Shella

by Andrew Vachss

  They never seemed to go out in the woods, but they were always dressed for it.

  Murray came by the dorm one morning. He walked over to my bunk, sat down on the next one. I was glad I had some of the reading in front of me.

  “How come you don’t put up no pictures?” he asked me.

  I didn’t know what to say. I used to hate that, before I figured out I didn’t have to say anything. But that was for other places. I looked around the big room. Guys had pictures on the walls near where they slept. Mostly women. From magazines. Their favorites were women wearing soldier stuff, like a naked girl with a rifle. I don’t understand pictures, why people have them. I mean, maybe a picture of a real person, to remember them. But men who buy magazines, they don’t know those women. Shella tried to explain it to me once, but I stopped listening once she got crazy. When Shella talks about why men do things with women, she gets twisted up inside and scary. I couldn’t think of anything to say to Murray so I just shrugged. He gave me a look, like he knew something about me. I saw the muscles flex hard across his arm as he looked at me.

  I seen that kind of look all my life.

  Murray came by where I was a lot. I got used to seeing him. One night, he just looked in the door. “Come on,” he said. “Cadre meeting.”

  I got up and went outside with him. I followed him, walking across the compound. He was almost bouncing, he was so pumped up, humming to himself, clenching his fists.

  Inside the room where he took us there was maybe eight, ten guys. Nobody was saying much, just smoking and standing around.

  The guy in the white shirt came in the back door, turned an easy chair so it was facing us, and then he went and stood in the corner.

  The leader came in and sat down. He had a suit on with a white shirt but no tie. He looked like the mug shot, just like it. Everybody stood up when he walked in. Then he made some gesture with his hand, like waving, and everybody sat down. I was the last one to sit, because I didn’t know what to do. And the guy in the white shirt, he never sat down.

  “I just wanted to walk in here and tell you, again, how much the Nation values your sacrifices. I know it’s no fun, giving up what you did, making those sacrifices. Like the good book says, if there’s a reason, there’s a season. There’s a time for everything. Soldiers make sacrifices … that’s the way of the warrior. But tonight, you’re getting a little break. Not the whole camp, now, just this cadre. What we’re going to have is a little training exercise, a full-dress rehearsal. Some of you have already been blooded, some of you haven’t gone the distance. Tonight isn’t that. Tonight’s just a way of spreading our message. Any questions?”

  Nobody said anything. I was toward the back of the room, but I could feel people behind me.

  The leader looked all around the room. He had a way of looking you in the face that didn’t challenge you. Not trying to stare you down, just making sure you was listening to him. You could look back at him and it wasn’t the signal to fight.

  “Being a Christian doesn’t mean you don’t have anything to do with sex,” he said to us. “A man is going to want sex, that’s the way nature intended it. But in these times, a man has to be careful. There’s a lot of traps out there.”

  He took a pipe out of his shirt pocket. A white pipe with a yellow stem. He pushed down the tobacco with his thumb, fired a wooden match, and took his time getting it going. Nobody else lit up. When he got it going, he took a puff. Then he held the pipe in his hand, looking at it, just settling down.

  “You men are going to have a little party tonight. Just down the road, about an hour’s drive from here, there’s a little prostitution ring operating. They’ve got three trailers parked side-by-side in this spot out behind a tavern, back in the woods, where you can’t see them from the road. Billy knows where it is—he’ll be leading the convoy.

  “Now let me tell you a little bit about this operation. It’s run by white men, but they don’t act like it. They don’t serve niggers in the roadhouse, but out back, they get the same rights as white men. You understand what I’m saying to you, boys? You fuck one of those trailer whores, and you may be going in right behind a nigger. You may be pulling sloppy seconds after a jungle bunny. Now, we told the guy who runs the operation we wouldn’t stand for this. Explained it to him real clear. He said he was gonna set up a separate trailer for them, and we went along. But we sent our own people in, and you know what they told us …? The niggers can only go in the trailer on the left, but the girls, they go to all of them. They’re on rotation, you see what I’m saying?”

