by Paige Notaro
“So you’ve never talked to him about his father or his old gang?”
“No.” I was more than prickling with irritation now. I needed to leave before I said something stupid.
It must have been obvious. Lem pinched his forehead, looking very tired a moment. “Rosa, I’m not trying to annoy you. I just want to make sure you’re safe.”
“Safe from what, Lem?” I sighed.
“What is the acronym for Storm’s Soldiers?”
“Acronym? SS?”
That tripped something deep in my memory. I thought a moment but couldn’t dig it out.
Lem looked at me curiously. “You don’t remember from world war two history?”
I looked over Lem’s dark, narrow features a moment. Then, it all came rushing back.
SS, that was Hitler’s death squad. The ones that went around to villages murdering everyone who they didn’t want to transport to camps. Why would a biker gang have that acronym?
Oh, no.
My arms went very cold.
“Wait,” I said. “SS is probably a common acronym. It could mean a lot of things.”
“Not in this instance.”
Lem flipped around his monitor. It held an old, ugly webpage with black background and white font. A rolling banner up top read, ‘White Pride Worldwide.’
Below was a black and white picture of a bunch of bikers, all clad in leather and denim. They stood shoulder to shoulder, with faces grim against the sunlight, and their hands outstretched in a Hitler salute.
And right there at the very edge of the screen, was a big, young, good-looking guy: Calix.
“No,” I whispered.
“It’s him.”
For once, I had no words.
But from the volcano rumbling to life inside me, I knew I was going to find them soon.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Calix
I got the text as I went in to the armory that afternoon.
Rosa: Change of plans. Let’s get dinner first today.
The change didn’t bother me. Her phrasing was unusual though. Rosa always expressed herself, but she let me take charge. It was an arrangement we both enjoyed.
Still, we’d only been together a few weeks. It felt like I knew her for a lifetime, but that was wrong. The girl was full of surprises. Perhaps this was just another aspect of her personality I hadn’t yet discovered.
I texted her back with consent and ventured into the shielded bunker.
Private Raynor greeted me inside, looking like a reed fighting the wind. He had a grinding smile and shifting eyes.
“What?” I asked, swiping in past the side door.
“We’re not alone today,” he whispered.
He ticked his head at a far corner of the room, ten rows of storage down. I couldn’t see anything through the aisles of weaponry but shadow and concrete.
Another private emerged from behind the far aisle. He was rolling a tray racked with rifles. He tossed me a quick salute and moved on to one of the other requisition counters.
“What’s the plan?” Rayner hissed.
“The plan is to do our job,” I said.
There must be some heavy training exercise planned for today. I wouldn’t have heard about them all. Fort McPherson was big.
“But what about our operation?”
I gripped Raynor by the skull and tipped him up so he could see the camera at the top of the room. I didn’t look.
“This doesn’t affect us,” I said. “I’ll do my thing and you do yours.”
I was supposed to be deep into arranging the next gun skimming operation. I knew how to account for cameras and how to handle company. I couldn’t handle human stupidity. There was plenty of time anyway.
And, in truth, I was grateful to have a reason to not work on the shipment.
“You think we should try recruiting him?” Raynor asked. He peeked at the guy from around the line of concrete dividers separating requisition windows.
“No.”
“Three eyes are better than two.”
“No.”
I went and sat before my computer. Two already seemed too high. I had handled the last shipment on my own. The main aim of involving Raynor was to bind him to the cause.
I caught him steaming a bit from the corner of my eye. He was too eager. It was why I had recruited him. But he just wanted to get some revolution started. He didn’t stop to ask about the ends. It rubbed me wrong more and more.
Maybe it wasn’t him who turned out to be different. Maybe I was seeing him through different eyes now. He reminded me too closely of who I’d once been. I had never been dumb, but I had been fervent once. I could have never imagined myself urging my father to be patient.
I clicked through the falsified inventory records I had made, studying my handiwork. It was a slow, methodical process to cover it up at every level. I had made plans to streamline it so I could move onto other tasks. Things like building up a bigger network on the base.
Thinking of recruits now only reminded me of Montego’s crime scene pictures. Keeping my promises to my father was one thing. But I didn’t have the will to expand the cause.
The only fire left in me came from Rosa.
My shift finished up, and I took leave. Soon, I would be recovered enough to be clear for full duty. I wouldn’t be granted so much time away from the base. The only way to see Rosa more than once a week would require a huge step in this relationship.
It was crazy. It was too soon. It couldn’t be kept secret.
And yet, as I roared towards the twinkling spires of Atlanta on my bike, it kept returning to my mind.
Rosa had asked me to meet at The Varsity. It was not even a diner, but a greasy fast food place downtown. Atlanta held it up with pride, but I hadn’t been there in decades.
I walked in and the air felt like a curtain of oil. But there was also the sizzle of grilled onions and the meaty aroma of beef. This place would do ok for a night.
