Perdition, U.S.A.

by Gary Phillips

  She was referring to the incident in the South where the members of a communist splinter group had, essentially, issued a challenge to the local Klan and hate groups. Sure enough, the day of the supremacist rally, the progressives mounted a counter-rally. Only the crackers didn’t need much provocation and promptly murdered four members of the organization in an ambush. An all-white jury exonerated the killers.

  Monk considered responding but concluded it would only be hypocritical. “I got one for you,” he said, placing the gun on the nightstand. “Who is Nolan Meyer?” Outside, he could hear little sounds hitting the window like the steady tapping of cat’s paws. A drizzle had started.

  She snorted. “He’s the big cheese of the bully boys. How do you know him?”

  “Did you know him at Rainier High?”

  She sat up again. “Sure did. He was a junior when I was a freshman.”

  “And he’s the son of Elsa Meyer, the daughter of Ira Elihu.”

  She took a pint of Southerbys out of her jacket pocket. “That’s right. Why? Is he the reason you came to town?” She broke the seal and poured a dose into a glass on the nightstand.

  “In due time, Honey West, in due time.”

  She made a snicking sound with her tongue against her teeth and handed the glass to Monk. She stood close to Monk and touched the bottle against the glass in his hand. “Skol, baby.” She took a swig.

  Monk also took a drink, against the advice from the clinic and his own good sense. Keenly aware of the young woman’s allure, he was torturing himself by fantasizing about quenching his real thirst with the nectar of sex. “Look, Katya, aside from the fact I got enough years on you to be your much older brother—”

  She didn’t let him finish. Her arms were around his neck and her body, powerful and full, was against his, her lips and tongue probing his mouth. Reluctantly, Monk eventually pulled away. “Can’t we just be friends?”

  “Tease,” she said, sitting in the bed again.

  “Anyway, what about you and Rameses?”

  “We’re comrades, Monk. We tried the other bit but it didn’t shake out, dig?”

  “Dug. What else can you tell me about my boy Nolan?”

  “I remember in his senior year he drew some flack for a presentation in speech class. Touting the line that the Holocaust never happened, you know? It split the faculty because of the free speech aspect.” She took another pop on the bottle then, putting the cap back on, placed it at the foot of the bed.

  “Was he ever involved with any violence during this time?”

  “No, I mean nothing beyond the usual harassing of interracial couples at dances or him and his crowd making fun of Jesse Jackson, blasting quotas, the whole shtick. But even then his hair was turning white and it sort gave him a kind of mystique. He cultivated a certain attitude on campus.”

  “This would be about the time that Bright Was starting to get national attention,” Monk absently reflected, sipping his scotch.

  “Yeah. The summer he graduated Bright came back through here and it was Nolan and some of the others who then organized a local War Reich chapter.”

  “Do you think Nolan is jealous of Bright’s notoriety?”

  “Hey, I don’t call him up and inquire.” She squinted at him. “What’s the angle, Coffin Ed?”

  “I’m getting there. I’ve noticed a few plaques around town not only thanking her old man, but Elsa Meyer herself, for her philanthropy and so forth. The clinic you guys took me to has one in the waiting room.”

  She uncapped the whisky, took another nip, and slanted her head at him.

  “And did mother dear put a little money in the coffers of her darling’s home for wayward psychos?”

  “It is alleged she gives money on the regular to the War Reich.” Katya drank some more.

  “Well, well.”

  Katya put the bottle on the nightstand and got up again. “Since you won’t let me ravage you, I’m not staying around here playing Delia Street to your Mason. I’m outta here.”

  “Keep out of the rain, Katya.”

  She had her hand of the door knob. “It’s gonna fall on everybody, Ivan. Sooner or later.”

  Chapter 22

  Somewhere a steam calliope played, and a juggler, his fingers bleeding from Victor Jara’s guitar strings, kept in synchronous orbit the mummified heads of Augusto Pinochet, Papa Doc, and Le Pen. The event was staged by Federico Fellini while Rudolf Hess and A. Philip Randolph went best two out of three in the ring to see who would be the keynote speaker. It was Vegas rules, so the end of a round wouldn’t save you if you were decked on the canvas. Swifty Lazar asked Ida B. Wells and D.W. Griffith to work the crowd for after-party invitees.

