Son of Fletch (14 page)

“Come again?”

“You will see. Those of you who believe in one world, the brotherhood of races, miscegenation, quickly will change your minds when there is only one deer left in the forest. Quickly you will learn with which pack of dogs you run.”

Carrie and Fletch looked at each other.

The Afro-American civil rights leader who recently had discussed matters with Fletch on the terrace behind the farmhouse at one point had burst into laughter and said, “Ah, Fletch! You’re not going to give me that one-world crap, are you?”

In the car, Carrie lowered her head so Wolfe could see her. She barked. “Aarrf!”

Softly, Fletch said, “Since the beginning of time, a few have taken the fact of economic competition, no matter how great the resources, and used it to create hatred and violence to satisfy their own greed.”

“Aarrf!” Carrie nodded in agreement.

Fletch looked into Wolfe’s eyes. “And that’s no joke.”

“Aarrf! Aarrf!” Carrie sat back. “Fletch, did I hear right? Did he call me a bitch?”

“So far, I don’t think he’s actually spoken to you. Or looked at you.”

“Notify him I’m fixin’ to bite his ankle.”

Wolfe handed Jack a six-pack of condoms.

He also handed one to Fletch.

“I beg your pardon?” Fletch asked.

“Once used, please turn them in at headquarters. A clerk will label them properly.”

“Our semen,” Jack said to Fletch, “will be stored. And used.”

“I beg your pardon?” Fletch asked.

“By artificial insemination,” Jack said. “To continue and improve our race.”

“Mister Fletcher.” Commandant Wolfe still stood at attention. “You must agree all the wrong people are having children!”

“About your parents,” Fletch said, “indeed I do agree.”

Wolfe’s cheeks colored. “Do this! It is your duty!”

He did a military about-face. Chin high, shoulders back, he marched away, up the slope, over rough ground.

“Well, I’ll be Adam’s uncle,” Carrie said. “Did you ever?”

“No,” Fletch answered.

Jack was watching Fletch.

“Here.” Fletch handed the condoms to Carrie. “Give these to your friend Leary. Save the world a lot of trouble.”

Empty chili bowl in one hand, with his other hand Jack tossed the pack of condoms into the air and caught it. “How can I object?” Jack said. “I am a result of selective breeding. Aren’t I?”

T
here were between
fifty and sixty men gathered in the middle of the encampment.

It was clear from their faces, the way they stood, talked, that many of these happy campers had ingested one form of intoxicant or another, or more than one form.

They were primed for firing.

Brush and old wood had been piled high at the other end of the central clearing. So there was to be a bonfire, Fletch surmised.

Among them stood a fat, bald man in a dirty white apron. He carried a metal ladle.

“That must be the chef,” Carrie said. “I must ask him where he gets his ragweed.”

A few women stood together at a distance from the men. Babies and girl children were with them. Boy children stood among the men.

A microphone, speakers at a distance each side of it, had been placed at the top of the three steps on the porch of the log cabin.

Fletch and Carrie stood well away from the crowd of men, to the side, where they could see almost everything well.

At the front of the men, Jack was adjusting a camcorder on a tripod.

“My, my,” Fletch said to Carrie. “This is being taped.”

“‘Vanity, vanity,’” Carrie said. “‘All is vanity.’”

“More than that,” Fletch said. “Like their predecessors, they are carefully documenting their own history.”

“So later they can deny it, right?”

Commandant Wolfe came through the door of the log cabin onto the porch. He was followed by Commandant The Reverend Doctor Kris Kriegel. He was still dressed in the ill-fitting slacks and shirt Carrie had found in one of the farm’s closets. The uniformed young man, still carrying the clipboard, was the last through the door.

Three times the men standing before the cabin raised their right arms in the stiff salute. Three times they shouted “Heil!”

Wolfe raised his eyes to the flag on the pole behind the men, raised his right arm, and said, “Heil!” only once, not loudly.

Fletch noticed that in this moment of concentrated rapture, Jack had taken the camcorder off the tripod. Crouched, he was videotaping the audience, moving back and forth.

Jack was recording every face.

At the microphone, Wolfe began to speak. There were a few sentences of greeting. He referred to his audience as
real men, real American men
. There was a joke about how surprised, upset their
Jewish employers
would be if they knew where these men were this night. Their
Jewish employers
wouldn’t know whether to give their jobs to
the ass-licking
niggers
or just sell out to
those yellow, slanty-eyed, Asian, pocket-sized, battery-operated calculators
.

Fletch watched Carrie.

Her mouth dropped open. Beneath her tan, her face drained of blood, turned white. Even her freckles receded, like stars when the moon appears. Her eyes widened and blazed blue.

She turned her face toward him. “Fletch…”

The skin around her eyes began to wrinkle.

“Don’t say anything,” Fletch said. “Don’t cry.”

