14
There 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….
… Fletch and Barbara did not know what they were seeing. To them, Shimoni was a hard-backed mud descent into darkness. Something, not a sound, not a smell, something palpable emanated from the cave.
“Do you wish to enter?” Juma asked.
Fletch glanced at Barbara. “Why not?”
“Going down is slippery.” Juma looked at the knapsack on Fletch’s back.
Fletch put the pack on the ground.
“There are bats.” Juma looked at Barbara’s hair.
“It’s a cave,” Fletch said.
“Is it a big cave?” Barbara asked.
“It goes along underground about twelve miles, “Juma said.
“What am I feeling?” Fletch asked.
Juma nodded.
He led the way down the slippery slope.
They stood in an enormous underground room, partly lit by the light from the entrance. Barbara remarked on the stalactites, then giggled at the hollow sound of her voice.
Fletch noticed that all the rock, every square centimeter of floor, all along the walls two meters high, had been worn smooth. Even in imperfect light, much of the stone looked polished.
“What was this place used for?” Fletch asked.
A bat flew overhead.
“A warehouse,” Juma said simply. “For human beings. A human warehouse. People who had been sold as slaves were jammed in here, to await the ships that took them away.”
Only the slow drip of water somewhere in the cave punctuated the long, stunned silence.
When Barbara’s face turned back toward them, toward the light, her cheeks glistened with tears.
“How afraid they must have been,” she said.
Juma said, “For hundreds of years.”
“The terror,” Barbara said. “The utter despair.”
Juma said, “The smell, the sweat, the shit of hundreds, maybe thousands of bodies. The crying that must have come from this cave, day and night, year after year.”
The entrance to the cave was wide, but not so wide it could not be sealed by a few men with swords and guns, clubs and whips. The rear of the cave was total darkness. That damp, reeking, weeping darkness extending twelve miles underground, no way out from under the heaviness of the earth, however frantic, however intelligent, however energetic the effort, to light, to air, to food, back to their own realities, existences, their own loves, lives, expectations….
There was only one way out of that cave: docile, enslaved.
“Did your ancestors buy slaves, do you think?”
“No,” Fletch answered.
“I’m pretty sure not,” said Barbara. Juma ran his bare foot over the smoothness of the floor stone. “You see, that is how we must think of things.”
“What do you mean?” Fletch asked.
“I’m pretty sure my ancestors sold slaves. Do you see? Which is worse—to buy people or to sell them?”
… 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.
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.
Apparently oblivious to all this, at the console, Jack threw a switch. Lights on the console’s panel went off.
Jack took off his earphones.
Pretending to rub each ear, he removed his earplugs.
Seeing him do so, Carrie and Fletch removed their earphones and plugs as well.
Carrie gripped Fletch’s arm.
Her eyes were blazing.
“What?” Fletch asked.
She nodded toward the back of Kriegel’s mostly fallen audience.
There, standing, staring at them, openmouthed was their friend, the sheriff, Joe Rogers.