  Some of the men nodded. I just watched him. He was too smart—there had to be more.

  “Anybody here know how to make a good fire?” The leader looked around the room.

  One guy raised his hand. I could see from his face that he knew all about fires. The leader looked across at the guy in the white shirt. They kind of nodded to each other.

  “Okay,” the leader said. “We got a rifleman here too?”

  Three of the guys put their hands up. The leader looked at the closest one, a guy with long blond hair and a mustache. “Where’d you learn?”

  “I was in the ’Nam,” the blond guy said.

  “Good enough, brother. What about you?” He was asking another guy, a guy with a shaved head.

  “Prison guard,” the man said.

  The leader moved his eyes to the third man. He was bigger than the others, with his hair combed forward over his eyes, like bangs. “Hunting …” he said. Like he was ashamed of it.

  The leader kept asking questions. He had a soft, friendly voice. Everybody liked him, you could see it.

  “No reason why you can’t have a little taste before you get to work. Thing is, with whores, you got to be careful. A whore is a liar, always remember that, men. A whore is a liar. Lying is their trade. Lying on their backs, lying with their mouths. So you have to watch yourselves at all times, be careful you don’t get something you didn’t bargain for. Everybody know what I mean?”

  Everybody nodded. Somebody said “Yeah,” but so soft I couldn’t tell who it was.

  “Is that right?” the leader said. “You all know what I mean, huh? Well, okay, how about you tell me what I mean.” He pointed at a guy right across from me. A bloaty-looking guy with real hairy arms.

  “Don’t go out without your rubbers.… I mean, don’t go in without them,” the fat guy said. On his face was a look like he got the right answer.

  A couple of men laughed, but they stopped when the leader looked at them.

  “Yes, that’s certainly true,” he said. “But I’m thinking of something else. Some of these little girls, well, they’re not girls at all. Understand?” He looked around the room. “Now, who knows how you tell whether you’re looking at a real woman, or one of those transvestites … a homo-sex-ual dressed up like a woman?”

  Nobody said anything. Nobody knew the answer.

  I knew.

  I knew the right answer.

  I raised my hand. The leader nodded at me. I touched my Adam’s apple. The leader smiled. “Now, where’d you learn that, son?”

  I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know why I raised my hand. I was stupid, that’s why I did it. I couldn’t tell him about Shella, how I learned those things, where I’d been. I felt myself being pushed in, like the air was too heavy. I didn’t know what to say.

  “In prison,” I said.

  The leader sort of chuckled. “Yes, that’s been the graduate education for many of us, hasn’t it? Well, you’re right. Right on the money.”

  He bowed his head, like he was praying. I saw the others do it, so I did it too.

  The man in the white shirt, he kept watching us.

  After the leader left, the man in the white shirt took out a clipboard. He wrote something on it, then he kind of pointed at the guy who was with him the first time I saw him. The guy with the shoulder holster.

  That guy explained what we were going to do. Some of the guys asked questions—you
could see it was okay to do that with the leader out of the room. The way they talked about it, it was like this army thing.

  But what they were going to do, it sounded like the same way they send a message in the city.

  We went in three cars. I was in the back of a station wagon, Murray was next to me. He kept squeezing a set of those handgrips, the ones with springs, to make you stronger. Over and over, switching them from one hand to the other. The handles were red, wood.

  They had asked me what kind of gun I wanted—they had a whole bunch of them spread out on a table. I took one that looked like the one the Indian gave me.

  The roadhouse was like a long, dark diner. Neon sign outside: Rebel Inn. The parking lot had mostly pickup trucks in it. You had to walk this dirt path around the back to get to the trailers.

  There were three of them, like the leader said, one standing off by itself to the left.

  “Twenty-two hundred hours, right on target,” one of the men said. The guy in the white shirt had said we should be there by ten o’clock, but I didn’t say anything.

