Amurrican flag to hide behind. Sorels was swaggering towards the room where China waited with a sawed-off shotgun of double-ought buckshot to do it herself if he got past us, but he didn’t. He saw us coming, he knew us, and he raged like a bull and fought with the same mindless rage. The only good thing I can say about that son of a bitch is that at the end, he wasn’t a coward like so many of his kind. He had that much Aryan left in him. Or else he was just too stupid to be afraid. Beneath a street light in that parking lot we shot the monster a dozen times just to slow him down a bit. I put a couple of Webley slugs in his kneecaps with Michael Collins’ and Rooney Ryan’s name on them. Carter leaped on him and wrestled the 9-millimeter pistol from his hand, and then Adam Wingfield did the honors with a chain saw, carving his gigantic carcass as delicately and precisely as a Christmas turkey. The sounds Sorels made as he fell to pieces, still living, I will not even attempt to describe. I grabbed the head when it fell to stop it rolling under a car. I picked up that bald pointy sucker in both hands by the big jug ears, and I swear to God it still tried to snap at me and bite me. Jesus, those must have been some steroids he was on! Then Ma did what she did best: she cooked. She doused the remains with gasoline and set them alight. I went into the motel room and hugged a weeping China to me and whispered to her, “You are not a whore! “ We drove to the Dundee FATPO barracks and hurled the severed head over the Bremer wall. Our message was sent. At long last Lewis County, Washington, was free of Leon Sorels, free of the tyrant he served, and everything hestood for. There was no going back. Not ever.

  * * *

  Some years after Longview, when it was plain that the Republic was going to be around for a while, and when Chine and I decided the time was right to bring Rooney home in every sense of the word, we contacted the National War Graves Commission. On another drizzly day in spring we went back to the hillside outside North Cove where we had buried her. It hadn’t changed much. The lone pine was still there. It took a couple of hours of electronic probing and then digging, but eventually the guys’ shovels turned up the black plastic of the garbage bags. They stopped digging and called down to their truck, and then the standard aluminum transportation coffin was hauled up the hill on a travois.

  Their foreman, a big middle-aged fellow named Andy who wore the War of Independence medal on his Labor Service overalls, came up to us. “You know, we do this a lot, and I’ve got some experience in how the families feel,” he said gently. “This part of it isn’t really something you need to see. Can I ask you two a favor? Would you wait down there on the road for us? We’ll bring her down to you as soon as we get her up.” So China and I went back down the hill, and after a while they brought the aluminum coffin down. I looked at the coffin and I thought not of the bones that lay within but of the rotted remains of a stuffed green alligator I had grabbed off China’s bed on the morning of October 22nd, so long ago. We had already decided that Rooney and Chompus would be re-interred as they were, in the shroud of black plastic wrapped around her body on that terrible day long ago, by those who had known and loved her. Volunteer Rooney Wingfield Ryan was buried in the Dundee Veterans’ Cemetery, with full military honors. A lone piper played Going Home, and a firing party was provided by the Old NVA Association. On her stone is not the Bible verse from Psalm Forty-Six that was spoken over her first grave, but my own personal epitaph for my friend, my comrade, my lover, my wife. It is from the greatest Bard of our Folk out of all of time:

  Cowards die many times before their deaths.

  The valiant never taste of death but once.

  * * *

  One day soon after we clipped Dummy-Dummy I was sent on a cash run to an office in Dundee where my old friend and former employer Sherry Cahoon was now working as a real estate agent, and also functioning as a Party banker and postmistress. I was supposed to pick up an envelope of cash for E Company, which presumably contained a large cut of our casino shakedown money. We hardly ever went on revolutionary expropriations any more; we actually now had an adequate supply of money if not a plentiful one, and the CO didn’t want us taking unnecessary risks and maybe pissing people off by robbing them. We were a bit short-handed that day, so while we took two vehicles I was accompanied by only one Volunteer, a guy we called Fast Eddie who had been with us about a year and had a good track record, so I wasn’t worried about backup. It was going into summer and it would have been very conspicuous for me to wear anything on the street in the daytime that was heavy enough to conceal King Henry the Fifth, my beloved owl-clip Webley, so I went really light, just a .380 in an ankle holster clip. This wasn’t anything complicated at all, just straight in and out, pick up the envelope and bring it back to the CO. It was always those little simple gigs that somehow went bad.

