11

Fletch said to Carrie, “Welcome to Sherwood Forest.” “Yeah,” Carrie said. “Where’s the Sheriff of Nottingham when you need him?”

There were many strange-looking men standing around. For the most part they wore army camouflage pants and shirts. Many wore wide belts with holstered knives and handguns hanging from them. Some were overbuilt, some overly fat, many short and runty, many with their heads shaved, faces scarred by acne or cuts, several showing damage wrought by alcohol and other drugs, teeth missing, noses broken, peculiarly intense eyes, one with an ear missing. A few held semiautomatic weapons carelessly.

One shirtless citizen was as big as Leary.

“These are the racially superior?” Carrie asked.

Fletch said, “Hush your mouth, girl.”

“They look like they were scraped off a tavern floor.”

The men gathered around the back door of the station wagon.

Kriegel had waited for Jack to open the back door for him.

The Reverend Doctor Kris Kriegel stepped out of the back door of the station wagon like the Empress Catherine alighting from her golden coach.

He raised his arms. “I have come!”

Carrie muttered, “He wishes he had.”

All the men standing around raised their right arms in stiff salute, except one, who raised his left arm.

There had been three men with semiautomatic weapons at the entrance to the encampment.

In a clipped voice, Jack had identified himself to them as ‘Lieutenant Faoni,’ Kriegel as ‘Commandant Kriegel,’ and told them Carrie and Leary in the truck behind them were part of the expected party.

“Who are you?” one of the men asked Fletch.

“Siegfried,” Fletch said.

Jack said, “Code name: Siegfried.”

They drove along a dirt road twisting through a thick forest.

Halfway along the road, another man stood with a semiautomatic weapon. He gave them a hard-eyed stare as they passed.

The encampment itself was a clearing of pasture gone to seed. In the most central place was a log cabin with a field-stone chimney, roofed front porch. At odd angles to each other were structures Fletch recognized as originally designed as carports: aluminum roofs held up by black poles in uneven cement floors. A few had their tarpaulin sides lowered, to keep out sun, rain, or eyes. Also at odd angles were several house trailers which had seen better days. Tipped on uneven cement blocks, their blue, white, gray, brown sides were sun-blistered. Recreational vehicles and smaller campers were parked helter-skelter throughout the clearing. At the edge of the woods around the clearing were many Porta Potties. In the midday heat, the smell from them permeated the camp.

The place looked like a wacky seven-year-old boy’s idea of heaven.

More or less in the center of the clearing was a flagpole.

The flag hanging from it was not the flag of the United States of America.

It was not the flag of the Confederacy.

It was not the flag of the state of Alabama.

It was a flag with a red field. The black symbols on it each looked like a chicken’s footprint.

“Listen to them,” Carrie said. The men gathered around Kriegel were talking to him, to each other, in tones that sounded more tight, abrupt, angry than anything else. “There isn’t one Southerner among them.”

Fletch listened. “You’re right.”

“Why don’t these boys stay home? Why don’t they shit in their own beds?”

From the log cabin marched a middle-aged man. He was dressed in a brown uniform with patches featuring the chicken footprints on collar tabs and shoulders. His wide belt held in his sizable gut to a size forty-four. From it dangled a holstered six-shooter. In the sunlight, as he crossed the clearing, his hair was brassy.

Carrie snorted. “He must have gotten that dye job at the county fair!”

The man was followed by another similarly uniformed young man, a teenaged boy, carrying a clipboard.

“Firsty!” From his pen on the back of the truck, Leary pulled himself up on the bars. He had realized the truck had stopped moving. “Let me out!”

Fletch said to Leary: “Say ‘please.’”

“Fuck you,” Leary said.

The men parted for the neatly uniformed man. Standing before Kriegel, the man stood at attention. He tried to click the heels of his soft combat boots together. He gave the stiff-armed salute.

He introduced himself as Commandant Wolfe.

In a most languid manner, Kriegel returned the salute.

There were introductions all around. Right arms snapped up one by one.

“Can’t they go to the Porta Potties without permission?” Carrie asked.

Kriegel and Wolfe drew closer together. Everyone began to look at Carrie and Fletch. Kriegel said, “Brunnehilde! … Siegfried! … Good for us to have them here …”

Fletch said, “Oh, Thor!”

As the two commandants walked toward the log cabin, Jack approached Carrie and Fletch.

