Downtown Owl

by Chuck Klosterman

  Tonight Mitch sat at the back of the bus, adjacent to Zebra’s ghetto blaster. They could not play the stereo before the game, but—if they won—they could play it on the ride home. (And if this happened, Mitch would sit near the front of the bus, away from all those stupidly deafening songs about legs and TV dinners and sharply dressed men.) Grendel sat across the aisle from him, staring blankly ahead; even without his shoulder pads, he seemed like a piece of machinery, wrapped in horseflesh and gorilla leather. Grendel was the undisputed star of the Lobos; his nineteen sacks had already shattered the school record and he would probably get three more tonight. There had been numerous newspaper articles written about his dominance, and it was rumored that he was being recruited by the University of Nebraska, a college he could not locate on a map. In the game against Cando, he had broken an opposing running back’s femur; the bone sounded like a deer rifle when it snapped.

  “Grendel,” said Mitch. He received only silence in response. “Hey, Grendel,” he said again. “Grendel. Grendel? Chris. Hey, Chris.”

  Grendel eventually turned his head. His eyes were piercing and vacant at the same time, which shouldn’t be possible.

  “What,” said Grendel.

  “Can I ask you a question?” said Mitch. He felt a little like Zebra when he asked this. He found himself trying to talk like Zebra, which almost worked.

  “Yes.”

  “What do you think of Cubby Candy?”

  “Cubby Candy,” repeated Grendel.

  “Yeah,” said Mitch. “What do you think of Cubby Candy?”

  “He’s crazy.”

  “Sure,” said Mitch, “but do you like him?”

  “I’ve never thought about it,” said Grendel.

  “Do you think you could beat him in a fight?”

  “Yes.”

  “Really,” said Mitch. “That’s interesting. That’s really, really interesting. And I totally agree with you. Absolutely. But you know what’s weird? What’s weird is that a lot of people think he could beat you in a fight, simply because of that aforementioned craziness. Which, I think, makes for an intriguing hypothetical.”

  “Nobody thinks that,” said Grendel. “Who thinks that?”

  “Well, it’s not like anyone specifically thinks he could kick your ass,” said Mitch, not showing his sudden nervousness. “It’s not like this is something people talk about, or anything like that. It’s just that Candy gets in a lot of fights, and he is a decent fighter, and the only fight he’s ever lost was with that cop, and that doesn’t really count, because the cop cuffed him and hit him with a billy club, which I think we’d all agree was a total cheap shot. So I guess certain people just wonder if maybe Candy could fight anyone and possibly win, even if the person he was fighting happened to be you. Because—like you said—he is crazy. And, you know, unpredictable.”

  “I’d wreck him,” said Grendel. “I would destroy.”

  “But what if he did something outrageous?” Mitch asked. “Like, what if he tried to bite your neck? Or what if he attacked you with a ball-peen hammer or a saber saw or a folding chair?”

  “I would fucking wreck him worse for trying,” said Grendel. “I’d rip out his heart and jam it into his fucking mouth. I wouldn’t let some bastard hit me with a folding chair. You can’t let people get away with shit like that.”

  “True, true,” said Mitch. “You’re right about this, Chris. You’re completely right. I was just curious about your opinion on this subject.”

  “You say a lot of bozo shit, Vanna.” Grendel hated the fact that kids like Mitch could use so many different words whenever they spoke. Like, he knew what the word hypothetical meant when someone else used it in a sentence, but there was just no way he could talk like that during normal conversation. Every time he tried to use a complicated word, people looked at him like he was speaking Spanish. Fuck them all. He resumed staring at the front of the bus and feeling unstoppable.

  “Sorry, man,” said Mitch. “I apologize for breaking your concentration. I was basically just talking to myself.”

  Owl beat Wishek by forty points. Grendel knocked their 130-pound quarterback into an eighteen-hour coma, but at least the dude lived.