  It was a warm afternoon. I parked a couple of blocks down from the real estate office and across the street, crossed to the north side of Second Street in the crosswalk, and moseyed on down towards my destination while Eddie cruised. I looked down the street and I saw a rare sight, two FATPO troopers on foot patrol, wearing full body armor and carrying their M-16s at the ready. Usually they never exposed themselves like this, and we had learned that when they did, it usually meant they were using some of their own people as bait to try and provoke the NVA into an attack so they could in turn ambush us. Five would get me ten there were a lot more Fatties somewhere in the area, walking a parallel course, and possibly even more concealed in buildings along the street and rolling through the area plainclothes in unmarked vehicles. The Feds didn’t seem to be showing any interest in the real estate office where Sherry worked, but they were walking towards me, and if I kept on my present course I would have to pass them on the sidewalk. I decided it would behoove me to be elsewhere, and it was best to evade them while they were still a couple of blocks away. I turned and casually looked into a store window, and then just as casually eased my body on down the street back the way I had come, not wanting to appear as if I were running from them. My car was across the street in the parking lot. Should I turn right and try to evade them on foot, and maybe run into whatever Fatties were parallel-patrolling in the alleys or up First Street? I decided to get back behind the wheel and motivate.


  I looked both ways before stepping into the crosswalk, and I saw the coast was clear except for a big blue Cadillac rolling slowly towards the intersection from the right. I could see a small white female head with thick glasses behind the wheel. It was a common sight. Since most public transportation had now been shut down because all the infrastructure money had been pissed away in Iraq or outsourced to India, small Northwest towns were plagued with elderly drivers who had no business at all behind the wheel of an automobile, but who had no other way to get to the store or get to their doctor’s appointments. They were a real traffic menace, but this woman was far enough down the street so she had plenty of time to stop, and so I stepped into the crosswalk not even looking, my eyes surreptitiously to the left, keeping an eye on the FATPOs. I felt a sudden blow and saw a burst of orange flashes, then it was lights out.

  The little old lady in the Cadillac had run me down. She had been in some kind of senile fugue state, and either she hadn’t seen me or else she hadn’t been able to react in time, and she had come barreling right through the crosswalk and knocked me flying. I figure I was out for only a couple of minutes, but that was enough for the two Fatties to come up, see the .380 in my ankle holster, and grab me. I learned later that it was indeed an ambush and by the time Fast Eddie turned the corner my position was surrounded by several Humvees and a mounted M-60 was pointing straight at him. He turned the nearest corner and took off, as he should have done, but the FATPOs were too excited about catching a white boy with a gun to notice or care. By the time I recovered consciousness I was lying in the back of a FATPO paddy wagon, my hands lashed behind my back with plastic disposable cuffs, a broken collarbone and cracked bone in my hip plus numerous abrasions from the car accident. I looked up and I saw an impassive Third World face of some kind staring at me, wearing a FATPO uniform. Filipino? Polynesian? South American Indio? Who knows? Somebody who sure as hell had no business on the North American continent. There was blood streaming down my face and into my eyes. I tried to clear my vision and say something, but the wog said nothing. Instead, he leaned over and calmly sprayed Mace into my face. The pain and nausea convulsed me, my skull and lungs seemed to explode, and I did the first of quite a bit of screaming I would do while in Federal custody. He maced me a couple of times all the way back to the FATPO compound.

  Oh, yeah, you scream. Everybody screams. Once again, the way Federal captivity has been portrayed on Northwest TV and in our movies is kind of off the mark. Big strong NVA Volunteers standing up to torture with a sneer and a smile, responding with quips and wisecracks and insults and promises of Aryan vengeance. Okay, I understand why that has to be for propaganda purposes, and to be sure some of us stood up to the torture, the most notable and noble example being Cathy Frost, who endured things so obscene that no full account of what was done to her by the FBI had ever been published. But everybody screamed. Believe it. At Auburn they had speakers in the cells and we used to get a daily karaoke of screams as our comrades were tortured because they’d pipe it in. When my turn came I sang as loud as anyone. It was the FBI version of Muzak.

  At the Dundee FATPO base I was treated for abrasions, a twisted kneecap, a cracked rib and a broken hip, without anesthetic. No one even bothered to interrogate me; they just ran my fingerprints and photographed my retinas in order to identify me, then shaved my head and tattooed a number on the back of my skull which you can still see a bit through my thin hair back there, although I’m told it’s pretty faded after seventy years. As a bit of historical trivia, they didn’t shave the heads of women prisoners because one of their tortures was to pull a woman’s hair out by the roots or set it on fire. They always put the number tattoo on her buttocks, so we weren’t the only ones who did that if you’re still worrying over what we did to that reporter. Then the FATPOs gave me a couple of perfunctory beatings which reopened the wounds and necessitated their being done up again. After about a week I was taken up to the big high-tech Federal Detention Center in Auburn, just south of Seattle.

