“Very funny. Well, something is going on at Hansen’s, and I figured because they’re just over the spur from you…”
“I thought you didn’t want a lot of conversation.”
Peggy looked up from her magazine and stared out at the trees across their lawn.
“Never mind me. Maybe it’s just that it’s late in the afternoon… and I’m late in the afternoon… and winter’s coming and my baby’s all grown up… and my husband has a big, weak heart…” She reached her hand out, took his, and gave it a squeeze. He squeezed it back.
“You’re just hitting your prime,” Neal said.
She squeezed his hand again and then let it go. “You’re a good guy, Neal. I know a few single women around here who’d die to meet you. You want to go with us to Phil and Margie’s tonight? Big Saturday night out? I’ll introduce you to some mountain women with shiny hair and long legs.”
“I don’t know how to dance.”
“I’m sure they’d love to teach you, honey.”
“I don’t know.” I don’t know, Peggy. The last woman who taught me ended up dead.
“Well, just come down around eight if you want to go.”
“Okay.”
Neal finished off his tea and got up. “Thanks for the drink. Tell Steve I needed to go, huh? Maybe I’ll see you tonight.”
He picked his pack up out of the truck, strapped it on, and headed back up to his cabin. He did have things to do.
If he was thinking of spending the winter here there was something he had to get resolved first.
Neal heard the bullet smack into the tree behind him as he dropped to the ground. He didn’t feel any pain, wondered if that’s what instant death was like, then checked himself to try to find the gaping hole in his body.
“You’re a dead kike,” Cal Strekker said as he came out from behind a boulder. He lowered his rifle and grinned.
“That was too goddamn close, Cal,” Neal croaked. “Live ammo.”
“You oughta be more alert,” Strekker said.
“I didn’t know the training session had even started,” Neal answered.
“We’re always in training, Carey.”
Well, you are anyway, Neal thought as he looked at Strekker. He was decked out in a tiger camouflage suit, replete with parachute pants, webbed belt, and combat boots. His face was striped with cammy paint and he wore a combat fatigue cap.
Even from my position groveling at your feet, you look stupid, Neal thought. He didn’t say that, though. Instead he said, “Well, you owe me new underwear, Cal.”
That seemed to mollify him, judging by the lupine grin that parted his mustache and beard. Then he got all man-to-man earnest. “You’ll thank me for this when it saves your life one day during the End Time.”
The End Time-the period foretold in Revelations that would see the final battle between good and evil, the last struggle between the chosen people and the hordes of Jews, niggers, and race traitors.
“Boy, for a second there I thought it was the End Time,” Neal said.
Neal got to his feet and offered his hand to shake. Strekker took it. Neal clamped his left hand over Cal’s wrist, lifted his arm up, spun underneath it, and pivoted, which locked Cal’s elbow up around his ear and going in the wrong direction. Neal took two long steps forward and pushed on Cal’s wrist, which took the bigger man off his feet and slammed him hard down on his back. Neal threw a punch that stopped a millimeter from Cal’s nose.
“We’re always in training, Cal, huh?”
He let go of Cal’s wrist and backed away. “You taught me that throw, Cal.”
Yeah, you taught me all right, Cal, Neal remembered. You threw me to the ground about five hundred times, always a lot harder than you had to, always giving my wrist that extra little twist. You always picked me as the “kike” in your hand-to-hand demonstrations. The choke holds, the elbow locks, the hip throws. You’ve been a good teacher. But I know seventy-year-old, five-feet-three, one hundred-pound Chinese monks who would dust your ass without looking up from their rice bowls.
“I’m going to take you to school, boy,” Cal growled. He got to his feet, drew his knife, and went into his combat stance.
Neal picked up his rifle and cocked a round into the chamber. “We’re all in our places, with bright shiny faces,” he said.
Cal started to circle him, passing the knife from hand to hand, making feinting jabs.
Neal braced the rifle stock against his cheek and focused on placing the bead right on Strekker’s alleged heart.
He almost did shit his pants when the sound of the gun exploded in his ears. He whirled around to see Bob Hansen standing there, his smoking rifle held at high port, a group of about ten men forming behind him.
“That’ll be enough, you two,” Hansen said sternly.
“Yes, sir!” Cal shouted.
“Yes, sir,” Neal croaked, his head still rushing from the thought that he had accidentally killed Cal Strekker.
Then Hansen’s face broke into a delighted smile.
“Do we have us some tigers here?” he asked the group. “They’re just spoiling to fight. I almost pity the ZOG race traitor who has to fight one of these fine men! Well, almost.”
The men behind him began to chuckle obediently. Cal looked like a German shepherd having his chest scratched. Then Hansen got stern again and frowned.
“But good white men can’t afford to fight each other, men. That’s what the enemy wants us to do. Let’s save that hatred for ZOG, all right?”
ZOG-Neal always thought it sounded like the monster in a low-budget Japanese horror movie, sort of a poor man’s Godzilla, but actually it was an acronym for Zionist Occupation Government, the white supremacist name for the federal government in Washington, manipulated by the Jews for the suppression of the true chosen people.
“Now shake hands,” Hansen ordered.
Neal gave Cal an ironic smile and stuck his hand out like he was Mickey Rooney coming back to Boys’ Town. Cal took it, gave it a hard tug, and stared into Neal’s eyes with an unmistakable this-is-a-long-way-from-being-over look.
Hansen stepped back into the center of the group. He wore plain khakis with cuffed slacks and a black baseball hat. He had a webbed belt with a holstered. 45 Colt.
Neal had come to know the rest of the men during the past few weeks. There was Strekker, of course. Levine had pulled the file on him-sergeant in the army, ranger certified, dishonorable discharge for beating up a trainee. Served two years in the Washington State pen for knifing a man in a bar fight. Member of the Aryan Brotherhood in prison.
His cell mate had been Randy Carlisle. Rape. About five-six, black hair, mustache. A perpetual expression of feral cunning, the kind of twisted leer that your mother was talking about when she asked you if you wanted your face to freeze that way. A coyote to Cal’s wolf.
There was Dave Bekke, the chunky, bearded man Neal had met in his first encounter with Hansen back on the ridge. Part-time mine worker, part-time ranch hand, full-time loser. He had a fat wife he was scared of so rarely saw. He was a follower looking for something to follow, and he found it in the white supremacist movement. No prison but some jail time for DUI and petty theft.
Bill McCurdy was a cowboy first and a cretin second, but it was a close race. He was a runty, bowlegged little bastard with a giggle that could have made Gandhi slap him in the mouth. Neal had never seen him without his cowboy hat, which was a mercy, because the brown hair that hung below his ears hadn’t been washed since Jimmy Carter was popular. But the boy was transformed on a horse. On horseback he became a centaur, an idiot savant of the saddle.
Craig Vetter was something else again. A tree with clothes. Six-five with broad shoulders, sinewy legs, and muscles that wouldn’t quit. Short blond hair and blue eyes and a face as open as a Bible on Sunday. Guiltless, guileless, fearless. Didn’t drink, smoke, cuss, or chase women. There was a wife and five kids back in St. George, Utah, and Craig would still be with them if he didn’t feel duty bound to fight for God and the white race. He sent his pay home, though.