  Canopies were provided by I.G. Farben and the shrimp dill sandwiches had been shipped in on dry ice courtesy of the National Front. Leonard Jeffries and Margaret Thatcher exchanged suggestive peeks while they parked the cars. The booze came in off the docks of Marseilles driven by Lucky Luciano in a straight eight flatbed. Sister Souljah and Vladimir Zhirinovsky provided color commentary while tossing a grenade back and forth. In a side tent, Nguyen Giap debated economics while playing Monopoly with Joseph Mobutu. Baruch Goldstein and Colin Ferguson, both wearing their Brooklyn Dodger caps, took care of the security. Cornel West sent Enoch Powell and a few Khmer Rouge out to hunt down some beef hotlinks, and to bring back the proper red wine. Bertold Brecht and Ruben Salazar took notes, and Frida Kahlo sketched with urgency.

  Monk banished the scenario from his mind and came up behind a gathering of townspeople. Blight’s rally was taking place in Elihu Park. There was a portable bandstand and a miked podium set near the statue of the deceased patriarch.

  At various places along the perimeter, and lining the bandstand, were a number of skinheads doing security. Milling about or setting up tables to sell their paraphernalia of bile were neo-nazis in German military uniforms replete with swastika arm bands, Aryan Nationalists, some Klan in their off-white and grey silks and, Monk gathered from their placards, Christian Identity types, tax resisters, and a few militia followers.

  On the south side of the park, across the street and behind a soon-to-be-useless police barricade, a growing throng of racially diverse skins, punks, wiggers, taggers, revolutionaries, and gangbangers gathered. Monk thought he recognized several Rolling Daltons from L.A. and Oakland.

  News crews and journalists weaved in and around the activity like worker ants with broken antennas. They were receiving blurred signals and didn’t know where to be when. Haram and his deputies stood to one side. Oates stood next to the sheriff, and pointed at Monk when he saw him. Anderson paced back and forth in tight, controlled circles.

  Presently, state police cars came rolling off the interstate and Hamm, cursing, ran over to greet the Captain who got out of the lead cruiser. Monk was pleased. That was the result of one of his calls which had been to Grant.

  People on both sides of the ideological and geographical line were shaking their signs and hefting bullhorns. Monk had never been in war, at least not one Uncle Sam recognized, but he knew this was how it felt, sitting in the foxhole or bombed-out house waiting for the next mortar to drop, the next round of incoming fire. Monk hadn’t been this apprehensive or excited in a long time.

  Perdition was a bottle of gas and somebody, before the day was through, was just liable to stick a lit rag in it.

  The Lincoln Town Car peeled off the east side of the street and came onto the grass next to the bandstand. Bright, and the other two Monk had seen with him the day before, got out. And one other passenger, Nolan Meyer.

  Monk held back, rather than follow his first inclination and edge close to the stage to keep an eye on Meyer. He didn’t want Meyer to think he was keying on him. But assuming Meyer and Bright already knew he was a PI up from L.A., why did Meyer show up? Well, why not? What proof did Monk have? And, he gravely surmised, maybe they figured Monk wouldn’t be returning to Los Angeles anyway.

  Reverend Creed kicked the rally off wit
h an invocation. He was a fervent white supremacist theologian who espoused, among other bizarre ideas, that blacks were the product of mating between apes and aliens.

  Then Meyer came to the podium and began the festivities in earnest. “Proud white members of the race gifted by God, as section leader of the western states War Reich, it is my pleasure to welcome you to this gathering that dares to speak for white rights in Zionist Occupied America. Indeed my friends, these coming months will be the time of the great pendulum. Will it swing this way or that?” his arms demonstrating his words. “The dawn is coming, and we’re going to see if it’ll light the way to ballots or bullets.”

  Applause went up from the crowd and Monk wondered if anybody realized Meyer stole his last line from one of Malcolm X’s speeches.