Carrie was looking at the calf bull on the back of the truck. “We have to get him in the shade, Fletch. Get him some water.”

“Yes.” The bull calf didn’t need to say ‘please.’ He had done a good morning’s work. Fletch said to Jack, “Help me lift the gate, will you? I think this bull calf has had just about enough of Leary’s company.”

Together they lifted the rear section of the pen.

Head and shoulders first, Leary crawled under the gate. He tripped on the truck’s tailgate and landed facedown on the ground. He laughed.

As Jack and Fletch refitted the rear section of the cattle pen, Leary got up.

With a rumbling giggle he bounded over to the only man there who was as big as he was.

Laughing, he smashed his forehead into the forehead of the other man.

He knocked himself unconscious.

The men watched him collapse onto the ground. They looked at him with only a modicum of curiosity.

Leaving Leary as he was, continuing to broil in the sun, they wandered off.

Carrie started the truck. She began backing it between house trailers toward the shade of the woods.

Jack said to Fletch, “What are your plans?”

“I’m not sure,” Fletch said.

“Are you going? Or do you mean to stay?”

Fletch hesitated. “I have some responsibility here. I helped you fools escape.”

Jack squinted at him. His smile was tight. “You mean to stay long enough to see what we’re doing, and why, the purpose of all this, and then turn us in?”

“Something like that,” Fletch said. “It’s been interesting so far.”

Then Jack’s smile was genuine. “You saw that turning us in immediately would serve no purpose?”

“You let me see you had an objective,” Fletch said. “You made me wonder what it was.”

Jack laughed. “You took the bait.”

“Yeah. I took the bait. You meant me to. So I did.”

“Yes,” Jack said. “I was hoping you would.”

“Clearly you did. You didn’t come cross-country to my house for my help. You would have been better off without it. You could have been here yesterday.”

“That’s for sure. With easy access to Moreno’s money.”

“You came to my house to involve me.”

“So far, it’s worked out pretty well.” Jack stuck his finger against Fletch’s solar plexus. “Siegfried.”

“Enough of that shit.”

Jack took a wad of bills out of his shorts pocket. “Two thousand dollars. Commandant Wolfe gave it to me. He wants me to rebuild the sound system.”

“What sound system?”

“There will be speeches this evening. Will you drive me into Huntsville to get the equipment I need?”

“Carrie will have to come with us. Or go home.”

“It would be better if she came with us.”

“Why?”

“Your theory. Cops look more closely at two men than they would two men and a woman.”

“I guess so.”

“I’ll go check it out,’ ‘Jack said.” See what we need. I’ll be right back. After I get something to drink. After I get a whole lot to drink.”

“Sure,” Fletch said. “We’ll do lunch.”

“FLETCH, THERE ARE women and children down there. Little children! Babies! In that big, filthy trailer.”

Fletch had wandered down to where Carrie had parked the truck.

Somehow she had gotten a big plastic tub onto the back of the truck, upside right. While the bull calf slobbered up the water, she poured more from a bucket through the rails of the pen.

“The children are filthy, Fletch. Dirty diapers everywhere. The trailer stinks. I think they’re hungry. The women seem half out of it. What are we going to do?”

“We’re going into Huntsville,” Fletch said. “With Jack.

Unless you’d rather take the truck and go home. I rather you would.”

“I can’t leave these children here. There’s a girl down there stuffing uncooked hamburger into a toothless baby’s mouth!”

“Well, you know,” Fletch said. “In this context. Women and children …”

“We’ve got to get them some baby food. Milk. Diapers. Soap. If we get them some soap, is there any way they can wash their clothes?”

“I don’t know.”

“I’m going with you,” Carrie said. “And I’m coming back.”

“THAT’S ODD.” CARRIE, in the middle front seat of the station wagon, craned to look over Fletch’s shoulder. Fletch driving, they were just entering the long wooded driveway out of the encampment. “A forest-green four-door Saturn with Tennessee license plates.”

“What’s odd about that?” Fletch, too, turned to look but could see nothing but the woods. “You finally found a car with Southern plates?”

“Francie drives a forest-green Saturn.”

“Francie who?”

“Joe Rogers’s wife.”

Jack sat to Carrie’s right.

“Sheriff Joe Rogers?” Fletch asked.

“Yeah,” Carrie said.

Fletch said, “Must be a coincidence.”

“Must be,” Carrie said.