A Mighty Fortress

by H. A. Covington

  By then Cody had already been assigned to Robert DiBella’s crew and enrolled in Hillside High with Farmer Brown posing as his daddy whenever needed for parent-teacher conferences and so on. He had insisted on using his own name despite the security risk, and surprisingly, DiBella had allowed this. He had been profoundly impressed when the boy told him with quiet, dead certainty, “The Jews took my father and my sister, and they tried to take my name. They tried to make my family disappear from the earth. I can’t do anything about my dad and my sister, but they will never take my name again.”

  Kelly had not been entirely accurate that morning at the breakfast table in her assessment of the student body. Being a poor blue-collar youth, or “grit” in the vernacular, Cody was able to attend Hillside on a special state diversity quota for underprivileged students, which in the recent absence of dark-skinned minorities had become known to most of the more affluent kids as the Trailer Trash Track. The high school gave Cody a visible and plausible cover and a reason for being almost anywhere; high school kids worked after school in all kinds of places, and they liked to cruise. Cody attended school during the day and was duly rousted by Farmer Brown and Bobby Bells to keep his grades up. He lived at a number of floating addresses with his comrades, and ran every conceivable errand for the crew, from grocery runs to taxi service to smuggling medical supplies, weapons, and illegal propaganda leaflets. He planted a few bombs, set a number of fires, and also drove and occasionally acted as the finger man for assassinations.

  He had willing embraced the NVA not out of ideology, but because of simple hatred for the system that had destroyed his family because his father had dared to defend himself against a sodden bully with a black skin, and also because he sought some feasible way to kill his foster family when time and place should serve, and get away with it. It was only when he had begun reading the works of George Lincoln Rockwell and Francis Parker Yockey during his nights on guard duty at various safe houses that he had come to understand why his world was the way it was and what the NVA was fighting for, and his vague sense of his own racial identity had coalesced into a personal commitment to a Homeland for his people. Like so many Volunteers, the Brock boy had started out to right his personal wrongs, and ended up as a political soldier trying to right the wrongs of history against his race.

  Having no draft exemption, he was already supposedly under orders to report to the United States Army induction center in September, orders which did not in fact exist, since on paper Cody himself did not exist except as a runaway in the California police computers. Cody’s ostensible reason for extending his strained high school career by becoming a student in the summer drama workshop for a final two months after graduation was because he wanted to have a creative credit on his record so he could get into an Army public relations unit and then once he got out, go to college on the GI Bill for a degree in Broadcasting and Communications.

  His real reason for taking the course was that he was head over heels in love with the cheerleader, homecoming queen and budding actress Kelly Shipman. In the social dynamic of Hillside High School, this was roughly equivalent to the stable boy in the palace seeking the hand of the princess, and had about as much chance of success outside of a fairy tale. It was virtually certain that this next two months in summer school was the last time in his life he would ever see Kelly, except on a movie screen. She was going on to college and Hollywood and stardom, to a wonderful life that he could only barely imagine, and one which he knew she fully deserved. He did not begrudge her this wonderful future. One of nature’s noblemen, he was genuinely happy for her. He himself would stay here in the cold Northwest to kill or be killed for a future he could imagine even less. These were their respective fates. Kelly had won the prize, and he had crapped out. Such was life. He understood this, and accepted it. Cody knew that he should have walked away from it after graduation and not drawn out the agony by wasting time in this puerile theatrical gig, but he simply could not bear to let her go just yet. The vision of her was the only memory he would ever have that was good in a childhood that had been nothing short of hell.