  Meyer had an orator’s skill and knew the correct places in his presentation to modulate his voice; where to add emphasis and where to be soft-spoken. His icy features stretched over his calm death’s-head face added to his ability to arrest the crowd’s attention.

  Along the street, the state cops had formed a loose wall between the supremacists and the anti-racists. Some of them hefted their banners, and made occasional bursts into their megaphones in an effort to disrupt the skinheads. But the bulk of them were also paying attention to a counter-rally. Monk could see Rameses up on a raised platform, talking and gesturing with his hands passionately.

  It went on like that for an hour and a half, each crowd pretending to ignore the other. The sky had started out a pale blue but was turning a slate grey by the time Bobby Bright came to the mike accompanied by a chorus of Sieg heils. Monk kept an eye on Meyer and, from where he stood, he could see him sitting rigidly in a folding chair next to the podium.

  “We must fight for the soul of America,” Bright said, surveying his audience with his arms outstretched. “Block by block, house by house, we must take our culture back, my friends.”

  “And send the niggers home with tight shoes on and fried chicken in their knapsacks,” somebody yelled from the audience. A round of laughter went up. From over Monk’s shoulder, somebody retorted. “You inbred motherfuckers ain’t taking nothing house by house ’cause you can’t count that high.” That produced a series of guffaws on the multi-racial side. Several beer cans and rocks sailed from the park and a couple of the state cops gripped the handles of their batons tighter.

  Name calling went back and forth and suddenly there were two distinct sets of youths facing one another down me middle of the street, a thin stream of busy state cops in tan the only thing separating the two groups. More name calling escalated to shoving.

  Monk’s stomach tightened and he weighed his chances of reaching Meyer should an all-out melee ensue. But even if he could, what would he do then? Half a dozen skins would be on him like white, literally, on rice and beat the living shit out of him. Or maybe Meyer would recognize him from that night in Wilmington and blast him on the spot. Either way, crowding the man wouldn’t produce any desired results.

  Bright had remained calm and from the stage was encouraging his people to return to the park. A few more tense minutes of unblinking eyes and free flowing epithets, and the racists drifted back to their event.

  Bright smoothly went back into his speech while sweat beaded on the foreheads of the state cops. Hamm and his deputies were also on the line, and more than once Monk caught Oates staring at him malevolently.

  The time seemed to compress as Bright’s speech continued. Beer drinking began on both sides of the police line, but the authorities made no moves to halt it. There was even the unmistakable aroma of weed wafting about—again on both sides. Like a spectator watching fish swim in an aquarium, Monk noted the physical characteristics of the gathered. He became fascinated with how they moved, with their body language, all the while calculating how he’d keep up with Meyer after the rally.

  “I’m pleased to announce that we have broken ground on 250 acres near Bay view, Idaho. This will be our training facility, our study center, our data base, our sanctuary against these mongrel hordes.” Bright pointed to an artist’s rendering which had been propped up on an easel. From where he stood, Monk couldn’t make out the details save for a piece of architecture which rose on one side of the compound. It was a cylinder spiraling like the Tower of Babel with a stylized cross at the apex.

  Cheers and whoops of delight went up from the increasingly unruly skins. Monk spotted Katya and angled close to her.

  “I’m going to try something later this evening, Katya.”

  She leveled a serious look on him. “Like trying to snatch Meyer?”

  Monk shook his head vigorously. “Nothing that goddamn crazy.” Some of the skins started a chant and they both turned nervous glances in that direction. “Does Meyer live in that big mansion on the other side of the beer plant?”

  She nodded in the affirmative. “Yep, he lives with his mother. And check this out, home fries, I know a way to get in there and it ain’t the front door.”

  Monk flashed on a half-formed image. An indistinct Polaroid seen through a haze. It was the last thing his brain had registered as Oates was clubbing him into unconsciousness. The three skins entering a dark maw under that odd light of the dead end street. “Can you show me?”

  Katya pulled on his hand grasping her upper arm. “I wish you were this excited when I came over last night. Sure,” she chuckled heartily, “if we’re all in one piece by tonight, I’ll show you.”