  The three guys with the rifles went in first. We had to wait for them to finish so they could stand guard. It didn’t take long. We all got a turn. I knocked on the door to the trailer. A skinny old woman with a big blonde wig let me in. It cost thirty bucks. The room was like a closet. The girl in there was tired and she smelled bad. You could hear the people grunting in the next room over—the walls were made of some cardboard stuff. I finished quick.

  When we got together outside in the parking lot, the one they called Billy checked us over. He pointed to the house on the left, told me and Murray to take that one. The other ones fanned out.

  “You see one, shoot him,” Murray said. “They all carry razors and they’ll cut you in a minute.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  Murray knocked on the door. A woman in a red dress opened it—she was fatter than the door opening. We climbed up the steps and went inside. We took out our guns.

  “Get your hands up,” Murray told the fat woman.

  She did it. She looked bored.

  “How many girls you got back there?” he asked her.

  “Three.”

  “They all busy?”

  “Two are. Mary’s alone in her room.”

  “Where’s the phone?”

  “There’s no phone here. We use the one in the tavern.” The fat woman sat down, lit a cigarette. Murray looked mad, but he didn’t say anything.

  The fat woman dragged on her cigarette. I could hear a radio playing. Country music, it sounded like.

  “Call her out … this Mary. Get her out here.”

  The fat woman started to get up, then she sort of shrugged, yelled “Maaary!”

  Another fat girl came out, this one was younger. She was wearing a shortie nightgown and high heels. When she saw the guns, she went and sat down next to the other one, like she was half asleep.

  “You try to run, I’ll blow you away,” Murray said to the women. They didn’t look like they could.

  The hall was too narrow for two of us. Murray went first. He stood outside a door to the left, pointed to my door on the right. He stepped back and kicked the door. It made a loud noise but it held. He kicked it again. I heard a scream. I turned the handle of my door and it opened. Inside there was a man just getting off a woman. They were both naked, except he had socks on. I pointed the gun at them.

  “Get out,” I said.

  The man kind of jumped into his pants, grabbed up his clothes and ran out. The woman just laid there.

  “There’s gonna be a fire,” I told her. I walked out of the room and I heard a shot. I looked through the open door. Murray was aiming at a man—I couldn’t tell if he hit him or not.

  “Come on,” I yelled at him. “It’s going up.”

  He followed me out. The two fat women were still sitting in the front room.

  Another shot, from one of the other trailers. A man in a red jacket came in the front door. He had a stocking mask over his face and a metal gasoline can in one hand. He started splashing the gasoline all over—the smell was choking me.

  The two fat women ran out. When the fire man got to the back of the trailer, the other two women came out too.

  We went back to the parking lot. There was a big whooosh! from between the three trailers. A fireball went up, then it shot out in three arms. You could see it rip toward the trailers. They all went up. It sounded like a war … explosions from inside, popping, then a big bang. People were running out of the tavern. There was a lot of shooting, but it was all up in the air. Two men ran to a corner of the parking lot. They stuck a cross in the ground. The guy in the red jacket lit that too.

  That was all. We got in the cars and took off. Nobody tried to stop us. I couldn’t hear sirens.

  The car I was in had a police radio in the front seat. I couldn’t understand it with all the crackling, but the guy next to the driver said the State Police were rolling toward the tavern. By then we were miles away.

  When we got back, they dropped us off near the dorms. The guy in the shoulder holster was waiting. He told me and Murray to come with him.

  We walked to another building, where the guy in the white shirt was waiting.

  Murray went in first. The guy with the shoulder holster told me to wait.

  When it was my turn, the guy in the white shirt asked me what happened. I told him.

  “Good work,” he said.

  I was walking back when I saw Murray ahead of me. He must have been waiting—I was in with the man in the white shirt for a while.

  “What’d you tell him?” Murray asked me.

  “What happened.”