  Not that there was any romance to let go of. Kelly was a wonderful and sensitive young girl, but the teenaged class system of Hillside High was ingrained in her, and she simply did not think of a boy like Cody in that way. Some kids were naturally in and some were out, and boys who wore clothing from the Salvation Army instead of Nordstrom’s or the Bon were definitely not in the former category. After a year of diffident, low-key but persistent effort, Cody had managed finally to obtain a peripheral “just friends” status; even now as he watched the two girls volleying back and forth, Kelly saw him watching from the sidelines and waved at him. They spoke almost every day at school and once or twice a week on the phone, and he had even taken Kelly out a couple of times to the local burger barn and bike riding in the park, but to his chagrin she seemed to think that being male, he was a good sounding board for her on-and-off relationship with class president and football team captain Craig Crabtree, a young man of her own affluent class who was also a major league asshole. Cody had ended up as Friar Lawrence, when what he wanted was to be Romeo.

  Kelly and Molly finished their game and came off the court, headed for the girls’ locker room. “Hi, Cody,” she said brightly, coming up to him. “Ready for your first starring role? I’m going to ask Mr. Newman if we can do Arsenic and Old Lace. I’m going to be doing teen queens and bitchy girls for years, and maybe a lot of screaming in slasher flicks, so I want to play one of the old ladies to expand my range. You’d make a good Mortimer.”

  “Or Teddy,” replied Cody. He raised his hand to his lips, tooted an invisible bugle and yelled “Chaaaaaaaaaarge!” while waving an invisible saber. Kelly giggled. “I’ll probably end up doing the lights or building sets or something on whatever we decide to do. I’m mostly looking for something to do in the army so I won’t end up getting my ass shot off by some hadji. I’m not much of an actor, really,” he added with a smile, grimly aware of the ironic fact that he had been playing a deep role very successfully with her for almost a year, concealing his other life from her and not even giving away so much as a hint that he had a political or racial thought in his head.

  “I wish my brother Jason would find something to do in the service besides the infantry,” said Kelly worriedly. Then she sighed, “Well, I promised him when he left I wouldn’t worry about him. I do think you’d be a good actor, but I want to do some stage work and tech stuff as well. Every bit of experience helps, and I probably won’t get to do much actual theater for a long time, unless maybe it’s some summer stock or dinner theater. I kicked around the idea of going to New York and trying for Broadway, but I seem to have got Hollywood into my blood now. You have no idea what it’s like to actually be on set and part of a production! I live for it now. Heck, I’d work as a script girl or a grip if it got me on set! Well, see you in a few minutes.”

  “Wait,” said Cody. He reached into his cheap canvas book bag and brought out a small square gift-wrapped parcel with a bow. It was a collection of four long-play CDs on language and dialect, a specialty item he had ordered online, which was put out by a famous linguist for one of the major Hollywood studios. Its purpose was to help American actors master over forty accents and dialects of the English language to fit their characters, from the flat drawl of East Texas to the consonant-less roil of the true Cockney born within the sound of Bow Bells, from Cajun to the sonorous declamation of the BBC and the Strine of the Australian bush country. “Happy birthday, Kel,” he said.

  “Oh, Cody, how sweet!” she said excitedly.

  “Open it,” he suggested.

  “No, if it’s okay I’ll open it at Molly’s this afternoon,” said Kelly. “She’s giving me a party for all our friends, although of course it’s supposed to be a surprise and I’m not supposed to let on I know about it. Of course I’d like you to be there. You know where she lives, right? We can all go over after class is out. You can follow me over w
hile I drive my Dad’s present. See that silver Explorer out in the parking lot?”

  “That’s your father’s birthday present?” he asked, impressed. “Neat! Well, it will fit right in with what all the other stars drive down there in the dream factory. Except when you’re riding in your chauffeured limo, of course.”

  “Will you come to Molly’s party?”

  “I wouldn’t miss it,” he said warmly. She gave him a quick peck on the cheek and then she ran to catch up with Molly and hit the showers. Kelly didn’t return his birthday wishes because Cody had never bothered to mention to her that he had turned eighteen that day as well. It didn’t seem important.