  They set a tentative time and Monk made his way across the street, stopping at a wall of skinheads who tried to obliterate him with their glares. Bright was winding up with a pitch to the crowd to give what they could to realizing the fascist dream of the facility in Bay-view. The damned thing was called the Waffen Lair.

  “How much you plan to contribute to the Waffle Shack?” Monk asked one of the snarling goons.

  No reaction. He moved off, after assuring himself that Meyer was still on the stage. Eventually, after the pitch and mini-concert from an Oy band calling itself Hammer Blow, the rally began to dissipate. The sky finally let go and the rain came down. Not in a rush, but fat heavy droplets like a wound intermittently bleeding.

  Evening in Perdition was like being in a frontier town where anarchy and the law coexisted but had little relationship with one another. The racist skinheads were everywhere and so too were their antithesis. Fist fights and skirmishes broke out on Hollis, in front of the mayor’s business on Commercial Street, and more than one window got itself shattered. Monk roamed around like a UN observer without a mission.

  Hamm was forced to quell fights if only to maintain some semblance of competence, the presence of the state police forcing him into action. Out on the interstate, a carload of skins in a big-wheel utility truck were shot at by a sniper. Someone set fire to Velotis Records, but Monk and some others quickly put that out. Rameses placed guards on the establishment.

  By ten, the rain had started its steady rhythm on several skinheads passed out in the park under trees from too much liquor. Some skins tried to break into the bank and the state cops arrested them, placing them in one of several Black Mariahs that had been brought into town after sundown. A few gangbangers charged into the Lonely Miner and overturned tables and chairs until Anderson and a couple of deputies arrived to drive them off. They left behind a spray-painted tag that read: “Crackers ain’t worth the peanut butter they’re spread with.” A gas station was set alight and amazingly the tanks didn’t blow before the fire department arrived to extinguish it.

  A young man naked to the torso with long red hair astride a Harley began racing around calling for Armageddon. It was unclear whose side he was on.

  Low-intensity warfare was waged back and forth throughout the town. At ten-thirty, Ash got on Perdition’s local radio station to announce the National Guard would be arriving by midnight. Over the airwaves, several rounds of gunfire could be heard punctuating his statement.

  Meanwhile, Monk made to keep his appointment.

  �
��Say, ain’t you the one who got smart with me earlier?” The youth was drunk, and the button fly of his jeans was undone. The woman standing next to him was stylish in grunge attire and there was a piece of rebar limp in her right hand.

  “How can you tell?” she slurred. That busted both of them up.

  “The only thing you people know to do in this town is fight. Go find a kitten to torture.” Monk walked forward along the street. From not too far away he could hear “People Get Ready” by the Impressions blasting into the brutal night.

  “Nigger lips,” the woman growled, haphazardly bringing the section of metal up.

  Monk stepped under the drunken swing and snatched the bar from her hand. He threw the bar away and trotted off to meet Katya.

  “The Guard rolled in off the highway ’bout fifteen minutes ago.” She was leaning on the south wall of the plant, her hands behind her back.

  What with her big frame, orange-tipped blonde hair and torn jeans, under the soft glare of the blue lights, Monk imagined Katya as a war angel stranded on Earth. “Yeah, on my way over I noticed some of the skins driving out of town.”

  She pointed at the outline of the large house beyond the grounds of the once-thriving enterprise. “I came this way from the other side, the front of the house. It’s actually on a rise and there’s a dead-end street at the bottom. There’s a set of stairs cut into the hill. I saw Blight’s Lincoln parked in front.”

  “Show me how to get to it from here, then I want you to split.”

  “You care about me, Ivan?”

  “Like a sister.”

  Deadpan, “You believe in incest?”

  At night the door was virtually imperceptible from the solid face of the high metal wall. Even in the day, you might pass by it since it had no handle or visible hinges. The wall itself was composed of sheeting of various sizes riveted into place. The door that Katya swung open was made to mimic that motif.

  “How’d you know about this?”

  “When Nolan was in high school, he used to brag about this secret entrance. Some of us followed him once to watch him go through it.”