“ ‘We hear the earth groaning,’ ” you whisper.
“Exactly. He talks all that claptrap, but we believe in the chosen destiny of the white race, traditional values, and the weapons and ammunition that support them. You’ll start off doing recruitment. We’ll send you back into your community and across the state—near high schools and middle schools mostly—and you’ll be asked to engage with the youth. Hand out material and whatnot. How’s that sound?”
You nod. “What’s it pay?”
Schembari wags a finger at you. “I like a man gets down to brass tacks, but keep in mind this ain’t about money.” He turns his head and hollers through the side door of his office. “Dickey! Get in here.”
Dick Underwood comes in, cold-eyeing you, followed by another man. Dick is wearing a bright orange pullover the color of a traffic cone and a fatigue ballcap curled into a tight upside-down U. He’s got a thin mustache now. The other man is wearing a ski mask, so all you can see is his grim eyes and thin white lips. Dick sits on a stool beside Schembari. The man in the mask stands behind them and crosses his hands over his crotch. He doesn’t blink.
“Keeper,” says Dick. He nods at you and you nod back.
“Good to see you,” you croak.
The man in the mask does not introduce himself. The captain launches in.
“See, what happened is Dick comes to tell me your rather peculiar story. How you went off to prison because you got mixed up with some radicals.”
“No mix-up,” you correct him. “I took a fall because the Feds couldn’t find shit on them. All I did was get high in the wrong place.”
“Well, maybe so, maybe not. But Dick tells me you also pal around with another guy we got our eye on, one who’s been working with the scum from Fierce Blue. You go to his church.”
“Andrade?”
“And his wife,” Dick adds.
You scoff at this. “Andrade and Ginna’re just do-gooders. I drive around with ’em sometimes while they hand out sandwiches to junkies.”
“Now that ain’t even remotely true, Keeper. Emilio Andrade’s been taking money from the green radicals. He’s got too long a pecker for a preacher, and he needs to be put in his place right quick.”
Your gaze slips up to the man in the mask. There is something unsettling about eyes just looking at you. For the first time, you realize eyes have no expression without the face; they’re just these cold orbs, always in stasis without the cues of the surrounding flesh. He stares at you, and it’s maddening that you can’t just ask who he is or why he’s there. The question itches all over your skin.
You shrug. “Maybe. But I don’t know nothing about that. Far as I’m concerned, he’s just a do-gooding reverend of a nondenominational church that tells you to suck it up and wait for heaven.”
All six eyes stare at you. Schembari laughs.
“We all got kids and wives, Keeper, and I know they can cause trouble and hassle.”
“Oh, my son, you wouldn’t believe,” Dick interjects. “He can’t keep his goddamn head out of a VR set. I had to take the door of his bedroom off the hinges.”
“No lie?” asks Schembari, cracking up.
“I was afraid he was going to yank his dick off if he spent one more day inside the porn worldes.”
Everyone but you laughs. The skin around the eyes of the man in the mask wrinkles with mirth. Schembari pats his finger on the blotter for emphasis.
“In this movement, this band of brothers, we have our outside responsibilities. Kids, wife, job. But the war for our nation comes first. It has to. You join us, you will be taken care of. Well-fed, well-resourced, well-paid, well-armed. Now, I don’t want to accuse you of nothing. I understand shit happens. But a Black baby is not something we can allow for. Hear me?” Schembari nods slowly, empathetically. “I’ve made mistakes myself, Lord knows. But you will have to cease contact with the woman and the child. Is that understood?”
The man in the mask watches you, his eyes like the holes in a carcass tunneled by worms.
On the drive back, it’s snowing again. Few cars on the road, fewer people outside. There’s a solitude to the graceful descent of the flakes. In grade school, they taught you that no two snowflakes are the same, but you found this idea impossible. Of course, plenty had to be alike.
Schembari and Dick Underwood had you fill out some bullshit paperwork: a beneficiary form and a loyalty oath, saying you’d never betray the brotherhood of the American Patriot League. The whole time Dick—nursing a boner for the new-recruit bonus coming his way—got to talking and wouldn’t shut up. He rambled on and on about this business plan he had for when the Great Lakes territory was captured and reserved entirely for the white race. How there’d still be enormous demand for “exotic sex,” and he’d get permits to open brothels on the borders in “free-trade spaces,” which would feature women of all different races. He’d always been such a fucking idiot.
All told, you spent five hours on this campus of fruit loops, and when you leave it’s like waking from a dream that never happened. You’re supposed to report for training in two days, which you obviously will not do. You’ll treat it how you’ve treated most jobs since high school. Just don’t show, and there’s not a whole lot they can do about it. More than the inanity of all these yokels running around jerking off their guns, what you recognize is the danger of any space where someone can tell you what to do. Anywhere another human being has power over you. You know this from prison, and especially from your time in the PRCC.
What you saw in your travels with the PRCC was not the worst of it. After the joke of a training camp in Colorado, after the Prion staff gave you and the other prisoners some CPR training and familiarity with search-and-rescue gear, they shipped you to Los Angeles for the aftermath of the El Demonio fire. For three months, you and the crew sifted through rubble to pull charred corpses and burned bone fragments from collapsed houses. Then it was on to Sioux Falls, St. Louis, and Nashville, as the Great Eastern Flood opened wide and swallowed the Midwest. Then it was Hurricane Rose devastating the coast of Georgia and northern Florida. Retreating floodwaters left their own peculiar human wasteland, and then the reconnaissance robot broke, so you and the crew had to start exploring unstable structures. Three-plus years of bearing witness to unchecked hell. You saw men, women, and children who’d been burned alive in their cars trying to escape the flames on a charred California freeway. Bloated, soggy bodies expelling noxious gases as they floated down retreating rivers or found in their attics, one woman’s face puffy and distended like a red, wet water balloon. That sick, ripe smell of a corpse. A little boy in Georgia, who’d been in a wheelchair. Someone had left him in a fucking elevator. He didn’t drown, just died of dehydration in that little box that short-circuited when the storm came. All the tools you’d used to try to reach people. The vibrations from the jackhammer in your arms, the nosebleeds you’d get from the dust, the shriek of a metal saw, the glowing sparks landing in the ruins, a piece of concrete wall suddenly collapsing, crushing that short guy from Arkansas, who you’d bummed a cigarette from just an hour earlier. Three others would eventually be killed, another half dozen wounded or crippled. The whole time you kept telling yourself: reduced sentence, reduced sentence, reduced sentence. But as if all this wasn’t awful enough, there was the crew you traveled with, an assembly of guys not handpicked for their willingness to contribute to society but because they were strong, able-bodied, and willing to do anything to reduce long time. You steered clear of them as much as you could. Kept to yourself, kept your answers short, stayed apart. Because you knew there were a few of them in there, the ones who could sense what you are and how easy it would be. You didn’t have an eye for this when you were young. And it cost you. Now you can see it. And you saw it in some of these men.