  The dramatic arts class numbered about forty students, and they met at ten o’clock in the school’s fully equipped, thousand-seat theater. Affluent Hillside was a magnet school, and as such had a massive array of science and liberal arts facilities of all kinds which were the envy of the West Coast: computer labs, chemistry and biology labs, a fully equipped television studio and student radio station, sports and track fields, an Olympic length indoor pool, and classrooms with 75-inch screen satellite TV connections where students could hear lectures and watch events from around the world. The drama class was only one of the courses offered at Hillside’s summer school; there were also courses in business for future yuppies like Craig Crabtree, law, engineering, television and film (Kelly had almost taken that one, and had arranged to sit in on some of the classes,) several advanced science fields, and total immersion language classes. The corridors were almost as full of kids as they were during the school year itself. The top students from Hillside High who took these classes could begin college with one credit in their major already, plus the Advanced Track would look good on a resumé. There was also the unspoken purpose of trying to keep the largely Caucasian group of young people under supervision as much as possible. A lot of things had been going boom of late in Seattle, many NVA recruits were known to be teenagers, and the government encouraged young white people to be corralled into group activities where they could be watched. The sub rosa fear seemed to be that the devil might make work for idle hands.

  The drama class was taught by Mitch Newman, who was now standing before them, casually leaning back against the stage. He was a hairy, bespectacled man in his mid-thirties who affected jeans and lumberjack shirts, as well as a broad-brimmed felt Northwest hat until it had become uncomfortably confused with the Party’s fedora. Even today, the NVA were sometimes referred to as “the hats.” Mitch encouraged his students to call him by his first name and tried to be one of the kids himself. Newman’s reputation in the theatric arts rested on his own five or six years in Hollywood, during which time he had racked up speaking parts in half a dozen minor films, including the sidekick to a major male hunk star in a cop-buddy flick that had grossed pretty well and still brought him a small royalty check every quarter. Newman had sense enough to realize that his talent as an actor was limited, and so he’d gone into production and direction. He had racked up technical, stage management and screenwriting credits on about a dozen more movies before he had suddenly returned to Seattle. The rumor was that he had been blackballed by the studios after some kind of incident with a young starlet. The word rape being whispered, which rather added to his romantic air of raffish insouciance. He certainly hadn’t let it cramp his style with the ladies, and campus scuttlebutt had it that he had been involved with several teachers and was constantly on warning status for inappropriate interaction with female students.

  The actual truth of these allegations was not known for certain among the student gossips, but Newman didn’t bother to conceal the fact that he had ostentatious eyes for the luscious blonde body of Kelly Shipman. During the drama department’s mid-term production of South Pacific, Newman had practically drooled over Kelly every time she appeared on stage in her Polynesian grass skirt outfit, and on several occasions he had found patently unnecessary excuses to adjust her costume.

  A pained Cody had asked Kelly why she allowed this, and he had received a surprisingly frank answer. “Look, I’m beautiful and sexy, and every man who sees me wants to take me to bed,” she told him. “It’s been that way since I was fourteen. I’m glad, because that is an asset I have to have as an actress if I can turn it into camera presence and use it to supplement real talent, which I’ve got. I want to be a Meryl Streep, not a Marilyn Monroe. In Hollywood sex appeal is a marketable commodity, and it’s an invaluable part of my package. It means I won’t always be stuck with character parts, and I can get a shot at lead roles. Guys like Mitch copping an occasional feel is a small trade-off for the edge my looks and my body give me. I’m not a slut, and I won’t let anyone treat me like one. I have already made a promise to myself that I’m never doing the casting couch, I don’t care what part’s on offer. But I want people to look at me, the men because they want me and the women because they want to be like me. That’s one of the things that makes a star.”

  Sexual harassment was a serious political charge, and it was something of a mystery as to how Mitch Newman was able to skate on it, despite the cloud of unsavory rumor that hung over his head. Cody thought he knew. Mitch was widely suspected of being Jewish, although he never actually said so. Like many Pacific Northwest Jews over the past few years, he had learned to conceal his racial identity, sometimes even to the extent of wearing a large gold cross outside his clothes. But there was one student he didn’t fool. Cody had lived too long among the Tribe, and he knew. Several times he’d attempted to interest his commanding officer Bobby Bells, or at least his friend Farmer Brown, in the idea of killing Newman, but he was unable to provide any proof of Newman’s Hebraic heritage.