  Auburn was not my most edifying experience in life by a long shot, but again, as reluctant as I am to give ZOG one inch, if I’m going to be honest about my past I have to admit that it could have been a lot worse. I had a few things going for me that some didn’t. For one thing, I was a very small fish in a small pond and the Feds quickly figured out that I wasn’t on the big-ticket reward list, nor had they convinced themselves that I knew all kinds of secrets like they thought poor Cathy did. Also, I was captured towards the end of the war when the NVA had long since made it entirely clear that there were certain Federal practices which would not be tolerated, and which would bring retaliation so horrific even by our standards that the Feds did in fact grudgingly give in and change their behavior. So I wasn’t thrown into a bull pen with twenty big buck niggers who beat me to a pulp and then forcibly buggered me up the ass, which had been known to happen in the early days of the struggle.

  This practice had led to our use of what was called the “necklace” as a special punishment for anyone guilty of abusing NVA prisoners. We got that one from the South African kaffirs. The abusive guard or cop had to be abducted or otherwise secured, and a large rubber truck tire soaked with gasoline was jammed down over his head and his shoulders tight enough to where he couldn’t get it off. Then the tire was set on fire and he who had dished it out had to take it, as he was burned alive. It only took three or four of these necklacings and all of a sudden NVA prison accommodation became strictly seg. The necklacings are not a pleasant part of our past, true, but they were another good example of how a little bit of courage and a little bit of willingness to do the necessary succeeded in bringing about actual change in the government’s behavior. “We don’t negotiate with terrorists” my ass! Burn a couple of those motherfuckers into charcoal, and the Americans will negotiate faster than you can flick your Bic, once they understand that they could be next. American prison authorities had used homosexual rape or the threat of it as a disciplinary measure against white inmates for generations. Being buttfucked by niggers was considered to be simply a part of going to prison; TV comedians actually made jokes about it. Then the bureaucrats and thugs who did such things were made to understand that they would be held responsible for their behavior, and that the mighty United States of America could not protect them against punishment. Certainty of punishment, not just severity. The practice of throwing handsome young white boys like Your Friend and Humble Narrator in with nigger perverts came to a screeching halt.

  The main thing about Federal political prison was that it was so completely inhuman, like the government it served. The guards were specially chosen military police from the various branches of the American services, and also some regular Federal correctional personnel. They wore black coveralls with a utility belt, body armor, and the face shields that concealed their identities except in the case of actual interrogation room staff. They spoke to the prisoners as little as possible and when they did their voices were carried through some kind of microphone inside the face shield, so the impression of their being robots was increased. The prison was simply a form of warehousing, and I was inventory who had been captured and was now placed on a shelf in my proper slot. We were manhandled like pieces of meat, slammed around and physically dragged up and down the corridors without even being given the chance to walk. At no time during my captivity was I ever charged with anything, brought before a judge, or given any semblance of a trial. If I had asked for a lawyer I would have heard what laughter from those helmet mikes sounded like before they beat the crap out of me. All of those things had gone out years before with the Patriot Act and none of us seriously expected it. After all, we were only getting the same treatment Muslim prisoners had been getting at Guantanamo Bay since 2001.

  A year or so before there had been a mass escape at Auburn FDC when a Volunteer drove a panel truck up to the gate and detonated it, and almost two hundred NVA people had scampered out into the night, eventually to rejoin their units and causing a maj
or setback in the government’s pacification program. The result was that they’d changed the system and Auburn was now in a permanent state of lockdown. The facility had been rebuilt in order to prevent the detainees from communicating with one another at all, and although I occasionally saw other NVA people in the facility being escorted or more accurately dragged around the place, I could only rarely even exchange a whispered word or two in passing. When we were caught doing so we got a shot from the agonizer, a spray injector carried by the guards which forced a solution of some kind of acid beneath our skin in a patch about the size of a nickel. It hurt like sin and if they gave it to you at the base of the spine or in the backs of the knees you’d be crippled for a couple of days. You never left your cell without full manacles, leg irons, and belly band. Some of the prisoners I saw being dragged around were hooded as well. I have no idea to this day why some of us rated hoods and others didn’t. All I know is that for whatever reason, they never hooded me. Like I said, I was never that high on their totem pole.

  When I arrived at Auburn I was jammed into a small, boxlike cell all on my own, and left for a while to heal up so I would be nice and healthy and sizzle for a long time in the chair. Unlike any other prison I have ever heard of, we were never even given numbers and other than Goldberg himself I don’t recall any of them addressing me by name. I finally figured out that if they’d assigned numbers to us it would be a form of identity within the system, it would leave a paper trail of some kind, and that there were circumstances wherein ZOG might not want to acknowledge that we had ever been there at all, which was a chilling thought. We could disappear any time they wanted us to, and some NVA prisoners did.