by John Shannon
Maeve took her time getting the beer. “Something inside me just clicks. I’m not hiding any secret.” As Gloria opened the bottle with her chop, Maeve abruptly put it together. Gloria was interested in turn-ons, not because she was considering the lesbian thing, but because she was caught up in a non-arousal funk of her own with her father. This is for professionals smarter than me, Maeve thought. She could barely cling to the edge of her own sexuality.
There was a scraping sound outside, and then the familiar muttering exhaust of her dad’s pickup on the driveway.
“Saved by the bell,” Maeve said.
“Not forever, chica. Y no me vienes otra vez tus quentos de hadas pendejos.” And don’t bring me any more lousy fairytales.
“¿A un tiempo, que si… todo en la vida eras mierda?” Maeve said.
Gloria laughed conspiratorially as a key fussed at the door.
Once upon a time, what if everything in life was shit?
*
Seth Brinkerhoff found the big man lying on a chaise out by the pool of the Washington Plaza. The amenities of the hotel were something of an afterthought, since the pool was surrounded by asphalt and squeezed between a parking lot and an alley. Not quite five stars.
Hardi Boaz was all by himself poolside. Maybe the Chinese didn’t swim. It was the top hotel in Monterey Park, and had been basically a Chinese hotel since about 1980. In all his years representing rich white clients in the San Gabriel Valley, Seth Brinkerhoff had never been inside the Washington.
He paused a moment at the pool gate, held by the altogetherness of the big hairy man on the chaise who wore only swim shorts. His head was thoroughly tanned like a day laborer, but the rest was a big white side of beef with the letters AWB tattooed across his chest. There was also a flag, a whirl of three black sevens in a white circle on a red background that looked dangerously like the Nazi flag.
What have the Reiks done to me? Brinkerhoff thought. He’d asked for an inspirational speaker, wanting somebody like Ron Paul or Michelle Bachman for his Tea Party dinner dance, and this was what they’d sent. Apparently, “inspirational” was a flexible concept.
This man was the founder of a border watchdog group along the California line east of San Diego. “Don’t worry, sir,” the Reiks’ gal Friday had told him, “this guy looks like a rough edge but he’s a really rousing speaker.” Like the damn overpowered rifle the Reiks had made him shoot. The episode still smarted.
Brinkerhoff was perfectly content to lend this side of beef to the lowlife bikers who were run by the son of his old realtor pal; Zook was actually his godson. But Brinkerhoff was not quite so content to have the man address his dinner-dance fundraiser in the Legion Hall the next day. At least he’d get an advance look at the keg party.
“Mr. Boaz,” Brinkerhoff announced as he entered the pool area.
“Me.”
The big man stirred and the chaise under him groaned, but he didn’t meet Seth’s eyes.
“I’m Seth Brinkerhoff, chairman of the Tea Party Express here.”
“Hardi Boaz. I’m your Commie-stomping Christian patriot. Lock up the virgins.”
The accent was bizarre. “I guess that’s what I’m here to talk about,” Brinkerhoff said grimly.
“You got me some virgins?” The big man pretended to come alert.
“We’re in the process of becoming a respectable part of the Republican mainstream, Mr. Boaz. So we’re all virgins in public. Can you tell me what that AWB on your chest stands for?”
“It’s ancient history. Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging. Afrikaner Resistance Movement, to you. We did our best to keep the kaffirs from taking over our lovely birthland, but our leaders sold us out. That’s a long time ago, and I’m an American now. Hail Washington. I got real fraternal feelings for all the San Diego ranchers afraid of the Beaners coming across every night. If you got a nice car outside, they’re probably stealing your hubcaps this minute.”
“Mr. Boaz, the borderlands are apparently a little bit different from the rest of California. Up here we gave up that kind of talk a long time ago, even if we believe there’s a grain of truth in it.”
Boaz squinted. “That why you stuck me in this dink hotel? The beds even smell yellow.”
“This place is ranked two stars. It’s the best in town. If you want to move to a Big 6 Motel, let me know.”
“I’m bighearted, ma’an.” He slapped the left of his chest, quite hard, as if to demonstrate the location of his big heart.