I found Rosa seated in the back corner of the back room. She must have come from the hospital, cause her round eyes were dimmed. Her hair was held back in a defeated ponytail, and her blouse was dark and wrinkled.
She still looked gorgeous.
The hard wooden tables around were mostly empty. The only other person in the room was a black teenager, and he had earbuds in.
An uneasiness hit my stomach. The isolation looked familiar.
“What are you doing here?” I asked as I sat.
She looked irritated. “I picked this place.”
“I mean this table. Why not closer to the food?”
She cleared her throat. Right then, I knew it wouldn’t be good. “I’m actually not very hungry.”
I held a deep breath. She must have rushed over from the hospital. There were only a few things reason I could see as a cause.
“Was there more trouble over your keycard history?” I asked.
“Actually, no, the opposite. They absolved me of all responsibility.”
“That’s perfect,” I said. “That should clear your mind.”
She studied her fingernails absently. “Yeah, it should, shouldn’t it?”
The calm troubled me more than any rage. She looked like the tide receding before a tsunami.
The silence ticked on. I strove for some way to keep the walls from crashing. I wondered if I could propose my idea from the ride here, but I was not equipped for it. It was a crazy thought, but I felt crazy thinking about what could be going on in her mind.
“Just tell me what you found out,” I said.
“Found out?” She laughed roughly. “Not even what happened or what I learned. ‘What I found out.’ You must have a lot of secrets to dig up if you’re not even sure which one would make a girl like this.”
“We all have secrets,” I said. “Some are covered on purpose. Most, simply by time passing.”
“There’s that stoic philosophy again,” Rosa said shaking her head. “It’s so elegant, the way you can justify th
ings.”
“I’ve never tried to justify the things I did. If I’ve left out details of my family’s criminal history, it’s because I’m no longer part of it.”
It was a last hope. Maybe Montego had contacted her about the keycard. He didn’t know we were involved. He might have shown her the pictures of the dead bikers and mentioned only their criminal affiliations, not the racial ones.
“Oh, I believe you stopped breaking the law for your family,” she said harshly. “I probably shouldn’t, but I’ll give that to you. But actions are easy to change. Can you change your mind so easy?”
The corner walls focused her fury and hung it like a cloud over my ears. A couple people came in holding trays and gave us nervous looks before sitting on the other side of the room.
“No,” I said. “You can’t.”
She blinked, dimming the sear of her eyes a bit. “So you’re still in agreement with your racist biker friends? The Storm Soldiers or whatever?”
“No. I mean that my ideas have been diverging from theirs for a long time.”
“And what ideas are those, Calix?”
“Violence.” I hung my head. “That’s all the Storm’s Soldiers are about. I can see that clearly now. I joined the army hoping to fix what was broken in them. Instead I came back to find that they’d rebuilt the pieces into something I could not support. I only abandoned them recently, but I left them mentally long ago.”
“We’re not talking about violence,” she said sharply. “You know I meant race. It sounds like your views didn’t change an inch if you came back looking to fix your old club.”
I studied my own hands, the pale of my palms despite the darkness of my tan on the other side. I might be ok living with two different worlds in my head. Of course, Rosa wouldn’t. This day had always been coming.
“They did,” I said. “Of course, they did. The army opened me up the world. The Soldiers and I might have gone our separate ways no matter who they were.”
“What exactly were you hoping to turn them back into? Were they just some sweet, little racist biker gang at some point?”
“They’re not racist,” I said, out of years of saying it.
Then I thought back to the men I knew inside: Homer and Thurgood and all the rest. Most would be fine even with perpetrating genocide. My father and I had laid down principles, but their violence had infected those along with everything else.
Rosa waited, eerily silent. I knew my words mattered.
“They were not meant to be racist,” I said. “The club was founded on white nationalism.”
Those were not the right words. Rosa’s tiny nostrils blared smoke. ”What the hell difference does that make?”
“It wasn’t about putting people down. It was about preserving a way of life.”
“A life of racism. Of exclusion.”
“No.”
“No?”
“It’s about…” I sighed.
All the words I could have used had come straight from my father’s mouth. I had no idea anymore what exact thing we were trying to preserve. I looked at Rosa and saw I had an inch of rope left. I had to find a deeper truth to all this. One that I could still believe in.
“It was about honoring my mother’s death,” I said, glumly.
Her face softened. “What do you mean? How does this have anything to do with your mother’s murder?”
I thought to the image of the gas station, a broken father, red and blue flashes on dark windows.
“She was killed in downtown Atlanta,” I said. “She and my little brother had pulled in to a gas station just as someone robbed the place. The guy killed her trying to take her car, then saw my brother in the backseat, panicked and ran away.”
“That’s awful.”
I shook my head. “She was supposed to me pick me up late after class, but my father got me earlier that day. I would have been in the front if I had been there. The robber would have seen me before shooting. We probably wouldn’t even be in that gas station.”