  “About the niggers?”

  “What niggers?”

  “At the place … the niggers. I told him I … shot one. A nigger. In the room with a white girl.”

  I didn’t say anything. All the men in the house had been white.

  Murray put his hand on my arm. I let him do that—he was scared of something.

  “John, did he ask you … if there was any niggers there?”

  “No.”

  “You won’t tell …”

  “Tell what?”

  “You’re my true brother, John,” Murray said, squeezing my arm hard.

  On the TV the next day, they said it was the KKK who set fire to the trailers. Some of the guys watching cheered. The fire man rubbed his hands, watching the tape of the burning.

  It was another ten days or so when Murray came by. All excited again. Worked up.

  “We going to an Action Team, John. I just heard. They tell you yet?”

  “No.”

  “Hey, it’s true. I got it straight from HQ. You’ll see, both of us got tapped.”

  He was pacing around in a little circle, really happy.

  The only thing I knew about the Action Team was what the leader said in one of his talks. He talked about Partition again. He said the niggers wanted their own land too, but, like all niggers, they wanted the government to just give it to them. Like Welfare. Our land, he said, our land would come from our own labor. We would pay for it. The Action Teams, they were the way they got the money.

  The guy in the white shirt, he was the one who told us about the Action Team they picked me and Murray for. Hijacking was what it was. An armored car, carrying a factory payroll from a bank. He knew everything about it. Everything. You can’t shoot out the tires on one of those armored cars—the guards would just stand inside and call the police on their telephone. Roadblocks are no good either. What you have to do, he said, is hit them while they make a transfer. While the door is open.

  He said they were experts. They did dozens of these, all around the country. It was the only way to get the money they needed.

  Me and Murray were watching TV. They just arrested this guy in Milwaukee. They found all kinds of bodies in his house. The announcer was saying the guy was maybe the worst serial killer ever. The fire man came in. He listened for a minute, gettin
g excited.

  “How many women did he kill?” he asked Murray.

  “He only killed boys,” Murray said.

  “He’s a sick bastard,” the fire man said, getting up and walking away.

  One day, Murray asked me if I wanted to go work out with him. There’s a weight room in one of the buildings. I told him no.

  “John, come on, man. You’re too skinny. I mean, I’m not coming down on you or anything, but I can see you got good musculature … a good skeleton, see? If you was to work out with me, I guarantee you, maybe six months, you wouldn’t recognize yourself.”

  “Thanks anyway,” I said to him.

  He sat down next to me. “John, if I made you feel bad, I’m an asshole. That wasn’t what I meant. This whole thing …” He waved his arms around. “This whole thing, it’s not just for race pride, you know what I mean? Like … why did you join up? How come?”

  “I hate niggers,” I told him.

  “Yeah, I know. Me too. As much as anybody. But … part of it, I guess … I wanted to have friends, too. Real friends. You understand me?”

  “Sure.”

  “So forget about the iron work, okay? I just wanted to say, you got anything I could help you with, you just gotta ask me, okay?”

  “Okay, Murray.”

  He punched me hard on the arm, but I could tell he wasn’t trying to hurt me.

  The guy in the shoulder holster came by one afternoon. He said the leader wanted to see me.

  I followed him over. The leader was in his big room, in his chair. The guy in the shoulder holster left us alone. I measured the distance. I saw the dots start to pop out on him. The door opened behind me—the guy in the white shirt came in.

  “You are the young man who knew how to tell a transvestite from a real woman, aren’t you?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “You know why that’s so important?”

  “No. I don’t, I guess.”

  “The homo-sex-ual doesn’t think with his mind, son. He thinks with his sex … whatever that is. They’re bad apples. One of our great leaders once said, a man who won’t fuck won’t fight. That’s why they don’t let them in the army. Just one of them … a single one, he can destroy a whole movement. You know, the white power movement didn’t start last week. It has a long, honorable history, ever since Reconstruction…. You know what that is?”