“What’s your border group called?” Brinkerhoff asked. Bernadette had been unwilling to tell him, and he was worried that they might have a really embarrassing name that would leak out, like the Bean Stompers.
“The name ain’t important, man. They can call us anything they like, long as they quake in their bloody boots. I hate sissies who’re afraid of words.”
“Who is it supposed to quake? The wetbacks?”
“Sure, long as it’s you saying it in this super-pure ecology, in the homo-commie part of California.”
“Mr. Boaz, you can say anything you want at the keg party tomorrow, but at the dinner, please try to stick to a Christian and patriotic agenda without mention of race and without profanity.”
“Fuckin’-A right!”
Brinkerhoff turned to go, but turned back after a few steps to stare at the neo-Nazi tattoo. “By the way, sir.”
“Ya—here we go. Rub us enough snake oil over the world of ideas, we got us a bright tomorrow.”
“Please wear a very opaque shirt.”
EIGHT
Over and Under
Rosa/Ellen summoned Jack Liffey with a phone call early the next morning. She opened quickly, the blue hair especially brash in the glare of the sun.
“Good morning, Mr. Liffey,” she said.
“Ohio,” he said brightly.
She smiled. “Don’t even try.”
He’d been told it meant hello in Chinese, but without the right intonation it probably meant My penis is on fire.
She thrust a flier into his hand, a Xeroxed invitation to a keg party that afternoon with a hand-drawn map.
Patriot Beer Bash!
Meet an American Hero!
“How did you get it?”
“It’s like a rave by invitation. They stand on street corners and leaflet only the target audience. I’m not sure how they define their demographic, but it certainly isn’t me. I got it from a neighbor kid who looks like Elvis Presley. I want my report.”
“You’ll get it. It might help more if you tell me more about the drug connection.”
“No.”
A baby began to squall inside. “Yours?”
She nodded. “My dad will never forgive me unless I become the head of Microsoft. I’ll call you tonight.”
“One quick question,” he blurted before she could shut the door. Something she’d said nagged at him. “What on earth is L7?”
She smiled, then made an L with one hand in front of her face and a 7 with the other and slid her hands together to form a square. “It’s from texting, Mr. Old School. A square, a nerd.”
“Well, twenty-three skidoo.”
*
Ambition had failed her and nothing had replaced it. Megan Saxton knew she wasn’t very likable, but what could one do about that? Left alone in this nowhere for a day now, she couldn’t stop ruminating on her life. Successful at this, successful at that, blah blah. But unbearably empty inside. In the bottom of her small suitcase, fetched to Hardi’s house now, she found the Xeroxed Christmas letter from her sister in Texas that she had never opened.
Hi there, super friends,
Jus’ another greeting from lil ol’ me here in Harlingen.
Whew! What a busy life Dick and me and Bobby Joe and Beth and Jessica had this past year. I can’t believe there were only 365 days to it…
…Summer we all trekked up north to Dick’s family in his favorite state of Iowa and we had a real wacky time with them, with Dick’s dad still “beating the band�
� about Iowa State and the missus “cooking up a storm” for all the massed legions…
Megan Saxton’s eye skipped down the page, dreading even more moronic quotation marks.
…Down to the Galveston beaches with the “three little stooges” in tow…
…Tornado touched down across town and sadly killed little Beth’s “bosom pal” Grace from Crockett School…
A photo fell out onto the floor, and she leaned out awkwardly in an attempt to reclaim it without changing position in her chair. The husband and wife—her sister—stood on the lawn, grinning and making horn-signs behind each other’s heads. A sixteen-year-old lout clutched a football and two girls glumly posed on their knees. Susan had aged noticeably even from last year, her hips spreading fast.
But why was she grousing? Susan looked happy. Every one of the single, self-reliant women Megan Saxton knew in Manhattan and Brooklyn went through periods of despondency and doubt, lonely terror and suicidal despair.
And why didn’t she just jump into her rental car and drive away from this place of testosterone horrors? She had made the attempt twice and failed.