Rosa’s lips lay shut now, and she shook her head. Her hand edged toward mine on the table, but it didn’t reach it.
“That’s awful,” she said, “But I don’t see how that would lead you to becoming what you are.”
“The guy that killed her was black.”
The words sounded suddenly feeble. Rosa’s face turned and I struggled to get more out. “The part of downtown she was in was dangerous at night. My father had always told her to avoid it. I was with him at home when he got the call from the police. He couldn't even believe she had ventured there.”
Rosa stared at me. Her brow slowly tightened. “That’s it?” she said.
“That’s what?”
“That’s why you became a white nationalist?”
“That’s what landed him down that path, yes. He used to teach geography before. He decided it was more important to create a place where people could be with their own. The place where my mother died was almost entirely black populated. If she hadn’t ended up there by accident she wouldn’t have died.”
My father’s grief had always centered around that fact. I could remember his voice as he took the police call.
Why is she there? His voice had faded in disbelief. I don’t understand officer. Why would my wife be there? Later, in the midst of his grief, he would still speak the words to himself, still not believing.
“Oh, what the hell?” Rosa said, breaking my thought. She sat back arms folded. “You know, I spent all evening imagining all sorts of horrific things about you and what you believed, but this is almost worse. It’s silly.”
I felt myself burn hot at that. “In what way?”
“This is what you and your father took from your mother’s death? He decided he needed to get away from an entire group of people cause of one person’s crime?”
“He wasn’t looking to punish anyone, just set people free from the choices other groups made.”
“Uh huh.” She shook her head. “Do you even hear yourself? You’re so desperate to not look racist that you look silly instead. Who would your father want to keep apart from if your mother had been killed by a white robber?”
“That wouldn’t have happened in that part of town.”
“No? Then why not somewhere in your part of town? Because you guys lived someplace good, where the robbers were all computer hackers?”
I shook my head. This was getting way off message. “You asked me what started all this, and I told you. I was not the one who started the movement. This was his reasoning. What else are you looking for?”
“Uh, a real reason.” She bent in hard over the table. “You think what happened to you justifies what you turned into? My father was killed too, I didn’t become some black panther.”
“Your father was killed by white men?”
Her eyes fluttered a moment, and she dropped her gaze. “You might see them that way, but they were Latino.”
“What happened?” I asked, peering in at her.
It looked like she might refuse, but her head dipped back towards the table. “He was stabbed. We were walking to the corner store and someone robbed him. He didn’t even try to resist. He gave them his wallet and a guy stabbed him anyway. Maybe they just didn’t want him to follow them. He didn’t. He bled out in front of me.”
She looked up and her eyes were glistening. I saw myself in the reflection of her tears. I saw her behind that veil.
“Rosa…” I reached for her hand, but she yanked it away.
“Grief makes people do crazy things, but your whole life shouldn’t be built around it.” She shook her head wildly. “Why are you even dating me if you believe the things you do?”
I wasn’t even sure what I believed anymore, but that had happened because of her. It hadn’t led me to her. The reason for that was far more simple. “Cause I liked you,” I said. “Inside and out.”
“Like me? I’m black. That’s your enemy. You didn’t even see me as Latino when you first met me.”
“Black is not the enemy.” I wished I could just make her understand, but the more I tried to find the words, the less it made sense. “Separation is just one path to peace.”
“And the other is what?” She laughed dully. “Banging the black out of their kids?”
Kids. My heart swelled at the idea of creating so deep a connection. It was beyond even the crazy thing I’d been imagining on the ride over. But how could I ever keep that secret?
“I didn’t think it that far,” I said.
Her eyes went wide. “I wasn’t thinking that either. It’s just basic sense. I’m pretty damn sure I don’t want a racist dad fucking with their heads.”
“I’m not…I would never do that.”
She waited, but I couldn’t explain this. It was a thing deep in my bones. I would never hurt those I cared for. Kids? My kids? No fucking way.
“Let me ask you something plainly,” she said finally.
I gathered my breath. “Ok.”
“Do you look down on black people or not?”
“No.”
We both startled at the strength of my voice. I had not expected the answer to come down easily. But I wasn’t even seeing Rosa. I was seeing the black men I had fought and served with.
I had nearly died saving one, and I would do it again without question. If I looked down on them, I was looking down on myself.
She nodded once. “So this is all behind you at least? This white nationalism thing.”
That question hung before me. There was no vision in my head of some white world. Even before, that day had seemed so far away. I could only focus on the immediate goals: people, supplies and defense.
Now, the idea only reminded me of my father toiling away in his house.
“I only do minor things for my father now,” I said.
“What?”
I picked my words carefully. “Nothing violent. I just help him gather supplies he needs.”
She pressed in. “That still counts as being involved, Calix.”
“It’s just enough for him to tread water. He doesn’t ask for much. I don’t even attend rallies anymore.”
