The station wagon’s front doors were open.
“Enjoyin’ yourselves?” Jack asked.
“Yes,” Fletch answered. “But nothing else.”
“Don’t like your chili?” He looked at the untouched chili in Fletch’s bowl.
“You can have it.” Fletch handed it to him.
Jack put the earphones on Fletch’s lap.
“What did your cook season it with?” Carrie asked. “Dried ragweed?”
Jack tasted it. “Yuck!”
Carrie said to Fletch, “The boy knows bad chili when he tastes it. Must have some sense.”
“What are the earphones for?” Fletch asked.
“You.” Jack was eating the chili. “You all.” He took two sets of earplugs from the pocket of his shorts and put them in Fletch’s hand. “Put these in your ears. When you see me put my headphones on, you both put yours on. And leave them on until I take mine off. Earplugs and headphones.”
“Why?”
“Kriegel’s about to give a speech.”
“Give me those ear-stoppers,” Carrie said.
Jack said, “I fixed the sound system.”
Fletch said, “I don’t get it.”
Commandant Wolfe was striding toward them.
Jack said, “Wear your ear-stoppers.”
Wolfe stood at attention near the open car door. Jack backed up. He continued to eat his chili. “I am Commandant Wolfe!”
“I’m Shalom Aleichem.” Fletch stuck his thumb toward Carrie. “This is Golda Meir, as a girl.”
“Doctor Kriegel has warned me of your sense of humor, Mister Fletcher.”
Fletch said, “It is tolerable.”
“You may make these jokes, Mister Fletcher, but you and your lady are what you are and you can be nothing else.”
“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?”
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.