She tried to imagine her face in place of Susan’s in the photograph. She doubted if she could ever summon the energy to conjure that suburban ranch house out of the maelstrom. In a way she admired Susan, though utterly without envy. You are what you want to be, she thought, if only you can figure out what that is.
Do I really want to go on playing with this big hairy gorilla, probably a borderline autistic of some sort, who’s without a particle of reflection or self-doubt?
*
Sujjested Donation 10$
Jack Liffey couldn’t remember seeing an actual beer keg since his college days, but they hadn’t changed a bit. Two of the ribbed aluminum kegs sat side by side on a concrete patio. Below the patio was a wide strip of abandoned wildland under crackling high-tension power lines. At the base of the nearest power pylon, down a shallow hillside, someone had piled up sturdy milk crates and set a plywood sheet across them to make a rudimentary stage. Maybe seventy-five people swarmed the front edge of the stage, talking and drinking beer. A few big men wore torn-sheet armbands—security, of course. A boom box on the stage was thumping away. Angry black rap music, a nice irony. As far as he could see the crowd was entirely white.
Uphill the powerline easement was open to a paved road parked up with cars and motorcycles far into the adjacent neighborhoods. Jack Liffey made his way up through a hirsute sample of humanity to the crush at the kegs. The women were at least as rough-looking as the men.
A fortyish bald man in a sleeveless denim jacket pushed in line ahead of him, talking to a man with a ponytail. “They sat in that hooch all day watching the flies zapped by the bug light. Hillbilly TV.”
“Dig it.”
Jack Liffey had worn jeans and an old Pendleton shirt. They looked him over carefully. “Lookatcha, bud—your clothes scream undercover.” Maybe his jeans were too crisp.
“I’m no cop. I came to hear the border guy.”
They got their beer and dismissed his existence just as a noisy outbreak down the slope drew their attention. A lot of push-and-shove and eventually one of the shovers vomited over the other. It was not going to be a tranquil afternoon.
The music cut off and a boomy voice rolled across the hillside. “Hey, hey! Bros and gals! Listen up!”
Jack Liffey drafted himself a beer. He wouldn’t drink it, but he had to have the prop.
“Back it down!” somebody shouted.
The hubbub died down a little as order was repeatedly demanded.
A skinny speaker on the stage waved a baseball cap over his head. He wore one of the white armbands. His other fist held a ludicrously small microphone corded to the boom box. “Listen up, boozers and boozettes! America’s for Americans, right?!”
A half-hearted cheer greeted the declaration.
“Hey, lemme hear you! America’s for Americans!”
The roar was louder, echoing off the nearby houses. Jack Liffey guessed the crowd was over a hundred now and folks were still strolling in from the street above. Why did the police tolerate it?
“We got some interesting company today, brahs and sisses! A soldier who’s been busy stopping up our borders like a big can of Drano!”
Jack Liffey smiled at the mixed-up simile. He descended toward the stage, careful not to take a sip automatically. He’d been sober for fifteen years now on his own hook. A dry drunk, as he’d been told his teetery condition was called.
“This border hero was born overseas and, I warn you, he talks pretty funny, but he’s a real legal American now and he’s our brother in the fight for the white. Let’s give it up for the border guardian, Hardi Boaz.”
A stocky man leapt onto the stage to a smatter of applause. He was dressed bizarrely in a safari shirt, khaki shorts, and desert boots, straight out of a Tarzan movie.
“Mah fella ‘Murcans, I wanna thank y’all for havin’ me here at your party!”
Jack Liffey wondered if he could be hallucinating. The desert warrior was doing his best to produce a Texas drawl, but it was so overlaid with tortured vowels and glottal stops that he doubted many of the partiers could even pick out the words. Fortunately, the man quickly dropped his strange hybrid voice.
“Gather up close-like, friends and patriots. I want this to be a campfire talk, just between me an’ you. I won’t bite you like no tick on no mangy dog.”
Reluctantly the crowd compressed a bit toward the stage.