  NOVEMBER 1, 1983

  (Julia)

  At first, Julia thought the horrible sounds she heard outside her window were the result of not being drunk, which made her fear that she was an alcoholic. Could she no longer sleep sober? Julia had stayed inside on Halloween night, unsure if she would spend the entire evening greeting trick-or-treaters; as it turned out, she was visited by only five kids, leaving her with two extraneous bags of mini Butterfingers. She watched Newhart and After MASH and missed being in college, remembering how Halloween was always a universal party night: She and all her girlfriends would dress like slutty nurses or slutty witches or slutty KISS members, as this was the lone night when slutty attire was expected. It was something to look forward to, and it was something to remember later. However, this Halloween had been a lonely, depressing night; she briefly considered smoking her last joint, but did not. Instead she simply went to bed, hoping she would dream about 1982.

  Her slumber was broken by the sounds of animal torture.

  Sometime after midnight, Julia heard a living creature scream and hiss and cry; it sounded like someone was forcing his own hand into a food processor. She could hear drunken men laughing on the lawn below her bedroom. Was one of these men Chet the Dog Lover? Possibly, but she could not tell for certain. Was this a dream? No. Something outside her window was dying, choking on its own windpipe. People were opening beer cans; every so often, the creature would expel a high-pitched screech of grotesque terror, and a handful of guys would go, “Ohhhhhhh!,” almost as if they’d just witnessed a particularly stunning golf shot. She wanted to look outside and see what was happening, but she was afraid (even though she did not know why). The noises finally ended around 1:00 a.m.; the men disappeared inside, and she fell back asleep. She dreamt of ambulances being attacked by apes.

  Julia awoke at 7:15 the following morning, surprised by how good she felt. Not drinking was really refreshing. During her shower, she slowly remembered the previous night’s howling. After dressing and applying mascara, she walked out behind the apartment and found the corpse of a mutilated cat, beaten with a hammer and ripped to shreds. Its intestines had been pulled from its guts with a stick, and the neck of a beer bottle was jammed into its rectum. The cat’s eyes were wide open and its jaws were locked; its tongue had been ripped out with a pliers.

  Julia immediately recognized the taste of lukewarm vomit on her tongue.

  She did not know what to do next.

  Had she seen this cat before? She thought that maybe she had. It used to be fat and orange. There was a house across the street, and the fat orange cat sometimes sat on its porch. Julia walked to the door and rang the doorbell. A middle-aged woman answered the door; she was wearing a terry-cloth robe.

  “Good morning,” said Julia. “I live in one of the apartments across the street. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but last night I heard some really awful sounds.”

  “Good Lord,” said the robed old woman. “What kind of sounds? A burglar?”

  “No, no,” said Julia. “Not a burglar. However, I have to ask you an unhappy question: Do you have a cat?”

  “Yes,” said the woman. “We have a cat.”

  “Is your cat okay?”

  The old woman knew what happened to cats on Halloween.

  “Kenny,” she said over her shoulder, still looking at Julia. “Do you know where Rocky is?”

  Kenny came to the door. He was eleven years old. He had a crew cut.

  “Have you seen my cat?” Kenny asked.

  Julia started to cry. “Maybe,” she said.

  “Where is he?” asked Kenny. “Is he all right?”

  Kenny already knew that he was not.

  Julia and the boy walked over to the corpse. They stood above its body. Kenny poked at it with a stick, ver
y gently. Julia swallowed another thimble of her own vomit.

  “Was he a friendly cat?” Julia asked.

  “Rocky was a good cat,” said Kenny. “He was my sister’s cat, and then he was my cat when my sister went to college.”

  The cat was so dead. It was extra dead. It looked like it had been electrocuted, but that was impossible.

  “Do you think other kids did this?” Kenny asked.

  “I don’t think it was kids,” said Julia. “I don’t know who did it, but I don’t think it was kids. I think it was grown-ups. I think it was some drunken grown-up idiots.”

  Kenny kept staring at the body. He wondered if he had time to bury it before school.

  “I will find out who did this,” said Julia. “I will ask around. I will do some sleuthing. They won’t get away with this. Whoever did this to Rocky will get caught. We will catch them, and they’ll have to pay a fine and maybe go to jail and absolutely buy you another cat. We will involve the police. The police will be involved.”

  “They would just deny it,” said Kenny. “They would probably just say you did it, because you found him. And it really doesn’t matter if we catch them, anyway.”