  “Look, Cody, I don’t doubt your word,” DiBella had explained to him patiently. “I’m sure this guy is a scumbag. It’s just that we can’t go around killing people because we think they might be Jewish, or even if we know they are, for that matter. Personal considerations can’t enter into Volunteer operations. The idea behind what we’re doing isn’t simply to gun people down on the street like we’re some kind of gangsters. The idea is to win our independence as a nation, and to do that we’ve got to function like a proper army and select our targets accordingly. Now if you can bring me any proof that this guy is not only a Jew but he’s doing something to help the ZOG, or that removing him would benefit the Volunteers in any way, then once you convince me he’s a legitimate military target, your Mr. Newman is history.” But despite snooping and even a few attempts to schmooze up to Newman, dropping a few Yiddish expressions as bait, Cody was never able to get anything definite.

  Now Mitch began to speak. “Guys and gals, welcome to the summer drama workshop. In this next two and a half months, we’re going to learn a lot about a complex and exacting craft, and we’re going to have more fun than a barrel of monkeys doing it. You can take that to the bank. I’m going to make sure that all of you remember this summer for the rest of your lives. Some of you, like Kelly, are already well on the way towards an acting career, but I hope to convince you that you can use your abilities and your love of drama not just to make a living, but to achieve a fulfilling and exciting life. We’ve got ten weeks, and I want us to work up two productions for public performance in that time. The first will be a series of three one-acts of theater in the round, for which I have selected the most modern and avant-garde short pieces I could find, carefully chosen to give the fullest range of expression possible to all the talent we’ve got here. You can find the scripts in the course packets that Suzanne is passing out.”

  Newman’s harried-looking teaching aide was giving out stacks of papers which were duly passed back up the row to all the students. Cody noticed that two of the three one-acts were by Jewish playwrights he had never heard of, and the third seemed to be by some kind of Hindu, Gupta Something-or-Other. A quick glance over the scripts confirmed that one playlet seemed to consist almost entirely of obscenities shouted at the top of the characters’ lungs, the second was a hippy-dippy dialogue
between people pretending to be various plants and animals, and in the third the lines were all to be spoken while the characters were whirling around the stage like dervishes in a state of nudity or at least semi-nudity.

  “Our second production will be a proper, full-blown stage play,” continued Newman. “I’d like to hear suggestions from you all now as to what that play will be. Needless to say, I think we need to showcase the talents of Kelly Shipman, since within our own community here in Seattle she has what amounts to star draw, and we would like to make something off the box office for the drama department. But no play or motion picture is a one-man or one-woman vehicle. Not by any means. Theater and film are team efforts on every level, and all of you will get a chance to learn and to participate in a professional-level production.”

  Most of the morning was spent in a debate on what the major play was to be, and Kelly was able to carry Arsenic and Old Lace. The minute it was clear that was the play she wanted to do, Newman backed her. It was shameless sycophancy but the kids didn’t mind. Arsenic was a funny play, after all. They broke for lunch at twelve. The school cafeteria was open, and somewhat to his annoyance Cody saw that Kelly and Molly ended up sitting with Craig Crabtree and the usual affluent class clique, which seemed to have survived graduation, at least for the summer until the privileged kids dispersed to their various colleges and universities. Kelly was chattering away. “I don’t see why we have to stay on campus for lunch,” she said with a pout, as she wolfed down a chef salad with diet ranch dressing. (Hillside was definitely a rich kids’ school.) “I wanted to take us all out to Burger Barn in my new Explorer.”

  “They’re scared we’ll get kidnapped or blown up or something by Jerry Reb,” said Molly Bergstrom, biting into a cafeteria BLT.

  “If we take that piece of crap Nissan Brock drives, maybe the goots will think we’re fellow trailer trash and let us pass,” said Crabtree with a shit-eating grin. Cody ignored him.