“I was born in a land far away, and when I grew up it used to be a lot like America. But it’s gone to hell, like a dollar knife tryin’ to cut rocks. We was a proud white country with a real civilization, but we got overrun by our own mud people, thieves and no-accounts who are as dumb as dirt. Okay, you can’t blame dirt for being dirt. The real problem was the white traitors, big city lib’rals, who opened the gates. The pansy college boys who don’t even know enough to piss downwind! J’yee-ziss, ma’an, they no worse traitors than traitors to their race!”
That got a bit of a boo from somewhere. Jack Liffey could hear the South African accent reclaim the man’s voice as he tried, without much success, to work up a rhythm of oratory. A burly guy was scurrying around in front of the stage taking photographs with his cell phone, also wearing an armband, but no one took much notice of him. Jack Liffey guessed most the crowd was busy trying to work out who this cartoon, fat-kneed wild man was.
“Ma’an, you got to hear the shit the city lib’rals talked when they felt they had to give account for what their fathers did to our mud people. They talk to some cowpat dirt-farmer, they say the niggers are the children of Ham and it’s gonna take them centuries to learn to walk upright without scraping their knuckles. But when they talked to the fuckin’ Brits in the cities who got all the currency, they got to make new names for things every ten minutes, like some sidesaddle sissy. They made up so many words for kissing black ass I can’t remember them all. One man one vote. Colorblind. Multicultural.”
The big man plucked at one of his buttocks, almost rammed the microphone up his ass and farted loudly into it. There was a strangled gasp from the crowd. This was an amazing moment that Jack Liffey knew he would always remember with a kind of fondness.
“There’s your multicultural! Might as well try putting socks on a duck!”
A confused titter, maybe just puzzlement, rippled through the crowd.
“I hate sissies afraid of words. Fuck the kaffirs and niggers and brown people and wetbacks, over there and here, too. You tell ’em, Hardi.”
People around Jack Liffey seemed ill at ease, whispering to one another, probably afraid they were being mocked in some way. He figured they might get most of the rant from the abusive epithets alone, but it would be weird beyond weird to them. And these were not folks to appreciate being made uncomfortable. They may have come for a hate-fest, but they wanted a familiar and comfy hate-fest.
“Sorry, all of you, if ol’ Hardi wanders away
from the point you care about. When I get worked up I run off the rails. I’m a hundred and ten percent America now. I’m here to tell you my Border Rangers are the last chance right now for the fighting whites down there who live along the border. These good white folks are threatened every night on their own ranches by armed Mexican drug-runners and wetbacks, and we got to protect them.
“I got no wish to be no better than ol’ George Washington in building a white country. Stronger and meaner and quicker, yah, but not tidied up for no limousine lib’rals in Beverly Hills. White people built a fine country here and we gonna take it back yet. Here’s what I say to all the mud people: Touch us, you tar barrels, and we’ll lop your fuckin’ hand off! You tell it, Hardi!”
A few partiers still straggled in from the road, and the man railed on about his work along the border, the nightly armed patrols in Jeeps and on horseback to keep out the plague of mental defectives.
“We need a government that’ll do what’s necessary. What we oughta do, we just nuke that land across the border. It’s all desert anyway, and we sure got plenty extra nukes stored up. Let the Mexes walk tiptoe over on the other side, that’s what I say. We gotta break bad. We gotta send all the wetbacks home. Then we just keep nuking the borderland. In ten years nobody can cross and everything calms down and we become just like any other goddamn country, a big respectable nation with a bit of a lousy past. We got to say all that right out loud.”
Jack Liffey almost felt sorry for the man. Nothing about the tirade was working very well with this crowd. From time to time there were buzzes and local cheers, but the rant was so outlandish and so far outside their experience that the crowd had little idea how to react.
“As far as I’m concerned, I’ll do this dirty business for white America forever. I’ll shoot every one of these muddies crossing the border. I’ll personally expel Mexicans and then I’ll drive up to L.A. and soak Che Guevara t-shirts in acid and hand them out to all the Jew hippie girls demonstrating against us—let them burn their tits off. I’ll do whatever the white nation needs to do to beat off the impure. I lost one country to the mud people and I ain’t losing my new one!”