  “Yes, it does,” said Julia. “It matters. Your cat was important. Don’t ever think this wasn’t important. Rocky was a good cat.”

  “Oh, that’s not what I mean,” Kenny replied. “I just mean that it doesn’t matter if we catch them, because all the people who did this will eventually die, because everybody dies. And then they’ll burn in hell forever.”

  Kenny walked back to his garage to get a shovel. Julia went back to her apartment to reapply her mascara and re-hate the world. They were both late for school.

  NOVEMBER 8, 1983

  (Horace)

  “They shot his dog,” said Edgar Camaro. This was not the first time this point had been made. “They walked into his yard and shot his dog in the throat. For barking. They shot his dog for being a dog. What does that tell you about their motivations? Does that sound like the work of credible law-enforcement personnel?”

  “They said they had no choice,” Gary replied.

  “No choice? It was a dog! Were they afraid he was gonna give them rabies? I don’t support what the man did, but there was no justification for shooting his dog. None. They just decided they wanted to shoot something, and that dog was the only thing available.”

  This was all true. On February 15, 1983, FBI agents assassinated Gordon Kahl’s black Labrador.

  “The dog. The dog! The man murdered two U.S. marshals, and all you want to talk about is the hound.” Bud said these words with the frustration one can only feel from having an argument for the tenth time. “Who do you think you are, the damn Dog Lover? You talk like a fish. You talk like a dope smoker!”

  “Gordon Kahl killed men who were trying to kill him and his family,” said Edgar. “I don’t support what the man did, but he was the one who didn’t have a choice. What were his options? He had no options.”

  “He could have paid his taxes,” said Horace. “All he had to do was pay his taxes.”

  “It was too late for that,” reiterated Edgar. “By the time those federal marshals arrived, it was too late. They had no intention of asking him for a check. Someone was going to die. They were going to make an example out of him. What would you do if the government tried to shoot your own son? What was he supposed to do? I don’t support what the man did, but what he did was not so wrong.”

  Born in Heaton, North Dakota, in 1920, Gordon Kahl spent his childhood hunting gophers and playing piano. He spent a few years farming and a few years working in a lumberyard; he tried to join the U.S. Army Air Corps in the autumn of ’41, but they wouldn’t take him. They said he had a bad nose. (He’d broken it as a boy and still didn’t breathe right.) When Japanese kamikazes destroyed Pearl Harbor that same December, the military changed its mind about his nose. He became a turret gunner on a B-25 bomber and shot down ten planes while receiving two purple hearts. The M*A*S*H surgeons in North Africa were never able to get all the shrapnel out of his body; he lived most of his life with metal inside his face. Gordon married a woman named Joan Seil in 1945, whom he had met when she was only fourteen. They moved to North Carolina. He gave her a double-barreled shotgun as a wedding gift.

  Gordon Kahl was a skeptical person. How was the attack on Pearl Harbor allowed to happen, he often wondered, sometimes during conversations that were not about war, Hawaii, or Japan. He read a book written by auto magnate Henry Ford called The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem. Had Zionist bankers convinced FDR to goad the Japs into launching their attack? Had there been a clandestine 1918 meeting among Russian Jews focusing on world domination? Perhaps. Were the Jews truly trying to take control of the banking system, the media, and the farm economy? It often seemed like it. His friends in Carolina told Gordon he was crazy, but he did not believe them. They seemed crazier than he was. He elected to move back to North Dakota.

  Gordon and Joan had six children. During the 1950s, they lived a semi-itinerant lifestyle: They farmed wheat in the summer and traveled to California in the winter. It seemed as if absolutely everyone in California already owned a car, and Gordon was naturally adroit at fixing anything that had the potential to break. He was a quiet, patient person. One West Coast winter, someone introduced him to a theology called the Christian Identity movement. It was a doomsday religion that split the world into two groups: The Good and The Evil. That distinction made sense to Gordon. The Christian Identity movement believed there was a coming nuclear war between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, and that the Aryan Race was superior to all others. Previous to joining the Movement, Gordon and Joan had converted to Mormonism for spiritual guidance, but they quit when Gordon concluded that Mormon ceremonies were replications of the rituals practiced by the Bavarian Illuminati and the Masons. Gordon Kahl was nobody’s puppet.