As if in a nearly fainting condition, as if appealing to him, her fingertips brushed Fletch’s forearm. “I can’t stand this.”

“I know.”

“Why do they come here to do this, say these horrid things? The license plates on the vehicles … they’re not from around here.”

“They’re everywhere now,” Fletch said. “North, south, east, west.” At last reckoning there were 346 groups such as this in the United States of America, up twenty-seven percent from the year before. “Great Britain, France, Germany, Poland, the Balkans, Russia. The Middle East. Africa. Ethnic cleansing. Separatism.” Fletch had guessed Kriegel had come to the United States to draw these groups together, and strengthen their ties with similar movements abroad.

Having been caught, tried, convicted, and sentenced for that “irrelevancy” in Washington surely must have frustrated him.

“The children.” Carrie’s eyes were wet with tears. “The babies.”

“I know.”

Carrie listened another minute.

Not hiding at all what she was doing, she then put the earplugs in her ears.

Encouraged by applause, whistles, shouts of
White rights!
Wolfe spoke on, and on, and on. There were references to those of African descent as
the mud people
. To those of Jewish descent as
the children of Satan
. To the United States government as
Z. O. G., just another Zionist organization
.

Not hearing much of anything of what Wolfe was saying, Carrie’s shoulders relaxed somewhat. She folded her arms across her chest. She stared at the ground in front of her.

Her face remained pale.

Clearly Wolfe had studied the newsreels of Mussolini. He folded his arms high across his chest. Lips in a downward crescent, he nodded his head violently in affirmation of everything he said, every noise of approbation from his audience. He strutted back and forth to the microphone between each utterance, raising his feet like a rooster on a gossip bench.

Fletch remembered the overwhelming sadness he had felt once in East Africa when his friend Juma had brought him and Fletch’s then wife, Barbara, to Shimoni, a huge cave at the edge of the Indian Ocean….

… So again Fletch stood with a woman who was deeply shocked, deeply saddened, her cheeks glistening with tears in less than perfect light; he, saddened before, saddened now, but now, half the world away, also enraged at the ignorance of the many, the purposeful ignorance of the few who manipulated such ignorance for their own power-mongering, greedy ends … enraged….

To rousing cheers and chants of
White rights! White rights!
Wolfe finished his speech and, arms still folded high across his chest, stepped back.

Kriegel stepped forward to speak.

His voice was higher than Wolfe’s. “I hereby name this camp,” he shrieked, “Camp Orania!”

The audience roared its approval.

Fletch doubted many, if any, in the audience knew what Orania signified. In the wasteland of Karoo, South Africa, Orania is the name of the headquarters of the Afrikaner Resistance Movement.

Without doubt, Kriegel meant it as a great compliment to the establishment of this camp in Alabama.

“Hey.” Fletch nudged Carrie. Having her attention, he nodded his head, indicating Jack.

Apparently leaving the camcorder on the tripod to run itself, Jack had gone forward to a sound console on a bench just in front of the porch of the log cabin. He had put on his earphones. He was fiddling with some dials.

Fletch inserted his earplugs, concealing what he was doing no more than Carrie had. Then he put on his headphones. They were plugged into nothing. He tucked the wire into the collar of his shirt.

Carrie did the same with her earphones.

Fletch could hear nothing. Kriegel’s mouth was moving, head bobbing, his arms waving; from the audience arms shot up, mouths stretched as wide as those of chicks hoping for food: Fletch heard nothing.

Carrie nudged Fletch and pointed.

Three little girls, standing near the women, were vomiting.

As Fletch watched, one of the women, apparently surprising herself, suddenly vomited.

Two boy children among the men were on their knees vomiting.

Several of the men in the crowd began to clutch their stomachs. They turned. They tried to run through and out of the crowd.

They vomited.

On the porch, the uniformed young man with the clipboard turned on his heel and entered the log cabin.

Kriegel’s face turned ashen. His mouth was still moving but less like an orator and more like a fish.

Wolfe raised one hand halfway toward his mouth and left it there. His eyes were staring downward in alarm. He stepped to the edge of the porch.

He vomited off the porch a wide, forceful stream.

The few men standing directly in front, somewhat below him, jumped back. Still they got splashed.

Men in the audience fell onto their knees and were vomiting wide puddles.

Others, standing over them, out of control, vomited on the heads, necks, backs of the kneeling men.

Kriegel projected vomit straight into the microphone. He fell over sideways onto the porch like a board.

Slowly, Carrie turned her face toward Fletch. Her eyes were wider than ever.

She smiled.

On his knees near them, Leary was vomiting such a steady stream he ran out of breath.

Among the crowd of men, some were puking with hands braced on their knees, others kneeling puking, others rolling on the ground clutching their stomachs as they rolled puking. The few standing, watching all this in amazement, looked like upright steel beams unaffected in a forest of trees being thrashed, laid low by a hurricane.