  By 1960, Kahl was positive that the government was corrupt; the creation of the Federal Reserve was the last straw. He considered joining the John Birch Society, but they weren’t radical enough. In the summer of ’64, he decided that the sixteenth amendment was illegal because it hadn’t been formally ratified by three-fourths of the states. Moreover, the IRS collected taxes on behalf of the Federal Reserve, an organization controlled by eight international bankers of Jewish descent who wanted to overthrow the Christian government; as such, paying one’s taxes was directly financing the destruction of Christianity. In fact, that’s why John F. Kennedy had been murdered in Dallas the previous winter: He knew about this conspiracy and refused to participate.

  Gordon was extremely confident about these things.

  “Never again will I give aid and comfort to the enemies of Christ,” Kahl wrote in 1967. He proceeded to mail these words to the IRS, who responded by demanding that he appear before a federal tax court. He ignored that request (and all similar requests that followed). Around this same time, he quit hauling his family to California; instead, he spent his winters working in the oil fields of Texas. In 1973, he joined an organization called the Posse Comitatus. The Posse Comitatus believed that governments did not exist above the county level; being the kind of man who refused to accept even a driver’s license from the state, such messages fit Gordon’s worldview. Kahl soon became the Posse’s coordinator for all of Texas. It was at this point that Gordon Kahl truly became an enemy of the United States; in 1976, he went on television and told everyone in America to stop paying their taxes, just as he had done for the past nine years. “When you become a Christian,” he said into the camera, “you put yourself on the opposite side of government.”

  Kahl’s thirty-minute television appearance earned him eight months in Leavenworth prison. Questions remain over what truly generated this penalty: Did Kahl go to jail for not paying his taxes, or did he go to jail for bragging about it on TV? Either way, he certainly didn’t help his cause on the trial’s opening day when he told the judge, “I didn’t fail to file my taxes. I refused to fil
e my taxes.”

  Prison did not reform him.

  Everybody said Gordon Kahl was (or at least had the potential to be) a likeable old man. He did not drink alcohol, smoke tobacco, or use foul language. This was mildly unusual for a racist anti-Semite who wanted to destroy the government. All he wanted (or so he would argue) was merely to be left alone; he wanted to be able to farm without government intrusion and to live without “oppression,” which he defined as having to write the IRS a ten-thousand-dollar check. On Sunday, February 13, 1983, a group of federal marshals from Fargo tried to arrest Gordon Kahl for his ten-thousand-dollar disobedience. They were going to send him back to jail. But Gordon Kahl was not going back to jail; the day he walked out of Leavenworth, he vowed that he would sooner die than return to prison. And—in keeping with his interpretation of the King James Bible and the Articles of Confederation—this vow was not a metaphor.

  Medina, North Dakota, is a community of 520 people that’s 125 miles west of Fargo, 71 miles east of Bismarck, and 11 catawampus miles from downtown Owl. It was here that five-foot-seven, 160-pound Gordon (along with his equally vigilant twenty-three-year-old son, Yorie) came to live, and it was here that they had a shoot-out with the law. It happened on a road just north of the Medina city limits, fifteen minutes before 6:00 p.m.; it was six hours and fifteen minutes from Valentine’s Day. The federal authorities blocked the road and pulled their guns on Gordon, Yorie, Joan, and two of Kahl’s companions as the quintet drove away from a chapter meeting of the North Dakota Constitutional Party, a group of perhaps two dozen local citizens who had just voted in favor of secession from the Union. Gordon was not surprised by the confrontation. He had long been certain that someone in Medina was a Mossad informant. “What do you guys want?” Kahl asked, crouching behind the open passenger door of a ’73 AMC Hornet, a gun leveled at his enemies. “All we want is you,” a marshal yelled in response. “Put the guns down, we’ll talk about it.” Almost everyone at the scene had at least one weapon (and most had more). For a few insane minutes, both parties stared at each other with weapons drawn, twenty-five feet apart, their breath visible in the winter air. It was 5:55 p.m.